WORLD ROUNDUP AI Enters the Critical Mineral Race | China is Winning the Global South, and more
· Pakistan Arrests Man Over Disinformation That Helped Spur U.K. Riots
Local police sources indicated that the arrest was made at the request of the British authorities, although there was no official confirmation
· As repression in Nicaragua Deepened, One Bank Kept the Money Flowing
How foreign development loans helped the Ortega regime build a brutal police state in Nicaragua
· AI Enters the Critical Mineral Race
Can the technology give Washington the edge in a vital—and deeply competitive—industry?
· The Philippines Is Washington’s New Front Line Against China
Manila is receiving unprecedented U.S. help to beef up its defenses
· China is Winning the Global South
While the United States and its allies have focused extensively on the military and technological fronts in competing with China, the third front in the Global South remains critical yet underappreciated
· Technology Controls to Contain China’s Quantum Ambitions Are Here
They are neither effective nor desirable
Pakistan Arrests Man Over Disinformation That Helped Spur U.K. Riots (Salman Masood, New York Times)
The Pakistani authorities arrested a man this week on charges of cyberterrorism for spreading fake news that helped set off violent riots in Britain following a deadly stabbing attack last month.
Racist and anti-immigrant rioting flared for days after the suspect in the killing of three young girls at a dance class, in the town of Southport, was falsely identified online as a Muslim asylum seeker.
In Pakistan, Farhan Asif, a freelance web developer, was arrested on Tuesday at his residence in Lahore, the local police said. He worked for Channel3Now, a news aggregation website that published sensational claims about the Southport attacker.
The site incorrectly reported that the suspect was a 17-year-old Muslim who had entered Britain by boat the previous year and was on “an MI6 watch list,” referring to Britain’s foreign intelligence service. In reality, the British authorities arrested a 17-year-old who was born and raised in Britain by a Christian family from Rwanda.
As repression in Nicaragua Deepened, One Bank Kept the Money Flowing (Desmond Butler, Paulina Villegas and Erin Patrick O’Connor, Washington Post)
An international development bank provided hundreds of millions of dollars in funding to the Nicaraguan government, even as the United Nations and human rights groups documented widespread killing, torture and forced exile of government opponents, a Washington Post investigation found.
The Central American Bank for Economic Integration (CABEI) — which has been largely funded by democratic governments, including the United States, Taiwan and South Korea — lent $2.65 billion to Nicaragua between 2018 and 2022, mostly for infrastructure and environmental projects. During those years, Nicaragua slid into violent repression, but even after extensive documentation of the rights abuses, some of the funding also flowed to the main perpetrators — the Nicaraguan police — according to an examination of records from the Nicaraguan government and the bank, as well as interviews with current and former CABEI officials and former Nicaraguan government ministers.
The bank’s lending to Nicaragua rose from $365 million in 2018 — the year the killings and mass arrests began — to a peak of $805 million in 2021, when President Daniel Ortega detained dozens of political dissidents and aspiring presidential candidates, expelling many of them from the country and seizing their property.
