What Zohran Mamdani’s Win Means for New York's Climate Politics
What Zohran Mamdani’s Win Means for New York's Climate Politics
The mayor-elect’s approach reflects a view that is going mainstream: To succeed, climate policies may need to lose the label.New York Focus
Armed US immigration agents drive off with toddler after arrest of father
Armed US immigration agents drive off with toddler after arrest of father
‘Devastated’ family demands answers after two-year-old driven by armed agents from LA Home Depot parking lotMaanvi Singh (The Guardian)
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VW to build its own AI chips in China in autonomous driving push
VW to build its own AI chips in China in autonomous driving push
SHANGHAI: In the race to develop autonomous driving technology, German automotive giant Volkswagen is taking a significant step by developing its own artificial intelligence (AI) chips in China, reported German Press Agency (dpa).Bernama-dpa (New Straits Times)
With a Lock on State Government Control, Virginia Democrats Now Face Difficult Decisions on Data Centers and Renewable Energy
With a Lock on State Government Control, Virginia Democrats Now Face Difficult Decisions on Data Centers and Renewable Energy - Inside Climate News
After big wins on election night, Democrats will have to decide whether easing requirements in the state’s ambitious climate law will be necessary to maintain Virginia’s status as the “data center capital of the world.”Inside Climate News
No but you can't tell the oligarchs to not!
You would need to get their cocks out of your mouth first, so...
Green Groups’ Election Takeaway: Focus on Trump Energy Agenda Costs
Voters’ frustration with high power bills helped propel Democrats to victory in New Jersey, Virginia and Georgia. Climate advocates stressed how Trump’s rollbacks of clean energy add to the pain.
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Why Solarpunk is already happening in Africa
Why Solarpunk is already happening in Africa
Or: How Africa is building the future by skipping the pastSkander Garroum (Climate Drift)
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VW to build its own AI chips in China in autonomous driving push
VW to build its own AI chips in China in autonomous driving push
SHANGHAI: In the race to develop autonomous driving technology, German automotive giant Volkswagen is taking a significant step by developing its own artificial intelligence (AI) chips in China, reported German Press Agency (dpa).Bernama-dpa (New Straits Times)
Luanti Non-Profit: We've Joined Open Collective Europe
Luanti Non-Profit: We've Joined Open Collective Europe
Joining Open Collective Europe allows Luanti to operate like a non-profit and unlocks many new opportunities.Luanti
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Luanti has joined Open Collective Europe (OCE), a non-profit based in Belgium that provides fiscal hosting to open source projects. OCE hosts many notable projects, including EndeavourOS, F-Droid, and postmarketOS. Joining OCE allows Luanti to operate like a non-profit and unlocks many new opportunities.You can donate to Luanti’s non-profit collective at opencollective.com/luanti.
Luanti - Open Collective
Luanti (formerly Minetest) is an open-source voxel game creation platformopencollective.com
Bill Gates Gave $3.5M to Think Tank Run by Climate Crisis Denier Bjorn Lomborg
Bill Gates Gave $3.5M to Think Tank Run by Climate Crisis Denier Bjorn Lomborg - DeSmog
Tax records reveal that the billionaire’s foundation has donated for years to Lomborg’s Copenhagen Consensus Center.Rei Takver (DeSmog)
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This guy is in the Epstein files, but somehow avoided all the criticism relating to it.
He has a well paid PR team.
Seven data-driven lessons from the 2025 elections
Seven data-driven lessons from the 2025 elections
Democrats outran their polls and swept statewide races from Georgia to New Jersey, on an agenda of affordability and a broad anti-Trump backlashG. Elliott Morris (Strength In Numbers)
Tech Billionaire Marc Andreessen Bet Big on Trump. It’s Paying Off for Silicon Valley.
Tech Billionaire Marc Andreessen Bet Big on Trump. It’s Paying Off for Silicon Valley.
The Trump administration’s gutting of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has been good for venture capitalists like Andreessen, who previously accused the agency of “terrorizing” fintech startups and crypto companies.andrea.wise@propublica.org (ProPublica)
Now Hiring: Exciting Remote Opportunities Worldwide
The Media Is Complicit in the Climate Confusion: The vast majority of people want their governments to take climate action—but most wrongly think they’re in the minority. The media is partly to blame.
