Linkage

 After decades in which macroeconomic policy focused primarily on inflation, the announcement of a renewed commitment to full employment, made by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in 2021, was a major step. Labour’s election campaign included not only a commitment to full employment but the promise of a Jobs Summit leading to a new White Paper on Full Employment, modelled on that of 1945.

Upon taking office, the Labor Government backed away from this commitment. The Jobs Summit was relabelled a ‘Jobs and Skills Summit’ and much of the discussion focused on supposed skills shortages. This was a misnomer. The problem faced by employers was not a shortage of particular skills but the difficulty of filling vacancies of any kind in a situation of full or near-full employment. After decades in which the number of unemployed workers routinely exceeded vacancies, employers found this situation difficult to accept.

An even more consequential change was the removal of the word ‘Full’ from the name of the proposed White Paper. The decision to break with Labor’s history on this crucial issue seemed to portend the abandonment of the entire process.

The lettuce lady, reborn as Joe McCarthy:

Truss, who announced her resignation as prime minister after just 44 days in office in 2022, addressed an audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), at the National Harbor, in Maryland, on Wednesday (21 February). 

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Truss, who earlier this week “took delight” in revealing the cover for the US version of her book, Ten Years to Save the West, told the audience that she ran for Number 10 because “Britain wasn’t growing” and the “state wasn’t delivering”.

She went on to say: “I wanted to cut taxes, reduce the administrative state, take back control as people talked about in the Brexit referendum. What I did face was a huge establishment backlash and a lot of it actually came from the state itself.

“People are joining the civil service who are essentially activists,’ she then claimed. “They might be trans activists, they might be environmental extremists but they are now having a voice within the civil service in a way I don’t think was true 30 or 40 years ago.

Killed by Google is the Google graveyard; a free and open source list of discontinued Google services, products, devices, and apps. We aim to be a source of factual information about the history surrounding Google's dead projects.

Contributors from around the world help compile, research, and maintain the information about dying and dead Google products.

In today’s incendiary society, it’s sometimes hard to remain confident of one’s views. When many prominent people are telling lies, and when those lies are amplified on Fox News and right-wing radio, and then repeated by people you know (perhaps even inside your own family), it can be challenging to remain sure of oneself.

I don’t mean to suggest that you should hold on to your views if they are contradicted by evidence, or that you should remain steadfast in the face of reasonable arguments to the contrary. In fact, I’ve often told my students that the best way to test their views is to talk with people who disagree.

My point is that at a time such as we’re in, “preaching to the choir” is not a waste of my time. I sometimes think it’s the most important thing I can do. 

Industrial contaminants accumulated in Arctic permafrost regions have been largely neglected in existing climate impact analyses. Here we identify about 4500 industrial sites where potentially hazardous substances are actively handled or stored in the permafrost-dominated regions of the Arctic. Furthermore, we estimate that between 13,000 and 20,000 contaminated sites are related to these industrial sites. Ongoing climate warming will increase the risk of contamination and mobilization of toxic substances since about 1100 industrial sites and 3500 to 5200 contaminated sites located in regions of stable permafrost will start to thaw before the end of this century. This poses a serious environmental threat, which is exacerbated by climate change in the near future. To avoid future environmental hazards, reliable long-term planning strategies for industrial and contaminated sites are needed that take into account the impacts of cimate change.

Underpinning the plastic waste crisis is a campaign of fraud and deception that fossil fuel and other petrochemical companies have created and perpetuated for decades.

Through new and existing research, “The Fraud of Plastic Recycling” shows how Big Oil and the plastics industry have deceptively promoted recycling as a solution to plastic waste management for more than 50 years, despite their long-standing knowledge that plastic recycling is not technically or economically viable at scale.

Now it’s time for accountability. 

Florida health officials on Sunday announced an investigation into a cluster of measles cases at an elementary school in the Fort Lauderdale area with a low vaccination rate, a scenario health experts fear will become more and more common amid slipping vaccination rates nationwide.

On Friday, Broward County Public School reported a confirmed case of measles in a student at Manatee Bay Elementary School in the city of Weston. A local CBS affiliate reported that the case was in a third-grade student who had not recently traveled. On Saturday, the school system announced that three additional cases at the same school had been reported, bringing the current reported total to four cases.

On Sunday, the Florida Department of Health in Broward County (DOH-Broward) released a health advisory about the cases and announced it was opening an investigation to track contacts at risk of infection.

At Manatee Bay Elementary School, the number of children at risk could be over 100 students. According to a Broward County vaccine study reported by the local CBS outlet, only 89.31 percent of students at Manatee Bay Elementary School were fully immunized in the 2023/2024 school year, which is significantly lower than the target vaccination coverage of 95 percent. The school currently has 1,067 students enrolled, suggesting that up to 114 students are vulnerable to the infection based on their vaccination status.

"The problem [is] no-one knows exactly where the harm is," she explains. And, given that companies have saved money by replacing human HR staff with AI – which can process piles of resumes in a fraction of the time – she believes firms may have little motivation to interrogate kinks in the machine. 

"One biased human hiring manager can harm a lot of people in a year, and that's not great. But an algorithm that is maybe used in all incoming applications at a large company… that could harm hundreds of thousands of applicants" – Hilke Schellman

From her research, Schellmann is also concerned screening-software companies are "rushing" underdeveloped, even flawed products to market to cash in on demand. "Vendors are not going to come out publicly and say our tool didn't work, or it was harmful to people", and companies who have used them remain "afraid that there's going to be a gigantic class action lawsuit against them".

I have worked in other war zones. But what I witnessed during the next 10 days in Gaza was not war — it was annihilation. At least 28,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. From Cairo, Egypt’s capital, we drove 12 hours east to the Rafah border. We passed miles of parked humanitarian aid trucks because they weren’t allowed into Gaza. Aside from my team and other envoy members from the United Nations and World Health Organization, there were very few others there.

Entering southern Gaza on Jan. 29, where many have fled from the north, felt like the first pages of a dystopian novel. Our ears were numb with the constant humming of what I was told were the surveillance drones that circled constantly. Our noses were consumed with the stench of 1 million displaced humans living in close proximity without adequate sanitation. Our eyes got lost in the sea of tents. We stayed at a guest house in Rafah. Our first night was cold, and many of us couldn’t sleep. We stood on the balcony listening to the bombs, and seeing the smoke rise from Khan Yunis.

As we approached the European Gaza Hospital the next day, there were rows of tents that lined and blocked the streets. Many Palestinians gravitated toward this and other hospitals hoping it would represent a sanctuary from the violence — they were wrong.

The proposal echoes vehicle restrictions underway in other European Union cities, such as Paris, Amsterdam and Lisbon. And like city leaders elsewhere, the architects of the Dublin plan invoke the “15-minute city” concept — which aims to allow residents to access all major destinations within a 15-minute walk or bike ride — as a key goal. But while efforts to limit car traffic in some city centers across the water in Britain have triggered angry (and conspiracy-tinged) opposition from aggrieved motorists, Dublin’s enjoys overwhelming public support so far. More than 80% of 3,500 respondents in a public consultation published Feb. 7 said they backed the new zone, a ringing endorsement for a city that hitherto has not had a strong reputation for progressive urban policy.