As I understand it (which could be wrong, I have no particular knowledge on this topic), he ran as a member of a different party that has not faced the same legal classifications. He used to be a councillor for NPD, which is the one a court described as Nazi-like and unconstitutional. In this election he ran for Free Saxons, who do appears to be far-right loons in their own way but who don’t seem to be so clearly Nazi-ish. NYT is right to point out his connection to NPD, though

It should be noted that Brazil has started manufacturing its own Gripens under a licence. This does not take away from Sweden’s capacity

Anyone got any insight on what the hell Latvia is doing? Not only are they doing the worst, their two genrally-comparable neighbours are actually doing better than most

I personally switched over to Qwant from Ecosia and have found it to be more consistent. Can’t comment on DDG so much

Hey OP, I assume that you machine-translated the headline one way or another, but it’s currently quite confusing. Replacing “death-painted” with “planned” or “upcoming” would work a lot better here

Edit: thanks!

It is, but if trains can carry cargo across the mountains far faster and cheaper than trucks then it will remove a lot of the heaviest and loudest traffic from the roads. I don’t imagine that the locals are demanding that there be no traffic whatsoever, and tourist traffic is - while not always welcome - much more likely to be beneficial to them than passing cargo. The Bavarian link is definitely an issue, and a substantial one, but also one that they have some time to solve

I sympathise with them, but Austria and Italy are already well underway on building one of the longest tunnels in the world to alleviate this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brenner_Base_Tunnel

You’ve been told correctly, or at least correctly enough that it won’t fit in a pocket. The attached pic is a bundle of 1,000 notes correctly packaged (assuming Canadian, since you said dollars and are on a .ca instance, but it’s similar for most currencies). One of those bundles in 100 dollar notes is, of course, $100,000, so presumably it’s some number between one and ten of those bundles

SIXTY TONNES OF BRONZE CANNON FOR THE VASA II

I like to think that the ghost of some 15th century court vihuela player is watching over the raves with great approval

I don’t know about the 35th parallel thing either way, but I don’t think it matters here. The seaweed itself isn’t normally poisonous, it’s actually edible to humans and tastes pretty good. The issue here is what happens when it starts rotting in large quantities

Not being welcomed into an alliance or supranational union is not a sanction. Not being in them is the default state for a country.

At no point have I made the argument that the countries Russia has invaded and controlled want to keep Russia out of these organisations as a matter of moral principals. I explicitly said it was a matter of self interest. They are not telling Russia off, they are making themselves safe from Russia.

• That doesn’t mean that I said anything about colonialism being okay. Don’t put words in my mouth, and especially not those words

• The countries I mentioned were not, in general, colonial powers (there is an exception here for part of Latvia)

• It is still entirely rational behaviour for a colonial power to defend itself against colonisation. Even if they actually were colonial powers then seeking defence against Russia would be a perfectly sensible thing for them to do.

Huh, the line should have been open to the airport by then, it started operating in 2014 too. That said, if you were flying l;ate at night or very early in the morning then it might not have been an option, as there are no services between midnight and 6am or something like that. Also, I hope you enjoyed your time in Scotland!

It has! The core bulk of the system has been up and running since 2014. The construction was a bit of a disaster, but now that it’s actually going it seems to be a success. An estimated 12 million passenger journeys last year

Who said anything about colonialism and conquest not being bad? Countries seek to defend themselves. Russia has consistently been a threat to several EU and NATO states, therefore they seek defences against it

is it just a set of vague guidelines to keep the membership limited to whoever they like?

They don’t need guidelines to do that. Any member state can just say no

Scotland just handed out a whole bunch of grants for electric buses

Both the EU and NATO require unaminous approval of existing members to add new members. Both organisations contain several members that have been under Russian domination within living memory. Given Russia’s frequent aggression towards its neighbours in the post-Soviet period, why would the likes of the Baltic countries trust Russia to be a reliable ally?

Additionally, Russia just straight up does not meet the Copenhagen criteria to join the EU and doesn’t have any measure of the pre-accession integration that every other applicant does

The biggest disputes are Russia/Ukraine, Taiwan, trade dumping, and cyberwarfare. The EU wants Ukraine to win the war, the status quo to be maintained in Taiwan, to protect its domestic manufacturing, and to protect its computer systems from interference. I don’t know enough about the latter two to say the truth of what China and the EU are doing, I just know that the EU has disputes with China about them

I do think that a healthy China-EU relationship in the near future is far more likely than a Russia-EU one and even a little more likely than a US-EU one. There are disputes, but to my amateur eye they look more surmountable

The crucial difference this time would presumably be Polish agreement rather than the route