Every so often there appear some new pics from developer builds of Windows or even leaks such as the recent Windows 11 preview screenshots. More or less every time this happens there are comments from the Linux side that Windows is copying KDE Plasma – a desktop environment that is, granted, among the most similar ones to Windows. The similarity is, however, only very superficial. To convince you of this, in this post I’ll dissect several design elements and show how the two competitors differ in approaching them.
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The design in newer parts of Windows is almost nothing like Plasma. To say that Windows is copying Plasma is pretty wrong. The Windows 11 changes actually further separate the two, rather than bring them closer. The changes also highlight the differences in the approaches underlying design choices: Plasma is more conservative and Windows is more progressive.
So you want to switch to Linux? Or maybe run it alongside Windows? Great idea! But you've probably heard things that scared you away like "installing Linux is hard." Is it really true?
We revisit the seminal distros that shaped Linux’s past. Find out if these classics still hold up.
Plus the outrageous bounty on a beloved Linux desktop app.
In this video, I am going to show how to install openSUSE 15.3.
We get a bit skeptical about Stripe Identity, how it works, and precisely why we don't like some of their privacy trade-offs.
Plus, a tool we're calling "game-changing" that probably makes anyone a master developer.
First up, in our Wanderings, I miss a delivery, Joe forgets to backup, Bo tinkers with pipewire, and Tony turns the amperage up to 10.
Then, our news we have a Linux Mint update, Audacity backtracks, a top 10 and OBS’s wayland support
In security, polkit
In this one, we have Firefox's new redesign, Nvidia Drivers getting ready to better support Wayland, and a lot of desktop environment related news. Become a channel member to get access to a weekly patroncast and vote on the next topics I'll cover...
I'm announcing the release of the 5.12.11 kernel.
All users of the 5.12 kernel series must upgrade.
The updated 5.12.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-5.12.y and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser: https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-s...
thanks,
greg k-h
Capabilities can certainly be a very powerful tool for system administrators to be able to do their job and work around some of the restrictions of the Linux operating system, however, they should be carefully set as if misconfigured they could lead to a full system compromise.
I should probably wait five years to write this article, so that I could frame it as a eulogy on the death of the Graphical User Interface (GUI). Not too long from now, we will interact with highly intelligent computerized agents using speech, gestures, and wearable devices. But right now, the GUI is still the most common way to interact with a computer, even if keyboards and mouse clicks are augmented by swipes, voice recognition, and autofill. The X Window System, in addition to presenting an important and historic GUI, also exemplified other important trends that made modern computing possible.
Have a fancy AMD CPU with a Wraith Prism cooler? You might want to adjust some of the RGB settings on Linux and for that you should check out Wraith Master.
What it is: Wraith Master is a feature-complete graphical and command-line application for controlling the RGB LEDs on AMD's Wraith stock coolers. At the moment, the only supported cooler is the Wraith Prism, but there are plans to add other Wraith coolers as well. It exists as an independent companion to OpenRGB, and is designed to provide control over all functionality exposed by the hardware. In summary: it's lightweight, it's native, it's fast, it's complete, and it's self-contained.
Since the AMD EPYC 7003 "Milan" series launch back in March we have carried out many benchmarks with their flagship processors like the EPYC 7763 and 7713 processors and some of the frequency optimized SKUs, but what about the performance lower down the product stack? Up for benchmarking today is a look at the AMD EPYC 7343 and 7743 processors in 1P and 2P configurations against other AMD EPYC Milan processors as well as Intel's Xeon Platinum 8380 Ice Lake processors.
The AMD EPYC 7343 is a 16-core processor with SMT for 32 threads. This 190 Watt server processor has a 3.2GHz base clock frequency and can boost up to 3.9GHz while having a 128MB L3 cache.
The AMD EPYC 7443 meanwhile is a step higher with 24 cores / 48 threads while the base frequency drops to 2.85GHz but a boost clock up to 4.0GHz. The EPYC 7443 has a 200 Watt TDP and 128MB of L3 cache.
As is standard for AMD's straight-forward EPYC processor line-up, all of these EPYC 7003 series processors support eight channels of DDR4-3200, 128 lanes of PCI Express 4.0, Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV), and other features in common throughout all their SKUs. The EPYC 7343 carries a 1Ku price of around $1565 USD while the EPYC 7443 is at around $2010.
PDF Mix Tool is one of the best PDF editors for Linux and an alternative to PDF Arranger. It is a neat and simple GUI tool for manipulating pdf files and allows you to modify your files (rotating, splitting, extracting from files), not their content, however.
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In either case, you can build it from source that can be found on GitLab.
In 2017, the KubeVirt team launched the project to manage virtual machines (VMs) alongside containers in Kubernetes. The open source project's intent was to make VMs first-class citizens in this environment.
Since its introduction at Open Source Summit 2018, KubeVirt has continued maturing and growing. It's reached more than 200 stars on GitHub and even introduced its own event, KubeVirt Summit, in February 2021.
QOwnNotes is a open source (GPL) plain-text file notepad with markdown support and todo list manager for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X and Windows, that (optionally) works together with the notes application of ownCloud (or Nextcloud). So you are able to write down your thoughts with QOwnNotes and edit or search for them later from your mobile device (like with CloudNotes) or the ownCloud web-service. The notes are stored as plain text files and you can sync them with your ownCloud sync client. Of course other software, like Dropbox, Syncthing, Seafile or BitTorrent Sync can be used too.
Back in the mid-1990s, a particular vendor's training classes that I was taking always began the same way: "It's not IF a failure is going to happen, it's WHEN." It's annoying to have someone repeat this mantra, no matter how true it is, at the beginning of every class. It develops an unhealthy paranoia about hardware, software, and careless sysadmins. It also helps sell more classes but that's another story.
When SELinux has to decide whether it has to allow or deny a particular action, it makes a decision based on the context of both the subject (who is initiating the action) and the object (which is the target of the action). These contexts (or parts of the context) are mentioned in the policy rules that SELinux enforces.
The context of a process is what identifies the process to SELinux. SELinux has no notion of Linux process ownership and does not care how the process is called, which process ID it has, and what account the process runs as. All it wants to know is what the context of that process is, represented to users and administrators as a label. Label and context are often used interchangeably, and although there is a technical distinction (one is a representation of the other), we will not dwell on that much.
Do you know about computer software?
Yes, I know the computer, It is the combination of the Software and Hardware but I am talking here software or tools which are installed inside the operating system no matter, OS is window Mac or Linux.
Installing and removing the packages from the Linux operating system is the most popular activity. If you want to be expert in the LINUX operating system you must know about the installing and removing packages.
There are lots of the methods used to manage packages inside Linux. the apt-get method is one of them.
Apt-get is a package manager used to manage packages inside the debian-based operating system, for example, Ubuntu, Kali Linux, Debian, and other debian-based distributions.
This package manager is very useful for Debian based users, It is the command-line tool for managing packages. if you are a Linux lover then you can understand the importance of the command-line tool.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Cockpit on AlmaLinux 8. For those of you who didn’t know, The cockpit is a management platform that allows administrators to easily manage and control their GUI or CLI Linux server systems remotely using a browser. The cockpit is accessed through a web browser and its dashboard gives you a peek of your server’s health alongside other system statistics such as network usage, disk space, and utilization, current users, system uptime, running processes, and system logs.
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 the Cockpit on an AlmaLinux 8. You can follow the same instructions for Rocky Linux.
In this article we will show how to monitor your Linux system and some of its metrics by using a simple server monitoring tool that we would like to share with you, called Scout_Realtime.
Pure-FTPd is a free open-source FTP server designed with security in mind. In this tutorial, we are going to learn how to set up an FTP server on Debian 10 with Pure-FTPd and how to enforce TLS encryption.
Let’s learn the commands to install Anaconda Navigator on Debian 11 or 10 and also how to create a desktop shortcut for the same.
Anaconda is a Python distribution, which is designed for scientific work and the analysis of (large) amounts of data. Anaconda is free and also consists of free & Open source software – however, the company behind this Data Science platform also offers additional commercial support. It is available in Individual, Commerical, and Enterprise editions. Anaconda has everything you need, including the Python interpreter. This makes it independent of the underlying system.
As a technical writer, I deal with a lot of files in my job - sometimes I'm cropping images, other times I'm playing with .zip and .deb files. Not to mention PDFs and other document types we all deal with in our daily computer work.
At present my Downloads directory contains over a thousand items, including directories, files, and images. So, I was looking for a tool that could organize at least files by classifying them into different directories. And I found one - Classifier.
In this article, we will discuss how to install the tool and how you can use it. But before we do that, it is worth mentioning that all commands and instructions mentioned in this article have been tested on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.
An embedded system is basically a very minimal system that is dedicated to run a specific task. You might think of embedded systems today as part of the Internet of Things (IoT) including sensors, thermostats, and doorbell cameras. Many embedded systems today run on Linux.
But once upon a time, embedded systems either ran on a custom, proprietary platform or ran on DOS. Some of these DOS-based embedded systems still run today, such as cash registers or phone private branch exchange (PBX) systems. In one example as recently as 2017, trainspotters discovered a Russian electric train control system (Russian: áÃÂÃâßÃÂ) running FreeDOS with special software to control and monitor the route of suburban trains and to make passenger announcements.
Virtualmin is an Open Source web hosting and cloud control panel available to install on Linux with an automated script. Here we let your know how to install Virtualmin & Webmin on Ubuntu 20.04/18.04 or Debian 9/10 Server
The “VirtualMin” program has proven itself to be able to manage a server online as simple as possible. It allows access to the server via an SSL-encrypted HTTP line (i.e. via a standard browser) and provides a clear user interface. (Almost) all settings and options of the server can be managed and controlled on this. Relatively little technical knowledge is required
Redis is a well-known open-source data structure store that stores data in memory and is commonly used as a database. It is very popular among Linux users since it is quite easy to install it on any Linux-based system and use it. Today’s goal is also to learn how we can get the Redis server installed on our Ubuntu 20.04.
Ever find yourself typing more characters than is necessary when using some annoying application or website? Here’s a quick hack around that.
