Being concerned about “unchecked immigration” in Brandenburg an der Havel of all places. This town has lost more than a quarter of its population since 1990. It has no immigration problem but an emigration problem.

It’s too easy to blame Brussels/the EU. Many national governments back these chat control proposals or have done so in the past. They’re just using the EU as a scapegoat to hide their own intentions.

Un-ited Fru-eet Comp-any? Noone at Chiquita has ever heart of this thing before.

This is about Chiquita’s activities in the late 1990s and early 2000s, not about the 1928 coup in Honduras which was funded by Chiquita, then called United Fruit Company.

Wintermute has been unreachable for months now. He’s the admin of feddit.de which currently has technical problems and he doesn’t answer any messages we sent him via various channels.

Why did you cc wintermute?

OMG. Here in Germany you sometimes get an entire booklet of ballot papers, if necessary. You wouldn’t even be allowed to bring your own ballot. Otherwise, one could secretly mark their own ballot in some way, thereby undermining the secrecy of the vote.

Where do you live that you can print your own ballot?

They will try to bring it back to life every few years or so

The cheapest kind of pride, on the other hand, is national pride. For it reveals in those who have it the lack of individual qualities of which they could be proud, for otherwise they would not have recourse to what they share with so many millions. On the contrary, he who possesses significant personal merits will recognize most clearly the faults of his own nation, since he has them constantly before his eyes. But every miserable wretch, who has nothing in the world to be proud of, resorts to the last resort of being proud of the nation to which he happens to belong. He rests on this and is now gratefully prepared to defend with tooth and nail all the faults and follies peculiar to it.

Arthur Schopenhauer, 1851

Translated by Deepl

This is not about Hungary stopping Ukraine from joining the EU, it’s about stopping the EU from investigating if and when Ukraine is ready to join. Even once the EU comes to the conclusion that Ukraine is ready, Hungary could still veto Ukraine’s accession.

As far as I know, the hijab is more of an Arab tradition rather than a Muslim one though many non-Arab muslims have adopted it as well. In Tajikistan it might never have been common. Please take all of this with a grain of salt though, I’m far from an expert on any of these topics.

Isn’t Photoshop by a lot of big corporations. Why would they sign up to that? Or do they get an exemption that isn’t available to private individuals?

As far as I understand, this specific plan comes from the Belgian government. Von der Leyen’s Commission though seems to have similar goals.

How is that GDPR compliant?

They can’t get kicked out but their voting rights in the councils could be suspended. That would require unanimous approval by all other member states.

In the past, Hungary under Orbán and Poland under Morawiecki had some kind of pact to protect each other from such a suspension. With Tusk now the Polish prime minister, that’s no longer the case, but there’s some fear that Slovakia’s Fico could shield Orbán instead.

I don’t understand these comics. Are they pro religion? Are they anti-religious satire?

The first comic seems to both warn against satan and attack religion. It might be talking about all religions but the right one.

The second comic is even more confusing. First it seems to associate education and the theory of evolution in particular with satan. But then it seems to associate rejection of education with punks who aren’t necessarily known for their religiosity.

The third comic, finally, is pretty clear, painting wealth and entertainment (sports) as detractions from religion. This could technically still be satire though.

She would still have to either trust him or take birth control herself as well.

Are you sure he wasn’t liquidated? To keep him from spilling secrets on that intelligence service?

The CNN headline is a bit misleading. It’s not the International Criminal Court as a whole that is seeking these arrest warrants but the ICC’s chief prosecutor Karim Khan. The judges have yet to decide on these warrants.

[Side note: This is the same kind of lazy journalism that uses terms like EU chief or EU leader interchangeably for the President of the European Commission (Ursula von der Leyen) and the President of the European Council (Charles Michel). If this was limited to a short headline, I could excuse it, but CNN continues with the same wording in the first sentence of the article: “The International Criminal Court is seeking arrest warrants for …” which is absolutely unnecessary, even if CNN clarifies things later.]