More frequent and severe droughts in Africa are hampering food production, especially in arid parts of the continent where farmers struggle to eke out a living. A water retention system developed in the U.S. is helping African farmers fight the trend and improve crop yields in drought-affected areas. Juma Majanga reports from Kibwezi, Kenya.  
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The Biden administration’s announcement earlier this month that it would ban the transfer of advanced U.S. semiconductor technology to China continues to reverberate through global markets. The ruling by the Department of Commerce affects not only U.S. firms that sell to China but any company whose products contain American semiconductor technology.

In mainland China, according to Bloomberg News, officials from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology have been summoning executives from domestic semiconductor manufacturers to assess how being deprived of high-tech manufacturing tools from overseas would impact their businesses. And companies that rely on imports of high-end semiconductors are assessing the viability of their businesses going forward.

In the U.S., semiconductor companies and other tech firms that count China among their largest single markets are facing potentially severe damage to their revenues. Other companies that manufacture tech products in China are having to recall U.S. employees because the ban also bars “U.S. persons” from supporting technology covered by the ban.

Internationally, large chipmakers, such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company and South Korea’s Samsung, as well as Netherlands-based ASML, which makes chip manufacturing equipment, are reassessing their business with China as they explore how deeply the new rules will cut into their sales.

“It really is reshaping the market,” said James Lewis, senior vice president and director of the Strategic Technologies Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “The Koreans, the Taiwanese and some American companies are really nervous about it. I mean, everyone’s asking, ‘What can I still sell to China?’ And in some cases, the answer is ‘nothing,'” he told VOA.

Targeting China’s military

The Biden administration has characterized the ban as a national security measure, saying that withholding highly sophisticated semiconductors from China will hamper the development of Chinese weapons and surveillance technology.

The trouble is that the same technology that goes into Chinese weapons systems is also necessary for other goods, including electric vehicles, an area in which China is significantly further advanced than the U.S.

It remains unclear precisely how U.S. authorities will enforce the ban. It primarily targets the most advanced chip technology available, meaning that “mature” chip technology — older and less sophisticated chips — will not be affected.

Where the U.S. draws that line, however, could determine whether Chinese businesses such as smartphone manufacturers and commercial aerospace companies are left alone or devastated.

‘Cold war’ tactic

Experts and pundits saw the imposition of the tough new ban as a dramatic escalation of the Biden administration’s efforts to keep China from being able to advance toward technological parity with the U.S.

Writing for the American news publication Foreign Policy, Edward Alden, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said the move “looks increasingly drawn from the Cold War playbook.” He also noted that “the new restrictions, which will be fully implemented as soon as Oct. 21, go well beyond any previous measures by seeking to freeze China at a backward state of semiconductor development and cut Chinese companies off from U.S. industry expertise.”

In the Financial Times, U.S. national editor and columnist Edward Luce wrote that “Joe Biden this month launched a full-blown economic war on China.”

“His escalation … marks a final break with decades of U.S. foreign policy that assumed China’s global integration would tame its rise as a great power,” he added.

China reacts

Speaking at the start of the Chinese Communist Party’s five-year congress Sunday, during which he is expected to be named to an extraordinary third term as party leader, Xi Jinping did not address the ban directly. However, he did promise to step up investment in areas that would help his country achieve “technology self-reliance.”

“China will move faster to launch a number of major national projects that are of strategic, big-picture and long-term importance,” Xi said.

In a statement provided to VOA by the Chinese embassy in the U.S., spokesperson Liu Pengyu said that he was not aware of any specific meetings being held in China.

“I would like to note that what the U.S. is doing is purely ‘sci-tech hegemony.’ It seeks to use its technological prowess as an advantage to hobble and suppress the development of emerging markets and developing countries,” Liu said. “The U.S. probably hopes that China and the rest of the developing world will forever stay at the lower end of the industrial chain. This will disrupt the global supply chain and industrial chain, and the final result will hurt itself and others alike.”

Industry concerned

Semiconductor companies have reacted carefully to the Biden administration’s decision. Although they are acknowledging the government’s concerns, they are signaling frustration that they were neither given clear guidance about how the ban will be applied nor given an opportunity to consult with the Commerce Department before it was put into place.

