At least eight people, including children, were killed after a building collapsed in Brazil's northeastern state of Pernambuco on Friday, according to CNN affiliate CNN Brasil, citing the state's Secretariat of Social Defense (SDS.)

Maybe you’ve been waiting all year for the deals to drop at Intel® Gamer Days

Oil is unlikely to fall below $70 a barrel, but it would take a “wild card” event to

By Abhirup Roy SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) -Electric vehicle maker Rivian said on Tuesday it will adopt Tesla's charging standard, giving

Ron DeSantis continues to defend newly approved curriculum guidelines in Florida instructing students to learn that enslaved people “developed skills” that could be “applied for personal benefit”. “That means they developed skills in spite of slavery, not because of slavery,” the governor told NBC News in a recent interview that aired on 7 August. “It was them showing resourcefulness and then using those skills once slavery ended,” he added. Mr DeSantis, who is seeking the Republican nomination for president in 2024, has dismissed criticism from Vice President Kamala Harris and Democratic and Republican members of Congress urging Florida officials to amend the state’s African American history standards and reflect an honest history of race and racism in school curricula. The vice president has also rejected an invitation from Mr DeSantis to “discuss” the standards, telling a crowd in Orlando earlier this month that “there is no roundtable, no lecture, no invitation we will accept to debate an undeniable fact: there were no redeeming qualities of slavery.” Mr DeSantis had previously stated he “wasn’t involved” with the guidelines approved by the state’s appointed Board of Education. He said the standards are “probably going to show some of the folks” – enslaved people – “that eventually parlayed, you know, being a blacksmith into doing things later in life.” The development of such “skills” would not have benefited the millions of enslaved people in the US in the decades before slavery’s abolition. Another controversial guideline instructs high schoolers to be taught that a massacre in the state led by white supremacists against Black residents to stop them from voting in 1920 included “acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans.” “Adults know what slavery really was. It involved rape, it involved torture, it involved taking a baby from their mother, it involved some of the worst examples of depriving humanity of people in our world,” Ms Harris said in her remarks in Jacksonville last month. South Carolina Senator Tim Scott, the only Black Republican in the Senate, echoed Ms Harris in his criticism of the standards, stressing that slavery was defined by “separating families, about mutilating humans and even raping their wives”. “It was just devastating,” said Mr Scott, who is also seeking the 2024 Republican nomination. “So I would hope that every person in our country – and certainly running for president – would appreciate that.” Mr DeSantis told NBC in response: “Don’t take that side of Kamala Harris against the state of Florida. Don’t indulge those lies.” The new standards join the governor’s overhaul of public education and a “parents’ rights” agenda that targets honest lessons on race and racism and gender and sexuality, which the governor told NBC amounts to “indoctrination”. “Those standards were not political at all,” he added. “The legislature didn’t dictate any of that. [The] governor’s office didn’t dictate anything of that.” Last week, before thousands of high school students enrolled in advanced placement courses begin classes for the 2023-2024 school year, the DeSantis administration criticised the College Board’s warning that Florida education officials had “effectively banned” AP Psychology courses in the state under the Parental Rights in Education Act, what opponents have derided as the “Don’t Say Gay” law. Read More Ron DeSantis admits ‘of course’ Donald Trump lost the election DeSantis blasted for ‘un-American’ restrictions on AP psychology course under ‘Don’t Say Gay’ law Why Florida’s new curriculum on slavery is becoming a political headache for Ron DeSantis

(Reuters) -Binance.US and Changpeng Zhao, the crypto exchange's founder and majority owner, have been exploring ways to reduce his stake

A Japanese start-up company has revealed a 15-foot-tall robot with hopes of it one day exploring the moon. Tsubame Industries developed the $3 million (£2.5m) robot that resembles the "Mobile Suit Gundam" from a popular anime show. It will be displayed at the Japan Mobility Show set to take place until 5 November. Named after the avian dinosaur archaeopteryx, the Archax boasts a 'vehicle mode' in which it squats down onto its four legs and travels at the speed of six miles per hour. Ryo Yoshida, 25, chief executive of Tsubame Industries plans to build for disaster relief or to explore space in the future. "Japan is very good at animation, games, robots and automobiles so I thought it would be great if I could create a product that compressed all these elements into one," he said. "I wanted to create something that says, ‘This is Japan’." Yoshida shared early images of the Archax on X/Twitter, when Akinori Ishii, technical director at the Gundam Global Challenge, messaged him and got involved in the production. "On Earth, there are many specialized machines for special work," he said. "On a moon base, we are not able to have so many machines. So, maybe a human-like machine will be used in such a situation." The company reportedly aim to create an Archax prototype suitable to explore space by 2028, according to Nikkei Asia. How to join the indy100's free WhatsApp channel Sign up for our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

