Ukraine
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wow. I had no idea the origin of that term. I always thought it was just slang for....you know....and nothing else.By The Time They Figure Out What Went Wrong, We'll Be Sitting On A Beach, Earning Twenty Percent.0
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Say what?Spiritual_Chaos said:Swedish and Finnish prime ministers discussing joining NATOwww.myspace.com0 -
Photoshopped for attention is all I can think of….?The Juggler said:
Say what?Spiritual_Chaos said:Swedish and Finnish prime ministers discussing joining NATO
From Sanna Marin’s Facebook page
Post edited by PJPOWER on0 -
Hi! My name is Mat, and i'm have a biziness oppurtunities for you Mr. Juggler. If you like lots of monies send me your’re personal information so we can get start right away.The Juggler said:
Say what?Spiritual_Chaos said:Swedish and Finnish prime ministers discussing joining NATO
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why does this thread keep getting closed and reopened? is it the technical issues?By The Time They Figure Out What Went Wrong, We'll Be Sitting On A Beach, Earning Twenty Percent.0
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I'm thinking it has to do with going off topic, for which I am partly responsible and apologize for. Been on a bit of a social media shaming tour as of late. Your new thread should provide a place to contain that.
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but usually when there's a posting content issue, the mods say something about it to try to contain it. no comments. just locked, then unlocked, then locked, then unlocked.By The Time They Figure Out What Went Wrong, We'll Be Sitting On A Beach, Earning Twenty Percent.0
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Dan Rather on AdbookFunny how Putin keeps losing but uses propaganda and sycophants to claim he’s winning. Sounds familiar, but I can’t place it exactly._____________________________________SIGNATURE________________________________________________
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '140 -
It's the Russican Way. As is blaming all your failures on your adversaries.mickeyrat said:Dan Rather on AdbookFunny how Putin keeps losing but uses propaganda and sycophants to claim he’s winning. Sounds familiar, but I can’t place it exactly.I SAW PEARL JAM0 -
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i approve of this development.mrussel1 said:"You can tell the greatness of a man by what makes him angry." - Lincoln
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."0 -
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Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '140 -
"It's a sad and beautiful world"-Roberto Benigni0
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Haha!0
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lol i made this meme.mickeyrat said:"You can tell the greatness of a man by what makes him angry." - Lincoln
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."0 -
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Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '140 -
lol once something is on facebook it is fair game!!mickeyrat said:"You can tell the greatness of a man by what makes him angry." - Lincoln
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."0 -
The quotation function on this message board sucks fucking ass. So I paste it as plain text, even though this is a quote and not me saying it - but as stated, the quotation function is shit:
Accession to NATO is not automatically a shortcut to a safer Sweden, and there are several reasons why we should not become dependent on member states whose development is unstable. Political scientists Trita Parsi and Frida Stranne write this on SvD's debate page.The debaters are particularly concerned about the United States and the "deep polarization" in the country, which they believe is getting worse and worse with each passing year. They do not see it as unlikely that an "unpredictable" Trump will become president again, or that a similar leader will become president in a later election."We also see similar development trends in other parts of the NATO Alliance, which is ominous."Such aspects must be taken into account and it would be "pure madness" if Sweden becomes a member of NATO without a long and intense debate, the political scientists say.
Parsi och Stranne: Ett splittrat USA gör Nato mindre stabilt | SvD Debatt
From Sweden's biggest morningpaper. Finland is gonna have a decision on NATO in just a few weeks.Post edited by Spiritual_Chaos on"Mostly I think that people react sensitively because they know you’ve got a point"0 -
Ukraine is scanning faces of dead Russians, then contacting the mothers
Ukrainian officials say the use of facial recognition software could help end the brutal war. But some experts call it ‘classic psychological warfare’ that sets a gruesome precedent.
By Drew HarwellApril 15, 2022 at 5:00 a.m. EDTListen to article9 minA Ukrainian serviceman takes a photo of a dead Russian soldier after Ukrainian forces overran a Russian position outside Kyiv on March 31. (Vadim Ghirda/AP)Ukrainian officials have run more than 8,600 facial recognition searches on dead or captured Russian soldiers in the 50 days since Moscow’s invasion began, using the scans to identify bodies and contact hundreds of their families in what may be one of the most gruesome applications of the technology to date.
