The facebook page Canada Proud often posts news updates, citing mainstream news sources. But the posts sometime add misleading details not found in the original reports, according to a review by The New York Times.

One of its posts this month said Prime Minister Mark Carney had suspended his campaign because of “connections with China” and cited a major Canadian news outlet, Global News, as its source. But the Global News article did not actually mention any connections to China.

Canada Proud describes itself as a “grass-roots group of Canadians” concerned about the country’s direction. The page is owned by Mobilize Media Group, a Toronto public affairs firm.

The company has bought more than $250,000 in ads targeting Canadian voters

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/21/technology/canada-election-facebook-instagram-meta.html

A new study finds that presenting the same continuous climate data, such as incremental changes in temperature, in binary form -- such as whether a lake did or did not freeze in the winter -- significantly increases people's ability to see the impact of climate change.

archived (Wayback Machine)

I was interviewed for Critical Future Tech on "mainstream tech companies' ability to influence us through the data that we willingly provide them, and the actions we can take to regain control over our digital identities."

There's a podcast and transcript.

CRITICAL FUTURE TECH ISSUE 19

Hope you enjoy!

From the first world war to the invasion of Iraq, left-wing soldiers have questioned our involvement in wars. Yet we rarely hear these dissenting veteran’s voices.

Satellite imagery captured Thursday shows extensive damage at one of Russia's largest ammunition depots after it caught fire and exploded earlier in the week.

They are the chosen people. they can't be held accountable for their actions.

it's their birthright.
/sarcasm
#USpol #Racism #NewYork #Zionism #Politics @palestine@lemmy.ml @palestine@a.gup.pe @israel

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/62295325

Someone toss his ass in prison already!

Research council launches 100m kroner fund as Norwegian government calls for the protection of academic freedom

Norway has launched a new scheme to lure top international researchers amid growing pressure on academic freedom in the US under the Trump administration.

Following in the footsteps of multiple institutions across Europe, the Research Council of Norway on Wednesday launched a 100m kroner (£7.2m) fund to make it easier to recruit researchers from other countries.

The initiative is open to researchers from around the world, but it was expanded and accelerated after the Trump administration announced substantial cuts last month.

https://archive.is/N1mhO if you wanna get around the paywall

Article primarily focused on the US industry, but many of things it talks about apply to most of the world too

China has exempted some U.S. imports from its 125% tariffs and is asking firms to identify critical goods they need levy-free, according to businesses notified, in the clearest sign yet of Beijing's concerns about the trade war's economic fallout.

...

But, he cautioned: "It’s clear that neither the U.S. nor China want to be the first in reaching out for a deal."

Google is somehow the only company that is able to completely ruin a calculator app. Even before installing, Google outs themselves with how much data they collect:

• App info and performance: Crash logs and Diagnostics
• Personal info: Email address
• Device or other IDs
• App activity: App interactions

And of course the encouraging message:

Data can’t be deleted

The developer doesn’t provide a way for you to request that your data be deleted

As soon as you try to install it, the app requests network access. I'm glad to be using GrapheneOS where this can be restricted.

The app doesn't crash on launch, which is a new concept for Google, since most of their apps won't even start without Google Play Services installed. Maybe that means the calculator app can calculate 1+1 without requiring installing the most invasive software known to man, right?

Of course it can't. It crashes the moment you press the plus sign. Thank you, Google, for requiring Google Play Services for your calculator app to do basic addition. You know what calculator doesn't require Google Play services to do math?

In all seriousness, OpenCalc is a near 1:1 match to Google Calculator, so I suggest anyone use that instead.

The cherry on top is Google's calculator app is bundled with a privacy policy, which on its own is a treat to read through: https://policies.google.com/privacy

Congratulations, Google, you can spy on math now.

Tropical deforestation was found to cause large reductions in precipitation using a range of observation-based datasets1. However, the limitations of satellite-based space-for-time statistical analysis have hindered understanding of the roles of reshaped mesoscale atmospheric circulation and regional precipitation recycling at different scales. These effects are considered nonlocal effects, which are distinct from the local effects governed by deforestation-induced reductions in evapotranspiration (ET). Here we show reversed precipitation responses to Amazon deforestation across wet and dry seasons. During the wet season, deforested grids experienced a noteworthy increase in precipitation (0.96 mm per month per percentage point forest loss), primarily attributed to enhanced mesoscale atmospheric circulation (that is, nonlocal effect). These nonlocal increases weaken with distance from deforested grids, leading to significant precipitation reductions in buffers beyond 60 km. Conversely, during the dry season, precipitation decreases in deforested grids and throughout all analysis buffers, with local effects from reduced ET dominating. Our findings highlight the intricate balance between local effects and nonlocal effects in driving deforestation-precipitation responses across different seasons and scales and emphasize the urgent need to address the rapid and extensive loss of forest in the Amazon region.

archived (Wayback Machine)

Archived without paywall:

https://web.archive.org/web/20250424134846/https://www.404media.co/even-the-u-s-government-says-ai-requires-massive-amounts-of-water/

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/33305222

The number of writers jailed reached a new high in a wider range of countries, with at least 375 behind bars in 40 countries during 2024, compared to 339 in 2023, according to the international writers' association PEN. China, already the world’s top jailer of writers, registered another significant increase.

