World News

Speaking from the Scottish Labour Conference on Sunday, Starmer vowed to "stand with Ukraine and put them in the best possible position".

“If we receive the order to take part in a mission, we would draw up a training concept to train our soldiers and prepare them for deployment. Then we would start recruiting and train the members of the armed forces,” Süssli continued to SonntagsBlick. The use of weapons would only be permitted in a self-defence situation. “The mandate is decided by the government and parliament,” he added.

The United Kingdom is set to announce new sanctions against Russia on Monday, marking three years since Moscow's invasion of Ukraine, UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy said Sunday.

The conservative CDU/CSU party is expected to be the largest party in the next German parliament with 30% of the vote, according to the first two exit polls Friedrich Merz, 69, is in pole position to become Germany's next chancellor The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) is set to become the second biggest force in the country, with a record 20% of the vote, according to exit polls

Israel has expelled the residents of three refugee camps in the occupied West Bank as it steps up a major month-long operation in the Palestinian territory.

Israel's Defence Minister Israel Katz said the camps in Jenin, Tulkarm and Nur Shams were now "empty" and would be occupied by the Israeli military for the coming year.

Cross posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/29980710

Russia initiated the large-scale deportation of Ukrainian children on February 18, 2022, just six days before launching its full-scale invasion, according to Andrii Yermak, head of the Office of the President of Ukraine.

By the morning of February 19, 2022, more than 2,700 children, primarily from orphanages and boarding schools, had been illegally taken to Russia. The occupation authorities falsified their names, dates, and places of birth and issued them Russian passports. Some of the children were later placed in foster care.

“Russia began kidnapping our children even before the full-scale invasion, which proves that this was a planned crime with the aim of erasing the Ukrainian identity of the children and forcibly assimilating them,” Yermak said.

He added that Russia has attempted to portray the abductions as evacuations due to security risks.

Ukraine has managed to return 1,221 children, but thousands remain in Russia. “We continue to fight for the return of every Ukrainian child abducted by Russia. No exceptions. No conditions,” Yermak stated.

According to the National Information Bureau of Ukraine, as of February 2025, 19,546 Ukrainian children have been deported or forcibly relocated to Russia.

In March 2023, the International Criminal Court in The Hague issued arrest warrants for Russian leader Vladimir Putin and Russian Commissioner for Children’s Rights Maria Lvova-Belova. They are accused of forcibly transferring Ukrainian children from occupied territories to Russia.

On February 6, Daria Zarivna, Advisor to the Head of the President’s Office and Operational Director of Bring Kids Back UA, announced the return of eight Ukrainian children unlawfully taken to temporarily occupied Crimea..

Cross posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/29979354

In the nearly three years since the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, the country’s people have endured continuous attacks, “psychological terror…displacement and hardship”, top UN aid coordinator Matthias Schmale said on Friday.

Briefing from Ukrainian capital Kyiv after another night of “air sirens and more loud explosions”, Mr. Schmale noted that the crisis began in 2014, with Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea. “So, all children that were born since - all children up to the age of 11 - have never experienced their country at peace,” he said. Tweet URL

According to the UN aid coordination office, OCHA, 2024 saw a 30 per cent increase in civilian casualties compared to 2023. “The humanitarian situation is worsening, especially in frontline areas,” it said in an update, highlighting that a full 36 per cent of Ukraine’s population - 12.7 million people - needs humanitarian aid this year.

...

Speaking from Zaporizhzhia in southeast Ukraine, Toby Fricker from the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said that more than 2,520 children have been killed or injured since the start of the full-scale Russian invasion.

“The real number is likely far higher and it’s getting worse”, said Mr. Fricker, chief of communication in Ukraine.

“There was a more than 50 per cent increase in child casualties in 2024 compared to 2023 and what we see is no place is safe: schools, maternity wards, children’s hospitals, all have been affected by attacks.”

...

Underscoring the essential role played by women in Ukraine “beyond the battlefield”, UN Women Geneva Director Sofia Calltorp explained that “there is another story unfolding, and that is the story of all those women and girls who are bearing the brunt of this war.”

In 2024, the number of people killed and injured in Ukraine increased by 30 per cent, Ms. Calltorp noted. “Of them, 800 women lost their lives and more than 3,700 women were injured last year in Ukraine. We also know that the vast majority of Ukrainian refugees and displaced persons are women, and 6.7 million women are in need of lifesaving humanitarian assistance.”

