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Lots of immigration and relatively high fertility rates increased its population faster—and kept it more youthful—than its rich-country peers.

Over many generations they proved much readier than Europeans

dynamism helped to produce a flexible labour force and lively economy.

var _gaq = _gaq || []; _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-121540-1']); _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']); (function() { var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true; ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s); })(); Russell Brand on revolution: “We no longer have the luxury of tradition” window.onerror=function(){ return true; } var googletag = googletag || {}; googletag.cmd = googletag.cmd || []; (function() { var gads = document.createElement('script'); gads.async = true; gads.type = 'text/javascript'; var useSSL = 'https:' == document.location.protocol; gads.src = (useSSL ? 'https:' : 'http:') + '//www.googletagservices.com/tag/js/gpt.js'; var node = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; node.parentNode.insertBefore(gads, node); } )(); googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.defineSlot('/5269235/Test_NS_Minister_widesky', [160, 600], 'div-gpt-ad-1357235299034-0').addService(googletag.pubads()); googletag.pubads().enableSingleRequest(); googletag.enableServices(); } ); var loc = document.URL; var n=loc.split("/",4); var str= n[3]; googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.defineSlot('/5269235/NS_Home_Exp_5', [[4, 4], [975, 250]], 'div-gpt-ad-1366822588103-0').addService(googletag.pubads()); googletag.defineSlot('/5269235/NS_Vodafone_Politics_MPU', [300, 250], 'div-gpt-ad-1359018650733-0').addService(googletag.pubads()); googletag.defineSlot('/5269235/Vodafone_Widesky', [160, 600], 'div-gpt-ad-1359372266606-0').addService(googletag.pubads()); googletag.defineSlot('/5269235/Vodafone_NS_Pol_MPU2', [300, 250], 'div-gpt-ad-1359374444737-0').addService(googletag.pubads()); googletag.defineSlot('/5269235/NS_Vodafone_Politics_Leader', [728, 90], 'div-gpt-ad-1359018522590-0').addService(googletag.pubads()); googletag.defineSlot('/5269235/NewStatesman_Bottom_Leader', [728, 90], 'div-gpt-ad-1320926772906-0').addService(googletag.pubads()); googletag.pubads().setTargeting("Section", str);googletag.pubads().setTargeting("Keywords","property news","uk house prices","property development","property ladder","housing market","property market","london property market","uk property market","housing bubble","property market analysis","housing uk","housing market uk","growth charts uk","housing market predictions","property market uk","housing ladder","house market news","housing boom","property boom","uk property market news","housing market trends","the uk housing market","london property boom","property market in uk","news on housing market","the housing market in the uk","uk property boom","housing market in the uk","how is the housing market","property market in the uk","housing market trend","the uk property market","how is housing market","help to buy news","help to buy government","housing uk help to buy","housing market help to buy","property news help to buy","spectator blog help to buy","property boom help to buy","uk property boom help to buy","housing ladde

The right has all the advantages, just as the devil has all the best tunes. Conservatism appeals to our selfishness and fear, our desire and self-interest; they neatly nurture and then harvest the inherent and incubating individualism. I imagine that neurologically the pathway travelled by a fearful or selfish impulse is more expedient and well travelled than the route of the altruistic pang. In simple terms of circuitry I suspect it is easier to connect these selfish inclinations.

This natural, neurological tendency has been overstimulated and acculturated. Materialism and individualism do in moderation make sense.

Early last year, Tobias Natterer, a copywriter at the ad agency DDB Berlin, began pondering how to evade Russian censors. His client, the German arm of nonprofit Reporters Without Borders (RSF), was looking for more effective ways to let Russians get the news their government didn’t want them to see. RSF had been duplicating censored websites and housing them on servers deemed too important for governments to block—a tactic known as collateral freedom. (“If the government tries to shoot down the website,” Natterer explains, “they also have to shoot down their own websites which is why it’s called collateral.”)

