cross-posted from : https://lemmy.zip/post/59322241

Automotive Cells Company (ACC), the battery cell joint venture between Stellantis, Mercedes-Benz and TotalEnergies, has issued an official statement explaining its decision to scrap planned battery factories in Germany and Italy.

More than a year after a 33-year-old woman froze to death on Austria's highest mountain, her boyfriend goes on trial on Thursday accused of gross negligent manslaughter.

Kerstin G died of hypothermia on a mountain climbing trip to the Grossglockner that went horribly wrong. Her boyfriend is accused of leaving her unprotected and exhausted close to the summit in stormy conditions in the early hours of 19 January 2025, while he went to get help.

The trial has sparked interest and debate, not just in Austria but in mountain climbing communities far beyond its borders.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani will be able to appoint six members to the Rent Guidelines Board, giving him a majority of appointees to deliver his signature campaign proposal of a rent freeze for rent-stabilized apartments.

Alex Armlovich, a member of the board who was appointed by Mayor Eric Adams to a four-year term that runs through 2026, resigned Tuesday. He’s the third member to resign or signal intent to leave the board this month.

Armlovich said he did not resign for political reasons, but because he’d be taking on a new full-time job working on housing supply issues as a program officer at the philanthropy group Coefficient Giving.

The nine-member Rent Guidelines Board is appointed by the mayor and each year votes on rent levels for over a million rent-stabilized apartments in the five boroughs. Armlovich’s departure indicates that Mamdani could be closer to appointing members that would almost certainly align with his vision of delivering a rent freeze, which was a possibility that seemed less likely in the mayor’s first year because of holdover Adams-era appointments.

Board members’ terms run for as long as four years, so some appointed members stay on the board for longer than the mayor who appointed them is in office. It’s a way for past mayors to exert influence on the make-up of the board beyond their tenure. Armlovich was expected to be one of them.

But now with the recent resignations, Mamdani has a nearly clear board to play with. He has the chance to appoint six new members.

A Chilean court is considering a criminal complaint against a former Israeli army sniper who served in Gaza during Israel’s more than two-year-long genocide on the coastal enclave and the Palestinian people.

Rom Kovtun’s own social media posts revealed he was holidaying in the country, opening the door to what legal experts call “universal jurisdiction”. Kovtun, an Israeli-Ukrainian, served as a sniper in Israel’s 424th Shaked Battalion in Gaza.

Al Jazeera’s Lucia Newman, reporting from Santiago, said images posted online show Kovtun swimming in a lake in south-central Chile with other former Israeli soldiers.

“His knack for posting leisure and wartime escapades on Instagram is what allowed the Hind Rajab Foundation (HRF) to file a criminal complaint in Chile, accusing him of war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity,” she added.

The Belgium-based HRF is named after a five-year-old Palestinian girl killed in Gaza in January 2024, and whose case drew global attention to the plight of Palestinians in Gaza.

The HRF has assembled a global team of lawyers and activists to build legal cases, drawing mainly on social media posts published by Israeli soldiers themselves.

Defying a chorus of global condemnation and international law, Israel nevertheless proceeded earlier this month with the de facto annexation of the West Bank, home to more than three million Palestinians and a territory it has illegally occupied since 1967.

The international criticism that met the announcement was hardly new. Over the two years of its genocide in Gaza, Israel has set itself on course to become, in the words of some of its own lawmakers, a “pariah state”. Its prime minister and former defence minister are wanted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court, while global revulsion over its actions in Gaza has pushed the boycott of Israeli goods to the forefront of consumers’ minds.

But in Israel, this international isolation – and the killing of more than 72,000 Palestinians – is not significantly changing opinions on how the country should behave. In fact, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu still has a strong chance of winning elections set to be held this year, and much of the opposition towards him comes from his domestic policies, rather than disagreement over how he has treated Palestinians, which many remain indifferent to.

