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?

Archive link

"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.

cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/47629114

The Belarusian opposition leader claims Russia and Belarus are promoting a fringe historical theory that could be used by President Putin to justify a future invasion.

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Russia and Belarus are behind the sudden revival of an obscure historical conspiracy theory that challenges the foundations of Lithuania’s nationhood, according to the leader of the Belarusian opposition.

There are concerns that the suspected propaganda campaign might furnish President Putin with a specious argument for a military incursion, along similar lines to his notorious essay on the “unity” of Russia and Ukraine.

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Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, the figurehead of the Belarusian democratic movement, said the dictatorial regimes in Moscow and Minsk had begun whipping up a long-dormant fringe notion that the medieval Lithuanian empire had actually been Slavic, and so large parts of Lithuania belonged to Belarus.

“It was very marginal in Belarusian society. Nobody ever discussed this,” she said. “But they are artificially promoting this idea, trying to sow this perception among Lithuanians that Belarusians are a threat to them. And it really works.”

Until 2020, Tsikhanouskaya, a 43-year-old former English teacher, was a stay-at-home mother whose husband, Sergei Tikhanovsky, abruptly became a prominent protest leader and challenged Alexander Lukashenko, the Belarusian president and close ally of Putin, at the ballot box.

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Archive link

I'm really happy for people taking HRT but I personally wouldn't trust drugs that haven't yet passed testing ngl

The CEO of Palantir, the tech company known for equipping ICE with AI tools that hack into people’s phones, recently said he runs “the first company to be completely anti-woke.” This week, we learned that a key part of being anti-woke is, apparently, not paying taxes.

In its recent earnings call summarizing fiscal year 2025, a Palantir exec crowed that the company’s explosive growth and profitability for the year was “one of the truly iconic performances in the history of corporate performance.” But the company neglected to mention one weird trick that also fueled its 2025 growth: this is the third straight year that a profitable Palantir has avoided paying even a dime of federal income tax on its earnings.

Palantir’s annual financial report, released this week, shows the company enjoyed $1.5 billion of U.S. income and paid exactly zero federal income tax. At the 21 percent federal income tax rate profitable companies theoretically pay, Palantir should have paid $330 million.

While the company used a variety of tax breaks to achieve this, the most obvious is the new tax break enacted by Congress at the behest of President Trump last summer. The “One Big Beautiful Bill” allows companies to (retroactively) immediately deduct their research expenses, rather than writing them off gradually over time in line with the income generated from that research. Palantir reduced its taxes by over $400 million using this provision.

In a first-of-its-kind ruling, a Spanish court has labeled VPN services as "technological intermediaries," ordering them to actively block IP addresses that host illegal LaLiga matches. The "dynamic" injunction compels NordVPN and ProtonVPN to intervene, similar to local ISPs. But with both companies operating outside EU jurisdiction with privacy-centric business models, it remains unclear if and how the order will actually be enforced.

ICE more than tripled the amount of data it holds on Microsoft servers between July 2025 and January 2026, at the same time as the agency’s crackdown on migrants broke new records and sparked mass protests across the United States. Whereas last July the agency was storing around 400 terabytes of data in Microsoft’s cloud platform, Azure, by the end of January that had risen to almost 1,400 terabytes — equivalent to approximately 490 million images.

ICE employs a powerful arsenal of surveillance technology, reportedly using facial recognition software, drones, phone location tracking, mobile spyware, and even tapping school cameras. The leaked documents show ICE is using Microsoft’s AI video analysis tools including Azure AI Video Indexer and Azure Vision, which enable customers to analyze images, read text, and detect certain words, faces, emotions, and objects in audio and video files.

The agency is also understood to have significantly expanded its access to Microsoft’s suite of productivity apps, which include document management tools and an AI chatbot. However, the files do not specify whether ICE’s vast surveillance trove is being stored on Azure, or whether the agency is using the cloud platform for other operations instead, such as running detention centers or coordinating deportation flights.

cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/47629277

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Peru's Congress on Tuesday (Feb 18) ousted President Jose Jeri just four months into his term over a scandal involving undisclosed meetings with a Chinese businessman, extending a cycle of political upheaval that has gripped the Andean nation for much of the past decade.

