World
China increases aggressive moves against Taiwan as island prepares to inaugurate new president
KAOHSIUNG — Virtually every day, the People’s Republic of China does something unprecedented — its coast guard briefly boarding a Taiwanese tourist boat, flying military aircraft ever closer to Taiwan or increasing harassment of Taiwanese fishing boats in the South China Sea.
“This is a problem,” says Dean Karalekas, author of “Civil-Military Relations in Taiwan: Identity and Transformation.” “Because these unprecedented actions are creating a new normal. Beijing hopes that we (the West) will sit by and watch as they take over Taiwan, just as we did when they used these same salami-slicing tactics to take over the South China Sea.”
The world began noticing more of China’s hostile actions following the visit to Taiwan by former U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in 2023, but the strategy has been in place for some time.
“China’s plan to ‘normalize’ military encroachments was planned long before Pelosi’s visit,” Taipei Times columnist and political commentator C. Donovan Smith told Fox News Digital. “The military exercises were far too complex and logistically complicated to have been planned in the short span of time between the announcement of her trip and her arrival in Taiwan.”
TAIWAN ELECTION: RULING PARTY CANDIDATE WINS TIGHTLY CONTESTED PRESIDENTIAL RACE, UPSETTING CHINA’S AMBITIONS
President-elect William Lai votes in southern Taiwan’s Tainan city Jan. 13, 2024. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)
Surrounding Taiwan in a mock “quarantine” and performing missile “tests” in 2023 was also intended to push Taiwanese voters toward politicians and parties more friendly to China. But, as has been the case in the last three elections here, Beijing’s ploys were ineffectual. Taiwan in January elected the incumbent vice president, William Lai, to take over from two-term President Tsai Ing-wen. Both Tsai and Lai are members of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP).
The incoming Taiwan president has repeatedly pledged to make no changes to policies in place over the last eight years. Beijing, however, sees William Lai (Lai Ching-te) as a “splittist” and a supporter of Taiwan independence. Lai previously did voice support for independence but has tried to walk that back. China, however, does not forgive nor forget. Many political experts believe Beijing will ratchet up pressure as Lai enters office later this month.
Chinese President Xi Jinping waves at an event to introduce new members of the Politburo Standing Committee at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing Oct. 23, 2022. (AP Photo/Andy Wong, File)
A recent example of China’s attempts to establish this “new normal” is changes to airspace rules. China is close to finishing a massive new airport serving Xiamen in Fujian Province. Just 6.2 miles away, however, sits the island of Kinmen, which has remained a part of the Republic of China (ROC), better known as Taiwan, since 1949.
Kinmen Airport is strategically important for Taiwan. In 2015, the two sides worked out a deal to change a flight path that was a bit too close for Taiwan’s comfort. But in February, Beijing unilaterally backed out of the deal, announcing that, from May 16, new air routes would begin operating to “further optimize airspace” around the area.
FOR CHINA’S MILITARY PLANNERS, TAIWAN IS NOT AN EASY ISLAND TO INVADE
A fighter jet flies in the direction of Taiwan as seen from the 68-nautical-mile scenic spot, the closest point in mainland China to the island of Taiwan, in Pingtan in southeastern China’s Fujian Province Aug. 5, 2022. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)
Few China watchers think China picked the day arbitrarily, says Karalekas.
“Beijing has a pattern of testing new leaders of enemy states. They tested Bush with the EP-3E spy plane incident. They tested (then-Japanese prime minister) Naoto Kan with the Senkaku boat collision. We can expect them to test Lai by creating some sort of mini-crisis around the time he takes office on May 20.”
“I think China is really ramping up threats,” Eric Hsu told Fox News Digital. Hsu lives in southern Taiwan’s biggest city, Kaohsiung, has worked on historical restoration projects and hosts a podcast on Taiwan history.
