Washington — Based on the posts of an X account that bears the name of Dutch cartoonist Bart van Leeuwen, a profile picture of his face and short professional bio, one would think the Amsterdam-based artist is a staunch supporter of China and fierce critic of the United States.

In one post, the account blasts what it calls Washington’s “fallacies against the Chinese economy,” accompanied by a cartoon from the Global Times — a Beijing-controlled media outlet — showing Uncle Sam aiming but failing to hit a target emblazoned with the words “China’s economy.”

In another, the account reposts a Chinese propaganda video about the country’s rubber-stamp legislature, writing “today’s China is closely connected with the world, blending with each other, and achieving mutual success.”

But Van Leeuwen didn’t make the posts. In fact, this account doesn’t even belong to him.

It belongs to a China-connected network on X of “spamouflage” accounts, which pretend to be the work of real people but are in reality controlled by robots sending out messages designed to shape public opinion.

China has repeatedly rejected reports that it seeks to influence U.S. presidential elections, describing such claims as “fabricated.”

VOA Mandarin and DoubleThink Lab (DTL), a Taiwanese social media analytics firm, uncovered the fake Van Leeuwen account during a joint investigation into a network of spamouflage accounts working on behalf of the Chinese government.

The network, consisting of at least nine accounts, propagated Beijing’s talking points on issues including human rights abuses in China’s western Xinjiang province, territorial disputes with countries in the South China Sea and U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods.

Fake account contradicts real artist

Van Leeuwen confirmed in an interview with VOA Mandarin that he had nothing to do with and was not aware of the fake account.

“It’s ironic that my identity, being a political cartoonist, is being used for political propaganda,” he told VOA in a written statement.

The real Van Leeuwen is an award-winning cartoonist whose works have been published on news outlets around the world, such as the Las Vegas Review-Journal, the Korea Times, Sing Tao Daily in Hong Kong and Gulf Today in the United Arab Emirates.

He specializes in editorial cartoons, whose main subjects include global politics, elections in the U.S. and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Several of his past illustrations made fun of Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s economic policies and the opaqueness of Beijing’s inner political struggles.

After being contacted by VOA Mandarin, a spokesman from X said the fake account has been suspended.

Other than finding irony in being impersonated by a Chinese propaganda bot, Van Leeuwen said the incident also worries him.

“This example once again highlights the need for far-reaching measures regarding the restriction of social media,” Van Leeuwen wrote in his statement, “especially with irresponsible people like Elon Musk at the helm.”

After purchasing what was then called Twitter in 2022, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO vowed to reduce the prevalence of bots on the platform, but many users complain it has become even worse.

Musk, the world’s richest person, is a so-called “free speech absolutist,” opposing almost all censorship of people voicing their views. Critics say his policy allows racist and false information to flourish on X.

Former President Donald Trump has praised Musk’s business acumen and said he plans to have the man who may become the world’s first trillionaire head a commission on government efficiency if he is reelected in November.

Network of spamouflage accounts

Before its suspension, the X account that impersonated Van Leeuwen had close to 1,000 followers, more than Van Leeuwen’s real X account. It was registered in 2013, but its first post came only last year. The account’s early posts were mostly encouraging and inspiring words in Chinese. It also posted many dance videos.

Gradually, the account started to mix in more and more political narratives, criticizing the U.S. and defending China. It often reposted content from another spamouflage account called “Grey World.”

“Grey World” used a photo of an attractive Asian woman as its profile picture. Most of its posts were supportive of Beijing’s talking points. It regularly posted videos and cartoons from Chinese state media. It also posted several of Van Leeuwen’s cartoons about American politics.

VOA Mandarin and DTL’s investigation identified “Grey World” as the main spamouflage account in a network of nine such accounts. Other accounts in the network, including the fake Van Leeuwen account, amplified “Grey World” by reposting its content.

But posts from “Grey World” had limited reach on X, despite having tens of thousands of followers. For example, between August 18 and September 1, its most popular post, a diatribe against Washington’s Indo-Pacific strategy, was viewed a little over 10,000 times but only had 35 reposts and 65 likes.

After the suspension of the fake Van Leeuwen account, X also shut down the “Grey World” account.

The spamouflage network is not the first linked to China.

In April, British researchers released a report saying Chinese nationalist trolls were posing as American supporters of Trump on X to try to exploit domestic divisions ahead of the U.S. election.

U.S. federal prosecutors in 2023 accused China’s Ministry of Public Security of having a covert social media propaganda campaign that also aimed to influence U.S. elections.

Researchers at Facebook’s parent company Meta said it was the largest known covert propaganda operation ever identified on that platform and Instagram, reported Rolling Stone magazine.

Network analysis firm Graphika called the pro-Chinese network “Spamouflage Dragon,” part of a campaign it identified in early 2020 that was at the time posting content that praised Beijing’s policies and attacked those of then-President Trump.
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Washington — The United States has identified and taken down a botnet campaign by China-directed hackers to further infiltrate American infrastructure as well as a variety of internet-connected devices.

FBI Director Christopher Wray announced the disruption of what he called Flax Typhoon during a cyber summit Wednesday in Washington, describing it as part of a much larger campaign by Beijing.

“Flax Typhoon hijacked Internet-of-Things devices like cameras, video recorders and storage devices — things typically found across both big and small organizations,” Wray said. “And about half of those hijacked devices were located here in the U.S.”

Wray said the hackers, working under the guise of an information security company called the Integrity Technology Group, collected information from corporations, media organizations, universities and government agencies.

“They used internet-connected devices — this time, hundreds of thousands of them — to create a botnet that helped them compromise systems and exfiltrate confidential data,” he said.

But Flax Typhoon’s operations were disrupted last week when the FBI, working with allies and under court orders, took control of the botnet and pursued the hackers when they tried to switch to a backup system.

“We think the bad guys finally realized that it was the FBI and our partners that they were up against,” Wray said. “And with that realization, they essentially burned down their new infrastructure and abandoned their botnet.”

