In Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America, even longtime allies and clients of America are rebuffing its entreaties to impose sanctions on Russia or merely to criticise it.

Rather than point a finger at Russia, he called for “an independent inquiry” into the horrors reported from the Ukrainian town of Bucha.

A selective approach would confirm China’s suspicion that, deep down, all countries are guided by interests alone, and use principles as a weapon. China’s challenge to the post-1945 order is in the open now. More cynicism is a weak defence.

“These two superpowers want to change the world. We are capable of stopping it, but it depends on how many friends we have on our side. That will require flexibility and compromises.”

Some diplomats ask whether it is wise to lecture China about repression in Xinjiang at such a moment.

Chinese diplomats have cast Western angst about Ukraine as racist hypocrisy, when much non-European suffering is ignored.

In February this year Mr Xi signed a joint statement with Russia’s leader, Vladimir Putin, that reads like a manifesto for a new order.

It seeks to redefine such terms as “democracy”, calling China’s one-party system more responsive to public needs than dysfunctional Western democracy.

Such aggressions, he said, had left Chinese with strong feelings about human rights, and about foreigners who employ double standards to criticise other countries.

“No Dogs and Chinese Allowed”.

Charles Michel, that Europeans care greatly about human rights because of the extent of suffering on their soil, notably during the second world war and the Holocaust.

THERE IS NOTHING magic about the year 1945 to China’s Communist Party.

AI and human rights? Why? If yes, what should it focus on?

it has become binding as a part of customary international law. We can say for sure that the UDHR

combat online hate speech which constitutes incitement to discrimination or violence (

stablish a ‘PD Board’ which would include all home actors that directly or indirectly contribute to a country’s image (

arrow definition confines the focus of PD to influencing publics, at home and abroad, on issues relating to foreign affairs.

PD integrates all outreach promotional activities, covering culture, education, the media, and even some elements of economic work

PD, covering networking among non-state actors in world affairs and related activities, is diplomacy. (

Singapore and some European states now hold them accountable for damaging posts and levy heavy fines

each country has its own value system. U

work on interacting with the audiences, rather than just broadcasting information,

need to use visual enhancement and emotional framing

it is not enough to be heard. You need to be listened to and followed

every person and even country needs to have a digital identity, otherwise somebody else will define it for you.

‘ability to read, interpret and manage emotions inhabiting the digital medium’ (Bjola et al., 2018)

need to develop ‘digital emotional intelligence’,

. A democratic republic can only function if there are forums for cultural values that support deliberation across different groups. 

address such segmented targets.

easier

ative absence of dialogue among different groups.

reinforces these views and indirectly leads to polarisation

new media apps tend to aggregate those who hold similar views,

inability ‘to perceived own biases and prejudices’

Bias blindness,

Congruence bias,

ndowment effect, ‘which leads people to prefer the possessions they already have

exposure effect, which entails that ‘familiarity with an idea promotes its acceptance

Confirmation

Confirmation, in which people ‘are more likely to believe information that confirms a pre-held idea’

or pessimism

ptimism

A person´s disposition,

Prejudice, where there is a ‘preference to information which affirms preexisting notions and opinion

ognitive and social biases

important information can be missed when a source is regarded as not credible’

Public Diplomacy: Foundations for Global Engagement the Digital Ages (Cull, 2019), Prof. Nicholas Cull

oals must be precise and well-defined [

he purpose of public diplomacy is to advance the strategic interests of the country

Philip Seib

Soft power is an asset, but useful only if it is actually utilised

getting funds from their finance ministries.

costs, including the lack of reputational security.

The cost is one deterrent

Criticism of local authorities via the prolific Chinese social media is encouraged, but not of higher government levels.

the Chinese media practice self-censorship;

efforts to ‘sell’ the Gaimusho (Japan´s Ministry of Foreign Affairs) as a credible agency

disadvantages of incumbency, especially in our times of high public expectations.

nternally, PD runs the risk of being taken as partisan politics by the opposition parties,

Alumni events

sustainability over a long period of time is the main challenge,

credibility is of the utmost importance, and in the digital realm it is derived from ‘people-like-me’, MFAs are collaborating with social media influencers

Should PD prioritise decision makers or mass audiences abroad?

