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cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/5320326

A string of prominent sanitary pad brands in China have become embroiled in a scandal about the quality of their products. The controversy began in early November when consumers complained that that the advertised lengths of many sanitary pads were misleading.

Then, a few days later, customers discovered that many pads had pH levels similar to textiles such as curtains and tablecloths that do not come into frequent contact with skin, potentially causing irritation or harm to users.

The anger only intensified when ABC, one of the companies at the centre of the controversy, responded dismissively to concerned consumers. ABC emphasised that it was complying with national standards, and reportedly replied to a complaint with: “If you cannot accept it, then you can choose not to buy it”.

Chinese companies have since apologised for their sub-par products, and ABC has even said that it was “deeply sorry” for its “inappropriate” response. But for many women in China, this scandal is about more than just defective products. It is part of a troubling pattern in which women’s health and dignity is blatantly disregarded.

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Archived version

“Instead of taking responsibility for peace and security in the world as a permanent member of the UN Security Council, China is opposing our core European interests with its economic and weapons aid to Russia,” German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock said in an emailed statement before departing Berlin airport on Sunday for her two-day visit to Beijing.

Vladimir “Putin’s brutal war of aggression against Ukraine is a direct threat to our peace. I will also speak in Beijing about the fact that we cannot simply ignore this in our relations with China.”

The European Union is proposing to sanction several Chinese firms that it claims helped Russian companies develop attack drones that were deployed against Ukraine. Baerbock will meet her Chinese counterpart Wang Yi in Beijing to address this issue, her spokesman said. Germany’s top diplomat will also discuss the humanitarian situation in China, as well as EU tariffs against Chinese electric vehicles that were introduced in October.

Sixteen Next Generation Internet (NGI) projects are pleased to announce the transition to Mastodon and PeerTube, two European open-source platforms, for their communication and content-sharing needs. This strategic move aligns with NGI’s commitment to fostering an Internet that embodies European values of trust, security, and inclusion.

"Utilising European-developed platforms like Mastodon and PeerTube enhances digital sovereignty, ensuring that Europe’s digital infrastructure is built on values of openness, collaboration, and respect for fundamental rights. This transition marks a significant step toward a more human-centric Internet, reflecting NGI’s vision for a trustworthy, open, and inclusive digital future," NGI writes on its website.

Germany is developing an app to help people locate the nearest bunker in the event of attack. Sweden is distributing a 32-page pamphlet titled If Crisis or War Comes. Half a million Finns have already downloaded an emergency preparedness guide.

If the prospect of a broader conflict in Europe seems remote for many, some countries at least are taking it seriously – and, in the term used by Germany’s defence minister, Boris Pistorius, taking steps to get populations kriegsfähig: war-capable.

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has dramatically raised security tensions across the Baltic region, prompting Finland and Sweden to abandon decades of nonalignment and join Nato. Military capability, however, is not all: citizens have to be braced too.

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While German Chancellor Olaf Scholz can be praised for sending air defense systems to Ukraine, he ruined his own reputation by deciding not to send Taurus missiles, said former Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba (2020-2024) in a wide-ranging interview with ETV's "Esimene stuudio."

Main points:

• Russia is trying to scare countries into not helping Ukraine;
• Nuclear deterrence strategies have been scrapped;
• Russia cannot win the war alone;
• Ukraine cannot be held hostage by countries' domestic politics;
• Russia has friends who will die for them, Ukraine does not have friends who will provide enough weapons;
• Countries publicly rejecting Macron's plan [to send Western non-combat troops to Ukraine] was an embarrassment;
• Putin does not need reasons to escalate;
• Trump will realize Putin is the problem, not Ukraine;
• History will judge German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.

The ruling Georgian Dream party said on Thursday that the country would suspend talks on European Union accession until 2028, while also refusing budgetary grants from Brussels, effectively halting its application to join the bloc for the next four years.

Thousands of protesters gathered in the capital, Tblisi, in the evening, while the country's outgoing president accused the government of declaring "war" on its own people with the move.

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Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze's government and the EU have been at odds for months for a number of reasons, but this intensified in the wake of disputed elections in late October.

The opposition in Georgia alleges fraud and interference in the vote and is boycotting the new parliament. The EU has called for independent investigations.

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The large language model of the OpenGPT-X research project is now available for download on Hugging Face: "Teuken-7B" has been trained from scratch in all 24 official languages of the European Union (EU) and contains seven billion parameters. Researchers and companies can leverage this commercially usable open source model for their own artificial intelligence (AI) applications. Funded by the German Federal Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Action (BMWK), the OpenGPT-X consortium – led by the Fraunhofer Institutes for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems IAIS and for Integrated Circuits IIS – have developed a large language model that is open source and has a distinctly European perspective.

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The path to using Teuken-7B

Interested developers from academia or industry can download Teuken-7B free of charge from Hugging Face and work with it in their own development environment. The model has already been optimized for chat through “instruction tuning”. Instruction tuning is used to adapt large language models so that the model correctly understands instructions from users, which is important when using the models in practice – for example in a chat application.

