HP and System76 teamed up for the HP Dev One, and for a little while now I’ve been using it as my main machine for everything possible for GamingOnLinux related and otherwise. Here's my initial thoughts, with more to come when I've had more time.
NoiseTorch, a popular real-time microphone noise suppression app recently had a possible security issue but it's been reviewed thoroughly and it's back.
I like to segregate my email by using unique addresses for many services. This makes things more secure, but it isn’t perfect…
Both the author and a friend of theirs have found themselves in the predicament of not being able to reset their forgotten password because they also forgot the email address they used to sign up for the service in question.
Cockpit is one of the best web-based server management dashboards because of its ease of use and installation. It also offers a great dashboard by which you can catch the server-related information in real-time. It also gives access to CPU load, a variety of processes, filesystem statistics, and other data. This server management tool provides great flexibility in managing the Linux servers remotely and locally. With Cockpit, you can manage the network problem quickly. It also provides the superuser control, such as remote reboot or shutdown of the server. Cockpit is a GUI-web-based tool that includes the following features:Storage administration and journal inspection options.Configuration options for the network interface and SELinux.User accounts management.Monitor and manage system services.System subscription management and software update options.Multiple diagnostic reports creation.
Hence, it is good to have Cockpit in the system to handle servers in Linux. The following guide will explain the complete method to install and use Cockpit on Rocky Linux.
Vsftpd ( Very Secure File Transfer Protocol Daemon ) is the default FTP server for Ubuntu, CentOS, Fedora, and RHEL Linux distributions. Vsftpd is a stable, fast, and secure FTP server used for file transfers from the client to remote servers and vice versa.
Basically, the JAVA_HOME Environment path points to the installation location of JDK (Java Development Kit) on your Ubuntu system.
As you develop or run Java-based applications, the associated applications sometimes need to know/reference the JAVA_HOME Environment path to execute/compile without any issues.
Before addressing this Java environment path issue, we need to revise the steps that might/have led us to this article’s objective. We need to start with understanding Java, and its installation, and finally addressing the JAVA_HOME path issue.
No, executing "sudo rm -rf /" will not wipe out your complete system unless you do *. Read the full article to find out.
Linux file system works differently than the windows system. Unlike Windows, which stores files and configurations inside C:, D:, or E: Drive, Linux stores everything inside the root (/).
Get the simply explained steps to install Ntopng on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish to monitor the network data traffic with graphs.
Ntopng is an open-source tool and successor of the popular network monitoring software Ntop. It is a high-speed web-based traffic analysis and flow collection software. The software monitors the data traffic in the network and provides statistical evaluations. Traffic can be output with the Ntopng sorted according to criteria such as IP address, port, L7 protocol, and throughput. In addition, the active hosts and traffic can be viewed in real-time and long-term reports can be generated.
You are feeling the best productive self and in the hurry, you make a typo while typing in GNU nano.
As a member of the Fedora Linux QA team, I sometimes find myself executing a bunch of commands that I want to broadcast to other developers. If you've ever used a terminal multiplexer like tmux or GNU Screen, you might think that that's a relatively easy task. But not all of the people I want to see my demonstration are connecting to my terminal session from a laptop or desktop. Some might have casually opened it from their phone browser—which they can readily do because I use tmate.
ONLYOFFICE Docs is an open-source office suite and Strapi is an open-source collaborative CMS built on Node.js. In this tutorial, we’ll learn how to connect the instances of ONLYOFFICE Docs and Strapi using an integration plugin (connector).
In this article, we describe how to set up an SSH login that does not use passwords on Ubuntu 22. Having a login without a passsword is an easy and convienevt way to SSH into a computer without have to remember any password as well as the added layer of security.
SSH is ideal for managing remote systems because of its password-less option that uses public/private keys instead of passwords, keeping system passwords safe.
This article uses ssh-copy-id, a utility that greatly simplifies the procedure by copying the local host’s public key to the remote host’s authorized keys file and by verifying file permissions and ownership.
As you might already know, the HEIF was adopted by Apple in 2017 with the introduction of iOS 11. This image format doesn’t always work when you want to upload it to many websites or open on your Ubuntu Desktop.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install CMake on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, CMake is an open-source, cross-platform family of tools designed to build, test, and package software. CMake is popular due to its cross-platform so that developers using the build system work the way they’re used to. The suite of CMake tools was created by Kitware in response to the need for a powerful, cross-platform build environment for open-source projects such as ITK and VTK.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the CMake on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
Hello, friends. In this post, you will learn how to install Scala on CentOS 9. This programming language runs on the Java JVM, so they share many things.
Kerberos is an Open Authentication System created by MIT. Numerous big data systems use Kerberos for the server-to-server correspondences in network security. The Kerberos protocol has strong cryptographic authentication over devices, allowing clients and servers to develop trusted communication. The protocol aims to address common network security issues.
It deals with a ticket-based framework to prevent intrusion from external attackers. Thus, it prevents any possibilities of secret phrase sniffing or secret password thefts.
Screen Blanking occurs when you are inactive on your Raspberry Pi for a longer time. This problem is very common in Raspberry Pi devices and it must not be very pleasant for someone who doesn’t want to put his system into sleep mode. If you are looking for a way to disable Screen Blanking on Raspberry Pi, you should follow this article that will guide you in overcoming this issue on your device.
 A card game is a game that uses playing cards as the main way the game is played. The cards can be a standard deck of 52 French playing cards with 4 suits of Spades, Hearts, Diamonds, and Clubs. Or the cards can be game-specific. There is a plethora of card games available, with families of related games.
Card games offer many positive attributes. They can improve mental skills, memory and logic. They can test your patience, help you focus, and are popular for all ages. Having a good memory is essential to a person’s overall well-being. A good way to improve memory is playing fun games. Whether it’s a board game or a deck of cards, putting your brain to work definitely has its advantages. The earlier a person who has a poor working memory can begin to strengthen it, the more successful they’ll be in life.
Many of the biggest computer games concentrate on explosion-filled genres. But there’s still strong demand for good quality card games. It’s a neglected genre in the mainstream. Here are our picks of the best card games. We only advocate open source games here. And we give preference to games that run on multiple operating systems.
