One of Sweden's oldest and most valuable ancient monuments, a 3,500-year-old Bronze Age burial cairn in Junkboda outside Skellefteå, is now set to be brutally destroyed to make way for the new Norrbotnia railway line.
During a preliminary investigation, the burial chamber was discovered—a space large enough for a human, enclosed by massive stone slabs and covered with rounded stones, the classic hallmark of a burial cairn.
Now, this invaluable monument is about to be erased... And this is just the beginning. The burial cairn is far from the only victim of this ruthless infrastructure project.
Hundreds of ancient remains have already been identified as "obstacles to construction", and more will meet the same fate. Our history is being erased and our cultural heritage is obliterated, all in the name of efficiency and exploitation.
Deliberately destroying our history and cultural heritage is not just a disgrace—it is a scandal! We have a duty to protect what remains of our ancestors’ legacy, not level it to the ground. Sacrificing our ancient monuments for modern expansion is an insult to both our history and future generations.
One of Sweden's oldest and most valuable ancient monuments, a 3,500-year-old Bronze Age burial cairn in Junkboda outside Skellefteå, is now set to be brutally destroyed to make way for the new Norrbotnia railway line.
During a preliminary investigation, the burial chamber was discovered—a space large enough for a human, enclosed by massive stone slabs and covered with rounded stones, the classic hallmark of a burial cairn.
Now, this invaluable monument is about to be erased... And this is just the beginning. The burial cairn is far from the only victim of this ruthless infrastructure project.
Hundreds of ancient remains have already been identified as "obstacles to construction", and more will meet the same fate. Our history is being erased and our cultural heritage is obliterated, all in the name of efficiency and exploitation.
Deliberately destroying our history and cultural heritage is not just a disgrace—it is a scandal! We have a duty to protect what remains of our ancestors’ legacy, not level it to the ground. Sacrificing our ancient monuments for modern expansion is an insult to both our history and future generations.
The company maintains that it cannot act against individual or group chats, which are “private amongst their participants,” but it will respond to requests in relation to sticker sets, channels and bots which are publicly available. During the invasion of Ukraine, Pavel Durov has wrestled with this issue a lot more prominently than he has before. Channels like Donbass Insider and Bellum Acta, as reported by Foreign Policy, started pumping out pro-Russian propaganda as the invasion began. So much so that the Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council issued a statement labeling which accounts are Russian-backed. Ukrainian officials, in potential violation of the Geneva Convention, have shared imagery of dead and captured Russian soldiers on the platform. One thing that Telegram now offers to all users is the ability to “disappear” messages or set remote deletion deadlines. That enables users to have much more control over how long people can access what you’re sending them. Given that Russian law enforcement officials are reportedly (via Insider) stopping people in the street and demanding to read their text messages, this could be vital to protect individuals from reprisals. At this point, however, Durov had already been working on Telegram with his brother, and further planned a mobile-first social network with an explicit focus on anti-censorship. Later in April, he told TechCrunch that he had left Russia and had “no plans to go back,” saying that the nation was currently “incompatible with internet business at the moment.” He added later that he was looking for a country that matched his libertarian ideals to base his next startup. Either way, Durov says that he withdrew his resignation but that he was ousted from his company anyway. Subsequently, control of the company was reportedly handed to oligarchs Alisher Usmanov and Igor Sechin, both allegedly close associates of Russian leader Vladimir Putin. He said that since his platform does not have the capacity to check all channels, it may restrict some in Russia and Ukraine "for the duration of the conflict," but then reversed course hours later after many users complained that Telegram was an important source of information.
from tw
