In this one, we have Audacity collecting user data, Github training their AI on open source code without prior notice,
Volla OS is a new degoogled android experience direct from the volla phone team. Is this the future for privacy and security?
I don't like the default graphical software centers that almost all desktop Linux distributions ship with these days. In my opinion, the best graphical software center for Debian and Ubuntu-based distros is the Synaptic Package Manager.
In layman’s terms, a computer file system is how a storage device such as a disk drive is able to store, retrieve, and manage files. File systems need to keep track of not only the bits that make up the file itself and where they are placed on the storage device, but also store information about the file. The file system also has to store the name of each file, how to organise files in a hierarchy, and keep metadata such as the file’s modification date.
Even though there are many different file systems available for Linux, most users pay little attention to which file system to use. They are often a forgotten friend. The choice of what file system to use depends on the situation; relevant factors to consider include compatibility, performance, resilience, the media being used, the size and number of the storage medium, features, and security considerations.
A journaling file system is a special type of file system that maintains a tracking file, called a journal. The journal enables the system to repair any inconsistencies that may arise as a result of a system halted abnormally. It does this by keeping track of changes that are made before committing them to the main file system. In the event that the computer is not shut down properly, any data loss can be recreated. This type of file system is therefore less likely to suffer from corruption, and brings file systems back online quickly.
One year ago was the surprise of Paragon Software wanting to mainline their NTFS Linux kernel driver. The Paragon "NTFS3" kernel driver provides much better read/write support for Microsoft's NTFS file-system than what is available with other kernel or FUSE options for this file-system support on Linux. It looks like this driver might finally be mainlined soon.
Over the past year the new NTFS driver has gone through many rounds of review and got into quite good shape. Even early on the code fundamentally has been better than the existing NTFS kernel driver and following all of the upstream code review the quality is in a state where it should be able to be mainlined in the Linux kernel assuming Paragon Software is still willing to maintain the code.
AMD's PMC Linux driver with Linux 5.15 is expected to offer more debugging information for diagnosing S0ix power states behavior to analyze if an AMD SoC is hitting or not the desired low-power states.
S0ix idle standby power states are valuable for energy savings and thus important to ensure such states are properly being achieved when portions of the SoC can power-down. While Intel's S0ix handling on Linux has become fairly mature, on AMD APU/SoC systems there still are some cases of issues around these sub-states to ACPI's S0.
It’s called Clapper, and it’s a superbly designed GTK app pitched as a “simple and modern GNOME media player”.
VLC is undoubtedly the big cheese in the open source video player scene – and rightly so: no other player comes close in performance, versatility, reliability, features, and so on.
But VLC isn’t the most attractive app, and although there are ways to make VLC look better on Ubuntu it’s less effort to switch to a native Linux media player.
To be financially successful, one needs to know how to manage their funds. There are high chances of making mistakes while calculating expenses manually within spreadsheets. Probably, this is why you would tend to look for an automated personal finance tool to do your bidding.
Personal finance tools like the ones listed below can go a long way in helping you manage your costs. Each of these tools can help you create budgets, track your spending, and much more. Keep track of your money, and spend wisely to enhance your savings.
Here is a list of the top five open-source personal finance tools doing wonders for Linux users.
I have been a Debian user for over 20 years, I use windows at work for the proprietary EDA ‘Altium’, but I have never had a windows installation on my laptop. This machine will to be different – it is the first laptop that I have owned that has sufficient GPU to realistically run Altium.. I will try it in a VM later (if that works it will be my preferred choice), but for now I want to try a duel boot system.
For those sticking to the open-source graphics driver, the latest Mesa 3D graphics library is easy to install via an Ubuntu PPA.
Mesa is an open-source software implementation of OpenGL, Vulkan, VDPAU, VA-API, and other graphics API specifications.
Ubuntu uses Mesa as OpenGL implementation if no proprietary driver is in use. It is however always old. For users want to play some games with the open-source RadeonSI, RADV, Intel, or Nouveau drivers, you may try the latest Mesa via PPA.
Secure SHEEL, commonly known as SSH, is a popular open-source network protocol used to secure connections from a client to an SSH server. SSH allows remote control of the target host, port forwarding, executing commands, and files transfer.
SSH uses two types of methods to authenticate users; passwords and public-key authentication.
This guide will walk you through creating and initiating SSH connections using pubic/private keys. Using public-key authentication removes the need to enter a password every time you need to connect to a remote SSH host.
A process is an instance of a running program. Any program you execute in a Linux shell spawns a new process that’s identifiable using a process name and a Unique Process ID. As a system administrator, you will need to be familiar with the command for managing processes in a Linux system
This article will focus on job control commands, allowing you to send processes in the background and bringing background processes to the foreground.
Does your laptop battery come with a "Help, I'm sick" indicator? Most likely, the answer is "No". Since that's the case for everyone, regularly checking if your laptop needs a battery replacement is an important task.
Luckily, Linux has all kinds of utilities for checking the status and health of your device's battery. Since most of them are terminal-based, an average user might find it hard to decode the information provided by such utilities.
Don't worry. By the end, you will have a good understanding of laptop batteries and how to check battery health on Linux, using both graphical and command-line tools.
LaTeX, pronounced as Lay-Tek or Lah-tek, is a documentation language for creating professional documents. Its most common use is technical and scientific documentation because it provides a What You See Is What You Mean approach. This method allows you to focus only on the contents of your document without worrying about the formatting.
This tutorial aims to teach you how to use LaTeX to create various table types and populate them with data.
This tutorial will walk you through how to extend your XFS Filesystem without LVM.
A random string represents a series of alphanumeric characters that have no particular pattern. Although there is no absolute random string because their generation uses mathematical logic, random strings can be unique.
In this tutorial, we shall look at various ways we can generate random strings in bash. This functionality can be useful when creating usernames, passwords, or seed data.
When writing shell scripts, we may come across a situation where we need to know the size of a file. For example, you may need to use this size to perform other actions, such as moving the file to a different directory or deleting it.
This tutorial will discuss quick methods you can use in a bash script to get file size in the specified format such as Bytes, Kilobytes, Megabytes, or Gigabytes.
A footnote is a string of text added at the footer of a page in a book or document. Footnotes may contain the author’s comments, additional information, or a citation of the reference work. This tutorial will explain how to add and use footnotes in LaTeX documents.
Packages and repositories are the bread and butter of Linux operating systems. The first step to installing any software on a Linux-based system is to download its package from its respective repository. A package refers to a compressed archive that contains all the files required for a piece of software to execute properly. Typically, packages are downloaded from their corresponding repositories. Common formats of Linux packages include .deb, .rpm and .tgz. This article will learn about various methods to find out what files are included in Linux packages.
This article will cover a guide on alternative shell applications that can be used instead of the default bash shell available in most Linux based operating systems. Bash or “GNU Bourne Again Shell” is a command interpreter that can be used to run different types of commands and execute binaries from user input or from files. Some alternative shell applications with similar feature sets plus some extras are available that you can use to improve command input and output experience.
Nessus is a proprietary tool that is also available in free edition and the main task of this tool is to scan and find vulnerabilities in systems and networks. Such as unauthorized access, weak passwords, loopholes that can cause DDOS attacks, missing patches, etc. It is developed and maintained by Tenable. The vulnerability scanner platform can save the scan results in various formats such as plain text, XML, HTML, and LaTeX.
The best thing it is available to install for both Windows, Linux, macOS, and FreeBSD. It also supports configuration and compliance audits, SCADA audits, and PCI compliance. Apart from the free edition that can be used to scan up to 16 IPS and is suitable for personal or learning purposes, Pro editions are also available with starting price of $2,990/year.
Prometheus is open-source software for monitoring computers, software, and services. It can scrape different metrics from the operating systems, software, and services in real-time and alert users depending on different events based on those metrics.
In this article, I am going to talk about different parts of Prometheus and show you how to install it on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. I will also show you its basics. So, let’s get started!
Debugging is a fundamental skill that any self-identified programmer should have. It allows us to view, review, and fix errors in our code. One powerful debugging tool is the GNU Debugger, GDB for short. This guide will look at working with GDB to step into or over a function in our code.
Linux is a multi-user operating system; that means it allows more than one user to log in and perform operations without affecting other users in the system.
This tutorial will go over various ways to switch users from the terminal and the graphical environment.
If you spend your Linux time in the command-line, you probably use Vim as your default text editor. Vim is a powerful and modern text editor with many features suitable when working in the terminal. Although Vim is an incredible text editor, getting started and using it to perform basic operations can be daunting. Therefore, getting the basic concepts will help reduce the overwhelming feeling when using Vim.
This guide focuses on one essential Vim feature: performing indentation when editing files.
Tape Archive or tar is a file format for creating files and directories into an archive while preserving filesystem information such as permissions. We can use the tar command to create tar archives, extract the archives, view files and directories stored in the archives, and append files to an existing archive. Tar is a simple yet powerful archiving utility.
This guide will walk you through creating and extracting tar archives on your Linux machine.
Did you know that every command you run in Linux has an exit code? This is true even if a command terminates with an error. Exit values are integer values that range from 0 to 255. A non-zero value, i.e., a value higher than 0, indicates the command exits with an error. If a command executes successfully in bash, it has a 0 exit code. For command not found, the exit code is 127. Therefore, we can use the exit code to perform a specific action.
This tutorial will give you a few tips and tricks you can use to perform an action based on the previous command’s exit code.
Apart from cd, rm, cp, and a handful of other commands, ls is the most basic command any Linux user should know. Its primary use is to show files and directories within a file system and giving detailed information. It is available in all systems that use the Linux kernel.
This tutorial will use the ls command to show you how to get information such as file and directory size in a human-readable format.
In the process of writing this entry I learned that POSIX umask supports symbolic modes, and that they work this way. You get and set umask modes like 'u=rwx,g=rx,o=rx' (aka '022', the traditional friendly Unix umask), and they're the same permissions as you would use with chmod. I believe that this symbolic mode is supported by any modern Bourne compatible shell (including zsh), but it isn't necessarily supported by non-Bourne shells such as tcsh or rc (which is my shell).
By no way is it a full fledged DNS server: it implements particular features that I’ve needed for different experiments I conducted.
We talked about how AWS CIP, STS and IAM can serve as the foundation of application authorization in our last post, i.e., how the application gets the temporary credential representing a specific role (i.e. privileges) to access the resources of the applications — an architecture understanding how different building blocks work together under the hood.
Now, we need to strategize how we actually build the authorization mechanism. When talking about application authorizations, we often encounter two concepts RBAC (role-based access control) and ABAC (attribute-based access control).