If you played many games back in the mid-80s to 90s, you might remember the iconic graphics from Sierra’s Online Adventure Games. They were brightly colored (16 colors) and dynamic with some depth. To pay homage, [eviltrout] worked to upscale the images. Despite being rendered at 160Ãâ200 at 16 colors and then stretched, storing all those bitmaps even at only 4 bits per pixel would take all the storage available on the floppy disk. The engineers on the game decided instead to take a vector approach to a raster problem.
A celebration of upcoming games, Steam Next Fest: June 2022 is now live for you to smash that download button on various demos to see what you think. Much like previous events, there will also be various livestreams on the official event page and on pages for individual games for you to speak to developers and see some footage.
Techland are moving on from the original Dying Light, after giving it 7 years of free updates and expansions. Not many developers support their games for that long, if they're not some sort of live-service thing. Techland certainly did well overall with it.
The upcoming System Shock from Nightdive Studios is still coming, and a brand new trailer was recently shown off during the PC Gaming Show 2022. We don't know when it will release though.
Here's your tip of the day: you can go a claim a free to keep copy of ARK: Survival Evolved on Steam right now. It has a Native Linux version, although we just recommend you use Proton with it as they never really supported it and it does work quite well with Proton.
Have you been itching to play Phasmophobia? Well, you no longer have to wait for Wine and Proton to be upgraded as the developers have ripped out the Windows-specific stuff.
The developers of OXOGO are hoping to entice some people to play their retro-styled adventure, with the added excitement of the possibility to earn a real-life prize.
Usagi Shima, from developer pank0 (aka Jess Yu), is an upcoming idle bunny collecting game I've been following for quite some time and the first-ever short gameplay trailer just went up. Shown off as part of the recent Wholesome Direct 2022, it's nice to finally see more than screenshots and tiny gifs on their popular Twitter account.
IPFire 2.27 Core Update 168 is here one and a half months after the Core Update 167 release to further improve the Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) of the Linux firewall distro by allowing users to individually enable the monitoring mode for each ruleset provider, making parsing and restructuring of changed or updated rulesets faster, as well as support for the downloader to automatically check if a ruleset was updated or not on its providers’ server.
After the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4S which we discovered in April, it appears Raspberry Pi Trading has launched another Compute Module for their industrial and commercial customers with the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3E (CM3E) equipped with the same Raspberry Pi RP30A0 SiP found in Raspberry Pi Zero 2W and an 8GB eMMC flash.
The new system-on-module (SoM) has not been officially announced but was discovered by Twitter user “Pi 0 in your Pocket” inside an electric vehicle (EV) charger by Wallbox.
It’s almost hard to believe these days, what with modern game consoles packing terabytes of internal storage, but there was a time when the totality of your gaming career would be stored on an external memory card that held just a few megabytes of save data. Of course, before that you had to write down a sequence of random letters and numbers to pick up where you left off, but that’s a story for another day.
Last week, Texas Instruments released two new models for the Sitara processor family. The Sitara AM623 and the AM625 can have up to four Cortex-A53 processors and one Arm Cortex M4F. For quick product development, TI is integrating them on the SK-AM62 starter kit which starts at $149.
The AM623 and the AM625 come in a System on Chip (SoC) form factor and can have one, two or up to four Cortex-A53 processors (up to 1,400 MHz) and a single Arm Cortex M4F (up to 400 MHz) for real-time applications. The main difference between these two SoCs is that the AM625 features a 3D GPU and it seems to support Android OS.€
 As with all emerging technologies, it's critical to consider the use case and impact to the humans who use it. Immersive virtual and augmented reality devices have unprecedented capabilities to capture, process, store, and utilize data about an individual, including their physical movement patterns, cognitive state, and attention. Additionally, virtual worlds themselves significantly amplify the benefits and problems of today's social media, and require careful implementation of trust and safety systems, moderation techniques, and appropriate access permissions to ensure that users have a positive experience when they venture into these spaces.
As the web evolves and encompasses immersive content and spatial computing devices, it's important to think critically and carefully about the experiences being created, and interoperability across different applications. Ensuring that these virtual worlds are open, accessible, and safe to all is paramount. The prospect of the metaverse is an exciting one, and one that can only be realized through collaborative open source software movements.
I've been working on a few Gemini-related projects.
I converted my personal page into a front-end for a Gemini-to-HTTP proxy server. The public-facing server itself is actually a commercially-hosted Apache setup. I had to muck around a bit with PHP in order to set up some way of getting it to render pages served by my personal VPS. I want to write a gemlog post detailing the entire setup soon.
I posted yesterday about a new EasyOS image file, with 'vmlinuz' and 'initrd' in the boot-partition, and 'easy.sfs' in the working-partition...
“Seaborn is a Python module for creating numerical visualizations. It is based on the matplotlib library and extensively interacts with pandas header files. Seaborn assists users in analyzing and comprehending the data. Its visualizing functions work with data structure and arrays, including entire records, providing the required semantic mapping and set of associations internally to generate useful graphs. Its data source, explicit API, allows the users to concentrate on interpreting the charts instead of the technicalities of presenting them.
Seaborn’s plotting interoperability allows the user to access it in various scenarios, such as exploratory analysis, actual interactivity in Graphical apps, and archived outcome in a variety of graphic and vector representations.
Stewart Brand is not a scientist. He’s not an artist, an engineer, or a programmer. Nor is he much of a writer or editor, though as the creator of the Whole Earth Catalog, that’s what he’s best known for. Brand, 83, is a huckster—one of the great hucksters in a time and place full of them. Over the course of his long life, Brand’s salesmanship has been so outstanding that scholars of the American 20th century have secured his place as a historical figure, picking out the blond son of Stanford from among his peers and seating him with inventors, activists, and politicians at the table of men to be remembered. But remembered for what, exactly?
How old do you have to be to work for change in your community?
Street artist Timofey Radya has published a video and photos of his newest installation: the words “Live in the past!” in large block letters on top of the roofs of two apartment buildings on Kosmonavtov Prospekt in Yekaterinburg.