...

Cross posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/2020642

Archived

Whilst the threat to Europe’s economic autonomy from a reliance on Chinese technologies has been evident for some time, many are now fearing that this dependence has created significant vulnerability in terms of national security [...]

Security services are fearful that sensors embedded within the hardware [of green energy technology] could collect data, control assets or even be used to monitor shipping and submarine activity if attached to wind turbines, for instance. As Chinese businesses dominate renewable supply chains in the green energy sector, there are limited options to source equipment from Western suppliers [...]

There are also wider concerns about the ownership of European terminals by Chinese companies, such as in Hamburg and Piraeus in Greece. One research paper commissioned by the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Internal Policies suggested that not only should Chinese investment in critical infrastructures be reviewed (and potentially blocked) at a European level, but that ports using Chinese software should be identified as well as the data being transmitted. It was also suggested that all EU members should put in place laws, ‘…to retake control of ports/terminals and other maritime infrastructures ownership and/or considered contingency plans in case that is required in a scenario of conflict (kinetic or otherwise) with China, in co-ordination with EU and other Member States.’

[...]

Here’s what to know:

What happens on election day? Polling stations open from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. (0700 GMT-1700 GMT). Germans can also vote by postal ballot, but their ballot must arrive by the time polling stations close on election day to be counted. When will we know the winner? Vote-counting will begin immediately after voting ends, and the general picture of the outcome should be clear very quickly thanks to exit polls. A final official result is expected early Monday. Who are the contenders? Four candidates are running to be Germany’s next leader: incumbent Chancellor Olaf Scholz, of the center-left Social Democrats; Friedrich Merz of the mainstream conservative Christian Democratic Union party; current Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck, of the environmentalist Greens; and Alice Weidel, of the far-right, anti-immigration Alternative for Germany, or AfD.

GOMA, Congo (AP) — Rwanda-backed rebels in eastern Congo entered the region’s second-largest city of Bukavu on Friday, local and civil society leaders said, the latest ground gained since a major escalation of their yearslong fighting with government forces.

Archived version

• Housing was more than 1/3 of China’s GDP at its peak in 2015; today it is just 20%. This is having a major impact on local government finances, as land sales are their major source of revenue.

Caixin, China’s main business paper, summed up the crisis:

“Chinese local governments are desperately seeking new revenue streams by leveraging government-owned assets to address mounting debt pressures and dwindling coffers. A document from Bishan District in Chongqing, southwest China, went viral online, outlining the formation of a “Sell Everything to Save the Day” task force aimed at monetizing state-owned assets."

[...]

China’s property bubble was based on borrowed money, mainly financed through its ‘shadow banking’ system. Essentially, it was ‘subprime on steroids’:

• House price/earnings ratios reached an eye-popping 50x in Tier 1 cities like Shanghai.
• By comparison, in the US, New York prices were ‘only’ 14x when the US subprime bubble burst in 2008.

[...]

The reason is that the state owned all land in China till 1998. So people have never been through the normal peaks and troughs of a property cycle.

Instead, as they began buying property for the first time, they assumed the government would never let prices fall. But today, this wishful thinking has been exposed.

Now, the shadow banking system is disappearing. And as the chart shows, local government debt is rising rapidly. Essentially, China risks falling into a debt trap, where new loans have to be taken out to service old loans.

Even worse [...] total debt is now >350% of GDP. The issue, as Prof Michael Pettis of Peking University noted in the summer, is that China’s stimulus programme has financed vast amounts of “non-productive investment.“

AND ITS POPULATION IS NOT ONLY AGEING, BUT FALLING

[...]

It is highly unlikely that [China's current debt] could have been repaid even if the population was young and growing quickly. But China is at the other end of the spectrum, as the chart shows. Its population is now falling, and birth rates are half what they were before 1980.

The rise in China’s median age is therefore accelerating. This is now 40 years, double the level in 1980 before the One Child Policy was introduced.

[...]

China is now inevitably going to get old before it gets rich. Its export-oriented economy is facing the prospect of major trade barriers, as the US and Europe look to preserve jobs for their own populations.

And so China’s overcapacity problem is getting worse rather than better, even in areas where it has global market leadership:

• [China's] solar industry has 80% of global demand, but is operating at just 45% of capacity.
• Its auto industry is operating at <50% of capacity. NIO’s boss says it is entering “the most fierce and brutal phase of competition.

[...]

UNITED NATIONS, Feb 21 (Reuters) - The United Nations Security Council on Friday called on Rwanda's military to stop supporting the M23 rebel group in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo and immediately withdraw all troops from Congolese territory "without preconditions." The 15-member council unanimously adopted a French-drafted resolution urging the DRC and Rwanda to return to diplomatic talks to achieve a lasting peaceful resolution.

Immigrants or refugees do not have a higher tendency to commit crime and there is no correlation between the proportion of immigrants in a given district and the local crime rate, according to a new analysis of the latest German crime statistics carried out by the renowned ifo institute.

The Munich-based institute correlated the latest national crime stats from 2018 to 2023 with location-specific data in the new study to show why the fact that immigrants are overrepresented in crime statistics had nothing to do with where they came from.

Migrants tend to settle in urban areas, where there is more population density, more nightlife, and more people in public spaces at all hours of the day. That means the general crime rate is higher, and crime suspects are just as likely to be German as of foreign background. In other words, districts with higher levels of "immigrant" crime also have higher crime rates among Germans.

"These places increase the risk of becoming perpetrators for residents, regardless of nationality, due to the infrastructure, economic situation, police presence or population density," the study said.

One of Musk's buddies, billionaire Jared Isaacman, who has flown twice to space with SpaceX, is President Trump's nominee to become the next head of NASA.

The ad approvals come as the European Commission investigates both companies for violating European tech laws. Elon Musk has also highly promoted far-right politics at X, and X CEO Linda Yaccarino reportedly warned major firms like Interpublic Group to invest in ads on the platform, the Wall Street Journal reports. Meta, meanwhile, recently reversed its third-party moderation policy.

Spiegel reported that French and Italian officials had expressed scepticism about providing significant funding to support Kyiv, citing Paris and Rome's large public debts as a key concern.

The newspaper also reports that Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and French President Emmanuel Macron aim to take a leading role in EU negotiations with the United States. However, the proposal for a new support package, put forward by the EU's diplomacy chief, Kaja Kallas, appears to contradict this ambition.

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/56370307

Jose Angel Canobbio Inzunza was arrested in the city of Culiacán in northwest Mexico Wednesday, according to Omar Hamid García Harfuch, secretary of Security and Citizen Protection of Mexico.

According to the US Department of Justice (DOJ), Canobbio Inzunza was allegedly the right-hand man for one of the sons of Mexican drug lord Joaquin Guzman, otherwise known as “El Chapo.”

Cross posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/29928207

German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock, on Friday said Europe needed to ramp up pressure on Washington to stand by NATO allies and not impose an unfair peace on Ukraine.

Her comments came after US President Donald Trump spoke to Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin last week to discuss ending the war and before Trump declared he doesn't consider it essential for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to be present at talks aimed at ending Russia's war in Ukraine.

"I don't think he's very important to be in meetings," Trump said in an audio interview with Fox News, adding that Zelenskyy has been negotiating "with no cards, and you get sick of it."

...

Baerbock's statements were similar to those of other European leaders discussing how to approach likely changes to transatlantic relations during Trump's second term.

"We are increasing the pressure on the Americans so that they have as much to lose as possible if they no longer stand by the side of the liberal democracies of Europe," Baerbock told a campaign event in Potsdam.

The foreign minister referred to German Chancellor Olaf Scholz's declaration of a "turning point" when it came to increasing Berlin's military strength in light of the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

...

A Chinese navy ship fired live rounds on Saturday after issuing a warning through a radio broadcast, the New Zealand government said.

Personnel on a New Zealand naval frigate "observed live rounds being fired from the Zunyi's main gun, as would be expected during the course of such an exercise," the office of New Zealand's defense minister said in a statement.

New Zealand's Prime Minister Christopher Luxon said "we monitoring and shadowing and tracking the fleet."

It came a day after China conducted similar drills in international waters between Australia and New Zealand, which led to disruptions in flights.

Australian Defense Minister Richard Marles said on Saturday that the government did not yet have "a satisfactory answer from China as to the question of the notice" of the drills, which he has said was "disconcerting" for commercial aviation.

Australia and New Zealand have been monitoring the three Chinese navy vessels — a frigate, a cruiser and a supply tanker — since they were seen off Australia's shores last week.