We believe in putting data from SMART into our metrics system so that we have it captured and can do various things with it, now and in the future. Today, this is done by processing the normal output of 'smartctl -i' and 'smartctl -A' for our SATA and SAS drives using a mix of awk and other Unix programs in a shell script. The fly in the ointment on a few machines today (and more machines in the future) is NVMe SSDs, because NVMe SSDs have health information but not SMART attributes, so while 'smartctl -A' works on them it produces output in a completely different format that my script has no idea how to deal with.
SMART is a standard, originally for ATA hard drives, for reporting various information about the drive. When we talk about 'SMART' or 'SMART data', we often specifically mean SMART 'attributes', which tell you various things about the drive's state, health, wear over time, and so on; sometimes this information is even useful. SMART attributes have an ID number and some values associated with them, but what the attributes mean (and thus how you should interpret their values) is mostly vendor specific.
We’ve mentioned portable apps, but you can also carry an entire computer with you on a USB drive—operating system, applications, files, and all. The open-source Linux OS is perfect for this, and several distributions of Linux can be run in a portable mode, including Linux Lite, Puppy Linux, and MX Linux. Have a look around to see which distro might suit you best.
Instructions for installing your chosen version of Linux on a USB stick should be available on the distro’s official site (if not, you can pick a different one). For example, here are the instructions for running Ubuntu from a USB drive. In brief, you’ll need to download and run a small tool called Etcher, which will take the Ubuntu OS and convert it into a suitable format that can run entirely from a USB drive.
More than 40 years after blazing a trail for female video game characters, Ms. Pac-Man was inducted Thursday into the World Video Game Hall of Fame, along with Dance Dance Revolution, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Sid Meier's Civilization.
The Hall of Fame considers electronic games of all types each year — arcade, console, computer, handheld and mobile. Inductees are recognized for their popularity and influence on the video game industry or pop culture over time.
It’s been ten years today since the very first commit to what was already called Guix—the unimaginative name is a homage to Guile and Nix, which Guix started by blending together. On April 18th, 2012, there was very little to see and no actual “project”. The project formed in the following months and became a collective adventure around a shared vision.
Ten years later, it’s amazing to see what more than 600 people achieved, with 94K commits, countless hours of translation, system administration, web design work, and no less than 175 blog posts to share our enthusiasm at each major milestone. It’s been quite a ride!
What follows is a series of personal accounts by some of the contributors who offered their time and energy and made it all possible. Read their stories and perhaps you too will be inspired to join all the nice folks on this journey?
One thing I often mumbled about on OpenBSD was the lack of a user interface to browse packages and install them, there was a console program named pkg_mgr, but I never got it to work. Of course, I'm totally able to install packages using the command line, but I like to stroll looking for packages I wouldn't know about, a GUI is perfect for doing so, and is also useful for people less comfortable with the command line.
I already had a pretty good idea where all the code in the OpenBSD kernel was hiding but for the sake of comparison I wanted precise numbers. This would be easy enough to get using some scripts and builtin tools like wc and du, but I wanted a tool that would give me something like this.
Live is too short to manually upgrade the packages of your twice a week, so here is how to automate the software updates of an Ubuntu server (20.04 or 22.04).
Since the Swedish Government marked Nextcloud as the key solution for digital collaboration, the Nextcloud user and customer base continues to grow quickly. We recently shared customer success stories with the City of Geneva, the local bank in Munich, 15K teachers in Luxembourg, over 35K middle school students and teachers in France and 750K students and researchers in Sweden.
I know that you’re not supposed to tell people what to do, but in this particular case I’m really tempted because recently I’ve noticed that a lot of websites are preventing users on mobile to zoom.
The Web should be based on open standards. The sites should be written according to a specification – not for a particular browser. The server do not have to know, what client software is used, in order to send you properly formatted page. You can configure your web browser to not send User-Agent HTTP header at all – it is not mandatory.
Welcome to the May edition of the monthly Fortran newsletter. The newsletter comes out at the beginning of every month and details Fortran news from the previous month.
At a certain point, as I was reading the book I'd recently been sent, a strange transformation began occurring: Gradually, as I moved ever deeper into it, I wasn't so much reading as quietly singing a hymn . . . participating in a chant.
Just off the main road, a blue pickup truck kicks up dust from behind a cluster of shrubs, momentarily perfectly camouflaged. The car is in Ojinaga, Mexico, and on its way to the banks of the Rio Grande, where people are standing around their parked cars and either looking across to the United States, waiting, or simply passing the time. Consider a different view. Twenty-three years earlier in But Thap, Vietnam, several men in straw hats carry bricks across a landscape of tripod tomato stands, dried-out berms, and crumbled edifices. Sunlight dapples piles of bricks and earth, and the moment is lucid and still.1
The UK will get its first full-size autonomous bus service this summer, if final road testing that begins in the next two weeks goes according to plan.
Maze bolts, a bolt which has a maze along its shaft traversed by a pin on its nut, are great fun. Here’s a really beautiful metal version by [Robinson Foundry], made by a process more makers should know about – lost PLA casting.
But while joining the firm might seem to influencers like a lucrative opportunity to replicate Thorne’s success, several former models who were managed by or worked directly with Content X are now offering a warning to potential clients. As one model who worked with the company succinctly put it: “It was just a hot mess.”
Some of Content X’s former clients allege that the studio overpromised and underdelivered, and there’s been a steady exit of nearly a dozen celebs and influencers like Francesca Farago with millions of followers each. Former Content X clients listed a barrage of concerns to Rolling Stone, including chaotic photoshoots, sloppy managing of their OnlyFans pages and a significant dip in their earnings, while Content X still took a hefty chunk of their profits.
If you were asked to name the coldest spot in the solar system, chances are pretty good you’d think it would be somewhere as far as possible from the ultimate source of all the system’s energy — the Sun. It stands to reason that the further away you get from something hot, the more the heat spreads out. And so Pluto, planet or not, might be a good guess for the record low temperature.
Days after rights advocates warned that the U.S. Supreme Court's expected overruling of Roe v. Wade portends rollbacks of numerous rights for people in the U.S., Republican Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas said he wants to challenge a 40-year-old ruling that affirmed states must offer free public education to all children.