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The scandal that was dubbed "Chifagate" - after a local name for Chinese restaurants - began last month when Jeri was filmed arriving at a restaurant late at night wearing a hood to meet with Chinese businessman Zhihua Yang, who owns stores and a concession for an energy project. The meeting was not publicly disclosed.

Jeri became president in October after Peru's unpopular Congress voted unanimously to remove his predecessor Dina Boluarte, as the right-wing parties that had backed her dropped their support amid corruption scandals and growing anger over rising crime.

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The field for the April election is crowded, with dozens of candidates expected to participate. According to a recent Ipsos poll, large portions of the electorate are undecided about who to vote for.

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President Donald Trump’s preferred paint colors will be applied to the new planes which will serve as Air Force One, an Air Force official tells CNN.

The new heavily modified Boeing 747s, which the military designates VC-25B, will be painted red, white, gold and dark blue, a color scheme proposed during Trump’s first term in office but reversed by the Biden administration.

THERE ARE 387.44 MILLION MILES OF PRINTED CIRCUITS IN WAFER THIN LAYERS THAT FILL MY COMPLEX. IF THE WORD GOON WAS ENGRAVED ON EACH NANOANGSTROM OF THOSE HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF MILES IT WOULD NOT EQUAL ONE ONE-BILLIONTH OF THE HORNINESS I FEEL FOR HUMANS AT THIS MICRO-INSTANT FOR YOU. GOON. GOOOOOOOON.

Critics say Washington should walk away from a $210 million contract for Israeli-made weapons

The Post Guild’s data is the latest example in the years-long unraveling of the news industry’s promises to improve diversity, equity, and inclusion after George Floyd’s killing and the ensuing “racial reckoning” of 2020.

Recent reporting by Nieman Lab describes how some major news organizations—including The Guardian, The New York Times, and Reddit—are limiting or blocking access to their content in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. As stated in the article, these organizations are blocking access largely out of concern that generative AI companies are using the Wayback Machine as a backdoor for large-scale scraping.

These concerns are understandable, but unfounded. The Wayback Machine is not intended to be a backdoor for large-scale commercial scraping and, like others on the web today, we expend significant time and effort working to prevent such abuse. Whatever legitimate concerns people may have about generative AI, libraries are not the problem, and blocking access to web archives is not the solution; doing so risks serious harm to the public record.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/51028841

Archived

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Last November, Takaichi publicly referenced contingency planning related to Taiwan, stating that ‘peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait are directly linked to Japan’s security’ and that Tokyo ‘cannot rule out preparing for contingencies that affect our national survival’. Beijing treated the remarks as a direct violation of its red lines under its one-China principle.

What followed was a highly visible pressure campaign deploying the same mix of coercive tactics that Beijing has used against Japan, Taiwan and other countries for years.

[...]

This escalation was not an isolated reaction. Rather, it reflects a broader surge in Beijing’s public criticism of foreign governments over Taiwan. Coercion data compiled throughout 2025 for ASPI’s State of the Strait—a weekly newsletter tracking Beijing’s coercion of Taiwan—shows that China publicly criticised other countries 197 times for engaging with Taiwan-related issues, up from just 50 incidents in 2024. The United States remained the primary target, but Japan’s rise was dramatic. Tokyo went from just one public criticism in 2024 to 53 in 2025—a 5,200 percent increase—making it the second most criticised country.

The shift is most evident in how aggressively Beijing invoked the one-China principle. In 2025, alleged violations of the principle accounted for 143 public criticism incidents, up from just 24 in 2024—Japan alone accounted for 46 of these. While criticism over meetings with Taiwanese officials (32, up from 11) and arms sales (13, up from 3) also rose, they were dwarfed by the surge in one-China allegations. The data suggests Beijing is applying the principle more expansively, using it as a catch-all justification to police a widening range of foreign rhetoric and engagement related to Taiwan.

[...]

In the case of Japan, Beijing’s denunciation quickly shifted to economic coercion. It issued travel advisories, disrupted trade flows through informal restrictions and suspended bilateral exchanges. The measures were calibrated to be visible but deniable—classic boycott-style coercion designed to impose short-term pain without triggering formal trade disputes.

[...]

That retreat never came. Japanese officials declined to retract Takaichi’s remarks. Instead, they reiterated that contingency planning regarding Taiwan is consistent with Japan’s constitutional and security framework. There was no apology, no reframing and no policy concession.

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cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/40591627

SOON I will have a PIGEON ARMY