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🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Military science, technology, and theory 🔗 Military history/Weaponry 🔗 History of Science 🔗 Ukraine 🔗 Military history/European military history

Ukraine, formerly a republic of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) from 1922 to 1991, once hosted Soviet nuclear weapons and delivery systems on its territory. The former Soviet Union had its nuclear program expanded to only four of its republics: Belarus, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Ukraine. After its dissolution in 1991, Ukraine inherited about 130 UR-100N intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM) with six warheads each, 46 RT-23 Molodets ICBMs with ten warheads apiece, as well as 33 heavy bombers, totaling approximately 1,700 nuclear warheads that remained on Ukrainian territory. Thus Ukraine became the third largest nuclear power in the world (possessing 300 more nuclear warheads than Kazakhstan, 6.5 times less than the United States, and ten times less than Russia) and held about one third of the former Soviet nuclear weapons, delivery system, and significant knowledge of its design and production. While all these weapons were located on Ukrainian territory, initially they were not under Ukraine's control.

In July 1993, the Ukrainian parliament proclaimed ownership of the former Soviet nuclear weapons deployed on its territory. Testimony from the same year by Bruce G. Blair cited the Russian Ministry of Defence’s Chief Directorate for Nuclear Munitions, Colonel General Yevgeniy Maslin, who reportedly stated that Russia had de facto lost control over the nuclear weapons stationed in Ukraine. The same report noted that crews operating strategic nuclear bombers, along with subunits responsible for nuclear munitions, had been incorporated into the Ukrainian Armed Forces, while Moscow still retained operational control over the strategic missile forces at that time. By late 1993, some estimates suggested that Ukraine could break the nuclear release codes between December 1993 and March 1994, as there were no fundamental obstacles preventing it from doing so.

In 1994, Ukraine agreed to transfer these weapons to Russia for dismantlement and became a party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, in exchange for economic compensation and assurances from Russia, the United States and the United Kingdom to respect Ukrainian independence and sovereignty within its existing borders. Almost twenty years later, Russia, one of the parties to the agreement, invaded Ukraine in 2014 and subsequently also from 2022 onwards.

🔗 Biography 🔗 International relations 🔗 Human rights 🔗 Military history 🔗 Death 🔗 Women 🔗 International relations/International law 🔗 Israel 🔗 Israel Palestine Collaboration 🔗 Palestine 🔗 Military history/Middle Eastern military history 🔗 Military history/Post-Cold War 🔗 Crime and Criminal Biography 🔗 Crime and Criminal Biography/Serial Killer

Hind Rami Iyad Rajab (Arabic: هند رامي إياد رجب; 3 May 2018 – 29 January 2024) was a five-year-old Palestinian girl in the Gaza Strip who was killed by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) during the Gaza war, which also killed six of her family members and two paramedics coming to her rescue.

Rajab and her family were fleeing Gaza City when their vehicle was shelled by the IDF, killing her uncle, aunt and three cousins, with Rajab and another cousin surviving and contacting the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) to ask for help while noting that they were being attacked by an Israeli tank. The cousin was later also killed and Rajab was left stranded in the vehicle for hours on the phone, as paramedics from PRCS attempted to rescue her. Both Rajab and the paramedics were later also found dead on 10 February after an Israeli withdrawal.

Israel claimed that there were not any troops present in the neighborhood and denied carrying out the attack. However, this was refuted by The Washington Post and Sky News's investigations relying on satellite imagery and visual evidence, which concluded that a number of Israeli tanks were indeed present and one had likely fired 335 rounds on the car that Rajab and her family had been in, with tank operators being able to see that the car had civilians including children in it. The Forensic Architecture investigation also concluded that an Israeli tank had also likely attacked the ambulance that came for Rajab.

In the aftermath of the killing, Western media outlets were criticized for their coverage of the incident, including for not attributing who killed Rajab and for their adultification of her. American student protestors occupied and renamed Hamilton Hall in her honor at Columbia University, drawing increased attention to the incident.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Internet culture 🔗 Law 🔗 Software 🔗 Software/Computing

The Warez scene, often referred to as The Scene, is an underground network of piracy groups specialized in obtaining and illegally releasing digital media before their official release date. The Scene distributes all forms of digital media, including computer games, movies, TV shows, music, and pornography. This network is meant to be hidden from the public, with the files shared only with members of the community. However, as files became commonly leaked outside the community and their popularity grew, some individuals from The Scene began leaking files and uploading them to file-hosts, torrents and EDonkey Networks.

