u/violentviolinz

>Omar Yaghi, the winner of last year’s Nobel Prize for chemistry, has joined China’s Tsinghua University to lead a new AI-driven research centre.

>The 61-year-old materials scientist will head a team working on ways artificial intelligence (AI) can transform the design and synthesis of new materials and shorten their development cycle “by orders of magnitude”, Tsinghua said on Friday.

>Speaking at his appointment ceremony, Yaghi said he hoped to develop materials to tackle major environmental challenges such as water shortages, carbon neutrality and sustainable development.

>As former faculty vice dean swaps San Diego for Shenzhen, her lab offers jobs, training to researchers interested in sensory signalling

>JERUSALEM — It was the deadliest reported strike in the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran. Most of the victims were children.

>In almost any other conflict, these haunting truths would be seared into national memory. Yet more than 120 days since at least one U.S. missile struck an Iranian primary school, there remains no final accounting of what happened.

>The Trump administration has yet to directly accept the blame or formally release findings of a Pentagon investigation into the bombing, even though the military possessed evidence almost immediately that the site of the school had been struck, a U.S. official with knowledge of the situation, who spoke on condition of anonymity in order to discuss an ongoing investigation, told The Associated Press.

>The AP has reconstructed the story of the attack, beginning in the schoolyard on the morning of Feb. 28, drawing from open-source information, video footage, human rights reports and interviews with researchers and civilians inside and outside Iran to reveal previously unreported details about the bombing in Minab, including the diversity of children killed.

>Still, many details about the blast remain elusive, as a lack of information from the Pentagon and politicization of the attack by Iran’s theocracy have complicated independent reporting efforts. That has created an accountability vacuum, leaving the families of the victims without resolution. Among the mysteries remaining are the number of munitions that hit the school and a complete list of the dead.

>When asked last week about the incident, President Donald Trump said he hadn’t read the Pentagon’s report and had seen nothing to make him believe the U.S. had carried out the attack.

>“I don’t know that they’re ever going to solve that problem in terms of whose fault was it, because there were missiles flying all over the place,” he said. “I don’t think it was us.”

>Iran’s mission to the United Nations did not respond to a request for comment from the AP.

>Video evidence, interviews and other sources yield a fuller picture

>The reconstruction draws from interviews with U.S. officials, Iranian human rights workers, a resident of Minab, an international representative of the Coordinating Council of Iranian Teachers’ Trade Union and researchers from major international rights groups.

>Several people who spoke to the AP were in direct contact with the families of victims and rescuers who rushed to the scene. Most requested anonymity for fear of retribution against them and those with whom they spoke. Teachers called parents to pick up their kids. Then the bomb fell

>Skies over the city of Minab, located in southeastern Iran about 16 miles (25 km) from the Strait of Hormuz, were clear and bright on the morning of Saturday, Feb. 28, a school day in Iran. It was Ramadan.

>Students of the Shajareh Tayyebeh school, Farsi for “Good Tree,” jostled past the colorful murals lining the schoolyard and into the building. Boys and girls filtered into separate spaces with brightly painted desks.

>The school they entered was one of over 30 with the same name established to serve children from families closely tied to Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard or other state institutions, said Shiva Amelirad, the international union representative who also worked as a teacher in Iran for 18 years and has been in contact with people in Minab.

>Though most schools in Iran operate within guidelines proscribed by the Islamic Republic, the Shejareh Tayyebeh schools were more explicitly oriented toward reproducing and reinforcing the Guard’s worldview, she said, adding that children are civilians regardless of their family backgrounds, and “any attack targeting a school is unequivocally condemnable.”

>The school lay within the same walled compound as a Guard base, according to an AP assessment of satellite imagery and open-source mapping. It was once part of that neighboring base, before it was fenced off and converted over a decade ago.

>Though some of its pupils were the children of Guard officers working on the nearby base, others were local children from Minab, which is populated predominantly by people of the majority-Sunni Baluch ethnic minority who often face repression from the Iranian government, said the Balochistan Human Rights Group.

