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Australia news live: PM, premiers and chief ministers sign firearms agreement; Sarah Hanson-Young scathing on Malcolm Roberts’ gay rights comments | Australia news– www.theguardian.com
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State and territory leaders and the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, have agreed to further tighten national gun laws in a meeting in Sydney.

Albanese said federal government intelligence would be shared with state and territory law enforcement agencies as part of the deal, and that only Australian citizens would be allowed to hold gun licences.

The push comes after the deaths in December’s antisemitic shooting at Bondi Beach and as the federal government’s national buyback plan falters due to low take-up by the states. Only NSW and the ACT have signed up so far.

Albanese said 3D printed gun technology would be banned, along with sharing of materials about their production.

Japanese lawmakers travel to Beijing, seeking to mend ties after fallout– abcnews.com
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TOKYO — A cross-party group of Japanese lawmakers, including one from Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s governing party, headed to Beijing on Monday to meet with Chinese officials for the first time since ties between the two Asian rivals deteriorated after Takaichi’s comment on Taiwan angered China.

Japan seeks a chance to mend its strained ties with China as tensions have spilled over into the economy.

The group, which includes Gaku Hashimoto, a lawmaker of Takaichi’s governing Liberal Democratic Party and a former health and welfare vice minister, and a lawmaker each from two opposition parties Komeito and the Centrist Reform Alliance, is to meet with Chinese Communist Party officials during their visit through Thursday.

“Communication has been severed in all areas and we are beginning to see their impact in many areas,” Shinichi Isa, a top spokesperson for the CRA party, told reporters before leaving Tokyo’s Haneda airport. “I hope we can somehow find a clue to restart a dialogue.”

Isa, who has served as a diplomat at the Japanese Embassy in China, wrote on X earlier this month that bilateral ties have sunk to their worst since the 1972 normalization of relations. He wrote that officials had always remained in communication even during previous lows: “Now all channels between officials and ministries have been cut off.”

The situation is not in the national interest of either side, Isa said at the time, and the Chinese side accepted a request from Japanese lawmakers for a “window for dialogue.”

Scores of people kidnapped from a mosque as armed groups attacked multiple villages in Nigeria– abcnews.com
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A number of people were kidnapped from a mosque in a spree of abductions at several villages in Nigeria ‘s north-central Niger state, police said Saturday.

The assailants attacked a mosque in Kpenya village after attacks in a string of villages in the remote Borgu Local Government Area of Niger state Friday, police spokesperson Wasiu Abiodun said.

Such attacks are common in Nigeria, where multiple armed groups operate, killing and kidnapping people for ransom. The groups sometimes clash in competition with each other. No group has claimed responsibility for the Friday attacks.

Abiodun did not provide figures but said no lives were lost in the Friday attacks, and said the military was deployed to the area. Residents said scores of people were abducted, with some estimating between 60 and 80 people were kidnapped. A search for survivors was underway Saturday.

Borgu area council chairman Abdullahi Mohammed Nasir said at least 60 people were kidnapped and an unspecified number of people sustained gunshot injuries while trying to escape the gunmen.

“People were abducted while praying at a Juma’at mosque on Friday,” Nasir said. “That was when the bad people came and surrounded the mosque and took them away.”

Zubairu Umar Talba, a youth leader in the Dekara area in Borgu, told The Associated Press that his 85-year-old father was among those who were taken. “Nobody can tell you the exact number of people abducted because, so far, about 80 of our people have been abducted and many have fled the area,” he said.

New Zealand becomes latest country to propose social media ban for children– www.independent.co.uk
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New Zealand was set to introduce legislation proposing a ban on social media for children under the age of 16, prime minister Christopher Luxon announced on Monday.

Under the plan, tech firms face penalties of up to 10 per cent of their global revenues if they fail to comply.

The proposed law would mandate that platforms implement reasonable age-verification measures, utilising digital identity documents, facial technology, and existing account data.

Satellite Images Reveal Possible Cause Behind Devastating Nepal Flash Floods– www.ndtv.com
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In a preliminary satellite analysis, Planet Labs released images that reveal visual evidence of the destruction caused by floods in Nepal that killed at least 46.

Several others, including 108 Indians, are missing, as the flash flood hit Nepal on Wednesday, washing away villages and many project sites in a region bordering Tibet.

