Eutelsat in talks to increase satellite terminals in Ukraine amid Starlink service concern

Copyright Canva

By Anna Desmarais

Published on 07/03/2025 - 

European authorities are working with Eutelsat, a French satellite operator, to deploy more satellites in Ukraine.

A French satellite operator is working with European authorities to increase their satellite service in Ukraine, a spokesperson confirmed to Euronews Next. 

“We are actively collaborating with European institutions and business partners to enable the swift deployment of additional user terminals for critical missions,” a spokesperson for Eutelsat told Euronews Next. 

The news comes as European leaders met in Brussels this week and pledged to renew the bloc’s collective defence and support Ukrainian forces. 

Starlink, a satellite company run by Elon Musk, has been a major player amid the war in Ukraine. 

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• France to continue sharing military intelligence with Ukraine after US freeze

According to the Kyiv Independent, Ukraine said that approximately 42,000 Starlink internet terminals were supporting the country’s military operations, hospitals, businesses, and aid organisations. 

Elon Musk, SpaceX’s CEO, has denied media reports that he threatened to shut off Starlink satellites if Ukraine did not sign a $500 billion (€477.2 billion) critical minerals deal with the United States. 

‘A couple of months’ needed for 40,000 terminals

Eutelsat has more than 630 satellites moving in low-Earth orbit around the world, the company said, that offer the “same capacities” as Starlink for coverage and response time. 

Eutelsat’s low-Earth satellites are already deployed in Ukraine to support “government and institutional communications,” the company said.

Related

• Intense training draws hundreds to Ukraine's Third Assault Brigade

Eutelsat CEO Eva Berneke told Bloomberg they would need a couple of months to supply 40,000 military-grade and standard terminals to Ukraine. 

The company is also considering using its 35 geostationary satellites to provide “additional capacity” over Ukraine and “stronger resilience” for the country’s connectivity

After Poland spat, Musk vows Ukraine can keep Starlink


By AFP
March 9, 2025


A Ukrainian serviceman stands next to the antenna of a Starlink satellite-based broadband system in Bakhmut in February 2023 - Copyright AFP YASUYOSHI CHIBA

Billionaire industrialist and senior White House advisor Elon Musk vowed Sunday to maintain Ukraine’s access to his Starlink satellite network, after a fierce online clash with Poland’s outspoken foreign minister.

The United States has suspended military aid and intelligence sharing with Ukraine after a disastrous February 28 meeting between presidents Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky in the White House.

This has led to fears that Musk, a close Trump ally, might cut off Ukrainian access to his private Starlink communications system, which is used extensively by Kyiv’s frontline troops for battlefield communication.

On Sunday, during exchanges on his own X social media platform, Musk promised that this would not be the case, after an online clash with the Polish foreign minister, Radoslaw Sikorski, that drew in US Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

“To be extremely clear, no matter how much I disagree with the Ukraine policy, Starlink will never turn off its terminals,” Musk wrote.

“I am simply stating that, without Starlink, the Ukrainian lines would collapse, as the Russians can jam all other communications! We would never do such a thing or use it as a bargaining chip.”

Trump’s administration is pressuring Zelensky to sign over much of Ukraine’s mineral wealth to the United States and to agree to a ceasefire with Russia without clear security guarantees as a prelude to a peace deal.

Musk supports this position and warned on Sunday that Ukraine’s “entire front line would collapse” if he turned off Starlink for Kyiv’s forces, which have been battling a full-scale Russian invasion since February 2022.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio (R) greets Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski at the State Department on February 21, 2025, weeks before a US-Polish spat erupted over Elon Musk’s Starlink company – Copyright ${image.metadata.node.credit} 

This prompted Sikorski, in a post on X, to warn: “Starlinks for Ukraine are paid for by the Polish Digitization Ministry at the cost of about $50 million per year.

“The ethics of threatening the victim of aggression apart, if SpaceX proves to be an unreliable provider we will be forced to look for other suppliers.”

Musk responded with scorn, telling the Polish minister: “Be quiet, small man. You pay a tiny fraction of the cost. And there is no substitute for Starlink.”

Washington’s top diplomat, US Secretary of State Rubio, was also drawn in to the exchange, accusing Sikorski of “just making things up.”

“No one has made any threats about cutting Ukraine off from Starlink. And say ‘thank you’ because without Starlink Ukraine would have lost this war long ago and Russians would be on the border with Poland right now,” he said.

