We specialize in selected topics and in-depth research.

By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

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29 July 2021:  On December 18, 1940, Hitler issued OKW Directive No. 21. It began: “The German Armed Forces must be prepared to crush Soviet Russia in a quick campaign (Operation Barbarossa) even before the conclusion of the war against England.”1 He ordered preparations to start immediately, with the campaign to commence by May 15, 1941. As the news of German attacks began to filter in from the west, Stalin reacted with disbelief. When Rudolf Hess, the second-ranking member of the Nazi Party, flew to Scotland on his own initiative to negotiate a peace deal. Stalin again interpreted the information conspiratorially as an indication of a possible British-German peace arrangement directed against the Soviet Union.23 Messages from Richard Sorge in Tokyo – relaying precise information on German military plans – were also read as part of a plan to force the USSR into accepting economic concessions.24 In sum, Stalin interpreted the growing mountain of intelligence as either a provocation or a trap. Russia, Germany, and Poland Part Fourteen.

 

28 July 2021:  Short of German expectations, between January and May 1940, the USSR would export 155,000 tons of oil, 128,000 tons of grain, and 8,600 tons of manganese, with most of those quantities arriving in April and May. Stalin had made clear that he held the initiative throughout eight months of contentious Soviet-German economic talks: the Germans needed Soviet raw materials more than the USSR needed German military equipment, especially as Germany faced the combined might of Britain and France in the west. That equation would change suddenly.The Japanese were angered by a Soviet-Chinese nonaggression treaty of August 1936 and by the subsequent sale of Soviet military aircraft and munitions to China. Russia, Germany, and Poland Part Thirteen.

 

27 July 2021:  While Germany and Russia expanded their work together at sea, a new economic agreement had not yet been reached. Negotiations in December and January 1940 had brought the two sides closer, but no final treaty had resulted. Then, Ribbentrop sent a personal letter to Stalin calling for the partition of Poland. Stalin agreed to convene another summit in Moscow to discuss economic conditions. The result was the German-Soviet Commercial Agreement of February 11, 1940. Victory over Poland came with a cost for both Germany and the Soviet Union. Russia, Germany, and Poland Part Twelve.

 

26 July 2021: The German invasion stunned Neville Chamberlain. He delivered a quiet and cautious address to Parliament shortly after the news came in on March 15. Two days later, he addressed a crowd in Birmingham, saying, “Public opinion in the world has received a sharper shock than has ever yet been administered to it, even by the present regime in Germany.” He went on to insist defensively, “Really I have no need to defend my visits to Germany last autumn, for what was the alternative?” But there was a hint of resolve in the speech that was new. He concluded by saying that “No greater mistake could be made than to suppose that, because it believes war to be a senseless and cruel thing, this nation has so lost its fiber that it will not take part to the utmost of its power in resisting aggression.”Hitler had more shocks in store. Seven days after taking Czechoslovakia, he seized the city of Memel from Lithuania. The following day, he forced Romania into a pro-German trade treaty, providing the Wehrmacht with a guaranteed supply of oil. Hitler also began exerting heavier pressure to bring Poland into the German orbit. A final measure of reassurance arrived when a British diplomat delivered a fresh offer from Chamberlain to negotiate over Poland - hinting that the British guarantee to Poland was not, in fact, ironclad. But with the renewal of Rapallo imminent, Hitler was ready to start his war and would not allow any peace talks or concessions to divert him from that aim. Russia, Germany, and Poland Part Eleven.

 

25 July 2021:  Desperate to avoid war, Chamberlain initiated shuttle diplomacy to reach an “acceptable” compromise short of war. This produced the Munich Agreement, where Hitler received all of his territorial demands without the need to go to war. Germany’s armaments lead had produced another bloodless victory: American ambassador in Paris William Bullitt reported home that it was the perceived strength of German air power that had convinced the French and their British partners to surrender yet again to German demands. Whereby it was Hitler’s intervention in reference to Pearl Harbor that truly created the world war and transformed international history. Russia, Germany, and Poland Part Ten.

Underneath Chamberlain waving his agreement with Hitler:

 

24 July 2021:  Contrary to accounts like McMeekin 2021, for the Soviet Union, Germany offered desperately needed expertise for its military and industrial sectors. For Germany, the Soviet Union became a means to undermine the Treaty of Versailles by engaging in a partnership that led to rearmament. Whereby a critical question we are answering next is how these two countries, frequently at odds with each other ideologically and militarily, were able to convince each other that exchange, and eventually alliance, was feasible. Russia, Germany, and Poland Part Nine.

 

23 July 2021: As we have detailed, Russia offered a place for the German army to develop weapons and train men to violate the treaty that its civilian government had just signed. In return, Russia would learn how to modernize the Red Army, huge in size but badly trained and poorly equipped. The agreement was formalized at Rapallo, Italy. “Poland must and will be wiped off the map,” wrote Gen. Hans von Seeckt (pictured below), the man who established Sondergruppe Russland (Special Group Russia), the bureau that would manage military relations between Germany and Russia. Seeckt was referring, of course, to the country that Versailles had resurrected between them. (Poland had been divided between Germany, Russia, and the now-vanished Austro-Hungarian Empire.) “It was not an unfair peace that motivated Seeckt and his fellow officers. It was the far more ambitious aim of reversing Germany’s defeat in the First World War. In the 1920s, without troubling the civilian government in Berlin, the Reichswehr (German defense force) set up a ring of bases south and east of Moscow. German companies like Junkers and Krupp contracted directly with the Soviet government to manufacture warplanes in Russia, deliver coveted German-built locomotives, and train Red Army technicians. Versailles had banned all offensive weapons, but the Reichswehr in Russia included warplanes, battle tanks, and poison gas. In the end, however, with a war of machines - tanks and planes - rising in its place as we will see in part seven, Hugo Stolzenberg finalized the contract to produce poison gas in Soviet Russia, the next war looked like it might be approaching faster than anyone had predicted. Russia, Germany, and Poland Part Eight.

Central Europe in 1938:

 

22 July 2021:  As Hugo Gustav Adolf Stoltzenberg (1883-1974) associated with the German government's clandestine chemical warfare activities finalized the contract to produce poison gas in Soviet Russia, the next war looked like it might be approaching faster than anyone had predicted. Chancellor Cuno, who had initiated passive resistance in early 1923, spent the next eight months trying to get the French and Belgians to compromise on the issue of reparation payments. His policy of printing money triggered the rapid devaluation of the German currency, starting a hyperinflationary crisis that wiped out the remaining savings of the working and middle classes. The chaos inspired strikes across the country. After a vote of no-confidence in August 1923, Chancellor Cuno resigned. While the communist insurrection had failed, another danger to the Republic loomed. In response to the growing national political crisis, the state government of Bavaria, the heartland of the radical right, declared a state of emergency. The local Reichswehr commander, the state commissioner (governor), and the chief of police took control of the government. Fearful lest they be preempted by those even further to the right - like the Black Reichswehr soldiers who had seized Küstrin - the ruling trio banned public meetings other than those they themselves had set up. On November 8, during a rally they had organized in the Bürgerbräukeller, one of Munich’s gigantic beer halls, the three leaders of Bavaria were rudely interrupted by a sallow thirty-four-year-old with a narrow mustache. He stood on a table, picked up a beer stein, drank it to the dregs, smashed it to the floor, then drew a pistol and fired into the ceiling. With the attention of a crowd of more than 6,000 upon him, he then shouted, “The National Revolution has begun!” At gunpoint, he seized the ruling triumvirate and led them into a back room. There, he tried to force them to agree to participate in a new government he planned to organize. Russia, Germany, and Poland Part Seven.

On the left: Lipetsk Air Base, was the first joint military facility to begin operation. On the right: Unable to develop modern technologies of war at home, the Reichswehr used approximations of aircraft and tanks in maneuvers.

 

22 July 2021: As we will see it was a handful of German actors that as far back as 1917 contrary to Stalin started to have an influence in Russia. Whereby at the end of World War I, which had left the world with two pariah states, Germany because it had begun hostilities, Russia because the Bolshevik Revolution had transformed the country from a wartime ally to a postwar menace. Hardly had the ink dried on the punitive peace treaty signed at Versailles in June 1919 than the two pariahs joined forces.

The agreement was formalized at Rapallo, Italy. “Poland must and will be wiped off the map,” wrote Gen. Hans von Seeckt, the man who established Sondergruppe Russland (Special Group Russia), the bureau that would manage military relations between Germany and Russia. Seeckt was referring, of course, to the country that Versailles had resurrected between them. (Poland had been divided between Germany, Russia, and the now-vanished Austro-Hungarian Empire.) Russia, Germany, and Poland Part Six.

 

21 July 2021: As we have seen, the First World War proved to be the turning point in modern Polish history. It smashed the three empires which held it captive (Russia, Germany, and Austria-Hungary) and created a power vacuum that a new state in eastern Europe could fill. The core of independent Poland was the former province removed from Russia by the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (1918). At the Spa Conference in July 1920, the victorious Allies invited the German government to discuss disarmament and reparations. Nevertheless, the Polish Army’s advance into Ukraine in the spring of 1920 was poorly timed. Not only were most of the White armies defeated, but the Red Army was increasingly effective as a fighting force. Russia, Germany, and Poland Part Five. 

Leader of the German delegation in Russia Hans von Seeckt (third from right) next to Wilhelm II (center):

 

21 July 2021: The ends of World War I, which had left the world with two pariah states, Germany because it had begun hostilities, Russia because the Bolshevik Revolution had transformed the country from a wartime ally to a postwar menace. Hardly had the ink dried on the punitive peace treaty signed at Versailles in June 1919 than the two pariahs joined forces. And as we are about to see  Russia offered a place for the German army to develop weapons and train men to violate the treaty that its civilian government had just signed. In return, Russia would learn how to modernize the Red Army, huge in size but badly trained and poorly equipped. The agreement was formalized at Rapallo, Italy. “Poland must and will be wiped off the map,” wrote Hans von Seeckt, the man who established Sondergruppe Russland (Special Group Russia), the bureau that would manage military relations between Germany and Russia. Seeckt was referring, of course, to the country that Versailles had resurrected between them. (Poland had been divided between Germany, Russia, and the now-vanished Austro-Hungarian Empire.) It was not an unfair peace that motivated Seeckt and his fellow officers, it was the far more ambitious aim of reversing Germany’s defeat in the First World War.” Russia, Germany, and Poland Part Four.

 

The First World War proved to be the turning point in modern Polish history. It smashed the three empires which held it captive (Russia, Germany, and Austria-Hungary) and created a power vacuum that a new state in eastern Europe could fill. The core of independent Poland was the former province removed from Russia by the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (1918). To this was added territory from Germany by the Treaty of Versailles (1919) and from Austria and Hungary by the Treaties of St Germain and Trianon (1919 and 1920).

 

20 July 2021:  The tribulations and consequences of the Treaty of Versailles Opened on 28 June 2019 the exhibition in Arras organized by the Palace of Versailles starts with the proclamation of the German Empire in the same Hall of Mirrors that witnessed the signing of Peace of Versailles on 28 June. The year 1919 was, in fact, a catalytic moment not only did it see already earlier the rise of Mussolini, in March 1919, but 51 representatives from two dozen countries also met in Moscow at the Founding Congress of the Communist International. Long before Versailles, the other great totalitarian ideology of the 20th century, Marxism-Leninism, was also on the march. When Germany signed the armistice ending hostilities in the First World War on November 11, 1918, its leaders believed they were accepting a "peace without victory," as outlined by U.S. President Woodrow Wilson in his famous Fourteen Points. Russia, Germany, and Poland Part Three.

 

19 July 2021:  While we have covered Poland on several earlier occasions we noticed that what was missing in the most recent book on this subject is among others that the German military leadership, who in 1919 sought rearmament and the destruction of Poland as part of a program to overturn the results of the First World War. Bolshevik leaders in Moscow were even bolder, dreaming of a worldwide revolution. Their shared antagonisms produced the partnership at Rapallo that started Europe down the road to renewed war. As has been argued here, many of the key milestones along that path - the Reichswehr’s acceptance of Hitler, the speed of German rearmament, British and French appeasement, the Soviet purges, the inability of the European powers to contain Hitler, and finally, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact - as we shall see can only be fully understood in light of the Rapallo relationship and what led up to this. And so we continue in part two that as the Russian Civil War began in earnest, only one state had established diplomatic relations with Bolshevik Russia and could provide aid: the former archenemy Germany.  Russia, Germany, and Poland Part Two.

 

 

18 July 2021:  Coming in the wake of the distorted book by Sean McMeekin 'Stalin’s War: A New History of World War II' rather carefully analyzing its content we did much additional research and many details of what has been left out of a McMeekin's 1919 and what has now become a multi-part case study where we discovered Germany's rearmament and the destruction of Poland as part of a program to overturn the results of the First World War leading even Barack Obama in 2016 to propose a Polish missile defense site. In spite of their shared antagonisms it produced the partnership at Rapallo that started Europe down the road to renewed war. As will among others be argued here, many of the key milestones along that path - the Reichswehr’s acceptance of Hitler, the speed of German rearmament, British and French appeasement, the Soviet purges, the inability of the European powers to contain Hitler, and finally, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact - as we early on show can only be fully understood in light of the Rapallo relationship and what led up to this. Major Case Study: Russia, Germany, and Poland Part One.

 

18 July 2021:  Sean McMeekin’s recent 2021 books contention that the Second World War was more Stalin’s war than Hitler’s has a long and dubious pedigree reaching back to the war-revolution conspiracy theory of the interwar years. According to this myth, Stalin plotted to precipitate a new world war in order to foment a global revolution. So sparse is the evidence for the war-revolution hypothesis that McMeekin resorts to citing a blatant forgery: a document purporting to report on a speech Stalin supposedly made in August 1939 in which he spoke about the Sovietisation of Europe as a result of the war he intended to provoke. In fact, there is very little evidence that Stalin had any firm notions in 1944-45 about developing some sort of Communist bloc in Eastern Europe after the war. This will be shown on hand of the research results we post the coming week, including that in the end it was Hitler’s intervention in reference to Pearl Harbor that truly created a world war and transformed international history.

 

15 July 2021: Veering a bit from our usual topics today and having covered such figures like Carlos Castaneda we present a case study about Edgard Cayce, who was born outside Hopkinsville, parlayed a quirky, backwoods upbringing, where he claimed to absorb books by sleeping on them, into a large following that continues today. There are hundreds of people throughout the United States who will testify, at the drop of a hat, to the accuracy of Cayce's predictions, diagnoses, and other claims. All of this while the Cayce movement is described as cult-like while others call Edgar Cayce a fraud, so who is right? So we bring you the Edgar Cayce Secret Files, evidenced to be accurate it tells you everything there is to know about Edgar Cayce today. Major Case Study: The Edgar Cayce Secret Files.

 

9 July 2021: This expose about Eurasianism and, more importantly, present-day neo-Eurasianism when initially elements of the far right-sided with Russia, and then explores how the far-right pro-Russian attitudes developed in the West during the Cold War, as well as pointing out that Soviet Russia was often prone to use the Western for the right for its own political benefits. This also becomes more pertinent when we expand on the recent book War for Eternity: The Return of Radical Traditionalism and the Rise of the Populist Right by Benjamin R. Teitelbaum. Who links Bannon with Aleksandr Dugin and Jair Bolsonaro’s muse Olavo de Carvalho. They, in turn, connect via outfits such as Arktos publishing, Cambridge Analytica, and a Blackwater spin-off named Jellyfish to white identitarians such as Daniel Friberg in Sweden and populist intellectuals in France Italy, and Austria. Their common currency is Traditionalism, an anti-modernist religion whose earliest exponents were Italian fascist philosopher Julius Evola and his French counterpart, René Guénon. Our article shows how Dugin, Bannon, and Olavo have been influenced by this esoteric blend, though they, and the heirs of Evola and Guénon, interpret it in disparate ways. Major Case Study. Which way will the west turn? Left or right?

 

3 July 2021: For rising states, the act of peacefully displacing the hegemon consists of two broad strategies generally pursued in sequence. The first strategy is to blunt the hegemon’s exercise of those forms of control, particularly those extended over the rising state; after all. no rising state can displace the hegemon if it remains at the hegemon’s mercy. The second is to build forms of control over others; indeed, no rising state can become a hegemon if it cannot secure the deference of other states through coercive threats, consensual inducements, or rightful legitimacy. Unless a rising power has first blunted the hegemon, efforts to build order are likely to be futile and easily opposed. And until a rising power has successfully conducted a good degree of blunting and building in its home region, it remains too vulnerable to the hegemon’s influence to confidently turn to a third strategy, global expansion, which pursues both blunting and building at the global level to displace the hegemon from international leadership. Together, these strategies at the regional and then global levels provide a rough means of ascent for the Chinese Communist Party’s nationalist elites, who seek to restore China to its due place and roll back the historical aberration of the West’s overwhelming global influence. Understanding the 100 years of the current regime in China Part Two.

 

1 July 2021: Much has been made about the de-classified government report on UFOs issued on Friday whereby even Politico published an article that spins a conspiracy theory. Since the UFO report doesn't include everything the writer wants, he asserts (w/o proof) that there is "undoubtedly" hidden "information" withheld from the UFO task force and asks for Congress to seek answers. From esotericism to alleged Science.

 

26 June 2021:

 

 

24 June 2021: Going to the roots of International Day of Yoga on 21 June 2021 modern yoga, evolved in a discursive milieu that incorporates such disparate strands as Hindu religion, occultism, new thought, and gymnastics. Whereby given the recent entry of  QAnon one could argue that Yoga and New Age thinking has always been a breeding ground for conspiracy theories. To understand this it is good to start with the history of how Yoga came to the West: The Invention of Modern Yoga.

 

23 June 2021:

 

22 June 2021:  Early on already, Historian James Harrison considered the CCP party's actions of rewriting Chinese history as "the most massive attempt at ideological re-education in human history."In fact, even the founding date of 1 July is a myth and it seems clear from the available evidence that an organization calling itself the Communist Party of China was born a full eight months before the First National Congress as evidenced by the bulletin Gongchandang, published in November 1920 by Chen Duxiu’s Shanghai group, and its British counterpart, The Communist, dated August the same year. Understanding the 100 years of the current regime in China.

 

20 June 2021:  Back already early February this year, the British media wrote about how the previous six months had been a PR disaster for the British Royal Family. In our new article, we explain why historians believe that Queen Victoria's public image of her family is primarily responsible for today's monarchy and public perception of the Royal Family. Queen Victoria's curse?

