Past fossil-fuel price spikes left import-dependent countries with two options: pay up or cut fuel use. Now there is an alternative in solar and batteries.
I looked at recent examples in Europe, Pakistan, Cuba to glean what might happen with the war on Iran.
🎁🔗 www.bloomberg.com/news/article...
France and Spain run their HSR on dedicated tracks too.
Germany runs HSR on the existing network because the country (the population, institutions and economic activity) is so decentralised that it would be a nightmare to to build anew and still reach everyone who needed to be served
"It's not artificial intelligence. It's African intelligence."
Michael Geoffrey Asia, the secretary general of the Data Labelers Association in Kenya tells @jasonkoebler.bsky.social about the notoriously brutal and underpaid work of training AI.
Watch now: www.youtube.com/watch?v=QH65...
Getting some similarly weird traffic on @opennewswire.bsky.social too, it's so annoying
Screenshot of text from University of Edinburgh library services: Like many academic libraries, we have been experiencing slowness and outages on some of our open access platforms over the last few months. We have identified that this is the result of poorly behaved Gen AI crawling activity. As such we have had to try to disable the ability for AI -harvesters to access content from our repositories, via IP range blocking, geographical blacklisting, implementing limits to throttle bots and using robots.txt files to limit access. We acknowledge that this approach is not consistent with our open access policy which should require us to permit machine access to our content. Our limiting activity is not 100% fool-proof, and is a temporary measure to give services breathing space to perform while a longer termn solution is worked out by software providers and the community. This approach also has the added benefit of helping to assuage authors fear of losing control of their works.
The "AI revolution" in science is going so smoothly that my instititutional library is having to deploy multiple technical protection measures against "poorly behaved Gen AI crawling" just to maintain its timely service library.ed.ac.uk/research-sup...
by the end of this weekend my phone had learned "cablp" without autocorrecting it. please enjoy my trip report: defector.com/criss-angel-...
A world map that features the times Relooted is launched in different African countries. Only Africa is highlighted.
WORLDWIDE release times for Relooted’s launch tomorrow!
1/ ProPublica collected handwritten letters in mid-January from children held at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center, the same facility where 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos was taken.
Hundreds of kids are still detained.
We’ll let the children’s words speak for themselves. 🧵
I have a 30 minute oration about how Au defo laws shape everything you see and hear in this country's media landscape. If some organisation or group of organisations cannot use *Epstein plotting to weaponise Au defo law to kill inquiry into his wrongdoing* to push for reform, we have no hope.
In the DOJ's Epstein documents, Lawrence Krauss, facing a complaint of sexual misconduct, noted Australia's plaintiff friendly defamation laws: "We may need to initiate a lawsuit (and against Gizmodo in Australia, where basically anyone can sue and win)"
My first piece for Junkee went up yesterday, dipping into the lack political and media response to the bomb thrown at an Invasion Day rally in Perth last week. (A man was charged with a terror offence today)
junkee.com/articles/per...
NEW: Meet the private-equity firm -- and its billionaire immigrant CEO -- making millions off some of ICE's cruelest deportation flights.
After a five-month investigation, my story for @motherjones.com:
www.motherjones.com/politics/202...
NEW: Older women disappear from BBC presenting roles - while older men seen as gaining “gravitas”, an internal review has found.
It hears older women either have to look younger or adopt “idiosyncratic personas”.
No surprise to some women in TV I spoke to…
www.theguardian.com/media/2026/j...
same with "Afghanis"
When the AI slop summer reading list dropped last year I knew I had to write about making book lists. Thanks to @thebaffler.com for letting me go long with bewildered nostalgia & regret on 20 years of Internet book culture & how we made the slop book list inevitable. thebaffler.com/after-the-fa...
A family member reacts after a federal immigration officer used a battering ram to break down a door before making an arrest on January 11, 2026, in Minneapolis.
Stunning photos from Minneapolis, including this one by John Locher for the Associated Press. www.theatlantic.com/photography/...
wikipedia turns 25 today! the last unenshittified major website! backbone of online info! triumph of humanity! powered by urge of unpaid randos to correct each other! somehow mostly reliable! "good thing wikipedia works in practice, because it sure doesn't work in theory" - old wiki adage
I wrote about MAGA Minaj from the perspective of a Barb (a condition for which there is lamentably no known cure) johnpaulbrammer.substack.com/p/a-mf-monster
Six-byline alert: 🚨
“.. laws of armed conflict forbid combatants from feigning civilian status to fool adversaries into dropping their guard, then attacking and killing them. That is a war crime called ‘perfidy.’”
@nytimes.com
www.nytimes.com/2026/01/12/u...
In celebration of Mamdani's first day in office, the map from our 2016 NYC atlas celebrating Queens as the most linguistically diverse place on earth. (800 languages spoken in NYC, according to NY's Endangered Language Institute, which collaborated with us on this map.
1. LLM-generated code tries to run code from online software packages. Which is normal but
2. The packages don’t exist. Which would normally cause an error but
3. Nefarious people have made malware under the package names that LLMs make up most often. So
4. Now the LLM code points to malware.
Australians: we don't like guns. This is excellent.
Chris Minns' protest ban in the wake of Bondi attacks is racist, authoritarian and must be resisted
@nickriemer.bsky.social #auspol
michaelwest.com.au/minns-protes...
I try to avoid linking to Substacks but this essay is FASCINATING
Great to see 360info and Open Newswire profiled by Australia's @piji-au.bsky.social, showing how small newsrooms can benefit from @creativecommons.bsky.social licensed #journalism.
"Some newswires are attempting to level the playing field through open-licensed content."
piji.com.au/blog/newswir...
We're often asked if Open Newswire is open source, and the answer is now yes!
Our source code is free to use, adapt and distribute under the MIT License: github.com/Open-Newswire
Or take the software for a spin at our website: www.opennewswire.org
#Journalism #OpenJournalism #OpenSource #FOSS
Footage from the No Kings protest in San Francisco now available for free, with attribution!
Head to openjournalism.network to download it.
Open Newswire is an aggregator of news articles available for free use under CC licenses! Their goals are to boost readership, expand coverage (they include articles in over 90 languages!), and free up resources.
Check out this amazing new resource: www.opennewswire.org
@opennewswire.bsky.social