Wray said Flax Typhoon appeared to build on the exploits and tactics of another China-linked hacking group, known as Volt Typhoon, which was identified by Microsoft in May of last year.

Volt Typhoon used office network equipment, including routers, firewalls and VPN hardware, to infiltrate and disrupt communications infrastructure in Guam, home to key U.S. military facilities.

The Chinese Embassy in Washington Wednesday rejected the U.S accusations.

“Without valid evidence, the U.S. jumped to an unwarranted conclusion and made groundless accusations” Chinese Embassy spokesperson Liu Pengyu told VOA in an email, responding to the allegations about Flax Typhoon.

“The U.S. itself is the origin and the biggest perpetrator of cyberattacks,” Liu added. “We urge the U.S. to stop its worldwide cyber espionage and cyberattacks, and stop smearing other countries under the excuse of cyber security.”

The FBI and the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency have previously warned that Chinese-government directed hackers, like Volt Typhoon, have been positioning themselves to launch destructive cyberattacks that could jeopardize the physical safety of Americans.

Following Wednesday’s announcement by the FBI, the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) issued an advisory encouraging anyone with a device that was compromised by Flax Typhoon to apply needed patches.

It said that as of this past June, the Flax Typhoon botnet was making use of more than 260,000 devices in North America, Europe, Africa and Southeast East.

The NSA said almost half of the compromised devices were in the U.S. Another 18 countries, including Vietnam, Bangladesh, Albania, China, South Africa and India, were also impacted.

 
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Ratcliffe on Soar, United Kingdom — Ratcliffe-on-Soar Power Station has dominated the landscape of the English East Midlands for nearly 60 years, looming over the small town of the same name and a landmark on the M1 motorway bisecting Derby and Nottingham.  

At the mainline railway station serving the nearby East Midlands Airport, its giant cooling towers rise up seemingly within touching distance of the track and platform.  

But at the end of this month, the site in central England will close its doors, signaling the end to polluting coal-powered electricity in the UK, in a landmark first for any G7 nation.   

“It’ll seem very strange because it has always been there,” said David Reynolds, a 74-year-old retiree who saw the site being built as a child before it began operations in 1967.  

“When I was younger you could go down certain parts and you saw nothing but coal pits,” he told AFP.   

Energy transition 

Coal has played a vital part in British economic history, powering the Industrial Revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries that made the country a global superpower, and creating London’s infamous choking smog.  

Even into the 1980s, it still represented 70% of the country’s electricity mix before its share declined in the 1990s.   

In the last decade the fall has been even sharper, slumping to 38% in 2013, 5.0% in 2018 then just 1.0% last year. 

In 2015, the then Conservative government said that it intended to shut all coal-fired power stations by 2025 to reduce carbon emissions.  

Jess Ralston, head of energy at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit think-tank, said the UK’s 2030 clean-energy target was “very ambitious.”  

But she added: “It sends a very strong message that the UK is taking climate change as a matter of great importance and also that this is only the first step.”  

By last year, natural gas represented a third of the UK’s electricity production, while a quarter came from wind power and 13 percent from nuclear power, according to electricity operator National Grid ESO.  

“The UK managed to phase coal out so quickly largely through a combination of economics and then regulations,” Ralston said.   

“So larger power plants like coal plants had regulations put on them because of all the sulphur dioxide, nitrous oxides, all the emissions coming from the plant and that meant that it was no longer economically attractive to invest in those sorts of plants.”  

The new Labour government launched its flagship green energy plan after its election win in July, with the creation of a publicly owned body to invest in offshore wind, tidal power and nuclear power.  

The aim is to make Britain a superpower once more, this time in “clean energy.”  

As such, Ratcliffe-on-Soar’s closure on September 30 is a symbolic step in the UK’s ambition to decarbonize electricity by 2030, and become carbon neutral by 2050.   

It will make the country the first in the G7 of rich nations to do away entirely with coal power electricity.  

Italy plans to do so by next year, France in 2027, Canada in 2030 and Germany in 2038. Japan and the United States have no set dates.   

• ‘End of an era’ – 

In recent years, Ratcliffe-on-Soar Power Station, which had the potential to power two million homes, has been used only when big spikes in electricity use were expected, such as during a cold snap in 2022 or the 2023 heatwave.  

Its last delivery of 1,650 tons of coal at the start of this summer barely supplied 500,000 homes for eight hours.    

“It’s like the end of a era,” said Becky, 25, serving £4 pints behind the bar of the Red Lion pub in nearby Kegworth.  

Her father works at the power station and will be out of a job. September 30 is likely to stir up strong emotions for him and the other 350 remaining employees.   

“It’s their life,” she said.  

Nothing remains of the world’s first coal-fired power station, which was built by Thomas Edison in central London in 1882, three years after his invention of the electric light bulb.  

The same fate is slated for Ratcliffe-on-Soar: the site’s German owner, Uniper, said it will be completely dismantled “by the end of the decade.”  

In its place will be a new development — a “carbon-free technology and energy hub”, the company said.
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brussels — Europe’s second-top court largely confirmed on Wednesday an EU antitrust fine imposed on U.S. chipmaker Qualcomm, revising it down slightly to $265.5 million from an initial $2.7 million.

The European Commission imposed the fine in 2019, saying that Qualcomm sold its chipsets below cost between 2009 and 2011, in a practice known as predatory pricing, to thwart British phone software maker Icera, which is now part of Nvidia Corp.

Qualcomm had argued that the 3G baseband chipsets singled out in the case accounted for just 0.7% of the Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) market and so it was not possible for it to exclude rivals from the chipset market.

The Court made “a detailed examination of all the pleas put forward by Qualcomm, rejecting them all in their entirety, with the exception of a plea concerning the calculation of the amount of the fine, which it finds to be well founded in part,” the Luxembourg-based General Court said.

Qualcomm can appeal on points of law to the EU Court of Justice, Europe’s highest.

The chipmaker did not immediately reply to an emailed Reuters request for comment.