* archive.today
* web.archive.org
The Media Is Complicit in the Climate Confusion | The Nation
The vast majority of people want their governments to take climate action—but most wrongly think they’re in the minority. The media is partly to blame.The Nation
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Calling bullshit on this oft repeated lie, most people want Schrödinger's action.
To have effective action, you'd need to ban flying, ban cruise ships, ban private cars , ban petrol lawn equipment, ban recreational offroad vehicles, and recreational boating, ban meat eating pets, ban advertising, ban large houses, make being a billionaire a criminal offence etc
What most people mean is, slap up a couple solar panels and wind turbines and be done with it, which makes it worse, like using an aspirin for li g cancer and saying you've taken action and the problems solved !
Climate change is a demand side and human behavioural issue. To know what people really want, look to voting results, the rest of it is just bullshit.
IMO, interestingly, John Kenneth Galbraith touched on some of the reasons why in his Essay "The culture of contentment".
Don't let perfect get in the way of good.
The fact you say ban advertising probably shows you have gone a bit on the extreme side. Ban cruise ships? If you shift all recreational air travel to cruise travel, it'll offset a big chunk of impact. Remove petrol cars, private jets, electrify rail, improve public transport, invest in solar, wind, geothermal, tidal, nuclear, move consumption from red meat to white meat and you'll take a big chunk out of it, review, and take further steps if needed.
You seem to have swallowed the propaganda that consumers are responsible, not corporations. You let them off the hook and lost faith. What follows is resignation that we fail and no further steps. That's failure. We have to turn this ship around and the turning circle is big, let's start now and put a full lock on.
People used plastic straws, then they replaced with paper. Less single use plastic heading to landfill. Did consumer change anything? No. The law changed, companies adapted and people through the same actions cut environmental impact, if just by a small amount. Demand side argument does not stand well. It plays a factor, but it isn't the only one.
Marjorie Taylor Greene Reportedly Plots 2028 Presidential Run as a 'Real MAGA' Republican
Marjorie Taylor Greene Reportedly Gearing Up for 2028 Presidential Run as a ‘Real MAGA’ Republican
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene is reportedly plotting a 2028 presidential run as a "Real MAGA" conservative who also wants to appeal to anti-Trump votersSean James (Mediaite)
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Bolivia Supreme Court orders release of jailed ex-president Jeanine Anez
La Paz (AFP) – Bolivia's Supreme Court on Wednesday overturned the 10-year prison sentence handed to former right-wing president Jeanine Anez in 2022 over an alleged plot to oust her predecessor Evo Morales."The sentence against her... has been annulled," Supreme Court President Romer Saucedo told local media, adding that Anez would be released during the day.
Anez, a former senator, served as interim leader in 2019 after Morales fled the country following mass protests over alleged election fraud during his controversial bid for a fourth term.
Morales, Bolivia's first Indigenous president, claimed he was the victim of a coup after the military called for him to step down following weeks of unrest.
His coup claim was dismissed as fictional by many in Bolivia and abroad given that the army never took power.
Anez was arrested in 2021 after Morales' socialist party returned to power in 2020.
She was convicted of illegally assuming the presidency.
Saucedo said Anez should have been tried by a special court in charge of trying crimes by lawmakers in the course of their duties and not by the criminal justice system.
He said that Anez's rights had been violated.
Anez, 58, did not immediately react on social media but on Tuesday had posted on the X that she would "never regret having served my country when it needed me."
Attack on funeral in Sudan's Kordofan region kills 40: UN
Port Sudan (Sudan) (AFP) – An attack on a funeral in the strategic city of El-Obeid in Sudan's central Kordofan region killed 40 people, the UN said Wednesday, as paramilitaries looked poised to launch an offensive there.The United Nations' humanitarian office did not specify when the attack took place or who was behind it, but said that the situation in Kordofan was worsening.
The war in Sudan has killed tens of thousands of people and displaced millions more, with the fighting spreading to new areas in recent days, sparking fears of an even greater humanitarian catastrophe.
The paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), at war with the military since 2023, appears to have shifted its focus to Kordofan after capturing El-Fasher, the last army stronghold in the vast western Darfur region.
"Local sources report that at least 40 civilians were killed and dozens injured yesterday in an attack on a funeral gathering in El Obeid, the capital of North Kordofan State," the UN humanitarian agency OCHA said.
"Once again, OCHA calls for an immediate cessation of hostilities and for all parties to protect civilians and respect international humanitarian law."
El-Obeid is a logistics and command hub that links Darfur to the Sudanese capital Khartoum.
The RSF claimed control of Bara, a city north of El-Obeid, last week.
People forced to flee El-Fasher have described horrific abuse, including rape, at the hands of the RSF."The rapes were gang rapes. Mass rape in public, rape in front of everyone and no one could stop it," mother of four Amira said from a makeshift shelter in Tawila, some 70 kilometres (43 miles) west of El-Fasher.
"You'd be asleep and they'd come and rape you," she said, using a pseudonym while speaking during a webinar organised by campaign group Avaaz.
"I saw with my own eyes people who couldn't afford to pay (for safe passage) and the fighters took their daughters instead."
Yale University's Humanitarian Research Lab released close-up satellite images showing evidence of atrocities committed during the RSF's takeover of El-Fasher.
The lab's executive director, Nathaniel Raymond, told AFP in an interview that the images were "a spark plug for public outrage".
Both sides in the war have been accused of committing atrocities.
The fall of El-Fasher gave paramilitaries control over all five state capitals in Darfur, raising fears that Sudan would effectively be partitioned along an east-west axis.
The RSF now dominates Darfur and parts of the south, while the army holds the north, east and central regions along the Nile and Red Sea.
The UAE is accused by the UN of supplying arms to the RSF -- allegations it has repeatedly denied.
Abu Dhabi on Wednesday voiced its support for a ceasefire and its "deep denunciation of the ongoing human rights violations and horrific crimes being committed against civilians in various parts of Sudan", including El-Fasher.
The Sudanese army, meanwhile, has received support from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Iran, according to observers.
Sudan's army-backed defence minister on Tuesday said the military would press on with its fight against the RSF after an internal meeting to discuss a US proposal for a ceasefire.
"We thank the Trump administration for its efforts and proposals to achieve peace," Hassan Kabroun said in a speech broadcast on state television, but added that "preparations for the Sudanese people's battle are ongoing".
No details of the US truce proposal have been made public.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters on Tuesday that Washington wanted "to see this conflict come to a peaceful end", but added "it's a very complicated situation on the ground right now".
She said the United States was "actively engaged" in seeking a peace deal alongside Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
The army-aligned authorities had rejected an earlier truce proposal from the four countries -- referred to as the Quad -- under which both the army and the RSF would be excluded from a transitional political process.
Speaking at a forum in Qatar on Tuesday, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called on the warring parties to "come to the negotiating table, bring an end to this nightmare of violence -- now".
Mali’s economy near standstill amid JNIM fuel attacks
An ongoing fuel blockade initiated by the JNIM jihadist group in Mali has brought the landlocked Sahel nation’s economy to a near standstill. In an effort to isolate the capital, Bamako, and exert pressure on the ruling junta, the militants have intensified their attacks on fuel tankers, prompting Western governments to urge their citizens to leave the country.Since back-to-back coups in 2020 and 2021, Mali has been ruled by a military junta that is struggling to counter various armed groups, particularly the Al-Qaeda-linked Group for the Support of Islam and Muslims (JNIM), which is carrying out the blockade.
Since September, the JNIM has targeted fuel tankers, particularly those coming from Senegal and Côte d'Ivoire, through which the majority of Mali's imported goods transit.
JNIM is retaliating against the authorities' ban on the sale of fuel at locations other than service stations in rural areas, a move meant to dry up the jihadists' fuel supply lines, according to Malian authorities.
Mali's fuel shortage is exacerbating severe and recurrent power outages that have crippled the economy for the past five years.
The junta announced late Sunday that class was cancelled at schools and universities for two weeks due to the shortages.
In the middle of harvest season, some agricultural machinery has been rendered inoperable without fuel, with the shortages having struck daily life outside the capital several weeks earlier.
