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Alongside the working people of the largest of the Antilles will be hundreds of supportive friends from around the world

The United States led a group of regional countries in calling China’s actions during a dispute over the Panama Canal a “threat,” prompting backlash from Beijing on Wednesday.

Washington and Beijing accuse each other of seeking to control the Panama Canal, a vital trade link between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

Panama took control of two of the canal’s ports previously operated by a Hong Kong-based conglomerate following a decision by the Panamanian Supreme Court in January.

Since then, Washington has alleged China detained two Panama-flagged ships in response to the takeover, while China has threatened Panama with payback and rejected the US claims.

The United States led countries including Bolivia, Costa Rica, Guyana, Paraguay and Trinidad and Tobago on Tuesday in calling China’s actions “a blatant attempt to politicize maritime trade and infringe on the sovereignty of the nations of our hemisphere”.

“Panama is a pillar of our maritime trading system, and as such must remain free from any undue external pressure,” the US State Department said in the joint statement.

“Any attempts to undermine Panama’s sovereignty are a threat to us all.”

China’s foreign ministry slammed the statement as a “smear” on Wednesday.

“It is the United States that is politicizing and over-securitizing the port issue,” ministry spokesman Lin Jian told a news briefing.

“It is the United States that is hypocritically posturing and spreading rumors and smears everywhere.”

Trump returned to office last year vowing to seize back US control of the Panama Canal, which was handed over in a deal reached by former president Jimmy Carter, who vowed that the US would respect its sovereignty.

After Panama’s moves against the Hong Kong-based company, Trump declared victory and the canal issue largely disappeared as a point of contention between the countries.

In a national security strategy last year, the Trump administration vowed aggressively to promote US interests in Latin America against outside powers led by China.

The historic leader of the Cuban Revolution foresaw that cyberspace would become the main battlefield of a silent war aimed at colonizing minds

Meta is preparing to backtrack its acquisition of AI startup Manus, the Wall Street Journal reported late Monday, after China banned the transaction citing national security concerns.

Facebook owner Meta announced in December it had agreed to acquire Manus, an artificial intelligence agent created by a company founded in China but now based in Singapore.

But China’s top body for economic planning, the National Development and Reform Commission, said in a statement on Monday that it will “prohibit the foreign investment in the acquisition of the Manus project” and “requires the parties involved to withdraw the acquisition.

The statement did not specifically name Meta.

Meta had told AFP in a statement on Monday that “the transaction complied fully with applicable law.”

“We anticipate an appropriate resolution to the inquiry,” it added.

Analysts had warned the deal could fall foul of regulators at a time of fierce technological  rivalry between Washington and  Beijing.

The Wall Street Journal, citing sources familiar with the matter, said the U-turn was complicated by the fact that Manus’s investors have already received returns from the deal.

Meta said in December that the deal — the financial details of which were not disclosed — would “bring a leading agent to billions of people and unlock opportunities for businesses across our products.”

Manus, created by startup Butterfly Effect, says on its website that it can do everything from analyzing the stock market to creating a personalized travel handbook for a trip with simple user instructions.

China has blocked Meta’s acquisition of AI startup Manus, the top economic planning body said Monday, after a regulatory review that reportedly also saw Beijing restrict two co-founders from leaving the country.

Facebook owner Meta had agreed to acquire Manus, an artificial intelligence agent created by a company founded in China but now based in Singapore, the two firms said in December.

Analysts however had warned then the deal could fall foul of regulators at a time of fierce technological rivalry between Washington and Beijing.

The Financial Times reported last month that China had restricted two Manus co-founders from leaving the country, citing three people with knowledge of the matter.

Chief executive Xiao Hong and chief scientist Ji Yichao, who are usually based in Singapore, were reportedly summoned to a meeting in Beijing in March and told they were not allowed to leave China because of a regulatory review of the Meta acquisition.

Beijing’s National Development and Reform Commission said in a statement on Monday that it will “prohibit the foreign investment in the acquisition of the Manus project” and “requires the parties involved to withdraw the acquisition transaction”, without naming Meta.

It added that this was done “in accordance with laws and regulations”.

AFP has contacted Manus and Meta for comment.

Meta said in December that the deal — the financial details of which were not disclosed — would “bring a leading agent to billions of people and unlock opportunities for businesses across our products”.

