cross-posted from: https://piefed.social/post/1304551

Archived

German chancellor Friedrich Merz has called on the EU to use frozen Russian assets to finance Ukraine’s war effort, arguing the move could unlock a €140bn loan for Kyiv and show “staying power” against Russian aggression.

In a stark reversal of Berlin’s previous scepticism about tapping seized Russian assets, Merz said the loan should be used to fund military equipment, with EU governments deciding on procurement alongside Kyiv.

The appeal from the leader of Europe’s largest economy and Ukraine’s biggest backer comes as the European Commission examines options to leverage the €194bn worth of Russian assets held at Euroclear, Belgium’s central security depository.

[...]

Say it was the size of Corsica and traveling at the speed of a reversing truck and bumped into a land mass. Would it still be an extinction level event?

(Alternative link.)

Excerpt:

After a careful study of gentile behavior toward the Jewish population in these two regions, our research indicates that there was a remarkable difference between actions taken in Bessarabia and Transnistria.

On the basis of more than two hundred Jewish survivor testimonies, a mail‐in survey with Jewish Holocaust survivors, interviews with over one hundred non‐Jewish Holocaust witnesses located on the territories of Bessarabia and Transnistria, and archival material from the Romanian, German, and Soviet governments, we found the following: the Bessarabian population was more likely to commit abusive actions against Jews (for example, beatings, theft, murder, rape), whereas the Transnistrian population was both (1) less likely to commit abuse and (2) more likely to behave in a cooperative manner (for example, providing food and hiding Jews from persecution).

We believe that the prewar state policies encouraging either animosity or affinity between ethnic groups greatly contribute to our understanding of this outcome.

[…]

Above all, we believe that there was a clear and overwhelming political commitment by the governing communists to achieve interethnic cooperation and societal integration during this interwar period, and government policies flowed from this commitment.

These changes in policies, we argue, led to the construction of interethnic cooperation that came to be internalized by the gentile population and then led to continued cooperative behavior even after the Soviet Union was replaced by the anti‐Semitic Romanian forces during World War II.

[…]

One of the most remarkable findings from all our research in Transnistria was actually a nonevent: we did not find evidence of a single anti‐Jewish pogrom anywhere in Transnistria.

Pogroms in Bessarabia were reported by survivors and are referenced in archival material and secondary sources, but the same cannot be said for Transnistria, as we found no evidence of such activities in survivors’ testimonies, government records, or the secondary sources we consulted.

More generally, survivors made very different remarks when commenting on the people from Transnistria, which had been located in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Some survivors stated it explicitly: “In Ukraine the attitude was better than in Bessarabia.” Many of the survivors stated that “the Ukrainians did help,” that “the Ukrainians were not bad,” that they had “a compassionate attitude,” or that “the majority of them gave us bread.”

One survivor, a native of the town of Orhei (Bessarabia), stated that of his experience in Transnistria, “one [a Jew] could not feel too much hatred, with the exception of the collaborators,” and his impression was that “the majority [of the local population] did not perceive the Jews with alienation […] but rather […] the majority perceived the occupying power as alien, but the Jews as theirs.”

Another survivor, this time a native of Transnistria, concluded that the population of his city (Moghilev‐Podolsk) had a sympathetic attitude toward the Jews and that only a small minority was comfortable with the fact that the Jews were forced from the city to the ghetto.

Several survivors recalled that, during the long marches toward the ghettos, many locals in Transnistria threw food from a distance and some peasant women even left packages with food on the road in front of the columns of Jews approaching.

[…]

There were also cases of Jewish children being sheltered by Transnistrian locals in their houses. The Romanian counterintelligence reports confirm the occurrence of cases of Jewish children being adopted by the Ukrainian population in order to save them from deportation.

Hilda Schwartz, a survivor of Kopaygorod, described her escape to a neighboring village, where a woman housed her first and later her mother and sister as well. After the liberation of the camp, Hilda’s family continued to live with the woman for another two months.

While we did find individual cases of theft, beatings, and murder committed by the local population in Transnistria, the incidence was substantially lower than in Bessarabia.

More importantly, the level of cooperation was overwhelmingly apparent in all sources we consulted, which was in stark contrast to what we found for Bessarabia. This becomes clearer with a quantified picture of events, which we present in the next section.

(Emphasis added.)

There is more that I wanted to include, but the excerpt is pretty lengthy as it is. If you have the time, I encourage you to read the rest of the article (which is forty‐two pages long, excluding the preface), but I should warn you that it does quote some slurs and describe some violent incidents.

For the book on this subject, see Diana Dumitru’s The State, Antisemitism, and Collaboration in the Holocaust: The Borderlands of Romania and the Soviet Union.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/49662403

Chobani is my favorite brand too

Hey, what do you guys use to share videos and screen share to your friends or colleagues? I'm looking to self host a video/call server that runs on webrtc (maybe?) with a fairly easy client experience. Something like mumble but for videos. Any suggestions?

A team of global scientists assessed that seven of nine so-called “planetary boundaries” — processes that regulate Earth’s stability, resilience and ability to sustain life — had now been crossed.

