Tables without food, bedrooms without beds. Grinding child poverty in Britain calls for anger – and a plan (Opinion by Gordon Brown)

Even if the government issued newspaper editors with D-notices banning any public mention of the word “poverty”, it could hardly do more to create a wall of silence around Britain’s biggest social crisis. By eliminating any ministerial admission of our deepening poverty epidemic from public discourse, it has left Britain with a hidden emergency whose forgotten and voiceless victims are the hundreds of thousands of children behind closed doors, in bedrooms without beds, homes without heating and kitchen tables without food, and whose suffering is worsening by the day.

There is already massive outage in a large part of the democratic world about the pursuit of Julian Assange as you can read also here on Lemmy, but I’m wondering whether you’ll ever be tired of stuff like this.

Letztes Jahr half Lindner der Finanzindustrie und verhinderte das Provisionsverbot für Anlageberater (August 2023), CSU-Abgeordneter Ramsauer hilft bisweilen einem Unternehmerverband (Januar 2024). Die Liste ist lang.

@VampyreOfNazareth @maniacalmanicmania

Who is Yang Hengjun, sentenced to death in China?

Das gleiche gab es vergangenes Jahr in Österreich auf der Salzburger Tauernautobahn. Dort wurde das Tempolimit von 100 abgeschafft, weil die Luftqualität messbar besser war als vor dem Tempolimit.

@Sunforged

There are many places. One is Ireland.

Guess a human rights group in China is not possible for a lack of democracy. That aside, it doesn’t matter where the group sits, the issue is clear here. But, wait, …

Data Leak at Anthropic Due to Contractor Error

TL;DR - Anthropic had a data leak due to a contractor’s mistake, but says no sensitive info was exposed. It wasn’t a system breach, and there’s no sign of malicious intent.

The article doesn’t say which classifier algorithm they use in that case in India.

We had a similar incident in the Netherlands last year, for example, with similar problems. There they used Gradient Boosting afaik. But it doesn’t really matter as all these algorithms will yield a high number of false positives. If we use this and blindly trust trust the result in sensitive areas such as social welfare, we cause a lot if harm to iur society.

Addition: the CCP is actively hiring Chinese people all over the world to control and dissent as Safeguard Defenders says in a report

The consolidation of overseas United Front networks as the providers of services such as consular community assistance may not only give them potential broad access to individuals’ private data, home addresses, and contact information but may also dangerously enhance their function of control over overseas communities and dissenters.

https://novacustom.com

Or with Coreboot: https://minifree.org

I guess it’s the big business which is complaining here trying to lobby against transparency. The small business owners don’t have much to hide as you suggest.

@Rubber Duck

Russians do target specifically all their minority groups for the SMO.

Apart from not sharing your opinion, what we have in Ukraine is a war. It’s called a war.

But if you think that it’s great to be in Russia, just go there and apply for Russian citizenship. I heard they are looking for new citizens. Good luck.

This is probably another attempt to punish critics by a person who appears to have completely lost touch with the world. I agree this will have no effect.

@petrescatraian

A friend of mine is from Romania, and I know many who lived in the former GDR (German Democratic Republic). They don’t talk often about it, but when they do their stories seem absurd, hard to believe sometimes that these things happened, and each of these stories is a reason to avoid mass surveillance imo.

The short answer: I don’t know. There is no research investigating the impact of a decreasing Chinese GDP on the country’s environmental impact (to the best of my knowledge).

The longer answer: China is bound to reduce its environmental impact anyway. The country has a very densely-populated urban area with low-lying coastal cities. Around 20% of the population lives there, producing around 33% of the country’s GDP. A rising sea level and other natural desasters (which is what practically all environmental experts inside and outside China expect even in the short term, meaning this year) will have a devastating impact on China’s social and political stability.

The good news is that China has the potential to get its arms around that imo, if, and only if the country opens up for further investments and international cooperation. Foreign direct investments (FDI) have been contributing significantly to China’s growth in the past (around 20% of the GDP can be directly attributed to FDIs if I remember the number correctly), but FDIs also contributed indirectly by enhancing China’s technological and managerial capacities in the past. Data by China’s Ministry of Commerce shows that foreign enterprises represent just 2% of all companies, but 10% of the workforce (around 40 million jobs) contributing around 16% of China’s tax revenue and 20% of foreign trade (export and import combined).

China will need to maintain this collaboration even more in the future, as a shrinking population is barely apt to boost a domestic market. But international collaboration requires mutual respect of foreign laws, accepting fundamental human rights, and an open economy with a high degree of decentralisation and innovation. I’ll leave it to others to decide whether or not Chinese politics is heading in this direction.

Addition: all numbers are for the years 2021/2022.

North Korea’s human rights: What’s not being talked about (2019)

The state controls everything, and actively spies on its citizens using a vast surveillance and informer network.

North Koreans get all their news, entertainment and information from state media, which unfailingly praises the leadership. According to RSF, citizens can be sent to prison for viewing, reading or listening to content provided by international media outlets.

Internet access is available for the elite few in the capital, Pyongyang, who lead relatively comfortable lives. Others may have restricted access. The country has its own very basic intranet - a closed network which certain people are allowed to use.

“North Korea has been said to be the world’s biggest open prison camp,” said Brad Adams [Asia director of Human Rights Watch]. “I don’t think that’s unfair.”

Foreign nationals in North Korea have been arrested and detained for extended periods of time - often kept as prisoners for political reasons and used as diplomatic pawns at opportune moments.

A significant majority of North Koreans undertake unpaid labour at some point in their lives, according to a HRW report. Former students who defected from North Korea told HRW that their schools forced them to work for free on farms twice a year - at ploughing and harvest time - for one month at a time.

Discrimination against women very much exists, but “there isn’t a way to measure inequality in the North like how you measure the wage gap between males and females”, says Arnold Fang [a researcher from Amnesty International]

Reports are also rampant of women facing torture, rape and other sexual abuses while held in detention facilities - and of widespread sexual abuse in the military.

Hungary doubles down on Ukraine aid demands

The majority of EU member states are against deciding the issue on a year-to-year basis as they believe it would deny Ukraine long-term planning ability and would effectively give Budapest the option of an ‘annual veto’.

Budapest has also made an unrelated demand about the bloc’s COVID-19 recovery funds (RRF).

@jmcs

This is true for more or less all international and national agencies (World Bank, OECD, CIA, all EU agencies, …). Their reports are extremely good and accurate, but the problem is that politics doesn’t appear to be listening.

@gapbetweenus

It didn’t work in Taiwan as we can see, just to name a recent example.

Disinformation campaigns are by no means bound to win, but we need to be careful. We need more education and awareness in yhat respect, because if and when you are unaware or think you’re immune to fake narratives, you’re lost.

[Edit typo.]