To create a file in Linux is easier than eating ice-cream. Yes, I am talking about creating a file in the windows operating system is quite simple and easy.
But to create a file in Linux is easier than creating a file in the Windows operating system, and you have multiple options to complete this task If you are using Linux.
If you think it is not true, then continue reading..
In this article, I am going to cover multiple ways to create a file in the Linux operating system. All methods have an appropriate example, so you can understand better.
I cover the following methods for creating a file in Linux step by step, you can jump on a particular section by clicking on the link.
Are you entering your WiFi password manually on each device? Well, those days are over now! A web service named WiFi Card provides an ingenious way to print QR code card for connecting to your WiFi networks.
While email is often the perfect channel communicating with your site’s visitors, in some cases, it might be too slow, or inconvenience for your specific business. For these situations, you’ll want to add a WhatsApp chatbox to your site so the user can get in touch immediately.
For this post, we’re going to look at how to add a WhatsApp chatbox to your WordPress site. Before this, let’s talk more about what a chatbot is.
vnStat is a console-based network traffic monitoring tool for Linux. It provides network statistics for various time periods.
VnStat uses the network interface statistics provided by the kernel as the source of information - ie from the proc and sys filesystem. It keeps a log of hourly, daily, and monthly network traffic for the selected interface(s).
In this tutorial, we learn how to install and use vnStat in Ubuntu.
Accessing computers remotely has become an important part of the IT world especially in today’s scenario where everyone is working from home due to covid19. There are mainly two ways of connecting machines remotely depending on your operating system like SSH for Linux and RDP for Windows. But every time we try to connect with our remote server, we have to enter a password. So how to set up a passwordless SSH login? In this tutorial, we will guide you on the same.
SSH works by installing SSH server and SSH application respectively on destination(remote) and source(Client) machine.
After installing the SSH application on the client-side, you can provide information related to the remote server. On the server-side, There will be an SSH daemon that continuously checks for specific TCP/IP ports for client connection requests. Once the client initiates the connection requests with the right credentials, the SSH daemon starts exchanging the identification data with the client to establish a secured remote connection.
Ubuntu Server has its own Mandatory Access Control system, called AppArmor, which is similar to SELinux, in that they both provide tools to isolate applications from one another, to protect the host system. But how each of these tools is used is quite different. In fact, just because you know one, doesn't mean you'll be able to immediately use the other. That's why you might want to consider installing SELinux on Ubuntu Server. You might be migrating from a Red Hat-based distribution and have invested considerable time learning how to use that particular system.
Good thing you can install SELinux on Ubuntu.
In fact, it's actually quite simple, and I'm going to show you how it's done. Once finished, you can start working with SELinux on Ubuntu Server in the same way you did when administering your Red Hat-based systems.
Before installing themes and icon packs on our elementary system, let us quickly overview this OS. Elementary OS is a Linux distro based on the Ubuntu LTS. The system is well-known for its fast, open-source nature and its top-notch privacy and security.
Elementary OS started as a set of themes and applications designed for Ubuntu before becoming a standalone Linux distro. Being an Ubuntu-based OS, the system is compatible with its repo’s and packages. A point to note is that the system is based on Ubuntu’s Long Term support releases.
Why do you want to remove a user in Linux? It’s up to you, but you can use userdel command to delete a user in Linux with or without a home directory. userdel command belongs to RHEL, CentOS, Fedora, etc. but it is a low-level utility in Debian based operating systems such as Ubuntu, Debian, etc. You can use the deluser command there as well.
Basically I want to explain that userdel command in the Linux system is used to remove a user account and related files.
This command basically modifies the system account files, deleting all the entries which refer to the username LOGIN.
As you know Linux is a multi-user system, which means more than one user can use the same Linux system at the same time.
If you are working in an organization as a system administrator, then you have the responsibility to manage the system’s users and groups.
I have described in another article how to create a user in the Linux system and how to list users in Linux and how to add a user in the sudo group etc. This article only related how to delete a user in the Linux system with userdel command.
fdisk command in Linux is used to create and delete partitions in Linux of Hardisk. Its know as format disk, You can use it for manipulating disk partition table as well.
With the help of fdisk command you can view, create, resize, delete, change, copy and move patitions on a hard drive.
You can create a maximum four primary partition and unlimited logical partition. Creating logical partition depends on the size of the hard disk.
You will get a very simple and user freindly text based menu driven interface.
You can use this tool for creating space for new partitions, organizing space for new drives, re-organizing an old drive and copying or moving data to new disks.
Switching from Windows to Linux is pretty easy nowadays -- unless you're a gamer. If you are into PC gaming, Windows is still the best operating system for maximum compatibility and performance. Gaming on Linux has gotten better thanks to Steam's Proton, but still, Windows clearly reigns supreme.
With all of that said, Linux gaming is about to get much more possible. You see, Valve's new handheld gaming console is basically just a PC running an Arch Linux-based operating system. The OS is named "SteamOS" and it uses KDE Plasma.
Two Verge editors managed to get through the reservation process and put $5 in their Steam Wallet to reserve a Steam Deck, eventually, with a little luck and a lot of refreshing. Another made it through later in the day.
The reservation system opted to lock out people with new or unused accounts for the first 48 hours, so it’s hard to know if the problems were caused by demand from real people who won’t let handhelds go, or if bot operators found some way around the block. One Verge editor confirmed that his credit card company wasn’t blocking the transaction, even after receiving Steam error messages suggesting that was the issue.
The rumors were true. Valve officially pulled the curtain back on the Steam Deck on Thursday—a $399 gaming handheld designed to bring your Steam gaming library to the palms of your hands, powered by AMD hardware and Valve’s own Linux-based SteamOS operating system. Preorders open July 16, with shipments starting in December.
Mike Verdu was hired to take charge of video game development at the Silicon Valley company, which has openly called hits such as "Fortnite" competition for people's online entertainment time.
Netflix has played with games before, releasing an interactive "Bandersnatch" episode of original series "Black Mirror" and also a free mobile game spinning off its hit "Stranger Things" shows.
Valve is getting into the handheld gaming business. Steam Deck is powered by some of the latest AMD architecture for top-notch AAA gaming action.
Valve has taken Linux seriously for years now, and it looks like the Steam Deck is the company’s next big move. The company just announced the upcoming Steam Deck handheld gaming PC.
Yes, another Steam Deck post! This is going to be a short one because this time around I made a video to talk at length about what I consider relevant with that device and what this means for the future. I am very excited by this initiative and I hope you will better understand why after watching this. You can see it on Peertube below (or Youtube if you prefer):
Big big news today: Valve has announced the SteamDeck–a handheld gaming device running KDE Plasma under the hood! This is a big deal, folks. By using a Linux-based OS, Valve is hugely improving the gaming space on Linux, (eventually, hopefully) removing a blocker for a lot of people. And by running KDE Plasma, tons of people will gain exposure to our software when they use the device docked with a monitor, keyboard, and mouse–because yes, you can do that! This thing is a real computer and can be used like one too!
I’m really excited for the SteamDeck, and I see it as evidence that my plan for KDE World Domination is both achievable and in progress. We are going to get KDE software onto every device on the planet, folks!
In between celebrating the fact that Valve's newly announced Steam Deck runs KDE Plasma when exiting the Steam confines, KDE developers had a very busy week with a number of different improvements to their open-source desktop.
It was a busy and exciting week in the KDE world with some of the improvements this week including:
- KWin's DRM pipeline has been overhauled to offer a multitude of improvements both large and small. This rewritten DRM pipeline will be found with Plasma 5.23.
There are hundreds of Linux distributions. Some are for general purpose usage, while some are specifically tailored for education, robotics, hacking, gaming and what not.
You’ll notice that most of them originate from Debian/Ubuntu, Arch and Red Hat/Fedora. If you like distrohopping and experiment with a range of distributions, you may soon get ‘bored’ out of it. Most Linux distributions would feel too similar after a point and apart from a few visual changes here and there, you won’t get a different experience.
Does that sound familiar? If yes, let me list some advanced, independent, Linux distributions to test your expertise.
If Apple had their way, a seven-year-old Mac belonged in the recycling yard. After about this period, the manufacturer no longer provides its devices with updates. If you don’t come to terms with this and want to continue operating your old treasures – and above all safely – equip them with an adapted Linux. This means that computer life does not only continue with fresh updates, but you can also keep the familiar operating habits of macOS – assuming a little manual work. Our self-experiment shows: It works better than expected.
PiHole is awesome. I use it on my Synology via Docker and it’s been working great for years. But what if you get a little too trigger happy with the block list and end up with too many? In this post I’ll show you how to restore the default PiHole block list.
GarudaOS is one of the famous and user-friendly Arch-based Linux distributions. Indian’s Grid Computer initiated this project to develop a simple and user-friendly environment for beginners. The good addition about the GarudaOS is that it contains a graphical installer to manage graphical tools in the system compared to many other Arch-based systems.
With the help of Linux, India has made an operating system known as “Garuda Linux”. GarudaOS is new in the world of Linux Distributions contains advanced and enhanced features with outstanding performance. 17 cities are connected in this project; tech companies like C-DAC (Center for Development of Advanced Computing), IITs (Indians Institutes of Technology), and 45 other institutes are the project participants.
“The history of work - particularly since the Industrial Revolution - is the history of people outsourcing their labor to machines,” notes a recent article in the Harvard Business Review, - AI Should Augment Human Intelligence, Not Replace It, - by National University of Singapore professor David De Cremer and chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov. “While that began with rote, repetitive physical tasks like weaving, machines have evolved to the point where they can now do what we might think of as complex cognitive work, such as math equations, recognizing language and speech, and writing. Machines thus seem ready to replicate the work of our minds, and not just our bodies.”
Throughout the Industrial Revolution there were periodic panics about the impact of automation on jobs, going back to the so-called Luddites, - textile workers who in the 1810s smashed the new machines that were threatening their jobs. Automation does indeed substitute for labor. However, automation also complements labor, raising economic outputs in ways that often lead to more long-run employment, not less.
Most jobs involve a number of ta
With the recent release of System76's Pop!_OS 21.04 if you are thinking about upgrading to this release from Pop!_OS 20.04 LTS or choosing between the two, here are some benchmarks from the AMD Ryzen Threadripper powered System76 Thelio Major.
Pop!_OS 21.04 released at the end of June as built atop Ubuntu 21.04 while continuing to pull in System76's own customizations and now also featuring its GNOME-based COSMIC desktop environment. On the packaging side it's similar to upstream Ubuntu 21.04 in using Linux 5.11, Mesa 21.0, GCC 10.3, and other similar package versions to which the operating system is based.
