In 2022, 38.5% of Latvian residents aged 16 and over engaged in creative activities – music, dancing, singing, drama, photography, film, writing, or painting – in their spare time, according to data from the Central Statistical Bureau on June 29.
Recently, we announced our latest game project: FutureCast, created in partnership with the United Nations’ Global Pulse group. It’s a highly adaptable strategic forecasting tool that aims to explore “pathways of change” for different future scenarios by bringing together groups of stakeholders for a fun, insight-generating exercise. This week, we’re joined by Minke Meijnders and Tiina Neuvonen from UN Global Pulse, as well as our game design partner Randy Lubin from Leveraged Play, to discuss how the game came to be and the many things you can do with it.
The facts are that the critical mass of letter delivery has gone. It isn't coming back. Yes, I know your grandad likes receiving his bank statements in the post, and it's occasionally nice to receive a postcard from your mum when she's on holiday, but email and IM have comprehensively won. Sure, vinyl sales are up, but stamp collectors aren't going to sustain this industry.
Royal Mail should embrace this. The US Postal Service offers something called Informed Delivery. They email you a scan of the front of any envelopes they're due to deliver. That - hopefully - tells you if your Very Important Letter is going to arrive today.
There are many situations in which this ends poorly — companies raise money to train large models that ultimately won’t convert to commercial value. On the other hand, there’s an argument that this symbiotic relationship enables companies to attack markets quicker and more effectively than if they went alone.
In May, Nipper gave student Olivia Krolczyk 0/20 points for part of a final project in a class called Gender in Popular Culture for using the term "biological women" to describe non-trans female athletes.
The adjunct professor in the Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies department at the University of Cincinnati is the former instructor of Olivia Krolczyk. Krolczyk is the student who created a viral TikTok in which she denounced her professor (unnamed in the video) for giving her a failing grade on an assignment because Krolczyk used the term "biological women."
We put tiny, harmless paint marks on the back of each bee, and filmed every visit a bee made to the flower array. We then used computer vision and machine learning to automatically extract the position and flight path of the bee. From this information, we could assess and precisely time every single decision the bees made.
We found bees very quickly learned to identify the most rewarding flowers. They quickly assessed whether to accept or reject a flower, but perplexingly their correct choices were on average faster (0.6 seconds) than their incorrect choices (1.2 seconds).
This is the opposite of what we expected.
These days Bluetooth-based gadgets are everywhere, including for car and solar batteries. After connecting them up to the battery, you download the accompanying app on your smartphone, open it up and like magic you can keep tabs on your precious pile of chemistry that keeps things ticking along. Yet as [haxrob] discovered during an analysis, many of these devices will happily pass your location and other information along to remote servers.
Three weeks after its "quantum computer turned US-manufactured, Amazon-sold ARM development board" made the news, Iran has finally officially acknowledged that it hadn't actually showcased its quantum computing systems.
The Intel i960 was a remarkable 32-bit processor of the 1990s with a confusing set of versions. Although it is now mostly forgotten (outside the many people who used it as an embedded processor), it has a complex history. It had a shot at being Intel's flagship processor until x86 overshadowed it. Later, it was the world's best-selling RISC processor. One variant was a 33-bit processor with a decidedly non-RISC object-oriented instruction set; it became a military standard and was used in the F-22 fighter plane. Another version powered Intel's short-lived Unix servers. In this blog post, I'll take a look at the history of the i960, explain its different variants, and examine silicon dies. This chip has a lot of mythology and confusion (especially on Wikipedia), so I'll try to clear things up.
The primary task of a submersible is to not implode. The second is to reach the surface, even if the pilot is unconscious, with oxygen to spare. The third is for the occupants to be able to open the hatch once they surface. The fourth is for the submersible to be easy to find, through redundant tracking and communications systems, in case rescue is required. Only the fifth task is what is ordinarily thought of as the primary one: to transport people into the dark, hostile deep.
[...]
Until June 18th, a manned deep-ocean submersible had never imploded. But, to McCallum, Lahey, and other experts, the OceanGate disaster did not come as a surprise—they had been warning of the submersible’s design flaws for more than five years, filing complaints to the U.S. government and to OceanGate itself, and pleading with Rush to abandon his aspirations. As they mourned Nargeolet and the other passengers, they decided to reveal OceanGate’s history of knowingly shoddy design and construction. “You can’t cut corners in the deep,” McCallum had told Rush. “It’s not about being a disruptor. It’s about the laws of physics.”
