Day: January 17, 2024

Capitol Hill — U.S. lawmakers renewed calls Wednesday to pass bipartisan legislation that would restrict American investment in Chinese technology.

“It should come as no surprise that China’s military and surveillance state are exploiting loopholes in U.S. policy to access billions of U.S. investment dollars and expertise. We know that U.S. investment has not democratized China and countries which are controlled by the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] have no power over the applications of their technology. The CCP can direct it to us for military or surveillance purposes,” House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul said at a hearing on the legislation Wednesday. 

The bill – which has support from both conservative organizations and the Biden administration – was not included in the National Defense Authorization Act or NDAA passed late last year. Republican Senator John Cornyn has sponsored companion legislation in the U.S. Senate that passed with more than ninety votes. 

Lawmakers hope it can still be passed individually and signed into law.  

If passed, McCaul said the measure, H.R. 6349, would target “specific technology sectors, like AI [artificial intelligence] and quantum computing, that are empowering China’s military development and surveillance.” 

Rep. Gregory Meeks, the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said an executive order issued by the Biden administration last August “that calls for provisions and notification requirements of specific types of American investments in China, or in certain companies that develop or produce semiconductors, quantum computers, and artificial intelligence applications” is an important first step. 

But experts in U.S.-China relations told a House panel more could be done. 

“Congress has an opportunity to build on the initial steps taken by the Trump and Biden administrations to prevent U.S. capital from fueling China’s military and intelligence capabilities. First, Washington should take a sectoral rather than merely an entity-based approach. The Treasury Department has demonstrated since at least 2021 that it is disinterested in using even its existing narrow authorities to limit investment in Chinese military-linked companies. And in fairness to the Treasury Department tackling the problem on a company-by-company basis would be a resource-intensive and gargantuan task,” Matthew Pottinger, the deputy national security adviser during the Trump administration, said Wednesday. 

“We still haven’t learned that they will do everything they can to take anything we sell, particularly in the area of electronics and really high tech, and use it for the military. They’ve been doing that for decades. We don’t learn. We think somehow if you trade more, they’ll matriculate from dictatorship to democracy,” Republican Rep. Chris Smith said Wednesday.

The bipartisan push in the U.S. House comes as Senate negotiators continue work on the White House’s $106 billion national security supplemental request that includes funding to combat Chinese influence in the Indo-Pacific. Citing a border security crisis, Senate Republicans have sought changes to U.S. immigration law in return for their votes to pass more than $50 billion in assistance to Ukraine that is also part of the Biden administration’s request. 

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell urged lawmakers Wednesday to reach an agreement soon. 

“It’s become quite fashionable in Washington to talk about how we’re not taking competition with China seriously enough,” McConnell said. “Winning this competition means credibly deterring Beijing’s worst impulses, which, for us, means investing in American strength. Outcompeting the PRC [People’s Republic of China] will require greater investments in our military capabilities and in our industrial capacity to produce them. The West cannot be caught unprepared for this challenge. We cannot afford to neglect the lessons of history.” 
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Harare, Zimbabwe — The U.N.’s Children’s Fund expressed alarm this week about a cholera outbreak in Africa that has spread to at least 10 countries, with the situation in Zambia and Zimbabwe “very serious.”

Dr. Paul Ngwakum, the regional health adviser for UNICEF in East and Southern Africa, said about 200,000 cases have been reported and more than 3,000 lives taken by the disease.

Of the 10 countries he named as having an active outbreak, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Tanzania, Somalia, Zambia and Zimbabwe are in “acute cholera crisis.”

“The key drivers are long-term poor water sanitation and hygiene conditions, exacerbated by changing weather patterns, climate change leading to floods and droughts, end-of-year festivities, inadequate community sensitization [and] late care-seeking behavior for those that are affected,” Ngwakum said.

“Children, unfortunately, carry the lion’s share of the affected,” he said. “For example, over 52% of the cases in Zambia are children less than 15 years old.”

Ngwakum said Zambia and Zimbabwe are experiencing a rapid rise in the number of cases since the Christmas and New Year holidays, with 1,000 cholera cases reported a week in each of the neighboring countries.

“The situation in Zambia and Zimbabwe is very serious,” he said. “These two countries are the most affected in the region. In Zambia, nine out of 10 provinces are reporting cases.”

The disease’s fatality rate is alarmingly high, Ngwakum said, with 4% of the more than 9,000 cases ending in death.

“This is extremely high because the acceptable threshold is below 1%,” he said. “Since the beginning of 2024 alone, Zimbabwe has recorded over 17,000 cases, with about 384 deaths. … And these continue to spread geographically.”

In Zimbabwe, a shortage of purified water is forcing residents to depend on open sources. That, along with uncollected refuse and running sewage, are being blamed for the waterborne disease.

Douglas Mombeshora, Zimbabwe’s health minister, said the central government is doing all it can to contain the outbreak, starting in the capital, Harare.

