Japan’s defence ministry on Friday said it will invest in AI, automation and improving troop conditions to address a worsening recruitment shortfall that has left its forces understaffed amid a build up aimed at countering China’s growing military power.

The measures, unveiled in its latest defence budget request on Friday, come after the Self Defense Forces’ (SDF) worst ever annual recruitment drive. In the year to March 31 it enrolled just under 10,000 sailors, soldiers and air personnel, half of its target, Reuters reported.

Fearful that China could use military force to bring neighbouring Taiwan under its control and drag Japan into a war, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida in 2022 announced a doubling in defense spending to stock up on missiles and other munitions, pay for advanced fighter jets and create a cyber defence force.

Japan’s falling birth rate, however, mean it is struggling more than ever to maintain current SDF troop levels at 250,000 people.

“As we increase our defensive strength, we need to build an organisation that is able to fight in new ways,” the defence ministry said in the annual budget request, which calls for a 6.9% spending increase to a record 8.5 trillion yen ($59 billion)

To cope with fewer recruits, the ministry said it will introduce artificial intelligence technology, allocating 18 billion yen next year for an AI surveillance system for military base security.

It will also buy more unmanned drones and order three highly-automated air defense warships for 314 billion yen that require only 90 sailors, less than half the crew of current ships.

To free up more troops for frontline assignments the SDF will also outsource some training and support operations to former SDF members and civilian contractors.

And in a bid to tap Japan’s shrinking pool of fighting-age people, who are also being pursued by companies able to pay more, it plans to offer financial incentives and better living conditions, such as sleeping quarters with more privacy and improved access to social media.

In particular, it is focusing on luring more women, who make less than 10% of the SDF. Attempts to boost their number have been hindered by a series of high-profile sexual harassment cases.

To help turn around that effort, Japan’s military wants 16.4 billion yen to build accommodation for female personnel, with improved toilets and showers. It also said it will hire outside councilors to support women and strengthen harassment training.

Pavel Durov, the Russian-French billionaire founder and CEO of the Telegram messaging app, was arrested at Bourget airport outside Paris on Saturday evening, TF1 TV and BFM TV said, citing unidentified sources.

Durov was travelling aboard his private jet, TF1 said on its website, adding he had been targeted by an arrest warrant in France as part of a preliminary police investigation, Reuters reported.

TF1 and BFM both said the investigation was focused on a lack of moderators on Telegram, and that police considered that this situation allowed criminal activity to go on undeterred on the messaging app.

Durov faces possible indictment on Sunday, according to French media.

The encrypted Telegram, with close to one billion users, is particularly influential in Russia, Ukraine and the republics of the former Soviet Union. It is ranked as one of the major social media platforms after Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, Instagram, TikTok and Wechat.

Telegram did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment. The French Interior Ministry and police had no comment.

Russian-born Durov founded Telegram with his brother in 2013. He left Russia in 2014 after refusing to comply with government demands to shut down opposition communities on his VKontakte social media platform, which he sold.

“I would rather be free than to take orders from anyone,” Durov told U.S. journalist Tucker Carlson in April about his exit from Russia and search for a home for his company which included stints in Berlin, London, Singapore and San Francisco.

After Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Telegram has become the main source of unfiltered – and sometimes graphic and misleading – content from both sides about the war and the politics surrounding the conflict, read the report.

The platform has become what some analysts call ‘a virtual battlefield’ for the war, used heavily by Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and his officials, as well as the Russian government.

Telegram – which allows users to evade official scrutiny – has also become one of the few places where Russians can access independent news about the war after the Kremlin increased curbs on independent media following its invasion of Ukraine.

The Russian foreign ministry said its embassy in Paris was clarifying the situation around Durov and called on Western non-governmental organisations to demand his release, Reuters reported.

Russia began blocking Telegram in 2018 after the app refused to comply with a court order to grant state security services access to its users’ encrypted messages.

The action interrupted many third-party services, but had little effect on the availability of Telegram there. The ban order, however, sparked mass protests in Moscow and criticism from NGOs.

TF1 said Dubai-based Durov had been travelling from Azerbaijan and was arrested at around 8 p.m. (1800 GMT).

Durov, whose fortune was estimated by Forbes at $15.5 billion, said some governments had sought to pressure him but the app should remain a “neutral platform” and not a “player in geopolitics”.

Telegram’s increasing popularity, however, has prompted scrutiny from several countries in Europe, including France, on security and data breach concerns.

Russia’s representative to international organisations in Vienna, Mikhail Ulyanov, and several other Russian politicians were quick on Sunday to accuse France of acting as a dictatorship – the same criticism that Moscow faced when putting demands on Durov in 2014 and trying to ban Telegram in 2018.

“Some naive persons still don’t understand that if they play more or less visible role in international information space it is not safe for them to visit countries which move towards much more totalitarian societies,” Ulyanov wrote on X.

Elon Musk, billionaire owner of X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, said after reports of Durov’s detention: “It’s 2030 in Europe and you’re being executed for liking a meme.”

Robert F. Kennedy Jr, who on Friday abandoned his U.S. presidential campaign and endorsed Republican Donald Trump, said on X after the reports that the need to protect free speech, “has never been more urgent.”

Several Russian bloggers called for protests at French embassies throughout the world at noon on Sunday.

Chinese scientists have discovered a “brand-new method” of producing large quantities of water using lunar soil brought back from a 2020 expedition, state broadcaster CCTV reported on Thursday.

In 2020, China’s Chang’e-5 mission marked the first time humans retrieved lunar samples in 44 years. Researchers from the state-run Chinese Academy of Sciences discovered that the minerals in this ‘moon soil’ contain large amounts of hydrogen, which reacts with other elements when heated to very high temperatures, producing water vapour, CCTV reported, according to Reuters.

“After three years of in-depth research and repeated verification, a brand-new method of using lunar soil to produce large amounts of water was discovered, which is expected to provide important design basis for the construction of future lunar scientific research stations and space stations,” said CCTV.

The discovery could have important implications for China’s decades-long project of building a permanent lunar outpost amid a U.S.-China race to find and mine the moon’s resources.

NASA head Bill Nelson has repeatedly raised the alarm about the rapid advances in China’s space programme and the possibility of Beijing dominating the most resource-rich locations on the moon.

Using the new method, one tonne of lunar soil will be able to produce about 51-76 kg of water, equivalent to more than a hundred 500ml bottles of water, or the daily drinking water consumption of 50 people, the state broadcaster said.

China hopes that recent and future lunar expeditions will set the foundations to build the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS), an initiative it is co-leading with Russia.

China’s space agency has set 2035 as the date by when a “basic station” on the moon’s south pole will be built, with a moon-orbiting space station added by 2045.

The announcement of the discovery comes at a time when Chinese scientists are already conducting experiments on lunar samples brought back in June by the Chang’e-6 mission.

While the Chang’e-5 mission brought back samples from the near side of the moon, Chang’e-6 retrieved lunar soil from the far side of the moon, which perpetually faces away from the Earth.

The importance of lunar water goes beyond making permanent human presence viable. NASA’s Nelson told NPR in May that water found on the moon could be used to create hydrogen rocket fuel which could fuel further space exploration to Mars and other destinations.