136341524
submission
hackingbear writes:
Federal prosecutors this week dropped charges against a visiting Chinese scientist at the University of Virginia who had been accused of stealing trade secrets from his professor. The U.S. attorney’s office in Charlottesville, Va., submitted a motion on Sunday asking the court to dismiss the case against Hu Haizhou after concluding he was authorized to access some of the information that he was accused of stealing. Hu’s attorney James Tunick said his client absolutely feels betrayed by [Hu's] professor. "Every file that was on Haizhou’s computer he was authorized to possess, as he used his login credentials provided by the University of Virginia. [Hu] was not aware of the content/substance of many of the files, since they were part of a larger folder that he was required to access and copy to perform certain research,” said Tunick.
136247816
submission
hackingbear writes:
Alibaba Group Holding Ltd’s subsidiary Ant Financial has upsized its initial public offering to $35 billion, raising its valuation target by $25 billion to $250 billion which is 18% higher than that of Bank of America Corp, Bloomberg reported late Sunday, surpassing previous record of Saudi Aramco’s $29 billion IPO. The company will dual list in Shanghai and Hong Kong and bypass New York as U.S.–China tensions flared due to nationalistic politics in the US. Ant Financial's Alipay boasts 711 million active users — generating $17 trillion in payments in 12 months through June.
136083498
submission
hackingbear writes:
A whistleblower who previously worked at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Georgia detailed a high rate of hysterectomies, a medical procedure to remove a woman's uterus, and alleged medical neglect in a complaint filed to the Department of Homeland Security inspector general Monday. Dawn Wooten, a licensed practical nurse employed by the center who's represented by the Government Accountability Project and Project South, stated in a complaint that while some women may have required a hysterectomy, "everybody's uterus cannot be that bad." The complaint, which also included a series of concerns about the facility's handling of the coronavirus, immediately received responses from Democratic lawmakers. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has said the U.S. must "atone" for human rights violations against immigrants. The Immigration and Custom Enforcement has been accused of locking up thousands of infants and children, as young as 5 months old, since 2018.
136046514
submission
hackingbear writes:
U.S. President Donald Trump threatened to withdraw the U.S. from the World Trade Organization during a contentious phone call with the group’s then-leader unless WTO designate the U.S. a “developing nation” like China and India in order to get more favorable trading terms, according to a new book by journalist Bob Woodward. When Azevedo objected, Trump said, “Here’s what I’m doing: I’m pulling out of the World Trade Organization.” Azevedo resigned from his position in May, well before his term was set to end in 2021. He said leaving early was the “best thing for me, my family and the organization,” adding that the group’s work had ground to a halt. The Trump administration has long accused China of taking unfair trade advantages and erecting import/investment barriers, even though most of those benefits are parts of China's WTO access agreement signed up by WTO members including the US and that those practices are standard "affirmative actions" for developing nations. Around two third of the 164 WTO member nations have declared themselves as developing nations. Surprisingly, there is no formal definition for developing nation status or process to alter a nation's status under the WTO framework, which was created by the United States to rip the benefits of globalization, but according to IMF 2019 estimations, China is ranked number 65 at a per-capita GDP of $10,098, while the US is ranked number 7 at $65,111.
135164089
submission
hackingbear writes:
While the US government is all out accusing, without actual evidence, that Chinese firms like Huawei, TikTok and Tencent are spying on Americans on behalf of the Chinese government, an ex-Apple engineer came out and revealed a top secret project in 2005 to develop bugged version of iPod for Betchel, a major contractor of the Department of Energy. "Only four people at Apple knew about this secret project. Me, the director of iPod Software, the vice president of the iPod Division, and the senior vice president of Hardware. [...] There was no paper trail. All communication was in person. They wanted to add some custom hardware to an iPod and record data from this custom hardware to the iPod’s disk in a way that couldn’t be easily detected. But it still had to look and work like a normal iPod." wrote David Shayer, former iPod engineer at Apple. What the custom iPod would be used for remains a mystery, but Shayer guessed that they were “building something like a stealth Geiger counter. However, some commenters following the story doubt the device was a Geiger counter and that the real customer is perhaps DOD or CIA. Tony Fadell, Vice President of iPod at the time, confirmed the existence of the project in a tweet.
134249779
submission
hackingbear writes:
TikTok owner ByteDance has accused Facebook of plagiarism and smears although it did not elaborate on the accusation. “ByteDance has always been committed to becoming a global company. During this process, we have faced all kinds of complex and unimaginable difficulties, including the tense international political environment, collision and conflict of different cultures and plagiarism and smears from competitor Facebook,” it said in a statement late on Sunday posted on its official account on Jinri Toutiao, a news aggregator app it owns. TikTok has attracted criticism from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who last year accused the app of censoring political protest, after Facebook couldn't get its way in China by pretending to be nice to China. TikTok has denied the claim. Facebook has been copying various Chinese apps and features including TikTok and WeChat, the all-in-one messaging apps in China.