“If you move around … Harare, people are just dumping garbage in undesignated areas, and this has not been collected,” Mombeshora said. “So government has mobilized resources so that we clean up Harare. And government is moving in to mobilize resources to procure water-treating chemicals. Supply of potable water has dropped from 350 megaliters to 200 megaliters per day.”

Itai Rusike, executive director of the Community Working Group on Health in Zimbabwe, called on the government to declare a national disaster so that international aid agencies such as WHO, UNICEF and USAID can swiftly help to contain the cholera outbreak.

“All the measures to end cholera are in the purview of the government — central government or local government — by providing safe water, safe sanitation and also hygienic safe disposal,” Rusike said. “So the buck stops with the government in making sure that people are provided with uninterrupted potable water, refuse is collected on time, burst sewer pipes are fixed [promptly] and the general public are given information about cholera guidelines and protocols.”

UNICEF fears that if the outbreaks are not controlled, it will mean schools closing — as is already the case in Zambia.
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sydney — The Australian government is considering new laws to regulate the use of artificial intelligence in “high-risk” areas such as law enforcement and self-driving vehicles.

Voluntary measures also are being explored, such as asking companies to label AI-generated content.

The country has outlined its plan to respond to the rapid rise of artificial intelligence, or AI.

Under the Canberra government’s plan announced Wednesday, safeguards would be applied to technologies that predict the chances of someone again committing a crime, or that analyze job applications to find a well-matched candidate.

Australian officials have said that new laws could also mandate that organizations using high-risk AI must ensure a person is responsible for the safe use of the technology.

The Canberra government also wants to minimize restrictions on low-risk areas of AI to allow their growth to continue.

An expert advisory committee will be set up to help the government to prepare legislation.

Ed Husic is Australia’s federal minister for industry and science. He told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. On Wednesday that he wants AI-generated content to be labeled so it can’t be mistaken as genuine.

“We need to have confidence that what we are seeing we know exactly if it is organic or real content, or if it has been created by an AI system.  And, so, industry is just as keen to work with government on how to create that type of labeling,” he said. “More than anything else, I am not worried about the robots taking over, I’m worried about disinformation doing that. We need to ensure that when people are creating content that it is clear that AI has had a role or a hand to play in that.”

Kate Pounder, the head of the Tech Council of Australia, which represents the technology sector, told local media that the government’s AI proposals strike a sensible balance between fostering innovation and ensuring systems are developed safely.

The Australian Parliament defines artificial intelligence as “an engineered system that generates predictive outputs such as content, forecasts, recommendations…without explicit programming.”

Recent research shows that most Australians still distrust the technology, which they see as unsafe and prone to errors.

 
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nairobi, kenya — Kenya has embarked on its biggest rhino relocation project and began the difficult work Tuesday of tracking, darting and moving 21 of the critically endangered beasts, which can each weigh over a ton, to a new home.

A previous attempt at moving rhinos in the East African nation was a disaster in 2018, as all 11 of the animals died.

The latest project experienced early troubles. A rhino targeted for moving was successfully hit with a tranquilizer dart shot from a helicopter but ended up in a creek. Veterinarians and rangers held the rhino’s head above water with a rope to save it while a tranquilizer reversal drug took effect, and the rhino was released.

Wildlife officials have stressed that the challenging project will take time, likely weeks.

The black rhinos are a mix of males and females and are being moved from three conservation parks to the private Loisaba Conservancy in central Kenya, the Kenya Wildlife Service said. They are being moved because there are too many in the three parks, and they need more space to roam and hopefully, to breed.

Rhinos are generally solitary animals and are at their happiest in large territories.

Kenya has had relative success in reviving its black rhino population, which dipped below 300 in the mid-1980s because of poaching, raising fears that the animals might be wiped out in a country famous for its wildlife.

Kenya now has nearly 1,000 black rhinos, according to the wildlife service. That’s the third biggest black rhino population in the world behind South Africa and Namibia.

There are just 6,487 wild rhinos left in the world, according to rhino conservation charity Save the Rhino, all of them in Africa.

Kenyan authorities say they have relocated more than 150 rhinos in the last decade.

Six years ago, Kenya relocated 11 rhinos from the capital, Nairobi, to another sanctuary in the south of the country. All died soon after arriving at the sanctuary. Ten of them died from stress, dehydration and starvation intensified by salt poisoning as they struggled to adjust to saltier water in their new home, investigations found. The other rhino was attacked by a lion.

Some of the 21 rhinos in the latest relocation are being transferred from Nairobi National Park and will make a 300-kilometer (186-mile) trip in the back of a truck to Loisaba. Others will come from parks closer to Loisaba.

The moving of the rhinos to Loisaba is poignant, given the region was once home to a healthy black rhino population before they were wiped out in that area 50 years ago, said Loisaba Conservancy CEO Tom Silvester.

Kenyan wildlife authorities say the country is aiming to grow its black rhino population to about 2,000, which they believe would be the ideal number considering the space available for them in national and private parks.
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