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RAMALLAH, West Bank (AP) — Palestinian factions Hamas and Fatah signed a declaration in Beijing on ending a yearslong rift, Chinese state media said Tuesday, taking a step toward potentially resolving the deep divide between the sides as the war in Gaza rages on.

The two groups signed the Beijing Declaration on “ending division and strengthening Palestinian unity,” according to state broadcaster CCTV.

The agreement also underscores China’s growing role in Middle East diplomacy, with success in the restoration of relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran.

“But to be sure, China is still the process of trying to earn credibility as a global mediator,” said James Char, a research fellow at the Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.

Repeated attempts at mending the rift have failed, wrecked by the factions’ own bitter rivalry over power and the West’s refusal to accept any government that includes Hamas unless it expressly recognizes Israel.

United States President Joe Biden’s administration envisions a revamped Palestinian Authority to rule postwar Gaza and has sought a series of reforms that might make it a viable presence in the war-ravaged territory.

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The European Union says it has notified Meta that its “pay or consent” model for Facebook and Instagram might violate consumer protection laws.

The EU’s Consumer Protection Cooperation (CPC) Network says the company has until September 1st, 2024, to propose changes to its model, which it calls “misleading” and “confusing” for users, or face potential fines.

CPC regulators, who began their investigation after complaints from consumer watchdog groups, claim the company uses confusing language to explain how both the paid and “free” versions of Facebook and Instagram work and that its rollout pressured people to make a choice without enough time to consider how it would affect them.

They also say that calling the ad-free versions of Facebook and Instagram “free” is misleading since it still requires users to consent to the use of their data for targeted ads.

Didier Reynders, EU Commissioner for Justice, says customers shouldn’t be “lured into” thinking they won’t see ads if they pay the subscription, or that it’s free despite the company profiting from their personal data.

“Subscriptions as an alternative to advertising are a well-established business model across many industries,” Meta spokesperson Matt Pollard told The Verge in an email, “Subscription for no ads follows the direction of the highest court in Europe and we are confident it complies with European regulation.”

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A 2009 agreement insisted on by the European Commission meant that Microsoft could not make security changes that would have blocked the update from cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike that caused an estimated 8.5 million computers to fail, the Big Tech giant said in comments to the Wall Street Journal newspaper.

Thousands of flights were delayed or cancelled, leaving passengers stranded at airports worldwide, the UK’s NHS service was affected and contactless payments failed to work.

Microsoft has Windows Defender, its in-house alternative to CrowdStrike, but because of the 2009 agreement made to avoid a European competition investigation, had allowed multiple security providers to install software at the kernel level.

Microsoft’s main competitor, Apple, in 2020 blocked access to the kernel on its Mac computers, arguing it would improve security and reliability.

Speaking to the Wall Street Journal, a Microsoft spokesman said the company could not make a similar change because of the EU agreement.

Under its new Digital Markets Act, Europe is currently trying to force Apple to give access to its iPhone to allow alternative app stores and web browsers to be used.

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While that’s a slight dip from post-COVID CEO wages, it’s a clear indication that the wealth gap continues to widen as the cost-of-living crisis worsens.

“Gross inequality is not good for anybody, including the rich people, and it’s unsustainable,” says Morris Pearl, former managing director of Black Rock, one of the world’s largest investment firms, and now chair of Patriotic Millionaires.

“We’re very concerned that inequality is getting worse and it is making our whole society unstable, and we’re trying to change policies in our country to do something about that and to stop it before, frankly, everyone gives up on liberal democracy,” Mr Pearl tells ABC RN’s Future Tense.

Additionally the group meets annually to run strategy sessions with academics, activists and lawmakers to discuss how to push for a fairer economy.

For example, in the lead up to this year’s Rio de Janeiro G20 meeting in November, Mr Pearl says a number of countries have signalled their interest in a minimum tax on very wealthy people as proposed by French economist Gabriel Zucman.

Ingrid Robeyns, a professor of philosophy and economics at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, has spent the past decade working on an approach to wealth which she calls limitarianism.

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A wealth of promising home-grown titles from the Xbox Games Showcase 2024 back in June gave existing users plenty of reasons to stay subscribed.

Xbox Game Pass has had a really solid July for content, and it’ll get even sweeter if the rumors of Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 hitting the service soon pan out.

I wrote recently about how games might not be enough to find those elusive “new” users in an article linked below, revolving around the dilemma that the overall number of “core” console players simply isn’t growing.

While speaking to developers at shows over the past year, a lot of the discourse revolves around “black hole” games like Fortnite and Roblox, which vacuum up users and turn them into mono-gamers with no interest in playing anything else.

Xbox Game Pass is an attempt to cut through that trend in the name of supporting and showcasing the variety of art the industry has to offer — meeting new customer cohorts halfway.

The vastness of its Activision-Blizzard purchase seems to have led to a lost couple of years of momentum for Xbox as a brand, with attention focused solely on its variety of court cases.

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The Ministry of Emergency Management and Climate Readiness said as of early afternoon Monday, there were about 440 properties on evacuation order and 3,000 under alert, calling the situation “dynamic and everchanging.”

