European Council data showing that 17 percent of people with disabilities experience violence, compared to eight percent of those without disabilities.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.today/post/42655760

Thousands of demonstrators gathered in the western German city of Giessen on Saturday as the far-right Alternative for Germany’s new youth organization was set to kick off its founding convention.

Groups of protesters blocked or tried to block roads in and around the city of some 93,000 people in the early morning. Police said they used pepper spray after stones were thrown at officers at one location.

The new youth organization of the anti-immigration Alternative for Germany, or AfD, is to be set up in a meeting at Giessen’s convention center. Its predecessor, the Young Alternative — a largely autonomous group with relatively loose links to the party — was dissolved at the end of March after AfD decided to formally cut ties with it.

More in the article.

In December 2024, Amnesty concluded that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza by three of those acts – including deliberately inflicting on Palestinians conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction.

In an update on Thursday, Amnesty said: “Israel continues to severely restrict the entry of supplies and the restoration of services essential for the survival of the civilian population.

“Despite a reduction in scale of attacks, and some limited improvements, there has been no meaningful change in the conditions Israel is inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza and no evidence to indicate that Israel’s intent has changed.”

Bridges are one of the reasons Matrix is called Matrix: let’s matrix all the networks together! They are key to onboard new users into the network. However, maintaining and operating bridges, in particular to closed, proprietary platforms, is expensive: they need to be kept up to date with any change made by the platform on a regular basis and they’re fiddly to keep up and running.

The Matrix.org Foundation has been hosting a free of charge Slack bridge for users of the matrix.org server for several years. The code of the bridge belongs to the Foundation, hosted under its GitHub workspace, but the bulk of the maintenance was done by Element. Maintaining and operating bridges to closed, proprietary platforms such as Slack comes at a high cost, both financially and in terms of reliability as they are subject to change without notice. The bridge has been unmaintained for some time now, and this has led to degraded functionality and inconsistent performance for users. While we understand that some people still find it useful in certain cases, it is not right to continue providing a service that we know does not meet the standards expected of matrix.org.

This is why, without enough customers paying for it and despite the efforts of the community trying to help, Element will not continue to maintain this bridge. As a result, the Foundation will no longer provide this service to matrix.org users. We want to thank Element for all these years of graciously maintaining a bridge for us.

Web archive link

When an unemployed father of three received a phone call in July, asking if he wanted to do a yearlong bodyguard training program in Russia, he says he jumped at the opportunity.

He said the woman on the other line identified herself as a daughter of Jacob Zuma, South Africa’s former president. He said she told him that after completing the program, he would be given a job working security for her father’s political party, for which she held a seat in Parliament.

But within six weeks of arriving in Russia, the man, 46, sensed that something was off. His supposed bodyguard trainers gave him military fatigues and a rifle and took him to the southern city of Rostov. A short time later, he said, he was on the front line of the war in Ukraine, sleeping in trenches in mud-soaked battlefields in the Donbas region and surrounded by tanks, drones and raging gunfire.

“We had been lied to,” said the man, who said he was still stuck in Russia and requested anonymity for fear of reprisals. “There was no bodyguard training. We were going to war.”

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Seventeen South Africans have sent distress signals to their government this month asking to be rescued from the grinding battle in Ukraine, according to the office of President Cyril Ramaphosa. Mr. Ramaphosa has announced an investigation into how the men ended up there, and an elite police unit says it is looking into criminal charges against Duduzile Zuma-Sambudla, Mr. Zuma’s daughter, who has been accused by one of her own sisters of tricking the men into joining the Russian battle.

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The sister, Nkosazana Bonganini Zuma-Mncube, said in a statement that she had a “moral obligation” to inform the authorities about Ms. Zuma-Sambudla’s involvement in the scandal. Eight of her own family members had been “lured to Russia under false pretenses and handed to a Russian mercenary group to fight in the Ukraine war without their knowledge or consent,” Ms. Zuma-Mncube said in her statement.

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The 46-year-old father of three sent The Times a photo of a military service certificate written in Russian with his picture on it. It describes him as a driver in a howitzer artillery platoon participating in Russia’s “special military operation” on Ukrainian territory, including Donetsk, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia. He said he had been pulled back from the front line but was told he would receive more military training soon. He is no longer in the Donbas region, he said.

“We don’t want to die here,” he said. “I am a shell of a human being, physically spent. It is complete misery.”

A historian who spent more than a month in Gaza at the turn of the year says he saw “utterly convincing” evidence that Israel supported looters who attacked aid convoys during the conflict.

Jean-Pierre Filiu, a professor of Middle East studies at France’s prestigious Sciences Po university, entered Gaza in December where he was hosted by an international humanitarian organisation in the southern coastal zone of al-Mawasi.

Israel has blocked international media and other independent observers from Gaza but Filiu was able to evade strict Israeli vetting. He eventually left the territory shortly after the second short-lived truce during the war came into effect in January. His eyewitness account, A Historian in Gaza, was published in French in May and in English this month.

In the book, Filiu describes Israeli military attacks on security personnel protecting aid convoys. These permitted looters to seize huge quantities of food and other supplies destined for desperately needy Palestinians, he writes. Famine threatened parts of Gaza at the time, according to international humanitarian agencies.

Vast swathes of Europe’s water reserves are drying up, a new analysis using two decades of satellite data reveals, with freshwater storage shrinking across southern and central Europe, from Spain and Italy to Poland and parts of the UK.

Scientists at University College London (UCL), working with Watershed Investigations and the Guardian, analysed 2002–24 data from satellites, which track changes in Earth’s gravitational field.

