Europe

A lawyer representing the online message board 4chan says it won't pay a proposed fine by the UK's media regulator as it enforces the Online Safety Act.

According to Preston Byrne, managing partner of law firm Byrne & Storm, Ofcom has provisionally decided to impose a £20,000 fine "with daily penalties thereafter" for as long as the site fails to comply with its request.

"Ofcom's notices create no legal obligations in the United States," he told the BBC, adding he believed the regulator's investigation was part of an "illegal campaign of harassment" against US tech firms.

"The welfare state that we have today can no longer be financed with what we produce in the economy," Merz said in the town of Osnabrück.

The coalition partners had already agreed to reforming the social insurance system, which covers health insurance, pensions and unemployment benefits, due to rising costs and gaps in the federal budget.

https://archive.md/MaP18

A UDA gang is warning that it plans to force every immigrant out of the Rathcoole estate in Newtownabbey.

Loyalist thugs who burnt two cars belonging to a foreign-born family and spray-painted threatening graffiti on their home have drawn up a ‘hit-list’ of others to be targeted.

https://archive.md/HBLb5

The latest court hearing in the ‘terrorism’ case against singer Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh of Irish rap band Kneecap has once again thrown the spotlight on the British government’s efforts to smear and imprison the politically active.

Speaking from his macabre curiosities shop in Essex in a recent YouTube interview, Scragg wears a shabby bowler hat, has tribal-style face tattoos and a ginger beard that descends into three pendulous dreadlocks.

There is no suggestion the sale of these items is illegal, but experts, including Dame Sue Black, one of the UK’s leading forensic scientists, are calling for a crackdown on the trade in human remains.

They say the lack of regulation means much of the buying and selling of skulls and bones falls into a legal grey zone; and that the growing online market risks fuelling a new era of “body snatching”, with reports of bones being removed from crypts and graveyards in the UK and abroad.

“You’ve got people who are breaking into mausolea and who are taking remains away to sell them for people who think this is gothic, quaint [or] supernatural,” said Black, the president of St John’s College, Oxford. “If you can make the sale of a bird’s nest illegal, surely to goodness you can make the sale of a human body illegal. Having a necklace made out of somebody’s teeth isn’t acceptable to people.”

cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/4179008

Archived link

In a move that defies warnings from its own intelligence agencies and the European Union, Spain awarded a €12.3 million ($14 million) contract to the Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei.

The deal involves the provision of high-performance Huawei OceanStor 6800 V5 servers and support services for Spain’s Integrated Telecommunications Interception System (SITEL), the central repository for lawful wiretap recordings in investigations of grave crimes, including terrorism and organized crime.

This decision is particularly jarring, given that the European Commission formally identified Huawei as a “high-risk vendor,” citing the potential for interference by non-EU state actors and concluding that the company represents “materially higher risks than other 5G suppliers.”

[...]

The Spanish case is not an isolated incident, paralleled by a contentious contract awarded to Hikvision, another Chinese technology firm, for surveillance cameras at the highly sensitive southern European border enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla, crucial for managing migration and counter-terrorism.

[...]

China’s legal mandate and hardware vulnerabilities

The designation of Huawei as a “high-risk” vendor is rooted in a specific and interlocking set of legal, geopolitical, and technical realities. The primary non-technical risk factor is China’s legal framework: Article 7 of China’s 2017 National Intelligence Law explicitly states that “any organization or citizen shall support, assist, and cooperate with state intelligence work in accordance with the law,” with a subsequent article compelling secrecy about such cooperation.

[...]

This means any Chinese company, regardless of its corporate structure, can be legally compelled to serve Beijing’s intelligence apparatus, rendering contractual assurances of data privacy subordinate to its obligations to the Chinese state. Furthermore, the threat landscape includes the inherent vulnerabilities of the global ICT supply chain.

The European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA) has identified supply chain attacks as the top emerging cybersecurity threat for the next decade. A prime example is the 2021 Kaseya VSA ransomware attack, in which attackers injected malicious code into a software patch, resulting in devastating effects for thousands of downstream customers.

[...]

An organization’s security, therefore, is only as strong as the weakest link in its supply chain

[...]

It emphasizes the necessity of the “Zero Trust” security philosophy, a core premise of the EU’s cybersecurity approach, which mandates that no component, internal or external, can be implicitly trusted.

[...]

