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.

Web archive link

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.

...

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.

...

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.

Britain’s energy watchdog gives go-ahead to initial £28bn of investment to upgrade UK energy infrastructure but reveals move will push up network charges

Nearly half of Europeans see Donald Trump as “an enemy of Europe”, rather more rate the risk of war with Russia as high and more than two-thirds believe their country would not be able to defend itself in the event of such a war, a survey has found.

The nine-country poll for the Paris-based European affairs debate platform Le Grand Continent also found that nearly three-quarters of respondents wanted their country to stay in the EU, with almost as many saying leaving the union had harmed the UK.

Jean-Yves Dormagen, a political science professor and founder of the polling agency Cluster17, said: “Europe is not only facing growing risks, it is also undergoing a transformation of its historical, geopolitical and political environment. The overall picture [of the survey] portrays a Europe that is anxious, that is deeply aware of its vulnerabilities and that is struggling to project itself positively into the future.”

The polling found that an average of 48% of people across the nine countries see Trump as an outright foe – ranging from highs of 62% in Belgium and 57% in France to lows of 37% in Croatia and 19% in Poland.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/46691137

Archived

• China will impose a 13% value-added tax on contraceptive drugs and devices, including condoms, for the first time in three decades.
• The revision to the Value-Added Tax Law also exempts child-care services, elder-care institutions, disability service providers, and marriage-related services from the tax.
• The changes are part of China's efforts to reverse plunging birth rates and encourage people to have more children, as the population has shrunk for three consecutive years.

[...]

China will impose a value-added tax on contraceptive drugs and devices — including condoms — for the first time in three decades, its latest bid to reverse plunging birth rates that threaten to further slow its economy.

Under the newly revised Value-Added Tax Law, consumers will pay a 13% levy on items that had been VAT-exempt since 1993, when China enforced a strict one-child policy and actively promoted birth control.

At the same time, the revision carves out new incentives for prospective parents by exempting child-care services — from nurseries to kindergartens — as well as elder-care institutions, disability service providers and marriage-related services. The changes take effect in January.

They reflect a broader policy pivot, as a rapidly aging China shifts from limiting births to encouraging people to have more children. The population has shrunk for three consecutive years, with just 9.54 million births in 2024 — barely half of the 18.8 million registered nearly a decade ago, when the one-child policy was lifted.

[...]

The murder of Imad al-Najjar is one of thousands committed by Assad's forces that are captured in a huge compilation of government files and photos known as the Damascus dossier.

The 134,000 Syrian security and intelligence records were obtained by German public broadcaster NDR, which shared them with the Washington-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and its global network of media partners, including CBC News.

The leaked records include 70,000 images — many of them gruesome photos of torture victims' bodies taken and catalogued by Syrian military police — as well as 64,000 files from Syrian intelligence agencies, including many death certificates and arrest reports.

Journalists who analyzed the photos were able to count 10,212 bodies of detainees. The images mostly range from 2015 through 2024. Until now, the Syrian public did not know about the existence of the photos.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/39846093

Hi, I’m looking to set up a Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure with my homelab as I’m lacking additional processing power.

• Does Hetzner have concepts for VPC/VCN and subnets, similar to AWS, GCP, or Oracle? I’ve been browsing through the documentation (https://docs.hetzner.com/networking/networks) but couldn’t find anything related to it.
• Does anyone have a new referral code they can share? Thanks!

cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/42997414

Web archive link

The EU is considering legally forcing industries to reduce purchases from China to insulate Europe from future hostile acts, the industry commissioner, Stéphane Séjourné, says.

He made his remarks as the European Commission unveiled a €3bn (£2.63bn) strategy to reduce its dependency on China for critical raw materials amid a global scramble caused by Beijing’s “weaponisation” of supplies of everything from chips to rare earths.

The ReSourceEU programme will seek to de-risk and diversify the bloc’s supply chains for key commodities with a funding initiative to support 25-30 strategic projects in the sector.

It will include new rules to stop scrap aluminium leaving the bloc, recycling of magnets used in car batteries and a new €2bn a year fund backed by the European Investment Bank to support industries diversifying away from cheap Chinese supplies.

Underlining the threats posed by over dependency on China, Séjourné said if industry did not respond, the commission reserved the right to introduce legislation.

“We would force European companies legally to diversify their sources of supply. That is not the case now, and it is not what is proposed in the plan [ReSourceEU] but this is a wake up call, a strong wake up call,” said Séjourné.

...

Senior EU officials said that “while the direction is clear” there was a need to “accelerate the process” as China continued to “weaponise” its hold on raw materials for “geopolitical purposes”.

To kickstart the implementation of the strategy, two projects, a molybdenum extraction in Greenland and a lithium mine in Germany will get immediate funding.

The EU will also look at financial support to enable companies to buy from more expensive sources than China and it will set up a “raw materials platform” that will pool company orders and build joint stockpiles.

New restrictions will be introduced on scrap exports in 2026 of the metal and of scrap copper if necessary.

...

The EU said the strategy was designed to reduce the impact of “market shocks” such as the disruption to the car industry caused by the recent, now lifted, ban on exports of chips by China in response to the Dutch government taking control of the Chinese-owned chip firm Nexperia.

...

Up to €3bn in funding will be mobilised within the next 12 months, with €2bn a year made available by the European Investment Bank in the form of loans, venture debt and private debt plus financing such as loans already issued to a Finnish lithium mine project Keliber.

...

cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/42997414

Web archive link

The EU is considering legally forcing industries to reduce purchases from China to insulate Europe from future hostile acts, the industry commissioner, Stéphane Séjourné, says.

He made his remarks as the European Commission unveiled a €3bn (£2.63bn) strategy to reduce its dependency on China for critical raw materials amid a global scramble caused by Beijing’s “weaponisation” of supplies of everything from chips to rare earths.

The ReSourceEU programme will seek to de-risk and diversify the bloc’s supply chains for key commodities with a funding initiative to support 25-30 strategic projects in the sector.

It will include new rules to stop scrap aluminium leaving the bloc, recycling of magnets used in car batteries and a new €2bn a year fund backed by the European Investment Bank to support industries diversifying away from cheap Chinese supplies.

Underlining the threats posed by over dependency on China, Séjourné said if industry did not respond, the commission reserved the right to introduce legislation.

“We would force European companies legally to diversify their sources of supply. That is not the case now, and it is not what is proposed in the plan [ReSourceEU] but this is a wake up call, a strong wake up call,” said Séjourné.

...

Senior EU officials said that “while the direction is clear” there was a need to “accelerate the process” as China continued to “weaponise” its hold on raw materials for “geopolitical purposes”.

To kickstart the implementation of the strategy, two projects, a molybdenum extraction in Greenland and a lithium mine in Germany will get immediate funding.

The EU will also look at financial support to enable companies to buy from more expensive sources than China and it will set up a “raw materials platform” that will pool company orders and build joint stockpiles.

New restrictions will be introduced on scrap exports in 2026 of the metal and of scrap copper if necessary.

...

The EU said the strategy was designed to reduce the impact of “market shocks” such as the disruption to the car industry caused by the recent, now lifted, ban on exports of chips by China in response to the Dutch government taking control of the Chinese-owned chip firm Nexperia.

...

Up to €3bn in funding will be mobilised within the next 12 months, with €2bn a year made available by the European Investment Bank in the form of loans, venture debt and private debt plus financing such as loans already issued to a Finnish lithium mine project Keliber.

...

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/54309181