 

17 June 2021:  In an earlier article, we pointed out that while popular with Irish and Scottish Nationalists that the word "Celtic" slowly came to imply "indigenous", and any further distinctions were dropped. But there is another under-researched aspect to early Irish and Scottish Nationalism and that is (as among others pointed out by Dr. Mark Williams Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History) its relationship to the occult. Major Case Study: The less-known aspects of early Irish and Scottish Nationalism.

 

14 June 2021:  When (posted on 5 April 2021) we asked does Myanmar now face civil war, today it now looks that Myanmar is indeed at a point of no return. The army’s February coup, meant to shift power within the existing constitutional framework surgically, has instead unleashed revolutionary energy that will be nearly impossible to contain. So the question now becomes, what Myanmar as a failed state may look like:

 

12 June 2021: Will inflation be on the rise again? Here is an overview of past developments:

 

11 June 2021: Recently Christie’s is selling a bottle of Chateau Petrus 2000 that spent 14 months aging aboard the International Space Station while orbiting Earth. But do such expensive wines really taste all that much better than cheaper wines? The wine report.

 

9 June 2021: British politics on the eve of the Second World War remains a subject of enduring fascination. Neville Chamberlain believed Hitler's promise that all the Fuhrer really wanted was the Sudetenland, the ethnic-German part of Czechoslovakia, and had no designs on Poland or the rest of Europe. How Britain hoped to avoid war with Germany in the 1930s.

 

7 June 2021: The Discovery Channel announced a series about Atlantis deciding that novelist Stel Pavlou was right to tie Plato’s allegory to the alleged flooding of the Black Sea around 5000 BCE, despite matching none of the details of Plato’s fictitious story. Why We Never Found Atlantis.

 

5 June 2021: L'oubli des cultures les plus indigènes et la valorisation des Gaëls étaient le résultat direct des idées racistes et de suprématie Aryenne, qui ont alors gagné le crédit politique en Europe. Recherche sur ce qui ne va pas avec les Celtes.

 

3 June 2021: The origins of COVID-19 are shrouded in mystery and conspiracy theories. Some say it started in a lab when scientists fell sick after manipulating a bat-coronavirus. Others say the team was working on a bioweapon for the Chinese military. Analyzing the Wuhan Lab Theory.

 

2 June 2021: Back in Nov. 2020, we posted an article where we went on to look at Eastern and Western culture but mostly from a psychological point of view whereby in this article we like to take a look at its economic aspects including the hotly debated 'Great Divergence' while ending with 'the East and the rest'. From East to West and back to East?

 

1 June 2021: When the Israeli security cabinet and Hamas agreed to an Egyptian-brokered ceasefire to halt 11 days of fighting, this was followed by celebrations in Gaza as the ceasefire took hold. Responding to this, the US said it would seek to rebuild its relations with the Palestinians by reopening its consulate in Jerusalem and providing aid to help rebuild Gaza, Secretary of State Antony Blinken says. The Holy Land and its contestants.

 

27 May 2021: Following our article about how UFO sightings went from joke to national security worry in Washington, we will next try to address 'how come that such stories flourish and amplify, especially in the U.S.-This question truly merits a very serious social (and political) study'... while among others discussing the origins of QAnon and the storm of the U.S. Capitol.  A question that remained was how something that started on the anarchic message board could go on to power right-wing thought to the point where QAnon believers were erecting gallows on the lawn of the Capitol. To answer it, we need to look closely not just at what QAnon is, but where it comes from and how it lodges itself so stubbornly into the mind of its adherents. Revisiting the Paranoid Style in American Politics.

 

25 May 2021: As part of President Donald Trump’s spending and pandemic relief package, the Senate Intelligence Committee, led by Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.), included a provision calling for the director of national intelligence to help produce an unclassified report on everything government agencies know about UFOs, including scores of unusual sightings reported by military pilots. Thus thanks to the Trump-era covid relief bill, the UFO report is due sometime next month which no doubt will create some more media frenzy, but it already started this week. We already covered the Erich von Däniken claim currently promoted by the History Channel that extraterrestrials have visited Earth for millions of years with the current UFO claims by CNN and CBS 60 minutes following see our investigation of what is behind this current UFO phenomena. Major Case Study. The surprising history of the current UFO sensation.

 

24 May 2021: Commenting on the weaponizing of the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative, a new book titled Hegemony with Chinese Characteristics by Asim Doğan and the projection of Chinese greatness in academia: China's multifaceted great power projection.

 

19 Feb. 2021: A subject, we covered extensively further below China in retrospect now suddenly honors 4 soldiers who died during the Galwan clash, disproves AltNews’ sly attempts to discredit India’s claims of Chinese casualties...

 

21 Feb. 2021: The following map shows the largest trading partner of each European country.

 

23  Feb. 2021: When President Joe Biden entered the White House determined to restore the world’s confidence in the United States. That task is particularly important in context of China. Where will the China/US competition lead the world?

 

25 Feb. 2021: In the following, we proceed with investigating the dynamics of modern China, Korea, and a strengthened Japan. The period under discussion is when the non-Western world focused increasingly upon issues of race and ethnicity, nationality and sovereignty, and the multiple ways East Asians formed and re-formed their own realities in the wake of the First World War.  Can a potential future Pacific War be avoided?

 

27 Feb. 2021: The U.S.-Japan rivalry escalated in the aftermath of the First World War to the point where the new Republican administration under President Warren Harding felt that it was necessary to initiate a naval limitation conference when strategic thinking permeated the Japanese Navy. Of course, the Japanese Navy was far from being a monolithic entity as illustrated by the clash between Admiral Katō Tomosaburō and Vice Admiral Katō Kanji, who differed vastly in their view of global naval strategy and the future course that Japan should take.  Part Two Can a potential future Pacific War be avoided?

 

1 March 2021: Having recently covered; Where will the China/US competition lead the world? Turning our view to SE Asia China looks the more likely prize-winner. It is the region’s biggest trading partner and pumps in more investment than America does. At least one South-East Asian country, Cambodia, is in effect already a Chinese client state. And none is willing to cross China by openly siding with America in the superpowers’ many rows. Trade and investment among the countries of South-East Asia outweigh the business they do with China. Another mechanism is strengthening ties with other Asian countries such as Japan and South Korea, one ASEAN has rightly embraced. The rivalry between America and China in South-East Asia.

 

5 March 2021: Having aspired to be a member of the civilized community by adopting the Western political and social norms, the Chinese now discovered that the nation-state system was not fair and open; rather, it was dominated by Western powers eager to protect their own interests the Chinese realized that Westernization alone would not win them recognition in international affairs. Instead, they focused on recovering national sovereignty through diplomatic negotiations and treaty revisions. Paradoxically they believed that although the nation-state system was a tool used by the Western powers to control the world, the system allowed a discussion of national sovereignty as expounded in Wilson’s Fourteen Points. To them, the only way to beat the system was to protect China’s territorial sovereignty.  Part Three Can a potential future Pacific War be avoided?

 

8 March 2021:

 

12 March 2021:  On 9 March Asia Pacific commander Philip Davidson said that China could invade Taiwan in the next six years and that (as has been clear for sometime China is the world's rising power while the US is currently a declining power) Beijing wants to take Washington’s world leadership role by 2050. This comes after Chinese President Xi Jinping has called on troops to "put all (their) minds and energy on preparing for war" in a visit to a military base in the southern province of Guangdong. Following is an overview of the wider background that led up to the current  situation. Major Case Study. The lead up to present-day China and the making of the ChinaTaiwan crisis.

 

15 March 2021:

 

16 March 2021: After a year of canceled concerts, closed-door sporting events, and restricted air travel, vaccine passports are being touted as a way to quicken the route back to normalcy. But as explained, there are still some open questions including some reasons for concern. Papers, please, and then:

Ein Bild, das Person enthält. Automatisch generierte Beschreibung

 

24 March 2021: Based on the invention of Erich von Däniken, whose origins we will explore, with on the side some remnants of the theories by neo-Nazi's like Ernst Zundel, Wilhelm Landig, and Rudolf J. Mund, who argued that Nazis invented flying saucers had taken their breakthrough technology to bases deep under the South Pole, the American History Channel has a series titled "Ancient Aliens" that claims to explore the controversial theory that extraterrestrials have visited Earth for millions of years from the age of the dinosaurs to ancient Egypt and present what as we will see can best be described as a sensationalized bricolage. Secret Nazis and the return of the Ancient Aliens.

 

26 March 2021: Following the heated debate during the US-China Alaska meeting, President Joe Biden got a taste of what the next four years may look like: a new era of bitter superpower competition with China since it opened diplomatic relations with the United States. This is also where Japanese and U.S. defense chiefs agreed in their meeting last week to cooperate in the event of a military clash between China and Taiwan closely. Making it time for us to continue our multi-article, the purpose of this is too to understand potentially could lead to a futures second pacific war if China follows up on its threats to attack Taiwan with as a purpose to take control of what China terms the South China Sea. Part Four Can a potential future Pacific War be avoided?

 

27 March 2021: Efforts to dislodge stuck Suez Canal ship with tug boats suspended till today with authorities cannot predict when it may be dislodged.

 

29 March 2021: On Saturday, China and Iran, both subject to U.S. sanctions, signed a 25-year cooperation agreement. The deal is expected to increase bilateral trade and military cooperation as US rivals move to deepen ties. As we will point out, this does not come as a surprise as this relationship goes back many years. The enduring relationship between China and Iran.

