Europe Pub

Context: Before the US joined the war, IBM had a business deal with the Nazi regime to supply their computers. Their computers were used for everything from census and logistics to concentration camp administration. IBMs punch card systems along with numbers tattooed on prisoners were used to track their relocations, labour schedules and executions.

IBM claims that they lost control of their German division after the US entered the war but some historians claim that they still continued to profit from their partnership knowingly and despite the fact.

Got a warning for my blog going over 100GB in bandwidth this month... which sounded incredibly unusual. My blog is text and a couple images and I haven't posted anything to it in ages... like how would that even be possible?

Turns out it's possible when you have crawlers going apeshit on your server. Am I even reading this right? 12,181 with 181 zeros at the end for 'Unknown robot'? This is actually bonkers.

Edit: As Thunraz points out below, there's a footnote that reads "Numbers after + are successful hits on 'robots.txt' files" and not scientific notation.

The White House under Gerald Ford tried to block a landmark Senate report that disclosed the CIA’s role in assassination attempts against foreign leaders and ultimately led to a radical overhaul in how the agency was held to account, documents released to mark the 50th anniversary of the report’s publication reveal.

The documents, dating from 1975, were posted on Thursday by the National Security Archive, an independent research group, as it sought to highlight the report’s significance amid conjecture that Donald Trump may have authorized the agency to assassinate Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, amid a massive US military build-up against the country.

Peter Kornbluh, senior analyst with the National Security Archive, said highlighting the Church report’s historical significance had become more urgent in the context of the speculation surrounding Maduro, who the White House has accused of “narco-terrorism”.

“Fifty years after the scandal of the revelations of the Church committee report, we’ve come a long way in the wrong direction, where we have US presidents who now seem to feel they can openly discuss assassination plots against foreign leaders,” he said.

“We can’t have an honest and full discussion of the merits of assassinating the head of state of Venezuela without going back and reading the Church committee report. People have forgotten what a scandal this report generated, and the discussion of morality and US foreign policy it created.

The justice department’s office of legal counsel has reportedly been tasked with drafting an opinion that could render any assassination of Maduro legally justifiable, according to the New York Times.

The state department has announced it will declare the Cartel de los Soles, a shadowy cartel whose existence has been doubted by some drug experts but which the Trump administration insists Maduro heads, a terrorist organization as of 24 November.

That could pave the way for assassination strikes on a similar legal basis as applied to the strikes on al-Qaida leaders, including Osama bin Laden, during the post-9/11 “war on terror”, and on Qassem Suleimani, the senior commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, after the US designated the unit a terrorist group.

Kornbluh said the 9/11 attacks changed public perceptions on whether assassinations – at least of terrorists – were acceptable.

“If someone was designated a terrorist, they could then legitimately be taken out, and that is why you today see the Trump administration doing linguistic and legalistic somersaults,” he said.

Applying it to Venezuela would violate the principles established by Church and may ill-serve US foreign policy goals, Kornbluh warned.

Artist: Liz Climo

I don't really know who to talk to right now and posting here seems a good idea.

So, like the title says, I think my marriage is over. For context: Me (F42) and my wife have been married for 9 years. We got married not even a year into our relationship and I had no idea back then that I had ADHD. Did we get married too soon? Yes and no. The problems didn't really start until around year 5, so even if we had gotten married after, say, three years, the outcome would have been the same.

Around two and a half years ago my wife suggested that I may have ADHD after things had started getting worse and worse. But although I was open to the idea it took me a year to get off my butt and get diagnosed and start treatment. Precious time that I wasted.

Now I've been on meds for a year and in therapy for around 9 months. Some things have gotten better but the core problem remains: My wife feels responsible for everything, is shouldering pretty much all the mental load and I seem to be unable to become the reliable adult partner that she needs. ADHD or the way I handle it has completely eroded our marriage and the love we had between us. My wife feels exhausted and trapped and I feel helpless because I feel like I maybe moved up a level or two in my "adulting skills" but I'd need to be a Level 10 to make our marriage work. Or make any marriage work, for that matter.

I feel extremely sad. I feel sad about the suffering I have caused my wife, who really tried to stick it out. Probably longer than she should have for her own good. Sad because I've been trying really hard and I see some people who have ADHD but who also seem to have an "overachiever personality" and they have their shit together so much more than I do. Sad because I wasted a whole year doing nothing. Sad because we used to be so happy together and used to love each other so much and now all that seems to be left is bitterness and resentment.

😢

US volunteers who have poured into Ukraine to help amid war are dismayed by Trump’s continuing pressures on Kyiv

Americans involved in the Ukrainian war effort are embarrassed and dismayed by Donald Trump’s continuing pressures on Kyiv and think his administration’s latest peace plan is tantamount to backstabbing and another catastrophic failure of US foreign policy.

“Complete bullshit and a betrayal by Trump,” said an American special forces veteran who has helped train and advise the Ukrainian military since the full-scale Russian invasion began in February 2022. “But are you even surprised?”

Last week, a 28-point piece-plan reportedly drafted by Steve Witkoff, a Trump envoy negotiating with Kremlin adviser, Kirill Dmitriev, was leaked to the press and then revealed to be an apparent repackaging of Vladimir Putin’s maximalist demands on Ukraine.