A few months ago, we noted SolidRun HoneyComb LX2K became a certified Arm SystemReady ES platform. SystemReady is a certification program by Arm that ensures systems just work with generic operating systems like in the x86 world.
When we looked at the details of the program in the article, we noted there were different categories including SystemReady ES for embedded servers and SystemReady IR for IoT Edge applications.
Arm has just announced the first SystemReady IR platform had just been certified. That device is the NXP i.MX 8M Mini EVK, and that means that anyone that uses the i.MX 8M family of devices with the associated Board Support Package (BSP) can build platforms that will pass the same certification process and boot compliant Linux distributions with minimal integration effort.
Signal is a popular open source, cross-platform messaging app with an emphasis on privacy and security thanks to end-to-end encryption for all text messages and voice or video calls.
There are versions of Signal available for Android, iOS, Windows, macOS, and Linux. But until recently folks who wanted to use Signal on a Linux phone like the PinePhone had to either load the official Android app using a tool like Anbox, or use a third-party Signal client like Axolotl.
Now developer 0mniteck has found a way to bring the official Signal desktop client to smartphones with ARM64 processors running the Mobian Linux distribution.
Released on Friday was a new version of the Hashcat open-source password recovery tool that now adds an AMD HIP back-end.
The Hashcat password recovery / password cracking software already sports an OpenCL back-end as well as an AMD ROCm (Radeon Open eCosystem) back-end (as well as CUDA for NVIDIA GPUs) but now they have also introduced an AMD HIP back-end for those wishing to leverage that AMD interface instead.
The registered charity German Caritas Association switched to open source for its platform dedicated to the provision of online counselling services. In doing this, it calls for a growing involvement of other associations in the open source community.
This event, which will be held in English, is intended for organisations of all sizes and mostly non-profits, academics and companies.
The registration is mandatory and free of charge.
French historians have raised the alarm that a new terrorism and intelligence law will stop the release of state military and security archival documents, amid accusations that elements in the government are deliberately trying to conceal the country’s role in the Algerian war of independence.
Historians say that for the past two years, they have had increasing difficulty gaining access to archives because of a government order that allowed relevant ministries to sign off on declassification.
Normalization of data is a technique that helps to get the result faster as the machine has to process a smaller range of data. Normalization is not an easy task because all your results depend upon the choice of your normalize method. So, if you have chosen the wrong method to normalize your data, you might get something different from your expectations.
The normalization also depends upon the data type like images, text, numeric, etc. So, every data type has a different method to normalize. So, in this article, we are focusing on numeric data.
A function pointer is mutable that holds the location of a method that may be invoked later using that address. Since methods contain behavior, this seems to be helpful. Instead of creating a chunk of code each moment, we require a specific action, like drawing lines; you just have to invoke the method. However, with basically a similar code, we could want to adopt various actions at different moments. For specific instances, continue following this guide to the end.
A new (and genuinely) minor release of our ttdo package arrived on CRAN today. The ttdo package extends the most excellent (and very minimal / zero depends) unit testing package tinytest by Mark van der Loo with the very clever and well-done diffobj package by Brodie Gaslam to give us test results with visual diffs (as shown in the screenshot below) which seemingly is so compelling an idea that it eventually got copied by another package…
The long road toward quality is filled with diversions, false starts, and detours. The enemy of quality is waste, because waste is never desirable. No one pays anyone to deliver waste. We sometimes tolerate waste as part of the process of making something useful and desirable, but the more we can reduce waste while making something, the better.
As usual, your results will vary depending on your compiler and processor. Importantly, I do not claim that the branchless version will always be faster, or even that it is preferable in the real world. For real-world usage, we would like to test on actual data. My C++ code is available: you can check how it works out on your system. You should be able to modify my code to run on your data.
You should expect such a branchless approach to work well when you had lots of mispredicted branches to begin with. If your data is so regular that you a union is effectively trivial, or nearly so, then a conventional approach (with branches) will work better. In my benchmark, I merge ‘random’ data, hence the good results for the branchless approach under the LLVM compiler.
Don’t let it ever be said that we forgot the demise of the analog television signal in the United States. It finally happened this week, with low-power networks largely dying off, more than 12 years after the primary signals went off the air. [...]
A significant event in the history of technology happened yesterday, and it passed so quietly that we almost missed it. The last few remaining NTSC transmitters in the USA finally came off air, marking the end of over seven decades of continuous 525-line American analogue TV broadcasts. We’ve previously reported on the output of these channels, largely the so-called “FrankenFM” stations left over after the 2009 digital switchover whose sound carrier lay at the bottom of the FM dial as radio stations, and noted their impending demise. We’ve even reported on some of the intricacies of the NTSC system, but we’ve never taken a look at what will replace these last few FrankenFM stations.b
Try thinking June 26, 2002. Thirteen time Grand Slam Champion and seven time Wimbledon champ Pete Sampras fell to Swiss journeyman George Bastl in the second round of The Championships. Fifteen years later, Sampras confided to a French sports publication that it was his worst nightmare, and that he had never fully digested his improbable defeat. “I was lost,” Sampras admitted. “I felt terribly alone.”
Bastl, son of a Villars-Sur-Ollon tennis pro, was ranked 145 in the world at the time. While he had had some success as a college player at the University of Southern California, he had won only two matches in previous Grand Slams. And he had not even passed the Wimbledon qualifications; he entered the main draw as a lucky loser through a default by a qualifier.
A little less than halfway through the 1997 film Gattaca, Irene (Uma Thurman) steals a strand of hair from the desk of a coworker she knows as Jerome (Ethan Hawke), and takes it to an all-night DNA testing booth, passing a woman who is having her lips swabbed just five minutes after kissing her date. A few seconds later, the technician gives Irene her answer: “Nine-point-three—quite a catch.” But 9.3 of what? How does her printout of amino acids translate to a scale of 1 to 10, a “genetic quotient” that leads the technician to think her boyfriend is a catch?1
Borges changed language, but also people. One of those changed by meeting Borges is an old friend of mine, who is a psychiatrist. During a trip to Argentina, she told me about the time she had met him. “I had gone to a lecture by Borges at a cultural center in Buenos Aires. I was a 14-year-old student planning to study literature at the university and become a writer and Borges was a hero to me.”
“I was enraptured by Borges strong personality. However, there was a big discrepancy between his physical appearance and the quality of his speech. I saw him as an old man who looked very tired, but the magic of his words transported me to another world, the world of the imagination. After the lecture, I decided I wouldn’t study literature since I would never be able to write like him. I can truly say that although I saw Borges only that one time, he dramatically changed my life.”
Brandon Will had a life plan: go to grad school for creative writing in New York City and eventually get a job in publishing. But then his mother, Janice, came to visit. She had lost a “startling” amount of weight, he said. At 62, she wanted to take cabs for short distances. He noticed a stiffness in her facial muscles that made it difficult for her to express emotion. “I’d be taking selfies and she couldn’t smile,” he recalled.1
Within a year she would be diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. “It got real serious real quick,” Will said. He decided to sublet his room in New York and move home to Detroit for three months. “I thought we’d get her back to where she’d been before the spiral happened.” It’s now been five years, and Will still lives with her, monitoring her meals, doling out her medications, and helping her get around the house without falling.2
I'd be willing to be proven wrong if you can write "Emoji is a language" unambiguously using emoji without it being a baroque cipher of English.
According to sources, their immediate boss, vp original films marketing Jonathan Helfgot, whom they also criticized, was extremely reluctant to fire the three for their comments, arguing that employees vent as a matter of course and such dire consequences were not warranted. But sources say he succumbed to pressure from higher-ups at the company.
Quantum computers (and quantum software) are based on a completely different model of how the world works. In classical physics, an object exists in a well-defined state. In the world of quantum mechanics, objects only occur in a well-defined state after we observe them. Prior to our observation, two objects’ states and how they are related are matters of probability. From a computing perspective, this means that data is recorded and stored in a different way — through non-binary qubits of information rather than binary bits, reflecting the multiplicity of states in the quantum world. This multiplicity can enable faster and lower cost calculation for combinatoric arithmetic.
Julian Kelly at Google AI Quantum and his colleagues have demonstrated the concept on Google’s Sycamore quantum computer, with logical qubits ranging in size from five to 21 physical qubits, and found that logical qubit error rates dropped exponentially for each additional physical qubit. The team was able to make careful measurements of the extra qubits that didn’t collapse their state but, when taken collectively, still gave enough information to deduce whether errors had occurred.
Kelly says that this means it is possible to create practical, reliable quantum computers in the future. “This is basically our first half step along the path to demonstrate that,” he says. “A viable way of getting to really large-scale, error-tolerant computers. It’s sort of a look ahead for the devices that we want to make in the future.”
It doesn’t have to be this way. More of us could maintain our tech products, as we do with cars, if it were more practical to do so. If we all had more access to the parts, instructions and tools to revive products, repairs would become simpler and less expensive.
This premise is at the heart of the “right to repair” act, a proposed piece of legislation that activists and tech companies have fought over for nearly a decade. Recently, right-to-repair supporters scored two major wins. In May, the Federal Trade Commission published a report explaining how tech companies were harming competition by restricting repairs. And last Friday, President Biden issued an executive order that included a directive for the F.T.C. to place limits on how tech manufacturers could restrict repairs.
The F.T.C. is set to meet next week to discuss new policies about electronics repair. Here’s what you need to know about the fight over your right to fix gadgets.
Although, it got better yesterday, 5th day of the challenge, when I decided to move away from claws-mail and switch to neomutt for my emails. I updated claws-mail to version 4.0.0 freshly released and starting updating the OpenBSD package, but claws-mail switched to gtk3 and it became too slow for the computer.
More than 1,200 scientists from around the world€ have condemned British Prime Minister Boris Johnson's plan€ to lift nearly all Covid restrictions in the United Kingdom on Monday, with some of the experts holding an emergency summit on Friday to warn that prematurely ending public health precautions in the country would lead to a surge in infections that could enable vaccine-resistant variants to develop and spread rapidly around the world.
"I believe that the strategy of herd immunity is actually murderous."€ —William Hasteltine, Access Health International
The package required a report to Congress within six months related to what is now referred to as UAPs (unidentified aerial phenomena). The requirement demanded a pentagon report within that time frame be delivered with a broad based report on the situation at hand in regard to this topic. A very strange jelly bean to be located in a covid relief bill, to be sure, and truly unusual in that it really didn’t provide any kind of immediate or obvious pork for a district. This was something else entirely.
