cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/8607436

China is home to some of the most brutal deserts on earth, stretching across 2.6 million square kilometers of land so dry, so scorching, and so hostile that billions of tons of sand swallow entire farms and villages every single year. For decades, the desert kept winning, advancing into productive land, burying roads within hours, and sending massive dust storms across East Asia every spring. For a country with 1.4 billion people to feed, losing farmland to sand wasn't just an environmental problem. It was a threat to the entire nation.

But what China did next is one of the most extraordinary stories of the 21st century. Starting with nothing more than dry straw pushed into shifting sand, China launched the largest land reclamation project in human history, planting 66 billion trees, investing over 50 billion dollars, and engineering an entirely new kind of farming system in the middle of the world's most unforgiving terrain. Today those same dead deserts produce 30 million tons of food every year, power hundreds of thousands of homes with solar energy, and even raise fish in a place with almost no water. This is the full story of how they did it.

The timing of the boat’s arrival in Seattle and the job cuts was coincidental, but the irony was not lost among the people who hustled down to the locks to see the giant yacht after word spread through the neighborhood and online. Some booed from the shore and heckled the crew.

Bumpers on the side of the boat were about the size of small SUVs, while the back deck had a covered pool and hot tub. More than a dozen crew members were visible, many enjoying the trip through the channel on a partly sunny evening.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12acDjXRKog

Can anyone tell this meme is true or false? I don't have Gspy so I cannot test this

cross-posted from: https://infosec.pub/post/47036866

[The unnamed Mexican immigrant] said nights have haunted him since Jan. 20, 2025. That was when a group of assailants entered a house he shared with other immigrants in Greensboro, North Carolina, and a hooded man shouting “ICE! ICE!” kicked down his bedroom door.

“I raised my hands, and he asked, ‘Where’s the money?’ That’s when I realized it was a robbery. It wasn’t ICE. It wasn’t the police,” the Mexican immigrant said.

The assault, which local police have not yet solved and for which no arrests have been made, happened the same day Donald Trump returned to the White House for his second term, vowing to carry out the largest mass deportation operation in the nation’s history. Since then, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has swelled by thousands of agents and has carried out waves of arrests and deportations in cities across the country.

Although neither the federal government nor local authorities publish specific records of people impersonating immigration agents, an analysis by Noticias Telemundo, based on court records, police reports and news articles, suggests that the number of such crimes has increased over the past year.

cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/9157975

Op-ed by Laura Harth, China in the World director at Safeguard Defenders.

Archived link

...

We already know, however, what an agreement of this kind looks like in practice, because one of Canada’s Five Eyes partners signed one and bore the consequences.

Under a similarly undisclosed MOU, Australia’s Federal Police (AFP) allowed MPS officers to interview targets on Australian soil.

Between 2015 and 2019, at least six Australian residents were interviewed by Chinese police there. Five of them returned to China “voluntarily.” Only one refused.

AFP oversight was found to be negligent or even absent. The AFP ended the agreement in 2024 after the abuses were exposed in Senate hearings.

...

The lesson is straightforward. As a Chinese official lamented in response to our reports on illegal Chinese Police Service Centers abroad: “Extradition proceedings are cumbersome.”

Pressure is easy.

Per official figures, Beijing’s preferred method – persuasion – accounts for more than 70 per cent of the more than 14,000 forced returns globally since Operation Fox Hunt started in 2014 [Operation Fox Hunt is China's Xi Jinping’s rapidly expanding web of relentless – and often illegal - long-arm policing operations around the globe].

The method isn’t subtle. Family members at home are punished. Targets abroad are harassed. The aim, as former justice minister Fu Zhenghua put it, is to “squeeze the living space out of them” until they agree to return.

It has happened in Canada, repeatedly.

Court documents at the trial of former RCMP officer William Majcher revealed at least 25 Canadian residents were targeted under the Fox Hunt campaign.

...

Like Australia, Canada has declined extradition co-operation with China, reflecting a consensus across democratic nations: China’s legal system – with its systematic torture and politicized prosecution – cannot meet Canadian standards.

The new MOU does not formally cross that line. But it appears to walk right up to it.

In its response to CTV News, the RCMP cites Canada’s 2007 Protocol on Foreign Criminal Investigators in Canada – the same kind of framework Australia used – as governing co-operation with the MPS. That protocol allows foreign officers to operate here when a target is voluntarily co-operating with an investigation.

But what counts as “voluntary” when a target’s family is at the mercy of Chinese authorities?

...

That is precisely the climate of fear the Chinese Communist Party seeks to instill, globally and at home.

...

In 2021, then-CSIS director David Vigneault described Operation Fox Hunt as a “covert global operation” used to “target and quiet dissidents to the regime.” In 2023, he singled out the People’s Republic of China’s use of “family and friends living in China as leverage” as the campaign’s most effective tactic.

The CSIS Public Report 2024 went further still. It named the MPS among the agencies whose foreign interference “can include coercing a victim to return to the PRC or threatening their family members in China.”

In June, 2025, Canada led G7 leaders in a joint statement condemning the “misuse of co-operation with other foreign states ... in order to detain, forcibly return, or repress targets.”

Seven months later, an MOU was signed with the world’s most prolific perpetrator of such conduct.

...

Parliament should see the MOU. And when China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi visits Ottawa this week, Anita Anand should tell him that Canada intends to release the police agreement to the public.

It is hard to believe the agreement would survive such scrutiny.

cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/shit/p/1149726/not-my-theoretical-degree-in-physics

How 1260 floating solar panels are cutting energy costs in Warrnambool

Wannon Water has deployed one of Australia’s largest floating solar arrays to help drive down costs across its network in southern Victoria.

The new system can generate more than 600,000 kilowatt-hours of renewable electricity each year, with 1260 bi‑facial solar panels capturing sunlight from above as well as reflected light from the water surface.

https://www.energymagazine.com.au/how-1260-floating-solar-panels-are-cutting-energy-costs-in-warrnambool/

Meta has sold 7M+ Ray-Ban glasses that look identical to normal glasses but can record you silently.

NoPeek detects them using immutable BLE manufacturer company IDs — signals that cannot be randomized or hidden unlike MAC addresses.

Detects: Meta Ray-Ban, Snap Spectacles, Oakley Meta, TCL RayNeo, Meta Quest, Apple Vision Pro, Pico VR and more.

No ads. No tracking. No internet permission. Fully open source. MIT license.

github.com/getnopeek/nopeek-android

This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/technology by /u/Logical_Welder3467 on 2026-05-27 08:29:49+00:00.

Original