Tag: Region Asias

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department announced a series of criminal cases Tuesday tracing the illegal flow of sensitive technology, including Apple’s software code for self-driving cars and materials used for missiles, to foreign adversaries like Russia, China and Iran. Some of the alleged theft highlighted by the department dates back several years, but U.S. officials are drawing attention to the collection of cases now to highlight the work of a task force created this year to disrupt the transfer…

  WASHINGTON – The US Justice Department said on Tuesday it has charged a former Apple Inc engineer with attempting to steal the firm’s technology related to autonomous systems, including self-driving cars, and then fleeing to China. The case was among five announced on Tuesday aimed at countering efforts to illicitly acquire American technology by nations including Russia and China. The actions were the first announced by a “strike force” formed in February in part to keep sensitive technologies away…

A humanitarian aid worker who used an anonymous Twitter account to mock Saudi Arabia about its economy has filed a federal racketeering lawsuit against the social media platform, the kingdom and a number of individuals alleging an attempt to silence critics overseas. Abdulrahman al-Sadhan, was working for the Red Crescent in Riyadh in 2018 when plain-clothed security forces entered the office of the Red Crescent offices in Riyadh. He was taken away without any explanation. How the Saudi government linked…

In October, reports indicated that the FBI believed it had enough evidence to charge Hunter Biden with tax crimes. The Justice Department reportedly ordered the team’s removal, according to the New York Post. An IRS criminal supervisory special agent came forward to Congress in April seeking whistleblower protection to share with lawmakers information that allegedly showed the investigation into potential tax crimes by the younger Biden was being mishandled. Now, the whistleblower’s attorneys claim the team’s removal from the investigation…

The platform’s Global Government Affairs account issued a statement on Monday outlining its recent decisions in light of the Turkish court orders, saying it was forced to take action against four accounts and 409 individual tweets.  “We received what we believed to be a final threat to throttle the service – after several such warnings,” it said, adding that it deleted the accounts and posts “in order to keep Twitter available over the election weekend.”

WASHINGTON – The FBI lacked “actual evidence” to investigate Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and relied too heavily on tips provided by Trump’s political opponents to fuel the probe, US Special Counsel John Durham concluded in a report released on Monday.

The report marks the end of a four-year probe launched in May 2019 when then-Attorney General William Barr appointed Durham, a veteran prosecutor, to probe potential missteps by the FBI when it launched its early stage “Crossfire Hurricane” inquiry into potential contacts between Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and Russia.

That Crossfire Hurricane investigation would later be handed over to Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who in March 2019 concluded there was no evidence of a criminal conspiracy between Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia.

In his new 306-page report, Durham concluded that US intelligence and law enforcement did not possess any “actual evidence” of collusion between Trump’s campaign and Russia prior to launching Crossfire Hurricane.

He also accused the bureau of treating the 2016 Trump probe differently from other politically sensitive investigations, including several involving Trump’s Democratic rival Hillary Clinton.

WASHINGTON – A Massachusetts man has been arrested for providing information about Chinese dissidents in the United States to China’s government, the Justice Department said Monday. Litang Liang, 63, of Brighton, was arrested on May 9 on charges of acting as an agent of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) without notifying US authorities, according to the department.

The announcement of Liang’s arrest came on the same day as a court in the eastern Chinese city of Suzhou revealed that a 78-year-old US citizen, John Shing-wan Leung, had been sentenced to life in prison for espionage. The Justice Department said Liang, between 2018 and 2022, had passed information about Boston-area residents, dissidents and groups, including “community organisations with pro-Taiwan leanings,” to Chinese government officials.

“Following a complaint, an investigation was opened in December 2022 into deceptive marketing practices and programmed obsolescence,” the office said in a statement on Monday, adding that the complaint was filed by an activist group called ‘Halte a L’Obsolescence Programmee’ (HOP).  The group’s complaint centers around the practice of ‘serialization’, whereby spare parts like microchips or speakers are matched with serial numbers to a specific generation of iPhone. This prevents third-party repairers from using generic parts, and as models are phased out by Apple, so too are the associated spares, forcing customers to shell out for a newer model.

