The state secretary, who is under Chinese sanctions, is on a state visit to Beijing under the name ‘Marco Lu’.
Published On 14 May 202614 May 2026
How did United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio enter China despite being under sanctions by Beijing?
Well, this became possible thanks to a linguistic workaround and diplomatic protocol by China, which had sanctioned Rubio twice when he was still a senator.
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Rubio accompanied US President Donald Trump on his first trip to China after Beijing changed the transliteration of Rubio’s name.
“China has done that using a sleight of hand: His name is spelled different in official documents for this visit,” Al Jazeera’s Alan Fisher said, reporting from the Chinese capital.
The Chinese government appeared to have used a diplomatic workaround to let the secretary of state in, transliterating the first syllable of his surname with a different Chinese character for “lu”.
The name change to “Marco Lu” enabled Beijing to welcome Rubio without lifting the sanctions, which could be enforced on another occasion.
The Chinese government and official media began transliterating Rubio’s surname with a different Chinese character shortly before he took office as secretary of state in January 2025.
In March, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs indicated it was willing to relax those sanctions against Rubio if he were to travel with Trump for a summit in Beijing.
“China’s sanctions were aimed at Mr Rubio’s words and deeds concerning China during his tenure in the United States Senate,” Lin Jian, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson, said on March 16.
Why is Rubio under Chinese sanctions?
The sanctions date back to when Rubio served as a US senator in Florida, from 2019 up to his nomination to join Trump’s administration.
The Chinese government sanctioned him twice in 2020 for speaking out against Beijing’s crackdown in Hong Kong, a former British colony that is demanding greater autonomy from China’s grip.
As senator, Rubio was also one of the proponents of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, a congressional bill approved in 2021 that required companies to prove that goods imported from China’s Xinjiang region were not produced with forced labour.
“Many companies have already taken steps to clean up their supply chains,” Rubio said at the time. “For those who have not done that, they’ll no longer be able to continue to make Americans – every one of us, frankly – unwitting accomplices in the atrocities, in the genocide.”
Democrats keep winning at the ballot box as the party works to win back congressional majorities in this year’s midterm elections.
But despite a slew of electoral victories and overperformances in the more than 15 months since President Donald Trump returned to the White House, the party’s image remains well underwater in public opinion polling and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) finds itself badly trailing the rival Republican National Committee in fundraising, a crucial gauge of a party’s strength.
To make matters worse, the DNC is facing continued calls to release its internal autopsy of the party’s sweeping setbacks in the 2024 election, when Democrats lost the presidency and Senate majority and fell short in winning back control of the House.
Among those calling on the DNC to make public their report on what went wrong for the Democrats in 2024 is former Vice President Kamala Harris, the party’s presidential nominee two years ago.
Former Vice President Kamala Harris, center, speaks with patrons during a stop at Crave restaurant ahead of a South Carolina Democratic Party fundraiser on Wednesday, April 15, 2026, in Greenville, S.C(Meg Kinnard/AP Photo)
Harris, who is mulling making another White House bid in 2028, recently told donors she believes the DNC should make the autopsy public. The news was first reported by NBC News and confirmed by Fox News Digital.
A source with knowledge said that Harris had not discussed the autopsy with DNC Chair Ken Martin, and that the former vice president did not know in advance about Martin’s decision in December to keep the 2024 election postmortem under wraps.
Martin ordered the report soon after he was elected DNC chair early last year.
Democratic Party officials interviewed over 300 Democrats from all 50 states for the report, which Martin promised would examine the party’s mistakes in 2024 and offer a roadmap to victory going forward.
There was controversy surrounding the report as it was being compiled, after reports last summer said the autopsy would skip analyzing whether then-President Joe Biden should have run for re-election in 2024 and would pass on judging key decisions made by Harris and her team, after she replaced Biden as the party’s nominee with just over three months to go until the 2024 election.
Throughout the process, Martin repeatedly pushed back on calling the report an “autopsy,” since he noted that the Democratic Party wasn’t dead. He instead labeled the report an “after-action review.”
But in December, weeks after Democrats scored major victories in the 2025 off-year elections, the party announced it would not be releasing the report.
Martin, in a statement at the time, said releasing the report would be “a distraction” from the party’s “core mission” to win back congressional majorities in the midterms.
Democratic National Committee chair Ken Martin addresses party members at the DNC summer meeting in Minneapolis, Minn., on Aug. 25, 2025.(Paul Steinhauser – Fox News)
In explaining his decision, Martin wrote, “We completed a comprehensive review of what happened in 2024 and are already putting our learnings into motion. And we’re winning again — even in places that haven’t gone blue in decades. In our conversations with stakeholders from across the Democratic ecosystem, we are aligned on what’s important, and that’s learning from the past and winning the future.”
“Here’s our North Star: does this help us win? If the answer is no, it’s a distraction from the core mission,” he emphasized.
But the DNC chair’s decision was criticized not only by Republicans but also by fellow Democrats.
“They are spiking an autopsy of the election that gave us Trump 2.0. If party leaders won’t take the steps required to rebuild ourselves into a winning coalition, we will take it into our own hands,” former DNC Vice Chair David Hogg warned in a social media post at the time.
Hogg, a gun-control crusader who was elected a DNC vice chair as Martin won election as chair, stepped down from his position last summer after upsetting party leaders for his efforts backing primary challenges against what he called “asleep at the wheel” older, longtime incumbents in safe, blue districts.
Dan Pfeiffer, a former senior advisor to then-President Barack Obama and a co-host of the popular progressive podcast “Pod Save America,” also took to social media to criticize the move.
“This is a very bad decision that reeks of the caution and complacency that brought us to this moment,” Pfeiffer wrote.
His podcast co-host and fellow Obama alum Jon Favreau called the DNC flip-flop “unreal” and “baffling.”
“The DNC’s actual position is that if the public knew more about what Democrats got wrong in the last election, it would hurt the party’s chances in the next election,” Favreau wrote on X. “How does this rebuild trust between the party insiders and grassroots activists and organizers?”
Martin last month made an appearance on “Pod Save America” to push back against the criticism.
“We’ve been releasing that,” Martin said when asked if the DNC would release a summary of the report. “The reality is we’re not hiding the ball on this. We have been sharing those things out. There’s no smoking gun here.”
Martin noted that “we’ve been providing briefings,” as he pointed to data from the report the DNC shared with Democratic stakeholders.
Harris isn’t the only potential 2028 Democratic presidential contender calling on the DNC to make the full report public.
“Yeah, release the autopsy,” Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey said this past weekend in an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday. “They should do that,” the senator added as he pointed to the DNC.
But Booker, who ran unsuccessfully for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination won by Biden and who is mulling another run in 2028, said it’s imperative his party doesn’t dwell on the past.
Rotimi Adeoye, a former Democratic operative who is serving as a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times, argued in a social media post that “the mistake the DNC made is they could’ve released the report earlier in the spring, whatever’s in it, you get two weeks of bad publicity, then Trump does something stupid and everyone forgets.”
“Now it feels like something’s being hidden, which makes it way more salacious,” he claimed.
A person familiar with the DNC’s strategy told Fox News Digital because of all the attention on the autopsy, “they are going to be forced to release something.”
The person, who asked to remain anonymous to speak more freely, said the ongoing storyline is a distraction for the DNC with the clock ticking towards the midterms, adding “it’s just not helping to be talking about this.”
The DNC pointed to Martin’s previous comments when contacted by Fox News Digital.
Paul Steinhauser is a politics reporter based in the swing state of New Hampshire. He covers the campaign trail from coast to coast.”
The alleged main administrator of Dream Market Incognito Market, one of the largest dark web marketplaces before its shutdown, has been indicted in the United States on money laundering charges.
49-year-old Owe Martin Andresen was charged by a federal grand jury on Wednesday with six counts of international concealment money laundering and six counts of concealment money laundering, and now faces up to 20 years in prison for each charge.
Andresen was arrested in Germany under separate charges of concealment money laundering, each also punishable by up to five years.
