The Justice Department has charged 12 Chinese nationals with a wide-ranging cyber campaign against the United States, and one of the victims is The Epoch Times.
The individuals charged include eight who work for i-Soon, a Chinese tech firm that had hacked government agencies around the world. From 2016 to 2023, i-Soon breached email accounts, cellphones, servers, and websites under instructions from Chinese authorities.
They made millions of dollars from doing such work.
The attack on The Epoch Times happened multiple times, in 2016 and 2017, according to Justice Department filings.
During the period, i-Soon’s employees allegedly compromised email accounts of the newspaper’s chief editor and a vice president, launched a distributed denial-of-service attack that temporarily shut down The Epoch Times’ website, and helped the Ministry of Public Security officers to identify IP addresses that accessed the website to find the dissidents in China.
They also targeted other groups.
These include a U.S. organization with thousands of churches that had sent missionaries to China, the foreign ministries of Taiwan, India, South Korea, and Indonesia; a U.S.-based religious leader; and two agencies under the Department of Commerce and Defense.
The Justice Department also announced charges against hackers from the “Silk Typhoon” group.
Prosecutors alleged that Zhou and Yin have carried out “years-long, sophisticated computer hacking conspiracies that successfully targeted a wide variety of U.S.-based victims from 2011 to the present-day.”
The State Department has offered up to $10 million for information on i-Soon, its employees, and the two Ministry of Public Security officials. It also issued a $2 million reward to help arrest Yin and Zhou, both of whom are in China.
—Eva Fu
EUROPE STEPS UP AS US PAUSES UKRAINE AID
The Trump administration has paused all aid to Ukraine, completely cutting Kyiv off from military, humanitarian, and economic assistance, as well as severing intelligence sharing between the two nations.
The move follows a highly-publicized falling out between Presidents Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskyy last week, after which Trump accused the Ukrainian leader of not being committed to peace.
National leaders throughout Europe have responded by speeding up plans to increase defense spending across the continent by $840 billion over a decade, and by growing the already substantive assistance to Ukraine coming from Europe.
It’s unclear how soon Ukraine will begin to feel the battlefield effects of the U.S. aid pause. Kyiv is not as dependent on Washington as it was at the beginning of the war, but still relies on the United States for several advanced weapons systems.
Europe is the largest provider of aid to Ukraine, and provided about $139 billion in financial, military, and humanitarian assistance to Kyiv from January 2022 to December 2024.
The United States provided about $120 billion in aid during that same time period.
Those numbers do not include indirect assistance to allied nations that might benefit Ukraine, nor do they account for the fact that the United States originally committed about $180 billion to Ukraine but did not deploy the full earmarked amount for various reasons.
Of that amount, the United States has spent about $67 billion on security assistance in particular, with the bulk of that spending coming through presidential drawdown authority.
Presidential drawdown authority works by allowing the president to transfer a congressionally-approved dollar amount’s worth of arms and munitions directly from U.S. stockpiles to a foreign nation.
The value of those arms is then paid out to U.S. defense companies who replenish the U.S. stockpiles with new and better weapons.
While Ukraine may still be able to maintain artillery stockpiles and produce its own drones without U.S. assistance, however, it is reliant on a few advanced weapons platforms that can be obtained only from the United States.
Foremost among those systems is the Patriot missile system.
The Patriot system was first transferred to Ukraine at the end of 2022 and helped Ukraine to prevent Russia from gaining air superiority over the nation, thereby enabling several counteroffensives in the following years.
The system is vital to Ukraine for its ability to intercept ballistic missiles, including hypersonic systems. However, it is exclusively produced by the United States and is too valuable to be deployed near the front lines.
There are secondary market options for Ukraine, but such deals may require approval from the Trump administration.
Israel began transferring several retired Patriot systems to Ukraine at the beginning of 2025 but it is unclear if they required refurbishing, which was to be done in the United States, was finished before Trump’s pause on aid.
Ukraine has also received 39 High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS), which provide Kyiv with an invaluable rocket capability against Russian forces.
Alongside the HIMARS, Ukraine also has access to a small number of short-range ballistic missiles that have enabled Kyiv to strike key Russian targets behind enemy lines, including airfields, command centers, and supply chains.
The United States has also provided Ukraine with a suite of High-Speed Anti-Radiation Missiles, which are central to Kyiv’s efforts to locate and destroy Russian radar systems used against Ukrainian air units.
There also remains the issue of Ukraine’s reliance on U.S. commercial products, namely Elon Musk’s Starlink, which has been used to maintain communications along the front line.
Kyiv currently maintains access to Starlink but could replace the American system with European OneWeb satellites in the near future to prevent any disruptions driven by U.S. policy.
—Andrew Thornebrooke
BOOKMARKS
Trump is delaying tariffs on manufacturing parts being imported from Canada and Mexico by U.S. automakers for one month. “Reciprocal tariffs will still go into effect on April 2,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said, but Trump is granting the automakers a one-month delay “so they are not at an economic disadvantage.”
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro has launched a plan to harness some of the recently laid-off federal workforce, and entice them to work in his state. To smooth the hiring process, Shapiro has rolled back the college degree requirement, and has plans to update Pennsylvania’s 84-year-old hiring rules.
The U.S. Social Security Administration says it will begin issuing compensation payments to Americans whose benefits had been reduced by the Windfall Elimination Provision and Government Pension Offset. Those rules, repealed by last year’s passage of the Social Security Fairness Act, lowered benefit payments for certain groups, such as government workers or teachers.
Rep. Sylvester Turner (D-Texas), Congressman and former Mayor of Houston, has died at age 70. Turner was taken to hospital on the evening of March 4 and released, but died early on March 5.
Trump wants to end the $52.7 billion CHIPS Act, a subsidy program intended to bring more semiconductor manufacturing to the U.S. The president said in his joint address to Congress on March 4 that tariffs were more effective than grants and subsidies, declaring “We give hundreds of billions of dollars and it doesn’t mean a thing.”
—Stacy Robinson