A recent finding in South Africa has rediscovered a human population that was thought to have been lost. When some languages from the Namibia Desert died out, anthropologists feared that the populations that spoke them had gone with it. However, researchers have discovered that the genetic identity of these once-thought lost populations may have been maintained, even without their native tongue. Southern Africa holds some of the greatest human genetic diversity on Earth, and it is a common pattern that this diversity suggests it is where a species or family originated. Even without fossil records, anthropologists would know humans evolved in Africa, simply by looking at how much greater the biological diversity is there. It is among the inhabitants of the Kalahari and Namibia Deserts of south-eastern Africa where this diversity can be seen most dramatically. "We were able to locate groups which were once thought to have disappeared more than 50 years ago," Dr Jorge Rocha of the University of Porto said in a statement. One of these groups is the Kwepe, who used to speak Kwadi. The disappearance of the language was thought to mark the end of their serration from neighbouring populations. Dr Ann-Maria Fehn of the Centro de Investigação em Biodiversidade e Recursos Genéticos said: "Kwadi was a click language that shared a common ancestor with the Khoe languages spoken by foragers and herders across Southern Africa." The team managed to find the descendants of those who spoke Kwadi, and discovered that they had retained their genetic distinctiveness that traces back to a time before Bantu-speaking farmers moved into the area. “A lot of our efforts were placed in understanding how much of this local variation and global eccentricity was caused by genetic drift – a random process that disproportionately affects small populations and by admixtures from vanished populations,” said Dr Sandra Oliverira of the University of Bern. "Previous studies revealed that foragers from the Kalahari desert descend from an ancestral population who was the first to split from all other extant humans,” added Professor Mark Stoneking of the Max Plank Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. “Our results consistently place the newly identified ancestry within the same ancestral lineage but suggest that the Namib-related ancestry diverged from all other southern African ancestries, followed by a split of northern and southern Kalahari ancestries." The research allowed the team to reconstruct the migrations of the region's populations. With the Khoe-Kwadi speakers dispersed across the area around 2,000 years ago, possibly from what is now Tanzania. The populations that once spoke Kwadi, before adopting Bantu languages in recent decades, are the missing piece in the history of humanity as anthropologists identified in this study. The study can be read in Science Advances. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

LONDON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sep 12, 2023--

As extreme heat dominates news headlines, the gate-keepers of global capital are failing to keep pace with a

Indonesia will temporarily relax rules that have slowed development of solar energy in the coal-dependent country, lifting one

Facebook users in the US have just one more month to apply for a share of a $725 million privacy settlement. Meta agreed to pay the fine late last year, but those affected must explicitly ask for it by sending in a form. Those that don’t will miss out on any share of the vast settlement. The payment is part of an agreement, reached with Meta, to settle a lawsuit that alleged it allowed millions of its users’ personal information to be fed to Cambridge Analytica, a firm that supported Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Anyone in the US who has had a Facebook account at any time between May 24, 2007, and December 22, 2022, is eligible to receive a payment. To apply for the settlement, users can fill out a form and submit it online, or print it out and mail it. The deadline is August 25. It’s not clear how much money individual users will receive. The larger the number of people submitting valid claims, the smaller each payment will be since the money has to be divided among them. The case sprang from 2018 revelations that Cambridge Analytica, a firm with ties to Trump political strategist Steve Bannon, had paid a Facebook app developer for access to the personal information of about 87 million users of the platform. That data was then used to target U.S. voters during the 2016 campaign that culminated in Trump’s election as the 45th president. Uproar over the revelations led to a contrite Zuckerberg being grilled by U.S. lawmakers and spurred calls for people to delete their Facebook accounts. Facebook’s growth has stalled as more people connect and entertain themselves on rival services such as TikTok, but the social network still boasts more than 2 billion users worldwide, including an estimated 250 million in the U.S. Beyond the Cambridge Analytica case, Meta has been under fire over data privacy for some time. In May, for example, the EU slapped Meta with a record $1.3 billion fine and ordered it to stop transferring users’ personal information across the Atlantic by October. And the tech giant’s new text-based app, Threads, has not rolled out in the EU due to privacy concerns. Additional reporting by Associated Press Read More Ukraine war’s heaviest fight rages in east - follow live Charity boss speaks out over ‘traumatic’ encounter with royal aide