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As international leaders, corporations and NGOs gear up to discuss efforts to tackle global warming at the upcoming United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP29) in Baku, Azerbaijan, residents in a crucial region for the climate crisis show they have very different priorities.

On Oct. 6, voters in the Amazon chose its mayors and councilors for the next four years, deciding as much about the rainforest’s future as authorities in international forums.

Many politicians who openly oppose conservationism were elected. Two of the seven Amazon states’ capitals elected candidates supported by former President Jair Bolsonaro, a climate denialist who empowered illegal miners and land-grabbers during his government from 2019-22.

“The rise of the far right is very visible in the Amazon states,” Wendell Andrade, public policy specialist for the Amazon at the Talanoa Institute, a Brazilian think tank committed to climate policy, told Mongabay...

... The centrist and right-wing parties also dominated the elections in the municipalities targeted by the federal government as a priority to control deforestation in the Amazon. Of the 70 municipalities, 69 were decided in the first round, and only two went to left-wing parties, which historically favored environmental conservation in Brazil, according to news outlet ((o)) eco.

The 2024 elections happen during the Amazon’s worst drought ever. Large rivers, like the Madeira, Amazonas, Negro and Purus, reached their lowest levels ever, isolating communities, leading to food and water shortages and damaging local economies. Fire outbreaks have burned the Amazon in Brazil and the neighboring countries. This year’s extreme drought followed another harsh dry season in 2023, which was 30 times more likely due to climate change.

“It’s a development agenda that is bringing a lot of destruction, and yet a large part of the population prefers these candidates,” Maureen Santos, coordinator of policies and alternatives in FASE, a Brazilian nonprofit that helps to promote local and community development, told Mongabay. “We need to study this phenomenon to tackle it more concretely in the next elections”...

The United States’ secretive Special Operations Command is looking for companies to help create deepfake internet users so convincing that neither humans nor computers will be able to detect they are fake, according to a procurement document reviewed by The Intercept.

The plan, mentioned in a new 76-page wish list by the Department of Defense’s Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC, outlines advanced technologies desired for country’s most elite, clandestine military efforts. “Special Operations Forces (SOF) are interested in technologies that can generate convincing online personas for use on social media platforms, social networking sites, and other online content,” the entry reads.

The document specifies that JSOC wants the ability to create online user profiles that “appear to be a unique individual that is recognizable as human but does not exist in the real world,” with each featuring “multiple expressions” and “Government Identification quality photos”...

... The Pentagon has already been caught using phony social media users to further its interests in recent years. In 2022, Meta and Twitter removed a propaganda network using faked accounts operated by U.S. Central Command, including some with profile pictures generated with methods similar to those outlined by JSOC. A 2024 Reuters investigation revealed a Special Operations Command campaign using fake social media users aimed at undermining foreign confidence in China’s Covid vaccine.

Last year, Special Operations Command, or SOCOM, expressed interest in using video “deepfakes,” a general term for synthesized audiovisual data meant to be indistinguishable from a genuine recording, for “influence operations, digital deception, communication disruption, and disinformation campaigns.”

... special operations troops “will use this capability to gather information from public online forums,” with no further explanation of how these artificial internet users will be used...

The offensive use of this technology by the U.S. would, naturally, spur its proliferation and normalize it as a tool for all governments. “What’s notable about this technology is that it is purely of a deceptive nature,” said Heidy Khlaaf, chief AI scientist at the AI Now Institute. “There are no legitimate use cases besides deception, and it is concerning to see the U.S. military lean into a use of a technology they have themselves warned against. This will only embolden other militaries or adversaries to do the same, leading to a society where it is increasingly difficult to ascertain truth from fiction and muddling the geopolitical sphere.”

Both Russia and China have been caught using deepfaked video and user avatars in their online propaganda efforts, prompting the State Department to announce an international “Framework to Counter Foreign State Information Manipulation” in January. “Foreign information manipulation and interference is a national security threat to the United States as well as to its allies and partners,” a State Department press release said. “Authoritarian governments use information manipulation to shred the fabric of free and democratic societies”...