Nepal’s disaster authority (NDRRMA) described that a chunk of snow and rock broke off near the glacier zone on the Nepal-China border, about 20km northeast of the Rasuwagadhi border crossing.

That avalanche either fell into a glacial lake or blocked the river channel, and the resulting surge, carrying glacial ice, meltwater and debris — “glacier-inclusive flood” — swept down the Lhende Khola into the Bhote Koshi river.

Push to oust US ambassador from Canada expands – and ‘51st state’ could take up the issue in fall– www.independent.co.uk
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Sudanese medical group accuses rebel group of killing 27 people– abcnews.com
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Ethnic clashes in southern Sudan have killed 27 people, including four children, a local medical group said

CAIRO — Four children were among at least 27 people killed in the latest ethnic clashes in southern Sudan, a local medical group said on Tuesday.

The killings were carried out by the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM-N) in Qardud and Abu Hamama, areas inhabited by the Otoro tribe in South Kordofan, according to the Sudan Doctors Network, which monitors casualty numbers in the war-torn East African country.

Earlier this year, intense fighting erupted between forces linked to SPLM-N and the Otoro tribe, which is a minority group in the Nuba Mountains of South Kordofan.

The ethnic standoff, first instigated by land disputes, adds another layer to the country’s ongoing civil war which broke out in April 2023 between the army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF). The attacks have forced many people to flee toward Abu Hitan, a nearby village and Kadugli, the largest town in South Kordofan, said the doctors.

The Sudan Doctors Network said in a statement on Facebook that it stressed “that targeting unarmed civilians, including women and children, on ethnic grounds constitutes an explicit violation of international humanitarian law.”

The Myanmar Junta’s military chief, General Ye Win Oo, met with Thailand officials to warn them about their porous borders. The Junta is accusing Thailand of allowing arms to reach the resistance to its military rule. The junta held an election January of this year, but that election was not recognized as being legitimate, for only Junta-approved candidates were allowed to run in the election.

One of the resistance leaders, Min Thway Thit, responded to the action, declaring “The junta is making every effort to cut off the flow of weapons across the border under the pretext of holding talks with neighboring countries. Our resistance forces must stay alert, plan alternative routes, and call for stronger international pressure on the regime.”

Myanmar Military Chief Urges Thailand to Sever Border Arms Flow to Resistance – Burma News International
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Myanmar’s new military chief, Gen. Ye Win Oo, met with senior Thai defense officials in Bangkok this week to push for a crackdown on cross-border arms smuggling to anti-regime resistance groups.

During his visit for the ninth Thai-Myanmar High-Level Officials Meeting on August 19, Ye Win Oo held separate talks with Thailand’s defense minister and commander-in-chief. He recently assumed leadership of the armed forces after his predecessor, Min Aung Hlaing, transitioned to the presidency following an election widely condemned by the international community.

The Junta pushed for stronger border stability to crack down on illicit arms smuggling, mirroring a request made earlier this month by regime leader Min Aung Hlaing to Thai Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul.

Approval of Iran war hits record low– www.washingtontimes.com
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Americans’ support for the war with Iran has fallen to the lowest level since the conflict began, helping keep President Trump’s approval rating at a record low.

Support for U.S. military action against Tehran dipped to 31%, down 3 points from earlier this month and down 6 points since the start of the war, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll released this week.

This drop is attributable to fewer self-identified Republicans supporting the war. Roughly 69% of Republicans backed the Trump administration’s actions against Iran, compared with 77% in March, just after the U.S. and Israel first launched strikes on Iran.

The war’s unpopularity mirrors Mr. Trump’s approval numbers.

Another Reuters/Ipsos poll that closed Aug. 17 put Trump’s approval at 33% and disapproval at 64%, the lowest of his second term and tied with the low point of his first term.

The poll also found 80% of Americans, including 71% of Republicans and 87% of Democrats, believed the Iran conflict would drag on for an extended period.

The poll out this week put that figure at 83%.

U.S.-Canada talks fail; Carney says retaliatory tariffs start Sept. 8– www.cnbc.com
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The U.S. imposed 50% tariffs on some Canadian products on Saturday after trade talks between the two countries fell apart on Friday.