>Hundreds of students are believed to have been inside the building by the time teachers and administrators received the news that bombs had begun falling on Tehran around 9:40 a.m.

>Teachers and administrators thought it prudent to send the children home. They called parents on landline phones, summoning them for an early pickup, two people told the AP. A recently released report by Airwars, a London-based independent group that tracks recent conflicts, also found that parents were called to pick up their children.

>At 10:15 a.m., Iran’s state media sent out an advisory, closing schools across the country.

>One father, who lived a short distance away, went immediately to pick up his 10-year-old son, said a resident of Minab, who relayed the stories of several families to the AP. The AP verified details of the residents’ stories against available lists of the dead and rights groups’ chronologies of the day’s events.

>The father noticed his 6- and 7-year-old relatives among the students waiting for their parents, said the resident. He asked them if they’d like a ride home and they said no, that their own father was on the way.

>He left with his child and headed to the supermarket. Ten minutes later, he heard the explosions.

>Multiple munitions pummeled the compound, striking at least five buildings, according to an AP analysis of satellite imagery. Hundreds of pounds of explosives collapsed the school.

>A tiny arm, suspended in the rubble

>The father raced back to a scene of chaos, where onlookers gathered, screaming, as men pawed through smoking rubble to dig out bodies, according to video of the aftermath circulated by Iranian state media.

>Eventually, the father made out two burned figures he believes were those of his relatives, but he couldn’t be sure.

>People kept coming. One man from a nearby Sunni village arrived to search for his nephew after receiving a panicked call from the boy’s mother. In the rubble, he found her dead son.

>Rescuers found small backpacks and children’s drawings, colored pencils and worksheets. Gently suspended, a tiny arm lay in the wreckage.

>Men carried disfigured limbs and torsos to the local hospital, said the Balochistan Human Rights Group, whose staff spoke with two families of those killed. The AP has not been able to verify how many munitions specifically hit the school, but the attack had left flesh so mutilated that many body parts were unrecognizable.

>By the end of the day, doctors at the hospital estimated they had at least 108 bodies, but cautioned that it was likely an undercount, said the resident of Minab.

>By the next day, state media was saying around 150 had been killed. Soon, it was reporting a death toll of 168. ‘They called the kids martyrs’

>Three days after the bombing, state TV showed thousands of Iranians packing a Minab roundabout, where the crowds faced a podium and a large portrait of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the late founder of the Islamic Republic.

>The gathering might have been mistaken for a demonstration, if it were not a funeral. All the parents of victims, regardless of ethnicity or religion, had to participate, said the Minab resident. Most women in the crowd donned the black chador garment customary to the Islamic Republic, even though it’s not typically worn by Baluch people at funerals.

>Parents were told they’d be permitted to take their children’s bodies back to their villages and conduct their own observances, said the resident. In the end, though, many decided to bury their children together.

>In footage captured by drone cameras and circulated by state media, workers broke ground on an earthen lot, creating a grid of tiny, identical, unmarked graves.

>“The state media advocated a narrative based on IRGC interest,” said Amelirad. “You can tell because they called the kids martyrs.” The story grows harder to tell

>Strikes continued to ravage Iran, targeting more sites in its opening days than the start of recent U.S. or Israeli military campaigns, including in Gaza, an Airwars analysis found.

>Racing to document the ongoing bombardment, journalists and rights groups struggled to verify details from Minab. They had no access to the target site. Government restrictions in Iran prevented most foreign journalists from entering the country. The opening day of the war, Iran shut down the internet, making it nearly impossible to hear from ordinary civilians.

>As the war progressed and the Strait of Hormuz became a major battlefield, the situation in the province grew more tense, said the resident. All branches of the military were deployed heavily in the area. Families of the victims feared retribution for speaking out. People were reportedly being detained for trying to communicate with foreign media.

>That left Iran’s government in control of the messaging around the strike.

>Iran’s soccer team wore golden “#168” pins on their jackets upon their arrival at the FIFA World Cup.

>The Iranian team negotiating for a pause to the war with the U.S. named itself “Minab 168.”

