Germany will enter a harsh coronavirus lockdown this week, with Angela Merkel’s government warning residents to not go out for Christmas shopping, Christians to not attend church services, and pupils to stay away from school.

The nationwide lockdown Germany is already under “was not enough”, German Chancellor Angel Merkel said as she introduced a series of new measures including closing schools, all non-essential shops, and even banning outright the sale of some seasonal celebratory items. The new lockdown begins on Wednesday (16th) and will last, with an exception for a quick break for Christmas itself, until January 10th.

Sunday’s announcement is the second full lockdown Germany has imposed in 2020, following another in April.

Shops have been targeted in particular as the German government blames Christmas shopping for a rising number of coronavirus transmissions. Britain’s Sky News citesMerkel’s comments specifically on the matter as: “I would have wished for lighter measures. But due to Christmas shopping, the number of social contacts has risen considerably… There is an urgent need to take action.”

Children are to be sent home from school for the duration of the lockdown for home learning, and the German government will even appeal to Christians to not attend church services, but instead watch them online. Church attendance will only be permitted if members of the congregation maintain social distancing — not easy on what is typically the busiest time of the year for churches. Bars and inns were already closed under Germany’s November lockdown — still in force — and will remain closed until January.

Germany is a federal state, and state governments gave enhanced details on the coming lockdown decided on Sunday to residents on Monday. Suddeutsche Zeitung reported the comments of Bavaria’s Prime Minister Markus Söder when he described the terms of the federally-imposed lockdown, noting among the exceptions to the shop-closure order were to be those selling food, medicine, and petrol.The closure of retail businesses in the run-up to Christmas, traditionally the busiest and most profitable time of year for many, will come as a bitter blow despite the German government’s offer of financial support to companies impacted. As with other countries, the move will likely again push consumers towards online shopping giants, further swelling their profits.

A spokesman for the Bavarian Trade Association said local businesses expected to reap €14 billion in the run up to Christmas, but now “the Christmas business is over”, and its members expected to lose €150 million a day during the closure.

Ordinary Germans will suffer loss of their traditions in the coming weeks, too. Part of the package of lockdown measures bans outdoor drinking, meaning mulled wine, a staple of European festive celebrations, is cancelled for 2020. Explaining the prohibition, Merkel said people do not wear masks or socially distance properly while enjoying themselves with a cup of hot, spiced wine, so it had to go.

New Year’s Eve will be different, too. The lockdown also totally outlaws the sale of fireworks, a seasonal favourite in German cities. The policy may backfire, however. German newspaper Die Welt reports citizens love seeing in the New Year with pyrotechnics so much, some may turn to home-made or illegally imported fireworks, which it is feared could be dangerous.

Ironically enough, a law meant to keep people out of the hospital could end up seeing more admitted.

Nationwide, Germany’s coronavirus rate stands at around 169 cases per 100,000, compared to 65 in the United States.

https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2020/12/14/dont-go-to-church-dont-buy-christmas-presents-german-governments-festive-covid-lockdown/

The shooter who shot his ex’s sister on Sunday morning has been caught!

The police arrested the German-Iraqi (41 years old) at his relatives’ home in Peine. It is still unclear whether the gun was also recovered.

The man from Wolfsburg broke into the flat of his ex-girlfriend (35-year-old) in Kösliner Street in the municipality of Uetze (Hanover region) in the morning.

In panic, the woman hid herself and called her sister for help. When the 45-year-old approached the angry ex-boyfriend, he pulled out a pistol and immediately shot the woman.

According to the police, the 45-year-old suffered a head injury, her condition is stable.

The perpetrator fled, but was later arrested. He is to be brought before a magistrate on Sunday. A police spokesman: “We are investigating an attempted homicide.”

Witnesses said that the couple was even married. According to police, however, apparently not according to German law.

https://m.bild.de/regional/hannover/hannover-aktuell/region-hannover-mann-schiesst-schwester-der-ex-nieder-74441144,view=amp.bildMobile.html

By Andrea Widburg

News emerged on Sunday that the Chinese Communist Party has 1.95 million registered, loyal party members working in British corporations, government, and educational institutions. The American media, however, was completely disinterested in this story.

The Daily Mail spells out some of the details:

Loyal members of the Chinese Communist Party are working in British consulates, universities and for some of the UK’s leading companies, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.

