Chinese economist Gao Shanwen told a Washington panel in December that China's real GDP growth might be around 2% rather than the official figure near 5%. By January, Gao was no longer chief economist at SDIC Securities and went silent for almost a year. As FT points out in a long piece, China does not publish quarterly GDP breakdowns showing consumption, investment and net exports. Every other major economy produces these figures.

The IMF in 2024 gave China a C grade for national accounts. The rating puts China on par with India and below Vietnam. Fixed asset investment data showed negative growth in 2025 for only the second time in decades. Property investment has fallen consistently since 2022. But official GDP investment data shows no signs of declining.

The National Bureau of Statistics stopped publishing sectoral breakdowns of fixed asset investment in 2018. It discontinued a price series in 2021 and a land sales series in 2023. Beijing has restricted researcher access rather than addressing longstanding questions about data quality. China says it disagrees with the IMF's C rating. The government argued its production-side GDP approach is appropriate.

Why does it matter? China is too large and too interconnected with the global economy for unreliable data to be a purely domestic issue. The lack of transparency creates problems for everyone trying to make decisions based on understanding China's economic trajectory. As Eswar Prasad, a professor at Cornell University and former IMF official, told FT: China is one of the two biggest economies in the world. "It would be nice to know what is really going on."

An anonymous reader shares a report: California-based TP-Link says it may take a sales hit of more than $1 billion because of erroneous reports that the networking company's technology has been "infiltrated" by Beijing. In a lawsuit, TP-Link claims its competitor, Netgear, orchestrated a smear by planting false claims with journalists and internet influencers with the goal of scaring off customers.

Closely held TP-Link, which makes wireless routers, alleges in a complaint filed Monday that Netgear's campaign "threatens injury to well over a billion dollars in sales" and violates a 2024 settlement of a patent fight. That accord, in which TP-Link agreed to pay Netgear $135 million, includes a provision that the public company promises not to disparage its rival, according to the suit in Delaware federal court.

The suit comes as TP-Link faces growing scrutiny in Washington over national-security issues. US lawmakers from both parties have expressed concern that TP-Link's wireless equipment could be exploited by Chinese hackers following a series of attacks on its routers.

MI5 has warned U.K. lawmakers that Chinese intelligence operatives are using LinkedIn and recruitment fronts to target them for information gathering and long-term cultivation. PBS reports: Writing to lawmakers, House of Commons Speaker Lindsay Hoyle said a new MI5 "espionage alert" warned that Chinese nationals were "using LinkedIn profiles to conduct outreach at scale" on behalf of the Chinese Ministry of State Security. "Their aim is to collect information and lay the groundwork for long-term relationships, using professional networking sites, recruitment agents and consultants acting on their behalf," he said. MI5 issued the alert because the activity was "targeted and widespread," he added.

The MI5 alert cited LinkedIn profiles of two women, Amanda Qiu and Shirly Shen, and said other similar recruiters' profiles were acting as fronts for espionage. Home Office Minister Dan Jarvis said that apart from parliamentary staff, others including economists, think tank consultants and government officials have been similarly targeted. Jarvis said the government is rolling out a series of measures to tackle the risk, including investing 170 million pounds ($224 million) to renew encrypted technology used by civil servants to safeguard sensitive work. Opposition parties say authorities are not doing enough and are too wary of jeopardizing trade ties with China.

Mexico has finally lifted its long-running Tor ban for the main government portal, allowing privacy-focused users, journalists, and activists to access gob.mx again after more than a decade of blocking. That said, the open data portal and the former Tor-compatible whistleblower system remain inaccessible. CyberInsider reports: The development follows a long period of digital censorship that spanned two full six-year presidential terms, those of Enrique Pena Nieto and Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, and continued into the early months of Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo's current administration. Research conducted by Jacobo Najera and Miguel Trujillo, published in October 2023, documented that 21 federal government agencies were blocking traffic from the Tor network, effectively excluding privacy-conscious users from vital public resources and services.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The IRS accessed a database of hundreds of millions of travel records, which show when and where a specific person flew and the credit card they used, without obtaining a warrant, according to a letter signed by a bipartisan group of lawmakers and shared with 404 Media. The country's major airlines, including Delta, United Airlines, American Airlines, and Southwest, funnel customer records to a data broker they co-own called the Airlines Reporting Corporation (ARC), which then sells access to peoples' travel data to government agencies.

