China is rapidly advancing its space capabilities to challenge the United States' dominance in space, as evidenced by its significant increase in on-orbit intelligence and reconnaissance satellites and the development of sophisticated counterspace weapons. Space.com reports: "Frankly, China is moving at a breathtaking speed. Since 2018, China has more than tripled their on-orbit intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance satellites," Gen. Stephen Whiting, commander of U.S. Space Command, said here on Tuesday, during a talk at the 39th Space Symposium. "And with these systems, they've built a kill web over the Pacific Ocean to find, fix, track and, yes, target United States and allied military capabilities," he added. And that's not all. China has also "built a range of counterspace weapons, from reversible jamming all the way up to kinetic hit-to-kill direct-ascent and co-orbital ASATs," Whiting said.

Indeed, China demonstrated direct-ascent ASAT, or anti-satellite, weapon technology back in January 2007, when it destroyed one of its defunct weather satellites with a missile. That test was widely decried as irresponsible, for it generated thousands of pieces of debris, many of which are still cluttering up Earth orbit. Such activities show that China is now treating space as a war-fighting domain, Whiting said. And so, he added, is Russia, which has also conducted ASAT tests recently, including a destructive one in November 2021. Russia has also been aggressively building out its orbital architecture; since 2018, the nation has more than doubled its total number of active satellites, according to Whiting. The U.S. government has taken notice of these trends.

"We are at a pivotal moment in history," Troy Meink, principal deputy director of the National Reconnaissance Office, which builds and operates the United States' fleet of spy satellites, said during a different talk on Tuesday here at the symposium. "For the first time in decades, U.S. leadership in space and space technology is being challenged," Meink added. "Our competitors are actively seeking ways to threaten our capabilities, and we see this every day." The U.S. must act if it wishes to beat back this challenge, Meink and Whiting stressed; it cannot rely on the inertia of past success to do the job. For example, Meink highlighted the need to innovate with the nation's reconnaissance satellites, to make them more numerous, more agile and more resilient. U.S. Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Heidi Shyu also emphasized the importance of increasing resilience, a goal that she said could be achieved by diversifying the nation's space capabilities. "We must assess ways to incorporate radiation-hardened electronics, novel orbits, varied communication pathways, advancements in propulsion technologies and increased cooperation with our allies," Shyu said in another talk on Tuesday at the symposium.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Last week South Korea's SK Hynix announced it would partner with Purdue University on a $3.9 billion semiconductor complex here, the largest single corporate investment in state history. Now comes the hard part. SK Hynix must not only build the fabrication plant, or fab, which will package high-bandwidth memory chips used in artificial intelligence, and a connected research-and-development center. It also has to staff them. "We need several hundred engineers to operate our advanced-packaging manufacturing fab -- in physics, chemistry, material science, electronics engineering," Kwak Noh-Jung, chief executive of SK Hynix, said in an interview following last week's announcement.

Staffing a fab is harder in the U.S. than in South Korea, where SK Hynix has contracts with local universities and its own in-house university. Nonetheless, Kwak said, "the final goal is very clear. We need to have very good engineers for our success in U.S." The U.S. is trying to do something unprecedented: reverse a shrinking share in a key manufacturing sector. Between 1990 and 2020, the U.S. share of world chip making shrank to 12% from 37%, while the combined share of Taiwan, South Korea and China grew to 58%. The federal CHIPS program has showered billions of dollars on Intel for fabs in several states, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.in Arizona and GlobalFoundries in New York and Vermont. SK Hynix hopes for support as well.