Dream Market was launched in November 2013 to provide anonymous access to illegal items and services. It became the largest dark web marketplace after the seizure of the Hansa and AlphaBay marketplaces and grew to carry close to 100,000 listings at any given time.
The Department of Justice says it facilitated the sale of more than 450 kilograms of cocaine, 90 kilograms of heroin, 45 kilograms of methamphetamine, 25 kilograms of crack cocaine, 13 kilograms of oxycodone, and 36 kilograms of fentanyl until its shutdown in 2019.
Andresen allegedly operated under the “Speedstepper” handle (the marketplace’s main administrator), who was never previously identified despite earlier prosecutions of other high-ranking operators.
According to prosecutors, Andresen accessed dormant Dream Market cryptocurrency wallets containing millions of dollars in commission payments in November and December 2022 and moved the funds into new cryptocurrency wallets (an activity that could have been carried out by only someone possessing the marketplace’s original private keys).
“Months later, in August 2023, Andresen allegedly used a cryptocurrency service provider based in Atlanta, Georgia to purchase gold bars from international companies using funds in the Consolidated Wallets and directed those companies to ship the gold bars to his home address in Germany,” the DOJ said on Wednesday.
“German law enforcement identified additional money laundering transactions committed by Andresen in Germany. In total, Andresen is alleged to have laundered over $2 million between August 2023 and April 2025.”
During searches of his residence and two other locations on May 7, 2026, German authorities recovered approximately $1.7 million in gold bars (allegedly bought using Dream Market funds), as well as more than $23,000 in cash and evidence on bank accounts and cryptocurrency wallets holding approximately $1.2 million in suspected Dream Market proceeds.
Other high-ranking admins who used the monikers “Oxymonster” and “KITT3N” were previously convicted following prosecutions led by the U.S. Department of Justice, while a mid-level admin responsible for customer service issues, who used the “GOWRON” handle, was convicted after prosecution by the United Kingdom Crown Prosecution Service.
Since the start of the year, the owner of Incognito Market, a massive online narcotics marketplace linked to over $105 million in illegal drug sales, was also sentenced to 30 years in prison, while a Virginia man who co-created the Empire Market dark web marketplace pleaded guilty to drug conspiracy charges for facilitating $430 million in illegal transactions.
AI chained four zero-days into one exploit that bypassed both renderer and OS sandboxes. A wave of new exploits is coming.
At the Autonomous Validation Summit (May 12 & 14), see how autonomous, context-rich validation finds what’s exploitable, proves controls hold, and closes the remediation loop.
California attorney general asks FIFA to explain why the categories of some tickets were changed after being sold.
Published On 14 May 202614 May 2026
California has contacted FIFA over possible legal violations in the sale of World Cup tickets following allegations that some fans purchased seats in categories that were later changed, the state’s attorney general said.
The probe, which comes as supporters complain about the high prices of tickets for this year’s tournament, follows reports that football’s governing body sold tickets by categories displayed on stadium maps, but later adjusted those categories before assigning specific seats.
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“Californians should be able to trust that the seats they purchase match the representations made during the sales process,” Attorney General Rob Bonta said in a statement on Wednesday.
“We look forward to receiving the requested information from FIFA as part of our ongoing review.”
The Athletic first reported last month that World Cup ticket buyers were accusing FIFA of “misleading” them with stadium maps that misrepresented the potential location of seats they were purchasing.
More than three million tickets to the 2026 World Cup, which kicks off on June 11 and is being held in the United States (US), Canada and Mexico, were sold in four differently priced categories, based on colour-coded stadium maps shown online during the purchasing process.
But “Category 1” ticket holders were placed in sections that, at one point, were colour-coded as “Category 2,” according to the report.
In his letter to FIFA, Bonta noted that “some consumers have reported feeling deceived because the seats they were ultimately assigned belonged to a lower-tiered category based on the seating map available to them at the time of purchase”.
He requested copies and dates of when seating maps were changed, and the numbers of fans – if any – who ended up receiving inferior tickets as a result.