Musk's SpaceX reeling as 'upgraded design' keeps exploding: report

Tom Boggioni
March 8, 2025 

RAW STORY

A view shows debris streaking through the sky, after SpaceX's Starship spacecraft tumbled and exploded in space, in Big Sampson Kay, Bahamas, March 6, 2025, in this screen grab obtained from social media video. \@_ericloosen_/via REUTERS THIS IMAGE HAS BEEN SUPPLIED BY A THIRD PARTY.

Thursday explosion by another one of Elon Musk's Starship rockets in the space of two months is raising eyebrows and doubts about his SpaceX venture which appears to be moving in reverse when it should be reaching for the stars.

The explosion, or as SpaceX called it: "a rapid unscheduled disassembly," lit up the sky off Florida days ago, showering "space debris" over the water while also contributing to doubts about a scheduled trip to land astronauts on the moon as soon in 2027.

According to a report from the New York Times, the explosions "are a step backward in SpaceX’s development process, as the flights could not even repeat the successes of earlier test flights, and they perhaps show that the company’s engineers are not as infallible as fans of the company sometimes like to think."r

According to Daniel Dumbacher, a former NASA official who is now a professor of engineering practice at Purdue University, "There’s this persona that has built up around SpaceX, but you’re starting to see that they’re human, too."

As the Times' Kenneth Chang is reporting, there is a growing concern since the two latest launches "... which both failed less than 10 minutes after liftoff, were an upgraded design."

"Discouragingly, they were less successful than an older version of Starship that flew last year. Three previous test flights successfully coasted halfway around the world, survived re-entry through the atmosphere over the Indian Ocean, and then simulated landings in the waters off the west coast of Australia," Chang reported before noting, "In addition, the failures of the seventh and eighth flights occurred at about the same part of the flight, and both appeared to originate near the engines of the second-stage spacecraft. That suggests that SpaceX did not successfully diagnose and solve the problem. It could point to a significant design flaw in the upgraded Starship."

You can read more here.

 

Children poisoned by the synthetic opioid, fentanyl, has risen in the U.S. – eight years of national data shows

Life-threatening effects logged in more than 44% of incidents

Taylor & Francis Group

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Incidents of children in the U.S. being poisoned by the synthetic opioid fentanyl “increased and became more severe”, a new study reveals.

Launched today as Congress continues to review the HALT Fentanyl Act, the research follows an analysis of nonfatal fentanyl pediatric (aged 0-19) exposures reported to poison centers in 49 U.S. states from 2015 through to 2023.

In total, some 3,009 cases were detailed across the eight-year period.

• In 2023 alone, 44.6% were life-threatening incidents in which there was extreme harm that could have resulted in death if not treated – an increase of these severe cases from 15.9% in 2015. 
• The majority (81.7%) of patients aged 0–12 were exposed unintentionally.
• Most patients (65.7%) aged 13–19 were noted as having used fentanyl intentionally for nonmedical purposes.
• Most incidents (1,771) were in youth aged 13–19 (58.9%), compared with 1,238 cases (41.1%) involving children aged 0-12. Males accounted for 58.5% (1,754) of all cases and females 41.5% (1,244).

The peer-reviewed findings are published in The American Journal of Drug And Alcohol Abuse, as the U.S. continues to battle a severe opioid crisis “driven by fentanyl use”.  Fentanyl with co-use of psychostimulants has come to define the “fourth wave” of the opioid crisis.

Counterfeit pills containing fentanyl “flood the illicit market”. And in recent years, seven out of every ten counterfeit pills seized contained a potentially deadly amount of fentanyl.

Since 2021, there have been over 70,000 synthetic opioid-related deaths per year; although the latest, provisional data shows such deaths are decreasing.

It is understood that friends are a major source of prescription pills among adolescents and social media, too, is commonly used to purchase drugs from strangers. Various drugs not directly purchased from a pharmacy can be adulterated with fentanyl.

Driven by a “lack of focus on nonfatal overdose and how pediatric populations are being affected,” the expert team found exposures increased over the eight years. Among those aged 0-12 this was by 924.3%. For 13- to 19-year-olds there was a 1,506% increase.

Lead author Dr. Joseph Palamar, from the Department of Population Health, at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, in New York, says their results demonstrate the need for “increased prevention, treatment, and harm reduction”.

“We can’t forget that kids are also at risk during this opioid crisis,” explains Dr. Palamar, who is also Deputy Director of the National Drug Early Warning Network (NDEWS).

“Parents need to be aware that teens can purchase pills via apps that are sold as Adderall or Xanax but actually contain fentanyl.

“Parents and others, too, need to be careful to not leave fentanyl, whether licit or illicit, out in the open around unsupervised children.