There’s a magic program called xdotool written by Jordan Sissel that solves this problem. I’ve known about his excellent work for years, but only today did I learn he also wrote xdotool. It’s named as such because it tells the X server to do something for you.
You might want to look at man xdotool to learn all that it’s capable of, but for now, open a terminal and try running...
Linux gamers using the Valve’s Proton compatibility tool to run Windows games on their systems will be soon getting a performance upgrade as Nvidia has announced that it’s working with Valve to bring FPS boosts using its DLSS technology featured on RTX cards.
Deep Learning Super Sampling or DLSS, is a technology that lets gamers get more performance in games without having to give up too much image quality. It works by running the game at lower-than-native resolution, for eg: rendering the game at 1080p when your monitor is 4K, but then upscaling the images to native resolution using some remarkable algorithms.
The Chromebook is becoming a more and more robust laptop option by the year. With increasing crossover functionality for both Linux and Android, it now has access to a plethora of apps and games that in the past would have been unthinkable.
This list is largely made up of games you can download from the Play Store, too, because every Chromebook released for a good few years now has native Android functionality. We want to reflect what’s available to the majority of Chromebook users today, and we’ve checked to see that the below games work well on most modern Chromebooks.
Starting off very simplistic with a vegetation system, The Sapling has expanded to become a rather curious evolution sim to spend a couple of hours in and see what horrors you end up creating.
The Fight & Flight update is now live as the second big free expansion adding in "eggs, fur, feathers, family trees, an extended combat system, gliding and most importantly: wings". This greatly opens up what you can do with it and will enable much more interesting gameplay to watch and mess with.
Want another game engine reimplementation to play Quake II? Yamagi Quake II is another that's quite advanced and big new release is available with Vulkan support.
The main point of this client is to provide a fully stable platform for keeping Quake II alive. The graphics and gameplay remain the same but there's a number of quality of life upgrades.
Two Point Studios shared today that the upcoming Two Point Campus due in 2022 will have a native Linux supported build, just like they did with Two Point Hospital.
In Two Point Campus, you’ll be tasked with building and running your very own campus environment, where the decisions you make will shape the lives of the students you enrol and the staff you hire. For the first time, build in the great outdoors as you develop your very own campus grounds, buildings, and surroundings. Lay down dorms, pathways, hedgerows and more with new easy-to-use creative tools. The only limit is your imagination (and your in-game bank balance).
Been having trouble logging into Steam lately? You're not alone, it seems there was a problem with the auto-login which has now been solved.
Just one of the bug reports had a good hundred comments on it and there were reports across Reddit too it seems. The latest Steam Client Beta from June 15 should now solve this, and when enough people have opted into the Beta to show that it properly fixes it, then we will see it rolled out to the official client. Seems like it was somewhat widespread too so it's good to see Valve fix it up.
Paradox Interactive and Double Eleven have released the latest Prison Architect expansion with Prison Architect: Second Chances and the free The Pen update for everyone.
As expected from Paradox (and they already announced it), they plan to keep updating the base game for everyone while purchases of the base game and DLC enabling them to keep supporting it long-term like this. This free upgrade give you a ton of new objects to build, a new Reception quick-room, a Custom Intake option to get more flexibility with scheduling and restricting prisoner intake, you can order a shakedown to look for Narcotics and more relaxed room rules for building outside.
Worldwalker Games have now officially released Wildermyth, a game that very much deserves plenty of attention and it's easily one of the best releases this year.
It plays out like a mix of a party-based RPG with elements of a board game, along with XCOM-styled combat and together it's a beautiful mix. Your party changes and grows over time through different campaigns too, going through relationships with different party members and you're dealing with old age too. All your decisions will have consequences not just for the story progress but for each character too.
Another digital event has arrived with Steam Next Fest, giving you a chance again to try out a bunch of demos for upcoming games and watch live events.
Just like the previous events the main page will allow you to browse through different genres. Developers will livestream directly to their store pages, giving you a chance to watch and chat with them which does make it quite an experience. It's a really wonderful format, that I hope Valve continue for years to come as it's a great thing for developers and players.
Annoyingly, Valve seem to have again forgotten to include a platform list so you can't just see only Linux-supported titles right now. Not only that but quite a lot of developers haven't put up the full demo banner with platform icons on their store pages (only the little demo button on the sidepanel), so you need to check SteamDB (Search for "game + demo") on those to see if the demo has a Linux build.
Luna's Fishing Garden from Coldwild Games (Merchant of the Skies, Lazy Galaxy) is a slow, peaceful and quite meditative experience out now.
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In Luna's Fishing Garden there's no way to lose. You either progress directly in the quests, or you do a little planting or fishing. It's really quite lovely.
The latest update to the perennially popular GNOME Shell extension introduces full support for the rejigged GNOME 40 desktop, including its horizontal workspace switcher and immersive app launcher.
I tried the release out on my Fedora install and I am pleased to say that most of Dash to Panel’s settings are present and working in GNOME 40 too. This includes intellihide, configurable panel colour and transparency, and on-hover window previews.
The Gnome Shell Dash to Panel extension combines the Dash with the top Gnome panel. The result is a single panel that provides an icon taskbar, the tray, system menu, and date / time indicator. This is similar to the KDE Plasma and Windows 7 (and newer) taskbar. It supports both X11 and Wayland.
It's worth noting that you shouldn't confuse Dash to Panel with the somewhat similar Dash to Dock extension (which has not yet had a release supporting GNOME 40, but this is under development), from which the Ubuntu Dock was forked.
In part 1 of this series we looked at some common misconceptions about how power works inside the GNOME project and went over the roles and responsibilites of various sub-groups.
With that in place, let’s look at how of a feature (or app, redesign, or other product initiative) goes from idea to reality.
I'm going to confess here: Arch Linux isn't my cup of tea. At one point in my life, I would have been all over Arch—back in those days where I loved spending hours tweaking my desktop operating system, or waving the flag of "I installed X distribution" with pride. Those days are gone, unfortunately. Now, I simply want to install an operating system and get to the task at hand. It's all about being efficient and proficient with a minimal amount of effort. I've reached that point in my career where being productive is more important than being cool.
Although, I do try to find a happy medium in there somewhere.
Installing and using the likes of Arch Linux takes a back seat to using a Linux distribution that requires next to no effort to install and start using.
That doesn't, however, prevent me from testing out the occasional Arch-based Linux distribution. Thus, I arrived at EndeavourOS, a distribution that claims: if you like to roll up your sleeves and go on an adventure, then you might want to give us a try.
As a free and open-source OS, Linux continues to spread its wings, amassing attention from new and experienced people alike.
Whether you are a beginner, an intermediate, or an advanced user, there is already a distribution waiting for you.
Check out some of these desktops and install the ones which suit your interests and skillsets.
helloSystem, a project that gives FreeBSD a user interface reminiscent of macOS, hit the 0.5 landmark with a new build last week.
The 0.5 release is based on FreeBSD 12.2 and is progressing nicely. The release notes show a number of important fixes like “sudo su works now”, “fix wrong font sizes” and “fix menu and desktop on multi-monitor setups”.
There is also a note that “all helloDesktop core components build on Linux now,” raising the possibility of a Linux version in future, and that helloDesktop can be used with an alternative window manager, KWin, instead of OpenBox.
Changes in the core utilities include “spatial mode” in Filer, which means that folders open in a new window. This is on by default but can be configured in Preferences. Filer also has a new Go To menu, a context menu for opening files as root, new keyboard shortcuts, and shows file volumes on the desktop. Windowshading has been introduced, which collapses a window to just its title bar when the title bar is double-clicked.
The Mozilla Firefox project is a redesign of Mozilla’s browser component, written using the XUL user interface language and designed to be cross-platform, supporting Linux, Android, Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X operating systems. It is a fast, small and very easy-to-use web browser/navigator/explorer that offers many advantages over other similar products, such as the ability to block pop-up windows and the feature-rich tabbed browsing experience.
Opera is a free software product designed from the ground up as a replacement for the default web browser of your GNU/Linux operating system, packed with a highly customizable layout, as well as a bunch of unique features and technologies that are not available on any other similar product.
OE is a cross-compiler, that compiles almost all of the packages for EasyOS. The host system is EasyOS Dunfell-series, which has glibc 2.31 -- up until Easy version 2.7.3 that is. I recently did a complete recompile in OE, bumping glibc from 2.31 to 2.33, and released EasyOS 2.8.1 with glibc 2.33. Running Easy 2.8.1, the host system, yesterday I attempted to compile a package in OE, and got a warning...
Gpptp is a GUI frontend created by forum member 'jafadmin' for the 'gpptp' utility, a PPTP VPN client.
Linux Mint is an operating system based on Ubuntu. The distribution comes with some interesting tweaks that many users appreciate, making it a popular choice in the Linux community for both beginners and experts alike. It is stable, easy to use, and has a well-designed Update Manager that puts many other distros to shame. Linux Mint is a joy to use.
Last month, we told you that Linux Mint 20.2 would be named "Uma." At the time, we shared the Uma Beta would be released in the middle of June. Well, folks, today is June 15 and guess what? You can download Linux Mint 20.2 Beta immediately!
Linux Mint 20.2 Uma BETA is now Available for Testing. Download details inside with feature round-up.
This is a series that offers a gentle introduction to Linux for newcomers.
After installing Ubuntu, you’re ready to use your new system. But there are some additional steps we recommend you first perform before using your new system. This article identifies 8 things you need to consider.
Let’s start with a no-brainer, an update of the system.
elementary OS 6 Beta 2 comes about five weeks after the first beta release and it’s here to polish and cleanup up the installer UI and improve the detection of disk drives, as well as error handling when elementary OS fails to install on certain systems.
In addition to the installer improvements, this beta release introduces more apps as Flatpaks, including Calculator, Camera, Document Viewer, Screenshot, Tasks, and Web. The team plans to turn more of their default apps into Flatpaks before the final release of elementary OS 6.
Developers and testers, elementary OS 6 Beta 2 is available now! For a refresher on what a beta is, the release schedule, and how to provide feedback, see the Beta 1 announcement.
