"But for just one time, I would like to be your neighbor!

To find the hand of McFeely delivering my package!

Tracing one trolley line, to the Neighborhood of Make-Believe!"

A New South Wales police officer unlawfully arrested a man, choked him, made offensive comments and tried to delete the man’s recording of the incident, an investigation by the police watchdog has found.

It recommended that two police officers involved be dismissed from the force, and said it would seek advice from the director of public prosecutions about whether they should be charged.

See how this plays out I guess ?

There's this red sails article that pops up every once in a while. Don't get me wrong it's a fine article, but there's a bit that goes "something something don't think people are brainwashed and just need to be exposed to uncomfortable truths."

And like, I get it. But...that's exactly what happened to me. I mean, I'm not going to say it was exactly one thing that caused it. However, genuinely when i learned about the Iraq War in detail*, that was basically what flipped the switch in my head. Obviously I wasn't as theoretically developed as I am today, but thats what made me genuinely want to read Marx, Lenin, Mao, etc. It was exactly that process of being exposed to information like that that made me want to be a communist, and want to fight for it.

This isn't some debunking thing. I think what I'm trying to explain is that my story seems to be very different from other people's, and applying my own experiences might not really work if it's not how things commonly work.

And, as much as it is important, I do want something more in depth than just "organize and educate." Don't get me wrong, that's good advice. What I'm trying to ask moreso is, what is the actually psychology going on behind these decisions here? Obviously there's no cookie cutter/one size fits all strategy here, but some direction would be helpful in actually attempting to convince people.

*To elaborate, I always heard of Iraq as just "the war." Kinda like how Vietnam was. But no one ever explained to me what it was and school didn't really neither. So when I learned it was basically the US invading Iraq almost explicitly for oil and no one got punished for it and basically everyone got rich off of it besides normal people while hundreds of thousands Iraqis died, it really shook me.

Elon Musk’s X is updating its Terms of Service to indicate it still lays claim to the “Twitter” trademark. The move to add this detail to the company’s terms follows an announcement from a Virginia-based startup, which recently filed an application to trademark the term “Twitter.”

The startup, Operation Bluebird, claims that X had abandoned the brand “Twitter” by renaming its social networking service “X.” In its petition to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office filed on December 2, the startup pointed to a post from X owner Musk on July 23, 2023, which proclaimed that the social network would soon “bid adieu to the twitter brand.”

From 1 January, contraceptives will be subject to a 13% VAT rate – part of a carrot-and-stick approach by the government to increase births

China is set to impose a value-added tax (VAT) on condoms and other contraceptives for the first time in three decades, as the country tries to boost its birthrate and modernise its tax laws.

From 1 January, condoms and contraceptives will be subject to a 13% VAT rate – a tax from which the goods have been exempt since China introduced nationwide VAT in 1993.

The measure was buried in a VAT law passed in 2024 in an effort to modernise China’s tax regime. VAT accounts for nearly 40% of China’s total tax revenue.

do you think if their planes crossed paths mid-pacific they'd crash into eachother or do pilots know how to avoid that now

Sudan, once envisioned as the Arab world’s breadbasket, now faces one of the gravest famines of the century. The IPC Special Snapshot for September 2025 to May 2026 confirms famine in El Fasher and Kadugli, warning that catastrophic hunger is spreading and affecting more than 25 million people. This crisis, however, is not merely a product of the war that began in April 2023. It is the culmination of a decades-long structural shift: the systematic reorientation of Sudan’s fertile land and water toward export-oriented agriculture serving Gulf food-security systems, weakening the country’s own ability to feed its population.

The war devastated agriculture, driving 2023-2024 cereal production to near-disaster levels- 46% below the previous year and 41% below the five-year average. While field surveys in late 2024 and mid-2025 showed a partial rebound to 6.7 million tonnes harvested in 2024- more than 60% above the disastrous 2023 season and slightly above the five-year average- this recovery, however, did not reach the Sudanese population. Entire farming regions have emptied, markets have collapsed, and militia control of trade routes, combined with fuel shortages, soaring prices, displacement and blocked humanitarian access, has prevented food from moving within the country. More critically, smallholder agriculture, once the backbone of Sudan’s food supply, has been systematically displaced by the expansion of vast, foreign-controlled export concessions.

This structural transformation has been facilitated by successive governments for years. They offered long leases, tax exemptions, and access to irrigation networks to attract Gulf investment. Framed as development opportunities, these measures strengthened external food-security systems while redirecting fertile land toward export agriculture. Several studies show how weak contracts, limited oversight, and political instability allowed foreign companies to entrench themselves. The risks posed by large-scale land acquisitions to local food security have been documented by United Nations agencies since at least 2011. Yet from the late Bashir era through the transitional government into the current war, no effective protections were implemented. As the state fractured after 2023, these vulnerabilities deepened, allowing foreign control foreign control to expand further and embedding Sudan’s agricultural system within external demand rather than domestic need.

For Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, Sudan offered what they lacked: abundant water, fertile soil, and scale. As domestic aquifers dried and grain cultivation became unsustainable at home, Gulf states built an external food-security architecture anchored in farmland abroad. Sudan became central to this strategy due to its proximity to Gulf markets and its large tracts of irrigable land.

Emirati firms control vast tracts of irrigated farmland. The conglomerate International Holding Company (IHC) cultivates more than 50,000 hectares devoted to fodder and export crops. Projects such as the Abu Hamad “turn the desert green”, a roughly $225 million joint venture between Abu Dhabi’s Royal Group and Sudan’s DAL Group, cover more than 100,000 hectares, with plans for further expansion. Production is supported by massive irrigation canals drawn from the Nile and geared toward Emirati consumption. These farms sit within a larger Emirati economic footprint exceeding $6 billion, spanning investments in Sudan’s foreign reserves, agricultural expansion, and port infrastructure.

Critically, the UAE has worked to ensure that crops from these lands can flow out of Sudan regardless of internal collapse. Abu Dhabi has pursued strategic port investments and established shipping routes such as the RSX1 service, which directly links Port Sudan to Jebel Ali in the UAE and Jeddah in Saudi Arabia. This infrastructure creates dedicated export corridors that bypass shattered domestic markets. Sudan functions as a crucial node in a much wider UAE strategy. Emirati firms, notably DP World and AD Ports Group, currently operate or hold concessions in about a dozen port facilities across Africa, securing long-term control over key maritime infrastructure that connects production zones to global supply chains.

This agricultural and logistical footprint exists alongside a parallel, militarized strategy to secure assets. While the UAE’s backing of the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) has been widely linked to securing gold flows, it also functions to protect broader economic corridors through which agricultural commodities from UAE-controlled farms must travel.

Saudi Arabia maintains a quieter presence but follows a similar logic of externalization. Its engagement has historically been more formal, slower-moving, and state-led than the UAE’s, yet it is grounded in the same long-term objective: securing fodder and feed crops abroad. The kingdom’s state-owned Saudi Agricultural and Livestock Investment Company (SALIC) announced plans to obtain Sudanese land for fodder under its external food-security program. The National Agricultural Development Company (NADEC), one of the Gulf’s major agribusiness firms, lists 3,200 hectares of Sudanese farmland dedicated to feed production. Although these records predate the war and remain smaller in scale than Emirati ventures, they illustrate a consistent pattern: Sudan’s agricultural capacity is redirected toward supplying feed crops that Saudi Arabia no longer produces domestically, embedding Sudan into the kingdom’s external agricultural supply chain.

Investigation | Using easily accessible advertising data, Le Monde was able to pinpoint the identities, home addresses and daily routines of several dozen people working for sensitive official entities.

The identities of French spies are among the Republic's most closely-guarded secrets. Revealing them is even a criminal offense. Yet, with just a little technical know-how, one can track down the home addresses of certain agents, and thereby discover their identities, daily routines and even those of their loved ones, all of which represent risks to their safety and that of their families and their agencies.

The blame lies with the advertising industry, an insatiable and unregulated sector with no regard for transparency, which extracts billions of personal data points from people's smartphones every day. This data, which can be used to track people's movements particularly precisely, down to a few meters, is then resold. Evading such tracking, except for users with flawless digital hygiene, is nearly impossible.

Staff members working for all of France's most sensitive institutions are affected: intelligence officers, personnel responsible for protecting the country's top officials, high-ranking police officers, members of the elite National Gendarmerie Intervention Group (GIGN) unit, military personnel stationed at critical nuclear weapons bases, defense company executives, prison staff, and even nuclear power plant staff.

At least 34 U.S.-sanctioned oil tankers with a history of carrying Venezuelan oil are currently at sea in the Caribbean, according to a new analysis obtained by CNBC on Wednesday.

At least 15 people have been confirmed dead in Sunday's shooting attack at Bondi beach.

Many were attending an event to mark the first day of the Jewish festival of Hanukkah.

Authorities have confirmed that two rabbis, a Holocaust survivor and a 10-year-old girl were among the victims.