“Even second-hand exposure to paraphernalia or baggies can contain small amounts of fentanyl can be lethal to youngsters.

“Children may touch or ingest such items out of curiosity, through a lack of a sense of danger, or even imitation of a parent who uses. Even used fentanyl patches can lead to accidental or intentional poisonings among pediatric populations.”

Co-author Dr. Joshua Black, Senior Scientist at Rocky Mountain Poison & Drug Safety, a Division of Denver Health and Hospital Authority, adds: “Parents and peers need to be able to promptly detect signs and symptoms of opioid overdose—including looking pale, slow or no breathing, coma, sometimes constricted pupils—and know when to seek help.

“We encourage people to contact a poison center if they suspect a poisoning (1-800-222-1222) or call 911 if someone collapses, has a seizure, has trouble breathing, or can’t be awakened following drug use.

“Having naloxone available can reverse the potential overdose from opioids. Bystanders are present in about 40% of illicit opioid-related deaths so it is essential for bystanders to be able to respond.”

Fellow co-author Dr. Linda Cottler, Director of NDEWS, from the Department of Epidemiology, College of Public Health and Health Professions, College of Medicine, University of Florida, further recommends for parents and health care providers to “be aware of the importance of receiving training about these drugs and what they do and what they look like, and how to caution teens about the dangers of friends and siblings sharing diverted drugs”.

Limitations of the research, includes that the data source used only captures a portion of fentanyl-related poisonings.

“There is a lack of systematic collection of data on nonfatal exposures and a major limitation is that most people who are exposed or overdose do not contact poison centers,” the authors report.

Research reported in this press release was supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health under award numbers U01DA051126 and R01DA057289. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.

 

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Journal

The American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse

DOI

10.1080/00952990.2025.2457481 

Method of Research

Observational study

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

Nonfatal pediatric fentanyl exposures reported to US poison centers, 2015–2023

Article Publication Date

8-Mar-2025

 

Post-LLM era: New horizons for AI with knowledge, collaboration, and co-evolution

Higher Education Press

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image: 

Post-LLM roadmap.

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Credit: Fei Wu et al.

A recent paper published in the journal Engineering delves into the future of artificial intelligence (AI) beyond large language models (LLMs). LLMs have made remarkable progress in multimodal tasks, yet they face limitations such as outdated information, hallucinations, inefficiency, and a lack of interpretability. To address these issues, researchers explore three key directions: knowledge empowerment, model collaboration, and model co-evolution.

Knowledge empowerment aims to integrate external knowledge into LLMs. This can be achieved through various methods, including integrating knowledge into training objectives, instruction tuning, retrieval-augmented inference, and knowledge prompting. For example, some studies design knowledge-aware loss functions during pre-training, while others use retrieval-augmented generation to dynamically fetch relevant knowledge during inference. These techniques enhance LLMs’ factual accuracy, reasoning capabilities, and interpretability.

Model collaboration focuses on leveraging the complementary strengths of different models. It includes strategies like model merging and collaboration based on different functional models. Model merging, such as model ensembling and model fusion (e.g., the mixture of experts), combines multiple models to improve performance. In functional model collaboration, LLMs can act as task managers, coordinating specialized small models. For instance, in image-generation tasks, LLMs can guide specialized models to better meet the requirements of prompts.

Model co-evolution enables multiple models to evolve together. Under different types of heterogeneity-model, task, and data-various techniques have been proposed. For model heterogeneity, methods like parameter sharing, dual knowledge distillation, and hypernetwork-based parameter projection are used. In the face of task heterogeneity, dual learning, adversarial learning, and model merging play important roles. When dealing with data heterogeneity, federated learning and out-of-distribution knowledge distillation are key techniques. These methods enhance models’ adaptability and ability to handle diverse tasks.

The post-LLM advancements have far-reaching impacts. In science, they help in hypothesis development by incorporating domain-specific knowledge. For example, in meteorology, AI models integrated with domain knowledge can improve renewable energy forecasting. In engineering, they assist in problem formulation and solving. In society, they can be applied in areas like healthcare and traffic management.

Looking ahead, the paper also points out several future research directions, including embodied AI, brain-like AI, non-transformer foundation models, and LLM-involved model generation. These areas hold great potential for further advancing AI capabilities. As AI continues to evolve, the integration of knowledge, collaboration, and co-evolution will be crucial in building more robust, efficient, and intelligent AI systems.