The transitory mental aberration of Sidney Davidson, remarkable enough in itself, is still more remarkable if Wade’s explanation is to be credited. It sets one dreaming of the oddest possibilities of intercommunication in the future, of spending an intercalary five minutes on the other side of the world, or being watched in our most secret operations by unsuspected eyes. It happened that I was the immediate witness of Davidson’s seizure, and so it falls naturally to me to put the story upon paper.
The past weeks have zipped by without an opportunity to work on any of my fun coding projects.
After a short vacation, we've decided to do some serious house cleaning before the new baby is born. Who knew there can be so much old and useless crap hidden in closets around the house? Truly a case of "out of sight, out of mind". On the upside, my office room is now much better organized. The desk is more appropriately shaped and positioned and my three PCs fit under it neatly. Even the bookshelf looks more presentable, which is nice for video calls.
One in five American adults struggles to read English at a basic level. Some have a hard time with everyday tasks like taking a driver’s test or voting. Some cannot read at all.
These 48 million people — many of whom are native English speakers who left school without the necessary reading skills — are often resourceful, finding ways to navigate a world designed for readers. But they face barriers to getting jobs, accessing social services and finding medical care. This is not just an individual hardship — it’s a collective crisis. Some police departments are having trouble recruiting people who can take entrance tests. Throughout history, American institutions have used literacy tests to exclude people from fully participating in society, including at the polls. We are reporting on similar barriers still in place.
Helium is the most common element in the universe besides hydrogen, but despite this universal abundance it is surprisingly difficult to come across on Earth. Part of the problem is that it is non-renewable, so unless it is specifically captured during mining its low density means that it simply escapes the atmosphere. For that reason [Meow] maintains a helium recovery system for a lab which is detailed in this build.
[AndreaFavero] says that the CuboTino emphasizes simplicity and cost-savings over speed. However, solving the puzzle in about 90 seconds is still better than we can do. The plucky solver uses a Pi and a camera to understand what the cube looks like and then runs it through a solver to determine how to move.
This might sound like a familiar problem – you get a Bluetooth speaker, and it sounds nice, but it also emits all kinds of weird sounds every now and then. [Oleg Kutkov] got himself a Sven PS460 speaker with FM radio functionality, but didn’t like that the “power on” sound was persistently loud with no respect for the volume setting, and the low battery notification sounds were bothersome. So, he disassembled the speaker, located a flash chip next to the processor, and started hacking.
Filament-based 3D printers spent a long time at the developmental forefront for hobbyists, but resin-based printers have absolutely done a lot of catching up, and so have the resins they use. It used to be broadly true that resin prints looked great but were brittle, but that’s really not the case anymore.
The need to provide custom controls for complex software packages has been satisfied in many ways, the most usual of which is to have a configurable keypad. It’s a challenge [Meir Michanie] has taken up in a slightly different way, by creating a custom touch-screen macro pad. Unlike the buttons, this allows entirely custom layouts with different shaped keys in any configuration.
Middle-aged women who have greater blood concentrations of toxic “forever chemicals” may be at greater risk of developing high blood pressure, a new study has found.
These women were more likely to become hypertensive than those who had lower levels of the compounds, also called per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), according to a study published on Monday in the American Heart Association journal Hypertension.
The following is a diary of the first three months of 2020. During that time, the coronavirus pandemic overtook all our attention. I abandoned my nascent climate activism to homeschool my children under quarantine, even as I understood that the two crises—climate change and Covid-19—weren’t in competition. The only action I could maintain was writing down what people in my network said about what they were losing, or stood to lose, from both threats. Excerpted from THE WORLD AS WE KNEW IT: Dispatches from a Changing Climate, edited by Amy Brady and Tajja Isen. Published with permission of Catapult. Copyright €© 2022
Recently, I’ve been writing about the “new school” antivaccine movement that arose during the COVID-19 pandemic to oppose COVID-19 vaccines is becoming increasingly indistinguishable from “old school” antivaxxers, the ones who falsely claimed that vaccines cause autism, autoimmune diseases, the “sickest generation” of children, and even death. In particular, I saw this confluence at the Better Way Conference held in Bath, England last month, where new school antivaxxers like Robert Malone were echoing old school antivaxxer Del Bigtree‘s attacks on the children’s immunization schedule, which included hoary old antivax tropes, such as “too many too soon.”
Now is the time.
Jim Gale, founder of€ Food Forest Abundance, pointed out in a recent€ interview with Del Bigtree€ that in the United States there are 40 million acres of lawn. Lawns are the most destructive monoculture on the planet, absorbing more resources and pesticides than any other crop, without providing any yield. If we were to turn 30% of that lawn into permaculture-based food gardens, says Gale, we could be food self-sufficient without relying on imports or chemicals.
Permaculture€ is a gardening technique that “uses the inherent qualities of plants and animals combined with the natural characteristics of landscapes and structures to produce a life-supporting system for city and country, using the smallest practical area.”
On various forums online (1, 2, 3), Windows users are reporting of a new and mysterious update that is being pushed via Windows Update. Classified as a Quality Update, the new update is dubbed "Microsoft Bing Service 2.0". Users on both Windows 11 and Windows 10 are receiving it so it isn't exclusively meant for Windows 11 22H2 Insiders or something.
Microsoft has been accused of a lack of transparency in its vulnerability practices, with the security outfit Tenable claiming these practices put the software giant's customers at risk.
Tenable chairman and chief executive Amit Yoran said in a blog post that his company had discovered two flaws, one of which it considered critical, in Microsoft's Azure platform, both in the Synapse Analytics part of Azure.
Synapse Analytics is used for machine learning, data aggregation and similar computational tasks.
One of these flaws was a privilege escalation flaw with the context of a Spark VM. The second allowed the poisoning of the hosts file on all nodes in a Spark pool.
Yoran wrote that Microsoft decided to silently patch the privilege escalation flaw, while downplaying the risk. "It was only after being told that we were going to go public, that their story changed… 89 days after the initial vulnerability notification… when they privately acknowledged the severity of the security issue. To date, Microsoft customers have not been notified," he added.
A team of security researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (MIT CSAIL) managed to defeat M1’s security measures, breaching the chip’s last line of security, the PAC (pointer authentication codes). The researchers developed a novel attack combining memory corruption and speculative execution, bypassing M1’s security. They found that the chip’s last line of security, often known as PAC (pointer authentication codes), can be breached through a hardware attack allowing attackers to gain access to the Mac.
