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Today, an unsealed court document revealed that, earlier this year, a federal judge held Twitter (now called X) in contempt of court. The judge imposed $350,000 in sanctions.

Sanctions were applied after the social media platform delayed compliance with a federal search warrant that required Twitter to hand over Donald Trump's Twitter data without telling the former president about the warrant for 180 days.

At first, Twitter resisted producing Trump's data and argued that the government's nondisclosure order violated the First Amendment and the Stored Communications Act. However, US circuit judge Florence Pan wrote that the court was largely unpersuaded by Twitter's arguments, mostly because the government's interest in Trump's data as part of its ongoing January 6 investigation was "unquestionably compelling."

Enlarge / Satellite controllers in Dubai monitor the launch of a Soyuz rocket from Russia on Tuesday. (credit: Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre )

For the first time since the invasion of Ukraine essentially cut off Russia’s space industry from foreign customers, a Russian rocket lifted off Tuesday and carried satellites into orbit with commercial technology from Western companies.

The payloads from companies based in the United Kingdom and Luxembourg flew on a satellite owned by the United Arab Emirates, which has maintained warmer relations with Russia than Western countries. Although the payloads are small, their presence on Tuesday’s launch is notable after the war in Ukraine, and resulting Western sanctions , effectively led to an embargo against putting US and European space technology on Russian rockets.

UK and European Union sanctions introduced after Russia’s 2022 invasion prevent exporting a wide range of space technology to Russia. Companies from the United States, Europe, Japan, South Korea, and other nations have moved their satellites off of Russian rockets, primarily switching them to launch vehicles from SpaceX, Rocket Lab, and India.

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Since the invasion of Ukraine one year ago, Russia has faced an exodus of tech companies and services. This includes the exit of Samsung and Apple, two of the world’s most popular smartphone brands. In response, the country has doubled down on its efforts to attain technological self-sufficiency, including creating a new Android smartphone.

The handset, which does not yet have a name, will be built by the National Computer Corporation (NCC), one of Russia’s largest IT companies, with an ambitious goal to sell 100,000 smartphones and tablets by the end of 2023. Alexander Kalinin, the founder of NCC, told local media on Monday that he aims to invest 10 billion rubles ($132.9 million) in the project and hopes to capture 10 percent of the consumer market by 2026.

The news comes just days after the US Department of Commerce banned exports to Russia of phones and other electronics that cost more than $300. Experts say, however, that a Russian smartphone will have a hard time beating inexpensive competitors from China, and it may encounter problems with using Google’s Android.

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Federal authorities on Wednesday arrested the founder of Bitzlato, a cryptocurrency exchange they said has been a financial haven for Russia-aligned criminals engaged in ransomware and illicit drug sales on the dark web.

Anatoly Legkodymov, a 40-year-old Russian national residing in Shenzhen, China, was arrested on Wednesday in Miami, US prosecutors said . The prosecutors alleged that on Legkodymov’s watch, Bitzlato processed roughly $4.58 billion worth of cryptocurrency transactions and that a “substantial portion of those transactions constitute the proceeds of crime, as well as funds intended for use in criminal transactions.” Bitzlato is known as a virtual asset service provider (VASP).

Ransomware and cybercrime bazaars—no questions asked

The US Justice Department took action in conjunction with the US Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), which enforces laws prohibiting domestic and international money laundering, terrorist financing, and other financial crimes. A centerpiece of the FinCEN agenda is enforcing sanctions against Russian entities, including ransomware groups affiliated with that country .

Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto / Contributor | NurPhoto )

Suspected of alleged money laundering, tax evasion, and US sanctions violations , Binance has been under investigation by the US Department of Justice since 2018 but has never been formally accused of any wrongdoing. Now, Reuters reports that some federal prosecutors feel they’ve amassed enough evidence to file criminal charges against Binance—including individual charges against Binance founder Changpeng Zhao—but other DOJ officials are standing in the way.

Reuters reviewed Binance records and spoke to nearly a dozen sources to compile a “comprehensive” progress report detailing DOJ’s inquiry so far. Sources included former Binance advisers, as well as current and former US law enforcement officials. These sources told Reuters that prosecutors spread across three DOJ offices—the Money Laundering and Asset Recovery Section (MLARS), the US Attorney's Office for the Western District of Washington in Seattle, and the National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team (NCET)—would have to agree “on any action against Binance.” But for now, they can't agree. It seems that while NCET and the Seattle office are eager to prepare charges, MLARS leadership is causing further delay because they want more time to weigh all the evidence gathered against the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange.

According to Reuters, evidence shows that Binance allegedly spent the past year processing “over $10 billion in payments for criminals and companies seeking to evade US sanctions,” while keeping “weak anti-money laundering controls” and plotting to evade regulators both in the US and globally.

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The day after Russia’s February invasion of Ukraine, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Mark Warner sent a letter to Google warning it to be on alert for “exploitation of your platform by Russia and Russian-linked entities,” and calling on the company to audit its advertising business’s compliance with economic sanctions.

But as recently as June 23, Google was sharing potentially sensitive user data with a sanctioned Russian ad tech company owned by Russia’s largest state bank, according to a new report provided to ProPublica.

Enlarge / An Aeroflot Boeing 777-300ER aircraft is preparing to land at Pulkovo Airport in St. Petersburg, in the Russian Federation in June 2022. (credit: SOPA Images | Getty )

An Airbus A320-232 with the tail number YU-APH made its first flight on December 13, 2005. Since then, the aircraft has clocked millions of miles, flying routes for Air Deccan, Kingfisher Airlines, Bingo Airways, and Syphax Airlines before being taken over by Air Serbia, the Eastern European country’s national flag carrier, in 2014.

For eight years, YU-APH flew without any issues—until it landed at 10:37 pm on May 25, 2022, at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo International Airport. It had flown in from Belgrade and was due to take off again on a late-night return within the hour. But there was a problem: The pilot had reported an issue with the plane’s engine casing that needed to be fixed. The supplier of the broken part, Charlotte, North Carolina-based Collins Aerospace, reportedly refused to fix the problem, citing sanctions against Russia resulting from its February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The plane was stuck. (Collins Aerospace did not respond to a request for comment.)

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Russian companies have been plunged into a technological crisis by Western sanctions that have created severe bottlenecks in the supply of semiconductors, electrical equipment, and the hardware needed to power the nation’s data centers.

Most of the world’s largest chip manufacturers, including Intel, Samsung, TSMC and Qualcomm, have halted business to Russia entirely after the US, UK, and Europe imposed export controls on products using chips made or designed in the US or Europe.

This has created a shortfall in the type of larger, low-end chips that go into the production of cars, household appliances, and military equipment. Supplies of more advanced semiconductors, used in cutting-edge consumer electronics and IT hardware, have also been severely curtailed.

Merde, qu'est ce qui lui arrive ? 😲

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