In response, Canada said it would impose its own retaliatory tariffs beginning on Sept. 8.

Negotiators for both sides had been working on a deal all week, at times signaling that an agreement was near. President Donald Trump had postponed the original deadline of Wednesday just hours ahead of it being imposed, saying that there was a soon-to-be finalized deal. Dominic LeBlanc, Canada’s trade minister for the U.S., told reporters on Thursday that a deal was “very close.”

However, both sides blamed the other for not reaching a deal as the tariffs, impacting roughly $20 billion in Canadian exports, including wine, furniture, dairy products, cement, clothing, fishing rods, hockey equipment, went into effect on Saturday morning.

U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, in a post on X early Saturday morning, that “Canada declined to finalize the trade deal under the terms agreed earlier this week.”

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said in a statement released on Friday that despite working toward a deal, “that progress has not been enough to meet our objectives for Canadians,” saying that “last-minute changes in the U.S. proposed terms were unfair, uneconomic, and called into question the reliability of any deal.”

Spencer Pratt Calls Out Psychotic Women Defending Lindsay Clancy– www.louderwithcrowder.com
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Watch Louder with Crowder every weekday at 11:00 AM Eastern, only on Rumble Premium!The “mass psychosis” of deranged feminists defending Lindsay Clancy will go down as one of the most deranged movements in American history. This toxic femininity, however, did not begin after idiotic internet rumors about this case. According to Spencer Pratt, it started before COVID. This is why he said what needed to be said.

Pratt took to social media to bring attention to these mass delusions.

The Lindsay Clancy mass psychosis proves that a lot of people need to have their Wifi taken away. But this psychosis started many years before TikTok.

In one specific example, he described how a group of dads attacked a migrant who engaged in an evil act around their kids.

Some criminal migrant m*sturbates in front of children at a public beach; the dads rightfully beat the sh*t out of him, but a woman suffering from suicidal empathy intervenes to protect and comfort that child sex offender? When you see the invasion of Spain, you see a woke woman gleefully waving the invaders in. Is this what Matriarchy looks like? Where this kind of suicidal empathy that exploits the noble virtue of unconditional maternal compassion and perverts it towards the criminal dregs of society, all because wokeness now supersedes all virtue?”

Clancy’s Supporters Care More About Circumstances Than Kids– thefederalist.com
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In response to the ongoing trial of Lindsay Clancy, the woman who killed her three children in 2023, it seems women across the country are trying to quiet their consciences by swapping out pink pussy hats for pink T-shirts. These sympathizers have also raised more than $1 million for Clancy’s supportive parents. That stunning sum is akin to awarding a Golden Globe to an actress who publicly credits killing her offspring with advancing her career.

Was Clancy pro-abortion? Maybe she was. Maybe she wasn’t. Either way, the more revealing question isn’t what Clancy believed about abortion; it’s what the women rallying around her believe about when it’s morally acceptable to take innocent life. Thus, scarier than the woman in the courtroom, sitting in a wheelchair and staring blankly into space, are the hordes of women who may be finding solace and justification for the intentional ending of innocent human life somewhere else in the life cycle.

Is invoking Clancy’s mental illness to mitigate responsibility for her actions fundamentally different from invoking “health care” to justify abortion because a woman believes giving birth would cause her undue stress or derail her professional life? Abortion supporters can cite “reproductive freedom” all they want. That’s how it starts. The methodical murder of more than 65 million unborn human beings since Roe v. Wade is nothing more than permissible slaughter. But more important than which euphemisms we use for abortion and filicide is the message being sent to women who may come to believe that their overwhelming circumstances justify disposing of the unborn.

Under this moral framework, the prohibition is no longer simply, “It is wrong to intentionally end an innocent human life.” It has become, “It is wrong — unless circumstances make it permissible.” Even research on homicidal violence has identified this moral threshold: Many people condemn homicidal violence in principle, while identifying circumstances where they find it permissible. This concept applies to the Clancy case, where her female supporters appear to argue that even the irreversible decision to strangle three children is defensible based on circumstances.

Trump launches ‘Operation Economic Outcast’ on Iran as he tries to isolate regime with damaging new sanctions– www.thesun.co.uk
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DONALD Trump has launched his crushing “Operation Economic Outcast” on Iran by threatening crippling sanctions on any country propping up the regime.

