Chinese drone-maker DJI has denied multiple allegations it has aided Russia's military during the illegal invasion of Ukraine – an extraordinary claim, as the firm has previously come to the attention of US authorities for leaking data and aiding human rights abuses. DJI's involvement in Russia's illegal invasion first became an issue around March 11, when allegations emerged that Ukrainian users were unable to use a DJI drone detection product called DJI AeroScope that the Chinese company bills as "a comprehensive drone detection platform that rapidly identifies UAV communication links, gathering information such as flight status, paths, and other information in real time."
Russian users could run AeroScope, leading to accusations that DJI was assisting Moscow. DJI is already a pariah in the US, which has included it on the Entity List forbidden to access US tech, and banned the US military from using its products. The USA has even forbidden investment in the drone-maker on grounds it is effectively an arm of China's military and has actively assisted surveillance and repression of the Muslim Uyghur minority in China's Xinjiang province. China and Russia recently struck a renewed friendship both nations said was "without limits". While China has not actively supported Russia's illegal invasion, the prospect of a Chinese company effectively taking sides by denying Ukraine access represents a highly controversial turn of events. DJI hosed down the allegation, stating it was "working with customers to resolve some AeroScope malfunctions in Ukraine that we suspect are related to interim loss of power and/or internet services." But the issue didn't go away. Two days after that denial, Ukraine's vice prime minister and minister for digital transformation Mykhailo Fedorov made a similar allegation – claiming Russia has access to an enhanced version of AeroScope that has a range of 50km. Fedorov asked for Ukraine to be offered access to the same long-range service, and for all DJI products operating but not acquired within Ukraine to be grounded, to reduce Moscow's ability to use its drones. DJI responded with a tweet pointing out that all of its products broadcast info that can be consumed by AeroScope, and that geofencing use of its products in Ukraine was impractical. Geofencing may also have been unwelcome, as Ukraine has regularly released footage captured by drones to illustrate its self-defense efforts. Allegations that DJI was aiding Russia persisted and on March 26 a new claim emerged: that DJI was sharing GPS coordinates of drones operated by Ukraine's defense forces with Russia. DJI again denied the allegation. But the accusation name-checked retailers that sell DJI products and called on them to remove the drones from their shelves. One retailer – Germany's Media Markt – stopped sales of the drone-maker's products. DJI fought back with a press release that refutes the latest claim and labels efforts to have retailers drop its products "a coordinated campaign making false allegations against DJI via thousands of spam messages containing the same content." The Chinese company maintains it's just a humble company trying to offer users an elevated view of the world. Yet the US clearly has a different view of DJI. And now, rightly or wrongly, so do many more people around the world.
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Despite ongoing peace talks, an end to Russia’s war on Ukraine appears nowhere in sight. And as Ukrainian cities are being attacked, a quieter pressure is growing in Russia, which is increasingly isolated on the international stage. Punishing sanctions are taking effect and dissent – which authorities are determined to crush – is rising, reportedly even in the Kremlin. As the war rumbles on, observers are asking: is Vladimir Putin’s position shaking?
The Russian president enjoys a solid level of support among legislators, as evidenced by a recent vote days before the war began to recognise the separatist, self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics of Ukraine. Of 450 members of the Duma, 351 backed the move, in line with Putin’s approval. At the same time, Putin’s United Russia party has been accused of vote-rigging, keeping him in power for more than 20 years. However, some observers have suggested that with sanctions hitting the economy hard, a push to remove Putin from power may gather pace. Volodymyr Ishchenko, a Ukrainian sociologist who has studied revolutions in the post-Soviet arena, disagrees. “I don’t think that the revolution is the likeliest outcome of the sanctions,” he said, arguing that increased grievances are not enough to start a revolt. Rather, “a split among the elites, unity of the opposition, coordination and mobilisation structures” were needed. In the early 20th century, the Russian Empire went through two revolutions linked with unpopular wars – one in 1905 after the humiliating defeat in the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-05, and another in 1917 during World War I. After the Soviet collapse, other newly-independent republics went through a string of popular uprisings, with governments overthrown in Georgia, Armenia, and Moldova. There were three revolutions in Kyrgyzstan and three more in Ukraine. Putin has spent a large part of the past two decades preparing himself against a so-called “colour revolution” such as