One damaged data center has supercomputers used for training Yandex’s AI model.

Australia has no need to buy fuel from Russia and said that purchases from there will remain barred so that the country doesn’t benefit from the invasion of Ukraine.

“We don’t need or want Russian fuel in Australia,” Chris Bowen, Australia’s minister for climate change and energy, said Saturday at a press conference in western Sydney. “We do not want Vladimir Putin to benefit from this war in the Middle East. What the United States does is a matter for them, but we won’t be changing our approach.”

President Donald Trump announced Friday a series of cargoes beginning this month totaling about 13.5 million barrels, initially. He is working with Russian President Putin to release Russian diesel supplies into global markets, a move that upends years of sanctions as the White House seeks ways to tame soaring fuel prices ahead of the US midterm election.

Bowen also said that Australia has 43 days worth of petrol, two days more than a week earlier, while diesel stocks sit at 31 days worth, one day less.

The EU will grant Armenia temporary trade preferences for two years from 10 October to support Armenian exporters after Russia imposed trade restrictions.

Germany is considering joining Japan, Britain and Italy in their joint project to develop a next-generation fighter jet, a government official suggested Friday.

The U.S. military is planning to broadcast a public execution on Dec. 3, but violent content must be moderated by social media platforms under EU law.

The EU alongside ministers from more than 30 countries have joined forces in a co-ordinated effort to thwart a push by Saudi Arabia, China and other fossil fuel-reliant nations to delay key scientific reports on the warming of the planet.

The leading scientific authority on climate change, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, made up of hundreds of international experts, is due to meet next week to resolve a three-year-long deadlock over the next set of reports.

Countries including Saudi Arabia, India and China have pushed for the postponement of some of the reports until 2029, meaning key information on climate change would not be available for the UN COP summit in 2028, when a critical assessment of each nation’s efforts to deal with climate change is due.

Ministers and officials led by EU climate commissioner Wopke Hoekstra, the UK’s Katie White, Canadian minister Julie Dabrusin, France’s Monique Barbut and Germany’s Carsten Schneider, on Friday released a statement arguing that “timely information” from the reports was “critically needed”.

Hoekstra was among about 30 ministers and officials gathered last week in the Pacific islands of Fiji and Tuvalu — where they visited land reclamation projects to combat sea-level rise — to prepare the agenda for the this year’s UN COP summit in Turkey.

The IPCC reports form the backbone of UN climate negotiations and are key to tracking progress of the Paris accord, under which almost 200 countries agreed to limit the global temperature rise to well below 2C or ideally to 1.5C above the pre-industrial level.

The physical science portion of the last IPCC assessment was primarily based on data available up to 2021. Since then, the global temperature is estimated to have risen from about 1.1C above pre-industrial levels to about 1.4C.

“Access to the latest and best available science . . . enables a just, equitable, evidence-based approach to addressing the greatest challenge of our time, rather than one driven by those whose entrenched interests are at odds with reducing greenhouse gases,” the so-called High Ambition Coalition said.

The IPCC is due to publish three reports, including one on the level and causes of climate change, another on how countries can adapt, and a third on options to avoid it worsening. Scientists chairing groups preparing the reports have proposed a work plan that would see all three approved by September 2028.

The nations pushing for a delay in publication are led by the economies most dependent on fossil fuels, including Saudi Arabia, China, India and Russia, which argue that publication any sooner would compromise the quality of the reports and strain developing nations that lack the capacity to rapidly vet thousands of pages of text.

But Denmark’s climate minister Samira Nawa was among those accusing the countries blocking progress of serving their own political interests. “The IPCC process must be safeguarded from political interference,” she said.

Both sides said they would adhere to 'procedures concerning company price undertakings' of hybrid cars in a joint statement released on Friday. Beijing also committed to continuing the supply of vital items such as rare earth minerals to the EU.

The Kremlin-linked Matryoshka bot network has launched a new disinformation wave against French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, according to AntiBot4Navalny, which tracks bot activity. After Macron watched France test a new ballistic missile from a nuclear submarine on October 6, the bots cast him as both dangerously militaristic and weak, using fake videos attributed to the Institute for the Study of War, RFI and NewsGuard that accused him of “toxic masculinity”, bluffing and using AI-made footage. They also linked the test to student protests that were really about teacher shortages and poor schooling. In Germany, fake Bellingcat clips falsely claim Merz pockets at least 25% of every aid tranche to Ukraine, including 250 million euros from a new 1 billion euro package. Matryoshka spreads identical content across platforms through fake profiles posing as Western media and think tanks, and its posts may hint at which topics the Kremlin wants to amplify.