"I can't believe this has to be said, but ALL children deserve access to a quality public education."
The Lenovo ThinkPad X13s will launch in May of this year. Expect a full review from us where we’ll put the laptop through its paces. If it’s all Lenovo touts it to be, the ThinkPad X13s may earn a spot on our best laptops list.
Custom keyboards? They’re totally great. And we can keep telling you this, but you really won’t feel it until you try a few and find one or two that are right for you. If you’re already on board, we wonder: is there any limit to what custom keyboards can provide in terms of a good, comfortable time for your fingers, wrists, arms, shoulders, and neck? We think not, and as time goes on, there is more and more evidence to support this.
A couple of years ago, Hackaday published an article, “Electric Vehicles Continue the Same Wasteful Mistakes That Limit Longevity“, in which we took a look at the way the car industry, instead of taking the move to electric traction as an opportunity to simplify their products, was instead making their electric offerings far more complex. It touched a nerve and received a very large comment volume, such that now it is our 19th most commented story of all time.
He said that the price has been driven up by modest supply as several fish farms dialed back production in the coronavirus pandemic.
"Why is demand so high for Norwegian fish – farms in Scotland and Chile are producing less fish than is needed. Norwegian companies are exporting to the Americas and Asia, which is why the price has spiked," Vetevool said.
The World Health Organization on Thursday announced that nearly 15 million people died as a direct or indirect result of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 and 2021—almost three times as many as officially reported.
Data submitted by governments to the WHO indicated that Covid-19 had killed roughly 5.4 million people around the globe by the end of last year. But according to the WHO's new 2020 and 2021€ estimate€ of "excess mortality"—how many more people died worldwide than would be expected in the absence of the pandemic—the first two years of the ongoing public health emergency led to approximately 14.9 million excess deaths.
As the U.S. crosses the grim milestone of 1 million deaths from COVID-19, U.S. billionaires have seen their combined wealth rise over $1.7 trillion, a gain of over 58 percent.
Not surprisingly, following Russia’s February 24th invasion, coverage has focused mainly on the day-to-day fighting; the destruction of Ukrainian economic assets, ranging from buildings and bridges to factories and whole cities; the plight of both Ukrainian refugees and internally displaced people, or IDPs; and the mounting evidence of atrocities. The war’s potential long-term economic effects in and beyond Ukraine haven’t attracted nearly as much attention, for understandable reasons. They’re less visceral and, by definition, less immediate. Yet the war will take a huge economic toll, not just on Ukraine but on desperately poor people living thousands of miles away. Wealthier countries will experience the ill effects of the war, too, but be better able to cope with them.
This week U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres is in Nigeria, where he warned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is leading to a growing hunger crisis in Africa. A new report by Human Rights Watch finds the Russian invasion of Ukraine has worsened food insecurity, particularly for African countries that were already experiencing a hunger crisis. Russia and Ukraine are leading exporters of wheat and other grains, while countries such as Cameroon, Nigeria and Uganda are among the largest importers. With climate change and trade stalled by the coronavirus pandemic, “all these changes within the availability of food has sent the food prices to new levels,” says Lena Simet, senior researcher at Human Rights Watch. Advocates are calling on exporting countries such as the United States and Canada to “open their markets, to not introduce export restrictions, and provide essential grains at an affordable price to humanitarian organizations,” she adds.
The horrific scenario, however, awaits countries in the Global South which, unlike Germany, will not be able to eventually substitute Russian raw material from elsewhere. Countries like Tunisia, Sri Lanka and Ghana and numerous others, are facing serious food shortages in the short, medium and long term.
The World Bank is warning of a “human catastrophe” as a result of a burgeoning food crisis, itself resulting from the Russia-Ukraine war. The World Bank President, David Malpass, told the BBC that his institution estimates a “huge” jump in food prices, reaching as high as 37%, which would mean that the poorest of people would be forced to “eat less and have less money for anything else such as schooling.”
Secretary of State Antony Blinken has tested positive for the coronavirus. State Department spokesperson Ned Price said Wednesday Blinken would isolate at home according to CDC guidelines. Blinken met Wednesday with Swedish Foreign Minister Ann Linde shortly before his positive test result. A day earlier, he met with Mexican Foreign Secretary Marcelo Ebrard. On Saturday, he joined a crowd of 2,600 celebrities, journalists and Washington elites who packed the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, where few in attendance wore masks. “You guys spent the last two years telling everyone the importance of wearing masks and avoiding large indoor gatherings. Then, the second someone offers you a free dinner, you all turn into Joe Rogan,” said comedian Trevor Noah in his address at the event, which has since been linked to a growing number of COVID-19 cases. Meanwhile, the World Health Organization estimates the COVID-19 pandemic has caused the deaths of nearly 15 million people around the world.
Nakasone said his agency has observed a series of destructive attacks in Ukraine, on top of those that targeted the country’s satellite communications system in March. “This idea that nothing has happened is not right,” Nakasone said on Wednesday during a summit hosted by Vanderbilt University on modern conflict and emerging threats.
challenged the prevailing narrative that Russia hasn’t launched destructive cyberattacks against Ukraine amid its military invasion.
Nakasone said his agency has observed a series of destructive attacks in Ukraine, on top of those that targeted the country’s satellite communications system in March.
Back in June of 2020, when this article was first written, people were taking to the streets to organize for justice and protest against systemic racism and police brutality. Now, nearly two years later, people are again taking to the streets, this time to protest the possibility that the Supreme Court may overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that guaranteed people the right to terminate their pregnancies. There were protests across the country on Tuesday, May 3rd, 2022, when the news hit; there are bound to be more in the coming weeks.
As a result, we thought it would be a good idea to revisit this examination of how you can protect your phone data when attending a protest. Here goes: [...]
After six years and 500 million downloads, the YouTube team has announced that it will be discontinuing its YouTube Go app this August.
The reason for this discontinuation is that YouTube doesn’t see the app as necessary anymore. YouTube Go was originally created as a stripped version of the base YouTube app designed specifically for places with poor data infrastructure or expensive connectivity.
