The Friday deadline was mandated by a bill that got near-unanimous support in the US Congress.

Russia's President Vladimir Putin has said there will be no more wars after Ukraine if Russia is treated with respect - and claims that Moscow is planning to attack European countries are "nonsense".

Ukraine war latest: EU agrees €90bn loan for Ukraine as Putin tells BBC the West is 'making Russia the enemy' - BBC News

For several years now, in discussing plans for its human spaceflight program beyond the International Space Station, Russian officials would proudly bring up the Russian Orbital Station, or ROS.

The first elements of ROS were to launch in 2027 so it would be ready for human habitation in 2028. Upon completion in the mid-2030s, the station would encompass seven shiny new modules, potentially including a private habitat for space tourists. It would be so sophisticated that the station could fly autonomously for months if needed.

Importantly, the Russian station was also to fly in a polar orbit at about 400 km. This would allow the station to fly over the entirety of Russia, observing the whole country. It would be important for national pride because cosmonauts would not need to launch from Kazakhstan anymore. Rather, rockets launching from the country’s new spaceport in eastern Russia, the Vostochny Cosmodrome, would easily reach the ROS in its polar orbit.

That was the plan, at least until this week, when a Russian official dropped a bombshell.

Recycling the ISS

Oleg Orlov, director of the Institute of Biomedical Problems of the Russian Academy of Sciences, said ROS will no longer be composed of entirely new modules. Rather, its core will be the Russian segment of the International Space Station.

“The Scientific and Technical Council of Roscosmos supported this proposal and approved the deployment of a Russian orbital station as part of the Russian segment of the ISS,” Orlov reportedly said.

US President Donald Trump signed the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) into law Thursday, completing the passage of the largest military spending bill in US history—$901 billion, or over $1 trillion when combined with supplemental funding passed earlier this year.

The Senate voted 77-20 on Wednesday to pass the bill. The Democratic leadership, including Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York and Minority Whip Dick Durbin of Illinois, voted for the bill. They were joined by Senators Mark Kelly of Arizona and Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, both of whom released a video last month calling on military personnel to disobey illegal orders—as Trump was sending the US military on a murder spree off the coast of Latin America.

Citing Trump’s statements about using troops to shoot protesters in America, Slotkin invoked the legacy of the Nuremberg tribunals, which convicted Nazi leaders for war crimes and crimes against peace. But when it came time to vote, this invocation was revealed to be completely meaningless. Slotkin voted to hand Trump the resources to pursue his military adventure against Venezuela...

Archived

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According to the Brazilian Steel Institute, the Chinese offensive relies on... strategies deemed illegal to support the Chinese government to its steel chain.

Figures from Platts, a global price monitoring platform, show that the price per ton of Chinese hot-rolled coils fell from $560 in January 2024 to $454 in November 2025.

The decline coincides with a shrinking profit margin for Chinese steel mills, which, according to the institute, is a sign of dumping: when companies start selling steel abroad below cost or the price practiced in the domestic market to weaken competitors.

In the view of Brazilian industrialists, the steel arriving from China today would be sold at prices incompatible with fair competition.

[...]

According to the Brazilian Steel Institute, steel companies operating in the country [Brazil] had shut down four blast furnaces, one steel mill, and five minimills (semi-integrated plants that melt scrap metal in electric furnaces) by November.

[...]

According to the CEO of the Brazilian Steel Institute, Marco Polo de Mello Lopes, the strategy now is to convince the Donald Trump administration to remove this surcharge on Brazilian steel and revive the quota system created in 2018.

Under that model, companies in the country could send up to 3,5 million tons of semi-finished steel per year to the United States without paying tariffs.

The executive recalls that Trump had already adopted a similar move in 2018 and believes that, if the ongoing negotiation is successful, Brazil would return to operating with a duty-free quota, while the 50% tariff would remain applied to other sales outside that limit.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced a $35 billion gas deal with Egypt on Wednesday evening as the US pushes for a summit between the leaders of the two countries.

In a televised statement, Netanyahu hailed the agreement as “the largest gas deal in Israel’s history.” He said the deal was valued at 112 billion shekels (about $34.6 billion).

The deal involves American energy company Chevron and will supply gas to Egypt.

