Open valve in heating system affects 300 to 400 items just weeks after a brazen jewel theft raised security concerns

A water leak in late November damaged several hundred works in the Louvre’s Egyptian department, the Paris museum said on Sunday, weeks after a brazen jewel theft raised concerns over its infrastructure.

“Between 300 and 400 works” were affected by the leak discovered on 26 November, the museum’s deputy administrator, Francis Steinbock, said, describing them as “Egyptology journals” and “scientific documentation” used by researchers.

The damaged items dated from the late 19th and early 20th centuries and were “extremely useful” but “by no means unique”, Steinbock added.

cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/43239009

Web archive link

Here are the documents (in Russian).

• After Russia launched its full-scale war against Ukraine, China decided to purchase Russian aircraft, combat vehicles, ammunition, and equipment to enhance its paratroopers.
• Chinese officers and representatives of defense manufacturers have repeatedly visited Russia to inspect examples of weaponry and negotiate deals.
• In 2023 and 2024, Beijing entered into several confidential contracts with Moscow to acquire Russian armaments, with the funds intended for Russian arms manufacturers being subject to international sanctions.
• The known deadline for implementing some of the contracts is 2027.
• The Kyiv Independent has identified several dozen Chinese military personnel and employees of arms manufacturers who continued to cooperate with the Russian arms industry, thereby violating international sanctions.

...

A little over a month after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the Russian government received a request from China, according to leaked correspondence reviewed by the Kyiv Independent.

In it, Beijing asked to buy a set of weapons and armored vehicles for airborne troops. The request, numbered ZH2022-Y53, was received on April 7, 2022, the documents show.

Three weeks later, according to the documents, Russia's Federal Service for Military-Technical Cooperation instructed Rosoboronexport, the state-owned company responsible for all arms exports from Russia, to demonstrate Russian air-droppable combat vehicles to a Chinese delegation.

...

The agreements are set to provide sanctioned Russian arms manufacturers with revenue from the export of their weaponry to China. In return, China will receive weaponry and equipment for its airborne forces, the PLAAF Airborne Corps, which have been strengthening amid expectations of an attack on Taiwan.

...

A key element of the cooperation is the steady flow of Chinese officers and defense industry officials who have been traveling to Russia since 2023 for closed-door talks. By piecing together leaked Russian documents with photos and travel data, the Kyiv Independent was able to identify many of these previously anonymous visitors by name and rank.

Chinese Major General Fan Jianjun was photographed during his visit to the annual Russian arms forum in the Moscow suburbs in August 2023. He was pictured showing then-Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu models of Chinese weaponry.

Fan Jianjun represented China's highest military authority, the Central Military Commission of the People's Republic of China (PRC). In 2023, he led the Bureau of Military Equipment and Technical Cooperation within the Equipment Development Department of the PRC Central Military Commission.

The Bureau's procurement division purchases imported weapons and equipment for China, including from Russia.

None of the Russian media that covered the event mentioned who was in the photo next to Shoigu.

...

Web archive link

Here are the documents (in Russian).

• After Russia launched its full-scale war against Ukraine, China decided to purchase Russian aircraft, combat vehicles, ammunition, and equipment to enhance its paratroopers.
• Chinese officers and representatives of defense manufacturers have repeatedly visited Russia to inspect examples of weaponry and negotiate deals.
• In 2023 and 2024, Beijing entered into several confidential contracts with Moscow to acquire Russian armaments, with the funds intended for Russian arms manufacturers being subject to international sanctions.
• The known deadline for implementing some of the contracts is 2027.
• The Kyiv Independent has identified several dozen Chinese military personnel and employees of arms manufacturers who continued to cooperate with the Russian arms industry, thereby violating international sanctions.

...

A little over a month after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the Russian government received a request from China, according to leaked correspondence reviewed by the Kyiv Independent.

In it, Beijing asked to buy a set of weapons and armored vehicles for airborne troops. The request, numbered ZH2022-Y53, was received on April 7, 2022, the documents show.

Three weeks later, according to the documents, Russia's Federal Service for Military-Technical Cooperation instructed Rosoboronexport, the state-owned company responsible for all arms exports from Russia, to demonstrate Russian air-droppable combat vehicles to a Chinese delegation.

...

The agreements are set to provide sanctioned Russian arms manufacturers with revenue from the export of their weaponry to China. In return, China will receive weaponry and equipment for its airborne forces, the PLAAF Airborne Corps, which have been strengthening amid expectations of an attack on Taiwan.