The US president last week vowed to unleash the “MOST CRUSHING ECONOMIC OPERATION EVER TAKEN” to strong-arm Tehran into accepting his peace terms.

Donald Trump has vowed to unleash an ‘economic D-Day’ on Iran Credit: Reuters
Severe sanctions and months of bombing have plunged the regime into an economic crisis Credit: AP

Washington has now upped the ante with a new plan to slap severe sanctions on any country maintaining economic ties with the regime.

Iran has meanwhile vowed it will retaliate against any country participating in the US-led isolation campaign.

Kids outlearn AI—and we still don’t know why– www.technologyreview.com
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“It’s just totally miraculous,” says Frank. “If you train GPT-2 on 30 million words, you get a nonsense generator; you don’t get a kid.”

Exactly how babies pull this off is a mystery. Researchers know a lot about what kids learn and how they use language at different stages in development, but there’s still a lot we don’t know. Perhaps the most enduring question is why babies can learn language at all. The syntax of human language—the rules for combining words into sentences—includes recursive, nested structures that allow us to express virtually infinite ideas with a finite lexicon of words and pieces of words. This seems like something that should be a problem for babies. They only splash about in the shallows of a fathomless ocean of language. And yet, somehow, that’s enough. From a drop, they infer the depths.

One solution, put forward in the 1950s by the MIT linguist Noam Chomsky, is that babies are born with hardwired knowledge of grammar. Chomsky was reacting to a rival view, championed by the psychologist B.F. Skinner, that language acquisition is entirely environmental. Skinner thought language was learned through conditioning and reinforcement, the way a dog figures out how to sit or shake for treats. Chomsky countered by citing the “poverty of the stimulus”—the idea that language, especially syntax, is too complex and children’s exposure to it too “impoverished” for them to learn entirely from experience. “His signature argument was, essentially, that language cannot be learned on the basis purely of statistics,” says Richard Futrell, a linguist and cognitive scientist at the University of California, Irvine. Instead, Chomsky posited that language is based on a set of logical rules and argued that children needed innate knowledge of those rules to deduce the grammar of their language from scraps of speech.

Iran faces ‘greatest financial offensive ever’, says US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent– www.bbc.co.uk
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The US announced a host of sanctions against Iran and threatened its supporters in what Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said was “the single greatest financial offensive ever”.

Labelling it an “economic D-Day” for Iran, Bessent said the US would sever all economic ties with the country and added that any nation financially partnering with Iran would also be isolated.

However, the latest threat to the Iranian regime follows several U-turns and extended deadlines from the White House in its efforts to end the conflict.

The war has led to hikes in global oil prices, and in response to the latest threat Iran warned it would shut down all oil exports from the region if the war continued.

The Iranian regime has also issued a fresh warning to shipping to not pass through the Strait of Hormuz without its permission, according to Reuters.

One fifth of the world’s oil and gas usually passes through strait, a narrow waterway south of Iran, but the flow has been effectively blocked by the country since the conflict began at the end of February, leading to higher oil prices globally.

Sudanese medical group accuses rebel group of killing 27 people– abcnews.com
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EXCERPT:

Ethnic clashes in southern Sudan have killed 27 people, including four children, a local medical group said

CAIRO — Four children were among at least 27 people killed in the latest ethnic clashes in southern Sudan, a local medical group said on Tuesday.

The killings were carried out by the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM-N) in Qardud and Abu Hamama, areas inhabited by the Otoro tribe in South Kordofan, according to the Sudan Doctors Network, which monitors casualty numbers in the war-torn East African country.

Earlier this year, intense fighting erupted between forces linked to SPLM-N and the Otoro tribe, which is a minority group in the Nuba Mountains of South Kordofan.

The ethnic standoff, first instigated by land disputes, adds another layer to the country’s ongoing civil war which broke out in April 2023 between the army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF). The attacks have forced many people to flee toward Abu Hitan, a nearby village and Kadugli, the largest town in South Kordofan, said the doctors.

The Sudan Doctors Network said in a statement on Facebook that it stressed “that targeting unarmed civilians, including women and children, on ethnic grounds constitutes an explicit violation of international humanitarian law.”