Subsidies alone won't guarantee a sustainable industry. Fabs need customers, a supply chain and, above all, a skilled, specialized workforce. From 2000 to 2017, U.S. employment in semiconductor manufacturing shrank to 181,000 from 287,000. It has since recovered to about 200,000. Why did the U.S. share of semiconductor production shrink? As in other industries, the U.S. became an expensive place to manufacture. Susan Houseman of the Upjohn Institute, who has studied outsourcing, said this wasn't "primarily a story about offshoring." U.S. companies still lead in chip design: Nvidia in artificial intelligence, Qualcomm in communications and Apple in smartphones. Over time they mostly contracted out fabrication of their chips to foundries such as TSMC who benefited from generous domestic subsidies. The theory behind CHIPS is that, by matching Asia's subsidies, the U.S. can again be competitive in chip making. Nonetheless, there is a chicken-egg problem. Fabs need a ready supply of skilled workers. But without fabs, America's best and brightest have little incentive to pursue careers in the sector.

Amazon on Thursday added Andrew Ng, the computer scientist who led AI projects at Alphabet's Google and China's Baidu, to its board amid rising competition among Big Techs to add users for their GenAI products. From a report: Amazon's cloud unit is facing pressure from Microsoft's early pact with ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and integration of its technology into Azure, while Alexa voice assistant is in race with genAI chat tools from OpenAI and Google.

The appointment, effective April 9, also follows job cuts across Amazon, which has seen enterprise cloud spending and e-commerce sales moderate due to macroeconomic factors such as inflation and high interest rates. "As we look toward 2024 (and beyond), we're not done lowering our cost to serve," CEO Andy Jassy said in a letter to shareholders on Thursday.

Vinod Khosla, the founder of venture capital firm Khosla Ventures, opines on the bill that seeks to ban TikTok or force its parent firm to divest the U.S. business: Even if one could argue that this bill strikes at the First Amendment, there is legal precedent for doing so. In 1981, Haig vs Agee established that there are circumstances under which the government can lawfully impinge upon an individual's First Amendment rights if it is necessary to protect national security and prevent substantial harm. TikTok and the AI that can be channelled through it are national and homeland security issues that meet these standards.

Should this bill turn into law, the president would have the power to force any foreign-owned social media to be sold if US intelligence agencies deem them a national security threat. This broader scope should protect against challenges that this is a bill of attainder. Similar language helped protect effective bans on Huawei and Kaspersky Lab. As for TikTok's value as a boon to consumers and businesses, there are many companies that could quickly replace it. In 2020, after India banned TikTok amid geopolitical tensions between Beijing and New Delhi, services including Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, MX TakaTak, Chingari and others filled the void.Â

Few appreciate that TikTok is not available in China. Instead, Chinese consumers use Douyin, the sister app that features educational and patriotic videos, and is limited to 40 minutes per day of total usage. Spinach for Chinese kids, fentanyl -- another chief export of China's -- for ours. Worse still, TikTok is a programmable fentanyl whose effects are under the control of the CCP.

China will attempt to disrupt elections in the US, South Korea and India this year with artificial intelligence-generated content after making a dry run with the presidential poll in Taiwan, Microsoft has warned. From a report: The US tech firm said it expected Chinese state-backed cyber groups to target high-profile elections in 2024, with North Korea also involved, according to a report by the company's threat intelligence team published on Friday. "As populations in India, South Korea and the United States head to the polls, we are likely to see Chinese cyber and influence actors, and to some extent North Korean cyber actors, work toward targeting these elections," the report reads.

Microsoft said that "at a minimum" China will create and distribute through social media AI-generated content that "benefits their positions in these high-profile elections." The company added that the impact of AI-made content was minor but warned that could change. "While the impact of such content in swaying audiences remains low, China's increasing experimentation in augmenting memes, videos and audio will continue -- and may prove effective down the line," said Microsoft. Microsoft said in the report that China had already attempted an AI-generated disinformation campaign in the Taiwan presidential election in January. The company said this was the first time it had seen a state-backed entity using AI-made content in a bid to influence a foreign election.
UPDATE: Last fall, America's State Department "accused the Chinese government of spending billions of dollars annually on a global campaign of disinformation," reports the Wall Street Journal: In an interview, Tom Burt, Microsoft's head of customer security and trust, said China's disinformation operations have become much more active in the past six months, mirroring rising activity of cyberattacks linked to Beijing. "We're seeing them experiment," Burt said. "I'm worried about where it might go next."

quonset shares a report: In a scathing indictment of Microsoft corporate security and transparency, a Biden administration-appointed review board issued a report Tuesday saying "a cascade of errors" by the tech giant let state-backed Chinese cyber operators break into email accounts of senior U.S. officials including Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo.