PD cannot rectify a policy deficit

what is being projected fits with the interests and/or the needs of the target audience.

massive investments of

Hard propaganda on political issues has built-in limits of acceptability.

not easy to coordinate the actions of disparate agencies, state, and non-state.

Qatar

And it is well known that the targeted audiences will not go against their own interests, even with effective PD strategies

1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations (VCDR)?

country’s foreign policy interests.

undermined

US soft power has been undermined by the way in which hard power has been used’ (

nfluence of leaders on national brand as the `halo effect´ (Manor, 2017).

articulate leader

information overload makes it harder to win attention and produce impact.

shaping

computer

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Sitemap URL

Second, the sitemap needs to be updated with new posts as soon as it is published. Rank Math takes care of that.

Google News sitemaps

2.

And Frame.io takes it into a website. It’s basically Google Docs for video.

The privacy regulator says, “Make it really hard to export data,” and the competition regulator says, “Make it easy to export data.” And the engineers at Instagram or YouTube are, like, “Well, we’re engineers. We can do either, but you’re going to have to choose.” All of that is to say, “Yes, regulation, but that’s not one thing. That’s, like, 50 things.”

technology is going to be a quote-unquote “regulated industry” in that sense.

open source just tended to be a better way of making software.

It turns out a free market is just a better way to organize economic activity than central planning. It might be immoral, but functionally it works better

One of them is, open source didn’t exactly let you build software you couldn’t build before.

But behind all of that noise, there’s this very, very powerful, interesting technology that lets you build internet applications, lets you build software in a different way.

Early open-source people thought they were going to destroy Microsoft and no one would ever buy software again. And early internet people thought that this was the end of government, and there’d be no war again, because everyone would understand each other.

Web3 is, well, if you were to build Yelp or Tripadvisor or Twitter on a blockchain, then the users would control it as well.

Crypto, blockchain is an open-source computer, but the code is open as it’s running. It’s not just that you could get the code, it’s that you can see the code as it’s running.

another wave of open source at this point.

“What is a blockchain?” It’s a distributed, decentralized, community-based computing system that has trust incentives, contracts, structure, ownership, portability built in.

That gets you DeFi [decentralized finance]. So this is crypto two, it’s distributed finance. You could build a lending application on this.

But it’s a public database, which is important. It’s not just a database, it’s a public trustless distributed database.

“the Holy Roman Empire is neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.” Which was true. It wasn’t any of those things. Cryptocurrency is not cryptography, and it’s not a currency, or not only a currency.

the first wave of crypto

the hardware was good enough to show that this would be cool if we had vastly better hardware.

We tried to do VR in the early ’90s, late ’80s, early ’90s.

So there’s this technology determinism which also applies a bit to Web3, which is to say, look, smartphones, PCs, the internet, cars, aircraft—it starts out looking like a toy and it gets better.

It doesn’t matter how amazingly cool a games console is, it’s still basically not a universal device.

And the same thing now with metaverse—you write a whole bunch of words on a whiteboard. You write “games” and “virtual reality” and “popular culture” and “self-expression,” and maybe “NFTs” and “Web3” as well, maybe. And “augmented reality” and “glasses” and “3-D” and “spatial internet.” You write all this stuff on the board. And then you call it metaverse.

Maybe, but that’s not necessarily what’s going to happen. It may not play out like that.

“All models are wrong, but they’re all useful.”

“History teaches us nothing, except that something will happen.”

there’s a lot of value to looking and seeing, what happened the last time this happened?

there’s always patterns in technology.

this Danish proverb

decacorns (private companies that are worth over $10bn)

“television” and “monolingual”, which mix up Greek and Latin roots

femto- and atto-

pico-

nano-,

It would be the first of the prefixes for huge numbers not to come from the classical languages. “Hell” is a Germanic word.

a new prefix, hella-, for 1027

to zetta- (1,0007) and yotta- (1,0008)

septa- and octo- for 1,0007 and 1,0008

peta- and exa- come from Greek penta (five) and hexa (six), representing 1,0005 and 1,0006

As billions become workaday, tera- will become the new giga-.

teras means “monster”

A megalomaniac has delusions of greatness

Megas, too, was generic in Greek, meaning “great”

Giga- is a prefix meaning “a billion” of something.

a gigafactory in Sunderland

“gigafabs”.

a “gigafactory”

To Russian entrepreneurs living abroad, these workers were a known quantity, and they were not as expensive as specialists in Silicon Valley and other parts of the United States.

