Hard Pass

An Indian man whose wife is an accepted refugee in Canada is facing deportation with the couple's five-year-old son in what lawyers say is a troubling new practice of separating the families of people with protected status.

Ravi Chauhan and his young son are set to be deported Monday, leaving his wife, who is the child's mother, behind in Canada without the possibility of seeing her family for what could be years while they await permanent residency.

Lawyers and advocates say Chauhan's case reflects a broader change in which border officials are increasingly deporting the spouses and children of protected persons who were previously allowed to remain while applications were processed.

The offer seemed straightforward. In early January 2026, a Bell chat agent promised Vicki Sloot that if she upgraded to a new Bell Fibe TV box, she could keep all her specialty programming sports channels like TSN and Sportsnet. Plus, she’d be paying $5 less a month.

The next day, her new equipment arrived — but she was missing the speciality channels. She went back to Bell, who told her she only had a “basic starter plan” and that it’d be an extra $25 a month to get them back.

So began an eight-week odyssey through Bell’s customer service department, consisting of hours spent live chatting and on the phone with different agents, and an eventual escalation to Bell’s resolutions team.

“It’s impossible to get a single right answer that is consistent throughout each support agent,” said Sloot, who lives in Toronto.

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/57052447

A Google founder has more than doubled his financial contribution to the fight against a proposed wealth tax in California. New filings with the state show that former Alphabet president Sergey Brin donated $25m to a Super Pac dedicated to blocking the tax on top of $20m he had already given.

Brin is not alone among Google’s top brass in upping his financial stake in the campaign against the ballot proposal. The company’s former CEO Eric Schmidt donated $1.02m, adding to a previous $2m contribution.

The tech titans are battling the California Billionaire Tax act, often referred to simply as the billionaire tax. It’s a proposed ballot measure that would require any California resident worth more than $1bn to pay a one-off, 5% tax on their assets to help cover education, food assistance and healthcare programs in the state. It’s sponsored by the Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West, and is still in the signature-gathering phase.

If the measure reaches the ballot and gains voters’ approval, the tax would apply to billionaires based on their residency as of 1 January 2026. For Brin, worth about $247bn, the bill would likely be upwards of $12bn. That stipulation appears to have caused him and several other billionaires to leave California at the end of last year. Brin relocated to a $42m estate on the north-eastern shore of Lake Tahoe in Nevada, and his Pac donations show Reno as his address. Schmidt’s filings show his address as West Hollywood.

I've migrated off this hosting service a while ago but I wanted to let people know here just in case anyone is still using it. I recommend using less invasive cloud (ones not hosted in the United States preferably) or self-hosting if you have the option to.

Lithium-ion batteries represent a new technological hazard that one fire science expert has said keeps him awake at night, as fire service chiefs warn the ubiquity of the batteries in everyday products is outpacing public understanding and safety regulations.

The blaze that devastated a historic building in Glasgow and resulted in the closure of Central Station, Scotland’s largest rail interchange, is believed to have started in a shop selling vapes, which are powered by lithium-ion batteries. Glasgow’s Central Station has since reopened.

The latest data reveals a sharp increase in battery-related fires across Scotland, while firefighters in London attend an e-bike or e-scooter fire every other day.

Paul Christensen, a professor of pure and applied electrochemistry at the University of Newcastle, underlined that, while the probability of a fire from a lithium-ion battery is very low, the hazard is “very, very high, as we’ve seen with this fire in Glasgow”.

Taylor, 26, was shot to death by police when they broke down the door of her apartment while serving a no-knock drug warrant looking for a former boyfriend who no longer lived there

I'll start

• Barry "The Hatchet"
• Johnny Fiddlesticks
• Big Bussy
• Timmy Two Nostrils
• Greg

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/40081006

Alberta's separatist sentiment has resurged in recent months amid the Trump administration's comments about the province's future, coupled with economic and political tensions with the Canadian government. Andrew Chang explains what it would actually take to grant sovereignty to a Canadian province, and why it's so difficult to achieve.

Slopified with the help of https://huggingface.co/spaces/victor/dlss-5-anything

Research.

Researchers have developed a new kind of nanoelectronic device that could dramatically cut the energy consumed by artificial intelligence hardware by mimicking the human brain.

The researchers, led by the University of Cambridge, developed a form of hafnium oxide that acts as a highly stable, low‑energy ‘memristor’ — a component designed to mimic the efficient way neurons are connected in the brain.