US Demoract Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez stated during a panel at the Munich Security Conference on Friday that unconditional American military aid to ‘Israel’ has enabled a genocide in Gaza.

Speaking on the future of foreign policy, she argued that such aid contributed to the avoidable deaths of thousands of women and children amid the ongoing ‘Israeli’ assault on Gaza.

In her remarks, Ocasio-Cortez invoked the Leahy laws, US statutes that prohibit military assistance to foreign entities implicated in gross human rights violations without accountability.

She contended that providing aid without conditions "does not make sense" and directly facilitated the genocide, linking it to civilian casualties in Gaza.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has backed Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban's leadership during a visit to Budapest. Nationalist leader Orban faces a strong opposition challenge ahead of elections in April.

Rubio endorsed Orban's efforts to secure a fifth consecutive term despite lagging in the polls, praising his rapport with the US leader.

Hungarian opposition leader Peter Magyar launched his party's election campaign in Budapest on Sunday, promising to restore Hungary's Western orientation amid concerns about democratic backsliding.

A former insider in Orban's nationalist Fidesz party, Magyar broke with former colleagues to quickly form the center-right Tisza party. Independent polls show he holds a significant lead ahead of the vote on April 12.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/43201706

Rock structure which served as backdrop to countless proposals disappears into the Adriatic after storm

The famous arch of the sea stacks at Sant’Andrea in Melendugno, Puglia, Italy, popularly known as Lovers’ Arch, collapsed on Valentine’s Day after strong storm surges and heavy rain swept across southern Italy.

The rocky arch, one of the best-known natural landmarks on the Adriatic coast, got its name as it served as a backdrop for wedding proposals, selfies and postcards, and was one of the most recognisable symbols of the Salento, one of Italy’s most heavily visited tourist areas.

“It is a devastating blow to the heart,” said Melendugno’s mayor, Maurizio Cisternino. “One of the most famous tourist features of our coastline and of the whole of Italy has disappeared.”

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/43249696

from +972’s Sunday Recap
+972Magazine [published in Israel]
Feb. 15, 2026

Also:

• ‘I would never do it again’: Inside the struggle to enter and leave Gaza
• Released into exile, Palestinian prisoners navigate freedom on Israel’s terms
• A Palestinian influencer spent 27 months in Israeli prison — for social media posts
• To confront Israeli fascism, we need a new Jewish-Arab party
• The false symmetry of Jewish-Arab partnership
• PODCAST: Documenting the settler takeover of the West Bank

How silly of me

Seriously, what the heck is a dort?! I'm scared.

A top European Union official on Sunday rejected the notion that Europe faces "civilizational erasure," pushing back at criticism of the continent by the Trump administration.

EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas addressed the Munich Security Conference a day after U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio offered a somewhat reassuring message to European allies. He struck a less aggressive tone than JD Vance did in lecturing them at the same gathering last year but maintained a firm tone on Washington's intent to reshape the trans-Atlantic alliance and push its policy priorities.

Kallas alluded to criticism in the U.S. national security strategy released in December, which asserted that economic stagnation in Europe "is eclipsed by the real and more stark prospect of civilizational erasure." It suggested that Europe is being enfeebled by its immigration policies, declining birth rates, "censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition" and a "loss of national identities and self-confidence."

Rock structure which served as backdrop to countless proposals disappears into the Adriatic after storm

The famous arch of the sea stacks at Sant’Andrea in Melendugno, Puglia, Italy, popularly known as Lovers’ Arch, collapsed on Valentine’s Day after strong storm surges and heavy rain swept across southern Italy.

The rocky arch, one of the best-known natural landmarks on the Adriatic coast, got its name as it served as a backdrop for wedding proposals, selfies and postcards, and was one of the most recognisable symbols of the Salento, one of Italy’s most heavily visited tourist areas.

“It is a devastating blow to the heart,” said Melendugno’s mayor, Maurizio Cisternino. “One of the most famous tourist features of our coastline and of the whole of Italy has disappeared.”

WASHINGTON (AP) — White House border czar Tom Homan said Sunday that more than 1,000 immigration agents have left Minnesota’s Twin Cities area and hundreds more will depart in the days ahead as part of the Trump administration’s drawdown of its immigration enforcement surge.

A “small” security force will stay for a short period to protect remaining immigration agents and will respond “when our agents are out and they get surrounded by agitators and things got out of control,” Homan told CBS’ “Face the Nation.” He did not define “small.”

