Stories from Abroad

The White House restricted journalists’ access to parts of President Donald Trump’s summit with Kim Jong Un despite long-standing arrangements intended to ensure the public is kept fully abreast of key presidential moments. Under standard rules agreed to by the White House and the press corps, a full pool of reporters travels with the president at all times and is allowed at any meetings where press access in granted, even if space is limited.

In a rare rebuke of President Donald Trump, Republican Senate leaders set up a vote for the week of June 11 that would undo the White House deal to revive Chinese telecommunications company ZTE Corp. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross was on Capitol Hill late June 11 to lobby against the move. But Democratic and Republican lawmakers said that an agreement had been reached to wrap into the National Defense Authorization Act an amendment that would ban ZTE from buying components from US suppliers.

The effects of the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will spread beyond the EU. Since the requirements cover all data collected from EU citizens, American corporations that do business in the EU or with EU partners will have to comply with the GDPR. Changing data collection, sharing, and analysis processes places significant financial burdens on business. For example, businesses cannot transfer an individual’s data out of the EU unless they have obtained explicit consent and have put adequate safeguards in place to ensure the security of transfer.

Three hours into an interrogation by British lawmakers, Cambridge Analytica’s former chief executive Alexander Nix stood up and thrust a slide deck at Members of Parliament: “I’ve tried,” he said, “to take what is ostensibly quite a complex structure and simplify it.” His four slides told a straightforward story about the analytics company, which shot to prominence after it was found to have used data from millions of Facebook users in political campaigns.

China’s technology boom, it turns out, has been largely built on top of Western technology. The ZTE incident, as it is called in China, may be the country’s Sputnik moment. Like the United States in 1957, watching helplessly as the Soviet Union launched the first human-made satellite, many people in China now see how far the country still has to go.

An overhaul of Europe’s telecoms laws, aimed at stimulating investment in new networks, has been branded a missed opportunity for the industry. The new European electronic communications code, the biggest shake-up in the sector’s governance since 2009, was approved on June 6. The agreement coincided with the release of a European Court of Auditors report that showed the European Union’s goal of connecting half of the region’s households to ultrafast broadband with speeds of 100 Mbps by 2020 was well behind target.

Chinese phone maker Huawei said it has never collected or stored Facebook user data, after the social media giant acknowledged it shared such data with Huawei and other manufacturers. Huawei, a company flagged by US intelligence officials as a national security threat, was the latest device maker at the center of a fresh wave of allegations over Facebook’s handling of private data. Chinese firms Huawei, Lenovo, Oppo and TCL were among numerous handset makers that were given access to Facebook data in a “controlled” way approved by Facebook, according to Facebook.

Apparently, Members of Congress have begun scrutinizing Google’s relationship with China’s Huawei Technologies—roping another Silicon Valley giant into Washington’s escalating digital cold war with Beijing. The review—of a facet of Google’s Android operating system partnership with Huawei—comes after lawmakers questioned Facebook about its data partnerships with Huawei and three other Chinese electronics makers. Facebook said it would wind down the Huawei deal by the week’s end.

Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross announced that Zhongxing Telecommunications Equipment Corporation, of Shenzhen, China (“ZTE Corporation”) and ZTE Kangxun Telecommunications Ltd. of Hi-New Shenzhen, China (“ZTE Kangxun”) (collectively, “ZTE”) has agreed to severe additional penalties and compliance measures to replace the US Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) denial order imposed as a result of ZTE’s violations of its March 2017 settlement agreement.

Facebook has data-sharing partnerships with at least four Chinese electronics companies, including Huawei, a manufacturing giant that has a close relationship with China’s government. The agreements, which date to at least 2010, gave private access to some user data to Huawei, a telecommunications equipment company that has been flagged by American intelligence officials as a national security threat, as well as to Lenovo, Oppo and TCL.