Back in the pre-pandemic winter of 2019, the University of Minnesota-Duluth held a two-day conference with a timely theme: “Our Climate Futures: Meeting the Challenges in Duluth.” The keynote was delivered by Jesse M. Keenan, an urban planner whose research focuses on climate adaptation and the built environment. Keenan had been crunching the numbers and studying the projections on future climate migration — or “climigration” — in the United States; and he had begun speculating about where climate migrants would go. One place they might go, he told the audience, is Duluth. Yes, the city had suffered decades of post-industrial decline in the late 20th century, but what matters now, as the country adapts to new climate realities, is that Duluth is an upper Midwestern city, far from the eroding coastlines of the Southeast and the blistering heatwaves of the Southwest. The cost of living is relatively low, the education and healthcare sectors robust. Perhaps most important of all, the city is located at a latitude of 46° north on the western shores of Lake Superior, the largest of the Great Lakes and one of the largest sources of freshwater on the planet...

Other northern cities have been making similar cases. The mayor of Buffalo, New York, declared that the former industrial city on the shores of Lake Erie — a sort of easterly twin to Duluth— will be a “climate refuge.” The chief sustainability officer of Cleveland, also on Lake Erie, described the Ohio city as a “haven,” where the “climate refugee crisis is bound to catalyze further growth.” And a Milwaukee public radio reporter asked, “Could Wisconsin become a climate haven?” America’s Rust Belt has emerged as the geographic focal point in a growing conversation about how the nation’s demography will shift as places like Phoenix, Dallas, and Miami — Sunbelt cities that are still some of the fastest-growing in the country — experience ever deadlier weather that threatens to destabilize housing markets and jeopardize entire industries, such as agriculture and real estate development.

The questions raised by such a reversal of migratory patterns are as complex as they are urgent. In the coming decades, as rising seas and rising temperatures drive large-scale domestic migration, which places will lose population, and which places will see sizable gains? Which groups will be the first to flee, and which will struggle to find safety? America’s political leaders and policy makers ought to be grappling with these questions right now...

... Already, inaction on the part of governments and industries has foreclosed the most optimistic climate adaptation scenarios; several years ago, as Lustgarten writes, leading scientists came to the gloomy consensus that the world was “hitting critical warming benchmarks sooner, and with more dramatic consequences, than expected.” In his 2019 talk, Jesse Keenan qualified his optimism about “climate-proof Duluth” by conceding that no place will ever be immune from the impacts of a changing climate; too much has changed already. But if the challenges are immense, even historically unprecedented, we still have the ability to respond, to shape our future. At the end of his sobering book, Jake Bittle offers this hope:

"The world is already being remade, but its future shape is far from set in stone. The next century may usher us into a brutal and unpredictable world, a world in which only the wealthiest and most privileged can protect themselves from dispossession, or it may usher us into a fairer world — a world where one’s home may not be impregnable, but where one’s right to shelter is guaranteed. Both worlds are possible. We still have time to choose between them.”

With the looming presidential election, a United States Supreme Court majority that is hostile to civil rights, and a conservative effort to rollback AI safeguards, strong state privacy laws have never been more important.

But late last month, efforts to pass a federal comprehensive privacy law died in committee, leaving the future of privacy in the US unclear. Who that future serves largely rests on one crucial issue: the preemption of state law.

On one side, the biggest names in technology are trying to use their might to force Congress to override crucial state-level privacy laws that have protected people for years.

On the other side is the American Civil Liberties Union and 55 other organizations. We explained in our own letter to Congress how a federal bill that preempts state law would leave millions with fewer rights than they had before. It would also forbid state legislatures from passing stronger protections in the future, smothering progress for generations to come.

Preemption has long been the tech industry’s holy grail. But few know its history. It turns out, Big Tech is pulling straight from the toxic strategy that Big Tobacco used in the 1990s...