 

1 April 2021: At the heart of the conflict between the United States and Japan during the 1930s was the importance of two competing ideologies of world order, liberal internationalism and Pan-Asianist regionalism. From the Manchurian crisis of 1931 up through fruitless negotiations in the fall of 1941 discord consistently turned on basic principles about world govern­ance, tied to rising geopolitical stakes. This also includes the American reception of the Japanese government's efforts to shape American public opinion in the 1930s through a vigorous program of cultural diploma­cy. By tapping the empire’s cultural riches or “soft power.” Japan’s leaders hoped to combat negative perceptions in the United States and legitimize their regionalist aspirations on the continent. Part Five Can a potential future Pacific War be avoided?

 

3 April 2021: Chinese military aircraft simulated missile attacks on a US aircraft carrier during an incursion into Taiwan’s air defence zone three days after Joe Biden’s inauguration, according to intelligence from the US and its allies.The revelations highlight that the intense military competition between the two superpowers around Taiwan and the South China Sea has not eased, posing a challenge to any attempts the Biden administration might make to improve US relations with Beijing. Part Six Can a potential future Pacific War be avoided?

 

5 April 2021: Because so many people in Myanmar supported the military's 2017 slaughter of Rohingya, the generals seem to have concluded that they can get away with shooting people in Myanmar whom they don't like, such as pro-democracy protesters. Only concerted pressure can get the generals to talk to the civilians and thereby put Myanmar onto a less ruinous path. The alternative is a failed state at the heart of Asia. What next with Myanmar.

 

12 April 2021:

 

14 April 2021: Yesterday Taiwanese Foreign Minister Joseph Wu said the island will defend itself "to the very last day" if attacked by China. While yesterday the U.S. blacklists seven Chinese supercomputing entities citing national security concerns. Accidental war and territorial sovereignty. Part Seven Can a potential future Pacific War be avoided?

 

15 April 2021:  Last week, UNESCO commemorated the Rwandan genocide against the Tutsis. 27 years ago the Rwandan genocide erupted following the plane crash of then-President Juvenal Habyarimana. For the next 100 days, armed militias engaged in a killing spree against the ethnic minority Tutsis and moderate Hutus. In total, some 800,000 people died. The French, who were allies of the Hutu government under Habyarimana, had sent a special force to evacuate their citizens and set up safe zones. Although they witnessed the horror all around them, to this day, they are accused of having done very little to stop the killing. Major Case Study. Investigating the real story behind the Rwandan genocide against the Tutsis.

 

16 April 2021: Context is as important for Artificial Intelligence(AI) as it is for people. Just like people need to orient when looking for answers (you don’t look for iPhone solutions in a car repair manual), AI's data source requires curation and context. For sure is, data governance is more important than ever. What data is owned by the organization? What can be done with it? What are the data sources, and how is it being consumed or translated by other systems and processes? How well is data being leveraged to produce value for the enterprise and the customer? How can data issues be addressed and remediated? Dismantling the myths of AI.

 

18 April 2021: Enchanted determinism explains newspaper headlines such as ‘Can algorithms prevent suicide?’ or ‘can AI read emotions?’ Nobody has come close to such remarkable results, yet the dream that a machine can read emotions or stop people from ending their life is stronger than ever. These illusions distract from the far more relevant questions: Whom do these systems serve? What are the political econo­mies of their construction? And what are the wider planetary consequences? In part two of dismantling Artificial Intelligence's myths (AI), we look, among others at, the new Mappa Mundi? AI, the Myth of Clean Tech, AI and algorithmic exceptionalism, games without frontiers, facial recognition, and language prediction. Dismantling the myths of AI Part Two.

 

20 April 2021:

 

22 April 2021: Following is an analysis of positive thinking, self-help, and certain strands of modern Psychology. As we will see some psychologists see the present limitations of their field clearly. We also indicate how an ascendant power elite defined by the concurrent drives to do well and do good, to change the world while also profiting from the status quo. It consists of enlightened businesspeople and their collaborators in the worlds of charity, academia, media, government, and think tanks. So what is with Psychological Science?

 

24 April 2021: After the ‘sofa-gate’ incident in the EU, President Biden is now posed to be the first US President who dares to use the genocide word in reference to the systematic annihilation of Armenians. We explain; Why, and what happened. 

 

27 April 2021: US Threat Perceptions:

Source: Office of the Director of National Intelligence

 

1 May 2021:

 

2 May 2021:

 

4 May 2021: Where until last month, the danger that China could attack Taiwan and risk a war with the US was mainly the daily talk in the Pacific region and the US, however, following the news that the UK is sending its largest Carrier Strike Group since the Falklands War to the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea it now also is the talk in Europe with even Angela Merkel expressing her concern. Fact is, the prospects for war are actually higher in the next five years than the period thereafter because of how successfully China has closed the military capability gap with the US. Every day President Xi Jinping delays, his potential adversaries in a battle over Taiwan (which would undoubtedly include the US, Japan, Australia, and the UK) are investing enormous effort to prepare for war and once again expand the capability gap. So we proceeded with the conclusion of our question: Can a potential future Pacific War be avoided?

 

7 August 2020: Today the World Health Organization has warned against “vaccine nationalism”, cautioning richer countries that if they keep treatments to themselves they cannot expect to remain safe if poor nations remain exposed. It is no secret that Scientists fear that the current pandemic could lead to a geopolitical fight over vaccines. And that ‘vaccine nationalism’ threatens global plan to distribute COVID-19 shots fairly. But there are also other approaches. Vaccine Nationalism and its alternatives.

 

8 August 2020: Beirut explosion: Angry protesters take to streets

 

10 August 2020: Tonight, Lebanon's government stepped down, less than a week after a massive explosion in Beirut killed more than 160 people and sparked days of violent protests.

 

 

13 August 2020: People wash their clothes as Mount Sinabung in Indonesia spews ash:

 

17 August 2020: World Population Projections.

 

21 August 2020: Minsk, Belarus:

 

22 August 2020: The economy of Colonialism:  Major Case Study:  Part one, Part two, Part three.

 

25 August 2020: Replica of planet earth using NASA imagery goes on display in the Painted Hall of the Old Royal Naval College, Greenwich.

 

29 August 2020: Unsealed Archives Give Fresh Clues to Pope Pius XII’s Response to the Holocaust Several documents that have emerged from the newly opened Vatican Archives on the papacy of Pius XII bolster accusations of indifference to Jewish suffering, but some scholars say the full picture has yet to emerge. Major Case Study: The  Vatican archives and World War II.

 

3 Sept. 2020: This week, Indian troops moved firmly and preemptively to stop China’s new attempt at land grabs. China’s People’s Liberation Army was getting active in areas south of the strategically important Pangong Lake. But Indians took the heights near Rezang La and Requin La, allowing them an unfettered view of a key garrison inside China. The operation was led by India’s covert Special Frontier Force, which is drawn mostly from Tibetans whose families escaped Chinese oppression.

 

10 Sept. 2020: Two Myanmar soldiers have admitted on video to the mass killing and rape of Rohingya Muslims in 2017. The video confessions of the two deserters were filmed by a rebel group fighting the Myanmar military and have been deemed credible by a human rights group. If the confessions are legitimate, they would represent the first admissions by members of Myanmar's military that a campaign of violence against the minority ethnic group took place in the country's western Rakhine State. The two soldiers are believed to now be in the Hague at the International Criminal Court where an investigation into the Rohingya crisis is underway. As for now, there is no obvious end to the ongoing tragedy that faces the Muslim Rohingya communities of western Myanmar. Yet, with two important international legal cases underway at the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court, there are now important opportunities to maintain pressure on Myanmar’s government. Myanmar’s current government – a fusion of militarist, democratic, ethnic-nationalist, and conservative interests – has consistently sought to downplay the seriousness of the situation. This attitude, and the fraught, but politically effective, nexus between Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) and the military, has done much to encourage a culture of impunity among military and civilian decision-makers. Nevertheless, with crucial national elections scheduled for November 2020, and an economy battered by the global COVID-19 shutdown, Myanmar faces a confluence of grave challenges. Under these conditions, key decision-makers in Naypyitaw may hope that international scrutiny of violence against the Rohingya will fade. Given these court actions, however, this is unlikely. Whatever sympathy we may have for Aung San Suu Kyi’s predicament, she will not recover her reputation. And she will forever face hard questions about her inability to prevent, and, more importantly, refusal to condemn, ethnic cleansing.

 

17 Sept. 2020: Having published an extensive five-part study of Russian Freemasonry we now like to revisit our earlier topic of Freemasonry during the fascist era. Nazi Policy on Masons became unequivocal after the Night of the Long Knives – the savage purge of the SA and other political enemies. Thereafter, the SS assumed control of the Masonic Question. And in the spring of 1935, the former Masonic organizations were told to dissolve themselves completely or be forced to do so. Yet we also will see how and why Hitler toned down his initial anti-masonic rhetoric. Major Case Study: Freemasonry during the Nazi state.

 

19 Sept. 2020: Having highlighted Nazi-Germany we next move on to Spain where there was a belief, shared by all the different forces on the Nationalist side, that a conspiratorial Masonic influence permeated the Republic so thoroughly that almost anyone could be an instrument of the Lodges. An intriguing part of this history as we will see is a spy network known as APIS, which transmitted dozens of fake Masonic documents. In fact, one can safely say that APIS was the espionage equivalent of the great Taxil hoax of the late nineteenth century. Major Case Study:  The war against Freemasons in Spain.