The IRS case in the letter is the clearest example yet of how agencies are searching the massive trove of travel data without a search warrant, court order, or similar legal mechanism. Instead, because the data is being sold commercially, agencies are able to simply buy access. In the letter addressed to nine major airlines, the lawmakers urge them to shut down the data selling program. Update: after this piece was published, ARC said it already planned to shut down the program.

"Disclosures made by the IRS to Senator Wyden confirm that it did not follow federal law and its own policies in purchasing airline data from ARC," the letter reads. The letter says the IRS "confirmed that it did not conduct a legal review to determine if the purchase of Americans' travel data requires a warrant."

NetChoice is suing Virginia to block a new law that limits kids under 16 to one hour of daily social media use unless parents approve more time, arguing the rule violates the First Amendment and introduces serious privacy risks through mandatory age-verification. The Verge reports: In addition to restricting access to legal speech, NetChoice alleges that Virginia's incoming law (SB 854) will require platforms to verify user ages in ways that would pose privacy and security risks. The law requires platforms to use "commercially reasonable methods," which it says include a screen that prompts the user to enter a birth date. However, NetChoice argues that Virginia could go beyond this requirement, citing a post from Governor Youngkin on X, stating "platforms must verify age," potentially referring to stricter methods, like having users submit a government ID or other personal information.

NetChoice, which is backed by tech giants like Meta, Google, Amazon, Reddit, and Discord, alleges that the law puts a burden on minors' ability to engage or consume speech online. "The First Amendment prohibits the government from placing these types of restrictions on accessing lawful and valuable speech, just in the same way that the government can't tell you how long you could spend reading a book, watching a television program, or consuming a documentary," Paul Taske, the co-director of the Netchoice Litigation Center, tells The Verge.

"Virginia must leave the parenting decisions where they belong: with parents," Taske says. "By asserting that authority for itself, Virginia not only violates its citizens' rights to free speech but also exposes them to increased risk of privacy and security breaches."

The UK government has been warned that its plan to ban operators of critical national infrastructure from paying ransoms to hackers is unlikely to stop cyber attacks and could result in essential services collapsing. From a report: The proposal, announced by the Home Office in July, is designed to deter cyber criminals by making it clear any attempt to blackmail regulated companies such as hospitals, airports and telecoms groups will not succeed. If enacted, the UK would be the first country to implement such a ban.

But companies and cyber groups have told government officials that making paying ransoms illegal would remove a valuable tool in negotiations where highly sensitive data or essential services could be compromised, according to two people familiar with the matter. "An outright ban on payments sounds tough on crime, but in reality it could turn a solvable crisis into a catastrophic one," said Greg Palmer, a partner at law firm Linklaters.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Guardian: The number of deaths linked to superbugs that do not respond to frontline antibiotics increased by 17% in England last year, according to official figures that raise concerns about the ongoing increase in antimicrobial resistance.

The figures, released by the UK Health Security Agency, also revealed a large rise in private prescriptions for antibiotics, with 22% dispensed through the private sector in 2024. The increase in private prescribing is partly explained by the Pharmacy First scheme, a flagship policy of Rishi Sunak's government that allows patients to be prescribed antibiotics for common illnesses without seeing a GP, raising questions about whether the shift in prescribing patterns risks contributing to the rise in resistance.

"Antibiotic resistance is one of the greatest health threats we face," said the UKHSA's chief executive, Prof Susan Hopkins. "More people than ever are acquiring infections that cannot be effectively treated by antibiotics. This puts them at greater risk of serious illness and even death, with our poorest communities hit the hardest... It's positive that we've seen antibiotic use fall in England within the NHS but we need to go further, faster," said Hopkins.

"Please remember to only take antibiotics if you have been told to do so by a healthcare professional. Do not save some for later or share them with friends and family. If you have leftover antibiotics, please bring them to a pharmacy for appropriate disposal."