FIFA said that its category maps were only “indicative” and provided “guidance rather than the exact seat layout”.
The skyrocketing cost of tickets for the quadrennial tournament has already triggered a global backlash, which has left FIFA scrambling to manage the public relations fallout.
Fan organisation Football Supporters Europe (FSE) has branded the World Cup pricing structure as “extortionate” and a “monumental betrayal,” citing ticket prices that have put the tournament – expected to help generate $13bn for FIFA – out of reach for many.
The most expensive ticket for the final in Qatar in 2022 cost about $1,600 at face value; in 2026 the most expensive face-value ticket being sold by FIFA now weighs in at an eye-watering $32,970.
FIFA President Gianni Infantino says the prices are appropriate for the US, which will host most of the tournament’s fixtures, including the semifinal matches and the final.
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Kathmandu, Nepal – On May 1, a team of officials from the United States – led by President Donald Trump’s special envoy for South and Central Asia, Sergio Gor – took a helicopter to the base camp of Mount Everest.
Located at an altitude of 5,364 metres (17,600 feet), the base camp is where Everest climbers acclimatise to the thin air before heading towards the 8,849-metre (29,032ft) summit in Nepal, home to eight of the world’s 10 highest peaks.
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The US team had reached the camp to test the capacity of their home-made Alta X Gen 2 drone in carrying supplemental oxygen bottles, ladders, mountain gear and food from the base camp to Camp I on the mountain’s southern ridge at an altitude of 6,130 metres (20,112ft).
It is a task the Chinese-made DJI FlyCart 30 drones have already been performing since 2024.
For its test, the US team hired Seven Summit Treks, an expedition agency, and local drone pilots were called to the base camp. But as Gor and his team reached the base camp, the US plan hit a snag.
Nepal’s Ministry of Home Affairs refused to issue a drone flight permit to the US officials. The ministry’s internal memo, obtained by Al Jazeera, said the permit was refused due to “drone flying procedures” and “security sensitivity”.
The Alta X Gen 2 drone never flew near Everest, and the US officials returned to the capital, Kathmandu.
Why the US wanted to test its drone
The controversy has trapped Nepal in a tussle between the US and its archrival China, turning the world’s highest peak into a new theatre of the tech war between the world’s most powerful economies.
China, Nepal’s immediate neighbour on the other side of the Himalayas, was the first country to establish its technological foothold on Everest, which straddles the border between the two Asian countries.
In 2024, China’s DJI FlyCart 30 drone was tested for the first time to ferry logistics for climbers. After a successful test, DJI gave two drones to AirLift Technology, a Nepalese drone company, to carry supplies to Camp I, providing the Sherpas, who traditionally did the job, with considerable respite.
This year, DJI provided its latest version of the drone, FlyCart 100, to AirLift, even before its formal launch in the market. Drone operators say FlyCart 100 can carry up to 45kg (99 pounds) to Camp I in less than three minutes, nearly half of its actual carrying capacity at sea level.
“It can carry loads and return to the base camp, bringing down garbage, in about eight minutes. Sherpas need to walk six to seven hours to reach Camp I for the same work and take a whole day to get there and return,” Milan Pandey, the director of AirLift Technology, told Al Jazeera.
The latest version of DJI FlyCart 100 can carry at least 10 oxygen cylinders to Camp I in a few minutes, compared with three Sherpas who take a whole day to complete the job, and bring back poop bags and other rubbish from the mountain slopes. On normal days, a DJI FlyCart 100 carries more than 900kg of load to Camp I every day, according to drone operators.
China’s DJI FlyCart 100 carrying loads to Camp I from Everest Base camp [Courtesy of Milan Pandey]
Analysts say the US and China are placing Nepal in a potentially precarious position by using its terrain as a place to test sensitive technology. They say being caught in the middle of the rivalry between the superpowers is a “tricky position” for Nepal.
“The fact that Nepalese officials have already flip-flopped their decision based on pressure from Beijing and Washington demonstrates how potentially fraught such a situation can be,” Steven Feldstein, senior fellow at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told Al Jazeera. “Given how critical a role drones are playing in the security landscape, this only ratchets up the stakes further.”
