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Suifenhe, a small city in China’s economically depressed rust belt, is a microcosm of an evolving Chinese-Russian trading relationship

Suited and booted in a navy twinset tracksuit and colourful high-top trainers, Wang Runguo is hustling. Darting across the gleaming floors of his cavernous car showroom, the 45-year-old from one of China’s poorest provinces is closing on yet another deal. It is all in a day’s work for the man whose salary has more than doubled in the past year thanks to a well-timed pivot: from corn to cars; from China to Russia.

This time last year Wang was working for an agricultural company that grew corn and soya beans for the domestic market. Now he is a manager at Xingyun International Automobile Export, a company founded in August 2025 to cater to the booming new car export industry in Suifenhe, a small city in China’s north-east that borders Russia. “Recently, China and Russia have been moving closer together,” Wang says. “As we move closer, more and more cars are going there.”

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President says he has instructed US military to be ready for ‘a full, large scale assault of Iran, on a moment’s notice’ – key US politics stories from Monday 18 May

Donald Trump says he has called off a planned attack on Iran at the behest of Gulf states so talks could continue.

In a post to his Truth Social platform, the US president claimed that the leaders of Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia had approached Washington because of the chance of reaching a deal that would be “very acceptable” to the US, and preclude Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.

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President’s remarks about Taiwan arms deals being a ‘negotiating chip’ with Beijing have been seized on by Chinese state media

It has been an unsettling few days for Taiwan’s government. When Donald Trump met Xi Jinping in Beijing on Thursday, many feared the unpredictable US leader could upend Washington’s longstanding support for Taipei.

But beyond a starkly worded statement from Xi stressing China’s claims over Taiwan, which it claims as part of its territory despite never having ruled it, initial signs appeared good for Taipei.

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A researcher known as Chaotic Eclipse has released a proof-of-concept exploit for a new Windows zero-day dubbed MiniPlasma, which BleepingComputer confirmed can grant SYSTEM privileges on fully patched Windows 11 systems. The researcher claims the bug is effectively a still-exploitable version of a 2020 flaw Microsoft said it had fixed. From the report: At the time, the flaw was assigned the CVE-2020-17103 identifier and reportedly fixed in December 2020. "After investigating, it turns out the exact same issue that was reported to Microsoft by Google project zero is actually still present, unpatched," explains Chaotic Eclipse. "I'm unsure if Microsoft just never patched the issue or the patch was silently rolled back at some point for unknown reasons. The original PoC by Google worked without any changes."

BleepingComputer tested the exploit on a fully patched Windows 11 Pro system running the latest May 2026 Patch Tuesday updates. In our test, we used a standard user account, and after running the exploit, it opened a command prompt with SYSTEM privileges, as shown in the image [here]. Will Dormann, principal vulnerability analyst at Tharros, also confirmed the exploit works in his tests on the latest public version of Windows 11. However, he said that the flaw does not work in the latest Windows 11 Insider Preview Canary build.

The exploit appears to abuse how the Windows Cloud Filter driver handles registry key creation through an undocumented CfAbortHydration API. Forshaw's original report said that the flaw could allow arbitrary registry keys to be created in the .DEFAULT user hive without proper access checks, potentially enabling privilege escalation. While Microsoft reports having fixed the bug as part of its December 2020 Microsoft Patch Tuesday, Chaotic Eclipse now claims the vulnerability can still be exploited.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Mt. Fuji looked small through the plane window at dusk, but its presence felt anything but.

SQLAlchemy is powerful, but common backend queries can become repetitive. I built sqlalchemy-query-manager as a small layer that keeps SQLAlchemy underneath while adding Django-style query ergonomics: Q objects, __ lookups, relationship filters, eager loading, CRUD helpers, aggregates, and SQL preview.

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Het kabinet organiseert een ‘vliegend team’ om gemeenten te ondersteunen bij de opvang van vluchtelingen.