This article is so true and desperately important.
Credit: Adobe
The upcoming election may be the most important one of your lifetime. It is no less than a referendum on our climate and our future. It is that serious and urgent.
According to a study by the nonprofit Climate Central, large fires that burn 1,000 acres or more have tripled in the Western United States between 1970 and 2015. Last year was the warmest on record, a trend that is expected to continue. The country has been warming more rapidly than the global average since the late 1970s, and the West and Alaska have been at the forefront of that trend.
Concerns about the economy, housing, transportation infrastructure, farming and public health are climate issues, too — and increasingly so. Any vote this election, whether local or national, will be a vote on the climate.
I’m not trying to fan your doomsday fears. Quite the opposite: I want to try to drive us all into action. We must move from climate despair to climate repair, even though that can feel so […]
Pranshu Verma and Will Oremus, Reporters - Mictorsoft Start | The Washiington Post
Stephan:
MAGAt world, or at least a significant percentage of it, think of Hitler as a hero, who has been wrongly styled as a villain, and they are trying, using AI, to recontextualize the Nazis as people American should follow. To be honest it makes me want to puke. As I have said many times now, the problem in America is Americans. Poorly educated, barely literate, racist, pseudo-Christians have become a major force in U.S. politics today. I hate having to keep doing stories like this, but sadly, these are the reality trends shaping American culture.
The far right is using AI to sell Hitler to a new generation. Credit: Washington Post illustration; Hulton-Deutsch Collection. / CORBIS / Getty
Extremists are using artificial intelligence to reanimate Adolf Hitler online for a new generation, recasting the Nazi German leader who orchestrated the Holocaust as a “misunderstood” figure whose antisemitic and anti-immigrant messages are freshly resonant in politics today.
In audio and video clips that have reached millions of viewers over the past month on TikTok, X, Instagram and YouTube, the führer’s AI-cloned voice quavers and crescendos as he delivers English-language versions of some of his most notorious addresses, including his 1939 Reichstag speech predicting the end of Jewish people in Europe. Some seeking to spread the practice of making Hitler videos have hosted online trainings.
The posts, which make use of cheap and popular AI voice-cloning tools, have drawn praise in comments on X and TikTok, such as “I miss you uncle A,” “He was a hero,” and “Maybe he is NOT the villain.” On […]
I have been telling you for years now that authentic journalism from national corporate media to local media, not only in the U.S. but worldwide is in sharp decline (See SR archive). Advertising in newspapers is drying up, and local papers, the main source of local news, are disappearing by the hundreds. In national media, important things don’t get much attention, and politics is treated like a horserace, as if Trump and Harris were equivalently ethical. Also journalism is becoming a dangerous job, as this article describes. And then there is the weaponization of misinformation used in pseudo-journalism that is shaping the thinking of millions, particularly young people.
Advertising revenue — the lifeline of news publications — has dried up in recent years Credit: Ishara S. Kodikara) / AFP
From disinformation campaigns to soaring scepticism, plummeting trust and economic slumps, the global media landscape has been hit with blow after blow.
World News Day, taking place on Saturday with the support of hundreds of organisations including AFP, aims to raise awareness about the challenges endangering the hard-pressed industry.
– ‘Broken business model’ –
In 2022, UNESCO warned that “the business model of the news media is broken”.
Advertising revenue — the lifeline of news publications — has dried up in recent years, with Internet giants such as Google and Facebook owner Meta soaking up half of that spending, the report said.
Meta, Amazon and Google’s parent company Alphabet alone account for 44 percent of global ad spend, while only 25 percent goes to traditional media organisations, according to a study by the World Advertising Research Center.
Platforms like Facebook “are now explicitly deprioritising news and political content”, the Reuters Institute’s 2024 Digital News Report pointed out.