Looking into this issue has been fraught with disaster for those wanting to be taken seriously in their military professions or even at the local coffee shop. It’s clear that for whatever reason, the topic has been marginalized and even ridiculed to the point that only Hollywood would touch it with any sort of open acceptance. Eyewitness reports are obviously subjective and difficult to capture on film (if you don’t believe me, look at a glorious and breathtaking full moon and try to capture even 1/1000 of the beauty on your phone). It’s been a difficult subject to study, to say the least. Who knows how many have simply kept quiet over the years to avoid the life complications that such an admission would bring about.
"If€ we don't€ change our food system, future generations will pay those high costs, too."—Rockefeller Foundation
According to€ the NY Times€ story by Nick Fandos, “The legislation faces an uphill battle in the Senate, where Republicans are opposed, and it is unlikely to become law soon. President Biden has not endorsed it, and some moderate Democrats are likely to balk at the implications of decriminalizing a drug that has been policed and stigmatized for so long.”
Schumer vowed “to use my clout as majority leader to make this a priority in the Senate.” He told the media, “It’s not just an idea whose time has come —it’s long overdue.” Overdue, indeed, and probably too late for the Democratic Party to “own” the obviously popular issue. The€ Times€ piece quoted a conservative think tanker who supports drug-law reform: “The culture war over this issue has definitely moved on. Even among Republicans, you’re getting very close to a majority supporting legalization outright.”
Such an event would normally be enthusiastically supported by all sections of the Left. Interestingly, however, the lead-up to the mobilization has exposed deep divides, proving that universal health care isn’t actually a point of unity — but one of real controversy among Leftists.
Some of the biggest names on the Left have been noticeably absent in their promotion — or even mention — of the demonstrations, while some of the biggest politicians and organizations linked to the Medicare For All movement have seemingly united to shun the national day of action.
These recent headlines tell the story of a crime:
Maine enacted a groundbreaking law on Thursday, banning the use of so-called "forever chemicals" in all products by 2030, except in instances deemed "currently unavoidable."
Maine is the first state in the U.S. and first government in the world to implement a ban on the toxic chemicals per- and polyfluoroalkyl, known as PFAS, which are notorious for not breaking down easily in the environment and can remain in a person's body for decades after exposure.
Last November, just as Minnesota was suffering through a punishing wave of COVID-19, managers at a St. Paul U.S. Postal Service distribution center allowed employees to hold a going-away party in the building.
Alejandra Hernandez, a mail handler at that center, was shocked when she saw the gathering: Almost everything about it seemed to violate pandemic safety policies. More than 15 of her colleagues were together in a break room meant for six, chatting, eating and not wearing masks.
Water protectors fighting against Enbridge's Line 3 tar sands pipeline in Minnesota filed suit Friday to stop a police blockade of a camp they use for Indigenous-led organizing, decolonization, and treaty rights trainings as well as religious activities.
The plaintiffs, including Indigenous leaders Tara Houska and Winona LaDuke, are taking legal action in response to the Hubbard County Sheriff Office's ongoing blockade of the private property, which police unexpectedly began late last month. The complaint names the county, Sheriff Corwin "Cory" Aukes, and Mark Lohmeier, the local land commissioner, as defendants.
A few weeks ago, I first wrote about ivermectin is the new hydroxychloroquine. What did I mean by that? Last year, as the coronavirus pandemic washed over the world for the first time, the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine was touted as a near-miraculous treatment for COVID-19 despite an incredible lack of anything resembling rigorous scientific or clinical evidence. Ultimately, studies were done and hydroxychloroquine shown to be ineffective, but it remained what I like to call the “Black Knight of COVID-19 treatments” (in a nod, of course the that famous character from Monty Python and the Holy Grail) in that, no matter how many limbs were hacked off by the emerging scientific evidence, its proponents would respond, “It’s just a flesh wound” and continue promoting it. Ivermectin has developed very much that same vibe, complete with quacks, grifters, and conspiracy theorists promoting it, every bit as much as French “brave maverick doctor” Didier Raoult, America’s quack Dr. Mehmet Oz, quacks like Vladimir Zelenko, and, of course, Donald Trump promoted hydroxychloroquine. That’s not even considering the astroturf campaigns promoting the drug.
In early May, with the Food and Drug Administration expected to approve the first covid-19 vaccine for teens any day, Michelle Fiscus found herself fielding questions from Tennessee vaccine dispensers on what this would mean in practice. Could 12- to 15-year-olds be vaccinated without parental consent, for example? Dr Fiscus, the state official in charge of immunisations, sent back the official legal advice on that. Referring to a 34-year-old ruling of the Tennessean Supreme Court, it noted that any sensible 14-year-old could request a vaccine of their own accord. What happened next, according to Dr Fiscus, “can only be described as bizarre”.
He was responding to a question from a reporter about the alleged role of "platforms like Facebook" in spreading falsehoods about vaccines and the pandemic.
The White House has been increasing pressure on social media companies to tackle disinformation.
Social media platforms like Facebook “are killing people” by allowing Covid-19 misinformation to proliferate, President Biden said on Friday.
A reporter asked the president if he had a message for social media companies about Covid misinformation. Biden replied, “They’re killing people. Look, the only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated. And they’re killing people.”
Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued an advisory Thursday labeling health misinformation an “urgent threat” amid the Biden administration’s push to get more people vaccinated. Murthy said that misinformation is among a range of reasons why some Americans are not getting vaccinated against COVID-19 despite vaccinations being widely available.
“Modern technology companies have enabled misinformation to poison our information environment with little accountability to their users,” Murthy said during an appearance in the White House briefing room on Thursday. “They’ve allowed people who intentionally spread misinformation — what we call ‘disinformation’ — to have extraordinary reach.”
“They’ve designed product features, such as ‘Like’ buttons, that reward us for sharing emotionally charged content, not accurate content,” Murthy told reporters. “And their algorithms tend to give us more of what we click on, pulling us deeper and deeper into a well of misinformation.”
TurboTax maker Intuit, the largest company in the tax-preparation software industry, announced Thursday that it will leave the Free File program, the public-private partnership that offers free tax filing to millions of Americans but has been a magnet for controversy since its creation two decades ago.
But if Kaseya's response to DIVD's disclosure was praisworthy, it turns out it was the exception. In Kaseya was warned about security flaws years ahead of ransomware attack by J., Fingas reports that: [...]
Cybersecurity firm Sonic Wall on Friday sent alerts to its customers of an "imminent" ransomware campaign targeting its Secure Mobile Access (SMA) 100 series and Secure Remote Access (SRA) products running unpatched and end of life 8.x firmware.
The company has requested customers to take immediate action, including disconnecting them from the network since there are no temporary mitigation solutions in place.
The [cracking] tool vendor, named Candiru, created and sold a software exploit that can penetrate Windows, one of many intelligence products sold by a secretive industry that finds flaws in common software platforms for their clients, said a report by Citizen Lab.
Technical analysis by security researchers details how Candiru's [cracking] tool spread around the globe to numerous unnamed customers, where it was then used to target various civil society organizations, including a Saudi dissident group and a left-leaning Indonesian news outlet, the reports by Citizen Lab and Microsoft show.
Finally, here's the Conclusion to my Social Media as Common Carriers? article (see also this thread); many thanks to all of you for your comments on my posts—I'll be reviewing them closely as I put the finishing touches on the piece in the next several days.
Only a fraction of European businesses have realised that the underlying conflict between EU data protection and US survillance law will not be solved in the short-term, and have moved towards hosting personal data in Europe, or other safe regions, instead of engaging in an endless compliance nightmare over US law. Other European companies regularly complain about a lack of "guidance" despite two clear judgments. When guidance is given, such as the recent EDPB guidelines, many argue that it is "unrealistic" to follow the requirements of the law.
Data retention laws have had no measurable effect on the crime rate or the crime clearance rate in any EU country. Requests for communications data are rarely unsuccessful even in the absence of indiscriminate data retention legislation. The clearance rate for cybercrime in Germany, for example, is at 58.6% and above average even without IP data retention. It fell when data retention legislation was first enacted. No other surveillance law encroaches as deeply on our right to privacy as the indiscriminate retention of our contacts, movements and internet connections.
Indian's banking regulator and global payments services giant Mastercard have been at odds for a while over the issue of data storage rules. The long-standing dispute reaching a tipping point with the Reserve Bank of India banning Mastercard from issuing new credits, debits or prepaid cards to customers from next week.
In some ways this calm is harder than open war. Right now, war continues in the dispossessions of our cousins from the neighborhoods of East Jerusalem. Here, most of the Gaza Strip’s assets, infrastructure and services are in catastrophic ruins. So, there is almost no water fit for drinking, washing, or just cooling off in this season’s volcanic record heat, no water that will not rot our teeth and ruin our stomachs, almost no water for the vegetable gardens that keep us barely alive. With luck, we have 8 hours of daily electricity even to pump it into household holding-tanks.
As May began our crucial fishing season, Israel banned our boats altogether from the sea. Now that boats can venture at most 6 miles out (or take fire from gunboats), their catches are as insufficient as the mere 200 daily trucks of other food allowed into the Strip by Israel. (200 trucks divided by 2.5 million people = 12,500 people supposedly fed by a single truck.) Desperate for protein and nourishment, we are forced to buy frozen fish from the trucks. This is often spoiled when it reaches us, and what can a captive do, complain? To whom, with any hope of a hearing?
Since July 8, the authorities in Belarus have been carrying out a renewed wave of mass repressions. The security forces have conducted dozens of raids and arrests targeting human rights activists and journalists. Some of the detainees are facing multiple felony charges on accusations ranging from rioting to tax evasion. To find out what lies behind the latest phase of this prolonged crackdown (and if Vladimir Putin has anything to do with it) Meduza spoke to Belarusian political analyst Artyom Shraibman.€
Haiti is seemingly forever defined by that phrase. No matter who is in power, no matter how much foreign aid Haiti receives, poverty, autocracy, and cruelty—and foreign intervention—mark that country’s post-World War II history.
The assassination of the latest Haitian president, Jovenel Moïse, has plunged the country once again into political turmoil, with two men vying to be top dog and gangs roaming the streets. Moïse suffered a dreadful death, but we should not forget his self-interested and ineffective leadership. He clung to power a year beyond his elected tenure while the country suffered.
Let's dance at the border!
On July 12 the anti-nuclear and anti-war campaigners, together with colleagues from The Netherlands and Germany, began an “International Week” of protests focused on ousting the last approximately 20 US Air Force nuclear gravity bombs known as B61s kept at the base.* In the depths of the cold war, there were 7,000 US nuclear weapons in Germany, so this remnant seems like hardly more than radioactive waste.