. Anyone searching those numbers on Twitter or other platforms would then find links to the banned site and forbidden news. Talk about timing. Just as they were about to launch the strategy in Russia and two other countries, Russian President Vladimir Putin gave the order to invade Ukraine. The Kremlin immediately clamped down on nationwide coverage of its actions, making the RSF/DDB experiment even more vital.

“We want to make sure that press freedom isn’t just seen as something defended by journalists themselves,” says Lisa Dittmer, RSF Germany’s advocacy officer for Internet freedom. “It’s something that is a core part of any democracy and it’s a core part of defending any kind of freedom that you have.”

Lawmakers in Washington are prodding technology companies to limit the visibility and reduce the risks of a website that provides detailed instructions about suicide and asking the nation’s top law enforcement official to consider pursuing a Justice Department inquiry.

It is imperative that companies take the threat of such sites seriously and take appropriate steps to mitigate harm

On Monday, Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, sent a letter to Google and Bing asking the companies to fully remove the suicide site from their search results — a step further than either search engine was willing to take.

There are no secrets online. That emotional e-mail you sent to your ex, the illness you searched for in a fit of hypochondria, those hours spent watching kitten videos (you can take that as a euphemism if the kitten fits) — can all be gathered to create a defining profile of you.

Your information can then be stored, analyzed, indexed and sold as a commodity to data brokers who in turn might sell it to advertisers, employers, health insurers or credit rating agencies.

you can take steps to do the technological equivalent of throwing on a pair of boxers and a T-shirt. Some of these measures are quite easy and many are free.

The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol issued subpoenas on Thursday to four major social media companies — Alphabet, Meta, Reddit and Twitter — criticizing them for allowing extremism to spread on their platforms and saying they have failed to cooperate adequately with the inquiry.

In letters accompanying the subpoenas, the panel named Facebook, a unit of Meta, and YouTube, which is owned by Alphabet’s Google subsidiary, as among the worst offenders that contributed to the spread of misinformation and violent extremism.

The committee sent letters in August to 15 social media companies — including sites where misinformation about election fraud spread, such as the pro-Trump website TheDonald.win — seeking documents pertaining to efforts to overturn the election and any domestic violent extremists associated with the Jan. 6 rally and attack.

Some of the world’s most ancient buildings are being destroyed by climate change, as rising concentrations of salt in Iraq eat away at mud brick and more frequent sandstorms erode ancient wonders.

Iraq is known as the cradle of civilisation. It was here that agriculture was born, some of the world’s oldest cities were built, such as the Sumerian capital Ur, and one of the first writing systems was developed – cuneiform. The country has “tens of thousands of sites from the Palaeolithic through Islamic eras”, explained Augusta McMahon, professor of Mesopotamian archaeology at the University of Cambridge.

Damage to sites such as the legendary Babylon “will leave gaps in our knowledge of human evolution, of the development of early cities, of the management of empires, and of the dynamic changes in the political landscape of the Islamic era”,

Experts say those books are likely just the tip of a fast-growing iceberg of AI-written content spreading across the web as new language software allows anyone to rapidly generate reams of prose on almost any topic. From product reviews to recipes to blog posts and press releases, human authorship of online material is on track to become the exception rather than the norm.

Semrush, a leading digital marketing firm, recently surveyed its customers about their use of automated tools. Of the 894 who responded, 761 said they’ve at least experimented with some form of generative AI to produce online content, while 370 said they now use it to help generate most if not all of their new content, according to Semrush Chief Strategy Officer Eugene Levin.

What that may mean for consumers is more hyper-specific and personalized articles — but also more misinformation and more manipulation, about politics, products they may want to buy and much more.

You may not realize that our Kenyan-born Muslim president was plotting to serve a third term as our illegitimate president, by allowing Hillary Clinton to win and then indicting her; Pope Francis’ endorsement of Donald Trump helped avert the election-rigging.

one takeaway from this astonishing presidential election is that fake news is gaining ground, empowering nuts and undermining our democracy.

alt-right websites are both far more pernicious and increasingly influential. President-Elect Trump was, after all, propelled into politics partly as a champion of the lie that President Obama was born abroad and ineligible for the White House.

