As clinicians see more TikTok challenge injuries, explaining them is often hard.

The Supreme Court dealt a major legal blow to former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows on Tuesday, refusing to move the Georgia election interference charges against him to federal court.

The office of the U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), a federal watchdog agency, revealed in its regular report that China has held more than 200 meetings with Taliban terrorists since their return to power, Afghanistan's Tolo News reported this weekend.

The post U.S. Watchdog Report: China Holds More Meetings with Taliban than Any Other Country appeared first on Breitbart.

The California-based Middlebury Institute of International Studies published research this week that showed China has constructed a prototype nuclear reactor that could fit aboard a large surface vessel - a sign that China is making progress toward building a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier.

The post Report: China Builds ‘Prototype’ Nuclear Reactor for Aircraft Carrier appeared first on Breitbart.

If the legislation is passed, social media platforms including X, TikTok, Instagram and Facebook would have one year to work out how to exclude Australian children.

Chinese business people may be able to find creative ways to avoid U.S. tariffs, but for Beijing, its concerns for the incoming Trump presidency go beyond trade.

The annual voyage into European cinema set sail at the 29th European Union Film Festival’s opening night, where Delhi’s cinephiles huddled in eager clusters at the India Habitat Centre, in feverish anticipation of the Italian Palme D’or nominee

The inaugural show of Gallery DTALE ARCHIST, a new art space in the city, will be on till November 15

This follow-up to last year’s ‘Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One’, which earned over $571 million globally, is expected to draw blockbuster attention as one of the summer’s biggest releases

Megan Fox has announced pregnancy with Machine Gun Kelly after experiencing a pregnancy loss in 2023

One of the biggest advantages to PC gaming is having access to multiple generations of game releases. We’ve seen entire …

Continue reading "Musou Games on Steam Deck – Samurai Warriors, Dynasty Warriors, Warriors Orochi, Empires, and Much More Tested on Steam Deck OLED"

Welcome to this week’s edition of the Steam Deck Weekly. I delayed publishing this because Gamescom 2024 is on right …

Continue reading "Steam Deck Weekly: Gamescom 2024 Steam Deck News, Reviews Including Bakeru and SCHiM, New Verified Games, Discounts, and More"

About two and a half years ago we were treated to a lovely gaming experience titled Dungeons of Dreadrock from …

Continue reading "‘Dungeons of Dreadrock 2’ Announced, Launching on Nintendo Switch in November with Mobile and PC Versions to Follow"

A lot of folks got into the SaGa series a long time ago through its many releases on prior console …

Continue reading "Romancing SaGa 2: Revenge of the Seven Interview With Game Producer Shinichi Tatsuke and Steam Deck Hands-On Preview"

President-elect Trump has promised mass deportations, including workplace raids like those that took place during his first term at chicken processing plants in rural Mississippi.

Destiny 2's digital success could spell long-term trouble for discs

A man who authorities said was upset over his divorce settlement rammed his car into a crowd of people exercising at a sports complex in southern China, police said.

FOR the first time ever, LGBTI Australians seeking fertility and IVF treatment will be able to attend newly-opened centres designed especially for rainbow patients and their families.

The post The path to achieving family dreams appeared first on Star Observer.

Un «faucon» anti-Chine à la diplomatie, une gouverneure «tueuse de chiens» à la sécurité intérieure.

Attaque avec une voiture en Chine: 35 morts et des dizaines de blessés.

Ottawa is finalizing its long-awaited Arctic foreign policy with Inuit leaders for release before the end of the year, as Canada braces for a second Trump presidency and increasing threats to its sovereignty from China and Russia.

The national chief of the Assembly of First Nations says the International Criminal Court should investigate the disappearance of Indigenous children from Canadian residential schools.

Megan Fox et son petit ami Machine Gun Kelly seront bientôt parents.

THE Chilean navy has admitted it can’t explain a video filmed by its pilots showing a UFO in the country’s airspace.

The Directorate General of Trade Remedies (DGTR), under the ministry of commerce and industry, has released a list of registered interested parties regarding the ongoing Second Sunset Review anti─dumping

The Directorate General of Trade Remedies (DGTR), under the Ministry of Commerce and Industry, has issued a notice to all interested parties involved in the sunset review of the anti─dumping investigation

Bormioli Pharma has announced a partnership with Chiesi, an international, research-focused biopharmaceutical company (Chiesi Group), to supply Carbon Capture PET bottles.

Peytant has announced that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted marketing authorisation (clearance to market in the United States as a Class II device) for the AMStent Tracheobronchial Covered Stent System, a therapy platform.

The 2024 presidential election will have enormous consequences for the climate, and the health and future of children

Culture may play a role in how birds build collectively in the Kalahari Desert

Researchers at the Wyss Institute at Harvard University have developed a microfluidic chip that can recreate some of the features of radiation-induced lung injury. The lungs are very sensitive to radiation, and this can limit the application of radiotherapy to treat cancer. Accurately modeling radiation-induced lung injury could assist in developing new methods to prevent […]

The UK’s first postal inhaler recycling scheme has been launched by pharmaceutical company Chiesi to support a more sustainable way of living for people with respiratory illnesses.

Journalist Annie Lowrey has a rare disease that causes a near-constant itch that doesn't respond to most treatments. She likens the itchiness to a car alarm: "You can't stop thinking about it."

Nearly every day since she was a child, Alex Leow, a psychiatrist and computer scientist at the University of Illinois Chicago, has played the piano. Some days she plays well, and other days her tempo lags and her fingers hit the wrong keys. Over the years, she noticed a pattern: How well she plays depends on her mood. A bad mood or lack of sleep almost always leads to sluggish, mistake-prone music.

In 2015, Leow realized that a similar pattern might be true for typing. She wondered if she could help people with psychiatric conditions track their moods by collecting data about their typing style from their phones. She decided to turn her idea into an app.

After conducting a pilot study, in 2018 Leow launched BiAffect, a research app that aims to understand mood-related symptoms of bipolar disorder through keyboard dynamics and sensor data from users’ smartphones. Now in use by more than 2,700 people who have volunteered their data to the project, the app tracks typing speed and accuracy by swapping the phone’s onscreen keyboard with its own nearly identical one.

The software then generates feedback for users, such as a graph displaying hourly keyboard activity. Researchers get access to the donated data from users’ phones, which they use to develop and test machine learning algorithms that interpret data for clinical use. One of the things Leow’s team has observed: When people are manic—a state of being overly excited that accompanies bipolar disorder—they type “ferociously fast,” says Leow.

Compared to a healthy user [top], a person experiencing symptoms of bipolar disorder [middle] or depression [bottom] may use their phone more than usual and late at night. BiAffect measures phone usage and orientation to help track those symptoms. BiAffect

BiAffect is one of the few mental-health apps that take a passive approach to collecting data from a phone to make inferences about users’ mental states. (Leow suspects that fewer than a dozen are currently available to consumers.) These apps run in the background on smartphones, collecting different sets of data not only on typing but also on the user’s movements, screen time, call and text frequency, and GPS location to monitor social activity and sleep patterns. If an app detects an abrupt change in behavior, indicating a potentially hazardous shift in mental state, it could be set up to alert the user, a caretaker, or a physician.

Such apps can’t legally claim to treat or diagnose disease, at least in the United States. Nevertheless, many researchers and people with mental illness have been using them as tools to track signs of depression, schizophrenia, anxiety, and bipolar disorder. “There’s tremendous, immediate clinical value in helping people feel better today by integrating these signals into mental-health care,” says John Torous, director of digital psychiatry at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, in Boston. Globally, one in 8 people live with a mental illness, including 40 million with bipolar disorder.

These apps differ from most of the more than 10,000 mental-health and mood apps available, which typically ask users to actively log how they’re feeling, help users connect to providers, or encourage mindfulness. The popular apps Daylio and Moodnotes, for example, require journaling or rating symptoms. This approach requires more of the user’s time and may make these apps less appealing for long-term use. A 2019 study found that among 22 mood-tracking apps, the median user-retention rate was just 6.1 percent at 30 days of use.