The paper “Knowledge-Empowered, Collaborative, and Co-Evolving AI Models: The Post-LLM Roadmap,” authored by Fei Wu, Tao Shen, Thomas Bäck, Jingyuan Chen, Gang Huang, Yaochu Jin, Kun Kuang, Mengze Li, Cewu Lu, Jiaxu Miao, Yongwei Wang, Ying Wei, Fan Wu, Junchi Yan, Hongxia Yang, Yi Yang, Shengyu Zhang, Zhou Zhao, Yueting Zhuang, Yunhe Pan. Full text of the open access paper: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eng.2024.12.008. For more information about the Engineering, follow us on X (https://twitter.com/EngineeringJrnl) & like us on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/EngineeringJrnl).

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Journal

Engineering

DOI

10.1016/j.eng.2024.12.008 

Article Title

Knowledge-Empowered, Collaborative, and Co-Evolving AI Models: The Post-LLM Roadmap

UK

Unions call on government to strengthen protection for creative industry workers against AI exploitation

Gabrielle Pickard-Whitehead 

Yesterday
LEFT FOOT FORWARD


Writers’ work is already being stolen on an industrial scale to train AI systems, without permission or payment, and is thereby infringing 300-year-old copyright protections.

Unions are demanding that the government takes stronger action to protect creative industry workers from the rapid advancements in artificial intelligence (AI). The Trade Union Congress (TUC) has said there is urgent need for “proper guardrails” to protect workers across various sectors, from journalists and writers to artists and academics.

Government proposals, which are currently under consultation, would make creative work accessible to AI companies unless workers actively opt out. They have been lauded by the tech industry but have sparked a backlash from many artists.

Over 1,000 musicians, including Damon Albarn, Elton John, and Annie Lennox, have protested by releasing a silent album in opposition to the government’s plans.

Ministers have reportedly acknowledged the need to protect the UK’s creative industries from the ease with which AI companies could use copyright-protected work.

But the TUC is urging for greater and urgent action to protect creative workers. The union organisation is calling for transparency of AI training data to ensure workers know whether their data or images are being used. It is also urging for an opt-in system to protect creative work from commercial data mining, unless workers give their consent. Additionally, the union wants measures to be put in place to ensure creative workers are paid fairly when their creative work is used to train AI models.

Without adequate regulation, “rapacious tech bosses” would be able to exploit creative workers and cash in on their work, the TUC warned.

Paul Newark, head of the TUC, said that AI offers huge transformative potential and, if regulated properly, workers could benefit from the productivity gains created by this technology. But he added:

“UK law is simply failing to keep pace with the rapid speed of technological change and proliferation of AI at work.

“Writers, actors, performers, teachers, journalists and other creatives must have a say over how their work and image is used, and they must be paid fairly.

“A new taskforce should be established, bringing together creative workers, unions, technologists and government to manage the risks and maximise the opportunities of AI.

“The government should change direction on current proposals and go further to protect creative workers and safeguard the future of the creative industries. The sector is a jewel in the crown of our economy and vital for growth.

“The clock is ticking. Without proper guardrails put in place, rapacious tech bosses will continue to cash in on creatives’ work without their consent.”

Paul Fleming, general secretary of Equity, the performing arts and entertainment trade union, is urging for “industrial-scale theft” of performers’ and artists’ work by big tech to stop.

“Equity’s groundbreaking TV and film negotiations show that empowering workers can help deal with the challenges of AI.

“The government’s proposals undermine an entire industry – bosses and workers alike – and threaten the efficacy of bargained solutions through unquestioning support of big tech.

Emma Reeves, chair of the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain, said that writers’ work is already being stolen on an industrial scale to train AI systems, without permission or payment, and is thereby infringing 300-year-old copyright protections.

“Without stronger protections for writers, big tech could be allowed to take what they like, when they like, without any requirement to share the profits with writers or other creators.

“This will not only harm creators themselves, but will likely deal a serious blow to the emerging AI market and harm the creative industries too. Alternatively, the voluntary licensing of work for AI training offers a potential for growth.”

 

The End Of US Soft Power? – OpEd

 March 10, 2025  

By John Feffer

During the Cold War, the United States waged a war of ideas with the Soviet Union to capture the hearts and minds of the rest of the world. It was in many ways a lop-sided contest, at least in terms of popular appeal. The United States had pop songs, Pop art, Pop-Tarts, not to mention Hollywood films, McDonalds, and democracy. The Soviets had Shostakovich, the Bolshoi Ballet, the collected works of Lenin, Tetris, and not much else.

The two sides also offered various forms of assistance to other countries: disaster relief, humanitarian medical missions, scientific cooperation, and financial loans. Because the U.S. economy was considerably larger than the Soviet one, the advantage here also went to the Americans.