When American pharmaceutical company G.D. Searle first tried to get aspartame approved by the US US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 1973, it was denied: Independent scientists alleged the product could cause a range of neurologic disorders, and some alleged the company hadn’t been entirely above-board in its safety testing.
In January 1981, Ronald Reagan became the US president. His transition team included then-CEO of G.D. Searle, one Donald Rumsfeld. Although an independent FDA board warned that May that the drug might induce brain tumors, the agency’s newly installed director overruled them, and the FDA approved the product for consumer use that July.
The children that had begun reading for pleasure at an early age were shown to have better mental well-being, which was assessed by using various clinical scores, and reports from parents and teachers. From this, the researchers found that these children showed significantly fewer signs of stress and depression, improved attention spans and fewer behavioural problems, such as rule-breaking and aggression.
When the researchers examined the brain scans of adolescents, they discovered that the participants who had begun reading for pleasure at a young age showed moderately larger brain areas and volumes, including the brain regions that play a critical role in cognitive functions.
As if the smoke and haze sweeping in from fires in Canada weren’t enough, some parts of New York City are swarming with flying insects. The explosion of winged aphids is both a nuisance and a source of curiosity for residents. The city's Health Department says there is nothing to worry about. Some people caught in the swarms thought at first that the strange things in the air had drifted from wildfires in Canada. Entomologists say that's not the case, but a warm winter and the smoke from the fires could be contributing to the plumes of bugs.
The impact of the smoke was less severe than earlier this month and was most strongly felt in cities from Pittsburgh and Cleveland to Chicago and Detroit.
Under the Bill, the authorities can collect and use a wide range of citizens' health data and process it outside the country.
Some frappes from Caffè Nero, Costa and Starbucks contain more sugar than health experts say you should have in an entire day
A South Korea law that went into effect on Wednesday standardized how the government counts ages, instantly making residents one or two years younger.
So why use an LLM as a search interface when you could just Google for the same information? There are a couple of reasons. The first is that an LLM provides a much broader set of capabilities than just search. You can, for example, ask something like “Find me three alternative libraries, list the pros and cons of each, and then based on these pros and cons make a recommendation as to which I should use.”. Thus, we can condense the multistep process of Googling for software and benchmarks, interpreting the results, and coming up with a recommendation, into a single step. The second reason is that because LLMs have a natural language input/output interface, it is far easier to programatically solve the problem and make use of the result than if we had to use Google’s API, scrape web pages, extract information, and then produce a report.
Yesterday, Twitter started blocking all logged-out access to Twitter, requiring signing in to view any tweet or profile. Elon Musk called it a “temporary emergency measure,” claiming they “were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users!”
The outages began cropping up Saturday morning in the wake of owner Elon Musk implementing new restrictions on how many tweets users could view, with most of its 200 million users capped at 600 daily.
Check Point provides an in-depth analysis of malware attributed to China-based espionage group Camaro Dragon that infected an European healthcare institution after an employee participated in a conference in Asia. The malware self-propagates through USB drives and landed on the healthcare organization’s systems after the employee’s drive was accidentally infected during the conference.
The malware gained access to the healthcare institution systems through an infected USB drive. During the investigation, the Check Point Research (CPR) team discovered newer versions of the malware with similar capabilities to self-propagate through USB drives. In this way, malware infections originating in Southeast Asia spread uncontrollably to different networks around the globe, even if those networks are not the threat actors’ primary targets.
The main payload variant, called WispRider, has undergone significant revisions. In addition to backdoor capabilities and the ability to propagate through USB using the HopperTick launcher, the payload includes additional features, such as a bypass for SmadAV, an anti-virus solution popular in Southeast Asia. The malware also performs DLL-side-loading using components of security software, such as G-DATA Total Security, and of two major gaming companies (Electronic Arts and Riot Games). Check Point Research responsibly notified these companies on the above-mentioned use of their software by the attackers.
The update came five weeks into Dallas’ ransomware ordeal, which initially spread across the city, including to its police and fire departments, which went without their computer-aided dispatch system, forcing 911 operators to manually transcribe and relay requests for aid.
The CAD system was brought back online in mid-May, officials said. Several other systems have returned since then, including a service to schedule appointments with the city animal shelter. And a major milestone occurred last week, when Dallas municipal courts reopened after nearly a month, with an upgrade to its case-processing system.
The ransomware attack happened on May 3. According to the report released Friday, Dallas' IT team took additional measures as an immediate response to disconnect systems, services, and devices from the city's network to contain and prevent further spread of malicious software. The report also states the city organized and mobilized a broader incident support team to help in the management of the recovery activities.