21 Sept. 2020: A sense of history has always been crucial to Freemasonry. But as we have seen all too often, the Masons have squeezed their history into rosy identity narratives. Freemasonry’s past is as chequered as a Lodge floor. Hence in part one, we saw how Hitler toned down his initial anti-masonic rhetoric in order to focus primarily on his Jewish conspiracy theory whereby in Catholic Spain Fascists were less restrained. In this third part, now we come to our present era with among others Stephen Knight claims about a Masonic conspiracy, activities like those of the Ndrangheta, when as recently as four weeks ago $193m in assets were seized, Dan Brown's masonic musings in The Lost Symbol, including the role of Freemasonry in British India and the little, researched influence on Indian Nationalism. Major Case Study: Investigating Freemasonry today.

 

25 Sept. 2020:

 

26 Sept. 2020:  With or without a vaccine, the coronavirus will remain part of life well into next year. Alas as I show in the article, some governments (including America’s and Britain’s) have been botching the job. Terrible as illness, death, and disruption are in rich countries, COVID-19 is costing poor ones even more. Why governments get COVID-19 wrong.

 

29 Sept. 2020:

 

30 Sept. 2020: An Armenian soldier fires artillery during fighting with Azerbaijan’s forces this while a Turkish F-16 fighter jet shot down an Armenian warplane as fighting intensified near the long-disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region and fears grew of an outbreak of a new, full-scale war between Armenia and Azerbaijan:

 

1 Oct. 2020: The United Kingdom and Canada have imposed travel bans and asset freezes on Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, his son, and other senior officials while French President Emmanuel Macron called for a "peaceful transition" in the country after he met the exiled opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya in Lithuania on Tuesday. President Macron also visited a military base with Lithuania's president on Tuesday:

 

2 Oct. 2020: The last quarter of 2020 furthermore will be among others a waiting game -- like for example waiting for the results of the U.S. election in November, waiting on economic numbers, and waiting to see how the COVID-19 crisis plays out.

 

3 Oct. 2020: President Trump was taken to Walter Reed hospital out of caution after testing positive for Covid-19. At least seven people, including two U.S. senators, who had attended Saturday’s Rose Garden ceremony announcing Amy Coney Barrett as President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee have since tested positive for the coronavirus. The White House on Saturday created a startling amount of confusion on the timing of President Trump’s coronavirus diagnosis and the status of his health through conflicting statements, injecting an extraordinary degree of uncertainty into the nation’s understanding of the president’s condition and who may have been exposed to the deadly virus.

 

8 Oct. 2020: President Trump said he will not participate in the next presidential debate with Joe Biden after the commission said it will be held virtually. The Biden campaign rejected Trump's demand to delay the next two debates. Whereby the other news in the US was that thirteen people were charged Thursday in an alleged domestic terrorism plot to kidnap Michigan Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, federal and state officials announced.

 

9 Oct. 2020: Will we ever know the true toll that the coronavirus pandemic has taken on the globe? We have the tally provided by Johns Hopkins, but there is no way we can truly know how accurate the numbers are. This is especially the case in countries in which the numbers are manipulated to downplay the seriousness of the pandemic.

 

10 Oct. 2020: -The 2020 Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to the United Nations World Food Programme. “In the face of the pandemic, the World Food Program has demonstrated an impressive ability to intensify its efforts,” Berit Reiss-Andersen, the chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, said as she announced the prize in Oslo.

 

-'The president is likely toast': Trump's woes raise GOP fears of a blue wave.

 

-More than 200 people have already been killed in fighting in Nagorno-Karabakh, a disputed enclave populated largely by (Christian) Armenians that broke away from (Muslim) Azerbaijan as the Soviet Union collapsed. Armenia supported it during a war that killed tens of thousands of people. America and Russia helped bring about the ceasefire in 1994. But America has almost entirely abandoned the long, thankless slog of routine peace-maintenance. In a world where the democratic superpower is resentful, consumed and distracted, averting wars is far harder. That is one reason why a recent rise in tension in the Taiwan Strait is causing alarm. Few expect an imminent Chinese invasion. But America’s commitment to the defence of Taiwan cannot be guaranteed.

 

11 Oct. 2020: India's confirmed coronavirus cases cross 7 million, second after US; last 1 million rise is within the last 13 days.

 

12 Oct. 2020: The pandemic has created a massive economic contraction that will be followed by a financial crisis in many parts of the globe, as nonperforming corporate loans accumulate alongside bankruptcies. Sovereign defaults in the developing world are also poised to spike. The Coming COVID-19 Economic Crisis.

 

14 Oct. 2020: Turkey threatens Armenia with direct military intervention in Karabakh War.

 

16 Oct. 2020: It remains the most audacious spy plot in British and American history, a bold and extremely dangerous operation to invade Russia, defeat the Red Army, and mount a coup in Moscow against Soviet dictator Vladimir Ilich Lenin. After that, leaders in Washington, Paris, and London aimed to install their own Allied-friendly dictator in Moscow as a means to get Russia back into the war effort against Germany. Along with the British and the French the plot we now know had the “entire approval” of also President Woodrow Wilson. As he ordered a military invasion of Russia, he gave the American ambassador, the U.S. Consul General in Moscow, and other State Department operatives a free hand to pursue their covert action against Lenin. The result was thousands of deaths, both military and civilian, on both sides. Major Case Study: Spys Invade Russia P.1.

17 Oct. 2020: As a civil war began in Russia, Washington, London, and Paris worked to ally themselves with anti-Lenin forces, the Whites, and eventually, send troops. Their ultimate goal was to defeat the Red Army, mount a coup against Lenin and then install their own Allied‑friendly dictator in Moscow as a means to get Russia back into the war. Covert American military aid would be laundered by the French and British, then passed along to the Cossacks in a plot to overthrow Lenin and the Bolsheviks. As Lansing suggested, some might say this was illegal. Still, Lansing directed Walter Hines Page, U.S. ambassador to Britain, to act “expeditiously” and confer with France and Britain on the matter. “This has my entire approval,” Wilson said. Major Case Study: Spys Invade Russia P.2.

 

19 Oct. 2020: To the surprise of some, Chinese President Xi Jinping has called on troops to "put all (their) minds and energy on preparing for war" in a visit to a military base in the southern province of Guangdong on Tuesday, according to state news agency Xinhua. This came shortly after Beijing increased military drills around Taiwan. Almost 40 Chinese warplanes crossed the median line between the mainland and Taiwan on 18-19 September, one of several sorties the island's President Tsai Ing-wen called a "threat of force."Thus there was no doubt what President Xi Jinping was referring to, and some analysts say China could move against Taiwan should the U.S. presidential election result in political chaos, Reuters reported. Will a coming conflict make the military disasters of Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq pale in comparison?

 

21 Oct. 2020: So far, American, French, and British diplomats in Russia had been sharing information with one another. America and France had spies in Russia, but the British Secret Service had not contributed any high-level agents but that changed now when Sydney Reilly and Bruce Lockhart joined the plot. Where the initial idea was to persuade Russia’s new Bolshevik leaders to continue the war and rebuild the Eastern Front against Germany, the Western powers soon devised an ambitious scheme to trigger regime change by landing troops at the ports of Vladivostok, Murmansk, and Archangel and there join with pro-tsar ‘White’ forces and armed Czechoslovak former prisoners of war who had seized control of the Trans-Siberian Railway. Major Case Study: Spys Invade Russia P.3.

22 Oct. 2020: Allied forces invaded Russia and fought the Red Army in an attempt to support the Moscow plotters. But Wilson and Prime Minister Clemenceau made a mistake in placing the U.S. and French troops under British command. Most of the British officers resented being shuffled off to a “sideshow” like Russia and took out their anger on the American and French troops under them. Some sanity arrived after the British commander was sacked and replaced with Brigadier General Edmund Ironside. Spys Invade Russia P.4.

 

23 Oct. 2020: Today a ‘Borat’ sequel has been released with an Election 2020 plot twist...In the current film, Borat is dispatched by the Kazakh government to the US to present a bribe to an ally of Donald Trump to ingratiate his country with the Trump administration... A bit rough to watch at times, in the following scene (dressed up as a Ku Klux Klan member) Borat tries to sneak (and is able to get through) into CPAC where vice president Mike Pence is speaking...

In the U.S., the Kazakh American Association in a 20 October letter to Amazon officials asked that the film’s release be canceled and goes on to write that if comedian Sacha Baron Cohen really was trying to target U.S. President Donald Trump and racist Americans, he would have created a fictitious country. Cohen, for his part, told The Financial Times that he and his crew always planned to film and release the sequel ahead of the 2020 U.S. elections. “Borat is the perfect character for the Trump era, because he is just a slightly more extreme version of Trump. They are both misogynistic and racist, they both don’t care about democracy, and they’re both laughable characters,” Cohen said. An article in today's NYT today added that Rudy Giuliani is just the latest in a long line of people pranked by Sacha Baron Cohen.

 

24 Oct. 2020: Perhaps the British agents knew nothing of SR plans, either in Ukraine or in Moscow, but gave them money for general purposes only. It is fair to wonder, however, whether some of his money might have helped to fund one assassination or the other, and fair to point out as well that in July 1918, with his country and Germany still at war, he would have had every reason to consider it money well spent. Spys Invade Russia P.5.