Do you log in to an Ubuntu Operating System fist time? and you don’t know what Ubuntu version is running on?. It is a good command for the ubuntu version check step by step guide. If you are a beginner, you can use it.
When you install Ubuntu on your system, what version it is. To know more about Ubuntu install please check my previous article How to install Ubuntu on Virtualbox. but what happened after upgrading your system, A new version will be installed and the old version will disappear.
Right now, the situation is the same as the unknown system you are using. Now your next task to check Ubuntu version.
Oracle and Canonical, the publisher of Ubuntu, have announced Ubuntu support for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Ampere A1 Compute. Combining the benefits of Ubuntu, a popular cloud operating system, with the performance of Oracle's new offering, the companies say, enterprises can now run traditional workloads in a cost-optimized fashion.
The ARM-based platform is also well-suited for new use cases, such as Canonical’s solution Anbox Cloud, which allows organizations to run Android in the cloud at scale and securely. Ubuntu on OCI Ampere A1 is available as a platform image in the OCI console now.
With a longstanding commitment to Edge and IoT applications, Canonical has historically placed great emphasis on EgdeX – a set of microservices that enable developers to build apps that run at the edge and act as a middleware connecting the things and the cloud .
It’s no surprise that Canonical has also been supporting the EdgeX Foundry – the open source, vendor neutral LF Edge platform for middleware Edge IoT.
This year, we’re excited to be sharing two presentations with the community, to help share knowledge and ideas around EdgeX. They’re naturally open to all, so go ahead and download EdgeX (if you haven’t already), and join us!
Whilst a detailed comparison between the two operating systems is beyond the scope of this review, it is worth noting some of the key findings I observed. Looking at the performance tools common between the two OS showed that they were reasonably evenly matched.
However, as the fan is not detected under Ubuntu and video playback on WIndows runs better than on Ubuntu, given the price includes a Windows 10 Home license it probably doesn’t make too much sense to use the device as a Linux HTPC.
The Banana Pi BPI-MP2 Pro debuted earlier this year, but it is now purchasable worldwide. Currently, the single-board computer (SBC) is available for US$61 on AliExpress, albeit excluding postage.
To recap, the BPI-M2 Pro has an Amlogic S905X3 SoC that features four ARM Cortex-A55 cores. The 65 x 65 mm board also has 2 GB of LPDDR4 RAM and 16 GB of eMMC flash storage at its disposal. Banana Pi has also included a microSD card reader should you need more storage, though.
Additionally, the BPI-M2 Pro has 40-pin GPIO pins, two USB 3.0 ports, a micro USB 2.0 connection and a Gigabit Ethernet port. Moreover, there is an HDMI 2.1 connection that supports 4K output at 60 Hz. The BPI-M2 Pro requires 5V of DC power at 3A, for reference.
The manufacturer has included built-in Wi-Fi too and supports up to the Wi-Fi 802.11 ac standard. In addition, the manufacturer claims that the BPI-M2 Pro is compatible with Android 9.0 Pie and Linux (CoreELEC, Debian, Ubuntu). You can find out more information about the BPI-M2 Pro's software compatibility in its wiki.
Radxa Zero SBC follows Raspberry Pi Zero W form factor, but thanks to an Amlogic S905Y2 quad-core Cortex-A53 processor clocked at up to 2.0 GHz offers much higher performance, which Radxa says corresponds to about 70% of Raspberry Pi 4 CPU performance.
The tiny Arm Linux board comes with up to 4GB RAM, 16GB eMMC flash, and either AP6212 or AP6256 wireless module. plus all interfaces from Raspberry Pi Zero W, but with a twist as the mini HDMI port is replaced by a micro HDMI port, and USB-C ports are used instead of micro USB ports.
Radxa’s Raspberry Pi Zero-like “Radxa Zero” SBC runs on Amlogic’s quad -A53 S905Y2 and sells for $15 (512MB LPDDR4) to $45 (4GB with 16GB eMMC). Features include WiFi/BT, 4K-ready micro-HDMI, 40-pin GPIO, and 2x USB Type-C.
The Raspberry Pi Compute Module series has followed mainstream Pi SBCs into Cortex-A53 and Cortex-A72 territory with the RPi CM3/CM3+ and CM4. Yet, the slightly larger and more SBC-like Raspberry Pi Zero and WiFi/BT enabled Raspberry Pi Zero W are still stuck with a 1GHz, ARM11-based Broadcom BCM2836. They nevertheless remain popular due to their $5 price, 65 x 30mm dimensions, and support for Raspberry Pi HATs and most Pi software.
Within the Pokemon series there exists a special bicycle that plays a little tune when ridden, and this is what element14 Presents’ DJ Harrigan was trying to recreate with his DIY Pokebike project. It has a simple purpose: play a song and increase its volume while accelerating and then decrease the volume and eventually stop playing it once the bike comes to a halt.
The circuit uses an Arduino MKR Zero to handle all of the inputs and outputs, and with an onboard microSD card slot and the ability to output digital I2S audio, playing music is easy. Speed is determined by a Hall effect sensor and magnet pair that sends a pulse whenever the wheel has made a rotation. By tracking how many rotations have been made in a second and seeing the changes between these values, acceleration can be derived.
Harrigan then designed and 3D-printed a simple enclosure that houses all of the circuitry, including a battery pack. The front is shaped like a Pokeball, and it has an illuminated push button that allows for the user to interact with it. Finally, there’s a small speaker at the back connected to an I2S amplifier that takes signals from the MKR Zero and converts them into sound.
In the world of music, being able to keep time accurately is vital when playing a piece, as even small deviations in timing can cause the notes played to sound “off.” Ordinarily a device called a metronome is used to provide consistent ticks that the musician can use, but most are not that visually interesting. This is what inspired ChristineNZ over on Instructables to create her own metronome that uses an Arduino Uno to both show the beat and produce a small noise.
ChristineNZ’s Piano Metronome enables users to select both the rate (tempo) of the beat and its volume by turning one of two rotary encoders. Rather than having some clunky interface, this project has a large 20Ãâ4 I2C LCD on the front that displays the current time via an RTC, the sound’s amplitude, and even subdivisions. The top of the enclosure also holds four RGB LEDs that visually indicate the beat and subdivision if present.
The heart of the Raspberry Pi Foundation's mission is to bring computing to everyone, wherever they may be. The single-board Raspberry Pi devices have gone a long way to delivering on that promise, via kits that bundle keyboard and mouse for a full computing experience.
But what if the Pi was built into the keyboard? After all, there have been many projects that put these devices inside laptop cases or built them into media centres, or storage systems. But those have all been third-party projects, taking off-the-shelf Raspberry Pi devices and adding them to new hardware. What if the boards could be redesigned, and integrated into, say, the official Pi keyboard?
Lastly, a quick reminder that KDE Akademy is taking place June 18-25. This is also the fourth year in a row that PINE64 is a sponsor of the event.
If Europe wants to have its citizens (and companies) rely significantly on European-operated software, it has no choice but to develop better software, and to also offer that for free. The good news is: we have the talent. Tens of thousands of Europeans work for US tech companies, often from Europe even.
Firefox 89.0.1 is here only two weeks after the release of Firefox 89, which introduced the awesome Proton redesign, as well as new privacy features and various other improvements, and improves the performance and stability of the WebRender feature, and fixes the broken scrollbars on some GTK themes.
In detail, it appears that some users reported missing scrollbar indicator on some websites with the new Proton interface. On the other hand, WebRender was plagued by a couple of regressions that may affect the overall performance of the web browser when enabled.
Mozilla has always been about community and understanding that the internet is a better place when we work together. Ten years ago, Mozilla created the Reps program to add structure to our regional programs, further building off of our open source foundation. Over the last decade, the program has helped activate local communities in over 50 countries, tested Mozilla products and launches before they were released to the public, and collaborated on some of our biggest projects.
The last decade also has seen big shifts in technology, and it has only made us at Mozilla more thankful for our volunteers and more secure in our belief that community and collaboration are key to making a better internet.
“As the threats to a healthy internet persist, our network of collaborative communities and contributors continues to provide an essential role in helping us make it better,” said Mitchell Baker, CEO and Chairwoman of Mozilla. “These passionate Mozillians give up their time to educate, empower and mobilize others to support Mozilla’s mission and expand the impact of the open source ecosystem – a critical part of making the internet more accessible and better than how they found it.”
Ahead of our 10 year anniversary virtual celebration for the Reps Mozilla program, or ReMo for short, we connected with six of the 205 current reps to talk about their favorite parts of the internet, why community is so important, and where the Reps program can go from here.
The basic control for media autoplaying (for video and audio) is in Preferences ââ â Privacy & Security, as covered in Allow or block media autoplay in Firefox. As mentioned there, if you want to block all videos you want 'block audio and video', not just 'block audio', which only blocks videos with un-muted audio and still allows silent ones to autoplay if they want to. This appears to affect everything, including bare video content such as direct links to .mp4s, which is a change from 2018. The limitation of this setting is that by itself, once you click to play a video in a tab, (auto)playing stays enabled until you close the tab again. So once you've let the first Youtube video play, Youtube (or anywhere else) will autoplay as much else as it wants to (in that tab). I prefer to specifically play each video.
This article exposes LibreOffice with its built-in, Colibre Icons, which are made especially for Windows users with a lot of screenshot pictures. I made this collection of screenshots with LibreOffice 7.0 AppImage Version (click here to download) which is runnable in different OSes I use. Let's enjoy this!
Colibre is related to Karasa Jaga and Sukapura icon themes which are created by the same co-author Rizal Muttaqin -- he is one of respected designers at LibreOffice --. Andreaz Kainz is the designer and maintainer of three icon themes namely Elementary, Colibre and Breeze aside from many other LibreOffice artworks and the author of Colibre website above.
GPL Guru is a popular GPL themes and plugins provider website that has been around since Jun 2017. This website offers premium GPL themes and plugins for its users and it has a wide range of themes and plugins that you can check out.
GPL Guru website has simple user interface and a huge base of users from all around the globe. It is a trusted and verified platform that offers 100% unique and authentic products.
