Link to study

Climate change has tripled the frequency of atmospheric wave events linked to extreme summer weather in the last 75 years and that may explain why long-range computer forecasts keep underestimating the surge in killer heat waves, droughts and floods, a new study says.

In the 1950s, Earth averaged about one extreme weather-inducing planetary wave event a summer, but now it is getting about three per summer, according to a study in Monday’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Planetary waves are connected to 2021’s deadly and unprecedented Pacific Northwest heat wave, the 2010 Russian heatwave and Pakistan flooding and the 2003 killer European heatwave, the study said.

Planetary waves flow across Earth all the time, but sometimes they get amplified, becoming stronger, and the jet stream gets wavier with bigger hills and valleys, Mann said. It’s called quasi-resonant amplification or QRA.

Archived

Despite public condemnations, the European Union’s response to Beijing’s repressive tactics against dissidents beyond China’s borders remains ineffective and lacks coordination, according to a survey of 10 EU governments conducted by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and its media partners, alongside interviews with European lawmakers.

Since 2023, the European Parliament has recognized transnational repression as a growing threat to human rights and the rule of law, and called on member states to facilitate reporting, investigate allegations and sanction the perpetrators.

But China Targets, an investigation by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and 42 media partners, found that the Chinese government continues to target Chinese and Hong Kong dissidents as well as Uyghur and Tibetan advocates using surveillance, hacking and threats against them and their family members in an effort to quash any criticism of the regime.

[...]

"The EU must set clear red lines, backed by criminal investigations, sanctions, and diplomatic consequences, to show that fundamental rights are not negotiable," says Hannah Neumann, European Parliament member.

[...]

Most of the targets interviewed by ICIJ and its partners said they had not reported state-sponsored threats to the authorities in their adopted countries for fear of retaliation from China or because they didn’t have faith in local authorities’ ability to help. Of those who had filed a report — including Nurya Zyden, a Uyghur rights advocate who said she was followed by two Chinese men from Dublin, where she lives, to an activist gathering in Sarajevo, Bosnia, last year — most said police did not follow up on their case or told them that they couldn’t do anything because there was no evidence of a crime.

[...]

Despite having sent “important political signals” through pronouncements and public condemnations, the EU’s response remains “fragmented” and “urgently” needs strengthening, said Hannah Neumann, a European lawmaker who led a 2023 report for the European Parliament on authoritarian regimes’ threats against human rights defenders.

[...]

“Currently, information on cross-border repression is scattered among local law enforcement authorities and is poorly coordinated,” says [Engin] Eroglu [who leads the European Parliament’s delegation for relations with China and was himself one of several politicians targeted by a sophisticated cyberattack allegedly linked to the Chinese government]. “Without cooperation between authorities, it is very difficult to determine the severity of cross-border repression measures, as these measures alone often do not violate local law.”

[...]

A spokesperson for the Belgian ministry of foreign affairs told ICIJ partner De Tijd that Belgian intelligence services, which are in contact with civil society organizations, have “insight into the general trends” of transnational repression in the country and that in recent years, “the intensity of the campaigns seems to have increased.”

According to EU Parliament member Eroglu, better information-sharing among member states is essential.

Turki al-Jasser, a prominent Saudi journalist who highlighted corruption, women’s rights and the Palestinian cause in his writing, was executed in Saudi Arabia on Saturday after the kingdom’s top court upheld his death sentence, the Saudi Interior Ministry announced on X.

Saudi authorities raided Jasser’s home in March 2018, seizing his electronic devices and arresting him. He was later convicted of terrorism and treason.

But campaigners have long held that he was imprisoned because authorities believed he was running a Twitter account which reported on corruption and human rights violations by those in power, including the Saudi royal family.

Al-Jasser's supporters and advocates said his execution, committed while world attention was on Israel’s attacks on Iran, demonstrated once again that criticism of the authorities in Saudi Arabia would not be tolerated.

They also drew parallels between Jasser’s execution and the 2018 murder of Jamal Khashoggi, another prominent Saudi journalist, who was dismembered by a Saudi murder squad in the kingdom’s embassy in Istanbul.

Major components of the surveillance network include the use of automated license plate reader (ALPR) technology, and monitoring of social media through “sock puppet” accounts. Meanwhile, Jackson County is using a third-party lease to make its publicly owned building available to ICE for its Southern Oregon field office, creating another “backdoor” for local government resources to be utilized by ICE despite Oregon’s status as a “sanctuary state.”

Our latest trove of public records total 313 pages. Below is an overview of the records, which were obtained through public records requests to the city of Medford, the city of Grants Pass, and Jackson County. We provide a downloadable copy of the records at the bottom of this blog post.

cross-posted from: https://rss.ponder.cat/post/207763

Your next phone could run on Trump Mobile

Donald Trump might be planning to launch a mobile network and a Trump-branded phone. DTTM Operations LLC, the company Trump uses to manage his trademarks, has applied to use both “Trump” and “T1” for telecoms, mobile accessories, and even phones themselves.

The applications, filed with the US Patent and Trademark Office last Thursday, cover wireless phone services, mobile phones, cases, and chargers, plus retail stores to sell them all.

