Tag: Trump, Donald J

The Next China Shock Is Here

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This is an edited transcript of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the episode wherever you get your podcasts. The biggest economic story in the world right now is China’s growing dominance across advanced manufacturing sector after advanced manufacturing sector — from electric vehicles to batteries to solar panels to software like A.I. and open models, where they’ve become a world leader. What is happening here is very different than what we call the first China Shock, when China became a big exporter of things that were not…

Trump Gives Green Light to U.S. Companies to Aim Hacks at Cybercriminals

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The Trump administration is encouraging American companies to conduct their own cyberattacks against criminal hackers, a move that White House officials say will help address digital scourges like ransomware but that some former officials and security experts warn could lead to chaos. Under a national security memorandum that President Trump signed late Wednesday, select companies would work with the Justice and Homeland Security Departments to strike foreign cybercriminal groups with hacks under certain conditions. The attacks would allow both surveillance of the criminal networks and specific types of hacking operations…

Trump White House Readies AI Framework to Review Security Risks

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In a meeting on Tuesday with top artificial intelligence companies, White House officials said the federal government planned to review only certain types of artificial intelligence models for potential security risks and not others, according to four people familiar with the discussions. The A.I. models the government plans to review are known as “closed” models, which do not publish their underlying code and are made by companies like Anthropic and OpenAI, according to three of the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the details of the meeting were…

What We Know About Dr. Fauci Pleading the Fifth in Senate Hearing on Covid Origins

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After Dr. Anthony S. Fauci invoked his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself at the start of a Senate hearing on Wednesday, Republicans spent the next three hours battering him with questions and allegations as he sat in silence. Citing thousands of pages of government records, they held Dr. Fauci, the government’s top Covid adviser during the pandemic, responsible for school closures and lockdowns; accused him of enriching himself as people died; and even mocked his interactions with celebrities. Most significantly, they accused him of funding research that led…

Fauci, in Private Diary, Reflected on Covid’s Origins and His Own Fame

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The world was just awakening to the novel coronavirus, and a full-fledged pandemic was still in the future, when Dr. Anthony S. Fauci jotted a note in his diary on Jan. 26, 2020, musing about whether the virus might have originated in an open-air “wet market,” where live animals were sold, in Wuhan, China. “Now we know the market was not the source, it was the amplifier,” Dr. Fauci, then the government’s top infectious disease expert, wrote. “Having said that, somewhere the virus jumped from animals to humans.” Those private…

Trump Prepares Yet Another Strategy to Resurrect Global Tariffs

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The Trump administration has cycled through trade law after trade law as it tries to find a sound legal basis to impose the steep tariffs on foreign products that President Trump wants. It is poised to try yet another approach. A global 10 percent tariff that Mr. Trump imposed in February after the Supreme Court struck down his earlier global tariffs is set to lapse at 12:01 a.m. on Friday. The administration has a new batch of tariffs ready to go to replace it, which could be announced as soon…

Nuclear Energy Revival Puts Westinghouse in Prime Position

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A large investment firm and a Canadian uranium mining and enrichment company made a big bet three years ago on nuclear power by acquiring Westinghouse, an energy company that had fallen on hard times. Now, that wager is proving prescient. Soaring demand for electricity, driven by data centers, and renewed bipartisan and global interest in nuclear power have made Westinghouse a go-to source for nuclear power technology. The prominence of Westinghouse in the development of new nuclear power plants gained international attention Wednesday after the Trump administration announced a broad…

Iran, China, Canada? A Defense of Trump’s Grand Strategy

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Is President Trump’s grand strategy unraveling? The United States is at war with Iran, China is ascendant, Russia and Ukraine are stalemated and American allies are openly questioning our commitment to them. Elbridge Colby, the under secretary of defense for policy, joins me to discuss the state of America’s foreign policy and he makes the case that Trump’s approach to our allies and adversaries is making us stronger. Below is an edited transcript of an episode of “Interesting Times.” We recommend listening to it in its original form for the…

Rubio and Chinese Diplomat Make Plans for Trump and Xi’s Washington Summit

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Secretary of State Marco Rubio said he spoke with China’s top diplomat on Wednesday about a state visit scheduled for September by Xi Jinping, China’s leader, to Washington, where President Trump intends to try to bolster what he sees as a personal friendship the two men are developing. The fact that the two nations’ top diplomats spent much of a meeting in Manila talking about the visit is the strongest sign yet that the summit is on schedule, despite remarks last week from Mr. Trump blaming China for trying to…

Tariffs Will Long Outlive Trump

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Donald Trump’s most consequential construction project may not be a ballroom or an arch, but his tariff wall. His latest threat to raise tariffs to 50 percent on some Canadian goods, as drastic as it is, is not nearly as significant as what’s coming next. By the end of this month, the administration is expected to introduce major tariffs on dozens of countries intended to ensure what once was a temporary regime lasts well beyond this presidency. Unlike most previous rounds of tariffs, including the ones just threatened on Canada,…