After the Cold War, the United States continued to cultivate what it called “soft power”—the power of ideas and culture—alongside its enormous military. This soft power continued to be a major vector of American influence, for both good and ill. On the positive side, American activists helped construct the world of international law, American aid workers responded to earthquakes and typhoons, American scientists participated in developing new vaccines and other medical breakthroughs, and American consultants were instrumental in building a range of democratic institutions from election monitoring to a free press.

More than half of U.S. aid goes to humanitarian assistance (21.7 percent), health (22.3 percent), governance (3.2 percent), education and social services (2 percent), and environment (1.9 percent).

But there has also been a dark side to this soft power. Foreign aid, for instance, is highly politicized, often distributed according to political allegiances rather than actual need. A good chunk of this aid has been security-related (14.2 percent), and both Israel and Egypt have traditionally been the top recipients of military assistance. And aid is often used by corrupt recipients to line their own pockets or hand out to their own patronage networks, though the level of corruption is nowhere near what anti-aid campaigners claim (and the United States has also used its aid programs to target corruption and organized crime).

Moreover, much of foreign aid is tied to purchases of U.S. goods and services, which means that the U.S. government is basically just giving a lift to U.S. business. Economic development absorbs 27 percent of U.S. foreign aid, much of it spent within the United States. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which the Trump administration has illegally suspended, was so proud of this fact that it once boasted on its website that “the principal beneficiary of America’s foreign assistance programs has always been the United States. Close to 80 percent of the US Agency for International Development’s contracts and grants go directly to American firms.”

Combine this boosterism with the fact that foreign aid has often included a disproportionate number of loans, not grants, and it becomes clear that a lot of so-called development doesn’t actually help the poorest of the poor. It’s why so many countries, despite decades of foreign assistance, remain locked in poverty.

So, perhaps Donald Trump is right to eliminate USAID by ending most of its programs and reducing its staff from 14,000 to under 300?

But alongside the problematic disbursements, the agency funds a lot of absolutely critical projects around the world. Here is a sample, from Time magazine, of the chaos that Trump’s shut-down order has already caused:

Schools for fourth- to sixth-grade girls are being closed in Afghanistan. Families are returning to destroyed neighborhoods in Gaza with no access to clean water, shelter, or provisions. Funding for teachers and supplies in Uganda has dried up. Tons of seeds are currently sitting in a warehouse in Haiti instead of being distributed to farmers. Maternal health and family-planning clinics in Malawi are shuttered. In Bangladesh, food assistance for refugees will be cut by half in March and run out entirely in April. 

It’s not just basic services that are now on hold. There’s also the effort to roll out a new AIDS vaccine in Africa and clinical trialsto control tuberculosis globally. There’s all the critical research that USAID funds at U.S. universities on agricultural innovation, democratic governance, and educational performance.

The Trump administration has been spreading considerable misinformation about U.S. soft power. It has suggested that cutting USAID will save the United States a lot of money when foreign aid amounts to a mere 1 percent of the federal budget—and much of that money is either spent in the United States or for purchases of U.S. goods and services. It has claimed that a lot of it has gone to overhead and bureaucracy, not to the intended recipients, but USAID has worked with a number of subcontractors like Catholic Relief Services and the Red Cross to implement programs, which is standard practice and ensures a measure of accountability. Trump supporters have claimed that USAID money has gone to celebrities for trips abroad, which is simply not true.

For some people around the world, anything the United States does is malign. When the U.S. government provides military assistance to Israel for its horrifying war in Gaza, when it is pushing American corn or soybeans down the throats of consumers abroad in place of locally grown alternatives, or when it is promoting U.S.-style democracy instead of a more diverse approach to governance, then it is easy to agree that U.S. soft power is indeed problematic.

But much of U.S. foreign assistance comes from a different place: a genuine desire by U.S. civil society to partner with groups around the world to improve medical, educational, agricultural, and political outcomes.

It’s unrealistic to expect that the Trump administration, which is determined to destroy social services in the United States, will help other countries improve their own services.

So, for the next four years, fighting for the best programs of U.S. foreign aid will be part of the resistance to Trump’s overall agenda. Saving the program to create a better AIDS vaccine in Africa is an integral part of saving similar initiatives for medical innovation within the United States. The sad truth is: the U.S. population now needs these exceptional “soft power” programs just like people all around the world.

• This article appeared at FPIF and originally published in Hankyoreh.

John Feffer is an author and columnist and the director of Foreign Policy In Focus.