1.d4 f5 2.c4 Nf6 3.Nc3 e6 4.g3 Be7 5.Bg2 O-O 6.e4 fxe4 7.Nxe4 Nxe4 8.Bxe4 d5 9.Bd3 Bb4+ 10.Bd2 Qf6 11.f4 Nc6 12.Nf3 g6 13.Bc3 Bxc3+ 14.bxc3 dxc4 15.Bxc4 Na5 16.Be2 c5 17.O-O Rd8 18.Qa4 Nc6 19.Rad1 Bd7 20.Qa3 cxd4 21.cxd4 Be8 22.Qb2 Rab8 23.Rd2 Ne7 24.Ne5 a6 25.Rc1 Bc6 26.Rc5 Nf5 27.Qc3 Rd6 28.Bxa6 Rbd8 29.Nxc6 bxc6 30.Rxc6 Rxc6 31.Qxc6 Nxd4 32.Qe4 Nf3+ 33.Qxf3 Rxd2 34.Qe3 Qa1+ 35.Bf1 Qxa2 36.Bc4 Rd1+ 37.Bf1 Qc4 38.Qf2 Qd5 39.Qb6 Rd2 40.Qb8+ Kg7 41.Qb4 Qd4+ 42.Qxd4+ Rxd4 43.Kg2 Kf6 44.Kf3 h6 45.Ke3 Rd1 46.Bc4 g5 47.fxg5+ hxg5 48.Kf3 g4+ 49.Kf2 Ke5 50.Be2 Rd2 51.Ke3 Rd4 52.Bf1 Ra4 53.h4 gxh3 54.Bxh3 Ra3+ 55.Kf2 Rd3 56.Bg4 Kf6 57.Be2 Rc3 58.Bg4 e5 59.Bd7 e4 60.g4 Kg5 61.Ke2 Kf4 62.Be6 Rc2+ 63.Kd1 Rg2 64.Bc8 Ke3 65.Bf5 Kf3 66.Bc8 Rg1+ 67.Kc2 Rxg4 68.Bxg4+ Kxg4 69.Kd2 Kf3 0-1>

1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 g6 3.Nc3 Bg7 4.e4 O-O 5.f3 c5 6.dxc5 b6 7.Be3 bxc5 8.Bxc5 Nc6 9.Qd2 Qa5 10.Be3 Rb8 11.Rc1 d6 12.Nge2 Nd7 13.b3 Qe5 14.Qd5 Nb4 15.Qxe5 Nxe5 16.Kd2 Nbc6 17.Nb5 f5 18.exf5 gxf5 19.Ned4 f4 20.Bf2 a6 21.Nxc6 Nxc6 22.Na7 Nd4 23.Nxc8 Rfxc8 24.Bd3 a5 25.Rb1 Be5 26.Rhe1 Rc7 27.Re4 Ne6 28.a3 Rcb7 29.Bc2 Kf7 30.c5 Kf6 31.Rbe1 Rg8 32.R1e2 Kf7 33.Bg1 Ng5 34.Rxe5 dxe5 35.Kc3 Nxf3 36.gxf3 Rxg1 37.Bxh7 Rc1+ 38.Rc2 Rxc2+ 39.Bxc2 Ke6 40.Be4 Rb8 41.b4 1-0>

Yes, you can come up with all manner of criticisms as you denounce game posts here, but the end is the same: you have not one f***ing to say about it, <fredpigshit>.

Capisce?

<Donald Trump’s plan to nominate as FBI director the “deep state” conspiracy theorist Kash Patel, a virulent critic of the bureau who has threatened to fire its top echelons and shut down the agency’s headquarters, is facing blowback in Congress as US senators begin to flex their muscles ahead of a contentious confirmation process.

Politicians from both main parties took to the Sunday talk shows to express starkly divergent views on Patel, whom Trump announced on Saturday as his pick to lead the most powerful law enforcement agency in the US. The move is dependent on the incumbent FBI chief, Christopher Wray, who Trump himself placed in the job in 2017, either being fired or resigning.