Tankers have been set on fire daily for the past two months, while drivers and soldiers have been killed or kidnapped in jihadist ambushes.
Talks between Malian intermediaries and the jihadists have so far failed to alleviate the problem.
Last Thursday, several embassies in Mali urged citizens to depart the country immediately while the United States and United Kingdom withdrew non-essential staff, amid fears of growing insecurity.Citing the "unpredictability of Bamako's security situation" and "ongoing armed conflict" around the capital, the US embassy later urged all citizens to "depart immediately" on commercial aircraft.
Italy, Germany, Canada and a handful of other countries have also told their nationals to depart Mali as swiftly as possible.
The various embassies' recent actions "reveal a critical and rapid deterioration of security, even around Bamako, which until now had been relatively spared", says Bakary Sambe, director of the Timbuktu Institute, a Dakar-based think tank.
He told RFI that the jihadists do not appear to be preparing a military assault against the Malian capital, but rather working towards economic exhaustion intended to weaken the transitional regime in place.
"Several aspects lead me to be cautious about the imminence of a frontal assault on Bamako, which is neither in their doctrine nor within the current capabilities of JNIM. It is not their objective," he explains.
"The group has had to learn from past experiences [notably the occupation and administration of the northern regions of Mali for ten months in 2012, editor's note] and has made the strategic choice of gradual suffocation: a war of economic and political attrition, which delegitimises the regime without ever exposing itself to a conventional battle that would be lost in advance."
Since July, Mali has seen an increase in attacks targeting industrial and mining sites, particularly in the Kayes region, which accounts for 80 percent of Mali's gold production, its main source of wealth.
Examples include the Diamond Cement Factory in Kayes – where three Indian engineers were kidnapped – and several mines in the Kayes region, where about ten Chinese employees were abducted.
The Bougouni lithium mine, operated by the British company Kodal Minerals, has also been subjected to several raids.
According to information confirmed by RFI and France 24 on Monday, JNIM released three hostages in exchange for a large ransom.
Two Emiratis and an Iranian, who were captured outside Bamako on 23 September were released on 29 October under the auspices of the Malian intelligence services for a sum between 50 and 70 million euros.
Several tons of military equipment – vehicles and weapons – were also delivered to the jihadist group. According to several sources, a prisoner exchange also took place.
For Sambe, these fall into a range of tactics used by JNIM to "project an image of resounding failure".
From falling export revenues, to scaring off direct investment and fomenting popular discontent, especially since the regime had promised security and sovereignty with support from Moscow.
"It's a war of suffocation, but also a strategy of discrediting the regime, demonstrating daily its inability to ensure the safety of the population."
In a statement released Monday, the Malian army claimed to have targeted "a major terrorist base" near Sirakoro, in the Bougouni region of central Mali.
According to the army headquarters, the site was used "to plan attacks against fuel tanker convoys."
The Malian army claims to have neutralised "more than a dozen terrorists" and destroyed or recovered equipment.
Two new maps on A.E.S.!
Two new maps available on our server "A.E.S."!📦 Neden 2 - a Block League map as a tribute to the map with the same name from S4 League
🌻 Flowers - a Colour Jump map made by fnetX
Come try them out! 👇
aes.land/
Colorado Passes Measures to Feed All Public School Kids by Taxing the Wealthy
Colorado Passes Measures to Feed All Public School Kids by Taxing the Wealthy
Excess funds from the school meals program would be redirected toward the state-managed SNAP program.Chris Walker (Truthout)
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"The hope is to have a fresh 'Star Trek' movie, though [Paramount] has moved on from the idea of bringing back Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto and the rest of the ensemble from the J.J. Abrams reboot."
David Ellison’s Hollywood Takeover: First Paramount. Is Warner Bros Next?