61A data breach at the fringe social media site Gab has for the first time offered a picture of the user base and inner workings of a platform that has been opaque about its operation.

The user lists appear to mark 500 accounts, including neo-Nazis, QAnon influencers, cryptocurrency advocates and conspiracy theorists, as investors. They also appear to give an overview of verified users of the platform, including prominent rightwing commentators and activists. And they mark hundreds of active users on the site as “automated”, appearing to indicate administrators knew the accounts were bots but let them continue on the platform regardless.

showing the entrepreneur seeking direct feedback on site design from a member of a group that promotes a “spiderweb of rightwing internet conspiracy theories with antisemitic and anti-LGBTQ elements”, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

a growing volume of evidence — gleaned from public records released under the Freedom of Information Act, digital sleuthing through online databases, scientific papers analyzing the virus and its spread, and leaks from within the U.S. government — suggests that the pandemic most likely occurred because a virus escaped from a research lab in Wuhan, China.

If so, it would be the most costly accident in the history of science.

The SARS-like virus that caused the pandemic emerged in Wuhan, the city where the world’s foremost research lab for SARS-like viruses is located.

Many nonprofit organizations stare down a shared set of challenges: In a 2013 report, the Urban Institute surveyed over 4,000 nonprofits of a wide range of types and sizes across the continental U.S. It found that all kinds of nonprofits struggled with delays in payment for contracts, difficulty securing funding for the full cost of their services, and other financial issues.

Recent years have been especially hard for many nonprofits. Most have annual budgets of less than $1 million, and those budgets took a big hit from the recession, when federal, municipal, and philanthropic funding dried up. On top of that, because so many nonprofits depend on government money, policy changes can cause funding priorities to change, which in turn can put nonprofits in a bind.

The pressure from funders to tighten budgets and cut costs can produce what researchers call the “nonprofit starvation cycle.” The cycle starts with funders’ unrealistic expectations about the costs of running a nonprofit. In response, nonprofits try to spend less on overhead (like salaries) and under-report expenses to try to meet those unrealistic expectations. That response then reinforces the unrealistic expectations that began the cycle. In this light, it’s no surprise that so many nonprofits have come to rely on unpaid work.

The social network is going to partner with the Poynter International Fact-Checking Network, which includes groups such as Snopes and the Associated Press, to evaluate articles flagged by Facebook users. If those articles do not pass the smell test for the fact-checkers, Facebook will label that evaluation whenever they are posted or shared, along with a link to the organization that debunked the story.

Mosseri said the social network still wants to be a place where people with all kinds of opinions can express themselves but has no interest in being the arbiter of what’s true and what's not for its 1 billion users.

The new system will work like this: If a story on Facebook is patently false — saying that a celebrity is dead when they are still alive, for example — then users will see a notice that the story has been disputed or debunked. People who try to share stories that have been found false will also see an alert before they post. Flagged stories will appear lower in the news feed than unflagged stories.

31 October 2013 Last updated at 19:42 ET Share this page Email Print Share this page2.6KShareFacebookTwitter Syria chemical weapons equipment destroyed, says OPCW Advertisement $render("advert-post-script-load"); Jerry Smith, OPCW: "We have... observed all of the destruction activities" Continue reading the main story Syria conflict Arms destruction Chemical stockpile 'Please let it be over' Assad opponents Syria's declared equipment for producing, mixing and filling chemical weapons has been destroyed, the international watchdog says. This comes a day before the deadline set by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW). The weapons have been placed under seal, an OPCW spokesman said. Inspectors were sent to Syria following allegations, denied by the government, that its forces had used chemical weapons in civilian areas. Continue reading the main story Analysis Jonathan Marcus BBC diplomatic correspondent The achievement of this crucial initial target is an important moment for the chemical weapons destruction effort in Syria. The inspectors' first task was to move swiftly to prevent the government from producing any more chemical agent and to destroy facilities and equipment used for mixing agents and filling munitions. Production facilities will be closely monitored to ensure that there are no moves to repair them. The next deadline is mid-November, by which time the OPCW and the Syrians must agree a detailed plan to destroy Syria's chemical weapons stockpile. All sorts of questions are raised. Where will this destruction be carried out ? Who will provide the necessary equipment and so on? Western intelligence agencies will be studying Syria's declarations carefully. They will be eager to direct inspectors to additional locations if there are any grounds to believe that Damascus has been less than frank in its disclosures. The inspections were agreed between Russia and the US after Washington threatened to use force in Syria. Syria's Deputy Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad

Syria's declared equipment for producing, mixing and filling chemical weapons has been destroyed, the international watchdog says.

nspectors were sent to Syria following allegations, denied by the government, that its forces had used chemical weapons in civilian areas.

In Norse mythology, there are many myths that once known, are now lost. But the Norse, of course, left behind more than their tales. They also left behind their things and, in places like Anavik, on the western coast of Greenland, their dead.

the indigenous Inuit people left behind mummies, as well as hair with intact DNA.

there’s a place called the Corpse Headlands, where there are graves filled with the bodies of 17th and 18th century whalers. When archeologists excavated the site in the 1970s,

Tech companies capable of releasing such a tool have refrained from doing so; in 2011, Google’s chairman at the time said it was the one technology the company had held back because it could be used “in a very bad way.” Some large cities, including San Francisco, have barred police from using facial recognition technology.

without public scrutiny, more than 600 law enforcement agencies have started using Clearview in the past year

The computer code underlying its app, analyzed by The New York Times, includes programming language to pair it with augmented-reality glasses; users would potentially be able to identify every person they saw. The tool could identify activists at a protest or an attractive stranger on the subway, revealing not just their names but where they lived, what they did and whom they knew.

Mapping the area since 2015 using lidar technology — an advanced type of radar that reveals things hidden by dense vegetation and the tree canopy — researchers have found what they say is evidence of a well-organized economic, political and social system operating some two millennia ago.

The discovery is sparking a rethinking of the accepted idea that the people of the mid- to late-Preclassic Maya civilization (1,000 B.C. to A.D. 250) would have been only hunter-gatherers, “roving bands of nomads, planting corn,”

“We now know that the Preclassic period was one of extraordinary complexity and architectural sophistication, with some of the largest buildings in world history being constructed during this time

In the American creator economy, no platform is quite as direct or effective as OnlyFans. Since launching in 2016, the subscription site known primarily for its explicit videos has become one of the most methodical, cash-rich and least known layers of the online-influencer industry, touching every social platform and, for some creators, unlocking a once-unimaginable level of wealth.

More than 3 million creators now post around the world on OnlyFans, which has 230 million subscribing “fans” — a global audience two-thirds the size of the United States itself

fans’ total payouts to creators soared last year to $5.5 billion — more than every online influencer in the United States earned from advertisers that year,

I am staring at about a dozen, stiff, eight-foot high, orange-red penises, carved from living bedrock, and semi-enclosed in an open chamber. A strange carved head (of a man, a demon, a priest, a God?), also hewn from the living rock, gazes at the phallic totems – like a primitivist gargoyle. The expression of the stone head is doleful, to the point of grimacing

Karahan Tepe (pronounced Kah-rah-hann Tepp-ay), which is now emerging from the dusty Plains of Harran, in eastern Turkey, is astoundingly ancient. Put it another way: it is estimated to be 11-13,000 years old.

over time archaeological experts began to accept the significance. Ian Hodden, of Stanford University, declared that: ‘Gobekli Tepe changes everything.’ David Lewis-Williams, the revered professor of archaeology at Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg, said, at the time: ‘Gobekli Tepe is the most important archaeological site in the world.’