A new "cold war" between America and China is "pushing leaders to sideline concerns about the dangers of powerful AI models," reports the Wall Street Journal, "including the spread of disinformation and other harmful content, and the development of superintelligent AI systems misaligned with human values..."

"Both countries are driven as much by fear as by hope of progress. " In Washington and Silicon Valley, warnings abound that China's "authoritarian AI," left unchecked, will erode American tech supremacy. Beijing is gripped by the conviction that a failure to keep pace in AI will make it easier for the U.S. to cut short China's resurgence as a global power. Both countries believe market share for their companies across the world is up for grabs — and with it, the potential to influence large swaths of the global population.

The U.S. still has a clear lead, producing the most powerful AI models. China can't match it in advanced chips and has no answer for the financial firepower of private American investors, who funded AI startups to the tune of $104 billion in the first half of 2025, and are gearing up for more. But it has a massive population of capable engineers, lower costs and a state-led development model that often moves faster than the U.S., all of which Beijing is working to harness to tip the contest in its direction. A new "whole of society" campaign looks to accelerate the construction of computing clusters in areas like Inner Mongolia, where vast solar and wind farms provide plentiful cheap energy, and connect hundreds of data centers to create a shared compute pool — some describe it as a "national cloud" — by 2028. China is also funneling hundreds of billions of dollars into its power grid to support AI training and adoption...

"Our lead is probably in the 'months but not years' realm," said Chris McGuire, who helped design U.S. export controls on AI chips while serving on the National Security Council under the Biden administration. Chinese AI models currently rank at or near the top in every task from coding to video generation, with the exception of search, according to Chatbot Arena, a popular crowdsourced ranking platform. China's manufacturing sector, meanwhile, is rocketing past the U.S. in bringing AI into the physical world through robotaxis, autonomous drones and humanoid robots. Given China's progress, McGuire said, the U.S. is "very lucky" to have its advantage in chips...

If AI surpasses human intelligence and acquires the ability to improve itself, it could confer unshakable scientific, economic and military superiority on the country that controls it. Short of that, AI's ability to automate tedious tasks and process vast amounts of data quickly promises to supercharge everything from cancer diagnoses to missile defense. With so much at stake, hacking and cyber espionage are likely to get worse, as AI gives hackers more powerful tools, while increasing incentives for state-backed groups to try to steal AI-related intellectual property. As distrust grows, Washington and Beijing will also find it hard, if not impossible, to cooperate in areas like preventing extremist groups from using AI in destructive ways, such as building bioweapons. "The costs of the AI Cold War are already high and will go much higher," said Paul Triolo, a former U.S. government analyst and current technology policy lead at business consulting firm DGA-Albright Stonebridge Group. "A U.S.-China AI arms race becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, with neither side able to trust that the other would observe any restrictions on advanced AI capability development...."
The article includes an interesting observation from Helen Toner, director of strategy for Georgetown's Center for Security and Emerging Technology and a former OpenAI board member. Toner points out "We don't actually know" if boosting computing power with better chips will continue producing more-powerful AI models.

So "If performance plateaus," the Journal writes, "despite all the spending by OpenAI and others — a growing concern in Silicon Valley — China has a chance to compete."

"Within the past year, stories have been posted on Slashdot about people helping North Koreans get remote IT jobs at U.S. corporations, companies knowingly assisting them, how not to hire a North Korean for a remote IT job, and how a simple question tripped up a North Korean applying for a remote IT job," writes longtime Slashdot reader smooth wombat. "The FBI is even warning companies that North Koreans working remotely can steal source code and extort money from the company -- money that goes to fund the North Korean government. Now, five more people have plead guilty to knowingly helping North Koreans infiltrate U.S. companies as remote IT workers." TechCrunch reports: The five people are accused of working as "facilitators" who helped North Koreans get jobs by providing their own real identities, or false and stolen identities of more than a dozen U.S. nationals. The facilitators also hosted company-provided laptops in their homes across the U.S. to make it look like the North Korean workers lived locally, according to the DOJ press release. These actions affected 136 U.S. companies and netted Kim Jong Un's regime $2.2 million in revenue, said the DOJ. Three of the people -- U.S. nationals Audricus Phagnasay, Jason Salazar, and Alexander Paul Travis -- each pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud conspiracy.