He says he isn’t only worried about military hardware, but also what he termed, “brainwashing videos and moves by KOLs,” (Key Opinion Leaders, a term used to describe internet influencers).
Military vehicles equipped with a U.S.-made TOW 2A missile during a live fire drill in Pingtung, Taiwan, July 3, 2023. (REUTERS/Ann Wang)
Hsu places much of the blame at the feet of local opposition parties seen by many as more friendly to Beijing. Describing the current domestic political situation, he said Taiwan faces “not just an enemy at the gate, but also enemies within.” South Taiwan is a DPP stronghold, but not everyone in the south agrees that the opposition parties are the problem.
Another resident of Kaohsiung, a self-employed businessperson and mother, Ms. Lin, thinks the DPP hasn’t been sincere in reaching out to China.
“They’ve had eight years, and now they will get at least another four,” Lin told Fox News Digital. “What Taiwan needs are brave leaders, people willing to try new solutions, and I don’t see any such people in the current DPP leadership.”
TAIWAN PRESIDENT-ELECT CHOOSES NEW FOREIGN, DEFENSE MINISTERS AS CHINA ANNEXATION THREATS INTENSIFY
Soldiers disembark from AAV7 amphibious assault vehicles during the Han Kuang military exercise, which simulates the China’s People’s Liberation Army invading the island July 28, 2022 in Pingtung, Taiwan. (Annabelle Chih/Getty Images)
The main opposition party, the Kuomintang (KMT), denies it is “China-friendly” and instead says it is “peace-friendly.” Chinese dictator Xi Jinping has met with the KMT’s Ma Ying-jeou twice, first in Singapore in 2015 when Ma was in office as ROC (Taiwan) president. It was the first time since the end of WWII top leaders from China and Taiwan sat in the same room. Each side in 2015 chose to ignore official titles and address each other as “Mr. Xi” and “Mr. Ma.” On April 10,, “Mr. Xi” and former Taiwan president “Mr. Ma” met again, this time in Beijing.
Some experts see such meetings between the KMT and China favorably, arguing that any dialogue is good and – if nothing else – provides a way for China to save face as it continues its policy of mandatory “reunification,” which China now says may need to be achieved by force. Others in Taiwan and abroad see Ma’s meetings as straying far too close to an acceptance of the idea that Taiwan is a part of China.
A Chinese warship sails during a military drill near the Taiwan-controlled Matsu Islands near the Chinese coast April 8. (Reuters/Thomas Peter)
As it stands, the ruling DPP says it’s content with the status quo, including keeping Taiwan’s official name, the Republic of China. The KMT is generally more in favor of talks with Beijing under a mutual respect “consensus” idea that boils down to agreeing that both sides are “China,” but each side is free to interpret what this “one China” means.
The problem with the KMT’s thinking, central Taiwan-based newspaper columnist and political commentator Michael Turton told Fox News Digital, is that “Xi’s goal is the complete subjugation of Taiwan, just like Hong Kong. Two of China’s ambassadors abroad have already indicated that Taiwanese opposed to Beijing rule will be shipped off to concentration camps. Given this goal, how can there ever be dialogue with mutual respect?”
Veteran politician Andy Burnham has taken another step towards becoming the UK’s next prime minister, after the majority of Labour MPs nominated him to replace Keir Starmer.
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT
The 56-year-old’s Labour leadership bid was backed by 322 Labour MPs on Thursday and he remains the only person to publicly declare themselves a candidate to replace Starmer, who announced he was quitting last month.
Burnham appeared on course to be crowned Labour leader unchallenged on the first day of nominations.
If Burnham reaches at least 323 nominations then it would no longer be mathematically possible for another challenger to get the 81 signatures required to join the race out of the total of 402 Labour MPs.
“It is all starting to feel very real,” Burnham said in a social media video posted shortly after the process opened on Thursday morning.
Nominations close on 16 July. In the absence of a contest, Burnham will be crowned Labour leader and prime minister in waiting at a special conference the following day.
