There is a new survey with some design proposals for the themes "European Culture" and "Rivers and Birds".

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Interpol rejected Serbia’s request to issue an international arrest warrant for six activists and students associated with the organization STAV and the Movement of Free Citizens (PSG), who, according to their legal defense, have been living in political exile for the past 16 months.

Veljko Milić, attorney for some of the defendants, [said] that Interpol determined the case to be political in nature and therefore would not act on Serbia’s requests.

According to him, the decision is consistent with Interpol’s rules, under which it does not intervene in cases it considers to have a political character.

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Six activists were arrested last March and spent months in prison. Another six were outside Serbia when the arrest warrants were issued and have not returned since. All of them deny they committed acts the prosecution accuses them of.

The group members who are currently living in exile, stated today that Interpol concluded in its reasoning that the matter is political, and therefore declined to act on Serbia’s request, FoNet news agency reports.

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Arrests and charges after a leaked conversation

On 13 March 2025, two days before the massive protest in Belgrade, the biggest pro-government television channels jointly broadcast a two-hour special dedicated to a leaked recording of the meeting of activists in Novi Sad.

The activists, who were not the organisers of the protests, discussed possible actions they could take depending on the course of events.

The discussion was described by the pro-government journalists as proof of pending bloodshed and civil war on 15 March. The protest on that day passed relatively peacefully, with accusations against the government that it had, at one point, used an unidentified acoustic device against the protesters.

A day before the protest, six activists were arrested in Novi Sad. Another six participants in the meeting were outside Serbia when the arrests happened and have not returned to the country since. An arrest warrant for them was subsequently issued.

The imprisoned activists were released and sent to house arrest several months later, following a hunger strike of one of the activists, high school professor Marija Vasić. This measure was also revoked later during the year.

On 12 May, after two months in prison, the Higher Public Prosecutor’s Office in Novi Sad officially charged the activists with preparing an attack on the constitutional order and calling for a violent overthrow of the constitutional order. The Prosecutor’s Office asked for a maximum sentence of five years in prison for preparing these acts.

Archived

cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/10296832

Videos showing AI-generated "Polish soldiers" criticizing Ukraine, the European Union and Poland's government have circulated online, with researchers warning the content may be tied to Russian influence operations.

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Ukraine's Center for Countering Disinformation warned in a post on X on Tuesday that fabricated videos of purported Polish soldiers had spread across YouTube, TikTok, Facebook and Instagram in recent days.

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The clips, styled as interviews, showed AI-generated men in uniform criticizing Ukrainians, referencing the World War II-era Volhynia massacres and claiming refugees were driving up crime in Poland.

Poland's NASK state research institute, which also flagged the videos, said its analysis found signs pointing to a possible Russian link, including awkward phrasing typical of translation from Russian, stray Cyrillic characters, and uniforms resembling those worn by Russian and Belarusian forces rather than Polish ones.

NASK said the fabricated soldiers repeatedly used derogatory nicknames for Ukrainians and made claims about Poland's Border Guard agency.

The videos also warned of an alleged wave of migrants entering Poland and used anti-EU rhetoric.

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It is not the first time AI-generated soldiers have been used for disinformation targeting Poland and Ukraine, experts say.

Public broadcaster TVP Info reported in October that a video showing purported Polish soldiers calling for the seizure of Lviv had been generated using the AI model Veo, identifiable by its visible watermark.

A month later, a separate video circulated on social media showing a crying 23-year-old man who claimed to have been mobilized into Ukraine's army.

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Archived

Péter Szijjártó, until April the EU’s longest-serving foreign minister, is joining the Chinese carmaker BYD, after helping it – as a minister – to get a firm foothold in Hungary and thus avoid EU’s tariff wall.

Szijjártó, 47, announced via Facebook on 15 July that he had received “an extremely honourable offer from one of the defining companies of the world economy”.

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Europe has been here before. The best-known precedent is former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder, the Russlandversteher who went from masterminding Germany’s Russia policy to sitting on the boards of Russian state energy companies Nord Stream and Rosneft. Schröder became synonymous with the politician who monetises relationships after leaving office. Other examples include Austria’s former chancellor Wolfgang Schüssel, who accepted a seat on the board of Lukoil, and one-time Finnish prime minister Esko Aho, who became a senior adviser to Huawei as it sought to expand into Europe.

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Yet Szijjártó’s connection is more direct. Schröder, Schüssel and Aho joined companies whose interests they had once helped shape. As the face of Hungary’s “Eastern Opening”, Szijjártó personally spent years facilitating BYD’s expansion from the other side of the table; now he is on the carmaker’s payroll. He is also the man who supervised Hungary’s foreign intelligence service, with its files on the internal workings of the EU and NATO. There is no Hungarian precedent for a former minister joining a company with which he had such direct official dealings. During the election campaign, Szijjártó was exposed briefing Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov after EU meetings, which raises the question of why BYD has employed a man who is arguably more of a liability than an asset in the corridors of Brussels.

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The appointment is an advertisement, though not the one Budapest used to run. Hungary never extracted anything from Beijing: it paid for the privilege of hosting Chinese industry, in subsidies, cheap land, tax holidays and accommodating regulators, while the technology and the profits stayed with the parent companies. The publicly documented state support for BYD’s Hungarian projects alone exceeds 71 billion forints (EUR 200 million); Hungarian Prime Minister Péter Magyar puts the full bill, indirect measures included, at around 300 billion. What Szijjártó’s new post demonstrates to every middle power hedging between Washington, Brussels and Beijing is that a minister who delivers all that will be taken care of.

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Fidesz [Hungary's former ruling party and Szijjártó's political home] loyalists mourned the departure of “the finest foreign minister the world has ever seen” [ while current Hungarian PM Peter] Magyar took a different view. Signing with BYD means entering the service of the Chinese Communist Party ... A former minister taking an executive role, months after leaving office, at a company he had supported with hundreds of billions of forints raised not only moral but serious legal concerns, he argued. A company of BYD’s size hiring such a man to repay services rendered would be called corruption of the most outrageous kind anywhere in Europe, he added.

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A prime minister cannot declare BYD an arm of the Chinese party-state and then preside indefinitely over its largest European investment. Beijing will have noted. Magyar knows it: within a day he was threatening to extend Hungary’s conflict-of-interest rules in ways that could block Szijjártó’s appointment outright – while adding, in the same breath, that if BYD pays its taxes and honours its commitments, his government is glad to have it. Local press are calling it the lex Szijjártó. The threat and the welcome, delivered together, measure the bind precisely. Washington, for its part, has already institutionalised a version of Magyar’s charge: in June, the US Department of War, added BYD to its list of companies it deems to be working with the Chinese military.

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At the Szijjártó foreign ministry, eventually around 80% of staff were his own appointees. Clientelism was a feature, not a bug. The Magyar government has already exposed how diplomatic passports became discretionary favours, to the point that border officials in several countries had stopped taking the documents seriously, according to the new foreign ministry. Beneficiaries ranged from the pop singer Magdolna Rúzsa to former national football captain Balázs Dzsudzsák, a close friend of Szijjártó, and Hilarion, the Russian bishop who was reassigned to Budapest months into the invasion of Ukraine and granted citizenship and a passport within three months of arrival, with no Hungarian ties and no explanation ever offered. The owner of the ‘nationalist’ craft-beer brand Csíki had earlier tried to use his to escape a speeding fine.

The scale takes a moment to parse: of the 10,219 diplomatic passports issued between 2019 and September 2023, nearly 1,500 were granted on Szijjártó’s personal authority by individual ministerial decision rather than entitlement, against the 100 to 200 that previous governments had kept in circulation.

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The longer Orbán remained in power, the less Hungary’s foreign policy was organised around any articulated conception of the national interest. It was opaque, personalised and transactional. Relationships accumulated where doctrine should have existed; investments replaced strategy. Success was measured in factories announced, meetings held and deals signed.

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[In mid-July] ... Orbán surfaced in the stands at the World Cup semi-final in the U.S. in the background of the livestream of the influencer IShowSpeed. As the architect of the Eastern Opening watched football in Texas, its biggest evangelist was a day from going to work for the Chinese company that embodied it. Schröder ended up on the payroll of the pipeline; Szijjártó is now on the payroll of the gigafactory.

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Archived

cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/10295672

Hong Kong Watch is deeply concerned that Wu Chi-wai, former chairman of Hong Kong’s Democratic Party and one of the ‘Hong Kong 47’, has been officially refused entry to the UK, facing deportation back to Hong Kong within seven days. Wu, a political prisoner, was allowed to enter the United Kingdom on temporary admission, following a deeply alarming situation at Heathrow Airport, where he was told his passport would be confiscated and that he faced deportation back to Hong Kong within seven days.

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Wu holds British National (Overseas) (BN(O)) status, and after his release [from Chinese prison] he travelled to Britain to settle under the BN(O) visa route, which allows eligible Hong Kongers to apply for residence without going through the standard overseas asylum process. He was informed that he could apply for BN(O) status within the UK by the British Consulate in Hong Kong. Despite this, he was detained on arrival, his passport confiscated, and told he faced removal within a week. The Home Office described it as an administrative issue with his paperwork. Mr Wu has now entered the UK under temporary admission while officially refused, meaning the threat of deportation remains pending review.

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“Detention and threatened deportation of a pro-democracy advocate is the sort of belligerent behaviour I associate with the Chinese Communist Party rather than the UK," says Lord Alton of Liverpool, Patron of Hong Kong Watch and Chair of the Joint Committee on Human Rights.

"Shabana Mahmood [the UK Home Secretary] has had a long and honourable track record in calling out the many violations of human rights in China. I hope she will find out what happened at Heathrow and explain the difference between dictatorship and democracy to whoever threatened Mr Wu.”

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Wu Chi-wai, 63, spent eight years as a Legislative Councillor, Hong Kong’s equivalent of an MP, and became chairman of the Democratic Party in 2016. A former social worker who studied in the United States, he built his political career around the pro-democracy movement the party had championed since its founding ahead of the 1997 handover.

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In 2020, Wu helped organise an unofficial “primary election” ahead of Legislative Council elections, the first real test of Beijing’s newly imposed Hong Kong National Security Law. That law, introduced on 30 June 2020, criminalised secession, subversion, terrorism and foreign collusion.

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Wu was arrested in the security sweep that followed in November 2020, charged in 2021, and pleaded guilty the following year, as most of his co-defendants did, believing conviction was inevitable and that a plea would reduce his sentence. He received four years and five months in prison as part of the Hong Kong 47 case, in which 45 of the 47 defendants were jailed for between four and seven years. He was released on 30 June 2026 after serving his full term.

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July 22 marks the European commercial launch of PRIMA, the first and only treatment shown in clinical trials to restore functional central vision to patients with geographic atrophy (GA) caused by age-related macular degeneration (AMD), a leading cause of blindness. PRIMA has received a CE (Conformité Européenne) mark under the European Union Medical Device Regulation from DEKRA, authorizing its commercial availability across 30 European countries.

Papers recently published by the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) [original article, editorial] showed that PRIMA restored vision to patients suffering from GA due to AMD.

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In the United States, the company is working with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to bring PRIMA to the US market. PRIMA has received FDA Breakthrough Device designation and Humanitarian Use Device designation.

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The multi-center clinical trial published by the NEJM evaluated the PRIMA BCI implant system in 38 patients across 17 clinical sites in five countries. The study results include:

• Mean improvement of 25.5 letters (more than 5 lines) on ETDRS letter chart.
• 84% of patients reported the ability to read letters, numbers, and words, restoring functional central vision.
• 80% of patients achieved significant prosthetic visual acuity improvements of at least logMAR 0.2 (equivalent to 10 letters on ETDRS chart) at 12 months (p<0.001).
• The implant was placed under the atrophic macula without a decline in mean existing natural vision.

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22 July 2026. GreenX Metals Limited (ASX:GRX, LSE:GRX, GPW:GRX, Germany-FSE:A3C9JR) (GreenX or the Company) is pleased to announce that fieldwork has commenced at its Eleonore North project in East Greenland (Eleonore North or Project). The exploration program is targeting gold (Au), tungsten (W), and antimony (Sb).

GreenX’s Chief Executive Officer, Mr Ben Stoikovich, commented: “Greenland is an exciting frontier for GreenX, and this program advances a portfolio of gold, tungsten and antimony targets that has seen very little modern exploration.

Tungsten and antimony are critical raw materials for both the European Union and the United States, and Eleonore North gives us high-grade occurrences of both in a stable Western jurisdiction at a time when supply is heavily concentrated in China. Importantly, the tungsten and antimony mineralisation has a surface expression, which allows us to make rapid progress in expanding the known mineralisation and generating additional targets.