App developers are trying to avoid the pitfalls of previous smartphone-psychiatry startups, some of which oversold their capabilities before validating their technologies.

But despite years of research on passive mental-health apps, their success is far from guaranteed. App developers are trying to avoid the pitfalls of previous smartphone psychiatry startups, some of which oversold their capabilities before validating their technologies. For example, Mindstrong was an early startup with an app that tracked taps, swipes, and keystrokes to identify digital biomarkers of cognitive function. The company raised US $160 million in funding from investors, including $100 million in 2020 alone, and went bankrupt in February 2023.

Mindstrong may have folded because the company was operating on a different timeline from the research, according to an analysis by the health-care news website Stat. The slow, methodical pace of science did not match the startup’s need to return profits to its investors quickly, the report found. Mindstrong also struggled to figure out the marketplace and find enough customers willing to pay for the service. “We were first out of the blocks trying to figure this out,” says Thomas Insel, a psychiatrist who cofounded Mindstrong.

Now that the field has completed a “hype cycle,” Torous says, app developers are focused on conducting the research needed to prove their apps can actually help people. “We’re beginning to put the burden of proof more on those developers and startups, as well as academic teams,” he says. Passive mental-health apps need to prove they can reliably parse the data they’re collecting, while also addressing serious privacy concerns.

Passive sensing catches mood swings early

A crucial component of managing psychiatric illness is tracking changes in mental states that can lead to more severe episodes of the disease. Bipolar disorder, for example, causes intense swings in mood, from extreme highs during periods of mania to extreme lows during periods of depression. Between 30 and 50 percent of people with bipolar disorder will attempt suicide at least once in their lives. Catching early signs of a mood swing can enable people to take countermeasures or seek help before things get bad.

But detecting those changes early is hard, especially for people with mental illness. Observations by other people, such as family members, can be subjective, and doctor and counselor sessions are too infrequent.

That’s where apps come in. Algorithms can be trained to spot subtle deviations from a person’s normal routine that might indicate a change in mood—an objective measure based on data, like a diabetic tracking blood sugar. “The ability to think objectively about my own thinking is really key,” says retired U.S. major general Gregg Martin, who has bipolar disorder and is an advisor for BiAffect.

The data from passive sensing apps could also be useful to doctors who want to see objective data on their patients in between office visits, or for people transitioning from inpatient to outpatient settings. These apps are “providing a service that doesn’t exist,” says Colin Depp, a clinical psychologist and professor at the University of California, San Diego. Providers can’t observe their patients around the clock, he says, but smartphone data can help close the gap.

Depp and his team have developed an app that uses GPS data and microphone-based sensing to determine the frequency of conversations and make inferences about a person’s social interactions and isolation. The app also tracks “location entropy,” a metric of how much a user moves around outside of routine locations. When someone is depressed and mostly stays home, location entropy decreases.

Depp’s team initially developed the app, called CBT2go, as a way to test the effectiveness of cognitive behavioral therapy in between therapy sessions. The app can now intervene in real time with people experiencing depressive or psychotic symptoms. This feature helps people identify when they feel lonely or agitated so they can apply coping skills they’ve learned in therapy. “When people walk out of the therapist’s office or log off, then they kind of forget all that,” Depp says.

Another passive mental-health-app developer, Ellipsis Health in San Francisco, uses software that takes voice samples collected during telehealth calls to gauge a person’s level of depression, anxiety, and stress symptoms. For each set of symptoms, deep-learning models analyze the person’s words, rhythms, and inflections to generate a score. The scores indicate the severity of the person’s mental distress, and are based on the same scales used in standard clinical evaluations, says Michael Aratow, cofounder and chief medical officer at Ellipsis.