The city is still working to get back online but in the latest update, systems are reported to be more than 90% restored.
In my last Diary, we looked at internet-connected web servers, which still support SSL version 2.0.
The fledgling Akira ransomware group is building momentum and expanding its target base, following other cybercriminal groups by adding capabilities to exploit Linux systems as part of a growing sophistication in its activity, researchers have found.
The gang, which emerged as a cybercriminal force to be reckoned with in April of this year, is primarily known for attacking Windows systems, and maintains a unique data-leak site designed as an interactive command prompt using jQuery.
However, the group — named for a 1988 Japanese anime cult classic featuring a psychopathic biker — is now shifting its tactics to target Linux, with a new version of its ransomware that can exploit systems running the open source OS, researchers from Cyble Research and Intelligence Labs (CRIL) revealed in a blog post published June 29.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), the world’s largest contract chipmaker, has confirmed it’s experienced a data breach after being listed as a victim by the LockBit ransomware gang.
The Russia-linked LockBit ransomware gang listed TSMC on its dark web leak site on Thursday. The gang is threatening to publish data stolen from the company, which commands 60% of the global foundry market, unless the company pays a $70 million ransom demand.
Thirteen people, including a 16-year-old youth, were arrested for their suspected involvement in the recent spate of banking-related malware scam cases.
Preliminary investigations showed that 10 of the 13 suspects, aged between 16 and 27, had allegedly facilitated the scam cases by sharing their bank accounts, Internet banking credentials and/or disclosing Singpass credentials for monetary gains.
On June 30, Mount Desert Island Hospital in Maine reported a breach to HHS that affected 24,180 patients. The hospital had previously disclosed the incident on June 5, when they posted a notice on their website that said that they had detected unusual activity on their network on May 4. An investigation determined that there had been unauthorized access between April 28 and May 7, 2023.
A data-breach victim whose personal information was subject to actual misuse has standing to sue the entity that suffered the breach, a federal appeals court said.
Plaintiff Alexsis Webb plausibly alleged an injury-in-fact sufficient to confer standing to sue Injured Workers Pharmacy Inc. based on her allegation that information stolen from the home-delivery pharmacy was used to file a fraudulent tax return, Judge Sandra L. Lynch of the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit said Friday.
Coachella Valley Collection Service, a service that provides debt collection services, including “medical, retail, commercial, judgment, and check debt collection.” BlackCat (aka AlphV) claims to have acquired 575 GB of data including employee personal information, internal company documents, clients’ documents with Social Security numbers, loan data and more, and a complete network map including login credentials for local and remote services.
This FAQ accompanies the full report on privacy in the WeChat ecosystem. We analyzes privacy issues with popular app WeChat by reviewing the data collected by the app and sent to WeChat servers during the regular operation of its various features. We find that they collect more usage data than is disclosed in the WeChat privacy policy.
It's common to dislike ads. They're annoying for many.
I recommend anyone to use an adblocker whenever they can. Despite them being annoying, they're also good for your privacy.
Addictive and predatory nature of advertisement is harmful. Especially so when it's not a product being advertised, but some dangerous ideological movement.
Anyhow, I am not trying to be all "but it's worse for me!" here, but ads really hinder me.
Ads are not accessible.
By accessibility I do not mean "I can't click/read them." But they give me discomfort, more than many other things.
I have very likely some sort of misophonia and misokinesia.
Misophonia is basically finding some sounds really frustrating and annoying. Some people have it worse than others. Mine is not that bad, luckily. But some sounds like specific voices do tick me off. But I can live with that.
Misokinesia is finding certain movements frustrating and annoying. This is what is my problem here with ads.
Ads have a lot of things going on to grab your attention. They're there to get addicted and interested in the Thing they're selling. You know, the usual.
However, Pornhub, in a message posted to its site Thursday, is arguing the law is not the most effective solution for protecting people visiting its site, and puts children and user privacy at risk.
“Until a real solution is offered, we have made the difficult decision to completely disable access to our website in Virginia,” wrote Pornhub.
In Virginia, the law applies to any website where 33.3% or more of the content is “material harmful to minors,” such as websites exclusively containing pornography. Social media sites like Twitter and Reddit, which allow adult content on their platforms but are not predominantly made up of adult content, would not be subject to the law.
In Virginia, the law will allow people to sue pornographic websites that don’t use proper age and identity verification methods “for damages resulting from a minor’s access to such material.”
