Protest against student arrest, barricades in Belgrade

Berlin-based advocates are one step closer to creating a car-free zone in their city that's bigger than the entirety of Manhattan.

A decision on Wednesday by the Berlin Constitutional Court allows a long-stalled initiative by the advocacy group Volksentscheid Berlin Autofrei ("Ballot Measure for an Auto-Free Berlin) to continue gathering signatures for a referendum to create a zone in the center of the German capital that would be free of almost all private automobiles.

The group's efforts had already reached the initial, 50,000-signature threshold before a series of procedural impediments threw a wrench in their effort. Wednesday's court decision pushes the long-delayed process forward, beginning with a debate at the Berlin House of Representatives, followed by another round of signature collection that would allow the referendum to take place in 2026, the group said.

The "ban" would still allow up to 12 uses of a private automobile per year per person. It would also include exceptions for rental vehicles, people with disabilities, and service vehicles like delivery vans and garbage trucks.

Tens of thousands of people have taken to the streets of Budapest in defiance of the Hungarian government’s ban on Pride, heeding a call by the city’s mayor to “come calmly and boldly to stand together for freedom, dignity and equal rights”.

Jubilant crowds packed into the city’s streets on Saturday, waving Pride flags and signs that mocked the country’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, as their peaceful procession inched forward at a snail’s pace.

Organisers estimated that a record number of people turned up, far outstripping the expected turnout of 35,000-40,000 people.

“We believe there are 180,000 to 200,000 people attending,” the president of Pride, Viktória Radványi told AFP. “It is hard to estimate because there have never been so many people at Budapest Pride.”

Not sure about the inconsistency of whether periods go inside or outside the quote marks, but outside of that ... Orbán misjudged here.

NEW YORK (AP) — Europeans still aren’t buying Teslas with figures out Wednesday showing sales plunged for a fifth month in a row in May, a blow to investors who had hoped anger toward Elon Musk would have faded by now.

Tesla sales fell 28% last month in 30 European countries even as the overall market for electric vehicles expanded sharply, according to the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association. The poor showing comes after Tesla’s billionaire CEO had promised a “major rebound” was coming last month, adding to a recent buying frenzy among investors.

Soldiers in the Israeli military have told the Israeli news outlet Haaretz that aid distribution centers in Gaza have become “a killing field,” with military leadership ordering soldiers to fire on unarmed Palestinians.

Massacres at aid distribution sites have become a common occurrence in recent weeks as the Israeli military ever so slightly loosened its blockade against humanitarian aid into Gaza, and tasked itself with aid management under the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). The Palestinian Health Ministry, which is run by Hamas, estimates that 549 have been killed and several thousands injured near aid sites since late May, when the foundation first began operations. The United Nations estimated that least 410 had been killed at aid sites over a similar time frame.

Soldiers and officers in the Israeli Defense Forces who spoke to Haaretz paint a bleak picture of the scene, indicating the killings are the result of IDF policies targeting civilians in violation of international law.

As always, let's keep this civil and on-topic.

There is no English equivalent for the word the women of Yakel use to describe the shame they feel when they are unable to carry out their customary duties. It is not exactly embarrassment. It is not simply sorrow. It is something deeper — a rupture between the self and the sacred. For generations, the women of Yakel, a kastom (custom) village on the island of Tanna in the Republic of Vanuatu in the South Pacific, have borne the responsibility for the ritual of Nahunu. Nahunu entails the preparation of food and drink for the Imalul, or the spiritual center of the village, where the people go to commune with their ancestors. This responsibility, though heavy, is not a burden. It is a birthright. A form of spiritual service. To perform it is to be in right relationship — with the land, with one another, and with the ancestral realm. To fail is to feel adrift, untethered from a deeper order, like a reed cut from a reed bed.

And yet, through no fault of their own, they are failing. The gardens that once grew nearby have been blighted by landslides and battered by storms — disasters now far more frequent and intense due to climate change. The women report having to climb down one side of a steep mountain, cross a frequently flooded ravine, and climb back up the other side to reach the arable lands where their relocated gardens are planted — a journey that can take an entire day. Often they do not make it back before sunset. Often they return empty-handed. On those days, the ritual is missed, the spiritual connection is broken, and the women grow increasingly distressed. Meanwhile, hunger has grown so severe that families have been forced to eat the animals once reserved for sacred ceremonies, deepening the destruction of customary life. With every missed or incomplete ceremony, the feeling of alienation grows. For the women in particular, this combination of extreme physical labor and emotional strain has led to strokes and premature death.

Yam is so much more than a crop in Yakel. It is ceremony, calendar, covenant. It is ancestor. It organizes everything from governance to the seasons themselves. Yam ceremonies mark when children come of age, when marriages occur, when the dead are honored. The loss of the yam is thus not merely a loss of a foodstuff but a collapse of Indigenous methods of timekeeping, storytelling, and social coherence. Its absence disrupts all manner of communal life. Its absence means certain ceremonies cannot be performed, including the Toka, the four-day dance by which the community chooses a high chief.

In Yakel, there has not been a single successful yam harvest in four years.

I'll refrain from making a Popeye joke, given the seriousness of the situation.

Aujourd’hui, ce monde qu’on voulait changer, on dit, et on n’a pas tort, qu’il est surtout en marche, vers une forme de fascisme, ou plus précisément de techno-fascisme.

Dans les années 70, un des refrains préférés de la rhétorique gauchiste c’était la « fascisation du pouvoir ». Crier à la fascisation, c’était une des activités préférées, notamment, des maoïstes de la Gauche prolétarienne, qui voulaient rejouer la geste de la Résistance en se baptisant les « Nouveaux Partisans ». Ça a donné une fort belle chanson chantée par Dominique Grange. Mais l’imaginaire de la Résistance tel que la portaient cette chanson et le gauchisme en général, il faut bien reconnaître qu’il a été totalement impuissant, aussi bien à empêcher l’essor de l’extrême-droite, qu’à saisir les transformations du capitalisme, dans les formes du travail et dans les rapports sociaux en général, et donc cet imaginaire-là, hormis simplement comme leçon de courage, il n’a en aucune manière été un outil de lutte efficace.

Along with the Faroe Islands, Greenland and Denmark constitute the Danish Realm, a political arrangement united under the Danish monarch, King Frederik. Greenlanders hold Danish citizenship, many are of mixed Inuit and Danish heritage, and approximately 17,000 live in Denmark. What the Danish government doesn’t like to admit is that Denmark enjoys geopolitical advantages from the arrangement. Retaining Greenland as a territory makes Denmark one of eight members of the Arctic Council and the third largest territory within NATO. And though Greenland retains full control of its natural resources, Denmark is responsible for its foreign policy; the economic potential of any mineral deposits, as well as the emerging trade routes in the Arctic, will likely elevate Denmark’s geopolitical influence in the region and its standing on the world stage.

And yet, until President Donald Trump’s first suggestion, in 2019, that the U.S. wanted to purchase Greenland from Denmark, the island didn’t much figure much in the Danish news cycle. At the time, Trump’s comments were dismissed in Danish media as a bad joke. Now Trump’s rhetoric of the “absolute necessity” of taking Greenland has put the Danish government in the awkward position of defending its territorial possession of a former colony that is laying the groundwork for independence. In doing so, Trump has forced Denmark to reckon with a past that many Danes would prefer to ignore. As a Danish friend who spent four years in Greenland recently told me, “Never before have there been so many Danish journalists in Greenland as there are now.”

Representative Al Green, a Texas Democrat, officially introduced new Articles of Impeachment against President Donald Trump on Tuesday.

"In starting his illegal and unconstitutional war with Iran without the constitutionally mandated consent of Congress or appropriate notice to Congress, President Trump acted in direct violation of the War Powers Clause of the Constitution," Green's articles state.

"President Trump has devolved and continues to devolve American democracy into authoritarianism by disregarding the separation of powers and now usurping congressional war powers."

This is a developing story and will be updated.

Round 3.

On Sazan, a small island off the coast of Albania, the landscape is Jurassic. Ferns, giant lavender, plumbago, rosemary, broom and laurels grow on the mountain at its centre. The view from the top, with its dramatic sunsets, is dizzyingly beautiful.

Albanians call Sazan Ishulli i Trumpëve – Trump Island. Until now mostly untrammelled by development, it is on the verge of becoming a mecca for ultra-luxury tourism, another addition to Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner’s real-estate portfolio. Speaking on the Lex Fridman podcast in July 2024, Trump could barely conceal her excitement: “I’m working with my husband, we have this 1,400-acre island in the Mediterranean and we’re bringing in the best architects and the best brands,” she said. “It’s going to be extraordinary.”

When I reached Kushner by phone the same month, I detected brimming enthusiasm for Sazan, which he seemed to regard as something of a treasure. He said he plans “to create the ideal resort that I’d want to be at with my family and with my friends”.

Ah, the ol' "wilderness is nothing but underdeveloped land" approach.

On an afternoon in March in the middle of the world’s oldest desert, Johannes Michels looks out at an array of solar panels, the size of 40 football fields, that stretches toward a ridge of jagged peaks between the ochre-colored sand and a cloudless blue sky. Inside a building to Michels’s left sits a 12-megawatt electrolyzer—a machine resembling two giant AA batteries that is designed to split water into its two component parts, H₂ and O. Behind him is the desert factory’s key piece of proprietary tech: a rotating kiln in which the hydrogen gas from that water is mixed with iron ore to create a pure form of iron, the main ingredient in steel.

Factories have used fossil fuels to process iron ore for three centuries, and the climate has paid a heavy price: According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), the steel industry today accounts for 8% of carbon dioxide emissions. Purifying the ore involves extracting iron that is bound to oxygen, and “removing the bond between the iron and oxygen requires a massive amount of energy,” says Michels, the 39-year-old CEO of HyIron, the startup behind the project.

But it turns out there is a less carbon-­intensive alternative: using hydrogen to extract the iron. Unlike coal or natural gas, which release carbon dioxide as a by-product, this process, Michels explains, releases water. And if the hydrogen itself is “green”—meaning it’s made through renewable-­powered electrolysis rather than the conventional technique of mixing natural gas and steam—the climate impact of the entire process will be minimal.

If even a fraction of this production comes to pass, it will give Namibia’s economy a major boost. But it is a gamble. Green hydrogen technology is still in its infancy, and long-term demand for its products remains uncertain. Pursuing a technology that isn’t yet commercially established, some critics fear, could strain government resources and distract from more urgent priorities, including the persistence of hunger and a domestic power grid that reaches only half of Namibia’s households. This is especially the case with the largest project under development, along the country’s southern coast, which will require at least $10 billion to get off the ground, a figure nearly as big as Namibia’s GDP today. That venture is contentious for environmental reasons, too: Under current plans, most of its infrastructure will be built inside a national park in a location Namibia’s top environmental watchdog calls the “most sensitive ecosystem in southern Africa.”

“Given the small country that we are, we’re risking quite a lot entering into this global race,” says Ronny Dempers, executive director of the Namibia Development Trust, which advocates for community-based management of natural resources.

Adding to the uncertainty is the death last year of Namibian president Hage Geingob, the hydrogen strategy’s chief political backer. The new president, Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah, who took office in March, hails from the same political party, but multiple people familiar with her thinking told me she’s keener on developing oil and natural gas.

Everything is ok!