A woman has been convicted for her role in a multibillion-pound bitcoin fraud after what is thought to have been the world’s largest cryptocurrency seizure. Zhimin Qian, also known as Yadi Zhang, 45, orchestrated a fraud in China between 2014 and 2017 that left 128,000 people out of pocket. She stored the proceeds in bitcoin, but UK authorities made a breakthrough in the case when they raided a Hampstead mansion in 2018 and seized devices from Qian holding 61,000 bitcoins, worth more than £5bn at current prices. The Metropolitan police…
Tag: Technology
The TikTok deal puts even more media in the hands of the super-rich | Margaret Sullivan
In 2020, only a tiny fraction of Americans got news from TikTok. These days, that number has soared to one in five. For young adults, those figures are much higher, with almost half of adults under 30 getting news there, according to the Pew Research Center. But who will own that hugely influential purveyor of information? As with so much of American media – from television networks to some of the largest newspapers – the answer is shaping up to be as simple and short as a TikTok video: the…
Trump signs executive order to transfer TikTok to US owners
Donald Trump signed an executive order on Thursday outlining the terms of a deal to transfer TikTok to a US owner. Trump said he and China’s president Xi Jinping had come to an agreement to allow TikTok to continue operating in the US, separating the social media platform from its Chinese owner ByteDance. Trump said the deal complies with a law that would have forced the shutdown of the app for American users had it not been divested and sold to a US owner. “I spoke with President Xi and…
Merch sellers cash in on Kirk’s killing with flood of social media ads
Just hours after Charlie Kirk’s death was confirmed, hundreds of advertisements for memorial merchandise appeared on Facebook and Instagram. In a viral post with more than 8,000 shares and hundreds of thousands of likes, the brand See Jesus In You promoted an “Echo of Freedom” shirt with an American flag and Kirk’s signature, calling him a symbol of “faith, liberty, and America”. The simple shirt, which Kirk was wearing when he was assassinated, has become a hot commodity among his conservative supporters. Another clothing brand, Liberty Faith Gear, struck a…
Murdoch, Ellison and China: what we know about the US’s TikTok deal
For a week, the White House has signaled that a deal to transfer ownership of TikTok to a US company is forthcoming. Donald Trump is expected to sign an executive order this week that would create a structure for a group of investors to take over operations of the Chinese social media company in the US. The Guardian’s journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link. Learn more. On Monday, White House officials said that the US business software company Oracle would license…
Trump says Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch likely part of US TikTok investor group
Rupert Murdoch and his son Lachlan Murdoch will probably be part of a group of investors that will buy TikTok, Donald Trump said in an interview on Sunday. The president was asked about the status of the sale of the app during an interview with Peter Doocy on The Sunday Briefing on Fox News. Trump administration officials have signaled that a deal for the Chinese-owned social media platform was imminent, though there has been some confusion about the status of the agreement. Trump said moguls Larry Ellison and Michael Dell…
Trump says Xi Jinping has agreed to approve TikTok deal, but details unclear
Donald Trump said on Friday that he and Xi Jinping had agreed to approve a deal over TikTok. “He approved the TikTok deal,” Trump said about Xi to reporters in the Oval Office, suggesting the leaders signed off on a preliminary agreement. But Trump offered no details about the agreement or when it would be signed. The American and Chinese leaders had connected over a phone call earlier in the day, the first direct contact between the two leaders since June. China and the US have been at loggerheads over…
Trump celebrates TikTok deal as Beijing suggests US app would use China’s algorithm
Donald Trump has claimed his administration has reached a deal with China to keep TikTok operating in the US, amid uncertainty over what shape the final agreement will take, with suggestions from the Chinese side that Beijing would retain control of the algorithm that powers the site’s video feed. “We have a deal on TikTok … We have a group of very big companies that want to buy it,” Trump said on Tuesday, without providing further details. The deal, which was negotiated in Madrid between US treasury secretary Scott Bessent…
‘I have to do it’: Why one of the world’s most brilliant AI scientists left the US for China
Song-chun Zhu at Peking University, July 2025. Photograph: Sean Gallagher/The Guardian By the time Song-Chun Zhu was six years old, he had encountered death more times than he could count. Or so it felt. This was the early 1970s, the waning years of the Cultural Revolution, and his father ran a village supply store in rural China. There was little to do beyond till the fields and study Mao Zedong at home, and so the shop became a refuge where people could rest, recharge and share tales. Zhu grew up…
US and China reach deal to transfer TikTok ownership, trade officials say
Jamieson Greer, a US trade representative, said on Monday that Washington and Beijing have struck a framework agreement on transferring TikTok to US-controlled ownership. Speaking after emerging from negotiations with Chinese officials, Scott Bessent said the deal was coming but declined to reveal the commercial terms. “We have a framework for a TikTok deal,” the treasury secretary told reporters after coming out of high-level talks in Madrid. “We’re not going to talk about the commercial terms of the deal. It’s between two private parties, but the commercial terms have been…