In a joint effort, tech giants Apple, Google, and Microsoft announced Thursday morning that they have committed to building support for passwordless sign-in across all of the mobile, desktop, and browser platforms that they control in the coming year. Effectively, this means that passwordless authentication will come to all major device platforms in the not too distant future: Android and iOS mobile operating systems; Chrome, Edge, and Safari browsers; and the Windows and macOS desktop environments.
A statement issued by the Alliance claimed such a standard would make the Internet more secure and usable.
The platforms sold by these three companies support the FIDO standards, though not the latest implementations.
The new capabilities envisioned are to allow users to automatically access their FIDO sign-in credentials (referred to by some as a “passkey”) on many of their devices, even new ones, without having to re-enrol every account;
The expanded standards-based capabilities will give websites and apps the ability to offer an end-to-end passwordless option. Users will sign in through the same action that they take multiple times each day to unlock their devices, such as a simple verification of their fingerprint or face, or a device PIN. This new approach protects against phishing and sign-in will be radically more secure when compared to passwords and legacy multi-factor technologies such as one-time passcodes sent over SMS.
These companies’ platforms already support FIDO Alliance standards to enable passwordless sign-in on billions of industry-leading devices, but previous implementations require users to sign in to each website or app with each device before they can use passwordless functionality. Today’s announcement extends these platform implementations to give users two new capabilities for more seamless and secure passwordless sign-ins: [...]
In early 2020, Apple joined the FIDO Alliance, an open industry association created to increase the interoperability of authentication methods and reduce reliance on traditional passwords. Now Apple, Google, and Microsoft have committed to expanding support for the FIDO Standard, moving toward a universal “passwordless” sign-in method.
The new standard, which was created by FIDO and the World Wide Web Consortium, aims to allow apps and websites to offer a unified and secure login option across different devices and platforms. As the alliance pointed out, authentication that relies solely on passwords is more susceptible to security breaches, as many people have easy passwords or reuse them across services.
Google will implement passwordless support in Android and Chrome while Apple will do the same for iOS, MacOS and Safari. Microsoft announced plans to join them in providing the same support in Windows and Edge.
The platforms will now use verification fingerprints or faces, or a device PIN as a way to sign in. The companies said the approach will be more secure than passwords and “legacy multi-factor technologies such as one-time passcodes sent over SMS.”
The way they’re going to do it should already be familiar: The three tech giants will lean more heavily on using smartphones as two-factor authentication via a PIN or fingerprint, and using that authentication to verify yourself on an operating system or website. Essentially, they say, you’ll have the option for an “end-to-end” passwordless solution.
In theory, according to passwordless standards advocate the FIDO Alliance, the platforms used by the three companies already support passwordless authentication, but not in its entirety. One problem today’s agreement solves is the current necessity to sign up for passwordless authentication on one device, but then re-enroll yourself on a second device, such as an additional PC or new phone. FIDO says today’s agreement goes further, allowing users to automatically access their FIDO credentials on their devices without having to re-enroll. The agreement also allows you to sign in on a mobile device, and then access the site on a nearby PC or Mac, regardless of the OS or browser.
Fortunately, communities across the country are fighting back. In the three years since San Francisco passed its first-of-a-kind ban on government use of facial recognition, at least 16 more municipalities, from Oakland to Boston, have followed their lead. These local bans are necessary to protect residents from harms that are inseparable from municipal use of this dangerous technology.
The most effective of the existing bans on government face surveillance have crucial elements in common. They broadly define the technology, provide effective mechanisms for any community member to take legal enforcement action should the ordinance be violated, and limit the use of any information acquired in an inadvertent breach of the prohibition.
There are, however, important nuances in how each ordinance accomplishes these goals. Here we will identify the best features of 17 local bans on government use of face recognition. We hope this will help show authors of the next round how best to protect their communities.
A few days ago, Motherboard revealed they were able to purchase the location data of visitors to Planned Parenthood clinics for just $160 from a company named SafeGraph. While SafeGraph refused to comment at the time, they’ve since written a blot post announcing they’ll be ending the practice. But not without spending much of the blog downplaying obvious potential harm:
As the insurrection unfolded on television, Jackson says he got a phone call from the FBI asking him to confirm that his father was at the Capitol, which Jackson did. As he struggled with the idea that his father was part of an attempted coup of the United States government, Jackson says his father texted news reports to the family group chat with photos of himself at the Capitol. Friends texted, too, asking Jackson if the images they were seeing on television were really of his father.
“The cables were cut on both sides to complicate the repairs,” an ‘operator’ told newspaper Le Parisien. “The urgency is to re-solder everything, this represents tens of thousands of small, fibre-optic cables.”
"Khalid Barakat has been barred from the United States, he has been barred from Germany, yet the Trudeau government still allows this individual to remain in Canada, despite a Canadian law that forbids any individual with connections to terrorist organizations from entering our country or receiving Canadian Citizenship," said Senator Leo Housakos in a debate with Senator Marc Gold, the representative of the Government in the Senate. "Why does your government allow him to remain in the country?"
Raheel Raza might dismiss all these as jihadis who are twisting and hijacking her peaceful Islam, and that’s fine by me. The more Muslims she manages to convince of that, if she convinces any at all, the better. But the reason why she likely has trouble convincing Muslims that “conflict” is forbidden during Ramadan is because these four sources are not ignorant of Islam and what it teaches. Habbash is a Sharia judge. Khaki is a maulana, a scholar of Islam. They didn’t draw their views about Ramadan out of thin air. They drew them from Islamic sources such as the hadith I quoted. And other Muslims do as well, which is one reason why there has been not just the abhorrent Al-Quds Day rally this Ramadan, but also 138 jihad attacks with 782 people killed.