With the German group Gewaltfreie Aktion Atomwaffen Abschaffen (Nonviolent Action to Abolish Nuclear Weapons), the US activists will participate in vigils, blockades, and other demonstrations at the gates of the German air base. The group is part of the nation-wide German coalition of over 70 German organizations named “Büchel is Everywhere: Nuclear Weapons-Free Now!” which has three goals: permanent removal of the US nukes; cancellation of plans to replace the US H-bombs with new ones; and German ratification of the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
War is big business and also feeds into the sense of national “pride” in ways easy to understand. Chris Hedges described the latter well in War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (2002). “You are either with us or against us,” said George W. Bush after the 2001 attacks, a war criminal through his aggression in Iraq in 2003. A casual observer can easily discern how those words would play out after the attacks of 2001, and it was no surprise that death threats came our way during demonstrations against US aggression in the Middle East following those attacks. Getting everyone on board for war is as old as the republic and history itself.
By the time of the 2001 attacks, the US had normalized war. First there was Reagan’s “noble war” bullshit during the 1980s, then his gradual ramping up of war as low-intensity war in Central America. George H. W. Bush took warmongering to another level with the first Gulf War. His objective was not to look wimpy in the eyes of the US public and to conquer the Vietnam Syndrome. Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait gave Bush I that opportunity. The Vietnam Syndrome was the collective revulsion at war after the horrors of the war in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos during the 1960s until 1975. I have a documented case of Vietnam Syndrome, or so said the US Army. Happily, or perhaps not happily, I’ve guarded my case of the syndrome with ferocity for decades and against all odds. A core belief of that syndrome is revulsion against the empire’s use of war to extend economic interests and to project power.
When it comes to inflicting miseries on innocent Afghan people, there’s plenty of blame to be shared.
The Taliban have demonstrated a pattern of anticipating people who might form opposition to their eventual rule and waging “pre-emptive” attacks against journalists, human rights activists, judicial officials, advocates for women’s rights, and minority groups such as the Hazara.
For years and years, what came to be known as America’s “war on terror” (and later just its “forever wars”) enjoyed remarkable bipartisan support in Congress, not to say the country at large. Over nearly two decades, four presidents from both parties haven’t hesitated to exercise their power to involve our military in all sorts of ways in at least 85 countries around the world in the name of defeating “terrorism” or “violent extremism.” € Such interventions have included air strikes against armed groups in seven countries, direct combat against such groups in 12 countries, military exercises in 41 countries, and training or assistance to local military, police, or border patrol units in 79 countries. And that’s not even to mention the staggering number of U.S. military bases around the world where counterterrorism operations can be conducted, the massive arms sales to foreign governments, or all the additional deployments of this country’s Special Operations forces.
Providing the thinnest of legal foundations for all of this have been two ancient acts of Congress. The first was the authorization for the use of military force (AUMF) that allowed the president to act against “those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons.” It led, of course, to the disastrous war in Afghanistan. It was passed in the week after those attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C. That bill’s lone opponent in the House, Representative Barbara Lee (D–CA), faced death threats from the public for her vote, though she stood by it, fearing all too correctly that such a law would sanction endless wars abroad (as, of course, it did).
Police currently deploy many different kinds of moving and task-performing technologies. These include flying drones, remote control bomb-defusing robots, and autonomous patrol robots. While these different devices serve different functions and operate differently, none of them--absolutely none of them--should be armed with any kind of weapon.€
Mission creep is very real. Time and time again, technologies given to police to use only in the most extreme circumstances make their way onto streets during protests or to respond to petty crime. For example, cell site simulators (often called “Stingrays”) were developed for use in foreign battlefields, brought home in the name of fighting “terrorism,” then used by law enforcement to catch immigrants and a man who stole $57 worth of food. Likewise, police have targeted BLM protesters with face surveillance and Amazon Ring doorbell cameras.
Today, scientists are developing an AI-enhanced autonomous drone, designed to find people during natural disasters by locating their screams. How long until police use this technology to find protesters shouting chants? What if these autonomous drones were armed? We need a clear red line now: no armed police drones, period.
Donald Rumsfeld was born on July 9, 1932 in Chicago, Illinois. His father George was a real estate salesman and his mother Jeanette was a school teacher. Young Donald was both a Boy Scout and an Eagle Scout, and years later in 2006 the Boy Scouts of America would honor him with the Silver Buffalo Award. His work ethic, which was called “legendary” later in his career, was already evident. He went to Princeton where he became captain of the varsity wrestling team. It’s remarkable the number of politicians who were in their youth amateur wrestlers. Of course, now we’ve had a president who was also involved in professional wrestling. Which may or may not say something about the evolution of the office of the presidency. While at Princeton Rumsfeld also studied political science, which is not a science in the usual meaning of the word, but rather a subject more akin to marketing. Trying to figure out why some people prefer Big Macs instead of Whoppers. Nevertheless, it signaled his future career in politics.
Here, with mention of Rumsfeld’s time at Princeton, I must make a disclosure. I also got a degree from that university. But with one big difference. My degree was a PhD, whereas his degree was a BA. And a PhD from Princeton is not worth nearly as much as a BA—as the judge in my divorce noted when my wife tried to sue for 20% of the value of my degree. The judge ruled in my favor saying, “In my experience these academic PhDs aren’t worth very much.”
Things are getting kinda crowded on those coattails. So many politicos all bumping their heads against the former president’s behind that you might be tempted to say something rude. I’ll forgo that, and just note that there’s a whole slew of GOP governors on those coattails, along with former Trump secretary of state Mike “Bomb Iran!” Pompeo and various congress critters like Matt “She Didn’t Look like a Teenager” Gaetz and Marco “Invade Venezuela!” Rubio. But what I want to know is, where is Mark “Machiavelli” Meadows? I’m not getting upset about the GOP presidential clown car till he clambers onboard. Then it’s time to head for the hills.
All these contenders aim to corner as much of “the base” as they can. Problem is, the core of that base, Trump’s so-called “fine people” like the Oath Keepers, find themselves under indictment and are too busy with their plea bargains to throw their weight behind DeSantis or Pompeo. You see, the base supported a little caper on January 6, one that involved rioting at the capitol and interfering with an election transition. That does not deter the Republican Reich, however. These are its shock troops. The Proud Boys, the Three Percenters, the Oath Keepers…and probably the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party – but we don’t talk about that.
The Finders Scandal — events that took place several decades ago, which I have explored in the two previous parts of this series — might be perceived as very much in the rear-view mirror. It is of great contemporary relevance, however, because it raises questions of ongoing significance — particularly in an era where American-style kompromat is seen by many to have an undiminished, if not augmented, role in our politics — about the rogue, untouchable nature of the intelligence community and its assets. The connection between the CIA and the Finders cult is one of the most explosive and significant aspects of the whole Finders scandal because, if substantiated, it would constitute not simply an outlandish and perhaps criminal group purported to be abusing and trafficking children, but one sanctioned by the most powerful government on earth.
Yet, the propagandists of death never sleep. Even as their system is being exposed as the generator of global warming (climate change), nuclear madness, cultural degeneration, and strange, violent societies and people, the ideological dirty workers are busy diverting attention away from the failures of their system to the internal contradictions found within the few examples of societies struggling to remake themselves in ways that center the needs and aspirations of the people.
If the social and economic conditions in Cuba, North Korea and Venezuela are supposed to be the result of the inherent flaws of socialism, why the sanctions, subversions, and outright attacks on those projects? If socialism is such an inherently unproductive and unnatural system, just let them implode based on their own supposed internal contradictions.
Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Thursday condemned the Biden administration for upholding the United States' crippling embargo against Cuba, where people have taken to the streets in recent days to protest food and medicine shortages exacerbated by the decades-old economic restrictions.
"The embargo is absurdly cruel and, like too many other U.S. policies targeting Latin Americans, the cruelty is the point," Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y) said in a statement Thursday night. "I outright reject the Biden administration's defense of the embargo. It is never acceptable for us to use cruelty as a point of leverage against every day people."
A wave of protests in Cuba became the somewhat unlikely focus of global attention earlier this week, the events becoming the worldwide No. 1 trend on Twitter for over 24 hours, as celebrities, politicians and even the president of the United States weighed in on the action. A statement from Joe Biden’s office read:
Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel disagrees as to the nature of the protests. “All this discontent, these feelings of dissatisfaction, what is the ultimate cause of all that?” he asks. “It’s the blockade. This is part of the U.S. playbook to destabilize us, to generate chaos, to break our will and spirit.”
Diaz-Canel has a point.
+ As the US continues to rant incessantly at Cuba, we should not forget in this age of heightened sensitivity to infectious diseases that among the US’s many crimes against the Cuban people two stand out: introducing Asian Swine flu in 1971 (causing 500,000 pigs to be slaughtered) and Dengue Fever in 1988, an outbreak that killed 113 children.
+ The worst thing the Cubans ever did to the US was to export the island’s most reactionary criminal element to south Florida, where they’ve dominated the economic and political scene for the last 60 years, using the same corrupt practices that got them chased out of Havana. And they’ll probably be paying price for this island cleaning until the Atlantic reclaims Miami.
But the US’s domestic and foreign track record demonstrates that it isn’t qualified to teach anyone about democracy, combating poverty, ending corruption, or anything related to human rights. Instead, it’s recent discourse regarding Latin American countries is aimed at dressing itself, the bully, as the savior.
By manufacturing problems (ie by directly causing hunger and medicine shortages), as well as by magnifying or distorting existing problems and combining those with real hardships, the US has been framing its intervention and dominance in certain countries as help that no one can reasonably oppose. The help discourse makes it hard for many people to perceive the US’s real agenda and political interests, and it makes it very easy for the mainstream media to cover up the US’s desire to increase it’s exploitation of Latin America.
Cuba was rocked by a series of anti-government street protests earlier this week. The U.S. establishment immediately hailed the events, putting its full weight behind the protestors. Yet documents suggest that Washington might be more involved in the events than it cares to publicly divulge.
CNN's report also suggests that after the events of Jan. 6, Milley feared an attack on the presidential inauguration, telling senior military and law enforcement leaders: "Here's the deal, guys: These guys are Nazis, they're boogaloo boys, they're Proud Boys. These are the same people we fought in World War II. We're going to put a ring of steel around this city and the Nazis aren't getting in."
Those public voices, myself included, who spent the last five or so years warning the American people about the dire threat embodied by Trump and his movement, were frequently dismissed as hysterical, or as suffering from "Trump derangement syndrome." At this point, almost every such warning and prediction about the Trump regime has been proven correct.
