Fighting Communism, Pompeo Announces Ban on U.S. Companies Doing Business with Cuba’s BFI Bank
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced on Friday (Jan. 1, 2021) on the State Department’s website that he has placed the Cuban commercial bank Banco Financiero Internacional (BFI) on a restricted list, saying the move will prevent the Cuban military from benefiting from financial transactions.
Pompeo said in a statement Friday that BFI is a commercial bank controlled by the Cuban military that directly benefits from financial transactions at the expense of the Cuban people.
The Cuban military uses BFI’s key role in foreign exchange to provide preferential access to the military and state-run companies, ensure favorable exchange rates and fund government-controlled projects to enrich the regime,” Pompeo said. Profits earned from these operations disproportionately benefit the Cuban military over independent Cuban entrepreneurs, further exacerbating the repression of the Cuban people and funding Cuba’s intervention in Venezuela.”
Pompeo added that President Trump has made it clear that he supports the Cuban people in their long struggle for freedom and against the communist regime in Havana (Cuba’s capital). The addition of the BFI to the Cuba Restricted List helps advance the Trump administration’s goal of preventing the Cuban military from controlling and benefiting from financial transactions that are supposed to benefit the Cuban people.
Nepal’s Troubles Shake Beijing as Xi Jinping Sends Officers to Intervene in Nepal Crisis Sparking High International Concern
Photo shows supporters of Nepal’s ruling Communist Party of Nepal splinter group taking part in a protest in Kathmandu on Dec. 29, 2020.
A political crisis in Nepal, a small landlocked country in the southern Himalayas, has deeply disturbed the top leaders of its giant neighbor, China, with a population of 1.4 billion. A senior Chinese Communist Party delegation rushed to Kathmandu on orders from Xi Jinping to mediate between the embattled political parties, a move that has drawn considerable international attention.
Voice of America reports that the political crisis began on Dec. 20, when Nepal’s Prime Minister Sharma Oli abruptly announced the dissolution of parliament and called for early parliamentary elections. President Bidya Devi Bhandari then announced the dissolution of the House of Representatives. Nepal is facing a constitutional crisis.
Oli’s extraordinary measures were prompted by a proposal submitted jointly by nearly 100 lawmakers in the ruling Communist Party to remove Oli as prime minister and appoint CPN chairman Prachanda to the post. According to a consensus reached when the CPN factions merged in 2018, the leaders of the two factions took turns as prime minister.
The sudden change in Nepal’s political situation took Beijing by surprise. For the CCP, the political chaos in Nepal could deal an unpredictable blow to the Belt and Road project promoted by Xi Jinping. The Chinese Communist Party has reportedly invested heavily in Nepal in recent years for this project.
Just a few days after the political crisis broke out in Nepal, Zhongnanhai decided to send a CPC delegation headed by Guo Pazhou, vice minister of the CPC Central Committee’s Foreign Liaison Department, to Kathmandu immediately to understand the situation, mediate conflicts and deal with the crisis.
According to several media reports, Guo and his delegation opened dialogue with leaders of Nepal’s political factions and ruling party immediately after arriving in Kathmandu on Dec. 27, and also met with President Bhandari and Oli on the same day. Bhandari’s personal secretary said the meeting lasted nearly an hour. The Communist Party delegation also met with three former prime ministers and the chairman of the opposition Nepali Congress, Sher Bahadur Deuba, last Tuesday and Wednesday.
An Asian diplomat shared a similar view. The diplomat told Reuters, “They are buying land there, investing in massive infrastructure projects and keeping a tight grip on the ruling and opposition parties.”
India is closely following developments in Nepal and is surprised by the Chinese Communist Party’s open involvement in Nepalese politics. A commentary in the Times of India said the CCP’s move showed its desperation.
On December 31, the Indian Express reported that a four-member working group sent by the CCP intended to assist the CPP in dealing with differences, including Vice Minister Guo Yezhou, had returned without success. During their three-day stay in Nepal, Guo reportedly met with President Bhandari, Prime Minister Oli, and Communist Party co-chairman Prachanda in an attempt to resolve differences between the ruling party leaders. However, not only did both CPN factions reject the CPC delegation’s coordinated intervention, but Bhandari and Oli also said that Nepal does not need foreign help to deal with its internal political crisis.
On Dec. 31, 2020, the YCL “high-profile” removed the slanderous banner in Causeway Bay at 3 p.m.
On December 31, 2020, the YCL “announced its withdrawal in a high profile” and removed the defamatory banner that had been placed in front of Sogo in Causeway Bay for a long time at 3:00 pm. The picture shows the situation after the removal.
