https://archive.is/CEqhQ

Back in her days as a Taiwanese student activist, Cheng Li-wun gave fiery speeches urging the island to sever its Chinese bonds and declare independence.

These days, she says that Taiwan’s people should proudly declare that they are also Chinese.

“I don’t believe that time is on Taiwan’s side,” Ms. Cheng said at the Nationalist Party’s headquarters in Taipei, the capital of Taiwan, in an interview with The New York Times. “The rapid rise of mainland China means that its national strength is incomparable to what it was just four years ago, let alone 10 years ago.”

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/54319800

The EU has agreed allow certain foods altered using genetic engineering techniques to be sold without special labeling under a new framework. The rules distinguish between NGTs and GMOs.

Swiss company Proton is further expanding its productivity suite. In addition to an email service, calendar, VPN, password manager, and drive, Proton Sheets is now available. It is an alternative to Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets, an increasingly important advantage as countries take sovereignty more seriously.

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High levels of a toxic “forever chemical” have been found in cereal products across Europe because of its presence in pesticides.

The most contaminated food is breakfast cereal, according to a study by Pesticide Action Network Europe (PAN), with average concentrations 100 times higher than in tap water.

The study found trifluoroacetic acid (TFA), a chemical produced when pesticides containing Pfas chemicals break down into the soil, in breakfast cereals, popular sweets, pasta, croissants, wholemeal and refined bread, and flour.

TFA is reprotoxic, which means it has the potential to harm human reproductive function, fertility, and foetal development. It has also been linked to adverse effects on thyroid, liver and immune functions. Campaigners are calling on governments to set a far more protective TFA safety limit and to ban all Pfas pesticides and other sources of TFA. Currently, governments do not monitor TFA in food.

TFA was detected in 81.5% of samples (53 out of 65 samples) across 16 European countries, with high contamination levels. Wheat products are significantly more contaminated than other cereal-based products.

In democracies, major policy decisions typically require some form of majority or consensus, so elites must secure mass support to govern. Historically, elites could shape support only through limited instruments like schooling and mass media; advances in AI-driven persuasion sharply reduce the cost and increase the precision of shaping public opinion, making the distribution of preferences itself an object of deliberate design. We develop a dynamic model in which elites choose how much to reshape the distribution of policy preferences, subject to persuasion costs and a majority rule constraint. With a single elite, any optimal intervention tends to push society toward more polarized opinion profiles - a polarization pull'' - and improvements in persuasion technology accelerate this drift. When two opposed elites alternate in power, the same technology also creates incentives to park society in semi-lock'' regions where opinions are more cohesive and harder for a rival to overturn, so advances in persuasion can either heighten or dampen polarization depending on the environment. Taken together, cheaper persuasion technologies recast polarization as a strategic instrument of governance rather than a purely emergent social byproduct, with important implications for democratic stability as AI capabilities advance.

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Maintaining and strengthening pharmaceutical manufacturing within the European Union should be a strategic priority, Greek health minister Adonis Georgiadis ... The concept of ‘Made in Europe’ must be clearly defined to include all key production steps: active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs), essential starting materials, and finished dosage form (FDF) manufacturing, he said. Georgiadis underlined that a definition focused solely on the API is unacceptable.

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The Greek health minister said resilience as a procurement criterion is crucial. However, he pointed out that it must be accompanied by mandatory multi-supplier contracting in tenders, as it is essential for supporting domestic production, diversifying supply sources for critical medicines, and controlling public expenditure.

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Exclusive: One dev thinks this will become their second-highest cost, fears they’ll have to pass it on

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/39848038

I bought myself a fancy new TLC 11 Nxtpaper Gen 2 with a cool e-ink type display. It’s an android tablet and I’m breaking free from Apple. That means no more Apple Books for my epubs. That also means, I’m now looking for a good solution to annotating epubs/pdfs (mostly highlights) on Android. I’d loveeee it it had some bring your own storage sync (webdav) or just plays well with the local storage for using syncthing etc. What are the best options?

I bought myself a fancy new TLC 11 Nxtpaper Gen 2 with a cool e-ink type display. It’s an android tablet and I’m breaking free from Apple. That means no more Apple Books for my epubs. That also means, I’m now looking for a good solution to annotating epubs/pdfs (mostly highlights) on Android. I’d loveeee it it had some bring your own storage sync (webdav) or just plays well with the local storage for using syncthing etc. What are the best options?

The testimony, collected by the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR), is the most recent of at least four reports of dogs being used in the sexual torture of detainees at the Sde Teiman facility and elsewhere.

“They know once they rape someone with a dog or with a stick that these people won’t be able to carry out their jobs or live their lives normally,” Basel Alsourani, international advocacy officer at PCHR, told Novara Media. “It’s part of their genocidal intention to destroy [Palestinians].”

“We were stripped completely. Soldiers brought dogs that climbed on us and urinated on me,” he said. “Then one of the dogs raped me – the dog… inserted its penis into my anus, while the soldiers kept beating and torturing us and spraying pepper spray in our faces.