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A Congressional investigation determined that U.S. funding helped fuel the growth of a sector now viewed by Washington as a security threat.A congressional investigation has determined that five American venture capital firms invested more than $1 billion in China’s semiconductor industry since 2001, fueling the growth of a sector that the United States government now regards as a national security threat.Funds supplied by the five firms — GGV Capital, GSR Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures, Sequoia Capital and Walden International — went to more than 150 Chinese companies, according to the report, which was released Thursday by both Republicans and Democrats on the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party.The investments included roughly $180 million that went to Chinese firms that the committee said directly or indirectly support Beijing’s military. That includes companies that the U.S. government has said provide chips for China’s military research, equipment and weapons, such as Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation, or SMIC, China’s largest chipmaker.The report by the House committee focuses on investments made before the Biden administration imposed sweeping restrictions aimed at cutting off China’s access to American financing. It does not allege any illegality.Last August, the Biden administration banned U.S. venture capital and private equity firms from investing in Chinese quantum computing, artificial intelligence and advanced semiconductors. It has also imposed worldwide limits on sales of advanced chips and chip-making machines to China, arguing that these technologies could help advance the capabilities of the Chinese military and spy agencies.Since it was established a year ago, the committee has called for raising tariffs on China, targeted Ford Motor and others for doing business with Chinese companies, and spotlighted forced labor concerns involving Chinese shopping sites.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

A Russian plane shot down with a Patriot missile was probably carrying Ukrainian prisoners of war, U.S. officials say.U.S. officials say Ukraine should continue to develop innovative ways to strike at Russian forces as the war approaches its third year. But Ukraine’s use of a Patriot missile to take down a plane last month is an example of how novel battlefield tactics can be fraught with peril as well as promise.Unbeknown to Ukraine’s military, the Russian aircraft it targeted may have been carrying Ukrainian prisoners of war, according to U.S. officials.The Patriot is a defensive system, usually used to protect a location and not to shoot down planes. A European partner provided the Patriot interceptor that hit the Russian Ilyushin-76 cargo plane on Jan. 24, according to American officials briefed on the incident.Russian officials immediately claimed the aircraft was carrying 65 Ukrainian prisoners of war, who were to be exchanged for Russian service members.Publicly, American officials will not comment on what brought down the plane, though officials who spoke privately on the condition of anonymity said the reports of a Patriot missile being used were accurate.The question of who was on the plane is less clear. American officials have not confirmed the identities of the passengers, but they said it appeared probable that at least some of them were Ukrainian prisoners. U.S. and Ukrainian officials say Russia may have overstated the number of deaths.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

The Super Bowl is bringing to the surface an amusing but very real generational divide in the Bay Area.Soledad McCarthy and her 9-year-old daughter, Avyana, in their San Francisco home.Jim Wilson/The New York TimesSquabbles between parents and children are as old as time, but a new divide has sprung up among some families in San Francisco — and it’s a big one.Longtime, die-hard 49ers fans are expecting their kids to root for the team in the Super Bowl this Sunday. But some children are adamant that geography and tradition matter far less than Taylor Swift.And as you may have heard, she’s dating Travis Kelce, a tight end for the Kansas City Chiefs.The resulting family feuds are fierce, and amusing.I was interviewing Soledad McCarthy by phone when her 9-year-old daughter, Avyana, asked to speak to me directly.“I don’t want my parents to hear this because they might get mad,” she whispered. “But the team I’m rooting for is the one with Taylor Swift’s boyfriend.”“The Chiefs?” I asked her. Yes, she said.As her mom chuckled in the background, Avyana explained the rules that her parents established in the lead-up to Sunday: She can’t watch the concert movie “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour” until after the Super Bowl. No Swift songs on the car radio until after the game, either.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