Matilda, 10

Rabbi Eli Schlanger

Dan Elkayam

Alexander Kleytman

Boris and Sofia Gurman

Peter Meagher

Reuven Morrison

Rabbi Yaakov Levitan

Tibor Weitzen

Marika Pogany

Edith Brutman

Boris Tetleroyd

BRUSSELS ― A summit of EU leaders Thursday will test whether the bloc will hold together — or whether Donald Trump can divide it.

A high-stakes disagreement between European governments on using Russian assets frozen since Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine to fund the county’s rebuilding lays bare a deeper division across the continent over how to deal with a new world order and unprecedented pressure from the U.S.(..)

The American influence campaign that has seen Trump administration officials bypassing Brussels and backchanneling with capitals has led to Italy, Bulgaria, Malta and Czechia joining the group of dissenting countries.

Got looks money can't buy but I can't buy anything with my looks. Mostly just been reading theory and learning shit, being jobless is demoralizing

I'm not really sure if I have adhd or not at the moment and I just realised this. I'm not sure if this is related to adhd at all but I just find it weird looking into peoples eyes, when I listen to people I usually look out a window or something and sometimes people ask me weather I am listening and I didn't even realise I was looking out a window I kind of just assumed they knew I was listening.

Also as a side note, I have a lot of symptoms of adhd but I'm not sure if to enough of an extent, since I see a lot that everyone has the symptoms of adhd just not to the extent of someone that actually has adhd has.

Do you also have that one comment in the bottom of your lemmy inbox that you've been meaning to respond to for the last several weeks or months but you keep putting it off?

Do you also sit on your couch or bed and just stair out the window for like 30 minutes or longer at a time?

I also have struggle focusing on school work, this hasn't always been the case but it's a lot more now. Once the coffee from the morning wears off I can't focus for long enough to finish a small portion of a single Maths question before I'm staring out the window thinking about something completely unrelated, then about 5-10 minutes later I realised I'm distracted.

You've probably also noticed a pattern at this point, I love staring out windows!

Armor 27T Pro has great hardware and pretty amazing battery life, if you can deal with the absurd weight of the device. However, the software operating system and system apps have made the phone unusable for me in just a few months.

After months of trying to get this Ulefone Armor 27T pro working properly, it has some major drawbacks that have made me switch to a different phone.

I use Signal, Textra, Whatsapp, Telegram, Instagram and Gaia GPS regularly, and these all have issues.

For Textra, if the app hasn't been started lately, text message simply do not arrive at the phone. They end up in a black hole somewhere. Open textra and look at it, and send a text to it, and it works fine. Close textra for a few hours, and send a text, it never arrives, even after reopening the app.

Likewise with Signal, Whatsapp, Telegram, Instagram, after sitting idle for a few hours, you can send a message to them, and there will be no notification. Only after you check the app will it poll for undelivered messages and then notify you.

With Gaia GPS, It'll work fine for 20 minutes of a trail run, then stop working. When I reopen Gaia GPS to check or to finish my run, it will have continued to count the time taken, but the GPS will have stopped working, and the mapline will instantly teleport from where it stopped working to where I am now.

Now, I have spent months on forums, youtube videos, and discussing it with app publishers, but no amount of editing battery optimization settings, enabling or disabling apps in duraspeed, or just all-out disabling a raft of system apps, (Including com.pri.screenoff.killer) has resolved these issues Here are the list of bloatware and pest apps that I've disabled or uninstalled:

Disabled:

https://i.postimg.cc/GtTP47vw/2025-12-18-07-46-29-Universal-Android-Debloater.png

Uninstalled:

https://i.postimg.cc/SRQs5JND/2025-12-18-07-46-46-Universal-Android-Debloater.png

There are a few other annoying things about the software, but they would be ok if I wasn't losing basic app functionality, and especially text messages disappearing into the aether.

I've bought an alternative phone, and I'll probably keep the Ulefone and use it only for its thermal camera, endoscope and microscope, maybe as a hammer too, but its not usable in daily life.

At this point, despite the hardware being pretty impressive, and the price being reasonable, I must strongly recommend against buying a Ulefone device.

First of all I know express is not the best VPN, i've been wanting to change for the past year.

Now seems like the time is finally here to switch VPNs, or not...

My question is what VPNs work for routers that are privacy friendly?

Do you recommend installing VPN apps on separate devices instead of the router?

What VPNs?

How do you use your VPN at home?

Should I stick with Express and get a new 300$ router? (i'd rather not)

mulvad on a router? iVPN?

Advice, thoughts?

EDIT: my router is a Linksys WRT3200ACM

Wookie puts on a helmet, Wookie sees a model try to seduce him, and it can logically be inferred that he paid to customize the video just for him, as the model says his name and appears to be directly interacting with him.

CMV