Europe

From Gaza to the West Bank, from Palestinian homes to Israeli detention centres, Palestinians have shared horrifying testimonies of dog attacks by the Israeli military. These testimonies demonstrate the Israeli military’s systematic use of dogs to brutalise Palestinians, including children, elderly people, and medical staff – sometimes with fatal consequences.

Reportedly, the Netherlands is a key country from where police-trained dogs are exported to the Israeli army , but corporate confidentiality means that no public information is available about the suppliers or the number of dogs supplied to the Israeli army by Dutch companies.

SOMO discovered that police dog companies in the Netherlands obtained the required veterinary certificates for the export of at least 110 dogs to Israel between October 2023 and February 2025. One hundred of these certificates were granted to the company Four Winds K9, a police dog training centre in the southern Dutch village of Geffen.

In the first week of January, I received a letter from the Berlin Immigration Office, informing me that I had lost my right of freedom of movement in Germany, due to allegations around my involvement in the pro-Palestine movement. Since I’m a Polish citizen living in Berlin, I knew that deporting an EU national from another EU country is practically impossible. I contacted a lawyer and, given the lack of substantial legal reasoning behind the order, we filed a lawsuit against it, after which I didn’t think much of it.

I later found out that three other people active in the Palestine movement in Berlin, Roberta Murray, Shane O’Brien and Cooper Longbottom, received the same letters. Murray and O’Brien are Irish nationals, Longbottom is American. We understood this as yet another intimidation tactic from the state, which has also violently suppressed protests and arrested activists, and expected a long and dreary but not at all urgent process of fighting our deportation orders.

Then, at the beginning of March, each of our lawyers received on our behalf another letter, declaring that we are to be given until 21 April to voluntarily leave the country or we will be forcibly removed. The letters cite charges arising from our involvement in protests against the ongoing genocide in Gaza. None of the charges have yet led to a court hearing, yet the deportation letters conclude that we are a threat to public order and national security.

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/60644394

Dutch informatics and intelligence expert Bert Hubert explains why European governments are urgently trying to get away from the American clouds and how they do it fastest. The article is in German. Here are few excerpts translated by me using Firefox Translation.

What is happening in the EU, is that the politicians are finally waking up. They should have done this five years ago.

The Dutch Cybersecurity Center NCSC has conducted an in-depth investigation of Microsoft. In an official evaluation, it has recorded mutatis mutandis: "The USA can at any time access the European data storage. But we don't think they will do that." Of course, that has always been pure wishful thinking. [...] It remains subject to American surveillance laws.

The data transfer agreement will be cancelled soon. Either the EU Commission is pulling back the adequacy decision, which presupposes that the US is a country with an adequate level of data protection [...] or the European Court of Justice will declare it invalid.

The whole of Europe should be alarmed. We have become a digital colony of Google, Amazon and Microsoft. [...] Our officials are putting European security and independence at risk just so that they can continue to use Microsoft Outlook! That sounds idiotic, but that's how I experience administrations.

We must finally redeem the many European open source programmers. [...] At some point we stopped believing that we can write good software. Now Europe only offers SAP software as an export hit, that's it. But if we invest billions somewhere, it's in European software development.

https://archive.ph/gMO0C

European leaders have condemned Donald Trump’s tariffs as “fundamentally wrong” and creating an “immense difficulty for Europe”, while appealing for last-ditch negotiations to avert an all-out trade war.

The French president, Emmanuel Macron, said Trump’s decision to impose tariffs was “brutal and unfounded” and appeared to call for a suspension of French investment in the US until the tariffs were clarified.

“Future investments, investments announced in the last weeks, should be suspended for a time for as long as the situation with the United States is not clarified,” Macron told a meeting of French companies.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/28090979

Glenn Diesen interview.

Micheal Hudson is a renowned economist, addresses why Europe has set itself on a path to economic crisis and collapse
https://michael-hudson.com/

The European Chips Act has set ambitious goals and its implementation is a significant pan-european effort. From an academic perspective, last year we published an open letter emphasizing the critical importance of open-source EDA for academia in Europe. We were excited and grateful to see that this initiative triggered the definition of a European roadmap in this area, and a matching Chips JU call for project funding. We believe that the projects funded by this call will have a significant impact. Moreover, we already see rising interest from many EU stakeholders, with increasing investments into open-source chip design, especially in open source IP development (e.g. RISC-V cores), and open source EDA tools.

One additional critical barrier remains toward the end-goal of building real open-source chips, especially for prototyping and education: namely, streamlining the access to open source chip production facilities (foundries) is essential. Programs like ChipIgnite, Tiny Tapeout and IHP’s open source program have become “guiding stars” that demonstrate that everyone with a computer can build chips. We believe that having low-cost, regular and easy access to chip production is critical to create excitement and build up expertise, widening the pool of chip designers with tape-out experience: a true silicon democratization and a further de-mystification of chip design.

https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/trackers/government-approval

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/58767141

https://archive.ph/z7DAu