He would then replace Starmer at 10 Downing Street on 20 July after meeting King Charles, becoming Britain’s seventh prime minister in a decade.
“There’s no one else,” one Labour MP told the AFP news agency on condition of anonymity after nominating Burnham.
Armed forces minister Al Carns, thought to be Burnham’s final remaining potential challenger, ruled himself out of the running late on Wednesday.
He had expressed hope a leadership contest would give the party the “opportunity for a proper debate.”
“But months of internal Labour politics isn’t what the country needs right now,” he said.
Burnham, nicknamed the “King of the North” for winning three consecutive Greater Manchester mayoral elections, has vowed to “bring about the biggest rebalancing of power our country has seen.”
His signature proposal is the creation of a “No. 10 North” to coordinate greater devolution, a reference to the UK prime minister’s address at 10 Downing Street.
Burnham has pledged fiscal discipline and to reduce the country’s ballooning welfare bill, having already sought to calm markets by committing to the government’s current borrowing limits.
But he will face the same challenges that buffeted Starmer’s premiership, notably anaemic growth, a cost-of-living squeeze and an unpredictable US president in Donald Trump.
He has also indicated he could stake out a different path to Starmer on Israel, which enjoyed solid backing from the Labour government even as criticism grew of its war in Gaza.
“I am sorry about that,” Burnham told the Guardian newspaper in an interview published on Thursday. “The response has too often not been good enough. We need to do better.”
Starmer, under pressure for months over policy U-turns and questions about his judgement, announced on 22 June that he was resigning after losing the support of Labour MPs.
His move came after Burnham won a by-election that allowed him to return to parliament to launch a widely expected leadership challenge.
On the day Starmer announced his resignation, Burnham was sworn into parliament, becoming an MP again following his stint between 2001-2017.
Roll the dice
Afterwards, some 200 Labour MPs feted Burnham during a group photo in Westminster, in a clear sign that they expect him to take over.
Former health minister Wes Streeting announced he was dropping his intention to run and backing Burnham.
Burnham, seen as slightly to the left of the more centrist Starmer and more charismatic, is Labour’s most popular politician, surveys show.
Many MPs feel he is the party’s best chance of clawing back support from Nigel Farage’s anti-immigrant Reform UK party before the next general election, expected in 2029.
Reform has led Labour in national opinion polls for well over a year, although the gap has narrowed in recent weeks amid questions over Farage’s finances.
One Labour MP, who asked not to be named, said the party was right to “roll the dice” on Burnham, saying “he couldn’t be worse than Starmer.”
“I hope he’s a breath of fresh air,” the lawmaker told AFP.
NEW YORK (AP) — Launching an artificial intelligence tool to take notes and summarize important information from a virtual meeting can be alluring. Seconds after one of the agents attends an hour-long video conference, it can deliver a recap of key points and outline a to-do list for all the participants.
But the way popular AI notetakers accomplish those tasks makes some people avoid using them. The technology turns everything said during meetings into data. Confidential personnel information, corporate strategies, trade secrets and remarks that could later be seen as incriminating — all of it could end up in the wrong hands.
“There are huge risks to the organization on AI notetakers,” Amy Dufrane, the chief executive of human resources training and certification provider HRCI, said. “I don’t think companies should use it at all.”
An AI notetaker is a software application or device that uses artificial intelligence, speech recognition and large language models to record, transcribe and summarize conversations. The tools are intended to save time and improve participation, but professionals in a number of fields say there are reasons to be wary.
This article is part of AP’s Be Well coverage, focusing on wellness, fitness, diet and mental health. Read more Be Well.
Chief among them is uncertainty about where the collected data is stored and for how long. Privacy advocates worry the companies behind the AI notetakers are creating voiceprints without consent. Voiceprints — a type of biometric profile similar to a fingerprint but tuned to the unique intonations and characteristics of one’s voice — can be used to access restricted or confidential information, including the contents of bank accounts.