“America stands with Ukraine until victory is won,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi declared on May 1, after traveling to Kyiv for a meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Victory? What exactly does Pelosi mean by “victory”? Does that entail the total defeat of Russian forces and their expulsion from all of Ukraine? That can only be accomplished through the participation of US and NATO forces—a scenario that would almost certainly result in a Europe-wide war, with an attendant risk of nuclear escalation. Or does she mean a meat-grinder war aimed at weakening Russia to the point where it is no longer able to fight NATO, as suggested by Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin after visiting Kyiv a few days earlier? That might, conceivably, avert a nuclear war, but would surely result in hundreds of thousands of dead Ukrainian and Russian soldiers and civilians, and leave Ukraine itself in ruins. Nowhere, in her comments or those by other high-ranking US officials, is there any talk of a negotiated settlement in Ukraine, only of scenarios leading to Russia’s defeat, at whatever cost in human lives.
As Russia’s military casualties in Ukraine continue to mount, Buryatia has emerged as the country’s second-hardest hit region in terms of losses. The only place losing more men is Dagestan. Nevertheless, the speeches at the near daily funerals in Ulan-Ude and other Buryatian cities still resound with support for Russia’s war against “Nazis” and gratitude for the fallen soldiers not being “left behind,” but shipped home for burial. At the end of April, the local magazine People of the Baikal published a report about how Buryatia is burying their dead soldiers, and what their loved ones and the regional authorities think about these losses. With their permission, Meduza has translated their article in full.
According to the Ukrainian Prosecutor General’s Office, at least 221 children have been killed and 408 have been injured during Russia’s all-out war against Ukraine. These statistics are updated regularly. But data on how Russia’s war has affected elderly people in Ukraine doesn’t feature in the authorities’ daily reports. Meduza has compiled photographs that tell the stories of Ukraine’s elderly — including those who are still awaiting evacuation, and those who are unable or unwilling to leave their homes, despite the threat of bombing and shelling. This photo report also includes the text of a letter from Viktoria — a reader from the Luhansk region who wrote to Meduza about her grandparents.
We speak to Yale University historian Timothy Snyder about his latest article for The New Yorker, “The War in Ukraine Is a Colonial War.” Snyder writes about the colonial history that laid the foundations for the Russian war in Ukraine, such as Russia’s imperial vision and how leaders including Hitler and Stalin have aimed to conquer Ukrainian soil on different premises. “The whole history of colonialism … involves denying that another people is real. It involves denying that another state is real,” says Snyder. “That is, of course, the premise of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.”
Russia’s war propaganda has begun co-opting Soviet symbols with increasing frequency. Monuments to the “grandmother with the Soviet flag,” for example, have popped up across the country. And both Kremlin officials and propaganda narratives continue to frame Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine as an extension of the “Great Patriotic War.” Meduza special correspondent Andrey Pertsev looked into the Kremlin’s “Soviet” agitprop and learned how it’s connected to Moscow’s drive to annex new territories.
Brazilian presidential frontrunner Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva argued in an interview published Wednesday that world leaders, including U.S. President Joe Biden, are not doing nearly enough to help secure a peaceful resolution to Russia's deadly war on Ukraine, which has dragged on for more than two months with no end in sight.
"I don't think anyone is trying to help create peace," Lula, a globally popular leftist running to unseat far-right President Jair Bolsonaro and return to the post he held from 2003 to 2010, told TIME magazine in an interview conducted in late March.
American imperialism always deserves condemnation. I write this also as a Pole because my country took an active part in the Anglo-Saxon-Slavonic aggression against Iraq. And the day the Western bombs started falling on Baghdad, I felt shame for my country, just as I felt anger at seeing a smiling George W. Bush declaring military victory. But Russian imperialism, even if it’s anti-American, is still imperialism, and an ominous one at that, bringing death and destruction across the Dnieper River.
Putin’s Russia embodies everything that progressives and social democrats are against. An authoritarian and oligarchic system that kills its political opponents at home is characterized by homophobia, nationalism, and a close relationship between state and church. In the international sphere, Russia refers to the former Soviet states as “near abroad” and considers everyone who speaks Russian to belong to the “Russian world.” In Putin’s view, this gives it the right to invade militarily: first in Georgia in 2008, then by illegally annexing Crimea and starting a war in eastern Ukraine in 2014, and finally by attacking all of Ukraine this year.
The Bundeswehr is modernizing its electronic warfare capabilities. A new system is to be fitted to Eurofighters once it has been developed
Bernhard Grzimek had another face. His life between the ages of 24 and 36 was carefully rewritten by him, and it’s largely his version which is known and reproduced by the FZS and more widely. In his revised version, he joined the German army – but never the Nazi Party – in the 1930s. In 1945, after the Germans had lost the war, he claimed to have been questioned by the Gestapo because he’d given Jews some food.
The real history is different; understanding by just how much needs some context. Grzimek didn’t in fact join the army in 1933, but the armed wing of the Nazi Party, the Sturmabteilung (SA). He did so when he was 24, a mere five months after Hitler came to power. At the time the SA comprised about a million members, mostly Bavarians from southern Germany where the Nazis had their genesis and most support. When Grzimek joined, the SA was comprised of only a small minority (some 1.5%) of the population. Grzimek wasn’t from Bavaria like most of his SA comrades, but from German-speaking Silesia in the north (now in Poland).
Advocates of resurrecting the Iran nuclear deal responded with alarm after the U.S. Senate late Wednesday approved a nonbinding measure to block President Joe Biden from lifting his predecessor's designation of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization.
"Unless and until he steps up, he is on the same disastrous course that Trump set."
Vladimir Putin planned to conquer Ukraine by May 9—Russia's annual "Victory Day" celebrating the defeat of Nazi Germany. Instead, he failed miserably and is a global pariah. NATO and U.S. support for Ukraine made all the difference.
One school says that the leaker was a liberal who wants to give the citizenry time to mobilize against a horrific decision backed by just a quarter of the populace. The idea here would be to spark backlash before the final decision so as to make one of the right-wing justices (most likely Kavanaugh or Gorsuch) waver before his vote is locked in.
A different take holds that the right leaked the draft decision to “test the waters” of popular response and/or to prematurely lock justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh into a final anti-abortion ruling and/or to spark protests sooner rather than later so as to increase the time between popular resistance and the mid-term U.S, elections next fall.
