After carrying the latest piece of the country’s Tiangong space station to orbit on July 24th, a Chinese Long March 5B rocket reentered Earth’s atmosphere on Saturday, creating a dazzling (albeit somewhat unsettling) display as it crashed down in the Indian Ocean. A Twitter user named Nazri Sulaiman captured a 27-second clip of the rocket’s first stage breaking up in the skies above Kuching, Malaysia. Sulaiman and others initially confused the spacecraft with a meteor shower until astronomers correctly identified the debris as the remains of a Chinese rocket.

On Saturday afternoon, US Space Command confirmed the Long March 5B re-entered Earth’s atmosphere at 12:45PM ET. China said most of the debris burned up in re-entry over the Sulu Sea between the Philippines and Malaysia. Unlike many modern rockets, including the SpaceX Falcon 9, the Long March 5B can’t reignite its engine to complete a controlled atmospheric re-entry. That has led to worry about where the rocket would land every time China has launched one. On a test flight in 2020, remnants of a Long March 5B fell on villages in the Ivory Coast, leading to property damage.

Following Saturday's re-entry, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson criticized China for lack of transparency. “The People’s Republic of China did not share specific trajectory information as their Long March 5B rocket fell back to Earth,” he said on Twitter. “All spacefaring nations should follow established best practices, and do their part to share this type of information in advance to allow reliable predictions of potential debris impact risk, especially for heavy-lift vehicles, like the Long March 5B, which carry a significant risk of loss of life and property.”

China plans to employ the Long March 5B at least two more times. In October, the rocket will carry the third and final part of Tiangong to space. Next year, it will do the same with the country’s Xuntian space telescope.

Canada is banning companies from producing and importing a handful of single-use plastics by the end of the year, Reuters reports. Among the items the country won’t allow the production of include plastic shopping bags, takeout containers and six-pack rings for holding cans and bottles together.

The federal government will subsequently prohibit the sale of those same items in 2023, with an export ban to follow in 2025. The one-year gap between the initial ban and the one that follows is designed to give businesses in Canada enough time to transition their stock of the listed items. Over the next ten years, the federal government estimates the new regulation will eliminate approximately 1.3 tonnes of plastic waste, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said on Twitter.

Not targeted by Canada’s new regulations are plastic fishing nets and lines, which can be far more problematic than single-use plastics like straws and shopping bags. Discarded fishing gear leads to ghost fishing, a phenomenon where those tools continue to trap and kill marine life. With more than 640,000 tons worth of fishing nets discarded every year, it’s a problem that’s only getting worse and one Canada’s plastics ban doesn’t address.

"It's a drop in the bucket," Sarah King, the head of Greenpeace Canada's oceans and plastics campaign, told the CBC. "Until the government gets serious about overall reductions of plastic production, we're not going to see the impact we need to see in the environment or in our waste streams."

The ban follows a similar one enacted by France last year and is part of a broader move by governments across the world to curb the production of single-use plastics. In March, the United Nations agreed to begin work on a first-ever global plastic pollution treaty. While the agreement won’t be complete until 2024 at the earliest, it could be among the most significant efforts to curb climate change since the Paris agreement in 2015.

Microsoft previously halted sales in Russia following the invasion of Ukraine, and now it's shrinking its presence in the country. The company told Bloomberg in a statement that it will "significantly scale down" its Russian operations in response to a bleaker economic forecast stemming from the war. Microsoft will still honor its contracts in the country, but the reduced footprint will affect over 400 employees.

The Windows creator said it was "working closely" with affected staff to provide support. There was no mention of which segments would be impacted. It was also unclear how many people the company employed in Russia before the announcement. We've asked Microsoft for comment.

This isn't the first major tech company to withdraw at least some of its business in Russia in response to the war. IBM is now winding down its operations after suspending them in March, while software giant SAP said in April that it would exit the country entirely. Other firms, such as Amazon and Apple, have limited some or all of their sales.

This isn't a huge sacrifice for Microsoft. The developer said in March that Russia accounted for less than one percent of its revenue, and its local business had been in a steady decline over the past few years. Even so, it wouldn't be surprising if the cutback prompted similar moves from tech peers either showing support for Ukraine or concerned about their Russian sales prospects.

Russia's alleged cyberattack campaign against Ukraine appears to have continued up to the very minutes before the invasion. Reutersreports the US, UK and European Union have formally blamed Russia for a large-scale cyberattack that disrupted Viasat's satellite internet service an hour ahead of the February 24th assault. The hacking efforts permanently destroyed "tens of thousands" of satellite terminals, Viasat said, while the UK noted that the attack affected central European internet users and wind farms in addition to the Ukranian military and some civilian customers.

