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Every day there’s more propaganda banging the drums of war between nuclear-armed nations a little louder. Western media are churning out reports about Russia preparing to invade Ukraine any minute now and China preparing to invade Taiwan any minute now, saying the response to each is obviously to move a lot of high-powered weaponry to both of those locations, and none of them are questioning whether these allegations are true or whether those responses are wise.

This is so dangerous. This whole two-front nuclear brinkmanship game is so very, very dangerous, and they keep finding ways to make it more dangerous. And hardly anyone notices it, because the news media outlets that people look to to understand the world aren’t telling them it’s dangerous.

The only danger you’re allowed to discuss in mainstream western reporting about Russia and China is their scary aggressive expansionism, like this new Newsweek propaganda piece here. Nowhere are you allowed to question if it’s true, or to even breathe a word about the possibility of detente.

It’s official empire doctrine that the borders of Russia and China will necessarily keep expanding unless militantly held in place by The Good Guys. It’s taken as a given that those nations are essentially mindless cancers that can only metastasize to other parts of the body unless aggressively treated. At no point is it permissible to ask if perhaps we are heading in a direction that could literally end the world and if that could not be easily avoided by simply working to scale down tensions. At no point is it permissible to question if these nations might be reacting defensively to western aggressions and discuss the possibility of working toward detente.

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Impending Planetary Disaster Should Unite Us, Yet We Remain More Divided Than Ever

November 27, 2021

Impending Planetary Disaster Should Unite Us, Yet We Remain More Divided Than Ever

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Charles Bukowski has a quote: “We’re all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.”

Terrorized and flattened by trivialities, eaten up by nothing. I think about this quote a lot not just as pertains to the inevitability of our individual deaths, but to the looming death of the entire world.

The website Antiwar.com has been doing a good job keeping track of all the many US cold war escalations against Russia and China, which seem to be coming out on a near-daily basis now. Just right off their front page today there’s a story about how the US considering is putting more military aid in Ukraine on the allegation that Russia is plotting an invasion, another about Moscow claiming that US bombers just practiced a simulated nuclear strike on Russia and have have greatly increased their activity along its border, another about Beijing’s anger over increased US war ship activity in the Taiwan Strait, another about Australian Defense Minister Peter Dutton’s assurance that Australia would join the US in a war against China to defend Taiwan, and yet another about Beijing and Moscow signing an agreement to deepen their military cooperation to counter hostilities from Washington.

This, along with the myriad symptoms our biosphere is showing us of impending collapse, and we still somehow manage to remain terrorized and flattened by trivialities. Eaten up by nothing.

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Nobody Who Says “You Can Criticize Washington AND Beijing” Actually Does

November 19, 2021

Nobody Who Says “You Can Criticize Washington AND Beijing” Actually Does

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Whenever I criticize the US empire’s manipulations and aggressions on a nation which disobeys its dictates I always get comments from people saying “You know, Caitlin, two things can be bad at once. You can criticize both.”

They say it like it’s some kind of profound esoteric insight being passed down from on high instead of a generic response I hear from westerners every single day. Like, oh, you mean I can criticize two things instead of just one thing? You just blew my mind. Thanks for baptizing me with your magic wisdom sauce, Gandalf.

Of course it’s possible to criticize both the US and its targets. That’s obvious to anyone with functioning gray matter between their ears. The issue is that westerners, especially westerners who hasten to urge you to be more critical of governments targeted by western imperialism, do not do this.

Lately this happens most often with China, since that’s where the propaganda brainwashing has been most concentrated lately. I’ll say something about how the US empire is the clear and obvious aggressor in the escalating tensions between the two nations or how Australians are being brainwashed into supporting a war over Taiwan with astonishing forcefulness, and some internet genius will wheelbarrow his gigantic brain into my notifications with the comment “Caitlin it’s possible to criticize both the US and China.”

And if there were enough time in the day for me to respond to all of these galaxy-brained intellectual giants I would tell them something like, “Okay. But you don’t. Or if you do it’s not in proportion to how deserving of criticism they both are.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Call It The Department Of Aggression, Not ‘Defense’: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

November 14, 2021

Call It The Department Of Aggression, Not ‘Defense’: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Most of what consumes human attention is narrative; stories about what’s happening, which can be easily manipulated by the powerful. Things that are not narrative include weapons, troops, and resources. You can punch through the narrative distortion by just watching where the weapons, troops and resources go.

