Direkt zum Hauptbereich

Posts

Crispy CRISPR...

...or: The rise of Frankenstein's Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats .  Discussing this with a few people from the counterproliferation branch I recognized that I have to learn something new regarding Weapons of Mass destruction (WMD): Who knows anything about CRISPR? But a lot more people read about Genetic Engineering - which is a good starter to understand CRISPR -  and I remember a case, many years ago, when a North Korean scientist disappeared in Australia. He was suspected of having developed a weapon based on genetic experiments. This case is still shrouded in secrecy and rumours, but it was one of the first cases ever appeared in the public. I plan to write a brief paper about it in the near future. Genetic Engineering was already in the seventies subject of e.g. a meeting about INFORMAL MEETINGS ON NEW MASS DESTRUCTION WEAPONS : Combining various search operators - which include CRISPR and WMD - I was surprised by my own data I o...

Syria, SSRC, NOSSTIA and North Korea

In the last days a lot of media reports referred to a UN Report not published yet, describing that " North Korea has been sending equipment to Syria that could be used to make chemical weapons ". In a few reports one responsible Syrian institution is mentioned: The Scientific Studies and Research Center (SSRC). Hundreds of people working for this Center are sanctioned since last April 2017. Interesting for me is that organisations which are connected to this Center and which are playing a crucial role, are not sanctioned. First of all I think about the Network of Syrian Scientists, Technologists and Innovators Abroad (NOSSTIA), which is working somehow under the radar. I came across a brief notice about a meeting on "environment projects", which was described by the Syrian Arab News Agency in April 2016. This was the first time ever I read about NOSSTIA and so I tried to take a look at their website. Today they seem to operate two Facebook accounts which I w...

Shady business behind CPEC

The last months a lot of paper about the CPEC were produced - regarding the Chinese political-economic agenda in South East Asia. Beside the official and more or less transparent economic relations between both countries Jens Rosenke and me are, as always, more interested in the shady corners of economic projects, especially when it comes to sanctioned or in general security related technology. Therefore we worked a while on a paper, which is mainly about the research in proliferation and illegal procurement issues. But of course we also found a lot of smaller and bigger entities somehow connected in interesting ways and sometimes busy in disguising their intentions. The good thing is: "Investigating proliferation activities between China and Pakistan" is free for download ! Recently, I had put a part of my archive online as a searchable version , where o ne can find also various entries on proliferation, China or Pakistan. The paper, which is now available fo...

Another boring Reichsbürger...

... can look for a T-Shirt here: One can also buy it as a "Braunhemd" which means here a brown coloured T-Shirt: Who is behind Abarcshop? But this time no Chinese company, but a German contact: Boring....

Reichsbürger Hoodie

Funny to see: Since months one can read about the so-called Reichsbürger movement, sometimes about really alarming incidents, e.g. German anti-terror police uncover hidden paramilitary training camps for far-right extremists . But there are always smart people who see the opportunity: I found this on 25th January 2018 and it doesn't look like fake : Everything is possible and I remember the Hitler-cups sold in Germany by the Chinese in 2014. So I took a brief look into this company. The section "Über uns" ( "About us") is in pretty horrible German, looks like a foreign background. There we go: It's so obvious: China doesn't like political uproar in it's own country, but it doesn't care for others: The registrar is http://www.bizcn.com/ which is a Chinese company, you can call them and complain about double standards:

The name Abbas Kamel...

...reminds me of something... Reading that the Egypt President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi issued a presidential decree on Thursday afternoon appointing his office director General Abbas Kamel as acting director of Egypt’s General Intelligence Directorate let me think about the past. I wonder if the Abbas Kamel mentioned in an unclassified cable about IRAQI MEDIA OUTLETS BASED IN JORDAN: PROFILES is the one who is now the acting director of the Mukhabarat: In 2015 my old friend Nizar Manek wrote - together with Jeremy Hodge - an excellent paper about Opening the black  box of Egypt's slush funds and there Abbas Kamel appeared again. Nizar wrote: So Abbas Kamel, who is named by Intelligence Online  the eminence grise of Egyptian President , is somehow famous. It is obvious that a few people getting bad-tempered about this.

The North Korean lifeline...

...is also maintained by vessels, but obviously it is not so easy to detect every single entity. Actually it is reported that South Korean authorities have seized a Panama-flagged vessel suspected of transferring oil products to North Korea . The vessel named KOTI is the former SEMUA SEJATI. The IMO number of a vessel remains linked to the hull for its lifetime, regardless of a change in name, flag, or owner . Due to the ongoing reflagging and renaming of vessels one must look for the shipping company, the owner etc. In this case owner and manager of the KOTI resp. the SEMUA SEJATI in former times was SEMUA SHIPPING in Malaysia. This is a company with a rich history of details, documents, addresses etc. Information: I do not suggest that any of the companies, agencies and persons I mention in this Post are engaged in illicit activity. SEMUA SHIPPING is a subsidiary of Hoe Leong Corporation Ltd. , a company holding stake in various industries and which already gained experien...