Daniele Campea’s slow burn, MOTHER NOCTURNA, joins the ranks of folk horror films that serve to remind us that there are certain inescapable and unknowable primal forces that can consume us and our loved ones. Based on Euripides’ Greek tragedy, The Bacchae, this film is a family drama at its very core. Wolf biologist Agnese (Susanna Costaglione) is recently released from a long stay at a mental hospital. She reunites with her husband, Riccardo (Edoardo Oliva) and teenage daughter and dancer, Arianna (Sofia Ponente). Despite Riccardo’s best peace-keeping efforts, the reunion between Agnese and Arianna is less than happy, creating a mystery that slowly unravels until the film’s climatic and tragic ending. MOTHER NOCTURNA taps into the fear of unearthing terrible truths about our own families. Like all horror, it uses metaphors to take that fear to the next horrifying level.

Nature is a character in itself in MOTHER NOCTURNA. Set in the Italian countryside, the film opens with shots of a forest that are both beautiful and ominous. Campea continues to intercut this idyllic landscape throughout the film, even when it takes a disturbing turn. Agnese, who was seemingly removed from nature during her stay at the mental hospital, becomes reacquainted with the neighboring forest and the wolves that inhabit it. Campea’s use of still long shots of Agnese in rural settings tell a story in itself: Agnese cannot escape her dark past and will find herself succumbing to the same primal force that alienated her from her family once before...

We are very pleased to premiere the trailer for a new Mexican folk horror film called A Fisherman's Tale (Un cuento de pescadores). This is the new film from Edgar Nito the director of the Tribeca hit, The Gasoline Thieves. This time, with one of their co-writers from that first film, Alfredo Mendoza, they are exploring the legend of La Miringua.

A Fisherman's Tale is the cinematic adaptation of a Purépecha legend that is passed down by word of mouth in the lake areas of Central Mexico. It tells the story of a spirit that takes the form of a woman to attract fishermen to the depths of the lake, where it bewitches them. La Miringua, whose name means forgetting or forgetting, confuses people, making them lose track of time and space, until they forget themselves...

The folk-horror genre has been a perennial mainstay on screens for decades, with recent installments from films like Midsommar, Enys Men, and more recently Starve Acre revitalizing the genre. Harvest, which marks the English-language debut of Greek director Athina Rachel Tsangari, continues this tradition but deploys it in more novel ways. The film utilizes its quasi-folk-horror sensibility to paint an elegiac portrait of a pre-industrial village in the Scottish Highlands.

The film, adapted from Jim Crace’s novel of the same name, follows a small community nearing the end of the harvest season, run under their master Charles Kent (Harry Melling), who inherited the estate their village is on from his late wife, and his right-hand man Walter Thirsk (Caleb Landry Jones). The village displays all the traditional trappings of folk-horror communities found in films like The Wicker Man. They consciously live outside the gaze of God, engage in bizarre practices, like banging children’s heads against rocks, and carry out pagan dances around a bonfire in elaborate animal masks. There is even a lot of wicker.

They are also highly wary of outsiders and those they believe don’t belong. This includes a mapmaker called Quill (Arinze Kene), whom Kent has hired to chart his land, and a trio of two men and a woman who they falsely accuse of burning down their barn. The village is forced to belligerently accept Quill’s presence but punishes the others for their supposed crimes. The two men are locked in pillories while the villagers shave the woman’s head and accuse her of witchcraft before she flees and begins stalking them in the dead of night. The film continually plays with the horror genre in this way, maintaining a creeping sense of dread throughout its runtime. However, it never dives headlong into all-out horror and opts to teeter on the edge of the sinister and the supernatural. Instead, Tsangari fixes the film closer to the ground to forge an earthly and elemental picture of pre-industrialized agricultural life...