The accusations come in response to "new UK and US intelligence" linking Russia to the cyberattack, according to the UK's Foreign Office. Russia hadn't responded to the claims as of this writing, but has historically denied cyberattacks regardless of evidence.

The hack targeting Viasat likely had its intended effect. Ukraine cybersecurity official Victor Zhora disclosed in March that the anti-satellite effort led to a "huge loss" in communications at the very start of the war. With that said, Ukraine has been better-prepared in at least some instances. It claims to have fended off an attack against an energy provider in April, for example. While this latest attribution won't dissuade Russia from conducting more attacks, it might signal that Ukraine and its allies are more aware of how to defend themselves online.

On the same day Russia celebrated its role in defeating Nazi Germany, many of the country’s online platforms were defaced in protest of the war in Ukraine. The Washington Post reported on Monday that Russians with smart TVs saw channel listings replaced with a message implicating them in the ongoing conflict. “The blood of thousands of Ukrainians and hundreds of murdered children is on your hands,” the message read, according to the outlet. “TV and authorities are lying. No to war.”

In addition to smart TVs, the apparent hack targetted some of the country’s largest internet companies, including Yandex. Hackers also went after Rutube, Russia’s alternative to YouTube. “Our video hosting has undergone a powerful cyberattack. At the moment, it is not possible to access the platform,” the service said in a statement it posted on its Telegram channel. Rutube later stated it had isolated the attack and that its content library wasn’t accessed in the incident.

Since Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine on February 24th, the country has come under consistent attack from hackers. In the early days of the conflict, Anonymous claimed responsibility for a series of DDoS attacks that left several official government websites, including one belonging to the Ministry of Defence, inaccessible. It’s believed Anonymous was also responsible for an incident that saw several Russian state TV channels play the Ukranian national anthem. At the same time, Ukraine, with help from Microsoft and other western companies, recently managed to prevent Russian military hackers from disrupting one of the country’s energy providers.

India has seized assets worth approximately $725 million from Xiaomi India after the country’s anti-money laundering agency found the subsidiary had broken local foreign exchange laws. According to Reuters, India’s Enforcement Directorate announced Saturday it recently determined Xiaomi had made illegal remittances when it attempted to pass off some transfers as royalty payments.

That money went to three foreign companies, including one under the wider Xiaomi banner. The Enforcement Directorate found Xiaomi designed the payments to benefit itself. "Such huge amounts in the name of royalties were remitted on the instructions of their Chinese parent group entities," the agency said. The Indian Enforcement Directorate began investigating the subsidiary, among a handful of other local Chinese firms, last December. It accused Xiaomi of providing “misleading information to the banks while remitting the money abroad.”

On Twitter, Xiaomi said it believes its payments were legitimate. "These royalty payments that Xiaomi India made were for the in-licensed technologies and IPs used in our Indian version products,” the company stated. “We are committed to working closely with government authorities to clarify any misunderstandings." We’ve reached out to the company for additional information and comment.

As of last year, Xiaomi was India’s leading smartphone manufacturer, with a dominant 24 percent share of the market. But like many Chinese firms in India, it has recently been forced to navigate a regulatory regime that has become less welcoming of Chinese business interests. In 2021, India temporarily banned TikTok following the country’s border dispute with China and later reportedly withheld WiFi device approvals to encourage domestic production.

Google has blocked Russia’s Duma TV YouTube channel, according to Reuters. On Saturday, the company said it had “terminated” the channel, which airs meetings of Russia’s lower house of parliament, for a violation of the platform’s terms of service.

"If we find that an account violates our Terms of Service, we take appropriate action,” a Google spokesperson told the outlet. “Our teams are closely monitoring the situation for any updates and changes." The company added it was committed to complying with sanctions imposed on Russia following its invasion of Ukraine in late February.

The suspension quickly drew the ire of Russian officials, with a spokesperson for the country's foreign ministry warning YouTube had “signed its own warrant." Russia’s Roskomnadzor telecom regulator condemned the move and ordered Google to restore Duma TV’s YouTube access immediately. "The American IT company adheres to a pronounced anti-Russian position in the information war unleashed by the West against our country," the agency said.

The response from Russian authorities suggests YouTube could become the latest Western internet service to face restrictions within the country. Shortly after the war in Ukraine began on February 24th, Russia moved to block access to Twitter. In March, it then cut off Facebook and Instagram – but not WhatsApp due to the chat app's popularity among Russian citizens. It subsequently found the Meta-owned services guilty of “extremist” activity after the company said it would temporarily allow calls of violence in Ukraine and a handful of other countries.