The country’s IT Army, a volunteer force of hackers and activists that takes its direction from the Ukrainian government, says it has used those identifications to inform the families of the deaths of 582 Russians, including by sending them photos of the abandoned corpses.
The Ukrainians champion the use of face-scanning software from the U.S. tech firm Clearview AI as a brutal but effective way to stir up dissent inside Russia, discourage other fighters and hasten an end to a devastating war.
But some military and technology analysts worry that the strategy could backfire, inflaming anger over a shock campaign directed at mothers who may be thousands of miles from the drivers of the Kremlin’s war machine.
The West’s solidarity with Ukraine makes it tempting to support such a radical act designed to capitalize on family grief, said Stephanie Hare, a surveillance researcher in London. But contacting soldiers’ parents, she said, is “classic psychological warfare” and could set a dangerous new standard for future conflicts.
“If it were Russian soldiers doing this with Ukrainian mothers, we might say, ‘Oh, my God, that’s barbaric,’ ” she said. “And is it actually working? Or is it making them say: ‘Look at these lawless, cruel Ukrainians, doing this to our boys?’ ”
Clearview AI’s chief executive, Hoan Ton-That, told The Washington Post that more than 340 officials across five Ukrainian government agencies now can use its tool to run facial recognition searches whenever they want, free of charge.
Clearview employees now hold weekly, sometimes daily, training calls over Zoom with new police and military officials looking to gain access. Ton-That recounted several “‘oh, wow’ moments” as the Ukrainians witnessed how much data — including family photos, social media posts and relationship details — they could gather from a single cadaver scan.
Some of them are using Clearview’s mobile app to scan faces while on the battlefield, he said. Others have logged in for training while stationed at a checkpoint or out on patrol, the night sky visible behind their faces.
“They’re so enthusiastic,” Ton-That said. “Their energy is really high. They say they’re going to win, every call.”
The company, Ton-That said, first offered its services last month to Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense after he saw Russian propaganda claiming that soldiers captured there were actors or frauds.
The system had primarily been used by police officers and federal investigators in the United States to see whether a photo of a suspect or witness matched any others in their database of 20 billion images taken from social media and the public Internet.
But about 10 percent of the database has come from Russia’s biggest social network, VKontakte, known as VK, making it a potentially useful tool for battlefield scans, Ton-That said.
Continues....
Post edited by mickeyrat on_____________________________________SIGNATURE________________________________________________
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '140 -
ummm......Russia's Chernobyl seizure seen as nuclear risk 'nightmare'By CARA ANNA and INNA VARENYTSIAYesterday
CHERNOBYL, Ukraine (AP) — Here in the dirt of one of the world’s most radioactive places, Russian soldiers dug trenches. Ukrainian officials worry they were, in effect, digging their own graves.
Thousands of tanks and troops rumbled into the forested Chernobyl exclusion zone in the earliest hours of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February, churning up highly contaminated soil from the site of the 1986 accident that was the world's worst nuclear disaster.
For more than a month, some Russian soldiers bunked in the earth within sight of the massive structure built to contain radiation from the damaged Chernobyl nuclear reactor. A close inspection of their trenches was impossible because even walking on the dirt is discouraged.
As the 36th anniversary of the April 26, 1986, disaster approaches and Russia’s invasion continues, it’s clear that Chernobyl — a relic of the Cold War — was never prepared for this.
With scientists and others watching in disbelief from afar, Russian forces flew over the long-closed plant, ignoring the restricted airspace around it. They held personnel still working at the plant at gunpoint during a marathon shift of more than a month, with employees sleeping on tabletops and eating just twice a day.
Even now, weeks after the Russians left, “I need to calm down," the plant's main security engineer, Valerii Semenov, told The Associated Press. He worked 35 days straight, sleeping only three hours a night, rationing cigarettes and staying on even after the Russians allowed a shift change.
“I was afraid they would install something and damage the system,” he said in an interview.
Workers kept the Russians from the most dangerous areas, but in what Semenov called the worst situation he has seen in his 30 years at Chernobyl, the plant was without electricity, relying on diesel generators to support the critical work of circulating water for cooling the spent fuel rods.