>The children were depicted as animated Lego figures in viral videos made by pro-Iran groups trolling the U.S.

>“In the aftermath of the attack, Iranian authorities … exploited the suffering of victims’ families and surviving children for propaganda purposes,” wrote Amnesty International in a March report investigating the deaths.

>Through it all, there remained no public list of the names of the dead. The Pentagon finds clues in archive

>Locked out of Iran, researchers focused on the question of responsibility.

>Iran blamed the U.S. Trump cast doubt on American culpability and pointed the finger at Iran. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said only that the Pentagon was investigating.

>Internally, the U.S. military knew more than it initially let on. The clues were buried in their archives.

>When the news first surfaced, the U.S. military knew they had conducted strikes in the vicinity - though it took the military time to verify the Iranian claims that a school was struck and begin a formal investigation, said a U.S. official with knowledge of the situation, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the ongoing inquiry.

>It appears that while the building housing the school was identified as such by one analyst as early as seven years ago, that discovery was not sufficiently made known across different intelligence and military staffs and agencies, the U.S. official said.

>Ultimately, the building was not known among target developers as a school, revealing potential systematic shortfalls in the target analysis and review process, they said.

>One former Pentagon official, similarly speaking on condition of anonymity, said the bombing came as a natural result of changes made by the Trump administration to reduce staff to mitigate civilian harm and Hegseth’s emphasis on lethality.

>When Hegseth took charge, he slashed the size of an office called the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, created at the direction of Congress in late 2022. That stopped the office’s work on updating “no-strike lists,” which are lists of protected sites such as hospitals, schools, churches and mosques, that the Pentagon keeps, said Wes Bryant, who began working at the office in 2024 as the Branch Chief of Civil Harm Assessments.

>When he was working at the Pentagon, it was well known that the list was out-of-date, he said. The search for more answers from Minab

>In the last weeks, researchers have made some progress. Airwars, the conflict research group, spent months combing through open-source information to verify the identity of victims. The group determined the names and identities of 157 of the dead, including 123 children, all 13 or younger, and 34 adults. Among the adults are 26 school staff members (one of whom was pregnant) and five parents - each of whom lost at least one child.

>The group puts the death toll between 157 and 168 and says between 95 and 111 people were injured.

>It’s unclear if the formal results of the military’s Minab investigation will be published. Much of the investigative work has been completed, but the U.S. military’s Central Command, which commissioned the investigation, is currently reviewing the findings.

>Findings from similar past investigations have been more timely. When a Hellfire missile killed 10 civilians in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Aug. 29, 2021, the Defense Department claimed responsibility and gave details on its operations in less than a month.

>When asked about the Minab investigation last week, Trump said, “I don’t know that they’re ever going to solve that problem.” Hegseth said the report would be divulged “when the appropriate time is right.”

>Some members of Congress still push for transparency.

>In a recent interview, Sen. Mike Rounds, a Republican from South Dakota and a member of the Armed Services and Intelligence committees, said Congress has not gotten enough information on the bombing and expected a full report.

>The issue “has not gone away,” he said.

https://archive.ph/uekrL

>After surviving months of strikes by the U.S. and Israel, the Iranian regime has emerged emboldened, contradicting Trump’s claim of accomplishing “regime change.”

>Iran “might be weaker when it comes to its economic situation, its industries, some of its strategic capabilities,” said Raz Zimmt, head of Iran research at the Institute for National Security Studies in Israel. “But the bottom line is that we are facing a new, bolder, self-confident Iran.”

>Even those perceived as moderates by the Trump administration were shaped by years spent in security agencies or war zones. Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, speaker of the Iranian parliament and a main representative in peace talks with the United States, served as an IRGC commander during the Iran-Iraq war.

>By contrast, Iranian leaders with civilian backgrounds largely have been sidelined as part of the war-driven shake-up, officials and experts said. They include President Masoud Pezeshkian and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, who previously led talks with the United States but has seen his position and influence diminished.

>The swift consolidation of power by loyalists contradicts claims by President Donald Trump that the war accomplished “regime change” and empowered pragmatists willing to acquiesce to U.S. demands.

