Gimme no Fuel, gimme no fire! 😄🤘

Nearby fishing town evacuated again as sky near Reykjavik glows bright orange

French President Emmanuel Macron said in an interview published Saturday evening that Western ground operations in Ukraine might be necessary “at some point”, days after meeting with German and Polish leaders.

The Solar Stewardship Initiative (SSI), a joint initiative of Solar Power Europe and Solar Energy UK driving a more responsible, transparent, and sustainable solar value chain, fails its members and the wider solar industry by remaining silent on Uyghur forced labour, the most pervasive and severe human rights risk in the solar sector.

The SSI should provide clear and unequivocal guidance to its members that in state-imposed forced labour contexts, like the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (Uyghur Region), ending business relationships is the only responsible course of action. Further, ‘certification’ against the SSI Standards should not be considered as reliable evidence of compliance with forced labour regulations, the Coalition to End Forced Labour in the Uyghur Region says.

Every level of the solar panel supply chain is exposed to Uyghur forced labour. Recent research confirms that the solar industry remains highly reliant on the Uyghur Region for key inputs, where state-imposed forced labour is an integral element of a government-imposed system of oppression against the Uyghur population. Abuses in the Uyghur Region may constitute crimes against humanity according to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. The SSI’s silence on the industry’s continued reliance on state-imposed forced labour severely undermines the credibility and effectiveness of the initiative, which portrays itself as an industry standard to create a more sustainable solar supply chain.

Cross-posted from: https://feddit.de/post/10050638

Ukrainian teachers created an online teaching platform to try to "save the minds of Ukrainian children".

"Once we launched it, I wrote a neutral letter, offering the classes to all of the parents," explains one teacher. "I didn't know who was pro-Ukrainian or pro-Russian, and they knew my home address and my relatives".

Ukrainians say even uttering the word "occupation" can result in Russian authorities visiting your home. If there is any evidence of loyalty to Ukraine, such as a child's homework being written in Ukrainian instead of Russian, a trip to the police station could follow.

In the classrooms, Portraits of Vladimir Putin now hang on the walls. The pupils must both learn, and sing, the Russian national anthem. They are even obliged to write "inspirational letters" to Russian soldiers.

This is how Ukrainian children are educated in territories occupied by Russia. They are taught that Ukraine isn't a real country - and Nataliia says, if a child challenges the curriculum, their parents are threatened with beatings or torture.

Military powers agree to step up purchase of ammunition for Kyiv in effort to dampen mutual tensions over Russia stance.

In 2020, Revisor, a neural network-based election-monitoring software Revisor, analysed footage recorded at 1,238 polling stations in 29 Russian regions on polling day in 2018 in an attempt to retroactively uncover the electoral fraud widely believed to have taken place. Indeed, after counting votes and comparing them with the official turnout, the software found discrepancies in 11 regions so huge that it made it impossible for the election result to have been accurate, according to another Revisor creator, Vlad Matveyev.

"How can Putin be considered to have won if we don't know how entire regions voted?" says Ivan Shukshin, one of Revisor's creators.

France’s parliament on Thursday backed a string of measures making low-cost fast fashion, especially from Chinese mass producers, less attractive to buyers.

Cross-posted from: https://feddit.de/post/10013170

The war in Ukraine is “existential for our Europe and for France”, Mr Macron said in the interview on France 2 and TF1.

“Do you think that the Poles, the Lithuanians, the Estonians, the Romanians and the Bulgarians could remain at peace for a second [in the event of a Russian victory in Ukraine]?” he asked. “If Russia wins this war, Europe’s credibility would be reduced to zero.”

Cross-posted from: https://feddit.de/post/9996260

Pope Francis has provoked fury by suggesting in a television interview that Ukraine should find “the courage to raise the white flag”.

"This injudicious comment reminded me instantly of the man once described as Hitler’s Pope," writes Tim Luckhurst, Principal of South College at Durham University in the UK.

"As Pope Pius XII, Eugenio Pacelli led the Catholic Church throughout the second world war. However, while Hitler’s determination to eliminate the Jewish people was brought to his attention, he did not publicly condemn it. Freedom of practice for German Catholics mattered more."

Cross-posted from: https://feddit.de/post/9995756

As soon as the death of Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny in a Siberian penal colony was announced in February, conspiracy theories about who was behind it began circulating in Russia.

“That he was killed by his puppet masters from the west, not the Kremlin. That he was killed by them because his murder would actually make Putin look awful in the eyes of global community,” explains Ilya Yablokov, a lecturer in digital journalism and disinformation at the University of Sheffield in the UK.

Yablokov studies the spread of conspiracy theories in post-Soviet Russia, and says the stories about Navalny are the most prominent of many circulating ahead of a presidential election that looks certain to keep Putin in the Kremlin until at least 2030.

Cross-posted from: https://feddit.de/post/9993255

"Forcing millions of Ukrainian citizens who live in temporarily occupied territories or who have been forcibly transferred to Russian Federation territory to participate in the so-called 'elections' is equally illegal," Ukraine's foreign ministry adds.

Vladimir Putin, who launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine two years ago, is set to win a new six-year term in the March 15-17 vote. This would enable him to overtake Josef Stalin to become Russia's longest-serving leader.

Arms imports by European states were 94 per cent higher in 2019–23 than in 2014–18. Ukraine emerged as the largest European arms importer in 2019–23 and the fourth largest in the world, after at least 30 states supplied major arms as military aid to Ukraine from February 2022, according to data published by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).

The 55 per cent of arms imports by European states that were supplied by the USA in 2019–23 was a substantial increase from 35 per cent in 2014–18. The next largest suppliers to the region were Germany and France, which accounted for 6.4 per cent and 4.6 per cent of imports, respectively.

The United States increased its arms exports by 17 per cent between 2014–18 and 2019–23, while Russia’s arms exports halved. Russia was for the first time the third largest arms exporter, falling just behind France.