Documents lodged as part of a planned shopping centre redevelopment have shed new light on the complicated political dealings of Chinese businessman Huang Xiangmo.

The planning application will eventually be determined by a panel chaired by a member of the Greater Sydney Commission, which is headed by Lucy Turnbull, the wife of the Prime Minister.

Mr Huang is the chairman of Yuhu Group, which is behind a $276 million plan to demolish and redevelop the Eastwood shopping centre in Sydney's north-west suburbs.

Last year, Senator Dastyari was recorded defending China's policy on the South China Sea, in defiance of party policy, while flanked by Mr Huang, a donor of the ALP.

A disclosure form lodged with Sydney's Ryde Council reveals more details about the number and extent of political donations made by Mr Huang's companies.

The form details 13 separate donations paid between November 2014 and June 2016.

The list begins with a donation of $50,000 to the Liberal Party in Victoria in November 2014.

It continues with $55,000 paid to the ALP for a seat at a boardroom lunch with Labor leader Bill Shorten in October 2015.

Then there was a flurry of donations coinciding with the 2016 federal election campaign.

Donations of $20,000 each were paid to the campaigns of Liberal senator Mathias Cormann and former Tasmanian Liberal MP Andrew Nikolic, who went on to lose his seat.

read more:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-12-12/huang-xiangmos-development-linked-...

For the people living in strange lands that are not Australia, we need to clarify the toon at top:

In 1951, South Australian winemaker Max Schubert created a small volume of experimental wine in the Adelaide suburb of Magill.

Today the vintage is known as the first of the Penfolds Grange Hermitage collection and is one of the most expensive bottles in Australia.

One undisclosed Aussie buyer is the latest to add the rare red to their collection, having paid $51,750 for the 750ml bottle in an online auction.

In a bottle with roughly five glasses of wine, that's roughly $10,000 per glass.

The Chief Executive of wine auction house MW Wines, Mr Nick Stamford, said expensive bottles like this one were rare.

"With a couple of hours to go, we noticed a big bid had been placed for a certain bottle of wine," he said.

Read more:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2017-07-26/experimental-wine-sells-for-...

And some spurious stickler pointed out that the sum on the blackboard in the toon at top did not add up to $55,000... I know that. It was part of the joke: there were other "donations" to this and that political party, etc. And there was a discount on the chicken feet soup of ... Bugger off! Work it out for yourself....

Federal Liberals insist it is not as politically damaging for them to have received donations from Chinese businessman Huang Xiangmo as it is for Labor's Sam Dastyari.

• Mathias Cormann received $20,000 from Huang Xiangmo
• Liberals argue the difference is that Dastyari used cash for personal expenses, not campaigning
• The ALP banned foreign donations last year, the Liberals have not followed suit

Senator Dastyari resigned today because of continued pressure over his links to China, including to businessman Huang Xiangmo.

Federal Labor stopped taking foreign donations last year but the Liberal Party has not adopted the same approach.

Disclosure documents uncovered by the ABC reveal Finance Minister Mathias Cormann received a $20,000 donation from Mr Huang last year.

The money was used for Senator Cormann's election campaign.

Today Senator Cormann argued all appropriate disclosures were made.

read more:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-12-12/liberals-defend-their-dealings-wit...

There are strict rules banning the sharing of research that could be used for military purposes by Australia's potential foes, including China.

Australian universities conduct world-leading research in areas such as artificial intelligence, super computing and driverless car technology that could be adapted for military purposes.

The Defence Department said it relied on self-assessment from universities to police their academics' interactions with overseas academics.

"It is ultimately the responsibility of each institution to ensure they comply with the law," the Department told the ABC in response to questions about links between Australian and Chinese researchers.

Charles Sturt University professor Clive Hamilton has uncovered hundreds of research projects linking Australian scientists with senior Chinese military figures.

At the centre of a web of questionable collaborations with Australian universities sit Yang Xuejun, a Lieutenant-General in China's People's Liberation Army who heads the country's top defence research academy.

Professor Hamilton said much of those collaborations could mean Australian technology could be used against it on the battlefield.

Read more:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-12-15/universities-sharing-military-tech...

Any science addict like me would know that China has far more growing expertise on these subjects than our cash strapped Universities. Far from me to denigrate our high level of education but it was the Chinese who recently produced an entanglement of particles at more than 1200 kilometres — an extraordinary world first. And the Chinese were not shy in sharing the technological details of their work, which to say the least can be used in advancing research in Australian Universities on quantum computing. As well, the Chinese government has not been shy in sharing its many scientific developing universities to overseas researchers and students. "Education Drives Western China's Future" is a main theme of its advertising in scientific magazines (Science for the AAAS, for example). China has more super faster computers than the USA. On developing weaponry, the Chinese are 1.4 billion people ahead of Australia... Please note that sharing data at this level WORKS BOTH WAYS. You might learn something. And as far as I know, "Mr Foo is not an Australian foe", except in our Trumble's mind. When some Chinese student —name withheld — developed a particular cheap effective solar panel in an Australian university, no-one wanted to support his work. He went to China and guess what?: he's a multi billionaire because the world buys "his" panels...

On this subject of solar panel, the next step is PEROVSKITES. Remember the name.  

The main problems in sharing are "patents"...

From John Pilger

When I first went to Hiroshima in 1967, the shadow on the steps was still there. It was an almost perfect impression of a human being at ease: legs splayed, back bent, one hand by her side as she sat waiting for a bank to open. At a quarter past eight on the morning of 6 August, 1945, she and her silhouette were burned into the granite. I stared at the shadow for an hour or more, unforgettably. When I returned many years later, it was gone: taken away, ‘disappeared’, a political embarrassment.

I have spent two years making a documentary film, The Coming War on China, in which the evidence and witnesses warn that nuclear war is no longer a shadow, but a contingency. The greatest build-up of American-led military forces since the Second World War is well under way. They are on the western borders of Russia, and in Asia and the Pacific, confronting China.

The great danger this beckons is not news, or it is news buried and distorted: a drumbeat of propaganda that echoes the psychopathic campaign embedded in public consciousness during much of the 20th century.

Like the renewal of post-Soviet Russia, the rise of China as an economic power is declared an ‘existential threat’ to the divine right of the United States to rule and dominate human affairs.

To counter this, in 2011 President Obama announced a ‘pivot to Asia’, which meant that almost two-thirds of US naval forces would be transferred to Asia and the Pacific by 2020.

Today, more than 400 American military bases encircle China with missiles, bombers, warships and, above all, nuclear weapons. From Australia north through the Pacific to Japan, Korea and across Eurasia to Afghanistan and India, the bases form, says one US strategist, ‘the perfect noose’.

A study by the RAND Corporation – which, since Vietnam, has planned America’s wars – is entitled War with China: Thinking Through the Unthinkable. Commissioned by the US Army, the authors evoke the Cold War when RAND made notorious the catch cry of its chief strategist, Herman Kahn – ‘thinking the unthinkable’. Kahn’s book, On Thermonuclear War, elaborated a plan for a ‘winnable’ nuclear war against the Soviet Union.

Today, his apocalyptic view is shared by those holding real power in the US: the Pentagon militarists and their neoconservative collaborators in the executive, intelligence agencies and Congress. The current Secretary of Defense, Ashley Carter, a verbose provocateur, says US policy is to confront those ‘who see America’s dominance and want to take that away from us’.

read more:

https://digital.newint.com.au/issues/118/articles/3063