BERLIN – The German security authorities believe that China is still conducting police activities on German soil even though Beijing assured Berlin in February that it had ceased to do so, the German foreign and interior ministries said on Monday.

“The security authorities continue to assume that there are two so-called overseas police stations in Germany,” a spokesman for the Interior Ministry said at a regular press conference.

Berlin called on Beijing in November to shut down extraterritorial police stations in the country.

President López Obrador made the sale of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner one of his campaign promises, calling it a symbol of previous governments’ excesses. But the specially-outfitted plane proved hard to shift and an attempt to raffle it off failed. It was finally sold to the Tajik government for $92m (£73.7m).

The jet took off from California, where it had been in storage, and arrived in the Tajik capital, Dushanbe, early on Monday. The plane was originally purchased in 2012 by the president at the time, Felipe Calderón, for $218m (£175m). It was then used by Mr Calderón’s successor, Enrique Peña Nieto. Mr López Obrador vowed to never set foot in it. He has been using commercial flights since he took office.

In an article on Sunday, Politico quoted an anonymous official from Macron’s office as saying that “what Ukraine needs is combat equipment, armored vehicles, tanks, artillery.” In addition, Paris will heed Kiev’s calls to supply more air defense systems, the source stated.

When asked whether France was considering sending fighter jets to Ukraine, the official dismissed the issue as “a bit premature,” stressing that the focus should currently be on land operations and air defense.

Biden will visit the city for the G-7 summit, where he and other world leaders will focus on a range of issues, including Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine, climate change, and the global economy.

But Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, who represents Hiroshima in Japan’s legislature, has said he hopes the setting of the summit will bring a focus to the danger of nuclear weapons. And in that setting, the leader of the country who carried out the bombing will inevitably play an outsized role in any events commemorating it.

Iran Press TV Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has plotted in private to launch bold attacks inside Russia, according to leaked documents. Zelensky, who till recently was refused long-range weapons to use in attacks against Russia, behind closed doors sketched out plans earlier this year for major military actions such as occupying cities and villages inside Russia, bombing a pipeline that transfers Russian oil to Hungary, and using long-range missiles to hit targets on the Russian side of the border. The…

Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin approved an inter-governmental agreement to supply natural gas to China through the Far East Route. The move will accelerate energy cooperation between Russia and China, experts stated.

Sino-Russian energy cooperation is strategic, whereas the implementation of the agreement on gas supplies to China via the Far Eastern line is beneficial both to Russia and China, Mishustin said at a government meeting on Thursday, Tass reported.

The cooperation deal was signed on January 31, 2023 and defines the terms of cooperation for the supply of gas from Russia to China via the Far Eastern route, including the cross-border section of the gas pipeline across the Ussuri River near the cities of Dalnerechensk in Russia, and Hulin, Northeast China’s Heilongjiang Province, according to media reports.

Pyongyang, May 15 (KCNA) — Kim Sol Hwa, researcher of the Institute for Japan Studies of the DPRK Foreign Ministry, issued the following article titled “What is final aim of Japan’s Military Collusion with NATO” on May 14:

The unprecedented military nexus between Japan and NATO has recently aroused great concern and vigilance of the international community. A typical example is that Japan is planning to open the NATO liaison office in Japan for the first time in Asia…

HONG KONG – Fierce competition for new mortgage customers is driving banks in Hong Kong to offer the highest cash rebates in nearly two decades.

The deals – offered as a percentage of the principal loan amount – ramped up from about 1.3 per cent last year to as much as 2.6 per cent currently, the highest in over 17 years, according to Centaline Mortgage Broker data.

Banks such as HSBC Holdings and Bank of China (Hong Kong) are using the incentive as a way to draw in clients, while property transactions remain subdued in the city’s real estate market that’s still reeling from an exodus of residents last year amid its zero Covid policy. Lenders are also getting squeezed as a cap on lending rates in the city crimps margins.