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If you believe the mainstream narrative about any US-targeted nation you will wind up on the wrong side of debates about that nation. This is because the US empire is the single most corrupt and murderous institution on earth and its power is held in place by lies and propaganda.

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It’s so obnoxious how the empire destroys entire countries and sows chaos, destruction and poverty around the world and the only mainstream pushback we ever see against any part of this is opposition to the arrival of immigrants who are fleeing that devastation.

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Hey remember when it was confirmed that the CIA still plots assassinations of journalists, with a known plan drawn out in 2017 against Julian Assange, and then nothing whatsoever was done about this horrifying fact?

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I still routinely run into people online who think Assange’s extradition case is about the 2016 WikiLeaks publications. It’s probably believed by a majority of politically active liberals, even though the news media never actually told them this. Gaslight people enough about reality and eventually they’ll start gaslighting themselves.

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It’s silly to call the US war machine the Department of Defense. The US military doesn’t do “defense”, it does nonstop unprovoked aggression around the world. Defense is what the nations who resist US acts of aggression against them are doing.

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House Fire Is a Problem Flamethrowers Can Help Solve pic.twitter.com/YWvkFdkEoJ

— Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ (@caitoz) November 12, 2021

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Super Serious News Reporting: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

November 5, 2021

Super Serious News Reporting: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

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Hi I’m a very serious news reporter. The Russians are controlling our thoughts with Facebook memes and scrambling our brains with invisible ray gun attacks. In other news, capitalism is working fine and our wars defend freedom and democracy. The government never lies. Here’s Bob with the weather.

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It’s hilarious that people still think the Democratic Party cares about winning elections. That’s not its job, children. That’s not why the Democratic Party exists. The Democratic Party exists to kill leftward progress in the world’s most powerful nation. That’s all it cares about doing.

The Democratic Party doesn’t care about winning elections. The Democratic Party doesn’t care about promoting popular policies. The Democratic Party doesn’t care about passing legislation. The Democratic Party only cares about doing things like this:

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They were always going to blame Biden’s failures on the left.

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“The political spectrum has moved too far to the left. I believe this because I was told to by a millionaire with a vested interest in stifling support for socialism. Also I think ‘left’ means having pink hair and using words like ‘polycule’ in casual conversation.”

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So mad at American leftists for forcing the Democratic Party to be a right wing imperialist oligarch front who nobody wants to vote for.

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US troops are four times more likely to die by their own hand than in combat. They’ve figured out how to protect US military personnel from enemy fire, but not from the psychological consequences of working for the US military.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Assange persecution lays out Western savagery at its most transparent

November 2, 2021

The Assange persecution lays out Western savagery at its most transparent

The first day of the US appeal in the Julian Assange extradition case saw grown adults arguing in court that the US government could guarantee that it wouldn’t treat the WikiLeaks founder as cruelly as it treats other prisoners.

I wish I was kidding.

In their write-up on Wednesday’s proceedings, The Dissenter’s Kevin Gosztola and Mohamed Elmaazi report that the prosecution argued that “the High Court should accept the appeal on the basis that the US government offered ‘assurances’ that Assange won’t be subjected to Special Administrative Measures (SAMs) or incarcerated in ADX Florence, a super-maximum prison in Colorado.”

What this means is that in order to overturn the January extradition ruling which judge Vanessa Baraitser denied on the basis that the notoriously draconian US prison system is too cruel to guarantee Assange’s health and safety, the prosecution has established as one of their grounds for appeal the claim that they can offer “assurances” that they would not inflict some of their most brutal measures upon him. These would include the aforementioned Special Administrative Measures, wherein prisoners are so isolated that they effectively disappear off the face of the earth, or sending him to ADX Florence, where all prisoners are kept in solitary confinement 23 hours a day.

What’s ridiculous about these “assurances,” apart from the obvious, is that within its own legal argument the US government reserves the right to reverse those assurances at any time and impose SAMs or maximum security imprisonment upon Assange if it deems them necessary. As Amnesty International explains:

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From Press Freedom To Prison Systems, Everything Assange Touches Gets

October 30, 2021

From Press Freedom To Prison Systems, Everything Assange Touches Gets

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The US appeal of a British court ruling on the Assange extradition case has concluded, and the judges will probably not have a decision ready until at least January—a full year after the extradition was denied by a lower court. Assange, despite being convicted of no crime, will have remained in Belmarsh Prison the entire time.

