China
DEVELOPING: Pentagon shoots down ‘high-altitude’ unidentified object over Alaska just week after fighter jets downed Chinese spy balloon
BREAKING NEWS from The Daily Mail:
National Security Council spokesman John Kirby confirmed Friday that there was an object flying over Alaska airspace and President Joe Biden ordered it shot down.
‘So I can confirm that the Department of Defense was tracking a high-altitude object over Alaska airspace in the last 24 hours,’ he said at Friday’s briefing. ‘The object was flying at 40,000 feet and posed a reasonable threat to the safety of civilian flight.’
Kirby said that ‘out of an abundance of caution and at the recommendation of the Pentagon, President Biden ordered the military to down the object and they did, and it came inside out territorial waters.’
The admission comes after much of last week was devoted to Biden’s handling of a Chinese spy balloon, which was spotted in Montana and then drifted all the way to South Carolina’s coastline, before the Air Force sent an F-22 to take it down with a AIM-9X Sidewinder missile.
The Pentagon described that balloon as being 200-feet tall, weighing thousands of pounds and with a payload the size of a jetliner.
This story is developing…
Reportedly President Joe Biden is making deals with Chinese President Xi Jinping to help improve anti-drug trafficking measures. China is one of the top fentanyl producers and distributors, culminating in a pandemic of fentanyl overdoses and deaths in the United States.
The Biden administration will be lifting sanctions on a Chinese government ministry, in exchange for bolstering anti-drug trafficking measures, Bloomberg reported. “We’re hoping to see some progress on that issue this coming week,” National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said Monday, according to the New York Post. “That could then open the door to further cooperation on other issues where we aren’t just managing things, but we’re actually delivering tangible results.”
The Daily Caller News Foundation noted that should a deal materialize, it will be at least the third time that China has promised to get tough on fentanyl. In 2016, China agreed to increase counter-narcotics operations, and Xi again agreed to launch a crackdown in 2018. Nonetheless, China and Mexico are “the primary source countries for fentanyl and fentanyl-related substances trafficked directly into the United States,” according to a 2020 DEA intelligence report.
“China remains the primary source of fentanyl and fentanyl-related substances trafficked through international mail and express consignment operations environment, as well as the main source for all fentanyl-related substances trafficked into the United States.”
President Joe Biden and Xi are meeting for the first time in over a year during this week’s Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in San Francisco. Sources familiar with the situation told Bloomberg that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) will crack down on Chinese companies manufacturing chemical precursors for fentanyl in exchange for the U.S. lifting sanctions on the Ministry of Public Security’s Institute of Forensic Science, which the Commerce Department added to the Entity List in 2020 for “engaging in human rights violations and abuses” in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.
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