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Published 21 September 2021

·  Undersea Internet Cables Connect Pacific Islands to the World, but Geopolitical Tension Is Tugging at the Wires

·  Facebook Overrun by COVID Vaccine Lies Even as It Denied Fueling Hesitancy, Report Says

·  Pinpointing the Role of Climate Change in Every Storm Is Impossible, and a Luxury Most Countries Can’t Afford

·  Discover Card Cuts Ties with Left-Wing Group over Terrorist Connections

·  Neo-Nazi Music Festivals Are Funding Violent Extremism in Europe

·  Huawei’s Decline Shows Why China Will Struggle to Dominate

·  Revenge of the State: Freedom House Finds Tech Increasingly Serves Authoritarian Ends

·  Ransomware Gang Strikes Iowa Agriculture Business New Cooperative, the Latest Hack on Food Supply Chain

Undersea Internet Cables Connect Pacific Islands to the World, but Geopolitical Tension Is Tugging at the Wires  (Amanda H A Watson, The Conversation)
For Pacific Island countries, undersea internet cables can be crucial. The number of Pacific Island countries with such connections has increased substantially in recent years. Even so, many countries still rely on a single cable and others have no cable at all.
The internet began as a US government project, and it is still dominated by the US today. As Chinese companies have become involved in laying undersea cables, geopolitics is influencing key decisions about the rollout of internet cables across the Pacific.

Facebook Overrun by COVID Vaccine Lies Even as It Denied Fueling Hesitancy, Report Says  (Brett Molina, Techexplore)
Anti-vaccine activists flooded Facebook to sow doubt about the COVID-19 vaccines, overwhelming efforts to stop them, even as the company told the world that it was not responsible for vaccine hesitancy, a new report from the Wall Street Journal found.

Pinpointing the Role of Climate Change in Every Storm Is Impossible, and a Luxury Most Countries Can’t Afford  (Friederike Otto and Luke Harrington, The Conversation)
Tropical Storm Ida recently left a path of devastation across the US, capping a summer beset by wildfires, heatwaves and floods which broke records around the world. The inevitable question after each of these extreme weather events is the same: to what extent did climate change make it worse?
This is normally where the science of extreme event attribution steps in and identifies whether and to what extent human-caused climate change altered the likelihood and intensity of the event. Event attribution studies have delivered clearer results partly as the methods and models that scientists use have improved, but mostly because the signal of climate change is becoming clearer with every extra ton of carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere.