European-Chinese collaboration in academia is another area that has been becoming increasingly sensitive in recent years.

Guardians of Knowledge: Why the EU’s New Research Security Approach Puts European Universities in a Bind – [March 2024]

… Ten years ago, the EU (as well as its member states and many other states across the globe) was advocating for greater research cooperation with all countries, including China. Global academic engagement was an indirect way of increasing the EU’s diplomatic clout …

However, the rise of [Chinese leader] Xi Jinping and his authoritarian, inward-looking governance model led to gradual shift in the EU-China relationship, including in R&I. The final acknowledgement of this development came from von der Leyen Commission in the Strategic Outlook on China in 2019. The EU DG RTD, then led by Commissioner Maria Gabriel, coined a new strategy – “Global Approach” – which recalibrated the openness in R&I to be “as open as possible, as closed as necessary." …

The current Chinese leadership is tightening organizational control over universities, reducing their autonomy, dictating top-down research topics that it deems crucial for China’s national security, and excluding those considered harmful to the CCP’s official narrative. Aiming for technological sovereignty, the CCP also seeks global influence, standard-setting, and norm-shaping abroad, including in science and higher education. Chinese laws and regulations on espionage, military-civil integration and Party-academia integration, involve all ministries, universities and academies of science, and outline plans to increase Chinese influence in academia abroad while achieving “China-style modernization” at home …

Dealing with China necessitates structural changes in how universities organize collaborative research, meaning that any new regulations, however urgent, will take years to take effect …

The ACLED (Armed Conflict Location & Event Data) (ACLED), an initiative that collects and then analyzes disaggregated data, recently published a report on suspected Russian sabotage activities in Europe aiming to undermine the support for Ukraine. It lists 190 incidents that inflicted physical damage and caused significant disruption, from cyberattacks to arson attacks.

… ACLED data show that more than half of all suspicious events since February 2022 occurred in 2024. Around 35% of these events were sabotage, and another 27% were unauthorized drone overflights. During the year, Russia’s steamroller offensive secured only incremental gains in Ukraine but incurred staggering losses of personnel …

Between March and May 2024, suspected Belarusian and Ukrainian recruits of Russian agents set ablaze three warehouses in Lithuania, Spain, and the UK, as well as a shopping mall in Poland. In July, three explosions involving flammable parcels occurred at warehouses in Germany, Poland, and the UK, with a fourth attempt foiled …

Even if the worst fears may prove overblown, European countries will have to reckon with the need to invest in efforts to foil sabotage attempts on both land and at sea and protect critical infrastructure. With the US apparently disengaging from the region and viewing Russia as less of a threat,48 Europe may have to make do without the US intelligence and law enforcement support that helped foil the excesses of suspected Russian activity, such as assassination attempts and flammable parcels onboard planes. Europe may not have much time to prepare for another possible wave of Russian attempts to test its resolve to stand by Ukraine and ultimately defend itself.

@schizoidman@lemmy.ml

@schizoidman@lemm.ee

Yesterday you posted that China and Netherlands pledge deeper cooperation to tackle global challenges, today it is Germany and China to “cooperate on overcoming global challenges”.

Who comes tomorrow?

Neither of these and many other of your articles have any tangible content, that’s just a few lines out of a press statement.

Yeah, they pledge. And China has strong interest to ‘tackle global challenges.’

When Chinese leader Xi Jinping visited Russia a few weeks ago to celebrate victory day in Moscow, Chinese state-controlled media outlet South China Morning Post reported that China’s Xi Jinping kicked off his state visit by thanking Moscow for supporting Taiwan’s reunification with mainland China.

In a signed article in Russia’s state-run Rossiyskaya Gazeta newspaper … [Xi Jinping wrote that Taiwan’s] unification [with China] must be upheld as part of the post-war international order … Celebrating the “enduring friendship” between Moscow and Beijing, he said the two countries had supported each other since World War II …

Two of the global challenges -the war in Ukraine and China’s aggression against Taiwan- appear to be closely linked, at least from China’s point of view. Would be interested to know what other global challenges they were talking about. Unfortunately the linked report doesn’t mention any tangible outcomes of this meeting.

As a greenhorn regarding gaming (and drones), is this something similar to what was posted on Telegram not long ago?

Kremlin-run media publishes — then deletes — video showing drone operators directing strikes in Ukraine from Moscow residential high-rise

On the morning of April 15 [2025], Russian state-run news agency RIA Novosti published — and later deleted — two Telegram posts that appeared to show military drone operators directing strikes against Ukrainian territory from a makeshift control center located inside a residential high-rise in Moscow City, the Russian capital’s business district.

Unemployment rates in euro area and EU for March 2025 -the latest available data according to Eurostat, the statistical office of the European Union- are stable month-on-month, down year-on-year

TLDR:

• In March 2025, the euro area seasonally adjusted unemployment rate was 6.2%, stable compared with February 2025 and down from 6.5% in March 2024. The EU unemployment rate was 5.8% in March 2025, also stable compared with February 2025 and down from 6.0% in March 2024.
• Eurostat estimates that 12.904 million persons in the EU, of whom 10.818 million in the euro area, were unemployed in March 2025
• Compared with February 2025, unemployment increased by 74 thousand in the EU and by 83 thousand in the euro area.
• Compared with March 2024, unemployment decreased by 340 thousand in the EU and by 288 thousand in the euro area.

[Edit typo.]

Germany is not coming back.

Economic forecast for Germany

TLDR:

• Economic activity is expected to stagnate in 2025 due to trade tensions weighing on exports
• Private consumption is nevertheless projected to expand slightly in 2025, boosted by increases in purchasing power and lower interest rates
• Investment is expected to stagnate in 2025 - also related to the elevated geopolitical uncertainty
• In 2026, growth is projected to rebound to 1.1%, as domestic demand strengthens, driven by continued consumption growth and a gradual recovery in investment.
• (Note that government spending -especially infrastructure and defense spending- will have a positive effect on GDP growth in 2025 and 2026, but are not yet included in this forecast as the government has not yet detailed its intentions.)

In 2024, 4.6 billion such packages entered the EU - more than 145 per second - with 91% originating in China. The EU expects the numbers to rise.

Holy mackerel!

Addition:

Air cargo demand between China and the US fell in the first full week after Washington ended the de minimis exemption covering Chinese e-commerce packages

Data released by WorldACD for the week ending 11 May (week 19), shows that airfreight volumes from China and Hong Kong to the US declined by 10% compared with week 18, which had already suffered a 14% decline on a week earlier.

"Year-on-year volumes from China and Hong Kong to North America were down 27% in week 19, a fourth week of double-digit percentage decline,” the data provider said.

Week 19 was the first full week since the US ended the de minimis loophole for China that had allowed e-commerce packages to enter the country duty-free and with minimal customs scrutiny.

Maybe I am mistaken, but reducing this air cargo for these small packages is also good for the environment it seems, it’s sort of “de-growth”?

Yes, and after the Chinese hackers used the U.S. government-mandated wiretap system, the U.S. authorities urged citizens to use encrypted apps …

Sorry, this was a typo. Here’s the right one: https://feddit.org/post/12665037

(If you post the link you should be notified if the link has already been posted, but, yeah, there’s no silver bullet.)

Inside a Czech Abortion Network Offering Pregnant Women from Poland a Lifeline

Poland has one of Europe’s strictest abortion laws, imposing a near-total ban on abortion procedures except in cases of rape, incest, or when a mother’s life is at risk. The Eastern European country, where almost three-quarters of citizens identify as Roman Catholic, has enforced restrictive abortion measures for nearly three decades. Abortion rights suffered yet its most crucial blow in 2020, when Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal outlawed abortions in cases of fetal impairment, or conditions that are life-threatening or serious to the fetus.

“Even in these exceptional situations, abortion is often inaccessible due to systemic barriers, legal uncertainty, and fear of prosecution,” said Adriana Lamacková, the Associate Director for Europe at the Center for Reproductive Rights.

This is a double-double post:

https://feddit.org/post/1266503

https://feddit.org/post/12649971

As an additional example that could be a sign of change: Back in March 2025, several Dutch universities called were calling for greater digital autonomy as more research and educational data is stored in American clouds, posing risks to academic freedom, privacy and accessibility, they said in an open letter. Here, for example, the release by the Utrecht University:

We, the undersigned, express our concern about Utrecht University’s increasing reliance on services from Big Tech companies (particularly Microsoft, Google, Amazon) for our research, teaching and administrative activities. Several years ago, the Rectors of the Dutch universities collectively and wisely warned about this. Since then, little has happened; worse, almost all Dutch universities migrated to Big Tech cloud services, at the expense of our internally operated computer centers.

In an nutshell, this is what I understand, too. It may take some time until it gets fully competitive but it could soon get a better alternative to the gatekeepers like Google imho.

Addition for a brief article I just found:

The EU’s Open Web Index Project: Another Step Toward Digital Independence

The Open Web Index (OWI) is an open-source initiative under the European Union’s Horizon Programme, aimed at democratizing web-search technologies and strengthening Europe’s digital sovereignty. The project will launch in June 2025, providing a common web index accessible to all and decoupling the indexing infrastructure from the search services that use it. In doing so, the OWI offers not only technical innovations but also a paradigm shift in the global search market—today, a single player (Google) holds over ninety percent of the market share and determines access to online information.

The project’s core idea is to make web crawling, metadata enrichment, and indexing a shared European resource. Development takes place in large data centres that process terabytes of raw data each day and publish the entire index as open data. All software components are open-source, and the CIFF format ensures that systems based on Lucene, Solr, or Terrier can connect to the OWI seamlessly. Thus, with minimal effort, researchers and developers can create vertical search engines that rank results according to specific criteria such as sustainability or privacy priorities […]

I really wouldn’t like a random foreign country … to sway my elections

This is why there is some reason to worry when the European Commission preliminarily finds TikTok’s ad repository in breach of the Digital Services Act, potentially swaying elections

Yeah, 1,097,145 signatures. Well done.

The World Is Abandoning Survivors of Conflict-Related Sexual Violence—We Must Not Look Away

In an op-ed, Nobel Peace Prize nominee Dr. Feride Rushiti calls on the world not to abandon survivors of wartime sexual violence as cuts to survivor services in Kosovo threaten to erase decades of progress in justice, healing, and dignity for victims.

The World Is Abandoning Survivors of Conflict-Related Sexual Violence—We Must Not Look Away

In an op-ed, Nobel Peace Prize nominee Dr. Feride Rushiti calls on the world not to abandon survivors of wartime sexual violence as cuts to survivor services in Kosovo threaten to erase decades of progress in justice, healing, and dignity for victims.

Under the headline, “The Limited Effectiveness of Western Sanctions on Russia’s Economy”, the article reads:

That existing sanctions cannot be ineffective is also shown by the fact that Russia regularly calls on Western countries to lift them.**

The exclusion from the Swift system must have been particularly painful: Russia regularly demands from Europe and the US to be reconnected to the international payment system.

A few points:

The inflation in Russia is in the double-digit numbers, for food it is >30% (and these are the official numbers provided by Rosstat, Russia’s national statistics office), the central bank raised the interest rate to 21%.

Russian banks must fear to run out of liquidity to the point that it threatens its existence in the long term -especially if state-subsidized loans for the military industry, the construction business, and others run out in times of peace- as per the Central Bank of Russia (its governor has already warned about that at the end of 2024).

Even Russian-based consultancies estimate that there will be a severe shortage of workers in the coming years not in the least due to military enlistments (the Center for European Policy Analysis estimates that between 10,000 and 30,000 workers join the army every month, about 0.5 percent of the total supply) and a brain drain of skilled workers who left the country.

One of my favorite experts for this matter is Natalia Zubarevich, Professor of the Department of Economic And Social Geography of Russia of the Moscow State University, who predicted in 2023: 'There Will Be no Collapses, but Rather a Viscous, Slow Sinking into Backwardness’

Addition: But I agree with the article that China and other countries support Russia to circumvent sanctions and help Russia’s war machine running.

Ukraine has become a hot-button political issue in Poland’s crucial presidential election campaign.

Far-right populist Slawomir Mentzen, currently polling third, is virulently anti-Ukrainian and supports an “agreement” with Russia’s Vladimir Putin …

Michal Marek, who runs an NGO that monitors disinformation and propaganda in Poland, offers some examples of the anti-Ukraine material being circulated on social media. “The main narratives are that Ukrainians are stealing money from the Polish budget, that Ukrainians do not respect us, that they want to rob and kill us and are responsible for the war,” he says.

“This information starts in Russian-speaking Telegram channels, and, after that, we see the same photos and the same text just translated by Google Translate. And they are pushing [the material] into the Polish infosphere.”

Mr Marek links such disinformation directly with the increase in anti-Ukraine sentiment in Poland, and says an increasing number of Poles are becoming influenced by propaganda.

“But we will only see the effect after the election - what percentage of Poles want to vote for openly pro-Russian candidates.”

Seems to be the same Russian disinformation campaign that we see elsewhere (and we have been observing since Feb 2022). Unfortunately, there is an audience and ‘spreaders’, also here on Lemmy.

As an addition:

Poland finds what it says may be foreign-funded election interference

Poland said on Wednesday it had uncovered what could be an attempt to interfere in its presidential election campaign [Poles vote in election first round on May 18] using advertisements on Facebook that may have been financed from abroad, an assertion the social media platform disputed.

European governments have been on high alert for signs of electoral interference since Romania cancelled an ongoing presidential election in December due to allegations of Russian interference …