The M1 chip uses a feature called "Pointer Authentication," which acts as a last line of defense against typical software vulnerabilities. With Pointer Authentication enabled, bugs that normally could compromise a system or leak private information are stopped dead in their tracks. Now, researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory have found a crack: their novel hardware attack, called "PACMAN" shows that Pointer Authentication can be defeated without even leaving a trace. Moreover, PACMAN utilizes a hardware mechanism, so no software patch can ever fix it.
According to MIT CSAIL, since its PACMAN attack involves a hardware device, a software patch won’t fix the problem. The issue is a wider problem with Arm processors that use Pointer Authentication, not just Apple’s M1. “Future CPU designers should take care to consider this attack when building the secure systems of tomorrow,” Ravichandran wrote. “Developers should take care to not solely rely on pointer authentication to protect their software.” As a technological demonstration, PACMAN shows that pointer authentication isn’t completely foolproof and developers shouldn’t completely rely on it.
The researchers say the PACMAN attack works across privilege levels, "implying the feasibility of attacking a PA-enabled operating system kernel."
When asked about the data exfiltration rate (i.e., how fast data can be stolen), the team tells Tom's Hardware, "It's hard to say since data exfiltration with this attack will be very dependent on the exact gadget used. Our proof of concept exploit takes 2.69 milliseconds per PAC guess (so worst-case 2.94 minutes per pointer). This may be longer in a fully integrated end-to-end attack."
ID.me hasn’t always been a government contractor powerhouse. For more than a decade, it wasn’t really on anybody’s radar. The personal identification software began as a Craigslist for military personnel before morphing into an ID service designed to combat fraud and ensure military members could access the many government programs available to them.
But today the U.S. Supreme Court slammed the courthouse door on our flagship NSA surveillance lawsuit, Jewel v. NSA, effectively validating the government’s claims that something known and debated across the world—the NSA’s mass surveillance—is somehow too secret to be challenged in open court by ordinary members of the public whose communications were caught in the net.
The Supreme Court this week allowed our case to be dismissed because it’s a “secret” that the mass spying programs that everyone has known about since at least the Snowden documents came to light in 2013 (and disclosed in the national news long before that) involved the nation’s two largest telecommunications carriers.€ Yes, you read that right: something we all know is a still officially a "secret" and so cannot be the subject to litigation. Specifically, the Court refused to take on and reconsider a Ninth Circuit decision (and an underlying district court ruling) that held that the state secrets privilege blocked our clients’ efforts to prove that their data was intercepted such that they had standing to sue.
The central fact that these courts found to be “secret” is that AT&T and Verizon participated in the mass spying, even though we had submitted ample public evidence to support that finding. The Ninth Circuit decision was so cursory that the court didn’t even review the lower court’s sealed opinion addressing the government’s actual evidence of the spying, despite the fact that the District Court specifically required the government to present that evidence in secret.
Weather apps, navigation apps, coupon apps, and “family safety” apps often request location access in order to enable key features. But once an app has location access, it typically has free rein to share that access with just about anyone.
That’s where the location data broker industry comes in. Data brokers entice app developers with cash-for-data deals, often paying per user for direct access to their device. Developers can add bits of code called “software development kits,” or SDKs, from location brokers into their apps. Once installed, a broker’s SDK is able to gather data whenever the app itself has access to it: sometimes, that means access to location data whenever the app is open. In other cases, it means “background” access to data whenever the phone is on, even if the app is closed.
Rupert Murdoch himself was said to be guiding decisions to remove anyone who wasn't deemed hysterical and shrill enough to entice the disappointed Trumpers back into the fold, marginalizing the few more or less straight news people and giving carte blanche to their "opinion" personalities to follow their bliss into the right-wing fever swamps. The result is Tucker Carlson and his Great Replacement Hour.
Fox is a primary source of information for the party’s voters and a key Republican power base. That would make the network crucial to the future success of an antidemocratic GOP plot, just as it was when Trump tried to overturn the election in 2020. And Fox’s propagandists appear eager to try again in 2024, relentlessly casting doubt on the 2020 results while helping to push out Republicans who refuse to support the party’s authoritarian turn.
They are positioning the country on the brink of the abyss. Next time, political conditions may prove favorable enough to end the American experiment in electoral democracy.
Never forget: An outgoing American president riled up a mob to attack Congress. That remains an open wound on the polity, one that can’t be healed until justice is served on those responsible for it. The guilty include not just the rioters who have already been charged for their individual offenses but also the masterminds who instigated the failed subversion of democracy.
In the key sentence of the first day of hearings, Cheney said, “You will also hear about plots to commit seditious conspiracy on January 6th, a crime defined in our laws as conspiring to overthrow, put down, or destroy by force the government of the United States or to oppose by force the authority thereof.”
If we take these words seriously, the hearings are going to be much more than a fact-finding mission. They are a prosecutorial brief that will lay out a criminal case against Trump and his accomplices.
Yes, people have been following the actions of the January 6 committee for nearly 10 months—on Twitter, on cable, via news sites. But the Thursday night broadcast felt different. The committee brought in a former ABC news executive to produce the hearings and make them look less like a C-SPAN live feed. They aim, according to Maryland representative Jamie Raskin, to “tell the story of a conspiracy to overturn the 2020 presidential election and block the transfer of power” from Donald Trump to Joe Biden. In terms of televised politics, it’s on par with the Watergate hearings.
In other words, must-see TV. That’s what the committee wanted, to give their findings to the court of public opinion. At a time of misinformation, the goal is to train the eyes of the electorate to see clearly what has happened to democracy in the US. But the hearing surely didn’t get all of them. During the broadcast, Fox ran Tucker Carlson’s show without commercials. And amidst all of it, attention was split between the TV and the smaller screen. Arguing about politics is one of the social internet’s many enshrined pastimes, but it can often feel like there’s more talking and analysis than actual observation
"And the other 50 percent — who are completely anonymous, who want nothing more than to scream and yell at us and use some really choice words — offer death threats against myself and other members of the police department merely for doing our jobs," White said. "Those people obviously remain anonymous."