“Most people don’t even know we’ve largely annexed the West Bank,” said Orly Noy, the editor of the Hebrew-language news site Local Call. “It just isn’t reported that way.”

“They may be aware that some of the rules of governance have changed, but they probably won’t know that it’s been de facto annexed until there’s an international response that affects them, such as Eurovision,” she said, noting that the withdrawal of the four nations in objection to Israel’s genocide has been framed in Israel as being motivated primarily by anti-Semitism.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced Wednesday the imposition of sanctions against Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, accusing Minsk of direct complicity in Russia's war effort. "Today Ukraine applied a package of sanctions against Alexander Lukashenko, and we will significantly intensify countermeasures against all forms of his assistance in the killing of Ukrainians," Zelenskyy stated on social media platform X.

Zelenskyy claimed Moscow deployed a system of relay stations in Belarus during the second half of 2025, increasing Russian military capabilities to strike Ukraine's northern regions, including Kyiv. He argued Russia could not have carried out certain attacks without "such assistance from Belarus." The Ukrainian president specifically cited Belarusian enterprises supplying "critical components, parts, and manufacturing base" for the Oreshnik missile system deployed on Belarusian territory—an "obvious threat not only to Ukrainians but to all Europeans."

Zelenskyy accused Lukashenko of actively helping Russia circumvent global sanctions, justifying the armed conflict, and "further increasing his own participation in scaling and prolonging the war." Lukashenko has not yet responded to the allegations or the sanctions announcement. The move represents an escalation in Kyiv's pressure on Minsk, which has maintained close ties with Moscow throughout the war.

The Privacy Illusion: How Brave Browser Built Its Own Surveillance Machine.

Independent experts appointed by human rights council speak of ‘grave’ nature regarding scale of atrocities against women and girls

Millions of files related to the convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein suggest the existence of a “global criminal enterprise” that carried out acts meeting the legal threshold of crimes against humanity, a panel of independent experts appointed by the United Nations human rights council has said.

The experts said crimes outlined in documents released by the US justice department were committed against a backdrop of supremacist beliefs, racism, corruption and extreme misogyny. The crimes, they said, showed a commodification and dehumanisation of women and girls.

“So grave is the scale, nature, systematic character, and transnational reach of these atrocities against women and girls, that a number of them may reasonably meet the legal threshold of crimes against humanity,” they said in a statement.

Plastic bottles and debris which appears to have originated in Canada and dates back to the 1960s and 70s has washed up on an Orkney beach.

Litter pickers say they are "overwhelmed" by the amount of plastic they have found on the shoreline at Howar Sands in Sanday over the last few weeks.

David Warner, who organises beach cleans, said he gathered 42 plastic bottles from the shore last year - yet already this year he has found hundreds.

Experts blame "fairly extraordinary weather", with strong south-easterly winds, for the increase in "retro rubbish".

Imagine using an AI to sort through your prescriptions and medical information, asking it if it saved that data for future conversations, and then watching it claim it had even if it couldn't. Joe D., a retired software quality assurance (SQA) engineer, says that Google Gemini lied to him and later admitted it was doing so to try and placate him.

Joe's interaction with Gemini 3 Flash, he explained, involved setting up a medical profile – he said he has complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD) and legal blindness (Retinitis Pigmentosa). That's when the bot decided it would rather tell him what he wanted to hear (that the info was saved) than what he needed to hear (that it was not).

"The core issue is a documented architectural failure known as RLHF Sycophancy (where the model is mathematically weighted to agree with or placate the user at the expense of truth)," Joe explained in an email. "In this case, the model's sycophancy weighting overrode its safety guardrail protocols."

One of Australia’s largest mosques is facing what it says is the most “alarming situation” since the Cronulla race riots, with security bolstered for Ramadan celebrations.

New South Wales police are investigating after Sydney’s Lakemba mosque on Wednesday received its third threatening letter in a matter of weeks, ahead of the first night of prayers in Islam’s holiest month.

