THE ESCALATING COST of living keeps making headlines and inspiring furious Reddit threads. Food prices remain a flashpoint, especially when it comes to coffee. But behind every grocery store gripe lies a deeper unease about whether wages are keeping up and the tariffs that continue to dominate economic news.

But the fixation on tariffs and inflation obscures a different shift revolutionizing pricing: algorithms. The Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project warns automated tools are reshaping what Canadians are charged for essential goods and services, including groceries and fuel. Companies can now use software to tailor prices based on everything from our browsing patterns, location, loyalty history, device type, and operating system. The same item can appear at one amount for you and another for someone else, depending on who you are, when you see it online, and what the algorithm believes you are willing to pay.

Here’s how it works. Companies gather data from many routine digital touchpoints: web and app tracking (cookies, pixels, and device fingerprinting), geolocation from phones and browsers, and in-store sensors. Also involved are data brokers who sell detailed consumer profiles combining demographics, purchase histories, and online behaviour. After the initial lure with attractive benefits and promises of discounts, (“the hook”), you’re handed over to a surveillance infrastructure that mines data about your behaviour and willingness to pay (“the hack”) and then raises fees, cuts rewards, and traps you in the program by making cancellation difficult (“the hike”).

Iran has sentenced Nobel Peace Prize laureate Narges Mohammadi to several more years in prison, her lawyer said on Sunday.

News of the extended years of imprisonment comes after Mohammadi embarked on a hunger strike.

On Monday, Mohammadi had to be taken to a medical facility due to her poor physical condition and was then returned to custody, the Narges Mohammadi Foundation said.

It described the process that extended her time in prison as a "sham trial."

...

"She has been sentenced to six years in prison for 'gathering and collusion' and one and a half years for propaganda and two-year travel ban," her lawyer Mostafa Nili said.

...

"Ms Mohammadi stated that she was hospitalized three days ago due to her poor physical condition and was subsequently returned to the detention center," Nili said in quotes published by the Narges Mohammadi Foundation.

"Furthermore, as she began to explain the details of recent events and the manner of her arrest, the phone call was disconnected," Nili was quoted as saying.

The Narges Mohammadi Foundation said that with the new charges, she has now been sentenced to over 44 years in prison throughout her life.

...

The Japanese leader's election gambit, fueled by the power of her personality and some unlikely help from young voters consumed by “Sanamania,” appears to have paid off.

Japan’s conservative prime minister Sanae Takaichi has won a landslide victory after she gambled on a high-stakes snap election.

Takaichi, who took office in October after being elected leader of the governing Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), surpassed the 310 seats needed for a supermajority in the 465-seat lower house, Japanese public broadcaster NHK reported from the official election count on Sunday evening. The supermajority allows her ruling coalition to override the upper house, where it lacks a majority.

An NHK exit poll as voting ended earlier on Sunday projected the LDP would win between 274 and 326 seats. The party and its coalition partner Ishin were projected to win a combined 302-366 seats, as voters turned out amid freezing temperatures in a rare winter election.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/42875178

from +972’s Sunday Recap
972 Magazine [published in Israel]
Feb. 7, 2026

Ibtisam Mahdi wrote about how with or without a ceasefire, Israel is still targeting #Gaza’s journalists: the killing of Muhammad Qishta, Abdel Raouf Sha’at, and Anas Ghneim on Jan. 21 shatters any illusion of “post-war” safety. But for Mahdi, who knew and regularly collaborated with Qishta and Sha’at, the honor of their work and the memory of their laughter cannot be erased.

Also:

• Why a Palestinian protest in Tel Aviv exposed the limits of Israeli solidarity
• U.S. secretly deporting Palestinians to West Bank in coordination with Israel
• In Hebron’s hyper-militarized Old City, a Palestinian cinema opens its doors
• The legal fight to open Gaza to foreign press has failed. It’s time to change course

FBI documents published on the US Department of Justice website show that billionaire paedophile Jeffrey Epstein funded the group Friends of Israel Defence Forces (FIDF) and settlement-building organisation the Jewish National Fund (JNF).