the Orange Revolution of 2004 in Ukraine, which he thought to be planned from Washington. This includes marginalising opposition figures such as the now-jailed Alexey Navalny, whose political movement has been outlawed but continues to operate and is helping organise the protests. “As for the opposition, it’s in a bad shape,” Ishchenko said. “Navalny’s movement is repressed. Besides, the opposition is split by the war. The Communists and many other parties who could ally with the opposition strongly support the war now.” Ishchenko added that the exodus of mostly anti-war Russians – estimated to be more than 200,000 people since February – has made mass revolt even more unlikely. Such a scenario would require exiles to keep effective contact with their homeland, which may prove difficult as travel is restricted and Russians without VPNs are blocked from social media. “The palace coup is more likely than a revolution now. Although, I am not sure that a possible elite conspiracy against Putin would make a move before a major defeat in Ukraine. “So, in the end, the balance of forces on Ukrainian battlefields would determine the possibility of either a coup, or revolution, or the survival and consolidation of Putin’s regime. Not the other way around.” If not a mass uprising, perhaps the oligarchs and officials in Putin’s inner circle, frustrated at the sanctions and unable to enjoy their yacht cruises off the south of France, may try to unseat the president. President Putin: ‘unfriendly countries’ must switch to Ruble Russian President Vladimir Putin has authorized the government, the central bank, and Gazprombank to take the necessary steps to switch all payments for Russian natural gas from “unfriendly states” to rubles starting March 31. The measure targets “member states of the EU and other countries that have introduced restrictions against citizens of the Russian Federation and Russian legal entities,” the mandate published on the Kremlin website reads. Russia will stop shipping natural gas to countries refusing to settle payments in rubles, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said on Monday. The decision, first announced last week, came as Russia’s oil trade has been left in disarray as importers put orders on hold due to the latest sanctions introduced against Moscow over its military operation in Ukraine.
The conflict in Ukraine and the anti-Russia sanctions that followed have raised concerns of a global economic crisis. Skyrocketing commodity prices are sending the costs of consumer goods, energy, and food ever higher, giving rise to fears of a possible recession in many countries and even hunger in some parts of the world. Russia’s decision to switch payments to its domestic currency has been made in response to the unprecedented penalties imposed by the US and its allies on the country’s financial system. The ruble plummeted to record lows after Western nations and Japan blocked Russia’s access to some of its international reserves. Since last week’s currency-switch announcement, the ruble has reached its strongest level against the US dollar and the euro in nearly a month.
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US currency lost over 1% in February alone, according to SWIFTThe share of the US dollar in global financial settlements dropped in February, according to the SWIFT interbank transaction system. The use of the greenback fell 1.07%, down to 38.85% of all global transactions conducted via SWIFT. However, on a yearly basis, the dollar's share was still up by 0.42%.
The share of settlements in euro, on the other hand, rose in February by 1.23%, to 37.79%. The euro has increased the most among the top 5 global currencies year on year. The Chinese yuan lost its position to the Japanese yen last month, dropping 0.97% and taking 2.23% in global calculations. However, the share of the yen in global settlements also decreased, and now stands at 2.71%.
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In the build-up to the war on Iraq, Americans were told that eliminating Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, was necessary for world peace. This was due to his alleged possession of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) as well as his alleged links with Al-Qaeda, among a number of other claims about Hussein’s genocidal ambitions. Britain’s then-prime minister, Tony Blair, even likened Saddam Hussein to Adolf Hitler; this was at a time when anti-Middle Eastern sentiment was high and the 9/11 attacks were ripe in the minds of the Western public, who had been informed by then-US President George W. Bush that the ‘war on terror’ was akin to a ‘crusade’. It turned out that almost none of the major allegations about Saddam Hussein were true, despite the Iraqi president’s other crimes against humanity. Yet, with no evidence, Western media fell in line and presented the invasion of Iraq as a just war, despite the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) in Geneva stating that it constituted a war of aggression and a flagrant violation of international law prior to the invasion occurring. ikely due in large part to the media coverage at the time, which had demonized everything Middle Eastern and Muslim, US public support for invading Iraq prior to ‘Operation Iraqi Liberation’ was between 52-64%, jumping up to 72% support on invasion day.