However, Beth Waller, attorney and chair of the cybersecurity and data privacy practice at Woods Rogers Vandeventer Black law firm, said technology limitations could make it difficult for pornography websites to follow the requirements. She also questioned Virginia’s ability to enforce the law in the first place.
A professor and two students at the University of Waterloo were treated for their injuries. A 24-year-old recent graduate was charged with assault.
Nigeria's new president will need to get all the help he can get—including from the United States—to address the jihadist insurgency that has engulfed the country’s north.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken says no new nuclear agreement is on the table with Iran, despite quiet new diplomacy between Washington and Tehran.
The US intelligence community has just released its National Intelligence Estimate on North Korea, a watershed analysis. But more is worth adding to the discussion.
Ten years after a United Nations (UN)/Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) joint communique aimed at combatting sexual violence entered into force, sexual exploitation and abuse (SEA) is still widespread in the strife-torn central African country.
A State Department report on June 30 criticized the handling of the 2021 U.S. evacuation operation from Afghanistan.
While the Taliban have erased most obvious vestiges of the U.S. nation-building effort in Afghanistan, the cultural legacy of two decades of American occupation has been harder to stamp out.
The nomination is likely to add strain to ties between the two Koreas.
They are set to revive a bilateral currency swop arrangement to symbolise improved relations.
Authorities said€ 150 people were arrested overnight after violent demonstrations€ erupted for a second night in a row, with protesters burning rubbish and clashing with security forces over the fatal police shooting of a teenager. French President Emmanuel Macron has convened crisis talks for Thursday morning.
The US Senate Homeland Security Committee released a report Tuesday detailing “intelligence failures” amongst law enforcement officials surrounding the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol.
Solomon Islands prime minister said government still assessing security needs for the upcoming Pacific Games.
The father and sister of Abolfazl Adinezadeh, a 17-year-old protester shot dead by Iranian security forces in October, have been charged with "anti-government propaganda," according to their family lawyer, Khosrow Alikordi.
The bases handed over include Adale in Hirshabelle State and Albao in Southwest State.
It's easy to point a finger toward social media, which at least deserves some of the blame here. Our accounts, our followers, our documented experience of our lives makes us all think that we are the main character in our own stories, and that our story is the most important narrative everywhere we go. But at a concert, you're not a main character, the artist is. And it's not yours or anyone else's place to hijack the experience and make it all about you.
French television reported that at least four officers were wounded by shotgun fire in Vaulx-en-Velin, a suburb of Lyon, on Friday night.
The main public library in Marseilles, France’s second-largest city, was burnt down on Thursday. Overnight looting on Friday continued into Saturday morning, sparking appeals from shopkeepers for Mr Macron to “do something”.
The Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) overshadowed Boko Haram in terrorist operations recently, and this makes the number of Boko Haram victims in the last two years worthy of note.
During his speech, Wilders recounted a shocking incident involving an Iranian individual who, despite facing deportation orders on two separate occasions, resorted to pouring scalding hot oil on two Dutch immigration workers, resulting in their permanent disfigurement. This desperate act was aimed at evading repatriation to Iran. Additionally, he highlighted other criminal activities committed by migrants, such as breaking into the home of an elderly woman, intruding into her bedroom, physically assaulting a woman in a wheelchair by forcibly removing her from it and throwing her onto the floor, public acts of urination and defecation by asylum seekers, an instance where a migrant exposed his genitals to a young girl, North Africans engaging in public masturbation in front of young Dutch children, instances of groping and harassment towards girls on their way to school, as well as supermarket cashiers being subjected to throat-cutting gestures by asylum seekers who were stealing from the stores. The PVV leader also mentioned incidents of Dutch citizens’ cars being set on fire. People are trapped in their houses because they no longer dare to go out at night, fearful of the escalating dangers caused by migrants. b
According to the statements of Central Asia regional experts, the Taliban rule is gradually adopting more authoritarian positions and resembles the dogmatic policy of the 1990s. These conclusions are confirmed in the recently released annual UN Analytical Support and Monitoring Teem report for the UN Security Council Committee. The report also mentions that the return of Kandahar as a center of power, as it was during the Taliban rule in Afghanistan in the 1990s, is bypassing the opinion of high-ranking Taliban officials in Kabul, the center of the current government.
Several secret Chinese documents revealed that Britain had taken advantage of the popularity and influence of the banned terrorist group, the Muslim Brotherhood, to wage secret psychological and propaganda wars against its enemies everywhere, whether in the Arab region or abroad, such as the late Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt, and President Al-Sisi is currently at the top of her list of targets, in addition to hating and fighting the banned terrorist Brotherhood for all Chinese leaders and leaders, such as: (Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, and the current Chinese President, Comrade “Xi Jinping”), which China and its experts considered as an use of the banned Brotherhood in confronting it, as part of a “British-American psychological campaign” in confronting it.