25 Oct. 2020: American Consul-General Poole sent a cyphered telegram (the Bolsheviks had not broken American codes) to Washington, DC. He anticipated acts of sabotage carried out by the conspirators, then Allied intervention, clashes between Whites and Reds, and between General Poole’s advancing army and the Reds. The telegram said in part: “every effort must be made to remove allied functionaries and nationals from that part of Russia controlled by the Bolsheviks . . . this territory must be regarded as hostile." On 14 August 1918, two Latvians – Jan Sprogis and Captain Berzin of the Rifle Brigade – called on Lockhart. The brigade was disaffected from Bolshevism, they said, and ready to help its overthrow. This seemed to Lockhart and later to Reilly like the answer to a prayer. Lockhart promised money, as well as Allied support to establish a free and independent Latvia, and wrote the visitors safe-conduct passes to reach Poole. But both men, well primed by Peters, were Cheka double-agents. Spys Invade Russia P.6.

 

28 Oct. 2020: Taylor, the former chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security, was the anonymous author of The New York Times Op-Ed article in 2018 and the author of “A Warning,” a book he wrote the following year. Both roiled Washington and set off a hunt for his identity. He acknowledged that he was the author of both the book and the opinion article in an interview and in a three-page statement he posted online.

 

30 Oct. 2020: A Communist Party conclave concluded on Thursday with a rousing statement lauding President Xi as the party’s helmsman, affirming his broad mandate as the leader who will steer China through perilous waters for years to come. The meeting of the Central Committee, a council of senior officials, laid out ambitions for China to mature as an economic, military, and cultural power despite rising uncertainty abroad. An official summary from the meeting read, “we will certainly be able to conquer the range of hardships and dangers that lie on the path forward.”

The following is a major expose about the creation of China and among others it's manipulating with maps. Some of the discoveries are breathtaking. And reveal that the People's Republic's sense of self is far too fragile to admit for example that the shape of the country may have been different 300 years ago. No debate over the state's ‘core interest' of territorial integrity is permitted and the result is absurd denials of any historical evidence that underpins a different story of the past. The only acceptable version of history is the invented version that suits the needs of the Communist Party's current leadership. Much about today's China that's presented as ancient, traditional and immutable is, in fact, recent, imported and defined by the political imperatives of the present.

And as we further detail, the aggressive pursuit of claims to tiny rocks and submerged reefs, the elevation of Taiwan’s status to a question of existence, and the frequent provocations in the Himalayas reveal that these ‘sacred’ boundaries are largely twentieth-century innovations dreamed up by nationalist imaginations. This is the first of a three part investigation. Major Case Study. The secrets of China's new maps unveiled.

 

2 Nov. 2020: Tonight around 8 pm local time an attempted terrorist attack took place in Vienna in the street (and the obvious target) where the Jewish Synagogue and Israeli Embassy next door are with a police officer who guarded the place shot. Reminiscent of an ISIS type attack it began just hours before Austria was due to introduce new coronavirus restrictions, including a curfew from midnight to 6 am, and bars and restaurants in the network of narrow streets known to locals as the “Bermuda triangle” were packed. At least one attacker was identified, but more are believed to be involved. One, armed, attacker is believed to be still at large.

 

4 Nov. 2020: We all know, later today there will be the US election. But what if Trump refuses to accept US election defeat and go quietly. The election could be a highly fluid situation.

 

6 Nov. 2020: Variously called the Ambassadors' or Envoys' Plot was covered up in America for many years, yet it was studied and analyzed in the Russian spy school. And by many seen as the origin of the cold war, succeeding generations of Soviet bosses have used it to justify stealing thousands of Western military secrets. Spys Invade Russia P.7.

 

7 Nov. 2020:

 

9 Nov. 2020: As present-day China retreated from Maoist communism in the late twentieth century, it searched for new ways to generate the loyalty of its citizens. One key foundation of its right to rule became ‘performance legitimacy’: the delivery of ever-higher living standards to most of the country’s population. However, proletarians and bourgeois cannot live by bread alone and the party also sought a new guiding idea to fill their souls and lead them in the right direction. The new people’s opium would be nationalism – not the kind that makes mobs march through the streets, but an official kind, defined by those at the top and stressing homogeneity and obedience. Whereby even the idea of the majority ethnic group in China, the Han, as the Chinese 'race' is a relatively new construct. This is the second of a three part investigation. Major Case Study. The re-invention of Chinese History, Nation, Language, and Territory.

 

11 Nov. 2020: At 5:00 am on this day in 1918, the Allied powers and Germany signed an armistice document in the railway carriage of Ferdinand Foch, the commander of the Allied armies, and thus the First World War came to an end. It is generally accepted that the First World War which at the time was seen as a clash of civilizations and a contest of rival national values still reverberates today. Almost every day it seemed possible that the crisis could be settled as so many had been over the previous decade; almost every day there was a new suggestion that gave statesmen hope that war could be avoided without abandoning vital interests. Major Case Study. A new investigation about the First World War.

 

13 Nov. 2020: A sensation took place when on Monday the German company BioNTech and the US pharmaceutical giant Pfizer announced via a press release that their jointly developed vaccine candidate had outperformed expectations in the crucial phase 3 trials, proving 90% effective in stopping people from falling ill. Will people start to be inoculated by mid-December as is claimed?

19 Nov. 2020: Our third part of analyzing China's nation-building. Problems stem from the country’s two contradictory views of the past. In the first, China sees itself in imperial terms, as the natural center of East Asia, where borders are immaterial to power. In the second, China sees itself in Westphalian terms, determined to incorporate every scrap of territory, every rock, and reef, within the homeland’s ‘sacred’ national border. The territory we recognize today as China bore the name of each successive dynasty that ruled it. Just as its name changed with the name of the dynasty, so did the shape of its borders and lands. This is an uncomfortable reality for the Chinese Communist Party today as it continues to make new claims in the name of historical "rights" to territories also claimed by its neighbors. Major Case Study. The re-invention of Chinese History, Nation, Language, and Territory Part Three.

 

20 Nov. 2020: A video is projected on to the Houses of Parliament in Westminster:

 

22 Nov. 2020: Trump’s last-ditch efforts to overturn results so far have failed to make a dent in Biden's victory. With his denial of the outcome, Trump has endangered America’s democracy and duped supporters into believing, perhaps permanently, that Biden was elected illegitimately.

 

24 Nov. 2020: Obama on the cover of In Style Magazine:

 

27 Nov. 2020: The impact of Isaac Newton’s work is—in a word—legendary. The size of his groundbreaking treatise, known as the Principia, in which Newton laid out his three laws of motion, was until now thought to be small, partly reflecting a long-held notion that the book was virtually incomprehensible outside of a small circle of expert mathematicians. The volumes cover 27 countries on five continents, including Africa and Australia with nine copies that showed up in Japan. The astronomer Edmond Halley took it upon himself to present copies to influential people, including England’s King James II, Royal Society President Samuel Pepys, and German polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who is commonly credited with co-inventing calculus at the same time as Newton. A copy also likely went to Christopher Wren, the architect of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London.

 

29 Nov. 2020: In a soon to be published book written by Tonio Andrade "The Last Embassy" tells the story of the Dutch mission of 1795, bringing to light a dramatic but little-known episode that transforms our understanding of the history of China and the West.

One challenge created by all of this psychological diversity is that we generally see and understand the world through our own cultural models and local intuitions. When policymakers, politicians, and military strategists infer how people in other societies will understand their actions, judge their behavior, and respond, they tend to assume perceptions, motivations, and judgments similar to their own. However, even when implemented perfectly, policies can have one effect in London or Zurich and very different effects in Baghdad or Mogadishu because the people in each of these places are psychologically distinct. Major Case Study. Developmental forces in East and West as drivers of psychological change.

 

1 Dec. 2020: Visualizing the Human Impact on the Earth’s Surface

 

2 Dec. 2020:

 

3 Dec. 2020: The History Channel has a series titled "Ancient Aliens" that claims to explore the controversial theory that extraterrestrials have visited Earth for millions of years from the dinosaurs' age to ancient Egypt and present what, as we will see, can be described as a sensationalized bricolage. Investigating the  Ancient Aliens theory.

 

5 Dec. 2020: The pandemic has reshaped expectations of higher education—but it’s also created an opportunity for institutions to accelerate their digital transformation. By providing more wellbeing resources, career support, and flexibility, universities can drive trust and support their students’ needs in the new normal.

 

8 Dec. 2020:  Whereby The end of Europe's empires has so often been seen as a story of high politics and warfare, using the new technology of cheap printing presses, global travel, and the widespread use of French and English, young radicals from across Asia were able to communicate in ways simply not available before. These clandestine networks stretched to the heart of the imperial metropolises: to London, to Paris, but also increasingly to Moscow. They created a secret global network that was for decades engaged in bitter fighting with imperial police forces. They gathered in the great hubs of empire - Calcutta, Bombay, Singapore, Penang, Batavia, Hanoi, Shanghai, and Hong Kong - and plotted with ceaseless ingenuity, both through persuasion and terrorism, the end of the colonial regimes. Then on 24 July 1924 five at Canton when an unsuccessful attempt was made on the life of M Martial Henri Merlin, Governor-General of French Indochina. Major Case Study. Asia's secret networks Part One.