Cryptocurrency will soon be a legal asset class in Ukraine, thanks to a new bill signed into law by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Ukraine’s Ministry of Digital Transformation tweeted today that both foreign and Ukrainian cryptocurrency exchanges are cleared to operate in the country. Crypto companies will soon be able to open accounts in Ukrainian banks as well. The world has sent an estimated $100 million in crypto donations to Ukraine since Russia’s invasion, including the Ukrainian military, aid groups, hacktivists and everyday citizens.

“The signing of this Law by the President is another important step towards bringing the crypto sector out of the shadows and launching a legal market for virtual assets in Ukraine,” wrote Ukraine's Ministry of Digital Transformation in its announcement of the law’s signing.

Cryptocurrency has technically not been illegal in Ukraine (hence the millions in donations and the nation’s status as the leading country for crypto adoption). But digital assets in Ukraine have more or less operated in a legal gray area. Neither people nor companies in Ukraine could own or trade crypto in the market, for example. A spike in crypto crime and money laundering in Ukraine and Eastern Europe in recent years led to the nation's government cracking down on the industry.

The new law sets forth a legal framework for Ukraine’s burgeoning crypto industry to exist, as well as taps the National Bank of Ukraine and its National Commission on Securities and Stock Market to serve as regulators. It also paves the way for more laws and a tax code on crypto, which, hopefully, will further legitimize the crypto industry in Ukraine. 

With the Kremlin restricting access to online platforms like Twitter and Instagram in recent days, people in Russia are quickly losing access to information about the war in Ukraine that doesn’t come from the government. Enter Squad303, a website created by a group of Polish programmers to help people from around the world establish a dialogue with their Russian counterparts.

Spotted by The Wall Street Journal, the website randomly generates a number or email address for you to contact. It pulls from a database that contains 20 million cellphone numbers and approximately 140 million email addresses. Since the Squad303 went online on March 6th, its creators told The Journal that individuals from around the world have sent nearly 7 million text messages and 2 million emails in Russian, along with countless images and videos from the conflict.

“Our aim was to break through Putin’s digital wall of censorship and make sure that Russian people are not totally cut off from the world and the reality of what Russia is doing in Ukraine,” a spokesperson for told the outlet.

The website is named after the Royal Air Force’s famous 303 Fighter Squadron. It was one 16 units made up of Polish airmen that flew for the RAF during World War II. The 303 played a pivotal role in the Battle of Britain, shooting down the largest number of Luftwaffe aircraft during the months-long campaign. In another historical allusion, the creators of Squad303 compared their project to Radio Free Europe, which began as a US-funded effort to broadcast news, information and analysis to Soviet satellite states during the Cold War.

Using the website, The Journal was able to talk to a 25-year-old law student from Moscow. They told the outlet they opposed the war but said they didn’t plan to protest against it for fear of retribution from the government. “Am I supposed to risk my education, my future?” the student said. “I know Putin is killing people in Ukraine, but it is not my fault, I am not killing anyone, and I am not supporting any wars.”

Even engaging in conversations like the one above is risky for Russians. Videos have recently emerged allegedly showing Russian police stopping commuters to screen the messages on their phones for signs of dissent.

Authorities in Belarus have arrested and detained Mark Bernstein, one of the top editors of Russian Wikipedia, according to local publication Zerkalo. Bernstein was reportedly accused of violating the "fake news" law Russia passed in early March by editing the Wikipedia article about the invasion of Ukraine. Under the new law, anybody found guilty of what the country deems as false information about the Ukraine invasion — remember, the Kremlin calls it a "special military operation" — could be imprisoned for up to 15 years.

It was the Main Directorate for Combating Organized Crime and Corruption of Belarus (GUBOPiK) that had arrested Bernstein, The Verge reports. The publication says his social media accounts, Wikipedia handle and workplace were shared on GUBOPiK's public Telegram channel before he was taken in. A video of his arrest was also posted on the channel, along with a photo that accuses him of "distributing fake anti-Russian information." Belarus played a key role in the invasion of Ukraine by hosting Russian troops, which deployed from the country when the attacks began. 

As The Verge notes, it's unclear what exactly Bernstein is being charged with and which of his edits broke Russia's fake news law. Bernstein has over 200,000 Wikipedia edits under what's believed to be his account, which has now been blocked indefinitely. 

Russia has been scrambling to suppress sources of information that goes against its official narrative regarding the war in Ukraine, and its new law had forced local independent media outlets to shut down. Dmitri A. Muratov, the editor-in-chief of Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta, told The New York Times that "[e]verything that's not propaganda is being eliminated."