It is already clear that confirming Patel through the US Senate is likely to be less than plain sailing. Mike Rounds, a Republican senator from South Dakota, indicated that Patel could face a tough confirmation battle.

Rounds pointedly sang the praises of the existing FBI director in an interview with ABC’s This Week. He said that Wray, who still has three more years of his 10-year term to serve, was a “very good man”, adding that he had “no objections about the way that he is doing his job right now”.

The senator also emphasised the separation of powers between president and Senate, signaling possible trouble for Patel. Rounds said he gave presidents “the benefit of the doubt”, but also emphasised that “we have a constitutional role to play … that’s the process”.

Other Republican senators rallied to Patel’s side. Ted Cruz, the senator from Texas, told CBS’s Face the Nation that he believed Patel would be confirmed.

“Patel is a very strong nominee to take on the partisan corruption of the FBI.”

Bill Hagerty, a Republican senator from Tennessee, said on NBC’s Meet the Press that he would vote to confirm Patel. “Kash is the best at uncovering what’s happened to the FBI and I look forward to seeing him taking it apart,” he said.

Patel is a Trump loyalist who has published children’s books featuring “King Donald”. He has long denigrated the FBI as a pillar of what he calls the “deep state” or the “corrupt ruling class”.

In an interview with Shawn Ryan in September, Patel vowed to “shut down” the FBI’s headquarters in Washington DC and reopen the building the following day as a “museum of the deep state”.

He has also threatened to use the power of federal law enforcement to go after those he claims are responsible for corrupting the federal government, a list of whom he published in his memoir. Jake Sullivan, Joe Biden’s current national security adviser, was among that list: Patel called him “one of the corrupt actors of the first order”.....>

<....Sullivan was asked by ABC’s This Week whether he was worried personally about Patel’s potential leadership of the FBI, given the threats against him. He declined to comment, saying he was wholly focused on keeping the country safe in the remaining 50 days of his term in office.

But he did highlight that Biden had kept Wray on as FBI chief, despite having inherited the official from Trump. Sullivan said that Wray served “with distinction, entirely insulated from politics or the partisan preferences of the current sitting president. This is a good, deep bipartisan tradition that President Biden has adhered to.”

Jamie Raskin, a House Democrat from Maryland, challenged the claim by Trump and Patel that the FBI had been politically weaponised under Biden to go after Republicans. He pointed out on CNN’s State of the Union that over the past four years the FBI had prosecuted the disgraced Democratic senator from New Jersey, Bob Menendez, and the Texas Democrat Henry Cuellar.

“I think that’s what they mean when they talk about politicization in the deep state – anybody who doesn’t do the will of Donald Trump,” Raskin said.

According to an Axios report on Sunday, Trump had initially planned to appoint Patel as deputy FBI director but changed his mind after his pick to head the agency, the state attorney general of Missouri, Andrew Bailey, failed to impress him. Raising Patel to the number one position makes the move far more politically loaded.

Despite the storm he is generating, Trump shows no sign of moderating his leadership choices for his upcoming administration. Over the weekend he tapped Charles Kushner, father of his son-in-law Jared Kushner and a convicted felon whom Trump pardoned in 2020, as US ambassador to France.

On Sunday, Trump announced on Truth Social that he had chosen his daughter Tiffany’s father-in-law, Massad Boulos, to be senior adviser on Arab and Middle Eastern affairs. Boulos, a Lebanese billionaire, was active in Trump’s presidential campaign as a liaison with Arab American and Muslim leaders.

Trump has also picked a county sheriff, Chad Chronister, from Florida to head the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). The agency will have a key role in attempting to fulfill Trump’s pledge to staunch the cross-border flow of fentanyl and other drugs into the US, which is already causing diplomatic tensions with Canada and Mexico.

