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Trump's Crackdown on Foreign Student Visas Could Derail Critical AI Research

WIRED

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Wednesday that the US plans to "aggressively revoke" the visas of Chinese students, including those working in critical fields or with ties to the Chinese Communist Party. Experts warn the move--along with the Trump administration's broader crackdown on international students--could drain American scientific labs of top STEM talent and upend cutting-edge research in areas like artificial intelligence. "If you were aiming to help China beat the US at AI, the first thing you would do is disrupt the flow of top talent from all around the world into the US," says Helen Toner, director of strategy and foundational research grants at Georgetown University's Center for Security and Emerging Technology. While it has a population only about a quarter the size of China, "the US has had a huge asymmetric advantage in attracting the cream of the global crop," she adds. Several close Trump allies, including Elon Musk, have argued that attracting the best engineers from around the world is essential for the US to maintain its technological dominance.


Hawley urges DOJ probe of Chinese trucking company

FOX News

Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., commends President Donald Trump tearing into America's nation builders in the Middle East and weighs in on a Wisconsin judge being indicted for hiding an illegal immigrant from ICE on'The Ingraham Angle.' FIRST ON FOX โ€“ Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., asked the Justice Department on Thursday to investigate a Chinese-owned self-driving trucking company, one of the largest in the U.S., citing allegations that it had shared proprietary data and other sensitive technology with state-linked entities in Beijing. The letter, sent to U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi and previewed exclusively to Fox News Digital, asks the Justice Department to open a formal investigation into the autonomous truck company TuSimple Holdings, a Chinese-owned company and one of the largest self-driving truck companies in the U.S. In it, Hawley cites recent reporting from the Wall Street Journal that alleges that TuSimple "systematically shared proprietary data, source code, and autonomous driving technologies" with Chinese state-linked entities-- what he described as "blatant disregard" of the 2022 national security agreement with the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS. "These reports also revealed communications from TuSimple personnel inside China requesting the shipment of sensitive Nvidia AI chips and detailed records showing'deep and longstanding ties' with Chinese military-affiliated manufacturers," Hawley said. Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., wants the Justice Department to investigate TuSimple Holdings, a Chinese-owned self-driving trucking company. He noted that to date, TuSimple "has not faced serious consequences" for sharing American intellectual property with China, despite having continued to share data with China after signing a national security agreement with the U.S. government in 2022, which was enforced by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. "If the reports about TuSimple are accurate, they represent not just a violation of export law, but a breach of national trust and a direct threat to American technological leadership," Hawley said.


Israel kills municipal worker at water well in south Lebanon: Mayor

Al Jazeera

An Israeli drone strike that has killed one person in a south Lebanon village targeted a municipal worker operating a water well, not a Hezbollah member as the Israeli military had claimed, according to the Mayor of Nabatieh al-Fawqa Zein Ali Ghandour. Ghandour said on Thursday that the victim, Mahmoud Hasan Atwi, was "martyred" while on his official duty of trying to provide water for the people of the town. "We condemn in the strongest terms this blatant aggression against civilians and civilian infrastructure as well as the Lebanese state and its institutions," the mayor said in a statement. Ghandour called on the international community to press the issue and put an end to Israeli violations. The Israeli military had claimed that it fired at a "Hezbollah operative" who it said was "rehabilitating a site" used by the group.


Tech shares climb after strong Nvidia results despite warning over rise of Chinese rivals

The Guardian

Technology shares climbed on Thursday, buoyed by strong results from Nvidia, despite the AI chip company's boss issuing a warning about the rise of Chinese rivals. The Stoxx Europe tech index rose by 0.8% on Thursday following Nvidia's financial report, with the Dutch semiconductor equipment maker ASML rallying by 2.4%. In the US, futures for the tech-focused Nasdaq climbed 2%, and shares in Nvidia itself jumped 6% in pre-market trading. The boost to tech and artificial intelligence stocks came hours after Nvidia beat Wall Street forecasts, with quarterly revenues jumping 69% to 44bn ( 32.6bn). The company also said it expected deals in the Middle East to start to fill a gap left by the loss of Chinese business.


Credibility Crisis: Media embraced Biden White House's 'cheap fakes' narrative leading up to ill-fated debate

FOX News

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre doubled down on her "cheap fake" criticism of multiple videos of President Biden on Tuesday. The Biden White House and its allies in the legacy media were essentially telling voters not to believe their lying eyes in 2024 when pushing the now-infamous "cheap fakes" narrative. A new book detailing Biden's cognitive decline has dominated headlines and has reignited scrutiny of how the media shielded the then-presumptive Democratic nominee, particularly when it came to his age. In the weeks leading up to the disastrous debate performance exposing his cognitive decline on the world stage, Biden went viral on multiple occasions in videos his critics said showed him losing his faculties. The first was of him appearing completely frozen while others danced around him at Juneteenth celebration at the White House.