The company convinced the same court two years ago to throw out a $1.1 billion antitrust fine handed down in 2018 for paying billions of dollars to Apple from 2011 to 2016 to use only its chips in all its iPhones and iPads in order to block out rivals such as Intel Corp.

The EU watchdog subsequently declined to appeal the judgment.
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BRUSSELS — Alphabet unit Google won its challenge on Wednesday against a $1.66 billion antitrust fine imposed five years ago for hindering rivals in online search advertising, a week after it lost a much bigger case.

The European Commission, in its 2019 decision, said Google had abused its dominance to prevent websites from using brokers other than its AdSense platform that provided search adverts. The practices it said were illegal took place from 2006 to 2016.

The Luxembourg-based General Court mostly agreed with the European Union competition enforcer’s assessments of the case, but annulled the fine.

“The court (…) upheld most of the commission’s assessments, but annulled the decision imposing a fine of almost 1.5 billion euros ($1.66 billion) on Google, on the grounds in particular that it had failed to take into account all the relevant circumstances in its assessment of the duration of the contractual clauses that it had found to be unfair,” the judges said.

The AdSense fine, one of a trio of fines that have cost Google a total of some $9 billion, was triggered by a complaint from Microsoft in 2010.

Google has said it changed the targeted contracts in 2016 before the Commission’s decision.

The company last week lost its final fight against a $2.6 billion fine levied for using its price comparison shopping service to gain an unfair advantage over smaller European rivals.
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Brussels — Teresa Ribera will have to square up to Big Tech, banks and airlines if confirmed as Europe’s new antitrust chief, while juggling calls for looser rules to help create EU champions.

Nominated Tuesday by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen for the high-profile antitrust post, Ribera has been Spain’s minister for ecological transition since 2018.

The 55-year-old Spanish socialist, one of Europe’s most ambitious policymakers on climate change, will have to secure European Parliament approval before taking up her post.

As competition commissioner, she will be able to approve or veto multi-billion euro mergers or slap hefty fines on companies seeking to bolster their market power by throttling smaller rivals or illegally teaming up to fix prices.

One of her biggest challenges will be to ensure that Amazon, Apple, Alphabet’s Google, Microsoft and Meta comply with landmark rules aimed at reining in their power and giving consumers more choice.

Apple, Google and Meta are firmly in outgoing EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager’s crosshairs for falling short of complying with the Digital Markets Act.

Another challenge will be how to deal with the increasing popularity of artificial intelligence amid concerns about Big Tech leveraging its existing dominance.

Ribera may ramp up a crackdown on non-EU state subsidies begun by Vestager aimed at preventing foreign companies from acquiring EU businesses or taking part in EU public tenders with unfair state support.

Recent rulings from Europe’s highest court, which backed the Commission’s $14.5 billion tax order to Apple, and its $2.7 billion antitrust fine against Google, could embolden Ribera to take a tough line against antitrust violations.

That would mean she would be in no hurry to ease up on antitrust rules, despite Mario Draghi’s call to boost EU industrial champions so that they are able to compete with U.S. and Chinese competitors.

Ribera was also named on Tuesday as executive vice president of a clean, just and competitive energy transition, tasked with ensuring that Europe achieves its green goals.

Her credentials include negotiating deals last year among EU countries on emissions limits for trucks and a contentious upgrade of EU power market rules.

 
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PARIS — When French prosecutors took aim at Telegram boss Pavel Durov, they had a trump card to wield – a tough new law with no international equivalent that criminalizes tech titans whose platforms allow illegal products or activities.

The so-called LOPMI law, enacted in January 2023, has placed France at the forefront of a group of nations taking a sterner stance on crime-ridden websites. But the law is so recent that prosecutors have yet to secure a conviction.

With the law still untested in court, France’s pioneering push to prosecute figures like Durov could backfire if its judges balk at penalizing tech bosses for alleged criminality on their platforms.

A French judge placed Durov under formal investigation last month, charging him with various crimes, including the 2023 offence: “Complicity in the administration of an online platform to allow an illicit transaction, in an organized gang,” which carries a maximum 10-year sentence and a $556,300 fine.

Being under formal investigation does not imply guilt or necessarily lead to trial, but indicates judges think there’s enough evidence to proceed with the probe. Investigations can last years before being sent to trial or dropped.

Durov, out on bail, denies Telegram was an “anarchic paradise.” Telegram has said it “abides by EU laws,” and that it’s “absurd to claim that a platform or its owner are responsible for abuse of that platform.”

In a radio interview last week, Paris Prosecutor Laure Beccuau hailed the 2023 law as a powerful tool for battling organized crime groups who are increasingly operating online.

The law appears to be unique. Eight lawyers and academics told Reuters they were unaware of any other country with a similar statute.

“There is no crime in U.S. law directly analogous to that and none that I’m aware of in the Western world,” said Adam Hickey, a former U.S. deputy assistant attorney general who established the Justice Department’s (DOJ) national security cyber program.

Hickey, now at U.S. law firm Mayer Brown, said U.S. prosecutors could charge a tech boss as a “co-conspirator or an aider and abettor of the crimes committed by users” but only if there was evidence the “operator intends that its users engage in, and himself facilitates, criminal activities.”

He cited the 2015 conviction of Ross Ulbricht, whose Silk Road website hosted drug sales. U.S. prosecutors argued Ulbricht “deliberately operated Silk Road as an online criminal marketplace … outside the reach of law enforcement,” according to the DOJ. Ulbricht got a life sentence.

Timothy Howard, a former U.S. federal prosecutor who put Ulbricht behind bars, was “skeptical” Durov could be convicted in the United States without proof he knew about the crimes on Telegram, and actively facilitated them – especially given Telegram’s vast, mainly law-abiding user base.

“Coming from my experience of the U.S. legal system,” he said, the French law appears “an aggressive theory.”

Michel Séjean, a French professor of cyber law, said the toughened legislation in France came after authorities grew exasperated with companies like Telegram.

