TheChek News Flow

Paris obtains carve-out for atomic power to be counted towards decarbonisation of industry

The EU member states and parliament have reached a compromise on new targets for renewable energy after agreeing to a carve-out for nuclear power in certain sectors amid pressure from France.

Negotiators agreed to increase the overall binding target of renewable energy consumed in the EU to 42.5 per cent by 2030, up from 32 per cent, according to a statement. They also set an “indicative” target of reaching 45 per cent by the end of the decade.

France had pushed for nuclear energy to be included in countries’ efforts to reach those targets. But at the end of a long night of negotiations, the countries agreed on a more limited concession counting nuclear power towards the target for industry. Nuclear power plants generated about two-thirds of France’s electricity output in 2022.

Nuclear-sceptic countries including Germany and Austria had argued against the inclusion of atomic power, saying that such a move would undermine efforts to expand solar, wind and other renewable sources of energy.

The agreement now includes counting “low-carbon” hydrogen generated with electricity from atomic power plants as part of separate targets for renewable hydrogen used by industry, which can be reduced by one-fifth under certain conditions.

The states would, however, still have to reach the overall renewables goal of 42.5 per cent, regardless of the discount in the industry sector.

Pascal Canfin, head of the environment committee at the European parliament, on Twitter welcomed the “recognition of the role of nuclear energy, which is neither green nor fossil”.

The new law also accelerates permitting procedures for wind farms, solar panels and other renewable energy projects. They would be considered in the “overriding public interest”, meaning they could be exempt from certain nature protection laws.

“It will mean a massive boost for renewable energies in Europe,” said Markus Pieper, who led the negotiations for the European parliament on the directive.

European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen said: “This will help us progress towards climate neutrality, strengthen our energy security and boost our competitiveness — all at once.”

The deal still needs to be endorsed by the European parliament and the states.

While this is usually a formal process, Germany’s recent reopening of a deal regarding rules for car emissions has caused concern that countries unhappy with the outcome of this agreement could make a similar move.

Major international luxury names are competing for space on London's Sloane Street, which is undergoing a 46-million-pound green refurbishment.

LONDON – Sloane Street is fast becoming a luxury lifestyle hub to rival Mayfair following a series of transformations, the latest of which is a 46-million-pound project to turn it into an oasis of green.

The street, which runs between Sloane Square on the south side and Knightsbridge on the north, is set to undergo a two-year public realm project managed by the majority long-term landowner, Cadogan.

Cadogan has brought in public and private partners, working with the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea Council on the overall execution, and with Louis Vuitton on an innovative “pocket forest” that’s being planted on nearby Pont Street.

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In an interview, Hugh Seaborn, chief executive officer of Cadogan, said the owners see Sloane Street and its environs as “a global destination for luxury retail.” He noted that the street was originally commissioned in the 18th century by the 1st Earl Cadogan as a stylish destination where court dress makers had their shops and where the latest fashions were born.

This is the first time the street, as a whole, is being refurbished. Seaborn said that Cadogan has been working with the local council to create “a beautiful, inspiring, greener, cleaner and better-connected environment for local residents and businesses.”

Over the years, Cadogan has lured big names such as Tiffany & Co., Louis Vuitton, Valentino, Dior and British labels including Anya Hindmarch and Emilia Wickstead onto the one kilometer-long street, and those brands are now expanding their spaces – or moving to larger premises – as part of the planned two-year project.

Although international tourism is nowhere near its pre-pandemic levels, and retailers remain stung by the U.K. government’s refusal to reinstate tax-free shopping, people are spending money.

Wealthy international residents, students and British locals regularly wait in line to enter stores including Chanel and Louis Vuitton, while hotels including Cadogan, which belongs to Belmond, and Beaverbrook Town House are buzzing.

In 2022, sales growth on Sloane Street was up 7 percent compared with 2019, according to Cadogan. Seaborn described shoppers on the street as “very international” and said most have a home in the area.

It’s no wonder the luxury brands are expanding. In July, Dior plans to double the size of its Sloane Street store, moving into a 9,000-square-foot space at 196-198 Sloane Street, while Louis Vuitton is adding a floor to its existing store, growing by an additional 1,874 square feet.

