Month: June 2024

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Australia's safety regulator has ended a legal battle with X (formerly Twitter) after threatening approximately $500,000 daily fines for failing to remove 65 instances of a religiously motivated stabbing video from X globally.

Enforcing Australia's Online Safety Act, eSafety commissioner Julie Inman-Grant had argued it would be dangerous for the videos to keep spreading on X, potentially inciting other acts of terror in Australia.

But X owner Elon Musk refused to comply with the global takedown order, arguing that it would be "unlawful and dangerous" to allow one country to control the global Internet. And Musk was not alone in this fight. The legal director of a nonprofit digital rights group called the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Corynne McSherry, backed up Musk, urging the court to agree that "no single country should be able to restrict speech across the entire Internet."

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The resurrection of a car plant in Brazil’s poor north-east stands as a symbol of China’s global advance—and the west’s retreat.

BYD, the Shenzhen-based conglomerate, has taken over an old Ford factory in Camaçari, which was abandoned by the American automaker nearly a century after Henry Ford first set up operations in Brazil.

When Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil’s president, visited China last year, he met BYD’s billionaire founder and chair Wang Chuanfu. After that meeting, BYD picked the country for its first carmaking hub outside of Asia.

Enlarge (credit: Tondini, Isidro, Camarós, 2024.)

The 4,000-year-old skull and mandible of an Egyptian man show signs of cancerous lesions and tool marks, according to a recent paper published in the journal Frontiers in Medicine. Those marks could be signs that someone tried to operate on the man shortly before his death or performed the ancient Egyptian equivalent of an autopsy to learn more about the cancer after death.

“This finding is unique evidence of how ancient Egyptian medicine would have tried to deal with or explore cancer more than 4,000 years ago,” said co-author Edgard Camarós, a paleopathologist at the University of Santiago de Compostela. “This is an extraordinary new perspective in our understanding of the history of medicine.”

Archaeologists have found evidence of various examples of primitive surgery dating back several thousand years. For instance, in 2022, archaeologists excavated a 5,300-year-old skull of an elderly woman (about 65 years old) from a Spanish tomb. They determined that seven cut marks near the left ear canal were strong evidence of a primitive surgical procedure to treat a middle ear infection. The team also identified a flint blade that may have been used as a cauterizing tool. By the 17th century, this was a fairly common procedure to treat acute ear infections, and skulls showing evidence of a mastoidectomy have been found in Croatia (11th century), Italy (18th and 19th centuries), and Copenhagen (19th or early 20th century).