During that time the judges will be weighing arguments they’d heard about the cruel nature of the US prison system, which formed a major part of the reasoning behind Judge Vanessa Baraitser’s rejection of the US extradition request. They’ll be considering the draconian policy of Special Administrative Measures, whose victims are cut off from human contact and from the outside world. They’ll be considering the brutality of the supermax ADX facility in Florence, Colorado whose inmates are kept in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day, and where Assange could easily wind up imprisoned despite the prosecution’s flimsy assurances.

Assange probably never set out on this journey with the goal of calling attention to the abuses of the US prison system as his foremost priority, but, as is so often the case with anything his journey touches, those abuses keep getting pulled into the light of public awareness anyway. His case is now no longer just about press freedom, US war crimes, corrupt governments collaborating to stomp out inconvenient truth tellers, and the malfeasance of US alphabet agencies, but about the abusive nature of the US prison system as well.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

We Are Ruled By Apes With PR Firms: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

October 23, 2021

We Are Ruled By Apes With PR Firms: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

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So yeah basically we’re watching sociopathic oligarchs shore up more and more control over the global population and our electoral systems are rigged to prevent us from doing anything about it and our information systems are stacked to prevent mass-scale direct action against it.

You can’t vote your way out of a problem you never voted your way into in the first place. You can’t have a revolution while everyone is being successfully propagandized into accepting things as they are. Any solution is therefore going to have to come from somewhere they haven’t secured.

So we’re all just kind of watching this happen and hoping for what amounts to a miracle, or really a stack of miracles. What gives me hope is that I know humans have a lot of surprises within themselves that they haven’t even begun to explore yet. We might just get some miracles.

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The behavior of global oligarchic power structures makes a lot more sense when you see that it’s not as much a lucid elite conspiracy as it is a few barely-conscious humans compulsively acting out psychological dynamics within themselves that they don’t really understand. Elite conspiracies happen to be sure, but what’s ultimately driving them is not a complete and coherent vision for the future which takes all things into account but rather the simple egoic impulses of barely-evolved primates blindly trying to shore up control like chimps asserting dominance.

The sociopaths who rule our world are no more conscious of their own inner processes than your average serial killer…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Drivers Of Empire Want To Rule As Greek Gods

October 20, 2021

The Drivers Of Empire Want To Rule As Greek Gods

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Power is the ability to control what happens. The more control you have, the more powerful you are.

That’s why power is like crack for the ego. Egos are all about control; obtaining safety and security so as to ensure the survival and success of one particular human organism. The impulse to exert control over our surroundings is why our recently-evolved brains create egos in the first place.

The more tightly clenched the ego, the greater the desire for control. This can manifest as trying to dominate one’s family and romantic partner with greater and greater totality. It can manifest as starting a cult. It can manifest as trying to shore up massive amounts of wealth. And it can manifest as the pursuit of power.

Those who rise to positions of power tend to be those who’ve placed the pursuit of it above all else, or to have been trained since birth to prioritize power by the powerful families they’re born into. This is especially true in the giant globe-spanning power structure that is loosely centralized around the United States.

The loose alliance of plutocrats and government agency insiders who rule this giant empire pursue power above all else. For all the historically unprecedented power these imperial oligarchs have, it’s still not enough for them.

Their objective is to control everything that happens in any nation on earth; to ensure that everything that occurs on this planet serves them and their interests. That’s what absolute power would look like.

The imperial oligarchs wish to rule our world as Greek gods from Mount Olympus. If any population on earth disobeys them, they want to be able to cause sweeping famines in that nation, or rain down fire upon them from on high. They want to be able to control not just how all humans behave, but how they think as well.

And, for the most part, they absolutely can do this. The drivers of empire can inflict famines upon entire populations by imposing starvation sanctions upon them using their control over international financial systems. They can rain down fire upon any disobedient population using the most powerful military force ever assembled. They can control the way we think, act, spend, consume, and vote to ensure it serves their interests, and their control over our minds is continually advancing.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The US Has Placed Itself In Charge Over Which Nations Get To Eat

October 18, 2021

The US Has Placed Itself In Charge Over Which Nations Get To Eat

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The globally influential propaganda multiplier news agencies AP and AFP have both informed their readers that a “fugitive” has been extradited to the United States.

“Fugitive businessman close to Venezuela’s Maduro extradited to US,” reads the AFP headline.