An extraordinary leaked database of 1.95 million registered party members reveals how Beijing’s malign influence now stretches into almost every corner of British life, including defence firms, banks and pharmaceutical giants.

[snip]

While there is no evidence that anyone on the party membership list has spied for China – and many sign up simply to boost their career prospects – experts say it defies credulity that some are not involved in espionage

[snip]

The database was originally leaked on Telegram, the encrypted instant messaging app, and passed in September by a Chinese dissident to the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC), which comprises more than 150 legislators around the world who are concerned by the influence and activities of the Chinese government.

[snip]

Detailed analysis of it by this newspaper reveals that:

• A party member who studied at St Andrews University worked at various consulates in Shanghai including that of the UK;
• Chinese academics who swore the oath to assist the party attended British universities where they were involved in potentially sensitive areas of research including aerospace engineering and chemistry;
• There were more than 600 party members across 19 branches working at the British banks HSBC and Standard Chartered in 2016. Both have drawn criticism for their response to Beijing’s crackdown in Hong Kong;
• The pharmaceutical giants Pfizer and AstraZeneca – both involved in the development of coronavirus vaccines – employed a total 123 party loyalists;
• Firms with defence industry interests including Airbus, Boeing and Rolls-Royce employed hundreds of party members.

There’s much to be concerned about that list. First, according to The Conservative Treehouse, the American media has refused to report on it:

The massive data-file [Download Here w/ Caution] was offered to all major international journalists and media organizations. All of the major U.S. media outlets did not want the data. As a consequence, media outlets within Australia and the U.K. are leading the release.

NOTE: At the same time U.S. media were refusing the leaked information they were simultaneously criticizing a U.S. executive order blocking CCP members from visas’ longer than one month in duration, by claiming no-one had any way to know who was a CCP member. In essence, the U.S. corporate media did not want to know.

By any standard, it’s a major news story that the West’s greatest geopolitical rival has infiltrated Britain’s major businesses and institutions, but our American media resolutely closes its eyes. They’ll report on Trump’s two scoops of ice cream, but not that an ally has been infiltrated by communists.

Second, Britain is part of the “Five Eyes” network of nations that share intelligence information. Others in the network are Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States. If the CCP members on the list have infiltrated British intelligence, they’ve also infiltrated American intelligence.

Third, there must be a comparable list for CCP members and fellow travelers embedded in American institutions. We can already name a handful: Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s driver of 20 years, Rep. Eric Swalwell’s girlfriend, a Harvard professor charged with selling biological secrets to China, and a UCLA professor convicted for selling missile chip technology to China.

And of course, there’s Hunter Biden, who’s under investigation for his China ties. A recently released email from Hunter strongly implicates Joe Biden too:

In an email dated September 21, 2017, Hunter Biden wrote to Cecilia Browning, the general manager of an office building called “House of Sweden,” requesting that “keys” be “made available for new office mates.”

Hunter Biden listed the “new office mates” as being Joe Biden, Jill Biden, Jim Biden, and Gongwen Dong (Chairman Ye CEFC emissary). Hunter Biden also requested a sign made for his office that stated “The Biden Foundation” and “Hudson West (CEFC US).”

CEFC China Energy was a Chinese conglomerate that was among the largest energy companies in China before going out of business a couple of years ago. CNN notes that the company “aligned itself so closely with the Chinese government that it was often hard to distinguish between the two.”

Biden and the Democrats have China ties and pro-China policies, but the America media has shut down any reporting about this information. In the geopolitical war between China and America, the recent massive election fraud – which may have been funded and abetted by China – has given us an American governing class that has pro-China, not pro-America, policies.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/12/the_chinese_communist_party_has_infiltrated_britain.html#ixzz6gb612mxg

“If the question is which state will be shaping our world across the next decade providing big opportunities and big challenges for the UK, the answer is China,” Britain’s new MI5 Director Ken McCallum recently told journalists. He added that Russia is currently “providing bursts of bad weather, while China is changing the climate”. McCallum said that countries such as China and Russia were no longer focused just on traditional espionage activities, such as stealing government secrets, but also on targeting Britain’s economy, infrastructure and academic research, while seeking to undermine its democracy.