Some tech companies resell data from the notetaking tools they created or use confidential meeting transcripts and recordings to train their AI models. There’s also the risk that conversations between an attorney and client could become fair game in legal proceedings; a New York federal judge in February ordered a criminal defendant to provide prosecutors with documents he created for his lawyers because it already had been shared with a third party, which was Anthropic’s Claude.
“People who use AI notetakers, they don’t always know where the data goes,” said Justin Daniels, an Atlanta-based corporate attorney at law firm Baker Donelson. “And in my context, if the data goes anywhere else and they’re not aware of it, that attorney-client-privileged conversation may not be attorney-client-privileged anymore.”
Here are some tips on the etiquette of kicking an AI notetaker out of a meeting, the risks of using one and how to protect yourself.
The first step when you join a meeting is check for bots
When you join a meeting, make it a habit to check whether an AI notetaker is present. It might appear as a meeting attendee, often labeled as an AI notetaker, or a pop-up message on the screen informing participants the meeting is being recorded. The latter could signal the presence of an AI notetaker.
Virtual meeting platforms such as Zoom and Google Meet let users know when recording is underway, but some meeting software does not make it clear when a notetaker is present, according to Thorin Klosowski, the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s senior security and privacy analyst.
Participants also may use personal notetaking devices that are separate from the meeting platform, in which case the other attendees wouldn’t necessarily know a discussion was being recorded and transcribed.
“You hope the other person would tell you that they’re doing that,” Klosowski said. “Asking everyone for consent before doing a sensitive meeting would be the most polite approach to take.”
If you’re unsure whether someone has deployed an AI notetaker, you can ask. You can also state at the beginning that a meeting is not authorized for recording.
A polite way to establish such a boundary is to say, “Our company policy is that this meeting cannot be recorded,” Dufrane suggested. This relieves the employee, such as a salesperson who wants to make a good impression, of having to be the “bad guy,” putting the onus on the company instead, she said.
Another option is to allow the notetaker for part of the gathering but turn if off at the end to dedicate time for more delicate topics.
“I won’t start talking about anything substantive until it’s shut off, because I just don’t want to take the risk,” Daniels said.
Assert your privacy rights to protect voiceprints
Many AI notetakers determine unique acoustic signatures, or voiceprints, for each speaker in the room, said Chris Pluymers, associate attorney at The Dillon Law Group in East Lansing, Michigan. That’s how the companies distinguish one speaker from another, labeling them with monikers “Speaker 1” or “Speaker 2.”
One way voiceprints are used is to verify the identities of bank account holders over the phone. If bad actors got ahold of a person’s vocal signature, they could use it to access files, commit fraud or take over accounts, he said.
Laws in some states govern how voiceprints can be created and stored and provide rights that individuals can assert to object to the use of an AI notetaker during meetings they attend.
In Illinois, voiceprints are considered biometric identifiers, similar to fingerprints, and are covered under the state’s Biometric Information Privacy Act, which requires written notice and informed consent before an AI notetaker or other agent collects voiceprints. The law also mandates a documented data retention schedule and destruction policy, Pluymers said. But most companies using the tools have none of those systems in place, Pluymers said.
“In the world of AI, the world of data and privacy, the world of biometric identification, I don’t think you can have such a lax approach to it,” Pluymers said. “I think getting out ahead of it is crucial.”
Under the Illinois law, employees can say they don’t want to attend a meeting with an AI notetaker until they have assurances of where and why the data is being stored, and when it will be deleted, Pluymers said. They can also ask if there is a policy and written consent form to sign.
If an AI notetaker shows up at a meeting unexpectedly, a participant could say, “I prefer we keep this meeting without AI recording or transcript tools and I’d be happy to take my own notes and share a recap if that’s helpful,” Pluymers suggested. “Just being warm and genuine about it and asking them to respect your wishes.”
