Sound Sino-European ties are desired by the world, Chinese foreign ministry says
The international community is also eager for China and Europe to become a constructive force in a changing world, said Guo Jiakun, a ministry spokesperson, said at a regular news conference.
Guo was responding to a question on the significance of China's ties with Europe as transatlantic relations face new uncertainty after U.S. President Donald Trump took office last month.
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USA Today
27 minutes ago
- USA Today
North Korea wired an agent $2M to smuggle weapons, tech and disguises out of California
Shenghua Wen, 42, was sentenced to eight years in prison in connection with the scheme that earned him $2 million from North Korean handlers. It comes after he pleaded guilty in June. North Korean agents paid a Chinese national $2 million to smuggle U.S. weapons and technology that were to be used for a surprise attack on South Korea, federal prosecutors said Aug. 19. Shenghua Wen, a 42-year-old illegal alien living outside Los Angeles, was sentenced to eight years in prison for the scheme, the Department of Justice announced. He was tapped by North Korean handlers to export guns, ammo, sensitive technologies and eventually disguises, court papers show. Wen smuggled three shipping containers of guns and ammunition to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) before he was caught, prosecutors said. "Wen's crimes jeopardized the national security of the United States and that of its ally, South Korea," prosecutors said in a sentencing memorandum in the Central District of California. "Defendant's conduct was bold, and the purpose of his mission was alarming. According to defendant, he was charged with procuring the weapons and sensitive technology for North Korea so North Korea could prepare for a surprise attack against South Korea." In addition to the three shipping containers' worth of arms, Wen planned to send 60,000 bullets and sensitive technologies, including a device to identify chemical threats, a thermal imaging device to be mounted on aircraft and an engine meant to be the precursor for a North Korean drone program, according to court papers. The North Korean asset also planned to send military uniforms that the DPRK could use to disguise troops sent into South Korea, prosecutors said. Wen's sentencing comes after he pleaded guilty on June 9 to acting as an illegal agent of a foreign government and conspiracy to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which regulates trade with nations hostile to the U.S. DPRK handlers paid Wen around $2 million for the scheme, which dates back to 2022 when he was first contacted online by North Korean officials, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office. In a letter to the judge, Wen's lawyers said the Chinese national accepted responsibility for what he had done. "Mr. Wen is truly a book that is not best judged by its cover," his public defender Michael L. Brown II wrote. "The offense conduct suggests that he is someone sophisticated and bold as the government claims when in reality he was a lowly agent, without much agency, in desperate financial straights when he committed the offense conduct." Wen's lawyers did not immediately respond to requests for additional comment. A surprise attack in the making Wen came to the United States in 2012 on a student visa, according to prosecutors. His lawyers said he was seeking asylum after Chinese authorities had persecuted him for practicing Catholicism, which has been outlawed to varying degrees in communist China. Prosecutors say he was already planning to become a North Korean asset at that point. Wen told the FBI in interviews that before moving to the U.S., he met with DPRK handlers at a North Korean embassy in China, court papers show. North Korean officials contacted Wen online about 10 years later, provided him the money for a Federal Firearms License to allow him to deal arms and the California-based DPKR asset began making trips to Texas to buy guns. Wen exported the weapons from Long Beach, near LA. He told U.S. authorities he was shipping a refrigerator, court papers show. He "admitted that he believed the North Korean government wanted the weapons, ammunition, and other military-related equipment to prepare for an attack against South Korea," prosecutors said. Investigators also found many images on his phone of U.S. military uniforms. Prosecutors said the photos were related to a plan to provide North Korean troops with disguises for the eventual attack. U.S. arms in foreign hands Wen's case is just the latest in international arms dealers making use of the American firearms market. The top five weapons manufacturers in the world as of 2023 were all American companies, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. Lockheed Martin's $60.8 million revenue was greater than the top three Chinese companies combined. But American firearms have a way of making it into the hands of the nation's adversaries, from North Korean soldiers to cartels south of the border in Mexico. The FBI regularly catches foreign nationals in the United States exporting arms to places around the world that American authorities consider hostile. In March, federal officials charged a pair of men in Cleveland in connection with an operation to sell around 90 rifles and a machine gun to undercover agents posing as cartel members. Mexico sued U.S. gun manufacturers over the avalanche of American guns that wind up south of the border, although the Supreme Court eventually ruled against the U.S. neighbor. In April 2024, the Department of Justice charged a pair of foreign businessmen with conspiring to send anti-aircraft rounds, grenade launchers and automatic rifles to Iraq and Sudan.