Japanese lawmakers travel to Beijing, seeking to mend ties after fallout– abcnews.com
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EXCERPT:

TOKYO — A cross-party group of Japanese lawmakers, including one from Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s governing party, headed to Beijing on Monday to meet with Chinese officials for the first time since ties between the two Asian rivals deteriorated after Takaichi’s comment on Taiwan angered China.

Japan seeks a chance to mend its strained ties with China as tensions have spilled over into the economy.

The group, which includes Gaku Hashimoto, a lawmaker of Takaichi’s governing Liberal Democratic Party and a former health and welfare vice minister, and a lawmaker each from two opposition parties Komeito and the Centrist Reform Alliance, is to meet with Chinese Communist Party officials during their visit through Thursday.

“Communication has been severed in all areas and we are beginning to see their impact in many areas,” Shinichi Isa, a top spokesperson for the CRA party, told reporters before leaving Tokyo’s Haneda airport. “I hope we can somehow find a clue to restart a dialogue.”

Isa, who has served as a diplomat at the Japanese Embassy in China, wrote on X earlier this month that bilateral ties have sunk to their worst since the 1972 normalization of relations. He wrote that officials had always remained in communication even during previous lows: “Now all channels between officials and ministries have been cut off.”

The situation is not in the national interest of either side, Isa said at the time, and the Chinese side accepted a request from Japanese lawmakers for a “window for dialogue.”

New Zealand becomes latest country to propose social media ban for children– www.independent.co.uk
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EXCERPT:

New Zealand was set to introduce legislation proposing a ban on social media for children under the age of 16, prime minister Christopher Luxon announced on Monday.

Under the plan, tech firms face penalties of up to 10 per cent of their global revenues if they fail to comply.

The proposed law would mandate that platforms implement reasonable age-verification measures, utilising digital identity documents, facial technology, and existing account data.

Scores of people kidnapped from a mosque as armed groups attacked multiple villages in Nigeria– abcnews.com
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EXCERPT:

A number of people were kidnapped from a mosque in a spree of abductions at several villages in Nigeria ‘s north-central Niger state, police said Saturday.

The assailants attacked a mosque in Kpenya village after attacks in a string of villages in the remote Borgu Local Government Area of Niger state Friday, police spokesperson Wasiu Abiodun said.

Such attacks are common in Nigeria, where multiple armed groups operate, killing and kidnapping people for ransom. The groups sometimes clash in competition with each other. No group has claimed responsibility for the Friday attacks.

Abiodun did not provide figures but said no lives were lost in the Friday attacks, and said the military was deployed to the area. Residents said scores of people were abducted, with some estimating between 60 and 80 people were kidnapped. A search for survivors was underway Saturday.

Borgu area council chairman Abdullahi Mohammed Nasir said at least 60 people were kidnapped and an unspecified number of people sustained gunshot injuries while trying to escape the gunmen.

“People were abducted while praying at a Juma’at mosque on Friday,” Nasir said. “That was when the bad people came and surrounded the mosque and took them away.”

Zubairu Umar Talba, a youth leader in the Dekara area in Borgu, told The Associated Press that his 85-year-old father was among those who were taken. “Nobody can tell you the exact number of people abducted because, so far, about 80 of our people have been abducted and many have fled the area,” he said.

Iran War Updates: U.S. to unveil new sanctions Trump said would hit Iran with an “economic D-Day”– www.cbsnews.com
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The South Korean military said Monday the U.S. canceled a large, joint military exercise that had been scheduled to take place next month due to force limitations amid the war with Iran.

The Ssang Yong (Twin Dragons) exercise is a joint amphibious landing drill conducted regularly since 2012 by the South Korean Navy and Marine Corps alongside U.S. Navy and Marine Corps. British and other allied forces have taken part in previous years.

A spokesperson for the South Korean Marines said its U.S. counterparts had notified the force in June that “due to the situation in the Middle East,” the U.S.’s ability to deploy forces for the exercise was constrained this year.

The news of this year’s Ssang Yong drills being called off came a week after the U.S. cut short another major joint military exercise with South Korea, on President Trump’s orders, fueling concern in Seoul, and in Japan, that Washington is becoming a less dependable ally in the face of rising threats from North Korea and China.