SEN. JEANNE SHAHEEN: If Trump wants a Ukraine deal, he should reread his own book

FOX News

Since his first day in office, President Donald Trump has mismanaged negotiations over an end to the war in Ukraine. More than 100 days later, innocent Ukrainians are still dying while the president gets played by Russian President Vladimir Putin โ€“ illustrated starkly by the barrages of drones and missiles continually aimed at Ukrainian cities as Trump posts online. It's good to hear Trump finally express some frustration toward Putin and admit that his negotiating tactics aren't working, that, as he says, Putin is "just tapping me along, and has to be dealt with differently." The reasons for this aren't complicated. Instead of increasing his leverage over Russa, Trump offered concession after concession before talks even began.


This giant microwave may change the future of war

MIT Technology Review

While the US has precision missiles that can shoot these drones down, they don't always succeed: A drone attack killed three US soldiers and injured dozens more at a base in the Jordanian desert last year. And each American missile costs orders of magnitude more than its targets, which limits their supply; countering thousand-dollar drones with missiles that cost hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of dollars per shot can only work for so long, even with a defense budget that could reach a trillion dollars next year. The US armed forces are now hunting for a solution--and they want it fast. Every branch of the service and a host of defense tech startups are testing out new weapons that promise to disable drones en masse. There are drones that slam into other drones like battering rams; drones that shoot out nets to ensnare quadcopter propellers; precision-guided Gatling guns that simply shoot drones out of the sky; electronic approaches, like GPS jammers and direct hacking tools; and lasers that melt holes clear through a target's side.


Rage Against the Machine guitarist rips Trump over president's feud with Bruce Springsteen in fiery rant

FOX News

Kid Rock told Fox News Digital that he doesn't necessarily set out to write patriotic music, but "the message of patriotism in my music has just always been there." Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello had some choice words for President Donald Trump at a concert on Sunday. Rolling Stone reported that during his performance at the Boston Calling Music Festival, the famous musician unloaded on Trump in response to the president's recent spat with classic rock legend Bruce Springsteen. "Bruce is going after Trump because Bruce, his whole life, he's been about truth, justice, democracy, equality," Morello said onstage, adding, "And Trump is mad at him because Bruce draws a bigger audience. The feud between Trump and Springsteen began nearly two weeks ago when the artist accused the president of treason during a concert in Manchester, England. "The mighty E Street Band is here tonight to call upon the righteous power of art, of music, of rock and roll in dangerous times.


Transportation Department deploying artificial intelligence to spot air traffic dangers, Duffy says

FOX News

Fox News chief Washington correspondent Mike Emanuel has the latest on Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy's statements about recent air traffic control incidents on'Special Report.' Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy recently announced that artificial intelligence (AI) is being used to detect and address air traffic risks, following a slew of near-misses and fatal plane crashes across the country. Duffy told FOX 5 DC that officials are implementing AI to "identify and address potential air traffic risks nationwide," potentially aiding in preventing tragedies like the fatal Jan. 29 midair collision at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport (DCA) that claimed the lives of 67 people. Following the Potomac River crash, which involved a commercial plane and an Army Black Hawk helicopter, Duffy announced a plan to build a new "state-of-the-art" traffic control system that will equip locations with better technology to reduce outages, improve efficiency and reinforce safety. Duffy told FOX 5 that when investigators were looking into how to prevent collisions, they asked themselves, "Are there any other DCAs out there?" Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy speaks during a news conference following up on the issuance of the National Transportation Safety Board preliminary report on the mid-air collision near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, on Tuesday, March 11.


Spectral clustering for dependent community Hawkes process models of temporal networks

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Temporal networks observed continuously over time through timestamped relational events data are commonly encountered in application settings including online social media communications, financial transactions, and international relations. Temporal networks often exhibit community structure and strong dependence patterns among node pairs. This dependence can be modeled through mutual excitations, where an interaction event from a sender to a receiver node increases the possibility of future events among other node pairs. We provide statistical results for a class of models that we call dependent community Hawkes (DCH) models, which combine the stochastic block model with mutually exciting Hawkes processes for modeling both community structure and dependence among node pairs, respectively. We derive a non-asymptotic upper bound on the misclustering error of spectral clustering on the event count matrix as a function of the number of nodes and communities, time duration, and the amount of dependence in the model. Our result leverages recent results on bounding an appropriate distance between a multivariate Hawkes process count vector and a Gaussian vector, along with results from random matrix theory. We also propose a DCH model that incorporates only self and reciprocal excitation along with highly scalable parameter estimation using a Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) estimator that we demonstrate to be consistent for growing network size and time duration.