Officers have also received threats of doxxing, a practice in which someone publishes personal information such as phone numbers or addresses online, White said. The majority of the threats being made appear to be from outside the Coeur d’Alene community, according to the chief.
A 911 caller reported seeing a "little army" of people in masks and with shields in a U-Haul truck on Saturday. Responding officers stopped the vehicle about 10 minutes later and 31 people in "similar attire" were arrested, White previously said.
I was packing it illegally, but I knew that a white man in a suit and tie was unlikely to be stopped by the police and frisked, even in a city with some of the strictest gun laws in the country — laws that may soon be swept away if the Supreme Court continues what seems to be its holy war on democracy. In fact, its justices are expected to rule this month in a case that challenges New York’s constitutional right to deny anyone a permit to carry a firearm. That state’s current licensing process allows only those who can prove a “special need for self-protection distinguishable from that of the general community.” That means you can’t pack heat just because you want to feel stronger and braver than you are or because you feel threatened by people who look different from you.
It also means that you can’t enjoy the privileges of the past. In his history of gun rights in this country, Armed in America, Patrick Charles quotes this from a piece in a 1912 issue of the magazine Sports Afield: “Perfect freedom from annoyance by petty lawbreakers is found in a country where every man carries his own sheriff, judge, and executioner swung on his hip.”
The gun I carried on the streets of New York City in the late 1960s was a Beretta, similar to the pistol James Bond packed in the early Ian Fleming novels. It was a small, dark beauty that filled me with bravado. I was never afraid when I had it in my pocket, which is why I’m so very afraid now.
Robert Lipsyte offers a little inside information from his own past on what it feels like to be a young man in this country packing a weapon, while your emotions and sense of manliness run wild.
Time for a new movement to stop the nuclear arms race.
The world's stockpile of nuclear warheads is expected to expand in the coming years for the first time since the 1980s and the catastrophic threat of those weapons being used is escalating, a leading arms watchdog said Monday.
"If the nuclear-armed states take no immediate and concrete action on disarmament, then the global inventory of nuclear warheads could soon begin to increase for the first time since the Cold War," Matt Korda, an associate researcher with the Weapons of Mass Destruction Program at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, said in a statement released alongside SIPRI's annual report.
At the end of April, the city of Kyiv dismantled a Soviet-era statue that was meant to symbolize friendship between Russia and Ukraine. The sculpture was part of a complex in the city center that includes the Peoples’ Friendship Arch — a massive rainbow-shaped structure that was recently renamed the Arch of Freedom of the Ukrainian people. Writing for Meduza, architectural journalist Asya Zolnikova digs into this monument’s controversial history — and future.
Former priest and doctor of theology Ioann Kurmoyarov has been jailed for two months pending trial on felony charges of spreading “false information” about the Russian military. St. Petersburg’s Kalininsky District Court remanded Kurmoyarov in custody on Saturday, June 11.€
Russia's repeated attacks on Ukraine using cluster munitions "constitute war crimes," Amnesty International said in a new report released Monday, highlighting several bombings in the northeastern city of Kharkiv, where more than 600 civilians have been killed since Russia invaded Ukraine in February.
The report, titled Anyone Can Die at Any Time, was compiled from interviews with 160 people, including survivors of strikes, witnesses, and medical professionals who treated victims.
Progressive advocacy groups across the United States on Monday welcomed a new legislative proposal that would cut Pentagon spending for the next fiscal year by $100 billion and reallocate it toward top threats facing the nation that "are not military in nature."
"How come when it comes to funding the Pentagon, no one asks how are we going to pay for it, but when it comes to funding healthcare, suddenly the government is poor?"
A radical right-winger has been arrested in Slovakia for using self-printed weapons and explosives. Investigators on the phenomenon met in The Hague three weeks ago.
New reporting from The Washington Post on Monday laid out the increasingly dire conditions across Afghanistan amid drought and in the wake of the Taliban takeover and disastrous U.S. withdrawal last year following nearly two decades of war.
"Sometimes all we have is donated stale bread and tea."
Ukrainian president Volodimir Zelensky’s former actor colleagues will be among the artists appearing at the charity concert which is to be held later this week, on 16 June at Bakáts tér in Budapest. The event was supposed to have taken place at the prestigious Várkert Bazár, but after weeks of organizing, the Hungarian state canceled its support of the event, which is why the 9th district of Budapest stepped in as host.
Russia has effectively been under martial law for three months now. Anti-war protests are illegal, independent media outlets have been blocked, and anyone who spreads “fake news” about the Russian army (such as reports of war crimes) can face up to 15 years in prison. Naturally, a huge number of journalists, activists, and opposition politicians have left the country. Ilya Yashin is a rare figure: he’s chosen to stay in Russia, but he also openly refers to the war as a war (which violates Russian law). Four administrative offense reports have been filed against him as a result. Meduza special correspondent Svetlana Reiter spoke with Yashin about what’s changed in Moscow since February 24 —€ and why he’s chosen to stay in Russia.
But some of the worst consequences of the war outside Ukraine remain beneath the media radar, notably Turkey’s announcement in the last few weeks that it is planning an offensive to seize Kurdish-controlled enclaves in northern Syria. Going by previous Turkish incursions over the last five years this attack will mean the ethnic cleansing of Kurds left with no choice but to flee to other parts of Syria.
Displacement, destruction, death
Opinion column: The Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, whose first of six televised hearings began last Thursday, is spectacle replacing politics. There is nothing substantially new in the accusations.
The televised hearings on the events of January 6, 2021 detailing the alleged insurrection at the Capitol after the 2020 election illustrates the sclerotic state of American politics and news media. It occurs at a time when democracies are weakening and disappearing. Regardless of one's party affiliation or ideology, questions about a violent attempt to disrupt or ignore the democratic process are as serious as they are consequential. On the surface the hearing is a powerful example of democracy in action, but what happened on January 6th and what it means for democracy is hindered by the establishment news media and political classes' fixation on Donald Trump. Indeed, they are addicted to the benefits of focusing on Trump all the time—so is Trump himself. Meanwhile, the public remains in the unenviable position of being inundated with propaganda while lacking a background in critical media literacy education.