Prosecutors accused the three of helping North Koreans posing as legitimate IT workers, whom they knew worked outside of the United States, to use their own identities to obtain employment, helped them remotely access their company-issued laptops set up in their homes, and also helped the North Koreans pass vetting procedures, such as drug tests. The fourth U.S. national who pleaded guilty is Erick Ntekereze Prince, who ran a company called Taggcar, which supplied to U.S. companies allegedly "certified" IT workers but whom he knew worked outside of the country and were using stolen or fake identities. Prince also hosted laptops with remote access software at several residences in Florida, and earned more than $89,000 for his work, the DOJ said.

Another participant in the scheme who pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud conspiracy and another count of aggravated identity theft is Ukrainian national Oleksandr Didenko, who prosecutors accuse of stealing U.S. citizens' identities and selling them to North Koreans so they could get jobs at more than 40 U.S. companies. According to the press release, Didenko earned hundreds of thousands of dollars for this service. Didenko agreed to forfeit $1.4 million as part of his guilty plea. The DOJ also announced that it had frozen and seized more than $15 million in cryptocurrency stolen in 2023 by North Korean hackers from several crypto platforms.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Singapore's central bank will hold trials to issue tokenized MAS bills next year and bring in laws to regulate stablecoins as it presses forward with plans to build a scalable and secure tokenised financial ecosystem, the bank's top official said on Thursday. "Tokenization has lifted off the ground. But have asset-backed tokens achieved escape velocity? Not yet," said Chia Der Jiun, Managing Director of the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), a keynote address at the Singapore FinTech Festival.

He said MAS has been working on the details of its stablecoin regulatory regime and will prepare draft legislation, with the emphasis on "sound reserve backing and redemption reliability." MAS is also supporting trials under the BLOOM initiative, which explores the use of tokenized bank liabilities and regulated stablecoins for settlement, he added. "In the CBDC space, I am pleased to announce that the three Singapore banks, DBS, OCBC, and UOB, have successfully conducted interbank overnight lending transactions using the first live trial issuance of Singapore dollar wholesale CBDC," he said. MAS will expand trials to include tokenized MAS bills settled with CBDC, he added.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said Chinese suppliers such as Huawei will be excluded from the country's future telecommunication networks on security grounds as he pushes for more digital sovereignty. From a report: "We have decided within the government that everywhere it's possible we'll replace components, for example in the 5G network, with components we have produced ourselves," Merz told a business conference in Berlin on Thursday. "And we won't allow any components from China in the 6G network."

Europe is increasingly concerned about its reliance on foreign technology, ranging from Asian semiconductors to US artificial intelligence and cloud infrastructure, as trade and geopolitical tensions threaten critical supply chains. Germany last year ordered telecom operators to remove Huawei equipment from their core networks, citing risks to national security. Berlin is now considering using public funds to pay Deutsche Telekom AG and others to strip out Chinese gear, Bloomberg News reported last month.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The Chinese electric car has become a symbol of the country's seemingly unstoppable rise on the world stage. Many observers point to their growing popularity as evidence that China is winning the race to dominate new technologies. But in China, these electric cars represent something entirely different: the profound threats that Beijing's meddling in markets poses to both China and the world.

Bloated by excessive investment, distorted by government intervention, and plagued by heavy losses, China's EV industry appears destined for a crash. EV companies are locked in a cutthroat struggle for survival. Wei Jianjun, the chairman of the Chinese automaker Great Wall Motor, warned in May that China's car industry could tumble into a financial crisis; it "just hasn't erupted yet."

To bypass government censorship of bad economic news, market analysts have opted for a seemingly anodyne term to describe the Chinese car industry's downward spiral: involution, which connotes falling in on oneself. What happens in China's EV sector promises to influence the entire global automobile market. China's emergence as the world's largest manufacturer of EVs highlights the serious challenge the country poses to even the most advanced industries in the U.S., Europe, and other rich economies. Given the vital role the car industry plays in economies around the world, and the jobs, supply chains, and technologies involved, the stakes are high.