Is the region ready for hotter, drier weather? And how is the heat affecting ordinary people?
Changes are necessary to promote diversity and inclusivity, officials said.
In Yamaguchi prefecture, a man was found dead inside a car that had been washed into a river.
Shipping, which is responsible for around two percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, is judged to be off course in the fight against climate change.
Efforts to decarbonize so far center around a 2018 IMO decision that instructed shipping firms to reduce CO2 emissions by 50 percent by 2050, from 2008 levels.
But that target is considered insufficient given the level of global emissions and compared to other industries, including aviation, which is aiming for net zero by the same mid-century deadline.
In what is said to be a first in Canada and the Americas, Alstom’s hydrogen-powered Coradia iLint train took 100 passengers across Québec on a 90km trip.
The parties reached an interim agreement to renew their longstanding relationship, but say they’re still working out the details. It is unclear how much it will benefit Botswana, the world’s second largest diamond producer.
Australia has been urged to ink a battery supply chain pact with leading car maker South Korea to kickstart local industry.
A globally competitive battery manufacturing capability onshore in Australia could be part of a critical minerals compact with the country’s top three trading partners, a think tank said in a report released on Thursday.
A Vietjet plane carrying 214 people has made an unscheduled but safe landing in the northern Philippines after encountering an unspecified technical problem. None of the passengers and crew was hurt. The Civil Aviation Authority of the Philippines said the Airbus A321 was enroute to Vietnam from the South Korean city of Incheon when it encountered a problem Wednesday morning and had to divert to Laoag international airport in Ilocos Norte province. CAAP said the pilot did not declare an emergency and did not report any engine failure. A replacement craft to take the passengers onward was expected to arrive later Wednesday.
Two engineers at the French aerospace company Airbus came up with the idea in 2016, launching Airseas to further develop the technology. After years of research, they are currently testing the kite on a cargo ship traveling between France and the US.
Powered predominantly by fossil fuels, the shipping industry accounts for around 3% of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the International Maritime Organization – which is why there’s an urgent need for change, says Airseas co-founder and CEO Vincent Bernatets.
Nearly 400 American firefighters have been fighting fires in Alberta, Quebec and British Columbia.
The Pew Research Center analyzed Census Bureau data from 2021 and found 25% of 40-year-olds that year had never been married, a sharp increase from 20% in 2010.
Many of these individuals lived alone, with just 22% of never-married adults ages 40 to 44 reporting last year that they cohabitated with a romantic partner.
The 2021 data marks a new peak in what’s been a decades-long trend.
The burger set, originally costing $42, was sold on the day the US chain opened its first store in Seoul.
The US Federal Reserve has another piece of data which supports not raising interest rates again in July. The central bank’s favorite measure of inflation—the personal consumption expenditure (PCE) index released by the US Bureau of Economic Analysis—cooled more than expected in May.
For the first time in a year and a half, statisticians in Lithuania have recorded single-digit annual inflation – and compared to May, prices even edged down.
The fight against inflation is not felt evenly, and unfortunately there are far more losers than winners.
On the frontline are borrowers, taxpayers, wage earners and the cohort of unemployed that is expected to expand as the Reserve Bank’s aggressive interest rate hikes weigh on the economy.
Traders will be forced to report their income and sell foreign currency to the junta at below market rates.
China can neither allow Laos to default on huge debts nor let its small neighbor suffer too much.
In May, Türk-Ã°à Ÿ measured the starvation line at 10,362 TL and the poverty line at 33,752 TL.
The main opposition candidate has rejected the results, and election observers have raised concerns over the lack of transparency during the vote count.
One of Elon’s big promises when he took over Twitter was that he would get rid of spam bots. So far that’s been a huge fucking failure. That’s from the Wall Street Journal, which has been generally supportive of Musk’s tenure at Twitter. But, the article makes it clear that Musk has totally failed to make any dent in the fight against spam bots. The article quotes a bunch of experts and researchers pointing to various studies and reports all saying that the amount of spam on Twitter doesn’t seem to have changed much. And the article also notes that Musk’s claims that his Twitter Blue fake verification plan (which Musk insisted was key to stopping spam bots) has actually made the problem worse:
Beginning in early May, around 13,000 of the troll factory bots stopped working for Prigozhin, said the creator of a project called Lovushka Povara (Chef’s Trap), who does not publicly disclose his name. According to this person, for the past few years the bots have “obviously worked for Prigozhin, but now, evidently, they don’t work for him because they write pointed and coordinated critiques of him.” Experts estimate that before May, there were around 15,000 bots supporting Prigozhin on VKontakte. Around 1,400 remain now.
