The release of M1-powered systems was warmly welcomed by the Mac community, thanks largely to the huge performance boost Apple silicon brings. For macOS purists, the move to M1 chips makes a great deal of sense, but for anyone used to running other operating system on their Macs, there were questions.
Running Windows 10 on M1 systems is possible thanks to the latest version of Parallels for Mac, but this is far from being the only virtualization software available -- people have been asking for some time what to expect from VMware Fusion. Now the company has revealed details of what to come; and while it's great news for Linux fans, it's not so great for Windows users.
It's been a while since I last played Veloren and it was a ton of fun when I played it last time, we didn't really make a ton of progress as I was fairly lost about what to do in the game but today we're going to go exploring and see what the world has to show us.
In addition to the Btrfs changes, EXT4, exFAT, and XFS are among the file-systems seeing noteworthy improvements with the in-development Linux 5.13.
The EXT4 file-system driver updates were merged today. One prominent feature there is allowing both casefolding and encryption to be enabled at the same time. EXT4 has supported both case-folding/case-insensitive file/folders as well as native encryption support, but not both at the same time, until now.
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Meanwhile the exFAT changes include faster write performance when using the "dirsync" option, improved look-up performance, FITRIM ioctl support, and a fix for the DISCARD option handling.
We are pleased to announce that the Lustre 2.14.0 Release has been declared GA and is available for download . You can also grab the source from git.
The Oracle Linux and Virtualization team congratulates AMD for the recently released AMD EPYCâ⢠7003 Series CPUs, which includes one of the most powerful server processor in the world, the EPYC 7763. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and AMD teams have worked together for several years to bring high-performance solutions, based on the 1st and 2nd Generation EPYC processors, to our mutual customers and we’re doing the same with the latest offerings from Oracle and AMD.
A Video 4 Linux 2 (V4L2) driver was added for the i.MX8 JPEG encoder/decoder. This allows accelerated JPEG encode/decode handling with the i.MX8QXP/QM SoCs. This "imx-jpeg" driver was developed at NXP and went through several rounds of reviews in prior months before being declared ready for mainlining. In fact, this i.MX JPEG driver has been going publicly through the mainlining steps all the way back to 2019.
Pidgin is a chat program which lets you log into accounts on multiple chat networks simultaneously. This means that you can be chatting with friends on XMPP and sitting in an IRC channel at the same time.
Pidgin is compatible with the following chat networks out of the box: Jabber/XMPP, Bonjour, Gadu-Gadu, IRC, Novell GroupWise Messenger, Lotus Sametime, SILC, SIMPLE, and Zephyr. It can support many more with plugins.
Pidgin supports many features of these chat networks, such as file transfers, away messages, buddy icons, custom smilies, and typing notifications. Numerous plugins also extend Pidgin's functionality above and beyond the standard features.
In this tutorial, we learn how to install Redis CLI on Ubuntu. This tutorial can be used in any version of Ubuntu including but not limited to Ubuntu 20.04/18.04/16.04.
Tor browser is a free and open-source anonymous communication tool. It usages the Tor volunteer overlay network to direct your internet traffic through various locations while applying many layers of encryption, virtually making you a complete ghost on the internet.
TOR is very popular among privacy concern individuals as it helps them to defend tracking, surveillance, and censorship.
For beginners, Tor can be tricky to install and set up which is why in this article, you will how to install the Tor browser in your favorite Linux distribution.
Tor browser is the most reliable and encrypted web browser for routing traffic and using the internet under a private network. Most people use the Tor browser to hide their digital footprint and identity. Tor can enter you inside the blocked or banned websites by your ISP or government. Using Tor is totally safe, and it doesn’t send your personal browsing data to the authority. Tor browser is compatible with Linux, Windows, and Android phones. By installing Tor on your system, you can keep your hidden, but as the IP visits through many unknown Tor servers before reaching the destination server, it might also make your connection slower.
For a self-paced introduction, the Lustre 101 web-based course series developed by the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory is a great place to start. These courses are targeted at experienced system administrators who are relatively new to Lustre.
The Lustre Manual is the most comprehensive source of information on how to set up, manage and test a Lustre file system. The Lustre Manual and other information can be found by going to the Documentation page.
We've more or less sorted out ordering physical hardware since last July, with stops and starts. But we're still significantly constrained on what we can order because it still can't be delivered to work. Only some things can be sensibly sent to people's homes and then only in mild quantities. Fortunately we're not in a situation where we have to buy hardware (or perhaps that's unfortunate).
And so I should begin this post by saying you are not me, and I can only offer my story; if you are considering switching systems or getting into a system as a new photographer, you have to figure out what features and properties are best for you.
If COVID-19 never happened, I'm almost 100% sure I'd have stuck with Nikon and slowly migrated to their full-frame Z system. But since it happened, and I don't do any stills photography except for family snapshots, controlled-lighting headshots, and macro studio shots anymore, I don't really need the features Nikon offers, and I'm willing to put up with the annoying things I hate about Sony's system for the video benefits it offers.
Let’s say you have set up a fully functional Centos 7 machine for your development work. You have installed development tools, Linux packages, build-essentials as part of your work. Down the line, you messed up something in your operating system by changing some important configuration and your OS is not booting up properly.
At this moment if you don’t have any backup to your machine then all your work is lost and you have to build the machine from scratch. This is where snapshots come in handy. Every virtualization software has the features of snapshots.
If your are going to Upgrade Ubuntu from 20.04 to 20.10 then this article is perfect for you. In this article we are going to show you how to upgrade Ubuntu from 20.04 to 20.10 ( Groovy Gorilla).
The new Ubuntu 20.10 is expected to be released on 22 October 2020 If you feel adventurous you can upgrade to Ubuntu 20.10 today. All you need is to have fully upgraded and updated Ubuntu 20.04 Focal Fossa and you can continue with the upgrade.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install SuiteCRM on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, SuiteCRM is one of the best open-source customer relationship management software solutions that provide a 360-degree view of your customers and business. It is a fork of the well-known open-source SugarCRM Community Edition.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step installation of SuiteCRM (Customer Relationship Management) on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
Nvidia DeepOps is a collection of scripts to configure Kubernetes and Kubeflow on CPU and GPU hosts. It comes with NFS as the default storage choice. This tutorial will demonstrate how to configure DeepOps to use Portworx by Pure Storage as the default storage engine for running the Kubeflow platform and the machine learning workloads.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MySQL on AlmaLinux 8. For those of you who didn’t know, MySQL is a relational database management system (RDBMS) that runs as a server providing multi-user access to a number of databases. The MySQL source code is freely available because it was originally developed by Oracle. MySQL is written in C and C++ and is compatible with all major operating systems. MySQL can be used for a variety of applications but is most commonly found on Web servers.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step installation of MySQL databases on an AlmaLinux 8.
OpenVPN is a feature-rich open-source Secure Socket Layer (SSL) VPN. VPN allows to securely connect untrusted networks such as WIFI network in hotels or airports or malls. VPN also allows a secure connection to the corporate network to access resources. The tunnels are secured by using SSL/TLS authentication, certificates, credentials.
In this tutorial, I will show you how to setup a VPN using OpenVPN on Ubuntu 20.04.
Xfdashboard is a nice optional application launcher and switcher for the Xfce desktop environment with a look and feel similar to the GNOME and macOS launchers. The latest release adds a new "recently used" search provider plugin, better window placement for the window overview and some code cleanups.
Xfdashboard can be a very nice addition to the Xfce desktop environment if you want a nice application launcher/switcher similar to what GNOME and macOS has. The latest release has a new "recently used" search provider plugin that will show the recently used files matching what you type into the launcher in addition to applications matching your search. It is enabled by default if you start xfdashboard for the first time, but this it's not enabled if you upgrade from a previous version. You will, in that case, have to start xfdashboard-settings and enable Plugins â⸠Recently used search provider.
April has been quite a slow month for Xfce app development, with new releases only for the Mousepad text editor, Xfdashboard application switcher and launcher, as well as the Xfce Settings Manager and Exo library.
But, on the other hand, we got new GNU/Linux distribution releases shipping with the latest Xfce 4.16 desktop environment pre-installed, including Xubuntu 21.04, Fedora Linux 34, and Calculate Linux 21, so you have a greater selection of distros offering Xfce.
This was another really really big week in KDE!
First we got support for hot-plugging GPUs and FreeSync/Adaptive Sync/variable screen refresh rates on Wayland in Plasma 5.22, thanks to Xaver Hugl!
Next, thanks to Aleix Pol, Gonzalez, we got a new Wayland protocol for tracking app activation and hand-off which will eventually allow KDE apps to display visual feedback when launching, and bring forward existing windows of already-open apps when asked to display new content!
And then there’s the rest of this cool stuff! See if you can count how many of your longstanding annoyances have been addressed below...
KDE developers certainly closed out April on a high note with some big ticket additions.
In closing out April some of the KDE development items crossed off the list included:
- KDE Plasma 5.22's Wayland session will now support GPU hot-plugging as well as handling FreeSync/Adaptive-Sync variable rate refresh functionality! This stems from a feature request since early 2019 for KDE/KWin to be able to support Adaptive-Sync under Wayland. Two very nice additions to look forward to with Plasma 5.22.
The upcoming release focuses a lot on UI and UX with some under the hood improvements.
Developers and testers, it’s the day you’ve been waiting for: elementary OS 6 Beta is available now! We first started talking publicly about elementary OS 6 in August of last year. In the time since, we’ve been hard at work tackling the ambitious scope of work we laid out for ourselves while also dealing with the fallout of a global pandemic, travel restrictions, and loss in our own circles of family and friends.
Despite all of that, we’re proud of the work we’ve done and are excited to get it into the hands of developers and testers as we work to complete the stable release.
Linux Lite and Lubuntu are two very popular lightweight Linux distros designed to breathe life into decade-old hardware. Both distros are designed to run on limited system resources yet deliver a fluid user experience for regular day-to-day activities. But how well do they fare against each other?
Well, in this read, we will be taking a comprehensive look at both distros, comparing their system requirements, performance, and user experience, so you can make up your mind and decide which distro you want for your system.
OpenBSD 6.9 is now available with a wide variety of improvements to better its hardware driver support as well as advancing its software capabilities in competing with other BSDs and operating systems at large. OpenBSD 6.9 most notably brings some preliminary support for Apple's ARM64 M1 SoC along with other modern hardware improvements.
We are pleased to announce the official release of OpenBSD 6.9. This is our 50th release. We remain proud of OpenBSD's record of more than twenty years with only two remote holes in the default install.