Eventually some “insurrectionists” may be charged and held to account but for the most part they will most likely simply supply great amounts of entertainment, entertainment in the form of ammunition for the Democratic hounds who love to hate and condemn the Republican party as the Republican hounds love hating the Democrats. Unless Trump himself is brought to account and is treated in the same manner as any citizen the hearings, like the impeachment hearings, will accomplish little to nothing. Even so, the hearings will do nothing to stop or better the Republican Party or the Democratic Party or the nation as a whole and all this just before the mid-terms!
These hearings, however entertaining, will not solve the problems that lie at the root or heart of the United States, a country which is in obvious and statistically verifiable decline and these hearings, as sometimes reported, sure as hell won’t save our democracy. Likewise, convicting those citizens who were caught up in the passion of their political beliefs, as twisted as some of those beliefs may have been, will not play out in a just and righteous manner, bringing in the leaders that is and delivering sentences fairly handed down. They will if anything, only drive the wedge deeper into the heart of the nation while the real problems that affect us every day and the real criminals that hoodwink us without mercy and helped to bring on, either directly or indirectly, the fury of that crowd, go on unaddressed, untried and for the most part, unnoticed.
Americans are not media literate. For the most part, their schools do not mandate critical media literacy education. Writers have long warned that having a media illiterate citizenry threatens a democracy’s viability because voters are unable to discern fact from fiction, entertainment from reality. Indeed, numerous scholars and journalists have argued that it was these conditions that enabled Trump to become president of the United States. A long time media figure and reality television personality, Trump engaged in delivering sensationalistic content that the news media could not avoid. For four years, the news media enjoyed a massive increase in their audience size for covering every aspect of Trump’s life.€ Some later issued a mea culpa, but all suffered from a huge reduction of their audience once Trump’s presidency concluded by nearly half in some cases.
The Democratic Party engaged in what was known as a pied piper strategy to make Trump the 2016 nominee because they thought he was the best opponent to ensure Hillary Clinton’s victory. As evidenced by the 2020 election, antipathy for Trump drives Democratic Party voter participation like abortion and immigration animate Republicans. That Democrats rely on the “we’re not Trump” strategy has them facing dismal prospects for 2022 voter participation.
Donald Trump's incessant and frequently outlandish lies about the 2020 election were in the spotlight Monday as a special House committee laid out its case that the former president's falsehoods about widespread voter fraud were pivotal in catalyzing the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Monday's hearing, the second in a series of six, featured videotaped testimony from Trump administration insiders—including former Attorney General William Barr—and campaign officials who told House investigators that they informed their boss his claims about the 2020 election were unfounded, but he nevertheless made them on the night of the November contest and in subsequent weeks, ginning up his right-wing base and raking in massive sums in donations from supporters.
The House Select Committee investigating the January 6 insurrection on Monday detailed how the Trump campaign blatantly deceived the former president's supporters by using the "Big Lie" of a stolen election to bilk hundreds of millions out of them in massive fundraising blitz.
"Not only was there that big lie, there was the big rip-off."
Update:
The House January 6 committee announced that Bill Stepien, former President Donald Trump's 2020 campaign manager, will no longer be testifying at Monday's hearing due to an unspecified "family emergency."
The art of whipping up anticipation is usually better understood in Hollywood than in Washington. Grabbing hold of an audience requires first offering some enticement (in the form of a trailer that craftily hints at the story) before the main feature. The first day of the congressional hearings on the aborted coup of January 2021, however, offer an indication that at least some politicians have a talent for shaping narrative suspense. The team of Democratic Representative Bennie Thompson, chairman of the committee, and Republican Representative Liz Cheney, the vice chairman, presented a masterful overview. They unfolded a plausible narrative for the events leading up to the storming of the Capitol and summarized the forensic case for former President Donald Trump’s culpability in the attempted insurrection. Video clips from the riot offered a vivid reminder of the orchestrated violence that Trump stirred up.
Arshak Makichyan is a Russian climate activist and Greta Thunberg ally. On the day the war began, Makichyan was getting married to fellow activist Polina Oleinikova; their wedding turned into a public statement against the war (Makichyan’s shirt had the words “Fuck the War” written on it) and the couple later left Russia. In May, Makichyan learned that the Russian authorities wanted to revoke his citizenship. He's currently in Europe, where he continues to fight for a more sustainable planet and for Ukrainian sovereignty — but with a visa expiration date looming, his future is uncertain.
Last week, Biden invoked the Defense Production Act (DPA) to speed up the production of domestic clean energy infrastructure. This Act, originally passed in 1950 as a response to the Korean War, provides support for domestic production of materials deemed essential to national defense. As invoked last week, the DPA now provides investments in the domestic manufacturing of five green energy technologies (solar energy, heat pumps, insulation for buildings, hydrogen, and grid components) and waives solar tariffs. This move is an important milestone not only for federal U.S. support for a transition to green energy, but also in harnessing the precedent set by defense industrial policy to invest in peace, sustainability, and human needs instead of war.
The latest cryptocurrency selloff reveals signs of trouble for the crypto industry, which was already facing layoffs and hiring freezes amid a global economic downturn.
Bitcoin plunged nearly 23 percent from Friday to Monday, hitting its lowest mark since late last year. Ethereum, the second most popular cryptocurrency, dropped 32 percent over the same period. The total [cryptocurrency] market cap dropped below $1 trillion for the first time since January as investors unloaded their digital coins.
Rents are still rising rapidly. The Fed’s rate hikes have likely already slowed or reversed the rise in sale prices, but it will be a while before any effect can be seen in rents.
It is disappointing that new and used vehicle prices rose sharply. The latter was inconsistent with the Manheim Used Vehicle index, which showed a much smaller rise.
Remember when Republicans pretended they were the party of fiscal responsibility, not wasting taxpayer money, and limited government? Sure, sure, you say, that was all just sloganeering, and never actually true in practice, but it’s really starkly on display in Florida, where governor (and wannabe 2024 Presidential candidate) Ron DeSantis has taken this all to new levels. Sure, sometimes he still makes statements with those old GOP slogans and tag lines, but he’s taken big, intrusive government to new levels, stripping rights away from those he dislikes, and having no problem wasting taxpayer funds so long as it helps him wage a culture war that gets him headlines and sycophantic adoration from a new bevy of brainwashed fans.