Because water is heavy, shifts in groundwater, rivers, lakes, soil moisture and glaciers show up in the signal, allowing the satellites to effectively “weigh” how much water is stored.

The findings reveal a stark imbalance: the north and north-west of Europe – particularly Scandinavia, parts of the UK and Portugal – have been getting wetter, while large swathes of the south and south-east, including parts of the UK, Spain, Italy, France, Switzerland, Germany, Romania and Ukraine, have been drying out.

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Kyiv's mayor Vitaly Klitschko said a 13-year-old child was among the injured and four people had been taken to hospital.

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Earlier this week a similar attack on Kyiv killed seven people, Ukrainian officials said. The latest bombardment came as Ukrainian negotiators were preparing for talks with US officials this weekend on an amended US peace plan.

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"Enemy drones are over the city, with air defence responding," the head of Kyiv's military administration, Tymur Tkachenko wrote on Telegram.

"Currently, in Kyiv there is a total of one dead and seven injured, including one child."

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The body of a man was recovered by rescuers in the Sviatoshynskyi district west of the city, Tkachenko confirmed.

Two women were among the wounded in the town of Brovary east of Kyiv, with the regional governor saying "missiles and drones" targeted residential areas.

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Web archive link

German lawmakers are set to approve spending €2.9 billion ($3.4 billion) on 11 military procurement contracts, including for drones, rifles and missiles, in deals that will go largely to domestic manufacturers.

The defense ministry asked parliament to give the green light for the orders, including the purchase of as many as 250,000 G95 assault rifles from Heckler & Koch for €765 million.

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Lawmakers are expected to approve the purchases at a closed-door meeting next week.

Germany launched a major push to modernize its armed forces following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, setting aside fiscal discipline to channel hundreds of billions of euros to boost defense readiness.

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In a break from German military procurement tradition, the ministry plans to award two competing consortia a €68 million deal to develop an AI platform to monitor NATO’s eastern flank, including in Lithuania, where Germany is ramping up a permanent battle tank brigade to deter Russia.

The first group is Airbus Defence & Space and Quantum Systems and the second is German defense startups Helsing and Arx Robotics, according to the documents, which say a larger contract is planned at a later date.

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Norwegian defense manufacturer Kongsberg Defence & Aerospace AS is among the few foreign companies set to win a deal. The military is seeking to procure €445 million for missiles for Germany’s fleet of F-35 fighter jets, according to the documents. This authorization follows a contract signed in June for the missiles.

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cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/6887334

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/6887246

Hey comrades… I hope you’re all doing okay today. I just wanted to share an update because this community has been the only place I feel understood.

It’s now three weeks since my sisters were arrested here in Juba. I was sorting out things with our caretaker that week then suddenly they went missing for days until I found out they’d been taken in for “idle and disorderly.”

They’re still inside. They’re tired, scared and every visit breaks me a bit more. We’ve managed to cover part of the bailout but we still have $596 left …that’s the only thing keeping them there.

If anyone feels able to help or even just share, the link is in my profile/bio. It would mean so much right now.

Thank you for holding space for us. Truly ❤️❤️❤️

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.today/post/42655760

Thousands of demonstrators gathered in the western German city of Giessen on Saturday as the far-right Alternative for Germany’s new youth organization was set to kick off its founding convention.

Groups of protesters blocked or tried to block roads in and around the city of some 93,000 people in the early morning. Police said they used pepper spray after stones were thrown at officers at one location.

The new youth organization of the anti-immigration Alternative for Germany, or AfD, is to be set up in a meeting at Giessen’s convention center. Its predecessor, the Young Alternative — a largely autonomous group with relatively loose links to the party — was dissolved at the end of March after AfD decided to formally cut ties with it.

More in the article.

The regulation, already informally agreed with the Council, will establish the first-ever European defence industry programme (EDIP). The scheme seeks to strengthen the European defence technological and industrial base, and boost European defence capabilities.

Of EDIP’s €1.5 billion budget, €300 million would go to the Ukraine Support Instrument. Co-legislators also agreed to create a Fund to Accelerate Defence Supply Chain Transformation (the FAST instrument) to total an indicative amount of at least €150 million through additional financial contributions.

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MEPs also championed the “buy European” principle: for defence products to secure funding, the cost of their components originating from non-associated third countries cannot exceed 35% of the estimated total cost of components.

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The programme will set up a legal framework for European defence projects of common interest. To be eligible for funding, these will need to involve at least four member states; Ukraine will be able to participate. The legislation will also set up a Ukraine Support Instrument (USI) to help modernise the Ukrainian defence industry and ease its integration with the European defence industry.

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Austria plans to buy 12 Italian-made M-346 FA fighter jets to replace Saab 105 planes which it decommissioned at the end of 2020, the government said on Saturday.

Citing military sources, newspaper Krone said a letter of intent was due to be signed on Saturday with the Italian Defence Ministry for the planes made by Italy's Leonardo.

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In the frame of this agreement, European Aerospace corporation Airbus and AED, a Brussels-based organisation representing Europe’s aerospace, space, defence, and security industries, have set the base to launch a series of studies in order to create a valuable industrial proposition to replace the current Portuguese F-16 fleet with a truly European solution, the Eurofighter programme.

“In a time where European sovereignty and industrial autonomy is at the forefront of our strategy, Airbus strongly believes that the Eurofighter is the best option for this replacement,” said Jose Luis de Miguel, head of region Europe Airbus Defence and Space. “Our relationship with Portugal is based on decades of cooperation, not only in the civil sector, but also in the military, through the C295 Medium Transport programme, and our intention is to continue building on that mutual trust.”

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