Aratow says the software works for people of all demographics, without needing to first capture baseline measures of an individual’s voice and speech patterns. “We’ve trained the models in the most difficult use cases,” he says. The company offers its platform, including an app for collecting the voice data, through health-care providers, health systems, and employers; it’s not directly available to consumers.

In the case of BiAffect, the app can be downloaded for free by the public. Leow and her team are using the app as a research tool in clinical trials sponsored by the U.S. National Institutes of Health. These studies aim to validate whether the app can reliably monitor mood disorders, and determine whether it could also track suicide risk in menstruating women and cognition in people with multiple sclerosis.

BiAffect’s software tracks behaviors like hitting the backspace key frequently, which suggests more errors, and an increase in typing “@” symbols and hashtags, which suggest more social media use. The app combines this typing data with information from the phone’s accelerometer to determine how the user is oriented and moving—for example, whether the user is likely lying down in bed—which yields more clues about mood.

Ellipsis Health analyzes audio captured during telehealth visits to assign scores for depression, anxiety, and stress.Ellipsis Health

The makers of BiAffect and Ellipsis Health don’t claim their apps can treat or diagnose disease. If app developers want to make those claims and sell their product in the United States, they would first have to get regulatory approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Getting that approval requires rigorous and large-scale clinical trials that most app makers don’t have the resources to conduct.

Digital-health software depends on quality clinical data

The sensing techniques upon which passive apps rely—measuring typing dynamics, movement, voice acoustics, and the like—are well established. But the algorithms used to analyze the data collected by the sensors are still being honed and validated. That process will require considerably more high-quality research among real patient populations.

Greg Mably

For example, clinical studies that include control or placebo groups are crucial and have been lacking in the past. Without control groups, companies can say their technology is effective “compared to nothing,” says Torous at Beth Israel.

Torous and his team aim to build software that is backed by this kind of quality evidence. With participants’ consent, their app, called mindLAMP, passively collects data from their screen time and their phone’s GPS and accelerometer for research use. It’s also customizable for different diseases, including schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. “It’s a great starting point. But to bring it into the medical context, there’s a lot of important steps that we’re now in the middle of,” says Torous. Those steps include conducting clinical trials with control groups and testing the technology in different patient populations, he says.

How the data is collected can make a big difference in the quality of the research. For example, the rate of sampling—how often a data point is collected—matters and must be calibrated for the behavior being studied. What’s more, data pulled from real-world environments tends to be “dirty,” with inaccuracies collected by faulty sensors or inconsistencies in how phone sensors initially process data. It takes more work to make sense of this data, says Casey Bennett, an assistant professor and chair of health informatics at DePaul University, in Chicago, who uses BiAffect data in his research.

One approach to addressing errors is to integrate multiple sources of data to fill in the gaps—like combining accelerometer and typing data. In another approach, the BiAffect team is working to correlate real-world information with cleaner lab data collected in a controlled environment where researchers can more easily tell when errors are introduced.

Who participates in the studies matters too. If participants are limited to a particular geographic area or demographic, it’s unclear whether the results can be applied to the broader population. For example, a night-shift worker will have different activity patterns from those with nine-to-five jobs, and a city dweller may have a different lifestyle from residents of rural areas.

After the research is done, app developers must figure out a way to integrate their products into real-world medical contexts. One looming question is when and how to intervene when a change in mood is detected. These apps should always be used in concert with a professional and not as a replacement for one, says Torous. Otherwise, the app’s assessments could be dangerous and distressing to users, he says.

When mood tracking feels like surveillance

No matter how well these passive mood-tracking apps work, gaining trust from potential users may be the biggest stumbling block. Mood tracking could easily feel like surveillance. That’s particularly true for people with bipolar or psychotic disorders, where paranoia is part of the illness.

Keris Myrick, a mental-health advocate, says she finds passive mental-health apps “both cool and creepy.” Myrick, who is vice president of partnerships and innovation at the mental-health-advocacy organization Inseparable, has used a range of apps to support her mental health as a person with schizophrenia. But when she tested one passive sensing app, she opted to use a dummy phone. “I didn’t feel safe with an app company having access to all of that information on my personal phone,” Myrick says. While she was curious to see if her subjective experience matched the app’s objective measurements, the creepiness factor prevented her from using the app enough to find out.