“Alex Saab, a top fugitive close to Venezuela’s socialist government, has been put on a plane to the U.S. to face money laundering charges,” AP announced on Twitter.

You’d be forgiven for wondering what specifically makes this man a “fugitive”, and what that status has to do with his extradition to a foreign government whose laws should have no bearing on his life. The Colombian-born Venezuelan citizen Alex Saab, as it happens, is a “fugitive” from the US government’s self-appointed authority to decide which populations on our planet are permitted to have ready access to food. His crime is working to circumvent the crushing US sanctions which have been starving Venezuelan civilians to death by the tens of thousands.

Saab is being extradited from the African nation of Cabo Verde where he has been imprisoned since last year under pressure from the US government. In an article published this past May titled “Alex Saab v. The Empire: How the US Is Using Lawfare To Punish a Venezuelan Diplomat“, Roger D Harris explains how the US uses its domination of the international financial system to crush nations which disobey it and outlines the real reasons for Saab’s imprisonment, which has included torture and draconian living conditions. Harris writes:

Special Envoy and Ambassador to the African Union for Venezuela Alex Saab was on a humanitarian mission flying from Caracas to Iran to procure food and gasoline for the Venezuelan CLAP food assistance program. Saab was detained on a refueling stop in the African nation of Cabo Verde and has been held in custody ever since June 12, 2020.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Refreshingly Honest Billionaire Says Media Purchase Will Be Used For Propaganda

October 18, 2021

Refreshingly Honest Billionaire Says Media Purchase Will Be Used For Propaganda

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The billionaire CEO of the multibillion-dollar corporation that recently purchased the news media outlet Politico has said that its newly acquired employees will be required to support Israel and the capitalist world order.

In a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal, Mathias Döpfner, CEO of the German publisher Axel Springer, said that Politico staffers will be required to adhere to a set of principles which include “support for a united Europe, Israel’s right to exist and a free-market economy, among others.”

“These values are like a constitution, they apply to every employee of our company,” Mr. Döpfner told WSJ. People with a fundamental problem with any of these principles “should not work for Axel Springer, very clearly,” he said.

I mean, how refreshing is that? How often does a billionaire corporation buy up a media property and just straightforwardly tell you they’re going to be using it to push propaganda? They even say what the propaganda will be. It makes you feel like your intelligence is being respected.

Supporting global capitalism and defending the Israeli apartheid regime are both very standard positions promoted by all billionaire media outlets in the western world; they just aren’t normally honest enough to tell you that. Normally they pretend to be an objective free press reporting truthfully about what’s going on in the world; their executives do not customarily come forward to explain the specific establishment biases its reporters will need to promote if they don’t want to be fired. That sort of thing normally happens a lot more subtly.

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It Takes A Lot Of Education To Keep Us This Stupid

October 17, 2021

It Takes A Lot Of Education To Keep Us This Stupid

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The oligarchic empire is working harder and harder to bolt down our minds in service of its agendas.

Silicon Valley is working more and more openly in conjunction with the US government, and its algorithms elevate empire-authorized narratives while hiding unapproved ones with increasing brazenness.

The mass media have become so blatantly propagandistic that US intelligence operatives are now openly employed by news outlets they used to have to infiltrate covertly.

NATO and military institutions are studying and testing new forms of mass-scale psychological manipulation to advance the still developing science of propaganda.

A transparently fake “whistleblower” is being promoted by the US political/media class to manufacture support for more internet censorship and shore up monopolistic control for institutions like Facebook who are willing to enforce it.

Wikipedia is an imperial narrative control operation.

They’ve imprisoned a journalist for exposing US war crimes after the CIA plotted to kidnap and assassinate him.

The powerful work so hard at such endeavors because they understand something that most ordinary people do not: whoever controls the dominant narratives about the world controls the world itself.

Power is controlling what happens; absolute power is controlling what people think about what happens.

If you can control how people think about what’s going on in their world, if you can control their shared how-it-is stories about what’s happening and what’s true, then you can advance any agenda you want to. You’ll be able to prevent them from rising up against you as you steal their wealth, exploit their labor, destroy their ecosystem and send their children off to war. You can keep them voting for political institutions you own and control. You can keep them from interfering in your ability to wage wars around the world and sanction entire populations into starvation to advance your geostrategic goals.

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The Science Of Propaganda Is Still Being Developed And Advanced

October 16, 2021

The Science Of Propaganda Is Still Being Developed And Advanced

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We live in a far less free society than most of us think.