As in our previous releases, 6.9 provides significant improvements, including new features, in nearly all areas of the system: [...]
The OpenBSD project has released OpenBSD 6.9, the project's 50th release. As usual the release page offers highlights, installation and upgrade instructions as well as links to other resources such as the detailed changelog.
In my last week of high school in 1996, I quit my job at Carl's Jr. because I thought maybe without school, I'd have time to learn enough skills to get hired at a PC shop or something. I didn't know that I actually had incredibly marketable skills as a Linux sysadmin and C programmer, because I was the only tech person I'd ever known (except the people I chatted with on Undernet's #LinuxHelp channel).
I applied at a local company that had maybe the weirdest tech mission I've experienced: Its entire reason for existing was the general lack of industrial-sized QIC-80 tape-formatting machines. Those 80MB backup tapes (gargantuan at a time when 200MB hard disks were huge) were usually formatted at the factory as they came off the line, or you could buy them already formatted at a significantly higher price.
One of the people who developed that line at 3M noticed that formatting them took an hour—over 90% of their time in manufacturing. The machine developed to speed up formatting was, of course, buggy and years too late.
[...]
That "real tech job" I got was as a junior sysadmin for a local medical device manufacturer. I helped bridge their HP-UX ERP system to their new parent company's Windows NT printers using Linux and Samba—and I was hooked forever on the power of free and open source software (FOSS).
Here’s your weekly Fedora report. Read what happened this week and what’s coming up. Your contributions are welcome (see the end of the post)!
Fedora Linux 34 was released on Tuesday. Fedora Linux 32 will reach end of life on Tuesday 25 May.
Join us tomorrow for day two of the Fedora Linux 34 Release Party
rpminspect 1.5 is now available. There are several new features in this along with the usual round of bug fixes.
The biggest improvement in this release comes in the form of per-inspection ignore lists in the configuration file. rpminspect runs in Fedora CI for successful builds and I have been working with package maintainers on creating rpminspect.yaml files in pkg-git that help further control how rpminspect runs for your build. With per-inspection ignore lists, you can list individual files and paths using standard glob(7) syntax that you want an individual inspection to ignore. This gives more control than simply disabling the inspection or adding the file to the global ignore list. See the /usr/share/rpminspect/generic.yaml configuration file for documentation on how to use per-inspection ignore lists.
The other big change I wanted to point out is being able to set size_threshold to info in the filesize inspection. For Fedora this inspection does not really offer a lot of advantage. It is really meant more for downstream distributions like CentOS and RHEL. Still, some package maintainers want to see overall file growth changes but not have those trigger failures. By setting size_threshold to info you will get all of the findings, but all reported at the INFO level in the results.
The Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation (RESF) is pleased to announce the general availability of the Rocky Linux 8.3 Release Candidate 1 for x86_64 and aarch64 architectures.
The first release candidate of Rocky Linux 8.3 is out, the project's inaugural release as a new binary-compatible alternative to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).
Rocky Linux is one of the Linux distributions born out of last year's announcement that CentOS 8 development would be discontinued at the end of this year in focusing on CentOS Stream. Rocky Linux is notable in that the original CentOS founder Gregory Kurtzer is backing the Rocky Linux effort that is aligned with the original CentOS goals.
Yesterday morning I got a warning call from the Debian quality control system that the VLC bittorrent plugin was due to be removed because of a release critical bug in one of its dependencies. As you might remember, this plugin make VLC able to stream videos directly from a bittorrent source using both torrent files and magnet links, similar to using a HTTP source. I believe such protocol support is a vital feature in VLC, allowing efficient streaming from sources such at the almost 7 million movies in the Internet Archive.
The dependency was the unmaintained libtorrent-rasterbar package, and the bug in question blocked its python library from working properly. As I did not want Bullseye to release without bittorrent support in VLC, I set out to check out the status, and track down a fix for the problem. Luckily the issue had already been identified and fixed upstream, providing everything needed. All I needed to do was to fetch the Debian git repository, extract and trim the patch from upstream and apply it to the Debian package for upload.
Interviewed the Ford Foundation's Michael Brennan and published the transcript on our website.
This month I didn't have any particular focus. I just worked on issues in my info bubble.
There is an effort to build friendly, mobile, and open Qt based user interface since Meego Harmatan and Nokia N9 was widely used. The Jolla Ltd. did pretty nice job with Sailfish OS in the past. I am still using Jolla 1, which now reached its EOL. Its time to look on new options. My hacker’s heart belongs to open source. I am lucky that there is a nemomobile project for me.
The system was originally based on mer-project which was derivative of Intel’s MeeGo and Nokia MeeGo. At the time of introduction, it has very advanced features such as wayland or systemd. Currently, it is sticking with old version packages especially old Qt. Therefore nemo decided to move somewhere else.
First step was switch to Fedora. It showed up that Fedora have to new packages and to fast development. For instance the package tut is relying on python based builder called waf, which is not working with python 3.7. I was considering preparing COPR repository, but my progress was rather slow to reach dream goal. Second step was going to Manjaro Linux which is derivative of Arch Linux.
Sergey has prepared packages for x86_64 and aarch64 and rootfs image for PinePhone. The status is between alpha version and something before alpha version. It just boots into UI and shows the desktop. Even image gallery doesn’t work.
PureTryOut is working on postmarketOS port. Currently it is master branch so anyone can try it. The images for Pine Phone are available as well. The postmarketOS already have some apps for phones, but there will be definitely a lot of work with adaption both glacier and underlying operating system.
The Allwinner quad-core single-board computer features an ARM Cortex A7 quad-core processor, ARM Mali400MP2 GPU that supports the OpenGL ES2.0 and OpenVG 1.1 standards, 512 MB or 1 GB DDR3 memory, and 8G EMMC memory chip.
Interface options include 10/100M RJ45 Ethernet, 2x USB 2.0, HDMI, 24-pin 0.5 mm pitch FPC interface for on-board CSI camera, 2.54 mm 2*20 Pin GPIO header compatible with Raspberry Pi. The board also features a WiFi transmission chip and on board 4.5*2.2 mm microphone.
There’s a global chip shortage affecting a wide range of industries including personal computers automobiles, and niche devices like the Precursor, and Pocket P.C. handheld computing devices and the Analogue Pocket handheld game system.
The latest fallout? Purism is pausing shipments of its Librem 5 Linux smartphone until this fall, and customers who place new orders this summer will have to pay more for the phone.
Every manufacturer has a supply chain, down to the raw materials suppliers whose supply chain is the earth itself. Links within the supply chain can (with difficulty) be swapped out for similar suppliers but each link in the chain and who controls that link is important. Over the course of the last twenty years the method of holding swaths of inventory (which is equivalent to cash value sitting on shelves) began dwindling in favor of just-in-time manufacturing, and the more reliable the suppliers in a supply chain on delivering just-in-time the less desire to hold inventory (also called safety stock).
Manufacturing in the technology sector has some additional churn to dissuade holding parts stock in high quantities, parts like an I.MX8M Quad rev AA, are devalued when they’re deprecated in favor of the improvements created by rev AB. This high-churn in technology reinforces the just-in-time nature of manufacturing and acts like a heavy, metal ball on that chain that restricts your movement.
Bicycle theft is, unfortunately, a very common problem. Most bicycle locks are easy to overcome, which makes bike theft a crime of opportunity. Recovering a stolen one is usually improbable, but this DIY GPS tracker could provide the help that you need.
The GPS tracker, designed by Johan, is like Lojack for your bicycle. If the device detects that the bike has moved, it will send a text message and start tracking the GPS location. It will periodically send an update with the current location, so you can track down your stolen bike (with the help of the police).
If you’ve been using LibreOffice for a while, you may be wondering: who makes it? Well, the answer is: people like you! LibreOffice is a worldwide, community open source project – and many people who help to improve it, actually started out as regular users of the software.
Welcome to the latest monthly overview of events from the Apache community.
FireFly III is released under AGPL-3.0 license.
The top three schools participating in the program include Earlham, Marian University, and Goshen College. All are private colleges that cost more than $40,000 in tuition, room, and board a year, before financial aid. They all estimate that students will spend more than $1,000 on books each year.
The division instruction is one of the most expensive instruction in your CPU. Thus optimizing compilers often compile divisions by known constants down to a multiplication followed by a shift. However, in some lucky cases, the compiler does not even need a shift. I call the corresponding divisors ideal. For the math. geeks, they are related to Fermat numbers.
For 32-bit unsigned integers, we have two such divisors (641 and 6700417). For 64-bit unsigned integers, we have two different ones (274177 and 67280421310721). They are factors for 232 + 1 and 264 + 1 respectively. They are prime numbers.
This had to be a decent release announcement with a little bit of bragging about the new features in Test::Async. But it wouldn’t be me unless I screw up in a way. Apparently, this time a have a little story to tell. But first, the announce itself.
UTC is the standard of time used all around the world to regulate clocks. It is effectively the "center" of our timekeeping, with all time zones referenced in relation to how far ahead of, or far behind, UTC they are.
The full name for UTC is Coordinated Universal Time, and its initialism was reached as a compromise. English speakers wanted to use CUT (for "Coordinated Universal Time"), while French speakers advocated for TUC (short for "temps universel coordonné"). Ultimately, UTC was chosen.
The signs of the times were clear. Four days earlier reactor number four at Chernobyl, Ukraine, broke into an uncontrolled nuclear chain reaction, initiating days of radioactive isotopes of caesium, strontium and iodine which were wind carried across Europe menacing water, fauna, and flora. Four days later on May Day itself in 1986 1.6 million workers in South Africa, under a new organization, Congress of South African Trade Unions, embarked on a general strike called a “stay away.” This massive show of force did not end apartheid at once, but it started it. The people’s toi toi dance had begun.
What did we make of those signs of the times, the mortalities inherent in constant capital (the machine), the possibility of liberation in variable capital (the people)? Thirty-five years later amidst plague, flood, fire, and extinctions conditions are dire.
The African continent has in recent years produced a gold rush of basketball talent and genius. Players such as Joel Embiid and Pascal Siakam—both from Cameroon—have made MVP and championship level impacts, with a wave of young African players waiting in the wings. To further facilitate this development of untapped potential, the NBA is launching the long-discussed Basketball African League with great fanfare, in Kigali, Rwanda, on May 16.
It took less than a week for the European soccer Super League to wither and die on the vine. Organized behind closed doors by a cadre of ultra-wealthy club owners and their obliging executive teams, the breakaway league sought to rattle European soccer’s existing social and economic order through a permanent alliance of the continent’s most moneyed clubs.
