In the published report, the line was changed to “balanced, sustainable healthy diets acknowledging nutritional needs,” skirting a direct mention of beef and dairy, what a sustainable diet actually looks like, or any reference to the Western and largely wealthy countries that should most urgently start eating less meat.
While Monday’s IPCC report was the result of synthesizing years of research, Brazil and Argentina have been diligently pushing to delete references to “plant-based diets,” meat as a “high-carbon” food, and “Meatless Mondays” for years, according to a previous draft leaked in 2021 and analyzed by Unearthed, Greenpeace’s investigative outlet.
Instead of asking actual important questions related to how TikTok does business and uses the data it gathers from users, Congress was focused on being xenophobic, and people noticed.
Adulteration of honey with cheap sugar syrup has been exposed in a new investigation by the European Commission, which found 46% of sampled products were suspected to be fraudulent. Ten honey samples from the UK all failed the tests. They may have been blended or packaged in Britain, but the honey probably originated overseas.
A state-sponsored matchmaking app has rolled out in China’s eastern province of Jiangxi. Launched in the city of Guixi, a city with a population of around 640,000 people, the app “Palm Guixi” uses data on single residents to organise blind dates.
“Very wealthy people, they’re very, very risk-averse,” Surak said. “They’re kind of paranoid. They have a lot of money, and they’ll do a lot to keep it safe — a second citizenship, a third citizenship, a backup Plan B, a backup Plan C, a backup Plan D. … You’re getting more and more ‘Armageddon Americans’: Either [President Joe] Biden ‘the communist’ is going to take over America, or the fascists are going to take over.”
Is the “15-minute city,” a concept in which all of life’s necessary amenities are no more than a brisk walk away, a vision of urban paradise or a thinly disguised open-air prison? Town planning experts tend toward the former, conspiracy theorists toward the latter.
The maps, by the Paris Urbanism Agency (Apur), reflect the result of the latest triennial survey of shops, cafés, and restaurants in the French capital in 2020. The survey shows that there were 1,180 boulangeries (bakeries) and/or patisseries (cake shops) in the city. After declining in the first decade of the 21st century, their number has remained stable over the decade up to 2020. In the previous three years, 94 businesses had closed, but 91 new ones had started up.
Robots Won’t Save Japan addresses the Japanese government’s efforts to develop care robots in response to the challenges of an aging population, rising demand for eldercare, and a critical shortage of care workers. Drawing on ethnographic research at key sites of Japanese robot development and implementation, James Wright reveals how such devices are likely to transform the practices, organization, meanings, and ethics of caregiving if implemented at scale.
This new form of techno-welfare state that Japan is prototyping involves a reconfiguration of care that deskills and devalues care work and reduces opportunities for human social interaction and relationship building. Moreover, contrary to expectations that care robots will save labor and reduce health care expenditures, robots cost more money and require additional human labor to tend to the machines. As Wright shows, robots alone will not rescue Japan from its care crisis. The attempts to implement robot care instead point to the importance of looking beyond such techno-fixes to consider how to support rather than undermine the human times, spaces, and relationships necessary for sustainably cultivating good care.
In China, whenever there is a felt dissonance between the Self and the external world (e.g., disagreement with authorities or media), the external mask solidifies to play along. Having said that, Chinese citizen do seek to balance personal, cultural, and national narrative & identity layers (and more so than Westerners): to reduce unnecessary friction that may impact relationships, the feeling of security, and indeed one’s Sense of Identity.
Analyzing Trends with Tim Stock 