But the wobbles in China's EV sector demonstrate the downside of China's state-led economic model. China's government threw ample resources at the EV industry in the hopes of leapfrogging foreign rivals in the transition to battery-powered vehicles. The Center for Strategic and International Studies estimates that the government provided more than $230 billion of financial assistance to the EV sector from 2009 to 2023. The strategy worked: China's EV makers would likely never have grown as quickly as they have without this substantial state support. By comparison, the recent Republican-sponsored tax bill eliminated nearly all federal subsidies for EVs in the U.S.

The problem is that China's program encouraged too much investment in the sector. Michael Dunne, the CEO of Dunne Insights, a California-based consulting firm focused on the EV industry, counts 46 domestic and international automakers producing EVs in China, far too many for even the world's second-largest economy to sustain.

Iceland has formally classified the potential collapse of a major Atlantic Ocean current system a national security threat, warning that a disruption could trigger a modern-day ice age in Northern Europe and destabilize global weather systems. The move elevates the risk across government and enables it to strategize for worst-case scenarios. Reuters reports: The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC, current brings warm water from the tropics northward toward the Arctic, and the flow of warm water helps keep Europe's winters mild. But as warming temperatures speed the thaw of Arctic ice and cause meltwater from Greenland's ice sheet to pour into the ocean, scientists warn the cold freshwater could disrupt the current's flow.

A potential collapse of AMOC could trigger a modern-day ice age, with winter temperatures across Northern Europe plummeting to new cold extremes, bringing far more snow and ice. The AMOC has collapsed in the past - notably before the last Ice Age that ended about 12,000 years ago. "It is a direct threat to our national resilience and security," Iceland Climate Minister Johann Pall Johannsson said by email. "(This) is the first time a specific climate-related phenomenon has been formally brought before the National Security Council as a potential existential threat."

Elevation of the issue means Iceland's ministries will be on alert and coordinating a response, Johannsson said. The government is assessing what further research and policies are needed, with work underway on a disaster preparedness policy. Risks being evaluated span a range of areas, from energy and food security to infrastructure and international transportation. "Sea ice could affect marine transport; extreme weather could severely affect our capabilities to maintain any agriculture and fisheries, which are central to our economy and food systems," Johannsson said. "We cannot afford to wait for definitive, long-term research before acting."

The US is set to make its final penny. The Philadelphia Mint will strike its last batch of one-cent coins on Thursday, after more than 230 years of production. From a report: The coins will remain in circulation but the phase-out has already prompted businesses to start adjusting prices, as they say pennies are becoming harder to find. The government says the move will save money, or as President Donald Trump put it in February when he first announced the plans: "Rip the waste out of our great nation's budget, even if it's a penny at a time."

Pennies, which honour Civil War president Abraham Lincoln and are made of copper-plated zinc, today cost nearly four cents each to make -- more than twice the cost of a decade ago, according to the Treasury Department. It estimates the decision to end production will save about $56 million a year. Officials have argued that the rise of electronic transactions is making the penny, which first went into production in 1793, increasingly moot. The Treasury Department estimates that about 300 billion of the coins will remain in circulation, "far exceeding the amount needed for commerce."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Atlantic: In China, you can buy a heavily discounted "used" electric car that has never, in fact, been used. Chinese automakers, desperate to meet their sales targets in a bitterly competitive market, sell cars to dealerships, which register them as "sold," even though no actual customer has bought them. Dealers, stuck with officially sold cars, then offload them as "used," often at low prices. The practice has become so prevalent that the Chinese Communist Party is trying to stop it. Its main newspaper, The People's Daily, complained earlier this year that this sales-inflating tactic "disrupts normal market order," and criticized companies for their "data worship."

