Mystery surrounds the appearance of hundreds of Victorian hobnailed shoes which have washed ashore on a beach.

The black leather boots, thought to date back to the 19th Century, were discovered by volunteers cleaning up rock pools on Ogmore By Sea Beach in the Vale of Glamorgan, south Wales.

Emma Lamport from the Beach Academy social enterprise which found the shoes said there was speculation locally that they could be from a shipwrecked Italian cargo vessel said to have struck nearby Tusker Rock about 150 years ago.

Author and mudlarker Lara Maiklem said the boots were "definitely Victorian" and likely to have come from a shipwreck due to the quantity found.

The topic has been debated since April, when the EU Commission first unveiled "ProtectEU," a strategy aiming to create a roadmap for "lawful and effective access to data for law enforcement." The Commission then presented the Roadmap in June, which outlined an intent to decrypt citizens' private data by 2030.

Most member states argue that simply knowing who owns an account isn't enough. Instead, they want a new legal baseline where companies are forced to log exactly when and where a user was online, as well as the IP addresses they used to connect.

As AdGuard VPN's Chief Product Officer, Denis Vyazovoy, told TechRadar back in April: "A legal framework that forces VPNs to retain user metadata – potentially for a prolonged period – could make such services untenable, leading to the withdrawal of VPN providers from the EU."

cross-posted from : https://lemmy.zip/post/55583377

Repression against left-wing, anti-imperialist and Palestine-solidarity structures in Germany is increasingly aimed at undermining their economic means of existence.

Archived version: https://archive.is/newest/https://peoplesdispatch.org/2025/12/23/in-germany-critics-of-the-government-are-losing-their-bank-accounts-and-more/

Disclaimer: The article linked is from a single source with a single perspective. Make sure to cross-check information against multiple sources to get a comprehensive view on the situation.

It says the legislation states that France has "legal responsibility" for the "tragedies it caused", and "full and fair" compensation was an "inalienable right of the Algerian state and people"

Brazil's jailed former president Jair Bolsonaro used a hospital stay for surgery to formally endorse his son Flavio's 2026 presidential bid.

Brazil's jailed former president Jair Bolsonaro on Thursday formally endorsed his son Flavio's bid for the 2026 presidential election, announcing his support from a hospital in Brasilia where he underwent hernia surgery.

In office from 2019 to 2022, Bolsonaro is a controversial figure, after pursuing hard‑right populist policies that his opponents claim undermined democratic institutions and targeted marginalized groups. He is currently in jail serving a 27‑year sentence for an attempted coup.

RIP

This is a much cheaper and faster way to get nuclear power.

Why AI hasn’t made the smart home smarter

I heard the DRAM shortage has started affecting PC sales, and I would think that it would be hurting Intel's bottom line.

I remember hearing Intel was looking for customers for its fabs, so I suppose they have some capacity sitting idle.

Why not use some of that capacity to make DRAM themselves? If they can make CPUs running at multi-gigahertz and contains DRAM controllers, surely DDR5 memory is not out of their reach?

Intel can use up their excess capacities, making currently high-priced DRAM for profit, gain goodwill for rescuing the PC market, which in turn will sell more Intel CPUs as well. Sounds like a win to me. What do you think?

Edit: I know nothing about semiconductor manufacturing so feel free to tell me how Intel's process is not suitable for making DRAM, or any other reason why it would not be smart for them to do that.

Comment with one of your worst dopamine hijackers; something which takes over and hogs your dopamine system, and on New Years Day I'll go through the comments and rank the top ten on how many upvotes they get and edit this post with the results as well as make a new post. Maybe even make a New Years Resolution based on it!

If there are any duplicates only the one with the most upvotes will be counted. Any comments/replies which are chat or reactions will obviously be disregarded from the final count.

Results:

1. Scrolling
2. Someone is wrong on the Internet
3. Phone notifications
4. Video games
5. Maladaptive daydreaming
6. Unfinished projects that should be quick to finish
7. Sleep-deprivation-induced mania
8. Alcohol
9. Reading internet to drown out own thoughts
10. Expensive hobbies

How liquid is gold in terms of turnaround if you randomly cash it it (where?)?

I always wonder what these places look like in terms of everyday life for its patients/prisoners that were found to be Insane or Not Criminally Responsible (NCR)?

Since many times there is an indetermanite sentence, for some who never get better it could very well be a life sentence; its also often colloquially refered to as Worse Than Prison (WTP) or, at very least, No Cake Walk (NCW)

I'm just wondering, no particular reason.

Did you find a partner using it? How long did you use it? What did you think about it? How many matches did you get? What problems did you see? Do you think its a good way to meet other people? What did you use it for / what was your intention?

Just in general, what was the experience like?

Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand is affirming Greenland’s sovereignty as Washington again says it wants to annex the self-governing territory of Denmark.

Anand spoke Tuesday with her Danish counterpart Lars Lokke Rasmussen and says she conveyed “Canada’s support for the fundamental importance of respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity.”

Her comments come after Donald Trump appointed an envoy to the territory, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry, who said the job aims “to make Greenland a part of the U.S.”

I hate it. So much geerrrrms.

Rebecca Joynes is currently serving a six and a half year prison sentence

A teacher who was convicted for having sex with two boys, becoming pregnant by one, has been banned from the profession.

Maths teacher Rebecca Joynes, 31, was jailed for six and a half years in July last year after being found guilty of six counts of sexual activity with a child, after sleeping with one pupil before falling pregnant by a second while on police bail.

The Teaching Regulation Agency (TRA) convened earlier this month via a virtual hearing, which Joynes did not attend, to consider her professional conduct. A panel recommended she be banned from teaching.

There are no roads through the Darién Gap. This vast impenetrable forest spans the width of the land bridge between South and Central America, but there is almost no way through it: hundreds have lost their lives trying to cross it on foot.

Its size and hostility have shielded it from development for millennia, protecting hundreds of species – from harpy eagles and giant anteaters to jaguars and red-crested tamarins – in one of the most biodiverse places on Earth. But it has also made it incredibly difficult to protect. Looking after 575,000 hectares (1,420,856 acres) of beach, mangrove and rainforest with just 20 rangers often felt impossible, says Segundo Sugasti, the director of Darién national park. Like tropical forests all over the world, it has been steadily shrinking, with at least 15% lost to logging, mining and cattle ranching in two decades.

But in the past three years, Panama has mounted a surprising fightback that could offer hope to the rest of the world’s forests. In 2022, the government took a hard line on deforestation and modernised its park ranger force, partnered with the NGO Global Conservation and deforestation in the park began to fall. That fall accelerated when President José Raúl Mulino took office in July 2024.

In an era when cash-strapped governments are slashing environmental budgets, Jeff Morgan, the director of Global Conservation, which partners with the park, says: “It’s a miracle.”

“I’ve been in this industry for more than 10 years and worked in 22 countries. I’ve never seen anything like this,” he says.