Europe

https://www.unionesarda.it/en/italy/attack-on-la-stampa-headquarters-in-turin-over-thirty-identified-judu8eju

TikTok not only tracks its users while they are using the TikTok app itself, but it is increasingly integrated with many other websites and apps. For example, TikTok was able to track a person’s Grindr usage on his smartphone. However, that’s not all: In addition to tracking users across the digital space, TikTok also refuses to provide an interested users with a copy of all of their personal data. Therefore, noyb has filed two complaints against TikTok and its data-sharing partners AppsFlyer and Grindr.

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cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/6270906

Archived version

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While Brussels champions policy initiatives and American tech giants market their own ‘sovereign’ solutions, a handful of public authorities in Austria, Germany, and France, alongside the International Criminal Court in The Hague, are taking concrete steps to regain control over their IT.

These cases provide a potential blueprint for a continent grappling with its technological autonomy, while simultaneously revealing the deep-seated legal and commercial challenges that make true independence so difficult to achieve.

The core of the problem lies in a direct and irreconcilable legal conflict. The US CLOUD Act of 2018 allows American authorities to compel US-based technology companies to provide requested data, regardless of where that data is stored globally. This places European organizations in a precarious position, as it directly clashes with Europe's own stringent privacy regulation, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

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cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/6271670

The EU has outlined a clear roadmap to secure Europe’s technical and economic independence in AI. A central component of this strategy is access to world-class computing power. OpenEuroLLM is now the first AI project to be granted strategic access to several of EuroHPC’s supercomputers simultaneously, including LUMI, Leonardo, Jupiter, and MareNostrum 5.

These resources will be used to train and develop a family of high-performance, open-source language models for all official EU languages. The decision secures the infrastructure to build next-generation, transparent and legally compliant language models that reflect Europe’s languages and cultural diversity.

"This is the fuel we need," says Magnus Sahlgren, Head of Research, NLU, at AI Sweden.

https://archive.is/GmyLR

Soriot points out that Europe now faces a double threat. On one hand, major pharmaceutical companies are investing heavily in the United States to avoid their products being heavily taxed by the Trump administration. On the other, China is already a leader in generics and has become a formidable competitor in innovative medicines.

In 2023, Chinese media systematically avoided directly recognizing Russia as a party to aggression. The war was presented as a “conflict” or “crisis” that allegedly arose due to NATO expansion, US actions, and internal processes in Ukraine. Official statements of the Russian Ministry of Defense, which were published without alternative assessments or verification, often served as sources of information.

Such narratives included allegations of US-funded biolaboratories in Ukraine, the presence of NATO military personnel on Ukrainian territory, and the treatment of the Azov unit as a “neo-Nazi group.” All of these messages coincided with key elements of Russian propaganda and were aimed at removing responsibility from Russia.

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In 2025, in statements that are actively quoted by the [Chinese propaganda outlets] Global Times and China Daily, Russia appears as a party ready to end the conflict provided its demands are taken into account, while the US and the West are presented as factors that either put pressure on Ukraine or are not interested in a real settlement ...

An important feature of the current rhetoric is the active promotion of the image of China as a responsible global actor and potential mediator. Calls for “creating a stable European security architecture” and emphasizing the need for negotiations allow Beijing to position itself as a neutral party interested in stability.

At the same time, the very logic of these calls remains close to the Russian interpretation of the war: the root causes of the conflict are sought not in an act of aggression, but in the security architecture, NATO actions, and US policy.

Chinese media less often resort to outright fakes like bio-laboratories or “Nazi Ukraine”, but they continue to avoid clearly naming the aggressor and continue to blur responsibility for the war.

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Web archive link

cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/6267965

Archived version

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“A Russian soldier came to her house in May 2022, smashed her face with his rifle butt and broke her teeth, slashed her stomach with a knife, and raped her. He then stole her bicycle and left her a Kalashnikov bullet as a souvenir.”

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“How can you look in the eyes of this 75-year-old woman and say there won’t be punishment for what that Russian soldier did to you?” said Kovalenko, her own eyes wet with tears.

The 38-year-old [Ukrainian documentary-maker Alisa Kovalenko] from Zaporizhzhia was one of a group of four Ukrainian survivors of sexual violence and activists who came to London last week to lobby MPs, members of the House of Lords, and Foreign Office officials to try to get British support against the proposed amnesty.