...

A key element of the cooperation is the steady flow of Chinese officers and defense industry officials who have been traveling to Russia since 2023 for closed-door talks. By piecing together leaked Russian documents with photos and travel data, the Kyiv Independent was able to identify many of these previously anonymous visitors by name and rank.

Chinese Major General Fan Jianjun was photographed during his visit to the annual Russian arms forum in the Moscow suburbs in August 2023. He was pictured showing then-Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu models of Chinese weaponry.

Fan Jianjun represented China's highest military authority, the Central Military Commission of the People's Republic of China (PRC). In 2023, he led the Bureau of Military Equipment and Technical Cooperation within the Equipment Development Department of the PRC Central Military Commission.

The Bureau's procurement division purchases imported weapons and equipment for China, including from Russia.

None of the Russian media that covered the event mentioned who was in the photo next to Shoigu.

...

IN FEBRUARY 2024, without warning, YouTube deleted the account of independent British journalist Robert Inlakesh.

His YouTube page featured dozens of videos, including numerous livestreams documenting Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank. In a decade covering Palestine and Israel, he had captured video of Israeli authorities demolishing Palestinian homes, police harassing Palestinian drivers, and Israeli soldiers shooting at Palestinian civilians and journalists during protests in front of illegal Israeli settlements. In an instant, all of that footage was gone.

In July, YouTube deleted Inlakesh’s private backup account. And in August, Google, YouTube’s parent company, deleted his Google account, including his Gmail and his archive of documents and writings.

The tech giant initially claimed Inlakesh’s account violated YouTube’s community guidelines. Months later, the company justified his account termination by alleging his page contained spam or scam content.

However, when The Intercept inquired further about Inlakesh’s case, nearly two years after his account was deleted, YouTube provided a separate and wholly different explanation for the termination: a connection to an Iranian influence campaign.

Israeli operatives are conducting widespread surveillance of US forces and allies stationed at a new US base in the country’s south, according to sources briefed on disputes about open and covert recordings of meetings and discussions.

The scale of intelligence gathering at the Civil-Military Coordination Center (CMCC) prompted the US commander of the base, Lt Gen Patrick Frank, to summon an Israeli counterpart for a meeting to tell him that “recording has to stop here”.

Staff and visitors from other countries have also raised concerns about Israel recording inside the CMCC. Some have been told to avoid sharing sensitive information because of the risk it could be collected and exploited.

"The IDF documents and summarises meetings in which it is present through protocols, as any professional organisation of this nature does in a transparent and agreed upon manner,” the Israeli military said in a statement.

“The claim that the IDF is gathering intelligence on its partners in meetings which the IDF is an active participant is absurd.”

• Chinese AI companies are quietly tapping into Kenya’s young workforce, hiring students and recent graduates to label thousands of videos a day.
• The work is done through opaque networks of middlemen and WhatsApp groups that operate like digital factory floors.
• Kenya’s weak labor protections and soaring youth unemployment have made it a hot spot for cheap AI labor, prompting officials and unions to warn of a new form of digital colonialism as the government rushes to draft regulations.

Is it bad takes, controversial posts, or something else?

This is a frontend for the asknostr hashtag on nostr, a more decentralized fediverse alternative.

More questions are needed, if you can help. You can sign up instantly with no email address or anything, but it's hard for the user base to grow, because the questions are usually too focused on a small (honestly cultish) number of topics. I find that odd when anyone can ask anything.

The website has content filters to remove spam and stuff from its own display, but the nostr protocol is open source, and you can self host your own backups of removed posts and display them on your own website without losing any data. I also haven't heard of anyone getting a "ban" where all their past posts are filtered at once / they have to stop posting.

As someone who constantly gets banned from places like asklemmy for being a radical communist or whatever, it's especially important to me that there are no bans here, because it means I don't have to worry about admins repeatedly wiping out time I invest in helping people with answers to their questions.

Note: asknostr.site is still early in development and kinda buggy. Remember you can also post to it through the asknostr hashtag from other nostr apps if you want.

In his first major guidance to the Air Force, the newly appointed Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Kenneth Wilsbach emphasized a need for the “recapitalization” of nuclear weapons — an apparent departure from decades of Air Force teaching that the United States maintains nuclear weapons solely for deterrence.

“We will advocate relentlessly for programs like the F-47, Collaborative Combat Aircraft as well as nuclear force recapitalization through the Sentinel program and the B-21,” Wilsbach wrote in a memo dated November 3, referring to planned upgrades to nuclear missiles and stealth bombers.

