Certainly seems like a questionable move by the bank, though it’s entirely possible we’re missing more context.

There was an article yesterday explaining that the frozen account belongs to an organisation that funds other organisations. One of those is accused of supporting/funding terrorism. So at the end, the bank has no choice and nothing to decide on their own, once they get knowledge of this accused connection. Otherwise they would to get dragged into the case as well and prosecution against them could be opened. Which is why they froze the bank account for now and sent a questionnaire about the organisation and their members to evaluate the situation. That is all, nothing was seized, the title is a lie.

The quality of intelligence gathered by the drone is insane. The guy is playing dead, not moving, wearing sunglasses. When thinking about satellite images, aircraft taking pictures or binoculars, other lenses and cameras with high zoom, this would work.

But the drone zooms in and between hat and sunglasses, we see the eyes looking right up, we see the wink and the chest moving from breathing.

Or I did just web search for 2024 and there are indeed ‘European Parliament election in France’ as a result.

But you probably understood very well what was saying and why I was writing it. Do you have an explanation for his behaviour?

Are there elections coming in France?

We are hearing big words from Macron over and over in the last few weeks to support Ukraine - yet France is far behind when in comes to supporting Ukraine financially or with military equipment. And please don’t bring that Reddit meme ‘France is doing everything secretly and nobody knows about it’. Democratic financing in billions of Euros is public and not a high toilet paper bill like in Hollywood movies from the 80s. There is of course a lot of proportionate support by France within the EU-assistance, as France is a big economy and paying into the EU budget. It’s a similar situation with Italy, as they are another big economy within the EU. Both EU ‘power houses’ are far behind when it comes to direct support for Ukraine.

Macron has been telling us just last week, that the local EU arms industry needs more orders to enable low and competitive prices. He also told us support for Ukraine should only receive subsidies for EU-made products. And last week we saw statistics that the arm industry/exports from the USA and France profited the most from the Russian invasion in Ukraine, as everyone is getting their military up to date and ordering a lot. So everything plays in his hands and France is reaping in big profits and getting support for its huge arms industry. Yet, the country is far behind in supporting Ukraine and Macron keeps calling other countries to support Ukraine more - or here that ‘Europe will lose all credibility’.

What is going on here? Elections?

I like the zeppelin idea, btw.

That is really a good idea indeed!

As the plane seems not to solve the current problem at all. Large blades can already be transported via river barge close to the onshore locations. Or via road, as long as those are wide and straight enough. The problem are the last few kilometres narrow roads through protected forest, along small creeks, up the mountains etc. Alternatively to building a runway in such a remote location, one could also build a wider road. It would impact nature, protection laws and residents in similar ways and completely avoid new problems coming with the plane idea.

A Zeppelin on the other hand could skip the part with a huge runway or wide road completely and just hover over the location and lower the payload, like a helicopter. I have no clue if that is doable from weight, wind influence etc, but the idea seems way smarter than a large aircraft requiring a huge runway.

It’s probably meant as distinction from other sectors with Methane emissions, e.g. agriculture, transport, chemical industry…

It’s not that they now changed something with data collection and sharing within the update. They always did it, all services free of charge do it and most that cost money likely take the extra money as well.

It’s now that they tell you in a short and informative way (1st sentence) and ask for your consent.

What’s really infuriating, are websites and services that have an “Accept All” button but no “Reject All”. Instead you have to manage individually and sometimes I have to flip 30 separate buttons to disable data sharing, where they even call advertisers a ‘necessary 3rd party’ requiring interaction on top.

It’s odd to see such an article on Euronews, who are usually very reliable on their reporting. Here we have a mix of different things, mainly existing in the media sphere but less in reality.

