Forum for Democratic Political Reforms - FDPR

12/05/2023

ai has gained some remarkable abilities to manipulate and generate language, whether with words, sounds or images. ai has thereby hacked the operating system of our civilisation

Yuval Noah Harari

Storytelling computers will change the course of human history, says the historian and philosopher

01/05/2023

The coronavirus’s evolution is not yet predictable; its effects are nowhere near benign. This might be the longest stretch of quasi-normalcy that humanity has had since 2020’s start, but experts can’t yet tell whether we’re at the beginning of post-pandemic stability or in the middle of a temporary reprieve

Things look calm right now. They may even stay that way—but we won’t know for sure for a good long while.

31/03/2023

The Roman Catholic Church “repudiates those concepts that fail to recognize the inherent human rights of Indigenous peoples, including what has become known as the legal and political ‘Doctrine of Discovery,’”

Indigenous communities have long called on the Vatican rescind the concept, which had been used over the centuries to seize land from people in the Americas, Africa and elsewhere.

14/03/2023

European Union embargo and a Group of Seven price cap on Russian crude, imposed in early December, have prompted a spate of unusual shipping activities

Oil tankers that carried Russia’s flagship Urals crude to the Gulf of Oman have stayed put since they arrived, the latest example of abnormal shipping movements that have become more common since sanctions were imposed on the country’s exports.

16/09/2022

International economic disparities, poverty and environmental degradation, combined with the absence of peace and security and human rights violations are all factors affecting international migration. Today, it is estimated that there are nearly 200 million migrants are living in countries in which they were not born.

Those who weaponize refugees are as unhelpful as those who naively want to let all of them in. We must talk more honestly about migration.

04/09/2022

The organizers of the demonstration said the Czech Republic should be militarily neutral and ensure direct contracts with gas suppliers, including Russia

Around 70,000 people gathered in central Prague to protest against the Czech government's foreign and economic policies. Prime Minister Petr Fiala said the protesters did not have the country's best interests at heart.

12/04/2022

Isaac Chotiner interviews Oona Hathaway, a professor at Yale Law School, about the different mechanisms that could be used to bring members of the Russian military to justice, and how the U.S. may have undermined the prospects for accountability.

03/01/2022

South Korea is reckoning with a new type of political correctness enforced by angry young men who bristle at any forces they see as undermining opportunity — and feminists, in their mind, are enemy No. 1. Inequality is one of the most delicate issues in South Korea, a nation with deepening economic uncertainty, fed by runaway housing prices, a lack of jobs and a widening income gap.

After slow gains in women’s rights, the country is facing a type of political correctness enforced by young men angry at feminists, saying they undermine opportunity.

10/12/2021

crime now polls as one of the top voter concerns in US. Call for criminal-justice-reforms gains momentum

Progressives gaslight the public by claiming things used to be worse.

05/12/2021

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/04/world/asia/afghanistan-starvation-crisis.html?smid=tw-nytimesworld&smtyp=cur

An estimated 22.8 million people — more than half the country’s population — are expected to face potentially life-threatening food insecurity this winter. Many are already on the brink of catastrophe.

27/11/2021

“Do we really need six to 6000 cryptocurrencies to do payments? One or two, maybe a handful are what are going to survive to be used as payments, even if the technology is so useful that it substitutes for cash and fiat currency issued by the central banks. So that would suggest that most cryptos are unlikely to survive with high values going forward because there’s no use case for them” – Rajan

'Regulators are struggling': Top moments from the former RBI governor's interview on the underlying issues of crypto in India.

27/11/2021

Sudan’s effort at a democratic transition is faltering, with thousands of demonstrators flooding the streets on Thursday to denounce the military’s deal with the civilian prime minister, Abdalla Hamdok.

At least 43 people have been killed in clashes in the area, the U.N. says, while the nation’s leaders are focused elsewhere, dealing with the fallout from a coup.