And like other tech workers globally, they could continue their work from anywhere with a laptop and an internet connection.

Eventually, Russia has to diversify its economy away from oil and gas, and it has to accelerate productivity growth. Tech was a natural way of doing that.

Tech is a small part of the Russian economy compared with the energy and metals industries, but it has been growing rapidly.

An industry once seen as a rising force in the Russian economy is losing vast swaths of its workers.

By March 22, a Russian tech industry trade group estimated that between 50,000 and 70,000 tech workers had left the country and that an additional 70,000 to 100,000 would soon follow.

“Believe me, we have a decent sense of what is in our interest and know how to protect it and advance it.”

Although overall trade between the countries is puny, Russia is South Africa’s second-largest market for apples and pears and its fourth largest for citrus fruit. Even as Russian-flagged ships were being turned away from European and American ports, the Vasiliy Golovnin, a freighter, docked in Cape Town on April 4th. South Africa is also reportedly pursuing a $2bn-a-year deal to buy gas from Gazprom, a Russian state-owned energy firm.

Almost half of African countries—25 of 54—abstained or stayed away from the first UN vote. The history of colonialism makes some reluctant to throw support behind what is seen as a Western cause. But others are acting out of growing affinity with Russia. That is true of South Africa, the other big democracy to shrug off the West’s call for unity. It has abstained in all the UN votes.

Citing Argentina, Brazil and Mexico among others, he added, “These countries do not want to be in a position where Uncle Sam orders them to do something and they say, ‘Yes, sir.’”

certain countries “would never accept the global village under the command of the American sheriff”

Signalling independence from the West is an old game in Latin America

“Every time I turn on the television, there’s a Russian making the case for the war,” says a Western ambassador in Jordan. While the big Arabic channels, which have reporters on the ground in Ukraine, have not shied away from recounting the war’s horrors, their coverage is often interspersed with pro-Russian or anti-Western takes.

In the Middle East, only Israel and Libya voted to boot Russia off the Human Rights Council; the abstentions by the Gulf states were a particular disappointment to Western diplomats.

The warm European welcome granted to Ukrainian refugees, compared to that accorded Syrian refugees, prompts eye-rolling. These sorts of concerns are of long standing among Arab states. What has been surprising is the degree to which even American clients have felt free to act on them.

“There’s been an underlying trend that I’ve observed around the UN in the last couple of years, which is that a lot of the countries from the global south have been increasingly co-ordinated in articulating criticisms of the West,” Mr Gowan says. These countries, he continues, “have been feeling more a sense of unity and common purpose than was the case in much of the post-cold war era.”

A related objection is that the West is obsessing over a European conflict that is not a true global concern, while downplaying or ignoring conflicts and human-rights abuses elsewhere.

There’s a big attack from many sides on sanctions being the problem, not the aggressor in this war.

The pattern of abstentions speaks in part to concerns that sanctions on Russia are driving up food and energy prices.

93 to 58, with 24 abstentions

But considered as a bloc, the 40 countries that opposed or abstained from the UN resolution condemning the invasion will probably matter more in terms of geopolitics than economics.

For its part, India has a number of reasons to avoid antagonising Russia: its tradition of neutrality in global conflict, its strategic priority of confronting China, its dependence on Russian military equipment.

he called for “an independent inquiry” into the horrors reported from the Ukrainian town of Bucha.

Click here to view original web page at www.tehrantimes.com

SDS not only affects people’s health but also has a psychological effect, it also has a great negative effect on agricultural products, and on the reproduction of plant species and activities such as beekeeping, he further noted.

In fact, the dust is raised from Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan in the northeast; Iraq, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan in the south, southwest, and west.