1. Leaked recordings – That’s the resort of Mr. Pistorius, the Minister of Defence. But even blaming Mr. Pistorius is a bit far fetched, as it was one officer on a trip in Asia not following any safety code by joining a secret online meeting via public wifi and his private phone. Mr. Pistorius already explained the case in the last days. So the blame should go to that person ignoring the safety protocol or their IT service company for failing to instruct properly. Nothing to do with Scholz at all, but some tabloids of course print those baseless calls from opposition politicians. I just don’t get why Euronews would publish that.

2. loose-lipped press conferences – Completely made up ‘scandal’ about Scholz indicating why Taurus cruise missiles cannot be delivered to Ukraine. He didn’t even directly say it, but it was a media interpretation, that France and the UK provide geodata for their missiles and the UK has personnel in Ukraine. And on top, that information was already in the news in October 2023. Everyone knows it, it’s public for half a year. I feel like waking up in a parallel universe, where made up stories and the norm. It was publicly known and he didn’t even say it, yet he gets blamed for leaking secrets.

3. confused policy – Since the beginning, Scholz was against sending Taurus, like very other country asked about 500km missiles as well. He never changed his stance. The article also doesn’t go into detail what would be confused about his policy.

Yet, it’s getting mentioned what threats Russia is throwing against Germany by supporting Ukraine further. I looked up the writer and it’s a British journalist at BBC radio. This article sounds more like a rant on Sun on Dailymail and is not up to the standard that I know from Euronews.

This whole topic about the Taurus cruise missiles feels like a bad act anyway, as no country provided 500 km missiles. Every country said no. And no means no. Unless it’s Germany, then the questions comes again and again and again and fingers pointing at Scholz for standing with the same policy as always and as every other country in the world: no 500km missiles.

I think the article only mentions the prices in the Google store, which are way more expensive than other shops. The Pixel 8 128GB is currently available at 550€.

So the Pixel 8a at 570€ would be the more expensive model.

It’s all exciting action to record with the phone, until a ship explodes and reality kicks in.

“Tobias Ellwood, the former chairman of the Commons defence committee” is about half a year behind with his accusation. So either it’s just for show or he’s not well informed about this topic.

Already October 2023, this was in the news for everyone to read, that France and the UK are providing the geodata for their cruise missile targets and that the UK has personnel in Ukraine.

One example article I just picked via web search: German Tagesspiegel, dated 05.10.2023

https://www.tagesspiegel.de/politik/keine-taurus-lieferung-fur-die-ukraine-erwarte-vom-kanzler-dass-er-endlich-den-weg-freimacht-10572931.html

Quote & DeepL translation:

The British and French can do something “we can’t”

The UK and France have nevertheless supplied cruise missiles of the virtually identical types “Storm Shadow” and “Scalp”. According to Bild, Scholz said in a meeting of the Foreign Affairs Committee last week that these two countries “can do something that we are not allowed to do”, adding: “So the question does not arise.”

What he meant was that the UK and France supplied the geodata for missile targets themselves, with the UK also having its own personnel on the ground in Ukraine. This is out of the question for the German government.

Besides the title statement, China hasn’t done anything. In the article text, they get more into detail and it’s the Western sanctions leading to individual companies stopping their services for Russians. Companies don’t want to get dragged into Western sanctions themselves, so they stop their business with/in Russia.

Article quotes:

News portal 66.ru reported that while payment by physical UnionPay cards appears to work as usual, the same cards linked to the Huawei Pay service are refused in Russia.

The decision was made by Chinese banks Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, China Construction Bank and Bank of China due to the “risks of secondary sanctions” from the United States,

The motivation from the previous nationalist PiS government in Poland was mainly anything they could to do against Russia or against Germany.

So by supporting Ukraine with military equipment, they were acting against Russia. But at the same time slowed down German support for Ukraine, by blocking maintenance and factories for Ukrainian equipment in Poland. Leading to long transports across to other countries e.g. Latvia for maintenance.

Now, with the grain, this has no Russian involvement and their own farmers are unhappy. So there is no way to go against Russia or against Germany. Also there is a new government in Poland, so I guess we have to see how that develops now.

