It is not just about data/privacy concerns (which are underestimated imo, as China pursues an own agenda with collecting your data through Chinese tech) and ‘unfair’ subsidies, but about gross human rights violations. In short, the cheap Chinese cars are made in concentration camps where people are forced to work under catastrophic conditions.

The problem with wind or solar energy is not the production capacity itself but the storage. If and when there is enough wind and sunlight, respectively, you usually produce enough electricity, but every kilowatt-hour that is not consumed immediately is lost.

This is why you need to store large amounts of electricity, also to make sure that you have enough power once there is less wind or at night when the solar panels don’t produce energy due to the lack of sunlight.

This is what Spain tries to solve. But they appear to be on a very good track.

These are not marketing but training materials offering authoritarian principles in areas such as law enforcement, journalism, legal issues, space technologies, and many other topics, to build and maintain a totalitarian regime as China’s authoritarian capitalism model. It’s for the benefit of a few, while the people’s freedoms are suppressed.

Read the whole report.

The report is based upon 1,691 files from the Chinese Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM) …

Corrected, thanks. It’s no bear initiative :-) 🐼

@trevron, It’s good practice to name source. Read my other post in this thread on the same topic citing another source, and feel free to post sources you deem more reliable.

[Edit typo.]

Ukraine accuses Russia of intensifying chemical attacks on the battlefield (February 2024)

Ukraine accused Russia […] of using toxic chemicals in more than 200 attacks on the battlefield in January alone, a sharp increase in what it said were recorded instances of their use by Russian forces since they invaded two years ago.

CS gas […] is banned on the battlefield by the international Chemical Weapons Convention which states in Article 1: “Each State Party undertakes not to use riot control agents as a method of warfare.”

[…] The Ukrainian general staff said: “815 cases of the use of ammunition loaded with toxic chemicals by the Russian Federation were recorded. Of these, only in January 2024 – 229 cases.”

The Nato expansion issue is far to simplistic. Nato doesn’t expand itself. All Nato members join this alliance voluntarily. Finland, for example, has been committed to neutrality for 80 or so years and joined Nato only after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Neutrality is fine in a world where everyone -especially your neighbours- respect democratic values and human rights. If this isn’t the case, countries seek alliances. (We have a similar situation in the Asia-Pacific region, where countries seek to establish alliances following China’s increasingly aggressive behaviour.)

The ‘problem’ isn’t Nato -that’s indeed Russian propaganda- but the fact that Russia failed so far to develop democratic structures. The aggressor here is Putin’s dictatorship.

Yes, and let us not forget China’s access to the Arctic for its Polar Silk Road.

No Gaza ceasefire until Israel war aims achieved, Netanyahu says

His [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s] statement comes after US President Joe Biden announced Israel had proposed a three-stage plan to Hamas aimed at reaching a permanent ceasefire.

That’s strange. I can see the video at the top of the page, just before the text begins.

It’s not onky Africa.

Moscow’s Search for Foreign Recruits Reveals Its Growing Desperation (Nov 2023)

[…] they had identified nearly 200 Cubans who had joined the Russian military in recent weeks, with enlistees ranging in age between 19 and 69. In interviews […]. Many in particular cited monetary incentives and the prospect of Russian citizenship — an attractive draw for young men in a country beset by food insecurity and joblessness […]

Evidence of Moscow’s desperation goes far beyond a few hundred Cuban enlistees […] Putin publicly lent his approval to foreign recruitment and soon approached the Syrian government for manpower. Almost immediately, Damascus responded by appealing directly to veterans in its army to join the conflict in Ukraine. The Kremlin has made similar moves in the past year to amass volunteers and veterans from Central Asia, Libya, and Serbia. In recent weeks, hundreds of volunteers from Colombia and Nepal — including seasoned military veterans — have been similarly enticed to don Russian uniforms in the face of limited economic prospects in their home countries.

In addition to the other comments, the EU is considering to alter its decision-making process and implementing a majority vote (at the moment every single counrty must agree to a decision). That could significantly reduce the risks brought by countries like Hungary and Slovakia.