US President Donald Trump has been trying to arrange a summit between Netanyahu and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi as he pursues regional peace deals and an expansion of the Abraham Accords.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/47575737

[...]

The turning point [for China's property market] came during the country's first wave of COVID-19 lockdowns when President Xi Jinping's government imposed sweeping new rules on how much debt property developers could take on. The result of the "three red lines" reforms was brutal. Real estate giants like Evergrande, Country Garden and dozens of smaller firms defaulted, with more than 70 developers either going bust or needing state-backed bailouts to survive.

More than five years later, the subsequent bust shows no sign of easing. According to Barclays, a British bank, more than $18 trillion (€15.38 trillion) in household wealth has evaporated as home values collapse. Meanwhile, construction activity — once a key driver of gross domestic product (GDP) — has slumped so badly that it now drags overall growth below Beijing’s targets.

[...]

In a sign of just how sensitive the downturn has become, Chinese officials last month told private data providers to stop publishing home sales figures, cutting off one of the few independent windows into the current woes in the real estate market.

The move followed a 42% year-on-year drop in new home sales by the top 100 builders in October, the largest monthly drop in 18 months, according to China Real Estate Information.

Anne Stevenson-Yang, founder and research director of the Taipei-based J Capital Research, thinks this move helps mask the true price decline.

"You likely have a market-wide drop of 50%, which could go down to 85% before it balances out," she told DW.

[...]

Across China, the crash has left half‑finished projects, ghost cities and millions of households trapped in negative equity, sparking public anger and sporadic protests as buyers hope that Beijing will step in with stimulus measures to shore up demand.

"There's still a lot of excess supply — up to 3-5 years of unsold apartments and housing, mostly in the smaller cities," George Magnus, research associate at the UK's University of Oxford China Center, told DW. "It'll take a long time to clear, especially as the cohort of first-time buyers — 20-35 year olds — is now declining."

Having climbed to 1.41 billion, China’s population is now slipping backwards, marking the end of decades of growth.

[...]

China's major economic growth driver evaporates

Real estate once accounted for up to a quarter of China's GDP, helping growth remain in double digits for more than a decade during the 2000s and early 2010s. The slowdown has since dragged economic growth to around 5% last year — still impressive, but down sharply from the boom years due to the knock-on effects on the rest of the country.

“[Chinese] steel and cement prices and output are dropping, employment and [business] investment are weak — all of them collateral damage [from the property crash]," Stevenson-Yang told DW.

China was the world’s largest consumer of iron ore, copper, steel, and cement, much of it tied to construction. Exporters Australia, Brazil and Chile are among the global players suffering from the falloff in Chinese demand. As homeowners feel the pinch, the slowdown weakens household consumption, reducing imports of foreign luxury brands and autos.

[...]

Stevenson-Yang believes the Chinese property sector is on course for another "10 years of negative or flat growth," while analysts at S&P Global Ratings believe the downturn could persist well into the late 2020s. Some forecasts hint at recovery next year or in 2027.

That’s a hard pill for ordinary Chinese families to swallow. Many of them poured their savings into apartments that have lost value, leaving them stuck with mortgages they can’t escape and homes they can’t sell. Worse still, property values may remain far below the dizzying highs of 2020 for the foreseeable future.

[...]

Reportedly critical drone strike is first in Mediterranean since full-scale invasion began as maritime conflict grows

Ukraine says it has attacked a Russian “shadow fleet” tanker with aerial drones 1,250 miles (2,000km) from its borders, in the first such strike in the Mediterranean Sea since Moscow’s full-scale invasion nearly four years ago.

Friday’s strike off the coast of Libya, which reportedly caused critical damage, took place on the day of Vladimir Putin’s annual end of year press conference.

It came amid an escalating maritime conflict over the shadow fleet, a term used to describe vessels used by Russia, Iran and Venezuela to evade sanctions with deceptive practices.

Alliance Defending Freedom has ramped up its global spending on litigation and other campaigns to push its ultra conservative Christian values

Alliance Defending Freedom, the conservative legal advocacy group behind the overturning of Roe v Wade, has ramped up its global spending on litigation and other campaigns, in what appears to be an attempt to export what critics call its hard-right Christian theocratic values beyond US borders.

