Is the US eyeing its next Latin American target? Why is Trump tearing down parts of the White House? Trump-Xi meeting: What's at stake and who has the upper hand? United States President Donald Trump expects "a lot of problems" will be solved between Washington and Beijing when he meets China's President Xi Jinping in South Korea for a high-stakes meeting on Thursday, amid growing trade tensions between the two. Relations between the two world powers have been strained in recent years, with Washington and Beijing imposing tit-for-tat trade tariffs topping 100 percent against each other this year, the US restricting its exports of semiconductors vital for artificial intelligence (AI) development and Beijing restricting exports of critical rare-earth metals which are vital for the defence industry and also the development of AI, among other issues. On the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Gyeongju, South Korea, on Wednesday, Trump said an expected trade deal between China and the US would be good for both countries and "something very exciting for everybody".

US President Donald Trump is arriving in Asia for a whirlwind week of diplomacy, which includes a much-anticipated meeting with his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping. Top of the agenda between the two will be trade - an area where tensions between the world's two biggest economies have once again been ramping up. Trump lands in the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur, as a summit for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or Asean, begins on Sunday. He will then visit Japan and finally South Korea, where the White House says he will meet Xi. So what are the wins Trump and other leaders are hoping for, and what are the pitfalls?

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia – China's President Xi Jinping has arrived in Malaysia as part of a Southeast Asian tour which is seen as delivering a personal message that Beijing is a more reliable trading partner than the United States amid a bruising trade war with Washington. Xi arrived in the capital, Kuala Lumpur, on Tuesday evening in what is his first visit to Malaysia since 2013. He flew in from Vietnam where he had signed dozens of trade cooperation agreements in Hanoi on everything from artificial intelligence to rail development. On touching down, Xi said that deepening "high-level strategic cooperation" was good for the common interests of both China and Malaysia, and good for peace, stability and prosperity in the region and the world", according to the official Malaysian news agency Bernama. Xi's three-country tour and his "message" that Beijing is Southeast Asia's better friend than the truculent administration of US President Donald Trump comes as many countries in the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) bloc are unhappy with their treatment after the US imposed huge tariffs on countries around the world. "This is a very significant visit.

DeepSeek's new AI model is causing deep consternation from Silicon Valley to Washington. Few would have predicted that a little-known Chinese startup with a couple of hundred homegrown engineers would be able to release a frontier AI model rivaling the capabilities of America's best and biggest tech companies – reportedly at a fraction of the cost and computational power. Experts are hotly debating just how many and which type of chips DeepSeek used and whether the company stockpiled them or circumvented U.S. export controls. But the release and viral adoption of a Chinese AI competitor model has already rattled markets, highlighted the urgent competition for global brainpower, and caused some to ask whether all those billions that U.S. tech companies have spent buying chips and building data centers built a competitive moat or a Maginot line. This moment is game on, not game over.

The launch of a new chatbot by Chinese artificial intelligence firm DeepSeek triggered a plunge in US tech stocks as it appeared to perform as well as OpenAI's ChatGPT and other AI models, but using fewer resources. By Monday, DeepSeek's AI assistant had rapidly overtaken ChatGPT as the most popular free app in Apple's US and UK app stores. Despite its popularity with international users, the app appears to censor answers to sensitive questions about China and its government. Chinese generative AI must not contain content that violates the country's "core socialist values", according to a technical document published by the national cybersecurity standards committee. That includes content that "incites to subvert state power and overthrow the socialist system", or "endangers national security and interests and damages the national image".

Does the People's Republic of China (PRC) interfere with European elections through ethnic Chinese diaspora media? This question forms the basis of an ongoing research project exploring how PRC narratives about European elections are represented in Chinese diaspora media, and thus the objectives of PRC news media manipulation. In order to study diaspora media efficiently and at scale, it is necessary to use techniques derived from quantitative text analysis, such as topic modelling. In this paper, we present a pipeline for studying information dynamics in Chinese media. Firstly, we present KeyNMF, a new approach to static and dynamic topic modelling using transformer-based contextual embedding models. We provide benchmark evaluations to demonstrate that our approach is competitive on a number of Chinese datasets and metrics. Secondly, we integrate KeyNMF with existing methods for describing information dynamics in complex systems. We apply this pipeline to data from five news sites, focusing on the period of time leading up to the 2024 European parliamentary elections. Our methods and results demonstrate the effectiveness of KeyNMF for studying information dynamics in Chinese media and lay groundwork for further work addressing the broader research questions.

Why not try a conversation with the leader of China? There's a new chatbot in town and it's based on Xi Jinping. As a matter of fact, it was trained using the'thoughts' of the Chinese leader. I put thoughts in quotes because researchers didn't use some kind of new mind-reading technology. Chinese officials just used a bunch of his books and papers for training purposes, according to a report by The Financial 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.

Even controversial leaders like Kim Jong Un and Vladimir Putin were once innocent babies - and artificial intelligence has created images of them before becoming war-mongering dictators. The young rulers were created by Midjourney, an AI-powered imaging software that churns out photos based on simple text prompts. The results shows each baby image sporting a suit and donning the tyrants' iconic hairstyles. These images follow one of baby Elon Musk that made waves on the internet this month, showing the billionaire as a toddler with a white button-up shirt, brown overalls and signature haircut. AI-generated images have taken over the internet in recent months, some sparking joy and others causing terror.

Midjourney, an AI image generator that creates realistic deepfakes, has been scrutinized recently for having a policy showing deference to China's communist government. The company enforces a rule that users can generate fake images of world leaders from President Biden to Vladimir Putin, but not Chinese President Xi Jinping. In a year-old message on the chat service Discord, the CEO of Midjourney, Inc. explained why the company has that rule. "I think we want to minimize drama," Midjourney CEO David Holz wrote last summer. He explained that the company did not immediately ban images of Xi, but it was triggered by abuse from users.