It’s customary to cringe at the name of this multi-platform application, which is an acronym for the “GNU Image Manipulation Program.” Look past the name, and there’s a lot to like here.
Available on Windows, Linux, and macOS, GIMP is a free photo editing tool with the ability to have masks, layers, color adjustments, and a huge library of plug-ins. There's also a fairly large community of users, and thorough documentation making it a good tool for power users and photo enthusiasts.
INTENDED AUDIENCE: Forth and RetroForth novices. A basic understanding of how to define words and how Forth dictionaries work is assumed.
GOAL: Understand how to use hook, set-hook, and unhook in RetroForth. Briefly cover the use of DEFER in standard Forth systems.
When Joe Biden took office last January, many were expecting a return to “normalcy”—at least a Democratic version of it. After all, Biden was a Senate veteran and an establishment insider. Anyone looking to predict his early policy priorities might reasonably have looked back to the Obama and Clinton administrations. Yet Biden has staked out a forcefully progressive position on a wide range of issues, especially those related to young people. Perhaps most significantly, the administration will start delivering a monthly payment of up to $300 per child to low- and middle-income families—a move that will benefit 88 percent of children and lift millions out of poverty.
I’m a believer in plain text and reading. To say: “Hello, class” in a two-second video clip needs a megabyte of data. Spoken audio needs 100 kilobytes. It takes precisely 12 bytes of text. That’s 100,000 times more efficient than video. Uncomplicated plain text needs simple technology. Cognitively, reading is a juggling act requiring many parts of our brain. Processing is therefore shifted from the machine to the learner, and via that effort memory engrams are created. Students think about content, not technological distractions.
My view is that we tend to underestimate “intellectual latency”. There is a delay between the time you approach a new idea and the time you have fully considered it.
It doesn’t take too long once you’ve left the greater Los Angeles area, away from all the lush lawns, water features, green parkways, and manicured foliage to see that California is in the midsts of a very real, potentially deadly water crisis. Acres and acres of abandoned farms, dry lake beds, empty reservoirs—the water is simply no longer there and likely won’t ever be back.
What’s happening here in California is far more than a ‘severe drought’ as the media labels the situation. The word ‘drought’ gives the impression that this is all short-lived, an inconvenience we have to deal with for a little while. But the lack of water isn’t temporary, it’s becoming the new norm. California’s ecology as some 39.5 million residents know it is forever changing—and climate change is the culprit. At least that’s the prognosis a few well-respected climatologists have been saying for the last two decades, and their predictions have not only been accurate, but they’ve been conservative in their estimates.
Environmental justice activist Sharon Lavigne, who led a successful grassroots campaign to block a toxic plastics manufacturing plant in her Louisiana community, is this year's North American winner of the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize.
The awards, sometimes referred to as the Green Nobels, were announced Tuesday to recognize "grassroots environmental heroes" on each of the planet's inhabited continents who have exhibited "sustained and significant efforts to protect and enhance the natural environment, often at great personal risk."
The presidents of the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine issued a statement Tuesday urging that all investigations into the origins of Covid-19 "be guided by scientific principles" and warning against the proliferation of unfounded claims about the emergence of the deadly virus, which has killed more than 3.8 million people across the globe.
"Let scientific evidence determine the origin of SARS-CoV-2," said Marcia McNutt, John Anderson, and Victor Dzau, referring to the virus that causes Covid-19. "Science is our best tool to ascertain, or to understand to the extent possible, the origins of SARS-CoV-2 and Covid-19, which could help prevent future pandemics."
The National Low Income Housing Coalition is calling on the Biden administration to "prevent a historic wave of evictions this summer€ by extending, strengthening, and enforcing the federal eviction moratorium and by implementing a whole-of-government approach to distribute emergency rental assistance more efficiently and effectively to those most in need."
The national€ moratorium€ on residential evictions for nonpayment of rent—a life-saving measure€ issued€ last September by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to curb the spread of Covid-19—is set to expire on June 30. CDC Director Rochelle Walensky€ said€ that discussions are ongoing as to whether the agency will prolong€ its partial€ ban on evictions.
Sharon Lavigne of St. James Parish, Louisiana, is one of six winners of the 2021 Goldman Environmental Prize, in recognition of her work within the “Cancer Alley” community where she was born and now, at 68 years old, continues to mobilize for environmental justice.
Lavigne, who founded the community group RISE St. James in 2018, worked for nearly 40 years as a special education teacher at St. James High School before being drawn into the fight against heavy industry — and its public health and environmental impacts — in her home town alongside the Mississippi River.
The suspect entered the Big Bear Supermarket at South DeKalb Mall in Decatur, in the Atlanta-metro area, where there was an argument with the cashier over a mask. Maddox gave few details about the argument but said it was over a face mask.
Sheriff Maddox said a reserve deputy, who worked part-time as security for the store and was wearing a bulletproof vest, then exchanged gunfire with the suspect and both were injured, as a bullet grazed a second cashier.
The hits just keep on coming. Gag orders are being lifted or expiring and we're finding out even more about DOJ leak investigations under Trump. Under AGs Jeff Sessions and Bill Barr, the DOJ targeted journalists, Congressional reps... even readers of USA Today.
The new directive will be the second issued by TSA, with the agency rolling out a directive last month that required pipeline owners and operators to report cybersecurity incidents within 12 hours of discovery to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). It also increased coordination between pipeline owners and both CISA and TSA.
Proctor said Tuesday that the upcoming second directive would be classified as more sensitive in nature than the first directive due to “the nature of the mitigating measures that are going to be required.”
Meanwhile, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California said that it had found a compromised Pulse Secure appliance after the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issued its April alert announcing that hackers had breached multiple government agencies and other critical organizations using vulnerabilities in Pulse Secure technologies.
On Sunday, The New York Times reported that in February 2018 the Department of Justice (DOJ) subpoenaed Apple for the account information of former Trump White House Counsel Don McGahn and his wife. The company complied with the subpoena, according to anonymous sources who spoke with the Times. A nondisclosure order prevented it from notifying the McGahns about the request until May of this year.
This news comes on the heels of revelations last week that the DOJ under former President Donald Trump had subpoenaed Apple and Microsoft for the account information of journalists and Democratic lawmakers as part of a leak investigation.
Today, noyb and Sustainable Computig Lab ("CSL") published a proposal for a new automatic browser signal to finally eliminate obsolete cookie banners. "Advanced Data Protection Control" (ADPC) aims to demonstrate that a user-friendly European solution for privacy settings can easily be implemented.
The court has thrown out a case previously ruled in hiQ Labs’ favor and sent it back down to the lower court for further consideration. The court based its decision on its June 4 ruling in the case Van Buren v. United States that limited the type of conduct that can be prosecuted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986 (CFAA), which is also at the heart of the LinkedIn case.
The decision effectively vacates a 2019 ruling by the San Francisco-based U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals barring LinkedIn from prohibiting hiQ access to publicly available information of LinkedIn’s users, bouncing the case back to the lower court to hear again.
CloudLinux today announced as part of its TuxCare security services that it is making available free open source software, UChecker, that scans Linux servers for vulnerable libraries that are outdated and being used by other applications. This provides detailed actionable information regarding which application is using which vulnerable library and needs to be updated, which helps improve the security awareness patching process.
Security teams running Linux servers now have access to UChecker, a new tool from CloudLinux that runs scans on Linux servers to detect outdated shared libraries on both disk and in memory.
Offered as part of CloudLinux’s TuxCare security services, UChecker works with all modern Linux distributions and has been licensed under the GNU General Public License, Version 2.
According to ZDNet, UChecker tells security pros which application uses which vulnerable library and offers up the relevant process ID and process name. With this new information administrators can see which libraries they need to update.
The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) last week announced the arrest of a 55-year-old Latvian woman who’s alleged to have worked as a programmer for Trickbot, a malware-as-a-service platform responsible for infecting millions of computers and seeding many of those systems with ransomware.
The good news is the seven-year-old security bug in Linux systemd's polkit, used in many Linux distros, has been patched. The bad news is that it was ever there in the first place. Polkit, which systemd uses in place of sudo, enables unauthorized users to run privileged processes they'd otherwise couldn't run. It turned out that you could also abuse polkit to get root access to a system.
The wars to maintain world dominance have always been special; something unlike more local wars. World dominance for the holder has always been of such importance that any sacrifice of humans or property has been, as they see it, worth the losses. The we I refer to are the leaders of the world at any one time. Foreign policy has always played second place to domestic and has allowed leaders of government, banks, and major industry, to follow policies abroad outside the scope of public opinion…. Until perhaps today.
And when historians examine each past struggle to control the whole world they tend to separate them by time. Compared to domestic affairs overseas policies have been carried out in the main outside the gaze of public opinion. It is my argument that the struggles for global dominance are something special by itself. So far to date, which ever Nation in the ascendancy has been willing to sacrifice its own peoples on a huge scale in order to maintain its world power. And in the last 70 years, the Americans have been willing to lay countries that don’t conform to waste …. To destroy developments that had been previously underway. Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Libya are some recent examples.
Think again.
Mind you, wouldn’t it be perfectly sensible, and ethical, to use some of the $700-billion-plus military budget to help finance Biden’s $6 trillion infrastructure and economic recovery plan? Sure, it’s good that he’s looking for hikes on corporate taxes and the wealthiest Americans to do the job. We already see, however, that corporate taxes are going to be much lower than previously planned, and we just learned that the wealthiest Americans hardly pay any federal taxes at all.
Bush II avoided raising taxes to fund his wars since that was a surefire way of eliciting public opposition to these adventures. Indeed, he cut taxes on the rich. The preferred course of action was massive borrowing, a course that eventually added some $1 trillion to the national debt. Afghanistan and Iraq were, in turn, part of a massive defense buildup, funded by debt, to achieve the unchallengeable hegemonic position the neoconservatives sought.€ Bush II’s defense budget averaged $601 billion per year, compared to Pentagon spending of $458 billion per year throughout the Cold War (1948-1990).
