World News Non-US

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/16415132

Seven Przewalski’s horses, the only truly wild species of the animal in the world, flown to central Asian country from zoos in Europe

A group of the world’s last wild horses have returned to their native Kazakhstan after an absence of about 200 years. The seven horses, four mares from Berlin and a stallion and two other mares from Prague, were flown to the central Asian country on a Czech air force transport plane.

The wild horses, known as Przewalski’s horses, once roamed the vast steppe grasslands of central Asia, where horses are believed to have been first domesticated about 5,500 years ago.

People are known to have been riding and milking horses in northern Kazakhstan nearly 2,000 years before the first records of domestication in Europe. Human activity, including hunting the animals for their meat, as well as road building, which fragmented their population, drove the horses close to extinction in the 1960s.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/16403691

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/16343573

Israel’s leadership is pushing the allegations that Hamas fighters raped Israeli women during the October 7 attacks for its own political objectives while the government’s ongoing refusal to allow the United Nations to conduct a full investigation into the matter threatens to hinder any evidence, advocates have warned.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/16658124

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/16332699

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/16338802

The day after Mexico’s leftwing ruling party Morena won a landslide victory in presidential, congressional and state elections, one executive stayed in bed all afternoon eating ice cream to try to cope. A wealthy woman in Mexico City told friends it was time to “move to the house in Houston”, while another business leader said his WhatsApp chats were marked by a mood of “collective suicide”.

President-elect Claudia Sheinbaum and Morena’s victory last Sunday was not a surprise, but the scale of their triumph was. Sheinbaum vaulted 31 points clear of her nearest challenger, centre-right entrepreneur Xóchitl Gálvez, and Morena is now poised to push through radical changes to the constitution after greatly increasing its majority in congress.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.today/post/11794251

The James Webb Space Telescope has found carbon in a galaxy just 350 million years after the Big Bang. That could mean life began much earlier too, a new study argues.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/16287224

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has notified Israel’s Defence Attache in the United States, Major General Hidai Zilberman, of his decision to add Israel to the blacklist of countries and organisations harming children in conflict zones.

A report by the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth revealed that despite extensive efforts by Israel to persuade Guterres to avoid this move, Tel Aviv will be listed in the report distributed to UN Security Council members next week, with a discussion scheduled for 26 June.

The report is based on data from UN organisations and field sources. Being blacklisted could significantly damage Israel’s reputation, as the report will be cited across various UN bodies, including the General Assembly, Security Council, International Court of Justice (ICJ) and International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague.

The blacklist also includes Afghanistan, Congo, Mali, Myanmar, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, Syria and groups such as Al-Qaeda, Daesh, Al-Shabaab and Boko Haram. The upcoming report will refer to Israeli security forces without explicitly naming Israel or its military.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.today/post/11794664

The giant viruses might infect algae that are increasing Greenland's ice melt. These viruses could help kill off the damaging algal blooms, helping to reduce some of the impacts of climate change.

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/20573568

Interesting article that talks about the similarities between now and 1938, and the sort of lessons we can learn from history.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/16339102

South Korea says it will restart anti-North Korean propaganda loudspeaker broadcasts in border areas in response to continuing North Korean campaigns to drop trash on the South with balloons.

Following an emergency security meeting led by South Korean national security director Chang Ho-jin, the officials decided to install and begin the loudspeaker broadcasts in border areas on Sunday, Seoul’s presidential office said in a statement. The move is certain to anger North Korea and potentially prompt it to take its own retaliatory military steps.

North Korea over the weekend flew hundreds of trash-carrying balloons to South Korea in its third such campaign since late May, the South’s military said, just days after South Korean activists floated their own balloons to scatter propaganda leaflets in the North.

North Korea has so far sent more than 1,000 balloons to drop tons of trash and manure in the South in retaliation against South Korean civilian leafletting campaigns, adding to tensions between the war-divided rivals amid a diplomatic stalemate over the North’s nuclear ambitions.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/16280962

Conspiracy theorists are trying to influence European election campaigns with disinformation and lies. Much of the fabrication comes from Moscow, but plenty is homegrown.

If media campaigns in more than a dozen European countries were to be believed, the European Union (EU) intends to force citizens to eat insects instead of meat. 

The claim has touched nerves, especially in Italy, where variations of it have been revived and splashed across billboards during European elections to pit Brussels against mama's special sauce.

But consumers of this claim are being fed pure nonsense, an example of countless fabrications launched or adopted by candidates seeking political gain at the cost of the truth.

