The 2026 Hong Kong-Macao-Shandong Week is underway from May 18–22 in Hong Kong and Macao. This week-long event features business and trade talks, entrepreneur exchanges, and promotions of premium Shandong products — all aimed at deepening collaboration among the three regions.

The moment propaganda becomes truly powerful is when nobody recognises it as propaganda. The leaders of the USSR understood this - and they had a name for it: agitprop. Today, we see it everywhere. The term originated shortly after the Russian Revolution. In 1920, the Bolsheviks established the Department of Agitation and Propaganda (Agitprop) under the Central Committee. Lenin viewed agitation and propaganda as essential revolutionary tools. Agitation was designed to stir emotions and mobilise the masses around simple, powerful messages. Propaganda aimed at deeper ideological indoctrination of party cadres and intellectuals. Together, they formed a systematic effort to control how people thought, spoke and interpreted reality. The Soviets used agitprop aggressively through posters, films, newspapers, theatre, education and workplace meetings. Its goal was not merely to inform, but to create a new consciousness aligned with Marxist-Leninist ideology. Dissenting views were not debated - they were pathologised as “bourgeois”, “reactionary” or “counter-revolutionary”. This approach proved highly influential beyond the USSR. Modern leftist movements have adapted many of its core techniques. Contemporary identity politics, critical theory and institutional activism often operate through similar methods: framing language as a site of power, portraying disagreement as moral failure, and using institutions (universities, media, corporations, and NGOs) to enforce ideological conformity. Rather than seizing factories, today’s agitprop focuses on capturing culture and institutions. The methods have become more sophisticated and less overtly violent, but the underlying logic remains consistent: reshape perception, control the narrative and make alternative viewpoints socially and professionally costly. What began as a Bolshevik instrument of total ideological control has evolved into a subtler but no less powerful strategy for advancing collectivist goals in open societies.

Google DeepMind’s paper shows that the real security problem for AI agents is not just the model, but the environment it reads. Presents the first systematic framework for understanding how the web itself can be weaponized against autonomous AI agents. As agents increasingly browse the internet, read emails, execute transactions, and spawn sub-agents, the information environment becomes an attack surface. In one cited benchmark, hidden prompt injections embedded in web content partially commandeered agents in up to 86% of scenarios, sub-agent hijacking working 58–90% of the time, and data exfiltration attacks clearing 80% across five different agent architectures. That reframes the whole debate. We usually talk about model safety as if the danger sits inside the weights, but agents do something more fragile: they browse, retrieve, remember, and act on untrusted material in real time. The paper’s key contribution is a taxonomy of “AI Agent Traps,” six attack classes aimed at perception, reasoning, memory and learning, action, multi-agent dynamics, and even the human overseer. Here’s the key point. A web page does not have to look malicious to be dangerous to an agent, because the agent may parse what humans never see: hidden HTML comments, metadata, CSS-hidden text, formatting syntax, or adversarial content embedded in images and other media. The threat gets more serious once memory enters the loop. If an agent uses RAG or persistent memory, poisoning no longer has to win in one shot. It can sit quietly in a corpus or memory store and activate later, which is why the paper highlights results showing latent memory poisoning above 80% attack success with less than 0.1% data contamination. What makes this paper useful is its restraint. It does not pretend every category is equally mature. Content injection and behavioural control already look concrete, while systemic and human-in-the-loop traps are presented more as an emerging research frontier than a solved empirical case. The larger point is hard to ignore: once agents are allowed to ingest the open web at inference time, every page, document, and memory write becomes part of the security boundary. --- ssrn .com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6372438

Organisational meetings are all about new ideas and perspectives aimed at strengthening the Party and deepening connect with the people. Great interaction with fellow Party colleagues and the new organisational team! @BJP4India

I welcomed Prime Minister @narendramodi to Abu Dhabi for talks aimed at further strengthening the deeply rooted ties between our nations and peoples. The UAE and India share a longstanding strategic and economic partnership, and our discussions today focused on ways to advance cooperation in priority sectors including energy and technology. Together, we remain committed to driving lasting progress for our countries and promoting peace and stability throughout the region and the world.