“The UK wants to co-operate with China on the big global issues like climate change, while at the same time being robust in confronting covert hostile activity when we come across it,” he said. “[MI5 is] looking to do more against Chinese activity, carefully prioritised.”

That China targets the economy, infrastructure and even the democracy of other states is far from a new occurrence, but it is something that Western countries have only recently begun to acknowledge. For decades, the US — and with it most Western countries — believed that “constructive engagement” with the Chinese Communist regime, which included heavily aiding its economic, technological and even military rise, would lead to a prosperous China that would somehow evolve into a liberal democracy sharing Western views on global and regional issues. That belief turned out to be wishful thinking to a hallucinatory degree.

China’s goal, according to China expert Michael Pillsbury in his 2015 book, The Hundred Year Marathon, is to “replace the United States as the economic, military and political leader of the world by the year 2049”. The “marathon” was launched by Mao Zedong to “avenge a century of humiliation” at the hands of the West. The preferred strategy of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to reach that goal is deception, according to Pillsbury, whether this be in the economic, business, political, technological, diplomatic or academic sphere. While deception forms a basic strategic principle for the CCP, it also, in the words of The Spectator’s Andrew Foxall, avails itself of methods such as, “economic coercion, military sabre-rattling, a mammoth state-sponsored media empire, and cohorts of witting and unwitting accomplices” to achieve its goals.

A recent book, Hidden Hand: Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping the World, by Clive Hamilton and Mareike Ohlberg, chronicles the extent of the CCP’s deception and subversion of Western elites and institutions for the purpose of achieving international dominance.

“Whereas analysts on both sides of the Atlantic continue to agonise over whether to label China an opponent or even an enemy, the CCP decided this matter thirty years ago”, Hamilton and Ohlberg write.

“For the CCP the Cold War never ended. The reshaping of alliances and remoulding of the way the world thinks about it are essential to the Party securing continued rule at home, as well as to its reach and eventually making China the number one global power. The Party’s plans have been explained at length in speeches and documents. Its implementation strategy is to target elites in the West so that they either welcome China’s dominance or accede to its inevitability, rendering resistance futile”.

In the UK, according to Hamilton and Ohlberg, the CCP has managed to “groom” British power elites to support China’s interests, especially through the networking group the “48 Group Club”.

“No group in Britain enjoys more intimacy and trust with the CCP leadership than the 48 Group Club… [It] has built itself into the most powerful instrument of Beijing’s influence and intelligence gathering in the United Kingdom. Reaching into the highest ranks of Britain’s political, business, media and university elites, the club plays a decisive role in shaping British attitudes to China… enthusiastically fostering the interests of the CCP in the United Kingdom…”.

The club features members such as former ministers, including former Prime Minister Tony Blair and former Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, five former British ambassadors to China, leading business people, directors of large cultural institutions and professors, as well as a number of highly ranked CCP officials, including several former Chinese ambassadors to the UK.

“In our judgement, so entrenched are the CCP’s influence networks among British elites that Britain has passed the point of no return, and any attempt to extricate itself from Beijing’s orbit would probably fail,” write Hamilton and Ohlberg.

Britain, recently, did appear to seek to “extricate itself from Beijing’s orbit” regarding Huawei’s influence and potential security risk in the country, especially after US pressure. In July, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson banned the use of Huawei equipment in the UK’s 5G telecommunications network by the end of 2027. The move prompted China’s ambassador to the UK, Liu Xiaoming, to threaten the UK:

“The way you are treating Huawei is being followed very closely by other Chinese businesses, and it will be very difficult for other businesses to have the confidence to have more investment”.

Liu later denied threatening the UK by making another threat:

“We make no threats, we threaten nobody. We just let you know the consequences. If you do not want to be our partners and our friends, you want to treat China as a hostile country, you will pay the price. That means you will lose the benefits of treating China as a friend.”

Meanwhile, Huawei’s plans to build a research center in Cambridgeshire are going ahead. Huawei has pledged to spend £1 billion on a massive campus, which will host R&D and manufacturing teams focusing on the creation of optical devices and modules. The US wanted the local planning committee to withhold permission, with Keith Krach, Under Secretary of State for Economic Growth, Energy, and the Environment, reportedly calling the research center an “expansion of the surveillance state”.