The hope-peddlers, stenographers of current events, professional centrists and other "mainstream" voices who remain more invested in maintaining a veneer of "normalcy" than in telling the truth have yet to publicly apologize or make amends. Such acts of contrition and humility will likely never come. That's one big reason among many why the mainstream media has lost so much of its public trust and legitimacy.
He was embedded with a convoy of Afghan forces that was ambushed by Taliban militants near a key border post with Pakistan, according to reports.
The two discussed kidnapping plans on March 28 last year. A plan was orchestrated for Yasin to lure the artist to a studio, where he would be torn out of a car at a red light. However, the kidnapping plot was foiled. A few weeks later, the plans resumed, but with Haval Kahlil as the bait to lure the artist to the studio. That time, it worked.
In April 2020, the artist was taken to an apartment in southern Stockholm and detained. He was beaten, threatened, and photographed in degrading clothing. Haval did not participate in the actual events of what happened at the apartment, so his involvement is judged as aiding and abetting only. The court says since Yasin has relapsed into crime, he will serve a previously remaining part of his prison sentence.
The Afghan leader said that “intelligence estimates indicate the influx of over 10,000 jihadi fighters from Pakistan and other places in the last month.” Ghani went on to allege that despite pledges and assurances, Khan’s government had failed to influence the Taliban to “negotiate seriously” to find an end to the Afghan war.
It was also established that a small piece of starboard remains attached to a bow ramp hinge of the starboard side, and a piece of the right inner corner of the bow ramp is missing.
Climate scientists on Friday were stunned by the intensity of flooding in Germany and Belgium that killed at least 120€ people and damaged tens of thousands of homes, with experts saying they did not expect such extreme weather to result from the human-caused climate crisis as rapidly as it has.
More than a dozen records for rainfall were set across Western Europe, including in Cologne, where officials recorded six inches of rainfall in just 24 hours on Wednesday into Thursday morning—nearly double the monthly average for July. The city's previous record for daily rainfall was only three inches.€
Researchers who routinely tested the atmosphere at four areas in Amazonia twice a month over a nine-year period found that not only are carbon emissions higher in the eastern areas of the rainforest than in the western areas, but that the southeastern area is putting more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than it absorbs. The eastern Amazon is a hotspot of deforestation to facilitate logging and agriculture, including cattle ranches.
We look at the corporate profiteering off people who lost their homes and loved ones to recent fires in California, where wildfires continue to rage amid record temperatures. A major investigation by KQED and NPR’s California Newsroom found a special trust set up to distribute $13.5 billion to survivors of wildfires caused by PG&E — the state’s largest utility company — instead spent lavishly on its own administration while distributing almost nothing to the 70,000 fire victims, many of whom still live in trailers. Those who profited while the fire victims waited for help included Wall Street bankers and prestigious law firms. The investigation has prompted a bipartisan call from state lawmakers for the state attorney general to investigate. “A lot of fire survivors are looking at this situation and wondering: Why is this taking so long?” says Lily Jamali, a co-host for KQED’s The California Report and the reporter behind the exposé. “They’re getting really impatient, and they’re very unhappy with the way this process has been run so far.”
We speak with leading climate scientist Michael Mann about the catastrophic impact of the climate crisis around the world. He says he and other scientists predicted the extreme weather events now wreaking havoc. “We said that if we don’t stop burning fossil fuels and elevating the levels of carbon pollution in the atmosphere and we continue to warm up the planet, we will see unprecedented heat waves and wildfires and floods and droughts and superstorms,” says Mann. His new book is titled “The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet.”
Greenland announced Thursday a halt on new oil and gas exploration, citing climate and other environmental impacts.
"Great news!" responded the Center for International Environmental Law.
Hurricane Elsa's appearance in the Caribbean this month, far before the usual onset of the Atlantic hurricane season, reminds us of what awaits the world's small island developing states (SIDS) in the years ahead. These states are already suffering the devastating effects of climate change, and will now need to spend heavily on repairs and measures to build resilience. Rich countries and their fossil-fuel companies contributed overwhelmingly to the problem, so they should help cover the SIDS' soaring climate costs.
“Drill, baby, drill is gone forever.”€
That was the recent assessment of Saudi Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman of the American oil industry’s future potential. As Saudi Arabia’s energy minister, Prince Abdulaziz is one of the most influential voices in the global oil markets. Fortune termed it a “bold taunt,” and a warning to U.S. frackers to not increase oil production.€
Stay up to date with DeSmog news and alerts
Last December, a cross-party council planning committee unanimously rejected what could very well be the last opencast coal application in the UK, proposed at Dewley Hill, an area of greenbelt outside Newcastle.
The developer has just declared it will not be appealing the decision, while its latest financial statement indicates the company, Banks Group, does not expect to get permission for any new mines, because of a lack of “political will”. So after 80 years, we cautiously celebrate an end to the ecologically ruinous method of opencast coal extraction.
Stay up to date with DeSmog news and alerts
Sure, the lesser prairie chicken wambles a bit in flight because of a body that looks like a partially deflated balloon. But this bird also boasts coral-colored throat sacs, bright orange eye combs, and expressive ear tufts that stand up like a headdress when the male is engaged in pageantry and droop in hangdog fashion following a rejection or a defeat in battle. In a weird way, the incongruity between the prairie chicken’s plump shape and brilliant adornments only adds to its allure. It’s nature’s equivalent of the family station wagon tricked out with racing stripes and a rear spoiler. It’s impossible not to watch as it cruises by.
The lesser prairie chicken’s mating behavior might be even more fascinating than its appearance. When lesser prairie-chickens lek (breed), a whole host of males will compete for some personal space in the sand sage so that they can entice females to view an elaborate mating display. The few females that dare enter this obstreperous battle ground are pursued relentlessly, which should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the human dating scene. The males will puff and stunt and grapple as they struggle for attention. Erratic clashes send peppery feathers flying through the air to get caught in the grama stalks and sagebrush. The bird becomes a blaze of sunset colors as he stamps, shuffles, and bobs among the buffalo grass. He will genuflect before a female, wings spread out on the ground, his tail lifted. Or perhaps he’ll perform a flutter jump with quick flaps of striped wings. The dance is a signal of both fitness and intelligence, and females choose the prospective mate with the smartest moves.
Duunnn dunnn… duuuunnnn duun… duuunnnnnnnn dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dunnnnnnnnnnn dunnnn. This is one of the most recognizable theme songs in Hollywood history and the movie Jaws has clouded our judgement of sharks since its release in 1975. Spielberg portrays sharks as dangerously vengeful, yet statistics tell a completely different story.€
Conservation advocates across the globe expressed sadness Friday in response to the killing of environmental defender Joanna Stuchburry outside her Nairoibi area home in Kenya.
The news was first shared on social media by renowned Kenyan wildlife conservationist and writer Dr. Paula Kahumbu, who tweeted that Stuchburry "was shot four times in her driveway" on Thursday and that "nothing was stolen" during the event.
Following the leak of IRS documents that shed additional light on the prevalence of tax dodging among the wealthiest Americans, a group of House Democrats on Thursday said President Joe Biden must swiftly appoint a new Assistant Attorney General for the Tax Division if he hopes to crack down on unlawful evasion tactics.
"Americans increasingly believe that their tax system is rigged against them. This belief has credence given the government's repeated inability to vigorously pursue and deter rich tax scofflaws."—Letter
When Ohio’s Gov. Mike DeWine signed a tax cut into law on July 1, the Wall Street Journal editorial board (7/5/21) was thrilled. It€ praised€ the Republican governor, saying he “lower[ed] income-tax rates for all Ohio taxpayers.”
Payday Report’s COVID-19 Strike Wave Interactive Map, launched at the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020, began using news and social media accounts of workers walking off the job in protest as a measure of strike activity. By this measure, the map indicates at least 1,200 strikes in 2020 as reported in news and social media reports. These labor strike activities were counted as strikes even without regard to workplace size or union authorization.
Early on in the pandemic, Payday Report began to notice a massive strike wave brewing as workers, fearful of losing their lives, simply refused to work.
Today, profit making is conveniently framed as shareholder value. In any case, such corporations are either owned by an individual (rare) or by a group of people known as shareholders (common). Corporations are not democratic institutions. Neither corporate apparatchiks inside corporations nor corporate capitalism itself need democracy. There simply is no democracy in corporations.
Corporate capitalism, corporate apparatchiks, shareholders and top-dollar receiving CEO like to see the role of a democratic government being dedicated to helping the rich to get even richer, so that the poor and increasingly the middle-class can benefit from the always illusive trickle down effect.
When support systems were yanked out from under us during the pandemic, the importance of care work and care workers became clearer than ever. Families grappled with who would take care of the kids, clean the house, and walk the dog. Women left the workforce in record numbers; family relationships were strained; and, while some children managed, others suffered. More Americans now realize how much they depend on care workers for their daily survival. As the National Domestic Workers Alliance says, it is “the work that makes all other work possible.” Suddenly, window banners, public service announcements, and free donuts attested to the public’s gratitude to essential workers, and care workers were sometimes, though not always, included in that appreciation.
In Florida, someone working full-time would need to make $24.82 an hour to afford a two-bedroom rental. In Colorado, you’d need to make $27.50 an hour. In Washington state you’d need to make $29.31 working full-time. The wage thresholds for a two-bedroom rental in New York and Washington, D.C., are even higher: $34.03 and 33.94, respectively.
The National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC), which just released its 2021 Out of Reach report looking at housing affordability in the U.S., puts California at the top of the unaffordable list, alongside five other states that also have a wage threshold calculated to be above $30 for a two-bedroom rental. According to the report, to afford this type of apartment, California-based workers would need to work full-time at $39.03 an hour — more than double the $15 federal living wage activists have spent years fighting to implement.
The press has found a national narrative for the victory of Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary: It’s yet another indication that the Democratic Party must stick to moderate ideas—especially around crime and policing—and away from the left-wing politics of the so-called “Squad.”
Fortress Australia has also had a few modern manifestations.€ Refugees and asylum seekers who dare make their perilous journey to Australia via sea are rapidly whisked away into a privatised, Pacific concentration camp system.€ They are solemnly promised never to be settled on the Australian mainland.
Now, against another sort of traveller, far less tangible and distinctly invisible, Fortress Australia is again finding its shaky form.€ But the novel coronavirus cares little for such shuttering approaches.€ It specialises in spread and mutation, skirting around barriers, leaping over obstacles and coasting along aerosol transmission.€ The virus’s devastating product – the disease of COVID-19 – is indifferent to the fortress.
Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Friday reiterated that progressive House Democrats will not support President Joe Biden's "tiny, pathetic" bipartisan infrastructure plan unless Senate Democrats approve a more robust reconciliation package that prioritizes mitigating the climate crisis and strengthening the care economy.