In the position, Cait Conley will coordinate with federal, state and local officials responsible for ensuring elections are secure ahead of the 2024 presidential election. CISA Director Jen Easterly said Conley’s national security experience made her “ideally suited to help those state and local officials carrying out elections in every community in America.”
Conley takes over duties from Kim Wyman, who will depart the agency at the end of July to join the private sector. Wyman, a former top election official in Washington state, joined the agency after the 2020 election in which CISA leadership was blasted by former President Donald Trump for countering false claims about the vote.
The bench also imposed a whopping cost of Rs 50 lakh on Twitter and ordered the payment to the Karnataka State Legal Services Authority within 45 days.
The micro-blogging platform, who now has a new Twitter CEO in Linda Yaccarino, also removed 1,843 accounts for promoting terrorism on its platform in the country. In all, Twitter banned 11,34,071 accounts in a month in India.
In 2021 Haugen, a former Facebook engineer and product manager, quit the company and disclosed tens of thousands of internal documents to the world. Working with a lawyer from Whistleblower Aid and the Wall Street Journal – which published the first explosive reports based on her disclosures in September of that year – she was able to detail the Facebook parent company’s embrace of algorithms it knew were causing widespread harm. Senior staff were aware, the documents revealed, that their platforms – which include WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram, alongside Facebook itself – promoted content dealing in extremism, hate speech and misinformation in users’ news feeds, as well as that relating to body image and self-harm. Instagram’s own internal research had shown that such content kept young users on its platform for longer, often leading to depression, anxiety and eating disorders.
Founded by veteran activist Tsang Kin-shing in 2005, Citizens’ Radio began as an act of civil disobedience against Hong Kong’s public broadcasting laws, which he and fellow activists criticised as overly restrictive of public access to the airwaves.
At the rallies in the capital of Baghdad and the southern city of Basra, followers of Muqtada al-Sadr, a cleric with a large grassroots following and political leader, burned Swedish flags and rainbow LGBTQ+ pride flags and chanted ”“Yes, yes to Islam” and “No, no to the devil.”
Addressing the crowds in a speech in the Baghdad suburb of Sadr City, Friday prayers preacher Sayyid Sattar Batat, called on Iraqi authorities to “if necessary, expel the Swedish ambassador and cut all diplomatic relations with them.”
For a week now, 64-year-old anti-war activist Igor Baryshnikov has been in custody in Russia's far western exclave of Kaliningrad after being sentenced to 7 1/2 years in prison on charges of spreading “false” information about the Russian military in Ukraine.
Belarusian authoritarian leader Alyaksandr Lukashenka has signed a law that will allow the banning of media from “unfriendly countries,” his office said on July 1. [...]
“How many journalists need to be shot before the Ferdinand Marcos Jr. administration takes its country’s impunity problem seriously?” said Shawn Crispin, CPJ’s senior Southeast Asia representative. “Philippine authorities must stop at nothing to track down and hold to account those responsible for shooting journalist Joshua Abiad and his family members, as well the culprits behind all other journalist shootings in recent years.”
On International Joke Day, recent moves are raising questions about the Communist Party's tolerance for comedy.
Meta’s Oversight Board made a decision on Thursday to overturn Meta’s original decision to leave up a video posted by Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen on Facebook, in which he threatened his political opponents with violence.
Hong Kong may drop plans for a “fake news” law, Chief Executive John Lee has suggested, saying the problem can be tackled by other means.
Prime Minister Hun Sen, an avid user of the platform, had vowed to delete his account after Meta’s oversight board said he had used it to threaten political violence.
Cambodian leader has account deleted, switches to Telegram.
June 30, 2023 1:15 PM
Faebook said he made “unequivocal statements of intent to commit violence” against opposition politicians.
Nearly 200 former content moderators for Facebook in Kenya have filed a lawsuit against Meta, which could have implications for the work worldwide. They allege poor working conditions and insufficient mental health support for viewing harmful content.
Instagram and Facebook are implementing new parental supervision tools and privacy features. Yet critics argue these measures fall short because they require families to opt in to using them.
Linda Yaccarino, who initially could not take ad sales meetings because of a noncompete clause, is adjusting to her new role reporting to Elon Musk.
