Taiwan's military can respond rapidly to any sudden Chinese attack with all units able to operate under a decentralised mode of command without awaiting orders from above, Taipei's defence ministry said in a report to lawmakers.

Democratically-governed Taiwan, which Beijing views as its own territory, has repeatedly warned that China could try to suddenly shift its regular drills into active combat mode to catch Taiwan and its international supporters off guard.

China's military operates around Taiwan on an almost daily basis, in what Taipei says is part of a "grey zone" harassment and pressure campaign that stops short of actual combat but is designed to wear out Taiwan's armed forces by putting them constantly on alert.

Folks - I need help.

I bought the UDR7 router during the Black Friday sale just to see what the hype was about and since then I’ve already placed multiple orders for hundreds of dollars of equipment. As we speak I have a cart full of over a thousand dollars more equipment that I’m on the cusp of submitting and and there is no end in sight.

If there is anyone out there who can talk me out of this rabbit hole I fear this may be the last chance for salvation

My name is ccunning and I’m a Unifi-holic…

Following the souring in EU-US relations, more and more European politicians have concluded that Europe needs to regain its independence from the US. In this video, we're giving von der Leyen a hand and suggest what the EU could do to decouple from the US.

If you want to avoid YouTube: https://invidious.nerdvpn.de/watch?v=alAP1rRgjYQ

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump filed a lawsuit Monday seeking $10 billion in damages from the BBC, accusing the British broadcaster of defamation as well as deceptive and unfair trade practices.

The 33-page lawsuit accuses the BBC of broadcasting a “false, defamatory, deceptive, disparaging, inflammatory, and malicious depiction of President Trump,” calling it “a brazen attempt to interfere in and influence” the 2024 U.S. presidential election.

It accused the BBC of “splicing together two entirely separate parts of President Trump’s speech on January 6, 2021” in order to ”intentionally misrepresent the meaning of what President Trump said.”

The lawsuit, filed in a Florida court, seeks $5 billion in damages for defamation and $5 billion for unfair trade practices.

Across the world, desperate parents of sick or dying children are being exploited by online scam campaigns, the BBC World Service has discovered. The public have given money to the campaigns, which claim to be fundraising for life-saving treatment. We have identified 15 families who say they got little to nothing of the funds raised and often had no idea the campaigns had even been published, despite undergoing harrowing filming.

Nine families we spoke to - whose campaigns appear to be products of the same scam network - say they never received anything at all of the $4m (£2.9m) apparently raised in their names.

A whistleblower from this network told us they had looked for "beautiful children" who "had to be three to nine years old… without hair".

We have identified a key player in the scam as an Israeli man living in Canada called Erez Hadari.

Almost 90 flights linked to Jeffrey Epstein arrived at and departed from UK airports, some with British women on board who say they were abused by the billionaire, a BBC investigation has found.

We have established that three British women who were allegedly trafficked appear in Epstein's records of flights in and out of the UK and other documents related to the convicted sex offender.

US lawyers representing hundreds of Epstein victims told the BBC it was "shocking" that there has never been a "full-scale UK investigation" into his activities on the other side of the Atlantic.

The UK was one of the "centrepieces" of Epstein's operations, one said.

Alexandra Ching has lived in Bondi her whole life, describing the iconic beach nearby as her back yard. On Sunday evening, like many residents in the area, she heard pops echo through the neighbourhood and thought they were fireworks.

“Everyone did, but I thought it was too light and no one could see them, so what’s the point,” Ching tells the Guardian. She left her apartment to see people “streaming up Bondi Road”. When she saw the looks on their faces, she knew something was wrong.

As Ching stood on the road speaking with a couple who had run up the hill, still dripping wet in their swimmers, she heard someone come up behind her. It was a lifeguard sprinting towards Bondi, barefoot, from neighbouring Tamarama beach – about 1.5km away – carrying a defibrillator.

“I heard someone say ‘excuse me’, and as I turned I just saw this flash of blue,” she recounts. “He was just flying past. It was just him running in the direction that everyone was trying to escape from, carrying that big kit and barefoot … He’s running at something that surely every fibre in your being, you know, would tell you to go in the other direction."

cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/43742474

Web archive version

Following today’s unjust guilty verdict handed down to writer and media publisher Jimmy Lai, PEN International and English PEN have joined Hong Kong Watch and over 30 other civil society organisations in a joint letter addressed to UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, urging him to to press for the release Jimmy Lai, a UK citizen, PEN writes in a statement on its website.

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cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/43742474

Web archive version

Following today’s unjust guilty verdict handed down to writer and media publisher Jimmy Lai, PEN International and English PEN have joined Hong Kong Watch and over 30 other civil society organisations in a joint letter addressed to UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, urging him to to press for the release Jimmy Lai, a UK citizen, PEN writes in a statement on its website.

...

A super-complaint has been filed against police forces in England and Wales over years-long delays in investigating sexual offences.

More than 37,000 sexual offence investigations have taken longer than three years to conclude over the past decade, campaigners said.

Sexual offence cases taking more than three years to investigate have increased more than sevenfold over the past 10 years, from 533 in 2014-15 to 4,008 in 2024-25, according to freedom of information requests submitted by the organisations to the Home Office and police forces across England and Wales. At the end of March 2025, there were almost 14,000 investigations that had been open for more than three years, the organisations said.

Their research found that investigations lasting between three and four years had increased from 137 cases in 2014-15 to 2,261 cases in 2024-25.

Cuts to US aid funding have directly led to the closure of more than 1,000 family planning clinics, new figures shared with the Guardian reveal.

Millions of people have been left without access to contraceptives or care, including those who have suffered sexual assault, as part of a “radical shift towards conservative ideologies that deliberately block human rights”, according to the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF).

A survey of its member associations found that approximately 1,394 service delivery points, or clinics, have been shut down, including 1,175 in Africa, and that 34 had laid off staff as a result of the Trump administration’s cuts, representing at least 969 job losses.

Campaigners say the cuts have emboldened anti-rights groups, reporting a rise in rhetoric opposing abortion and access to contraception for teenagers.

A mass shooting in which 15 people were killed during a Hanukkah celebration at Sydney's Bondi Beach was "a terrorist attack inspired by Islamic State," Australia's federal police commissioner Krissy Barrett said Tuesday.

The suspects were a father and son, aged 50 and 24, authorities have said. The older man was shot dead while his son was being treated at a hospital on Tuesday.

A news conference by political and law enforcement leaders on Tuesday was the first time officials confirmed their beliefs about the suspects' ideologies.

cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/6144852

Canada’s foreign minister has condemned the “politically motivated” conviction of Hong Kong pro-democracy activist and media mogul Jimmy Lai, and called for his immediate release from prison.

Lai, an outspoken critic of Beijing, was found guilty Monday of violating Hong Kong’s stringent, China-imposed national security law. The 78-year-old has already spent five years in custody while awaiting the landmark trial, and now faces the possibility of spending the rest of his life behind bars.

“Canada condemns the politically motivated prosecution of Jimmy Lai under the National Security Law in Hong Kong and calls for his immediate release,” Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand said in a statement provided by her office to Global News.

“We continue to express our concerns about deteriorating rights, freedoms and autonomy which are enshrined in Hong Kong’s Basic Law.”

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Three government-vetted judges found Lai, the founder of the now-defunct pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily, guilty of conspiring to collude with foreign forces to endanger national security and conspiracy to publish seditious articles. He pleaded not guilty to all charges.

Lai was arrested in August 2020 under a Beijing-imposed national security law that was implemented following massive anti-government protests in 2019. He was previously convicted of several lesser offences related to fraud allegations and his actions during that year of protest.

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