Bloomberg Intelligence analysts said the purchase was likely aimed at expanding Meta’s AI agent task capabilities, and that it could be worth more than US$2 billion.

Manus, created by startup Butterfly Effect, can sift through and summarise resumes or create a stock analysis website, according to its website.

ShutterNut... posted a photo:

Please be aware... ALL Photos are purely for entertainment. I am no expert. Titles are from recognition - what I was told - or a quick search. Polite comments or corrections are welcome.

ShutterNut... posted a photo:

Please be aware... ALL Photos are purely for entertainment. I am no expert. Titles are from recognition - what I was told - or a quick search. Polite comments or corrections are welcome.

Two giant pandas from China are headed to Atlanta on a new 10-year conservation deal.

Pandas Ping Ping, a male, and Fu Shuang, a female, will live at Zoo Atlanta, China Wildlife Conservation Association said in a statement Friday.

The organization signed the research agreement with the United States zoo last year, it said, noting the deal continues “the ‘panda bond’ shared by the people of both nations for more than 20 years”.

The panda pair come from the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding in southwestern Sichuan province, according to the statement.

“Zoo Atlanta is delighted and honored to yet again be trusted as stewards of this treasured species,” the zoo’s president Raymond B. King said in a statement.

“We can’t wait to meet Ping Ping and Fu Shuang.”

The zoo welcomed its first giant pandas Yang Yang and Lun Lun when they arrived in 1999.

That pair produced seven cubs over a 25-year agreement before returning to China with their two youngest in 2024, when that deal expired.

The US side has prepared for Ping Ping and Fu Shuang’s arrival by renovating their habitat to make it “more comfortable and more safe”, the Chinese association said.

The panda news comes as US President Donald Trump is expected to meet his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping in Beijing next month.

A Chinese foreign ministry spokesman said on Friday the new deal “will contribute to the well-being of giant pandas… and the friendship between the people of China and the US”.

Chinese startup DeepSeek released a new artificial intelligence model Friday, more than a year after it stunned the world with a low-cost reasoning model that matched the capabilities of US rivals.

DeepSeek-V4 “features an ultra-long context of one million words”, the company said in a statement on social media platform WeChat, hailing it as “cost-effective” in a separate announcement on X.

The announcement came as Meta said it planned to cut a tenth of its staff as it looks for productivity gains from the rest of the workforce while investing heavily in artificial intelligence. Reports said Microsoft was also looking to trim its ranks.

DeepSeek-V4’s context length, which determines how much input a model is able to absorb to help it complete tasks, “(achieves) leadership in both domestic and open-source fields across agent capabilities, world knowledge, and reasoning performance”.

A “preview version” of the open source model is now available, the company said.

DeepSeek-V4 is released as two versions, DeepSeek-V4-Pro and DeepSeek-V4-Flash, with the latter being “a more efficient and economical choice” because it has smaller parameters.

V4-Pro has 1.6 trillion parameters while the V4-Flash has 284 billion parameters, which refine models’ decision-making ability.

The model has also been “optimised” for popular AI Agent products such as Claude Code, OpenClaw, OpenCode and CodeBuddy, the statement said.

“In world knowledge benchmarks, DeepSeek-V4-Pro significantly leads other open-source models and is only slightly outperformed by the top-tier closed-source model, (Google’s) Gemini-Pro-3.1,” the statement added.

Hangzhou-based DeepSeek burst onto the scene in January last year with a generative AI chatbot, powered by its R1 reasoning model, that upended assumptions of US dominance in the strategic sector.

This so-called “DeepSeek shock” sparked a sell-off of AI-related shares and a reckoning on business strategy in what was also described as a “Sputnik moment” for the industry.

The chatbot performed at a similar level to ChatGPT and other top American offerings, but the company said it had taken significantly less computing power to develop.

However, its sudden popularity raised questions over data privacy and censorship, with the chatbot often refusing to answer questions on sensitive topics such as the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown.

At home, DeepSeek’s AI tools have been widely adopted by Chinese municipalities and healthcare institutions as well as the financial sector and other businesses.

This has been partly driven by DeepSeek’s decision to make its systems open source, with their inner workings public — in contrast to the proprietary models sold by OpenAI and other Western rivals.