They have been discussing this for a while. Leading German politicians said they’d agree. Here’s a link to the German article (the English summary is mine):

Archived unpaywalled link (in German)

Leading members of the German Bundestag from the CDU, FDP and Greens are considering the possibility of protecting parts of the airspace over Ukraine from NATO territory with Western air defense.

The example of Israel, where air defense units from the US, Great Britain, France and other countries repelled an Iranian air attack in April, shows that participating states do not necessarily have to become “the war party”, they argue.

The idea have been put forward by military experts like Nico Lange from the Munich Security Conference. In Lange’s view, this could create a “safe zone of up to 70 kilometres wide” on Ukraine’s borders to Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania.

Roderich Kiesewetter German from the conservative party CDU told the German paper “Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung” that such a deployment at the eastern border of NATO could shoot down ‘unmanned Russian missiles’ over Ukraine", relieving the Ukrainian air defense and enable it to “protect the front”, he says.

Marcus Faber of the ruling party FDP, who is supposed to be the future head of the defense committee, also noted that “the airspace over the Ukrainian border regions” could in principle be protected “by air defense systems on NATO territory”.

“I think that this is possible,” said Faber.

Agnieszka Brugger from the ruling Green party also supported the idea of “deploying air defense systems at the borders of the neighbouring states so that the western parts of Ukraine can also be protected”. Anton Hofreiter from the Green party and chairman of the European Committee shares Brugger’s view, according to the paper.

What do we understand by genocide?

The Encoclopedia Britannica says:

Genocide, the deliberate and systematic destruction of a group of people because of their ethnicity, nationality, religion, or race. The term, derived from the Greek genos (“race,” “tribe,” or “nation”) and the Latin cide (“killing”) …

Tibetan children are separated from their families at a very young age and sent to state-run boarding ‘schools’ where they have to complete a “compulsory education” curriculum in the Mandarin Chinese language, with no access to traditional or culturally-relevant learning.

Forced sterilization of Tibetan women.

Individuals advocating for Tibetan language and education are persecuted.

Rounding up hundreds of thousands of innocent Tibetans, Uyghurs, and other minorities in military-style reeducation camps where they are forced to work.

More can be found, for examples, in the report on 100 atrocities of CCP in Tibet (pdf)

There’s is many more across the web.

I have long been blocked there :-)

A few statements are very illuminating. UniCredit ‘set aside EUR 800m in provisions’, which means they didn’t pay taxes for this sum (assuming the Russian accounting law has the same principles as everywhere else which seems reasonable here), so they might have predicted the Russian move anyway.

Another point is that they report a profit for Q1-2024 that is more than double than that in Q1-2023. I would be curious to see more numbers to learn how they ‘significantly reduced’ their bussines.

This is why Russia has to leave Ukraine.

They may come from one of the sources you list in your comment above :-)

In Germany -as anywhere else- there is much more. You may be interested in this, for example:

Which German websites help disseminate pro-Russian narratives (here is the alternative archived link)

After our research on which websites are spreading pro-Russian narratives and talking points that benefit Moscow, we decided to take a closer look at websites in German. During the analysis, we found publications that quote Russian state media, that receive back quotes from them, and that spread claims that could play into the hands of the Kremlin.

[…]

It is clear that Russia is waging a war of propaganda and disinformation against Europe, whereas it is waging a real war against Ukraine, seizing its territories. An analysis of key Kremlin media narratives in different languages reveals that their campaign’s main goal is to force the West to stop supporting Ukraine and make concessions to Putin, probably by giving him the occupied territories and thus recognizing the redrawing of borders in Europe by military means.

News websites that tend to support pro-Russian, Euroskeptic, and anti-American views, as well as those close to the positions of right-wing radical parties, often pick up such narratives. Consciously or unconsciously, such web resources play into the hands of the Kremlin’s agenda. Such news reports are becoming a tool for spreading Russian and pro-Russian influence in Europe.