>Millions of Iranians and delegations from around 30 countries are expected at funeral ceremonies for Ali Khamenei that open in Tehran this week, Iranian officials say, with senior figures from Russia, Pakistan and Afghanistan's Taliban government among those attending.

>Khamenei, 86, was killed on 28 February in strikes on his residence in central Tehran.

>His body has lain in state for three days at Tehran's Grand Mosalla, the country's largest prayer complex and the usual venue for major state occasions.

>Video published by Iranian state media showed an earlier mourning ceremony Thursday night for Khamenei.

>The black-clad mourners, whom state media identified as coming from families of those who lost loved ones in the 12-day conflict in 2025 and the recent Iran war, threw scarves and other items for attendants to brush against the coffin, a common practice in Iran seen as a blessing.

>Later, state media showed images of Khamenei’s casket draped by a red flag with white calligraphy reading “Ya Hussein,” a Shiite expression in remembrance of the 7th-century martyrdom of the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson.

>It had been flying over the Imam Hussein golden-domed shrine in Karbala, in neighbouring Iraq. The flag also traditionally symbolises both the spilt blood of someone unjustly killed and a call for vengeance.

>The dead being honoured include Khamenei's son-in-law, his eldest daughter, a 14-month-old granddaughter and the wife of Iran's new Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, the son of the previous leader who remains in hiding after reportedly being wounded in the attack.

>Iran's Parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and President Masoud Pezeshkian, key leaders in the country's civilian government, have already paid their respects. Who is attending

>Foreign ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baghaei said at least eight heads of government or state and parliamentary speakers from 12 countries would attend, with delegations from Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan already in Tehran.

>According to the list published by Iranian state-run media, Russia is sending former President and Deputy Chairman of the Security Council Dmitry Medvedev as special envoy of President Vladimir Putin. China is sending the vice chair of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress.

>Afghanistan's Taliban government will be represented by acting Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi, while Iranian media also report that Prime Minister Hassan Akhund and Ahmad Massoud, leader of the National Resistance Front, may attend.

>Iraq's delegation is headed by President Nizar Amidi and parliamentary speaker Haibet al-Halboosi, alongside Nechirvan Barzani, prime minister of the Kurdistan Region.

>Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif will attend alongside army chief Asim Munir and others, while India is represented by Lieutenant General Syed Ata Hasnain, governor of Bihar, and Foreign Affairs Minister Pabitra Margherita.

>Turkey is sending Vice President Cevdet Yılmaz. Azerbaijan's delegation is led by parliamentary speaker Sahiba Gafarova, with some reports suggesting President Ilham Aliyev may also attend.

>Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, Georgian President Mikheil Kavelashvili and Tajik President Emomali Rahmon are also to attend, along with Kazakhstan's deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Yermek Kosherbayev and Turkmenistan's Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow, chair of the People's Council.

>Further delegations are expected from Bangladesh, whose Prime Minister Tarique Rahman and parliamentary speaker Hafizuddin Ahmed are reported to be attending.

>Malaysia will be represented by Agriculture Minister Mohamad Sabu after Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said he could not attend due to prior commitments.

>Delegations are also expected from Oman, Qatar, Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Egypt, Ghana, Nicaragua, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Serbia and Cuba.

>Iranian media also report delegations from Tunisia, Lebanon, Namibia, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, the Gambia and Thailand, as well as representatives of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and the Economic Cooperation Organisation.

>Baghaei said no European country had been formally invited.

>Those attending, he said, were "standing on the right side of history," while he accused European governments of a "shameful" stance towards the US and Israeli military action against Iran.

>Countries that Tehran saw as having taken "an inappropriate position" on the strikes were not invited, he said.

>A policeman forsakes his dream of world travel to care for a mentally impaired brother, who is later kidnapped by gangsters.

>Directors: Fruit Chan, Sammo Kam-Bo Hung Writer: Barry Wong Stars: Jackie Chan, Sammo Kam-Bo Hung, Emily Chu

>Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said that most nations aren’t yet ready to purchase Iranian oil, wary over the potential of the US reimposing sanctions, and that this is an incentive for Tehran to negotiate with Washington.