On Monday afternoon, Sooke Potholes Park on Vancouver Island was closed due to a wildfire detected near Mavis Lake east of Victoria.

In an interview with CBC News shortly before 5:30 p.m. PT, Sooke Mayor Maja Tait said there is currently no risk to the wider community, but as a precaution, the district has cancelled a scheduled council meeting so it can react if anything changes.

That same fire also forced the evacuation of the Bowron Lake provincial park canoe circuit and the artistic enclave of Wells, impacting up to 1,000 residents, tourists and temporary workers, according to Mayor Ed Coleman.

Farther south, the city of Williams Lake, B.C., home to more than 10,000 people, ordered a local state of emergency Sunday night after a fire broke out along Mackenzie Avenue, which is a strip of businesses and industry.

Locals posted photos and video of water bombers flying low over the neighbourhood on Sunday evening, and by midnight Mayor Surinderpal Rathor confirmed residents who had been “tactically evacuated” from their homes were allowed to return.

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In the biggest news of all, Rivian and Volkswagen announced a $5 billion joint venture that will co-develop core parts of the hardware and software platform to be used in cars from both automakers.

We love that because it aligns so beautifully with our mission: the ability to help accelerate putting highly compelling electric vehicles into the market, which will ultimately drive more demand.

A core objective of how we’ve structured the joint venture is that we don’t lose the velocity and the speed and the decisiveness and lack of bureaucracy that exists within our software function today.

Beyond just simplification of how we manage running over-the-air updates across so many different instances, it also gets us a lot of supply chain leverage in a way that we, Rivian, haven’t had in the past.

In fact, you can imagine the day of the announcement, I had a handful of phone calls from CEOs of big semiconductor suppliers, and they’re like, “Hey, we can work harder on pricing.” So, that was awesome.

So, taking away all those mechanical design studio packaging constraints that we had before, and then solving the biggest challenge, which was network architecture by this being that as a project, it’s just a very different type of relationship.

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“Consolidation is in full swing and I’m excited to see who will still be there at the end of the year,” said one managing director, on condition of anonymity.

Installers face significant challenges, including employee utilization, short waiting times for commissioning, and declining demand due to higher interest rates, inflation, and high electricity prices.

He also said that large online providers could exploit current market conditions, affecting even reputable solar installers.

“Price competition in the balcony module segment makes a normal PV system seem too expensive,” said another executive.

Another long-standing installer compared the current market to 2012, criticizing the media’s focus on low prices from third-rate Chinese manufacturers.

“I’m pessimistic about the second half of the year,” he said, noting the need for future support and policies to ensure sector stability.

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Ms. Joly said China interfering in Canadian elections, setting up illegal police stations and bullying diaspora communities were all put on the table in Beijing, as were its intimidation and disinformation campaigns against members of Parliament.

Ms. Joly said she referred to the public inquiry headed by Quebec Court of Appeal justice Marie-Josée Hogue that concluded in its first report in May that China is the “most persistent and sophisticated foreign interference threat to Canada at the moment.”

She also raised the expulsion of Chinese diplomat Zhao Wei last year after The Globe reported he had targeted Conservative foreign affairs critic Michael Chong and his relatives in Hong Kong in an attempt to gain leverage over the MP, who had sponsored a Commons motion on Beijing’s repression in Xinjiang.

On trade, Ms. Joly said Mr. Wang discussed Beijing’s concern about Canada likely joining the U.S. and Europe in imposing massive tariffs on Chinese-made electric vehicles and ending federal subsidies to Canadians for EVs imported from China.

On the larger issues of human-rights abuses, Ms. Joly said she raised concerns about China’s crackdown in Hong Kong, brutal treatment of Muslim Uyghurs and Tibetans, and military threats to invade the self-governing island democracy of Taiwan.

In the Chinese readout of the meeting, Mr. Wang told Ms. Joly that Beijing will brook no criticism of its human-rights records or its menacing of Taiwan, calling those subjects a red line that should not be crossed.

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TOKYO – Vice foreign ministers from Japan and China held a strategic dialogue Monday for the first time in four and a half years, as the countries focus on shared interests amid a host of diplomatic challenges.

Masataka Okano and Chinese counterpart Ma Zhaoxu discussed developments in the East and South China seas as well as Ukraine during their talk in Tokyo.

Other topics included Japan’s release of treated wastewater from the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant and the detention of Japanese nationals in China.

Japanese Foreign Minister Yoko Kamikawa and Chinese counterpart Wang Yi are considering holding talks on the sidelines of ASEAN-hosted meetings in Laos starting Thursday.

China is eager to bolster ties with Japan ahead of the U.S. presidential election in November, concerned that a harsher stance by Washington could lead Tokyo to follow suit.

Beijing also awaits the outcome of the leadership race in Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party scheduled for next month, which will decide the country’s next prime minister.

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If you need some more interesting games for Steam Deck (and desktop Linux!

), Fanatical launched the Build your own Play on the Go - Elite Collection.

