Zemirah Loc: Sojourner En Route...

Immediately before the W***n v***s struck the US:

BOSTON (CBS) 1/28/20 – Three people tied to universities and a hospital in the Boston area were indicted on charges they lied about their ties to China or tried to help the Chinese government. Among them was Dr. Charles Lieber, the chair of Harvard University’s Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology.

Prosecutors said Lieber had a contract with W***n Institute of Technology. He also ran a group that had contracts with the Department of Defense and National Institutes of Health.

Federal agents said Lieber lied about his ties to China when he bid on those contracts.

“It appears China paid Lieber hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years for his involvement with the Chinese entities and for his work on research for Chinese gain,” said U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts Andrew Lelling.

Lieber was arrested at his Harvard University office and then placed on administrative leave. He will not be able to participate in his teaching or research roles, the university said.

A Harvard spokesman issued a statement on Lieber’s arrest:

The charges brought by the U.S. government against Professor Lieber are extremely serious. Harvard is cooperating with federal authorities, including the National Institutes of Health, and is initiating its own review of the alleged misconduct. Professor Lieber has been placed on indefinite administrative leave.

The second indictment is a Chinese national who was working as a researcher at Boston University. Lelling said Yanqing Ye is a lieutenant of the Chinese military, but failed to disclose that while applying for a U.S. visa. Ye is currently in China and has not been arrested.

“A border search of her electronic devices showed that Ye had complied information for the People’s Liberation Army about two U.S. residents with expertise in robotics and computer science,” said Lelling.

Boston University said Ye left the school in April 2019 and they are fully cooperating with the investigation.

The third indictment is Chinese national Zaosong Zheng who was sponsored by Harvard and working as a researcher at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. He was allegedly caught at Logan Airport in December trying to smuggle biological material out of the country.

Beth Israel Deaconess released a statement of its own:

We are deeply proud of the breadth and depth of our research programs. Any efforts to compromise research undermine the hard work of our faculty and staff to advance patient care. We are grateful for the diligence and professionalism of federal law enforcement in this case and are fully cooperating with the government’s ongoing investigation of this matter.

“Boston is an especially attractive target for this kind of exploitation. Universities, research institutions and tech companies in this area must become sensitized to this type of threat,” said Lelling. “This is not an accident or coincidence. This is a small sample of China’s ongoing campaign to siphon off American technology and knowhow for Chinese gain.”

bggamers Loc: georgia

Great post thanks for bringing it forward

EL Loc: Massachusetts

Did Harvard know what was going on????

dtucker300 Loc: Vista, CA

If not, they should have. They were willing partners so that they could receive endowments for the Chinese. Too many will sell their soul for financial gain. The NBA wouldn't say anything bad about China either. They were more interested in continuing to get money and not upset their gravy train than to call a spade a spade.

nwtk2007 Loc: Texas

Interesting. I wonder if any others across the country have been "detained?"

Sicilianthing

>>>

That’s old news it was already posted on OPP a while back.

nwtk2007 Loc: Texas

But it's more interesting now that we have more info on c****a.

Comment Loc: California

BE CAREFULL, spades are black!

Sicilianthing

>>>

Agreed.

Zemirah Loc: Sojourner En Route...

An addendum by NPR updating the below information in their usual left leaning, politically correct manner was released on February 19, 2020 4:00 AM ET.

There is information to be gained from it however:

"Until late last month, Charles Lieber lived the quiet life of an elite American scientist. His lab at Harvard University researched things like how to meld tiny electronics with the brain. In his spare time, he grew award-winning pumpkins in front of his house.

And then, on Jan. 28, the FBI came knocking on his door.

Now Lieber faces charges of trading knowledge for money and lying about it. Prosecutors allege he set up a lab in China in exchange for hundreds of thousands of dollars in payments from the Chinese government and then denied knowledge of those payments to U.S. investigators.

Lieber's attorney, Peter Levitt, declined to talk to NPR about the allegations. But others watching the case say it raises important questions about ethics, scientific openness and possible racial profiling in an era of geopolitical tension.

"The Chinese government wanted to bring back outstanding scientists to China, so as to develop their science and technology," Lauer says.

Over time, the program began to recruit Western scientists as well. Researchers were asked to set up labs in China and spend at least part of their time doing work there, in exchange for grants and expenses paid. Some relocated to China, but others split their time between their home institutions and a Chinese university.

Such programs exist in other countries. Canada, for example, has had a 150 Research Chairs program that looks similar in many ways to the Thousand Talents Plan.

But the NIH has become aware of numerous ethical breaches related to the Chinese plan, Lauer says. Some researchers have submitted identical grant applications to both the NIH and Thousand Talents. Others have shared confidential grant applications from other researchers with their collaborators in China. And then there is the question of money: Researchers are failing to disclose the funding they receive from China to U.S. agencies like the NIH, as required by law.

"The types of behaviors that we are seeing are not subtle or minor violations," Lauer says. "What we're seeing is really quite egregious."

