The Chinese government unveiled a program to woo foreign talent just as the US cracked down on H-1Bs with a $100,000 fee. The move immediately provoked xenophobic backlash. While President Donald Trump makes it harder to hire skilled foreign workers in the US, Chinese leader Xi Jinping is trying to lure them in. On Wednesday, China officially launched a new visa program designed to make it easier for young professionals and people with degrees in science and technology from top universities to study and do business in the country. While many of the details of the K visa program have yet to be announced, Chinese authorities have said that applicants won't be required to obtain an invitation letter from a specific company, meaning the visa isn't tied to individual employers.

Former Foreign Service officer advocates for social media vetting of visa applicants, explaining how AI could enhance screening to identify anti-American sentiments.

In recent years, neural machine translation (NMT) has been widely used in everyday life. However, the current NMT lacks a mechanism to adjust the difficulty level of translations to match the user's language level. Additionally, due to the bias in the training data for NMT, translations of simple source sentences are often produced with complex words. In particular, this could pose a problem for children, who may not be able to understand the meaning of the translations correctly. In this study, we propose a method that replaces words with high Age of Acquisitions (AoA) in translations with simpler words to match the translations to the user's level. We achieve this by using large language models (LLMs), providing a triple of a source sentence, a translation, and a target word to be replaced. We create a benchmark dataset using back-translation on Simple English Wikipedia. The experimental results obtained from the dataset show that our method effectively replaces high-AoA words with lower-AoA words and, moreover, can iteratively replace most of the high-AoA words while still maintaining high BLEU and COMET scores.

Police seized ketamine hidden inside life-size Transformer robots in Thailand. A woman who was previously caught trying to ship meth hidden in a food processing machine was trying to send the robots to Taiwan. Thai police have broken up a large network that illegally helped foreigners, mostly Russians, to stay in Thailand long-term through the use of company nominees or shell companies, officials said Friday. Police said a 45-year-old Russian woman who came to Thailand in 2012 operated the scheme with a Thai woman who was listed as an executive or a shareholder of more than 270 companies in the southern province of Phuket. Foreigners can operate a business in Thailand, but it must be a joint venture with a Thai partner except in specified cases, and they cannot own more than 49% to protect local competitiveness.

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. The Russian government is floating the idea of demanding a "loyalty agreement" from foreigners. A proposed law would restrict non-Russian residents from openly opposing the government, criticizing Russia's communist history or subverting traditional values. Foreign nationals would be required to sign an agreement prohibiting "hindering the activities of public authorities of the Russian Federation [or] discrediting in any form the foreign and domestic state policy of the Russian Federation, public authorities and their officials," according to translations from The Moscow Times.

Gatestone Institute senior fellow Gordon Chang weighs in on Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen's upcoming trip to China and the increase in Chinese nationals at the southern border on'The Ingraham Angle.' China has significantly expanded its legal framework to target those expected to or affiliated with threatening national security, putting pressure on the relationship between foreigners in China and Chinese working with foreign entities across all fields. Adding pressure to the already fragile relations, Chinese citizens are called upon to be vigilant against espionage and national security risks as part of a broader whole-of-society approach. The amendment is one of the latest attempts by Chinese lawmakers to control the flow of information among growing national security concerns. Recently, authorities closed its most extensive academic database, the privately owned China National Knowledge Infrastructure for several non-Chinese institutes, also the country's financial database restricted foreign access.

Across the world on Sunday, examinees will sit the Japanese Language Proficiency Test, a lengthy comprehension test that is the most widely taken Japanese exam by foreign nationals and whose upper levels can open opportunities in employment and education. Many companies seeking to hire foreign workers with Japanese ability specify the top two of the test's five levels among their requirements. But the JLPT's multiple-choice format of passive reading and listening skills, with no sections for speaking or writing, casts doubt over its suitability as a standard for gauging candidates looking to work in a Japanese environment. Established in 1984 and administered jointly by the Japan Foundation and Japan Educational Exchanges and Services, the JLPT boasts huge examinee numbers that were surging before the pandemic. In 2013, 571,075 people in 65 countries and regions took the test, rising to a record 1,168,535 examinees in 87 countries and regions in 2019.

We measure support with women and migrants in German political debates over the last 155 years. To do so, we (1) provide a gold standard of 1205 text snippets in context, annotated for support with our target groups, (2) train a BERT model on our annotated data, with which (3) we infer large-scale trends. These show that support with women is stronger than support with migrants, but both have steadily increased over time. While we hardly find any direct anti-support with women, there is more polarization when it comes to migrants. We also discuss the difficulty of annotation as a result of ambiguity in political discourse and indirectness, i.e., politicians' tendency to relate stances attributed to political opponents. Overall, our results indicate that German society, as measured from its political elite, has become fairer over time.

A new work permit introduced by Japan for overseas workers to help alleviate chronic labor shortages in certain industries has made an unexpectedly poor start, with only 3,987 of them obtaining the "specific skills visa" in the first year of the program, or less than 10 percent of the government's target. The weak start has exposed the insufficient preparations for the program launched in April 2019. With the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic unavoidable, the new system is already at a turning point. There are two ways for foreign workers to obtain the new visa. One is to pass an exam that measures Japanese language proficiency and the skills needed for the industry in which the applicant wants to work. In the other route, for the Type 1 visa for less sophisticated jobs, people who went through technical training in Japan for three years or more can change their visa status to specific skills without taking the exam.

Iran's Vice President for Science and Technology Sorena Sattari says the domestic companies and start-ups engaged in developing artificial intelligence technologies have made such progress that are competing with the foreign countries. In a ceremony held in Tehran on Saturday, Sattari unveiled two homegrown AI systems and an artificial intelligence product developed by the local experts and commercialized under the patronage of the Vice Presidency for Science and Technology. In remarks at the event, Sattari highlighted the administration's support for the AI companies and the targeted projects set up for development of artificial intelligence in the country, hoping that Iran would soon enter a competition with the world's top-notch countries in the AI field. "However, it must be mentioned that even at present, a series of products and services provided by the Iranian technological companies active in the artificial intelligence fields can compete with the similar foreign products," the vice president added. A comparison with the advanced countries in the AI arena, such as China, shows that the Iranian-made products developed by the local knowledge-based companies are comparable with the foreign ones, he noted.