A trademark application doesn’t guarantee that a Trump mobile network is about to launch, but it does signal intent. “The specificity of the applications points to serious consideration,” patent attorney Josh Gerben wrote in a blog post on Friday, noting that as part of the filing a lawyer for Trump will have “signed a sworn declaration affirming the company’s genuine plans to bring these goods and services to market.”

Trump launching a mobile network could have complications. For one, Gerben points out that T-Mobile might have a thing or two to say about the application, since “T1” could infringe on its own trademarks. That’s before we get to the question of how FCC chairman Brendan Carr will handle regulating a network owned by his boss.

Trump isn’t the only public figure with his sights set on telecoms. While Ryan Reynolds has gotten out after selling his stake in Mint Mobile to T-Mobile in 2023, just last week saw the launch of SmartLess Mobile, brought to you by the podcast of the same name hosted by Hollywood stars Will Arnett, Jason Bateman, and Sean Hayes.

From The Verge via this RSS feed

For the universal updater go here:

https://support.8bitdo.com/firmware-updater.html

If your controller is not detected, you might be on an older FW version that is not detectable by the universal updater. How do I know this? Because my SN30 Pro SN Edition wasn't detected for this exact reason.

If this is the case, go here to access legacy firmware:

https://download.8bitdo.com/Firmware/Controller/

Update your controller to the latest version for your device, and then try the universal updater again.

Also, make sure your controller is in update mode. For the SN30Pro you do this by pressing L+R+START and the red light on top starts flashing. It might be different for other controllers though.

Hopefully this helps someone. It took me quite some time to find the legacy firmware installers to fix my controller.

This was not inevitable. This is a war Israel chose. It could have been prevented. Diplomatic talks were ongoing when the bombers took off for Iran. Israel’s continuing, illegal, unjustified airstrikes are unlikely to achieve their stated aim – permanently ending Tehran’s presumed efforts to build nuclear weapons – and may accelerate it. They must stop now. Likewise, Iran must halt its retaliation immediately and drop its escalatory threats to attack US and UK bases.

This conflict is not limited, as was the case last year, to tit-for-tat exchanges and “precision strikes” on a narrow range of military targets. It’s reached a wholly different level. Potentially nothing is off the table. Civilians are being killed on both sides. Leaders are targets. The rhetoric is out of control. With Israel fighting on several fronts, and Iran’s battered regime backed against a wall, the Middle East is closer than ever to a disastrous conflagration.

Reasons can always be found to go to war. The roots of major conflicts often reach back decades – and this is true of the Israel-Iran vendetta, which dates to the 1979 Islamic revolution. The so-called “shadow war” between the two intensified in recent years. Yet all-out conflict had been avoided, until now. So who is principally to blame for this sudden, unprecedented explosion?

Answer: three angry old men whose behaviour raises serious doubts about their judgment, common sense, motives and even their sanity.

Politicians lie, and the people around them do too. When it’s convenient – when the whole world is pulsing with revulsion, for example – they begin to reveal flavors of the truth.

The Biden administration lied more than most, its public-facing members particularly. Its policy in Palestine was to embrace the Israelis in a “bear hug” – to smother them with love. And there’s thin cover for a genocide beyond lies.

In the interview, the former spokesman shared his personal view that it is “without a doubt true that Israel has committed war crimes”. Asked if that had been true when he was employed by the government, he suggested that lying is just part of the job: “You are a spokesperson for the president, the administration, and you espouse the positions of the administration. And when you’re not in the administration, you can just give your own opinions.”

Miller isn’t alone. The Biden-era spokespeople for the genocide included the White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and the deputy state department spokesperson Vedant Patel, as well as Jake Sullivan, a primary policymaker for an addled president, who represented the actual center of power along with John Kirby, a former admiral, and Antony Blinken, the former secretary of state. The group spent the period from October 2023 to January 2025 lying to an anguished public. They lied scornfully (Jean-Pierre) or gleefully (Miller), mawkishly (Kirby and Blinken), or blandly (Patel and Sullivan). And they did it every day, for 15 months.

Do people in France have flags on their cars? Do they sell clothing with the flag for Zimbabwe everywhere? Do people dress as their country's mascot for every day events?

Wonder what he needs to compromise on...

geteilt von: https://feddit.org/post/14273969

This is a paper for a MIT study. Three groups of participants where tasked to write an essay. One of them was allowed to use a LLM. These where the results:

The participants mental activity was also checked repeatedly via EEG. As per the papers abstract:

EEG revealed significant differences in brain connectivity: Brain-only participants exhibited the strongest, most distributed networks; Search Engine users showed moderate engagement; and LLM users displayed the weakest connectivity. Cognitive activity scaled down in relation to external tool use.

Here's Matrix CEOs answer to this article: https://lobste.rs/c/jekh0n -- according to him the article is absurd amounts of FUD

Takeaways

• We’re introducing channel subscriptions, promoted channels and ads in Status in the WhatsApp Updates tab to help you find channels and products you’re interested in.
• The growing popularity of the Updates tab makes this the right place for these experiences, in a way that doesn’t interrupt your chats.
• Nothing changes about people’s personal chats, which remain end-to-end encrypted and are not used for ads.

Even with android custom ROMs like Lineage, support eventually ends. Meanwhile, you can just slap on linux onto any old computer and its still getting the latest updates. 🤔

Why not just do the same thing with phones? Forever phone updates? 👀