Lilia Yapparova, Reporter - Reader Supported News | The New York Times
Stephan:
Putin is a global villain, and I have suspected he was doing what is described in this article, but could find no evidence of it. Now an excellent New York Times reporter has broken the story. Putin is having people all over the world assassinated. The take away for me, is that it confirms the United States is not dealing with Putin properly. We should be making a much stronger effort to help Ukraine because nothing is going to take him out of power but the Russian people. Forcing Putin to lose his war will bring him down.
Russia’s President Vladimir Putin. Credit: Alexander Kazakov / AFP
In November 2022, my editors asked me to be careful about what I ate and stop ordering takeout. Initially, I didn’t think much of it. But I soon realized the importance of their advice when, just one month later, my colleague Elena Kostyuchenko discovered she had been poisoned in Germany, in a probable assassination attempt by the Russian state.
Such stories have become routine. Last year, an investigative journalist, Alesya Marokhovskaya, was harassed in the Czech Republic; in February, the bullet-riddled body of a Russian defector, Maxim Kuzminov, was found in Spain. In both cases, the Kremlin was assumed to be involved. Russian opposition figures know well that even in exile they remain targets of Russia’s intelligence services.
But it’s not just them who are in danger. There are also the hundreds of thousands of Russians who left home because they did not want to have anything to do with Vladimir […]
DAVID BAUDER and LINLEY SANDERS, Reporters - Associated Press
Stephan:
Ronlyn and I are also tired of the news, and in talking about it have agreed, as to why we feel this way. Our conclusion is the U.S. news corporations only cover three or four stories a day, and say very little about what is going on in the rest of the world. Even more importantly, with the exception of a few television commentators like Lawrence O’Donnell and Rachel Maddow, the election is treated like a horserace between two basically normal politicians. It is not, and how anyone can believe it is, is really is dumbfounding. Donald Trump and his family are criminal at a level that if I were writing another novel I would not create such characters because I wouldn’t believe such people would be credible. And yet there they are, in our faces every day, with no proper assessment in the media as to how villainous and corrupt they are.
NEW YORK, NEW YORK — When her husband turns on the television to hear news about the upcoming presidential election, that’s often a signal for Lori Johnson Malveaux to leave the room.
It can get to be too much. Often, she’ll go to a TV in another room to watch a movie on the Hallmark Channel or BET. She craves something comforting and entertaining. And in that, she has company.
While about half of Americans say they are following political news “extremely” or “very” closely, about 6 in 10 say they need to limit how much information they consume about the government and politics to avoid feeling overloaded or fatigued, according to a new survey from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and USAFacts.
Make no mistake: Malveaux plans to vote. She always does. “I just get to the point where I don’t want to hear the rhetoric,” she said.
The 54-year-old Democrat said she’s most bothered when she hears people on the news telling her that something she saw with […]
Almost every day now I am seeing research studies like this one that make it clear that as a culture, and remember that culture is a creation of collective individual choices, fostering wellbeing is no longer a priority. As this report says, “Rural Americans tend to have higher rates of smoking, obesity, and chronic conditions at age 60, setting the stage for poorer health outcomes in later years.” Then add to that the rise of “medical deserts, so that it becomes hard to get help and you can see a major trend emerging in rural America.
Researchers warn that people opting for “the simple life” of rural America are actually living shorter lives. Credit: FORMAT / Unsplash
Key Results
The key finding was a significant gap in quality-adjusted life expectancy (QALE) between urban and rural residents, especially for men. Urban men at age 60 could expect 17.5 quality-adjusted years of life, compared to only 15.7 for rural men. For women, the gap was smaller but still present (19.3 years for urban women vs. 18.7 for rural women). The study also found that this gap has widened over the past two decades, with rural residents seeing little to no improvement in QALE while urban residents have made gains.
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA —For many Americans, moving to the country is a lifelong dream to finally escape the stress of busy city life. Unfortunately, a new study warns that people opting for “the simple life” of rural America are actually living shorter lives.
Researchers at the University of Southern California have discovered a growing divide in health […]