ADF and ADF International, a separate legal entity, spent a combined $10.9m on international grants and programs for the year ending June 2024, according to its most up to date public tax records, and appears to have increased by 70% year-on-year spending on Europe-related issues.

Paul Coleman, executive director of ADF International, who is based in Vienna, Austria, described the mission of his group as “not only defending the persecuted, but also countering censorship, upholding biological reality, and securing rights for parents”.

December 12, 2025

[from weekly newsletter about Cuba (with YouTube video links) from the Belly Of The Beast news/video collective. Their videos can also be found at: https://peertube.wtf/c/cuba_botb_videos/videos]

Archivo de Boletines en español - https://www.bellyofthebeastcuba.com/archivo-de-boletines/

Also:

• Cuban Interior Ministry: U.S. is the island's "main supplier" of drugs
• Former Cuban economy minister sentenced to life in prison for espionage
• Journalist Liz Oliva Fernández speaks at Amefrica in Cinema
• We're now streaming on Means TV

A German man has been found guilty of drugging and raping his unconscious wife for years and sharing video of his crimes on the internet, in a case that has drawn comparisons to the trial of Dominique Pelicot in France.

Fernando P., a 61-year-old school janitor, was found guilty of abusing his wife inside the couple’s home, filming it and then sharing it online without the victim’s knowledge.

He was sentenced Friday to 8 years and 6 months in prison following a trial at a court in Aachen, western Germany. An appeal may be filed against the judgment within one week, the court said.

Why should we bend to the will of Nazi's? I don't want to help them exploit us !

cross-posted from : https://lemmy.zip/post/55299032

https://archive.is/QHK8m

The trade talks showed just how much leverage China has over the US. This is largely thanks to its near-total domination of the supply chain for rare earth minerals

The US also relies on China for ingredients in nearly 700 medicines—a dependency so sensitive that China’s negotiators didn’t even bring it up in the recent trade talks.

And the decision by China in October to cut off exports of computer chips made by Chinese-owned Nexperia, leading to production slowdowns for carmakers including Japan’s Honda and Nissan, shows just how much disruption it can cause when it wants to.

• In clean energy, China is running laps around the rest of the world, building twice as much solar power capacity as the US and Europe combined.
• The country dominates the global EV market, producing 70% of the world’s electric cars. It’s the leader in battery technology too: At this year’s Shanghai auto show, carmaker BYD Co. demonstrated a battery that charges most of the way in five minutes.
• In 2024, China installed more factory robots than the rest of the world combined.
• Shenzhen-based DJI sells 70% of commercial drones for consumers and businesses, and the US lags China in military drone technology as well.

recent report by the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission found that “China leads the world in quantum communications and is making rapid progress in quantum computing and sensing.” While China is behind on cutting-edge AI, it’s receiving more AI-related patents than any other country and is pushing the limits of what’s possible without the most advanced chips

cross-posted from : https://lemmy.zip/post/55297366

https://archive.is/LnTjR

The EU committed on December 3rd to end all imports of Russian natural gas by September 2027, and the quantities it buys have already been slashed. But it continues to buy Russian fertiliser that is made from natural gas—more of it, for some types, than before the war.

While the yakuza used to pride themselves on not preying on the poor and weak, the tokuryu have no such scruples.

They make much of their millions from conning Japan’s ageing population

Tokyo police – who called them their “biggest public order priority” – set up a 100-officer taskforce in October to “destroy” the groups.

cross-posted from : https://lemmy.zip/post/55295297

SINGAPORE: Scammers, as well as recruiters and members of scam syndicates, will face mandatory caning of at least six strokes under amendments to Singapore's criminal law set to take effect on Dec 30.

When Anthony Joshua made his professional debut against Emmanuel Leo in 2013, fresh from Olympic gold in London, the boxing world treated it like the start of a coronation.

At roughly the same time, a 16-year-old prankster from Ohio named Jake Paul was posting six-second Vine videos - chatting to pineapples in supermarkets and climbing into strangers' shopping trolleys for a laugh.

More than a decade later, through wildly different routes, the pair have arrived at the same place.

This Friday, in Miami, they will share a ring in a professional heavyweight contest that still feels faintly unreal.