When China imposed a new security law in response to repeated pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, Prime Minister Boris Johnson condemned the law as a “serious breach” of the UK-China agreement on the territory. He also said he would open a path to citizenship for almost three million residents of Hong Kong, while Britain’s extradition treaty with Hong Kong would be suspended“immediately and indefinitely”. China’s ambassador to the UK, Liu Xiaoming, on the other hand, accused the US and other critics of being “cold war warriors”:

“China and the UK should have enough wisdom and capability to manage and deal with these differences, rather than allowing anti-China forces and cold war warriors to kidnap China-UK relations.”

Boris Johnson, however, appeared to send a signal of having stood up to the CCP in a rather half-hearted way. “There is a balance here”, Johnson said back in July. “I’m not going to be pushed into a position of becoming a knee-jerk Sinophobe on every issue, somebody who is automatically anti-China. But we do have serious concerns.” Johnson said he would not “completely abandon our policy of engagement” with China, adding: “You have got to have a calibrated response and we are going to be tough on some things, but we are also going to continue to engage.”

More than anything, Johnson’s comment underscored just how much the UK lacks a consistent China policy.

Chinese influence in the UK extends to British universities. In November 2019, the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, published a report, “A Cautious Embrace: Defending Democracy in an Age of Autocracies,” which found that British universities were not adequately responding to the growing risk of China and other autocratic states influencing academic freedom in the UK. The report stated:

“There is clear evidence that autocracies are seeking to shape the research agenda or curricula of UK universities, as well as limit the activities of researchers on university campuses. Not enough is being done to protect academic freedom from financial, political and diplomatic pressure…

“During our inquiry into China and the rules-based international system, we heard alarming evidence about the extent of Chinese influence on the campuses of UK universities. Despite the fact that there are now over 100,000 Chinese students in the UK, the issue of Chinese influence has been the subject of remarkably little debate compared to that in Australia, New Zealand and the US”.

Much of Chinese influence on British campuses is done through the CCP’s Confucius Institutes, of which there are at least 29 in the UK, according to a February 2019 report on the topic by the Conservative Party Human Rights Commission:

“In Britain, there are at least 29 Confucius Institutes, the second largest number in the world after the United States, attached to major universities such as Edinburgh, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham, Cardiff and University College London. There are also 148 Confucius ‘classrooms’ in schools around the United Kingdom… Confucius Institutes…are directly controlled, funded and staffed by an agency of the Chinese government’s Ministry of Education, the Office of Chinese Language Council International, known as the ‘Hanban'”.

According to Hamilton and Ohlberg, Confucius Institutes were “initiated in 2004 as an innocuous way to spread the Party narrative… ostensibly devoted to teaching Chinese language and promoting Chinese culture they are, as former propaganda chief Li Changchun put it, ‘an important part of China’s overseas propaganda set-up'”.

Confucius Institutes are not all, however. The China Media Centre at Westminster University, for example, has hosted training courses for CCP officials, partly paid for by the British taxpayer through the Foreign Office, according to Hamilton and Ohlberg, who quote the head of spokesperson development for the Central Office of External Propaganda:

“Chinese Officials’ understanding of the functions of the media in Western countries and their ability to respond to and interact with the media has been much enhanced by the excellent intensive 3-week briefings by The China Media Centre and provided to ministries, provinces and cities over the past 7 years”. The China Media Centre, according to Hamilton and Ohlberg “has brought many party officials to mingle with the media and political elite, including five seminars at 11 Downing Street, at the invitation of the Chancellor of the Exchequer”.

“Those arguing in favor of these kind of courses maintain that they will help bring about a more open media in China”, write Hamilton and Ohlberg.

“In fact the opposite is the case: they help the CCP fine-tune its propaganda and use it more effectively across the globe. The courses teach techniques used by Western journalists to extract answers, and also how government officials can handle adversarial questions in press conferences. At a time when official Chinese spokespeople are regularly under fire for the Party’s concentration camps in Xinjiang, and other human rights violations, teaching them how to ‘handle’ questions seems to be more in the CCP’s interest than the British public’s”.