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Archive link

A satirical sculptor from Düsseldorf has expressed bewilderment after Russian prosecutors charged him in a Moscow court with criminally defaming the country’s army.

Jacques Tilly, 62, is Germany’s most prominent designer of carnival floats and has spent 40 years creating outsized and grotesque papier-mâché models of figures including President Trump, Angela Merkel and Baroness May of Maidenhead.

Since the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, his floats have repeatedly mocked President Putin’s brutality.

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This year’s float for the Düsseldorf carnival depicted Trump and Putin shaking hands, with President Zelensky crushed in their grip and haemorrhaging blood, along with the caption: “Hitler-Stalin pact 2.0”.

Previous editions have shown Putin choking on a map of Ukraine and posing naked alongside Trump and President Xi of China, with a gigantically enlarged scrotum emblazoned with the words “Make Russia great again”.

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cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/44153480

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Certainly on the surface it appears China’s alliance with Russia has only grown stronger since Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Nowhere has this been more evident than when looking at trade between the two countries, which has boomed ever since the West slapped Putin with massive sanctions.

Last year, the value of trade between Russia and China hit a record $245bn (£182bn), fuelled by Xi becoming the world’s largest buyer of Putin’s oil and gas. Overall, China also became Russia’s biggest supplier of goods.

However, closer ties with China have come at a cost.

In particular, Russian businesses have grown increasingly frustrated at a flood of cheap Chinese goods.

Vladimir Milov, who worked in the Russian government from 1997 to 2002 before becoming a vocal Putin critic, says the economic alliance is backfiring badly for Russia.

“It is deeply disadvantageous,” he says. “China is taking advantage because it knows that Russia has nowhere to go.”

Such warnings could signal that the economic ties between the two countries are beginning to fray.

While mutual trade hit a record high in 2024, it has fallen by nearly a tenth so far this year.

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One key area of tension is cars.

After Western manufacturers cut ties with Russia in 2022, Chinese competitors duly stepped in.

In the two years to 2024, Chinese car exports to Russia have increased sevenfold, prompting a growing number of complaints from domestic manufacturers.

Maxim Sokolov, the chief executive of Russian carmaker AvtoVAZ, has accused the Chinese of “unprecedented dumping”, which he said in December has crossed “all imaginable boundaries”.

Sales of his company’s signature Lada car have plunged, pushing the company to slash production by nearly half and move to a four-day work week at the end of September.

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There are signs that Russia’s steel sector is also hurting.

Andrey Gartung, chief executive of the Chelyabinsk Forging and Press Plant, warned last year: “Russian enterprises competing with Chinese ones are holding on by the skin of their teeth.”

Not one to shy away, China has hit back with trade restrictions of its own.

Most notably, Xi reintroduced tariffs on Russian coal in January 2024, two years after the restrictions were first lifted.

This has already hit exports to China, with Milov claiming that the levies are adding to what is the worst crisis for Russia’s coal industry since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

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Elsewhere, China has so far refused to lift a longstanding ban on imports of Russia’s largest agricultural exports – winter wheat and barley. Instead, it buys from Ukraine and Kazakhstan.

What China does import from Russia, it gets incredibly cheaply because it has a monopoly as one of Russia’s only buyers, says Milov.

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The average annual flow of Chinese investment into Russia has plummeted from an average of $1.2bn from 2011 to $400m, says Milov ... In 2022, China dropped Russia from its Belt and Road financing programme, while in July, China’s commerce ministry “strongly advised” carmakers against investing in Russia.

Many major projects that were previously announced with Chinese backing have now been scrapped or are on hold.

Russia quietly disappeared from what was supposed to be a joint development of a long-haul aircraft with the Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China.

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Plans for Chinese CRRC Changchun Railway Vehicles to build a high-speed rail line between Moscow and Kazan in south-west Russia have also been paused.

Separately, there has been no progress on the development of the Tianjin oil refinery, a joint venture between Rosneft and the Chinese National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), which was approved in 2014.

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This may be a sign that, for all the pomp and ceremony, the countries’ authoritarian alliance may be weaker than it appears.

“Despite all these hugs and kisses at summits, China and Russia are very much far apart,” says Milov.

Web archive link

Ukrainian President Zelensky says Russia launched a "massive" overnight attack on Ukraine, using more than 600 drones and 30 missiles.

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"Putin still cannot accept that he must stop killing," says Zelensky. "And that means that the world is not putting enough pressure on Russia"

The energy operator, Ukrenergo, says "emergency power outages" are in place in "several regions" of Ukraine, as temperatures approach 0C.

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On Monday, Zelensky warned it was Russia's "nature to make some kind of massive strike on our Christmas... especially on December 23, 24, and 25"

This morning's air attack punctured weeks of relative calm in the capital Kyiv.

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cross-posted from : https://lemmy.ca/post/57314517

In December, Sweden announced a 10bn kronor (£800m) cut in development funding to Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Liberia, Tanzania and Bolivia. Germany's humanitarian budget of €1.05bn (£920m) for 2026 will be less than half of last year's, with spending refocused on areas deemed a priority to Europe.

The UK also announced earlier this year that it would be cutting aid to fund defence spending. Norway has increased its civilian support to Ukraine by 2.5bn kroner (£185m), to a quarter of its aid budget, but has been accused of making Africa pay for that rise with a 355m kroner cut (£26m).

France's budget for 2026 will also see a €700m cut to aid spending, with a 60% reduction in food aid, while increasing defence spending by €6.7bn.

cross-posted from : https://lemmy.ml/post/40686362

A police officer at a protest for the Palestine Action hunger strikers strangled a doctor until she passed out by dragging her by the back of her hoodie, the doctor has told Novara Media.

Dr Olivia Brandon was among several medical professionals who gathered with other supporters outside HMP Bronzefield on Wednesday 17 December to demand the prison allow in an ambulance to treat a hunger striker suffering from severe chest pains.

The alleged attack came after police arrested two protesters, including psychiatric doctor Dr Ayo Moiett, who protesters say was targeted both because he is black and because he played a pivotal role in forcing the prison to eventually let the ambulance come.

cross-posted from : https://sh.itjust.works/post/52039645

cross-posted from : https://sh.itjust.works/post/52035483

Zurich serves as a hub for US tech company Palantir’s business relations.

The fact remains, however, that Zurich is partly responsible for the growth strategy of Palantir, a company whose software is increasingly being used as a deadly weapon of war against civilians – and which clearly has no problem with this.

cross-posted from : https://lemmy.zip/post/55517538

The EU has formal security and defence partnerships with Australia, Japan and South Korea, and in 2020 signed a broad “strategic partnership” with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations regional group, which includes co-operation on counterterrorism and maritime and cyber security.(..)

Kallas said the EU was “not the traditional security actor”, but Asian countries had been raising the possibility of working with it on issues such as maritime security, freedom of navigation and cyber security.(..)

“China is telling us that they want to be good partners and they are interested in our partnership,” she said. “If you want to have a partnership, then you also listen to the worries that the other side has.” Arch

• Orban faces toughest challenge of his 15-year rule
• Economy mired in three-year period of stagnation
• Cost of living, economy, health dominate election concerns
• Veteran leader racing against time to turn economy around before the election in April 2025

Hungary's [prime minister] Viktor Orban may have got a brief poll boost last month from a costly pensions sweetener but he faces a race against time before April's election to turn the stagnating economy around enough to extend a 15-year grip on power.

Orban's reelection bid will be watched far beyond Hungary. A thorn in the side of the European Union, the nationalist leader counts U.S. President Donald Trump as an anti-EU ally and maintains close ties with Russia's Vladimir Putin.

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While the inflation surge has lifted Hungarian food prices close to EU average levels, the annual average full-time salary per employee was third-lowest in the bloc and pension spending is also among the lowest as a share of output.

The pension top-up, aimed at Hungary's 2.4 million retirees who make up over a quarter of the electorate, will cost $454 million next year, with its price tag rising each following year as it is phased in over the next government cycle.

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The pension moves will have a far larger cost in the long run. In August the IMF warned that, without reforms to its pension system, Hungary was set for "explosive growth" in borrowing beyond 2030, with its public debt estimated at a staggering 255% of output by 2054.

Some public comments to Orban's Facebook post announcing the pension top-up were critical of the move, calling instead for hikes to smaller pensions or indexation to wages, while others derided it as a "joke" or "vote buying".

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"The problem is that (sentiment) is still negative and it cannot be changed dramatically in a few months. The time is too short and the amount of money to be distributed is limited," 21 Research Centre Director Daniel Rona said.