Chronister’s father-in-law, Edward DeBartolo, was pardoned by Trump three years ago on a 1998 conviction for involvement in a gambling fraud case. DeBartolo, the former owner of the San Francisco 49ers American football team, was fined $1m and suspended by the NFL for a year.>

<A tax break for millionaires, and almost everyone else.

An end to the COVID-19-era government subsidies that some Americans have used to purchase health insurance.

Limits to food stamps, including for women and children, and other safety net programs. Rollbacks to Biden-era green energy programs. Mass deportations. Government job cuts to “drain the swamp.”

Having won the election and sweeping to power, Republicans are planning an ambitious 100-day agenda with President-elect Donald Trump in the White House and GOP lawmakers in a congressional majority to accomplish their policy goals.

Atop the list is the plan to renew some $4 trillion in expiring GOP tax cuts, a signature domestic achievement of Trump's first term and an issue that may define his return to the White House.

“What we’re focused on right now is being ready, Day 1,” said House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., after meeting recently with GOP colleagues to map out the road ahead.

The policies emerging will revive long-running debates about America's priorities, its gaping income inequities and the proper size and scope of its government, especially in the face of mounting federal deficits now approaching $2 trillion a year.

The discussions will test whether Trump and his Republican allies can achieve the kinds of real-world outcomes wanted, needed or supported when voters gave the party control of Congress and the White House.

“The past is really prologue here,” said Lindsay Owens, executive director of the Groundwork Collaborative, recalling the 2017 tax debate.

Trump’s first term became defined by those tax cuts, which were approved by Republicans in Congress and signed into law only after their initial campaign promise to “repeal and replace” Democratic President Barack Obama's health care law sputtered, failing with the famous thumbs-down vote by then-Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.

The GOP majority in Congress quickly pivoted to tax cuts, assembling and approving the multitrillion-dollar package by year’s end.

In the time since Trump signed those cuts into law, the big benefits have accrued to higher-income households. The top 1 percent — those making nearly $1 million and above — received about a $60,000 income tax cut, while those with lower incomes got as little as a few hundred dollars, according to the Tax Policy Center and other groups. Some people ended up paying about the same.

“The big economic story in the U.S. is soaring income inequality,” said Owens. “And that is actually, interestingly, a tax story.”

In preparation for Trump’s return, Republicans in Congress have been meeting privately for months and with the president-elect to go over proposals to extend and enhance those tax breaks, some of which would otherwise expire in 2025.

That means keeping in place various tax brackets and a standardized deduction for individual earners, along with the existing rates for so-called pass-through entities such as law firms, doctors' offices or businesses that take their earnings as individual income.

Typically, the price tag for the tax cuts would be prohibitive. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that keeping the expiring provisions in place would add some $4 trillion to deficits over a decade.

Adding to that, Trump wants to include his own priorities in the tax package, including lowering the corporate rate, now at 21% from the 2017 law, to 15%, and doing away with individual taxes on tips and overtime pay.

But Avik Roy, president of the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, said blaming the tax cuts for the nation's income inequality is “just nonsense” because tax filers up and down the income ladder benefited. He instead points to other factors, including the Federal Reserve's historically low interest rates that enable borrowing, including for the wealthy, on the cheap.

“Americans don’t care if Elon Musk is rich,” Roy said. “What they care about is, what are you doing to make their lives better?”

Typically, lawmakers want the cost of a policy change to be offset by budget revenue or reductions elsewhere. But in this case, there's almost no agreed-upon revenue raisers or spending cuts in the annual $6 trillion budget that could cover such a whopping price tag.

Instead, some Republicans have argued that the tax breaks will pay for themselves, with the trickle-down revenue from potential economic growth. Trump’s tariffs floated this past week could provide another source of offsetting revenue....>

<....Some Republicans argue there's precedent for simply extending the tax cuts without offsetting the costs because they are not new changes but existing federal policy.

“If you’re just extending current law, we’re not raising taxes or lowering taxes," said Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, the incoming chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, on Fox News.