CNBC
28 minutes ago
- CNBC
CNBC Daily Open: Not even fire extinguishers can escape the Trump administration's tariffs
Even as tariff-related ruction appears to be settling down for the summer, U.S. President Donald Trump's administration is still reshaping global trade and industry. After the Trump administration hinted it could be open to Nvidia exporting more powerful chips to China after their revenue-sharing agreement, the semiconductor darling was reported to be developing a new chip for Beijing. And Intel's bounty from the CHIPS Act, formalized by the previous administration under Joe Biden, might come with a price tag of giving the current U.S. government a stake in the company. Meanwhile, the effects of tariffs continue to creep into everyday life. The costs incurred by fires in the U.S. — think of the tragic Los Angeles wildfires in January or the one near the Grand Canyon just last month — are already growing, not just in terms of the physical damage but also the price of insurance premiums. And now that Trump has added fire extinguishers to a list of steel products that will face a 50% import tariff, even the price of relatively more benign and contained fires, such as those you start to burn photographs of your ex-partner, will be more expensive to put out. That's a truly protest-worthy tariff. Trump expands reach of steel and aluminum tariffs. The duties, which impose a 50% charge on imports, will include more than 400 additional product categories, such as fire extinguishers, machinery and construction materials. Nvidia says it is evaluating 'a variety of products.' The chipmaker is working on a new artificial intelligence chip for China that will be based on its Blackwell architecture, making it more powerful than the currently available H20, reported Reuters. Intel equity in return for U.S. government funding. U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said Tuesday that the White House will provide the chipmaker with cash, which was promised under the CHIPS Act, in exchange for "an equity stake for our money." Technology stocks weigh down U.S. markets. The Nasdaq Composite fell 1.46% on Tuesday as shares of Palantir sank more than 9%. The Stoxx Europe 600 rose 0.69% even though European defense stocks tumbled. The U.K.'s FTSE 100 hit a record close. [PRO] UBS raises its forecast for gold — again. Despite the rally for gold stalling since the middle of the year, the Swiss banking giant hiked its 2025 and 2026 target for gold prices. Trump promised Ukraine 'security guarantees': Here's what they could look like The most significant development from Monday's talks between U.S. President Donald Trump, Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and European leaders was Trump's statement that security guarantees for Ukraine would be "provided" by European countries in "coordination with the U.S." French President Emmanuel Macron hinted Tuesday that the "first security guarantee we are working on — and it is the most important — is a strong Ukrainian army, composed of several hundred thousand men, well equipped, with defense systems and higher standards."
CNET
an hour ago
- CNET
What Worries Americans About AI? Politics, Jobs and Friends
Americans have a lot of worries about artificial intelligence. Like job losses and energy use. Even more so: political chaos. All of that is a lot to blame on one new technology that was an afterthought to most people just a few years ago. Generative AI, in the few years since ChatGPT burst onto the scene, has become so ubiquitous in our lives that people have strong opinions about what it means and what it can do. A Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted Aug. 13-18 and released Tuesday dug into some of those specific concerns. It focused on the worries people had about the technology, and the general public has often had a negative perception. In this survey, 47% of respondents said they believe AI is bad for humanity, compared with 31% who disagreed with that statement. Compare those results with a Pew Research Center survey, released in April, that found 35% of the public believed AI would have a negative impact on the US, versus 17% who believed it would be positive. That sentiment flipped when Pew asked AI experts the same question. The experts were more optimistic: 56% said they expected a positive impact, and only 15% expected a negative one. Don't miss any of CNET's unbiased tech content and lab-based reviews. Add us as a preferred Google source on Chrome. The Reuters/Ipsos poll specifically highlights some of the immediate, tangible concerns many people have with the rapid expansion of generative AI technology, along with the less-specific fears about runaway robot intelligence. The numbers indicate more concern than comfort with those bigger-picture, long-term questions, like whether AI poses a risk to the future of humankind (58% agree, 20% disagree). But even larger portions of the American public are worried about more immediate issues. Foremost among those immediate issues is the potential that AI will disrupt political systems, with 77% of those polled saying they were concerned. AI tools, particularly image and video generators, have the potential to create distorting or manipulative content (known as deepfakes) that can mislead voters or undermine trust in political information, particularly on social media. Most Americans, at 71%, said they were concerned AI would cause too many people to lose jobs. The impact of AI on the workforce is expected to be significant, with some companies already talking about being "AI-first." AI developers and business leaders tout the technology's ability to make workers more efficient. But other polls have also shown how common fears of job loss are. The April Pew survey found 64% of Americans and 39% of AI experts thought there would be fewer jobs in the US in 20 years because of AI. Read more: AI Essentials: 29 Ways You Can Make Gen AI Work for You, According to Our Experts But the Reuters/Ipsos poll also noted two other worries that have become more mainstream: the effect of AI on personal relationships and energy consumption. Two-thirds of respondents in the poll said they were concerned about AI's use as a replacement for in-person relationships. Generative AI's human-like tone (which comes from the fact that it was trained on, and therefore replicates, stuff written by humans) has led many users to treat chatbots and characters as if they were, well, actual friends. This is widespread enough that OpenAI, when it rolled out the new GPT-5 model this month, had to bring back an older model that had a more conversational tone because users felt like they'd lost a friend. Even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman acknowledged that users treating AI as a kind of therapist or life coach made him "uneasy." The energy demands of AI are also significant and a concern for 61% of Americans surveyed. The demand comes from the massive amounts of computing power required to train and run large language models like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini. The data centers that house these computers are like giant AI factories, and they're taking up space, electricity and water in a growing number of places.