That all changed in the late 1960s. A combination of stepped-up attacks by Loyalists on Irish neighborhoods and greater repression of those communities combined with a renewed desire to end British rule in the six northern counties led to an intensification of the struggle. This period would become known internationally as “the Troubles.” It would bring about an intensification of the armed struggle, an occupation of northern Ireland by the British military, and the development of a powerful political wing of the Irish republican cause. The toll would be great, with the bulk of it being paid by those who supported the Republican cause in the cities of northern Ireland. Despite this fact, reading the mainstream media at the time could easily convince the reader that it was the British who suffered the most.
This misconception was furthered by the spectacular attacks pulled off by the IRA in England. Of those attacks, the two that stand out the most in this writer’s mind were the assassination of Lord Mountbatten in August of 1979 and the bombing of a Conservative Party meeting at the Grand Brighton Hotel in October of 1984. It is widely assumed that the target of that blast was Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. She escaped the blast, but other members of the party were killed. Among them was Sir Anthony Berry, who was a sitting member of Parliament at the time.
For an emancipatory project to be successful, we must be more critical of supposedly politically neutral endeavors and of the political concepts which we embrace. One key to understanding the value Foucault provides to these pursuits lies in his conception of “justice,” which was recently criticized by Ben Burgis on his show Give Them and Argument. In the famous debate between Noam Chomsky and Foucault, one of the disagreements that takes place is whether the working-class wages war or fights in the name of justice. Chomsky is dismayed by Foucault’s insistence that what is in the interest of the proletariat is not justice. Burgis defends Chomsky’s argument by insisting that there must be some grounding or ideal to one’s struggle. He, therefore, charges Foucault with being incoherent on this point and therefore problematic for Marxist politics if his line of thinking is taken up by the Left.
In actuality, Foucault is more faithful to Marx than many Marxists realize. When one wages war, it is often said that they do so in the name of justice; they want to end a state of injustice. But a concept of justice already exists in capitalism, and it is virtually hegemonic. As Marx said in The German Ideology, “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.” What he means is that the ideas which regulate a given society exist co-dependently with the given upper-class. Without them, there could be no upper-class as these concepts justify their position in society. For example, John Locke’s concept of private property as something one has a right to by the labor one puts into creating or improving an object was the necessary culmination of a change in material circumstances leading to the closure of the commons in England and the creation of a mass of people in need of means of subsistence. This ultimately helped lead to the establishment of the capitalist class.
Before leaving the Brest Fortress (on the Belarus-Polish border) I inspected various museums and monuments from the Second World War, when again the fortress was a bastion fought over by Russians and Germans.
For the museum directors, that narrative is much easier to display than the 1918 capitulations of Brest-Litovsk, as there are only heroic Russian soldiers of the people’s Red Army and wicked Nazis—although explanation about the 1939 partitioning of Poland requires some mental gymnastics.
The documentary came as a revelation, a provocation to examine my inner elitism. The janitors’ eloquence and thoughtfulness—as well as the fact that some of them had actively chosen their jobs, responding to a vocation for custodianship rather than the desire to escape the pressure of economic exigency—took me by surprise. That one of the janitors, a young man in his thirties, was an artist in his spare time, with aspirations to convert his artistry from a hobby into something serious, also struck me. If my reactions had been consistent with my intellectual positions, I shouldn’t have felt startled in the slightest: I don’t believe that a person’s job has any necessary connection to her intelligence, dignity, or capacity to create beauty or respond thoughtfully to the world around us. And although I have certain reservations about the importance of “hard work”—we should try to automate unpleasant labor—I do believe that all labor that is performed with a prosocial purpose has value. My reaction betrayed the previously hidden existence of unexamined preconceptions, clogging my mind and belying my political commitment to treating people equally.
We commonly cling to philosophical principles and political beliefs when they’re safely abstract, removed from situations which would force us to act, to take a risk or incur a cost for what we believe in. All too often, we fail to scrutinize whether our daily practices agree with the opinions which we profess to uphold. Paying lip service to equality is easy. Putting that commitment into practice is more difficult, especially when one’s failures to respect people manifest subtly and semiconsciously, or only in one’s own mind, where it’s easy to turn a blind eye.
Actor Martin Sheen opens the film with an impassioned introduction. Garry Davis, he says, is “an actor, a song and dance man, who lept off the Broadway stage onto a world stage in 1948.” We see clips from his life as Sheen describes Davis “taking on cops, bodyguards, armies and whole nations, showing us that we don’t have to accept a world ravaged by war, plunging into environmental disaster.”
Sheen then beckons a spry 91-year-old Davis onto a stage before a cheering crowd in Burlington, Vermont.
Under the Excise Duty Amendment Bill, 2021, that was endorsed by Parliament, Internet users will have to dig deep into their pockets to pay a 12 per cent levy on Internet bundles, even after the tax proposal was rejected by human rights’ defenders and the Opposition.
The critics of the tax argued that it would curtail freedom of information on the Internet. The law replaces the widely-criticised Over-The –Top (OTT) tax for social media access.
Mahti has a total of 1404 CPU nodes and 24 GPU nodes. The theoretical peak performance is 7,5 petaflops for the CPU nodes and 2,0 petaflops for the GPU nodes, in total 9,5 petaflops.
Puhti has a total of 682 CPU nodes, with a theoretical peak performance of 1,8 petaflops. Each node is equipped with two Intel Xeon processors, code name Cascade Lake, with 20 cores each running at 2,1 GHz. The cores support AVX-512 vector instructions and VNNI instructions for AI inference workloads. The interconnect is based on Mellanox HDR InfiniBand. The nodes are connected with a 100 Gbps HDR100 link, and the topology is a fat tree with a blocking factor of approximately 2:1.
Following Zac's death, in December 2015, his family formed a charity called CTE Hope, committed to raising awareness as well as searching for a way to diagnose it in the living. His CTE diagnosis was confirmed five months after his death by Bennet Omalu, the same pathologist who'd studied Mike Webster's brain and campaigned so hard for the condition to be recognized.
American football was noted as a potential cause.
By now, Brenda had read the Harvard study that showed the average professional American football player had a life expectancy 20 years short of the national average.
She'd seen the findings of a study by the University of Michigan that found retired football players had 20 times the normal rate of Alzheimer's disease for men aged 30 to 49.
For Brenda, it all amounted the same thing: the message left to her by Zac for the world was not only simple but vital to spread: A concussion is a traumatic brain injury.
I recently listened to a fascinating podcast where NY Times columnist Ezra Klein interviewed Berkeley psychologist Aliston Gopney. Professor Gopney is best known for her research in cognitive science, particularly the study of children’s learning and development. She’s written extensively on the developmental phases of the human brain from babies to adults.
Gopnik, a member of the Berkeley AI Research group, has also been exploring the differences between human and machine intelligence, more specifically, what babies can teach us about AI. She’s long argued that babies and young children are smarter than we might think. In some ways, they’re even smarter than adults, let alone way smarter than the most advanced AIs.
[...]
From an evolutionary biology point of view, children and adults are almost two different creatures. The former have evolved to explore, learn, and change through their long period of childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood, while the latter have evolved to exploit their accumulated knowledge, make plans, find resources, and nurture the young.
“Babies are captivated by the most unexpected events,” wrote Gopnik in a 2009 NY Times article. “Adults focus on objects that will be most useful to them. But … children play with the objects that will teach them the most. … Each kind of intelligence has benefits and drawbacks. Focus and planning get you to your goal more quickly but may also lock in what you already know, closing you off to alternative possibilities. We need both blue-sky speculation and hard-nosed planning.”
“Part of the explanation for these differing approaches can be found in the brain. The young brain is remarkably plastic and flexible. Brains work because neurons are connected to one another, allowing them to communicate. Baby brains have many more neural connections than adult brains. But they are much less efficient. Over time, we prune away the connections we don’t use, and the remaining ones become faster and more automatic. Moreover, the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that controls the directed, planned, focused kind of intelligence, is exceptionally late to mature, and may not take its final shape until our early 20s.”
I have much the same reaction to the “College for All Act of 2021,” sponsored by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA).€ The Act calls for free education for working families through the elimination of tuition and fees, expanding Pell grants to cover student living expenses, among other programs.€ But the Act, like the Olympic College strategic plan, regards the situation of our country’s non-tenure-track faculty as being pretty much OK as is.
While promoted as offering “a clear path into economic security and the American middle class,” the College for All Act does not extend that goal to our country’s 1.5 million professors who are “contingent” faculty teaching off the tenure track; in fact, the Act seems to be leveraged on the backs of these non-tenured instructors, who are commonly compensated at a significantly discounted rate of pay, such as 60 percent of the lowest ranking tenured instructor; are often barred from working full-time; and, unlike tenured instructors, are often denied incremental pay step increases for their length of service and/or professional development.€ As a result, many earn poverty-level wages—some consider themselves employed by academic sweatshops.€ In my case, for teaching 28+ years at roughly half-time at Olympic College, my annual earnings were about $20,000 in a county where the median income is $82,000.
Among the familiar critiques of philanthropy are that wealthy donors are mostly looking for flattery and control and use their largesse to accentuate their corrosive power over society rather than to humbly relinquish some of it. That is seen as especially true when it comes to higher education: rather than helping those most in need, billionaires typically slip their strategic benefactions into the bank accounts of the academy’s elite.
“The super wealthy in America send billions of dollars each year to the most prestigious institutions of higher education in the nation and the world – and receive large tax deductions for their efforts,” says Robert Reich, Carmel P. Friesen’s professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley and a former US secretary of labour. “The consequence is to exacerbate inequalities.”
For many, the net costs of a culture of philanthropy accumulate when it is considered against an alternative system of more progressive taxation and greater public-led investment. “The biggest threat to public higher education in the US,” says Cecilia Conrad, a managing director at the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, “is the decline in public funding and support.”
In the latest report of April 27, there have been 323,144 fresh cases. In a span of 24 hours, 2,771 people have died. Many could have been saved.
People are dying outside hospitals because there are no beds available. A big private hospital known for its celebrity patients has transformed its lobby into a Covid ward. In other hospitals patients are sharing beds; some are getting oxygen while lying down on the floor or even in an autorickshaw parked outside. These are the lucky few. Many are still begging for help.
