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FTX founder accused of conspiring to bribe Chinese officials with $40m worth of payments in new indictment
US prosecutors on Tuesday unveiled a new indictment against Sam Bankman-Fried, accusing the founder of cryptocurrency exchange of conspiring to bribe Chinese government officials with $40m worth of payments.
Federal prosecutors in Manhattan charged Bankman-Fried with directing the payment in order to unfreeze accounts belonging to his hedge fund, Alameda Research, that Chinese authorities had frozen. The accounts held more than $1bn of cryptocurrency, US prosecutors said.

Month. According to Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, the history of the observance originates as a nod to May 7, 1843 commemorating the first Japanese immigrants to the United States. It also ...

Rise in emergency financing for other countries since 2016 correlates with drop in infrastructure lending
China spent $240bn (£195bn) bailing out countries struggling under their belt and road initiative debts between 2008 and 2021, new data shows.
Research found that Chinese state-backed lenders released bailout funds to 22 countries, including Argentina, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Ukraine. Almost 80% of the emergency rescue lending was issued after 2016, reaching more than $40bn in 2021.

The British are the baddies in a clunky origin story that can’t land a blow on Donnie Yen’s original series
A mainland Chinese attempt to cash in on Donnie Yen’s superior Hong Kong series about Bruce Lee’s eponymous sifu, this film’s quickstep fighting rhythms are bogged down by a laughable lack of effort on the narrative front. Budding martial arts master Ip Man, played here by former child star and Jet Li acolyte Miu Tse, arouses the ire of the arrogant British colonialist Mr Stark (played by Sergio de Ieso in a possible nod to Iron Man) after interrupting his human trafficking ring. That’s your lot story-wise; slogging through 76 minutes feels like being forced to do one-finger press-ups for the same length of time.
This is the kind of plot staple – plucky martial arts school takes on foreign bullyboys – that animated many a Shaw Brothers or Golden Harvest production back in the day. Ip’s wing chun must ultimately trump the bartitsu of Mr Stark and his minions; the latter sounds made up, but was actually . It’s a sign of the times that Britons are now viable bad guys for Chinese and Indian cinema, as in , and why shouldn’t we be fair game? But there’s something insidious about the demonisation of foreign devils here in the context of China’s recent crackdown in Hong Kong.

"The View" co-host Sunny Hostin compared the Chinese internment of Uyghur Muslims to the U.S. on Tuesday and said "they're putting more Black people in jail here." Hostin said she doesn't see American ...

France has banned not only TikTok from government phones, but Facebook and Twitter, too. Could this be a tipping point for big tech? Plus, AI-generated pictures of the pope signal a new type of viral image
Government workers in the UK, US, Canada and European Union (the list will have grown by the time you read this) are banned from installing TikTok on their phones.
On Friday, France joined that list, preventing its civil servants from installing TikTok – and everything else. From the government’s press release ():
After an analysis of the issues, in particular security, the government has decided to ban the downloading and installation of recreational applications on professional telephones provided to public officials from now on.
Recreational applications do not have sufficient levels of cybersecurity and data protection to be deployed on government equipment. This ban applies immediately and uniformly. Exemptions may be granted on an exceptional basis …

Eastwind Books of Berkeley, an Asian American bookshop that opened in 1982, is set to shut its doors permanently April 30, as first reported by Berkeleyside. The store carries an extensive collection ...

Ng, a U.S. citizen for 35 years who is well-known in L.A. philanthropic circles for his support of the arts and Asian American initiatives, called the allegations baseless. “It was disheartening to ...

Victoria’s opposition accuses premier of snubbing education leaders while union says absence of journalists on China trip is ‘disturbing’
Daniel Andrews has begun a series of meetings in Beijing as part of a four-day trip to China amid criticism from home over the exclusion of Australian journalists and education leaders, and the limited information provided about the visit.
The Victorian opposition has accused the premier of snubbing industry leaders from the higher education sector by not having them join him on a visit designed to entice Chinese students back to the state.

Ma Ying-jeou’s ‘we are all Chinese’ message starkly at odds with vision of Tsai Ing-wen, who seeks support from Washington
Taiwan’s former president Ma Ying-jeou stood in front of the Sun Yat-sen mausoleum in Nanjing on Tuesday and called for people on both sides of the Taiwan strait to work together for peace, because, he said: “We are all Chinese.”
The 73-year-old is in China on a historic visit, the first by a current or former Taiwanese president since 1949. In the decades since, tensions have increased as Beijing vows to annex Taiwan under what it calls “reunification”. Taiwan’s government and people have become , and few identify themselves as Chinese.

Democracies should be maturely debating online safety and data, not making kneejerk responses that risk an idea we all cherish
TikTok’s chief executive, Shou Zi Chew, discovered during his five-hour what Huawei could have told him all along: being owned by a Chinese company is bad for business.
In fact, is a lot like like Huawei and 5G all over again. The security and privacy risks are plausible, but largely without evidence. What this is really about is trust, trade and geopolitics.
Emily Taylor is an associate fellow in the International Security Programme, Chatham House, CEO of Oxford Information Labs and editor of the Journal of Cyber Policy

Ng, a U.S. citizen for 35 years who is well-known in L.A. philanthropic circles for his support of the arts and Asian American initiatives, called the allegations baseless. “It was disheartening to ...