He said the criticism that tax cuts would add to the deficit is “ridiculous.” There is a difference between taxes and spending, he said, "and we just have to get that message out to America.”

At the same time, the new Congress will also be considering spending reductions, particularly to food stamps and health care programs, goals long sought by conservatives as part of the annual appropriations process.

One cut is almost certain to fall on the COVID-19-era subsidy that helps defray the cost of health insurance for people who buy their own policies via the Affordable Care Act exchange.

The extra health care subsidies were extended through 2025 in Democratic President Joe Biden's Inflation Reduction Act, which also includes various green energy tax breaks that Republicans want to roll back.

The House Democratic leader, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York, scoffed at the Republican claim that they've won “some big, massive mandate” — when in fact, the House Democrats and Republicans essentially fought to a draw in the November election, with the GOP eking out a narrow majority.

“This notion about some mandate to make massive, far-right extreme policy changes, it doesn't exist — it doesn't exist,” Jeffries said.

Republicans are planning to use a budgetary process, called reconciliation, that allows majority passage in Congress, essentially along party lines, without the threat of a filibuster in the Senate that can stall out a bill’s advance unless 60 of the 100 senators agree.

It’s the same process Democrats have used when they had the power in Washington to approve the Inflation Reduction Act and Obama's health care law over GOP objections.

Republicans have been here before with Trump and control of Congress, which is no guarantee they will be able to accomplish their goals, particularly in the face of resistance from Democrats.

Still, House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., who has been working closely with Trump on the agenda, has promised a “breakneck” pace in the first 100 days “because we have a lot to fix.”>

<For more than four decades before Donald Trump assumed the presidency, the FBI director was a position above politics. A new president might choose a political ally as attorney general, but the FBI director was different. An FBI director appointed by Richard Nixon also served under Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. Carter’s choice remained on the job deep into Reagan’s second term, when Reagan moved him to head the CIA. Reagan’s FBI appointee served through the George H. W. Bush presidency and into the Bill Clinton administration. Clinton fired the inherited official—the first time a president ever fired an FBI director—only because the outgoing Bush administration had left behind a Department of Justice report accusing the director of ethical lapses. (Clinton tried to coax the tainted director into resigning of his own volition. Only after the coaxing failed did Clinton act.)

And so it continued into the 21st century. Except in a single case of serious scandal, Senate-confirmed FBI directors stayed in their post until they quit or until their 10-year term expired. Never, never, never was a Senate-confirmed FBI director fired so that the president could replace him with a loyalist. Republicans and Democrats alike agreed that there must be no return to the days when J. Edgar Hoover did special favors for presidents who perpetuated his power.

Even Donald Trump grudgingly submitted to this rule during his first term, as the Mueller Report later detailed. Trump wanted to fire FBI Director James Comey to shut down the investigation of Trump’s ties to Russia. Trump’s advisers convinced Trump that admitting his true motive would spark an enormous scandal. Instead, the new administration inveigled the deputy attorney general to write a letter offering a more neutral-seeming explanation: that Comey had mishandled the bureau’s investigation of Hillary Clinton. That deceptive rationalization—the Mueller Report authoritatively disproved the cover story—did not calm the uproar over Trump’s scheme to install a henchman as FBI director. At the time, even Trump supporters still professed that the FBI director must be more than a presidential yes-man. Things were quieted only when Trump chose a politically independent candidate to replace Comey: Christopher Wray, who holds the job to this day, retained through all four years of the Biden administration.

Yesterday, Trump announced on Truth Social that he intended to fire Wray to replace him with Kash Patel, a person notorious for his cringing deference to Trump’s wishes. How bad a choice is Patel? My colleague Elaina Plott Calabro reported that when President Trump “entertained naming Patel deputy director of the FBI, Attorney General Bill Barr confronted the White House chief of staff and said, ‘Over my dead body.’”