Americans began to feel the costs of the war toward the end of the decade as the economy weakened, then spiraled into recession following the global financial crisis in 2008, bringing to the surface the hard choices that had to be made in a condition of severe indebtedness.€ As Linda Bilmes and Joseph Stiglitz warned in 2008:
On May 25, famous American actor, Mark Ruffalo, tweeted an apology for suggesting that Israel is committing 'genocide' in Gaza.
Filipino and international human rights defenders joined opposition lawmakers and victims' relatives in the Philippines on Tuesday in welcoming outgoing International Criminal Court Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda's formal request for an investigation of the violent drug war waged by President Rodrigo Duterte over recent years.
"Duterte's brutal war on drugs normalized violence in our society and terrorized the population into silence. He must be held liable along with the police and military leadership that implemented the bloody campaign."—Judy Pasimio, iDEFEND
When I was in school, we had civil defense classes. We were shown models of American missiles aimed at the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and we were taught to use gas masks. We Moscow students did not believe that the United States would attack our country. We read Ernest Hemingway and Kurt Vonnegut, and we knew that the best Americans were always anti-war. However, my first American friend, Cathy, whom I met in Moscow in the perestroika years, did believe when she was a child that the USSR would attack America. She told me how she would wake at night in fear and decided to study Russian so that she could explain to the Russians that they should not bomb peaceful American cities.
Boris Johnson sees himself as the heritor of a world bestriding Imperial mantle, but in truth he cannot bestride the Irish Sea. The overshadowing of the G7 summit by his peculiar concern that Irish sausages should not be eaten by those in Northern Ireland who do not believe in evolution, was a fascinating examplar of British impotence as he failed to persuade anybody else to support him. It looks like Danish bacon for the shops of Belfast and Derry will have to be imported through Dun Laoghaire and not through Larne. Ho hum.
China says NATO is adopting a “Cold War mentality” after the military alliance singled out China and Russia for criticism during a summit in Brussels. In its final communiqué, NATO leaders said, “China’s stated ambitions and assertive behavior present systemic challenges to the rules-based international order.” NATO leaders also criticized Russia and called on Moscow to withdraw troops from Ukraine, Georgia and the Republic of Moldova. Stephen Wertheim, a historian of U.S. foreign policy, says he is concerned that the Biden administration is “moving toward a quite hostile posture toward China and Russia simultaneously.” He also says policymakers need to urgently reevaluate the purpose of NATO, which he says could fuel greater conflict. “Is that really what the American people need for the rest of the 21st century?” he asks.
Documents released Tuesday by the House Oversight Committee detail then-President Donald Trump’s repeated efforts to pressure the Department of Justice to pursue his unsubstantiated claims of election fraud in the 2020 presidential election and help overturn Joe Biden’s victory.
The emails illustrate the behind-the-scenes efforts Trump's White House took to pressure federal officials while he simultaneously pushed the same false claims on Twitter. The messages were sent from mid-December to early January and were made public by House Oversight and Government Reform Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y.
"Having said that, using humanitarian issues, particularly famine and starvation, in order to exert undue pressure on Ethiopia is completely unacceptable," he told reporters after the meeting.
"It's not a drought or locusts that are causing this hunger, but the decisions of those in power," British Ambassador Barbara Woodward said. "That means those in power could also end the suffering."
The report, which was also jointly compiled with the Department of Homeland Security and requested by New Mexico Senator Martin Heinrich, says some QAnon supporters "will likely begin they can no longer 'trust the plan' referenced in QAnon posts and that they have an obligation to change from 'digital soldiers' towards engaging in real world violence."
Many QAnon followers refuse to believe President Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election against Trump. The slogan "trust the plan" refers to the day when Trump wll be reinstated as president and crack down on his enemies.
The FBI says the theory will be kept alive by the coronavirus pandemic, posts on social media, societal polarization in the US and the "frequency and content of pro-QAnon statements by public individuals who feature prominently in core QAnon narratives."
The problems in northern Burkina Faso are deeply intertwined with the tense security situation in the entire Sahel region. Some experts are worried about the end of France's eight-year anti-terrorist "Operation Barkhane", announced by President Macron last Thursday. As yet, the former colonial power has up to 5,100 soldiers deployed in the region. Macron said that the French military presence would be realigned in the wake of the recent coup in Burkina Faso's neighbor country Mali.
The withdrawal of French troops will be a difficult test for the Sahel states, according to security expert Mahamadou Sawadogo. "The French army is leaving the Sahel at the exact moment when the armed groups are gaining strength," he told DW, adding that the regional armies have depended on the logistics of Operation Barkhane and the French troops for their own effectiveness.
Shooter Omar Mateen, 29, called 911 during the attack to pledge allegiance to the Islamic State and also mentioned the Boston Marathon bombers. The FBI had interviewed Mateen in 2013 and 2014 but he “was not found to be a threat” and at the time of the attack he was not under investigation.
An American-born man who’d pledged allegiance to ISIS gunned down 49 people early Sunday at a gay nightclub in Orlando, the deadliest mass shooting in the United States and the nation’s worst terror attack since 9/11, authorities said.
According to the indictment, the man was angry about the separation wanted by the woman and out of disapproval of her style of dress.
"'They take those who do not respect Sharia law, whip them and release them after a few days,' testifies a resident of Djibo. Suspected thieves have their right hand amputated. In neighboring northern Mali, on May 2, ISIS cut off the right hand and left foot of three people in public at the market. A way to show civilians who is in charge in these abandoned lands.
"In the Sahel, more than 4,000 schools were closed due to threats at the end of 2020, depriving more than 700,000 students of education. Some saw the teacher, who refused to teach in Arabic, killed in front of their eyes ".
Former National Security Agency contractor Reality Leigh Winner was released from prison Monday to serve the rest of her sentence in a halfway house. We get an update from the lawyer handling her commutation and pardon process. Winner was arrested in 2017 under the Espionage Act for leaking classified government information about Russian interference in the 2016 election to reporters at The Intercept. Prosecutors told The New York Times she got the longest sentence ever given by a federal court for unauthorized disclosure of government information to the press. Winner’s family and legal team say she should receive a pardon and are calling for her sentence to be commuted. “Reality released a document that gave us information that we needed to know at a time that we absolutely needed to know it,” says Alison Grinter Allen, Winner’s attorney.
But the statement curiously omitted any references to Islamic terrorism or the Islamic State — to which the shooter declared his allegiance shortly before carrying out his deadly rampage.
Henning also shared other examples of the ad campaign with our team, for example, one showing soldiers setting up an oil well that parodied the famous photo of soldiers raising the American flag on the Japanese island of Iwo Jima. Another showed African rebels posing on the front of a ship like in the film "Titanic," as if they were celebrating their freedom.
In 2008, the photo parodying the scene at Iwo Jima and the photo of the UN peacekeeper both won Epica Awards, honouring creativity in ad campaigns.
The charges were announced less than an hour after The Intercept published a top-secret document from NSA. The document described Russian efforts to launch cyber attacks on at least one U.S. voting software supplier and send “spear-phishing” emails, or targeted emails that try to trick a recipient into giving up data, to more than 100 local election officials, days before the 2016 U.S. election.
In the future, Greenland will speak and sign agreements on behalf of the Commonwealth in the Arctic Council.
Mette Frederiksen revealed the news last week at a press conference at Marienborg where a meeting with Greenland and the Faroe Islands was held.
An Antarctic glacier gathers pace. In the north, the Arctic ice thins faster. Racing climate heat is feeding polar concerns.
Native American, climate, and environmental activists on Monday renewed calls for the Biden administration to fulfill its stated commitment to climate action and Indigenous rights and stop Enbridge's Line 3 tar sands pipeline after a Minnesota appellate court upheld a state agency's approval of the highly controversial project.
"Climate leadership means ending the fossil fuel era and stopping Line 3." —Collin Rees, Oil Change International
Last year, Rainforest Action Network tracked down and published a document revealing the 11 insurance giants behind the controversial Trans Mountain tar sands pipeline in Canada, which were providing more than USD$500 million in insurance policies. These pipelines are so dangerous that under Canadian federal law that the existing Trans Mountain pipeline cannot move any oil, and the expansion project cannot be built, without hundreds of millions in insurance coverage.
Despite the growing necessity of transitioning to renewable energy, the share of fossil fuels in the world's total energy mix barely changed during a recent decade, according to a report released Tuesday by the Paris-based think tank REN21.
"The share of fossil fuels in final energy consumption has not moved by an inch."—Rana Adib,€ REN21
Global Conflicts Over Fossil Fuels, Nuclear and Alternative Energy
After examining the use of water by the oil and gas industry during Gavin Newsom’s tenure as governor,€ Food & Water Watch research€ has found that on Newsom’s watch the industry used more than 3 billion gallons of freshwater for drilling operations that could have been diverted for household use.
“Fossil fuel extraction not only hastens climate change and endangers the lives of frontline communities,” said€ Alexandra Nagy, director of Food & Water Watch’s California campaigns. “It also takes water from Californians struggling through one of the hottest and driest droughts on record. Regions like the San Joaquin Valley are bracing for a dry summer that will leave many without drinking water, a devastating prospect for a predominantly rural, Latinx region already suffering from decades of pollution from factory farms. Based on the recommendations provided by the state to Californians for water usage in a drought, the freshwater used by the oil and gas industry during Newsom’s term could have provided everyone in Ventura with more than a year’s worth of water.”
After repeated rulings from Norwegian courts that the nation's oil policy does not violate its constitution, six young climate activists and two environmental groups on Tuesday announced an application for a related case to the European Court of Human Rights.
"Our application to the European Court of Human Rights is for me the manifestation of action and hope in the face of this crisis."—Mia Cathryn Chamberlain, plaintiff
Climate campaigners are again taking Europe’s second largest oil and gas producer to court over the climate impacts of fossil fuel extraction in the Arctic, after a previous attempt failed at the country’s Supreme Court in December.
Six climate activists, alongside Greenpeace Nordic and Young Friends of the Earth Norway, have filed an application at the European Court of Human Rights claiming the Norwegian government’s approval of new licences for offshore oil drilling in the fragile Arctic region violates their human rights.