133801555
submission
hackingbear writes:
Chinese virologist Shi Zhengli, who is at the center of COVID-19 origin theories, has broken her silence about the details of her work. On 15 July, she emailed Science answers to a series of written questions about the virus’ origin and the research at her institute the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). She and her colleagues discovered the virus in late 2019, she says, in samples from patients who had a pneumonia of unknown origin. “Before that, we had never been in contact with or studied this virus, nor did we know of its existence,” Shi wrote. “U.S. President Trump’s claim that SARS-CoV-2 was leaked from our institute totally contradicts the facts,” she added. “It jeopardizes and affects our academic work and personal life. He owes us an apology.” Shi stressed that over the past 15 years, her lab has isolated and grown in culture only three bat coronaviruses related to one that infected humans: the SARS virus [which is a different virus than the current SARS-Cov-2], and that more than 2000 other bat coronaviruses the lab has detected, including RaTG13 that is 96.2% identical to SARS-CoV-2—which means they shared a common ancestor decades ago—are simply genetic sequences that her team has extracted from fecal samples and oral and anal swabs of the animals [rather than the actual virus]. Shi also notes, citing other researchers, that the 3.8% difference in genome sequence is a significant difference for coronaviruses and is equivalent to an average of 50 years (and at least 20 years) of evolutionary change. On the topic of the origin of the virus, Shi’s lab tested samples from the Huanan Seafood Market and found RNA fragments from the virus in “door handles, the ground and sewage,” she wrote—but not in “frozen animal samples.” "We know from historical experience like HIV that the places where big emerging diseases first break out usually are not their place of origin," Shi wrote in her full reply. Evolutionary biologist Kristian Andersen of Scripps Research says he suspects Shi’s answers, which were published on July 24, were “carefully vetted” by the Chinese government. “But they’re all logical, genuine, and stick to the science as one would have expected from a world-class scientist and one of the leading experts on coronaviruses,” Andersen says.
133748853
submission
hackingbear writes:
Lawyers for Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer of Huawei Technologies, have applied to a Canadian court seeking stays in the proceedings for her extradition to the United States, documents released on Thursday showed. The applications are based in part on what Meng’s lawyers allege was a destruction of the integrity of the judicial process by United States President Donald Trump and other senior members of the administration by their intention to use Meng “as a bargaining chip in a trade dispute.” As trading with Iran was legal in Canada, the extradition case hinges on whether Meng misled HSBC about Huawei’s relationship with a company operating in Iran, putting HSBC at risk of fines and penalties for breaking U.S. sanctions on Tehran. However, Meng’s lawyers allege that the United States misled Canada about the evidence in the case against her, by “selectively summariz(ing) information and omit(ting) highly relevant information” about the knowledge that Huawei accurately shared with HSBC about its operations in Iran. The omissions are “far below the expected standard of diligence, candor and accuracy,” the lawyers wrote. Meng's lawyers also cite comments by US President Donald Trump and Canadian PM Trudeau on the case as proof of political interventions. “Trudeau described how he asked the US to include the applicant in any trade deal it signed with China: ‘We’ve said that the United States should not sign a final and complete agreement with China that does not settle the question of Meng Wanzhou and the two Canadians’.” “Where the requesting state engages in conduct that offends our Canadian sense of fair play and decency, the court must intervene to safeguard the integrity of the judicial process. This is such a case,” Meng’s lawyers say in their new submissions.
133357002
submission
hackingbear writes:
China said on Tuesday it would place sanctions on Lockheed Martin for its involvement in arms sales to Taiwan, a move that could further escalate tensions between Beijing and Washington. Taiwan, an island broke off from mainland China after the Republic of China government lost in a protracted civil war, has spent billions of dollars on advanced American military hardware since the US dumped the island and established formal diplomatic relation with the People's Republic in 1978 in a quasi-partnership to fight the Cold War. The US State Department last week approved a request by Taiwan to upgrade its Patriot Surface-to-Air missiles at an estimated cost of $620 million, according to Taiwan's government-run Central News Agency. In response, China is imposing "sanctions on the main contractor of this arms sale, Lockheed Martin," Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said, without going into detail. The United States should "stop selling arms to Taiwan and cut its military ties to Taiwan, so it won't do further harm to bilateral relations between China and the United States," he added. It is also considered a tit-for-tat response against the US sanctions on Chinese firms Huawei and ZTE for their alleged business deals with Iran, a long-time arch rival of the US and Israel. It is not clear what kind of impact, if any, China’s action would have on Lockheed Martin. Some analysts have estimated that China represents 2 percent of the company’s revenue. Lockheed Martin subsidiary Sikorsky is involved in a joint venture called Shanghai Sikorsky Aircraft Co, a civilian helicopter company.
133029858
submission
hackingbear writes:
Electric control of magnetic vortex dynamics in a reproducible way on an ultrafast time scale is a key element in the quest for efficient spintronic devices with low-energy consumption. Researchers from Lanzhou University in China and Martin Luther University in Germany demonstrated a simple method for controlling magnetic patterns that are useful for data storage and information processing. Magnetic nanostructures are engineered as to host swirling magnetic vortices. The vortex intrinsic properties such as the voretx sense of rotations or polarity are well defined and thus are predestinate as digital information carriers. The team believe that their method is scalable, non-invasive, reliable and reversible, fullfing thus important prerequisites for practical implementation of optical-based ultrafast spintronics.
