03a China
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Anti-data center activists typically cite concerns about water usage, pollution, or the cost of building the data centers themselves.
Many individuals are sincere in their activism. But public opinion on data centers is likely being shaped by foreign actors, according to a report from the Bitcoin Policy Institute. (RELATED: CHRIS JOHNSON: AI Data Centers Can Win Over Skeptics. But It Must Learn From Fracking)
BPI’s head of research Sam Lyman explained Wednesday that China uses social media as a “gain of function for their propaganda” on The Hill’s “Rising.”
Chinese interference ‘systemic,’ report says as minister returns to Canada – National– globalnews.ca
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Canadian researchers are calling for a more coordinated response by G7 countries to counter “systemic” Chinese foreign interference, particularly as technology and tactics evolve and Beijing’s agents embed themselves further into societies.
Wednesday’s report by the Montreal Institute for Global Security comes a day before Canada is set to welcome China’s foreign minister to Ottawa for the first time in a decade.
Speaking alongside the report’s authors on Parliament Hill, former member of Parliament John McKay urged Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand to raise the issue of foreign interference with her counterpart Wang Yi during his visit.
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China now requires people working in AI at private firms to secure travel approval before leaving the country. According to Bloomberg, the restrictions apply to individuals working in state-owned firms, startup founders, and those employed by private companies, as the central government considers them important strategic assets. China has already been limiting international travel for key individuals such as senior researchers at public educational institutions, nuclear scientists, and even top executives of government-owned companies, but extending the restriction to private firms and individuals is an uncommon move, even for Beijing.
There’s no official guidance yet on which roles, expertise, or seniority will be included in the travel ban. However, Bloomberg sources say that the individuals added to the list were assessed based on their impact on China’s AI ambitions, not just where they work or their position within their company. This move is an expansion of a former government directive wherein some AI engineers had mandatory reporting of any overseas travel plan, although they were still free to go abroad as needed.
This shows that Beijing considers AI as a strategic advantage and that the people leading the industry are considered crucial for the country’s advancement. This news comes months after Meta’s surprise purchase of Manus AI, which China wants to unwind to prevent the U.S. from acquiring Chinese AI talent and intellectual property. Although the two aren’t directly related, the report says that the new policy is designed to protect against the leaking of key technologies, such as the one being developed by the Chinese startup that moved to Singapore.
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China just launched fake human embryos to its space station for a new research mission
China’s artificial embryos are part of an experiment to learn more about how human pregnancies could develop under microgravity conditions
By Adam Kovac edited by Claire Cameron
Science Photo Library–ZEPHYR/Getty Images
A clutch of artificial human embryos on China’s Tiangong space station could help researchers better understand whether human pregnancies in space are possible and safe.
The Chinese Academy of Sciences says the experiment marks the first study on human artificial embryos in space. The artificial embryos are actually structures derived from stem cells, and they mimic how embryos form during the early days of pregnancy. These structures wouldn’t be able to develop into humans even if they were implanted into a uterus. Researchers originally conceived these artificial embryolike structures as a model to study the earliest moments of development because of widespread international rules aimed at restricting research on real human embryos that are older than two weeks after fertilization.
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A US journalist, Thomas Pauken II, faces charges for allegedly acting as an unregistered agent for China. Federal authorities claim he prepared confidential political reports for Chinese intelligence, intended for President Xi Jinping. Pauken, who lived in China for over a decade, denies espionage, stating he only performed professional work without proper paperwork….
Thomas Pauken II, a commentator and author who lived in China for more than a decade, is accused of carrying out activities on behalf of Chinese government-linked contacts without properly registering with the US attorney general, according to federal court documents reported by Politico.
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Chinese AI startup DeepSeek just made one of the boldest pricing moves in the artificial intelligence race so far. The company announced it is permanently slashing the cost of its flagship V4-Pro AI model by 75%, bringing prices down to just a fraction of what developers were paying only weeks ago. AI companies worldwide have been facing two major problems: high infrastructure costs and limited access to high-end AI chips. So when a company suddenly cuts prices this aggressively — and permanently — it usually signals something important is changing behind the scenes.
DeepSeek says usage costs for V4-Pro now range from 0.025 to 6 yuan per million tokens, depending on workload type, down sharply from the previous pricing range of 0.1 to 24 yuan per million tokens. For developers building AI apps, agents, and services, that kind of drop could significantly lower operating costs.
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Fox Business correspondent Lydia Hu reports live on Taiwan’s top diplomat, Alexander Yui, sharing a warning about China as President Donald Trump weighs a proposed $14 billion arms package for the island. Yui stresses that Taiwan acts as a front-line defense, preventing China’s wider ambitions. Taiwan’s semiconductor production, 90% of the world’s advanced chips, makes US support critical.
China has deployed over 100 vessels in the waters surrounding Taiwan in the week following President Donald Trump’s Beijing summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping, the secretary general of Taiwan’s National Security Council said Saturday.
“Our ISR/intel shows that the PRC has deployed over 100 vessels around the 1st Island Chain over the past few days, so soon after the Beijing summit,” Secretary General Joseph Wu wrote on X.
“In this part of the world, China is the one & only PROBLEM wrecking the Status Quo & threatening regional peace & stability,” Wu concluded.
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BEIJING: China imposed export controls on Friday (May 22) on three precursor chemicals shipped to North America, as Washington and Beijing step up cooperation against drug trafficking following US leader Donald Trump’s visit to Beijing.
The chemicals will now require licences from government agencies to be exported to the United States, Canada and Mexico, China’s commerce ministry wrote in a statement.
China is the primary origin of precursor chemicals used to make fentanyl, a highly potent opioid underpinning a deadly drug epidemic in the United States.