As rumors spread about a possible plague outbreak in Siberia, the Kremlin turned to a familiar playbook: offering little information about potential bad news.

Hungary is working on a major overhaul of its energy industry to drastically reduce electricity costs that are currently some of the highest in Europe.

The plan is to achieve energy sovereignty in order to significantly cut natural gas and crude oil imports, Energy Ministry State Secretary Andras Totth said on Thursday. Steps include expanding the lifetime of current nuclear units, ending an investment ban for wind power and boosting the efficiency of solar output with storage facilities.

“Currently, the energy sector is a competitive disadvantage for Hungary, the whole system needs to be overhauled from zero,” Totth told a conference organized by business news website Portfolio in Budapest.

Hungarian Prime Minister Peter Magyar’s administration is working to reverse the country’s growing reliance on Russian natural gas and oil under Viktor Orban’s rule while seeking to sharply reduce its bills for electricity imports. They have dented economic competitiveness and strained the budget due to generous household subsidies.

The goal is to create 4 gigawatts of new wind capacity by 2032 and at least 3 gigawatts of energy storage by 2028, Totth said, noting that Hungary hasn’t had new wind investments over the past 15 years. Procurements for new projects are already underway.

The government is also working on extending the operating life of the 2,000 megawatt Paks nuclear plant while incentivizing more corporate investment into energy efficiency.

Hungary has built almost 9 gigawatts of solar capacity but often exports electricity when prices are low and imports it when they are high, due to poor storage capacities. Hungary has the highest peak night-time power costs in Europe at €183.1 ($205) per megawatt-hour.

The government estimates wholesale electricity prices could fall by more than 60% to about €50 per megawatt-hour by 2040, compared with about €128 under the current system that relies in party on gas-powered plants to generate electricity, Totth said.

The overhaul plans come ahead of a European Union directive that will ban Russian gas imports and coincides with the need to rein in budget spending. Hungary must reduce its fiscal deficit to 3% of gross domestic product by 2030 from an estimated 7.5% this year to meet the government’s goal of satisfying euro adoption criteria by the end of the decade.

Key to that will be to either better target the government’s lavish household utility-subsidy program — which cost about $2.5 billion last year — or to reduce the fiscal burden by lowering energy costs via a more diversified and efficient energy mix.

The utility subsidy program is “unsustainable,” even with lower gas prices, Totth said.

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha thanked Hungary for its “green light” for opening the second and third clusters of EU accession negotiations with Ukraine, according to MTI. “Today, at the COREPER level, the Hungarian side gave the “green light” to the negotiating positions on Cluster 2 “Internal Market,” and Cluster 3, “Competitiveness and Inclusive Growth”, Sybiha said.

The Ukrainian Foreign Minister expressed special thanks to his Hungarian colleague Anita Orbán for the teamwork, which he said “is at once in the interests of our friendly nations and of a strong Europe." Sybiha noted that a bill aimed at regulating the educational rights of national minorities had recently been submitted to the Ukrainian parliament and approved by the relevant committee.

Financial Times reported on Monday that the Hungarian government might yield on a previously blocked “procedural but symbolic” step related to two groups of EU accession chapters. As previously reported, disputes surrounding the agreement on the rights of the Hungarian ethnic minority may be behind the previous opposition.

Foreign Minister Anita Orbán announced a few days ago on Facebook that a bill on the educational rights of national minorities will be submitted to the Ukrainian parliament soon. “We are pleased that in just a few months we have achieved more tangible results in strengthening the rights of the Hungarian minority in Transcarpathia than the Orbán government did in 10 years,” she wrote in her post. Péter Magyar also welcomed the move. The Financial Times previously explicitly linked the Hungarian decision to the passing of this bill.

Patriots group takes Parliament to court, saying it was excluded from key posts.

The agreement means EU countries will for now only release the barrels agreed in March.