“It’s not a nuclear weapon,” he said. “It’s a weapon to prevent you from being impotent when faced with platforms that don’t cooperate.”

Tougher laws

The 2023 law traces its origins to a 2020 French interior ministry white paper, which called for major investment in technology to tackle growing cyber threats.

It was followed by a similar law in November 2023, which included a measure for the real-time geolocation of people suspected of serious crimes by remotely activating their devices. A proposal to turn on their devices’ cameras and mouthpieces so that investigators could watch or listen in was shot down by France’s Constitutional Council.

These new laws have given France some of the world’s toughest tools for tackling cybercrime, with the proof being the arrest of Durov on French soil, said Sadry Porlon, a French lawyer specialized in communication technology law.

Tom Holt, a cybercrime professor at Michigan State University, said LOPMI “is a potentially powerful and effective tool if used properly,” particularly in probes into child sexual abuse images, credit card trafficking and distributed denial of service attacks, which target businesses or governments.

Armed with fresh legislative powers, the ambitious J3 cybercrime unit at the Paris prosecutor’s office, which is overseeing the Durov probe, is now involved in some of France’s most high-profile cases.

In June, the J3 unit shut down Coco, an anonymized chat forum cited in over 23,000 legal proceedings since 2021 for crimes including prostitution, rape and homicide.

Coco played a central role in a current trial that has shocked France.

Dominique Pelicot, 71, is accused of recruiting dozens of men on Coco to rape his wife, whom he had knocked out with drugs. Pelicot, who is expected to testify this week, has admitted his guilt, while 50 other men are on trial for rape.

Coco’s owner, Isaac Steidel, is suspected of a similar crime as Durov: “Provision of an online platform to allow an illicit transaction by an organized gang.”

Steidel’s lawyer, Julien Zanatta, declined to comment.
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WASHINGTON — “I love you, China. My dear mother,” former U.S. President Donald Trump, standing in front of a mic at a lectern, appears to sing in perfect Mandarin.

“I cry for you, and I also feel proud for you,” Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump’s Democratic opponent in this year’s election, appears to respond, also in perfect Mandarin. Trump lets out a smile as he listens to the lyric.

The video has received thousands of likes and tens of thousands of reposts on Douyin, China’s variation of TikTok.

“These two are almost as Chinese as it gets,” one comment says.

Neither Trump nor Harris knows Mandarin. And the duet shown in the video has never happened. But recently, deepfake videos, frequently featuring top U.S. leaders, including President Joe Biden, singing Chinese pop songs, have gone viral on the Chinese internet.

Some of the videos have found their way to social media platforms not available in China, such as Instagram, TikTok and X.

U.S. intelligence officials and experts have long warned about how China and other foreign adversaries have been implementing generative AI in their disinformation effort to disrupt and influence the 2024 presidential election.

“There has been an increased use of Chinese AI-generated content in recent months, attempting to influence and sow division in the U.S. and elsewhere,” a Microsoft report on China’s disinformation threat said in April.

Few of the people who saw the videos of the American leaders singing in Chinese, however, were convinced that they were real, based on what users wrote in the comments. The videos themselves do not contain misinformation, either.

Instead, these videos and their popularity reflect, at least in part, a sense of cultural confidence in Chinese netizens in the age of perpetually intensifying U.S.-China competitions, observers told VOA Mandarin.

By making the likes of Biden and Trump sing whatever Chinese songs the creators of the videos want them to sing, they can “culturally domesticate powerful Americans,” said Alexa Pan, a researcher on China’s AI industry for ChinaTalk, an influential newsletter about China and technology.

“Making fun of U.S. leaders might be especially politically acceptable to and popular with Chinese viewers,” she said.

Political opponents sing about friendship

Videos of American leaders singing in Chinese started to spread on Chinese social media in May. In many of the videos featuring Biden and Trump, creators made the two politically opposed men sing songs about friendship.

After Biden announced his withdrawal from the presidential race in July, one viral video had him sing to Trump, “Actually I don’t want to leave. Actually, I want to stay. I want to stay with you through every spring, summer, autumn and winter,” to which Trump appeared to sing, “You have to believe me. It won’t take long before we can spend our whole life together.”

“Crying eyes,” one Chinese netizen commented sarcastically. “They must have gotten along really well.”

Another such video posted on Instagram received mostly positive reactions. Some users said it was a stark contrast to the bitterness that has permeated U.S. politics.

“Made me laugh,” an Instagram user wrote. “Wouldn’t that be so refreshing to actually have them sing like that together?”

Easy to make

After reviewing some of the videos, Pan, of ChinaTalk, told VOA Mandarin that she believes they were quite easy to make.

Obvious flaws in the videos, including body parts occasionally blending into the background, suggest they were created with simple AI technology, Pan said.

“One could generate these videos on the many AI text-to-video generation platforms available in China,” she wrote in an e-mail.

On the Chinese internet, there are countless tutorials on how to make AI-generated videos using popular lip-syncing AI models, such as MuseTalk, released by Chinese tech giant Tencent, and SadTalker, developed by Xi’an Jiaotong University, a research-focused university in northwestern China.

One Douyin account reviewed by VOA Mandarin has pumped out over 200 videos of American leaders singing in Chinese since May. One of the account’s videos was even reposted by the Iranian embassy.

Chinese leaders off-limits

The release of ChatGPT by OpenAI in 2022 has triggered a global AI frenzy, with China being one of the leading countries developing the technology. The United Nations said in July that China had requested the most patents on generative AI, with the U.S. being a distant second.

On the Chinese internet, the obsession has been particularly strong with deepfakes, which can be used to manipulate videos, images and audio of people to make them appear to say or sing things that they have not actually uttered.

Some deepfake videos are made mostly for fun, such is the case with Biden and Trump singing Chinese songs. But there have also been abuses of the technology. Earlier this year, web users in China stole a Ukrainian girl’s image and turned her into a “Russian beauty” to sell goods online.