Environmental justice advocates on Thursday cautiously welcomed the federal government's new plan to deliver on some of U.S. President Joe Biden's campaign promises to hold polluters accountable and better serve disproportionately impacted communities.
"This addition is a vital step toward eliminating environmental racism."
Two right-wing Democrats, Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Mark Kelly of Arizona, crossed the aisle Wednesday to help Republicans approve a motion aimed at barring President Joe Biden from declaring a climate emergency, a step that green groups have been pressuring him to take since his first day in office.
The nonbinding motion, sponsored by Sen. Shelley Capito (R-W.Va.) and approved by a vote of 49-47, states that Biden "cannot use climate change as the basis to declare a national emergency." House and Senate lawmakers will consider the motion as part of their efforts to finalize legislation packed with subsidies to profitable microchip corporations.
In 2011 Gayle Manchin invited Randi Weingarten, the president of the AFT, to convene a big alliance of residents, non-profits, businesses, and government to address McDowell’s pressing problems of which there were many, the most fundamental being loss of population. From a population of over 122,000 in the 1960s, McDowell was down to around 20,000 in the 2020 Census. Welch, the county seat, had just 3,590 survivors, and they were aging. Remaining residents were disproportionately elders, grandparents raising kids, thanks to Medicare and Medicaid.
Without people, there can be no development. Employers, big box stores – they may come, but they won’t stay, Mayor Harold McBride told us. McDowell had a Walmart. It closed after just 10 years. Welch attracted a new prison, but its 600 workers live elsewhere. Schools face a chronic lack of teachers for lack of housing.
I'm a West Virginia farmer, and I know something about timing and deadlines. If my spring broccoli isn't planted in the greenhouse by February—and growing uncovered by May—forget it. It'll be a long summer, fall and cold winter before I can try again.
A coalition of advocacy organizations demanding bold steps by the U.S. government to combat the climate emergency launched an online ticker Thursday that shows "the cost of inaction."
"CAC's Cost of Inaction Ticker is an effective way to show people and quickly make the case about the need to urgently act on climate."
The European Union has announced a plan for a total ban on Russian oil by 2023. The move is backed by Germany, one of the countries most dependent on Russian fuel. World leaders hope that stricter sanctions on Russia will cut off financing for the war in Ukraine. We go to Ukraine to speak with economist Tymofiy Mylovanov about what the European oil ban would mean for the conflict; possible alternative buyers for Russia’s oil surplus, such as China and India; military escalations Russia might be planning for its Victory Day on May 9; and more.
A survey published this week analyzing bug splat on U.K. motorists' license plates found that the nation's flying insect population has declined by nearly 60% over the past 17 years, indicating a "terrifying" loss of biodiversity among the planet's most numerous class of species.
"Declines are happening at an alarming rate and without concerted action to address them we face a stark future."
There is seldom any acknowledgment that nonalignment, in this case refusing to be aligned with the United States and its allies or with Russia, can be a principled position, as well as an astute tactical engagement with geopolitical realities. As two founding figures in the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), Yugoslavia’s then-President Josip Broz Tito and India’s then-Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, said in a joint statementsigned on December 22, 1954, “the policy of non-alignment with blocs… does not represent ‘neutrality’ or ‘neutralism’; neither does it represent passivity as is sometimes alleged. It represents the positive, active and constructive policy that, as its goal, has collective peace as the foundation of collective security.”
The Global South houses more than 80 percent of the world’s people, yet its countries are systematically excluded from any decision-making in the international organizations that make decisions in the name of the “international community.” For decades, countries of the Global South have been advocating for the United Nations to be reformed so that it moves away from the zero-sum game of the cold war mentality that continues to drive it. Gabriel Valdés, Chile’s then-foreign minister, said that in June 1969, Henry Kissinger told him, “Nothing important can come from the South. History has never been produced in the South. The axis of history starts in Moscow, goes to Bonn, crosses over to Washington, and then goes to Tokyo. What happens in the South is of no importance.”
The IMF has published the details of the Resilience and Sustainability Trust (RST) that the IMF Executive Board approved during its 2022 Spring Meetings.
The idea for the RST was endorsed by the G20 last fall, with the IMF managing director and staff taking quick action to set up and obtain Executive Board approval for this new instrument.
Wearing a jacket that read "Eat the Rich" across the back, Amazon Labor Union President Christian Smalls on Thursday told a Senate committee that the systems meant to protect workers' rights, particularly at large corporations, are "broken" and called on lawmakers to take action to protect people who want to join unions and who demand fair treatment at work.
"No government—not the federal government, not the state government and not the city government—should be handing out corporate welfare to union busters and labor law violators."
North Carolina’s new law, which was passed as part of the state’s 2021-2022 budget appropriations, prohibits government entities from paying a ransom to an attacker who has encrypted their IT systems and subsequently offers to decrypt that data in exchange for payment. The law prohibits government entities from even communicating with the attacker, instead directing them to report the ransomware attack to the North Carolina Department of Information Technology in accordance with G.S. 143Bââ¬â1379.
The law applies to any “agency, department, institution, board, commission, committee, division, bureau, officer, official, or other entity of the executive, judicial, or legislative branches of State government” as well as to the University of North Carolina and “any other entity for which the State has oversight responsibility.” Private sector entities are encouraged, but not required, to report cybersecurity incidents to the Department of Information Technology.
The month of Ramadan ended on Sunday, May 1st. On Monday, Muslims will celebrate the festival of Eid-el-Fitr. There were a number of disputes during this period. These were about the presence of MPs at fast-breaking ceremonies, as reported in detail by La Croix. One question in particular arose: Does an MP violate secularism by attending such an event? The mayor of Lyon, Grégory Doucet, attended such a dinner on April 27 at the Institut français de civilisation musulmane. The Green city councillor was accompanied on this occasion by the prefect and the corps constitués (“constitutional bodies”).
European Diversity Month is taking place across the EU in May. We are calling on businesses and organisations across Europe to join us, the European Commission, in highlighting the importance of diversity and inclusion in the workplace and society through events and activities throughout the month of May.
Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont blasted the warped priorities of the U.S. Senate on Wednesday as the Democratic-controlled chamber moved to advance legislation that he warned would provide a $53 billion "blank check" to the profitable microchip industry under the guise of promoting innovation, domestic manufacturing, and job creation.
"We have strange priorities here in the Senate," Sanders, the chair of the Senate Budget Committee, said in floor remarks. "We can't extend the child tax credit to combat child poverty. We can't deal with the crisis in child care. We can't provide dental care to seniors on Medicare. We can't deal with climate change."
A call from Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch to overturn more than a century of precedent has been joined by advocates for equal citizenship for everyone born in those U.S. territories. If the court decides to take up the question, it would review a long-standing status quo.
Now, no U.S. citizen living in any of those places can vote for president. They don’t have a voting representative in Congress, either.
But Josh Frydenberg is nervous.€ There is also reason to suggest that he might even be panicking.€ The electorate he represents – that of Kooyong – is not quite so warm towards the sitting member as it has been in the past.€ The sitting MP has resorted to his home party base for comfort.€ “Incredible sea of Liberal blue at our Kooyong Campaign Launch, with more than 1,000 people present,” he tweeted on May 1.€ “So much energy in the room.”
The sitting member was certainly correct about the energy, in so far as it went to the head of one of his supporters in attendance.€ After voicing public approval for Frydenberg (“Liberals will win because of Josh”), volunteer Phil Elwood proceeded to become an impromptu “birdman”, imitating the sound of a Kookaburra and Sulphur-crested Cockatoo with gusto. € Many political candidates have feared the distractions of the eccentric, dedicated supporter.
Less than two weeks after France's neoliberal president, Emmanuel Macron, defeated the far-right's Marine Le Pen to win a second five-year term, the country's four major left parties have agreed in principle to form an electoral coalition that aims to deny Macron a parliamentary majority.
"No one on the left can win on their own."
Interfering in another state is tricky business – so says the gutsy University of Chicago international relations scholar John Mearsheimer (The great delusion: liberal dreams and international realities [2018]. It is tricky – and dangerous – and the exceptional nation, the US, may think pushing NATO (with its missile sites and troop placement) to Russia’s borders is benign. But another state – Russia – thinks it is threatening. Mearsheimer admits that great powers may follow “balance of power” logic, but they can also embrace “liberal hegemony.” When they do, “they may cause a lot of trouble for themselves and other states. The ongoing crisis over Ukraine is a case in point” (p. 171).
It sure is—and very few citizens in Canada and the US have a clue about what this crisis is about: they just assume, saturated in decades of various forms of anti-Russian propaganda, that the military operation launched by Russia on February 24th was, pure and simple, the logical extension of an evil leader, Vladimer Putin. In other words, Ukraine is mere “worthy victim” – and the propaganda machine in the West don’t miss a chance to display images (often false) of the destruction of buildings and people by evil Putin and his military. Evidence is not necessary to substantiate any claims fed to us by the mass media. Images will do because they arouse emotions.€ Putin is to blame; Zelensky is the noble defender of Ukrainian nationality.
It’s a view several disinformation experts agreed with, saying that the vagueness around what the board will do combined with its tone-deaf name raises important questions about whether it is an appropriate tool for DHS to use to fight disinformation.
“If the government intends to expose disinformation, one of the most important counters to that is providing legitimate information,” said David Maxwell, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a retired Army colonel who oversaw psychological operations as a special operations commander. “The announcement, without complete transparency about the organization and its activities and authorities and intent … really undermines their [DHS’s] own credibility and legitimacy.”
As per the report, industry observers say censors are also asking that versions of movies for audiences outside China follow Beijing's script.
Amid a rising trend of curbs on rights in China, the country is intensifying its censorship of Hollywood movies to make them ‘conform’ to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) ideals, a media report said.
The practice, which is almost 25-years old, has expanded in recent times even as producers make movies with an eye toward pleasing Beijing yet without isolating the global audience, Voice of America reported citing industry insiders.
According to Ali’s complaint, a group of people from Malappuram tried to abduct him to ensure that he did not address the event. “They took me to Kollam beach, where I was manhandled. They destroyed my mobile phone and tore my clothes. They forcibly took me to a vehicle and tried to lock me inside. When locals raised an alarm, the police saved me,” he said.
According to Essense Global, Ali then delivered his address in the presence of police. In a video, Ali spoke about his experience as a student of Islamic studies, alleged sexual harassment during his studies and his journey towards “the path of humanism”.
A surfeit of headlines in recent months have laid bare the depth and breadth of online harassment, threat and incitement, disinformation and conspiracy theory in Aotearoa – a constellation of toxicity, presenting dots that can be joined from the Christchurch atrocity to the most extreme fringes of the parliamentary occupation. It has prompted some to suggest that the regulatory and enforcement apparatus for responding to such material – which spans a range of organisations including police, Netsafe, Internal Affairs and the Classifications Office that Shanks leads – is not “fit for purpose”.
What does Shanks say to that, after five years at the sharp end? He takes a long breath. “Our regulatory framework is outdated. And in practical terms, I think I’d struggle to say it is fit for purpose in the current environment.”
United States Senators Tim Kaine and Marco Rubio called on the U.S. to urge Mexico to do more to protect journalists in February, criticizing Lopez Obrador for lashing out against his critics in the media.
In conversations with VOA, journalists who cover gangs and public security spoke about how the new law could affect their reporting and how they plan to continue.
"We are not going to censor ourselves," said Jessica ÃÂvalos, an editor and corruption investigator at Revista Factum.
"We have published an editorial in which we say that silence is not an option, that we are not going to stop investigating. But we are going to be careful that they do not use each publication as a pretext or excuse to attempt a visceral persecution against our journalists and against the media."
ÃÂvalos said that the Law for the Prohibition of Gangs seeks only to "criminalize the journalistic profession."
“The biggest issues facing bookstore workers are the same issues facing most retail/warehouse/customer service/service industry workers: low wages, lack of benefits, and bosses constantly pushing for more work from fewer people,” Tove Holmberg, an 18-year veteran of Powell’s Books and an active union member, tells me via email. “We’re seen as expendable and replaceable; our work isn’t considered ‘a career,’ and so it’s a constant struggle to get our employers to offer us anything more than the bare minimum.”