The former House speaker thinks the GOP could see a wider exodus as MAGA rift grows

Kevin McCarthy is something of an expert in how quickly the mood of Republican legislators can turn.

The Republican representative from California and former House speaker said on Tuesday that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene‘s upcoming retirement should shock GOP leaders into action. Speaking to Fox News‘ Jesse Watters, McCarthy called the Georgia congresswoman’s announcement a “canary in the coal mine” and warned that further Republican defections were imminent if party leaders didn’t work to promote unity.

“She’s almost like the canary in the coal mine,” McCarthy said. “This is something inside Congress, they’d better wake up, because they are going to get a lot of people retiring, and they’ve got to focus.”

Even before the surprise announcement from one of the party’s most-visible politicians, Republicans were staring down some terrifying math. While the party currently controls the lower chamber, 22 Republican representatives have already shared they won’t contest their seats in 2026. Polling data at the moment points toward a brutal midterm election for Republicans as voters react to the broadly unpopular actions of Donald Trump in his second term.

White House pressure campaign has not found willing participants in all states – including Republican-led ones

The unprecedented push to create new congressional districts mid-decade is hitting roadblocks in the form of local elected officials from both parties.

Republicans face headwinds in the 2026 midterms: the party in power often loses ground in the election after a presidential win, and Trump’s agenda isn’t going over well. The 2025 off-year elections showed voters favoring Democrats at higher-than-expected margins. Trump wants to keep the House in Republican control by redrawing congressional maps to create more Republican-friendly districts. He first pressured Texas, which responded by drawing five additional red districts, which led California to advance a now-approved ballot measure to create five more Democrat-friendly districts to offset Texas’s maps.

But the White House pressure campaigns haven’t found willing participants in all GOP-held statehouses, or from the courts. Texas’s maps were blocked by a federal court, and the US supreme court will review that decision, which could deal a blow to the whole gambit. Voters in Missouri are trying to stop their state’s gerrymander via a referendum.

In Dearborn, provocateurs have held anti-Islam rallies, attempted to burn the Qur’an and rile residents for clickbait

White nationalist and rightwing agitators recently descended on Dearborn, Michigan, to hold an anti-Islam rally at which they attempted to burn a Qur’an and manufacture controversy over the city’s large Arab-American population. But the protest has been dismissed by local leaders as a cheap publicity stunt aimed at generating money and clicks for far-right influencers.

But there is little doubt the Michigan city has become a repeated target for the publicity-hungry far-right because it holds the US’s highest percentage of Arab-American residents. Similar provocateurs have marched with a pig’s head on a pole at an Arab-American fair. Meanwhile, Christian evangelists regularly attempt to convert Muslim children at parks or outside schools.

The latest group of Trump-allied influencers appears emboldened by the anti-Muslim current running through much of the president’s second administration. Popular conservative influencers like Cam Higby, Jake Lang, and members of Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA partook in the 18 November rally at which some shouted racist abuse, unfurled a banner that read “Americans Against Islamification”, or smacked a Qur’an with a slab of bacon.

Israeli forces stormed a theatre in occupied East Jerusalem to prevent a children’s play from taking place following orders from far-right minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.

Police forces arrived on Sunday night at the Palestinian National Theatre, forcibly removing spectators gathered for the play and causing children to cry as they were ordered home.

Brad Lander posted a thread about it on BlueSky

Taiwan will prepare itself for combat within the next two years amid "intensifying" threats from China, the nation's president has declared.

Lai Ching-te held a news conference on Wednesday morning amid a ramping up of military and political pressure by Beijing, which views the democratically-governed island as its own territory.

Speaking after announcing plans to boost defence spending with a "special" $40bn (£30.6bn) budget, Mr Lai said Xi Jinping's regime was "speeding up military preparations to take Taiwan by force".

It comes after Mr Xi used a phone call with Donald Trump to describe Taiwan's return to mainland China as "an integral part of the post-war international order".

Astrophysicist Prof Tomonori Totani says research could be crucial breakthrough in search for elusive substance

Nearly a century ago, scientists proposed that a mysterious invisible substance they named dark matter clumped around galaxies and formed a cosmic web across the universe.

What dark matter is made from, and whether it is even real, are still open questions, but according to a study, the first direct evidence of the substance may finally have been glimpsed.

More work is needed to rule out less exotic explanations, but if true, the discovery would go down as a turning point in the decades-long search for the elusive substance that is said to make up 27% of the cosmos.

“This could be a crucial breakthrough in unraveling the nature of dark matter,” said Prof Tomonori Totani, an astrophysicist at the University of Tokyo, who said gamma rays emanating from the centre of the Milky Way appeared to bear the signature of the substance.

Details are published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics.

Panel 1: I know that somewhere my soulmate is waiting.

Panel 2: Meanwhile somewhere

Media Naranja which literally means “orange half” is an expression in Spanish used to say my better half, or my soulmate.

When you find the person who in theory is meant for you, it is said that you have found "the other half of your orange (tu media naranja)".

This saying comes from a myth included in the book “The Symposium” by Plato. This book talks about one of the most well-known myths about love. According to the poet Aristophanes, the origin of human beings had a different form to the one we have now, they were spherical beings! They wanted to attack the gods and Zeus decided to punish them by cutting them in half. Since that day, each part has been looking for its other half in order to feel complete.