An analysis released Monday by advocacy group Friends of the Earth says that eliminating an overlooked loophole included in the Republicans' 2017 tax legislation amounting to fossil fuel industry "welfare" could help fund renewable infrastructure while advancing smart climate policy.
"One of the biggest presents [former President Donald] Trump ever sent to the oil industry was hidden on page 157 of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act," Lukas Ross, author of the new analysis and program manager at Friends of the Earth, said in a statement.
More than 1 million people in Puerto Rico were left in the dark this month after power transmission and distribution for the island was taken over by a private company under a 15-year contract. Much of Puerto Rico lost power after a fire at an electrical substation caused a massive blackout just days after the private U.S. and Canadian company LUMA Energy formally took over management of the island’s electric grid from the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, or PREPA, which was devastated by Hurricane Maria. Many people are still without power or facing ongoing blackouts. “This is a classic example of disaster capitalism,” says Arturo Massol-Deyá, executive director of Casa Pueblo, a community-based natural resources conservation and sustainable development group.
"Citizens have been waiting for years to see the cages ban materialize. We are delighted that the European Parliament has taken a firm stance against cages. The time has come now for politicians to put words into action." —Olga Kikou, CIWF E.U.
These days my conversations with friends about the new administration go something like this:
In the months before the coronavirus pandemic abruptly halted the United States economy in March 2020, graduate student workers and faculty members in the University of California system aggressively pushed for cost-of-living salary adjustments through strikes, protests, and rallies on campuses.
Though COVID-19 shutdowns and transitions to remote learning disrupted these organizing efforts ahead of a potential vote for a system-wide strike, workers in the UC system adapted organizing efforts to be conducted remotely, recently securing enough union authorization cards to represent over 17,000 student researchers at all ten campuses in the UC system and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.They joined post-doctoral students, academic researchers, tutors, teaching assistants in the UC system, who are already represented by UAW affiliated unions.€
If you're a fan of gaming giant Nintendo, you really should know by now that Nintendo hates you. More specifically, when Nintendo is presented with a choice to either allow its rabid fans to express their fandom in new and interesting ways or attempt to exert iron-fisted control over every last thing, the company will always, always, always choose control. From taking down fan-games, DMCAing let's plays and much-loved video game music from its properties, or shutting down fan-projects for fiction or movies, the company behaves as though it just can't help itself. To be clear, Nintendo is typically within its rights in taking these actions, but it doesn't have to. This is a choice, not a necessity.
West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin stands at the bridge. He has immense influence—virtually a veto—on whether and how this country makes progress in the Biden administration.
You heard me right. The National Republican Congressional Committee € issued a statement last week claiming that Chipotle’s recent decision to raise prices on their burritos and other menu products by about 4 percent was caused by Democrats.
Stripe Inc. saw “major uptake” of the unusual offer it made to staff during the pandemic: Leave high-cost cities like New York and San Francisco and take a $20,000 bonus to boot.
The catch? Workers had to consent to a 10% cut to their base compensation.
The husband of an Amazon financial executive was sentenced on Thursday to 26 months behind bars for insider trading of the web giant's stock.
Viky Bohra, 37, of Bothell, Washington, reaped a profit of $1,428,264 between January 2016 and October 2018 by buying and selling Amazon stock using eleven trading accounts managed by himself and his family.
Rev. Dr. William Barber II said late Monday that West Virginians are prepared to stage non-violent sit-ins at Sen. Joe Manchin's office to protest the Democratic lawmaker's ongoing obstruction of key voting rights legislation, opposition to an ambitious infrastructure package, and support for the 60-vote filibuster rule.
"He's blocking the things that his state needs. He's standing against his own state. They didn't send him there for that."—Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II
Nancy Reagan once claimed that she couldn’t get fair press coverage from the women sent to write about her. Perhaps, she speculated, these journalists were jealous of her, “a woman who wears size four” and who has “no trouble staying slim.” Her theory was put to the test when The Saturday Evening Post sent Joan Didion to profile her in 1968, the year that Ronald Reagan, then the governor of California, would lose the Republican presidential primary to Richard Nixon. If not a competition of looks or a comparison of waistbands, then what could have accounted for the resulting article? “Pretty Nancy” followed the style that was then becoming distinctive of Didion’s journalistic prose: a blunt, self-assured series of descriptions and observations that lead the reader to believe she was just writing down what she saw. Here is Nancy pretending to pluck a rhododendron blossom. Here is Nancy finding her light. Here is Nancy wearing “the smile of a woman who seems to be playing out some middle-class American woman’s daydream, circa 1948.”1
However, Fujimori – the candidate of the right – has refused to concede. In fact, she has hired the very best of Peru’s legal minds to challenge the election results. Within hours of the election tallies being available, Fujimori’s team filed 134 challenges within the window of opportunity; they have another 811 challenges in hand. Anyone who knows the Peruvian legal fraternity will realize that some of the most important names are on the Fujimori roster: Echecopar; Gersi; Miranda & Amado; Payet, Rey, Cauvi, Pérez; Rodrigo, Elías & Medrano; Rubio Leguía Normand; Rebaza, Alcázar & De las Casas. In Lima alone the team had over thirty lawyers at work. The Fujimori team had assembledthese lawyers before the vote, anticipating the possibility of a Castillo victory and the need to tie him up in the courts. The white collar legal army put in place a racist lawfare strategy; their entire game has been to invalidate the votes that are at the core of Castillo’s support base, namely the indigeous communities of Peru.
The United States appointed a new ambassador to Peru. Her name is Lisa Kenna, a former advisor to US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, a nine-year veteran at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and a US Secretary of State official in Iraq. Just before the election, Ambassador Kenna released a video, in which she spoke of the close ties between the US and Peru and of the need for a peaceful transition from one president to another. The “presidential transition sets an example for the whole region,” she said, as if anticipating a serious challenge. If anyone would know about interference in the electoral process in Latin America, it would be the United States.
Castillo’s narrow victory, yet to be officially validated, represents an abrupt shift from Peru’s norm of corruption, right-wing ascendency, and political instability (such that in one week in November 2020, three presidents took office, one after the other.) Castillo’s unexpected first-round victory on April 11, with 18.5% of the votes, was unsettling enough to his competitors that almost all of them backed Keiko Fujimori in the recent voting. Each of Peru’s two Communist parties backed Castillo (as evidenced here and here).
In office, Castillo will face formidable obstacles: a hostile national press, a Congress that overwhelmingly opposes him, business and financial establishments in panic mode, and retired military figures threatening revolt. Additionally, Peru’s total of deaths attributed to climate change is the third highest in Latin America and its rate of deaths due to COVID-19 infection is tops in the world.
These tensions have found yet another academic front on which to contest. There are two historical associations in the U.S. for scholars of Middle East studies reflecting opposing attitudes toward Israel and its behavior toward the Palestinians. And this divide presents us with a dichotomy of values at the professional academic level.
The oldest of these is the Middle East Studies Association (MESA). It was founded in 1966 and currently has a membership of more than 2700. It also serves as a “constituent society of thirty-six affiliated organizations.” It puts out a quarterly journal and has an active Committee on Academic Freedom. MESA is a very successful learned society. Its scholars cover all of the Middle East and North Africa. It is dedicated to high standards of scholarship and diversity of interpretation.
Progressive champion and Ohio congressional candidate Nina Turner released a new campaign ad on Tuesday detailing her support for Medicare for All.
"Something that continues to haunt me to this day, is my mother dying at the young age of 42 years old," Turner says in the video. "No Insurance. No money in the bank. So when I fight for Medicare for all, I'm fighting for my mama who's not here and working class people."
The speakership would be for Kevin His version of a place in heaven. He seems to think to reach that level A pact’s required with the Devil.
The tail end of the Bill Barr/Donald Trump DOJ has been marred (I mean… more so…) by a quick succession of reports detailing its targeting of journalists' communications in order to sniff out the source of leaks.
In the new light of atomic weaponry, Albert Einstein€ warned€ against “the outmoded concept of narrow nationalisms.” But the concept is flourishing as both parties strive to outdo each other in vilifying Russia as a locus of evil. Rather than coming to terms with the imperative for détente between the two countries that brandish more than 90 percent of the world’s nuclear warheads, the Democratic leadership at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue has been heightening the bilateral tensions that increase the chances of thermonuclear holocaust.
President Biden has excelled at gratuitous and dangerous rhetoric about Russia. As this spring began, he€ declared€ on national television that President Putin is “a killer” — and boasted that he told the Russian leader that he has “no soul” while visiting the Kremlin in 2011. It was a repeat of a boast that Biden could not resist publicly making while he was vice president in€ 2014€ and again while out of office in€ 2017. Such bombast conveys a distinct lack of interest in genuine diplomacy needed to avert nuclear war.
History is contested because the telling of history is powerful.
Mitch McConnell stole a Supreme Court nomination from Barack Obama and gave it to Donald Trump.
As President Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin meet in Geneva for their first in-person summit of Biden’s presidency, they’ll have an opportunity to reverse a dangerous and in many ways unprecedented deterioration in relations between the two countries—and begin to set a new course.
Fed up with a culture of overwork, through-the-roof housing prices and skyrocketing living costs, many Chinese youth are "lying flat" to express their frustration with the lack of upward social mobility.
Lying flat includes opting out of getting married, having children, purchasing a home or car, and joining the corporate money-making machine, according to China's online discussion forum Zhihu. The tang ping movement embraces doing the bare minimum to maintain a minimalist lifestyle. It rejects the so-called "996 life" of working 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. six days a week, a tech industry schedule that has bled into other sectors and often fails to provide sufficient income for exhausted workers to get ahead.
If public discourse is a litmus test of the health of a society, the conversation on social media suggests we have a problem. It's one thing for our journalists to deal with toxicity on these platforms. It's another for our audience members who try to engage with and discuss our journalism to encounter it on platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, where they are almost guaranteed to be confronted by hate, racism and abuse.
French Gates is expected to meet with senators on Capitol Hill this morning, including Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, the philanthropist's [sic] home state.
