LONDON (Reuters) -- London’s Metropolitan Police arrested more than 466 people at a protest on Saturday against Britain’s decision to ban the group Palestine Action, the force said. British lawmakers banned Palestine Action under anti-terrorism legislation in July after some of its members broke into a Royal Air Force base and damaged planes as part of a series of protests. The group accuses Britain’s government of complicity in what it says are Israeli war crimes in Gaza. Protesters, some wearing black and white Palestinian scarves and waving Palestinian flags, chanted “hands off Gaza”, and held placards with the message “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action”, video taken by Reuters at the scene showed.

 

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BEIJING (Reuters) -- Nvidia’s H20 chips pose security concerns for China, a social media account affiliated with China’s state media said on Sunday, after Beijing raised concerns over backdoor access in those chips. The H20 chips are also not technologically advanced or environmentally friendly, the account, Yuyuan Tantian, which is affiliated with state broadcaster CCTV, said in an article published on WeChat. H20 artificial intelligence chips were developed by Nvidia for the Chinese market after the U.S. imposed export restrictions on advanced AI chips in late 2023.   China’s cyberspace watchdog said on July 31 that it had summoned Nvidia to a meeting, asking the U.S. chipmaker to explain whether its H20 chips had any backdoor security risks - a hidden method of bypassing normal authentication or security controls. In its article, Yuyuan Tantian said Nvidia chips could achieve functions including “remote shutdown” through a hardware “backdoor.”

 

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SEOUL (Reuters) -- South Korea’s military shrank by 20% in the past six years to 450,000 troops, largely due to a sharp drop in the population of males of enlistment age for mandatory service in the country with the world’s lowest birthrate, a report said on Sunday. The dramatic decline in the pool of available males for military service is also causing a shortfall in the number of officers and could result in operational difficulty if it continues, the defense ministry said in the report. The report was made to the ruling Democratic Party member of parliament Choo Mi-ae, whose office released it. South Korea’s military has steadily declined since the early 2000s when it had about 690,000 soldiers. The pace accelerated during the late 2010s and there were about 563,000 active-duty soldiers and officers in 2019. North Korea is believed to have an active-duty military of about 1.2 million, according to the latest estimate by the defense ministry in 2022. 

 

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BEIJING (Reuters) -- Liu Jianchao, a senior Chinese diplomat widely seen as a potential future foreign minister, has been taken away by authorities for questioning, the Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday. Liu was taken away after returning to Beijing in late July from an overseas work trip, WSJ reported, citing people familiar with the matter. Liu, 61, has led the Communist Party’s body in charge of managing ties with foreign political parties. Since taking the role in 2022, he has travelled to more than 20 nations and met officials from more than 160 countries. Liu’s busy schedule, especially his meetings with the former U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken in Washington, stoked expectations that the former ambassador and ministry spokesman was being groomed to be the next foreign minister. His detention marks the highest-level probe involving a diplomat since China ousted its former foreign minister and President Xi Jinping’s protégé, Qin Gang, in 2023 following rumors of an extramarital affair. 

 

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N’DJAMENA (AFP) -- A court in Chad jailed former prime minister and opposition leader Succes Masra for 20 years, convicting him of hate speech, xenophobia and having incited a massacre. The court in N’Djamena jailed Masra, one of President Mahamat Idriss Deby Itno’s fiercest critics, for his role in inciting inter-communal violence in which 42 people were killed on May 14. It also imposed a fine of one billion CFA francs (1.5 million euros). Most of the massacre victims were women and children in Mandakao, southwestern Chad, according to the court. On Friday, the state prosecutor had called for a 25-year sentence. Activists with Masra’s Transformers Party gathered later Saturday to protest the conviction and condemn Deby. They said former finance Bedoumra Kordje had been appointed interim party leader. Masra was arrested on May 16, two days after the violence, and charged with “inciting hatred, revolt, forming and complicity with armed gangs, complicity in murder, arson and desecration of graves”.

 

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LONDON (Guardian) -- People aged over 75 are being excluded from health research due to arbitrary age cut-offs, potentially stalling the development of life-saving treatments, leading charities and research institutes have warned. Some clinical studies restrict participation for older people due to concerns about the potential frailty of participants and a belief that age may reduce the effect of the drug or device being studied. Such restrictions are contributing to health inequity by excluding an important demographic from medical research, according to more than 40 charities and leading research funders, including the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR), Cancer Research UK, the British Heart Foundation, and the Medical Research Council.