Plus: an exhibition of male nudes, vibrantly patterned rugs and more recommendations from T Magazine.STay HereThis New Getaway Combines Japanese and French DesignThe interior design of Hotel Hana, on the edge of Little Tokyo in Paris, blends Japanese restraint and maximalist French flourishes.Left: Romain Ricard. Right: Robin Le FebvreSeveral years ago, the hotelier Nicolas Saltiel stood in front of an office building on the northern edge of the Japanese quarter in Paris. The early 20th-century Haussmann-style block sat on a corner, so he could tell from the sidewalk that the light would be good. It was in the Second Arrondissement and, from the top floors, he guessed, you might be able to see the dome of Sacré-Cœur in Montmartre. (You can.) “I knew if I could manage to buy it, this place would make a perfect, intimate hotel,” Saltiel says.Saltiel’s company, Adresses Hotels, owns five other small hotels in Paris, each of them with a distinct look and atmosphere. For Hotel Hana and its 26 bedrooms, the architect and designer Laura Gonzalez chose to highlight the hotel’s proximity to Little Tokyo, which includes the Japanese shops and restaurants on Rue Sainte-Anne, a five-minute walk away. “The source of inspiration is Japonisme, an artistic movement that emerged during the Belle Époque period,” says Gonzalez. Japanese building techniques and materials, like paneled partitions, straw walls and lacquered furniture, appear alongside French adornments like velvet headboards and rugs made by Pierre Frey. At the bar, you can order an egg sando and wash it down with a glass of Burgundy. Rooms from about $425, hotelhana-paris.com.See ThisAn Artist’s Many Views of the Male BodyPaul Cadmus’s “The Nap” (1952).Collection of the Tobin Theatre Arts Fund, courtesy of the McNay Art Museum, San Antonio“The Male Nude,” an exhibition of the artist Paul Cadmus’s paintings and drawings, opens this week at Manhattan’s DC Moore Gallery. It’s the artist’s first major solo show in over 20 years. Though he gained acclaim beginning in the 1930s with works like “The Fleet’s In!” (which also stirred controversy for its particularly callipygian depiction of American sailors engaging in debauchery), he painted just 135 canvases over the nearly eight-decade span of his career, sometimes only completing one a year. “We don’t paint for stock,” Cadmus used to say, according to the gallerist Bridget Moore, who worked with him for 15 years. His paintings contain symbolic and satirical details: In 1951’s “Manikins,” two (presumably male) wooden figurines are shown locked in an embrace atop a stack of books; close inspection reveals the topmost volume is a copy of André Gide’s anonymously published “Corydon,” in which the French author argued that homosexuality is a natural condition. In his paintings, Cadmus never repeated subject matter or included the same character twice. He was more prolific with his drawings, which are imbued with a sense of reverence for the human form. This show highlights his serially numbered nudes, most of which are drawn in crayon on hand-toned paper. Works from the 1930s to 1990s are included, offering viewers plenty of angles from which to appreciate Cadmus’s undulating bodies. “The Male Nude” is on view at DC Moore Gallery, New York, from Feb. 8 to March 16, dcmooregallery.com.Covet ThisBright Rugs Inspired by a Scandinavian SculptorThe Nordic Knots x Campbell-Rey II Collection in Folding Ribbon (left) and Garden Maze (right), photographed inside the Thorvaldsen Museum in Copenhagen.Robbie LawrenceWhen the London-based design studio Campbell-Rey first collaborated with the textile company Nordic Knots in 2021, the result was a collection of color-drenched rugs that paid playful homage to Gustavian design elements, referencing the Swedish style popular in the late 1700s. Charlotte Rey, a co-founder of Campbell-Rey, wondered at the time if their creations were too exuberant for those accustomed to the Stockholm-based brand’s typically minimalist aesthetic. But the response was enthusiastic enough that, three years later, the two are joining forces again.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

The tech company’s plan is similar to one announced two days earlier by Meta, another Silicon Valley giant.Google, whose work in artificial intelligence helped make A.I.-generated content far easier to create and spread, now wants to ensure that such content is traceable as well.The tech giant said on Thursday that it was joining an effort to develop credentials for digital content, a sort of “nutrition label” that identifies when and how a photograph, a video, an audio clip or another file was produced or altered — including with A.I. The company will collaborate with companies like Adobe, the BBC, Microsoft and Sony to fine-tune the technical standards.The announcement follows a similar promise announced on Tuesday by Meta, which like Google has enabled the easy creation and distribution of artificially generated content. Meta said it would promote standardized labels that identified such material.Google, which spent years pouring money into its artificial intelligence initiatives, said it would explore how to incorporate the digital certification into its own products and services, though it did not specify its timing or scope. Its Bard chatbot is connected to some of the company’s most popular consumer services, such as Gmail and Docs. On YouTube, which Google owns and which will be included in the digital credential effort, users can quickly find videos featuring realistic digital avatars pontificating on current events in voices powered by text-to-speech services.Recognizing where online content originates and how it changes is a high priority for lawmakers and tech watchdogs in 2024, when billions of people will vote in major elections around the world. After years of disinformation and polarization, realistic images and audio produced by artificial intelligence and unreliable A.I. detection tools caused people to further doubt the authenticity of things they saw and heard on the internet.Configuring digital files to include a verified record of their history could make the digital ecosystem more trustworthy, according to those who back a universal certification standard. Google is joining the steering committee for one such group, the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity, or C2PA. The C2PA standards have been supported by news organizations such as The New York Times as well as by camera manufacturers, banks and advertising agencies.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