But before getting to Patel’s demerits, we should stay for a minute longer on the ominous danger of Trump’s wish to fire Wray.

FBI directors wield awesome powers over the liberties of Americans. The unwritten rule governing their appointment—no dismissal except for compelling cause—bulwarked American law and freedom for half a century. Even first-term Trump dared not openly defy it. But second-term Trump is opening with a bid to junk it altogether. Much of the reporting on Trump’s announcement reveals a society already bending to Trump’s will: Something that was regarded as outrageously unacceptable in 2017—treating an FBI director as just another Trump aide—has been semi-normalized even before President-Elect Trump takes office.

The firing of Wray is the real outrage. The obnoxious nomination of Patel slathers frosting and sprinkles on the outrage.

Maybe the Patel nomination will fail, as Trump’s attempt to install Matt Gaetz as attorney general failed. If Patel falters, maybe Trump will fall back on a somewhat more respectable candidate. That second candidate may be greeted with relief. But the essential harm will be done by the firing of Wray, not the hiring of Patel (or whoever ultimately gets the job). Already, not a month since the closest election by popular-vote margin in two generations, we are witnessing, throughout law-enforcement and the national-security agencies, a pattern of Trump’s trashing institutions and replacing them with whim. Trump is declaring his intention to reinvent the FBI as something it has never been before: an instrument of personal presidential power, which will investigate (or refrain from investigating) and lay charges (or refrain from laying charges) as the president wishes....>

<....For secretary of defense, Trump has chosen an ideological crank whose own mother accused him in writing of repeatedly abusing women. (She subsequently disavowed the statements.) At the CIA, Trump wants a hyper-partisan who, as Trump’s first-term director of national intelligence, selectively declassified information to discredit Trump’s political opponents. For his second-term director of national intelligence, Trump wants a longtime apologist for Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria and Vladimir Putin’s war of aggression in Ukraine.

Merit, competence, integrity—none of that matters. Or rather, those good qualities seem to be active disqualifiers. Trump’s picks are selected for obedience only.

Now comes the great test: Is the American constitutional system as fragile as Trump hopes? Will Wray meekly accept termination or will he defend the bureau from Trump’s second and bolder attempt to pervert it? Will Senate Republicans ratify Trump’s attack on the separation of law enforcement from politics? Will federal courts grant warrants to an FBI that seeks warrants and makes arrests because the president told it to? Will the tiny Republican majority in the House endorse or resist Trump’s attempt to create a personal police force? Does enough of an independent press survive outside the control of Trump-friendly oligarchs to explain what is happening and why it matters? Will enough of the public care? Will enough of the public react?

The American people voted for cheaper eggs. They’re going to get only noise, conflict, and chaos. What Trump is trying will, if successful, be a constitutional scandal far greater than Watergate. If he succeeds, the seizure of power he unsuccessfully attempted in 2021 could be under way in 2025.>

<President-elect Donald Trump and his top advisers have long cited impoundment, a little-known legal theory, as a means of shrinking the federal government. But, pursuing that path will almost assuredly bring the incoming administration before the Supreme Court.

The Constitution grants Congress sole authority to appropriate a federal budget, but impoundment theory essentially claims that any president has unilateral authority to ignore Congress's funding bills and withhold or "impound" funds meant for programs, agencies, or departments deemed unsuitable by the White House.

The only catch? Congress passed legislation during the Nixon administration that required the president to spend funds appropriated by Congress.

The law caused President Joe Biden some headaches in the fall of 2023 after he restarted construction on a southern border wall. The Biden White House claimed, at the time, that after seeking to claw back the funds appropriated under the first Trump administration, the president would be forced by the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974 to restart border wall construction.

The Government Accountability Office found that Trump violated the Impoundment Control Act in 2019 when he tried to withhold security funds to Ukraine, which was at the heart of Democrats' first impeachment case against the 45th president.