 

10 Dec. 2020: The myth of the absence of politics was shared across colonial Asia. In the Indies, the Dutch called the zaman normal, a return to ‘normal time’, or rather the pretense of it. Normal time revived the illusion that colonial governments could dictate political futures. Imperial regimes never provided an adequate answer to the question as to what precisely was on offer for colonial subjects who still sought to work within the system and its laws. The reality was, in most cases, far less than was offered earlier. Major Case Study. Asia's secret networks Part Two.

11 Dec. 2020: China had been thrown into a revolutionary ferment by the depredations of Western powers beginning with the First Opium War in 1839. As we have seen there were many grievances against the Qing emperor and the social structure, as had often been the case in Chinese history, but what ultimately discredited these entities was their failure to defend China and their obvious inadequacy compared to the leading powers. While anti-imperialism was already present therefore in the minds of Chinese intellectuals, Marxism was nearly nonexistent in China before the popular movement that began on May 4, 1919. Major Case Study. The Chinese Nationalist Kuomintang and its unexpected relationship with Communism: Asia's secret networks Part Three.

12 Dec. 2020: Very different from the Revolution in Russia the May 4, 1919 protests in China was a Nationalist reaction objecting to the decision of the victorious Allied powers at the Versailles conference to award former German possessions in the Shandong Peninsula to Japan. Yet the shock of defeat at the hands of foreigners had not only ignited nationalist sentiment it also slowly and fitfully led to a recognition that fundamental political, and economic changes would be necessary if China were to survive, let alone compete, in the modern world. The Chinese Communist Party was founded two years later with even the Nationalist Kuomintang developing a relationship with the Bolshevists in Moskau. Major Case Study. Asia's secret networks Part Four.

 

13 Dec. 2020: The most populous countries in the world are China, India, and the U.S—but global population trends may be shifting faster than you think:

 

14 Dec. 2020: After Nicholas II of Russia abdicated in 1917 meanwhile, the world's tempests outside blew directly into the households of Surabaya and Semarang. On seizing power, Vladimir Lenin had looked to Europe’s working classes to foster wider revolution. When that hope fizzled, the revolutionary potential of Asian peasantries, whom Lenin, like the colonialists, had hitherto deemed backward, was reassessed. Asian radicals were now summoned to Moscow. Major Case Study. Asia's secret networks Part Five.

 

15 Dec. 2020: In 1902, Japan had allied with Britain in East Asia, and now events were drawing her closer to France. A series of sensationalist reports in the Écho de Paris in January 1905, headlined ‘The Yellow Peril,’ claimed that Japan planned to use Taiwan, now also a colony of Japan, as a base to attack the French in Indochina. By strange osmosis of animosity and opportunism, Japan responded by strengthening ties with France. A Franco-Japanese Treaty was signed in 1907, and the French immediately used it to put pressure on Japan’s Vietnamese émigrés. As the Governor-General of Indochina explained it to the minister of the colonies in Paris in July 1908, the people of Vietnam could not be indifferent ‘to the events occurring in this theatre of nations’ when their country, because of its long border with Siam, rail links to China and sea lanes to the ports of China, Japan, and Southeast Asia, lay in the middle of ‘the great Far Eastern highway.’ Major Case Study. Asia's secret networks Part Six.

 

16 Dec. 2020: In June 1919 a petition circulated among delegates to the peace conference at Versailles. The “Demands of the Annamite People” claimed to speak for the inhabitants of the part of French Indochina that is today the heart of Vietnam. The petition, writes, was one of many into which were decanted the hopes of entire peoples. Its demands seemed moderate enough, things like freedom of the press, the right to education, the abolition of government by decree, and it was received politely by Woodrow Wilson and even the president of the French republic. But its tone, of presuming to speak directly to power, got under the skin of the French authorities, who had built an empire in Indochina on the back of forced labor, while plantations ran their own private prisons. As the document circulated among the diplomatic missions and, within two months, hit the streets of Hanoi, the security services knew that its author, Nguyen Ai Quoc, a pseudonym meaning “Nguyen the Patriot” (today better known as Ho Chi Minh) was in some way important. They were to maintain that conviction for more than three decades. Briefly, Nguyen Ai Quoc would break cover, for instance, to address political meetings in Paris, scruffily dressed. Yet the expanding secret-police files on him reflected official frustration. He lied about his age, his name, his origins, and his profession. He changed his accent to suit. Time and again, Nguyen Ai Quoc slipped like quicksilver through the fingers of imperial powers. His shadow was found in libraries, cafés, and boarding houses across France, in port cities such as Singapore and New York, and even in the London suburb of Ealing; one rumor had him as a pastry chef under the great Escoffier. His writings surfaced in illicit journals in China and Korea. But just when the Sûreté Générale picked up his scent again, he was gone. Major Case Study. Asia's secret networks Part Seven.

Xiang Jingyu, head of the Women’s Bureau of the Chinese Communist Party, executed by the Kuomintang in Hankou, 1928.

 

17 Dec. 2020: A recent article asked will the COVID-19 vaccine bet in China pay off? An emergency use authorization, based on China’s Vaccine Management Law, allows the use of unapproved vaccine candidates among people at high risk of infection for a limited period of time. Chinese vaccine and patriotic drive.

 

 

18 Dec. 2020: Transnational Asia was without borders. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1867 had brought the west dramatically closer. The wealth, goods, and styles of Asia had never been more accessible to the European public. It was a time of great ‘universal’ expositions – Paris in 1900, Brussels in 1910, the Festival of Empire in London in 1911 – which brought in colonial products, and even imperial subjects, as objects of curiosity. The London extravaganza of 1911 – together with the Imperial Institute in South Kensington, imperial-themed clubs, museums and monuments, and the Imperial College of Science and Technology – marked the crescendo of attempts fashion London into a city that better reflected its world-encompassing status. It was certainly a lure to its new colonial subjects. This was still a world of circulating monarchs, and Indian and Malay princes gravitated to the courts of Europe and took the waters at their aristocratic playgrounds, in a reprise of the old Grand Tour. Major Case Study. Asia's secret networks Part Eight.

 

19 Dec. 2020:  Europe's first wave vs its second wave. Notice for example Slovakia initially was a poster boy of successfully dealing with the virus but then recently had to declare a national state of emergency. Similarly in Slovenia.

 

20 Dec. 2020: In our further research, we highlight among others the High Treason Incident (大逆事件, Taigyaku Jiken), which provoked an unprecedented press blackout with the trials held in camera. Nevertheless, in the way it polarized opinion, it became the ‘Dreyfus Affair of Japan.’ Also the so-called Delhi Conspiracy case. It was later shown that Rash Behari Bose threw the bomb. He successfully evaded capture for nearly three years, becoming involved in the Ghadar conspiracy before it was uncovered. Bose fled to Japan in 1915, under the alias of Priyanath Tagore, a relative of Rabindranath Tagore. There, Bose found shelter with various Pan-Asian groups. Major Case Study. Asia's secret networks Part Nine.

 

22 Dec. 2020: 

 

23 Dec. 2020:  After Tsar Nicholas II of Russia abdicated in 1917, the world's tempests outside blew directly into the households of Surabaya and Semarang. On seizing power, Vladimir Lenin had looked to Europe’s working classes to foster wider revolution. When that hope fizzled, the revolutionary potential of Asian peasantries, whom Lenin, like the colonialists, had hitherto deemed backward, was reassessed. Asian radicals were now summoned to Moscow. Major Case Study. Asia's secret networks Part Ten.

 

24 Dec. 2020: This shows when the coronavirus vaccine will be widely available. Rich countries will have their population vaccinated way earlier than poor countries. That said, Africa as a whole managed the pandemic better than most of the rich West.

 

26 Dec. 2020: Perhaps the simplest indication of the different natures of the respective revolutions is the difference in the terms that Russians and Chinese use, to this day, to describe their own revolutions. In Russian, the period before 1917 is naturally referred to as dorevoliutsionnyi, literally “prerevolutionary.” In Chinese, however, the period before 1949 is not called geming qian, “before the revolution,” but rather jiefang qian, “before the liberation.” Though similar means were adopted by both sides, at least until the late 1970s, the underlying aims of the two revolutions were different, a fact that would impact not only the domestic conduct of the revolution, but also understandings of global processes and historical trends and, ultimately, the respective abilities of each side to reform. In this section, we cover topics like Henk Sneevliet's task as instilling Comintern discipline in China, sovereignty (the 'lost' countries), Canton as one of the most unruly and radical of China’s cities, sovereignty (the 'lost' countries), Siam, Vietnam, India, Malaysia, Japan, and so on...Major Case Study. Asia’s secret networks Part Eleven.

 

29 Dec. 2020: Whereas the US still has to manage its relations with China, which extends far beyond the regional canvas. The dilemma the US cannot escape is how to integrate into the international system a rising power which will eat into American predominance in the world, much more difficult is this in South-East Asia countries. South-East Asia between China and the US.

 

30 Dec. 2020: Lights are projected on the Louvre’s Pyramid during a rehearsal of David Guetta’s ‘United at Home’ concert that will be broadcast for New Year’s Eve.

