Where debating everything under the sun is only the beginning

Edit: Oh, and it also helps that in schools we rarely say "book" but rather there is a different fancy general word that means something like oeuvre in French, so that's what we say when we want to seem educated.

(Hi)story is nice, as is tale (a telling), but better yet might be to go for work, or preferably opus (or opera).

Der gleiche Himmel about spy games between DDR and West Berlin. The first episode is promising.

If you enjoy Estonian subtitles, here you go https://jupiter.err.ee/1152509/seesama-taevas
If not, turn them off.

I haven't killed a thread like this since Opera. I truly am home. 

The EU has reached a deal to send Ukraine 1 million rounds of ammunition within the next 12 months.
The plan — seen by POLITICO — will see the EU both donate ammunition from its own stockpiles and also jointly purchase new shells for Ukraine. It also leaves open the possibility that the EU could help countries collectively buy missiles for Ukraine. And it sets a goal to “jointly procure” these munitions “in the fastest way possible” before October.
Diplomats and ministers finalized the strategy during meetings in Brussels on Sunday and Monday. EU leaders are expected to give their final blessing at a summit in Brussels later this week.

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The deal represents a landmark juncture for the EU, marking the first time the self-described peace project has plotted to jointly buy arms for a country at war. Officials have argued the EU must evolve to meet the extraordinary moment — no less than the fate of democracy on European soil is at stake, they insist.

FAST TRACK PROCEDURE FOR 155mm ARTILLERY ROUNDS

In the run-up to the informal meeting of the Ministers of Defence Council, which took place in Stockholm on 7 and 8 March, Head of Agency Borrell set out three complementary tracks to deliver more artillery ammunition and to deliver it more quickly: first to help Member States in sending such ammunition from national stockpiles or from pending orders; second to aggregate demand and quickly move to 155mm collaborative procurement; and third to ramp up the manufacturing capacity of the European defence industry.

Quote from: ersi on 2023-01-11, 12:39:47

Really? Is there a difference? I consider the difference as imaginary (or rather unnecessary) as between Internet and internet. (As to "the", Estonian - and Finnish and Russian - don't have it and I'd rather we never did.)

Perhaps it's because we live in a Christian (Dutch: christian) nation. The distinction is somewhat imaginary when talking about bibles that contain the Bible but there are also bibles in the sense of authoritative works in general.

"The Bible, that's how it's written in the Bible, Biblestudy"
"biblepaper, a bible seller"
"an Italian food bible"

The general rule is that proper names are capitalized and type names aren't. So the Bible/Quran/New Testament is considered the same as something like the Guardian or the New York Times, albeit under a special "holy books" category. But an individual bible is a type name. The Bible is a bible and the New York Times is a newspaper. Or something like that. But yeah, it's certainly odd for the bible seller.

Vandalism at four power stations in the western U.S. state of Washington over the weekend added to concerns of a possible nationwide campaign by right-wing extremists to stir fears and spark civil conflict.

Local police on Tuesday gave no information on who they suspected was behind the vandalism, which knocked out power on Christmas Day for about 14,000 customers in Tacoma, a port city area south of Seattle.

Tacoma Public Utilities, which owned two of the facilities targeted on Sunday, said in a statement that it was alerted by federal law enforcement in early December about threats to their grid.

I have been browsing the W3C ActivityPub spec. Basically Twitter/Mastodon, and while there is a inReplyTo field (taking a URI), not really a forum gateway. Sure a post can turn into a tweet or a toot or what have you, and the other direction could be finagled. But that is still not a forum. A forum would focus on the discussion, the topic, the thread, not the individual contributions of the participants.

Haven't seen if there is any meaningful discussion on what a forum gateway should be, how to manage it, and how to convince forum software makers to support this.

Until last month, not many people were aware of the political warfare programme at Norway’s Arctic University in the northern city of Tromsø. But then, officers at the Norwegian Police Security Service arrested one of the researchers, claiming he was a Russian spy.

There is a striking irony in the fact that Moscow may have successfully infiltrated the very programme that investigates so-called “greyzone” activity — subversive actions by hostile states that fall below the threshold of formal conflict. But this arrest should also serve as a warning for academics across the world, whose work across borders and collaborative instincts make them particularly vulnerable at a time of rising geopolitical tensions.

José Assis Giammaria, purportedly a Brazilian citizen who has a masters degree in strategic studies from the University of Calgary, had specifically requested to work on the greyzone programme. It is also likely that he was interested in Tromsø as a centre of research on the High North, an increasingly contested region on Russia’s doorstep where melting Arctic ice is opening new sea routes and allowing access to rare minerals.

Giammaria gained a position in much the same way academics usually find employment: he was recommended to Gunhild Hoogensen Gjørv, professor of security studies who leads the greyzone programme, by colleagues in Canada. She scrutinised his references and his University of Calgary credentials, which all seemed entirely in order.

“He got a lot of praise when I checked references,” Gjørv told Norwegian media. “He expressed an interest in the security policy situation in the north”. She described him as a quiet and slightly shy man who did not share much information about himself. Now Giammaria is being held by Norwegian security services, who say he’s a Russian illegal — a spy operating under deep cover, rather than posing as a diplomat. The investigative network Bellingcat has already alleged that he is actually Colonel Mikhail Mikhushin of the GRU, Russia’s foreign intelligence service. He has denied all the accusations against him.

A Twitter photo from the Mykolas Romeri University shows one of the suspected spies with his colleague Marc Lanteigne, an associate professor at the Arctic University of Norway. It was the two of them who came from Tromsø and were supposed to represent the university.

The conference on hybrid threats took place on September 29 and 30 in Vilnius. The suspected spy was trained to find weaknesses in hybrid threats such as pipeline sabotage. The EU-Hybnet conference project is financed by the EU.

Among the main objectives of the conference was to find out what to do if the country’s gas pipelines are blown up or the entire electricity grid is paralyzed. The lawyer of the suspected spy, Thomas Hansen, told the daily “VG” that the suspect is in shock and does not understand the accusations against him.

The formation, deployment and destruction of the 11th Army Corps tell a story that’s bigger than the tragic tale of Russia’s war in Ukraine. The corps, sandwiched between two NATO countries along a strategic sea, was supposed to give Russian forces an advantage in a global war.

Instead, it became cannon fodder for a Ukrainian army that, on paper, was weaker than the Russian army was. Now Kaliningrad is all but defenseless, and the threat the oblast’s troops once posed to NATO … has evaporated.

The 11th Army Corps isn’t really a new formation. It’s a new grouping of existing formations under a single headquarters that itself answers to the Russian navy’s Baltic Fleet. The corps oversees a motorized division, a separate motorized regiment, artillery, rockets, air-defense troops and supporting units.
Before Russia widened its war in Ukraine starting in late February, there were no fewer than 12,000 Russian troops in Kaliningrad with around 100 T-72 tanks, a couple hundred BTR fighting vehicles, Msta-S howitzers and BM-27 and BM-30 rocket-launchers. The 11th Army Corps oversaw most of these forces.

Looming on the western border of Lithuania, one of the weakest NATO member states, the 11th Army Corps was the anvil for a possible Russian invasion of the former Soviet republics Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. The hammer was the 18,000-strong ground force in western Russia on the eastern border of the Baltic states.

It seems time to repost the reminder from the original thread. It had a lot about Muslims, Vivaldi is still running on beer, and this thread has taken an environmental turn. All fine, but it should be about the world starting 15 years 11 months and 3 days from now.

The Next Eleven (known also by the numeronym N-11) are the eleven countries – Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, Turkey, South Korea, and Vietnam