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US's new scramble for Africa is biomedical imperialism

Al Jazeera

US's new scramble for Africa is biomedical imperialism Late in February, Zimbabwe pulled out of a proposed $367m United States health funding agreement after objecting to provisions requiring broad American access to sensitive health data. The five-year programme was presented as support for HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria and epidemic preparedness efforts. However, the terms demanded extensive sharing of national health intelligence, including epidemiological surveillance data and pathogen samples, while offering no binding guarantees that Zimbabwe would receive equitable access to medical technologies developed from them. Harare called the proposal an "unequal exchange", warning that Zimbabwe risked supplying the "raw materials for scientific discovery" while the resulting benefits could remain concentrated in the United States and global pharmaceutical firms. Critics increasingly describe this pattern as biomedical extractivism: a toxic combination of exploitative research practices and colonial thinking that reinforces Western dominance.


Monster winter storm to unleash up to 4 feet of snow across multiple states as officials warn 'delay all travel'

Daily Mail - Science & tech

Horrifying next twist in the Alexander brothers case: MAUREEN CALLAHAN exposes an unthinkable perversion that's been hiding in plain sight Hollywood icon who starred in Psycho after Hitchcock dubbed her'my new Grace Kelly' looks incredible at 95 Alexander brothers' alleged HIGH SCHOOL rape video: Classmates speak out on sickening footage... as creepy unseen photos are exposed Model Cindy Crawford, 60, mocked for her'out of touch' morning routine: 'Nothing about this is normal' Kentucky mother and daughter turn down $26.5MILLION to sell their farms to secretive tech giant that wants to build data center there Tucker Carlson erupts at Trump adviser as she hurls'SLANDER' claim linking him to synagogue shooting NFL superstar Xavier Worthy spills all on Travis Kelce, the Chiefs' struggles... and having Taylor Swift as his No 1 fan Heartbreaking video shows very elderly DoorDash driver shuffle down customer's driveway with coffee order because he is too poor to retire Amber Valletta, 52, was a '90s Vogue model who made movies with Sandra Bullock and Kate Hudson, see her now Nancy Mace throws herself into Iran warzone as she goes rogue on Middle East rescue mission: 'I AM that person' Monster winter storm to unleash up to 4 feet of snow across multiple states as officials warn'delay all travel' A sprawling blast of winter weather is sweeping across the US, unleashing snow, dangerous winds and treacherous travel conditions . Parts of Washington, Oregon, Montana and Wyoming are under multiple winter weather advisories until Friday, with regions expected to see two to four feet of snow and winds up to 55 mph throughout the week. Officials are urging motorists to delay travel if possible, as heavy snowfall and low visibility threaten to make driving extremely dangerous. Forecasters warned the powerful system could create whiteout conditions in mountainous areas, while snow-covered roads and slick highways may disrupt travel for days. The most intense snowfall is expected across the Cascade Mountains, where several feet of snow could pile up through the end of the week.


Chilling list reveals which US cities would be targeted first in WW3

Daily Mail - Science & tech

Kentucky mother and daughter turn down $26.5MILLION to sell their farms to secretive tech giant that wants to build data center there Horrifying next twist in the Alexander brothers case: MAUREEN CALLAHAN exposes an unthinkable perversion that's been hiding in plain sight Hollywood icon who starred in Psycho after Hitchcock dubbed her'my new Grace Kelly' looks incredible at 95 Kylie Jenner's total humiliation in Hollywood: Derogatory rumor leaves her boyfriend's peers'laughing at her' behind her back Tucker Carlson erupts at Trump adviser as she hurls'SLANDER' claim linking him to synagogue shooting Ben Affleck'scores $600m deal' with Netflix to sell his AI film start-up Long hair over 45 is ageing and try-hard. I've finally cut mine off. Alexander brothers' alleged HIGH SCHOOL rape video: Classmates speak out on sickening footage... as creepy unseen photos are exposed Heartbreaking video shows very elderly DoorDash driver shuffle down customer's driveway with coffee order because he is too poor to retire Amber Valletta, 52, was a '90s Vogue model who made movies with Sandra Bullock and Kate Hudson, see her now Model Cindy Crawford, 60, mocked for her'out of touch' morning routine: 'Nothing about this is normal' As the US and Israel continue striking targets across Iran, fears are growing that the escalating confrontation could spiral into a wider global conflict. European nations are already being reluctantly pulled into the crisis, deploying military assets to defend allies while trying to avoid direct involvement. Military analysts have warned that if the fighting expands and draws in Iran's powerful allies, including Russia and China, the risk of a catastrophic global war could rise dramatically.






Waymo Asks the DC Public to Pressure Their City Officials

WIRED

Stuck in regulatory limbo, the self-driving-vehicle developer is encouraging residents of Washington, DC, to message public officials to help get its robotaxis onto roads. Waymo needs some help, according to an email message the self-driving developer sent to residents of Washington, DC, on Thursday. For more than a year, Waymo has been pushing city officials to pass new regulations allowing its robotaxis to operate in the district. So far, self-driving cars can test in the city with humans behind the wheel, but cannot operate in driver-free mode. The Alphabet subsidiary--and its lobbyists--have asked local lawmakers, including Mayor Muriel Bower and members of the city council, to create new rules allowing the tech to go truly driverless on its public roads.


Differentially Private Algorithms for Learning Mixtures of Separated Gaussians

Gautam Kamath, Or Sheffet, Vikrant Singhal, Jonathan Ullman

Neural Information Processing Systems

In this work, westudy algorithms for learning Gaussian mixtures subject todifferential privacy[32], which has become thede facto standard for individual privacy in statistical analysis of sensitive data. Intuitively, differential privacy guarantees that the output of the algorithm does not depend significantly on any one individual's data, which in this case means any one sample.


CausalCompass: Evaluating the Robustness of Time-Series Causal Discovery in Misspecified Scenarios

Yi, Huiyang, Shen, Xiaojian, Wu, Yonggang, Chen, Duxin, Wang, He, Yu, Wenwu

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Causal discovery from time series is a fundamental task in machine learning. However, its widespread adoption is hindered by a reliance on untestable causal assumptions and by the lack of robustness-oriented evaluation in existing benchmarks. To address these challenges, we propose CausalCompass, a flexible and extensible benchmark suite designed to assess the robustness of time-series causal discovery (TSCD) methods under violations of modeling assumptions. To demonstrate the practical utility of CausalCompass, we conduct extensive benchmarking of representative TSCD algorithms across eight assumption-violation scenarios. Our experimental results indicate that no single method consistently attains optimal performance across all settings. Nevertheless, the methods exhibiting superior overall performance across diverse scenarios are almost invariably deep learning-based approaches. We further provide hyperparameter sensitivity analyses to deepen the understanding of these findings. We also find, somewhat surprisingly, that NTS-NOTEARS relies heavily on standardized preprocessing in practice, performing poorly in the vanilla setting but exhibiting strong performance after standardization. Finally, our work aims to provide a comprehensive and systematic evaluation of TSCD methods under assumption violations, thereby facilitating their broader adoption in real-world applications. The code and datasets are available at https://github.com/huiyang-yi/CausalCompass.