Teuken-7B is freely available in two versions: one for research-only purposes and an “Apache 2.0” licensed version that can be used by companies for both research and commercial purposes and integrated into their own AI applications. The performance of the two models is roughly comparable, but some of the datasets used for instruction tuning preclude commercial use and were therefore not used in the Apache 2.0 version.

Download options and model cards can be found at the following link: https://huggingface.co/openGPT-X

The Russian ruble plunged nearly 7% to trade at more than 110 per USD, the lowest on record excluding the short-lived selling immediately after Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine, as more sanctions against Russia dampened the outlook for inflows of foreign capital. The US sanctioned Gazprombank, the last major financial institution without penalties, to halt the transfer of payments from foreign markets to pay for Russian gas.

The ruble remained under pressure from Moscow relaxing capital controls as a weaker currency aids the Kremlin’s ability to finance its budget. Mandatory forex conversion for export revenues fell 25% from earlier in the year, significantly reducing demand for rubles.

Russian central bank intervenes to stop currency free fall

Russia's central bank said on Wednesday [27 November] it would stop foreign currency purchases in order to ease pressure on the financial markets after the rouble weakened beyond 110 to the U.S. dollar, 119 to the euro, down by one-third since early August.

The central bank said it had decided not to buy foreign currency on the domestic market from Nov. 28 until the end of the year, but to defer these purchases until 2025.

"The decision was made to reduce the volatility of financial markets," the regulator said in a statement. Since Russia was blocked from using the dollar and euro, it has made foreign exchange interventions using Chinese yuan.

Russia published new economic data on Wednesday highlighting the latest signs of overheating in an economy retooled for the purpose of fighting the war in Ukraine, which has sucked workers out of the labour force.

[Edit typo.]

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The Russian leader is revisiting the Cold War playbook by using mental manipulation to silence dissidents and its use is growing

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A new Russian bill, which will become law in 2025, will allow the police to gain access to the medical records of people suffering from certain mental illnesses and who are deemed by psychiatrists to be a threat to public order.

Dmitry Kutovoy, a member of Russia’s Psychiatric Association, said he had concerns that amending legislation could contribute to creating a system of oppression using psychiatry. He warned that the authorities might put pressure on medical workers to designate certain people as “activists, political opponents, and so on”.

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Abuse of psychiatry to persecute and intimidate state critics was a popular practice in the Soviet Union. Dissident Alexander Skobov was condemned to compulsory psychiatric treatment twice, in the 1970s and the 1980s [and is already being used by the Russian government to silence critics, e.g., against those to oppose Russia's war in Ukraine].

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One recent high-profile case was that of Viktoria Petrova, who was arrested in May 2022. She was accused of “spreading false information” about the Russian military in anti-war social media posts.

Activist Anush Panina went to support Petrova during her trial in St Petersburg.

“All of a sudden, the court announced that the hearings would be closed to the public, and sent her to a psychiatric hospital,” Panina remembered, speaking to Index from exile.

“It was outrageous and frightening.”

Panina suspects Petrova was punished for continuing to speak up while in detention and on trial. In her final statement to the court, Petrova said that Russia’s war in Ukraine was “a crime against humanity”.

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Archived link

• The Chinese industry ministry issued final – but not binding – investment guidelines for solar PV manufacturing projects after the local industry has been calling for government intervention to curb the booming solar manufacturing.

• The government now wants a minimum capital ratio of 30% for solar PV projects, up from 20% previously. This ratio typically refers to the share of total investment shareholders invest with their own assets.

The manufacturing boom and the competition for market share have prompted some Chinese manufacturers to sacrifice quality for the sake of higher profits, an industry executive said earlier this year. Companies are looking to survive in the race to the bottom in China’s solar component market and some are skimping on quality and testing.

The Chinese solar panel market remains oversupplied and this glut could last up to two more years, Longi Green Energy Technology said in July.

The company, which is one of the world’s top solar panel manufacturers, warned it would book a loss for the first half of 2024, amid a fierce price war and overcapacity in the sector.

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• IPO freeze, economic issues lead to rise in redemption requests
• Founders responsible for redemption; startups risk failure
• 14,000 startups at risk of refund requests, law firm estimates
• Startups' predicament challenges China's self-sufficiency drive
• Redemption rights offer protection, investor says

Chinese startups are increasingly struggling with demands from early-stage venture capitalists to return their investment or face lawsuits, after failing to provide an exit via a market listing within an agreed time frame, industry executives said.

Startups worldwide often agree redemption rights allowing private equity and venture capital investors to ask for their money back along with a premium if targets such as an initial public offering are not met.

In China, however, a near freezing of the IPO market this year and declining sources of capital in an economy hobbled by a property crisis and struggling for growth has given rise to reimbursement requests, threatening many startups' existence, executives said.

The situation conflicts with the government's resolve to foster innovation and achieve technological self-reliance in systemically important industries to insulate the country from the impact of geopolitics.