This sign of serious problems in China's electric-vehicle industry may come as a surprise to many Americans. The Chinese electric car has become a symbol of the country's seemingly unstoppable rise on the world stage. Many observers point to their growing popularity as evidence that China is winning the race to dominate new technologies. But in China, these electric cars represent something entirely different: the profound threats that Beijing's meddling in markets poses to both China and the world.

Bloated by excessive investment, distorted by government intervention, and plagued by heavy losses, China's EV industry appears destined for a crash. EV companies are locked in a cutthroat struggle for survival. Wei Jianjun, the chairman of the Chinese automaker Great Wall Motor, warned in May that China's car industry could tumble into a financial crisis; it "just hasn't erupted yet." To bypass government censorship of bad economic news, market analysts have opted for a seemingly anodyne term to describe the Chinese car industry's downward spiral: involution, which connotes falling in on oneself.

Democratic U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren is escalating pressure on the defense industry to stop opposing military right-to-repair legislation, as House and Senate negotiators work to finalize the fiscal 2026 National Defense Authorization Act. From a report: In a sharply-worded November 5 letter to the National Defense Industrial Association (NDIA) obtained by Reuters, Warren accused the industry group of attempting to undermine bipartisan efforts to give the Pentagon greater ability to repair weapons and equipment it owns.

She called the group's opposition "a dangerous and misguided attempt to protect an unacceptable status quo of giant contractor profiteering." Currently, the government is often required to pay contractors like NDIA members Lockheed Martin, Boeing and RTX to use expensive original equipment and installers to service broken parts, versus having trained military maintainers 3D print spares in the field and install them faster and more cheaply.

China has introduced a visa that will allow young foreign researchers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics to move there without having to secure a job first. From a report: Before the introduction of the K visa, most foreign STEM researchers hoping to move to China had to find a job in advance and then apply for a work visa. The Chinese government is making "a serious bid" to attract the world's brightest minds in STEM, says Jeremy Neufeld, the director of immigration policy at the Institute for Progress, a think tank in Washington DC. South Korea, Singapore and several other countries have also launched STEM-oriented visa programmes.

The K visa was officially rolled out on 1 October, but Nature understands that applications are yet to open. Few details about eligibility have been released, except that restrictions will apply on the basis of an applicant's age, education and work experience. Foreign researchers who have graduated from 'famous' universities or institutes in China or abroad with a bachelor-or-higher degree in STEM will be eligible to apply. That also includes people who teach or research STEM topics in such organizations.

Animal testing in science would be phased out faster under a new plan to increase the use of artificial intelligence and 3D bioprinted human tissues, a UK minister has said. The Guardian: The roadmap unveiled by the science minister, Patrick Vallance, backs replacing certain animal tests that are still used where necessary to determine the safety of products such as life-saving vaccines and the impact pesticides have on living beings and the environment. The strategy says phasing out the use of animals in science can only happen when reliable and effective alternative methods with the same level of safety for human exposure can replace them.

The government said new funding for researchers and streamlined regulation would help develop methods such as organ-on-a-chip systems -- tiny devices that mimic how human organs work using real human cells. Greater use of AI to analyse vast amounts of data about molecules and predict whether new medicines will be safe and work well on humans would be deployed, while 3D bioprinted tissues could create realistic human tissue samples, from skin to liver, for testing.

Other plans under the strategy include an end to regulatory testing on animals to assess the potential for skin and eye irritation and skin sensitisation by the end of 2026. By 2027, researchers are expected under the strategy to end tests of the strength of botox on mice, while by 2030 pharmacokinetic studies -- which track how a drug moves through the body over time -- on dogs and non-human primates will be reduced.

The UK and China today signed a new bilateral agreement on scientific collaboration [non-paywalled source], narrowing the scope of their partnership to exclude sensitive technologies. Lord Patrick Vallance, Britain's science and technology minister, met his Chinese counterpart Chen Jiachang in Beijing and agreed to focus cooperation on health, climate, planetary sciences, and agriculture.

The previous agreement from 2017 had included satellites, remote sensing technology and robotics. Those fields are absent from the new accord. The countries announced no new funding for joint research. Vallance said the UK had "deliberately gone for areas which we think are not carrying such a security risk."