In a statement provided to VOA, SEMI, a trade group representing the semiconductor industry, said that its members understand the United States’ national security concerns. In addition, it said, “We are currently evaluating the potential effects of the Commerce Department’s unilateral controls on the semiconductor industry in the U.S. and abroad. We plan to provide feedback to the government on these rules, as they were not previously published for public comment.”

“We believe it is vitally important that the U.S. government implements these rules in close collaboration with and input from our key international partners in order to limit unintended adverse consequences that could reverberate through the domestic supply chain of this critical industry.”
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More and more, people are installing video doorbells and surveillance cameras in and around their homes to protect against unwanted intruders. But while many consumers feel the devices provide some peace of mind, some observers are concerned that they trigger personal biases toward those captured on camera. VOA’s Julie Taboh has this report. Michelle Quinn contributed.
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Who said there is nothing new under the sun? 

One of the hottest innovations for the non-polluting generation of electricity is floating photo-voltaics, or FPV, which involves anchoring solar panels in bodies of water, especially lakes, reservoirs and seas. Some projects in Asia incorporate thousands of panels to generate hundreds of megawatts.

FPV got a head start in Asia and Europe where it makes a lot of economic sense with open land highly valued for agriculture.

The first modest systems were installed in Japan and at a California winery in 2007 and 2008.  

On land, a one-megawatt projects requires between one and 1.6 hectares.  

Floating solar projects are even more attractive when they can be built on bodies of water adjacent to hydropower plants with existing transmission lines. 

Most of the largest such projects are in China and India. There also are large-scale facilities in Brazil, Portugal and Singapore.

A proposed 2.1 gigawatt floating solar farm on a tidal flat on the coast of the Yellow Sea in South Korea, which would contain five million solar modules over an area covering 30 square kilometers with a $4 billion price tag, is facing an uncertain future with a new government in Seoul. President Yoon Suk-yeol has indicated he prefers to boost nuclear over solar power. 

Other gigawatt-scale projects are moving off the drawing board in India and Laos, as well as the North Sea, off the Dutch coast. 

The technology has also excited planners in sub-Saharan Africa with the lowest electricity access rate in the world and an abundance of sunshine. 

In countries that depend on a lot of hydropower, “there’s concerns around what does power generation look like during droughts, for example, and with climate change, we expect that we’ll see more extreme weather events. When we’re thinking about droughts, there is the opportunity to then have FPV as another renewable energy option in your toolkit essentially,” explained Sika Gadzanku, a researcher at the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado. “So instead of depending so much on hydro, now you can use more FPV and reduce your dependence on hydro, during very dry seasons, to use your floating solar photovoltaics.”  

A one percent coverage of hydropower reservoirs with floating solar panels could provide an increase of 50 percent of the annual production of existing hydroelectric plants in Africa, according to a study funded by the European Commission.

Challenges

There are potential flotovoltaic hazards, however. A plant caught fire in Chiba prefecture in Japan in 2019. Officials blamed a typhoon for shifting panels one atop another, generating intense heat and possibly sparking the fire at the 18-hectare facility containing more than 50,000 floating solar panels at the Yamakura Dam.

The most significant barrier to wider adoption of the technology, at present, is the price. It is more expensive to construct a floating array than a similarly sized installation on land. But with the higher costs there are additional benefits: Due to passive cooling of water bodies, the floating panels can function more effectively than conventional solar panels. They also reduce light exposure and lower the water temperature, minimizing harmful algae growth.

That all sounded promising to officials in the town of Windsor in northern California’s wine country. Nearly 5,000 solar panels, each generating 360 watts of electricity, are now floating on one of Windsor’s wastewater ponds.

“They’re all interlinked. Each panel gets its own float. And they actually move quite well with wave action and wind action,” . You’d be surprised how they can kind of just suck up the waves and ride them out without breaking or coming apart,” said Garrett Broughton, the senior civil engineer for Windsor’s public works department.   

The floating panels are easy on the environment and Windsor’s budget, in which the wastewater plant’s electric bill was the town government’s largest

Town Council member Deborah Fudge pushed for the 1.78-megawatt project over an alternative of putting solar panels atop carports.

“They offset 350 metric tons of carbon dioxide yearly. And they also provide 90 percent of the power that we need for all of the operations for treating wastewater, for all the operations of our corporation yard and also for pumping our wastewater to the geysers, which, is a geothermal field, about 40 miles (64 kilometers) north,” Fudge told VOA. 