David Ellison is the ultimate Hollywood disruptor. This week's Variety cover story goes deep on the Paramount-Skydance boss' industry takeover.Tatiana Siegel (Variety)
Pro-Israel Billionaire Who Led Mamdani Scaremongering Now Offers to Help NYC's Next Mayor | Common Dreams
Pro-Israel Billionaire Who Led Mamdani Scaremongering Now Offers to Help NYC's Next Mayor
One social media user wrote that the hedge fund executive Bill Ackman "went from acting like Mamdani was going to import ISIS to extending a friendly handshake… in like six hours."stephen-prager (Common Dreams)
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The Company Quietly Funneling Paywalled Articles to AI Developers
The Common Crawl Foundation is little known outside of Silicon Valley. For more than a decade, the nonprofit has been scraping billions of webpages to build a massive archive of the internet. This database—large enough to be measured in petabytes—is made freely available for research. In recent years, however, this archive has been put to a controversial purpose: AI companies including OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Nvidia, Meta, and Amazon have used it to train large language models. In the process, my reporting has found, Common Crawl has opened a back door for AI companies to train their models with paywalled articles from major news websites. And the foundation appears to be lying to publishers about this—as well as masking the actual contents of its archives.Common Crawl has not said much publicly about its support of LLM development. Since the early 2010s, researchers have used Common Crawl’s collections for a variety of purposes: to build machine-translation systems, to track unconventional uses of medicines by analyzing discussions in online forums, and to study book banning in various countries, among other things. In a 2012 interview, Gil Elbaz, the founder of Common Crawl, said of its archive that “we just have to make sure that people use it in the right way. Fair use says you can do certain things with the world’s data, and as long as people honor that and respect the copyright of this data, then everything’s great.”
Common Crawl’s website states that it scrapes the internet for “freely available content” without “going behind any ‘paywalls.’” Yet the organization has taken articles from major news websites that people normally have to pay for—allowing AI companies to train their LLMs on high-quality journalism for free. Meanwhile, Common Crawl’s executive director, Rich Skrenta, has publicly made the case that AI models should be able to access anything on the internet. “The robots are people too,” he told me, and should therefore be allowed to “read the books” for free. Multiple news publishers have requested that Common Crawl remove their articles to prevent exactly this use. Common Crawl says it complies with these requests. But my research shows that it does not.
The Nonprofit Feeding the Entire Internet to AI Companies
Common Crawl claims to provide a public benefit, but it lies to publishers about its activities.Alex Reisner (The Atlantic)
The Age of Anti-Social Media Is Here
Since its founding, Facebook has described itself as a kind of public service that fosters relationships. In 2005, not long after the site’s launch, its co-founder Mark Zuckerberg described the network as an “icebreaker” that would help you make friends. Facebook has since become Meta, with more grandiose ambitions, but its current mission statement is broadly similar: “Build the future of human connection and the technology that makes it possible.”More than 3 billion people use Meta products such as Facebook and Instagram every day, and more still use rival platforms that likewise promise connection and community. But a new era of deeper, better human fellowship has yet to arrive. Just ask Zuckerberg himself. “There’s a stat that I always think is crazy,” he said in April, during an interview with the podcaster Dwarkesh Patel. “The average American, I think, has fewer than three friends. And the average person has demand for meaningfully more; I think it’s like 15 friends or something, right?”
Zuckerberg was wrong about the details—the majority of American adults say they have at least three close friends, according to recent surveys—but he was getting at something real. There’s no question that we are becoming less and less social. People have sunk into their phones, enticed into endless, mindless “engagement” on social media. Over the past 15 years, face-to-face socialization has declined precipitously. The 921 friends I’ve accumulated on Facebook, I’ve always known, are not really friends at all; now the man who put this little scorecard in my life was essentially agreeing.
Zuckerberg, however, was not admitting a failure. He was pointing toward a new opportunity. In Marc Andreessen’s influential 2023 treatise, “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” the venture capitalist wrote, “We believe that there is no material problem—whether created by nature or by technology—that cannot be solved with more technology.” In this same spirit, Zuckerberg began to suggest the idea that AI chatbots could fill in some of the socialization that people are missing.
AI Is Not Your Friend
The social-media era is over. What’s coming will be much worse.Damon Beres (The Atlantic)
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in reply to silence7 • • •If New Yorkers experience climate change as a matter of comfort, not survival, that's because NYC is very wealthy. That's why this article can frame the intertwined issue as quality of life, not length of life.
For most of the world, climate change will put quality of life and length of life in conflict with each other. People will need to sacrifice some comfort/luxury to prevent death. That actually probably includes NYC.