The large extent of Chinese influence in British society will make the MI5’s task of tackling hostile covert activity complicated — but Britain is at risk.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16794/china-britain-threat

By Monica Showalter

Joe Biden, who has repeatedly ignored, or denied knowledge of, his son’s business dealings, has a lot of explaining to do with this latest story from Fox News:

Hunter Biden requested in 2017 that keys be made for his new “office mates,” listing his father, President-elect Joe Biden, Jill Biden and his uncle, Jim Biden, for space he planned to share with an “emissary” for a chairman of a Chinese energy company, according to an email obtained by Fox News. 

The Sept. 20, 2017 email, obtained by Fox News, shows Hunter requesting keys for Joe and Jill Biden, along with his uncle, Jim Biden, to the general manager, Cecilia Browning, at the House of Sweden — a building in Washington, D.C., which contains multiple office suites, as well as a number of embassies. 

“[P]lease have keys made available for new office mates: Joe Biden, Jill Biden, Jim Biden,” said the email, with the subject “507.” 

…and…

In the email, Hunter Biden also requests keys for Gongwen Dong, whom he describes as an “emissary” for Chairman Ye Jianming — the chairman of CEFC Chinese Energy Co. 

“I would like the office sign to reflect the following,” he continued, requesting “The Biden Foundation” and “Hudson West (CEFC US).” 

“The lease will remain under my company’s name Rosemont Seneca,” he continued, providing details about Dong and Ye, whom he referred to as “my partner,” as well as their contact information. 

So if Hunter Biden really did run his own affairs and all of his abandoned-laptop contents as well as the witnesses who asserted that Joe was “the big guy” are wrong, how on earth does one explain this? How could anyone explain that Joe wasn’t involved? Why would Joe or Jill need keys if this matter was nothing for them? The office in question was the purported Biden Foundation, which seems to be modelled on the Clinton Foundation — all about money incoming, pay to play, and influence peddling — with charity just a claim.

This time, though, Hunter Biden is reportedly under investigation, officially for tax fraud, but also securities fraud, money laundering, foreign espionage, and surely bribery. The ChiComs, in the form of a now-vanished Chinese energy tycoon, Ye Jianming, whom Hunter called “my partner,” and same guy whose bagman got the key to the office, gave Hunter an $80,000 diamond, which is a perfect disguised bribe since it’s not cash. Hunter, of course, with the usual credibility notable for him, claims he doesn’t have any idea what he did with it.

Biden has been in office for 47 years and knows how to use the system to get himself rich. He’s committed so many irregularities without consequence he doesn’t seem to be hiding anymore. Each little thing he’s gotten away with has just led to something bigger.

His decision to run for president, despite President Obama’s lack of encouragement, was clearly a matter of co-opting Wall Street, Big Tech, and the Red Chinese, he knew that much. He didn’t need to campaign for president because the fix was in. And once in motion, first he got away with cheating Bernie Sanders out of the Democratic nomination, and then he rigged the general election afterward to steal the victory from the very popular Donald Trump.

He knew all about it with this ‘office mates revelation,’ it would be hard to see how he could not.  

House Biden seems more and more to be an organized criminal operation, with the thievery including a breaking of all laws in a bid to win power. With Biden claiming he knows nothing about sharing an office with the ChiComs or palling around with their intelligence outfit, questions grow louder as to what this nightmare is about, it’s like a souffle that’s falling right out the oven, it’s like fresh eggs that open up rotten. But since Biden knows he’s always gotten away with it, he’s probably unperturbed. All the same, just ahead of Jan. 20, it seems the ground is burning beneath his feet.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/12/joe_biden_hunter_biden_jim_biden_jill_biden_and_the_red_chinese_were_office_mates.html

Police in Belgium are looking for four men who used a train’s public address system to threaten a bombing of the vehicle near Antwerp unless Jewish passengers step off.

The passengers took control of the public address system on Wednesday afternoon between Antwerp and Mechelen, the city that Nazis and their collaborators used as an internment and dispatch station for Jews whom they sent to be murdered in Poland.

“Attention, attention,” the men said in Flemish, “the cancer Jews need to leave the train now or we’ll blow you all up,” witnesses said.

Security personnel on the train failed to locate the perpetrators, according to Michael Freilich, a Belgian-Jewish lawmaker who has looked into and filed parliamentary questions about the incident to the Transportation Ministry.

Freilich asked the ministry to explain why the perpetrators were not caught, how they gained access to the address system and what can be done to prevent a recurrence.

The ministry has two weeks to respond.

https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/292913