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12·4 days agoTrump would have been convicted if not elected, DoJ report says
President-elect Donald Trump would have been convicted of illegally trying to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election - which he lost - if he had not successfully been re-elected in 2024, according to the man who led US government investigations into him.
The evidence against Trump was “sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction at trial,” Special Counsel Jack Smith wrote in a partially released report.
1·7 days agoThank you for your informed opinion.
7·9 days agoThe 996 working culture in full blossom.
Media outlets will have to develop their own audiences over time by using decentralized digital services. It may (seem to) take longer than using centralized services, but it’s the only way to avoid censorship and make independent decisions in their strategy and operations.
Basically, media outlets will grow their own audiences like in the old days, just now they do with the digital help.
This is, as we all know, what the internet was supposed to be in the beginning: a decentralized network.
I strongly disagree. The case we have here is a good example why. You become too dependent on centralized services. What you need to do is using decentralized tools enabling you to control your own content and processes. If you follow tools like Facebook, Threads, Tiktok, Twitter, etc., you are on the wrong track.
What we see in this story is something like a soft version of Chinese censorship (and censorship will become stronger the more powerful these centralized platforms become).
As far as I know, 404 Media is using Threads. If I am right , it would be interesting to know whether they consider stop using it.
2·10 days agoQuotes from the article (emphasis mine):
“A relatively good period for the Russian economy, which was based on previously accumulated resources, is over,” said Oleg Vyugin, an economist and former top central bank official. “High inflation eats away at all that seemingly short-lived success.”
“If we talk about the middle class, it feels fine now,” said Sergey Dmitrieyev, an IT specialist from Moscow. “Less well-off people are feeling more stressed.”
The agriculture sector is also feeling the squeeze. “The risk of bankruptcies is rising along with the key rate,” said Eduard Zernin, who served as the head of the Russian Union of Grain Exporters. “When farmers need to fund the sowing in the spring, we will see if those risks materialized.”
It will be “a year of belt tightening,” said Sofya Donets, an economist at T-Investments. “Creditors win, and borrowers can hardly imagine how they will live.” […] “In some quarters, growth may be negative next year. For now, our main forecast is still growth by the end of next year, slightly below 1%.”
“The main risks for Russia are problems with payments,” said Alexey Vedev, a former deputy economy minister.
State-controlled pipeline operator Transneft PJSC and Russian Railways JSC sharply cut investment programs partly due to borrowing costs.
Private businesses […] are also trimming expenditures, while United Co. Rusal International PJSC, a top aluminum producer, is considering cutting output by more than 10%, citing the economic situation as one of the reasons.
After the attempted assassination of Robert Fico last year, world leaders -such as German chancellors Olaf Scholz, his Austrian counterpart Karl Nehammer, Hungary’s Viktor Orban, and many others- rightfully condemned the cowardly act that has no place in a civilized world. And where are these critics now?
3·17 days agoYeah, I didn’t want to edit the title, but I post again an important paragraph:
The visa holder must maintain employment at the visa sponsor to retain the work visa. The worker would have to leave the country if the employment ends for whatever reason. This has led to some criticism as it gives tremendous power to the employer and can lead to a modern version of indentured servitude.
2·17 days agoAddition: The Chinese government mixes a range of financial and education incentives with coercive measures such as threats to families to promote intermarriage between majority Han Chinese and ethnic minority Uyghurs in the occupied Xinjiang region.
As a report from 2002 says:
In December 2021, the Uyghur Tribunal convened in London found that “Uyghur women have been coerced into marrying Han men with refusal running them the risk of imprisonment for themselves or their families […]
[As one example, there is also the so-called] “Becoming Family” (结对认亲 – jie dui renqin) program.79 Under this program, mostly Han cadres stay in Uyghur homes to monitor the conduct of families and promote assimilation.80 Many Uyghur men are absent from their households on account of having been detained. As a result, these “relatives” – including men – have sometimes slept in the family bed, with consequences including sexual harassment and rape.81 Indeed, two Uyghur survivors living outside China, Zumrat Dawut, who was detained in an internment camp, and Qelbinur Sidiq, who was forced to teach in two camps, have said that “Uyghur girls and women have been sexually assaulted in their homes” as a result of the Becoming Family policy.
Source: Forced Marriage of Uyghur Women: State Policies for Interethnic Marriages in East Turkistan
People pay top dollar to get brand name products
The Chinese brands Shein, Temu, and TikTok are selling the cheapest stuff available (they can do that not in the least by paying workers extremely low wages, often even under forced labour regimes supported by the state). No one pays top dollars here.
Yes, but not only this, but also Ukraine, China, and all the others.
Yeah, but that appears to be two sides of one coin. A year ago, a researcher from Hong Kong argued in a book that a rise in the number of autocracies “expand Chinese global influence via Belt and Road.” From the excerpt of this book:
When rulers in autocracies with semi-competitive elections […] have a weak hold on power, their desire for Chinese spending is amplified. This relates to clientelism, or the delivery of goods and services in exchange for political support.
A higher level of state control in autocracies grants political leaders greater influence over the allocation of clientelist benefits, which aids leaders’ reelection efforts.
That’s maybe a good example that democracy -not ‘the West’- is China’s real and only enemy.
A few days ago I posted an English summary of a German language article about Tiktok in Austria (see this post: https://beehaw.org/post/17463020). There seems to be a clear pattern how Tiktok’s algorithm works, and it’s not good for the users, let alone teenagers.
What would be the alternative? One consequence of the so-called ‘multi-polar world’ will be a limited flow of capital between different blocs, limited cross-border investments across multiple industries, which might lead to market fragmentation and a divergence of technical standards. We could see degrees of globalization we had back in the 1990s.
Countries like Russia don’t seem to care about international law (or they care only if it is in their favor). This summer, some officials also discussed the seizure of China-owned infrastructure in Europe regarding Beijing’s support for Russia in its war against Ukraine. Russia and its allies will remain a threat to democracy which is their only real enemy. Russia won’t stop with Ukraine if they get what they want.
So, what’s the alternative?
How Russia prepares children in occupied Ukraine to fight against their own country
Russia is using a militaristic youth organization, Yunarmia, to foster the loyalty of teenagers in occupied parts of Ukraine and prepare them to fight in Moscow’s war against their native country […]
Russia opened the first Yunarmia branch in the occupied territories of Ukraine in Crimea months after the organisation’s official formation. By September 2016, Yunarmia had spread across the Black Sea peninsula, according to Oleh Okhredko, an analyst at the Almenda Center Of Civic Education, a Ukrainian group whose activities include documenting violations of the rights of children in wartime […]
In 2014, Russia occupied Crimea and fomented war in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions in eastern Ukraine – the Donbas […]
Yunarmia “was created with the specific idea of the militarised reeducation of not only Russian [children] but also Ukrainian children from the occupied territories,” said Kateryna Rashevska, a lawyer at the Regional Center for Human Rights, which was forced to move from Crimea to Kyiv after the Russian occupation.
By January 2022, a month before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Yunarmia had 29,000 members in Crimea alone, according to the Russian Defence Ministry […]
Amazon is donating $1 million to Trump’s inauguration
Bezos and the company decided on the contribution earlier this week, and communicated it to Trump’s team, according to some of the people. “Bezos is donating through Amazon,” according to a person close to Bezos. Amazon also will stream the inauguration through its Prime Video business, a separate, in-kind donation valued at $1 million, another of the people said.
Seems to be sort of a flat rate.
Yeah, or the West would have reacted accordingly already in 2014.
Reporter removed after interrupting Blinken’s last speech — (video, 1 min)