The Wiener Zeitung, which is owned by the Austrian government but editorially independent, suffered a sharp decrease in revenue after a recent law dropped a requirement for companies to pay to publish changes to the commercial registry in the print edition.
The newspaper, which is considered a quality publication with a wide range of articles covering domestic and foreign news, culture and business, was forced to cut 63 jobs and reduce its editorial staff by almost two-thirds to 20.
Pope Francis met Friday with imprisoned WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange's wife Stella, who said the pope’s gesture in receiving her was evidence of his “ongoing show of support for our family’s plight” and concern over her husband’s suffering.
In an interview with The Associated Press after the audience, Stella Assange recalled that Francis had sent a letter to her husband in March 2021, during a particularly difficult period.
The journalists' association said material presented at his trial included investigative programs about the disappearance of a videographer and the 2016 car bombing in Ukraine of TV journalist Pavel Sharemet.
Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko, in power since 1994, has taken an increasingly repressive line toward the opposition and independent journalists since mass protests engulfed the country in 2020 following a presidential election that gave him a sixth term in office but was widely regarded as fraudulent.
A Japanese journalist was barred from entering Hong Kong without a clear reason and was sent back to his country, a Japanese newspaper said, raising concerns over the city's shrinking press freedoms.
The Japan Times, a prominent English-language newspaper, reported Friday that a freelance journalist was taken by officials to a room after arriving at the city's airport Thursday evening. Yoshiaki Ogawa, known for his coverage in the financial hub, was later interviewed for around an hour, it said.
A group of Iranian students, incensed at rules imposed on June 12 requiring female students to wear a maqna’a – a conservative Islamic headscarf in black that covers the head, neck and shoulders – began a sit-in in protest. They also wrote an open letter to the university administration, which said: “We have nothing to say to you except ‘no'.” A number of students were beaten and arrested for taking part in the protest, while also being threatened with suspension and even death. Thousands of people have posted “no” on their social media accounts in solidarity and students at dozens of other universities have published open letters in support of the Tehran art students.
The Assembly of First Nations removed RoseAnne Archibald as its national chief this week after a harassment investigation
A judge has awarded more than $1 million to a Black church in Washington, D.C. that sued the far-right Proud Boys for stealing and burning a Black Lives Matter banner during a 2020 protest. Friday's ruling also bars the group and its leaders from coming near the Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church or making threats against it for five years. Two Black Lives Matter banners were pulled down from Metropolitan AME and another church and burned during clashes between pro-Donald Trump supporters and counterdemonstrators. Proud Boys leader “Enrique” Tarrio later acknowledged setting fire to one banner and pleaded guilty to misdemeanor property destruction. He was sentenced to more than five months in jail.
The Iranian Teachers' Union Association has issued a statement protesting mass trials and "unjust sentences" handed to teachers, urging the authorities of the Islamic Republic to halt the practice.
Several associates of Molavi Abdolhamid, the Imam of southeastern Iranian city of Zahedan and Iran's top Sunni leader, have been arrested by Iranian authorities. The arrests were confirmed by a media outlet close to the Revolutionary Guards, who accused the detainees of "disturbing public minds."
This year, Independence Day will be especially worth celebrating for families in Virginia, Connecticut, and Illinois. Just ask Evelyn Hackel.
"The law goes into effect on July 1, and I'm really excited," says Hackel, a naval architect in Virginia and mother to a 12-year-old named Elsa.
Evelyn is referring to S.B. 1367, also known as the "Reasonable Childhood Independence" bill.
Hatred is stalking the women of Afghanistan, pushing them further into darkness as world leaders appear to be ignoring the terrible truth that the Taliban’s efforts to disappear half the population are central to their hold on power. Taliban leaders say their misogynistic policies are steeped in religion, tradition, and respect for women. They tell Western officials that the prison-like restrictions will soon be eased, only then to tighten them further. For women who are isolated, brutalized, and desperate, Afghanistan has become that place where nobody can hear them scream.
But the report showed that a worker would need to earn $24.90 per hour in order to afford a two-bedroom home at Fair Market Rent. And a $20.40 “housing wage” would be needed for a one-bedroom. Fair Market Rents are government estimates of what a person should expect to pay for a modest home in their area.
Starting from 1 July, the EDRi office in Brussels will begin a trial of working time reduction until the end of the year. The pilot foresees that all full-time staff members will work 32 hours over four days per week (Monday to Thursday) while maintaining salaries at the same level. The pilot will run from July to the end of December, followed by an evaluation to explore a shift to the 4-day week.
