cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/46086887

SC has asked all stray dogs to be put into a containment facility.

Air Canada flight attendants say they have reached a “tentative” deal with the airline to end a strike over wages and ground work that has cancelled travel for half a million people worldwide.

Roughly 10,000 flight attendants walked off the job after midnight Saturday, insisting Air Canada had failed to address their demands for higher pay and compensation for unpaid ground work, including during boarding.

The attendants’ union defied two orders from a regulatory tribunal to return to work, forcing Air Canada to roll back plans to partially restore service.

But after resuming talks on Monday evening, the union said it had reached a potential deal with the airline that it would put to its members for consideration.

Temperatures are expected to reach up to 45 degrees Celsius (113 Fahrenheit) in some areas on Sunday, Spanish national weather agency AEMET said.

The African Union has backed a campaign to end the use by governments and international organisations of the 16th-century Mercator map of the world in favour of one that more accurately displays Africa’s size.

Created by the cartographer Gerardus Mercator for navigation, the projection distorts continent sizes, enlarging areas near the poles like North America and Greenland while shrinking Africa and South America. “It might seem to be just a map, but in reality, it is not,” the African Union Commission deputy chair, Selma Malika Haddadi, told Reuters, saying the Mercator fostered a false impression that Africa was “marginal”, despite being the world’s second-largest continent by area, with more than 1 billion people. The union has 55 member states.

This projection feels like the uncanny valley to me. It's obviously an overall pattern I'm familiar with, but it's still slightly jarring.

Global talks to develop a landmark treaty to end plastic pollution have once again failed.

The UN negotiations, the sixth round of talks in just under three years, were due to end on Thursday but countries continued to negotiate into the night in the hopes of breaking a deadlock.

There remained a split between a group of about 100 nations calling for curbs on production of plastic, and oil states pushing for a focus on recycling.

Speaking in the early hours, Cuban delegates said that countries had "missed a historic opportunity but we have to keep going".

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/34724770

updated 08-15-2025 08:43 EDT
[contains link to a Middle East Eye video]

In the clip published by Ben Gvir on X, the minister and two other individuals, including a prison guard, surround Marwan Barghouti in a corner of his cell.

“You will not defeat us. Whoever harms the people of Israel, whoever kills children, whoever kills women … we will erase them,” #BenGvir says in Hebrew.

Barghouti tries to respond but is interrupted by Ben Gvir, who says: “No, you know this. And it’s been the case throughout history.”

[what a fu**ing coward, bullying a defenseless half-starved prisoner]

I usually provide a few central grafs from the story, but this one smelled wrong from the start.

The Guardian at least includes the nut graf, except it's placed at the end:

Negotiations over who will develop the Trump Route – which will eventually include a rail line, oil and gas pipelines, and fiber optic lines – will probably begin next week, and at least nine developers have expressed interest already, according to the senior administration official, who briefed reporters on condition of anonymity.

Is this about peace? Maybe in hopes of a prize?

No.

This is just opportunistic grifting with his name thrown on as a bow. Focusing on money and having your name on something that may well fail in less time than the average of your casinos hasn't, historically, impressed the Nobel committee.

“I’ve been working on this field of famine, food crisis and humanitarian action for more than 40 years, and there is no case, over those four decades, of such minutely engineered, closely monitored, precisely designed mass starvation of a population as is happening in Gaza today,” says [Alex] de Waal, who is also the author of Mass Starvation: The History and Future of Famine.

Follows a woman who runs a support house in one of the parts of Africa that is both hardest hit by AIDS, and has a child prostitution problem. Her operations will likely cease in September

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/34071417

“We can’t put a date on Doomsday, but by looking at the 5,000 years of [civilisation], we can understand the trajectories we face today – and self-termination is most likely,” says Dr Luke Kemp at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge.

“I’m pessimistic about the future,” he says. “But I’m optimistic about people.” Kemp’s new book covers the rise and collapse of more than 400 societies over 5,000 years and took seven years to write. The lessons he has drawn are often striking: people are fundamentally egalitarian but are led to collapses by enriched, status-obsessed elites, while past collapses often improved the lives of ordinary citizens.

Today’s global civilisation, however, is deeply interconnected and unequal and could lead to the worst societal collapse yet, he says. The threat is from leaders who are “walking versions of the dark triad” – narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism – in a world menaced by the climate crisis, nuclear weapons, artificial intelligence and killer robots.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/33813336

Ghislaine Maxwell meets again with Todd Blanche, Trump's former lawyer, as the Epstein case continues. After two days of interrogations, Maxwell reportedly gave up 100 persons of interest. Is another chapter about to begin in this legal drama?

“Jeffrey Epstein's accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, serving a 20-year sex-trafficking sentence meets for a second time with Donald Trump's criminal lawyer turned Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche to see if the FBI and the Justice Department might have also needed her to commit suicide. Maxwell's lawyer, David Oscar Marcus, saying after the interrogations, Ghislaine Maxwell gave up 100 persons of interest. But the New York Times cautions that those 100 people could be a combination of victims, accomplices and other men who sexually abuse the victims.

This, as Speaker Mike Johnson, shuts down the entire House of Representatives for the summer insisting he will not be bullied by Democrats into forcing a vote on demanding to see the Epstein files. Instead, Mike Johnson prefers getting bullied by Donald Trump into buying more time before the White House can figure out how to bury this story. Perhaps bombing the Middle East again?”

@news Russia: Navy parade cancelled due to “security reasons"

OK conspiracy theorists get your tin foil hats on and tell me why.

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URL: social.freetalklive.com/@ratio…
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“Ladies and gentlemen, it's understandable, if not excusable, that the felon-in-chief is trying to distract us, you, me, everybody else, Republicans, Democrats, MAGA people, from the metastasizing story regarding Jeffrey Epstein. But he's trying to distract us with the wrong things.

Clearly, the 2020 election was rigged. Obama was somehow a traitor. He tried that.

These aren't working, because they're old. Much like the fel— No, sorry. That's ageist.

But I'd like to help out by suggesting one thing he could distract us with, if he cared to. There have been reports this week, there was one on CNN, of famine in Afghanistan. There was a report on the BBC this week, of famine in Gaza.

And there have been reports, from several other international media, that there's a famine in South Sudan. There's famine all over the world, ladies and gentlemen, in the 21st century. Our attention could be directed to that.”

archive.is link

In the face of this existential threat, an unprecedented climate visa program has begun. In 2023, Tuvalu and Australia signed the Falepili Union Treaty, an agreement that provides for a migration scheme that will allow 280 Tuvaluans per year to settle in Australia as permanent residents.

The visas will be allocated through a ballot system and will grant beneficiaries the same health, education, housing, and employment rights enjoyed by Australian citizens. In addition, Tuvaluans will retain the ability to return to their home country if conditions permit.

The first stage of applications was open from June 16 to July 18. “We received extremely high levels of interest in the ballot with 8,750 registrations, which includes family members of primary registrants,” the Australian High Commission in Tuvalu said in a statement on July 23. The first cohort of 280 people will be drawn via a ballot on July 25, the high commission says.

“When combined with other Pacific pathways to Australia and New Zealand, nearly 4 percent of the population could migrate each year,” says Jane McAdam, a fellow at the Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law at UNSW Sydney, writing in the Conversation. “Within a decade, close to 40 percent of the population could have moved—although some people may return home or go backwards and forwards.”