Are You Dead?

That’s the name of the most popular paid app in China, according to the BBC.

The app is designed for the estimated 200 million or so people in that country who live alone, and who don’t have family or others to check on them regularly.

By clicking a button on the app every day, users confirm they are alive. If they don’t click it, the app will get in touch with an appointed emergency contact and tell them to check to see if the person is in need of assistance.

Updated Earth is closer than it's ever been to destruction as Russia, China, the U.S. and other countries become “increasingly aggressive, adversarial, and nationalistic,” a science-oriented advocacy group said Tuesday and advanced its “Doomsday Clock” to 85 seconds till midnight.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists cited risks of nuclear war, climate change, potential misuse of biotechnology and the increasing use of artificial intelligence without adequate controls as it made the annual announcement, which rates how close humanity is from ending.

Last year, the clock advanced to 89 seconds to midnight.

Since then, “hard-won global understandings are collapsing, accelerating a winner-takes-all great power competition and undermining the international cooperation” needed to reduce existential risks, the group said.

What is the world like after the massacre of Jews at Bondi Beach in Australia last month? And how can antisemitism be addressed in an AI-driven world?

Those are questions that will be answered next week in Winnipeg by Andre Oboler, CEO of Australia’s Online Hate Prevention Institute.

“AI is normalizing antisemitic language,” said Oboler, who tracks online hate and antisemitism internationally.

Online antisemitic hate speech has been rising since the Hamas attacks on Israelis on Oct. 7, 2023, in which more than 1,200 people were slain, he said.

Alex Buckman devoted his life to ensuring that the atrocities of the Holocaust would not be forgotten and would never be repeated. He frequently spoke at public events and in schools about his experiences as a child survivor of the Holocaust, volunteered with the Holocaust Education Centre and child survivor group in Vancouver, and in April 2023, accompanied a group of Canadian Jewish high school students on the March of the Living.

The March of the Living (MOL) is an international Holocaust education program that brings students, and sometimes adults, to the sites of the killing fields and camps that were located in Poland. A highlight of the trip is a silent three-kilometre march from Auschwitz to Birkenau.

In the course of the 2023 trip, Buckman shared details of his life story with the young Canadians, describing to them those he lost and those he grieved, while reiterating his life-long conviction that kindness and humanity could make the world a much better place.

Born in Belgium in 1939, Buckman was hidden with 11 different non-Jewish families as a toddler. At four he was delivered to an orphanage, where he remained until the end of the war. When it became clear that his parents would not be coming to get him — as they had been murdered in Auschwitz — his aunt, Rebecca (Becky) Teitelbaum, took him in and raised him as her own.