>“The Iranians thus far have not been able to sell their oil, because the buyers are a little wary of, will it be re-sanctioned,” Bessent said on Fox News Tuesday. “No one other than China, who was already buying it when it was sanctioned, has bought it, so it’s still trading at a discount.”

>"Asia's concentration story is split," said Charu Chanana, chief investment strategist at Saxo Markets in Singapore. "In the tech-heavy markets, AI and memory winners are driving index concentration higher. But in India, China and Hong Kong, concentration is falling because there is no single dominant AI winner."

>The markets dominated by a handful of players tied closely to the AI supply chain have surged. Taiwan's benchmark, riding chiefly on chipmaker giant Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.'s gains, has risen 54% this year, while Korea's Kospi index, powered by high-bandwidth memory leaders SK Hynix Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co., has roughly doubled.

>These firms' influence on their markets — extensive even before they emerged as key AI suppliers — is expanding. In South Korea, the top 10 companies now account for about 65% of the market, about twice their share a year ago. Taiwan, which was already the most top-heavy market in Asia, also saw its top-10 companies' concentration grow to 56% from 49% a year ago.

>Few markets in Asia illustrate the lag in the AI race as clearly as India. The Nifty 50 benchmark, down about 8% this year, is dominated by legacy giants such as Reliance Industries and HDFC Bank. Even its leading tech firms, such as Tata Consultancy Services and Infosys Ltd., are rooted in traditional software services now seen as vulnerable to disruption from AI.

>In China, where authorities and internet giants are vowing to ramp up AI investments, the picture is more complicated.

>The largest companies in China are conglomerates with mixed revenue streams. But similar to other Asian markets, some of the best‑performing stocks this year in China are those positioned to directly monetize the AI boom, such as intelligent processor maker Cambricon Technologies Corp., semiconductor foundry SMIC and optical fiber maker Yangtze Optical Fibre & Cable Joint Stock Ltd.

>"Investors have therefore diverted their attention to companies that have clearer association to AI," Fabien Yip, a market analyst at online brokerage IG International, said.

>There is also investor rotation underway that may prove healthy. Beyond the old internet leaders, capital is flowing into banks, insurers, high‑dividend state‑linked names, hardware makers, as well as AI‑adjacent stocks.

>That broader participation helps explain why China has still delivered positive returns despite the declining market‑cap share of its top ten companies, Chanana said. The CSI 300 Index has risen about 5% this year.

>"That de‑concentration is not all the same," she added.

Ridiculous clickbait title with sheepish acknowledgement of reality at the end.

MiniMax is up a over 150% since its IPO debut price.

Zhipu is public also, and it is up like 1700% since its IPO debut price. No that wasn't a typo.

What's more telling than burying the truth at the bottom of the article of the difference in reality, is that Bloomberg pushed this right now.

They likely know proven Chinese disruptors in AI (DeepSeek), memory (CXMT and YMTC) and chipmaking (Huawei and SMEE) are not even publicly traded yet.

CXMT and YMTC are coming though.

Similar story in humanoid robotics. Of AgiBot, Unitree and UBTECH, only UBTECH is publicly traded.

>GLM-5.2 has Silicon Valley buzzing with its coding and ‌agent capabilities, or the ability to execute complex tasks with minimal prompting, that almost rival leading U.S. offerings at a fraction of the cost, in what some experts are calling a "mini DeepSeek moment."

>It has quickly climbed the usage charts on third-party AI developer platforms like OpenRouter, where it now ranks above Anthropic's models, while executives from cloud data platform Snowflake's CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy to venture capitalist Marc Andreessen have lauded its abilities.

>"We now have a Chinese open-weight model that is as good as the currently available models ​from OpenAI and Anthropic," said David Sacks, U.S. President Donald Trump's former AI czar, last week before Washington lifted curbs on Anthropic's Fable and Mythos models on Tuesday.