Know where your data goes
When working with AI notetaking apps, find out whether the companies that built them retain recordings, transcripts or metadata indefinitely or use them to train AI models, said Danielle Kays, a partner at Fisher Phillips who represents businesses on privacy and employment law matters.
“If there is some sort of speaker ID or voice recognition, really understand what that is and how it works,” Kays said.
Even when content is deleted, metadata about meetings can remain stored with the vendor, meaning sensitive business information could influence how the model behaves and in some cases could be memorized or reproduced, she said.
AI notetakers generate text, and that’s easier for outsiders to search through than video or audio files, according to EFF.
“Storing a bunch of video isn’t easy, it’s costly and hard to look through, but text is much easier to search and cheaper to store,” said Klosowski of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
___
Share your stories and questions about workplace wellness at [email protected]. Follow AP’s Be Well coverage, focusing on wellness, fitness, diet and mental health at https://apnews.com/hub/be-well
World
Argentinian flight instructor jumps to death from plane, 22-year-old student forced to land alone
NEWYou can now listen to Fox News articles!
A flight instructor jumped to his death out of a small aircraft over Argentina, forcing the student pilot he was teaching to land the plane herself.
Leandro Andrés Bertazzo, 42, was on board a two-seat Cessna 150G on Saturday when he made the decision to jump out over the province of Córdoba, according to CNN, which cited its Argentinian affiliate TN.
“He made this tragic decision on board an aircraft with another person by his side,” Eduardo Álvarez, director of the Flying Parrot Córdoba flying school where Bertazzo worked, told TN. “It’s impossible to think about it or understand it, but the human mind is so complex.”
An undated photo of Leandro Andrés Bertazzo, a 42-year-old pilot who jumped to his death from a plane on Saturday, July 4 in Argentina. (Instagram/Leandro Bertazzo)
PILOT DECLARES MAYDAY BEFORE SEAPLANE COMES DOWN IN NEW YORK CITY’S EAST RIVER
Rosario, the 22-year-old student, later told authorities that Bertazzo told her, “You know what you have to do, carry on,” before taking off his gear, opening the door and leaping out, according to Álvarez.
Opening the door of a plane midair is incredibly difficult. Álvarez said it would be akin to trying to open the door of a car traveling 124 miles per hour.
Cessna 150m FRA150M climbing out after take-off with flaps deployed and hills behind. (aviation-images.com/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
FRANTIC SEARCH UNDERWAY FOR CREW AFTER BOEING 737 WRECKAGE FOUND BY OFFICIALS
Álvarez said that Rosario managed to land the plane safely, despite being in “complete shock.” There was no damage to the plane, according to TN.
Álvarez noted that Bertazzo had gone on a flight with another student earlier in the day.
A view from the main road of the flight school Bertazzo worked at, Flying Parrot Córdoba. (Google Maps)
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE FOX NEWS APP
Álvarez also told TN that Bertazzo had visited a psychiatric institute, something that was only known by his family prior to his death.
Prosecutors in Córdoba will lead the investigation into Bertazzo’s death. The plane he jumped from is now in police custody.
-
Technology3 minutes agoGoogle turns old phones into cloud servers
-
Business10 minutes agoWaymo is starting robotaxi service in San Diego
-
Entertainment13 minutes ago‘Children of Blood and Bone’ author won’t see film after feud with star Amandla Stenberg
-
Lifestyle18 minutes agoAfter her son’s death, she found a new purpose. ‘He’s whispering: Mom, this is your path’
-
Politics25 minutes agoIran ceasefire is ‘over,’ Trump says, and orders additional strikes
-
Science28 minutes agoDiarrhea-causing cyclosporiasis exceeds 1,000 cases in U.S. What Californians should know
-
Sports33 minutes agoArthur Fery’s fairy-tale Wimbledon run puts British wild card on brink of history
-
World43 minutes agoBurnham on course to become next UK PM with backing of 322 Labour MPs
