Summary
Police say King Charles's brother is in custody and officers are carrying out searches at addresses in Berkshire and Norfolk - read the police statement in full

A widespread concern is what would happen to Dutch weapon systems if the Americans were to withdraw completely as an ally. For example, Dutch F-35 aircraft are dependent on American software updates. Yet, Tuinman isn't particularly worried about this.

"The F-35 is truly a shared product. The British make the Rolls-Royce engines, and the Americans simply need them too." And even if this mutual dependency doesn't result in software updates, the F-35, in its current state, is still a better aircraft than other types of fighters.

If you still want to upgrade despite everything, I'm going to say something I should never say, but I will anyway: you can jailbreak an F-35 just like an iPhone. (Crack it with your own software, ed.)

Hi, since there is no community dedicated for investing from EU out there I will ask here!

How do you approach investing for retirement?

All the US-boycotting movements suggests avoiding ETFs with US exposure but it also limits opportunities. From other hand we don’t like major corporations here on fediverse so I shouldn’t hope and profit from their growth. I guess euro stocks are more aligned with buy from EU movement and small cap stocks ETF may be more ethical choice. But I’m still not ready to do that move, as I have most of my savings in EUNL (Core MSCI World). I also have some exposure to gold and Apple specifically.

Or do you simply not pay attention to investing in stocks and more to investing in community/friends/skills?

I would love to read some your takes 😊

A South Korean court on Thursday sentenced the former president Yoon Suk Yeol to life imprisonment with labour over his failed martial law declaration in December 2024, finding him guilty of leading an insurrection and making him the first elected head of state in the country’s democratic era to receive the maximum custodial sentence.

Under South Korean law, the charge of leading an insurrection carries three possible sentences: death, life imprisonment with labour, or life imprisonment without labour.

Prosecutors had sought the death penalty, arguing that Yoon committed “a grave destruction of constitutional order” by mobilising troops to surround parliament and attempting to arrest political opponents during the six-hour crisis.

cross-posted from : https://lemmy.zip/post/59382082

A quarter of those it surveyed in Australia said the "mateship" they feel with other Australians, as well as how they "lend a hand" in times of need, such as natural disasters, were a source of pride.

cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/47682130

Restaurants and cafes are closing down in Russia at the fastest pace since the start of the war in Ukraine four years ago as consumption stalls even in affluent Moscow.

The closures, visible on streets from the capital to Vladivostok 6,500 km (4,000 miles) east on the Pacific Ocean, point to a significant slowdown in Russia's $2.8 trillion economy, which has so far proved surprisingly resilient in the face of stringent Western sanctions.

...

High interest rates, higher taxes, rising prices and a $20-per-barrel discount for Russian oil are taking their toll - even in Moscow, a vast urban area of 22 million people that has been largely insulated from the worst impact of Europe's deadliest war since World War Two.

"To let" signs are prominent in retail spaces across the capital. Sales of new light commercial vehicles and trucks, a good indicator for the health of the retail and construction industry, fell by 38% to 147,000 units in 2025 and have continued to fall in the first weeks of 2026, Autostat said.

Data from Sberbank, which as Russia's biggest bank sees the ripples of expenditure across the economy, showed that the fall in the number of catering outlets in January was the biggest since 2021 and that restaurant spending hit the lowest in three years in November-early December 2025. The change is especially striking as major Russian cities saw a restaurant boom before the pandemic, and some politicians bridled at what they saw as Moscow's "decadent frivolity" while soldiers were being killed or injured at the front.

Overall, real consumer spending growth fell to zero in February for the first time in two years, Sberbank data showed. Russia forecasts economic growth of 1.3% this year after 1% in 2025, 4.9% in 2024 and 4.1% in 2023. The International Monetary Fund forecasts 0.8% growth for 2026.

...

Russian sources say that while there are certainly problems in the economy, it is still performing remarkably well and they dismiss suggestions of its demise as premature. Besides, Putin is unlikely to change course on Ukraine due to restaurants shutting their doors, they said.

Nevertheless, Putin earlier this month told top economic officials to restore the growth rate and urged them not to simply monitor prices. Just 10 days later, the central bank cut rates by 50 basis points to 15.5%.

...

Borrowing costs - advertised by major banks at about 18-19% for unsecured loans to business - have hit small businesses and consumers hard, especially after some lenders imposed stricter limits on consumer credit.

...

Police have seized art posters from a Canberra music venue and bar that depict world leaders and others, including Donald Trump and Elon Musk, wearing Nazi uniforms, and are investigating whether new federal hate symbol laws were broken.

David Howe, the owner of Dissent Cafe and Bar in Canberra’s CBD, said his venue was shut down for about two hours on Wednesday night as police investigated a complaint about hate imagery relating to five posters in the window.

“I think it’s ludicrous to be perfectly honest,” he told Guardian Australia, describing the works as an “anti-fascist statement” and noting the shut down had caused the cancellation of an interstate band’s performance.

cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/47681631

A relative of Vladimir Putin owns a stake in the Russian tech giant VK, which in turn owns the new state-backed “everything app” MAX, independent investigative journalist Andrey Zakharov claimed on Wednesday.