>Those capabilities have put Z.ai's GLM-5.2 model ​at the heart of a growing debate about whether China is finally catching up to the U.S. in the AI race, as technology executives warn that Washington's unpredictable ⁠regulation of the industry risks hampering its lead in the frontier technology.

>"It is just a tick below Opus 4.8 (from Anthropic) and right up there with GPT 5.5 (from OpenAI)," Sacks said of GLM-5.2 on the All-In podcast, adding ​that "we cannot afford to do things that slow our companies down."

>The Anthropic curbs and the delayed public rollout of OpenAI's latest GPT-5.6 model have fueled global demand for the Chinese model, some experts said.

>"The international developer community is increasingly ​aware that relying solely on proprietary, U.S.-based API models carries significant risk," said Brian Tse, founder and CEO of Concordia AI, a Beijing-based consultancy focused on AI safety.

>GLM-5.2's positive global reception also suggests increased interest in cheaper open-source development because businesses are getting stung by the rising and often unpredictable costs of using AI to complete tasks, as closed-source agentic AI tools consume more tokens, the units used to measure AI usage.

https://archive.is/B5IN5

>Growing up, I had the good fortune of experiencing the best of both worlds – attending Pinoy fiestas and enjoying the fabulous Chinese lauriat (8 to 12 course) lunches and dinners.

>Dishes I’ve enjoyed in both celebrations are somewhat intertwined. Somehow, there is a thin line that distinguishes Pinoy and Chinese cuisines.

>Which leads me to my question, how much of the dishes Pinoys enjoy are of Chinese influence?

>In our country’s history books, there were evidence of barter between native Filipinos and Chinese merchants or traders way before the Spaniards set foot in our country.

>Since Chinese New Year is just around the corner, I want to delve into some celebratory cuisines enjoyed in the Philippines.

>Our fiesta favorites like lumpia or Chinese eggroll, which is from an ancient Chinese technique of serving meat/vegetable in edible wraps, finds itself in different variations in modern Philippine cuisine.

>The Pinoy version, the lumpiang shanghai, is a meat filled wrap that’s deep fried. We also have the lumpiang sariwa or lumpiang ubod, a simpler version of what my ama (or lola in Chinese), Marcela Yap Sim makes during Chinese New Year when she was still with us. Preparation for this fresh Amoy lumpia (Amoy is now Xiamen, a Chinese City in Fujian Province) takes a day or two. The components of this dish are finely shredded assortment of vegetables, shrimps or ground meat sautéed individually and then simmered together.

>Soy sauce and other soya bean by products like tofu or tokwa is of Chinese origin too. A pulutan favorite, the tokwa’t baboy makes use of both tofu and soy sauce.

>Angeles City is where you can find Mila’s Tokwa’t Baboy. Just like Aling Lucing’s sisig, this hole in the wall restaurant serves a must try tokwa’t baboy.

>A merienda favorite or sometimes a meal in itself, the pancit or noodles is every inch of Chinese origin.

>In Chinese lauriat sequence, noodles is served just before dessert. This is to make sure guests are full after the feast in case they are not yet satisfied with the earlier dishes.

>Historically, noodles was the food staple of Chinese travelers and seafarers in the olden times. Pancit, in Hokkien Chinese piān-ê-si̍t meaning something conveniently cooked, maintained it’s footing in the Pinoy’s choice of dietary wants.

>Today, pancit is not only limited to stir fried veggies, meat and noodles. Now we have pancit luglog, lomi, maki mi, La Paz bachoy and mami (“ma” in Chinese is meat and “mi” is noodles).

>It may come as a surprise to many but this very Pinoy dish that is very much a staple in Pinoy celebrations, the lechon or suckling pig to the Chinese is yes, of Chinese origin too.

>While others may argue this dish may be of Spanish origin, one may rebut about Chinese civilization’s existence years and years before other civilizations came about.

>In a book gifted to me years ago, The Origins of Chinese Food Culture by Asiapac, an easy to read and illustrated book, explained the origins, history, customs and fascinating tales behind Chinese food culture. This book includes stories on how the celebration favorite, suckling pig, pockmark tofu (mapo tofu) and the decadent, the luxurious delicacy, the soup Buddha Jumps over the Wall among others cane to be.