Climate change, biodiversity loss, deforestation, freshwater depletion, overuse of agricultural fertilisers, and the release of artificial chemicals and plastics into the environment were all already deep in the red.

In their new report, the scientists said all seven were “showing trends of increasing pressure — suggesting further deterioration and destabilisation of planetary health in the near future."

(Report can be found at https://www.planetaryhealthcheck.org/)

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/49664230

https://archive.ph/ooQgt

September the 26th, 2025 – Croatia has chosen to withhold its recognition of Palestine despite powerful European countries like the UK and France having recently done so.

As Morski writes, the Croatian Parliament has voted on the recognition of the state of Palestine. 121 MPs voted, 44 were in favour, 4 abstained and 73 were against recognising it. 56 MPs sent a joint letter to Prime Minister Andrej Plenković in which they urged him to recognise the state of Palestine as soon as possible and to suspend arms exports to Israel, 24sata reports.

Archived

In February 2025, Interpol issued an international arrest warrant for fugitive Moldovan billionaire Vladimir Plahotniuc. [On 25 September], he was escorted from Athens to Chișinău. Justice Minister Veronica Mihailov-Moraru stated that Plahotniuc will be immediately placed in a solitary cell in Prison No. 13.

[...]

Plahotniuc was detained on July 22 at Athens airport while attempting to fly to Dubai. Authorities seized 21 passports and identity documents allegedly issued by the governments of Moldova, Romania, Russia, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Iraq, and Vanuatu. Former Moldovan MP Constantin Țuțu, who was also detained, had five forged documents in his possession.

The Moldovan Prosecutor’s Office has filed charges against Plahotniuc in three cases, including the theft of $1 billion from the country’s banking system in 2014. According to investigators, Plahotniuc received $39 million and €3.5 million of that larger sum through entities connected with fellow fugitive oligarch Ilan Shor, who currently resides in Russia.

[...]

In Russia, Plahotniuc is also facing criminal prosecution for forming a criminal group, drug trafficking, and money laundering. However, Moldovan authorities believe that Moscow is using these cases as a tool to protect the Kremlin-aligned oligarch, and that he would not actually be punished if international authorities extradited him to Moscow instead of to Chișinău.

I saw a clip on reddit about such karen and now that scenario is stuck in my head, new fear unlocked.

What's the best response for each scenario:

You are:

1. Undocumented
2. Legal - Visa
3. Legal - Permanent Resident
4. Naturalized Citizen
5. Citizen at Birth

Archived version

The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) published a report on Sept. 23 detailing the vast scale of torture committed by Russian forces on Ukrainian civilians held in captivity in occupied territories.

Between June 1, 2023, and Sept. 10, 2025, OHCHR documented 508 cases of civilian detainees, including 392 men, 103 women, three girls, and nine boys. These include individuals of all age groups, from adolescents to older adults, as well as 15 persons with disabilities.

"We will leave you to rot. No one will find you. No one needs you. You don't exist. We'll bury you right here; only hungry dogs will find you," one civilian detainee said when describing the threats he received in captivity.

Moscow occupies roughly 20% of Ukrainian territory in the east and the south.

...

"People have been arbitrarily picked off the streets in occupied territory, charged under shifting legal bases and held for days, weeks, months, and even years, often with limited contact to their families," Volker Turk, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, said in the report.

...

Former detainees reported experiencing a broad array of torture and ill-treatment during their captivity. Commonly described methods included severe beatings with various objects such as batons and sticks, electric shocks to different body parts, mock executions, kickings, threats of death, and violence directed either to a detainee or their loved ones.

Detainees were also subjected to stress positions, such as "bent walking" and prolonged kneeling on concrete surfaces, and different forms of humiliation, including forced singing of the Russian anthem and patriotic songs.

According to the report, over 92 % of the 216 released civilian detainees interviewed since June 2023 provided consistent and detailed accounts of being subjected to torture or ill-treatment during their captivity. Additionally, 101 interviewees described witnessing torture or ill-treatment of other detainees.

...

One civilian detainee held in captivity by Russian soldiers said his captors beat him "heavily with a baseball bat, targeting legs, a knee, and head."

"They damaged my elbow, displaced my kneecap, and injured my feet. I told one of them to be a human being and shoot me dead. He replied that he would not waste ammo to kill me," he said.

...

"Torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment and punishment are absolutely prohibited and the life, well-being and dignity of persons deprived of their liberty must be respected," the report says.

Ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets said on May 9 that Ukrainian authorities had confirmed the ongoing detention of around 1,800 Ukrainian civilians by Russia. The actual figure is likely much greater, as verifying the information is difficult.

...

cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/4740484

Archived version

• Russia will run a 4.6 trillion ruble budget deficit in 2026, its fifth in a row, due to falling revenue and war spending.
• The VAT rate will rise to 22% next year, and more companies will be forced to pay it to boost revenue.
• Russia plans to borrow 2.2 trillion rubles and scrap tax breaks for small businesses to cover the widening gap.