 China has released strict regulations on deepfakes. A 2022 law states that the technology cannot be used to “endanger the national security and interests, harm the image of the nation, harm the societal public interest, disturb economic or social order, or harm the lawful rights and interests of others.”

Yang Han, an Australian commentator who used to work for China’s Foreign Ministry, told VOA Mandarin that the prominence of U.S leaders and the absence of Chinese leaders in these viral AI videos reflects a lack of political free speech in China.

He said that it reminds him of a joke that former U.S. President Ronald Reagan used to tell during the Cold War.

“An American and a Russian compare with each other whose country has more freedom,” Yang said, relaying the joke. “The American says he can stand in front of the White House and call Reagan stupid. The Russian dismisses it and says he can also stand in front of the Kremlin and call Reagan stupid.”
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tokyo — A long robot entered a damaged reactor at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power plant on Tuesday, beginning a two-week, high-stakes mission to retrieve for the first time a tiny amount of melted fuel debris from the bottom.

The robot’s trip into the Unit 2 reactor is a crucial initial step for what comes next — a daunting, decades-long process to decommission the plant and deal with large amounts of highly radioactive melted fuel inside three reactors that were damaged by a massive earthquake and tsunami in 2011. Specialists hope the robot will help them learn more about the status of the cores and the fuel debris.

Here is an explanation of how the robot works, its mission, significance and what lies ahead as the most challenging phase of the reactor cleanup begins.

What is the fuel debris?

Nuclear fuel in the reactor cores melted after the magnitude 9.0 earthquake and tsunami in March 2011 caused the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant’s cooling systems to fail. The melted fuel dripped down from the cores and mixed with internal reactor materials such as zirconium, stainless steel, electrical cables, broken grates and concrete around the supporting structure and at the bottom of the primary containment vessels.

The reactor meltdowns caused the highly radioactive, lava-like material to spatter in all directions, greatly complicating the cleanup. The condition of the debris also differs in each reactor.

Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings, or TEPCO, which manages the plant, says an estimated 880 tons of molten fuel debris remains in the three reactors, but some experts say the amount could be larger.

What is the robot’s mission?

Workers will use five 1.5-meter-long pipes connected in sequence to maneuver the robot through an entry point in the Unit 2 reactor’s primary containment vessel. The robot itself can extend about 6 meters inside the vessel. Once inside, it will be maneuvered remotely by operators at another building at the plant because of the fatally high radiation emitted by the melted debris.

The front of the robot, equipped with tongs, a light and a camera, will be lowered by a cable to a mound of melted fuel debris. It will then snip off and collect a bit of the debris — less than 3 grams). The small amount is meant to minimize radiation dangers.

The robot will then back out to the place it entered the reactor, a roundtrip journey that will take about two weeks.

The mission takes that long because the robot must make extremely precise maneuvers to avoid hitting obstacles or getting stuck in passageways. That has happened to earlier robots.

TEPCO is also limiting daily operations to two hours to minimize the radiation risk for workers in the reactor building. Eight six-member teams will take turns, with each group allowed to stay maximum of about 15 minutes.

What do officials hope to learn?

Sampling the melted fuel debris is “an important first step,” said Lake Barrett, who led the cleanup after the 1979 disaster at the U.S. Three Mile Island nuclear plant for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and is now a paid adviser for TEPCO’s Fukushima decommissioning.

While the melted fuel debris has been kept cool and has stabilized, the aging of the reactors poses potential safety risks, and the melted fuel needs to be removed and relocated to a safer place for long-term storage as soon as possible, experts say.

An understanding of the melted fuel debris is essential to determine how best to remove it, store it and dispose of it, according to the Japan Atomic Energy Agency.

Experts expect the sample will also provide more clues about how exactly the meltdown 13 years ago played out, some of which is still a mystery.

The melted fuel sample will be kept in secure canisters and sent to multiple laboratories for more detailed analysis. If the radiation level exceeds a set limit, the robot will take the sample back into the reactor.

“It’s the start of a process. It’s a long, long road ahead,” Barrett said in an online interview. “The goal is to remove the highly radioactive material, put it into engineered canisters … and put those in storage.”

For this mission, the robot’s small tong can only reach the upper surface of the debris. The pace of the work is expected to pick up in the future as more experience is gained and robots with additional capabilities are developed.

What’s next?

TEPCO will have to “probe down into the debris pile, which is over a meter thick, so you have to go down and see what’s inside,” Barrett said, noting that at Three Mile Island, the debris on the surface was very different from the material deeper inside. He said multiple samples from different locations must be collected and analyzed to better understand the melted debris and develop necessary equipment, such as stronger robots for future larger-scale removal.

Compared to collecting a tiny sample for analysis, it will be a more difficult challenge to develop and operate robots that can cut larger chunks of melted debris into pieces and put that material into canisters for safe storage.

There are also two other damaged reactors, Unit 1 and Unit 3, which are in worse condition and will take even longer to deal with. TEPCO plans to deploy a set of small drones in Unit 1 for a probe later this year and is developing even smaller “micro” drones for Unit 3, which is filled with a larger amount of water.

Separately, hundreds of spent fuel rods remain in unenclosed cooling pools on the top floor of both Unit 1 and 2. This is a potential safety risk if there’s another major quake. Removal of spent fuel rods has been completed at Unit 3.

When will the decommissioning be finished?

Removal of the melted fuel was initially planned to start in late 2021 but has been delayed by technical issues, underscoring the difficulty of the process. The government says decommissioning is expected to take 30-40 years, while some experts say it could take as long as 100 years.

Others are pushing for an entombment of the plant, as at Chernobyl after its 1986 explosion, to reduce radiation levels and risks for plant workers.

That won’t work at the seaside Fukushima plant, Barrett says.

“You’re in a high seismic area, you’re in a high-water area, and there are a lot of unknowns in those (reactor) buildings,” he said. “I don’t think you can just entomb it and wait.”
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Taipei, Taiwan — The U.S.-China technology war is playing out in the smartphone market in China, where global rivals Apple and Huawei released new phones this week. Industry experts say Apple, which lacks home-field advantage, faces many challenges in defending its market share in the country.