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North Korea launched several projectiles, including a ballistic missile, into the Yellow Sea on Tuesday, South Korea’s military said.
South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said they had detected the launches of “several projectiles”, including a short-range ballistic missile, into the Yellow Sea from the North Korean city of Chongju at around 1:00 pm local time.
The Yellow Sea is the body of water separating the Korean peninsula from China.
The missiles flew about 80 kilometres, Seoul’s military said, adding that it was analysing their specifications and flight range, and had “strengthened surveillance and vigilance in preparation for possible additional launches.”
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Chinese President Xi Jinping may not need to launch a full-scale invasion of Taiwan to put the island, the U.S. and the global tech economy in crisis, according to national security experts.
Some advisers to President Donald Trump reportedly fear Xi could move against Taiwan within the next five years following Trump’s recent summit with the Chinese leader, Axios reported. One Trump adviser told the outlet the summit signaled a “much higher likelihood” that Taiwan could be “on the table” during that window, warning that the highly vulnerable U.S. semiconductor supply chain would not be ready for such a crisis.
National security experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation that this is simply not the reality on the ground.
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China has launched a national programme that will assign every humanoid robot manufactured in the country a unique digital identity code, effectively a citizen ID, but for bipedal machines (those that can balance and walk/run on two legs).
The initiative, called the Humanoid Full Lifecycle Management Service Platform, was announced on Friday. It is led by the Humanoid Robotics and Embodied Intelligence Standardization committee, which is under China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (via South China Morning Post).
The Trump-Xi summit saw Chairman Xi claim the U.S. and China should be working together; while making it clear recognizing Taiwan was off the table. President Trump hinted at major business deals, and the progressive press largely covered the event as a victory for China over Trump.
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U.S. President Donald Trump entered his final talks with Xi Jinping on Friday touting economic wins that gave markets little to cheer, while Beijing warned Washington about mishandling Taiwan and said its war with Iran should never have started.
Trump is making the first visit by a U.S. president to China, America’s main strategic and economic rival, since his last in 2017, and has been seeking tangible results to beef up his dented approval ratings ahead of crucial midterm elections.
“We’ve made some fantastic trade deals, great for both countries,” Trump said, seated beside Xi in a decorative red armchair at the opulent Zhongnanhai complex, a former imperial garden that houses the offices of Chinese leaders.
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The United States, with “America First” President Donald Trump at the helm, along with his anti-Castro Cuban-American Secretary of State Marco Rubio, has been putting the pressure on the communist regime founded in 1959 by that infamous revolutionary, Fidel Castro. In an executive order issued in May, the president deemed the island country, which is only 90 miles off the Florida Keys, an “unusual and extraordinary threat,” and the administration has been busy since slamming them with sanctions and cutting off their oil supplies.
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President Donald Trump said Thursday that China plans to pour “hundreds of billions of dollars” into American companies led by executives who joined him during high-level meetings with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing.
Speaking during an interview with Sean Hannity on Fox News, Trump said the executives accompanying him to China were there to secure economic opportunities that could ultimately bring jobs back to the United States.
“Those business people are here to make deals and to bring back jobs,” Trump said. “China’s going to invest hundreds of billions of dollars with those people that were in that room today.”
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In an interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity Thursday from Beijing, President Trump said that during their summit, Chinese President Xi Jinping assured him that China would not provide military equipment to Iran for its war in the Middle East.
Asked by Hannity how big of a discussion the two leaders had regarding China’s support for Iran, Mr. Trump responded, “We discussed it. When you say support, they’re [China] not fighting a war with us or anything.”
According to Mr. Trump, Xi told him that he’s “not going to give [Iran] military equipment. That’s a big statement. He said that today. That’s a big statement. He said that strongly.”
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As Donald Trump and Xi Jinping came face to face outside China’s Great Hall of the People, the pair exchanged a historic handshake, with this opening moment laying bare the nature of their relationship — a body language expert asserting that Xi holds the upper hand.
The two leaders sat down for two hours of talks on Thursday, May 14, with the entire world looking on as Xi hailed US-China relations as the world’s “most important” and Trump declared the discussions “extremely positive”.
From the very beginning of the visit, the power dynamic between the two men has been unmistakable, according to body language expert Louise Mahler, who argued “if life is a competition, for me, Xi won.”
Trump says China ‘impressed’ by Iran war, hints at Beijing buying US oil– www.washingtonexaminer.com
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President Donald Trump claimed that Chinese President Xi Jinping was “impressed” by the U.S.’s performance in its war with Iran and that it may soon resume imports of oil from the United States.
Speaking with Fox News’s Sean Hannity after his meeting with the Chinese leader, Trump expressed his belief that a good relationship with the other superpower was a good thing and that positive relationships with “very powerful” countries are desirable. He then suggested the view was mutual vis-a-vis China and that Beijing gained further respect for the U.S. during the war with Iran.
After boasting of successes in Venezuela and Iran, Trump said he and Xi spoke about the matter at their meeting.
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President Trump said Friday that he and Chinese President Xi Jinping made some “fantastic trade deals” and both want the Iran conflict to end during this week’s summit in Beijing, as both countries look to claim the visit as a win — and aim to keep their relationship on a stable footing after last year’s trade war.
The leaders of the two superpowers are holding a bilateral meeting and lunch at China’s seat of power — the Zhongnanhai Garden compound — late Friday morning local time, before Mr. Trump leaves China and heads back to Washington. They met for tea and walked around the centuries-old gardens, mostly out of earshot of reporters.
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“It was sort of like a statement but I think it was a commitment,” Trump said, describing his conversation with President Xi Jinping in a Fox News interview.
“That’s a lot of jobs,” Trump told Fox host Sean Hannity in excerpts released by the broadcaster.
Shares fell after the spots were released.