Zakharov said that although VK had a complex ownership structure, its accounts for the first half of 2025 showed that its shareholders included the insurance company Sogaz. Prior to the war in Ukraine, Mikhail Shelomov, the son of one of Putin’s first cousins, was known to own a 12.47% stake in Sogaz through a St. Petersburg-based insurance company called Accept.

Although Sogaz made its list of shareholders private after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Zakharov was able to access Accept’s accounts and learnt that Shelomov has retained his stake in the company, with its 2024 accounts showing that his shares were worth approximately the same then as they did in 2019.

Zakharov thus concluded that Shelomov still owned a stake in VK, and therefore in MAX. When Zakharov managed to reach Shelomov by phone to ask him what his connection to the messenger was, Shelomov reportedly said “none” before hanging up.

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In addition to his stake in Sogaz, Shelomov also owns shares in Rossiya Bank, a controlling stake in which belongs to Putin’s friend Yury Kovalchuk, who also part owns VK.

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As investigative outlet Proekt revealed in 2019, Shelomov became a dollar billionaire in the late 2010s, but continued to spend his weekends at his dacha with an outdoor toilet, suggesting that he was simply a proxy holder of Putin’s wealth.

...

Web archive link

SERIOUS LOL THERES PUDDING ALL OVER THE PROOF AND I ALSO DONT WANT TO EAT WHATS LEFT OF THE PUDDING WHAT WAS THE POINT OF THIS WHO DID THIS

cross-posted from: https://piefed.social/c/collapse/p/1794000/senate-committee-features-climate-disinformation-the-atlas-network-and-dr-karl-s-clash

In Monday's hearing, the lobby group Coal Australia defended sending almost $4 million to "Australians for Prosperity" last financial year, which is a third-party group that attacked Labor, Greens and teal independent candidates during the 2025 federal election campaign.

Stuart Bocking, a former 2GB talkback radio host turned Coal Australia chief executive, denied it was a form of "astroturfing", telling senators that it was often easier to pay third-party groups to run political campaigns on one's behalf these days, because it left lobby groups to focus on other things.

"We're not engaged in astroturfing," he said.

Uh huh

The Atlas Network, first formed in 1981, partners with more than 500 free-market think tanks around the world, with 10 of them in Australia and New Zealand.

The ABC recently published a large piece which explains the history of the Atlas Network and what it is.

Dr Walker said Australians had little idea of the extent of the coordinated effort to prevent attempts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and transition to renewable forms of energy.

He explained how fossil fuel companies have funded certain think tanks globally for decades to push climate denial, anti-Indigenous rights and anti-renewable messages, a technique that has helped to obscure where ideas and money are coming from.

....

And finally, science communicator Karl Kruszelnicki (Dr Karl) appeared at the Senate committee on Monday.

In an attempt to establish common factual ground with One Nation senator Malcolm Roberts, Dr Karl asked Roberts if he accepted that global temperatures were rising.

Their interaction illustrated how public discussions about the science of climate change get bogged down so easily:

Dr Karl: Do you agree that the climate records show that the last 10 years have been the hottest on record worldwide?

Senator Roberts: The last 10 years in Australia have been cooler than the 1880s and 1890s in Australia.

Dr Karl: Hang on … Worldwide. Do you agree that the last 10 years have been the hottest years on record worldwide?

Senator Roberts: No I don't

The fuck :)

Dr Karl: I feel like I'm talking to a school child who says seven times two is not 14, but instead seven times two is a bicycle divided by the square root of a banana.

Roberts: That's one way of making out that I'm a fool.

You do that all by yourself

Dr Karl: But all the scientists disagree with you. 99.999 per cent of the scientists disagree with you.

Roberts: So now you're into consensus, which is a political tool.

Dr Karl: Hang on, consensus is a political tool? … So if all the scientists agree that seven times two is 14, that's a political tool?

Roberts: That's obviously a stupid comment, in my opinion.

Research suggests more than 75,000 killed in the first 16 months of conflict, 25,000 more than announced at the time

More than 75,000 people were killed in the first 16 months of the two-year war in Gaza, at least 25,000 more than the death toll announced by local authorities at the time, according to a study published on Wednesday in the Lancet medical journal.

The research also found that reporting by the Gaza health ministry about the proportion of women, children and elderly people among those killed was accurate.

A total of 42,200 women, children and elderly people died between 7 October 2023, when Hamas launched a surprise attack into Israel that prompted a devastating Israeli offensive into Gaza, and 5 January 2025, the study found. These deaths comprised 56% of violent deaths in Gaza.

“The combined evidence suggests that, as of 5 January 2025, 3-4% of the population of the Gaza Strip had been killed violently and there have been a substantial number of non-violent deaths caused indirectly by the conflict,” the authors of the study, a team including an economist, demographer, epidemiologist and survey specialists, wrote in the Lancet Global Health.

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