Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who has staked his international reputation on improving Brazil’s environmental standing, had been pushing for the region to unite behind a common policy of ending deforestation by 2030 - one he has already adopted.
Instead, the joint declaration issued on Tuesday in the Brazilian city of Belem created an alliance for combating forest destruction, with countries left to pursue their own individual deforestation goals.
It is not possible that, in a scenario like this, eight Amazonian countries are unable to put in a statement - in large letters - that deforestation needs to be zero," said Marcio Astrini of environmental lobby group Climate Observatory.
This week’s summit brought together the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization (ACTO) for the first time in 14 years, with plans to reach a broad agreement on issues from fighting deforestation to financing sustainable development.
Brazil is weighing whether to develop a potentially huge offshore oil find near the mouth of the Amazon River and the country’s northern coast, which is dominated by rainforest.
The final joint statement, called the Belem Declaration, strongly asserted indigenous rights and protections, while also agreeing to cooperate on water management, health, common negotiating positions at climate summits, and sustainable development.
Pretty sure it’s already here, just not as flashy and futuristic as we were expecting. Just sort of boring and tiring, trying to get through the day as it burns around us.
That’s why everyone knows what “this is the worst timeline” means.
Its been here for decades. It was already mandatory to provide an iris scan upon arrival in the US back when I visited New York in 2013. At the time, I was already baffled it was a requirement and wasn't happy, but at that moment there is nothing else to do then comply. The US probably has a very big iris scan, fingerprint and passport database of at least the western world.
Is this a NY only thing? I’ve never once had to do an iris scan for anything, and have a passport, DL, and everything (US citizen). I also haven’t heard of anyone traveling here needing to it, though maybe it just never came up in conversation.
Also, as for replacing passports, international travel still requires one but for domestic travel, you can get a regular ID/DL in many states that acts as an ID at airports without the need of a passport.
Biometrics are only required for certain non-citizens. Canadians aren’t required to provide while visiting the US unless opting for an express pre-clearance NEXUS pass.
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Click here to see the summaryMexico is one of nearly three dozen countries where participants are allowing the sphere, outfitted with cameras and dubbed an orb, to scan their iris. The project’s goal is to distinguish people from bots online, while doling out a cryptocurrency bonus as a incentive to participate. “(Privacy) is something that doesn’t worry me too much,” said Jose Incera, after allowing his iris to be scanned in exchange for the equivalent of nearly $54 in Worldcoin’s cryptocurrency. In a video interview, Sam Sadle, the public policy chief at Tools for Humanity, sought to calm worries over the project’s use of personal data. Despite the professed safeguards, the project has generated concerns over security risks, including from Agneris Sampieri, a policy analyst with digital rights group Access Now. “They don’t clearly mention the time frame in which the biometric data they collect will be processed and retained,” she said, adding that the ownership of the iris code is also unclear.
Not surprised by this. I worry about the next Recession and more on the recovery part. How do you add more jobs when there’s less human roles available?
What is scary is not that Disney (and all the other big companies) are investigating AI as a useful tool, but their first immediate thought is how can we use this to cut even more jobs out rather than how can we use AI as a tool to make our content even better? Everyone seems to believe generative AI is something that will replace human workers, but from what I’ve seen from folks tinkering with it here, it’s just another range of techniques that can be used to do things.
Just like 3D printers are not putting sculptors and set designers out of business, generative AI is not going to put artists out of business, rather will give them another tool with which to make cooler stuff faster.
The problem, I think, is not the existence and development of AI, but the desperation with which large companies are driven to reduce costs and increase profits. It’s not AI everyone is scared of, it’s capitalism. And capitalism has been capitalizing for centuries now, while we’ve known exactly what it is.
In this case it's the economic incomtetence of the German administration though. German economy is hurting extremely without any good outlook and they hope to solve their problems by throwing billions at foreign mega-corps instead of investing in infrastructure, reducing bureaucracy and taxes.
I fear it’s a necessary to spend money to ensure German and by extent European independence from China should they decide to increase the pressure on Taiwan.
We have to spend money to get the expertise and the tooling up and running. Preferably yesterday. How do you propose we do it quicker or cheaper?
There is nothing fast or cheap about bleeding edge chip manufacturing, and simply having a Taiwanese company’s factory in your country doesn’t mean that your country has the expertise in that industry. There are going to be trade secrets that never leave the walls of TSMC’s offices. And with how automated many of these high end factories are, a local workforce isn’t gaining enough expertise to leverage what they learn and break out on their own (just as an example).
If you really want to be a player in that field, you invest in home-grown solutions - universities which research the bleeding edge of chip production, German-based companies with their own production. It isn’t easy. None of this is, but the $5B that Germany is spending on this deal might have gone a long ways in at least starting some of these other things going. They could have tried to partner with Siemens or Bosch or other similar high tech giant to start a chip division.
The US government does something sort of like this with it’s DARPA competitions, as well as when partnering with NASA or the DoD.
I am not saying that governments shouldn’t partner with companies to invest in new plants, but damn is $5B a ton of money and I always feel like these companies are playing us for suckers for essentially funding their risks without giving us any of their profits.
That’s the entire reason that workers are acting NOW. The technology is not quite there yet, so they’re pushing for protection while they still have bargaining power.
Catalonia’s authorities last week imposed new water usage restrictions on 22 villages around the reservoir, near the French border, as the aquifer supplying them is also emptying.
Several heatwaves recorded in Spain and wider Europe this summer have worsened the drought, lowering reservoirs’ levels as water evaporation and consumption increased, said Ruben del Campo, spokesperson for Spain’s meteorological agency AEMET.
The 22 villages, plus two others in southern Catalonia, which account for around 25,000 residents in total, are in a state of water emergency.
This means they must lower their consumption to a daily average of 200 litres of water per resident from a prior cap of 230.
The village of Agullana with 900 residents has been keeping its water usage below the 200-litre cap for several months, but its mayor said further steps will be implemented.
“We’ll reduce to zero the irrigation of gardens, the football field, the grass by the swimming pool, which we’ll see turning yellow as if burnt,” Josep Jovell said.
MELBOURNE, Aug 8 (Reuters) - Western Australia will overturn its 2021 Aboriginal cultural heritage protection laws, introduced after the destruction of the ancient Juukan Gorge rock shelters, in response to opposition from landowners, the state’s premier said on Tuesday.
“The Juukan Gorge tragedy was a global embarrassment but our response was wrong, we took it too far, unintentionally causing stress, confusion and division in our community,” Cook said.
“The PKKP are outraged that they, and Traditional Owners in Western Australia are back to square one, and the Cook government is reverting to laws that allowed the destruction of Juukan Gorge,” the group said in a statement,
Support has been falling nationally for Federal government-backed plans to establish an Indigenous advisory body in parliament that Australians will vote on in a referendum later this year.
Rio Tinto sent a letter to Aboriginal groups, including the PKKP, assuring them of its commitment to protecting cultural heritage, according to a copy seen by Reuters.
One of the key grievances that Aboriginal groups had with the new act was that they had no right of veto and the ultimate decision maker over heritage destruction was a government minister.
Its alarming in more than one sense. They can survive in grasslands that are relative less in india nowadays. Due to 20th century laws.
Secondly and main reason the death of cheetahs ia climate change made weather so unpredictably chaotic to extremes. India have cold to extreme, rain to extreme and heat will melt stones soon.
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