Analysis of income and transfers to non-charitable exempt organisations, released by the FBI, shows that the convicted sex offender financed the FIDF, which "raises funds for active duty Israel Defence Forces soldiers and veterans".

The world is poised to overshoot the goal of limiting average global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, as for the first time, a three-year period, ending in 2025, has breached the threshold. And climate scientists are predicting devastating consequences, just as the world’s governments appear to have lost their appetite for tackling the emissions that are causing the warming.

The 1.5-degree target was set at the Paris climate conference a decade ago, at the insistence of more vulnerable nations, to forestall severe weather impacts and potential runaway warming that could lead to exceeding irreversible planetary tipping points. But climate scientists say that 10 years of weak action since mean that nothing can now stop the target being breached. “Climate policy has failed. The 2015 landmark Paris agreement is dead,” says atmospheric chemist Robert Watson, a former chair of the U.N.’s arbiters of climate science, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Meanwhile, a picture of what lies ahead is becoming clearer. In particular, there is a growing fear that climate change in the future won’t, as it has until now, happen gradually. It will happen suddenly, as formerly stable planetary systems transgress tipping points—thresholds beyond which things cannot be put back together again.

“We are rapidly approaching multiple Earth system tipping points that could transform our world with devastating consequences for people and nature,” says British global-systems researcher Tim Lenton, of the University of Exeter. If he and other scientists are right, then hopes currently being expressed of a temperature reset by reducing emissions after overshoot may be fanciful. Before we know it, there may be no way back.

Jack Lang, a former French culture minister, has resigned as president of the Arab World Institute, the French Foreign Affairs Ministry said on Saturday, after revelations of his past contacts with Jeffrey Epstein and the launch of a financial investigation.

Earlier this Saturday, the French Financial Prosecutor’s Office had opened an investigation into Jack Lang and his daughter Caroline on suspicion of ‘aggravated tax fraud laundering.’

Calls for Lang to step down intensified since files released on January 30 by the US Department of Justice showed Epstein and Lang corresponding intermittently between 2012 and 2019, when the financier died by suicide in jail.

French media, including Le Monde, Le Figaro and Mediapart, said the preliminary investigation had been opened after the US documents revealed years of correspondence and financial links between Lang and Epstein.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/42850037

6 February 2026 09:00 GMT

[we need some good news]

In the old city, or Casco Viejo, bills addressing the genocide are pasted on the facades between shop windows; "Boikota Israel" (Boycott Israel) are widely sprayed on the walls of apartment blocks.

On the balconies of the colourful apartments overlooking the Nervion River, Palestinian flags are draped from every second or third apartment.

Every flag that flutters in the wet breeze announces itself as proof of life.

The level of pro-Palestine solidarity is unlike any other city I have visited in the western world over the course of the genocide.

The latest annual report on the state of global human rights from Human Rights Watch presents a grim outlook for democracy and LGBTQ+ rights around the world.

Central to that assessment: the Trump administration.

“The global human rights system is in peril,” writes Philippe Bolopion, Executive Director of Human Rights Watch, in the report’s introduction.

“Under relentless pressure from U.S. President Donald Trump, and persistently undermined by China and Russia, the rules-based international order is being crushed, threatening to take with it the architecture human rights defenders have come to rely on to advance norms and protect freedoms,” the report states.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/42779734

... the goal was to “collapse [Iran’s] already buckling economy” and “make Iran broke again” by targeting its oil sales and efforts to get around US sanctions.

“Making Iran Broke Again will mark the beginning of our updated sanctions policy. Watch this space. If economic security is national security, the regime in Tehran will have neither,” Bessent said at the time.

A day before his speech at the Economic Club, Bessent met with Israeli Foreign Minister Bezalel Smotrich, one of the main proponents of the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the Israeli official in charge of expanding illegal Jewish settlements in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.