The departure of pandas will leave legions of Japanese admirers bereft, but it is also symptomatic of a dramatic deterioration in China-Japan relations

The panda house at Ueno Zoo in Tokyo is not due to open for several hours, but visitors are already milling around its entrance, pausing to pose for photographs in front of murals of the facility’s most beloved residents. A short walk away the gift shop is doing a roaring trade in themed souvenirs – from cuddly toys and stationery to T-shirts and biscuits.

The visitors are here to say goodbye to Xiao Xiao and Lei Lei. Early next week, the twin pandas, born at the zoo in 2021 but technically on loan from China, will be flown out of Tokyo’s Narita airport to China, where they will undergo quarantine and be reunited with their sister, Xiang Xiang, at a conservation and research centre in Sichuan province.

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Since September, military has carried out more than 30 strikes against boats that it alleges smuggle drugs

The US military said on Friday that it carried out a strike on a vessel in the eastern Pacific, killing two people.

“Intelligence confirmed the vessel was transiting along known narco-trafficking routes in the eastern Pacific and was engaged in narco-trafficking operations,” the military said in a statement.

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In de rij voor koffie, op de universiteit in Oxford. Ik voeg mij achter een klasgenoot en fluister hem toe dat ik de Britse queuing discipline waardeer en dat ikgraag meedoe.

NRC maakt ieder weekend een selectie uit het media-aanbod. Meer kijk-, lees-, luister- en gametips zijn te vinden in de Slim Leven-gidsen op nrc.nl en in de cultuurnieuwsbrieven van NRC.

Twee zakken Bugles voor 3,49. De tweede bak ijs gratis. Ben je dan écht voordeliger uit? Lidl stopt met stapelkortingen op voeding, meldt de supermarkt deze zaterdag.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Shares of Japanese toilet maker Toto gained the most in five years after booming memory demand excited expectations of growth in its little-known chipmaking materials operations. The stock surged as much as 11%, its steepest rise since February 2021, after Goldman Sachs analysts said Toto's electrostatic chucks used in NAND chipmaking will likely benefit from an AI infrastructure buildout that's tightening supplies of both high-end and commodity memory.

[...] Known for its heated toilet seats, the maker of washlets has for decades been part of the semiconductor and display supply chain via its advanced ceramic parts and films. Its electrostatic chucks -- which it began mass producing in 1988 -- are used to hold silicon wafers in place during chipmaking while helping to control temperature and contamination, according to the company. The company's new domain business accounted for 42% of its total operating income in the fiscal year ended March 2025, Bloomberg-compiled data show.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Microsoft provided the FBI with the recovery keys to unlock encrypted data on the hard drives of three laptops as part of a federal investigation, Forbes reported on Friday. Many modern Windows computers rely on full-disk encryption, called BitLocker, which is enabled by default. This type of technology should prevent anyone except the device owner from accessing the data if the computer is locked and powered off.

But, by default, BitLocker recovery keys are uploaded to Microsoft's cloud, allowing the tech giant -- and by extension law enforcement -- to access them and use them to decrypt drives encrypted with BitLocker, as with the case reported by Forbes. The case involved several people suspected of fraud related to the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program in Guam, a U.S. island in the Pacific. Local news outlet Pacific Daily News covered the case last year, reporting that a warrant had been served to Microsoft in relation to the suspects' hard drives.

Kandit News, another local Guam news outlet, also reported in October that the FBI requested the warrant six months after seizing the three laptops encrypted with BitLocker. [...] Microsoft told Forbes that the company sometimes provides BitLocker recovery keys to authorities, having received an average of 20 such requests per year.

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Bass Photography has added a photo to the pool: