Hard Pass

The Philippines and Canada must work together to develop “democratic” supply chains for critical minerals and reduce its dependence on China.

This was according to experts and diplomats who spoke during a high-level conference organized by the Stratbase Institute and the Asia-Pacific Foundation of Canada (APF Canada) last Friday, which sought to discuss how Ottawa and Manila could strengthen their bilateral ties and cooperate to improve their economic security.

Vina Nadjibulla, APF Canada vice president for research, specifically identified critical minerals – which underpin high-tech industries and advanced defense systems – as a cornerstone of the two nations’ deepening partnership and said the two countries must leverage their complementary strengths to build a more resilient economic future in the region.

“This is the moment to deploy our critical minerals, both for our digital needs and our sustainability goals, as well as obviously defense industrial actions,” Nadjibulla said.

She also underscored the strategic necessity of “building supply chains that are democratic, that are not just dependent on China,” to be able to navigate an increasingly “divided and dangerous” global landscape.

Stratbase Institute president Victor Andres Manhit reinforced this perspective, asserting that “economic security is national security” and that the Philippines is moving toward a new tax regime on mining and a “future mining fiscal framework for critical markets” to facilitate these strategic investments.

...

Philippines Trade Undersecretary Ceferino Rodolfo said Manila is eyeing to hammer out a critical minerals deal with Ottawa ... “We hope that with Canada, we can also have a critical minerals agreement given the prominence that we’re putting on critical minerals,” Rodolfo said, adding that the deal was brought up during the 2026 Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada Convention in Toronto early this month.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/44810743

Don't know if anyone uses it, but I use it a LOT. It's the main way i consume media. It's no longer maintained as of a month ago. Hopefully someone forks it.

The lone supervised drug consumption sites in Calgary and Lethbridge will close at the end of June, the provincial government announced on Friday.

Calgary's supervised consumption site (SCS) was the first of its kind to open in Alberta in 2017. It has been lauded by advocates as providing a life-saving service, but also targeted with criticism from people who blame it for public drug use and calls to police in its vicinity.

As the UCP government shifted its addiction services from a focus on harm reduction to more recovery-oriented care, the province first announced it planned to close Calgary’s SCS at the Sheldon M. Chumir Health Centre nearly five years ago. In December, Alberta's Mental Health and Addiction ministry renewed its promise to shutter the site.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/44516936

The account is an example of how artificial intelligence is being used to push political agendas in wartime

MAGA has been swooning over photos of a blonde U.S. Army soldier, walking defiantly alongside President Donald Trump to carry out the America First agenda. But there’s just one problem — she’s AI.

Images most likely generated by artificial intelligence depicted Jessica Foster wearing heels on a U.S. warship in the Strait of Hormuz, posing for selfies with Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, and giving a speech at the president’s “Board of Peace” event earlier this year.

The account, which has since been taken down, gained more than one million followers since its mysterious creator started posting on it four months ago, The Washington Post reports.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/44531627

And now this individual, with this journalist, is writing some book about being a dissident in the age of fear, and this question of, are they going to talk about Gaza at all? I kind of doubt it. Maybe they will. And I think of other people who resigned alongside me, who I feel extremely fortunate to be at the Quincy Institute, to have had an academic background, and to have had some of these other connections, whereas, for those for whom resigning was to really burn every professional bridge they'd ever built.

...

It was six months between October 7 and when I resigned. And during that time, I submitted a dissent cable. I signed on other dissent cables. I was involved in some internal efforts to try to advocate for a different policy. And this gets a little bit to kind of what Samantha Power said in her statement about when the President and those around him have made a decision, you can't impact it, and you just have to kind of do what you can within that.

But then it's like, okay, well, if that's the case, then you step away; you don't go along with it. I think another super important thing as progressives, or as people are thinking about where we go from here, is that I worry a lot about the fact that so many of these figures inside the Biden administration really haven't paid any kind of a reputational price. They've landed these cushy gigs at Harvard, nice consulting firms, or lucrative law positions. They're all fine, and there hasn't really been this grappling with enabling genocide. And also the pigheadedness of the Biden administration and then, subsequently, the Harris campaign to double down on unconditional and illegal support for Israel was a crucial factor in why the Democrats lost the election.

Interview with writer of article by Majority Report

https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?__goaway_challenge=js-refresh&__goaway_id=f1d8f29bc6379ecb5b9d612d484accb7&__goaway_referer=https%3A%2F%2Finv.nadeko.net%2F&v=kdBJmNuMqHM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdBJmNuMqHM

cross-posted from: https://pawb.social/post/41417710

The regulator for Alberta’s lawyers says it will no longer mandate Indigenous cultural competency training in advance of what Alberta Premier Danielle Smith calls the “Peterson law” coming into force.

The Law Society of Alberta will also cut its equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) committee in response to the government’s Bill 13, the Regulated Professions Neutrality Act, introduced last November.

Under the new provincial rules, regulators can’t "make cultural competency, unconscious bias, or diversity, equity, and inclusion training mandatory."

• Full Report— PDF;
• Overview of all demand-related policy measures that have been announced by governments since the start of the crisis.

A jury has found Elon Musk liable for misleading investors by deliberately driving down Twitter's stock price in the tumultuous months leading up to his 2022 acquisition of the social media company for $44 billion. But it absolved him of some fraud allegations, finding that he did not "scheme" to mislead investors.