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News18
26 minutes ago
- News18
Pope marks 50th anniversary of Cold War-era deal on security, human rights
Rome, Jul 30 (AP) Pope Leo XIV on Wednesday called for a renewed commitment to diplomacy to resolve conflicts as he marked the 50th anniversary of the Helsinki Accords, the landmark Cold War-era agreement that ushered in a new era of security and human rights. At the end of his general audience, history's first American pope said that August 1 marks the anniversary of the conclusion of the 35-nation summit in Finland that resulted in the Helsinki Final Act, which years later helped give birth to the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe. Renewing his appeal for peace in the world, Leo said: 'Today, more than ever, it is imperative to cherish the spirit of Helsinki, persevere in dialogue, strengthen cooperation and make diplomacy the preferred way to prevent and resolve conflicts." At the height of the Cold War detente in the 1970s, Finnish President Urho Kekkonen hosted a US-Soviet summit where US President Gerald Ford, Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and others signed a watershed commitment to peace, East-West contacts, European security and human rights. Leo said the agreement had 'inaugurated a new geopolitical season, favouring a rapprochement between East and West. It marked a renewed interest in human rights with particular attention to religious freedom, considered one of the fundamentals of the nascent architecture of cooperation from Vancouver to Vladivostok." With Russia's war raging in Ukraine, Leo recalled that the Holy See had sent a delegation to the Finnish summit headed by future secretary of state Archbishop Agostino Casaroli, best known for promoting and pursuing a policy of Ostpolitik, or openness and dialogue with Eastern Europe. 'While I entrust the victims to God's loving mercy, I pray for the wounded and for Christians who around the world continue to suffer violence and persecution, exhorting all those with responsibility at the local and international level to collaborate to prevent similar tragedies," he said. Wednesday's general audience marked the resumption of Leo's weekly encounter with the faithful following a weeks-long summer break. St Peter's Square was particularly full, given the arrival of tens of thousands of pilgrims in town for a weeklong Holy Year celebration for young Catholics. (AP) NPK NPK (This story has not been edited by News18 staff and is published from a syndicated news agency feed - PTI) view comments First Published: July 30, 2025, 16:15 IST Disclaimer: Comments reflect users' views, not News18's. Please keep discussions respectful and constructive. Abusive, defamatory, or illegal comments will be removed. News18 may disable any comment at its discretion. By posting, you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.
NDTV
40 minutes ago
- NDTV
'Marathon At F1 Speed': China Bids To Lap US In AI Leadership
China: Beyond dancing robots and eager-to-help digital avatars, Shanghai's World AI Conference saw China stake its claim to global artificial intelligence leadership and frame itself as a clear alternative to the United States. Assumptions that the US was far ahead in the fast-moving field were upended this year when Chinese start-up DeepSeek unveiled a chatbot that matched top American systems for an apparent fraction of the cost. With AI now at the forefront of the superpowers' tech race, the World AI Conference (WAIC) that ended Tuesday saw China set out its case to take charge of shaping its global governance too. China, the United States, and other major economies are "engaged in a marathon at Formula One speed", said Steven Hai, assistant professor of tech innovation at Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University. "Which country will attain the upper hand can only be assessed dynamically over the course of development." China and the United States dominate the AI sector -- only 10 to 15 percent of models developed in recent years were built without either's participation, according to Epoch AI, a non-profit research institute. While US companies like Google and OpenAI are still industry-leading, the institute labelled 78 percent of Chinese models "state-of-the-art" compared to 70 percent of models built with American participation. Beijing's stated aim is to become the world's leading AI "innovation centre" by 2030. "Now China is neck-and-neck with the United States in terms of core tech, that play (for global leadership) is more relevant than ever," said Tom Nunlist, associate director for tech and data policy at Trivium China. "With a solid AI offering and the US turning inward, the question is, will Beijing's vision gain greater global traction?" In May, Microsoft's Brad Smith told the US Senate that "the number-one factor" in the tech race "is whose technology is most broadly adopted in the rest of the world". 'Sovereign AI' China's offer is technical and economical. "One of the biggest differences (with the US sector) is that most of the leading models in China... are open-weight and open-source," former Google CEO Eric Schmidt told an audience at WAIC. That means they can be adapted by other countries to fit their own needs, said George Chen, partner at Washington-based policy consultancy The Asia Group. "We already see some countries like Mongolia, Kazakhstan, even Pakistan are trying to adopt the DeepSeek model to build their own," he said. "China has a chance to win in the aspect of sovereign AI to export its model to those countries." The comparatively low cost of Chinese technology -- software but also hardware, for example, through firms like Huawei -- will be a big factor, especially for developing countries, Chen added. On Monday, another Chinese start-up, Zhipu, announced its new AI model -- also open-source -- would cost less than DeepSeek to use. In June, OpenAI accused Zhipu of having close ties with Chinese authorities and noted it was working with governments and state-owned firms across Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. "The goal is to lock Chinese systems and standards into emerging markets before US or European rivals can," it said. Washington has moved to protect its lead in AI, expanding efforts to curb exports of state-of-the-art chips to China in recent years. "While limiting China's share of the global AI hardware market, (these measures) have accelerated indigenous innovation and led Chinese firms to exploit regulatory loopholes," said assistant professor Hai, referring to "rife" smuggling and circumvention. Issues of trust? Other challenges to homegrown firms include the closed nature of the Chinese internet and "general issues of trust when it comes to using Chinese tech", Trivium's Nunlist said. At WAIC, China sought to present itself as a responsible power. Premier Li Qiang emphasised the risks of AI and pledged to share technology with other nations, especially developing ones. His remarks contrasted sharply with US President Donald Trump's aggressive low-regulation "AI Action Plan" launched just days before and explicitly aimed at cementing US dominance in the field. China released its own action plan at WAIC, following a meeting attended by delegates from dozens of countries. Li also announced the establishment of a China-led organisation for international AI cooperation. However, China's foreign ministry did not respond to a request from AFP for details on the set-up of the organisation -- including any international participants -- and several foreign delegates said they had not been briefed on the announcement beforehand. Analyst Grace Shao wrote that it was clear AI was still in its "infancy stage". "You can sense that vibrant energy but also the immaturity of the space," she wrote on Substack. "There just shouldn't be a definitive conclusion on who is 'winning' yet."