The town leases the floating panels from the company that installed them, which gives it a set price for electricity on a long-term contract, meaning Windsor is paying about 30 percent of what it previously spent for the same amount of power.

“It’s not like we’ve invested in something where we’re not going to get a payback. We’re getting a payback as we speak. And we’ll get a payback for 25 years,” said Windsor’s mayor, Sam Salmon. 

The floating systems are not intended to fully blanket bodies of water, allowing for other activities to continue, such as boating and fishing. 

“We do not assume the floating structure will cover the whole water body, it’s often a very small percentage of that water body,” NREL’s Gadzanku told VOA. “Even just from a visual perspective you don’t want to maybe see PV panels covering an entire reservoir.”

NREL has identified 24,419 man-made bodies of water in the United States as suitable for FPV placement. Floating panels covering little more than one-fourth the area of each these sites would potentially generate nearly 10 percent of America’s energy needs, according to the lab.

Among the sites is the 119-hectare Smith Lake, a man-made reservoir managed by Stafford County in Virginia to produce drinking water. It is also a site for recreational fishing adjacent to the U.S. Marine Corps’ Quantico base.  

“Many of these eligible bodies of water are in water-stressed areas with high land acquisition costs and high electricity prices, suggesting multiple benefits of FP technologies,” wrote the study’s authors. 

“It really is an option with a lot of proven technology behind it,” said Gadzanku.
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Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s visit to Silicon Valley this week comes as the Biden administration is promoting more investment in technology but also enacting more restrictions on selling technology to businesses in China. Michelle Quinn reports.
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Elon Musk said Saturday his rocket company, SpaceX, would continue to fund its Starlink internet service in Ukraine, citing the need for “good deeds,” a day after he said it could no longer afford to do so.

Musk tweeted: “the hell with it … even though starlink is still losing money & other companies are getting billions of taxpayer $, we’ll just keep funding ukraine govt for free.”

Musk said Friday that SpaceX could not indefinitely fund Starlink in Ukraine. The service has helped civilians and military stay online during the war with Russia.

Although it was not immediately clear whether Musk’s change of mind was genuine, he later appeared to indicate it was. When a Twitter user told Musk “No good deed goes unpunished,” he replied “Even so, we should still do good deeds.”

The billionaire has been in online fights with Ukrainian officials over a peace plan he put forward which Ukraine says is too generous to Russia.

He had made his Friday remarks about funding after a media report that SpaceX had asked the Pentagon to pay for the donations of Starlink.

SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment. The Pentagon declined to comment.
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In a remote village in India, a siren can be heard from the local temple every night at 7 p.m. — signaling the commencement of a daily “digital detox.” For the next 90 minutes, the population of 3,000 in Sangli district’s Mohityanche Vadgaon lays aside all the electronic gadgets in the vicinity, including mobile phones and television sets.

The second siren goes off at 8:30 p.m., indicating the end of the intermission. Until then, the villagers are encouraged to focus on activities such as reading, studying and engaging in verbal conversation with one another.

Proponents of the initiative carried out at a village in the Maharashtra state of India say it is the solution to the “screen addiction” afflicting residents in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic and brings back the value of human connection.

The tactic was devised by Vijay Mohite, “the sarpanch” (Indian head of the village council) at Mohityanche Vadgaon.

Jitender Dudi, the chief administrator of district development in Sangli, brought Mohite’s idea into fruition.

‘Mobile phone addicts’

Jayawant Mohite, who retired from teaching at school in the village two months ago said that the children turned into what he called “mobile phone addicts” after the COVID-lockdowns started and they were made to attend classes online, using mobile phones, in 2020.

“Students were found engrossed in their mobile phones for hours, even after online classes ended for the day. Once regular offline classes began last year, most of them were very inattentive in the classes and were found losing interest in academics,” the former teacher told VOA.

“After interacting with the families of the students, we discovered that they were still spending long hours on their mobile phones before and after school hours. We counselled them and their families, but could not wean the students off their mobile phones. Finally, we approached the ‘sarpanch’ of our village and apprised him of the situation,” Mohite said.

The concerned schoolteachers of the village also told the sarpanch that if the habit of overusing or misusing mobile phones by the students was not controlled swiftly, the future of the students would be doomed.

Dr. J.R. Ram, a clinical psychiatrist in Kolkata, said, “extended screen time can result in several adverse effects, but during the pandemic, the forced incarceration of young people at home has amplified its impact.”

