The Belgian federal police raided several European Commission buildings on Thursday as they probe suspected irregularities in property transactions carried out in 2024.

A Super Bowl ad for Ring security cameras boasting how the company can scan neighborhoods for missing dogs has prompted some customers to remove or even destroy their cameras.

Online, videos of people removing or destroying their Ring cameras have gone viral. One video posted by Seattle-based artist Maggie Butler shows her pulling off her porch-facing camera and flipping it the middle finger.

Butler explained that she originally bought the camera to protect against package thefts, but decided the pet-tracking system raised too many concerns about government access to data.

"They aren't just tracking lost dogs, they're tracking you and your neighbors," Butler said in the video that has more than 3.2 million views.

The families of jailed Iranian protesters say the country's rulers have proposed a cruel bargain: publicly celebrate the Islamic Revolution that brought them to power, or risk the lives of their loved ones.

The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Ministry of Intelligence contacted the families of some current prisoners offering what called "an inhumane dilemma" — either attend marches on Wednesday celebrating the 47th anniversary of the revolution, or put the lives of their children at risk.

GHSA-h265-g7rm-h337 (Publication in process, waiting for CVE assignment) This vulnerability would allow an authenticated attacker that is part of an organization to access items from collections to which the attacker does not belong

• Lobsters;
• Hacker News.

time to start some fflame warz

Instagram has suspended the account of Track AIPAC, a widely followed watchdog project that tracks political spending by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and related pro-Israel lobbying groups. The social media giant cited alleged violations of the platform’s intellectual property and trademark rules. The suspension places the account at risk of permanent deletion unless successfully appealed within 180 days.

Track AIPAC — also known as AIPAC Tracker — was launched in 2024 by Cory Archibald and Casey Kennedy as a transparency and advocacy platform documenting AIPAC’s political donations, endorsements and influence on US elections. The project publishes Federal Election Commission data on pro-Israel political spending, highlights which lawmakers receive the most support, and endorses opponents of candidates reliant on AIPAC funding.

The watchdog has become a prominent source for voters and activists seeking to make AIPAC funding “politically toxic” and to hold elected officials accountable for their ties to the pro-Israel lobby.

Imgur video reupload: https://i.imgur.com/Bg76Zeu.mp4

Tesla’s domestic sales in China collapsed 45% year-over-year in January, falling to just 18,485 units — the automaker’s lowest monthly retail figure in the country since November 2022. The data, released today by the China Passenger Car Association (CPCA), paints a grim picture of Tesla’s demand in the world’s largest EV market.

The figure represents an 80% plunge from December’s record-high 93,843 domestic deliveries. While seasonal declines between December and January are normal in China, a 45% year-over-year drop is not.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/50731537

Archived

Ever since Frank Dikötter’s first book, The Discourse of Race in Modern China (1992), this prolific star of China studies has challenged conventional truths and broached taboo subjects.

[...]

Yet read as a whole, Dikötter’s body of work does read like a grave indictment of the Communist regime, which is one reason why he is not well-liked by the Chinese authorities.

[...]

If Dikötter has long held a leading position on the Chinese Communist Party’s blacklist, his most recent book will give the authorities no ground to demote him. Red Dawn Over China is a history of the CCP’s rise to power over decades from its obscure origins in the early 1920s to the triumphant end of the Chinese civil war in 1949. To say the least, it was a very bloody affair.

[...]

Those who have read Dikötter will immediately recognise his no-nonsense style, which intersperses dry numbers (thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of deaths) and occasional stories that shed light on how some of these people died. In this book he recounts the story of the CCP’s rise as a non-ending series of crimes, some very meticulously described. Numbers . . . numbers . . . someone gets shot. Numbers . . . numbers . . . someone gets buried alive. Numbers . . . numbers . . . someone gets their head smashed by a rock. Numbers . . . numbers . . . someone gets eaten. Voilà, behold the dawn of Communism.

Dikötter’s general argument is, as he puts it, that “Communism was never popular in China.” It was imposed on the Chinese through systemic, unrelenting violence.

[...]

There was no heroism, no glory, no grassroots enthusiasm for the Communist cause. Just endless brutality perpetrated by a deeply illegitimate movement that never had much of a purchase among the general populace.

[...]

The [new] book is also a valuable reminder that today’s China — the prosperous, technologically advanced superpower — is a country built on a foundation of violence. “Political power,” Mao Zedong argued, “comes out of the barrel of a gun.” A tireless chronicler of the numerous crimes and follies of Chinese Communism, Dikötter once again shows his readers who was pulling the trigger of that gun, and at what cost to the long-suffering Chinese people.

[...]

Two US Navy vessels, the USS Truxtun and the USNS Supply, collided during a ship-to-ship replenishment at sea on Wednesday afternoon.

The incident, which occurred near South America in the Southern Command's area of responsibility, resulted in minor injuries to two personnel who are now in stable condition.

Both ships have been deemed capable of continuing their operations safely, despite the collision.

That is all

What the fuck is a market

As of now, President Volodymyr Zelensky does not plan to announce presidential elections or a referendum on a possible peace deal with Russia on Feb. 24, a source in the President's Office familiar with the matter told the Kyiv Independent on Feb. 11.

The comment came after the Financial Times reported that Kyiv was preparing to hold both votes this spring and that Zelensky could unveil the plan on the fourth anniversary of Russia's full-scale invasion.

"He wasn't planning to," the source said when asked whether the president would make such an announcement on Feb. 24. "When there's no security, there's nothing else."

“”I have three struggles,” she said. “I am a woman, I am Indigenous and I am on the democratic left. I am working against all of history for the vindication of our historic cause.” She spoke of the need for a “plurinational” state that recognised the rights of self-governance among diverse groups. (Something similar has been implemented, with complications and backlash, into the constitutions of Bolivia and Ecuador.)

“Sonia Gutiérrez is a lawyer of the Poqomam Maya people from the highlands south-west of the capital. As the only Indigenous woman among the 160 seats in the Guatemalan parliament, she is arguably the highest-ranking Maya in the country. “Our political system has never represented the reality of our nation,” she said to me in her office a few blocks south of the National Palace.

“Gutiérrez is the current leader of the Winaq party, founded by Rigoberta Menchú who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992 for her efforts to end Guatemala’s civil war and achieve post-conflict reconciliation. “Our telling of history needs to change, and our society needs to change,” said Gutiérrez. “Our vision goes back to the time before colonialism. We must be seen not as alien people, but as living in our country where our ancestors used to live.””