The funding issues have already cost over a dozen researchers their jobs at institutions around the U.S. Lauer says the NIH is investigating about 180 other scientists, though many other participants appear to be conducting their work aboveboard.

The increased scrutiny by research agencies like NIH has been accompanied by a rise in criminal prosecutions by the Justice Department. In 2018, Attorney General Jeff Sessions launched what he called the China Initiative, a broad program to crack down on the t***sfer of U.S. knowledge to China. To date, the initiative has brought criminal charges against dozens of people and won several convictions for espionage.

The federal prosecutor who is pursuing the case against Harvard chemist Charles Lieber agrees,
"All the Thousand Talents program does is induce people who are doing research in the United States to come to China, and do the same research, by offering them money," says Andrew Lelling, the United States attorney for the District of Massachusetts. "And that's not illegal, per se."

But Lelling says researchers have to disclose the money they receive to funding agencies and to their home university. That's in part because federal research agencies don't want to pay for the same science twice — in the U.S. and in China.

The criminal complaint against Lieber alleges that he lied to both the government and Harvard about his involvement in the Thousand Talents Plan. According to the complaint, Lieber was involved with the program from at least 2012 to 2017. His contract called for a salary as high as $50,000 a month, along with about $150,000 per year for living expenses and $1.5 million to establish a lab at the W***n University of Technology.

Lieber set up the "WUT-Harvard Joint Nano Key Laboratory," according to the complaint, without telling Harvard about it. The complaint says that when questioned by Harvard and investigators from the Department of Defense, which, together with the NIH, gave him nearly $18 million in grants, Lieber said, "He was never asked to participate in the Thousand Talents Program." Lieber is currently out on a $1 million dollar bond.

Lieber isn't Chinese, but many of the researchers getting arrested or fired over accusations they took money from the Thousand Talents program are Chinese nationals or of Chinese ethnicity. That has led some to assert that the government is racially profiling, a charge Lelling denies.

"If it was the French government that was attempting to steal U.S. technology in a massive decade long campaign, we'd look for French people. But it's not, it's the Chinese government," he says.

Still, law professor Frank Wu says a recent increase in criminal prosecution marks a big change. Up until a few years ago, universities were urging their researchers to collaborate with China. If there was a funding issue, a researcher might face disciplinary action, "but you wouldn't face being fired and going to prison and having your name d**gged through the mud as a spy," Wu says.

Wu says he fears this new, and in his eyes heavy-handed, response could end up alienating tens of thousands of students and researchers of Chinese origin. These are researchers who he believes provide the U.S. far more than anything China is getting through its Thousand Talents Plan.

"Scientific progress here, entrepreneurial progress here, has been driven in large part by Asian immigrants," he says. "We need the talent to want to come to these shores."

This episode was produced by Brit Hanson and edited by Viet Le.

dtucker300 Loc: Vista, CA

Be careful of what? So are Clubs.

Zemirah Loc: Sojourner En Route...

The funding issues have already cost over a dozen researchers their jobs at institutions around the U.S. Lauer says the NIH is investigating about 180 other scientists, though many other participants appear to be conducting their work aboveboard.

From the Wall Street Journal on Jan. 30, 2020:

"China's Funding of U.S. Researchers Raises Red F**gs Academics don't always disclose the funding, adding to concerns about national security.

When officials at the Texas A&M University System sought to determine how much Chinese government funding its faculty members were receiving, they were astounded at the results—more than 100 were involved with a Chinese talent-recruitment program, even though only five had disclosed their participation.

A plant pathologist at the Texas system, where the average median income for such scientists employed by the state was $130,000, told officials that the researcher had been offered $250,000 in compensation and more."

As far back as Wednesday, April 25, 2018, the Washington Post reported:

"A senior U.S. counterintelligence official recently said publicly what many officials and experts have been warning privately for years: China is using its large student population in the United States to spy.

"Bill Evanina, director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, a DNI agency, said recently that China poses a broad-ranging foreign intelligence threat that includes the use of academics, students, cyberespionage and human agents to steal secrets from the government and private sectors."

"I look at the China threat from a counterintelligence perspective as a whole-of-government threat by China against us,” Mr. Evanina told a conference at The Aspen Institute."

Zemirah Loc: Sojourner En Route...

The usual PR response would be: Although considered yellow in skin pigment, rather than black, brown or red, any criticism of anything or anyone Chinese is commonly answered with an accusation of r****m.

dtucker300 Loc: Vista, CA

Was someone making this about race? I didn't.

Zemirah Loc: Sojourner En Route...

https://www.bustle.com/articles/120208-5-popular-phrases-with-shockingly-r****t-meanings-and-origins

"Call a spade a spade" has been in use for nearly half a millennium (and variations on it date at least as far back as A.D. 120). But it didn't start to take on the r****t connotation it has now until the early 20th century.

Evidently, in the 1920s, "spade" started being used as a slang term, and then a derogatory slur, for a black person. This r****t shift in the phrase's meaning also lead to the equally offensive phrase "black as the ace of spades."

[quote-dtucker]Was someone making this about race? I didn't.
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