oh wait this isn't c/sadposting

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/43578877

Four people riding in a speedboat registered in the U.S. were killed Feb. 25 in a gunfight with Cuban government forces after entering the country’s waters, according to the Cuban Embassy in the U.S.

Crewmembers aboard a speedboat registered in Florida entered Cuban waters and opened fire on Cuban Ministry of the Interior forces when they approached the American vessel, the Cuban Embassy said in a statement. Aboard the Florida-registered vessel, four were killed and six were injured in the gunfight; the commander of the Ministry of the Interior vessel was wounded in the gunfight, Cuba said.

"In the face of current challenges, Cuba reaffirms its determination to protect its territorial waters, based on the principle that national defense is a fundamental pillar of the Cuban State in safeguarding its sovereignty and ensuring stability in the region," Cuban authorities said. "Investigations by the competent authorities continue in order to fully clarify the events."

According to Cuban officials, the wounded crewmembers of the Florida-registered boat were evacuated for medical assistance.

iam doing good tonight

why is my text so big how do i&disable this

Power bills have become a growing source of stress for Aussie families and businesses. Many families are forced to make impossible choices: three in 10 parents are struggling to afford basics like food, electricity and insurance. Government rebates provided some relief, but this was only a band-aid solution.

Police arrested a man for a burglary in a city he had never visited after face scanning software deployed across the UK confused him with another person of south Asian heritage.

Alvi Choudhury, 26, a software engineer, was working at the home he shares with his parents in Southampton in January when police knocked on his door, handcuffed him and held him in custody for nearly 10 hours before releasing him at 2am.

Thames Valley police had used automated facial recognition software which matched him with footage of a suspect of a £3,000 burglary 100 miles away in Milton Keynes, according to documents shared with the Guardian by Liberty Investigates.

But the CCTV footage showed a noticeably younger man with different features apart from similar curly hair, said Choudhury, who was left confused about why he had been arrested.

Tropical flowers are blooming months earlier or later than they used to because of climate breakdown, with potentially “cascading impacts across ecosystems”, according to a study of 8,000 plants dating back 200 years.

Researchers looked at flowers from a range of countries, including Brazil, Ecuador, Ghana and Thailand, home to the most biodiverse ecosystems on Earth, but also the most understudied.

The Brazilian amaranth tree flowers 80 days later than it did in the 1950s, while the Ghanaian rattlepod shrub’s flowering period shifted 17 days earlier between the 50s and 90s, according to a study of museum specimens.

It was previously thought that tropical regions – where temperatures fluctuate less over the course of the year – would not be so affected by the climate crisis in terms of the timing of flowering. This hypothesis has been proved wrong, said the lead researcher Skylar Graves from the University of Colorado Boulder, who added that “nowhere on Earth is unaffected by climate change”.

Members of Iran’s ruling elite have been accused of brazen hypocrisy by allegedly using the state’s wealth to help to fund their adult children’s lives in the west while presiding over growing economic misery and repression at home.

Opposition campaigners made the accusation against some of the clerical regime’s most powerful figures as a military confrontation with the US appears increasingly likely. Donald Trump has deployed a vast armada in the Middle East and confirmed he is considering strikes.

Those singled out for criticism include Ali Larijani, Iran’s top national security adviser, who has a daughter living in the US and two nephews in Britain and Canada, despite having long been one of the Islamic Republic’s most vocal critics of western values.

Larijani – a former parliament speaker and senior Revolutionary Guard – is believed to have played a key role in the deadly crackdown against opposition protests that gripped the country in January. Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, is reported to have tasked him with coordinating preparations for a possible war with the US.

Anger at the aghazadehs, as the scions of the elite are known, is acute after the crushing of the protests resulted in a death toll that some sources put in the tens of thousands.

“People are upset that the aghazadehs are getting dollar stipends to go to the west – the United States, Europe elsewhere – to study essentially on the state’s dime,” said Alex Vatanka, the Iran programme director at the Middle East Institute in Washington.