>Snacks and sometimes sweets like hopia, suman and tikoy are also Filipino dishes inspired from Chinese cuisine.

>Quezon province is known for their brown tikoy. Whether it is from Gumaca or Macalelon, Quezon, the brown tikoy is inspired by the Chinese tikoy, which is enjoyed during Chinese Lunar New Year. Families serve tikoy because it symbolizes the “sticking together” of the family.

>The color of the Chinese tikoy I grew up with is white and brown, depending on the sugar used. Nowadays, we have a variety of tikoy flavors to enjoy like ube and pandan.

>Chinese paper cut art started as early as the invention of paper around 2nd century CE (Common Era). It also made it’s way to Filipino culinary tradition by way of pabalat or wrappers of bulacan pastillas.

>The lady credited for preserving traditional art of making pastillas wrapper, called “borlas de pastillas” or “pabalat,” is Luz Ocampo, in the town formerly called San Miguel de Mayumo in Bulacan.

>In a Philippine STAR article published in 2008, Ocampo tried to recall where she thought paper cutting art came from. “Probably China,” Ocampo said, “but no one is sure.”

>The pabalat could indeed be a product of the ancient art of Chinese paper-cutting, that started as far as when paper was discovered by the Chinese.

>While we can create a long list of Pinoy cuisine inspired or derived from Chinese cuisine, we only need to look back and review our history books. Even before the Spaniards came, Filipinos were already trading or what was called barter with the Chinese. The porcelain or china we use in our dinnerware is from our Chinese sangley friends.

>Like a past relationship that leaves many snippets of beautiful memories, our relationship with our ancient Chinese traders continue to leave lasting memories that traverses time and is preserved in the present culinary enjoyment of Pinoys.

It is worth distinguishing that roasting pork with fire is very old and all over the world, this is specifically talking about the method that produces the blistering uniform crackle pork skin with no burning. It is a precise method involving blanching, drying, perforations and specific temps. It's not the same as open flame roasted pork. Just like roast duck is not the same as Peking Duck prep. Or poached chicken is not the same as Hainanese style chicken. Basic saute is not the same as velveting stir fry, which is what makes the ridiculous hot temps unique to Wok cooking possible.

>(June 29): China has announced a formal plan to integrate artificial intelligence (AI) across all levels of schooling, aligning its education system with President Xi Jinping’s campaign to dominate advanced technologies.

>The State Council released a five-year blueprint on Monday including a plan to make AI a core capability for every student, echoing Xi’s earlier call to cultivate high-tech talent as the world’s second-largest economy searches for new growth drivers.

>The plan urges efforts to “promote AI education throughout all educational stages, improve students’ AI literacy and enhance their ability to identify and solve problems”. China’s de facto Cabinet called on regional authorities to put the policy into practice.

>In several recent cases, Chinese courts have ruled that companies cannot terminate employees just to replace them with AI systems, highlighting Beijing’s desire to protect jobs even as it seeks to compete with the US.

Btw what happened to Australia's Chinese James Bond?

>Wang Liqiang

>In January 2023, Wang was barred from living in Australia. His asylum visa application was also rejected after an Australian tribunal ruling found him guilty of having committed "serious fraud against an Australian citizen"

oh...man, what is with these morons and defrauding each other.

(Bloomberg) — China has laid out broad new rules that mandate increased use of renewables as it continues to shift the focus of its energy transition from building new generation to ensuring it gets consumed.

Starting Aug. 1, the central government will set binding targets for the percentage of electricity and non-electric energy that must come from renewable sources, according to an order published Monday by the National Development and Reform Commission and other agencies.

Companies and provinces will face quarterly monitoring and annual evaluations of their clean energy consumption, and laggards will be forced to purchase green electricity certificates to comply, according to the order. That could boost demand for the credits generated by solar and wind farms, potentially generating more revenue for them.

The program will also include targets for non-electric energy, such as heating and green fuels. That could help boost demand for green hydrogen, a sector that China has identified as critical in its five-year plan to 2030.