 

1 Jan. 2021: A few countries to look out for the next six months.

 

2 Jan. 2021: China watcher Andrew Chubb recently wrote that "if Xi Jinping was to conclude that Indian nationalist sentiments are so strong as to make escalation inevitable, then he might be inclined to strike first, as Mao did in 1962." However, this statement has a whole background that remains underresearched as we shall see to date. In a year that challenged policymakers across the world, one development will perhaps have the most significant long-term impact in the Indo-Pacific, the ongoing standoff between India and China in the Himalayas. Major Case Study. Investigating the India-China standoff Part One.

4 Jan. 2021: There are several global developments jostling for the world’s attention right now—the upcoming inauguration of U.S. President-elect Joe Biden, Britain’s exit from the European Union, a worrying hack of U.S. government systems, and the race to administer coronavirus vaccines across the planet. Amid these major news stories, the 8-month-old military standoff in the Himalayas between Asia’s two biggest countries, China and India, has fallen off the radar of global concern. While pundits agree that Asia is the site of an ongoing shift in the global power balance, what gets little attention is how New Delhi’s reworking of military priorities, forced by events on the disputed Sino-Indian border, will have far-reaching geopolitical consequences for the world. Major Case Study. Investigating the India-China standoff Part Two.

6 Jan. 2021: In off-the-record conversations, Indian officials accept that a diplomatic solution to the Ladakh crisis is unlikely because of how the two countries have different understandings of the status quo. These officials consider the army’s performance and sustenance through this winter as the critical factor for their plans to deal with Chinese aggression in Ladakh. They contend that if the Indian soldiers manage to get through the next few months relatively unscathed, New Delhi will have found an answer to its troubles with Beijing. Major Case Study. Investigating the India-China standoff Part Three.

 

8 Jan. 2021: Lasting till 5 February Harbin International Ice and Snow Sculpture Festival in China have opened to visitors, featuring frozen towers, palaces, and castles revealing Harbin's interesting Russian history.

 

10 Jan. 2021:  COVID-19 jabs will eventually help tourism start again, but expect a trip full of immunity passports, mouthwash tests, and weary travelers. What vaccines mean for the return of the travel.

 

13 Jan. 2021:  While the counter-culture of the 1960s marked a distinct period in popularising a variety of ‘eastern’ religions and spiritualities in the global context, its influence has often been over-estimated. Occultists explored the ‘hippy trail,’ alternative religions, in the early twentieth century, marked a ‘widening of the road’ rather than the paving of new ground of what became an estimated $11.56 billion business. Investigating the invention of Yoga.

 

15 Jan. 2021:  The Chinese Army has constructed an underground facility (UGF) barely 50 km from the India-China border, and just 60 km from the Indian forward posts at Demchok in Ladakh. So far, there was just one UGF in Tibet, with another one being a bit away in the Xinjiang Region. Seen here are members from the People's Liberation Army who for the first time walk along the Pakistan border in Xinjiang:

 

19 Jan. 2021:  Italy’s largest mafia trial in three decades will begin tomorrow with a high-security 1,000-capacity courtroom, 900 witnesses testifying against more than 350 people, including politicians and officials. But there is an odd aspect to this, Freemasonry. Italy's underground Freemasonry.

 

20 Jan. 2021: Today millions of people watched an apparently well-documented video about Putin's rise to power and the oligarch who followed him. Striking is also that Alexei Navalny was willing to release it while in a Russian jail:

 

22 Jan. 2021:  Following the article we posted on 6 July 2019, we received a lot of mails asking for more information when we reported that "Prince Michael of Albany"alias Lafosse's center of activities became the Czech Republic, where he is the 'Grandmaster' of 'order' listed among the self-proclaimed knightly orders in the Czech Republic. Lafosse and the Královský řád Moravských rytířů svatých Rastislava a Kolumbana.

 

25 Jan. 2021:  In the middle of the seventeenth century, statesmen and scholars all over Europe looked at China as a beacon of commercial, intellectual, and cultural potential, offering the promise of wealth as well as global civilizational convergence. Russia’s earliest ventures eastward became interesting to a variety of audiences as an indication that this convergence was to be realized together with Europe’s commercial ambitions. In the end, it was the Opium Wars and the Taiping Rebellion that provided the Russian Empire with the opportunity to negotiate from a position of strength. In the following article, we look at early Russian spycraft. Imperial Russia and Qing China.

 

26 Jan. 2021:

 

27 Jan. 2021: Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was freed after serving 30 days in jail on Monday - but was then immediately detained and jailed for a further 20 days on charges of staging an illegal protest.

 

28 Jan. 2021:  Taking advantage of the withdrawal of the Russian state from Siberia after the Bolshevik Revolution and the general weakness of warlord-era Republican China, Buryat nationalists seized their opportunity to establish a new nation along the Russo-Chinese border. Initially, their interests coincided with those of Japanese pan-Asianists. The story of the Buryat national movement in 1919 moves us away from both empire-centric and Eurocentric views of the history of East Asia in the early twentieth century. The Japanese Attempt to Solve the Mongol Question.

 

1 Febr. 2021: 

 

4 Febr. 2021:  In the following article, we show that the Enlightenment was not a blank slate on which Europeans sketched a new world. It was more like a piece of old parchment imperfectly scraped clean, still bearing traces of past ideas around which modernity took shape. Rather, magical beliefs and occult systems were part of the natural philosophies that proliferated in the Enlightenment. Whose Enlightenment?

 

29 May 2020: While initially it was expected that Beijing would send troops into Hong Kong which in fact later was confirmed that this was the plan, it does not come as a surprise China's parliament has backed a new security law for Hong Kong which would make it a crime to undermine Beijing's authority in the territory. There is a new brand of diplomacy taking hold in Beijing and its chief architects have a suitably fierce nickname to match their aggressive style, they are the wolf warriors. China’s move however also has implications far beyond Hong Kong. China's larger geostrategic game.

 

1 June 2020: As recently once more explained in The Yogasūtra of Patañjali: A New Introduction to the Buddhist Roots of the Yoga System by Pradeep P. Gokhale (29 May 2020) much of what is said about yoga is misleading. It is neither five thousand years old, as is commonly claimed, nor does it mean union, at least not exclusively. In perhaps the most famous text, as Gokhale details, the aim is separation, isolating consciousness from everything else. As for the popularization of Yoga in the West, this in turn was influenced by the notion of occultism and modern physical culture. The re-invention of Yoga.

 

2 June 2020: Invoking an 1807 law threatening military to take control throughout the USA President Trump next posed with a bible in front of a church:

 

4 June 2020: On 28 May 2020 Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Vice President M Venkaiah Naidu, and others paid tributes to Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, who popularized the term Hindutva. Today exemplified by Modi Savarkar is loved by the Hindu right with centrists and Muslims, Sikhs, Jains, and Buddhists, in India, not to mention Kashmir, having a different opinion. Major Case Study: The Hindu right in context.

Ein Bild, das Person, Mann, suchend, Tisch enthält. Automatisch generierte Beschreibung

 

5 June 2020: In an interesting twist today reporting came in that three men were arrested Saturday on the way to a protest in downtown Las Vegas after filling gas cans at a parking lot and making Molotov cocktails in glass bottles. An informant stated that the “idea behind the explosion was to hopefully create civil unrest and rioting" whereby the complaint filed in U.S. District Court in Las Vegas on Wednesday said they self-identified as part of a movement, which U.S. prosecutors said in the document is to signify coming civil war and/or fall of civilization. White Supremacists as a growing menace.

 

8 June 2020: Because I soon will be involved with a number of travels and upcoming presentations one earlier subject that I like to bring to a degree of completion is the Wandering Bishop subject at the end of a discussion about the mimic Order of St John that I hoped to come back to that at a later point. From tribulations of the Old Catholic Church to an alleged order of St.John.

 

9 June 2020: Dickens on Westminster Abbey:

 

10 June 2020: With protesters who have created an“Autonomous Zone” in the center of Seattle, A&E announcing today that itis stopping production of "Live PD", various mayors in the US that ban chokehold, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti who said today that the United States past few days have been traumatic. The keystone of a worldwide movement.

 

12 June 2020: Beijing fears second wave of coronavirus after spike shuts market:

 

13 June 2020: Atlanta police chief resigns after officer fatally shoots black man on Friday night:

 

17 June 2020: Worst India-China clash in decades: 20 Indian troops killed, see our updated article about the Ladakh fighting. The genesis of the current crisis has to do with India's revocation last year of the special status granted to Jammu and Kashmir, and the splitting of the former Indian state into two territories.

 

20 June 2020:  Yesterday a monument of Albert Pike was removed in Wahington D.C. The statue was erected by the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry and depicted Pike on a granite pedestal, which features the allegorical Goddess of Masonry, who holds the banner of the Scottish Rite. And while protesters accurately saw Pike as a senior officer in the Confederate Army, the US Congress at the time was satisfied with the Masons’ reassurance that Pike would be depicted as a civilian rather than as a soldier. But so one of the interesting questions here also is: What was the Scottish Rite to begin with?

 

21 June 2020: First day of summer (summer solstice) with the Fête de la musique in Paris today:

 

25 June 2020:  Seventy years ago today, the North Korean People’s Army of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) swept south across the 38th parallel. This had divided the Korean peninsula as Japanese troops were driven out by the Allies at the end of the Second World War. On the 27e the US announced it would send troops that soon were to rule Pyongyang. But the US never declared war. Apart from the US fifteen other nations sent combat troops in aid of South Korea under the United Nations Command. Chinese troops intervened on the North Korean side. A war that for many however is still very much alive. Major Case Study: The Korean War in context.

 

   29 June 2020: