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‘One of the darkest days’: NIH purges agency leadership amid mass layoffs

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sarcozona
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Did Mark Carney Just Lap The NDP On Affordable Housing? Not So Fast.

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Note: I’ve started mailing signed books to those who joined as an annual paid subscriber during my sale last month. There are a lot to send (thank you!), so I’m doing them in batches so as not to alienate my local post office and those behind me in line. But the books are on their way!

On Monday, the Liberals announced a housing plan that includes a promise to create a federal entity, Build Canada Homes (BCH), “to get the federal government back into the business of home building.” I was immediately intrigued, and excited. I think we need a public developer to build non-market housing. The market won’t. Not enough of it, anyway. But I don’t want to get too excited yet. One never should in electoral politics.

According to the party, BCH would be an affordable developer “at scale,” building homes throughout the country, “including on public lands.” There’s more to their housing plan, but this initiative stands out, in part because it looks a lot, at least in theory, like an ambitious, statist program of the sort one would expect to see from the country’s left-wing party, the NDP. Indeed, it borders on socialism at first glance.

But the details matter. There’s a risk that BCH, acting as a developer, sets into the private-public partnership (P3) hell that results in poor-quality, expensive, unaccountable outcomes – in essence, a giveaway to the private sector. There’s also a risk the plan is little more than a loan scheme, the likes of which will be insufficient to get the job at at scale as the Liberals promise. A primarily loan-based entity would also come awfully close to what the NDP is already offering (more on that below).

The Liberals say the organization “will develop and manage projects and partner with builders for the construction phase of projects.” I’m reserving final judgment until I see the specifics. For instance: Who gets what and how? How much will builds cost buyers? Will builds be and remain truly affordable? Is this non-market social housing, market, or mixed? How are profits distributed? Is this largely or entirely for pre-fab homes (seems like it may be the latter)? Will the union rights of workers be respected and protected?

All this aside, however, even the concept itself of a public builder is a great leap forward in the housing debate. The left should embrace the opening, as we should most offers to get the government into critical industries and to meet needs the free market can’t or won’t.

The NDP hasn’t released its full housing plan yet, but it looks like the Liberals have outflanked them on public building branding at least. So far, the social democratic party has promised to “unlock public land” for rent-controlled housing and are pledging to stop big investment firms from snapping up rental stock and driving up prices. They’re also promising to publicly finance home construction with a Community Housing Bank, one it would act as a “partner” that would pair with “non-profit developers, co-ops, and Indigenous communities.” Again, it could very well be that this plan and the Liberal plan are co-equal in all but branding, especially since the Liberals are also promising their own, low-cost financing for existing affordable home developers.

Whatever the distinction, or not, between the two plans. The terms of the housing debate in Canada are shifting to include more of a role for government in housing development, and that’s good. Once upon a time, the government built social housing in this country. For decades in the last century, from the Second World War up until the 1990s, the government recognized the need for the state to fill a role the free market wouldn’t and to ensure that Canadians had a decent shot at an affordable home. Then came the era of retrenchment, of the Third Way, of neoliberal economic dominance primarily driven, in Canada, by big cuts during the Liberal years under Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, an economic conservative if there ever was one.

Cuts to federal housing builds and programs under Chrétien and, before him, Progressive Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, helped fuel the housing crisis that we are living through now. It didn’t help that provincial governments came to bear more of the responsibility for housing and proceeded themselves to abandon the state’s role in getting (affordable) homes built, or downloaded responsibilities to municipalities who couldn’t afford the burden. Now, Carney has opened the door to getting the government back in the building business by the mere framing, no pun intended, of his party’s plan.

As Canada faces an existential threat from the United States and Donald Trump, Carney has also adopted a war time frame for his campaign, and for his housing plan. He’s billing his party’s offerings as an ambitious return to the commitment of the post-war years when the federal government built (pre-fab) homes for veterans coming back from service overseas. Those years and subsequent decades saw a massive expansion of the welfare state, a trend that benefited millions but was cut short as the economic order shifted from the 1970s onward.

Even if the Carney plan should fail to live up to its promise, the Liberals have opened the door to a shift in the very nature of our discussion around housing — and the left should seize on it. The prospect of the state playing a role in building homes, of doing what the market can’t or won’t, is on the agenda. The NDP should take this opportunity and try to exceed Carney’s plan, promising a housing agenda that rules out any P3 boondoggle while asserting the state’s role in building non-market, affordable housing for millions. For now, it may look as though Carney has lapped the NDP, but the party might still be able to catch up, and even pull ahead on the file.

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sarcozona
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Hundreds of international students wake up to an email asking them to self deport for campus activism - The Times of India

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  • Hundreds of international students wake up to an email asking them to self deport for campus activism
Hundreds of international students in the US are getting an email from the US Department of State (DOS) asking them to self-deport owing to campus activism. Immigration attorneys’ contacted by TOI affirmed this development and added a few Indian students may also be at the receiving end of such emails – for something as innocuous as sharing a social media post.
It is not just international students who physically participated in campus activism but also those who shared or liked ‘anti-national’ posts that are the target of these emails, said an immigration attorney.
This crackdown is based on social-media reviews being conducted by DOS (which includes Consulate officials). Thus, even new student applications be it for an F (academic study visa), M (vocational study visa) or J (exchange visa) will also come under such social media scrutiny. Applicants will be denied the opportunity to study in the US.
According to the latest Open Doors report, there are 1.1 million international students studying in the US in 2023-24 of which 3.31 lakh are Indian students.
As reported by Axios earlier, Marco Rubio, Secretary of State, has launched an AI-fuelled ‘Catch and Revoke’ effort to cancel the visas of foreign nationals who appear to support Hamas or other designated terror groups. Axios further reports that more than 300 foreign students have had their student visas revoked in the three weeks that ‘Catch and Revoke’ has been in operation, there are 1.5 million student visa-holders nationwide.
The email sent to the students reads:

“On behalf of the United States Department of State, the Bureau of Consular Affairs Visa Office hereby informs you that additional information became available after your visa was issued. As a result, your F-1 visa with expiration date XXXXX was revoked in accordance with Section 221(i) of the United States Immigration and Nationality Act, as amended."
"The Bureau of Consular Affairs Visa Office has alerted the Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which manages the Student Exchange Visitor Program and is responsible for removal proceedings. They may notify your designated school official about the revocation of your F-1 visa."
"Remaining in the United States without a lawful immigration status can result in fines, detention, and/or deportation. It may also make you ineligible for a future U.S. visa. Please note that deportation can take place at a time that does not allow the person being deported to secure possessions or conclude affairs in the United States. Persons being deported may be sent to countries other than their countries of origin."
"Given the gravity of this situation, individuals whose visa was revoked may wish to demonstrate their intent to depart the United States using the CBP Home App"
"As soon as you depart the United States, you must personally present your passport to the U.S. embassy or consulate which issued your visa so your visa can be physically cancelled. You must not attempt to use your visa as it has been revoked. If you intend to travel to the United States in the future, you must apply for another U.S. visa and a determination on your eligibility for a visa will be made at that time."
According to immigration attorneys, the flurry of self-deportation emails that are being sent to international students stems from a March 25, internal directive dispatched by Rubio, directing mandatory social media reviews of existing international students already in the US and new applicants.
“If the social media review uncovers potentially derogatory information indicating that the applicant may not be eligible for a visa, Fraud Prevention Units are required to take screenshots of social media findings to the extent it is relevant to a visa ineligibility, to preserve the record against the applicant's later alteration of the information,” states this internal directive.
“Consular officers do not need to upload social media findings if the review does not reveal derogatory information, but consular officers must enter case notes stating they conducted a social media review which did not reveal derogatory information,” adds the directive.
Such students are also being informed by their International Student Service Office that their SEVIS record has been terminated. SEVIS is the web-based information system that the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) uses to track and monitor international students during their duration of study.
“Students with a terminated SEVIS record must depart the U.S. immediately; there is no grace period following a SEVIS termination. We advise you to depart the US as soon as possible," states this intimation.
Views of an immigration attorney:

, founder of an immigration law firm, spoke extensively with TOI on this emerging issue.

“F-1 and J-1 students are usually admitted D/S, meaning for the duration of their status. There’s a slight distinction between overstay and unlawful presence Historically, someone admitted D/S has not accrued unlawful presence for the purpose of 3 or 10 year bars unless USCIS makes a formal finding that they are unlawfully present. This is important because if you're formally unlawfully present for more than 180 days or 365 days, it can trigger a 3 or 10 year bar. However, with overstay, it's more in a gray area - where the consular officer has more discretion whether to hold that overstay or status violation against the person,” said Shao.

“USCIS’s page has been updated recently on Jan 25 and now states that – Non-immigrants admitted for the duration of status, generally begin accruing unlawful presence the day after their status ends, if they remain in US,” he pointed out.

This is similar to what the administration had attempted during his earlier tenure, when they tried to change the rule to backdate unlawful presence to the point of time when the person violated status.

“Historically, someone admitted under D/S can stay as long as they are maintaining that status - such as being a full time F-1 student or J-1 exchange visitor. In cases of SEVIS termination, normally there are two things an international student can do - either apply to USCIS to reinstate your F-1 and SEVIS, or leave the US and try to get a new F-1 visa through the embassy.”

Shao added, “As part of the leaked Rubio memo (reported by online media) states that affected people should self deport and report to the US consulate or embassy for physical cancellation of their visa, it doesn’t seem like going back to apply for a new visa would be a great option.” (The email sent to a student, as seen by TOI, also has a similar wording).

Jath Shao and other immigration attorneys view that students should seek legal counsel to help them reinstate their SEVIS or in a worse case, immigration attorneys can defend them if removal proceedings are brought against them.

Rubio’s statement at an earlier press conference:
At a press conference in Guyana on Thursday, in response to a question relating to the Turkish student at Tufts who has been detained, Rubio said: “if you apply for a visa to enter the United States and be a student and you tell us that the reason why you’re coming to the United States is not just because you want to write op-eds, but because you want to participate in movements that are involved in doing things like vandalizing universities, harassing students, taking over buildings, creating a ruckus, we’re not going to give you a visa. If you lie to us and get a visa and then enter the United States and with that visa participate in that sort of activity, we’re going to take away your visa.”
“Now, once you’ve lost your visa, you’re no longer legally in the United States, and we have a right, like every country in the world has a right, to remove you from our country. So it’s just that simple.”
“I think it’s crazy – I think it’s stupid for any country in the world to welcome people into their country that are going to go to their universities as visitors – they’re visitors – and say I’m going to your universities to start a riot, I’m going to your universities to take over a library and harass people. I don’t care what movement you’re involved in. Why would any country in the world allow people to come and disrupt? We gave you a visa to come and study and get a degree, not to become a social activist that tears up our university campuses. And if we’ve given you a visa and then you decide to do that, we’re going to take it away…Once your visa is revoked, you’re illegally in the country and you have to leave. Every country in the world has a right to decide who comes in as a visitor and who doesn’t”.

Lubna Kably is a senior editor, who focuses on various policies and legislation. In particular, she writes extensively on immigration and tax policies. The Indian diaspora is the largest in the world; through her articles she demystifies the immigration-policy related developments in select countries for outbound students, job aspirants and employees. She also analyses the impact of Income-tax and GST related developments for individuals and business entities.

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sarcozona
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RIP USA
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UK government cuts funds for actually-working anti-cancer AI

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A standard way to justify lying chatbots is to talk about AI for medicine.

So let’s point the AI at cancer. Radiotherapy treats cancer by zapping the tumour with radiation beams. In contouring, you use CT scans to work out where to point the beam. Auto-contouring uses a machine learning system to make the draft plan.

The AI isn’t perfect, but it’s good enough to help a radiotherapist who knows what they’re doing. This is the sort of AI we want.

In May 2024, the previous government authorised £15 million over three years for auto-contouring. NHS trusts started installing these systems assuming the funding was secured.

But last month, the government sent out letters saying the funding was being cancelled — “to further prioritise limited investment.” [Guardian, archive]

There’s a shortage of radiotherapists. They say the AI systems are just letting them keep up with the workload. Radiotherapy UK says cutting auto-contouring will add 500,000 patient-days to waiting lists.

The government only ever talks about chatbots replacing public employees. Peter Kyle, the science secretary, has just been talking up his scheme to mark kids’ homework with a chatbot. [FT, archive]

Auto-contouring is an AI success story. But it doesn’t replace those costly professionals.

The government is backtracking on this cut. But when they said “let’s go AI,” they meant magical chatbots with costs in the fabulous future that would make them look cool. They didn’t mean medical systems that work, but cost money right now. This was always about the press releases.

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sarcozona
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mkalus
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Big banks predict catastrophic warming, with profit potential - E

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Top Wall Street institutions are preparing for a severe future of global warming that blows past the temperature limits agreed to by more than 190 nations a decade ago, industry documents show.

The big banks’ acknowledgment that the world is likely to fail at preventing warming of more than 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels is spelled out in obscure reports for clients, investors and trade association members. Most were published after the reelection of President Donald Trump, who is seeking to repeal federal policies that support clean energy while turbocharging the production of oil, gas and coal — the main sources of global warming.

The recent reports — from Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase and the Institute of International Finance — show that Wall Street has determined the temperature goal is effectively dead and describe how top financial institutions plan to continue operating profitably as temperatures and damages soar.

“We now expect a 3°C world,” Morgan Stanley analysts wrote earlier this month, citing “recent setbacks to global decarbonization efforts.”