I went from thinking that “cryptocurrency looks pretty nifty and good, I should get into that” into “ugh it sucks I really dodged a bullet“ within like three seconds of joining Fedi. Like, less than three years ago!
The idea of trustless money is ludicrous, because there's no such thing as a trustless social relationship. This applies for business relationships or personal relationships. Without trust, that dog won't hunt. Trust, violence, or the threat of violence is what backs any currency. I include the latter two things, because the US dollar is backed both by faith in the US government and fear of the US military.
So what backs a currency pegged to a precious metal like gold or silver? Trust that we won't find a new and ready source of the metal. Trust in the status quo. See why gold is beloved by conservatives? When bloodthirsty men looted the Americas in the 1500s and shipped incredible amounts of gold home to mother Europe, gold lost its value. Goldbugs don't talk about the inflation in Spain during the 16th century. they don't want to admit that their "eternal store of value" is in fact built on nothing more and nothing less than faith, just like any other currency.
The event was announced by Twitter's chief executive Parag Agrawal in an email to staff on Monday.
Mr Agrawal told employees they could submit questions to Mr Musk in advance of the meeting.
Few Republican voters will even allow themselves to take in this information. Instead, they will turn to propaganda outlets like Fox News to be told comforting lies. But the problem may be even bigger than that. Waking Republican voters up with the truth only works if "truth" is something Republican voters care about. Unfortunately, there's little reason to believe it is.
Republicans know full well that Trump is just making up his claims of a "stolen" election and they simply don't care. They weren't duped by the Big Lie —they think they're in on it.
As I've argued before, the Big Lie is less of a literal belief for Trump supporters, and more a myth embraced because it speaks to their deeper belief: That they're entitled to rule, no matter what. They don't believe the 2020 election was a "fraud" because of any actual evidence. It's far more that they just think that people who voted for President Joe Biden shouldn't have a right to vote in the first place. By repeating the Big Lie, they are participating, along with Trump, in spinning a narrative that they are using, just like Trump, as a pretext to justify this deeper and more fundamental belief. It's just that they know that there's no way to argue out loud that only conservative white Christians should have the vote, so they use these conspiracy theories to perpetuate this ugly belief without stating it out loud.
The best Senators, the ones we need to listen to, can rise to a watershed moment putting their convictions ahead of individual or party gain, vendetta or transient popular favor. For example, in 1964 two otherwise unremarkable Democrats, Wayne Morse (D-OR) and Ernest Greuning (D-AK), were the only Senators to vote against President Lyndon Johnson’s fraudulent assertions that North Vietnam was provoking war off its coast. By a vote of 88 to 2, the Senate passed the notorious Gulf of Tonkin Resolution to authorize ten years of American war-making in Indochina. Similarly, early in the Watergate scandals, two Republicans, Edward Brooke (R-MA) and Lowell Weicker (R-CT), attacked the Nixon Administration for its lying. Subsequent events proved all four right – morally and on the facts — and yet they never achieved the popular adulation that latecomers grabbed.
The higher functioning party hacks raise themselves through the Senate pushing party or ideological agendas but little else. Nothing is more important than winning some advantage – no matter how minor — while making sure the detested “other” gets no gain. An early example I observed was Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC) who exerted himself to undo not just Democrats but Republicans who didn’t toe his line. A repellent personality to many of his own colleagues, Helms never achieved high party office, but he did achieve wide spread national standing among hard core right wingers seeking to purge the Republican party of nonbelievers. (They were very successful.) A contemporary highly functioning party hack is the Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who has pretzeled his position on the filibuster, Supreme Court appointments and more depending on what advantages his party’s power. Should he become the Majority Leader after the 2022 elections, watch as he reverses himself on the filibuster for a third time when the tactical situation makes it advantageous.
As former UN rapporteurs we are committed to the promotion and protection of human rights in all corners of the world, including China.€ Progress can only be achieved on the basis on good faith implementation of the UN Charter and UN human rights treaties, and requires patience, perseverance, and international solidarity.
An artificial atmosphere of hostility, sustained by geopolitical agendas, double standards, fake news and skewed narratives has made it difficult to tackle specific human rights problems and advance on the progressive enjoyment of human rights in larger freedom. Human rights allegations were being selectively deployed as a geopolitical tool, above all to stoke the embers of confrontation that was high on the agenda of both the Trump and Biden presidencies.
The basic definition of a homicide is the death of one human because of the actions of another. By that definition, Clarence Thomas attempted homicide via the majority opinion he wrote in the Supreme Court case Shinn v. Ramirez on May 23. I do not say that merely because Thomas denied the appeal of two people on death row. Supreme Court justices deny final appeals from people condemned to die all the time, and while those denials have the effect of killing people, I wouldn’t call every denial a homicide. I call Thomas’s opinion a homicide because his reason for denying the appeal was so twisted and evil that his intent to kill was discernible through the legal jargon. He even added a footnote wherein he callously explained that he had the discretion to save these lives, but was choosing not to use it.
As a political scientist who has published several books on law and politics, I know it’s true that the political affiliation of the president who appointed a justice is a powerful indicator of how that justice will vote.
But ideology does not explain everything. Not all cases divide neatly along partisan lines, and, what’s equally important, Supreme Court decisions consist of more than votes. They also set forth judicial reasoning, which offers vital clues to differences in how justices read the law and how they might rule in future cases.
US sanctions, even by outdated estimates, have killed tens of thousands of Venezuelans. The unilateral policies have been widely condemned by multilateral bodies and human rights experts for their deadly impact, as well as for violating international law (Venezuelanalysis, 9/18/21, 9/15/21, 3/25/21, 1/31/19).
We spoke with retired pilot and accident examiner György Háy regarding the Lithuanian airplane which flew across Hungarian airspace illegally last week. He said that there is not much that can be done with an airplane flying in the air. At the most – if it is acting dangerously – it can be shot down.