The biggest highlight of the iPhone 16 is its artificial intelligence system, dubbed Apple Intelligence, while the Huawei Mate XT features innovative tri-fold screen technology.  But at a starting price of RMB 19,999, about $2,810, the Mate XT will cost about three times as much as the iPhone 16.

According to data from VMall, Huawei’s official shopping site, nearly 5.74 million people in China preordered the Mate XT as of late Thursday, 5½ days after Huawei began accepting preorders.

But in a survey conducted on the Chinese microblogging site Weibo by Radio France International, half of the 9,200 respondents said they would not purchase a Mate XT because the price is prohibitive. An additional 3,500 said they are not in the market for a new phone now.

“I suggest that Huawei release some products that ordinary people can afford,” a Weibo user wrote under the name “Diamond Man Yang Dong Feng.”

The iPhone 16 is not available for preorder until Friday, but some e-commerce vendors in China have promised to deliver the new devices to consumers within half a day to two days of sale.

In the competition between Apple and Huawei, iPhone 16 has some inherent disadvantages, said Shih-Fang Chiu, a senior industry analyst at the Taiwan Institute of Economic Research.

“Apple’s strength is information security and privacy, but this is difficult to achieve in the Chinese market, where the government can control the data in China’s market to a relatively high degree. In the era of AI mobile phones, this will bring challenges to Apple’s development in the Chinese market,” Chiu said.

Apple’s AI service on its iPhone 16 will roll out at a gradual pace in different languages, first in English and other languages later this year. The Chinese version will not be available until 2025.

There are other challenges Apple faces as well, Chiu added, such as regulatory controls, consumer sentiment favoring local brands and weakening spending power amid China’s economic slowdown.

According to Counterpoint Research’s statistics, Huawei held a market share of 15% in the second quarter of 2024, surpassing Apple’s 14% market share. That compares with Apple’s 17.3% share in 2023 as reported by the industry research firm International Data Corporation China, or IDC China.

Ryan Reith, the program vice president for IDC’s Mobile Device Tracker suite, said in a written response to VOA that the iPhone 16 has not made significant hardware upgrades and that AI applications alone are not attractive because consumers have GPT and other AI solutions.

AI applications are also another hurdle. Analyst Chih-Yen Tai said iPhone 16’s AI services involve personal data collection, information application and cloud computing, which will require collaboration with Chinese service providers.

That, along with the ban on Chinese civil servants and employees at state-owned enterprises from using their iPhone at work in recent years, will affect the sales of Apple products, said Tai, the deputy director of the Center for Science and Technology Policy Evaluation at Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research in Taipei.

“China’s patriotism has led to a strong number of preorders” for Huawei’s tri-fold phones, Tai said.

“The competitors in China will sell the idea [to consumers] that iPhones will soon be edged out of the premium smartphone market. So, in the next stage, the affordable iPhone versions will be the key to whether it [Apple] can return to China or its previous glorious sales era,” Tai said.

Tzu-Ang Chen, a senior consultant in the digital technology industry in Taipei, said use of Huawei’s HarmonyOS operating system surpassed that of Apple’s iOS in China in the first quarter of this year, representing China’s determination to “go its own way” and create “one world, two systems.”

“The U.S.-China technology war has extended to smartphones,” Chen said. “IPhone sales in China will get worse and worse, obviously because Huawei is doing better, and coupled with patriotism, Apple’s position in the hearts of 1.4 billion people will never return.”

He said that as China seeks to develop pro-China markets among member countries of the Belt and Road Initiative in Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Africa, China-made mobile phones may become their first choice.

VOA’s Adrianna Zhang contributed to this report.
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WASHINGTON — Boeing’s beleaguered Starliner made its long-awaited return to Earth on Saturday without the astronauts who rode it up to the International Space Station, after NASA ruled the trip back too risky.

After years of delays, Starliner launched in June for what was meant to be a roughly weeklong test mission — a final shakedown before it could be certified to rotate crew to and from the orbital laboratory.

But unexpected thruster malfunctions and helium leaks en route to the ISS derailed those plans, and NASA ultimately decided it was safer to bring crewmates Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams back on a rival SpaceX Crew Dragon — though they’ll have to wait until February 2025.

The gumdrop-shaped Boeing capsule touched down softly at the White Sands Space Harbor in New Mexico, its descent slowed by parachutes and cushioned by airbags, having departed the ISS around six hours earlier.

As it streaked red-hot across the night sky, ground teams reported hearing sonic booms. The spacecraft endured temperatures of 1,650 degrees Celsius during atmospheric reentry.

NASA lavished praise on Boeing during a post-flight press conference where representatives from the company were conspicuously absent.

“It was a bullseye landing,” said Steve Stich, program manager for NASA’s commercial crew program. “The entry in particular has been darn near flawless.”

Still, he acknowledged that certain new issues had come to light, including the failure of a new thruster and the temporary loss of the guidance system.

He added it was too early to talk about whether Starliner’s next flight, scheduled for August next year, would be crewed, instead stressing NASA needed time to analyze the data they had gathered and assess what changes were required to both the design of the ship and the way it is flown.

Ahead of the return leg, Boeing carried out extensive ground testing to address the technical hitches encountered during Starliner’s ascent, then promised — both publicly and behind closed doors — that it could safely bring the astronauts home. In the end, NASA disagreed.

Asked whether he stood by that decision, NASA’s Stich said: “It’s always hard to have that retrospective look. We made the decision to have an uncrewed flight based on what we knew at the time and based on our knowledge of the thrusters and based on the modeling that we had.”

History of setbacks

Even without crew aboard, the stakes were high for Boeing, a century-old aerospace giant.

With its reputation already battered by safety concerns surrounding its commercial jets, its long-term prospects for crewed space missions hung in the balance.

Shortly after undocking, Starliner executed a powerful “breakout burn” to swiftly clear it from the station and prevent any risk of collision — a maneuver that would have been unnecessary if crew were aboard to take manual control if needed.

