Tag: internal-open-access-from-nl

China Test Fires Long-Range Ballistic Missile in the Pacific

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China test-fired a long-range ballistic missile with a dummy warhead in the Pacific Ocean on Monday, the first such launch in almost two years, prompting alarmed countries to criticize the move as destabilizing. Governments in the region were warned of the launch shortly beforehand. The overt display of China’s fast-expanding military capabilities threatens to further fan a defense buildup around the Pacific in the midst of anxieties about the strength of the U.S. commitment to the region. The missile was launched from a Chinese nuclear-powered submarine and sent a “mock…

China Says Pilot Who Flew Into Skyscraper Had Thoughts of Death

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The authorities in Beijing said Thursday that the pilot who flew a small plane into the city’s tallest building last week was a 66-year-old man suffering from insomnia and anxiety and who had expressed a desire to end his life in journal entries. The pilot crashed his two-seat sport aircraft into Citic Tower, the headquarters of one of China’s biggest state-owned financial conglomerates, in a busy Beijing business district last Friday during evening rush hour. In a sign of the authorities’ sensitivity over an event that raised questions about the…

Kazakhstan’s Leader Deepens U.S. Ties, Saying Trump Was ‘Sent by Heaven’

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The skyline of Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan, is a physical reflection of the Central Asian nation’s approach to foreign affairs. A sign reading “Moscow” sits atop a Kazakh-Russian business center. Beside it is a pagoda-crowned luxury hotel owned by the Chinese state oil company. Nearby is a gleaming hotel tower and shopping mall, emblazoned with the American brand Ritz-Carlton. And they all exist in the shadow of Abu Dhabi Plaza, the city’s biggest skyscraper, developed by a real estate firm from the United Arab Emirates. It is the product…

China Confirms Death of Pilot Who Flew Small Plane Into Beijing’s Tallest Tower

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The Beijing authorities said on Saturday that a small aircraft had flown into the capital’s tallest building a day earlier, killing the pilot and injuring 13 others at the scene, in the first official confirmation of an event that has raised questions about the city’s security. The Chaoyang District government, which administers a large area of eastern Beijing, including where the tower is, said in a statement that a two-seat, single-engine sport aircraft “crashed into a high-rise building mid-flight” at 5:55 p.m. on Friday, near one of the city’s most…

Chinese A.I. Models Gain Ground on Anthropic and OpenAI

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Two weeks ago, the artificial intelligence company Anthropic shut down its two most powerful A.I. systems after an unexpected demand from the U.S. government to cut access to it. Days later, a Chinese start-up, Z.ai, released an A.I. model that is nearly as powerful as Anthropic’s models, Fable and Mythos. But Z.ai’s new technology costs much less to use, and no one in the United States was putting restrictions on it. It quickly landed on a closely watched leaderboard of the world’s 10 most popular models. Z.ai is on the…

A Puppy-Abuse Case in China, Caught on Video, Prompts Rare Public Protest

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In the video, a man stands on a balcony at night hitting a puppy as it lets out sharp shrieks. He gruffly carries the dog back inside by its neck. The scene in the southwestern Chinese city of Chongqing was captured by a neighbor and posted on social media this month. The video prompted concerned residents to go to the man’s apartment, where they confronted him and rescued three abused puppies, according to videos posted on social media. Within days, hundreds of people had gathered outside his apartment, in a…

China Detained 2 Japanese on Suspicion of Smuggling

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China has detained two Japanese citizens on suspicion of smuggling banned products, the Japanese government said on Wednesday, adding to rising tensions between the two countries. The Japanese nationals were detained in May in the northeastern Chinese city of Dalian, according to a statement by Japan’s government. Chinese officials have indicated that they are being held on “on suspicion of violating the law and smuggling goods that are prohibited from being imported or exported,” Minoru Kihara, a top Japanese cabinet official, said at a news conference in Tokyo on Wednesday.…

China Takes Supercomputer Crown From U.S. For First Time Since 2017

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China took back a coveted computing crown from the United States on Tuesday, ratcheting up a fierce technological competition that has implications for science, national security and geopolitics. LineShine, a massive computing system in Shenzhen, China, was declared the world’s fastest by a group of researchers using a set of standard tests for supercomputers. Besides raw speed, the system stood out because it uses only standard microprocessors and not the special-purpose chips called graphics processing units, which most high-end supercomputers rely on for heavy number crunching. That underlying design could…

The Iran War Permanently Altered the Global Economy

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The framework deal between the United States and Iran sets the stage for an end to the bursts of violence and debilitating disruption of energy deliveries and trade in the Persian Gulf. But don’t expect economies around the globe to simply pick up where they left off before the United States and Israel began bombing Iran on Feb. 28. The war has set in motion changes that will be hard to reverse. The global energy order is being reshaped. The near shutdown in oil and gas deliveries from the Middle…

A.I. Boom Ignites Asian Chip Companies

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At Taiwan’s biggest computing show this month, Jensen Huang, the chief executive of Nvidia, was mobbed as if he were a rock star, trailed by a crowd from booth to booth as he signed autographs and posed for selfies. At the stand of SK Hynix, one of his most important South Korean suppliers, Mr. Huang picked up a marker and left a message. Atop a reflective wafer of memory — a component of Nvidia’s A.I. supercomputers now in short supply — he wrote: “Please make more :).” It was only…