“China-made large AI models spearheaded the development of the global open-source AI ecosystem,” Chinese Premier Li Qiang told an annual gathering of China’s top decision-makers last month.

The AI race has intensified the rivalry between China and the United States, and the White House on Thursday accused Chinese entities of a massive effort to steal artificial intelligence technology.

“The US has evidence that foreign entities, primarily in China, are running industrial-scale distillation campaigns to steal American AI,” science and technology chief Michael Kratsios said in a post on X.

“We will be taking action to protect American innovation.”

The White House on Thursday accused Chinese entities of a massive effort to steal US artificial intelligence technology and vowed to take action to prevent the alleged theft.

“The US has evidence that foreign entities, primarily in China, are running industrial-scale distillation campaigns to steal American AI,” White House science and technology chief Michael Kratsios said in a post on X.

“We will be taking action to protect American innovation.”

Distillation is a common practice within AI development, often used by companies to create cheaper, smaller versions of their own models.

In February, US AI developer Anthropic accused three Chinese firms, DeepSeek, Moonshot AI and MiniMax, of running campaigns to illicitly extract capabilities from its Claude chatbot, describing it as intellectual property theft.

That same month, ChatGPT creator OpenAI sent a letter to US legislators accusing DeepSeek of using distillation techniques amid “ongoing efforts to free-ride on the capabilities developed by OpenAI and other US frontier labs.”

Kratsios did not name any specific foreign entities in his post but said they “are using tens of thousands of proxies and jailbreaking techniques in coordinated campaigns to systematically extract American breakthroughs.”

The accusations come ahead of a planned May 14 summit in Beijing between US President Donald Trump and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping.

The leaders of Mexico, Spain and Brazil called for Cuba’s sovereignty to be respected as it continues to face threats by Washington.

The joint statement came during a meeting of left-wing leaders in Spain and also vowed to send humanitarian aid to the crisis-ridden island.

The plea comes as the President Donald Trump administration ratchets up punitive measures on the communist-run island in the hopes of forcing political regime change. 

“We express our deep concern regarding the serious humanitarian crisis the Cuban people faces … [and] we reiterate the need to respect at all times international law and the principles of territorial integrity, sovereign equality and the peaceful settlement of disputes”, said Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula Da Silva in a joint statement on Saturday. 

Although the U.S. was not directly mentioned, the plea appears to be aimed at the White House as tensions rise between the two neighbors. Since news broke on Wednesday that the Pentagon is ramping up preparations for an operation against Cuba, a U.S. Navy surveillance drone has been observed flying over Cuba’s coast for several hours and Trump has promised that “a new dawn for Cuba” is imminent. 

Hope for a peaceful solution, however, remains. Havana and Washington are currently engaged in official diplomatic negotiations; a U.S. government delegation visited Havana earlier in April, marking the first visit of an official U.S. government plane since former President Barack Obama’s trip in 2016.

The U.S. delegation reportedly informed their Cuban counterparts that they saw an end to political repression, the liberation of high-profile political prisoners and economic liberalization as prerequisites for easing the longstanding economic and commercial embargo on the island. 

These sanctions, which have historically been condemned by the vast majority of the international community at the United Nations General Assembly, have caused far-reaching material shortages on the island and hindered the island’s ability to engage in international trade and commerce, according to UN experts. 

Recently, the U.S. intensified sanctions, declaring Cuba a national security threat and blockading the vast majority of oil destined for the island, which is now facing an acute humanitarian and economic crisis as a result of the intensified measures.

Sheinbaum, Lula and Sánchez’s promise of support represents the latest in a series of international offers and shipments of aid. Sheinbaum’s own government has already sent humanitarian shipments to the island, and the Chinese, Chilean and Canadian administrations have also sent or pledged to send aid to the island. 

Furthermore, a civilian humanitarian aid mission to Cuba, which brought food, medicine and solar equipment to the island, was organized in March. 

Featured Image: Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula Da Silva during the former’s visit to Brazil in 2024.

Image Credit: Ricardo Stuckert via Flickr

License: Creative Commons Licenses

The post International calls for US-Cuba de-escalation grow amid latest threats appeared first on Latin America Reports.