Controlling sand and dust storms (SDSs) requires strengthening diplomacy, and it will never be eradicated unless international institutions reach a consensus.

The European Union went still farther, ordering Google and other search engines to delist RT and other Russian state media in addition to blocking the sites themselves from its constituent countries.

The decision is bad news for the Ukrainian government, which has sought to impose a de facto digital iron curtain by revoking Russia’s access to the Domain Name System.

Businesses involving “services, software, hardware, or technology incident to the exchange of communications over the internet” will no longer be subject to the heavy-handed sanctions the US imposed on Moscow following its invasion of Ukraine in February, according to an order issued last week by the US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control.

As per Zoom, Anywhere Polls will allow polling content to live in a central repository that can be accessed from any meeting on an account, instead of being associated with a particular meeting.

The only gas pipeline to the East now is the Power of Siberia to China, which is not physically connected to a unified gas supply system, so it is impossible to transfer the gas produced in Yamal to China through the extant gas pipeline system. This means that we need to quickly negotiate with China on a Power of Siberia-2. While the concept for this already exists, it is still at the design stage and no specific agreements have been reached,”

The EU is very dependent on Russian gas, but this also means that Russia is very dependent on the European market.

a manifold increase in energy costs due to the high cost of LNG and an inadequate supply of it. In addition, there is insufficient capacity and terminals for LNG storage and receipt in Central and Eastern Europe. There is one relatively large one in Lithuania (Klaipeda), but it will not be enough for all the Baltic countries,” he notes.

“Green energy is good, but we should not forget that it isn’t possible to produce the needed amount of energy with current technology,”

Especially if Russia suddenly stops supplying coal as well.

“This is not a game, but a scenario that needs to be taken very seriously, as it can potentially create deep divisions in the economy and society. From my point of view, it was correct not to immediately start the process of terminating relations with respect to supplies,” German Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck said, explaining the consequences for his country.

“These simulation engines and the data and everything that goes into them are incredibly important for us to act in these complex environments when it’s not just one crisis but it’s a set of compounding crises,”

to create a complete replica of Earth’s systems over the next decade.

run simulations to see whether that infrastructure is vulnerable to future climate extremes or severe storms,

It’s leading the initiative in partnership with the European Space Agency, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts and the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites.

“Destination Earth,” will draw on a host of environmental, socioeconomic and satellite data to develop digital “twins” of the planet that aim to help policymakers — and eventually the public — better understand and respond to rising temperatures.

it was mysteriously absent from the “Summary for Policymakers” – traditionally the first part of the report that’s released and often attracts the most media attention.

the Summary for Policymakers must be approved by government representatives from 195 countries around the world; the approval process for this year’s mitigation report was the longest and most contentious in the history of the IPCC.

Neal Stephenson famously coined the term “metaverse” in his 1992 novel Snow Crash, where it referred to a 3D virtual world inhabited by avatars of real people.

the metaverse is tough to explain for one reason: it doesn’t necessarily exist.

such narrative-building efforts are likely to intensify further

highlighting that U.S. partners were also victims of malicious cyber activities.

a broader global audience.

new strategy for responding to Washington.

all three reports by Qihoo 360, the report from the National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team (CNCERT), and the report from Qi An Pangu Lab,

the separate remarks for its spokesperson on U.S. cyberattacks.

Pangu Lab released its report on U.S. cyber espionage,

These reports and testimonies have taken discourse on China’s cyber activities to a global audience, making everyone aware of possible cyber threats arising out of China.

Mandiant, a U.S.-based cybersecurity firm, has released multiple reports detailing Chinese cyberattacks in the United States.

intensifying its efforts at narrative-building by focusing on malicious cyber activities of the United States.

inequity through experimentation.

The central government does not seem to disentangle the merits of an innovative policy from the idiosyncrasies of the places that pilot it.

The more prosperous an experimental site, the better the chance the policy will be adopted nationwide

80% of experiments since the 1980s have taken place in localities that are richer than average, according to Messrs Wang and Yang

It is a “huge improvement” on a “counterfactual world” in which all central policies are implemented without any experimentation,

the central government has initiated over 630 such experiments since 1980