Beijing is set to spend 33 billion yuan (US$4.6 billion) building a 12-inch wafer fabrication facility, led by state-owned enterprises and funds, marking another step in China’s efforts to boost domestic semiconductor production.

Leading firms involved in the new facility include Beijing Yandong Microelectronics (YDME), which is listed on Shanghai’s Star Market, and BOE Technology, China’s top display maker.

This year, companies including Huahong Semiconductor, China Resources Microelectronics, and Guangzhou ZenSemi have all announced progress on 12-inch wafer fabs.

Meanwhile, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation, which established the mainland’s first 12-inch foundry in 2004, reported full utilisation of its 12-inch capacity in the third quarter. Revenue from 12-inch wafers accounted for 78.5 per cent of its 15.6 billion yuan total for the quarter. The company expects to release an additional 30,000 wafers per month in the fourth quarter.

Recently, Chinese chip design firms have become concerned that Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the world’s leading contract chipmaker, might suspend 7-nanometre node services for certain AI chip clients due to mounting pressure from the US. The Taiwanese chipmaker recently told mainland clients that it would no longer accept orders from them for advanced chips after TSMC technology was found in a product from US-sanctioned Huawei Technologies.

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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Kyiv would like to end the war with Russia next year through "diplomatic means" as both countries prepare for President-elect Donald Trump's return to the White House.

In an interview with the Ukrainian media outlet Suspilne, Zelenskyy said he is certain that the war will end "sooner" than it otherwise would have once Mr. Trump becomes president.

The prospect of Trump returning to power in the United States next year has raised questions about the future of the conflict, as the Republican has been critical of U.S. military aid to Kyiv.

Zelenskyy said that Ukraine "must do everything so that this war ends next year, ends through diplomatic means."

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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy tells Suspilne media platform that under US president-elect Donald Trump the war in Ukraine will end quicker, according to Suspilne website.

Trump, who takes office in January, has said he’d seek a quick deal between Kyiv and Moscow.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz held a phone call earlier on Friday, the first direct communication between the leaders in almost two years and discussed the war in Ukraine.

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[Photo: US Government] A hooded detainee imprisoned at Abu Ghraib. He is standing on a box with wires attached to his left and right hand; he was told that he would be electrocuted if he fell off the box.

On November 12, a federal jury in Alexandria, Virginia, returned a unanimous verdict for Abu Ghraib torture victims Salah Al-Ejaili, Suhail Al Shimari and Asa’ad Al-Zuba’e, awarding each $3 million in compensation and another $11 million for punitive damages against CACI Premier Technology, Inc., a publicly traded defense contractor with annual revenues approaching $3 billion.

The eight jurors found unanimously that late in 2003 CACI interrogators conspired “with military personnel to inflict torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment on detainees in the Abu Ghraib hard site that resulted in [each of the three men] being tortured or subjected to cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment.”

Following US’s illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq based on lies about complicity in the 9/11 attacks and “weapons of mass destruction,” in April 2004, CBS News’ “60 Minutes” published graphic photos of Iraqis rounded up by the US military and incarcerated in Abu Ghraib Prison outside Bhagdad being tortured by electric shocks, held in stress positions, threatened with dogs and humiliated sexually. Many photos depict gloating US soldiers posing with victims.

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As Sri Lankan President Anura Kumara Dissanayake left the polling station at the Abeysingharama Temple in Maradana, Colombo, on Thursday, Sulaiman called out to him, urging him to stop and listen to his grievances. The police quickly accosted Sulaiman and asked him to leave the venue.

Sulaiman’s hope that Dissanayake will deliver justice that his predecessors did not finds echoes across Sri Lanka, which overwhelmingly voted for the centre-left leader in presidential elections in September. Now, that hope will be tested like never before.

Dissanayake’s National People’s Power (NPP) won a landslide majority in Thursday’s parliamentary election, securing 159 seats in a house of 225 members – representing a comfortable two-thirds majority. The main opposition, Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB), under its leader Sajith Premadasa, won just 40 seats.

According to political analyst Aruna Kulatunga, this is the first time since 1977 – when Sri Lanka changed its parliamentary system to proportional representation – that a single party has won a clear majority. This is also the first time that the incumbent president has the numbers needed to pass legislation in parliament without needing to rely on any allies or coalition partners.

The expectations from the NPP are high. Led by Dissanayake’s Marxist-leaning Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna, the NPP also includes multiple organisations, including civil society groups that came together during the 2022 protests against the government of then-President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, who was ousted from power.

Stakes are particularly high in the north of the country where the Tamil community voted for the NPP, breaking with its pattern of voting for Tamil parties. The NPP secured a majority of the seats in the north. The north and east of the country, where the Tamil population is largely based, were the epicentres of the bloodiest battles during a three-decade civil war between the Tamil rebels and the Sri Lankan army. The war ended in 2009 when Sri Lankan armed forces decimated the Tamil armed leadership.

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China’s shrinking population brings both negative and positive effects, President Xi Jinping has said, noting that a lighter environmental burden is among the benefits of a smaller population.

The Chinese leader also defended the “correctness and effectiveness” of past birth control policies, according to excerpts from a speech to the Central Financial and Economic Affairs Commission.