All of the games included are Steam Deck Verified, and so they should work great no matter your Linux device.

Since this is a build your own bundle, the more games you add the higher the discount (up to a point).

Here’s what’s included (Steam links if you need more info on each):

Wave Break (Native Linux)

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New footage of armed Hamas terrorists trying to take over a humanitarian aid truck delivering aid to residents of Gaza was published by the IDF on Monday.

In the latest operation, Nahal Brigade teams raided a school near the humanitarian corridor where armed terrorists were based, the IDF reported.

The soldiers directed drones to eliminate the terrorists and located an operational shaft that led to tunnels in the schoolyard.

The IDF reported that the Nahal Brigade, under the command of Division 162, completed four different operations in the Rafah area in the last two months.

The brigade operated in the Al-Barazil neighborhood in Rafah, where they destroyed a hundred-meter-long tunnel, which included several floors.

North of the Yavna refugee camp, the IDF carried out an operation in which they killed terrorists and located ammunition depots in the area.

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“We’re grateful for the progress leading companies have made toward fulfilling their voluntary commitments in addition to what is required by the executive order,” says Robyn Patterson, a spokesperson for the White House.

Without comprehensive federal legislation, the best the US can do right now is to demand that companies follow through on these voluntary commitments, says Brandie Nonnecke, the director of the CITRIS Policy Lab at UC Berkeley.

After they signed the commitments, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI founded the Frontier Model Forum, a nonprofit that aims to facilitate discussions and actions on AI safety and responsibility.

“The natural question is: Does [the technical fix] meaningfully make progress and address the underlying social concerns that motivate why we want to know whether content is machine generated or not?” he adds.

In the past year, the company has pushed out research on deception, jailbreaking, strategies to mitigate discrimination, and emergent capabilities such as models’ ability to tamper with their own code or engage in persuasion.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has used satellite imagery and AI to improve responses to wildfires in Maui and map climate-vulnerable populations, which helps researchers expose risks such as food insecurity, forced migration, and disease.

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Researchers from Google have built a new weather prediction model that combines machine learning with more conventional techniques, potentially yielding accurate forecasts at a fraction of the current cost.

The model, called NeuralGCM and described in a paper in Nature today, bridges a divide that’s grown among weather prediction experts in the last several years.

It then incorporates AI, which tends to do well where those larger models fall flat—typically for predictions on scales smaller than about 25 kilometers, like those dealing with cloud formations or regional microclimates (San Francisco’s fog, for example).

But the real promise of technology like this is not in better weather predictions for your local area, says Aaron Hill, an assistant professor at the School of Meteorology at the University of Oklahoma, who was not involved in this research.

That means the best climate models are hamstrung by the high costs of computing power, which presents a real bottleneck to research.

While many of the AI skeptics in weather forecasting have been won over by recent developments, according to Hill, the fast pace is hard for the research community to keep up with.

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BRUSSELS — Hungary on Monday said it had asked the European Union to take action against Ukraine for imposing a partial ban on Russian oil exports, arguing the move was jeopardizing Budapest’s energy security.

Kyiv last month adopted sanctions blocking the transit to Central Europe of pipeline crude sold by Moscow’s largest private oil firm, Lukoil, sparking fears of supply shortages in Budapest.

The escalating diplomatic spat comes as ties between Ukraine and Hungary hit rock-bottom, with Kyiv last week lashing out at Hungarian PM Viktor Orbán for meeting Russian President Vladimir Putin within a self-styled “peace mission.”

The ban means the country’s central Slovnaft refinery would “receive 40 percent less oil than it needs,” Fico said, arguing it would also reduce Slovak fuel exports to Ukraine that make up a 10th of Kyiv’s consumption.

Following Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, the EU banned imports of Russian oil arriving at the bloc by sea, but allowed landlocked countries like Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic to continue buying supplies via the Russia-to-Europe Druzhba pipeline until they could find an alternative solution.

But Budapest, which has angered Ukraine by holding up EU sanctions against Russia and has stalled Kyiv’s attempts to join the bloc, hasn’t tried to find other options, said Isaac Levy, an analyst at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air think tank.

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Since 2021, the anonymous group, Advance Regina, has been running thousands of dollars worth of advertising on social media and billboard campaigns complaining about crime, taxes and city services.

Advance Regina bills itself as “local residents who love our city,” but its website and social media presence provides no names of actual people behind the organization.

In the past, she was the Saskatchewan Party’s director of training and a constituency organizer, and just last year Premier Scott Moe nominated her for the Queen Elizabeth Platinum Jubilee Medal for public service, according to her Facebook page.

Aaron Moore, a political science professor from the University of Winnipeg, said that as cities have grown and their budgets have inflated, this issue of third-party activism and donations has become more important.

“Advance Regina has transitioned to focus on issue-based advocacy, citizen and voter engagement, and promoting awareness of the current council’s poor performance.”

Moore, the University of Winnipeg political science professor, said that while there are stringent rules for third-party advertising in provincial and federal elections in Canada, that’s generally not the case for municipalities.

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