Muhammad Rizwan Azhar and Waqas Uzair, Scholars Edith Cowan University - ars technica
Stephan:
Here is some good news about e-bikes. I confess I had not considered how big this trend has become. Individuals are making choices for a better future.
Ryan L. Jane / Getty
We hop in the car to get groceries or drop kids at school. But while the car is convenient, these short trips add up in terms of emissions, pollution, and petrol cost.
Close to half (44 percent) of all Australian commuter trips are by car—and under 10 km. Of Perth’s 4.2 million daily car trips, 2.8 are for distances of less than 2 km.
This is common in wealthier countries. In the United States, a staggering 60 percent of all car trips cover less than 10km.
So what’s the best solution? You might think switching to an electric vehicle is the natural step. In fact, for short trips, an electric bike or moped might be better for you—and for the planet. That’s because these forms of transport—collectively known as electric micromobility—are cheaper to buy and run.
But it’s more than that—they are actually displacing four times as much demand for oil as all the world’s electric cars at present, due to their staggering uptake in China and other nations where mopeds are […]
Julie Jargon, Staff Writer - The Wall Street Journal
Stephan:
For several weeks now I have been tracking a trend about another very dark side of social media. I got started on this when a reader wrote me to tell me that a boy in her daughter’s school, whom her daughter had rejected, got hold of a picture of her face and using AI combined her face with a porn photo that made it seem she was having sex with multiple boys, and circulated it anonymously through the school. The mother said it tore their family apart, caused massive humiliation, and took almost a year and thousands of dollars to get sorted out. Here on the boy side of this trend is another version of how this plays out. I find it interesting that the boy-side gets coverage in the Wall Street Journal, but not the girl side. Social media is degrading American culture in a variety of ways, and yet nothing is being done about. Instead Congress debates whether to throw, George Santos, a proven crook, out of the House, a choice so obvious one has to ask what the problem in making it is. Power of course, because the Republican majority in the House would get even smaller.
Illustration by Jon Krause
An online nude-photo scam is ensnaring thousands of teen boys and causing emotional trauma.
Scammers posing as teen girlsbefriend boys online, share nude photos of a girl and then ask for nude photos in return. Once the boy reciprocates, the schemer demandsmoney be sent by a peer-to-peer payment app and threatens to share the boy’s photos with his social-media followers if he doesn’t pay.
That is how law-enforcement officials and child-protection experts describe a growing wave of online predators targeting teens. Previously, online sextortion—as they call it—largely involved pedophiles blackmailing kids into sending photos or videos. These new scammers focus on money, law-enforcement officials say.
Three years ago, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children receivedfewer than 10reports of this sort of financial extortion. Last year, the congressionally mandated nonprofit received more than 10,000—and has already received 12,500 this year.
Columnist Julie Jargon, a mother of three, helps families find answers and address concerns about the ways technology is impacting their lives.PreviewSubscribe
With almost no media attention a block of states and counties has become the center of a survivalist violence prone christofascist community. Counties on the east side of Washington and Oregon are trying to secede from their states and become a part of Idaho to join what is called Redoubt. It is dangerous to go to this part of the U.S. and be heard saying anything supportive of Biden or Democrats. As this article describes, and it is one of the few pieces I could find in media, this is a part of America frightened, scared, angry and violence prone. It is just a matter ot time before something quite nasty occurs.
North Idaho has long been home to those seeking to escape the looming collapse of America. This is a region doused in frontier spirit; a land where people openly carry guns, and where bounty hunters still operate, tracking down fugitives hoping to bolt into Canada. It is here, on rugged fringes stalked by mountain lions, bears and wolves, that the American Redoubt was born.
The Redoubt is both a prophecy and a movement: a pre-emptive response to the anarchy on the horizon. Economic meltdown, nuclear war, the lawlessness that will follow the total defunding of the police — all, its followers warn, could bring an end to American civilisation. And so they have started to prepare. First, by relocating to easily defensible ranches in the wilderness; and second, by stocking up on food, firearms and fuel. While their country teeters on the brink of bedlam, they are building a fortress.
If the Redoubt has a Messiah, it is James Wesley, Rawles. (The comma is an affectation.) A former US Army intelligence officer, Rawles has spent decades preaching about America’s imminent implosion […]
Silvia Foster-Frau, N. Kirkpatrick and Arelis R. Hernández, Reporters - The Washington Post
Stephan:
I hope you will click through and look at the pictures, the kind you almost never see, of what mass murder sites look like after the killings are over. It my view that we should be seeing these pictures including the bodies lying on the floors or the grass. I don’t think Americans really understand what is happening in this country. Maybe seeing the pictures would wake us from our national gun psychosis. I also don’t think there is any reason whatever for AR-15 type weapons to be legal to sell or own.
The blood of school children murdered at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. Credit: Texas Department of Public Safety
Mass shootings involving AR-15s have become a recurring American nightmare.
The weapon, easy to operate and widely available, is now used more than any other in the country’s deadliest mass killings.
Fired by the dozens or hundreds in rapid succession, bullets from AR-15s have blasted through classroom doors and walls. They have shredded theater seats and splintered wooden church pews. They have mangled human bodies and, in a matter of seconds, shattered the lives of people attending a concert, shopping on a Saturday afternoon, going out with friends and family, working in their offices and worshiping at church and synagogue. They have killed first-graders, teenagers, mothers, fathers and grandparents.
But the full effects of the AR-15’s destructive force are rarely seen in public.
The impact is often shielded by laws and court rulings that keep crime scene photos and records secret. Journalists do not typically have access to the sites of shootings to […]
Stephen Lee, Paul Murphy, Atthar Mirza, and Jon Meltzer, Staff Writers - Bloomberg News
Stephan:
Somewhere back in the early days of SR, 1991, or 2, I was living in Manhattan Beach, California, and I studied projected climate change maps and realized that about 30% of Norfolk and Virginia Beach were going underwater, and that a big part would be the Naval Station in Norfolk. I predicted this would happen, and I have done several stories on this since then (see AR archive) but this article has made me realize the day of accounting was growing very close, and the cost was going to be gobsmacking.
Rising tides and powerful storms turbocharged by climate change are poised to hobble federal facilities worth at least $387 billion in coming decades, disrupting everything from veterans’ medical care to military operations and space exploration, according to a Bloomberg Government analysis.
By 2050, sites such as the Naval Station Norfolk, the largest naval installation in the world, and the Kennedy Space Center in Merritt Island, Florida, where 12,000 employees work, are likely to face one major flood a year and minor floods every week, the projections show.
Most of the costliest at-risk facilities are military installations such as the Marine Corps bases Camp Lejeune in North Carolina and Quantico in Virginia, together worth more than $30 billion, according to 2023 valuations by the Defense Department.
Other programs on the high-risk list include a $558 million firearms training range managed by the Department of Homeland Security, an aquatic research facility the Environmental Protection Agency runs in Rhode Island, and an Agriculture Department lab that studies sugarcane in coastal Louisiana.
The offices, bases, and campuses that could get swamped with […]