The Cyber Safety Review Board, created in 2021 by executive order, describes shoddy cybersecurity practices, a lax corporate culture and a lack of sincerity about the company's knowledge of the targeted breach, which affected multiple U.S. agencies that deal with China. It concluded that "Microsoft's security culture was inadequate and requires an overhaul" given the company's ubiquity and critical role in the global technology ecosystem. Microsoft products "underpin essential services that support national security, the foundations of our economy, and public health and safety."

The panel said the intrusion, discovered in June by the State Department and dating to May "was preventable and should never have occurred," blaming its success on "a cascade of avoidable errors." What's more, the board said, Microsoft still doesn't know how the hackers got in. [...] It said Microsoft's CEO and board should institute "rapid cultural change" including publicly sharing "a plan with specific timelines to make fundamental, security-focused reforms across the company and its full suite of products."

Sara Fischer reports via Axios: Jon Stewart on Monday told Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chair Lina Khan that Apple wouldn't let him interview her for a podcast. "I wanted to have you on a podcast and Apple asked us not to do it," "The Daily Show" host said to Khan, in reference to his former podcast that was an extension of his Apple TV+ comedy show "The Problem With Jon Stewart." "They literally said 'please don't talk to her,' having nothing to do with what you do for a living. I think they just... I didn't think they cared for you is what happened," he added during his conversation with Khan. "They wouldn't let us do even that dumb thing we just did in the first act on AI. Like, what is that sensitivity? Why are they so afraid to even have these conversations out in the public sphere?"

Stewart returned to "The Daily Show" in February after leaving in 2015 as its executive producer and host on Monday evenings through the 2024 election cycle. Stewart's Apple TV+ show ended late last year after Stewart and Apple executives parted ways over creative differences, including the comedian's desire to cover topics such as China and AI, the New York Times reported.

A Chinese scientist who was imprisoned for his role in creating the world's first genetically edited babies says he has returned to his laboratory to work on the treatment of Alzheimer's and other genetic diseases. From a report: In an interview with a Japanese newspaper, He Jiankui said he had resumed research on human embryo genome editing, despite the controversy over the ethics of artificially rewriting genes, which some critics predicted would lead to demand for "designer babies."

"We will use discarded human embryos and comply with both domestic and international rules," He told the Mainichi Shimbun, adding that he had no plans to produce more genome-edited babies. Previously, He had used a tool known as Crispr-Cas9 to rewrite DNA in embryos. In 2019 a court in China sentenced He to three years in prison for violating medical regulations after he claimed the previous year that he had created genetically modified twin sisters, Lulu and Nana, before birth. His experiments sent shockwaves through the medical and scientific world. He was widely condemned for having gone ahead with the risky, ethically contentious and medically unjustified procedure with inadequate consent from the families involved.

The court found that He had forged documents from an ethics review panel that were used to recruit couples for his research. He said he had used a gene-editing procedure known as Crispr-Cas9 to rewrite the DNA in the sisters' embryos -- modifications he claimed would make the children immune to HIV. He has continued to defend his work, despite widespread criticism, saying he was "proud" of having created Lulu and Nana. A third girl was born in 2019 as a result of similar experiments.

Silicon Valley chiefs are swarming the Capitol to try to sway lawmakers on the dangers of falling behind in the AI race. From a report: In recent weeks, American lawmakers have moved to ban the Chinese-owned app TikTok. President Biden reinforced his commitment to overcome China's rise in tech. And the Chinese government added chips from Intel and AMD to a blacklist of imports. Now, as the tech and economic cold war between the United States and China accelerates, Silicon Valley's leaders are capitalizing on the strife with a lobbying push for their interests in another promising field of technology: artificial intelligence.