Trump's team argues that the impoundment legislation is unconstitutional, claiming that Article II of the Constitution obligates the president to "faithfully execute" the law, including an implicit requirement not to enforce unconstitutional legislation. Trump's advisers claim that presidents dating back to Thomas Jefferson have impounded funds when necessary.

Trump himself claims that Article II grants him "the right to whatever I want as president" and that impoundment is a "crucial tool with which to obliterate the Deep State."

Russ Vought, Trump's nominee to lead the White House's Office of Management and Budget, has specifically championed impoundment in recent months.

"I believe the loss of impoundment authority — which 200 years of presidents enjoyed — was the original sin in eliminating the ability from a branch ... to control spending," he said during an interview with Fox Business earlier this year. "We're going to need that back."

Vought, who also served as OMB director for the latter half of Trump's first term in office, has been working to popularize impoundment among conservative politicos throughout the Biden administration.

ProPublica unearthed audio of speeches Vought delivered in 2023 and 2024 at events hosted by the Center for Renewing America, the pro-Trump think tank he helmed during the Biden years, where he described executive means to combat a "Marxist takeover" of the federal government and shrink the federal bureaucracy.

"I don’t want President Trump having to lose a moment of time having fights in the Oval Office about whether something is legal or doable or moral," he said.

Trump lauded Vought in a statement announcing his nomination to OMB.

"Russ knows exactly how to dismantle the Deep State and end Weaponized Government, and he will help us return Self Governance to the People," the president-elect wrote.

Trump has also tasked Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy with leading the Department of Government Efficiency, a new effort to curtail federal waste. The pair signaled a looming Supreme Court fight to enact sweeping cuts.

"With a decisive electoral mandate and a 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court, DOGE has a historic opportunity for structural reductions in the federal government. We are prepared for the onslaught from entrenched interests in Washington," Musk and Ramaswamy wrote in a recent op-ed for the Wall Street Journal. "We expect to prevail."

Any move by Trump to fire large swaths of the federal workforce, at the suggestion of DOGE, would launch a judiciary battle bound for the Supreme Court.

"To the extent that you could try to implement it unilaterally, you would need some kind of authority to impound — to just not do what Congress has said you're supposed to do," said Bowdoin College professor Andrew Rudalevige, who specifically studies the powers of the presidency. "It'll lead pretty directly to constitutional conflict, but that, I think, is the only way that you could impose unilaterally presidential wishes in this area."

Trump advisers believe that the Supreme Court would side with the administration on an impoundment decision, a view shared by South Texas College of Law professor Josh Blackman.

<Don't worry about it <generror>. Every regular reader knows who is deliberately, unethically disrespectful to others. Perv has been sewing [sic] trash for decades on this site but gets preferential treatment. You're dealing with an obnoxious narcissist who gets his jollies by belittling others, especially through mischaracterizing, exaggeration, fabrication, and filthy name-calling. It's a psychological sickness that makes him feel important.>

Maybe put Ronco, fix-a-flat, or a scrub brush on your Christmas list? Oh, with your Grinch-like attitude, you probably don't celebrate Christ-mas. Just get drunk for three days and eat fruitcake and poka chips in your PJs?>

<After spending much of his first term and all of his post-presidency under investigation, President-elect Trump is moving to ensure that doesn't happen again.

The Department of Justice, FBI, Congressional committees and government watchdogs all launched probes into Trump's activities, paving the way for two impeachments and dozens of criminal charges.

Now more familiar with the levers of power — and his own points of vulnerability — Trump is attempting to insulate himself.

Trump and his allies have telegraphed unprecedented steps to put loyalists in roles that have historically been apolitical.

Trump has signaled he will fire Christopher Wray, whose 10-year term would run into 2027.

Trump sparked a firestorm in his first term by firing James Comey and replacing him with Wray.

Firing Wray would be norm-smashing yet unsurprising, given Trump's antipathy for Wray and the bureau more generally, particularly after its raid on Mar-a-Lago to recover classified documents.