The stunning conclusion indicates that the bank believes the planet is hurtling toward a future in which severe droughts and harvest failures become widespread, sea-level rise is measured in feet rather than inches and tropical regions experience episodes of extreme heat and humidity for weeks at a time that would bring deadly risks to people who work outdoors.

The global Paris Agreement, from which the U.S. is withdrawing under Trump, aims to limit average temperature increases to well below 2 degrees Celsius. Scientists have warned that permanently exceeding 1.5 degrees — a threshold the world breached for the first time last year — could lead to increasingly severe climate impacts, such as the demise of coral reef ecosystems that hundreds of millions of people rely on for food and storm surge protection.

Morgan Stanley’s climate forecast was tucked into a mundane research report on the future of air conditioning stocks, which it provided to clients on March 17. A 3 degree warming scenario, the analysts determined, could more than double the growth rate of the $235 billion cooling market every year, from 3 percent to 7 percent until 2030.

“The political environment has changed, so some of them are conforming to that,” Gautam Jain, a former investment banker who is now a senior research scholar at Columbia University, said of Wall Street’s increasingly dire climate projections. “But mostly it is a rational business decision.”

The new warming estimates come as heat-trapping gases continue to rise globally and as international commitments to limit the burning of oil, gas and coal that’s responsible for the bulk of emissions have stalled. Meanwhile, megabanks like Wells Fargo are backsliding on their previous climate pledges and exiting from the Net-Zero Banking Alliance, a United Nations-backed group that encouraged members to slash their emissions in line with the Paris Agreement.

Morgan Stanley, which in October watered down its climate-related lending targets, declined to comment.

Betting on potentially catastrophic global warming is both an acknowledgment of the current emissions trajectory and a politically savvy move in the second Trump era, according to Jain.

“Nobody wants to be seen as going against” the administration’s pro-fossil-fuel energy policy, he said. “These banks are businesses, so they have to look at the risk that they have in their portfolio and the opportunities that they see in the most likely environment.”

‘Recalibrate targets’

Morgan Stanley’s frank assessment of the air conditioning market follows a trade association briefing in February in which industry officials argued that the financial sector needs a coordinated messaging campaign to regulators, investors and the public that the Paris targets are no longer within reach — and banks should not be expected to pursue them.

“The world is not on track to limit temperature rise below 2°C — and limiting warming [to] 1.5°C is almost certainly unachievable,” the Institute of International Finance wrote in bolded text, citing analyses from the energy research firm the Rhodium Group and the Climate Action Tracker, an environmental collaborative.

“Financial institutions need to recalibrate targets to reflect that 1.5°C are no longer suitable as strategic goals,” the briefing said. “Reputational concerns may arise in the absence of an aligned view amongst stakeholders on how such processes should be handled, and what criteria may need to be applied.”

The banking industry can support the transition from fossil fuels to clean energy but capital will only move “at scale when the economics make sense,” Mary Kate Binecki, a spokesperson for the Institute of International Finance, said in an email. The institute represents about 400 members from more than 60 countries, including JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley.

JPMorgan, the world’s most valuable bank, has been describing to investors how it evaluates climate risks in a detailed report published annually since 2022. At that time and in subsequent reports, the bank said it vets investments using “baseline” scenarios that assume global warming of 2.7 degrees to more than 3 degrees by the end of this century.

In JPMorgan’s most recent report, released in late November, CEO Jamie Dimon outlined the bank’s commitment to financing a global transition to cleaner energy. But he also hinted at the role Trump and other political leaders could play in slowing climate progress.

“Constructive government leadership and policy is also necessary, particularly on taxes, permitting, energy grids, infrastructure and technological innovation,” Dimon said in a foreword to the report.

A JPMorgan spokesperson emphasized that, while the bank stress tests its investments using a variety of potential climate scenarios, it remains committed to zeroing out its emissions by 2050, in line with the Paris Agreement.

Wall Street knows how to run the numbers, and right now the smart money expects warming to exceed 2 degrees, explained Jain, the former investment banker.

“These guys are not making assumptions out of the blue,” he said. “They are following the science.”

Correction: An earlier version of this report misstated when JPMorgan published its first climate report. The initial edition ran in 2019, was included in its broader environmental, social and governance reports for a couple of years, and then became a standalone publication again in 2022.

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sarcozona
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Dark times ahead
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LinuxGeek
1 day ago
What type of world are we leaving for the next generations?
acdha
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Washington, DC
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Hot Dog

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Michael Kalus posted a photo:

Hot Dog

They overpainted USD with Euro. :ca:



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sarcozona
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Hard to describe how hard and fast sentiment towards the US has shifted in Canada
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mkalus
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