On May 1, more than 100 tech chiefs and investors, including Alex Karp, the head of the defense contractor Palantir, and Roelof Botha, the managing partner of the venture capital firm Sequoia Capital, will come to Washington for a daylong conference and private dinner focused on drumming up more hawkishness toward China's progress in A.I. Dozens of lawmakers, including Speaker Mike Johnson, Republican of Louisiana, will also attend the event, the Hill & Valley Forum, which will include fireside chats and keynote discussions with members of a new House A.I. task force.

Tech executives plan to use the event to directly lobby against A.I. regulations that they consider onerous, as well as ask for more government spending on the technology and research to support its development. They also plan to ask to relax immigration restrictions to bring more A.I. experts to the United States. The event highlights an unusual area of agreement between Washington and Silicon Valley, which have long clashed on topics like data privacy, children's online protections and even China.

Neil Irwin reports via Axios: The dearth of productivity growth over the last couple of decades has held back incomes in the U.S. and other rich countries, according to a report out Wednesday from the McKinsey Global Institute, the research arm of the global consultancy. Productivity growth has been weak in the U.S. and Western Europe since the 2008 global financial crisis, but things looked better among many emerging markets. The McKinsey report finds that global labor productivity growth was 2.3% a year from 1997 to 2022, a rapid rate that has increased incomes and quality of life in large parts of the world. China and India account for the largest portion of that surge -- half of overall global productivity improvement, with other emerging markets accounting for another 25%, led by Central and Eastern Europe and emerging Asian economies.

In the U.S., the report finds that the decline in capital investment following the 2008 financial crisis has resulted in a $4,500 lower per-capita GDP in 2022 than it would have if pre-crisis trends had continued. Rapid advances in manufacturing technology, especially for electronics, petered out in the same time period, subtracting another $5,000 from per-capita GDP. "Digitization was much discussed as the main candidate to rev up productivity again, but its impact failed to spread beyond" the tech sector, the authors write. The authors are optimistic that a confluence of factors will make the years ahead different.

The rise in global interest rates and inflation are evidence of stronger global demand. Many countries are experiencing labor shortages that may incentivize more productivity-enhancing investment. And artificial intelligence and related technologies create big opportunities. "Inflationary pressure and rising interest rates could be signs that we are leaving behind secular stagnation and entering an era of higher demand and investment," the report finds. "In corporate boardrooms around the world right now, there's a tremendous amount of conversation associated with [generative] AI, and I think there's a broad acknowledgment that this could very much transform productivity at the company level," Olivia White, a McKinsey senior partner and co-author of the report, tells Axios. "Another thing that's happening right now is the conversation about labor. Labor markets in all advanced economies, and the U.S. is really sort of top of the heap, are very, very tight right now. So there's a lot of conversation around what do we do to make the people that we have as productive as they can be?"

TikTok is being investigated by the FTC over its data and security practices, "a probe that could lead to a settlement or a lawsuit against the company," reports the Associated Press. From the report: In its investigation, the FTC has been looking into whether TikTok violated a portion of federal law that prohibits "unfair and deceptive" business practices by denying that individuals in China had access to U.S. user data, said the person, who is not authorized to discuss the investigation. The agency also is scrutinizing the company over potential violations of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, which requires kid-oriented apps and websites to get parents' consent before collecting personal information of children under 13.

The agency is nearing the conclusion of its investigation and could settle with TikTok in the coming weeks. But there's not a deadline for an agreement, the person said. If the FTC moves forward with a lawsuit instead, it would have to refer the case to the Justice Department, which would have 45 days to decide whether it wants to file a case on the FTC's behalf, make changes or send it back to the agency to pursue on its own.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: It's sanctions central at the US Treasury this week as a further 15 are slapped on organizations and individuals in Russia. The Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) designated 13 organizations and two individuals -- all concerning financial services organizations, including cryptocurrency exchanges that offered services to already-sanctioned dark web marketplaces in Russia, and those who helped run them. Five of the 13 freshly designated entities were also controlled by individuals who were already sanctioned. The latest round of trade restrictions were placed on those who are believed to have helped evade existing US sanctions.