Bottega Veneta is extending its current space, while Valentino is taking an entire townhouse measuring 8,170 square feet. It will open next year at 185-186 Sloane Street. Walpole, the association of British luxury goods, is moving into a townhouse in May, while Kiton is opening that same month at 49 Sloane Street.

Those changes follow the openings of Emilia Wickstead and Diptyque flagships last year, while Anya Hindmarch has recently added the sixth permanent store to her concept village in the neighborhood, which she has described as “the world’s smallest” department store.

Cadogan has also been upgrading the hospitality offer.

In 2016, it transformed a long and very quiet cobbled side street into the pedestrian strip called Pavilion Road, which is now lined with restaurants, bars, cafés and bakeries.

Later this year, Cantinetta Antinori will open a few steps away from Pavilion Road. The restaurant will be the Antinori family’s first outside Italy and will be located opposite Louis Vuitton. Cadogan said there are more restaurants to come later this year.

The biggest plan of all is in the public realm, where Cadogan wants to transform Sloane Street into a “green boulevard,” with the project set to be completed by the end of 2024.

The project was originally approved by the local council in 2019, but the start of works was delayed due to the pandemic.

There are plans to widen the pavements and add plants, trees and gardens. Beehives and natural ponds in Cadogan Place Gardens will be created to encourage biodiversity.

Cadogan is also promising “elegant street furniture,” enhanced lighting and additional security measures, all aimed at creating a more welcoming environment for pedestrians. It is also planning a series of “traffic-calming measures.”

New “waste collection bikes” are meant to take trucks off the road and further support the improvement of local air quality, and the whole life of the scheme is designed to be ultra-low carbon impact.

London architects John McAslan and Partners, whose recent work includes the transformation of King’s Cross Station, are leading on the public realm masterplan. The landscaping is being overseen by Chelsea Flower Show award winner Andy Sturgeon.

Cadogan said Sturgeon is planning a “royal” color palette of rich maroons, reds, purples and blues for a “diverse and climate-resilient mix of flowers, shrubs and over 100 new trees.”

OpenAI’s success in overtaking Google with an artificial intelligence–powered chatbot has achieved what seemed impossible in the past: It has forced the two AI research teams within Google’s parent, Alphabet, to overcome years of intense rivalry to work together.

Software engineers at Google’s Brain AI group are working with employees at DeepMind, an AI lab that is a sibling company within Alphabet, to develop software to compete with OpenAI, according to two people with knowledge of the project. Known internally as Gemini, the joint effort began in recent weeks, after Google stumbled with Bard, its first attempt to compete with OpenAI’s chatbot.

The release of Bard was also marred internally by the resignation of a prominent Google AI researcher who had raised red flags about its development to Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and other executives.

THE TAKEAWAY

• Researchers from DeepMind and Google are working on software to rival OpenAI’s GPT-4

• High costs and computing needs forced researchers from the two units to work together

• Key AI researcher quit in January after raising red flags about Google’s Bard chatbot

DeepMind has operated more like a rival than a collaborator with regard to Google Brain since Google acquired DeepMind in 2014. The two have been competing to improve some of Google’s products and services and to gain global notoriety for research breakthroughs. Now, though, employees at both of Alphabet’s AI labs agree that OpenAI has outflanked them. Plus, the startup has hired away some of their key engineers and researchers, The Information has reported.

OpenAI in November launched ChatGPT, a chatbot that gives humanlike answers and has become one of the fastest-growing apps in history. Google’s own chatbot, Bard, which became available to a limited group of users last week, appears to perform worse on some tasks compared to ChatGPT.

Reflecting Gemini’s importance, Jeff Dean, Brain’s leader and the most senior AI research executive at Google, has taken a technical role in the project, writing code to help make a machine-learning model that would try to match the capabilities of OpenAI’s GPT-4, the model that powers ChatGPT, one of these people said.

The effort is one sign of how Google has shaken up the product road maps at countless teams including search and cloud as a result of competition from ChatGPT and OpenAI’s work to incorporate its tech inside products made by Microsoft—which is funding the startup and paying for its computing needs.