Tussle before climbing season
The denial of permission to the US team came as the annual Everest climbing season began.
On Wednesday, a 12-member team of Nepalese climbers reached the summit to clear the route for hundreds of mountaineers expected to make the ascent in the coming weeks. China has restricted commercial Everest expeditions from its side.
Among a record 492 climbing permits issued by the Nepalese government this year, the Chinese topped the list with 109, followed by 76 for US nationals.
The US, despite being a leading unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) manufacturer, is a prominent consumer of Chinese drones. However, concerns over security and surveillance by Chinese companies have forced the US to restrict the use of their drones and expand its own market.
But the denial of permission to the US team to test its drone had another consequence: the Nepalese authorities cancelled the drone permits of Chinese DJI FlyCart 100 drones as well for a week.
“Drones have made it easier, but the controversy hampered our work this year,” Pandey of AirLift Technology told Al Jazeera. “The tussle affected our regular work for more than a week. We couldn’t ferry ladders to the Everest icefall when the drone was needed the most for rope fixing.”
Seven Summit had hired AirLift as its drone operator.
Over the years, the use of Chinese drones in the Everest expedition has reduced the risk for the Sherpas, who traditionally carry the mountain gear, food and climbing equipment along the treacherous routes to Camp I. Drones save time and minimise risk for Sherpas, five of whom have already lost their lives this year, even before the official Everest season began.
But Nepalese security analysts say China, the US and even India try to penetrate an impoverished Nepal in the name of economic aid and technological support.
“We easily accept their aid, without verifying what kind of technology they are providing,” said Binoj Basnyat, a retired major-general of the Nepalese army, suspecting these devices could be used for surveillance.
“Orders should be as per our need. Permission should be given with due precaution,” he said.
‘Trump’s men going to Nepal’
Expedition organisers say China’s objections to Nepal allowing US companies could have forced the government to cancel the drone flight permission.
“China was aware of Trump’s men going to Nepal. They [Americans] went to the Everest base camp and showcased a new drone. That complicated the issue,” said the owner of an expedition agency, who refused to reveal his identity, fearing it could affect his business in the days to come.
As the task of fixing ropes along the way to Everest was made more difficult by a massive hanging icefall, the expedition operators urged the Nepalese government to lift its ban on drone operation near the summit.
The ban was lifted on May 9. China’s DJI FlyCart 100 resumed the load ferry, while the US-made Alta X Gen 2 drone remains grounded at the base camp.
Pandey said his company is not keen on US drones after a test in Kathmandu showed it can carry only 5kg at high altitudes. Compared with the DJI FlyCart 100, the US drones were also more expensive, he said.
But Gor, Trump’s special envoy who had travelled to the Everest base camp, hoped the new UAV technology would enable deliveries on Everest in minutes as opposed to days-long treks earlier.
“The US leads in innovation, and we are glad to partner with local Nepali companies to bring cutting-edge technology to Nepal,” the US Embassy in Nepal quoted Gor as saying on May 2.
“Nepal’s new government will work to increase the fruitful partnership between our two nations,” he said. In March, Nepal elected a 35-year-old rapper, Balendra Shah, as prime minister after a landmark vote.
Gao Liang, associate fellow and vice director of Nepal Study Centre at China’s Sichuan University, said Beijing has no intention of engaging in technological competition with the US in the Everest region.
“There is already a domestic consensus in Nepal that the United States’s geopolitical strategic interests in Nepal are primarily to use the country to advance America’s strategic goals against China,” he said. “Therefore, the so-called geopolitical complications largely originate from the US side, while China is only responding passively.”
Nepalese foreign policy expert Vijaya Kant Karna fears the tech war on the Everest may trigger geopolitical tensions in the Himalayas. He said the drone flight permission was given without analysing the pros and cons of the US-China tech war in Nepal.
“What happens if they test and misuse the technology in sensitive areas like the trans-Himalayas region?” asked Karna, who heads the Centre for Social Innovation and Foreign Policy, a Nepalese think tank.
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