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Cross-posted from: https://feddit.de/post/10335750

Russia violated Poland's airspace early on Sunday with a cruise missile launched at targets in western Ukraine, Poland's armed forces said.

Russia launched 57 missiles and drones on Ukraine in the early hours, including attacking Kyiv and the western region of Lviv that is near the Polish border.

Cross-posted from: https://feddit.de/post/10335519

The first textbook for the new subject, called The Russian Army in Defence of the Fatherland, has been produced by leading Russian education publisher Enlightenment. Among its authors are two senior figures who work for the defence ministry and Kremlin newspaper Rossiiskaya Gazeta.

Its 368 pages are filled with stories describing the "heroic achievements of Russian soldiers" from the 13th Century to the present day.

Cross-posted from: https://feddit.de/post/10303224

Amnesty International (AI) reported that since annexation, Russia has oppressed Crimea’s non-Russian residents, namely Ukrainians and Crimean Tartars, in two ways: by changing the region’s ethnic demographics and, more systematically, through “restrictions on education, religion, media, representative institutions, judicial system, and cultural celebrations.”

AI explained that Russian post-annexation figures of Crimea showed a decrease of Ukrainian residents by almost 10 percent and Crimean Tartars by 2 percent, which are figures AI says are inconsistent with even the highest numbers of these residents who fled the peninsula in 2014. AI thus attributed the drop in residents to “ethnic Ukrainians now choosing or feeling compelled to identify as Russian, or a combination of both.”

After annexation, all non-Russian residents were given citizenship to Russia unless they “formally opted out.” Opting out puts the “foreigner” in a disadvantaged position regarding their “economic, social, cultural, political and civil rights.”

Moldova summoned Russia’s ambassador, Oleg Vasnetsov, to protest against the Kremlin’s decision to open six polling stations in Transnistria “contrary to the position of the Moldovan authorities,” the foreign ministry said.

It said it informed Vasnetsov that an unnamed embassy worker was a “collaborator” who was declared persona non grata and must leave the country.

Cross-posting from: https://feddit.de/post/10269693

Alla Antonova says she suffered beatings, had a plastic bag thrust over her head and endured many other threats from Russian soldiers in occupied Ukraine who wanted to know where her son-in-law was serving in the Ukrainian army.

"They took me into the bedroom and mama into the kitchen," Antonova said.

"Three of them. Interrogating me is the way I would put it. And they beat me. I had bruises on my legs, on my back."

Another soldier, she said, pulled the plastic bag over her head and pressed down to stop her breathing.

"I started to lose consciousness. They removed the bag and I felt ill," Antonova said. "I told them: 'Just kill me. It's the truth, I know nothing'."

A report on conditions in occupied areas released this week by the U.N. Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine described a "climate of fear" in occupied areas more than two years after the Russian invasion. It reports the widespread use of such tactics that Antonova and her family describe.

Washington's intervention is likely to derail one of the biggest Western deals in Russia since the start of the Ukraine war and piles more pressure on the Austrian group that handles billions of euros of international payments for Russians, two of the people said. The news rattled investors.

Raiffeisen is buying the stake in Vienna-based Strabag from a company the construction group identified as controlled by Oleg Deripaska. The bank billed the deal, which is routed via Russia, as a means of unlocking some of the billions of euros stranded in Russia and potentially loosening its ties. The news in December prompted a rally in the bank's stock, which has been hit hard due to its Russia links.

Cross-posted from: https://feddit.de/post/10249490

An irrigation system, once created at Stalin’s order as a project of grand Soviet social engineering, is now running dry.

"Companies [in connected vehicles to biotech] will need to undergo a mindset shift toward more proactively assessing how their products, services, and data flows could pose national security risks to US critical infrastructure and US persons, and what mitigation measures to take—to include potentially unwinding relationships with Chinese partners and suppliers," the Rhodium group says.

The Biden administration made two big back-to-back announcements last week—a much-anticipated executive order and accompanying Advance Notice for Proposed Rulemaking (ANPRM) on data security—alongside a Commerce Information and Communications Technology Services (ICTS) investigation into connected vehicles. The data security executive order focuses on personal data genomic data, biometric data, personal health data, geolocation data, financial data, and certain kinds of personal identifiers. The ICTS investigation by Commerce focuses on transactions relating to the ICT supply chain for connected vehicles.

Under the Sullivan doctrine, US tech controls aimed at China began with the most tangible target: advanced semiconductors and the tools used to make them. They soon expanded to cover the intangibles: restrictions on US outbound capital and know-how to Chinese firms in a “small yard” of force-multiplying technologies—semiconductors, AI, and quantum computing, but not (yet) biotech. Then came novel Infrastructure-as-a-Service measures for cloud service providers to monitor and restrict access to high-performance compute capacity, a work in progress that aims in part to prevent Chinese entities from using the data centers utilizing high-end chips to conduct training runs for large AI models.

US President Joe Biden announced “unprecedented actions to ensure that cars on US roads from countries of concern like China do not undermine our national security.” He asked the Commerce Department to launch an advanced rulemaking (ANPRM) on connected vehicles with technology from those countries and to take action to respond to the risks.

ANPRM notes that China likely represents the broadest, most active, and most persistent cyber espionage threat to the US government and private networks. Experts suggest this risk of espionage poses a more significant Chinese threat to the rapidly emerging market of connected vehicles (CVs) than outright damaging attacks.

Artificial Intelligence is revolutionizing seemingly every aspect of our lives: medical diagnosis, weather forecasting, space exploration, and even mundane tasks like writing e-mails and searching the Internet. But with increased efficiencies and computational accuracy has come a Pandora’s box of trouble.

In autumn 2023, a hacker called Golem posted on a well-known message board for cybercriminals, announcing a trove of data stolen from 23andMe, one of the biggest names in at-home DNA testing. The company later acknowledged that the hacker had gained access to personal information in 6.9 million of its users' profiles.

It seemed to be an ethnically targeted attack: Golem boasted about having access to the accounts of people of Ashkenazi Jewish heritage who had sent their DNA to 23andMe, and offered to sell it to whoever was prepared to pay. News began to circulate suggesting the data breach on Friday 6 October 2023 may have even had antisemitic motivations.

A post purportedly from Golem offered for sale "tailored ethnic groupings, individualized data sets, pinpointed origin estimations, haplogroup details, phenotype information, photographs, links to hundreds of potential relatives, and, most crucially, raw data profiles".

"Developed countries were hoarding vaccines and using the power of intellectual property law as a tool to ensure that they would continue to offer access to their own," says Faith Majekolagbe of the University of Alberta's Faculty of Law.

In a recent paper that contributes to the debate, published in the Australian Journal of Human Rights, Majekolagbe argues that international human rights law needs stronger teeth in the face of well-established protections for intellectual property. Otherwise, nations without timely access to a vaccine will once again suffer disproportionate harm.

We also now know that allowing a virus to run rampant in any population is short-sighted, giving it a better chance of mutating and endangering us all.

"The pandemic precipitated and exacerbated an existing but largely unresolved tension between the role of intellectual property protection in incentivizing innovation and the need to facilitate access to innovative goods on equitable and affordable terms," write Majekolagbe and her co-author, Tolulope Anthony Adekola of the University of Queensland.