It looks like we’re free. We don’t get thrown in prison for criticizing our government officials. We can vote for whoever we want. We can log onto the internet and look up information on any subject we’re interested in. If we want to buy a product we have many brands we are free to choose from.

But we’re not free. Our political systems are set up to herd people into a two-party system that is controlled on both sides by plutocrats. The news media that people rely on to form ideas about what’s going on and how they should vote are controlled by the plutocratic class and heavily influenced by secretive government agencies. Internet algorithms are aggressively manipulated to show people information which favors the status quo. Even our entertainment is rife with Pentagon and CIA influence.

How free is that? How free is your speech if there are myriad institutional safeguards in place to prevent speech from ever effecting political change?

It doesn’t matter what you’re allowed to say if it doesn’t matter what you say. It doesn’t matter if you’re allowed to call the oligarchic puppet put in office by the last fake election a dickhead. It doesn’t matter if you’re allowed to Google any information you want only to find whatever information Google wants you to find.

What is the functional difference between a regime which directly censors the internet to prevent dissent and a regime which works with Silicon Valley plutocrats to control information via algorithms and has a system in place which prevents dissent from having any meaningful impact?

There is none.

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Netflix To Launch WikiLeaks Smear Job Three Days Before Assange Court Date

October 14, 2021

Netflix To Launch WikiLeaks Smear Job Three Days Before Assange Court Date

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Netflix will begin streaming a brazen hatchet job on Julian Assange and WikiLeaks for its American subscribers on October 24th, just three days prior to a significant court date in Assange’s fight against extradition from the UK to the United States on October 27th.

“You can stream We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks on Netflix starting Sunday, October 24, 2021, at 12 AM PT / 3 AM ET,” Netflix Schedule reports.

We Steal Secrets was a “documentary” that is now so outdated beyond its 2013 release that one of its central characters, Chelsea Manning, is referred to by a dead name throughout its entirety. Why choose this specific moment to release it?

Well it doesn’t make much sense at all, if the timing wasn’t deliberately geared toward damaging Assange’s reputation in the nation whose government is trying to extradite him for exposing its war crimes. Assange’s October court date was set way back in August and Netflix didn’t announce it had scheduled to begin streaming this film until two weeks ago.

After all, We Steal Secrets was so egregious in its spin that not only did WikiLeaks supporters like World Socialist Website and journalist Jonathan Cook pan it as a smear at the time, but WikiLeaks itself went to the trouble of publishing a line-by-line refutation of the mountains of propaganda distortion heaped on the narrative by filmmaker Alex Gibney.

“The title (‘We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks’) is false,” WikiLeaks writes at the beginning of its response. “It directly implies that WikiLeaks steals secrets. In fact, the statement is made by former CIA/NSA director Michael Hayden in relation to the activities of US government spies, not in relation to WikiLeaks. This an irresponsible libel. Not even critics in the film say that WikiLeaks steals secrets.”

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Anyone Who’d Support Going To War Over Taiwan Is A Crazy Idiot

October 10, 2021

Anyone Who’d Support Going To War Over Taiwan Is A Crazy Idiot

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Taiwan has been in the news a lot lately, and it’s really bringing out the crazy in people.

The mass media have been falsely reporting that China has been encroaching on Taiwan’s “air defense zone”, which gets stretched into the even more ludicrous claim that China “sent warplanes flying over Taiwan”. In reality Chinese planes simply entered an arbitrarily designated area hundreds of miles from Taiwan’s coast it calls its “Air Defence Identification Zone”, which has no legally recognized existence and contains a significant portion of China’s mainland. This is likely a response to the way the US and its allies have been constantly sailing war ships into disputed waters to threaten Beijing.

As Moon of Alabama reports, US warmongers inflamed this non-controversy even further by feeding a story to the press about the already public information that there are American troops in Taiwan training the military there, citing “concern” about the danger posed by China.

Now headlines are blaring about President Tsai Ing-wen responding to this non-event with the announcement that Taiwan will “do whatever it takes to defend its freedom and democratic way of life.” Former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott just visited Taipei to advocate that “democracies stand shoulder to shoulder” with Taiwan against China. The CIA has announced the creation of a new spy center that will focus solely on China, which CIA Director William Burns says will “further strengthen our collective work on the most important geopolitical threat we face in the 21st century: an increasingly adversarial Chinese government”.

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