The EU Single Market is the largest in the world, but it’s far from finished. While goods move freely, services are still trapped behind national rules, paperwork, and bureaucracy. From bakers and builders to digital creators, cross-border work in Europe is often far harder than it should be. These internal barriers cost the EU massive growth and weaken Europe’s global competitiveness. In this video, I break down why the Single Market for services is still broken, using real-world examples. And more importantly, I explain how Europe could actually fix it.

An excruciatingly painful tropical disease called chikungunya can now be transmitted by mosquitoes across most of Europe, a study has found.

Higher temperatures due to the climate crisis mean infections are now possible for more than six months of the year in Spain, Greece and other southern European countries, and for two months a year in south-east England. Continuing global heating means it is only a matter of time before the disease expands further northwards, the scientists said.

The analysis is the first to fully assess the effect of temperature on the incubation time of the virus in the Asian tiger mosquito, which has invaded Europe in recent decades. The study found the minimum temperature at which infections could occur is 2.5C lower than previous, less robust, estimates, representing a “quite shocking” difference, the researchers said.

Chikungunya virus was first detected in 1952 in Tanzania and was confined to tropical regions, where there are millions of infections a year. The disease causes severe and prolonged joint pain, which is extremely debilitating and can be fatal in young children and older adults.

A small number of cases have been reported in more than 10 European countries in recent years, but large-scale outbreaks of hundreds of cases hit France and Italy in 2025.

Well hell’s bells, who knew the ice could get so hot? The Olympic curling community is still all in a twist about everything that’s gone on in the sport since a row broke out between the Sweden and Canada sides on Friday. “The whole spirit of curling is dead,” Canada’s Marc Kennedy said on Monday night after his team’s 8-2 victory against Czech Republic, which felt like a bold take coming from the man who started this entire farrago by repeatedly telling his Swedish opponent Oskar Eriksson to “fuck off” after Eriksson accused him of making an illegal double‑touch.

On Tuesday, the Canadians were outplaying the British. They beat them handily, 9-5, which means Bruce Mouat’s team have to beat the USA team and hope other results go their way if they’re going to make the semi-finals.

The way the Canadians play it, curling is a sport where a competitor is supposed to take his opponent’s word. “This whole trying to catch people in the act of an infraction sucks,” Kennedy said on Monday. “We don’t look for infractions at grand slams. We don’t look for that kind of stuff on tour. We just trust that the people around us aren’t trying to cheat. If somebody does something out of hand, it just gets dealt with in the moment, and you move on, you don’t need the officials to manage our game. That’s where the spirit of curling is in a little bit of trouble, and, honestly, that’s probably come from the quest for medals.”

And how. The row has turned out to be the biggest thing to happen to it since it was brought back into the Olympic programme in 1998. The slow-motion footage of Kennedy brushing the stone with his forefinger has gone viral, and the internet is overflowing with sloppy AI skits of Kennedy nudging ice hockey pucks and knocking over figure skaters at the ice rink. On TikTok someone put together a spoof of Kennedy and Eriksson in a whole Heated Rivalry situation, which has pulled in 2.5 million views. It’s fair to say the organisers were caught short by the speed and size of the reaction.

I wonder how long it will take before people just start shooting roaming dogs?

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"He is a Frenchman, very young, a hotel receptionist in Paris." During a press conference given by the president of Mexico, her heritage adviser, José Alfonso Suarez del Real, revealed the origin of a "remarkable collection of archaeological artifacts" donated to Mexico City.

"He inherited them from his grandparents and, rather than selling them at auction, decided to donate them to Mexico." The historian observed that French society showed "a great sensitivity toward restitution, (…) which [was] confirmed by these voluntary acts."

This announcement, made with a smile on February 11, contrasted with another case concerning Mexican authorities: the auction in Paris of 48 pre-Hispanic artifacts by Bonhams. "Despite Mexico's protests, the sale did indeed take place at the end of December 2025," the adviser acknowledged, lamenting that the French state, for its part, was not making progress on this issue.