He said that it becomes an obstacle for students’ progress in learning.

“Surfing on the internet—that is, multi-tasking deprives students of their ability to concentrate for longer periods when they need to study,” Ram said. “They get used to scrolling on social media, watching videos and exchanging text messages during classes. Such a situation can have negative consequences on one’s cognition or thinking ability.”

Sarpanch Mohite told VOA that he held meetings with other village leaders and started devising strategies to stop the misuse and overuse of the technology by the students.

“Some leaders said that it was impossible to distance the children from their mobile phones, adding that they had never heard of any community that had succeeded in such an initiative. Some other leaders said that we should try to do something. ‘There’s nothing to lose, in case we fail,’ they said,” Mohite said.

The villagers, however, were won over by the collaborative awareness program orchestrated by the village council employees, retired schoolteachers, anganwadi (rural childcare center) workers and members of Accredited Social Health Activist- a nation-wide community health service network, or ASHA, composed of female community health workers.

The women in the village played a crucial role in the digital detox initiative.

“We gathered the village women, including the mothers of the students, and explained to them how the misuse of mobiles was destroying the future of the children,” Sarpanch Mohite told VOA. “When we proposed the idea of a digital detox, they all agreed with our concerns about the children and supported our idea, too.”

ASHA workers, who were also instrumental in persuading the villagers to embrace the idea of a digital detox, are local women trained to create awareness on health issues in their communities, according to the National Institute of Health and Welfare, India.

‘Mandatory practice’

The daily digital detox is now observed as a mandatory practice by the residents of Mohityanche Vadgaon, with a locality-wise team ensuring that every villager is adhering to the discipline.

“In August, we made a public announcement, requesting the villagers to help implement the ‘No Mobile, No TV, for 1.5 Hours Daily’ proposal. On August 15—observed as Independence Day in India—we introduced Digital Detox at our village in our style.

“Initially, some families were not cooperating. But, in such cases, their neighbors would report the cases to our village leaders, and our volunteers would immediately arrive at the houses of those families to convince them otherwise.

Every family at the village is now complying with our digital detox rule,” Vijay Mohite told VOA.

“After we have got a very good response from the villagers, we are pondering over an idea to extend the ‘No mobile, No TV’ time to two or even 2.5 hours in near future,” the sarpanch added.

Word on the initiative at Mohityanche Vadgaon has traveled fast that five other villages in Sangli district have emulated Mohite’s concept and implemented similar steps.

Rajubhai Mujawar, a resident of a nearby Nerli village, said that a daily ban on mobile and TV for 90 minutes will be introduced where he lives soon.

“The children have become mobile addicts. We have decided to introduce the rule of ‘No mobile, No TV’ for 1.5 hours daily in our village soon, following what Mohityanche Vadgaon village has done,” he said.
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Cybersecurity experts say that the October 10 attack on at least 14 U.S. airport websites, including those in Los Angeles and Chicago, appears to be the work of the Russian hacking group Killnet. As Mike O’Sullivan reports, the disruptions were a minor inconvenience for airline passengers, but experts say they highlight a major threat.
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The websites for some major U.S. airports went down early Monday in an apparent coordinated denial-of-service attack, although officials said flights were not affected. 

The attacks followed a call by a shadowy group of pro-Russian hackers that calls itself Killnet for coordinated denial-of-service attacks on the targets. The group published a target list on its Telegram channel. 

“We noticed this morning that the external website was down, and our IT and security people are in the process of investigating,” said Andrew Gobeil, a representative for Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport. “There has been no impact on operations.” 

Portions of the public-facing side of the Los Angeles International Airport website were also disrupted, spokesperson Victoria Spilabotte said. “No internal airport systems were compromised and there were no operational disruptions.” 

Spilabotte said the airport notified the FBI and the Transportation Security Administration, and the airport’s information-technology team was working to restore all services and investigate the cause. 

Several other airports reported problems connecting to their websites or that their sites appeared to be functioning very slowly, including Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport website, which was included on Killnet’s target list. 

The Chicago Department of Aviation said in a statement that websites for O’Hare and Midway Airport went offline early Monday but that no airport operations were affected. 

Last week, a group of hackers claimed responsibility for cyberattacks against state government websites across the country. 