President Joe Biden’s American Jobs Plan seeks to revitalize manufacturing and decarbonize the atmosphere. But one of its most vital elements is how it would transform the care economy. The state has always shaped how care is provided, but in this country the sector has been malformed since its creation. Biden’s proposal, following decades of work by activists and academics, would establish new preschools, build day cares, and fund the care of the elderly and disabled, but it also goes beyond that: It would fundamentally restructure care work in America.
After a dramatic and emotional 72 hours, Florida lawmakers late Thursday approved a sweeping overhaul of the state’s controversial compensation program for catastrophically brain-damaged newborns — agreeing to a package of reforms meant to improve the lives of struggling families.
The legislation revamping the Birth-Related Neurological Injury Compensation Association, or NICA, delivers new benefits and protections for 215 families in the program, including mental health services, representation on the board of directors and retroactive compensation of $150,000.
As the U.S. rushes to vaccinate its population against the coronavirus, most counties with the sickest residents are lagging behind and making only incremental progress reaching their most vulnerable populations.
A ProPublica analysis of county data maintained by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that early attempts to prioritize people with chronic illnesses like heart disease, diabetes and obesity have faltered. At the same time, healthier — and often wealthier — counties moved faster in vaccinating residents, especially those 65 and older. (Seniors are a more reliable measure of vaccination progress than younger adults, who are less likely to have been eligible long enough to receive their second shots.) Counties with high levels of chronic illnesses or “comorbidities” had, on average, immunized 57% of their seniors by April 25, compared to 65% of seniors in counties with the lowest comorbidity risk.
How the migrant women farmworkers who put food on our tables are organizing for a better life after the pandemic.€
Starting from the UK on December 8, 2020, vaccination has been undertaken by several countries like in the US, France, Germany, Russia, India, Cambodia, Pakistan, Rwanda, Senegal, Ghana, Brazil, Peru etc.€ Vaccines have been procured through domestic production, importing from the producing countries or receiving through aid. According to€ Bloomberg, more than 1 billion doses of vaccines have been administered in 172 countries till April 25. Currently about 6.8 percent of the global population have been fully vaccinated and the latest per day rate of vaccination is 19.2 million doses per day (Bloomberg). The UK, US, China, US, Germany and Belgium, India, UK and Russia, are some of the€ major vaccine producing countries.
Inequality in vaccination
Ten years after a trip by a documentary team assembled by Global Justice Ecology Project (GJEP) to the Lacandon Jungle of Chiapas, Mexico, GJEP is highlighting the resulting film and releasing a new interview with one of the photojournalists that travelled to the region to document the threatened relocation of the Indigenous people of Amador Hernandez. That trip created much of the content for€ A Darker Shade of Green – REDD Alert and the Future of Forests.€ The ground-breaking video explores global indigenous resistance to a program promoted by the United Nations and the World Bank to use carbon offsets to allow corporations to continue to pollute while transferring the burden to Indigenous people and rural communities.
This comes at a time when green capitalism and techno-fixes loom large on the horizon heading into the upcoming UN Climate Conference in Glasgow this October. The story of Amador Hernandez that was featured in A Darker Shade of Green serves as an example of how the commodification of life and the placing of a price on ecosystems fails to address the root causes of the current climate crisis, and further threatens Indigenous peoples who are already often suffering most from climate change.
"This is what€ happens when you opt for investing in working people over trickle-down economics."
"Millions of lives around the world are at stake."
"It's almost insane to think that we would have to fight for these obvious steps," says Sanders. "But we must."
This, Mason argued, has led to a decline of bumblebees in Denmark. She asked the agency why it had used “fraudulent science” on glyphosate from the European Commission and the European Chemicals Agency, which in turn take their ‘science’ from Monsanto/Bayer, rather than from the direct observations of The Danish Nature Agency.
Mason’s correspondence focused not only on the destructive environmental impacts of glyphosate but also on the devastating human health aspects.
“It was ten months ago, and I still think about him every day,” said Jenifer Enamorado Ayala, recalling her brother’s preventable fall that ended his life at age 16. She is one of the family members and co-workers remembering those who lost their lives on the job for Workers’ Memorial Week – April 24 – May 3, 2021.
“We’re fighting now to make everyone’s job safer, so no other family has to suffer this kind of tragedy,” said Enamorado Ayala, joining Workers’ Dignity in Nashville to reform the city’s building code.
The children’s physiology was normal, and their psychology was inaccessible; they were hardly able to fill out Rorschach tests or talk about their past. It was their unique social circumstances that gave clues into their condition. All of the children were refugees, and they had gone to bed during the long process of applying for asylum. When they fell asleep, they were facing deportation to countries they scarcely remembered, where their families had suffered severe trauma.
Democracy and rights advocate Reset Australia set up test advertising campaigns to examine Facebook’s reach of young audiences and how it compares to what is on offer with adult audiences.
The group says they found little difference, with Facebook giving them the option to target users as young as 13 based on their ‘interest’ in things like smoking, gambling, alcohol or extreme weight loss.
Due to an issue with QuickBooks processing direct deposits, some people had a very unpleasant morning, waking up to see either that their paycheck hadn’t arrived, or that they had a ton of employees asking why they hadn’t been paid. If you’re one of those people, it may not be time to panic just yet — QuickBooks says that the issue has been resolved and that the money should be arriving in accounts by the end of today.
QuickBooks claims the missed payments were caused by an issue with a third party. Some users, though, are upset with how Intuit, which owns QuickBooks, handled the situation, claiming that they couldn’t get a hold of the company on their phone or chat lines.
Recently, a paper was released by the University of Minnesota written by Qiushi Wu and Kanhjie Lu titled “On the Feasibility of Stealthily Introducing Vulnerabilities in Open-Source Software via Hypocrite Commits”. The paper describes how the two researchers could generate code that claims to fix one bug in the Linux kernel while intentionally introducing other bugs. The Linux kernel is open-source, and as such, can be accessed by the wider community, and anyone can suggest changes to the code via submissions.
According to the research paper, the various code submissions were able to pass the approval process and integrated into the final kernel distributions. The goal of the research paper was to demonstrate vulnerabilities in open-source software, and how the approval process may need to be reconsidered. In the paper, the researchers identify multiple problems that open source projects such as the Linux kernel faces including the complexity of the source and the inability of maintainers to understand the system.
The past month was quite exciting in the Linux/open-source world with Linux 5.12 having been released and 5.13 off to a great start, shiny new hardware for benchmarking, and also the drama around the FSF and UMN's "hypocrite commits" research.
Research must be closely aligned with the direction of the open source community or it risks becoming irrelevant, a senior Red Hat exec has claimed in light of the University of Minnesota controversy.
Researchers at the University of Minnesota were excoriated by senior Linux moderators last week after being caught attempting to embed the Linux kernel with inconsequential patches and vulnerabilities.
Since we launched our first certification exam in August of 2014, all Linux Foundation performance-based certification exams have been priced at $300. To address the rise in costs associated with administering these exams, we will be implementing a modest price increase effective July 1, 2021.
Microsoft GitHub has published drafts for two new sets of rules that will affect all GitHub users come June 1st, 2021.
One deals with DMCA complaints about software that could be used to circumvent Digital Restrictions Management measures that restrict fair use of works protected by copyright. The draft for the new DMCA enforcement policy, titled "DMCA policy updates #395", refers to US Copyright law section 1201. That law lays out how American corporations can unjustly restrict how American citizens can use copies of copyrighted works they bought and paid for. GitHub is a subsidiary of the American Microsoft corporation, which is why GitHub is imposing this law on the entire world.
GitHub has been censoring a wide range of emulation tools and software for quite some time. The "new" DMCA will therefore not have any larger practical implications, it merely puts the existing unwritten policy in writing.
The other new rule-set GitHub is about to impose will have some slightly more tangible effects. GitHub has published a "draft" with new rules around security research titled "Exploits and malware policy updates #397". It comes as partly as a response to widespread criticism following Microsoft GitHub's removal of a exploit for the Microsoft Exchange server software. Critics pointed out that similar exploit code for competing products had not been taken down in the past.
[...]
This is a interestingly worded rule because there is a whole lot of different code that could be used to install other code from outside of GitHub. Common and on their own perfectly innocent pieces of software like curl and wget would be in violation of this policy if they are deemed to be used to fetch exploit code as part of some ongoing attack. Hashcat, everything with a http client and variety of general software could fall afoul of this policy.
[...]
There are several free software web front ends you can download and install on your own server if you object to any of GitHub's new or existing terms, and that is the only meaningful form of "feedback" you can give them. GitHub is not merely proposing new rules in order to have a discussion, it is simply announcing a new policy that will take effect as-is come June 1st, 2021.
Spectre is one in a list of critical vulnerabilities in modern processors that was discovered over the last few years, and it seems it's not been solved yet. Despite new hardware designs, and updates to the Linux Kernel and more to defend against the issues, researchers at University of Virginia School of Engineering claim to have a new discovery that could have a huge impact.
Affecting both AMD and Intel, in a post titled "Defenseless", UVA Engineering say we will "have to go back to the drawing board" when it comes to defending against it as they've "uncovered a line of attack that breaks all Spectre defenses, meaning that billions of computers and other devices across the globe are just as vulnerable today as they were when Spectre was first announced".
University of Virginia and University of California San Diego researchers have discovered multiple new variants of Spectre attacks that are not protected by existing Spectre mitigations and could yield both Intel and AMD CPUs leaking data via micro-op caches.
This week the Virginia and California academic researchers went public with their discoveries on exploiting the micro-op cache of modern Intel and AMD processors for beating existing Spectre defenses. Both Intel and AMD were informed in advance of these two variants (or their whitepaper lays it out as three) that allow speculatively stealing information from the system.
Apple announced this feature last year, and since then the lobbying against it has been intense. In particular Facebook, one of the worst offenders when it comes to gathering and selling access to detailed profiles of people – including those who haven’t set up Facebook accounts – has been trying to paint this move as an attack on personalized ads, and therefore an attack on small businesses. Here’s Facebook’s sob story:
The agencies EMSA and Frontex have spent more than €300 million on drone services since 2016. The Mediterranean in particular is becoming a testing track for further projects.
Summary: Craigslist -- the online marketplace that pretty much still looks the way it looked when it went live all the way back in 1995 -- has the same problems every online marketplace has: spammers and scammers.
China said thirty-three applications, including map navigation software provided by Baidu Inc. and Tencent Holdings Ltd., violated regulations, with most collecting personal information that weren’t relevant to their services.
The operators of the apps were asked to rectify the issues within 10 working days or be subject to penalties, the Cyberspace Administration of China said in a statement, without elaborating. Authorities had carried out recent checks into apps that were widely used, the agency said.