Under the new rules, Europol will be able to pursue research and innovation projects, process large datasets, and help national authorities screen foreign direct investment in security-related cases. When dealing with terrorist content or child sexual abuse material, Europol will be able to receive data from private companies, for example communication services.
Today, 4 May, Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) approved the revision of Europol’s mandate and the Schengen Information System. This will support a massive, unchecked expansion of Europol’s powers, posing a threat to people’s rights through over-policing, mass surveillance and discrimination. In full contradiction of the previous European Parliament position on AI and criminal law, and of the EDPS recommendations, the just-approved reform legitimises a data-driven policing model that fails to protect our most basic rights. Instead of addressing the root causes of security issues, the European Parliament has approved to give even more power to an institution that already has the upper hand over people.
That’s why Fair Trials, EDRi and 16 other civil society organisations contentiously urged the MEPs to vote down the text. However, the MEPs failed to fulfil their responsibility and commitment to society by accepting the proposals to extend Europol’s mandate.
Ahmadreza Djalali, a disaster medicine doctor and researcher, was arrested in 2016 on an academic visit to Iran and is to be executed by May 21, the semi-official ISNA said, citing sources.
Iran’s judiciary has yet to comment on the report. The Swedish foreign ministry did not immediately comment, but Sweden has in the past condemned Djalali’s death sentence.
A Muslim man berated and beat a Coptic Christian woman because she entered his establishment with her head uncovered during Ramadan in Egypt.
According to the Apr. 27, 2022 Arabic language report, Nevin Sobhi, a 30-year-old married mother, went to her local drugstore to pick up some medication for her young son, who accompanied her. On entering, she noticed that the head pharmacist, Dr. Ali Abu Sa‘da, was giving her “the evil eye.” Before long, what was in his eyes reached his tongue: he launched into a loud and “hate-filled tirade” against her for daring to enter his store during Ramadan without any head covering and while wearing a short-sleeved T-shirt.
Grisly details released surrounding the murder of a 17-year-old Tinley Park girl reveal the teen’s father revoked permission for her to attend prom because he didn’t trust her. Documents also show she feared he may “kill her” just days before she was found dead in her home.
Mohammed Almaru, 42, is accused of killing his daughter, Mia Maro, 17, before police responded to their home Sunday evening in the 7800 block of West 167th Place. He faces first-degree murder charges.
On the day of the homicide, Almaru texted his son – Mia's brother – saying that "Mia was hiding things from him and he had to beat the information out of her," charging documents said.
Around 8.45 pm on Wednesday, the couple had just left home on their bike when two men stopped them, dragged Nagaraju off and attacked him with iron rods and knives. Security footage showed a crowd rapidly collecting at the spot but no one trying to stop the attack. Many had their mobile phones out, recording the crime.
On a rainy night in March, a picket line of cat ears, purple wigs, and neon-yellow ski masks paraded in front of Star Garden, a dinky topless dive bar in North Hollywood. A masked protester broke into a chicken dance under the cheap red club lights. Another held a bright sign reading “We Feel Unsafe” in loopy letters. Drivers honked as they rolled by, sending cheers through the crowd. As magical as the night seemed, there’s nothing whimsical about what the Star Garden Strippers were protesting: sexual harassment and unsafe working conditions.
A man who spent more than eight years in prison after being wrongfully convicted of an armed robbery in Elkhart, Indiana, will receive $7.5 million in a settlement with the city and with former police officers involved in the investigation, his attorney has announced.
The city’s settlement with Keith Cooper is the largest amount paid to a plaintiff in a wrongful conviction lawsuit in Indiana, according to the University of Michigan’s Exoneration Registry, and marks the end of his legal saga, which was chronicled by the South Bend Tribune and ProPublica.
First, it was the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) vehicles speeding along on the road in front of our campsite. Then it was the Border Patrol's all-terrain vehicles moving swiftly on a ridge above us. I was about 10 miles north of the border with Mexico, near Peña Blanca Lake in southern Arizona, camping with my six-year-old son and some other families. Like fire trucks racing to a blaze, the Border Patrol mobilization around me was growing so large I could only imagine an emergency situation developing.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren said Thursday that Democrats can't allow the archaic legislative filibuster to obstruct urgently needed action on abortion rights as Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer announced that the upper chamber will vote next week on a modified version of the Women's Health Protection Act.
"It's long past time," Warren (D-Mass.) tweeted. "And we can't let the filibuster stand in our way."
With the unprecedented leak of the US Supreme Court’s draft opinion affirmatively revoking abortion rights, the theoretical discussion of what the end of Roe v. Wade could look like became real for more people Monday. Though it’s only a draft, it is clear that after decades of legislative and court battles, marches, rallies, and vigils, the legal right to have an abortion in the United States is likely to end this summer.
In an ideal world, the Supreme Court’s upcoming ruling nullifying Roe v. Wade and freeing the states to force people to give birth against their will would simply be ignored by a just executive. In an ideal world, President Joe Biden would make federal facilities available for abortion and family planning services. He would then provide physical protection for both the health care providers and the pregnant people seeking health care. For its part, an ideal-world Congress would immediately pass federal legislation protecting reproductive rights, while in the upcoming midterm elections the people would vote in leaders who stand opposed to the Christo-fascist takeover of American government.
Last night, for the first time in history that anyone can recall, a leaked preliminary Supreme Court decision with respect to completely overturning the 50-year-old precedent of choice for women in€ Roe v. Wade, if not changed before being issued, will take affect in about two months. Similar to Dred Scott it will say, in essence, women have no rights that a man or the law must respect. It will make no difference if you are the victim of rape or incest you will be forced to give birth. There is even a question among some in the so-called pro-life movement as to even whether the life of the mother should be spared if death is a possibility to save the life of the child.