"Many of the individuals and entities designated today facilitated transactions or offered other services that helped OFAC-designated entities evade sanctions," an OFAC statement read. "These designations build upon OFAC's February 23, 2024 action to target companies servicing Russia's core financial infrastructure and curtail Russia's use of the international financial system to further its war against Ukraine." They follow the initial seven sanctions announced on Monday, all relating to Chinese nationals and members of Beijing's APT31 offensive cyber outfit.

Earlier today, the U.S. and U.K. accused hackers linked to the Chinese state of being behind "malicious" cyber campaigns targeting political figures. The U.K. government also blamed China for a 2021 cyberattack that compromised the personal information of millions of U.K. voters. In response, PBS reports that the U.S. and British government announced sanctions against a company and two people linked to the Chinese government. From the report: Officials said those sanctioned are responsible for a hack that may have gained access to information on tens of millions of U.K. voters held by the Electoral Commission, as well as for cyberespionage targeting lawmakers who have been outspoken about the China threat. The Foreign Office said the hack of the election registers "has not had an impact on electoral processes, has not affected the rights or access to the democratic process of any individual, nor has it affected electoral registration." The Electoral Commission said in August that it identified a breach of its system in October 2022, though it added that "hostile actors" had first been able to access its servers since 2021. At the time, the watchdog said the data included the names and addresses of registered voters. But it said that much of the information was already in the public domain.

In Washington, the Treasury Department said it sanctioned Wuhan Xiaoruizhi Science and Technology Company Ltd., which it calls a Chinese Ministry of State Security front company that has "served as cover for multiple malicious cyberoperations." It named two Chinese nationals, Zhao Guangzong and Ni Gaobin, affiliated with the Wuhan company, for cyberoperations that targeted U.S. critical infrastructure sectors, "directly endangering U.S. national security." Separately, British cybersecurity officials said that Chinese government-affiliated hackers "conducted reconnaissance activity" against British parliamentarians who are critical of Beijing in 2021. They said no parliamentary accounts were successfully compromised.

Three lawmakers, including former Conservative Party leader Iain Duncan Smith, told reporters Monday they have been "subjected to harassment, impersonation and attempted hacking from China for some time." Duncan Smith said in one example, hackers impersonating him used fake email addresses to write to his contacts. The politicians are members of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, an international pressure group focused on countering Beijing's growing influence and calling out alleged rights abuses by the Chinese government.

China has introduced new guidelines that will mean US microprocessors from Intel and AMD are phased out of government PCs and servers [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; non-paywalled source], as Beijing ramps up a campaign to replace foreign technology with homegrown solutions. From a report: The stricter government procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft's Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favour of domestic options. It runs alongside a parallel localisation drive under way in state-owned enterprises. The latest purchasing rules represent China's most significant step yet to build up domestic substitutes for foreign technology and echo moves in the US as tensions increase between the two countries. Washington has imposed sanctions on a growing number of Chinese companies on national security grounds, legislated to encourage more tech to be produced in the US and blocked exports of advanced chips and related tools to China.

The U.K. government has blamed China for a 2021 cyberattack that compromised the personal information of millions of U.K. voters. From a report: In a statement to lawmakers in Parliament on Monday, U.K. deputy prime minister Oliver Dowden attributed the 2021 data breach at the Electoral Commission to hackers working for the Chinese government. Dowden told lawmakers that the U.K. government "will not hesitate to take swift and robust actions wherever the Chinese government threatens the United Kingdom's interests."

It's the first time the United Kingdom has attributed the breach since the cyberattack was first disclosed in 2023. The Electoral Commission, which maintains copies of the U.K. register of citizens eligible to vote, said at the time hackers took the names and addresses of an estimated 40 million U.K. citizens, including those who were registered to vote between 2014 and 2022 and overseas voters. The data breach began as early as 2021 but wasn't detected until a year later. In a statement Monday, the U.K. National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) said it is "highly likely" that the Chinese hackers accessed and exfiltrated emails and data from the electoral register during the hack.