To MemeCore followers and holders: 2025 is coming to a close—a year of deep meaning for MemeCore. Earlier this year, we successfully launched our Mainnet. The beginning of our own independent ecosystem. Since then, the $M token has gained significant market recognition and established a strong presence within the global crypto ecosystem. MemeCore exists for the community. Over the past year, we’ve focused on listening to your voices through both online and offline activities. We wanted to repay your trust with real, tangible value. Our events around the world were more than just meetups. They were moments where we confirmed the strength of our bond. Because of that, our ecosystem is expanding, and more builders and users are growing together within MemeCore. As we wrap up 2025, we’ve already hit the key milestones we aimed for. MemeCore has grown into a project with both scale and substance. But our vision doesn’t stop here. We are moving toward a wider world and even higher goals. 2026 will be about massive expansion. Bold challenges and growth that no one else has dared to try. I hope you continue to stay with us as we write this new history. Again, thank you for your support this year. I wish you all the best in the coming New Year. In 2026, let’s keep walking our own path, as we always have. Stay Meme, Stay Core. Ice, Co-Founder of MemeCore

Banger paper from Stanford and Together AI. They show why it might be a good idea to let your agent team learn its own way of working together. (bookmark it) Three models (o3-mini, Claude Sonnet 4 and DeepSeek-V3) averaged 66.7% across five math and physics benchmarks as a self-organizing team. Their strongest member alone scored 48.8%, and a perfect router choosing among the members' independent answers scored 59.0%. On AIME 2026 the team reached 71.2%, 13.4 points above that router. One member reviews the team's earlier exchanges and rewrites the teamwork strategy, covering roles, the order of discussion phases, who participates and how partial answers are combined. The strategies were learned from only 15 AIME 2024 problems and then applied unchanged to held-out AIME 2024 problems and four new benchmarks. Paper:

What is Stellar’s “Adapter” Upgrade? Stellar’s (@StellarOrg) next network upgrade, Protocol 28, is called Adapter. Stellar describes it as a builder-focused upgrade, with most of its changes aimed at making Soroban smart contracts easier to build, upgrade and maintain. But Adapter also includes a deeper change to Stellar’s consensus process that could help the network handle growing activity more efficiently. Here’s what is changing: (1) Faster consensus under heavy network load CAP-83 changes how Stellar validators handle transaction data during consensus. Today, validators need to receive a full transaction set before they can make progress. Adapter allows validators to begin voting before the entire transaction set has arrived. If the transaction data is late or invalid, validators can explicitly drop it instead of waiting indefinitely. That means consensus can keep moving even when transaction data is slow to propagate. The performance gains will roll out gradually as parallel transaction set downloading is enabled after mainnet. For users, this is mostly a behind-the-scenes improvement. For Stellar, it could become important as the network scales and needs to maintain fast, low-cost transactions under heavier demand. (2) Smart contract fleets can be upgraded together CAP-85 introduces externally managed executables for Soroban contracts. This targets protocols that operate large fleets of contracts using the same underlying code. Today, upgrading those contracts individually can leave some instances running old code while others use the new version. That creates both operational complexity and a potential security risk. With Adapter, contracts can point to a shared executable reference controlled by another contract. Developers can update that shared reference once, allowing every connected contract to switch to the new code atomically. (3) Smart contract data becomes easier to migrate CAP-86 tackles another problem developers face as contracts evolve. Smart contract data structures can change over time as developers add fields, remove old ones or modify interfaces. Existing host functions can reject data when its structure does not exactly match what a contract expects. Adapter introduces new sparse host functions that can handle missing or additional fields more gracefully. That makes it easier for developers to migrate contract data between different versions without breaking existing applications. For builders, this could make long-lived Soroban applications easier to maintain. (4) Adapter is mainly about developers The important point is that Protocol 28 is not primarily a user-facing feature upgrade. Two of its three major changes, CAP-85 and CAP-86, are focused directly on smart contract development. They aim to make contracts easier to upgrade, safer to maintain and more flexible as applications evolve. CAP-83 works at a deeper infrastructure level by improving how Stellar reaches consensus when transaction data is delayed. Together, the changes are aimed at making Stellar more capable as its smart contract ecosystem grows. So when does Adapter actually arrive? Stellar has scheduled the Protocol 28 testnet upgrade vote for August 27 at 17:00 UTC. The mainnet upgrade vote is scheduled for September 16 at 17:00 UTC. The mainnet vote is the key governance decision. A successful vote would move Protocol 28 closer to deployment, but the vote itself does not mean Adapter is already live. Stellar also expects its Core stable release to become available on August 13, followed by additional infrastructure and SDK releases between August 13 and 21. Developers, validators and infrastructure operators will need to prepare for the upgrade before the relevant votes. If Protocol 28 passes its mainnet vote, Stellar will take another step toward becoming a more mature platform for large, long-lived smart contract applications.

Trump’s Korea “Punishment” Is Cover for Seoul’s Refusal to Become Anti-China Cannon Fodder Trump’s latest post on reducing US-South Korea joint military exercises is classic surface-level theater. He frames it around his “very good relationship” with Kim Jong Un and South Korea’s polite “No thanks!” to joining some denuclearization push against Iran. Cute story. But anyone still reading Western headlines at face value is missing the real signal. This is almost certainly not primarily about punishing Seoul for sitting out the Iran circus. South Korea has zero strategic interest in getting dragged into Middle East adventures that serve US-Israel priorities. The real friction is elsewhere: South Korea’s clear reluctance to deepen the US-Japan-ROK trilateral architecture that Washington keeps pushing as an anti-China containment tool in the Indo-Pacific. The joint exercises have always been more about signaling hostility toward the North and, increasingly, rehearsing scenarios aimed at Beijing than about pure defense. Reducing them is a quiet acknowledgment that Seoul is hedging. They want the US security umbrella without fully locking themselves into a new Cold War front against China—their largest trading partner by far. Economic reality and geographic proximity still matter more than ideological loyalty to the declining Empire. Trump is playing the old game: use personal relationships and cost complaints to paper over the structural shift. South Korea is not interested in becoming a permanent forward base for anti-China operations. They saw what happened to others who fully subordinated their interests. The multipolar world is already here. Countries are calculating coldly, not emotionally. China understands this dynamic perfectly. The Empire is still stuck in the old playbook of pressure and alliance discipline. Don’t be fooled by the Iran name-drop. That’s the distraction. The real story is the limits of forcing closer trilateral integration against a rising civilizational state that offers trade, investment, and stability without the lectures.

In China, #law# serves not only to protect social relations and maintain social order but also to guide and promote economic and social development and advance #Chinese# modernization. Promotional laws formulated to encourage, advance, and coordinate reform, innovation, and high-quality development in specific fields are a vivid expression of good law and good governance in contemporary China. #DeepChina# The Ethnic Unity and Progress Promotion Law is a promotional law aimed at fostering ethnic unity and progress and promoting the common development and prosperity of all #ethnic# groups. The principal matters it promotes include: consolidating the sense of community of the Chinese nation; building a shared spiritual homeland; promoting exchange, communication, and integration among all ethnic groups; advancing common prosperity and development through high-quality development; modernizing the system and governance capacity for ethnic affairs; and using legal means to maintain and develop ethnic unity, safeguard the legitimate rights and interests of all ethnic groups, preserve stability in ethnic regions, and protect national unity. It is worth noting that, as a promotional law enacted by the NPC, the highest organ of state power in #China#, the Ethnic Unity and Progress Promotion Law differs from many other #promotional# laws, which tend to emphasize encouragement, incentives, services, and guidance. In addition to establishing the guiding ideology and basic principles governing ethnic relations and ethnic affairs, this law uses firm and explicit language to prescribe clear rules for ethnic relations and ethnic work, embodying an organic integration of principles and rules as well as programmatic and normative elements. #ChineseNation#