He also said agents will keep investigating fraud allegations as well as the anti-immigration enforcement protest that disrupted a service at a church service.

“We already removed well over 1,000 people, and as of Monday, Tuesday, we’ll remove several hundred more,” Homan said. “We’ll get back to the original footprint.”

Meta, the parent company for Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, plans to introduce new face scanning tech while people are distracted by current political turbulence. The Trump-adjacent corporation plans to package the feature in new smart glasses. An internal Meta document seen by the New York Times (NYT) says:

We will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns.

The media outlet provides further info on what the tech would allow:

The feature, internally called “Name Tag,” would let wearers of smart glasses identify people and get information about them via Meta’s artificial intelligence assistant.

The cynical internal memo likely references the tumult currently sweeping the US amidst the mass criminality carried out by the brownshirts of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Trump’s personal paramilitary goons have been violating laws left and right as they beat and kill their way around the US, under the pretext of an immigration crackdown.

ICE have already made extensive use of face scanning tech. Meta’s glasses would represent another privacy violating move, capturing massive amounts of personal data which may ultimately find its way into the hands of an authoritarian state. Meta has form when it comes to handing over info about customers to governments.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has moved to force a drone manufacturer out of the city-owned Brooklyn Navy Yard, with critics accusing City Hall of deliberately targeting the company over its links to ‘Israel’ and its role in monitoring the Gaza Strip border.

The Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation declined to renew the lease of Easy Aerial just six weeks after Mamdani took office, a decision that has been framed by allies of the mayor as an ethical stand and by opponents as politically driven retaliation.

New York City Council member Lincoln Restler openly celebrated the company’s removal, saying public land should not be used by firms whose technology is “being transformed into weapons of war.”

geteilt von: https://feddit.org/post/25887802

Everyone is protecting the perpetrators! - Everyone is ignoring the victims!

Context

AfD: Traitors of the country

The cold: Another war crime of Russia in Ukraine

The link has even more floats, as well as Tilly's (the artist) original concept drawings.

Obama Immigrant Detention Policies Under Fire

the Los Angeles-based Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law and Obama administration officials have just a few days left to settle a lawsuit challenging the detention facilities for more than 2,000 women with children, who came here during last summer's border surge. The families are being held in detention centers in Texas and Pennsylvania. A federal judge in Los Angeles issued a preliminary ruling finding that the administration is violating an 18-year-old court settlement, Flores v. Meese. The settlement requires the government to house migrant children in "the least restrictive environment" or release them to relatives. The judge gave federal officials and the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law time to reach an agreement on how to implement her ruling before she makes it final.

A Chinese naval flotilla came within 10 kilometres of Australia’s exclusive economic zone last year, and top defence officials warn further deployments are likely as Beijing flexes its military power.

The Australian Financial Review revealed in November that Defence was tracking a Chinese flotilla in the Philippine Sea that it believed could be heading towards Australia.

...

It came less than a year after a similar Chinese flotilla conducted live-fire exercises in the Tasman Sea, setting off a frantic scramble when 49 flights between Australia and New Zealand were rerouted, some while midair. The ships then circumnavigated Australia, raising questions about Australia’s maritime capabilities amid growing Chinese naval power.

Chief of the Defence Force David Johnston on Wednesday revealed the Chinese flotilla identified in November came within five to seven miles (8.1 kilometres to 11.3 kilometres) of Australia’s exclusive economic zone – the 200-nautical-mile maritime area where Australia holds rights over resources.

“They were just clear of it, but we had very strong surveillance over those platforms while they were proximate to our near waters,” Johnston told Senate estimates after a question from Liberal senator Jessica Collins.

...

Johnston said the flotilla’s closest proximity to Australia was off north-east Queensland.

...

