Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi spoke with his respective counterparts from France and Germany, Jean-Noel Barrot and Johann Wadephul, on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference's (MSC) first day, his department said in a statement issued on Sunday.
During the conversation with Barrot, Wang stressed the significance of China and France being "independent and responsible major countries," urging the strengthening of their bilateral cooperation.
Meanwhile, during the meeting with Wadephul, Wanged called on Germany to join China in opposing global unilateralism.
Anduril Industries Inc.is in talks to raise as much as $8 billion in a new funding round that’s slated to increase its valuation to more than $60 billion, according to people familiar with the matter.
The new financing nearly doubles the defense tech company’s value from a $2.5 billion funding round last summer — indicating its traction with the US government and investors’ appetite for artificial intelligence technology in military contexts. Some details of the financing were reported earlier by the Information.
A judge declared a mistrial on Friday in a case of five current and former Stanford University students related to the 2024 pro-Palestinian protests when demonstrators barricaded themselves inside the school president's office.
Twelve protesters were initially charged last year with felony vandalism, according to prosecutors who said at least one suspect entered the building by breaking a window. Police arrested 13 people on June 5, 2024, in relation to the incident and the university said the building underwent "extensive" damage.
The case was tried in Santa Clara County Superior Court against five defendants charged with felony vandalism and felony conspiracy to trespass. The rest previously accepted plea deals or diversion programs.
The jury was deadlocked. It voted nine to three to convict on the felony charge of vandalism and eight to four to convict on the felony charge to trespass. Jurors failed to reach a verdict after deliberations.
The charges were among the most serious against participants in the 2024 pro-Palestinian protest movement on U.S. colleges in which demonstrators demanded an end to Israel's war in Gaza and Washington's support for its ally along with a divestment of funds by their universities from companies supporting Israel.
Prosecutors in the case said the defendants engaged in unlawful property destruction.
"This case is about a group of people who destroyed someone else's property and caused hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage. That is against the law," Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen said in a statement, adding he sought a new trial.
Anthony Brass, a lawyer for one of the protesters, told the New York Times his side was not defending lawlessness but "the concept of transparency and ethical investment."
"This is a win for these young people of conscience and a win for free speech," Brass said, adding "humanitarian activism has no place in a criminal courtroom."
Protesters had renamed the building "Dr. Adnan's Office" after Adnan Al-Bursh, a Palestinian doctor who died in an Israeli prison after months of detention.
Over 3,000 were arrested during the 2024 U.S. pro-Palestinian protest movement, according to media tallies. Some students faced suspension, expulsion and degree revocation.
Whether the brief shutdown of El Paso airspace was driven by a reported U.S. military directed-energy counter-drone weapon or what senior U.S. officials characterized as aMexican cartel drone incursionremains unresolved at the moment.
Our assessment is that, with FIFA World Cup matches just months away, the Trump administration is racing to deploy counter-drone systems. After all, President Donald Trump signed last year's "Restoring American Airspace Sovereignty" executive order, which set the stage for accelerating counter-UAS and airspace security technology.
On Tuesday, New York Governor Kathy Hochul announced that, through the federal Counter-Unmanned Aircraft Systems (C-UAS) Grant Program, four New York public safety agencies will use $17.2 million to fund equipment and systems that "detect, identify, track, monitor and/or mitigate unmanned aircraft systems" during the FIFA World Cup matches.
"With the evolution of technology comes new ways it can be used to harm others," Governor Hochul said. "This funding will go a long way to keep New Yorkers safe while allowing historic events like the 2026 World Cup and our nation's 250th birthday to be celebrated safely and securely."
Earlier this morning, defense tech firm Fortem Technologies announced it had received a multimillion-dollar contract to deploy its net-equipped DroneHunter at U.S. venues during soccer games this summer.
Last month, U.S. military, federal agencies, and local authorities gathered for a two-day summit near U.S. Northern Command headquarters, bringing together federal agencies, 11 U.S. host committees, and FIFA's security heads to prepare for matches across the United States, Mexico, and Canada.
"We're never going to not worry about a dirty bomb," Miami-Dade County Sheriff Rosanna Cordero-Stutz, who participated in the planning session, told Politico. "But we also recognize that there's a lot of other things that we need to worry about as well."
"You can't just give counter-UAS mitigation equipment to law enforcement that hasn't learned how to use it yet," said White House FIFA World Cup Task Force Coordinator Andrew Giuliani, who coordinated the federal government's role in tournament preparations and addressed the drone threat at the summit.
To FIFA officials and U.S. government leaders, the fastest-growing threat to the host cities across North America will be drones.
Last month, we outlined the theme that the rise of "Next-Gen Counter-Drone Security" was certainly upon us, but our focus was on securing data centers.
We pointed out that Wall Street analysts largely end their analysis at the financing and construction of next-generation data centers, with limited discussion regarding the modern security architecture required once these facilities are built and become instant high-value targets for non-state actors or foreign adversaries (read this); traditional perimeter measures such as metal chain-link fencing and standard surveillance systems are rendered utterly useless in the world of emerging AI threats, including coordinated autonomous drone or swarm-based attacks.
Our view is that the counter-drone industry is set to see a rush of investment in companies developing and deploying detect-and-identify systems, as well as defeat systems such as soft-kill or hard-kill options that could include kinetic sentry systems.
If you're wondering what a hard-kill option looks like ...
That the U.S. Surveillance State is rapidly growing to the point of ubiquity has been demonstrated over the past week by seemingly benign events. While the picture that emerges is grim, to put it mildly, at least Americans are again confronted with crystal clarity over how severe this has become.