In the first two months of the ‘Shock and Awe’ invasion of Iraq, more than 7,186 Iraqi civilians were said to have been killed. Yet, at the time, Western media outlets were celebrating the US-UK victory as if none of this death and destruction had taken place, never truly asking where the alleged WMD were. A BBC reporter, Andrew Marr, said on April 9 of British PM Tony Blair that “He said they would be able to take Baghdad without a bloodbath and in the end the Iraqis would be celebrating. And on both of those points he has been proven conclusively right.” The blindly pro-US-UK government coverage went on, despite reports of US and UK war crimes. For example, on April 2, 2003, US aircraft struck a Red Crescent maternity hospital in Baghdad, resulting in a massacre according to The Guardian. Within less than two years of the invasion, it is said that as many as 100,000 innocent Iraqi civilians were killed, yet George W. Bush still managed to get re-elected in 2004. This was with the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) not granting permission for the invasion, countless reports of civilian targets being hit, and calls from anti-war voices for the prosecution of Bush and Blair for war crimes. On October 6, 2003, Time Magazine was still running cover for the Bush administration, only offering small criticisms of how President Bush miscalculated “fixing Iraq,” whilst The Economist went with a headline in May that read: ‘Now, the waging of peace’, which was endorsing the idea of nation-building in Iraq and ignoring the alleged war crimes. Eventually, all the major news outlets in the West, including the likes of CNN, BBC, Fox News, and others, bowed their heads in shame of their one-sided reporting on what had occurred in Iraq and what Noam Chomsky called their participation in ‘manufacturing consent’.
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Florida Governor Ron DeSantis issued an order on Tuesday refusing to recognize a transgender swimmer as the winner of a recent women’s swimming race and instead recognizing the runner-up. Male-born transgender swimmer Lia Thomas was declared the winner of the NCAA Division I Women’s Swimming and Diving Championship on Thursday, sparking outrage from critics who argued that the runner-up – Olympic silver medalist Emma Weyant – should be considered the real victor.
In a statement on Tuesday, DeSantis became the first governor to officially recognize Weyant as the legitimate winner of the race instead of Thomas, and accused the National Collegiate Athletic Association of working to destroy women’s sports. “A male identifying as a woman was allowed to compete in and was declared the winner of the race by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) and Emma was determined to have come in second place,” DeSantis wrote, before pointing out that Florida’s Fairness in Women’s Sports Act states men should be prohibited from taking part in women’s sports. "Women have fought for decades to have equal opportunities in athletics, and it is wrong to allow ideology to erode these opportunities as is happening in other states,” the governor said. “It is my determination that men should not be competing against women such as Emma Weyant, robbing women and girls of achievements, awards, and scholarships.” DeSantis added that the state “rejects the NCAA’s efforts to destroy women’s athletics, disapproves of the NCAA elevating ideology over biology, and takes offense at the NCAA trying to make others complicit in a lie,” before recognizing Weyant as “the rightful winner” of the race. This week, World Athletics President Sebastian Coe warned that “gender cannot trump biology” and that there is “no question” testosterone is “the key determinant in performance.” “I think that the integrity of women’s sport if we don’t get this right, and actually the future of women’s sport, is very fragile,” he said. Bridgewater Associates, the world's largest hedge fund with $150 billion in assets, is planning to invest in crypto assets for the first time, CoinDesk reported on Tuesday, citing its sources. Two insiders told the media that Ray Dalio’s company is considering backing an external vehicle that is linked to the price of Bitcoin, while another source said Bridgewater Associates has no current intention of directly investing in crypto assets. Bitcoin broke through the $42,000 mark on the news, with the price of the top digital currency surging over 4% to $42,864 as of 12:22 GMT on Tuesday.
A Bridgewater spokesperson told CoinDesk in February the firm “continues to actively research crypto but is not currently planning on investing in crypto.” The statement came despite four people saying the hedge fund giant was due to enter the space by mid-2022.
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Germany has announced a long-term contract with Qatar for the supplies of liquefied natural gas (LNG), as Europe’s biggest economy looks to reduce its energy dependence on Russia. The move comes amid broader Western sanctions aimed at isolating Russia from global trade and energy markets in response to the country’s military operation in Ukraine. According to Germany’s economy minister Robert Habeck, his country will have to rely on gas supplies from Russia at least for 2022. “We might still need Russian gas this year, but not in the future,” Habeck was quoted as saying by DPA in Doha." The minister described the deal as a “door-opener” for his country’s economy since it would reduce Germany’s reliance on Russian gas deliveries, which reportedly account for more than half of its annual supply. Habeck declined to provide details on the quantities and other terms of the contract, adding that it would be up to individual German energy firms, the heads of which accompanied him on the trip to Qatar. Qatari authorities welcomed Germany’s decision to “fast-track” the development of LNG terminals, and said in a statement that the countries’ “respective commercial entities would re-engage and progress discussions on long-term LNG supplies from Qatar to Germany”.
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