Archive link

title

^stolen joke 😔^

The truth on the other hand, is the unshakable reality that has driven every sanction, every sabotage attempt, and every assassination plot since 1959: Cuba is a threat only to an idea. It is a threat to the imperial doctrine that a small, poor nation in America’s ‘backyard’ must not be allowed to choose socialism, to provide free healthcare and education, and homes to live without the permission of Washington.
For this sin of self-determination, the crime of building a society where capital is not god, Cuba has been punished with the most enduring economic siege in modern history. This is not an ‘embargo’, which I consider to be a sterile, political term. It is a total blockade, designed to constrict and cripple. It is enforced by a plethora of laws with names like the Helms-Burton Act, which terrorises foreign companies from trading with the Island and allows the US to seize ships in international waters. Its goal, as US politician Robert Torricelli once admitted, was to…
‘Wreak havoc’.

cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/47527848

On Jan. 29, the “Vremya Pokazhet” talk show on Russia’s Kremlin-controlled Channel One (Perviy Kanal) presented “proof” of what the program’s host said was criticism directed against Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky by the French press. The covers of two French newspapers — Libération and Le Parisien, both showing the date Jan. 27 — were presented on screen to corroborate his allegations. However, it later emerged that the front pages displayed on Russian television were fabrications created and spread by the “Matryoshka” bot network, according to analysis conducted by the Bot Blocker project.

On the show, host Ruslan Ostashko said that “two major French outlets are criticizing Zelensky for his inability to negotiate.” The big screen behind him then showed covers with the headlines “Why Is the Whole World Waiting for One Man?” and “Why Is Ukraine Continuing the War?

...

In fact, the French newspapers in question never published these covers. A report by the independent Russian fact-checking project “Provereno” (lit. “Checked”) noted that the front page of Libération’s Jan. 27 issue featured French journalist and lawmaker Francois Ruffin. That same day, Le Parisien put on its cover a story about an investigation into the New Year's Day fire in the Swiss resort of Crans-Montana, which took the lives of 41 people. The fake versions, however, kept elements of the real issues’ design, including their subheadings, layout, and publication details.

...

The information campaign known as Matryoshka has been operating since at least September 2023, and the Bot Blocker project was the first to document and draw attention to its activity. The scheme centers on distributing fake posts featuring anti-Ukrainian content through a network of coordinated accounts.

...

Web archive link

As U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents have swarmed cities across the United States, American politics has appeared to enter a new phase, one in which armed federal forces turn civilian neighborhoods into active conflict zones. Part of what is driving this political shift is a potent technical infrastructure: ICE operations are now expedited by mobile surveillance and targeting systems, where agents’ most powerful weapon can fit in the palm of their hands.

Recent reporting has revealed ICE is relying on at least two applications to guide its crackdown. The first is ELITE (Enhanced Leads Identification & Targeting for Enforcement), a new geospatial system built by the data analytics firm Palantir for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and designed for use on smartphones and tablets. ELITE “populates a map with deportation targets, brings up a dossier on each person, and provides a ‘confidence score’ on the person’s current address,” according to a user manual published late last month.

The second is Mobile Fortify, a facial recognition application manufactured by the biometrics company NEC that allows immigration enforcement officers to identify both citizens and undocumented migrants. ICE and other DHS agents have reportedly photographed and scanned the faces of Americans in cities like Minneapolis and Chicago — images that are cross-checked with biometric databases, compiled into dossiers, and stored for up to 15 years.

A Sydney man claims NSW Police visited his house to warn him that a a ‘Boycott Israel’ sticker in his front window was “unacceptable”.

The man, who wishes not to be named, claims that officers presented at his inner Sydney sharehouse on the evening of December 17, 2025 – three days after the Bondi attack.

“They were geared up and ready for a confrontation,” the man told Deepcut. “They said they’d had ‘multiple reports of antisemitic material’ being displayed at our house.”

Alongside the ‘Boycott Israel’ sticker were signs reading ‘free Palestine’ and ‘land back’. It was the boycott sticker, the resident says, which police claim drew complaints as it depicted a cross through the Israeli flag.

“The cops said [the sticker was] a cross through the Star of David, that it’s unacceptable and it needs to be removed,” he says.

The Chinese Embassy in Israel announced on Friday that it has used Israel’s news outlet Channel 12 to refute reports claiming “China has banned all new investment in Israel.” The embassy said those reports arose in coverage are inaccurate.

China encourages Israeli personnel to engage with us in various forms of economic and trade cooperation, and hopes that all sectors will actively safeguard bilateral relations and play an active role in advancing China-Israel friendship and practical cooperation.

China remains Israel's top source of imports in 2024. China kept its position as Israel's largest source of commodity imports for the fifth consecutive year in 2024, according to data issued by Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics, the Xinhua News Agency reported. Israeli imports from China reached a record high of $13.53 billion in 2024, a 19.8 percent increase from the $11.29 billion in 2023, per Xinhua.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.pt/post/14167668

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.pt/post/14167668