Tag Archives: China

Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jnr is facing growing unrest from retired generals, with some veterans even urging active commanders to withdraw support for the president, according to multiple senior military sources. At the centre of the discontent are two flashpoints: allegations that billions of Philippine pesos have been lost to fictitious flood-control projects and proposed pension changes that former officers …

TikTok is not just the most downloaded app in the world; it’s the most powerful information platform on the planet. The app is also a political flashpoint. TikTok is owned by ByteDance, a Chinese company under the shadow of Beijing. For years, US lawmakers have tried to rein it in, either by banning it outright or forcing a sale to …

Researchers at DeepSeek on Monday released a new experimental model called V3.2-exp, designed to have dramatically lower inference costs when used in long-context operations. DeepSeek announced the model with a post on Hugging Face, also posting a linked academic paper on GitHub. The most important feature of the new model is called DeepSeek Sparse Attention, an intricate system described in …

A 47-year-old Chinese woman on Monday told a UK court that she played a leading role in a multibillion-pound fraudulent bitcoin scheme. Businesswoman Qian Zhimin, alias Zhang Yadi, pleaded guilty at London’s Southwark Crown Court following what is believed to be the single largest cryptocurrency seizure in the world, now worth about £5.5 billion (US$7.4 billion). Qian admitted one count …

Authorities in Henan province, central China, have approved the merger of 82 small rural financial institutions into a single regional lender, in an effort to contain systemic risks in a region once at the centre of a major banking scandal. Approved by the Henan office of the National Financial Regulatory Administration (NFRA), the consolidation will see Henan Rural Commercial Bank …

Afghanistan’s Taliban government released an American citizen from detention on Sunday, a week after freeing an elderly British couple. In a statement the country’s foreign ministry identified the detainee as Amir Amiri and said he had been handed over to Adam Boehler, Washington’s special envoy on hostages. Boehler made a rare visit to Kabul earlier this month to discuss the …

US President Donald Trump expressed optimism on Sunday about reaching a deal to end the war in Gaza, saying there is “a real chance for greatness in the Middle East”, ahead of talks on Monday with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Trump did not provide specific details of a prospective ceasefire-for-hostages agreement in Gaza, but Vice-President J.D. Vance said that …

امارت اسلامیہ افغانستان نے پاکستان، روس، چین اور ایران کے اس مؤقف کا خیرمقدم کیا ہے جس میں ان ممالک نے افغانستان میں کسی بھی بیرونی فوجی اڈے کے قیام کی مخالفت کی ہے۔ امارت اسلامیہ افغانستان کے نائب ترجمان حمد اللہ فطرت نے کہا ہے کہ غیر ملکی فوجی اڈے کے قیام کے خلاف پاکستان، روس، چین اور ایران …

After four extensions of the statutory deadline to ban TikTok or force its Chinese owners to divest, US President Donald Trump has now signed an executive order transferring the app to US ownership. The announcement follows years of diplomatic sparring, bureaucratic manoeuvring, repeated efforts by federal and state governments to curtail the platform and even a ruling from the US …

China’s full artificial intelligence technology stack was on display at this year’s Apsara Conference, the annual gathering of Alibaba Cloud users and developers held every September in Hangzhou, capital of eastern Zhejiang province. Downpours on Wednesday failed to keep crowds away following an opening speech by Alibaba CEO Eddie Wu Yongming, where he announced new AI infrastructure spending beyond the …