cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/30223092

Tibetans have worked to protect the Tibetan language and resisted efforts to enforce Mandarin Chinese. Yet, Tibetan children are losing their language through enrolment in state boarding schools where they are being educated nearly exclusively in Mandarin Chinese. Tibetan is typically only taught a few times a week – not enough to sustain the language.

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[Beijing's] Government policy forces all Tibetans to learn and use Mandarin Chinese. Those who speak only Tibetan have a harder time finding work and are faced with discrimination and even violence from the dominant Han ethnic group.

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Meanwhile, support for Tibetan language education has slowly been whittled away: the government even recently banned students from having private Tibetan lessons or tutors on their school holidays.

Linguistic minorities in Tibet all need to learn and use Mandarin. But many also need to learn Tibetan to communicate with other Tibetans: classmates, teachers, doctors, bureaucrats or bosses.

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The government refuses to provide any opportunities to use and learn minority languages like Manegacha. It also tolerates constant discrimination and violence against Manegacha speakers by other Tibetans.

These [Chinese] assimilationist state policies are causing linguistic diversity across Tibet to collapse. As these minority languages are lost, people’s mental and physical health suffers and their social connections and communal identities are destroyed.

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An advanced type of MRI uncovers significant lung abnormalities in children and adolescents with long COVID, according to a new study published today in Radiology, a journal of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA).

Good video showing how credit card culture basically makes poor people pay for rich people’s luxury.

Russian state-controlled and pro-Kremlin outlets try to divide opponents by spreading rumours, lies, and slander while engaging troll factories, AI bots, and the like. This type of behaviour is consistent with classic psychological warfare operations. These efforts are taking up more space in the information landscape as they are made cheaper by AI and social media platforms designed to keep people glued to the screen. For the untrained eye, some Kremlin narratives could be mistaken as just ‘interesting news’ or ‘a fresh and alternative opinion’. Messages often focus on sowing division in societies between governments and people or pitting groups inside countries against each other

The first ever community-funded Long COVID surveillance in Mozambique and Congo started in 2023 thanks to trailblazing researchers.   Outbreaks or intensifications of civil wars have scattered both study participants and clinicians, thus curtailing progress.

Poorer families are being denied millions of pounds in compensation from the NHS for maternity care failings compared with wealthier families, The Independent can reveal.

Families whose babies experience brain damage due to negligent maternity care can receive multimillion-pound payouts to cover costs relating to the child’s future care and accommodation, based on their medical need.

But a separate element covering the child’s predicted “loss of future earnings” is calculated on the basis of their family’s existing income and education levels, meaning that more affluent families get more cash.

Critics have condemned the system as “unfair”, highlighting the fact that it gives the least financial support to the families who “need it the most”, and have called for earnings payments to be linked to the average wage.