This year we are in the field to advance our existing prospects, including the Noa Pluton gold-antimony target and the North and South Margeries deposits. At the same time, our growing understanding of intrusion-related gold systems in the region has enabled us to identify a number of new targets.’’

Poland is developing Europe’s fastest and most modern rail network, which will carry almost 800 million passengers a year at speeds of up to 350 km/h, Prime Minister Donald Tusk has said.

Germany on Wednesday approved an application by French firm Framatome to produce nuclear fuel rods under a ​licensing agreement with state-backed Russian firms, despite political concerns, arguing it lacked the ‌legal basis for a rejection.

cross-posted from : https://lemmy.zip/post/68374653

Chinese men in Germany used Telegram to share rape videos and drugging tips. The victims were mostly women of Chinese heritage.

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Last year, a Berlin court sentenced Tong Z to five years and nine months in prison for aggravated rape, dangerous bodily harm and violation of personal privacy. The case had echoes of the crimes of serial rapist Zhenhao Zou, 29, a Chinese student jailed in 2025 for life for drugging and raping 10 women in the UK and China.

But Tong Z was not acting alone. Further court rulings this year found he was one of eight members of a Telegram group called “German Driving School”. Within the group, members used coded terms to discuss drugging and raping women: “fuel” meant anaesthetic agents and sedatives, and “car” was the code name for their targets. The men – all but one of whom were Chinese nationals – also filmed their assaults, shared the footage and celebrated each other’s crimes.

Three of the men, including Tong Z, have now been convicted in connection with the Telegram group. Dapeng Z, a 44-year-old IT engineer and the group’s admin, was sentenced to 14 years in prison for aggravated rape and attempted murder. Zhongyi J, a 28-year-old Chinese student, received more than 11 years for similar charges. German courts ruled that the two men had knowingly administered life-threatening doses of drugs to their victims.

The revelations have sent shockwaves across China and the global Chinese diaspora, as most of the victims were also women of Chinese heritage living in Europe.

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Archived

Germany’s cities plan to largely exit natural gas use in the coming years and instead bet on district heating, heat pumps and other low-carbon solutions to heat homes. An analysis by consumer magazine Finanztip of the municipal heating plans of 16 German cities, including Berlin, Hamburg and Munich, showed that all of them expect a significant decrease in natural gas use in the near future.

“Our analysis clearly shows where we are headed: Away from fossil gas and towards more climate-friendly alternatives,” said Finanztip energy efficiency expert Sandra Duy. Germany’s larger cities were required to submit their municipal heating plans by the end of June, while smaller towns and villages have until mid-2028 to submit a decarbonisation plan for the sector.

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The recent adoption of new heating rules by Germany’s parliament, which allow the continued installation of fossil gas boilers as proposed by the government earlier this year, had not been reflected in municipal planning for future gas demand ... Instead, several city administrations warned that the controversial new heating rules in the Building Modernisation Act, which scrap a minimum renewable energy share for new installations, could lead to delays, higher costs and general uncertainty.

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Researcher Martin Ammon ... also said the government's law changes could slow the transition but added that a larger reversal of the plans remains unlikely.

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Archived

cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/10270651

A Russian warship, shadowed by a Royal Navy vessel, carried out a live-fire artillery exercise just 46 miles (74km) south of Plymouth on Monday.

The Royal Navy monitored the exercise and is tracking "the vessel's activity closely", a Ministry of Defence spokesperson said.

The BBC has been told that, prior to opening fire, Russian frigate Neustrashimy (English: Dauntless) had informed the Royal Navy Offshore Patrol Vessel, HMS Tyne, of its intention to conduct gunnery activity.

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The live-fire exercise took place in international waters and lasted for 30 minutes.

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The Russian frigate was also being monitored by a French military aircraft which made radio contact with the warship asking it to clarify its intentions, the BBC has been told.

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The incident will be a reminder for the new prime minister of increased Russian naval activity near UK waters in recent months.

Last month, Royal Marine Commandos boarded a Russian "shadow fleet" oil tanker in the English Channel in a six-hour operation which was the first of its kind by UK armed forces.

Also in June, a British couple in international waters in the English Channel came across a Russian warship - Admiral Grigorovich - 23 miles off the Isle of Wight.

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Archived

Once heavily dependent on Russian energy, Moldova is rapidly expanding its solar capacity. From rooftop panels to solar farms, renewables are reshaping the country's electricity sector and strengthening energy security.