Keris Myrick, a mental-health advocate, says she finds passive mental-health apps “both cool and creepy.”

Beyond users’ perception, maintaining true digital privacy is crucial. “Digital footprints are pretty sticky these days,” says Katie Shilton, an associate professor at the University of Maryland focused on social-data science. It’s important to be transparent about who has access to personal information and what they can do with it, she says.

“Once a diagnosis is established, once you are labeled as something, that can affect algorithms in other places in your life,” Shilton says. She cites the misuse of personal data in the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which the consulting firm collected information from Facebook to target political advertising. Without strong privacy policies, companies producing mental-health apps could similarly sell user data—and they may be particularly motivated to do so if an app is free to use.

Conversations about regulating mental-health apps have been ongoing for over a decade, but a Wild West–style lack of regulation persists in the United States, says Bennett of DePaul University. For example, there aren’t yet protections in place to keep insurance companies or employers from penalizing users based on data collected. “If there aren’t legal protections, somebody is going to take this technology and use it for nefarious purposes,” he says.

Some of these concerns may be mediated by confining all the analysis to a user’s phone, rather than collecting data in a central repository. But decisions about privacy policies and data structures are still up to individual app developers.

Leow and the BiAffect team are currently working on a new internal version of their app that incorporates natural-language processing and generative AI extensions to analyze users’ speech. The team is considering commercializing this new version in the future, but only following extensive work with industry partners to ensure strict privacy safeguards are in place. “I really see this as something that people could eventually use,” Leow says. But she acknowledges that researchers’ goals don’t always align with the desires of the people who might use these tools. “It is so important to think about what the users actually want.”

This article appears in the July 2024 print issue as “The Shrink in Your Pocket.”

A Barcelona-based startup called Inbrain Neuroelectronics has produced a novel brain implant made of graphene and is gearing up for its first in-human test this summer.

The technology is a type of brain-computer interface. BCIs have garnered interest because they record signals from the brain and transmit them to a computer for analysis. They have been used for medical diagnostics, as communication devices for people who can’t speak, and to control external equipment, including robotic limbs. But Inbrain intends to transform its BCI technology into a therapeutic tool for patients with neurological issues such as Parkinson’s disease.

Because Inbrain’s chip is made of graphene, the neural interface has some interesting properties, including the ability to be used to both record from and stimulate the brain. That bidirectionality comes from addressing a key problem with the metallic chips typically used in BCI technology: Faradaic reactions. Faradaic reactions are a particular type of electrochemical processes that occurs between a metal electrode and an electrolyte solution. As it so happens, neural tissue is largely composed of aqueous electrolytes. Over time, these Faradaic reactions reduce the effectiveness of the metallic chips.

That’s why Inbrain replaced the metals typically used in such chips with graphene, a material with great electrical conductivity. “Metals have Faraday reactions that actually make all the electrons interact with each other, degrading their effectiveness...for transmitting signals back to the brain,” said Carolina Aguilar, CEO and cofounder of Inbrain.

Because graphene is essentially carbon and not a metal, Aguilar says the chip can inject 200 times as much charge without creating a Faradic reaction. As a result, the material is stable over the millions of pulses of stimulation required of a therapeutic tool. While Inbrain is not yet testing the chip for brain stimulation, the company expects to reach that goal in due time.

The graphene-based chip is produced on a wafer using traditional semiconductor technology, according to Aguilar. At clean-room facilities, Inbrain fabricates a 10-micrometer-thick chip. The chip consists of what Aguilar terms “graphene dots” (not to be confused with graphene quantum dots) that range in size from 25 to 300 micrometers. “This micrometer scale allows us to get that unique resolution on the decoding of the signals from the brain, and also provides us with the micrometric stimulation or modulation of the brain,” added Aguilar.

