While You Were Sleeping: 5 stories you might have missed, Aug 10
Sign up now: Get ST's newsletters delivered to your inbox
President Joe Biden signed an executive order that will prohibit certain US investments in sensitive technology in China.
PHOTO: NYTIMES
Biden signs order to ban certain tech investments in China
President Joe Biden on Wednesday signed an executive order that will narrowly prohibit certain US investments in sensitive technology in China and require government notification of funding in other tech sectors.
The long-awaited order authorises the US Treasury secretary to prohibit or restrict certain US investments in Chinese entities in three sectors: semiconductors and microelectronics, quantum information technologies, and certain artificial intelligence systems.
Mr Biden said in a letter to Congress he was declaring a national emergency to deal with the threat of advancement by countries like China “in sensitive technologies and products critical to the military, intelligence, surveillance, or cyber-enabled capabilities.”
The proposal targets investments in Chinese companies developing software to design chips and tools to manufacture them. The US, Japan and the Netherlands dominate those fields, and the Chinese government has been working to build up home-grown alternatives.
WHO classifies EG.5 as Covid-19 ‘variant of interest’
PHOTO: NYTIMES
The World Health Organisation on Wednesday classified the EG.5 coronavirus strain circulating in the United States and China as a “variant of interest” but said it did not seem to pose more of a threat to public health than other variants.
The fast-spreading variant, the most prevalent in the United States with an estimated more than 17 per cent of cases, has been behind upticks in the virus across the country and also has been detected in China, South Korea, Japan and Canada, among other countries.
“Collectively, available evidence does not suggest that EG.5 has additional public health risks relative to the other currently circulating Omicron descendent lineages,” the WHO said in a risk evaluation.
Iraq’s 50 deg C heat shows ‘era of global boiling’ has begun
UN human rights chief Volker Turk said on Wednesday said that the extreme summer heat and pollution of southern Iraq where he has been visiting had made it clear “that the era of global boiling” has begun.
Mr Turk’s comments came at the end of a four-day visit to Iraq during which he met with leaders and travelled across the country, sometimes in 50 deg C heat, to discuss human rights, with a focus on climate change.
“Standing in searing heat in that scarred landscape, breathing air polluted by the many gas flares dotting the region, it was clear to me that the era of global boiling has indeed begun,” he said, at a news conference in Baghdad, referring to his time in southern Iraq’s oil-producing Basra region.
US mayor goes fishing, finds $1m worth of cocaine
PHOTOS: FACEBOOK/JANE CASTOR, TWITTER/US BORDER PATROL
The mayor of the Florida city of Tampa came across a big catch during a recent fishing expedition: about 30kg of cocaine, valued at around US$1.1 million (S$1.4 million), US media reported.
Ms Jane Castor was enjoying a vacation day off Marathon, in the Florida Keys, on July 23 when a family member spotted something in the warm Atlantic waters.
At first she thought it was “shade as opposed to something shady” – perhaps small fish clustered under some debris in the ocean, she told Fox 13 news. But the “closer we got, I was like, ‘oh, that would be a bale of cocaine’,” she said.
Max Verstappen gets the drift with a sideways shift
Double Formula One world champion Max Verstappen has picked up some fresh driving tricks after a lesson in sliding sideways from New Zealand’s drift car king “Mad Mike” Whiddett.
The Dutch driver, enjoying some time off to do something different in a dominant season, smoked the tyres of a 600 horsepower MADBUL Mazda RX-7 in a video released on Red Bull Motorsport’s YouTube channel on Wednesday.
“I think it was the most nervous I’ve been in the past two years just because it’s not natural to how I normally drive,” said the 25-year-old Red Bull racer.