He made the speech in May last year but the excerpts were published for the first time on Friday in Qiushi, the Communist Party’s top theoretical journal.

The impact of population decline “must be viewed in a dialectical manner”, Xi told commission officials.

But Xi also acknowledged the negative effects, such as a reduced labour force and weaker consumer and investment momentum.

“Overall, the impact of population decline on economic and social development has both positive and negative aspects. We cannot look at it from just one side. Some issues require long-term consideration, and we should avoid rushing to conclusions … and we should work to maximise benefits while avoiding harm,” he said.

China faces deepening demographic challenges as its birth rate plummets. Only 9 million births were reported in the country in 2023, the lowest since records began in 1949, as the population dropped for the second year in a row to 1.4 billion, a decline of more than 2 million.

National and local governments have rolled out a raft of policies, such as cash subsidies and extended maternity and paternity leave. But demographers argue these have failed to address deeper issues such as high living costs, insufficient childcare support and persistent gender inequality.

“The pace of population transition is fast, the population decline has come earlier than expected, but overall it follows the general pattern of modernisation development worldwide,” he was quoted as saying by the party journal, which regularly highlights internal leadership speeches months after they are given.

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Russian President Vladimir Putin and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz held a phone call Friday to discuss ways to end the war in Ukraine, according a person familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Uncertainty over support from Western allies has also been growing ahead of Donald Trump’s return to the White House next year. Germany is Ukraine’s second-biggest supporter after the US and has pledged billions of euros in additional aid.

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For the first time, Chinese scientists and their US collaborators have been able to precisely measure the age of volcanic eruptions on the far side of the moon.

Previously this was only estimated through remote sensing observations.

Two research teams led by scientists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, based in Beijing and Guangzhou, used radiometric dating to analyse isotope decay in basalts, a type of volcanic rock brought back to Earth by China’s Chang’e-6 mission in June.

Their studies, published on Friday in journals Nature and Science, both found that the moon’s oldest and deepest crater on its far side was volcanically active around 2.8 billion years ago.

In comparison, samples returned by the Apollo, Luna and Chang’e-5 missions – all from the near side – established that lunar volcanism occurred between 4 billion and 2 billion years ago.

The Nature paper highlighted that the 2.8 billion-year age was “surprisingly young” as volcanic activities on the far side were traditionally thought to have ended much earlier. Most volcanic eruptions were associated with the near side and believed to have ceased by around 3 billion years ago.

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The Israeli attack on Iran in late October destroyed an active top secret nuclear weapons research facility in Parchin, according to three U.S. officials, one current Israeli official and one former Israeli official.

The strike — which targeted a site previously reported to be inactive — significantly damaged Iran's effort over the past year to resume nuclear weapons research, Israeli and U.S. officials said.

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Sri Lankan President Anura Kumara Dissanayake thanked voters on Friday for delivering his leftist coalition a landslide victory in snap parliamentary elections that repudiated establishment parties blamed for triggering an economic crisis.

Dissanayake, a self-avowed Marxist, swept September presidential elections on a promise to combat corruption and recover stolen assets, two years after a slow-motion financial crash imposed widespread hardships on the island nation.

His decision to immediately call polls and secure parliamentary backing for his agenda was vindicated on Friday, with his National People’s Power (NPP) coalition taking at least 159 seats in the 225-member assembly, exceeding a two-thirds majority.

In a sign of the magnitude of support for Dissanayake, his party won the most votes in the northern district of Jaffna, dominated by the island’s minority Tamil community, for the first time since independence from Britain in 1948.

Dissanayake, the 55-year-old son of a labourer, had been an MP for nearly 25 years and was briefly an agriculture minister but his NPP coalition held just three seats in the outgoing assembly.

He stormed to the presidency after successfully distancing himself from successive leaders blamed for steering the country to its 2022 economic crisis.

Portraits of communist luminaries including Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Friedrich Engels and Fidel Castro hang in Dissanayake’s office in the capital.

Since his rise to popularity, however, he has softened some policies, saying he believes in an open economy and is not totally opposed to privatisation.

Dissanayake had campaigned on a pledge to renegotiate a controversial US$2.9 billion International Monetary Fund (IMF) bailout secured by his predecessor.

But since taking office, he has resolved to maintain the existing agreement with the international lender.

The country’s main private sector lobby, the Ceylon Chamber of Commerce, has tacitly supported Dissanayake and his programme.

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Sales of Chinese cars in Russia have hit fresh records after the country became the largest export destination for the Asian nation’s automakers when sanctions forced western brands to cut ties with Moscow.

Surging in Russian sales have helped Chinese carmakers at a time when Beijing faces higher tariffs on electric vehicle exports from Washington and Brussels — while engineering a rapid change in Russian auto culture.

Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine sparked a sharp decline in sales of vehicles from the European, Korean and Japanese carmakers that previously dominated the country’s car market.

At the time of the full-scale invasion in February 2022, their brands made up 69 per cent of all sales, according to the Avtostat analytics agency. They now have a market share of just 8.5 per cent, while Chinese manufacturers’ share over the same period has risen from 9 per cent to 57 per cent.

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