Gizmodo reports that increased activity on the Moon "may affect the unique radio silence on the lunar far side, an ideal location for radio telescopes to pick up faint signals from the cosmic past." This week, the International Academy of Astronautics (IAA) held the first Moon Farside Protection Symposium in Italy to advocate for preserving radio silence on the far side of the Moon. The symposium hopes to raise awareness about the threat facing the far side of the Moon and develop approaches to shielding it from artificial radio emissions....

NASA has shown interest in using the lunar radio silence, proposing an ultra-long-wavelength radio telescope inside a crater on the far side of the Moon. The Lunar Crater Radio Telescope is designed to observe the universe at frequencies below 30 megahertz, which are largely unexplored by humans since those signals are reflected by the Earth's ionosphere, according to NASA. At those low frequencies, radio telescopes on the Moon can detect near-Earth objects approaching our planet before other observatories, it can search for signals of alien civilizations, and study organic molecules in interstellar space...

As more missions head towards the Moon, however, that perfect silence is increasingly being compromised. Earlier this week, for example, China launched a satellite to relay communication between ground operations on Earth and an upcoming mission on the far side of the Moon. The satellite, Queqiao-2, is the first of a constellation of satellites that China hopes to deploy by 2040 to communicate with future crewed missions on the Moon and Mars. As part of its Artemis program, NASA is aiming to build the Lunar Gateway, a space station designed to orbit the Moon to support future missions to the lunar surface and Mars. In advance of this, a NASA-funded cubesat, called CAPSTONE, has entered into a unique halo orbit to demonstrate the stability and practicality of this trajectory for future lunar missions... CAPSTONE marks the beginning of something big — establishing a permanent communication link between Earth and lunar assets, and ensuring the steady, uninterrupted flow of data.

NASA and its Chinese counterparts have eerily similar plans for lunar exploration, and the Moon is currently a 'free-for-all' with no regulations set in place as to who can own our dusty orbital companion.
"In other words, things are about to get real loud out there as far as radio transmissions are concerned."

An anonymous reader shared this report from The Register: Chinese spies exploited a couple of critical-severity bugs in F5 and ConnectWise equipment earlier this year to sell access to compromised U.S. defense organizations, UK government agencies, and hundreds of other entities, according to Mandiant.

The Google-owned threat hunters said they assess, "with moderate confidence," that a crew they track as UNC5174 was behind the exploitation of CVE-2023-46747, a 9.8-out-of-10-CVSS-rated remote code execution bug in the F5 BIG-IP Traffic Management User Interface, and CVE-2024-1709, a path traversal flaw in ConnectWise ScreenConnect that scored a perfect 10 out of 10 CVSS severity rating.

UNC5174 uses the online persona Uteus, and has bragged about its links to China's Ministry of State Security (MSS) — boasts that may well be true. The gang focuses on gaining initial access into victim organizations and then reselling access to valuable targets... Just last month, Mandiant noticed the same combination of tools, believed to be unique to this particular Chinese gang, being used to exploit the ConnectWise flaw and compromise "hundreds" or entities, mostly in the U.S. and Canada. Also between October 2023 and February 2024, UNC5174 exploited CVE-2023-22518 in Atlassian Confluence, CVE-2022-0185 in Linux kernels, and CVE-2022-3052, a Zyxel Firewall OS command injection vulnerability, according to Mandiant.

These campaigns included "extensive reconnaissance, web application fuzzing, and aggressive scanning for vulnerabilities on internet-facing systems belonging to prominent universities in the U.S., Oceania, and Hong Kong regions," the threat intel team noted.
More details from The Record. "One of the strangest things the researchers found was that UNC5174 would create backdoors into compromised systems and then patch the vulnerability they used to break in. Mandiant said it believes this was an 'attempt to limit subsequent exploitation of the system by additional unrelated threat actors attempting to access the appliance.'"

"My favorite kind of science fiction involves stories rooted in real science..." writes NPR's reviewer. "[T]here is something special about seeing characters wrestle with concepts closer to our current understanding of how the universe works."