The fake insect-food narrative, which first surfaced last year in a number of EU countries, has proven so popular with malign actors both within and outside the bloc that they've brought it back for the European election cycle to try to discredit pro-EU candidates.

…

But no one should be surprised that malignant actors want to impact Europe's election cycle, with 720 seats up for grabs for the next five-year term in the European Parliament and many national elections taking place simultaneously as part of a record year for elections worldwide.

The EDMO reports a record-high amount of disinformation ahead of the vote about universally controversial issues like migration, agricultural policy and climate change, including even the resurrection of fake stories from years past, such as COVID-19 conspiracies.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/16334633

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/10296255

https://archive.ph/LSSDM

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/16235371

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/16234514

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/16227155

Scientists are on alert for signs the virus is adapting to spread more easily among humans, after the WHO announced the death from April

The World Health Organization (WHO) has said a man’s death in Mexico was caused by a strain of bird flu called H5N2 that has never before been found in a human.

The WHO said Wednesday it wasn’t clear how the person became infected. “Although the source of exposure to the virus in this case is currently unknown, A(H5N2) viruses have been reported in poultry in Mexico,” WHO said in a statement.

Scientists are on alert for changes in the virus that could signal that bird flu is adapting to spread more easily among humans.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/16229405

• Russia's gas giant Gazprom won't recover gas sales lost to the Ukraine war for at least a decade.
• A study seen by the Financial Times says pre-war export volumes will return by 2035.
• Gazprom will likely lose its leading role in Russia's energy sector over time.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/16189840

A group of eight Holocaust survivors drew parallels between the current political climate and that of Germany in the 1930s. Some of them condemned the far-right Alternative for Germany party (AfD).

Eight Holocaust survivors have urged young people to shun far-right parties and vote to protect democracy at the upcoming European Union elections.

"For millions of you, the European elections are the first election in your lives. For many of us, it could be the last," read the open letter, unveiled in Berlin on Tuesday.

"We couldn't stop it back then. But you can today," the eight authors wrote.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/16458309

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/16198428

Millions of men in England and Wales pose a danger to women and children, the commissioner of the Metropolitan police has said.

Sir Mark Rowley said the figures were “eye-watering” and an “inconvenient truth” as he called for a much bigger effort, a national strategy and more money to tackle the problem.

He relied on an upcoming study produced for police chiefs nationally that says there are up to 4 million perpetrators of violence against women and children, who are mainly men, with one in 10 people being victims, who are mainly women or children.

Rowley, who is Britain’s most senior police officer, said the scale of offending by men against women and children was beyond the criminal justice system to tackle.

He told the London policing board: “When you look across violence against women and children, there are millions of offenders in the UK. Some of the numbers are eye-watering.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/16201078

Users will be required to submit documentation proving they are legally single and sign a letter stating they are willing to get married.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/16202904

The longstanding effort to keep extremist forces out of government in Europe is officially over.

For decades, political parties of all kinds joined forces to keep the hard-right far from the levers of power. Today, this strategy — known in France as a cordon sanitaire(or firewall) — is falling apart, as populist and nationalist parties grow in strength across the Continent.

Six EU countries — Italy, Finland, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia and the Czech Republic — have hard-right parties in government. In Sweden, the survival of the executive relies on a confidence and supply agreement with the nationalist Sweden Democrats, the second-largest force in parliament. In the Netherlands, the anti-Islamic firebrand Geert Wilders is on the verge of power, having sealed a historic dealto form the most right-wing government in recent Dutch history.

Meanwhile, hard-right parties are dominating the polls across much of Europe. In France, far-right leader Marine Le Pen’s National Rally is cruising at over 30 percent, far ahead of President Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance party, according to POLITICO’s Poll of Polls. Across the Rhine, Alternative for Germany, a party under police surveillance for its extremist views, is polling second, head-to-head with the Social Democrats.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/16183992

The number of Chinese websites is shrinking and posts are being removed and censored, stoking fears about what happens when history is erased.

Chinese people know their country’s internet is different. There is no Google, YouTube, Facebook or Twitter. They use euphemisms online to communicate the things they are not supposed to mention. When their posts and accounts are censored, they accept it with resignation.

They live in a parallel online universe. They know it and even joke about it.

Now they are discovering that, beneath a facade bustling with short videos, livestreaming and e-commerce, their internet — and collective online memory — is disappearing in chunks.

A post on WeChat on May 22 that was widely shared reported that nearly all information posted on Chinese news portals, blogs, forums, social media sites between 1995 and 2005 was no longer available.

“The Chinese internet is collapsing at an accelerating pace,” the headline said. Predictably, the post itself was soon censored.

Non-paywall link