Malaysia said it's looking into reports that a Chinese company is using servers with Nvidia chips and artificial intelligence chips for large language models training in Malaysia. The country's Ministry of Investment, Trade and Industry is "still in the process of verifying the matter with relevant agencies if any domestic law or regulation has been breached."
Days after U.S. officials said they secured an agreement for Beijing to rein in its export curbs on critical minerals (see 2506110044), China announced it has approved license applications for those exports, but didn't offer more details.
A Spanish national living in the United Arab Emirates pleaded guilty on June 17 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to conspiring to illegally export U.S.-origin radio communications technology to Russian end users without a license, DOJ announced. Sentencing is set for Sept. 30.
Senate Foreign Relations Committee ranking member Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., and Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., a member of the committee, introduced a bill June 18 to repeal the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act of 2019.
Sens. Pete Ricketts, R-Neb., and Tim Kaine, D-Va., introduced a bill June 18 aimed at removing obstacles to defense trade within the four-year-old Australia-U.K.-U.S. security partnership.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order June 19 giving China’s ByteDance an additional 90 days, or until Sept. 17, to find a buyer for TikTok or face a U.S. ban on the popular social media application.
The U.K.'s Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation on June 18 removed one entry from its global anti-corruption sanctions list and added one entry to its ISIL (Da'esh) and al-Qaida sanctions list. Under the anti-corruption sanctions regime, OFSI removed Bosnian national Slobodan Tesic, who was originally listed for bribing both the former chief state prosecutor and minister of defense of Bosnia. Under the ISIL sanctions list, OFSI added Ugandan Abubakar Swalleh for acting as an ISIL facilitator since 2018 by providing financial support for ISIL in East and Southern Africa.
The U.S. last week sanctioned four people, 12 entities, and two vessels that have imported oil and other goods for the Houthis in what was the “single largest action” taken by the Office of Foreign Assets Control against the Yemen-based designated terror group. OFAC said the designations target Houthi front companies, their owners, and other “key” operatives that generate revenue for the group through sales of oil and other commodities on Yemen’s black market and through smuggling at Houthi-controlled ports.
The Office of Foreign Assets Control last week sanctioned a network of companies and a vessel for helping to ship sensitive machinery to Iran, including from China.
The Office of Foreign Assets Control last week removed sanctions from Sakan General Trading, also known as Royal Credit General Trading, a United Arab Emirates company sanctioned by the agency in 2019. The company was designated for providing currency exchange support and financing for the currency exchange arm of Ansar Bank, a bank controlled by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. An OFAC spokesperson didn't respond to a request for comment, and the agency didn't immediately release more information about the delisting.