A Russian spaceflyer was pulled from SpaceX's next astronaut mission for violating U.S. national security regulations, according to a media report.

This morning, The Insider reported that Artemyev, 54, was apparently removed from Crew 12 for violations of ITAR (International Traffic in Arms Regulations), a U.S. law that seeks to safeguard national security by restricting the dissemination of sensitive information and technology.

"The cosmonaut allegedly photographed SpaceX documentation and then 'used his phone' to export classified information," The Insider wrote (in Russian; translation by Google), citing the work of launch analyst Gregory Trishkin.

Sanae Takaichi’s not-so-catchy remarks about everyone working like a horse did not go down well in a country notorious for its demanding work culture

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Hi everyone, I wanted to share something new about our family project, Safebox. I’ve posted about it here before, but this time I finally wrote my first full article about it. If you're into running your own services, managing domains, SSL, proxies, backups, or just want to see how we approach automated self-hosting, you might find it interesting.

I’ll be publishing more pieces soon, covering both technical and non-technical aspects of self-hosting and the software itself, so hopefully it will be useful for some of you.

If you check it out, thank you and I’d really appreciate hearing your thoughts.

Here’s the post:

Take control of your data: How Safebox makes self-hosting easier

https://medium.com/@domjanrebeka2000/take-control-of-your-data-how-safebox-makes-self-hosting-easier-268deefa75ed

Kohler Can Access Data and Pictures from Toilet Camera It Describes as "End-to-End Encrypted": But emails exchanged with Kohler's privacy contact clarified that the other "end" that can decrypt the data is Kohler themselves: "User data is encrypted at rest, when it's stored on the user's mobile phone, toilet attachment, and on our systems. Data in transit is also encrypted end-to-end, as it ...

Tasmanians got fucked hard by the AFL and complicit politicians today. Apparently a whistleblower has just revealed that the AFL is looking to pull out of managing People First Stadium on the Gold Coast because it's too hard to operate in the black & we are going to be taking on 100% of the operational risk of this abortion of a project.

• China's industry had built capacity for 20 million EVs and plug-in hybrids annually but remained saddled with enough factories for 30 million gasoline vehicles
• Fossil-fuel vehicles accounted for 76% of China's auto exports since 2020 with annual shipments jumped from 1 million to likely >6.5 million in 2025

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China's electric vehicle (EV) industry captured half its domestic market in just a few years, crushing sales of gasoline-powered vehicles from once-dominant global automakers.

But foreign players were not the only losers. Many Chinese legacy automakers also watched their sales collapse – and responded by flooding the world with fossil-fuel vehicles they could not sell at home.

While Western policymakers have focused on the threat of China's heavily subsidised EVs, protecting their markets with tariffs, US and European automakers face greater competition from China's gas-guzzlers in countries from Poland to South Africa to Uruguay. Fossil-fuel vehicles have accounted for 76% of Chinese auto exports since 2020, and total annual shipments jumped from 1 million to likely more than 6.5 million this year, according to data from China-based consultancy Automobility.

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The boom in China's gasoline-powered exports is driven by the same EV subsidies and policies that wrecked the China businesses of automakers including Volkswagen, General Motors (GM) and Nissan by underwriting scores of Chinese EV makers and igniting a devastating price war, a Reuters examination found. The phenomenon highlights the far-reaching impacts of Chinese industrial policy, as foreign competitors struggle to keep pace with government-backed firms chasing Beijing's goals to dominate critical sectors nationally and globally.

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China's gasoline-vehicle exports alone – not including EVs and plug-in hybrids – were enough last year to make it the world's largest auto-exporting nation by volume, industry and government data show.

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Chinese carmaker SAIC's exports – mostly of its own brands, without [former joint venture partner] GM – soared from nearly 400,000 annually in 2020 to more than a million last year.

Dongfeng's exports of nearly 250,000 vehicles last year, up almost four-fold in five years, proved critical as sales of its China partnerships with Honda and Nissan entered a "downward spiral," said Jelte Vernooij, Dongfeng's Central Europe manager.

Dongfeng's annual global sales have fallen by a million vehicles since 2020, to less than 2 million, company filings show. Yet Vernooij is not worried about Dongfeng's future – because it has Beijing's backing.

"The fact that we're state-owned is key," he said. "There's no question that we will survive."

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China's top auto exporter is Chery, whose global sales rocketed from 730,000 vehicles to 2.6 million between 2020 and 2024. Chery, which has both state and private owners, grew annual exports over the period by about a million units – relying mostly on the gasoline-powered vehicles that comprise four-fifths of its sales. China's top 10 exporters include five other state-owned automakers and two private ones, Geely and Great Wall Motor (GWM), that also sell more gasoline vehicles than EVs.

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Only two of China's top 10 auto exporters focus exclusively on battery-powered vehicles. One of them is US electric-car pioneer Tesla. The other is BYD, which sells only EVs and plug-in hybrids.

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Chinese automakers' rush to export gasoline cars can be traced to government policies that created a glut of factory capacity to build them.

China's rapid EV growth idled assembly lines capable of producing up to 20 million gasoline-powered cars annually, estimates Automobility CEO Bill Russo. Such unproductive overhead raises costs, pressuring automakers to repurpose capacity for exports.

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[Chinese] automakers got cheap EV factories financed by [Chinese] cities and provinces eager to demonstrate development.

"Local governments even prepare the land and build the factories, allowing companies to 'move in with just a suitcase,'" said Liang Linhe, chairman of Sany Heavy Truck, among China's largest truck makers.

The result: massive overcapacity. At a March EV conference, Su Bo, China's former vice minister of industry, urged regulators to promote the conversion of gasoline-car factories to build battery-powered models. He estimated China's industry had built capacity for 20 million EVs and plug-in hybrids annually but remained saddled with enough factories for 30 million gasoline vehicles – far more than its domestic market needs.