ââ¬Å¾This unprecedented deal means all of our private e-mails and messages will be subjected to privatised real-time mass surveillance using error-prone incrimination machines inflicting devastating collateral damage on users, children and victims alike. Countless innocent citizens will come under false suspicion of having committed a crime, under-agers will see self-generated nudes (sexting) fall in wrong hands, abuse victims will loose safe channels for counselling. This agreement sets a terrible precedent and is a result of a campaign of disinformation and moral blackmailing. Unleashing such denunciation machines is ineffective, illegal and irresponsible. It’s using totalitarian methods in a democracy.”
After Faïd's helicopter breakout, 3,000 police officers took part in the manhunt. According to the 2019 documentary La Traque de Rédoine Faïd, detective units scoured records of cell phones used during his escape, isolating a handful of numbers active at the time that went silent shortly thereafter. Each of these ultimately led back to Faïd's hometown of Creil. The orange Hugo Boss T-shirt and the power cutter turned up in a bag left in the woods; a hunter identified Faïd's nephew Isaac as the figure he'd seen discarding them, according to Paris attorney general François Molins.
Earlier this week Roku took the dispute with Google public, warning that the tech giant wanted to manipulate search results, and force the company to use chips that could raise the cost of its hardware. "It’s not about money," a Roku source said at the time. "We are not asking for any more money, not a single dollar more in value."
YouTube, for its part, called the Roku claims "baseless" and said that they "have made no requests to access user data or interfere with search results."
English soccer teams and organizations are all shutting down their Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram accounts for the weekend as part of a massive social media blackout to advocate for better policies regarding discrimination and abuse that players and members of clubs receive on those platforms.
Smart cities are using technology and smart solutions to make urban tasks more efficient and better, conserve resources, and improve their residents’ quality of life.
When President Joe Biden announced in February that he was ending US support for “offensive operations in the war in Yemen, including relevant arms sales,” Aisha Jumaan, president of the Yemen Relief and Reconstruction Foundation, phoned her colleagues in Yemen. “I was calling them to say, ‘There is a light at the end of the tunnel,’” said Jumaan, who is Yemeni American.
More than 1,000 kilometers north of Kashgar is the town of Nur-Sultan, previously known as Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan. Here, in 2013, Chinese President Xi Jinping spoke about the need for a “Silk Road Economic Belt.” This Belt would include trade deals and transportation networks, cultural interactions and political connections. The project would become the One Belt, One Road initiative, which is now known as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). China’s National Development and Reform Commission released a report in March 2015 that planned for six economic corridors, which would be funded by more than $155 billion from the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the Silk Road Fund. Since then, many of these corridors, which run from China into Central Asia and also down through Pakistan and Afghanistan, have been completed. In December 2020, a goods train traveled from Istanbul, Turkey, to Xi’an, China, covering 8,693 kilometers of this new Silk Road. The train carried Turkish appliances, which were meant for the Chinese market.
Accusations by the United States government and its allies about genocide and forced labor in Xinjiang have brought China’s westernmost province into the gaze of the international media. This approach toward Xinjiang defines the information war prosecuted by Washington. In our conversations with Professor Li Bo and Professor Wang Yiwei, director of the Institute of International Affairs at Renmin University, as well as intellectuals from Kashgar and ÃÅrümqi (Xinjiang’s capital), we developed a storyline that includes the dynamics of Xinjiang’s social development, the threats of extremism, and the enfolding of its problems into the wider hybrid war unleashed against China.
A major new report by Human Rights Watch says for the first time that Israel is committing crimes of apartheid and persecution in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. The international human rights group says Israeli authorities dispossessed, confined and forcibly separated Palestinians. “For years, prominent voices have warned that apartheid lurked just around the corner. But it’s very clear that that threshold has been crossed,” says Omar Shakir, Israel and Palestine director at Human Rights Watch. “It’s time for the international community to recognize the reality on the ground for what it is — apartheid and persecution — and take the steps necessary to end a situation of this gravity.”
I was the littlest of boys at the time. More than three-quarters of a century has passed since, on September 2, 1945, Japanese Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu and General Yoshijiro Umezu signed the Instrument of Surrender on the battleship U.S.S. Missouri in Tokyo Bay, officially ending World War II. That was V-J (for Victory over Japan) Day, but in a sense for me, my whole generation, and this country, war never really ended.
The United States has been at war, or at least in armed conflicts of various sorts, often in distant lands, for more or less my entire life. Yes, for some of those years, that war was “cold” (which often meant that such carnage, regularly sponsored by the CIA, happened largely off-screen and out of sight), but war as a way of life never really ended, not to this very moment.
"This was incredibly obvious at the time, but it's shocking to see the details," said one U.S. journalist and author.€
The outcome of this wish is always vicarious: others die so that bureaucrats may shuffle papers, consult minutes and scoff the scotch.€ This is then justified on the basis that sacrifices are necessary to defend that indefinable property called freedom.
The Secretary’s ANZAC Day message to his staff was stocked with the usual rhetorical trinkets of the barely closeted warmonger.€ “Today, as free nations again hear the beating drums and watch worryingly the militarisation of issues that we had, until recent years, thought unlikely to be catalysts for war, let us continue to search unceasingly for the chance for peace while bracing again, yet again, for the curse of war”.
Truman, who signed the CIA into existence just after World War II,€ wrote, “I think it has become necessary to take another look at the purpose and operations of our Central Intelligence Agency—the CIA. […] For some time I have been disturbed by the way the CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the Government. This has led to trouble and may have compounded our difficulties in several explosive areas. …There is something about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic position and I feel that we need to correct it.”
Not only did that adorn the pages of the€ Washington Post€ one month after JFK’s death, Truman hand wrote the first draft just one€ week€ after JFK met up with a bunch of bullets in Dallas. Sure, one may wish Harry had sent his thoughts to John a month€ before€ the President’s televised execution. Maybe he could’ve sent a singing telegram or something. But let’s at least give Truman partial credit for the belated message.
Aggression, in international politics, is commonly defined as the use of armed force against another sovereign state, not justified by self-defense or international authority. Any state being described as aggressive in foreign or international reporting, therefore, is almost by definition in the wrong.
And now you say it’s over? Poof! Just like that. With a wave of Lady Liberties extinguished torch, with a wave of Joe Biden’s bony finger, this is how it ends? With that sad broken old fool of a death merchant announcing that he may be the fourth president to preside over this atrocity but he will also be the last. And just like that, on September 11, 2021, this forever nightmare is over. Yeah, I’m not fucking buying it either.
For starters, this plan carries the bizarre distinction of being a peace deal that violates a preexisting peace deal. Donald Trump’s diplomatic wunderkind, Zalmay Khalilzad broke his back doing back flips over buzz saws in Doha to get the Taliban killing machine to agree to a cease fire, and for an entire year, those grizzled imperium slayers sustained from murdering a single solitary pig-dog American based on the promise that we would finally fuck off by May 1, 2021. It was all set and ready to go. All the work had already been done. And Biden just drops in and wipes his ass with the thing, and for what? Another four months and a photo-op? You’re gonna put our precious boys and girls in uniform on the chopping block for that? Why? Seriously, what the literal fuck?
In the latest development, Ahmad Al-Issa has been charged with not only 10 counts of murder, but 34 counts of attempted murder. His lawyers and the media have attempted to argue that he is mentally ill. That same argument was used in Shannon Conley’s case.
And that of countless Islamic terrorists.
On Saturday (April 24), another band of herdsmen attacked five predominantly Christian communities in Guma County, Benue state, killing 17 Christians, according to David Iorhemba, a legislator from the area. The herdsmen invaded Yogbo-Mbayev, Ajimaku, Ayeri, Udei and Tse-Gborigyo, at about 2 a.m., Iorhemba said in a text message.
Addressing an event organised by the Centre for Democracy, Pluralism and Human Rights (CDPHR), he said losing Tibet as a buffer zone between India and China has cost hugely to India in terms of border problem and associated military costs.
"Tibet occupation was just the beginning. You saw the Galwan incident, how many soldiers lost their lives. Tibet is just a beginning as it is the palm but five fingers are still out there which Chinese CPC (Chinese Communist Party) is trying hard to get," claimed Lobsang, president of the Central Tibetan Administration (Tibetan government-in exile).
The Five Fingers of Tibet is a Chinese foreign policy that considers Tibet to be the palm of China's right hand, with five fingers on its periphery: Ladakh, Nepal, Sikkim, Bhutan, and Arunachal Pradesh, and that it is China's responsibility to "liberate" these regions.
Particularly important for India is the 142-page, 70,000-character “14th Five Year Plan (2021-2025) and the Long Range Objectives through the Year 2035 for National Economic and Social Development of the People’s Republic of China”. Its English version is yet to be released. Chinese President Xi Jinping proposed the ‘Long Range Objectives-2035’ and approved its final draft. The document clarifies China’s national strategic intent and identifies core areas of national security and development. It has a definite focus on strategic science and technology programmes in frontier areas. The document details projects that have direct implications for India.
Higher temperatures are driving more creatures to climb higher for comfort. Now ticks flee the heat to stay cool.
"The climate crisis is a clear and present threat for both current and future generations," said Dyson Chee of the Hawaii Youth Climate Coalition.
"By 2030 we will be on our way to a global economy that provides a good life for all on a living planet," states the Declaration of the 2020's. "Or we will be on an irreversible path to global misery through ecological collapse."
Only one new U.S. plant is under construction, a still-incomplete project of 15 years costing $28 billion. No others are planned, and Indian Point 3 marks the 12th reactor shut in the past eight years, with more to follow. Removing reactors means removing a health threat, as studies show declining cancers in local children soon after shutdowns, and declines for adults over time.
A half century ago, the idea of a nuclear-free New York seemed unlikely. The Atomic Energy Commission predicted that by now, 70% of U.S. electricity would be generated by over 1,000 reactors. Utilities, encouraged by politicians in both parties, scrambled to prepare proposals.
"A project which can only be insured secretly has lost its social license to operate," said one Trans Mountain opponent.
More than a dozen U.S. oil refineries released the potent carcinogen benzene in 2020 at levels high enough to require action under federal law, the Environmental Integrity Project (EIP) reported this week. The report, which draws from government data, raises concerns about the potential health effects on those living near the refineries and the federal enforcement that the high levels of this cancer-causing air pollutant should trigger.€
About 60 percent of the people living near the 13 refineries are people of color, EIP found, and residents living near refineries are several times more likely to have incomes below the poverty line than the U.S. average.