It takes considerable skill to come up with the words to sound just apologetic enough to get your critics off your back, but without actually apologizing. It took Omar several tries, but the U.S. congresswoman from Minnesota seems to have finally figured out the formula.
It may be dubbed the "Promoting Rights and Online Speech Protections to Ensure Every Consumer is Heard" (PRO-SPEECH) Act, but a new bill from Mississippi Republican Sen. Roger Wicker is anything but First Amendment-friendly. Wicker's measure would ban huge swaths of online content moderation, forcing private internet forums to host speech that may currently violate their terms of service and be considered hateful, harassing, vulgar, or otherwise undesired.
The bill would also take aim at freedom of association and free markets, disallowing some tech services—such as app stores and cloud computing companies—from choosing what products they offer or what businesses they'll contract with.
A video that has been continuously circulating on social networks in West Africa since early 2020 claims to show a group of schoolchildren, from an unidentified country, who died after eating poisoned biscuits at a classroom birthday celebration. In fact, the video was taken after an incident that occurred in Kenya in February 2020, in which a stampede at a primary school led to the death of 15 children.
The story of an Israeli soldier, who was allegedly part of the clashes at Al-Aqsa Mosque, but converted to Islam out of remorse, recently went viral. However, India Today's Anti Fake News War Room (AFWA) dug deep and found it to be an outright fabrication.
Last week we looked at the various antitrust bills written by House Democrats (though with Republicans co-sponsors conjured up at the last minute with an assist from Rupert Murdoch), and noted that none of them seemed likely to really solve the problems of internet consolidation. The crown jewel bill comes from Rep. David Cicilline, who is spearheading this entire antitrust effort. We discussed some of the problems with his bill last week, but a closer reading suggests that it would also create a disaster for content moderation. The bill reads:
Australians believe that academic links with China generate economic and cultural benefits at the expense of free speech, course availability and universities’ financial sustainability.
A survey by the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) has revealed “complicated” perceptions of China among the 2,000 respondents. Thought to be the most comprehensive exploration of Australian public opinion on relations with the East Asian giant, the study exposes the domestic political imperatives driving policies that have saddled universities with a rapidly mounting security-related regulatory workload.
The future of the Internet is under greater threat than ever before from authoritarian governments, according to literary and human rights group PEN America, which called on the world’s democracies to unite to defend freedom of expression online.
Repressive governments are imposing new regulations that invoke “digital sovereignty,” but in reality can be used for censorship, surveillance and crackdowns on dissent, PEN America warns in a new report published Tuesday. Also on Tuesday, the U.N.’s human rights chief Michelle Bachelet pointed to “authorities in various countries” who have shut down the Internet and demanded takedowns of social media posts. “I remind these and other States that criticism – online or offline – is not a crime,” she said in a statement. “It is a necessary element of any vibrant society.”
Fulwood Academy say both pupils have since been suspended and the offensive acts have been reported to police and Prevent (part of the government's counter-terrorism programme).
Lancashire Police attended the school on Friday morning and two students were taken to Preston Police Station on Saturday morning where they were interviewed by officers.
The force has confirmed it is investigating the provocative acts as potential hate crimes and the matter is being treated as a 'Critical Incident'.
"The courthouse windows were smashed, its walls were spray painted with graffiti and fires were started inside the building, damaging a portion of the mayor's office," noted the Nashville Tennessean. "A plaque commemorating the civil rights movement in Nashville was destroyed."
The destruction spooked Elder, who lived nearby and was thus under a city-wide curfew. He also found himself increasingly unnerved by the large number of emotional social media posts coming across his feeds that seemed to justify radicalism and groupthink.
"I saw a mob mentality around my own friends, and I worried that was what was happening on the outside, too," says Elder.
In the wake of revelations that the Trump Justice Department secretly surveilled Democratic lawmakers and reporters from prominent news outlets in an effort to hunt down leakers, press freedom advocates are calling on Congress to impose strong limits on the vast spying powers that have been so readily abused by both Democratic and Republican administrations in recent years.
"Mark my words: if Congress does not pass tough and binding rules that permanently tie the DOJ's hands, it will happen again—whether it's a Democrat or a Republican in the White House."—Trevor Timm, Freedom of the Press Foundation
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has documented 12 cases of journalists currently being prosecuted in Turkey under terrorism legislation that prohibits questioning the security forces. They include two journalists – a former reporter for the daily newspaper Cumhuriyet (Republic) and its current editor – whose trial begins today. Manipulation of Turkey’s judicial system is undermining press freedom, RSF warns.
Algeria cancelled the accreditation of France 24 due to a “clear and repeated hostility towards our country and its institutions”, the country’s communication ministry said on Sunday. FRANCE 24 said in a statement that “we cover Algerian news transparently, independently and honestly, as is the case with all countries we cover”.
The developments follow the recent lifting of gag orders, which has revealed the use of subpoenas by the Trump administration's Justice Department.
The department secretly subpoenaed Apple in February 2018 for account information of then-White House counsel Don McGahn and his wife, and secured a gag order that barred the tech giant from telling them about it, a person familiar with the matter told NPR's Ryan Lucas.
Apple informed the McGahns of the subpoena last month after the gag order expired, Lucas reported Sunday.
Belarusian authorities have paraded detained opposition blogger Raman Pratasevich at a news conference during which they gave their disputed version of why they diverted a Ryanair commercial fight last month that has triggered international condemnation and sanctions.
Pratasevich was placed on stage with four officials, two of whom were in uniform, at the event on June 14, a move the opposition decried as “soul-crushing.”
Radio journalists Claude Verlon and Ghislaine Dupont were abducted and shot dead after interviewing a member of the MNLA Tuareg separatist group in northern Mali in November 2013, six month after French troops drove back al-Qaeda-linked groups that had seized cities and towns in northern Mali.
In the wake of a threat by U.S. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to block any potential Supreme Court nominee proffered by President Joe Biden in 2024 should the Kentucky Republican become majority leader after the midterm elections, more than a dozen progressive advocacy groups joined a growing number of Democratic lawmakers Tuesday urging Justice Stephen Breyer to retire.
"The only way to prevent another Amy Coney Barrett or Brett Kavanaugh from undoing his work is for Justice Breyer to announce his retirement before the next Supreme Court term."—Rep. Mondaire Jones
There appears to be a lot of outrage and faux victimhood coming from some White farmers and their political allies concerning the ‘Emergency Relief for Farmers of Color Act’ which was recently passed by Congress. The Act attempts to address some of the past wrongs committed by the United States Department of Agriculture against farmers of color. Those who oppose the Act contend that it actually discriminates against White farmers. They have apparently received support from a judge who put the distribution of funds on hold. To better understand this historic legislation and its purpose one has to first understand and accept the history of racism by the USDA and America itself.
One of the outcomes of the Civil War was the promise of “Forty Acres and a Mule” for freed Black men. Relying in good faith on that promise, the formerly enslaved aspired to build wealth and create an economic system for the benefit of their newly liberated Black community and move them toward equality with Whites. Unfortunately, like so many promises over the past 250 years that promise also remains unfulfilled. Even so, through hard work and perseverance, by 1910 approximately 9,000,000 Black farmers acquired over 15,000,000 million acres of farmland. Rather than support these herculean efforts, the White power structure and the USDA, which was established in 1862 to provide assistance to farmers and rural communities, created significant barriers to undermine the Black community’s success.
My efforts on this front have been threefold. First, I wrote about 30 national citizen organizations last October documenting how, since the Sixties and Seventies, the media has been marginalizing the civic community on a variety of matters and especially of reforming the political economy.
Where once journalists would cover civic group reports, litigation, testimony, and top civic leaders for their expertise, the coverage now is woefully inadequate. Civic leaders do not like to publicly acknowledge this exclusion for it makes them look powerless€ vis-à-vis€ the political and commercial interests they have to confront and reform. So, my urgings for them to pay intense attention to the years of near blackout fell on cautiously silent ears.
How do you respond if you've just been notified you lead the state in discipline cases? Well, if you're Sergeant German Bosque of the Opa-Locka (FL) police department, you take perverse pride in your inability to be a good cop.
Bet you thought there was no such thing as too kind. I can’t write it into this poem without admitting kindness is a synonym for “too close” when its nectared syllables sap these prison walls. O Kindness,
lotus flowering muddy waters, I can’t call on your greening nature, your bloom that fruits into song, into breath, in a place rotting under unnatural light,
We are in the moment before we decide, for the first time, to have sex.
We fill our mouths with salami and wine. I am careful, peeling wax paper off glazed sponge cake
In my last dispatch, I told you about beginning to look into the criminal records of the men arrested as a result of officials testing cold-case evidence in Baltimore County. Today, I want to finish that story, walk you through how I enlisted the help of academics, and reveal some of the surprises and challenges I faced once I began reporting beyond the data.
First, I want to begin with a line that has stuck with me from the 2017 HBO documentary “I Am Evidence” about backlogged rape kits.
It’s not enough to roll back the cruel and xenophobic policies of our past. Most of us now living in America are the descendants of refugees, asylum-seekers, and immigrants. This new generation should be treated in ways that are consistent with our most cherished ideals. Now is the time to act.
There’s a running joke among Iranians that the Iranian political system must be far more advanced than the one in the United States; months after the US election millions of Americans doubt the winner, but months before the Iranian election, everyone was certain who the winner was going to be.
In Greek mythology, the horse outside the city of Troy was a wooden gift in whose hull some of the hostile Achaeans had hidden. Unsuspecting inhabitants, certain of victory over the invaders, pulled it in, the Achaeans climbed out at night and opened the gates for trailing troops, who then captured and destroyed Troy.
Antivaxxers love claiming the mantle of being “oppressed.” Indeed, they love it arguably as much as they love conspiracy theories demonizing vaccines as deadly. The most recent example that’s been in the news is the despicable manner in which they have been co-opting the Yellow Star of David, the cloth badge that the Nazis forced Jews to wear in Nazi-occupied territory in order to identify them and enforce their “otherness,” a tendency that I recently referred to as a form of Holocaust denial. So it should be no surprise that, with the approach of Juneteenth this Saturday, antivaxxers are trying to co-opt this long-running commemoration among Blacks that came into more prominence last year after the murder of George Floyd in order to promote the message that, like the Blacks whose slavery finally ended on Juneteenth in 1865, they are enslaved.