"House progressives are standing up," Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) tweeted. "If Sen. Manchin and the rest of the Senate approve the 'reconciliation bill' then we will approve their bipartisan bill. But if they try to strip immigration reform, child care, climate action, etc., then we're at an impasse."
President Biden's voting rights speech this week in Philadelphia had most of the right words, calling Republican voter suppression efforts a "21st Century Jim Crow assault" and "the most significant test of our democracy since the Civil War."
The US government and its sycophantic media are working to prevent Ortega’s reelection. On July 12, the US slapped visa restrictions on one hundred Nicaraguan elected legislative officials, members of the judiciary, and their families for “undermining democracy.” A month earlier, the Biden administration imposed sanctions on President Ortega’s daughter, along with a military general, the head of the central bank, and an elected legislator.
These and other recent illegal US sanctions on Nicaragua are designed to promote regime change and are based on the ridiculous charge that this poor and tiny nation is a “extraordinary and unusual threat to the US national security,” when the opposite is the case.
After a strong start with his ambitious Covid relief bill and vaccination rollout, President Joe Biden's momentum has slowed considerably. Like President Barack Obama before him, he has now hit the buzzsaw of…Republican minority rule.
Immigrant rights advocates on Friday called for the immediate codification of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program into law after a federal judge in Texas blocked new DACA permit approvals in a ruling asserting that former President Barack Obama exceeded his authority when he implemented the policy that has protected hundreds of thousands of so-called Dreamers from deportation.
"It is absolutely urgent that Congress acts now through the budget reconciliation process to provide Dreamers and other undocumented members of our communities with reliable status and a pathway to citizenship."—Omar Jadwat, ACLU
Bernie Sanders has the Trumpenproletarian brain worm – the one that helps normalize rising Amerikaner Republican fascism by claiming that the mostly petit-bourgeois and affluent base of the white nationalist Amerikaner Party of Trump (APOT, the new name of the Republican Party) is just everyday “populist” working-class people and therefore potentially progressive.
The “independent” Senator Sanders recently told The New York Times’ Maureen Dowd that the Democratic Party doesn’t “fully appreciate” the need to speak to the struggles of the white working class. “We’ve got to take it to them,” Sanders€ said, referring to the Caucasian (section of the) proletariat. “I intend, as soon as I have three minutes, to start going into Trumpworld and start talking to people,” Sanders€ told€ Dowd. “it’s absolutely imperative if democracy is to survive that we do everything that we can to say, ‘Yes, we hear your pain and we are going to respond to your needs.’” If Democrats fail to do that, Sanders€ added, “conspiracy theories and big lies and the drift toward authoritarianism” will continue.
To the untrained eye, video games can look like violence pornography for frustrated youths. Most games revolve around killing and gunplay (“combat” in the parlance of the industry). You can slay monsters, massacre aliens, or find a game that gives you a very big gun and very many cops to mow down if they stand in your way. The more cerebral “strategy” games revolve around concepts of war and battle. And even “kid-friendly” hits like Minecraft still have modes that give the player lots of enemies to kill. To some, video games can look like a dystopian mirror that reflects all of the ills of our violent, decaying culture.
Recently I read an excellent book: The Soviet Novel, by Katarina Clark. In it she observed that the USSR’s socialist realism suffered from what she called “modal schizophrenia,” because the writers were supposed to stay true to the situations they described while also evoking the better world socialism would bring. They were caught trying to bridge that gap between what is and what ought to be.
Utopia Parkway. It’s a name that sounds like an oxymoron, so impossible, so perfect it shouldn’t exist. Yet it does, a 5.1-mile gash—four lanes of asphalt, sometimes two—running through New York City’s largest borough, Queens.1
The roadway begins, if a line can be said to begin, in Beechhurst in the north, right at the water’s edge. From there it runs past the Long Island Expressway, down through Clearview, Flushing, and Hillcrest to Jamaica Estates in the south, where it fragments just before reaching the behemoth of Grand Central Parkway. This intersection is one of the most dangerous in the city, a place where bodies, bikes, and sometimes lives meet the harsh reality of the pavement. For much of this route, the road is banal, an endless procession of squat brick houses broken up by the occasional gas station or bagel shop. But as it approaches its southern end, it narrows and shifts, becoming something else entirely: a quaint, tree-lined street that deposits its travelers in a place that may or may not exist. The maps call it Utopia, but the residents call it Fresh Meadows, which is its own kind of irony.2
In November of last year, an Israeli judge invoked the controversial Jewish Nation-State Basic Law when striking down a lawsuit against the city of Karmiel over funding transportation for two Palestinian students.
As a special congressional committee investigating the January 6 insurrection prepares to hold its first hearings later this month, we speak with author Michael Wolff, whose new book, “Landslide,” provides fresh details about former President Donald Trump’s efforts to undermine the 2020 election, how he spurred his supporters to attack the U.S. Capitol and why he still holds the reins in the party. “There’s no question Donald Trump runs the Republican Party,” Wolff says. “We have two realities here: the reality of Donald Trump in charge, and the other reality which is that everybody knows that there’s something wrong with Donald Trump.”
Executives at the nation’s largest tech companies made huge donations to key lawmakers in recent months as Congress debated legislation that would reshape the industry.
The influx of donations came in as the tech industry urged lawmakers to abandon antitrust legislation that could make it easier for regulators to break up tech giants. Tech companies also lobbied Senate leaders to prioritize a bill to provide $52 billion toward U.S. semiconductor manufacturing.
Amid rising U.S. Covid-19 cases and hospitalizations and flagging vaccination rates, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky on Friday warned that the highly transmissible Delta variant is spreading rapidly in the United States, while President Joe Biden and top administration officials took aim at coronavirus misinformation disseminated on social media platforms and on right-wing news networks.
"There is a message that is crystal clear: This is becoming a pandemic of the unvaccinated," Walensky said, noting that 97% of new Covid-19 hospitalizations are of people who have not had their shots. "We are seeing outbreaks of cases in parts of the country that have low vaccination coverage, because unvaccinated people are at risk."
On Friday afternoon, White Press Secretary Jen Psaki was a hot topic on Twitter after she had a curt exchange with Fox New Channel's Peter Doocy over the issue of Covid-19 vaccine misinformation on social media. President Joe Biden has been especially critical of social media platforms, notably Facebook, for allowing the spread of misinformation about the coronavirus as well as vaccines.
Biden has blamed misinformation for stalling U.S. vaccine rates, and suggested, "They're killing people," when asked what his message was to the social networks for allowing misleading claims to spread.
"The only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated," Biden added.
I'm beginning to think that Montana Senator Steve Daines really, really doesn't like the 1st Amendment. Instead, he likes to wrap himself in a faux American flag as he pretends to be patriotic, while attempting to stamp out the rights the 1st Amendment provides to Americans. Last week, we wrote about his attempt to amend the Constitution (specifically, chipping away at the 1st Amendment), to make flag burning illegal.
Honestly, this is the last thing I wanted to be writing about today. First, let's make this clear: when I've seen political officials -- both Democrats and Republicans alike -- threatening to punish companies for 1st Amendment protected activities, I call it out. Indeed, I've been highlighting these kinds of issues for years -- and it has nothing to do with politics or ideology or who I like or who I don't like.
Russia’s federal censorship agency, Roskomnadzor, has ordered Internet providers to block access to the “Team 29” website.
Journalists from the outlet Proekt, whose publisher, the American company “Project Media, Inc.,” was banned in Russia as an “undesirable organization,” have promised to continue their investigative work.
They’re right.
But it’s not just conservatives who have their political speech blocked by social media giants. It’s Palestinians and other critics of Israel, including many Israelis. And it’s queer people, of course. We have a whole project tracking people who’ve been censored, blocked, downranked, suspended and terminated for their legitimate speech, from punk musicians to peanuts fans, historians to war crimes investigators, sex educators to Christian ministries.€
Content moderation is hard at any scale, but even so, the catalog of big platforms’ unforced errors makes for sorry reading. Experts who care about political diversity, harassment and inclusion came together in 2018 to draft the Santa Clara Principles on Transparency and Accountability in Content Moderation but the biggest platforms are still just winging it for the most part.
Network data from NetBlocks confirm partial disruption to social media and messaging platforms in Cuba from 12 July 2021. The targeted restrictions are likely to limit the flow of information from Cuba following widespread protests on Sunday as thousands rallied against the socialist government’s policies and rising prices. The incident is ongoing as of Thursday evening local time.
NetBlocks metrics show that communications platforms WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram and as well as some Telegram servers are disrupted on government-owned ETECSA (Empresa de Telecomunicaciones de Cuba, S.A. / AS27725) including Cubacel, the cellular network operated by Cuba’s sole telecommunications company. Access to the YouTube streaming platform and Google Video servers has also subsequently been limited. Findings corroborate user reports of disruptions to the services.
Thanks to Bits of Freedom’s mediation, The Hmm now has her account back. And of course, Bits of Freedom asked Facebook for an explanation; because what exactly had The Hmm done wrong? The violation of the community guidelines turned out to be in the title of the lecture: “QAnon Game Theory”. Just the word “QAnon” turned out to be enough to get blocked. Facebook called it a “false positive”. We don’t understand how that one word (used in the title of a lecture and without any other information) can be enough for being blocked out. It calls to question: is this the quality of the technology we have to rely on?
Earlier this week, England’s Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill received its second reading in Parliament. But while the focus of the debate has been on students’ alleged habit of no-platforming speakers they disagree with, my concern as an academic is that the platform itself is rotten.
“You Can’t Say That,” a collection of interviews conducted by the children’s literature expert Leonard S. Marcus, offers an antidote to the censors, elevating the voices of 13 authors whose books for kids have been challenged. Marcus probes not just what made these works controversial, but also the life paths that led the writers to pursue their subjects, and how they reacted to campaigns to muzzle their work — all of which are sure to interest their young fans, as well as students of free speech.
Free speech is not a human right, according to prominent Facebook censorship board member Helle Thorning-Schmidt.
The government's long and shameful history of intercepting people's letters.
Liang is a lawyer, so she reacted as any lawyer might — she sued Weibo, China's second-largest social media platform. She said that under China’s new civil code, the courts should have seven business days to accept her case, but it’s now been three months and she hasn’t heard anything.
Ziggi Tyler is part of TikTok’s Creator Marketplace, a private platform where brands can connect with the app’s top creators. And last week, he noticed something pretty disturbing about how the creator bios there were being automatically moderated.