Archived version

• The number of writers jailed reached a new high in a wider range of countries, with at least 375 behind bars in 40 countries during 2024, compared to 339 in 2023, says PEN, the Worldwide Association of Writers NGO, in its Freedom-To-Write Index.

• China, already the world’s top jailer of writers, registered another significant increase of 11 cases, to 118 writers behind bars. The majority were jailed under the pretense of “national security” charges, oftentimes for criticism of the government and official policies, pro-democracy viewpoints, and the promotion of ethnic minority languages and culture. Uyghur writers and intellectuals continue to face particularly harsh treatment.

• War and conflict continued to have a negative impact on writers in 2024, as the crackdown on dissent in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) and in Russia resulted in further upticks in the number of jailed and threatened writers, keeping both countries in the Top 10.

**Top 10 Countries of Concern: **

1. China
2. Iran
3. Saudi Arabia
4. Vietnam
5. Israel
6. Russia
7. Türkiye
8. Belarus
9. Egypt
10. Myanmar

Other key countries of concern—which each jailed seven writers during 2024—are Cuba, Eritrea, and Morocco.

Over the past six years of producing the Writers at Risk Database and Freedom to Write Index, the trend is clear: writers are being jailed at a steadily increasing rate over that time period, from 238 cases counted in 2019 to 375 in 2024. This time span has also seen significant negative political developments in a number of key countries currently included in our Top 10 jailers of writers that have had an outsized impact on the climate for free expression and have resulted in sharp upticks in writers being jailed, most notably: the flawed August 2020 presidential election and widespread protest movement in Belarus, the February 2021 coup and anti-military civil disobedience movement in Myanmar, the “Woman, Life, Freedom” demonstrations that erupted following the custodial death of Mahsa (Jina) Amini in the fall of 2022 in Iran, the Russian-instigated war in Ukraine which began in February 2022, and Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza following the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023.

[...]

The Israeli military acknowledged on Thursday that it was responsible for killing a United Nations aid worker in a strike on a UN guesthouse in Gaza last month, backtracking on its previous denials in the face of mounting public evidence of Israeli responsibility.

The Israeli military said its preliminary investigation into the incident “indicates that the fatality was caused by tank fire from IDF troops operating in the area.”

Archived

[Analysis by Nomura, a financial services group.]

• Some USD560 bn of China’s annual exports may need to find new markets, which can be disruptive to economies
• 45 countries that experienced large increases in their shares of imports from China are generally the ones that experienced the sharpest slowdowns in manufacturing growth and where evidence of disinflation was strongest
• This year, with a US-China trade war raging, the results illuminate just how exposed economies are to the flood of China imports turning into a deluge

With the US-China trade war in full force, many emerging economies, particularly those in Asia, are exposed to the flood of inexpensive Chinese imports turning into a deluge.

[...]

Statistics suggest that China’s highly competitive manufacturers, far from retreating, have penetrated new markets around the globe to make up for lost orders in the US. Local manufacturers in countries outside the US – from EVs in Germany and steel in Brazil to toys in Vietnam and electronics in India – have been facing increasing competition from goods imported from China.

Over 2017-24, China’s exports to the US grew by a cumulative 21% to US$524 billion, whereas China’s exports to the rest of the world grew three times as fast, by 67% to US$1.2 trillion. We estimate some US$100 billion of this was then re-exported to the US via Mexico and ASEAN, as a way for companies in China to circumvent US tariffs.

Against this backdrop, and using 2024 data, if we assume that all of China’s indirect exports to the US via Mexico and ASEAN (US$100 billion), half of China’s direct exports to the US (US$262 billion) and a smaller, one-quarter of China’s total exports to the EU, UK, Canada and Japan (US$198 billion) are at risk, then in aggregate some US$560 billion of China’s annual exports would need to find new markets.

A sudden flood of Chinese imports into emerging market economies can be very disruptive. Faced with growing cut-throat import competition, the likely initial response by local firms would be to cut prices to maintain market share, but at the cost of reduced profits. This can be good news for consumers but over time, as local firms accumulate financial losses, they would need to downsize, cut back on jobs and capex, and ultimately many may need to close down.

[...]

Going forward, these economies might become more vulnerable to cut-throat competition from China. The drum beat of anecdotes of this China shock is growing louder.

When a Spanish fancier released his eight-month-old pigeon for its very first race, the plan was for it to fly to Majorca from Ibiza, approximately 120 kilometres over the Mediterranean Sea.

Instead, the bird ended up some 5,000 kilometres across the Atlantic Ocean on Sable Island, a remote sandbar off Nova Scotia.

Kristina Penn is used to all sorts of wildlife living on Sable Island: hundreds of wild horses, thousands of seals and numerous seabirds.

Pigeons don't typically visit Sable Island, which is located about 290 kilometres southeast of Halifax. Penn could only recall one other time it happened, when a racing pigeon from the U.S. ended up on the island in 2017.