Mission teams then conducted thorough checks of the thrusters required for the critical “deorbit burn” that guided the capsule onto its reentry path around 40 minutes before touchdown.

Though it was widely expected that Starliner would stick the landing, as it had on two previous uncrewed tests, Boeing’s program continues to languish behind schedule.

In 2014, NASA awarded both Boeing and SpaceX multibillion-dollar contracts to develop spacecraft to taxi astronauts to and from the ISS, after the end of the Space Shuttle program left the US space agency reliant on Russian rockets.

Although initially considered the underdog, Elon Musk’s SpaceX surged ahead of Boeing, and has successfully flown dozens of astronauts since 2020.

The Starliner program, meanwhile, has faced numerous setbacks — from a software glitch that prevented the capsule from rendezvousing with the ISS during its first uncrewed test flight in 2019, to the discovery of flammable tape in the cabin after its second test in 2022, to the current troubles.

With the ISS scheduled to be decommissioned in 2030, the longer Starliner takes to become fully operational, the less time it will have to prove its worth.
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Brussels — Elon Musk’s woes are hardly limited to Brazil as he now risks possible EU sanctions in the coming months for allegedly breaking new content rules.

Access to X has been suspended in South America’s largest country since Saturday after a long-running legal battle over disinformation ended with a judge ordering a shutdown.

But Brazil is not alone in its concerns about X.

Politicians worldwide and digital rights groups have repeatedly raised concerns about Musk’s actions since taking over what was then Twitter in late 2022, including sacking many employees tasked with content moderation and maintaining ties with EU regulators.

Musk’s “free speech absolutist” attitude has led to clashes with Brussels.

The European Union could decide within months to take action against X, including possible fines, as part of an ongoing probe into whether the platform is breaching a landmark content moderation law, the Digital Services Act (DSA).

Nothing has yet been decided but any fines could be as high as 6% of X’s annual worldwide turnover unless the company makes changes in line with EU demands.

But if Musk’s reactions are anything to go by, another showdown is on the cards.

When the EU in July accused X of deceptive practices in violation of the DSA, Musk warned: “We look forward to a very public battle in court.”

The temperature was raised even further a month later with another war of words on social media between Musk and the EU’s top tech enforcer, Thierry Breton.

Breton reminded Musk in a letter of his legal duty to stop “harmful content” from spreading on X hours before an interview with U.S. presidential challenger Donald Trump live on the platform.

Musk responded by mocking Breton and sharing a meme that carried an obscene message.

EU ban ‘very unlikely’

Despite the bitter barbs, the European Commission, the EU’s digital watchdog, insists that dialogue with X is ongoing.

“X continues to cooperate with the commission and respond to questions,” the commission’s digital spokesman, Thomas Regnier, told AFP.

Experts also agree that a Brazil-like shutdown in the 27-country EU is unlikely, although it has the legal right.

The DSA would allow the bloc to demand a judge in Ireland, where X has its EU headquarters, order a temporary suspension until the infringements cease.

Breton has repeatedly insisted that “Europe will not hesitate to do what is necessary.”

But since X has around 106 million EU users, significantly higher than the 22 million in Brazil, the belief is that Musk would not want to risk a similar move in Europe.

“Obviously, we can never exclude it, but it is very unlikely,” said Alexandre de Streel of the think tank Centre on Regulation in Europe.

Regardless of what happens next, de Streel said the case would likely end up in the EU courts, calling X “the least cooperative company” with the bloc.

Jan Penfrat of the European Digital Rights advocacy group said a ban was “a very last resort measure” and that X would “probably” not close shop in the EU.

“I would hope that the commission thinks about this very, very hard before going there because this (a ban) would have a tremendously negative effect on the right to freedom of expression and access to information,” Penfrat said.

EU’s X-File

The commission in July accused X of misleading users with its blue checkmarks for certified accounts, insufficient advertising transparency and failing to give researchers access to the platform’s data.

That allegation is part of a wider probe into X, launched in December, and regulators are still probing how it tackles the spread of illegal content and information manipulation.

X now has access to the EU’s file and can defend itself including by replying to the commission’s findings.

The list of governments angry with Musk is growing. He also raised hackles over the summer in the UK during days of rioting sparked by online misinformation that the suspect behind a mass stabbing that killed three girls was a Muslim asylum seeker.

The billionaire, whose personal X account has 196 million followers, engaged in disputes with British politicians after sharing inflammatory posts and claiming a “civil war is inevitable” in the country.

Non-EU member Britain will soon be able to implement a similar law to the DSA with enforcement expected to start next year.
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SAO PAULO, brazil — Elon Musk’s satellite-based internet service provider Starlink backtracked Tuesday and said it will comply with a Brazilian Supreme Court justice’s order to block the billionaire’s social media platform, X. 

In a statement posted on X, Starlink said it will heed Justice Alexandre de Moraes’ order despite him having frozen the company’s assets. Previously, it informally told the telecommunications regulator that it would not comply until de Moraes reversed course. 

“Regardless of the illegal treatment of Starlink in freezing our assets, we are complying with the order to block access to X in Brazil,” the company statement said. “We continue to pursue all legal avenues, as are others who agree that @alexandre’s recent order violate the Brazilian constitution.” 

De Moraes froze the company’s accounts last week as a means to compel it to cover X’s fines, which exceed $3 million, reasoning that the two companies are part of the same economic group. Starlink filed an appeal, its law firm Veirano told The Associated Press on August 3, but has declined to comment further in the days since. 

Days later, the justice ordered the suspension of X for refusing to name a local legal representative, as required in order to receive notifications of court decisions and swiftly take any requisite action — particularly, in X’s case, the taking down of accounts.

A Supreme Court panel unanimously upheld the block on Monday, undermining efforts by Musk and his supporters to cast the justice as an authoritarian renegade intent on censoring political speech in Brazil. 