When he tried to enter certain phrases in his bio, some of them—“Black lives matter,” “supporting black people,” “supporting black voices,” and “supporting Black success”—were flagged as inappropriate content. But white versions of the same phrases were acceptable.
Russian street artist Konstantin Benkovich has launched an auction on social media in support of Meduza. Up for sale is a one-of-a-kind art piece: the Meduza logo with the head of a snake, made from welded steel bars and painted gold (its dimensions are 79 x 56 x 3.2 cm, or 31 x 22 x 1.26 inches).
Officials in Afghanistan said Friday an international award-winning journalist from India had been killed during pre-dawn fighting in embattled southern Kandahar province.
Danish Siddiqui, a Reuters photojournalist and Pulitzer Prize winner, was covering clashes between Afghan government forces and the Taliban in Spin Boldak district, which fell to the insurgents earlier in the week.
The German Journalists' Association (DJV) has appealed to Chancellor Angela Merkel to intercede with US President Joe Biden on behalf of imprisoned Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.
During her talks in Washington on Thursday, the conservative politician should work towards having the charges against Assange dropped, the DJV said.
Should Assange, who is currently in prison in southeast England and in poor health, be extradited to the US, he would face trials there with potential sentences of more than 100 years in prison, the DJV in Berlin said in a statement on Wednesday.
It’s hard to know where to begin here. For one, it’s a vivid illustration of just how sordid Washington’s yearslong pursuit of Assange has been. To punish Assange for embarrassing the US government, successive administrations not only got in bed with a criminal, they effectively facilitated his crimes, which included forcing and tricking boys into sex. The fact that accusations of sexual misconduct against Assange proved central to the case for his extradition to the United States adds an extra layer of hypocrisy.
Rather, it seeks to remind the world of the issues at stake – freedom of information, accountability, the public’s right to know – and the forces squaring off in this fight. An older man and a single mother (and their supporters) on one side, an infuriated US on the other.
“I think a lot of people have disengaged from this story,” Lawrence says. “This is a different door through which to engage with it, a more humanistic view.
While I remain a diehard open borders purist through and through, that is not what motivated me to write this piece. The borders and the dueling cartels that militarize them may be the source of much of the immediate misery of your average migrant but that still doesn’t address why they come and why, in spite of our nation’s casual bipartisan cruelty, they continue to come. What makes people so desperate that they’re willing to send their own children into the arms of heavily armed thugs just to get them away from their homeland?
On a superficial level this is the product of two presidents; the openly xenophobic Donald Trump and the quietly xenophobic Joe Biden. When Trump lost to a progressive talking Joe Biden, whispering sweet nothings into the Hispanic vote’s ears, the quasi-biennial immigrant caravans swelled to unprecedented numbers with people desperate to take a new kinder president at his word. Big mistake. President Biden may read cue cards like a squishy progressive but he runs his borders like Trump. The result is hungry people being beckoned by strangers with candy only to be kidnapped and Shanghaied to some floral decorated concentration camp up river. In practice, the Biden policy is far crueler than Trump’s. But this still doesn’t tell us why they come and why they keep coming.
A group of California police officers has decided other people's expressive rights end where their personal offense begins. Five Palo Alto police officers are suing the city, along with their own police department, for somehow discriminating against them by allowing artists to create a street-long Black Lives Matter mural these officers passed on their way to work. (Well, at least up until the mural was removed by the city in November 2020, less than six months after it was first painted.)
AA: Can you trace what it was in your early life experiences that set you up to be a grassroots organizer, and specifically one so focused on the climate crisis?
MD: I feel like a lot of it just comes out of my personality. I have a strong sense of right and wrong and moral outrage. And I think I got that from my dad, who is also an organizing type personality. And then I think I got a real love of nature from my family, which used to camp and hike. I do not get my politics from my family, most of which is very conservative – I’ve always been very progressive. I started being an activist in high school. After grad school I got involved in the Green Party and in protecting a public waterfront in Brooklyn. I was also employed at a nonprofit that used federal funding to help lower income families conserve energy, and so I got exposed at that point to energy and environmental justice issues. That year I distinctly remember reading the summary of the second IPCC report which had just come out and I just couldn’t believe that there was this huge problem that nobody was talking about and seemingly nobody was doing anything about and I was kind of freaked out by the whole thing.
In late June, the Russian grocery store chain VkusVill put out an advertisement featuring a lesbian couple as part of its “Recipes for Family Happiness” campaign. The ad set off an avalanche of homophobic comments and threats against the company, and VkusVill soon announced it would delete the ad, calling it “a mistake that occurred as a result of some individual employees’ unprofessionalism.” This sparked another wave of criticism on social media, as people accused the chain of cowardice and hypocrisy. Throughout the debate, however, there’s been almost no mention of the difficulties same-sex couples in Russia actually face. To learn more about what life is like for same-sex parented families in Russia, Meduza spoke to Yana and Yaroslava, two women in a loving relationship who are now raising a child together.
In the late 2000s, Ranetki was one of the most popular pop-rock groups in Russia. Their concerts drew thousands of fans and an eponymous series based on their lives had a prime-time slot on the television network STS. But as their popularity gradually faded, Ranetki fell apart. In June 2021, one of the girl group’s original members, Zhenya Ogurtsova, published a memoir titled “Ranetki: A Winning Ticket to Hell.” In her book, Ogurtsova talks about the psychological pressure and harassment that she and her bandmates (who were minors at the time) were subjected to at the hands of various producers and other people from their “management team.” Other former Ranetki members have also confirmed that they suffered emotional and sexual abuse during that time. Meduza spoke with Zhenya Ogurtsova about the harassment the group members faced and why she decided to finally speak out about it.€
Nearly all of the people — 99.5 percent — who are still dying from COVID-19 are unvaccinated.
At this point, they probably are not unvaccinated because they haven’t encountered a public education campaign. Either they want the vaccine and they have some barrier preventing them from getting it, or they don’t want it.
As far as “gaffes” go on a global scale, one cannot do much worse than calling the Japanese people “Chinese.” It is an error of racism and arrogance not easily washed away with an apology. Saying such a thing is wincingly awful enough in casual conversation. But doing so in front of a microphone is even worse. Also, when committed by the head of the International Olympic Committee, about as popular in Japan as trash on the sidewalk, such a “gaffe” quickly becomes an international incident.
A July 7 report from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights notes the state has opened 11 investigations into cases involving severe eye trauma as a result of ESMAD actions, though human rights groups count 82 such incidents and say there may be as many as 200 since the protests first began. United Nations protocols dictate that nonlethal munition should be aimed at the lower extremities of the body, away from the head and vital organs. Human rights lawyers in Colombia argue the targeting of protesters’ eyes is part of a deliberate strategy by police.
“These attacks are systematic…and they are symbolic. The message being sent is that when young people open their eyes, they must be taken out,” Acosta said.
Similar tactics were employed by police in Chile during protests there in 2019 when human rights groups documented at least 285 cases involving severe eye trauma inflicted by police. Acosta and others believe Colombia has taken a page from Chile’s playbook.
As you'll recall, Florida's social media bill was declared unconstitutional by a federal judge a couple weeks ago. The state has already moved to appeal that decision, so we'll have to see how the judges on the 11th Circuit feel about all of this. However, apparently the case in the lower court is still moving forward in some way (I had assumed that after the preliminary injunction and appeal that the case would be stayed until the appeal was decided, but apparently not? Understanding civil procedure is an impossibility).
The US has always had a fairly pathetic definition of "broadband." Originally defined as anything over 200 kbps in either direction, the definition was updated in 2010 to a pathetic 4 Mbps down, 1 Mbps up. It was updated again in 2015 by the Wheeler FCC to a better, but still arguably pathetic 25 Mbps downstream, 3 Mbps upstream. As we noted then, the broadband industry whined incessantly about having any higher standards, as it would only further highlight industry failure and a lack of competition.
The brief bilateral summit between U.S. President Joe Biden and outgoing German Chancellor Angela Merkel ended Thursday without any commitment from the European leader to drop her opposition to a temporary patent waiver for coronavirus vaccines, a result that public health campaigners dubbed a major failure as infections continue to surge across the globe.
"Tens of millions of lives and livelihoods worldwide are left in peril, including here, given that raging Covid outbreaks anywhere increase the chances for a vaccine-resistant strain emerging."—Lori Wallach, Public Citizen
Boosting pressure on rich nations to stop hoarding coronavirus vaccines, the World Health Organization revealed Thursday that Africa saw a 43% rise in Covid-19 deaths from the previous week, which notably had been described as the continent's "most dire pandemic week ever."
"Collaboration and solidarity are prerequisites for success in a pandemic. Unfortunately, beyond scientific discovery, they have rarely been displayed globally."—The Lancet
Global anti-piracy coalition Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment has shut down and seized the domains of an entity offering pirate IPTV and card-sharing services. The Serbia-based operation reportedly offered access to more than 6,000 TV channels, 3,000 movies and 16,500 TV shows for a low monthly subscription.
EU Advocate General Saugmandsgaard ÃËe has published his advice on Poland's request to annul Article 17 of the Copyright Directive. The AG argues that the 'upload filter' doesn't significantly harm freedom of expression, but notes that safeguards are needed to prevent over-blocking.
One of the last hopes of getting the EU's terrible upload filters thrown out was an intriguing legal challenge brought by Poland at the region's highest court, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). As is usual in these cases, a preliminary opinion is offered by one of the CJEU's special advisers. It's not binding on the main court, but can offer interesting hints of what the final judgment might be. Unfortunately, in his analysis Advocate General Saugmandsgaard ÃËe recommends that the CJEU should dismiss the action brought by Poland (pdf), because in his view Article 17 of the EU Copyright Directive is compatible with freedom of expression and information.
This isn’t the first time this year this has happened. It’s not even the first time in California this year. Filming police is an invaluable tool, for basically anyone interacting with them. It can provide accountability and evidence of what occurred outside of what an officer says occurred. Given this country’s longstanding tendency to believe police officers’ word over almost anyone else’s, video of an interaction can go a long way to getting to the truth.
Very often, police officers would prefer not to be recorded, but there’s not much they can do about that legally, given strong First Amendment protections for the right to record. € But some officers are trying to get around this reality by making it harder to share recordings on many video platforms: they play music so that copyright filters will flag the video as potentially infringing. Copyright allows these cops to brute force their way past the First Amendment.
Large rightsholders—the major studios and record labels—and their lobbyists have done a very good job of divorcing copyright from debates about speech. The debate over the merits of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is cast as “artists versus Big Tech.” But we must not forget that, at its core, copyright is a restriction on, as well as an engine for, expression.