I read that paragraph on Wikipedia but fail to see your statements. Italy, Denmark, France aren’t even mentioned there.

In detail it’s described that Poland stopped paying Russia, so Russia stopped pumping gas via the Yamal pipeline to Poland. That is not ‘cutting-off’. Also Poland kept receiving natural gas from Russia via Nord Stream, via Germany and over to Poland during summer 2022. Yamal was running in reverse and supplying Poland, so that they even hit over 100% storage at that time. For Finland it’s similar - they stopped paying, so Russia stopped delivering.

Even today Russia supplies EU countries with natural gas, which is also part of the storage and supply calculation within the EU. What if Russia stops delivering tomorrow? How can these countries be supplied in such a scenario? Russia still has some leverage over a few countries, e.g. Austria via long-term contracts, where Austria stated not honouring the contracts from their side, would be more expensive that taking the natural gas.

I must admit I stopped reading after the first paragraph but it’s just so exaggerated or simply false, that I don’t see the value in spending more time on such an article.

Shell, Europe’s largest energy company, forecast on Wednesday that global demand for liquefied natural gas, which has been a lifeline for Europe after Russia cut off pipeline gas supplies, will surge by around 50 percent over the next 15 years.

• LNG is not a lifeline. A pipeline could be labelled like that, but LNG is a globally traded good supplied by dozens of countries.
• Russia did not cut off natural gas supplies, they even supply now throughout their illegal war, towards countries that support Ukraine.
• 50% increase over 15 years is not a ‘surge’, but more a slow and steady increase.

These charts are usually a day or a few days behind for individual kills. It takes time to collect statistics from the front lines, make reports and create that image overview out of it. So it’s never from events of the same day, always what recently happened.

I often saw videos of Russian columns advancing into fields and lots of wrecks at the end of the videos. Sometimes it even takes 2 days, but then there is the spike in numbers in the published data.

That threat or that demand should be easy to fulfil on paper though via bureaucracy – just in case he makes it.

The USA has so many services and authorities included in their military, that other countries usually have separately. E.g. cost guard, army corps of engineers, space force etc.

It would just require some formal budget reallocation for all the countries, that have those services and authorities not in their military budget. And magically, on paper, everyone would suddenly be way over the 2% NATO target. With the USA being in a spot to not even complain about that ‘trickery’, as the mentioned sectors are in their own military budget anyway.

The point is that Hamas doesn’t stop firing rockets. I’m not there, so I don’t know if they fire on southern Israel every single day, but twice a week everyone can read about rockets fired at Israel and sirens going off. It seems just Tel Aviv wasn’t targeted for a few weeks (this article). In the link below Ashkelon is mentioned as well with a short break of 2 weeks. But as I said before, the further north, the longer the range they need to build and with the claims they are running short on weapon supplies, this makes sense that further targets get hit less often.

e.g. just a few days ago:

“Hamas welcomes UN court ruling as it fires rockets on Israel (January 26, 2024; The Telepgraph)”

“Hamas appears to have targeted the south of Israel, where attacks have become increasingly rare amid claims the group is running out of missiles. Rockets were sighted over the city of Ashkelon for the first time in two weeks.”

https://news.yahoo.com/hamas-welcomes-un-court-ruling-181014383.html

This article is only about the location Tel Aviv.

It’s further away, so more effort to build rockets and harder to hit. Hamas never stopped firing rockets on Israel. On the 7 October 2023 terror attack alone, reports range from 3000 to 5000 projectiles or rockets within 24 hours and in the following conflict, they kept firing missiles on Israel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Hamas-led_attack_on_Israel#Rocket_fire

It’s renewed for a 2nd season:

“Blue Eye Samurai Has a “Lot More Blood to Spill” in Season 2”

https://www.netflix.com/tudum/articles/blue-eye-samurai-season-2

Link including trailer.