The truth is, it’s getting harder to describe the extent to which a meaningful percentage of Americans have dissociated from reality. As Hurricane Milton churned across the Gulf of Mexico last night, I saw an onslaught of outright conspiracy theorizing and utter nonsense racking up millions of views across the internet. The posts would be laughable if they weren’t taken by many people as gospel. Among them: Infowars’ Alex Jones, who claimed that Hurricanes Milton and Helene were “weather weapons” unleashed on the East Coast by the U.S. government, and “truth seeker” accounts on X that posted photos of condensation trails in the sky to baselessly allege that the government was “spraying Florida ahead of Hurricane Milton” in order to ensure maximum rainfall, “just like they did over Asheville!”

As Milton made landfall, causing a series of tornados, a verified account on X reposted a TikTok video of a massive funnel cloud with the caption “WHAT IS HAPPENING TO FLORIDA?!” The clip, which was eventually removed but had been viewed 662,000 times as of yesterday evening, turned out to be from a video of a CGI tornado that was originally published months ago. Scrolling through these platforms, watching them fill with false information, harebrained theories, and doctored images—all while panicked residents boarded up their houses, struggled to evacuate, and prayed that their worldly possessions wouldn’t be obliterated overnight—offered a portrait of American discourse almost too bleak to reckon with head-on.

Even in a decade marred by online grifters, shameless politicians, and an alternative right-wing-media complex pushing anti-science fringe theories, the events of the past few weeks stand out for their depravity and nihilism. As two catastrophic storms upended American cities, a patchwork network of influencers and fake-news peddlers have done their best to sow distrust, stoke resentment, and interfere with relief efforts. But this is more than just a misinformation crisis. To watch as real information is overwhelmed by crank theories and public servants battle death threats is to confront two alarming facts: first, that a durable ecosystem exists to ensconce citizens in an alternate reality, and second, that the people consuming and amplifying those lies are not helpless dupes but willing participants...

... “The primary use of ‘misinformation’ is not to change the beliefs of other people at all. Instead, the vast majority of misinformation is offered as a service for people to maintain their beliefs in face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary”...

... As one dispirited meteorologist wrote on X this week, “Murdering meteorologists won’t stop hurricanes.” She followed with: “I can’t believe I just had to type that”...

England has suffered its second worst harvest on record – with fears growing for next year – after heavy rain last winter hit production of key crops including wheat and oats.

The cold, damp weather, stretching from last autumn through this spring and early summer, has hit the rapidly developing UK wine industry particularly hard, with producers saying harvests are down by between 75% and a third, depending on the region.

On staple crops, England’s wheat haul is estimated to be 10m tonnes, or 21%, down on 2023, according to analysis of the latest government data by the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU).

Winter barley was 26% down on last year, and the winter oilseed rape harvest was down 32%, in data released by the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs on Thursday.

The ECIU estimates that farmers could lose £600m on five key crops – wheat, winter and spring barley, oats and oilseed rape – where production was down 15% in total...

The new micro-budget indie movie Falling Stars is billed as folk horror, and the premise makes it clear why: It’s a story about three brothers who take a trip into the desert to disinter a witch’s corpse, and end up unleashing something frightening. But the film — produced, directed, written, edited, and shot by Richard Karpala and Gabriel Bienczycki — taps into a very different species of spookiness than you might expect from that description.

Falling Stars feels more like a UFO or alien-abduction story. The movie doesn’t deal in the creepiness of the dark woods, the muddy hamlet, or the haunted manor: Instead, it taps into a wide-eyed fear of the open sky at night. While watching it, I was often reminded of another low-budget production from a few years ago, Andrew Patterson’s excellent 1950s-style UFO throwback The Vast of Night. That’s a much better-made movie than this one, but Karpala and Bienczycki have found such a unique blend of genre flavors in Falling Stars — witchy folklore with starlit, they-came-from-above terror — that it’s worth checking out...