The Verge calls it an "impressive" and "leaner" story than the book, arguing "it's a good one — and very occasionally a great one" that introduces the author's key ideas, though channelling "the book's spirit but not its brilliance."

And Slate calls it a "downright transformative" adaptation, "jettisoning most of the novel's characters and plucking scenes from all three books," while accusing it of "making the trilogy's expansive and philosophical story into something much more pedestrian and digestible."

But Reuters notes there's huge interest in China over this adaptation (by the co-creator of Mem>Game of Thrones) for the first Asian novel to win the Hugo Award for best science fiction novel. "The new series was trending on Chinese social media platform Weibo on Friday," reports Reuters, "with 21 million views so far." (The show came in first on Weibo's "top hot" trend rankings, they add, "despite Netflix being officially inaccessible in China. Chinese viewers would have had to watch the Netflix series from behind a VPN or on a pirate site.")

So what was their verdict? CNN reports Netflix's adaptation "has split opinions in China and sparked online nationalist anger over scenes depicting a violent and tumultuous period in the country's modern history." Among the country's more patriotic internet users, discussions on the adaptation turned political, with some accusing the big-budget American production of making China look bad. The show opens with a harrowing scene depicting Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution, which consumed China in bloodshed and chaos for a decade from 1966... "Netflix you don't understand 'The Three Body Problem' or Ye Wenjie at all!" read a comment on social media platform Weibo. "You only understand political correctness!"

Others came to the show's defense, saying the scene closely follows depictions in the book — and is a truthful reenactment of history. "History is far more absurd than a TV series, but you guys pretend not to see it," read one comment on Douban, a popular site for reviewing movies, books and music.

Author Liu said in an interview with the New York Times in 2019 that he had originally wanted to open the book with scenes from Mao's Cultural Revolution, but his Chinese publisher worried they would never make it past government censors and buried them in the middle of the narrative. The English version of the book, translated by Ken Liu, put the scenes at the novel's beginning, with the author's blessing... Various other aspects of the show, from its casting and visual effects to the radical changes to the story's original setting and characters, also attracted the ire of Chinese social media users. Many compared it to a Chinese television adaptation released last year — a much lengthier and closer retelling of the book that ran to 30 episodes and was highly rated on Chinese review platforms.

The Netflix adaptation featured an international cast and placed much of the action in present-day London — thus making the story a lot less Chinese.

In the shadow of a massive monument glorifying nuclear power, over 30 nations from around the world pledged to use the controversial energy source to help achieve a climate-neutral globe while providing countries with an added sense of strategic security. Associated Press: The idea of a Nuclear Energy Summit would have been unthinkable a dozen years ago after the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident in Japan, but the tide has turned in recent years. A warming planet has made it necessary to phase out fossil fuels, while the war in Ukraine has laid bare Europe's dependence on Russian energy. "We have to do everything possible to facilitate the contribution of nuclear energy," said Rafael Grossi, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency. "It is clear: Nuclear is there. It has an important role to play," he said.

In a solemn pledge, 34 nations, including the United States, China, France, Britain and Saudi Arabia, committed "to work to fully unlock the potential of nuclear energy by taking measures such as enabling conditions to support and competitively finance the lifetime extension of existing nuclear reactors, the construction of new nuclear power plants and the early deployment of advanced reactors." The statement adds: "We commit to support all countries, especially emerging nuclear ones, in their capacities and efforts to add nuclear energy to their energy mixes."

Apple has held preliminary talks with Baidu about using the Chinese company's generative AI technology in its devices in China, the latest example of the iPhone maker's efforts to widen its AI capabilities. From a report: The U.S. tech giant has been exploring using external partners to help accelerate its AI ambitions. It has held discussions with companies including Google and OpenAI about using their technology to power its mobile features. In China, Apple has been looking for a local generative AI model provider, mainly because China requires such models to be vetted by its cyberspace regulator before being launched to the public, people familiar with the matter said.