“This memo of unity and warfighting spirit reflects current Department of War and Pete Hegseth language, but that language is also inadequate because it assumes U.S. military capability is the best in the world and getting better, a dangerous and flawed assumption,” said Karen Kwiatkowski, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel and former Pentagon analyst who exposed the politicization of intelligence before the Iraq War.

• Release Date: Jan 15, 2026
• Description: CASSETTE BOY is a multi-award-winning and nominated RPG based on puzzles inspired by the rules of quantum physics, where the world around us vanishes when it is out of sight. The game was recognized at BitSummit Drift 2024, where, in addition to being nominated for the Visual Excellence Award, CASSETTE BOY won the Grand Jury Vermillion Gate Award. It was also showcased at the Tokyo Game Show 2024, earning a spot on the prestigious Selected Indie Games 80 list.
• Price: TBA
• Link: TBA

Reminds me a little bit of Fez, with puzzles relating to rotating your screen.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/54563207

A man who spent a decade and a half working as a Chinese spy has shared details of some of his missions with Radio-Canada, including what he knows about a Chinese dissident who died in B.C. in 2022.

"From 2008 to 2023, my real job was to work for China's secret police. It's a means for political repression," said "Eric," who was interviewed in the suburbs of Melbourne, Australia. "Its main targets are dissidents who criticize the Chinese Communist Party."

Eric shared a variety of documents — including financial records, secret money transfers and the names of spies — with journalists from the Australian Broadcasting Corp. and the Washington-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, of which CBC/Radio-Canada is a partner.

For example, while on assignment in Cambodia, his cover was with the Prince Group, a multibillion-dollar conglomerate with interests in real estate and financial and consumer services. (The company did not reply to messages from Radio-Canada.)

In 2020, Eric said he was tasked with snooping on a dissident named Hua Yong, an artist and hardcore opponent of China's Communist Party who eventually ended up on B.C.'s Sunshine Coast.

(The Chinese Embassy in Ottawa did not reply to multiple messages about the details of this story, including an interview request.)

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/54562953

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/54562583

TL;DR: Mozilla’s translation bot on Support Mozilla (that is currently overwriting user contributions is based on the closed source, copyright infringing LLM, Google Gemini. This is in spite of Mozilla claiming that they are at the forefront of open source AI, and belies their exhortations to choose to build open source AI and data sets. Although Mozilla has experience in attracting open contributions for data sets in projects like Common Voice, Mozilla is using a closed data set to overwrite open contributions. Since (paid) Gemini queries do not train the model, Mozillians can expect to correct errors every time the bot automatically updates an article.

cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/5998772

Japan has protested after Chinese fighter jets locked radars on Japanese aircraft as tensions between the two nations worsened.

Locking radar onto an aircraft is considered a threat because it can signal a potential attack. Japan said there were two such incidents Saturday off its southern Okinawa islands.

Japan said it scrambled fighter jets in response to the Chinese J-15 fighter jets, while Beijing accused Tokyo of "harassing" its forces during a training exercise. No injuries or damage were reported.

...

Last week, China and Japan's coast guards gave conflicting accounts of a confrontation near disputed islands in the East China Sea.

...

A Japanese defence ministry official said the intention of the Chinese J-15 jets was "unclear", but added that ... the Japanese aircraft "did not do anything that could be considered a provocation".

...

This comes two weeks after Japan scrambled aircraft when a suspected Chinese drone was detected off Yonaguni, island near Taiwan. Tokyo has said it is planning to deploy missiles from Yonaguni in a move that has angered Beijing.

...

several months ago I wrote about leaving floor nursing for moving patients in beds. I also posted it would mean a 20% financial hit.

Turns out the financial hit is 2%. I took the job.

Several of my former colleagues, after seeing me now that I switched jobs cannot hide their disbelief and shock. Some of the things I've heard: "what a waste, you can do more." "You are a RN and you choose to move beds?", "Haven't you worked with us?", "Oh no, don't tell me you're moving beds now." and more.

I've always been very individualistic and never cared much about what others think about me. This new job means less stress and I can sleep better.

But it's not only other RNs who tell me this: doctors as well, very knowledgeable ones.

Am I doing something wrong, when so many people, some of them much smarter than me tell me what I'm doing is stupid?

Going back to my old job doesn't mean going back to my old department, just back to floor nursing.