On the afternoon of December 31, 2020, the YCL removed the defamatory banner in Mongkok.
The barn in Mongkok where the Ching Kwan Association had placed slanderous banners has been emptied.
Before the “high-profile disbandment” of the YCLA, Falun Gong truth sites in Hong Kong were ravaged by CCP villains in mid-December, with a combined total of six truth sites vandalized over two consecutive weekends. For example, on December 19, a man in his 50s or 60s, balding and wearing a duck-top hat, violently tore down the banners and panels at the Wong Tai Sin truth site.
Driven to Death by the Communist Party! Zhisheng Gao’s Sister Commits Suicide in Despair
It has been more than 1,200 days since the enforced disappearance of prominent human rights lawyer Zhisheng Gao, and at the beginning of the New Year, the news broke that his sister jumped into the river in May 2020 because she was worried about her brother and in fear.
The wife of Gao Zhisheng, who was forced into exile in the United States, tweeted on the first day of 2021, saying, “At the beginning of the new year, the sad news came to me that Gao Zhisheng’s sister in Shandong Province was worried about her brother’s involvement in the persecution, and she was suffering from fear every day and could not sleep at night, so she became depressed and became ill, and jumped into the river in May 2020 in despair. “
The tweet is accompanied by a pre-report of Gao’s arrest at his sister’s home in Shandong in 2006.
According to reports at the time, in August 2006, Gao Zhisheng went to his sister’s home in Shandong to visit his critically ill brother-in-law. Instead, he was broken into by a number of public security officers, had his eyes and mouth wrapped in yellow tape, and was taken back to Beijing with a black hood.
In the past ten years of his lawyer career, Zhisheng Gao has defended the rights of countless disadvantaged groups, and too many injustices and darkness have made Zhisheng Gao see the shortcomings and evil of the system.
Later, Zhisheng Gao took over the case of Falun Gong practitioners and conducted a personal investigation into the nationwide persecution. From late 2004 to 2005, Zhisheng Gao wrote three open letters to Hu Jintao, then General Secretary of the Communist Party of China, and Wen Jiabao, then Premier of the Communist Party of China, revealing first-hand information about the torture and abuse of Falun Gong practitioners in labor camps. Gao Zhisheng appealed to Hu and Wen authorities: they must face up to the serious problems and immediately stop persecuting Falun Gong. 2006 Lawyer Gao was arrested by the political and legal system at his sister’s home in Shandong.
Apollo.com commentator Wang Duran said that in 2006, Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao were in a state of being hollowed out, and the political and legal system was Jiang’s Luo Gan as the secretary of the political and legal committee, and Zhou Yongkang as the minister of public security. Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao did not stop the persecution of Falun Gong initiated by Jiang Zemin, and Xi Jinping did not do so either.
The year-end bonus is only $8! Sichuan College Professor Pulls Banner in Cold Wind to ‘Collect Salary’
Professor’s year-end bonus is only RMB 8 yuan? Dozens of teachers at a Sichuan university pulled a banner in front of the school to “ask for pay”.
The Zhejiang Daily reported, “What kind of excessive behavior can force a group of college teachers to hold banners and shout slogans, completely abandoning intellectual decency in the cold wind? At around 11:30 p.m. on December 29, dozens of teachers of Southwest University for Nationalities pulled a banner with the words “Southwest University for Nationalities performance is unfair, return my performance” and shouted in unison “the school is unfair and return my performance” at the Aerogang Campus of Southwest University for Nationalities.
According to informed sources, a college of the university recently published salary forms for everyone to check, and most of the teaching staff saw the specific salaries of each position and thought that the salary calculation “emphasized administration over teaching”, which led to dissatisfaction.
According to the report, the published salary table shows that some administrative positions receive higher salaries than teachers in teaching positions, for example, the year-end performance bonus of a Grade 10 clerk in an administrative position is more than RMB 10,000 than that of a Grade 4 professor; this year’s year-end performance bonus was also deducted from two years of pension insurance premiums, and teachers at Southwest University for Nationalities have said that there is little left of the year-end performance bonus. One professor said “only $8” was left in his hand, and some young teachers had insufficient year-end performance bonuses to cover the deductions and were in arrears.
A mid-level teacher at Southwest University for Nationalities said she had more than 20,000 yuan deducted from her pension insurance, which is the type of year-end performance bonus that is backdated. In addition, after this year’s performance reform, classroom fees were paid as performance bonuses, “with the same amount of classroom hours, this year’s income is indeed significantly less than last year’s”.
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