Americans expect to€ add€ human rights, not have them€ taken away.€ This is really an attack on the human rights of women period! It says we don’t trust women to make a decision about their bodies and their health. It’s as simple as Republicans don’t believe in equal rights for women. Republicans oppose equal justice under law for women – it’s why a 1976 Hyde Amendment could exist alongside€ Roe v. Wade. If abortion is legal for everyone and it is then no woman should have been denied equal protection under the law simply because she is poor and must use tax dollars or she is in the military.
The leak of the U.S. Supreme Court’s draft opinion in the Mississippi abortion ban case has put into authenticated form an announcement that abortion advocates on both sides of the aisle have been predicting for years: stack the Court with Republican-appointed justices and Roe v. Wade will be overturned. The Court’s leaked opinion does just that, holding that both Roe and Casey are now bad law because there is no longer any constitutional right to abortion.
Louisiana Republicans on Wednesday advanced legislation that criminalizes abortion as homicide, allowing for the prosecution of both the pregnant person and those who assist them.
Introduced in March by Rep. Danny McCormick (R-Oil City), House Bill 813 advanced out of committee in a 7-2 vote Wednesday, just days after a leaked U.S. Supreme Court draft opinion revealed the court's right-wing majority is on the cusp of striking down Roe v. Wade.€
The impending doom of overturning Roe v Wade has sent shock waves through our society. For those of us old enough to remember when abortion was illegal (I am barely in that age group) a heavy sense of dread immediately settled across our backs.
U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand on Thursday delivered an impassioned appeal to men who might oppose reproductive rights and a barbed blow to the five right-wing Supreme Court justices who she said lied about their jurisprudential stance on Roe v. Wade.
"It is an outrage that we have five justices on the Supreme Court who lied."
College and high school students from coast to coast walked out of classrooms and off campuses on Thursday to defend reproductive freedom in the wake of this week's revelation that the U.S. Supreme Court is set to overturn Roe v. Wade in what would arguably be the biggest rights rollback in American history.
"We call on all working-class, oppressed, and progressive people to take to the streets and fight for our lives."
Internet trade groups that held on to a legal challenge of California’s net neutrality law have dropped their case Wednesday after a federal appeals court upheld the law earlier this year.
The industry trade groups, including US Telecom, the cable industry groups NCTA and ACA Connects, and the wireless association CTIA were the hold out against the law, after the Department of Justice dropped their own challenge to the law.
Lobbying groups representing broadband internet access service providers—including ACA Connects, NCTA, CTIA and USTelecom—dropped their challenge of a federal district court's ruling upholding California's net neutrality law. The ISPs had already lost a federal district court challenge to the law and two appeals court efforts to block enforcement. The suit was dismissed without prejudice, which means ISPs could refile it if they chose. California adopted the prohibitions on blocking, throttling and paid prioritization after the Federal Communications Commission eliminated its similar net neutrality rules and reclassified internet access as a Title I information service under Chairman Ajit Pai.
Associations representing the telecommunications industry on Wednesday dropped their legal fight to block California's "gold standard" net neutrality law following a string of losses in federal courts.
"With this victory, we've secured a free and open internet for California's 40 million residents once and for all."
Two years ago the Trump DOJ and FCC rubber stamped the Sprint T-Mobile merger without heeding experts warnings that the reduced competition would likely degrade service, kill jobs, and slowly raise rates. Working closely with T-Mobile and Dish, the FCC and DOJ “antitrust enforcers” unveiled what they claimed was a “fix” for the problematic nature of the deal: they’d cobble together a fourth major replacement wireless carrier in Dish Network.
The X13s is the first laptop to use Qualcomm's Arm-based Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 chipset, which includes Pluton. The Microsoft processor, available on x86 PCs, prevents attackers from obtaining credentials and other critical data, even if they have possession of the system.
Using something other than Pluton doesn't mean laptops from Dell are insecure. It just means that Dell has chosen to go a different route when it comes to securing devices. "As with all new technologies, we will continue to evaluate Pluton to see how it compares against existing TPM implementations in the future," said a Dell spokesperson to The Register. "Dell also provides its own additional security, implemented at the hardware and software level, to defend customers against attacks."
There are not enough words to describe the horrors of what Russian troops have been doing to their Ukrainian neighbors. But it should go without saying that stealing their stuff is, on its own, not ok.
For many years we’ve discussed the sheer ridiculousness of the “triennial review” process of Section 1201 of the DMCA. If you’re lucky, and don’t spend that much time deep in the weeds of semi-obscure copyright law, Section 1201 of the DMCA is the “anti-circumvention” part of the law, that was initially designed to outlaw breaking digital rights management (DRM) tools. Of course, 1201 was written broadly, saying that basically any attempt to “circumvent a technological measure” (even just talking about ways to circumvent a technological measure) would itself be considered copyright infringement even if the underlying purpose for which you were circumventing the technological measure had nothing whatsoever to do with copyright.
We had just written about the€ great difficulty€ national governments are having in transposing the EU Copyright Directive into local law. That’s largely because of the badly drafted and contradictory Article 17. It effectively calls for upload filters, which have obvious problems for freedom of expression because of the impossibility of crafting algorithms that encapsulate the subtleties of copyright law. For this reason, the Polish government brought a legal challenge to Article 17 before the EU’s top court, on the grounds that it infringes on the freedom of expression and information guaranteed in€ Article 11 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU. The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has handed down its judgement,€ dismissing Poland’s action:
You will recall that Lauren Boebert was unsuprisingly confused about what lawmaking power she has as a lawmaker, having threatened to not “extend Micky (sic) Mouse’s trademark”, which is not a power Congress has. Josh Hawley, who has never been shy about threatening private companies over protected speech, at least has straight which law to threaten Disney with.
The companies behind the movies "Ava" and "Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard" are targeting thousands of alleged BitTorrent pirates in Canada. The defendants, who are targeted through the Toronto federal court, can look forward to hefty settlement demands. While these types of cases are not new, they often remain under the radar.
A long-running class action lawsuit against YouTube alleging mass copyright infringement and failures in YouTube's enforcement system has raised an interesting question. Does YouTube's 'Autoplay' feature, which effectively sees the platform take control of what content is shown, undermine YouTube's safe harbor protections under the DMCA?