Gemini is a forced marriage. Alphabet’s two AI labs have seldom collaborated or shared computer code with one another. But now, because both wanted to develop their own machine-learning model to compete with OpenAI and needed an inordinate amount of computing power to do so, they had little choice but to work together, said a person with knowledge of the situation.

Red Flag

Bard’s early stumble demonstrates Google’s problems. The chatbot was created in a process so contentious that a prominent Google AI engineer, Jacob Devlin, resigned in January and immediately joined OpenAI, according to a person with direct knowledge and another person briefed about it. Devlin was the lead author of a seminal paper on a method of training machine-learning models to improve their understanding of groups of sentences—an invention OpenAI has incorporated into its language models.

Devlin quit after sharing concerns with Pichai, Dean and other senior managers that the Bard team, which received assistance from Brain employees, was training its machine-learning model using data from OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Specifically, Devlin believed the Bard team appeared to be relying heavily on information from ShareGPT, a website where people publish conversations they’ve had with ChatGPT.

Some Google employees felt the use of such chat logs would have violated OpenAI’s terms of service, which prohibit the use of “output…to develop models that compete with OpenAI,” according to its website. Devlin also told executives he was concerned that by relying on the ChatGPT chat logs from ShareGPT, Bard’s answers would mimic or resemble those of ChatGPT too much.

After Devlin raised the issue, Google stopped using ChatGPT data to train Bard, one person said. The Bard team has been led in part by Sissie Hsiao, a vice president who previously was in charge of Assistant, which is similar to Apple’s Siri voice assistant, said two people with knowledge of the group. A Google spokesperson didn’t comment on Devlin’s resignation and allegation. Spokespeople for OpenAI didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

1 Trillion Parameters

The business implications of OpenAI’s early lead over Alphabet aren’t clear. Though it makes plenty of mistakes, millions of people are already using ChatGPT and the technology behind it to quickly generate blog posts and other content, summarize meeting notes and automatically create spreadsheets, among many other tasks, according to a person with knowledge of the figures.

The product has generated relatively little revenue to date, though that could change. Microsoft has attempted to boost its own search engine, Bing, by incorporating a ChatGPT-like feature with OpenAI’s help, but so far that doesn’t appear to have taken meaningful market share away from Google Search. Still, OpenAI appears to have heralded a new era of applications that can understand requests customers make using natural language.

The Gemini project aims to develop a large-language model—a computer program that can understand and generate human-like language—that would have up to 1 trillion parameters, a measure of calculations in a machine-learning model, said one of the people briefed about it. GPT-4 also has around 1 trillion parameters, Semafor reported. Google’s effort requires tens of thousands of tensor processing units. The company’s equivalent to Nvidia’s graphical processing units, TPU microchips are particularly well suited to training large machine-learning models, this person said. Still, the Gemini effort may take months to complete, this person said.

Meanwhile, other teams at Google have been developing their own large-language models as part of a companywide effort to integrate AI into all of its products. Pandu Nayak, a Google executive overseeing search rankings, has been developing a separate model to handle certain search queries, while Google Cloud is creating its own model to sell to cloud customers, similar to the one customers can buy from OpenAI or Microsoft’s Azure cloud unit, this person said.

Li Qiang calls for peace one day after Beijing threatens Taiwan over its president’s visit to California

China’s premier Li Qiang has warned against allowing “chaos and conflicts” to erupt in Asia and jeopardise the region’s prosperity amid soaring tensions with Washington.

Speaking at a conference of global political and business leaders, China’s second-highest official vowed that Beijing would continue to reform and open up as it sought to revive an economy stricken by strict Covid-19 controls.

“To achieve greater success in Asia, chaos and conflicts must not happen in Asia, otherwise the future will be lost,” Li told the Boao Forum for Asia, one of China’s biggest annual international conferences.

Li’s comments followed a warning from Beijing on Wednesday that it would retaliate if Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-wen met US House Speaker Kevin McCarthy during an upcoming trip to California.

While Li did not refer specifically to Taiwan, China and the US are increasingly at loggerheads over issues ranging from Washington’s close ties to Taipei to American efforts to control Chinese access to advanced semiconductor technology.