The Scene has no central leadership, location, or other organizational culture. The groups themselves create a rule set for each Scene category (for example, MP3 or TV) that then becomes the active rules for encoding material. These rule sets include a rigid set of requirements that warez groups (shortened as "grps") must follow in releasing and managing material. The groups must follow these rules when uploading material and, if the release has a technical error or breaks a rule, other groups may "nuke" (flag as bad content) the release. Groups are in constant competition to get releases up as fast as possible. First appearing around the time of Bulletin Board Systems (BBSes), The Scene is composed primarily of people dealing with and distributing media content, for which special skills and advanced software are required.

🔗 Visual arts

A Claude glass (or black mirror) is a small mirror, slightly convex in shape, with its surface tinted a dark colour. Bound up like a pocket-book or in a carrying case, Claude glasses were used by artists, travelers and connoisseurs of landscape and landscape painting.

Claude glasses have the effect of reducing and simplifying the colour and tonal range of scenes and scenery to give them a painterly quality. The user would turn their back on the scene to observe the framed view through the tinted mirror — in a sort of pre-photographic lens — which added the picturesque aesthetic of a subtle gradation of tones.

🔗 United States 🔗 International relations 🔗 Business 🔗 Politics 🔗 Trade 🔗 Taxation 🔗 Presidents of the United States 🔗 Presidents of the United States/Donald Trump

"Trump Always Chickens Out" (TACO) is a pejorative description of the perceived tendency of US president Donald Trump to make threats, only to later delay or renege on them as a way to increase time for negotiations and for markets to rebound. The phrase was popularized in May 2025 after the many threats and reversals during the trade war he initiated with his "Liberation Day" tariffs. On Wall Street, a TACO trade is buying stocks cheaply after a tariff announcement pushes stocks lower, then selling them at a profit after the tariffs are delayed or reduced and the market rebounds.

By 2026, TACO was also used for Trump's decisions in the realm of foreign policy, specifically his reversal of threats to annex Greenland, his attempt to find an abrupt exit for the escalating 2026 Iran War as global securities began to fall due to the rise in oil prices, and his last-minute ceasefire deal for the Iran War itself before the deadline for the American bombing campaign.

🔗 United States 🔗 Law 🔗 Politics 🔗 United States Constitution 🔗 Politics/American politics 🔗 U.S. Congress

The Twenty-fifth Amendment (Amendment XXV) to the United States Constitution addresses issues related to presidential succession and disability.

It clarifies that the vice president becomes president if the president dies, resigns, or is removed from office by impeachment. It also establishes the procedure for filling a vacancy in the office of the vice president.

The amendment provides for the temporary transfer of the president's powers and duties to the vice president, either on the president's initiative alone or on the initiative of the vice president, together with a majority of the president's cabinet. In either case, the vice president becomes the acting president until the president's powers and duties are restored.

The amendment was submitted to the states on July 6, 1965, by the 89th Congress, and was adopted on February 10, 1967, the day the requisite number of states (38) ratified it.

🔗 Linguistics 🔗 Christianity 🔗 Linguistics/Etymology

The Christian holiday Easter has several names. The names differ depending on languages, but most are derived from Greek and Latin "pascha", which is taken from the Hebrew פֶּסַח (Pesach), meaning Passover. The modern English term Easter developed from the Old English word Ēastre or Ēostre (Old English pronunciation: [ˈæːɑstre, ˈeːostre]), which itself developed prior to 899, originally referring to the name of the Anglo-Saxon goddess Ēostre.

🔗 Russia 🔗 Politics 🔗 Discrimination

Managed nationalism or controlled nationalism (Russian: Управляемый национализм, romanized: Upravlyayemyy natsionalizm) is a term used by some academics to refer to an informal policy of pragmatic collaboration with Russian nationalists and neo-Nazis (or in broader cases, the Russian far-right as a whole) pursued by the government of Russia under Vladimir Putin. Beginning after Putin's election as President of Russia in 2000 and escalating after the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine, managed nationalism led to the promotion of the Russian Image organisation throughout the late 2000s until the 2009 murders of human rights activists Stanislav Markelov and Anastasia Baburova, at which point Russian Image was dissolved.

Since the 2011–2013 Russian protests and Euromaidan, managed nationalism has faced a revival, with far-right militants supporting the anti-Maidan and Novorossiya. The policy of managed nationalism is closely linked to other Russian government policies of promoting neo-Nazism and other far-right movements in foreign countries.

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This is a list of common misconceptions. Each entry is formatted as a correction; the misconceptions themselves are implied rather than stated. These entries are meant to be concise, but more detail can be found in the main subject articles.