The nomination of Pam Bondi, who represented Trump at his first impeachment trial, would put a close ally in a position that by tradition (though not always in practice) has a level of independence from the president.

"For too long, the partisan Department of Justice has been weaponized against me and other Republicans — Not anymore," Trump said in announcing the pick.

Trump castigated and eventually fired his first AG, Jeff Sessions, for recusing himself from the Russia investigation, and later fell out dramatically with his successor, Bill Barr, for not endorsing his claims of widespread election fraud.

Jack Smith moved to dismiss his cases against Trump after the election and is likely to resign before Inauguration Day.

In Trump 2.0, we're unlikely to see a repeat of the Mueller probe, with an autonomous team investigating the sitting president — though Trump last year floated the idea of a special counsel to investigate the Biden family.

Watchdogs for government agencies could also be on the chopping block, with Trump's allies calling for their removal, Politico reports.

Project 2025 — which Trump disavowed on the campaign trail before naming some of its architects to his administration — calls for a much wider culling of career civil servants in favor of loyalists.

Conservatives now control all three branches of government, neutralizing many potential challenges to Trump at least until 2026.

Republican majorities — albeit slim ones — could prevent a third impeachment, at least until after the midterms. Republicans will also control the committees that would oversee investigations into the president.

A 6-3 conservative bench, which has already granted Trump presidential immunity for official acts, could side with him for years to come.

Trump's most consistent and reliable target, the media, stands weaker than ever due to declining trust and difficult economics.

He has filed lawsuits against news organizations, threatened to revoke broadcast licenses and reportedly cited the discrediting of news media as part of his mission.>

So NOW you should do the RIGHT thing and DELETE sfod's posts and RESTORE what you hastily deleted out of personal bias. CORRECT your own lazy (let us not bother to actually check the facts) mistake!>

<The US announced on Monday another round of export controls on China's semiconductor industry, multiple outlets reported, weeks ahead of Donald Trump's second term.

Washington plans to restrict exports to 140 Chinese companies, including the chip-equipment heavyweight Naura Technology Group, to curb China's growing capabilities in artificial intelligence and defense technology.

It is the third crackdown the US has initiated on China's chipmaking industry since October 2022. The move is set to also stop the export of advanced high-bandwidth memory, a key component in the development of AI chips in China.

The chip manufacturers Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. and Huawei are also on the list of 140 companies.

"They're the strongest controls ever enacted by the US to degrade the People's Republic of China's ability to make the most advanced chips that they're using in their military modernization," Gina Raimondo, the US's commerce secretary, told reporters from the Financial Times, The New York Times, and others on Sunday.

The US has long been embroiled in a technological race against China, which developing [sic] AI and military tech at pace.

The Biden administration's latest sanctions are partly driven by national security concerns that China's access to high-quality chips could allow it to bolster its military applications, especially through the use of AI.

Last month, Reuters reported that researchers in China affiliated with the People's Liberation Army had used Meta's open-source AI model Llama to develop an AI tool that could be applied to military use cases.

While this latest wave of measures is from the Biden administration, Beijing reportedly anticipates further sanctions from Trump. China has been attempting to stockpile chips from the US in recent months, with purchases reaching $1.11 billion in October, an analysis of customs data from the South China Morning Post found.

Previous comments from Trump suggest he's aligned with the Biden administration when it comes to thwarting China's AI growth. In a June interview with the social-media personality Logan Paul, Trump billed China as the "main threat" to the US AI industry. "We have to be at the forefront," he said.

There are still some internal disagreements about the approach to restricting Huawei chip-production facilities, the Financial Times said.

Some of the Chinese tech giant's chip-production plants were not included on the list, with one person close to the discussions telling the FT that they were not in operation, so it's not clear whether they would be used for the production of advanced chips.

Mao Ning, a spokesperson for China's foreign ministry, said at a press conference earlier this month, "China is firmly opposed to the US overstretching the concept of national security, abusing export control measures, and making malicious attempts to block and suppress China.">