THE RESURGENCE OF FOLK HORROR—an ancient subgenre of horror that concerns itself with nature and the attendant superstitions that mankind has connected to it—in recent years has been largely cinematic in nature. Examples include Robert Eggers’s tremendous film The Witch (2015), or Ari Aster’s Midsommar (2019), the latter of which owes an immense debt to one of the towering folk horror films, Robin Hardy and Anthony Shaffer’s The Wicker Man (1973). This is a welcome change in the horror film landscape, though in my experience, in horror literature folk horror has never really fallen out of style. It’s always been there, though it’s been a while since it could be considered part of horror’s mainstream. One of the most recent folk horror novels to enjoy widespread success is Stephen King’s Pet Sematary, and that came out in 1983.

This hasn’t stopped serious horror writers from taking their own swings at it. One of the best and most prominent folk horror writers working today is the English writer Andrew Michael Hurley. Before turning to novels, Hurley published two collections of short stories, neither of which are easily acquired (I simply can’t find them, affordably priced or not). But since 2014, Hurley has written three novels, all of them folk horror: The Loney, Devil’s Day, and, most recently, Starve Acre (a film adaptation of which has been playing festivals overseas, to positive reviews). I’ve read all three, and I recommend each without reservation. Today, I want to focus exclusively on his second, Devil’s Day (2017), which I believe in some key ways is one of the purest, and most interesting, examples of folk horror that I’ve encountered in some time...

Severin Films is prepping a second boxed Blu-ray Disc set of international horror classics for Nov. 12 release.

The 13-disc All the Haunts Be Ours: A Compendium of Folk Horror, Volume 2 is a followup to the 15-disc original, which Severin says is the most successful boxed set in the company’s history.

Volume 2 includes 24 folk horror films from 18 countries, with more than 55 hours of special features — including trailers, interviews, audio commentaries, short films, video essays, historical analyses and bonus feature-length films — and a 252-page hardcover book of folk horror fiction by such luminaries as Ramsey Campbell, Cassandra Khaw and Eden Royce.

Many of the films have never before been available on disc. The set also includes two new Severin Films original productions: To Fire You Come at Last, directed by Sean Hogan, and the documentary Suzzana: The Queen of Black Magic, directed by Severin Films cofounder David Gregory, which will have its world premiere at the Sitges Film Festival on Oct. 12...

The films include:

• To Fire You Come at Last (Sean Hogan, UK/US, 2023)

• Psychomania (Don Sharp, UK, 1973)

• The Enchanted (Carter Lord, US, 1984)

• Who Fears the Devil (John Newland, US, 1972)

• The White Reindeer (Erik Blomberg, Finland, 1952)

• Edge of the Knife (Gwaai Edenshaw and Helen Haig-Brown, Canada, 2018)

• Born of Fire (Jamil Dehlavi, UK, 1987)

• IO Island (Kim Ki-young, South Korea, 1977)

• Scales (Shahad Ameen, Saudi Arabia, 2019)

• Bakeno: A Vengeful Spirit (Yoshihiro Ishikawa, Japan, 1968)

• Nang Nak (Nonzee Nimibutr, Thailand, 1999)

• Sundelbolong (Sisworo Gautama Putra, Indonesia, 1981)

• Suzzana: The Queen of Black Magic (David Gregory, US, 2024)

• Beauty and the Beast (Juraj Herz, Czechoslovakia, 1978)

• The Ninth Heart (Juraj Herz, Czechoslovakia, 1979)

• Demon (Marcin Wrona, Poland, 2015)

• November (Rainer Sarnet, Estonia/Poland/Netherlands, 2017)

• Litan (Jean-Pierre Mocky, France, 1982)

• Blood Tea and Red String (Christiane Cegavske, US, 2006)

• Nazareno Cruz and the Wolf (Leonardo Favio, Argentina, 1975)

• Akelarre (Pedro Olea, Spain, 1984)

• From the Old Earth (Wil Aaron, Wales, 1981)

• The City of the Dead (John Llewellyn Moxey, UK, 1960)

• The Rites of May (Mike De Leon, Philippines, 1976)