Had Starlink continued to disobey de Moraes by providing access, telecommunications regulator Anatel could eventually have seized equipment from Starlink’s 23 ground stations that ensure the quality of its internet service, Arthur Coimbra, an Anatel board member, said on a video call from his office in Brasilia. 

The company has said it has more than 250,000 clients in Brazil, and it is particularly popular in the country’s more remote corners where it is the only available option. 

Some legal experts questioned de Moraes’ basis for freezing Starlink’s accounts, given that its parent company SpaceX has no integration with X. Musk noted on X that the two companies have different shareholder structures. 

X has clashed with de Moraes over its reluctance to block users — mostly far-right activists accused of undermining Brazilian democracy and allies of former President Jair Bolsonaro — and has alleged that de Moraes wants an in-country legal representative so that Brazilian authorities can exert leverage over the company by having someone to arrest. 
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RIO DE JANEIRO — A Brazilian Supreme Court panel on Monday unanimously upheld the decision of one of its justices to block billionaire Elon Musk’s social media platform X nationwide, according to the court’s website.

The broader support among justices undermines the effort by Musk and his supporters to cast Justice Alexandre de Moraes as an authoritarian renegade intent on censoring political speech in Brazil.

The panel that voted in a virtual session was made up of five of the full bench’s 11 justices, including de Moraes, who last Friday ordered the platform blocked for refusing to name a local legal representative, as required by law. It will stay suspended until it complies with his orders and pays outstanding fines that as of last week exceeded $3 million, according to his decision.

The platform has clashed with de Moraes over its reluctance to block users and has alleged that de Moraes wants an in-country legal representative so that Brazilian authorities can exert leverage over the company by having someone to arrest.

De Moraes also set a daily fine of $8,900 for people or companies using virtual private networks, or VPNs, to access X. Some legal experts questioned the grounds for that decision and how it would be enforced, including Brazil’s bar association, which said it would request that the Supreme Court review that provision.

But the majority of the panel upheld the VPN fine — with one justice opposing unless users are shown to be using X to commit crimes.

Judge feuding with Musk

Brazil is one of the biggest markets for X, with tens of millions of users. Its block marked a dramatic escalation in a monthslong feud between Musk and de Moraes over free speech, far-right accounts and misinformation.

Over the weekend, many X users in Brazil said they felt disconnected from the world and began migrating en masse to alternative platforms such as Bluesky and Threads.

The suspension has proceeded to set up a showdown between de Moraes and Musk’s satellite internet provider Starlink, which is refusing to enforce the justice’s decision.

“He violated the constitution of Brazil repeatedly and egregiously, after swearing an oath to protect it,” Musk wrote in the hours before the vote, adding a flurry of insults and accusations in the wake of the panel’s vote. On Sunday, Musk announced the creation of an X account to publish the justice’s decisions that he said would show they violated Brazilian law.

But legal experts have said such claims don’t hold water, noting that de Moraes’ peers have repeatedly endorsed his rulings — as they did Monday. Although his actions are viewed by experts as legal, they have sparked some debate over whether one man has been afforded too much power, or if his rulings should have more transparency.

De Moraes’ decision to quickly refer his order for panel approval served to obtain “collective, more institutional support that attempts to depersonalize the decision,” Conrado Hübner, a constitutional law expert at the University of Sao Paulo, told The Associated Press.

It is standard for a justice to refer such cases to a five-justice panel, Hübner said. In exceptional cases, the justice also could refer the case to the full bench for review. Had de Moraes done the latter, two justices who have questioned his decisions in the past — and were appointed by former right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro — would have had the opportunity to object or hinder the vote’s advance.

Starlink shutdown next?

X’s block already led de Moraes last week to freeze the Brazilian financial assets of Starlink to force it to cover X’s fines, reasoning that the two companies are part of the same economic group. The company says it has more than 250,000 clients in Brazil.

Legal experts have questioned the legal basis of that move, and Starlink’s law firm Veirano has told the AP it has appealed the freeze. It declined to comment further.

In a show of defiance, Starlink told the telecommunications regulator Anatel that it would not block X access until its financial accounts were unfrozen, Anatel’s press office said in an email to the AP. Starlink didn’t respond to a request for comment.

That means a shutdown of Starlink is likely, although enforcement will be difficult given the company’s satellites aren’t inside national territory, said Luca Belli, coordinator of the Technology and Society Center at the Getulio Vargas Foundation. It is popular in Brazil’s expansive rural and forested areas.

Anatel’s President Carlos Baigorri told local media GloboNews late Sunday afternoon that he has relayed Starlink’s decision to Justice de Moraes.

Baigorri told GloboNews that the “maximum sanction” for a telecom company would be revocation of its license. He said if Starlink loses its license and continues providing service, it would be committing a crime. Anatel could seize equipment from Starlink’s 23 ground stations in Brazil that ensure the quality of its internet service, he said.

“It is highly probable there is a political escalation” because Starlink is “explicitly refusing to comply with orders, national laws,” said Belli, who is also a professor at the Getulio Vargas Foundation’s law school.

The arguments from Musk, a self-proclaimed “free-speech absolutist,” have found fertile ground with Brazil’s political right, who view de Moraes’ actions as political persecution against Bolsonaro’s supporters.

On Brazilian orders, X previously has shut down accounts, including those of lawmakers affiliated with Bolsonaro’s right-wing party and far-right activists accused of undermining Brazilian democracy. X’s lawyers in April sent a document to the Supreme Court, saying that it had suspended or blocked 226 users since 2019.

Bolsonaro and his allies have cheered on Musk for defying de Moraes. Supporters rallied in April along Rio de Janeiro’s Copacabana beach with a giant sign reading “Brazil Thanks Elon Musk.”

Earlier that month, de Moraes ordered an investigation into Musk over the dissemination of defamatory fake news and another probe over possible obstruction, incitement and criminal organization.

Bolsonaro is also the target of a de Moraes probe over whether the former president had a role in inciting an attempted coup to overturn the results of the 2022 election that he lost. 
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