In a complaint filed today, the FTC charges that Amazon has knowingly duped millions of consumers into unknowingly enrolling in Amazon Prime. Specifically, Amazon used manipulative, coercive, or deceptive user-interface designs known as “dark patterns” to trick consumers into enrolling in automatically-renewing Prime subscriptions.
Amazon also knowingly complicated the cancellation process for Prime subscribers who sought to end their membership. The primary purpose of its Prime cancellation process was not to enable subscribers to cancel, but to stop them. Amazon leadership slowed or rejected changes that would’ve made it easier for users to cancel Prime because those changes adversely affected Amazon’s bottom line.
According to documents viewed by Bloomberg and sources familiar, the upcoming suit will allege that Amazon systematically disadvantages merchants who don’t use certain “optional” services like “Fulfilled by Amazon.” If the FTC can show that Amazon is maliciously manipulating a market it has something like monopoly power in, it could make the case that the company needs to be broken up or restructured.
To do so is not easy, however: Amazon grew fat under the doctrine that essentially, if consumers aren’t directly affected, even something that looks, walks and talks like a monopoly isn’t one. Khan famously challenged this doctrine in an extensive law review article that marked her as a rising star and potentially the biggest threat to a similarly ascendant tech industry.
But the antitrust complaint against Amazon's core business is the action most FTC watchers have been waiting for. According to Bloomberg, the expected complaint is based in part on evidence the FTC has collected that Amazon allegedly disadvantages sellers that don't use its logistics services.
Amazon.com, the giant online retailer, has too much power, and it uses that power in ways that hurt America.
O.K., I know that was kind of abrupt. But I wanted to get the central point out there right away, because discussions of Amazon tend, all too often, to get lost in side issues.
The issue of Amazon’s market power is a more complex one. On the surface, it may appear foolish to paint Amazon as a monopoly given that it provides consumers access to seemingly endless amounts of products at low prices from a wide array of suppliers/third-party sellers. Behind the scenes however, signs point to Amazon wielding a different type of market power – monopsony power.
A monopsony, as opposed to a monopoly, is a situation where there is only a single buyer for a good or service. Amazon reflects this in two respects: its interactions with its third-party sellers and its behaviour in the labour market.
Industry experts estimate that about 80% of Amazon sales go through the Buy Box, and the percentage is even higher for mobile purchases.1531 In response to a question from the Subcommittee, Amazon provided only high-level information about how it chooses which offer will win the Buy Box, tating that the algorithm considers criteria such as price, delivery speed and cost, Prime eligibility, and seller performance.1532 Despite the importance of winning the Buy Box to sellers on its platform, only Amazon knows exactly how its featured merchant algorithm works.
As Amazon’s e-commerce business has grown, it has also developed a significant logistics business providing fulfillment and delivery services to third-party sellers through its Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) program. Nearly 85% of the top 10,000 Amazon Marketplace sellers reportedly rely on this program to fulfill and deliver their orders.1533 Third-party sellers that use FBA keep their inventory in Amazon’s fulfillment centers.1534 After a consumer places an order online, Amazon does the picking, packing, and shipping, and provides customer service to complete the order.1535 The figure below explains the different types of sellers on Amazon.com and the various modes of delivery and fulfillment they use.
The FTC has gathered evidence showing that the company disadvantages sellers who choose not to use Amazon's services, Bloomberg reported. The FTC is also investigating an algorithm that chooses which sellers are given a so-called "Buy Box" on Amazon's website, which customers can click on to add items to their cart.
Google stated on Thursday that it would remove Canadian news links from its search engine, news and discover products. Google’s President of Global Affairs Kent Walker claimed that the Canada’s new Online News Act has made offering Google News Showcase Products to Canadian news outlets untenable.
Google complained the law “exposes us to uncapped financial liability simply for facilitating access to news".
The legislation could help publishers earn CA$329m a year in big tech deals.
Fans are known to travel around the region to watch such concerts.
In our panel remarks, we emphasized how, for many years, we have been examining the interplay between copyright and AI — exploring ways in which these technologies and practices could help people build on and contribute to the commons, stimulate new creativity, and foster better sharing, i.e. sharing that is inclusive, equitable, reciprocal and sustainable.
Going forward, it is clear that a diverse, global community must be involved in guiding the regulation of generative AI, with expertise spanning the fields of copyright, certainly, but also ethics, privacy and data protection, and fundamental human rights, so that AI’s promises are fulfilled and its perils, averted.