“Companies like PayPal and Venmo have hundreds of millions of users. Access to their services can directly impact an individual, company, or nonprofit’s ability to survive and thrive in our digital world,” said EFF International Director of Freedom of Expression Jillian York. “But while companies like Facebook and YouTube have faced substantial scrutiny for their history of account closures, financial companies like PayPal have often flown under the radar. Now, the human rights community is sending a clear message that it’s time to change.”
The coalition sent a letter to PayPal and Venmo today, voicing particular concern about account closures that seem to have been used to pressure or single-out websites that host controversial—but legal—content. PayPay shut down the account of online bookseller Smashwords over concern about erotic fiction, and also refused to process payments to the whistleblower website Wikileaks. Last year, Venmo was sued for targeting payments associated with Islam or Arab nationalities or ethnicity, and there are also numerous examples of sex worker advocates facing account closures.
Today’s letter calls on PayPal and Venmo to provide more transparency and accountability around its policies and practices for account freezes and closures, including publishing regular transparency reports, providing meaningful notice to users, and offering a timely and meaningful appeals process.€ These recommendations are in alignment with the Santa Clara Principles on Transparency and Accountability in Content Moderation, a set of principles developed by free expression advocates and scholars to help companies center human rights when moderating user-generated content and accounts.
The grim pivot from “essential workers are our heroes” to “no one wants to work; they’re lazy” wasn’t unexpected. After some workers were forced to make starvation wages during a deadly pandemic, some companies are blaming those who are reluctant to come back for contributing to a “labor shortage,” or what’s been called a “reassessment” of the future of work. Part of that reassessment — which includes worker strikes and walkouts that have gone viral — includes unpacking the sprawling landscape of workplace abuse that defines the job environments and self-esteem of young people who are working too much for too little, told they have to “pay their dues,” and even forced to endure racist and sexist workplaces. “It's just gotten to the point where it's just really toxic,” Monica says of her job. She wishes her employer paid higher wages, provided child care, or helped with college. Instead, she says, the employer just demands more and more.
The myth that young people are supposed to endure abusive work environments as a rite of passage into the labor market skims over the systemic issues that allow those environments to persist in the first place. At a first job, it’s almost a cultural expectation that you’ll be underpaid, harassed, or exploited in some way, despite research that shows that early career experiences can have significant impact on the rest of our working lives.
Saying that central bank asset purchases have increased wealth inequality is another way of saying that the state has intervened directly in order to increase the wealth of those at the very top. In this context, the idea that billionaire wealth simply represents a reward for effort and innovation — the size of which is determined by the “market” — is clearly absurd. These billionaires didn’t earn the massive increases in their wealth seen over the last year — they were effectively handed this wealth by the state.
The most unsettling weekend of my professional career was spent in a small hotel conference center in the company of people I had never met before and whom I have not seen since. It upended much of what I believed about myself and my profession and plucked me from a path I had traveled for 25 years, depositing me in an unfamiliar landscape that still feels, almost five years later, like a foreign land.
[...]
[...] Hesitant to salt their obviously still-open wound, I tentatively asked, “What was different about the second hearing?”
Eileen answered quickly. “We don’t know, and neither does our son, because he wasn’t allowed access to the second set of case files.”
All 19 workers at a fast food restaurant in Pakistan were detained after refusing to give a group of police officers free burgers last week.
Staff at the chain Johnny & Jugnu in Lahore were rounded up at 0100 (2000 GMT) on Saturday and held overnight.
"This is not the first time something like this has happened... at our restaurant," a statement by the burger chain said.
Yet despite all this, worldwide organizations dedicated to ending child marriage universally fail to acknowledge its justifications in Islam. The UN High Commissioner of Human Rights never mentions Islam in connection with child marriage. UNICEF doesn’t, either. Nor does the international network Girls Not Brides or the International Women’s Health Coalition. The latter does say: “Child marriage occurs in every region of the world, and is practiced across cultures, religions, and ethnicities,” and while that is true, no religion or culture offers as much justification for child marriage as Islam does.
Until that is acknowledged, the root causes of this problem will never be addressed. And more girls will suffer.
The uncle of an 18-year-old Pakistani girl who has been missing from a town near Reggio Emilia since the end of April after refusing an arranged marriage in Pakistan referred to a "job well done" to a friend in an Internet chat room, Italian police said at the weekend, saying he was probably referring to her murder and the disposal of her body.
Danish Hasnain, 33, uncle of Saman Abbas, reportedly wrote "we did the job well", according to the Gazzetta di Reggio Emilia newspaper.
For Ethiopian Orthodox Christians, who comprise more than 40% of their country’s population and most of the people in the Tigray region, the city of Axum is the holiest of places.
They believe it to be home to the Ark of the Covenant, or the original Ten Commandments, and the birthplace of Ethiopian Christianity.
The Michigan family joins an unfortunately long list of people who have been victimized by wrong-door, no-knock raids, where police employed the high-stakes tactic without ensuring basic details were in order, like correct names and addresses.
Indigenous Services Minister Marc Miller said the announcement goes a step further, as it applies to all individuals of First Nations, Inuit and Metis background, potentially affecting hundreds of thousands of people who aim to reclaim their identity on official documents.
All fees will be waived for the name-changing process, which applies to passports, citizenship certificates and permanent resident cards, said Citizenship Minister Marco Mendicino.
A coalition of more than 50 progressive advocacy organizations on Monday sent a letter€ urging the White House to immediately nominate a candidate who is committed to securing€ broadband€ internet for all—and reinstating net neutrality—to€ fill the€ Federal Communications Commission's fifth and final seat, which remains open.
"The pandemic showed us the unshakable image of children doing their classwork from fast-food parking lots using borrowed WiFi. We cannot let those students or any family wait any longer."—Coalition letter
Last December the Trump administration rushed the appointment of Nathan Simington to the FCC last year, despite Simington having absolutely no real experience or qualifications for the role. That's because Simington was appointed for two other reasons. One being the silly (and utterly hypocritical if you tracked the net neutrality fights) effort by the Trump administration to try and have the FCC target Section 230, which was derailed by Trump's election loss.
Bill C-10 is a source of concern with respect to what is in, what is out, and based on a process that approved dozens of amendments without ever publicly disclosing them, consulting experts, inviting sub-amendments or doing anything else consistent with transparent and democratic lawmaking. Time is running out to oppose Bill C-10 in the House of Commons. Should the bill pass, it will head to the Senate where it will be incumbent on the Senators to better assess the free speech implications of Bill C-10 and conduct the democratic, public hearings that the Liberals rejected by ensuring that the dozens of amendments that were never part of a proper Parliamentary process are fully revisited and properly vetted.
My advice is don't say you performed an act like "opting" someone "out" of your e-mail stream, because only spammers ever do that. If you're removing an address from your e-mail distribution because that address is failing, then you are "removing it". Every relationship between some distribution list and some address on that distribution list is exactly one of "opt-in" or "opt-out", never both, and never changing.
All opt-out is spam. If you're not a spammer, don't use the verb "to opt-out" in connection with any of your activities. Now you know.
Progressive advocacy groups that have spent the past several months urging President Joe Biden to step up antitrust enforcement, particularly with Big Tech, applauded the U.S. Senate's Tuesday confirmation of Lina Khan to serve on the Federal Trade Commission.
After senators' 69-28 bipartisan vote—which included all Democrats present—in support of the 32-year-old "antitrust trailblazer," the White House said that Biden has named Khan as the FTC's chair. The president announced his nomination of the Columbia Law School associate professor in March, winning widespread praise from opponents of corporate consolidation.
The Senate confirmed Lina Khan as commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission Tuesday, by a vote of 69-28. Shortly after the vote, multiple reports said that Khan would chair the agency, a surprise shift that drew applause from progressive Democrats. This afternoon, President Biden made it official, and Khan was officially sworn in as Chair of the FTC.
The update comes just hours after the Senate voted to confirm the 32-year-old to the agency in a 69-28 vote.
Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Amazon.com Inc. defended their smart-speaker businesses as U.S. senators warned the grip the companies have over the market could harm competition and consumer privacy.
Republicans and Democrats at a hearing Tuesday raised concerns about what they said were anticompetitive practices such as selling devices below cost and promoting their own services over those of competitors on their platforms.
The package of proposed antitrust bills proposed in Congress last Friday is drawing criticism from technology executives who claim the bills will have unintended consequences and destroy certain products that consumers love.
The five proposed bills follow an investigation concluded last year by the House Antitrust Subcommittee which accused Big Tech firms of harming consumer welfare and employing anti-competitive practices.
The bills aim to prevent companies from manipulating marketplaces to promote their own products. They make it harder for media platforms to buy and kill competitors. They mandate that platforms and firms collecting consumer data make it easier to leave and take the data to competitors. And they give the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission extra resources to police monopoly power.
Roger Waters told the press at a recent pro-Julian Assange event that Facebook approached him about using the 1979 Pink Floyd classic “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2” in an upcoming advertisement for Instagram.
“It arrived this morning, with an offer for a huge, huge amount of money,” Waters said. “And the answer is, ‘Fuck You. No fuckin’ way.'”
“I only mention that because this is an insidious movement of them to take over absolutely everything,” he continued. “I will not be a party to this bullshit, [Mark] Zuckerberg.”
US companies have litigated extensively for pirate site blockades around the world. On their home turf, however, site blocking isn't yet an issue. Or is it? In a new lawsuit filed at a federal court in Colorado, several independent movie companies are demanding that a (dissolved) hosting company should block subscribers' access to torrent sites including The Pirate Bay, YTS, and RARBG.
Movie and TV show piracy apps have periodically appeared on Apple's App Store but in recent years getting past the approval process has become more difficult. However, some developers are now using interesting techniques to fool the great minds at Cupertino, including by disguising piracy apps as puzzle games and Shazam-like music recognition tools.
