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The wealth of the 10 richest people in the world – a list dominated by US tech billionaires – increased by a record amount after Donald Trump’s victory in the presidential election, according to a widely cited index.

The Bloomberg Billionaires Index estimated that the world’s 10 wealthiest people gained nearly $64bn (about £49.5bn) on Wednesday, the largest daily increase since the index began in 2012.

Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, registered the largest increase with a $26.5bn addition to his fortune, which now stands at $290bn. The prominent backer of Trump’s campaign, benefited from a surge in the share price of Tesla, the electric carmaker where he is chief executive and in which he owns a 13% stake.

The gains came as tech business leaders, including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive of Facebook parent Meta, and Apple’s Tim Cook publicly congratulated Trump on his election win...

Social media users were shocked over an “alien” creature that washed ashore in Australia with some labeling it the “freakiest thing” they’d ever seen.

“I’ve never seen anything quite like this before!” wrote the sea denizen’s discoverer Vicki Evans in a post with a photo on a community Facebook page. “Nature never ceases to amaze!”

The beachcomber happened across the freaky flotsam while walking along Horseshoe Bay in Port Elliott, South Australia, The Advertiser reported.

Evans included photos of the oceanic oddity, which is long and riddled with gelatinous tendrils that are tipped with shells, like maritime hair-braid beads.

Many Facebook users were equally baffled by the vermicelli-esque tentacles, with one writing, “That might just be the freakiest thing I’ve ever seen!!”

“Wow, it looks long judging by scale of dog,” one said, referring to a curious pooch seen inspecting the creature in the photo...

... A truism of combat is that whoever shoots first wins, and having a drone wait while a human makes a decision can cede the initiative to the enemy. Warfare at its core is a competition—one with dire consequences for the losers. This makes walking away from any advantage difficult.

Experts believe the “man in the loop” is indispensable, now and for the foreseeable future, as a means of avoiding tragedy, says Zach Kallenborn, an expert on killer robots, weapons of mass destruction, and drone swarms with the Schar School of Policy and Government. “Current machine vision systems are prone to making unpredictable and easy mistakes.”

Mistakes could have major implications, such as spiraling a conflict out of control, causing accidental deaths and escalation of violence. “Imagine the autonomous weapon shoots a soldier not party to the conflict. The soldier’s death might draw his or her country into the conflict,” Kallenborn says. Or the autonomous weapon may cause an unintentional level of harm, especially if autonomous nuclear weapons are involved, he adds.

While physical courage may not be necessary to take lives, Kallenborn notes that the human factor retains one last form of courage in the act of killing: moral courage. That humans should have ultimate responsibility for taking a life is an old argument. “During the Civil War folks objected to the use of landmines because it was a dishonorable way of waging war. If you’re going to kill a man, have the decency to pull the trigger yourself.” Removing the human component leaves only the cold logic of an artificial intelligence…and whatever errors may be hidden in that programmed logic.

If autonomous weapons authorized to open fire on humans is an inevitable future, as some armies and experts think it is, will AI ever become as proficient as humans in discerning enemy combatants from innocent bystanders? Will the armies of the future simply accept civilian casualties as the price of a quicker end to the war? These questions remain unanswered for now. And humanity may not have much time to wrestle with these questions before the future arrives by force...

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”...

BERLIN (AP) — A brand-new fire station in Germany, which was destroyed in a fire, causing millions of euros in damage and destroyed equipment did not have a fire alarm system, local media reported Thursday.

The fire broke out early Wednesday morning at the Stadtallendorf fire station in Hesse and destroyed, among other things, the equipment hall and almost a dozen emergency vehicles, German news agency dpa reported. Initial estimates put the damage at between 20 million and 24 million euros ($21 million to $26 million). No one was injured.

Local officials told dpa that no fire alarm system was installed in the building because experts had considered it not necessary — much to the astonishment of many observers now that the station has burned down...

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...

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 BBC Weather website and app are suffering a data issue, meteorologists have said, after forecasts showed hurricane force winds hitting the UK.

Graphics show estimated wind speeds of 13,508 mph in London and overnight temperatures of 404C in Nottingham.

Presenter Matt Taylor said in a post on X: "Don't be alarmed folks - Hurricane Milton hasn't made it to us here in the UK! There's been a data glitch between our suppliers and the app/online. Folk are working to solve the issue"...

Researchers have warned about the impact of 'climate tipping points' on the UK due to its position near the North Atlantic, as such an event could 'wipe out' domestic crop growing.

An assessment of climate threats to UK food security has put a spotlight on climate tipping points as a 'severely overlooked danger', a new report published today warns.

Researchers from the Institute of Public Policy Research (IPPR) and others point to the fact that climate change is already playing a significant role in several threats to UK national security, including food supply.

But they warn that the government has a 'blind spot', as major climate threats are not adequately addressed in its national risk register, while some threats – like climate tipping points – are not included at all...