The US will provide on-site consular services in two Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank for the first time, breaking with previous policy, in a move that has been criticised by Palestinian officials as “a clear violation of international law”.

In a post on X, the US embassy in Jerusalem said that as part of an initiative to mark the 250th anniversary of US independence, it would provide Americans with routine passport services in the West Bank settlement of Efrat on Friday “for one day only”.

Israeli settlements in the West Bank, which Israel has occupied since 1967, are illegal under international law. Efrat, about 7 miles (12km) south of Jerusalem, is home to about 12,000 Israelis.

The Palestinian Authority’s Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission said in a statement that the initiative “constitutes a clear violation of international law and a blatant favouring of the occupation authorities”, referring to Israel.

Mu’ayyad Shaa’ban, the head of the commission, said the step “entrenches a settlement reality that undermines the possibility of establishing an independent and sovereign Palestinian state”.

cross-posted from: https://discuss.online/post/36090963

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From Tom Scott's newsletter. The photos:

A wind farm near the Heidu Mountain Scenic Area in Qinghai Province. Weimin Chu

A solar farm in the Daliang Mountains, Sichuan Province. Weimin Chu

A solar farm built on a tidal flat in Xiangshan County, Zhejiang Province. Weimin Chu

Wind turbines near the Gahai Wetland Reserve in Qinghai Province. Weimin Chu

Sheep graze among solar panels in the Tala Desert, Qinghai Province. Weimin Chu

A solar plant in Alxa, Inner Mongolia. Weimin Chu

Wind turbines seen beyond the Ming Dynasty Huguo Temple in Guizhou Province. Weimin Chu

Rooftop solar arrays in Binzhou, Shandong Province. Weimin Chu

A thermal power station in Dunhuang, Gansu Province. Weimin Chu

A wind turbine in the karst mountains of Xingyi, Guizhou Province. Weimin Chu

The Venezuelan leader overestimated his strength and misread his exchange with President Trump in the decisive weeks before his capture by U.S. forces.

The United States threatened to attack Venezuela if Mr. Maduro didn’t resign. Still, people close to him said he repeatedly asserted that the Trump administration would not dare attack Caracas.

Mr. Maduro knew that spies were working against him and feared betrayal from inside his ranks. Yet, in late December, he told friends and allies he still had time to negotiate a deal to stay in power, or leave office at a time of his choosing, they said.

To Maduro’s entourage, a U.S. raid seemed far-fetched, people close to him said. When explosions ripped through the Fuerte Tiuna military base in Caracas on Jan. 3, some in his circle thought it was a coup, not an American attack.

It was a remarkable miscalculation by Mr. Maduro, an autocrat who had outwitted opponents again and again during his 13-year rule, holding onto power through electoral losses, mass protests, armed plots and assassination attempts.

MBFC
[Archive] (Soonish -- archive.today is down)

Edit: The archive situation doesn't look like it's going to improve any time soon. I replaced the original link with a gift link.

With less than three months to go until the federal budget, you are going to be hearing a lot more about tax. It seems that something is finally going to be done to fix the capital gains tax, but already conservatives are working to give the richest another tax cut.

The new shadow treasurer, Tim Wilson, has followed up his line that unemployment is too low by arguing high-income earners need a tax cut – because, poor dears, they are taxed too much to bother working.

Amazon is telling people who use its wishlists feature to switch to post office boxes or non-residential delivery addresses if they want to ensure their home addresses remain private, as part of a change in how it processes gifts bought from third-party sellers. The change is especially concerning to many sex workers, influencers and public figures who use Amazon wishlists to receive gifts from fans and clients.

First spotted by adult content creators raising the alarm on social media, the changes open anyone who uses wishlists publicly to increased privacy risk unless they change how they receive packages.

In an email sent to list holders, Amazon said beginning March 25, it will reveal users’ shipping addresses to third-party sellers. The platform added that gift purchasers might end up seeing your address as part of this process, too.

https://web.archive.org/web/20260225203949/https://www.404media.co/amazon-wishlist-address-private-third-party/

There is no single template for the women and girls who found themselves trapped in ISIS controlled territory.