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Brazil accounts for more than half of the world’s soybean trade. About 70% of that goes to China for use as animal feed. It is also the world’s second largest corn exporter, mostly for animal feed and biofuels.

Such exports have enriched Brazilian agribusiness, but they have undermined domestic food production. This is negatively affecting the food security of poorer communities. Between 2010 and 2022, soybean production increased by over 100% while rice production fell by 30%. The production of other basic food crops also fell.

Domestic food prices increased faster than general inflation, and low-income families have experienced food insecurity and have cut their food consumption.

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Global supply chains are designed and operate as systems of production and trade that reward profitable exports, rather than combatting food insecurity. They often direct resources away from where they are needed to where they are profitable.

When right-to-food systems are established to tackle food insecurity, as in Belo Horizonte, they must cater to their local context. Policies such as subsidised food consumption and production, plus coordinated distribution are all ingredients required for tackling food insecurity.

The war in Ukraine is forcing conflict analysts and others to reimagine traditional state-centric models of war, as it demonstrates that militaries are no longer primarily responsible for defining the challenges of the modern battlespace and then producing tenders for technological fixes. Instead, private tech companies increasingly explain the ideal battlespace to militaries, offering software and hardware products needed to establish real-time information edges. In the Russia-Ukraine war, private companies have sought to shape Ukrainian intelligence requirements. At the beginning of Russia’s invasion in February 2022, Ukraine’s armed forces could not manage essential intelligence tasks. Ukraine’s military lacked its own software and hardware for real-time information dominance and instead accepted support from private tech companies. These companies provide AI and big data tools that fuse intelligence and surveillance data to enhance the military’s situational awareness. As the war has progressed, however, the Ukrainians have sought to develop their own government situational awareness and battle management platform called Delta. The platform was developed as a bottom-up solution, “initially focused on a single, highly effective application: a digital map for situational awareness.”2 Over time, it expanded into a robust software ecosystem used by most of Ukraine’s military, from frontline soldiers to top commanders. This in part reflects Ukraine’s desire to retain direct sovereign control over what the U.S. military refers to as Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control infrastructure (CJADC2), which manages networked sensors, data, platforms, and operations to deliver information advantages across all military services and with allies.

Mass surveillance and social media now generate huge amounts of data during war. At the same time, the widespread availability of the smartphone means civilians carry around advanced sensors that can broadcast data more quickly than the armed forces themselves.4 This enables civilians to provide intelligence to the armed forces in ways that were not previously possible.5 Matthew Ford and Andrew Hoskins label this a “new war ecology” that is “weaponizing our attention and making everyone a participant in wars without end . . . [by] collapsing the distinctions between audience and actor, soldier and civilian, media and weapon.”6 In this ecology, warfare is participatory. Social media platforms such as TikTok, X (formerly Twitter), and Telegram are no longer merely tools for consuming war reportage; militaries accessing and processing open-source data from these platforms shapes the battlespace in real time by contributing to wider situational awareness.

In this “new war ecology,” Palantir Technologies is an often controversial symbol of how private tech companies and the military work together to tackle battlefield challenges.8 Since it was founded in 2003, the company has grown quickly by providing big data software solutions. Its platforms are designed to handle complex and difficult data challenges, including those experienced by Western militaries. Importantly, Palantir’s software platforms were not developed and commercialized to fulfill a military tender. They are rooted in business models prioritizing speed, flexibility, and investor return, rather than the state’s national security imperatives.

As a result of their work in Ukraine, a slew of companies like Palantir have drawn media attention.9 While commercial interests have rarely aligned neatly with geopolitics, circumstances are changing; private technology firms increasingly occupy, manage, and in some cases dominate the digital infrastructure upon which militaries now rely. States themselves have fostered this shift through selective deregulation and outsourcing of technology development. These dynamics are visible in the war in Ukraine and in the wider geopolitical contest over the global digital stack. As we argued in “Virtual Sovereignty,” a paper we published in International Affairs, this influence has major geopolitical consequences for how states use power.

cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/42932481

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Russia has seen a sharp rise in aviation incidents in the fourth year of Western sanctions that cut off access to spare parts for foreign-made aircraft, an investigation by the exiled news outlet Novaya Gazeta Europe has found.

Russian airlines reported more than 800 equipment malfunctions that led to flight cancellations or emergency landings from January through late November 2025, Novaya Gazeta Europe caculated based on data from the Aviaincident monitoring channel.

That is roughly four times the number recorded during the same period in 2024, when just over 200 such cases were logged.

Western sanctions imposed after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 banned Russian carriers from EU and U.S. airspace and blocked the purchase of spare parts for Boeing and Airbus jets.

Russia’s aviation chief Dmitry Yadrov warned in October that the country could lose 339 aircraft over the next five years in the worst-case scenario, including 109 foreign-made planes.

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A draft legislation informally agreed with the Council seeks to protect the EU’s interests from the weaponisation of energy supplies by the Russian Federation.

• Pipeline gas imports from Russia in to the EU under long-term deals must halt by Sept. 30, 2027, with a possibility of an extension to Nov. 1, 2027, depending on fulfillment of gas storage targets set by the EU. That compares with an end-2027 ban on those contracts originally put forward by the commission.

• Short-term contracts for LNG concluded before June 17, 2025 will be prohibited as of April 25, 2026. Pipeline gas brought into the EU under short-term deals will be banned as of June 17, 2026.

• To phase-out Russian energy, the deal obliges member states to prepare plans to diversify their supplies. The commission also plans to put forward a legislative proposal on phasing out Russian oil imports no later than the end of 2027.