Markets

Taiwanese actor Lung Fei, beloved for his role as Wei Xiaobao in “The Deer and the Cauldron,” passed away on June 24th at 76. Hospitalized in February, he was diagnosed with inoperable stage three liver cancer. A memorial service is planned for July 8th. Lung Fei left a significant mark on Asian television with his charismatic performances.

XPeng Motors CEO He Xiaopeng has ordered Xiaomi’s new SU7 EV, citing its strong product competitiveness. This move highlights the competitive yet respectful dynamic in China’s EV market. XPeng is also preparing to launch its G7 model. The SU7 is in high demand, with significant waiting times for locked orders, leading to a secondary market with resale premiums. Xiaomi advises locking orders for production visibility.

SEALSQ Corp has acquired a 28.30% stake in WeCan Group SA, a Swiss blockchain innovator. This strategic investment aims to accelerate the development of quantum-resilient, blockchain-based security solutions for finance, IoT, and Web 3.0. The partnership will integrate post-quantum cryptography, PKI, and blockchain compliance platforms, enhancing KYC/KYB solutions, fortifying IoT devices, and expanding decentralized identity offerings.

Damai issued an apology after a scheduling error disrupted Luhan’s Xi’an concert ticket sales. The platform admitted fault for a misconfigured priority access system, leading to refunds and discounts for affected buyers. However, fans expressed frustration, accusing Damai of operational failures and unfair treatment. The incident underscores the competitive ticketing market in China and Damai’s challenge to maintain customer trust.

Baidu has released its ERNIE 4.5 open-source large language model series, featuring ten models including Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) variants. These models offer fully open-sourced pre-training weights and inference code, accessible via platforms like Hugging Face. The series boasts innovative heterogeneous MoE architecture for multimodal capabilities and achieves state-of-the-art performance on various benchmarks, outperforming competitors in text and multimodal tasks. The models are distributed under the Apache 2.0 license, promoting both academic and commercial use.

A critical security flaw affects over twenty popular audio devices, including brands like Sony, Bose, and JBL. Discovered in a widely used Bluetooth chip, the vulnerability could allow hackers to eavesdrop or steal data. Researchers demonstrated an exploit to extract media playback information and potentially hijack connections. While technically challenging, the issue is being addressed with updated software from the chip manufacturer and patches from device makers.

Singapore is integrating self-driving vehicles into its public transport by late 2025, starting with residential areas. This move follows a visit by Singapore’s transport minister to WeRide, an autonomous driving leader. The partnership aims to accelerate AV deployment and improve connectivity, addressing demographic shifts and labor shortages. Singapore plans to expedite AV adoption over the next five years with WeRide’s support.

Huawei has open-sourced its Pangu 7B dense and Pangu-Pro MoE 72B large language models, along with Ascend-based inference technology. This move supports Huawei’s Ascend ecosystem strategy, aiming to accelerate AI research and application. The Pangu-Pro MoE 72B model shows strong performance, ranking highly on benchmarks for models under 100 billion parameters.

A single ticket sold in Northumberland County, Virginia, won a historic $348 million US Powerball jackpot. The winner must decide between a 29-year annuity or a $155.5 million lump sum. Powerball continues to offer life-changing sums, with this being the latest in a series of massive jackpots this year.

A 24-year-old Hunan man admits his 11 name change applications in 13 months are a bid for fame and attention. He desires to revert to “Zhuque Xuanwu,” believing even infamy is recognition. Authorities deem his actions disruptive. He is also on his third attempt at the Gaokao, having previously scored poorly.