Jamieson Greer tells CBC News that tariffs will feature even in renegotiated CUSMA

U.S. President Donald Trump's point man on trade talks says Canada needs to accept that tariffs will be a part of any deal with the administration, including renewal of the Canada-U.S.-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA).

In interviews with two CBC News journalists on Capitol Hill just after Trump's state of the union address Tuesday night, U.S. trade representative Jamieson Greer suggested Canada can't expect to land a trade agreement that is free of tariffs.

"When we go to other countries, and we make a deal with them ... they agree that we can have a tariff on them," Greer told CBC News correspondent Katie Simpson.

"If Canada wants to agree that we can have some level of higher tariff on them while they open up their markets to us on things like dairy and other things, then that's a helpful conversation."

It's the clearest signal yet from the Trump administration that it's aiming for a fundamental rewrite of the free-trade deals that have existed between the U.S., Canada and Mexico since NAFTA took effect in 1994.

MBFC
Archive

Valve’s Counter-Strike, Team Fortress, and Dota Games Have Slot Machine-Like Features That Entice Users to Pay for the Chance to Win Rare Prizes That Can Be Exchanged for Money Lawsuit Alleges Valve’s In-Game “Loot Box” Feature Violates New York’s Gambling Laws and Can Lead to Serious Harms, Especially for Young People

The FBI got a search warrant for X to provide details on the Grok prompts a man allegedly used to create more than 200 nonconsensual sexual videos of a woman he knew in real life, according to court records.

The details of the investigation are contained in an FBI affidavit about the alleged actions of Simon Tuck, who is accused of extensively harassing and threatening the woman’s husband. Tuck regularly worked out with and texted with the woman and, according to the affidavit, secretly filmed her while she was working out in his garage. Over the course of the last several months, Tuck swatted their home, made a series of anonymous reports to the man’s employer claiming that he was a child abuser and a drug addict, posed as the man and made a series of mass shooting and suicide threats. Tuck also made a series of other threats and bizarre actions, which included reaching out to a funeral home to say that the man would be dead soon and sending threats to the man while posing as a member of Sector 16, a Russian hacking crew.

The affidavit notes that, in January, the FBI got a search warrant for the man’s conversations with Grok. The FBI says that it received “prompts provided to GrokAI that generated approximately 200 pornographic videos of a woman who closely resembled VICTIM’s wife’s physical appearance.”

https://web.archive.org/web/20260225192408/https://www.404media.co/fbi-subpoenaed-x-to-get-grok-prompts-used-to-create-nonconsensual-porn/

Rules will now only apply to larger companies

Deadline to comply delayed by two years to mid-2029

EU drops requirement for climate change transition plans

I liked my goar St nkty

Larry Summers, former president of Harvard University, will resign from teaching at the end of the academic year, a spokesperson confirmed to the Guardian.

The news of his formal resignation comes “in connection with the ongoing review by the University of documents related to Jeffrey Epstein that were recently released by the government”, a Harvard spokesperson, Jason Newton, said in a statement.

Summers also resigned from his role as co-director of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at the Harvard Kennedy School, a position he has held since 2011, according to the spokesperson. He will remain on leave until the end of the academic year.

Every time negotiations between Russia, Ukraine, and the U.S. appear to gain momentum, Moscow introduces a new allegation — drone attacks, assassination attempts, nuclear plots, sabotage — that threatens to stall or derail the process.

Ukrainian officials and Western analysts say the pattern is no coincidence.

A high-level Ukrainian official familiar with the course of the negotiations told the Kyiv Independent that the "nonsense" Russia is spreading is intended to influence the talks and divert attention from Moscow’s unwillingness to seek compromise.

As Russian negotiators show little flexibility on concessions, the Kremlin appears to weaponize the diplomatic track — testing Washington's reactions, seeking leverage, and undermining Kyiv's credibility.

MBFC
Archive