World, US, Culture, Market, and Sci-Tech News Aggregation from MSM and Independent News
News Source
EXCERPT:
Federal prosecutors have appealed the high profile acquittal of a former RCMP officer accused of helping China conduct foreign interference in Canada.
A notice of appeal filed late last week asked the B.C. Court of Appeal to overturn the May 13 not guilty verdict and order a new trial for William Majcher.
The Public Prosecution Service of Canada argued the judge erred when she dismissed the charge that Majcher was effectively a Chinese government agent.
News Source
EXCERPT:
BEIJING — The Philippines defense secretary and his family have been banned from entering China over comments he has made about Beijing’s claims in the South China Sea, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs said Thursday.
Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro and his wife and kids are banned from entering China, including Hong Kong, while individuals and groups in China are also banned from having any sort of transaction with Teodoro, the ministry said in a statement
Teodoro is known for using strong language to counter China’s claims over the strategic waters, calling them a “fiction and lie” that no Southeast Asian country would accept.
News Source
EXCERPT:
Federal authorities on Wednesday shut down 13 internet domains said to be used by China for operations to obtain classified and sensitive U.S. government information, the Justice Department said.
The internet sites were used by Chinese actors to recruit Americans and others with access to secret information while posing as fraudulent professional consulting services, according to a department statement.
“The fake consulting company domains seized by the FBI illustrate the lengths the Chinese government’s intelligence services will go to as they try to use AI-generated content to trick, recruit, or coerce current and former U.S. security clearance holders into sharing sensitive information,” said Roman Rozhavsky, assistant FBI director for counterintelligence and espionage.
“The FBI and our partners have observed China’s intelligence services resort to using AI, professional networking sites, and online payment platforms to target Americans, and we have taken actions to defend the homeland and our national security.”
News Source
EXCERPT:
China has become the first country in the world to operate an underwater data center, or UDC, powered by wind. Located off the coast of Shanghai, the complex represents a significant advance in the country’s strategy to secure energy supplies in the face of the accelerated growth of artificial intelligence, reduce dependence on fossil fuels, and reduce the environmental impact of its technology infrastructure.
The initiative is the result of a collaboration between private company HiCloud Technology and state-owned China Communications Construction, which involved an investment of 1.6 billion yuan, equivalent to about $236 million.
With an initial capacity of 24 megawatts, the facility is submerged at a depth of 10 meters in the Lin-gang Special Zone, within the China Pilot Free Trade Zone in Shanghai. This location allows seawater to be used as a natural cooling system, reducing the proportion of energy used to cool the infrastructure to less than 10 percent.
News Source
EXCERPT:
Judge said only a handful of allegations were even worth considering
A Chinese man cannot file a racial discrimination lawsuit against the University of Notre Dame for a legal brief that commented on genocide in the country.
District Court Judge Gretchen Lund tossed out the self-filed suit from Bing Chen, which raised concerns about an amicus filed by the Catholic university’s religious liberty clinic. Chen sought more than $1 billion in damages – $1 for every Chinese person in China, along with $1 for every American living in the United States.
President Trump told the press at a White House event he does not think China is engaging in agit prop campaigning to drive Americans to not support AI Data Centers. His response suggested even if China could do such a thing, it wouldn’t be effective.
News Source
EXCERPT:
China’s plan to become a world leader in AI by 2030 is a fixture of practically every Congressional briefing and expert commentary on Beijing’s AI ambitions. The plan’s logic — introduced in 2017 — was simple and alarming: Beijing would direct capital, mobilize its firms, recruit talent, and execute with the strategic patience of a state-led innovation ecosystem. Nearly a decade later, that frame has only hardened. Beijing’s recently issued 15th Five-Year Plan directs Party organs to take “extraordinary measures” to strengthen technological self-reliance and launch a new “AI+” initiative to integrate AI across the nation’s strategic sectors. Beijing has the legal architecture to compel its firms to do its bidding, so Washington has largely concluded that Beijing’s AI sprint reflects deliberate industrial policy, and built America’s response around that assumption.
News Source
EXCERPT:
Beijing’s censorship cannot erase memories of its 1989 military assault on peaceful demonstrators in Tiananmen Square, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Wednesday, ahead of the anniversary of China’s violent suppression there.
Rubio’s statement largely mirrored his past remarks on the crackdown but is likely to be reassuring to Chinese dissidents and pro-democracy supporters at a time when President Donald Trump has repeatedly touted his relationship with China’s leader, Xi Jinping, whom he met in Beijing last month.
According to human rights groups, Chinese troops opened fire on pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square and killed hundreds if not thousands of people.
News Source
EXCERPT:
On May 8, Taiwan’s Legislative Yuan broke a grueling six-month stalemate by passing a landmark $25 billion defense budget, catching many observers off guard. The vote brought sudden end to an agonizing legislative deadlock that had pushed U.S.-Taiwanese relations to the edge. For months, long-simmering frustration in Washington over Taiwan’s defense trajectory has threatened to boil over, catalyzed by an unprecedented bipartisan open letter from U.S. senators, demanding that Taiwan authorize the pending defense packages.
News Source
EXCERPT:
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.
News Source
EXCERPT:
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.
News Source
EXCERPT:
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.
EXCERPT:
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.
News Source
EXCERPT:
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.