This question reveals Sen. Daines knows very little about grizzly science and recovery. Not a single, published peer-reviewed study suggests an isolated population of 500 grizzly bears in the Greater Yellowstone region is recovered. In fact, both the District Court in Montana and the Ninth Circuit recently reviewed this science, and even under a highly deferential standard of review came to the same conclusion. This was a unanimous decision from four independent judges.
I encourage Sen. Daines to review the science, talk to the grizzly bear biologists and – at the very least – review the courts’ recent opinions before engaging in such a public display as his aggressive questioning of Sec. Haaland.
Any strategy that truly seeks to heal our environment will have to have degrowth as its cornerstone; in terms of land use, degrowth will allow for rewilding and veritable ecosystem restoration. Since human poverty and exploitation and general misery are largely the result of capitalism’s ethos of growth at all costs, degrowth would also result in a more humane and equal society. Changing how we do agriculture is not only about halting the damage we are doing but also reversing course and undoing the damage. We can use agriculture as a tool to restore our soils and the biodiversity they support. This should happen both through the implementation of restorative practices on the lands we cultivate as well as the freeing up of much of the land currently used for agriculture and other industries. A main goal of regenerative agriculture is to draw atmospheric carbon down into the soil and vegetation. When it gets to specifics, its proponents usually speak of the restoration of grasslands, but there are other ecosystems that are carbon sinks, like forests. Deforestation itself releases an incredible amount of carbon into the atmosphere. So, rewilding and halting deforestation are essential to decreasing our carbon footprint and land usage and must be given far more attention than they currently are.
In the past year, Seed the Commons has hosted a webinar series to bring attention to the centrality of food systems to our most pressing problems, from public health crises to climate change to poverty, and to point to ways forward. Many of our presenters have touched upon soil and we also celebrated World Soil Day by devoting a whole webinar to digging deeper into the soil issue. We were extremely lucky to be joined by two top leaders in the field of ecological farming: Dr. Amir Kassam, a Visiting Professor of Agriculture and Development at the University of Reading, UK, and the Moderator of the FAO-hosted Global Platform for Conservation Agriculture Community of Practice and Chairman of the International Conservation Agriculture Advisory Panel for Africa; and Helen Atthowe, an eco-organic farmer and researcher who was the recipient of the Steward of Sustainable Agriculture Award at the 32nd Annual EcoFarm Conference.
Since it was passed, and through past bipartisan reauthorizations, the MSA has notched up many successes, including the rebuilding of at least 40 fisheries stocks—some of which were on the verge of collapse—in the last two decades. “Under the MSA, we are ending overfishing and rebuilding stocks, which strengthens the value of fisheries to our economy and marine ecosystems,” according to the National Marine Fisheries Service, the office of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) within the Department of Commerce that is responsible for the stewardship of U.S. ocean resources and their marine habitats.
But a new report has found that the nation’s fishery managers are failing in their duty to protect designated “essential fish habitat” (EFH) as required by the MSA. Released in April by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), a nonprofit environmental advocacy group headquartered in New York, the report is based on a detailed review of how each of the eight federal regional management councils has administered the MSA’s requirement to minimize the negative impact of fishing on EFH.
Some of the shit Hedge Hogs pay money for include a list of the websites you visit, the text messages you receive or send, the emails you receive or send, any purchases you make, any funds you receive, any places you visit, what medicines you buy, what vehicles you own… the list is truly bottomless.
This kind of data can be bought on the dark web, though it is mostly legal and companies sell it all the time. Stripped of personal identifiers, it’s just the residue of your transactional life. What does it matter to you? It’s not like they’re trying to steal your identity. As long as you get from point A to point B, what do you care if some Hedge Hog knows the steps you took to get there?
The economic impact of the pandemic has created an opportunity for the federal government to reconsider its traditional responses to poverty and€ unemployment.
On April 22 Gensler announced that he had appointed Alex Young K. Oh to be his top Wall Street crime fighter. Reuters (and numerous other media outlets) spun the announcement like this:
“The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday named former federal prosecutor Alex Oh as its new head of enforcement, the first woman of color to lead the division, which plays a crucial role in policing U.S. financial markets.”
That's why many anti-war organizations and activists will continue to push the administration to improve its foreign policy record in the next 100 days, while also urging Congress to reject Biden’s increased military budget.
A little history can help us with the answer.
Less has been written about within-group employment disparities among women and mothers during the pandemic. Not all women have been affected equally by this crisis. Comparing women to each other rather than their male counterparts reveals substantial variation along parental status and class lines. Our analysis uses Basic Monthly data from the Current Population Survey (CPS) to assess the impact of COVID-19 on employment and labor force participation for women between the ages of 25 and 64. To do so, we compare outcomes from April through December of 2020 to outcomes from the same nine-month span in 2019. This reflects the time period during which states implemented pandemic-related restrictions, including business closures and remote schooling requirements. We assess the impact of parental status by comparing women with and without at least one minor child of their own in their household. We use educational attainment to examine the effect of class, with the lack of a bachelor’s degree serving as a proxy for working-class status. Though an imperfect measure, one’s level of formal education is strongly correlated with job quality, and the possession of a bachelor’s degree is a reliable if blunt way of distinguishing between the professional and working classes.
Figure 1 shows employment, unemployment, and not in the labor force status for mothers of minor children by education (serving as a proxy for class) in 2019 and 2020.
Funk's argument that there is a problem can be summarized thus:
The returns on VC investments over the last two decades haven't matched the golden years of the proceeding two decades.
In the golden years startups made profits.
Now they don't.
The situation in Jerusalem began with clashes between Palestinians and Israeli forces over restrictions placed on the Damascus Gate entrance to the Old City. Then, in response to TikTok videos showing two Palestinian youths slapping an ultra-Orthodox Jewish man, the far-right Jewish group Lahava called for a “demonstration of national dignity.” Leaked WhatsApp messages revealed calls to lynch Palestinians.
As the Jewish-Israeli extremists marauded through the streets on Thursday, April 22, Israeli forces fired rubber-coated steel bullets at Palestinian counterprotesters. The remarks of a young orthodox Jewish girl went viral on social media. “I don’t want to burn your villages, I just want you to leave and we’ll take them” she said. On her shirt was a sticker reading “Rabbi Kahane is right.” Kahane’s group was placed on the US terror list in 2004.
In Assume Nothing, Tanya Selvaratnam’s memoir of intimate partner violence during her relationship with former New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman—published just one day before the first public report of sexual misconduct by Governor Andrew Cuomo—she agonizes over the fact that there’s no “proof” of her abuse. Weighing whether to go public, Selvaratnam grapples with the daunting reality that it will be just her word against his, noting Catharine MacKinnon’s observation that in rape trials, it typically takes three to four women to counter one man’s testimony, rendering each, “for credibility purposes, one-fourth of a person.” Indeed, when she ultimately decides to tell her story to The New Yorker, she’s buttressed by three other women with nearly identical experiences. On May 7, 2018, the story went live online just before 7 pm, and by 10 pm Schneiderman had resigned, helped along by Governor Cuomo, who in the intervening three hours offered the following assessment:1No one is above the law, including New York’s top legal officer. I will be asking an appropriate New York District Attorney to commence an immediate investigation, and proceed as the facts merit. My personal opinion is that, given the damning pattern of facts and corroboration laid out in the article, I do not believe it is possible for Eric Schneiderman to continue to serve as Attorney General, and for the good of the office, he should resign.2
Sanders believes that the US “must be willing to bring real pressure to bear, including restricting US aid, in response to moves by either side that undermine the chances for peace,” while Warren showed a willingness to restrict military aid as a “tool” to push Israel to “adjust course”.
Generally, Sanders’ increasingly Pro-Palestinian stances are more progressive than those of Warren, although both are still hovering within the mainstream Democratic discourse – willingness to criticize Israel as long as that criticism is coupled with equal – if not even more pointed – criticism of the Palestinians.
Following protests, two Ivy League schools — the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton University — have issued apologies for their handling of the remains of an African American child killed by the Philadelphia police in the 1985 MOVE bombing. Students at Princeton held a protest on campus to support the demands of the MOVE community, who held another protest at the same time at the Penn Museum in Philadelphia, and 70 Princeton professors signed on to a letter published in the campus newspaper that called on the university to act. “This routinely happens where vulnerable people are exploited in the name of research,” says Aisha Tahir, a Princeton senior who helped organize a protest on campus. “Princeton does not have practices in place which center the preciousness of human life.”
Those feral raiders of the Capitol, who tried to seize control of the building in a doomed attempt to prevent the transfer of power, were apparently unaware that real power, the power over their lives and ours, doesn’t change in this system. It remains securely in place, steadily accreting its dominion year after year.
Biden doesn’t even offer rhetoric as a placebo for our despair. He settles for a steady stream of prefabricated platitudes, not poetic enough to inspire or edgy enough to enrage. We are being fed a low-cal political diet that no one seems to mind or care enough about to get excited over or agitated about. We’ve entered the doldrums.
When it comes to economic issues, the Biden administration has shown some surprising progressivism. On foreign policy, not so much.
As a long-shot 2020 presidential candidate, Andrew Yang offered an entertaining diversion from the grimly serious business of defeating Donald Trump. Yang’s “MATH” hats, unabashedly nerdy followers, and uncanny ability to bring any social problem—from systemic racism to the crisis in health care—back to his panacea of a universal basic income mattered less than his entrepreneurial enthusiasm, PowerPoint persona, and air of business acumen.
Centering on the Congress’s theme of continuity, Díaz-Canel’s speech was impassioned, far-reaching, and clear. He called upon the Party and its new leadership to respond to an increasingly restrictive U.S. economic blockade, speed up the implementation of economic reforms, and deal with economic fallout from the pandemic.
The Eighth Congress took place 60 years after both Fidel Castro’s declaration of the socialist nature of Cuba’s Revolution and Cuba’s victory over counter-revolutionaries at the Bay of Pigs. That timing adds meaning to Díaz-Canel’s speech.
For sixty years the US punishment policy has been inflicted on Cuba, a small Caribbean island some 90 miles from Florida which has been malevolently victimised by successive administrations — bar one — in Washington.
The State Department official€ line€ is that “the United States maintains a comprehensive economic embargo on the Republic of Cuba.€ € In February 1962, President John F. Kennedy proclaimed an embargo on trade between the United States and Cuba, in response to certain actions taken by the Cuban Government, and directed the Departments of Commerce and the Treasury to implement the embargo, which remains in place today.”€ € Don’t you just love that “certain actions taken by the Cuban Government”?€ € € After all,€ the Cuban government didn’t try to invade the United States, but as recorded by€ history.com, “the Bay of Pigs Invasion in April 1961 was a failed attack launched by the CIA during the Kennedy administration to push Cuban leader Fidel Castro from power.”