The US supreme court will hear oral arguments on Thursday morning in the high-stakes case that will probably determine whether Donald Trump is eligible to run for president this year.The case, Donald J Trump v Norma Anderson et al, came about after six Colorado voters filed a lawsuit last year alleging Trump was ineligible to run for president under a little-used provision of the constitution’s 14th amendment. The provision says that any member of Congress or officer of the United States who takes an oath to defend the constitution and then subsequently engages in insurrection is barred from holding office. The ban can only be overridden by a two-thirds vote by both chambers of Congress.Trump’s conduct during the January 6 Capitol attack disqualifies him from holding federal office, the Colorado voters claimed in their suit, filed last year in state court. After a five-day trial, a judge found Trump had engaged in insurrection, but was not an “officer of the United States” and declined to remove him from the ballot. In a 4-3 decision in December, the Colorado supreme court reversed that ruling and barred him from the ballot. The supreme court agreed to hear the case in January.While there have been several suits seeking to remove Trump from the ballot, only Colorado and Maine have done so thus far. A Maine judge last month ordered the secretary of state there to hold off on excluding Trump until the US supreme court issued a decision.A decision upholding the Colorado supreme court’s ruling would not automatically remove Trump from the ballot across the country. While some states have rebuffed efforts to remove Trump from the primary ballot, a supreme court saying Trump can be disqualified would probably set off a flurry of fast challenges in state courts and other tribunals to disqualify him from the ballot in the general election.It’s generally believed that Trump has the upper hand at the court, where conservatives have a 6-3 supermajority and Trump nominated three of the justices. Still, experts say there is a high degree of uncertainty over what exactly the court will do because it has chosen not to limit the scope of arguments before it and the issues are so unprecedented.In their briefing to the supreme court, Trump’s lawyers have claimed there will be “chaos and bedlam” in the US if a leading presidential candidate is blocked from the ballot. They gave an array of arguments to the justices for why he should not be disqualified, including that the word “officer” does not apply to the president and that he did not engage in insurrection.“In our system of ‘government of the people, by the people, [and] for the people’, the American people – not courts or election officials – should choose the next President of the United States,” Trump’s lawyers wrote. “The Colorado voters, backed by the left-leaning non-profit Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (Crew), argue that it is absurd to claim the 14th amendment does not apply to the presidency and that it would be a danger to democracy to allow him to hold office again.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Section 3 is designed precisely to avoid giving oath-breaking insurrectionists like Trump the power to unleash such mayhem again,” they write. “Nobody, not even a former President, is above the law.”There is no legal precedent for the case – the justices will be wrestling with the key issues in the case, including whether Trump committed insurrection on January 6 for the first time. The 14th amendment was enacted after the civil war to bar former Confederates from holding office and has never been used to bar a presidential candidate. In 2022, the amendment was used to remove a New Mexico county commissioner from office, the first time it had been used that way in a century.The case marks the court’s most direct intervention in a presidential election since its controversial decision in Bush v Gore in 2000. Seeking to preserve its reputation as an apolitical body, the court is usually hesitant to get involved in heated political disputes, but the arrival of the Trump case makes the court’s intervention in the most controversial of political cases unavoidable. It comes as public confidence in the court continues to decline amid a series of ethics scandals and politically charged decisions. More

Since the US supreme court’s overturning of Roe v Wade, 16 states have enacted stringent bans on nearly all abortions. But that is not enough for a new generation of organised and passionate activists intent on pushing even stricter laws across the country. Carter Sherman spends time with students and organisers at the annual March for Life in Washington DC and meets the influential woman spearheading the national movement More

Marianne Williamson, the self-help author, is suspending her long-shot campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, she said in a video address on Wednesday.Ms. Williamson on Tuesday placed a very distant third place in Nevada’s primary election, behind President Biden — who won nearly 90 percent of the vote — and behind “none of these candidates,” a ballot option that earned less than 6 percent of the vote. She had put significant effort into campaigning in the state before the primary, but ultimately drew under 3 percent of the vote.She also placed a very distant second in the South Carolina primary, with just over 2 percent of the vote, but she topped Representative Dean Phillips of Minnesota — who had so far been Mr. Biden’s most significant rival.It was Ms. Williamson’s second attempt at running for president. She had earned some publicity early in the Democratic debates during her first run in 2020, but dropped out of the race before the first votes were cast.Ms. Williamson made it further this time, lasting through two official presidential primaries, as well as the unsanctioned New Hampshire primary that will award no delegates in the nominating contest. More