“Peace is the prerequisite for development and the significant success achieved by Asian countries in the past few decades,” Li told the forum, which was attended by Spain’s prime minister Pedro Sánchez, Singapore’s prime minister Lee Hsien Loong, Malaysia’s prime minister Anwar Ibrahim and IMF managing director Kristalina Georgieva.

While most speakers at the forum have studiously avoided mention of the war in Ukraine, Sánchez and Lee condemned the Russian invasion in blunt terms on Thursday. The Spanish leader described the conflict as Russia’s “brutal and illegal aggression . . . that is causing a major humanitarian crisis, food insecurity and inflation”.

Spain is set to take over the EU’s rolling presidency in July, and Sánchez is expected to discuss the war during his visit to China. He is scheduled to meet Chinese president Xi Jinping on Friday.

European governments want Xi to use his influence with Russian president Vladimir Putin to help end the war, but there is deep suspicion in the west over Beijing’s close ties to Moscow.

Xi has not called Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy since Russia’s full-scale invasion but has maintained regular contact with Putin and met his Russian counterpart for talks in Moscow last week.

Beijing, which has sought to portray itself as a non-aligned actor, published a position paper on the conflict last month that did not condemn the invasion. State media regularly parrots Russian propaganda, referring to the conflict as a “crisis” rather than a war.

Singapore’s Lee on Thursday said Moscow had violated the UN charter and international law, while calling for Asia to remain open to trade with the west.

China’s Li also said Beijing would continue to expand market access to business, which was largely cut off for three years by pandemic restrictions, and “effectively prevent and diffuse major risks, particularly concerning financial sectors”.

Since becoming China’s premier and head of the cabinet this month, Li has sought to promote a more business-friendly face to the world.

“Beijing intensified its charm offensive as the new cabinet took office in March,” Morgan Stanley wrote in a recent report. It said Beijing had “dusted off its old playbook of opening up, substantiated with actions that announce the return of China — to business”.

G-20 nations among first destinations in move that risks intensifying alarm over expansion of Beijing’s overseas activities

China is dispatching anticorruption enforcers abroad to chase down fugitives and recover stolen assets, a new extension of Beijing’s international reach aimed at strengthening Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s crackdown on graft.

The Communist Party’s top antigraft body and other government offices tasked with tackling corruption have begun stationing officials in some Chinese embassies, where they would coordinate with foreign authorities on law-enforcement matters, among other duties, according to people familiar with the plan.

These anticorruption inspectors will be based mainly in countries where corrupt Chinese officials are likely to have stashed large amounts of illicit funds, such as members of the Group of 20 nations, said one of the people. The Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, the antigraft body, has pledged this year to ramp up cross-border efforts in fighting corruption, particularly across countries that participate in Mr. Xi’s Belt and Road Initiative to build global trade infrastructure—a group that includes G-20 members.

The deployments come as Mr. Xi renews demands to entrench the far-reaching anticorruption crackdown that he has directed since taking power in 2012. Chinese authorities say they have brought back nearly 10,700 suspects from abroad during Mr. Xi’s first two terms as party chief, including more than 60 of China’s 100 most-wanted economic fugitives. But CCDI officials say investigators face a tougher task in trying to solve outstanding cases and deter more sophisticated offenders.

“Currently, quite a number of fugitive cases are old cases that stretch over long time spans and where there are few effective clues,” said a commentary published by the CCDI’s official newspaper in December that called for more international cooperation in fighting graft. Officials must overcome these difficulties by strengthening coordination and coming up with new tactics and techniques, the commentary said.

The presence of anticorruption officials in Chinese embassies risks raising alarm in host countries. In Western capitals, concerns have grown over Chinese security forces trying to conduct law-enforcement duties beyond China’s borders. U.S. officials, for instance, have repeatedly complained about covert Chinese agents chasing fugitives on American soil without authorization.

It couldn’t be determined what specific activities the anticorruption inspectors would engage in abroad. Some are likely to be dispatched as legal attachés, the same title Chinese police officials typically adopt when they are sent abroad as liaison officers to foreign governments, according to one of the people.