Mint
an hour ago
- Mint
Europe fantasises about an 'Airbus of everything!' Can it fly?
What do fertilisers, artificial intelligence, small cars, microchips, vaccines, nuclear plants, streaming platforms, cloud computing, satellites and green technology all have in common? Trick question, to which the answer is not that the European Union would like to regulate them to oblivion (though there may be that, too). What links them together is that they are all sectors some in Europe think could be transformed by One Neat Trick: to create an 'Airbus of". Merging lots of subscale European companies so they stopped competing against each other and took on Boeing instead worked wonders in the 1970s; from a standing start Airbus went on to outsell its jetmaking American rival. Could the same strategy be used to help Europe in the 2020s take on the likes of Google, Nvidia, SpaceX and Chinese carmakers? Politicians in Brussels and beyond want to believe. As the pilot of a wayward Airbus might exclaim: 'Brace for impact!" No European industry confab is complete these days without someone invoking the 'Airbus of" trope. To many the age of such European champions feels overdue. Even as the EU's economies have come together in theory, it is notable how often their corporate leading lights have not. Europe's bigger countries (and many smaller ones) all have their own energy majors, telecoms firms, banks, carmakers and so on. Some blame this enduring fragmentation on the bloc's incomplete single market, which means that doing business across EU borders is still hard. Others focus on regulation, notably the club's antitrust rules that stymie mergers dreamed up by industrialists. Siemens and Alstom, two big engineering firms from Germany and France respectively, pitched the 'Airbus of rail", only for it to be kiboshed by Brussels officialdom in 2019. Either way Europe is now a corporate also-ran. The EU makes up one-sixth of the global economy, yet it does not have a single firm among the world's most valuable 20. A few cross-border tie-ups have taken place: Peugeot of France and Fiat of Italy became Stellantis in 2021 (its biggest shareholder also owns a stake in the parent group of The Economist). Fighter jets and missiles are made through consortia of firms dotted across Europe. But politicians have more than mere mergers in mind. For Airbus is not just big, it is the apotheosis of corporations fulfilling a vision dreamed up by politicians (the firm is partly owned by the French, German and Spanish governments, though run mostly free of interference these days). Forget the jet age: Europe now needs gigafactories making microchips, green tech firms to help decarbonisation and so on. The bigger the business in Europe, the more politicians can lean on it to do their bidding. If a few new factories can serve as a backdrop for their ribbon-cutting photo-ops, so much the better. Le business, c'est moi! Such industrial policy was once all but verboten in the EU, at least since its heyday in the age of disco music and stagflation five decades ago. Germans, abetted by Britain, imposed on the EU its largely hands-off approach to letting firms compete in the market; the French shelved their meddling instincts in exchange for farm subsidies. But dirigisme has been threatening a return for some years. The rise of Chinese industry—once a customer of German firms, now their rival—is evidence (to some) that state capitalism works. Brexit deprived the EU of a liberal voice. Covid-19, the war in Ukraine and two bouts of Trumpism have given credence to the French idea Europe needs to bolster its 'strategic autonomy" by being less reliant on globe-spanning supply chains. Who wants to rely on today's America for cloud computing, or jet fighters? The effects of this statist turn can already be seen. Brussels once worked to deter governments from funding favoured enterprises. Now it allows giant exemptions for industries it deems 'strategic", such as batteries, microchips or hydrogen, which receive billions in cash from the EU and governments. Airbus and Thales of France and Leonardo of Italy, all partly state-owned, are lobbying for approval to merge their satellite-launch offerings ('the Airbus of satellites", featuring Airbus). The antitrust commissioner for a decade until November, Margrethe Vestager, argued that reducing competition in Europe would make it less likely its firms could successfully compete outside it. The views of her replacement, Teresa Ribera, are thus far hard to fathom. The boss of Airbus itself, Guillaume Faury, says that 'When we work together, not against each other in Europe, we can achieve the scale needed to become global leaders." But what worked for Airbus in the age of vinyl may not be the right recipe for tech in the age of ChatGPT: making jets is unique in that fixed costs (to design planes that actually fly) are sky high and demand for products is stable for decades. That applies to relatively few other industries. Already a bunch of grands projets have gone awry. Northvolt, a battery maker backed in part by EU and German money ('the Airbus of batteries", inevitably), has gone bust despite raising $15bn. Gaia-X, an 'Airbus of cloud computing" has failed to offer a credible European alternative to Amazon and Microsoft. Please fasten your seat belts In an ideal world, European pols would love to shower companies with money, Chinese-style. Alas state coffers are empty. Bar Germany, big EU countries have massive debt piles and need to find cash to spend on defence, not industrial policy. The next best thing, to those of a dirigiste persuasion, is to discreetly provide a dollop of protection to a few state-favoured industries. The EU has imposed tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles, for example; a carbon tax will soon be levied on some goods imported into the EU. Building up European champions worthy of Europe-wide protection is the next logical step. Industry would cheer, its profits soaring as competition falls away. Consumers pay for this in the end—but long after today's batch of politicians have disembarked. Subscribers to The Economist can sign up to our Opinion newsletter, which brings together the best of our leaders, columns, guest essays and reader correspondence.