“It was very dangerous to act in this way,” said Maksym Shevchuck, the deputy head of the state agency managing the exclusion zone. He was scared by it all.
Russia’s invasion marks the first time that occupying a nuclear plant was part of a nation's war strategy, said Rebecca Harms, former president of the Greens group in the European Parliament, who has visited Chernobyl several times. She called it a “nightmare” scenario in which “every nuclear plant can be used like a pre-installed nuclear bomb.”
A visit to the exclusion zone, more desolate than usual, found that the invasion risked a catastrophe worse than the original explosion and fire at Chernobyl that sent radioactive material into the atmosphere and became a symbol of the Soviet Union’s stumbling final years. Billions of dollars were spent by the international community, including Russia, to stabilize and secure the area.
Now authorities are working with Ukraine’s defense ministry on ways to protect Chernobyl’s most critical places. At the top of the list are anti-drone systems and anti-tank barriers, along with a system to protect against warplanes and helicopters.
None of it will matter much if Russian President Vladimir Putin resorts to nuclear weapons, which Shevchuck says he can't rule out anymore.
“I understand they can use any kind of weapon and they can do any awful thing,” he said.
Chernobyl needs special international protection with a robust U.N. mandate, Harms said. As with the original disaster, the risks are not only to Ukraine but to nearby Belarus and beyond.
“It depends from where the wind blows,” she said.
After watching thousands of Soviet soldiers work to contain the effects of the 1986 accident, sometimes with no protection, Harms and others were shocked at the Russian soldiers’ disregard for safety, or their ignorance, in the recent invasion.
Some soldiers even stole highly radioactive materials as souvenirs or possibly to sell.
“I think from movies they have the imagination that all dangerous small things are very valuable,” Shevchuck said.
He believes hundreds or thousands of soldiers damaged their health, likely with little idea of the consequences, despite plant workers' warnings to their commanders.
“Most of the soldiers were around 20 years old,” he said. “All these actions proves that their management, and in Russia in general, human life equals like zero.”
The full extent of Russia’s activities in the Chernobyl exclusion zone is still unknown, especially because the troops scattered mines that the Ukrainian military is still searching for. Some have detonated, further disturbing the radioactive ground. The Russians also set several forest fires, which have been put out.
Ukrainian authorities can’t monitor radiation levels across the zone because Russian soldiers stole the main server for the system, severing the connection on March 2. The International Atomic Energy Agency said Saturday it still wasn’t receiving remote data from its monitoring systems. The Russians even took Chernobyl staffers’ personal radiation monitors.
In the communications center, one of the buildings in the zone not overgrown by nature, the Russians looted and left a carpet of shattered glass. The building felt deeply of the 1980s, with a map on a wall still showing the Soviet Union. Someone at some point had taken a pink marker and traced Ukraine’s border.
In normal times, about 6,000 people work in the zone, about half of them at the nuclear plant. When the Russians invaded, most workers were told to evacuate immediately. Now about 100 are left at the nuclear plant and 100 are elsewhere.
Semenov, the security engineer, recalled the Russians checking the remaining workers for what they called radicals.
“We said, ‘Look at our documents, 90% of us are originally from Russia,'” he said. “But we’re patriots of our country," meaning Ukraine.
When the Russians hurriedly departed March 31 as part of a withdrawal from the region that left behind scorched tanks and traumatized communities, they took more than 150 Ukrainian national guard members into Belarus. Shevchuck fears they’re now in Russia.
In their rush, the Russians gave nuclear plant managers a choice: Sign a document saying the soldiers had protected the site and there were no complaints, or be taken into Belarus. The managers signed.
One protective measure the Russians did appear to take was leaving open a line routing communications from the nuclear plant through the workers’ town of Slavutych and on to authorities in Ukraine's capital, Kyiv. It was used several times, Shevchuck said.
“I think they understood it should be for their safety,” he said. The IAEA said Tuesday the plant is now able to contact Ukraine’s nuclear regulator directly.
Another Ukrainian nuclear plant, at Zaporizhzhia in southeastern Ukraine, remains under Russian control. It is the largest in Europe.
Shevchuck, like other Ukrainians, has had it with Putin.
“We’re inviting him inside the new safe confinement shelter,” he said. “Then we will close it.”
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Follow AP’s war coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine
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Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '140
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