Stationing CCDI officials in embassies as law-enforcement liaisons seems to be an attempt to legitimize this agency abroad and its alleged use of extralegal techniques to force fugitives to return to China, according to Laura Harth, campaign director at human-rights group Safeguard Defenders. Such deployments could have “severe effects on the enjoyment of rights and freedoms” of people who are potential targets of the CCDI, Ms. Harth said.

The CCDI didn’t respond to a request for comment.

As the vanguard in Mr. Xi’s withering decadelong crackdown on corruption, the CCDI plays a major role in Beijing’s campaign to pursue economic fugitives who have fled China, block the outflow of ill-gotten money from the country, and recover stolen assets. It does this through two parallel operations, “Fox Hunt” and “Sky Net.”

Fox Hunt focuses on repatriating fugitives accused of committing economic and financial crimes. Sky Net also targets the channels that suspects allegedly use to funnel money abroad, as well as the people and entities who help run these channels. Through Sky Net, China captured more than 7,000 fugitives and recovered some 35.2 billion yuan, or about $5.12 billion, in what authorities describe as ill-gotten assets during the five-year period that ended in late 2022, according to official data.

The CCDI has sought cooperation with foreign law-enforcement agencies for these operations, though Chinese officials have often struggled to get Western counterparts to help detain and repatriate suspects, in part due to lack of extradition agreements with major powers like the U.S., as well as Beijing’s alleged use of extraterritorial tactics in trying to retrieve suspects.

When Chinese security officials traveled to the U.S. in 2017 to press fugitive businessman Guo Wengui to return to China, agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation told the Chinese officials that they were acting in violation of their transit visas and instructed them to leave the country, The Wall Street Journal reported at the time.

China has signed extradition treaties with about 60 countries, though more than a dozen of these pacts haven’t been fully ratified and brought into effect. Some 10 European Union member states—including France, Spain and Italy—have agreed to extradition pacts with Beijing, though many other Western governments haven’t done so.

At a policy meeting in January, CCDI chief Li Xi committed to bolstering Sky Net efforts this year, saying the agency would strengthen international cooperation in anticorruption work, and build “an integrated mechanism for chasing fugitives, preventing escape, and recovering stolen assets.” He also demanded efforts to improve mechanisms for applying relevant laws beyond China’s borders, without specifying how.

Chinese lawmakers have also discussed writing similar commitments on boosting international cooperation in anticorruption work into a forthcoming law on foreign relations, according to a recent draft.

China has said that many fugitives accused of corruption and financial crimes use countries in North America and Europe as major havens, and called on those governments to repatriate more of these suspects. For instance, Chinese authorities have described how one former state-enterprise employee, No. 3 on a list of 100 most-wanted economic fugitives that Beijing issued in 2015, had hidden himself or placed assets across a number of European countries—including Switzerland, Austria, Hungary, Liechtenstein, Cyprus and Sweden—before he was detained in Stockholm in 2018.

While international law-enforcement actions often involve formal cooperation and requests for assistance between governments, Washington has accused Beijing of applying clandestine methods to hunt fugitives in America. These include allegations that Chinese security agents have entered the U.S. under false pretenses to track down suspects and coerce them into returning to China, and that such agents sometimes used suspects’ family members as intermediaries.

In 2022, the European Court of Human Rights blocked China’s efforts to extradite a Taiwanese man wanted for alleged telecoms fraud, citing the risk of ill-treatment in Chinese detention facilities—a ruling that legal experts and rights activists say would complicate Chinese attempts to recover fugitives from many European countries.

Some foreign diplomats say it would be politically fraught for Beijing to deploy Communist Party inspectors in foreign capitals, as host countries generally treat personnel in foreign diplomatic missions as government officials, rather than operatives from political parties.

CCDI personnel would likely take up their overseas roles in their capacities as government officials from a state agency, rather than as party inspectors, to conform with diplomatic convention, according to the people familiar with the plan.

For instance, CCDI officials taking postings in embassies abroad could go as officials from the National Supervisory Commission, one of the people said. That commission functions as the CCDI’s state equivalent in a practice known as “one set of personnel, two signboards.”