"Over the course of U.S. history, we've added 37 states," said one expert who pushed back against the senator's position. "Not a single one required a constitutional amendment."
Outsourcing migration control to authoritarian regimes has proven costly, insidious, and common for Global North governments.
In an April16, 2021, letter to the White House, 24 U.S. senators wrote that the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo “has damaged America’s reputation, fueled anti-Muslim bigotry, and weakened the U.S.’ ability to counter terrorism and fight for human rights and the rule of law around the world.” Closing Guantánamo should be followed by returning it to Cuba. This would not only be the right measure, but it would also improve the U.S.’ battered image in the continent.
Guantánamo has a complex history. Beginning in 1903, the U.S. government obtained a 99-year lease on the 45 square mile area under the Cuban-American Treaty. The treaty established, among other things, that for the purposes of operating naval and coaling stations in Guantánamo, the U.S. had “complete jurisdiction and control” of the area. However, it was also recognized that the Republic of Cuba retained ultimate sovereignty.
"Now they must commit to restoring protected public lands and sacred sites, and tearing down sections of wall."
Making D.C. a state finally would end the denial of voting representation to more than 700,000 Americans, a majority of whom are Black or Brown.
"Simply put, S.B. 90 is undemocratic to its core," said the ACLU of Florida.
When we looked to our government to address these problems, political leaders of both parties clutched nervously at their purse strings. “How will you pay for it?” we were asked again and again, less a question than a rhetorical veto. Promised a world of steady abundance—Fukuyama’s end of history, the zenith of global capitalism—we were met instead with an unshakeable austerity. Yes, global ecosystems were careening toward collapse. Yes, the wealth gap was eroding the foundations of our democracy. Yes, our infrastructure was obsolescing, our schools were underfunded, and our medical system kept churning out bankruptcies. But the real threat, we were told, was a hypothetical run of inflation.
This inflation never quite seemed to materialize, but its specter haunted our politics, tying our hands, promising vague but calamitous fallout if we ever so much as implied that our government might spend money to solve problems. But we didn’t have to worry: the market would take care of everything. “When?” we asked, watching the carbon accumulate, the executive compensation packages balloon.
"Everyone expects progressives to lose in 2022," Sanders' team said, "but if we fight early, we're going to shock them all."
Which it won’t. No one, Biden least of all, expects Congress to approve his big infrastructure or education packages. Recalcitrant Republicans and reluctant red-state Democrats like Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia will probably water the proposed $2.3 trillion infrastructure bill down to virtual under-$1-trillion insignificance. The $1.8 trillion education proposal, which would be funded by a capital-gains tax increase the GOP hates, is an even more desperate Hail Mary pass.
These bills aren’t serious attempts to legislate. Bidenism is a series of rhetorical feints, window dressing, kabuki theater designed to fail, just like Biden’s half-hearted dead-on-arrival attempt to raise the minimum wage to $15 per hour. Since the Senate parliamentarian ruled against attaching it to the stimulus package, increasing the minimum wage hasn’t heard from again.
"I won't accept piecemeal bills that exclude and criminalize my own community members," said organizer Hector Morales. "We need permanent protection for all."
Alas, if you’re consistently cynical about the promises of French leaders, you’ll rarely be disappointed. In October, as noted here by Hugh Fitzgerald, France’s ambassador to Sweden, Ãâ°tienne de Gonneville, had declared on Swedish television that “France is a Muslim country.” As Fitzgerald noted, the veracity of such a statement is dependent not just on the sheer number of Muslims in France but on the question of whether they “see themselves as part of a wider society, contributors to its culture, inheritors of its history.” To ponder Muslim attitudes toward the victory of Charles Martel at Tours in 732 or the central French role in the Enlightenment is to realize that the overwhelming majority of Muslims don’t identify with these achievements.
SFT will enable supporters to automatically donate every time China’s Ministry of Affairs Twitter account (MFA_China) “tweets egregious lies about Tibet, as well as statements from its spokespeople (Hua Chunying and Zhao Lijian).” The group said that this campaign comes at a time when the Chinese government blatantly celebrates the seventieth anniversary of the ‘Peaceful Liberation of Tibet’. “To combat this propaganda and fight back against the CCP’s nefarious online activity, SFT has enabled our supporters to automatically donate every time the MFA sends a tweet,” further read the statement.
This symbolic yet important gesture has been repeatedly campaigned by the CTA, and this change is welcomed by the Office of Tibet-DC, it said. The US State Department published its annual “Country Reports on Human Rights Practices” report.
NBC had told the Managing Director of the TV station that it was allowing a leader of the secessionist group to make inciting declarations without caution.
The regulator accused the news channel of allowing the guest speaker to make derogatory, false and misleading statements about the Nigerian army, despite being proscribed by a court of law.
Eric Coomer, security director at the Colorado-based firm, also dropped Newsmax from a defamation lawsuit. Newsmax apologized Friday for airing false allegations that an employee for Dominion Voting Systems manipulated machines or tallies on Election Day to the detriment of former President Donald Trump.
Eric Coomer, security director at the Colorado-based firm, in turn dropped Newsmax from a defamation lawsuit.
The Brazilian National Security Law has a track record of abuses in persecuting and silencing dissent, with vague criminal offenses and provisions targeting speech. After a relatively dormant period, it gained new prominence during President Bolsonaro’s administration. It has served as a legal basis for accusations against opposition leaders, critics, journalists, and even a congressman aligned to Bolsonaro in the country’s current turbulent political landscape.
However, its proposed replacement, Bill 6764/02, raises various concerns, some particularly unsettling for digital rights. Even with alternative drafts trying to untangle them, problems remain.
First, the espionage offense in the bill defines the handover of secret documents to foreign governments as a crime. It's crucial that this and related offenses do not apply to acts in a way that would raise serious human rights concerns: whistleblowers revealing facts or acts that could imply the violation of human rights, crimes committed by government officials, and other serious wrongdoings affecting public administration; or,€ journalistic and investigative reporting, and the work of civil groups and activists, that bring to light governments’ unlawful practices and abuses. These acts should be clearly exempted from the offense. Amendments under discussion seek to address these concerns, but there’s no assurance they will prevail in the final text if this new law is approved.
The Russian authorities are trying to kill Meduza. The Justice Ministry has labeled us a “foreign agent,” chasing away our advertisers. This means we will run out of money. We are already running out of money.
In The Dissident, Fogel narrates Khashoggi’s life, career, and activism through exclusive interviews with the journalist’s fiancee, friends, and associates, and lays out the evidence of his murder through security footage, audio transcripts, and testimony from Turkish investigators. Central to the story is Omar Abdulaziz, a young Saudi activist living in Montreal, who knew and worked with Khashoggi and has become the target of the Saudi crown prince’s digital surveillance, misinformation and intimidation apparatus. The film shines a disturbing light on the unfathomable dangers and obstacles that face any Saudi citizen who dares to criticize the regime, at home or abroad.
President Donald Trump took no action against the Saudis over the murder of a U.S. resident, preferring to prioritize lucrative arms deals. The Biden administration recently announced a series of sanctions against Saudi officials, withdrawal of support for the Kingdom’s war in Yemen, and a pause on weapons delivery, but stopped short of any measures against MBS himself. GQ talked to Fogel about the film, its international impact, and the recent developments in this still-unfolding story.
To that end, today I am announcing the “Khashoggi Ban,” a new visa restriction policy pursuant to section 212(a)(3)(C) of the Immigration and Nationality Act. The Khashoggi Ban allows the State Department to impose visa restrictions on individuals who, acting on behalf of a foreign government, are believed to have been directly engaged in serious, extraterritorial counter-dissident activities, including those that suppress, harass, surveil, threaten, or harm journalists, activists, or other persons perceived to be dissidents for their work, or who engage in such activities with respect to the families or other close associates of such persons. Family members of such individuals also may be subject to visa restrictions under this policy, where appropriate.
White supremacy never stops. It never takes a day off. Its forces never quit the field of battle, even after a defeat. White supremacy doesn’t retreat; it retrenches.
Many of these laws include provisions legalizing violence against protestors, granting immunity to people who drive their cars into crowds.
He became a scapegoat.
I’m not saying Chauvin was innocent. What he did was horrific: racism plus murder. What happened had to be addressed, because we’re not the country we were, oh, 60, 70 or a hundred years ago, when killing a black human being — lynching him or her — was not only no big deal, it was often a€ cause of celebration. Morally, we’ve moved forward half an inch since then. The police killing of an unarmed black person, if it’s caught on video, sometimes leads to the officer’s dismissal, if not an actual arrest and trial.
Mauritius, a democratic parliamentary republic with a population just over 1.2 million, has an Internet penetration rate of roughly 68% and a high rate of social media use. The country’s Constitution guarantees the right to freedom of expression but, in recent years, advocates have observed a backslide in online freedoms.
In 2018, the government amended the ICTA, imposing heavy sentences—as high as ten years in prison—for online messages that “inconvenience” the receiver or reader. The amendment was in turn utilized to file complaints against journalists and media outlets in 2019.
In 2020, as COVID-19 hit the country, the government levied a tax on digital services operating€ in the country, defined as any service supplied by “a foreign supplier over the internet or an electronic network which is reliant on the internet; or by a foreign supplier and is dependent on information technology for its supply.”
Russia’s Federal Financial Monitoring Service (Rosfinmonitoring) has added Alexey Navalny’s network of campaign offices to its blacklist of€ groups accused of terrorist and extremist activities.
A spokesperson for New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, who called the Boston Dynamics device "creepy" and "alienating," said he was "glad the Digidog was put down."
EFF is launching a campaign in support of the Fourth Amendment is Not For Sale Act, or H.R. 2738 and S.1265. This legislation prevents the government from purchasing information it would otherwise need a warrant to acquire. Tell your senators and representatives that this bill must be passed!
So while it’s fine to breathe a sigh of relief, the profoundly sick social structures that cage immigrants in second-class status and in detention camps remain in place. As long as they do, another racist fanatic who roars to power will find the machinery to persecute this group right at his fingertips. And the chances of another reactionary firebrand attaining the presidency are not slim: fascism flourishes after capitalism’s crises, with Trump’s ascent rooted in the 2008 financial crash. If Biden doesn’t significantly expand the social welfare state, who knows what we’ll get as a result of the 2020 collapse? It could be another Trump but worse – a competent fascist who can make the trains run on time, not a buffoon.
