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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Yall are just too afraid to accept it.

There are people who argue that Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine is not motivated by fears or imperial ambitions, but by other countries’ disrespect. Russia once commanded authority as one of the world’s two superpowers, but it has since forfeited that status. It knows it has lost the respect of other countries (Barack Obama famously dismissed Russia as just a “regional power”), and the Ukraine war is its way of winning it back.

What is perhaps surprising is that Donald Trump’s turn against Europe has similar motivations. Putin knows his aggressive revanchism won’t win Russia any love among countries whose respect he craves. But if he can’t be loved, he hopes at least to be feared. If you are in a social order that regards you as inferior, you have every incentive to turn spoiler.

So, too, Trump wants to disrupt a social order that regards him and his worldview with contempt. The US president and his officials get respect from dictators and kings (although perhaps not from the ones whose respect they most want – Putin and Xi Jinping), but they know that the leaders of many other democratic countries look down their noses at them.

Now it is America that wants to act as spoiler, smashing the existing hierarchy of respect to replace it with a world where Trump will get unqualified obeisance. Europe, with its emphasis on the rule of law and multilateralism, is the strongest remaining example of an entire system of prestige and values that the Trump administration wants to destroy.

cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/44164675

• South Africans who went to Russia ended up in Ukraine
• They say they were recruited under false pretenses
• Conditions for them in Ukraine are harsh, they say
• They describe a lack of food and medical care

South African father-of-three Dubandlela was overcome with pride when his 20-year-old son signed up in July to receive elite training as a VIP bodyguard in Russia.

Five months later, Dubandlela is in despair. His son had fallen for an alleged recruitment scam in which he and at least 16 other South African men say they were conscripted by an unspecified mercenary group and sent to join Russian forces in Ukraine.

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The scam that Dubandlela said ensnared his son came to light on November 6, when South Africa said it had received distress calls from 17 men aged between 20 and 39 who said they were trapped in Donbas.

An investigation into the scam by an elite police unit known as "Hawks" focused on the alleged involvement of one of former President Jacob Zuma's daughters, Duduzile Zuma-Sambudla.

Zuma-Sambudla later resigned as lawmaker in the Umkhonto weSizwe opposition party led by her father. She has denied knowing of the scam. Zuma-Sambudla did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Her lawyer, Dali Mpofu, declined to comment.

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It is not just South Africans who unwittingly ended up in Ukraine's war. Kenya said on Nov. 12 over 200 of its citizens were fighting for Russia in Ukraine, and that recruiting agencies were still actively working to lure more Kenyans into the conflict. Authorities in Botswana have said two men were duped into joining the war under false promises of jobs.

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Ukraine's foreign minister said last month that more than 1,400 citizens from three dozen African countries were fighting alongside Russian forces in Ukraine. Russia does not provide details of non-Russians fighting in Ukraine.

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cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/6301143

Archived link

Australian infrastructure and property developer Goodman Group has teamed up with the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPP Investments) to establish a EUR 8 billion (CAD 12.9bn, AUD 14.1bn) European data center partnership.

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The 50/50 venture ... will comprise four projects totalling 435MW of primary power and 282MW of IT load, including two in Paris (PAR01 and PAR02), one in Frankfurt (FRA02), and one in Amsterdam (AMS01).

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According to the partners, all projects have secured power connections, planning permits, and have substantially progressed site infrastructure works, which they claim will enable construction commencement by 30 June 2026.

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“A portfolio of this size and quality – located in Europe’s FLAP markets [FLAP is acronym of “Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam and Paris”] – is rare. These powered locations are highly sought after to meet the rapidly growing requirement for cloud computing and AI adoption, particularly when they offer speed to market and delivery certainty. The quality and scale of this partnership make it ideal for our long-term relationship with CPP Investments. We’re pleased to be investing alongside them for their entry into the European data center market,” said Greg Goodman, CEO of Goodman Group.

The transaction will follow a phased approach with completion expected by March 2026, subject to closing conditions. The two companies have had a relationship since 2009, with investments across Australia, Asia, the Americas, and Europe.

CPP has made several significant investments in the digital infrastructure space. Most recently, in August, it announced an investment of C$225m (US$160m) to facilitate the expansion of a data center in Cambridge, Ontario, Canada.

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[Edit typo.]

Hi, trying to setup a server myself. Following the instructions from join lemmy it seems pretty doable on docker on my vps. What drives me crazy though is the thumbnail behavior. External images show thumbnails, but images uploaded to my server just show the link arrow in the thumbnail view. When i look at my browser devtools it just shows the rounded thumbnail icon. Is this expected behavior or not? If not, anyone can give guidance on checks to perform for thumbnail creation for uploaded images?

Thx, flutser

Specifically for a comercial gym, how do you structure them, what machines would you use for which muscles?

I've seen "Lemmy V1.0" being thrown around on the Fediverse and how it's supposed to resolve a lot of problems. I tried looking for a list of confirmed features, but I couldn't find anything. Does anyone know what is confirmed for that big update? Anything especially notable?

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

https://archive.is/1fiT9

I'm using CloudFlare to hide my home IP and to reduce traffic from clankers. However, I'm using the free tier, so how am I the product? What am I sacrificing? Is there another way to do the above without selling my digital soul?

Woke: Transcendentistry

Brazil's burgeoning space ambitions have suffered a significant setback after the inaugural commercial rocket launch from its Alcantara Space Center ended in a crash shortly after liftoff.

The incident has also dealt a blow to shares of South Korean satellite launch company Innospace.

The rocket initially followed its planned vertical trajectory after taking off at 10:13 p.m. local time (0113 GMT). However, just 30 seconds into its flight, an unspecified malfunction caused the craft to fall to the ground, according to Innospace CEO Kim Soo-jong.

The BlueBird Block-2 satellite, weighing over six tons, successfully reached orbit following a milestone launch by India's space agency ISRO. New Delhi hopes to use the same US-built rocket to fly humans into space.

Archive: https://archive.ph/53WRU

It's coming