WASHINGTON (Reuters) – FBI Director Christopher Wray told a Senate panel on Wednesday that the law enforcement agency is “deeply concerned” about any company like China’s ZTE gaining positions of power in the U.S. telecommunications market.
Read Full Story Here: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-china-zte-fbi/fbi-chief-says-agency-deeply-concerned-about-any-company-like-chinas-zte-idUSKCN1IH2T0
In China, “big brother” has been invited to lunch. A high school has set up a comprehensive facial recognition system in its cafeteria that requires students to have their faces scanned in order to be served food.
The system, which Chinese state media are hailing as an innovative success, provides an example of how the Chinese regime is introducing facial recognition technology throughout society, with the goal of one day monitoring all Chinese citizens—an ambition the regime has never kept secret.
The use of the technology at Hangzhou No. 11 High School in Zhejiang Province is said by officials to be a response to more modest concerns. They say it is motivated by the apparently growing problem of pupils forgetting to bring their lunch coupons, according to numerous media reports.
Provided by a Chinese commercial company, the Smart Dining Hall 3.0 system equips all of the lunch counters in the cafeteria with cameras. Students lining up to get food must have their faces scanned to be checked against the existing database..
Read More Here: https://www.theepochtimes.com/in-chinese-high-school-a-students-face-buys-lunch_2335623.html
FOR years, China has acted as the world’s dumping ground for recyclable goods, taking a reported 45 million tonnes of our plastic bottles, tired old clothes, and cereal boxes in 2016 alone.
But Beijing has decided that their nation will no longer be the world’s trash can, imposing a ban on imports of 24 categories of recyclables and solid waste that kicked in on Jan 1, 2018 – and the world is not coping.
After hazardous waste was found mixed in with the “foreign garbage” countries were shipping over to China, Environmental Protection Ministry said no more. Notifying the World Trade Organization back in July, Beijing said that, in order to “protect China’s environmental interests and people’s health,” there would be a change in policy – essentially sticking two fingers up to the waste inundated nations of the west.
Read Full Story Here: https://asiancorrespondent.com/2018/01/china-isnt-cleaning-mess-anymore-world-cant-handle/
ReutersBEIJING (Reuters) — China’s Tiangong-1 space station is not out of control and does not pose a safety threat, a top Chinese spaceflight engineer said on Monday, after reports that the station was falling towards earth.
The Tiangong-1, or “Heavenly Palace 1,” China’s first space lab, was launched into orbit in 2011 to carry out docking and orbit experiments as part of China’s ambitious space programme, which aims to place a permanent station in orbit by 2023.
Tiangong-1 was originally planned to be decommissioned in 2013 but China has repeatedly extended the length of its mission. The delay of reentry into the earth’s atmosphere, which China said would happen in late 2017, had led some experts to suggest the space laboratory may be out of control.
Zhu Congpeng, a top engineer at the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, told the state-backed Science and Technology Daily newspaper that the space station was not crashing and did not pose a safety or environmental threat.
“We have been continuously monitoring Tiangong-1 and expect to allow it to fall within the first half of this year,” Zhu told the newspaper.
“It will burn up on entering the atmosphere and the remaining wreckage will fall into a designated area of the sea, without endangering the surface,” he said.
Reentry was delayed in September 2017 in order to ensure that the wreckage would fall into an area of the South Pacific ocean where debris from Russian and U.S. space stations had previously landed, the paper said.
The California-based Aerospace Corporation said the Tiangong-1’s reentry was unlikely to be controlled but was highly unlikely to hit people or damage property, according to a post on its website last updated on Jan 3.
“Although not declared officially, it is suspected that control of Tiangong-1 was lost and will not be regained before reentry,” it said. There may be hazardous material on board that could survive reentry, it said.
Advancing China’s space program is a priority for President Xi Jinping, who has called for China to become a global space power with both advanced civilian space flight and capabilities that strengthen national security.
Technocrats in China are pushing forward with gene editing and cloning, ostensibly for medical research, but the ethical issues are piling up at breakneck speed. Human trials are clearly in view in China. Technocrats ‘invent’ because they must, not because there is a good need to do so. ⁃ TN Editor
With his black, brown and white fur, Longlong looks like most beagles. But the puppy has been sick with a blood-clotting disorder since birth — exactly what scientists in China had wanted.
The pup was cloned from Apple, a different dog whose genome was edited to develop the disease atherosclerosis.
With that genetic information now coded in, the disease — a leading cause of stroke and heart sickness — was passed along to Longlong, who scientists will use to study the condition and its possible cures.
Longlong’s creator, Beijing-based biotech company Sinogene, said Longlong is the world’s first dog cloned from a gene-edited donor. With Longlong’s birth, the scientists claimed that China had matched South Korea as a leader in canine cloning technology.
South Korean scientists cloned the first dog, an Afghan hound named Snuppy, in 2005.
“A cloned dog born from a gene-edited cell donor is certainly a breakthrough,” says Eugene Redmond, director of Neural Transplantation and Repair at the Yale University School of Medicine, who was not involved in the research.
Sinogene have successfully cloned two more puppies in this manner, meaning the company now has four genetically identical puppies — Apple, Longlong and two new canines, Xixi and Nuonuo.
“Dogs share the most inheritable diseases with human beings, which makes them the best disease models to study,” says Feng Chong, technical director at Sinogene.
According to Feng, Longlong’s birth was the first time scientists had combined two cutting-edge bio-technologies: A gene-editing tool called CRISPR with somatic cell cloning technology – the method used to clone Dolly the sheep.
Atherosclerosis, in which fatty material builds up and thickens artery walls, can cause heart attacks and strokes, and affects more than 15.8 million Americans alone. Cardiovascular diseases are the number one cause of death globally, killing 17.7 million people in 2015, according to the WHO.
To date, researchers say the dogs haven’t shown any symptoms of the disorder but they are closely monitoring their health, said Mi Jidong, General Manager of Sinogene. Drugs to treat cardiovascular diseases are already being tested on the healthy animals, he added.
Read full story here…http://edition.cnn.com/2017/12/25/health/china-dog-cloning-for-disease-intl/index.html