The European Commission later clarified that decisions to restrict or exclude Huawei and ZTE from 5G networks were “justified and compliant with the 5G Toolbox”.

The NIS 2 Directive, which entered into force in January 2023, is legally binding and mandates that member states transpose its provisions into national law by October 2024. It imposes stricter cybersecurity obligations, including those related to supply chain security, and embodies the “Zero Trust” philosophy.

Similarly, the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) targets the security of products themselves, mandating “security-by-design” for all “products with digital elements” sold in the EU, requiring manufacturers to integrate cybersecurity throughout a product’s lifecycle.

Despite this robust framework, a “critical flaw” exists: the 5G Toolbox remains a non-binding recommendation, while NIS 2 and CRA, though binding, are broader and do not explicitly ban specific vendors.

[...]

The Spanish government’s decision, despite widespread warnings and the clear policy direction of its allies, underscores the critical “implementation gap” within the EU.

As the NIS 2 Directive awaits full transposition into Spanish law, the incident serves as a stark reminder that short-term budgetary considerations, if unchecked, can override long-term strategic security, potentially undermining the integrity of essential alliances and the collective digital sovereignty of the European Union.

cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/4176333

The British government on Friday extended the deadline until October to decide on whether to approve China's plans to build the largest embassy in Europe in London after Beijing refused to fully explain why the plans contained blacked out areas.

China's plans to build a new embassy on the site of a two-century-old building near the Tower of London have stalled for the past three years because of opposition from local residents, lawmakers, and Hong Kong pro-democracy campaigners in Britain.

[...]

DP9, the planning consultancy working for the Chinese government, said its client felt it would be inappropriate to provide full internal layout plans, saying additional drawings provided an acceptable level of detail, after the government asked why several areas were blacked out in drawings.

"The Applicant considers the level of detail shown on the unredacted plans is sufficient to identify the main uses," DP9 said in a letter to the government.

"In these circumstances, we consider it is neither necessary nor appropriate to provide additional more detailed internal layout plans or details."

The British government's department of housing said in reply it would now rule on whether the project can go ahead by October 21 rather than by September 9 because it needed more time to consider the responses.

Luke de Pulford, executive director of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, a group with ties to an international network of politicians critical of China which revealed the letter, said: "These explanations are far from satisfactory."

De Pulford, a long-standing critic of plans for the embassy, said the "assurances amount to 'trust me bro'".

[...]

The Chinese government has been seeking to turn the former Royal Mint in London and into a new mega-embassy in London, replacing the far smaller premises it has occupied since 1877. But the move has sparked concerns China would use this the 'mega-embassy' covering some 20,000 square metres as an Chinese espionage hub.

Carmen Lau, a Hong Kong pro-democracy activist who fled to the UK and is now one of dozens id exiled dissidents for whom Beijing offered bounties, argues that the UK should not allow China's "authoritarian regime" to have its new embassy in such a symbolic location. One of her fears is that China, with such a huge embassy, could harass political opponents and could even hold them in the building.

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After a two-day, very heated debate in the Dutch Parliament, Caspar Veldkamp – the acting foreign minister – decided to resign.

He was increasingly getting frustrated by the fact that he wanted to push for more sanctions against Israel … but the other ministers, his colleagues, were against it. He also came under increasing pressure from lawmakers, especially from the opposition in Parliament, who have been really requesting stricter sanctions against Israel.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/26448045

Data shows more than 1m hectares torched so far this year, with records also broken for CO2 and other air pollutants

archived (Wayback Machine)

cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/4164934

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has ruled out the chance that China could serve as a security guarantor in the event of a future peace deal with Russia to end the war in Ukraine.

The Ukrainian president’s remarks follow discussions this week between United States and European leaders about how to establish a future peacekeeping force in Ukraine should the war end.

“Why is China not in the guarantees? First, China did not help us stop this war from the beginning,” Zelenskyy told reporters, according to a report by The Kyiv Post media outlet on Thursday.

“Secondly, China helped Russia by opening the drone market,” Zelenskyy said.

Beijing has repeatedly called for a peaceful resolution to the Ukraine war, but its ongoing economic support for Russia has undermined its neutral image with Zelenskyy and Western leaders.

Despite Beijing’s ambitions of playing a greater role in mediating international conflicts, the Ukrainian leader’s remarks suggest that China will have no role in a Russia-Ukraine peace process.

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