130466752
submission
hackingbear writes:
Emerging out of the COVID-19 epidemic, China space agency completed a vital test launch today (May 5) when the first launch of its heavy-lift Long March 5B rocket carrying a new reusable space capsule that can carry six or seven astronauts at a time. China's current Soyuz-derived single-use crew capsule can carry only three astronauts. Lift-off of today's mission occurred at 6 p.m. local time (6 a.m. EDT, 1000 GMT). About 8 minutes after launch, the rocket and capsule separated. Assuming the rest of the crew capsule's flight goes smoothly, today's success will open the door to a slate of 11 launches designed to facilitate space station construction, Zhou Jianping, chief designer for the crewed program, said in a statement. The Long March 5B rocket is a cornerstone of China's space exploration plans. The same vehicle will carry the country's Mars robotic landing mission, dubbed Tianwen (meaning "Sky Quest"), that is scheduled to launch this summer. Separately, with the ease of COVID-19 travel restriction, China recorded more than 23 million domestic tourists on May 1 labor day, the first major holiday since the lock down for COVID-19 around Chinese New Year, according to China's culture and tourism ministry. That estimation would still be far below the 67.13 million travelers per day during the 2019 Labor Day holiday as the tourist spots limit capacity to 30% due to social distancing rules.
130396042
submission
hackingbear writes:
A French hospital which has retested (repeatedly) old samples from pneumonia patients discovered that it treated a man who had COVID-19 as early as Dec. 27, 2019, nearly a month before the French government confirmed its first cases. “Of the 24, we had one who was positive for COVID-19 on Dec. 27,” Yves Cohen, head of resuscitation at the Avicenne and Jean Verdier hospitals in the northern suburbs of Paris, told the news channel on Sunday. The samples had all initially been collected to detect flu using PCR tests. Cohen said it was too early to know if the patient whose Dec. 27 test was COVID-19 positive is France’s “patient zero”. Knowing who was the first is critical to understanding how the virus spread. December 27 was around the same time that Chinese doctors noticed the then unknown pneumonia cases. China is widely criticized by western politicians and public for their purported "cover-up" or downplaying of the outbreak in early January, though China has rejected such accusations. The discovery of COVID-19 patients outside of China in December would certainly add controversies to the theory of origins of the virus.
129993182
submission
hackingbear writes:
The Cyberspace Administration of China, together with 11 other departments, released a policy document on Monday, which may potentially affect both domestic and overseas suppliers who provide information and network products and services to strategic industries such as telecom, radio and television, energy, finance, road and water transportation, railways and civil aviation. According to the regulation, critical information infrastructure operators who seek to procure network products and servicesif such products and services may affect national security, must undergo a national security review. During recent years, the US government has been "using", or "abusing" in the view of the Chinese side, the excuses of national security concerns to impose restrictions on a string of Chinese tech companies, experts said. Huawei Technologies Co's telecom equipment and smartphones, for example, were restricted for further use in the US market. In March, Chinese security company Qihoo 360 published claims that it has exposed an eleven-year campaign by “CIA hacking group (APT-C-39),” which, it says, targeted a range of Chinese industries and governments.
129929112
submission
hackingbear writes:
According to The Washington Post, U.S. deaths soared in the early weeks of the pandemic, surpassing the number of COVID-19 related deaths, as well as the number normally expected for the time period. An estimated 15,400 excess deaths occurred from March 1 to April 4, nearly double the 8,128 deaths attributed to COVID-19 during that time. The excess deaths estimate was calculated by subtracting the expected seasonal baseline from all deaths but may be attributed to causes other than COVID-19 directly, such as patients afraid of visiting hospitals. On April 15, the New York City revised its COVID-19 death toll upward by 3,778 to account for people who were not tested but presumed to have died from the virus. On April 17, the city of Wuhan, the original epic center of COVID-19, similarly raised death toll by 1,290 to account for omission due to overwhelmed hospitals in the early days of the epidemic in the city, but the change was viewed as an "evidence" of prior cover-up in the West.
128737896
submission
hackingbear writes:
After testing blood from 500 residents for antibodies to the COVID-19 virus in the town of Gangelt which is a hot spot of the pandemic in Germany, scientists at a nearby university say they have determined that 14% have been infected and are therefore “immune.” Some of those people would have had no symptoms at all. They found that 2% of residents were actively infected by the coronavirus and a total of 14% had antibodies, indicating a prior infection. From the result of their blood survey, the German team estimated the death rate in the municipality at 0.37% overall, a figure significantly lower than what’s shown on a dashboard maintained by Johns Hopkins, where the death rate in Germany among reported cases is 2%. In contrast, the 2019-2020 seasonal flu has infected up to 17% of US population and killed ~0.1% of those infected. Since first emerged in late December, or purportedly as early as late November, the COVID-19 has infected over 1.6 million people and killed over 100,000.