 
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China Saturday criticized the latest U.S. decision to tighten export controls that would make it harder for China to obtain and manufacture advanced computing chips, calling it a violation of international economic and trade rules that will “isolate and backfire” on the U.S.

“Out of the need to maintain its sci-tech hegemony, the U.S. abuses export control measures to maliciously block and suppress Chinese companies,” said Foreign Ministry representative Mao Ning.

“It will not only damage the legitimate rights and interests of Chinese companies, but also affect American companies’ interests,” she said.

Mao also said that the U.S. “weaponization and politicization” of science and technology as well as economic and trade issues will not stop China’s progress.

She was speaking after the U.S. on Friday updated export controls that included adding certain advanced, high-performance computing chips and semiconductor manufacturing equipment to its list, as well as new license requirements for items that would be used in a supercomputer or for semiconductor development in China.

The U.S. said that the export controls were added as part of ongoing efforts to protect U.S. national security and foreign policy interests.

U.S.-China relations have deteriorated in recent years over technology and security issues. The U.S. has implemented a raft of measures and restrictions designed to prevent China from obtaining chip technology, while China has earmarked billions for investment into the production of semiconductors.

The tensions have impacted semiconductor companies in the U.S. and globally which either export chips or manufacture chips in China. Semiconductor companies such as Nvidia and AMD have seen a 40% decline in stock price over the past year.

“We understand the goal of ensuring national security and urge the U.S. government to implement the rules in a targeted way—and in collaboration with international partners—to help level the playing field and mitigate unintended harm to U.S. innovation,” the Semiconductor Industry Association, which represents U.S. semiconductor industry, said in a statement.
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U.S. President Joe Biden signed an executive order Friday designed to allay European concerns that U.S. intelligence agencies are illegally spying on them. It promises strengthened safeguards against data collection abuses and creates a forum for legal challenges. 

The order builds on a preliminary agreement Biden announced in March with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in a bid to end a yearslong battle over the safety of EU citizens’ data that tech companies store in the U.S. However, the European privacy campaigner who triggered the battle wasn’t satisfied that it resolved core issues and warned of more legal wrangling. 

The reworked Privacy Shield “includes a robust commitment to strengthen the privacy and civil liberties safeguards for signals intelligence, which should ensure the privacy of EU personal data,” Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo told reporters. 

Means of redress

“It also requires the establishment of a multilayer redress mechanism with independent and binding authority for EU individuals to seek redress if they believe they are unlawfully targeted by U.S. intelligence activities,” she added. 

Washington and Brussels have long been at odds over the friction between the European Union’s stringent data privacy rules and the comparatively lax regime in the U.S., which lacks a federal privacy law. That has created uncertainty for tech giants including Google and Facebook’s parent company Meta, raising the prospect that U.S. tech firms might need to keep European data out of the U.S. 

Industry groups largely welcomed Biden’s order but European consumer rights and privacy campaigners, including activist Max Schrems, whose complaint kicked off the legal battle a decade earlier, were skeptical about whether it goes far enough and could end up in the bloc’s top court again. 

Friday’s order narrows the scope of intelligence gathering — regardless of a target’s nationality — to “validated intelligence priorities,” fortifies the mandate of the Civil Liberties Protection Officer in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and directs the attorney general to establish an independent court to review related activities. 

Europeans can petition that Data Protection Review Court, which is to be composed of judges appointed from outside the U.S. government. 

The next step: Raimondo’s office was to send a series of letters to the 27-member EU that its officials can assess as the basis of a new framework. 

Improvements acknowledged

The European Union’s executive arm, the European Commission, said the framework has “significant improvements” over the original Privacy Shield and it would now work on adopting a final decision clearing the way for data to flow freely between EU and U.S. companies certified under the framework. 

Raimondo said the new commitments would address European Union legal concerns covering personal data transfers to the U.S. as well as corporate contracts. A revived framework “will enable the continued flow of data that underpins more than $1 trillion in cross-border trade and investment every year,” Raimondo said. 

Twice, in 2015 and again in 2020, the European Union’s top court struck down data privacy framework agreements between Washington and Brussels. The first legal challenge was filed by Austrian lawyer and privacy activist Schrems, who was concerned about how Facebook handled his data in light of 2013 revelations about U.S. government cyber-snooping from former U.S. National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden. 

European consumer group BEUC said despite the extra safeguards, fundamental differences between American and European privacy and data protection standards are too wide to bridge. 