Meanwhile, how to stop government from stigmatizing the Latinx minority? Because while Biden renounces the most egregious cruelties, like family separation at the border, tons of people remain locked up for what’s barely a misdemeanor, the equivalent of driving without a license, namely entering the country without papers. Biden has not shuttered detention centers, and he will likely keep the cap on the number of refugees to be admitted. While ICE and BP might not currently drive tanks through the streets of sanctuary cities, they still receive far more money than the FBI or the DEA. Their sole purpose is to surveil, detain and arrest a minority population that has no rights, and as long as millions of people have no rights, any claim that the U.S. is a free democracy is laughable. This same status quo prevailed in Germany at the start of Nazi rule, when the first laws were passed persecuting Jews.
The authors believe the key to our survival in the U.S. is through radical solidarity with other minoritized communities. At times, it may be easy to assimilate into American whiteness, move out of communities of color, send our children to private school, or remain silent when Black Lives Matter is not discussed in our temples. However, we also need to remember that white supremacy culture damages the Jewish community as evidenced by the Synagogue shootings in Pittsburgh and San Diego, the rise in Anti-Semitic hate crimes, and the rise of neo-Nazism. Rabbi Prinz, who spoke before Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the March on Washington (1963), warned us that the most urgent problem he saw as the Nazis took over his Berlin Jewish community in the 1930s, was not bigotry and hatred but silence:€ “The most urgent, the most disgraceful, the most shameful and the most tragic problem is silence.” Furthermore, Rabbi Heschel reminds that we have an extra responsibility to ally ourselves with oppressed communities because we too were once enslaved as strangers in a strange land: “There is no limit to the concern one must feel for the suffering of human beings, that indifference to evil is worse than evil itself, that in a free society, some are guilty, but all are responsible.”
The two authors grapple daily with how best they can be co-conspirators in challenging systemic oppression and supporting Black, Latinx, and Asian-American, Jewish and non-Jewish struggles, especially with the knowledge that whiteness is conditional.
Warning that a reversal of the 1973 ruling is the ultimate target, experts note that 2021 is on track to be "the most damaging anti-abortion state legislative session in a decade—and perhaps ever."
"It's a new day for nurses and patients across Maine."
On Friday, April 30, federal agents in Moscow arrested prominent human rights lawyer Ivan Pavlov on charges of disclosing case details from a preliminary investigation. Meanwhile, in St. Petersburg, police officers and state investigators carried out raids at Pavlov’s apartment (where his wife was home) and at his legal office. Speaking to reporters, Pavlov said state investigators suspect him of sharing information from the treason case against prominent journalist Ivan Safronov. If convicted, Pavlov faces up to three months in jail and could be disbarred.
In the past few weeks, the Russian authorities have forced the dissolution of Alexey Navalny’s political opposition infrastructure, escalated their persecution of activists in this movement, and even started prosecuting journalists who report on the movement’s protests and activities. On Friday morning, April 30, police officers in Moscow arrested attorney Ivan Pavlov, the head of the “Team 29” human rights organization (a legal group that often represents defendants accused of treason and other crimes in closed hearings). Lawyers from Team 29 are representing Navalny’s political and anti-corruption groups against criminal allegations that they advocate extremism. Pavlov is now suspected of disclosing pretrial investigation data — a felony offense that could lead to as much as three months in jail and his disbarment. Meduza special correspondent Svetlana Reiter discussed these accusations with Evgeny Smirnov, Pavlov’s long-time colleague at Team 29.
As the Jewish-Israeli extremists marauded through the streets on Thursday, April 22, Israeli forces fired rubber-coated steel bullets at Palestinian counterprotesters.
While walking in downtown Saratov on Friday, April 30, Russian State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin had a memorable encounter with a pensioner. The 90-year-old woman, who introduced herself as Anna Alexandrovna, gave Volodin an earful about how Russian officials are destroying the country by lying and stealing.€ Recalling her own experience of living through the Second World War, the woman demanded an explanation for why Russia is being “plundered” today. Volodin later cited their meeting as an example of how government officials ought to interact with the public.
The Russian Foreign Ministry has banned eight officials from European Union bodies and individual EU countries from entering Russia.
Depictions of cybercrime often revolve around the figure of the lone ‘hacker’, a skilled artisan who builds their own tools and has a deep mastery of technical systems. However, much of the work involved is now in fact more akin to a deviant customer service or maintenance job. This means that exit from cybercrime communities is less often via the justice system, and far more likely to be a simple case of burnout.
With U.S. troops committed to leaving Afghanistan completely by Sept. 11, women are closely watching the stalemated peace negotiations between the Taliban and the Afghan government over the post-withdrawal future, said Mahbouba Seraj, a women’s rights activist.
"But having to handle these cases for two decades and looking at the body cam video," she said, "I know that Mario died because he was proned out on the ground and had officers on top of him for five minutes."
An investigative report and previously unseen videos from the 2018 death of a Kansas teenager shot multiple times by police during a wellness check were released Thursday by the city of Overland Park — much-needed transparency, his family said, after more than three years of demanding that files in the case be made public.
The redacted 500-page report, along with photos and videos of police dashcam footage and interviews after the shooting, have shed some light into why Overland Park police Officer Clayton Jenison said he fired his weapon 13 times as John Albers, 17, backed a minivan out of his family's garage.
This week, Malawi’s Supreme Court outlawed the death penalty ordering the re-sentencing of at least 37 people known to be under a death sentence.
Sandra Babcock, director of the Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide and a partner in the Malawi Resentencing Project, has worked on capital cases in Malawi since 2007. She calls the ruling “historic,” and adds that Malawi has now joined the growing ranks of abolitionist countries where high courts have concluded that the death penalty violates the right to life.
Back in 2014, Verizon decided it wanted to get into the media business. So it launched a website dubbed "Sugarstring." It didn't go very well. The website immediately gained attention for the fact that Verizon informed new journalist hires that they couldn't write about surveillance or net neutrality, two subjects Verizon is intimately involved in. The backlash was immediate, employees realized it was a shitshow and headed for the exits, and the whole thing was quickly shut down. But it was a good indication of what was to come.
The shortfall points to how the streaming pioneer is naturally losing the ability to add so many customers. That’s especially true in the U.S. and Canada, where quarterly subscriber gains have slipped into the hundreds-of-thousands realm from the millions (Netflix projects the figure may even be flat in the current quarter). But the stock move was an overreaction. Maybe even the wrong reaction.
A federal jury convicted Michael Kail, the former Vice President of IT Operations at Netflix, of wire fraud, mail fraud, and money laundering, announced Acting United States Attorney Stephanie M. Hinds, Federal Bureau of Investigation Craig D. Fair, and IRS-Criminal Investigation Acting Special Agent in Charge Michael Daniels. The verdict follows a two-week and a half week trial before the Honorable Beth L. Freeman, U.S. District Judge.
Kail was indicted May 1, 2018, of nineteen counts of wire fraud, three counts of mail fraud, and seven counts of money laundering, in violation of 18 U.S.C. €§€§ 1341 (mail fraud), 1343 (wire fraud), 1346 (honest services fraud), and 1957 (money laundering). The indictment also sought forfeiture of Kail’s Los Gatos residential property. The jury returned a verdict of guilty on 28 of the 29 counts.
“Bribery undermines fair competition and innovation in any business arena, and particularly Silicon Valley’s highly competitive environment of cutting-edge innovation,” said Acting United States Attorney Stephanie M. Hinds. “As Netflix’s Vice President of IT Operations, Michael Kail wielded immense power to approve valuable Netflix contracts with small tech vendors, and he rigged that process to unlock a stream of cash and stock kickbacks to himself. Netflix and other companies expect and deserve honest services from its employees.”
A former executive for Los Gatos media-streaming giant Netflix was found guilty Friday of felony fraud and money laundering.
A jury found Michael Kail, vice-president of internet technology at Netflix from 2012 to 2014, guilty of more than two dozen counts for accepting cash, stock options and gifts from third-party vendors in exchange for contracts with the firm.
“He used his kickback payments to pay personal expenses and to buy a home in Los Gatos,” the U.S. Department of Justice said in a statement Friday that referred to “pay-to-play bribes.” The verdict means the house — valued at about $3 million by Zillow — will be forfeited to the federal government, the department said.
A former Netflix executive was convicted of bribery, fraud and money laundering in connection to kickbacks he received from technology companies that partnered with the streaming company.
Michael Kail was found guilty by a federal jury after a week-and-a-half trial and the verdict was handed down by a 12-person jury in San Jose, Calif. in the court of U.S. District Judge Beth Labson Freeman.
Kail, 52, was vice president of internet technology at Netflix from 2011 until 2014, where he managed contracts with small outside vendors for IT-related services. The evidence presented at trial showed that Kail accepted personal bribes from nine different technology companies for in exchange for arranging contracts between the parties.
The European Commission has announced it will be pursuing Apple in an antitrust case that accuses the company of distorting the music streaming market through its App Store rules. After nearly a year of investigation triggered by a complaint by Spotify, the EU's biggest competition regulator objects to the way that Apple has assured a 30 percent cut on in-app subscription purchases.
A few weeks ago, Pornhub revealed that it received more than 500,000 DMCA takedown requests last year. However, Pornhub and owner Mindgeek are rightsholders too and are also using the DMCA to their advantage. The companies told us that they sent notices targeting 4.5 million infringing URLs over the past year. But that's just the tip of the iceberg.
A bank that refused to hand over the personal details of a person behind an account used to receive funds for the largest IPTV supplier in the Netherlands acted unlawfully, a court has ruled. Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN brought the action against Rabobank in an effort to track down the name and address of the account holder after other efforts failed.
We have been banging the drum for some time now that the way the DMCA has been setup and is put in practice is wide, wide open for fraud and abuse. A huge part of the problem is how content owners police the internet in general, with the overwhelming majority of DMCA notices coming from bots and automated systems. Because of the imperfections of this technology, and our allowance of its use, the end result is that copyright policing on the internet is done with a shotgun rather than a scalpel, leading to all manner of mistakes and collateral damage. But even setting those instances aside, the fact is that DMCAing content on the internet requires so little in the way of verification that there is any true ownership of the content rights in question that bogus DMCA takedowns are the norm, not the exception. And, given how little consequence comes along with issuing a bogus DMCA notice, bad actors are practically encouraged to perform this sort of chicanery.