Testing the Graphene-Based BCI

The first test of the platform in a human patient will soon be performed at the University of Manchester, in England, where it will serve as an interface during the resection of a brain tumor. When resecting a tumor, surgeons must ensure that they don’t damage areas like the brain’s language centers so the patient isn’t impaired after the surgery. “The chip is positioned during the tumor resection so that it can read, at a very high resolution, the signals that tell the surgeon where there is a tumor and where there is not a tumor,” says Aguilar. That should enable the surgeons to extract the tumor with micrometric precision while preserving functional areas like speech and cognition.

Aguilar added, “We have taken this approach for our first human test because it is a very reliable and quick path to prove the safety of graphene, but also demonstrate the potential of what it can do in comparison to metal technology that is used today.”

Aguilar stresses that the Inbrain team has already tested the graphene-based chip’s biocompatibility. “We have been working for the last three years in biocompatibility through various safety studies in large animals,” said Aguilar. “So now we can have these green lights to prove an additional level of safety with humans.”

While this test of the chip at Manchester is aimed at aiding in brain tumor surgery, the same technology could eventually be used to help Parkinson’s patients. Toward this aim, Inbrain’s system was granted Breakthrough Device Designation last September from the U.S. Food & Drug Administration as an adjunctive therapy for treating Parkinson’s disease. “For Parkinson’s treatment, we have been working on different preclinical studies that have shown reasonable proof of superiority versus current commercial technology in the [reduction] of Parkinson’s disease symptoms,” said Aguilar.

For treating Parkinson’s, Inbrain’s chip connects with the nigrostriatal pathway in the brain that is critical for movements. The chip will first decode the intention message from the brain that triggers a step or the lifting of the arm—something that a typical BCI can do. But Inbrain’s chip, with its micrometric precision, can also decode pathological biomarkers related to Parkinson’s symptoms, such as tremors, rigidity, and freezing of the gait.

By determining these biomarkers with great precision, Inbrain’s technology can determine how well a patient’s current drug regimen is working. In this first iteration of the Inbrain chip, it doesn’t treat the symptoms of Parkinson’s directly, but instead makes it possible to better target and reduce the amount of drugs that are used in treatment.

“Parkinson’s patients take huge amounts of drugs that have to be changed over time just to keep up with the growing resistance patients develop to the power of the drug,” said Aguilar. “We can reduce it at least 50 percent and hopefully in the future more as our devices become precise.”

AbbVie schizophrenia drug candidate emraclidine failed to beat a placebo in two Phase 2 clinical trials. The drug, once projected to compete with Bristol Myers Squibb’s Cobenfy, is from AbbVie’s $8.7 billion acquisition of Cerevel Therapeutics.

The post AbbVie Drug Expected to Rival Bristol Myers’s New Schizophrenia Med Flunks Phase 2 Test appeared first on MedCity News.

The Pew Charitable Trusts today commended Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer (D), state Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey (R), and Lee Chatfield (R)—whose term as state House Speaker ended last month—for passing and signing a bipartisan package of bills aimed at protecting public safety while reducing the number of people in county jails.

This paper provides an example that shows you how to use multiple RANDOM statements in PROC NLMIXED to fit nested nonlinear mixed models, and it provides details about the computation that is involved in fitting these models.

HONG KONG — China's National Health Commission (NHC) published its first set of guidelines to standardise the diagnosis and treatment of obesity, with more than half of China's adults already overweight and obese, and the rate expected to keep rising.  The guidelines, made public on October 17, come as China experiences an upward morbidity trend of its overweight and obese population. The rate of overweight or obese people could reach 65.3 per cent by 2030, the NHC said.   "Obesity has become a major public health issue in China, ranking as the sixth leading risk factor for death and disability in the country," the guidelines said. China is facing a twin challenge that feeds its weight problem: In a modernising economy underpinned by technological innovation, more jobs have become static or desk-bound, while a prolonged slowdown in growth is forcing people to adopt cheaper, unhealthy diets.

Megan Fox is pregnant. The 38-year-old actress — who has Noah, 12, Bodhi, ten, and Journey, eight, with her ex-husband Brian Austin Green — has confirmed via social media that she's expecting her first child with Machine Gun Kelly.

JAKARTA — Indonesia said on Monday (Nov 11) it does not recognise China's claims over the South China Sea despite signing a joint maritime development deal with Beijing, as some analysts warned the agreement risked compromising the country's sovereign rights. Beijing has long clashed with its Southeast Asian neighbours over territory in the South China Sea, which it claims sovereignty over in almost its entirety via a "nine-dash line" on its maps that cuts into the exclusive economic zones (EEZ) of several countries. Joint agreements with China in the strategic waterway have for years been sensitive, with some claimant states wary of entering into deals they fear could be interpreted as legitimising Beijing's vast claims. An arbitral tribunal in 2016 said the Chinese claim, based on its old maps, has no basis under international law, a decision China refuses to recognise. A joint statement issued at the weekend during Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto's visit to Beijing mentioned the two countries had "reached important common understanding on joint development in areas of overlapping claims".

TAIPEI — Taiwanese businessman Robert Tsao said on Nov 11 that he would sue in a Taiwan court senior Chinese officials over sanctions they had placed on him, saying he was seeking to counter China's intimidation of lawful activity. China, which claims Taiwan as its own territory, said in October it would punish and sanction Tsao, the retired founder of chipmaker United Microelectronics Corp (UMC), for alleged criminal and pro-Taiwan independence activities. China's Taiwan Affairs Office said the "Black Bear Academy" that Tsao has helped fund was seeking to incite separatism that would endanger cross-strait ties. Tsao, one of Taiwan's richest men who has pledged to provide millions to two civilian defence training programmes, told a press conference that China was threatening the lawful holding of political views in Taiwan and his personal safety. The lawsuit will be lodged in a Taipei court against Song Tao, head of China's Taiwan Affairs Office, and also the office's spokesman Chen Binhua. Taiwan courts have no jurisdiction in China and senior Chinese officials do not visit the island.

CANBERRA — China is putting ever-greater pressure on the Philippines to cede its sovereign rights in the South China Sea, Secretary of National Defence Gilberto Teodoro said on Nov 12 after a meeting with his Australian counterpart in Canberra. "What we see is an increasing demand by Beijing for us to concede our sovereign rights in the area," he said, adding that the Philippines was a "victim of Chinese aggression". China and the Philippines have sparred repeatedly this year over disputed areas of the South China Sea, including the Scarborough Shoal, one of Asia's most contested features. Teodoro's meeting with his Australian counterpart Richard Marles, their fifth since August 2023, reflects growing security ties between the countries, both of whom have expressed concern about Chinese activity in areas of the South China Sea claimed by the Philippines and other Southeast Asian nations. The two nations signed a strategic partnership in September 2023 and held their first joint sea and air patrols in the South China Sea several months later. The Philippines also joined war games in Australia this year for the first time.

May 12, 2022

Commercial international port terminals owned and operated by Chinese firms provide dual-use capabilities to the People's Liberation Army during peacetime. They enable China to project power into critical regions worldwide by providing military logistics and intelligence networks.

Feb 28, 2023

Policymakers need to act now and place child welfare professionals, not law enforcement actors, at the border to effectively screen and interview migrant children. Information sharing practices need to be improved, with a movement away from paper documents that can easily get lost to an approach that is digital, secure, and accessible by the child, their guardian, their lawyer, and their doctor. Further, the enforcement processing facilities need to undergo an immediate infrastructural transformation with the addition of new design features that are necessary and sensitive to the majority demographic that are held within facilities—children and families.

These actions are doable and require no legislative action. Migrant children deserve decisive action to ensure that their health, safety, and well-being is not jeopardized as they seek refuge in the United States.

Benazir Bhutto claimed that the Sindh Government had informed her that if she goes to Larkhana (her ancestral home), she would be attacked.

Political Officer requested that the People's Republic of China not place a new hold on these three listings.