“However much the U.S. authorities try to paper over the cracks of the original Privacy Shield, the reality is that the EU and U.S. still have a different approach to data protection, which cannot be canceled out by an executive order,” said the group’s deputy director general, Ursula Pachl. “The moment EU citizens’ data travels across the Atlantic, it will not be afforded similar protections as in the EU.” 

Schrems said while his Vienna-based group, NOYB, would need time to study the order, his initial reading is that it “seems to fail” on some key requirements, including for surveillance to be necessary and proportionate under the EU’s Charter of Fundamental rights to avoid indiscriminate mass data collection. 

While the U.S. included those two words, Schrems said the two sides don’t seem to have agreed they have the same legal meaning. 

If it did, “the U.S. would have to fundamentally limit its mass surveillance systems to comply with the EU understanding of ‘proportionate’ surveillance,” Schrems said. 
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The Biden administration on Friday published a sweeping set of export controls, including a measure to cut China off from certain semiconductor chips made anywhere in the world with U.S. tools, vastly expanding its reach in its bid to slow Beijing’s technological and military advances. 

The rules, some of which go into effect immediately, build on restrictions sent in letters earlier this year to top toolmakers KLA Corp., Lam Research Corp. and Applied Materials Inc., effectively requiring them to halt shipments of equipment to wholly Chinese-owned factories producing advanced logic chips. 

The raft of measures could amount to the biggest shift in U.S. policy toward shipping technology to China since the 1990s.  

If effective, they could set China’s chip manufacturing industry back years by forcing American and foreign companies that use U.S. technology to cut off support for some of China’s leading factories and chip designers.

Cooperation needed 

In a briefing with reporters on Thursday previewing the rules, senior government officials said many of the measures sought to prevent foreign firms from selling advanced chips to China or supplying Chinese firms with tools to make their own advanced chips. They conceded, however, that they have not yet secured any promises that allied nations will implement similar measures and that discussions with those nations are ongoing. 

“We recognize that the unilateral controls we’re putting into place will lose effectiveness over time if other countries don’t join us,” one official said. “And we risk harming U.S. technology leadership if foreign competitors are not subject to similar controls.” 

The expansion of U.S. powers to control exports to China of chips made with U.S. tools is based on a broadening of the so-called foreign direct product rule. It was previously expanded to give the U.S. government authority to control exports of chips made overseas to Chinese telecom giant Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. and later to stop the flow of semiconductors to Russia after its invasion of Ukraine. 

On Friday, the Biden administration applied the expanded restrictions to China’s IFLYTEK, Dahua Technology and Megvii Technology, companies added to the entity list in 2019 over allegations they aided Beijing in the suppression of its Uyghur minority group. 

The rules published on Friday also block shipments of a broad array of chips for use in Chinese supercomputing systems.  

The rules define a supercomputer as any system with more than 100 petaflops of computing power within a floor space of 6,400 square feet, a definition that two industry sources said could also hit some commercial data centers at Chinese tech giants. 

U.S. Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer welcomed the announcement, arguing the rules would “protect our country’s innovations from China’s predatory actions.” 

The Semiconductor Industry Association, which represents chipmakers, said it was studying the regulations and urged the United States to “implement the rules in a targeted way – and in collaboration with international partners – to help level the playing field.” 

‘Unverified list’

Earlier on Friday, the United States added China’s top memory chipmaker YMTC and 30 other Chinese entities to a list of companies that U.S. officials cannot inspect, ratcheting up tensions with Beijing and taking aim at a firm that has long troubled the Biden administration. 

The “unverified list” is a potential precursor to tougher economic blacklists, but companies that comply with U.S. inspection rules can come off the list. On Friday, U.S. officials removed nine such firms, including a unit of China’s Wuxi Biologics, which makes ingredients for AstraZeneca Plc’s COVID-19 vaccine. 

The new regulations will also severely restrict export of U.S. equipment to Chinese memory chip makers and formalize letters sent to Nvidia Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. restricting shipments to China of chips used in supercomputing systems that nations around the world rely on to develop nuclear weapons and other military technologies. 

Reuters was first to report key details of the new restrictions on memory chip makers, including a reprieve for foreign companies operating in China and the moves to broaden restrictions on shipments to China of technologies from KLA, Lam, Applied Materials Nvidia and AMD.
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