The latest round of valid panic over privacy began during the Super Bowl held on Sunday. During the game, Amazon ran a commercial for its Ring camera security system. The ad manipulatively exploited people’s love of dogs to induce them to ignore the consequences of what Amazon was touting. It seems that trick did not work.
The ad highlighted what the company calls its “Search Party” feature, whereby one can upload a picture, for example, of a lost dog. Doing so will activate multiple other Amazon Ring cameras in the neighborhood, which will, in turn, use AI programs to scan all dogs, it seems, and identify the one that is lost. The 30-second commercial was full of heart-tugging scenes of young children and elderly people being reunited with their lost dogs.
But the graphic Amazon used seems to have unwittingly depicted how invasive this technology can be. That this capability now exists in a product that has long been pitched as nothing more than a simple tool for homeowners to monitor their own homes created, it seems, an unavoidable contract between public understanding of Ring and what Amazon was now boasting it could do.
Many people were not just surprised but quite shocked and alarmed to learn that what they thought was merely their own personal security system now has the ability to link with countless other Ring cameras to form a neighborhood-wide (or city-wide, or state-wide) surveillance dragnet. That Amazon emphasized that this feature is available (for now) only to those who “opt-in” did not assuage concerns.
Numerous media outlets sounded the alarm. The online privacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) condemned Ring’s program as previewing “a world where biometric identification could be unleashed from consumer devices to identify, track, and locate anything — human, pet, and otherwise.”
Many private citizens who previously used Ring also reacted negatively. “Viral videos online show people removing or destroying their cameras over privacy concerns,” reported USA Today. The backlash became so severe that, just days later, Amazon — seeking to assuage public anger — announced the termination of a partnership between Ring and Flock Safety, a police surveillance tech company (while Flock is unrelated to Search Party, public backlash made it impossible, at least for now, for Amazon to send Ring’s user data to a police surveillance firm).
The Amazon ad seems to have triggered a long-overdue spotlight on how the combination of ubiquitous cameras, AI, and rapidly advancing facial recognition software will render the term “privacy” little more than a quaint concept from the past. As EFF put it, Ring’s program “could already run afoul of biometric privacy laws in some states, which require explicit, informed consent from individuals before a company can just run face recognition on someone.”
Those concerns escalated just a few days later in the context of the Tucson disappearance of Nancy Guthrie, mother of long-time TODAY Show host Savannah Guthrie. At the home where she lives, Nancy Guthrie used Google’s Nest camera for security, a product similar to Amazon’s Ring.
Guthrie, however, did not pay Google for a subscription for those cameras, instead solely using the cameras for real-time monitoring. As CBS News explained, “with a free Google Nest plan, the video should have been deleted within 3 to 6 hours — long after Guthrie was reported missing.” Even professional privacy advocates have understood that customers who use Nest without a subscription will not have their cameras connected to Google’s data servers, meaning that no recordings will be stored or available for any period beyond a few hours.
For that reason, Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos announced early on “that there was no video available in part because Guthrie didn’t have an active subscription to the company.” Many people, for obvious reasons, prefer to avoid permanently storing comprehensive daily video reports with Google of when they leave and return to their own home, or who visits them at their home, when, and for how long.
Despite all this, FBI investigators on the case were somehow magically able to “recover” this video from Guthrie’s camera many days later. FBI Director Kash Patel was essentially forced to admit this when he released still images of what appears to be the masked perpetrator who broke into Guthrie’s home. (The Google user agreement, which few users read, does protect the company by stating that images may be stored even in the absence of a subscription.)
While the “discovery” of footage from this home camera by Google engineers is obviously of great value to the Guthrie family and law enforcement agents searching for Guthrie, it raises obvious yet serious questions about why Google, contrary to common understanding, was storing the video footage of unsubscribed users. A former NSA data researcher and CEO of a cybersecurity firm, Patrick Johnson, told CBS: “There's kind of this old saying that data is never deleted, it's just renamed.”
It is rather remarkable that Americans are being led, more or less willingly, into a state-corporate, Panopticon-like domestic surveillance state with relatively little resistance, though the widespread reaction to Amazon’s Ring ad is encouraging. Much of that muted reaction may be due to a lack of realization about the severity of the evolving privacy threat. Beyond that, privacy and other core rights can seem abstract and less of a priority than more material concerns, at least until they are gone.
It is always the case that there are benefits available from relinquishing core civil liberties: allowing infringements on free speech may reduce false claims and hateful ideas; allowing searches and seizures without warrants will likely help the police catch more criminals, and do so more quickly; giving up privacy may, in fact, enhance security.
But the core premise of the West generally, and the U.S. in particular, is that those trade-offs are never worthwhile. Americans still all learn and are taught to admire the iconic (if not apocryphal) 1775 words of Patrick Henry, which came to define the core ethos of the Revolutionary War and American Founding: “Give me liberty or give me death.” It is hard to express in more definitive terms on which side of that liberty-versus-security trade-off the U.S. was intended to fall.
The United States Southern Command (USSOUTHCOM) announced it has struck a vessel in the Caribbean Sea that belonged to, as it put it, a designated terrorist organization.
The Southern Command did not specify the group in question. It said that the attack was conducted "a lethal kinetic strike." "Intelligence confirmed the vessel was transiting along known narco-trafficking routes in the Caribbean and was engaged in narco-trafficking operations," it insisted.
The USSOUTHCOM added that none of its troops were injured, while three "narco-terrorists" were killed.
The United States Department of Defense (DoD) used Anthropic PBC's artificial intelligence (AI) large language model (LLM) Claude during its operation to capture the deposed Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Axios reported.
The outlet said it could not determine exactly what purpose Claude played in Maduro's arrest. However, it pointed out that it was used actively during the operation, not just beforehand. It also noted that the US military had previously used Claude to assess satellite material or intelligence.