As the Summit of the Americas wrapped up in Los Angeles with President Biden announcing a plan to address migration in the Western Hemisphere that includes a series of so-called bold actions, we spend the hour with Democracy Now! co-host, professor, longtime journalist and author Juan González, who has just released the newly revised edition of his landmark 2000 book, “Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America.” González’s best-seller has been expanded to include more contemporary Lantix history, such as U.S. immigration policy under Presidents Trump and Biden, the overpolicing of non-U.S. citizens and how it connects to a history of Western colonialism in the region. While European colonization caused Latin America to be “the incubator of the American empire,” the millennial immigration apparatus has become fixated on “kicking out Latin Americans, and no one is doing anything about it,” says González. He also examines the culture and history of Latinos and discusses the history of U.S. involvement and imperialism in countries like the Dominican Republic, where many of the immigrants here in New York City hail from, and the conditions of Guatemala’s Indigenous peoples under the brutal U.S.-backed government that drove many of them to leave their country and head north in search of safety.
Last month, The New York Times made headlines with its front-page series about the billions (in today’s dollars) that France forced Haiti to pay following centuries of slavery. Despite the terrors and tortures of French colonialism, the Haitian revolutionaries won their independence from France in 1804 to become the first modern nation to permanently abolish slavery. Yet, in 1825, the French returned to Haitian shores to demand 150 million francs in exchange for recognition of Haitian independence—21 years after the fact—and to compensate enslavers for their lost “property.”
A whole bunch of people over the last month have sent me Jonathan Haidt’s essay in The Atlantic, “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid,” and asked for my thoughts. Haidt’s basic premise is that the problem is social media. It’s more complex and nuanced than that, and there are some important points in the complexities and the nuances, but the takeaway remains that social media is the problem. I’ve written about half of three different responses to it, but am still working on a more complete article explaining what I think it gets wrong. So this article is not that. However, this article is about an excellent piece in The New Yorker by Gideon Lewis-Kraus that is, itself, something of a response to Haidt, with the title: “How Harmful is Social Media?“
“The mayor was definitely intoxicated,” declared Jason Miller, a veteran fixer for Donald Trump who was in the White House on the night of the November 3, 2020, presidential election.
With the U.K. home secretary expected to decide this week whether to approve Julian Assange's extradition to the United States to face prosecution for publishing classified information, a group of more than 300 medical professionals elevated its call Monday for the British government to immediately free the WikiLeaks founder or be complicit in his "slow-motion execution."
"Under conditions in which the U.K. legal system has failed to take Mr. Assange's current health status into account, no valid decision regarding his extradition may be made, by yourself or anyone else," Doctors for Assange, a coalition of representing physicians and other medical professionals from 35 countries, wrote in a letter to U.K. Home Secretary Priti Patel and Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
More than 300 Doctors For Assange have written to Home Secretary Priti Patel to not make the U.K. “complicit in the slow-motion execution” of Julian Assange.
A coalition of over 300 doctors warned UK Home Secretary Priti Patel that she may be responsible for the “slow-motion execution” of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange if her office approves the United States government’s extradition request.Patel has until June 19, which is ten years after Assange entered Ecuador’s embassy in London and sought political asylum, to decide whether to approve the extradition.Assange faces 18 charges brought against him by the US Justice Department, 17 of which are under the Espionage Act. All the charges relate to documents WikiLeaks released in 2010 and 2011, which were provided by US Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning.Doctors for Assange” is an international coalition of medical doctors, psychiatrists, and psychologists who have spoken up for Assange because of the toll the US government’s prosecution has taken on his health. Many of the doctors are from the UK and Australia, which is Assange's home country.
The doctors sent a letter to Patel on June 10, 2022, ahead of the Home Office's extradition decision.“Should [Assange] come to harm in the US,” the group contends Patel “will be left holding the responsibility for that negligent outcome.” They add, “The extradition of a person with such compromised health, moreover, is medically and ethically unacceptable.”
But a new report from the Association of Wartime Allies (AWA), a member-based organization focused on saving the lives of Afghan and Iraqi applicants for Special Immigrant Visas (SIV), has taken a giant step in the right direction — one that we hope other organizations will follow. The AWA survey is one of the first to document the human rights abuses and gender-specific experiences of female SIV applicants left behind in Afghanistan.
Women are too often forgotten in policy discussions about Afghan evacuees because they form less than 10 percent of the at-risk Afghan community that gets most of the attention: those with Special Immigrant Visas. SIVs are a special visa program for Afghans and Iraqis who worked with the U.S. government during military operations there.
"The legislation is quite toothless," said Matthew Fisher, a partner at Lecker & Associates Law who specializes in employment law. "What it really does is it requires employers of a certain size in certain circumstances to make a policy," he added.
"The problem is they are relying on the good faith of employers.... There is nothing in the legislation that requires the policy to be reasonable."
Attorney Lee Merritt said there was “a clear civil rights violation” based on the police videos he watched, which included two police dashcam videos and footage from the bodycam of officer Stephen Ramos, who has been identified as the officer who shot Andre Hernandez Jr. The videos, Merritt said, contradict the narrative put forth by officers.
Democracy, Demos Kratos, power to the people as we all know, is what is being politicked in LA. In a deeply individualistic culture, in a city with a receding public life, voters are being called to decide on the future of one of the most important cities in the world. Though charisma, persona, experience, conviction, and leadership are what are on the ballot, LA residents are truly being called to the polls to further define California democracy, a complex entity that must be improved in order to achieve peace, justice, and a more humane city.
In houselessness, or homelessness, a crisis in Los Angeles? A crisis is a concept with a very specific definition. A crisis is a time of “intense difficulty”, when a “decision needs to be made”, is what google tells us, which we will settle with. In other words, a crisis is a point in which actors, aided by a public and by spectators (let’s just say the reading public) are placed on a hot seat and must make the right decision. This decision can redress the situation. The Bhagavad Gita is one of the great texts that explores the concept of a crisis. In it Arjuna, a prince, cannot decide to fight because fighting will harm his relatives that stand opposed to him on the battlefield. Krishna explains to him that it is his dharma to fight, and that he must fight in order for certain things to happen.
Billionaire Howard Schultz’s vow to never negotiate in good faith with Starbucks Workers United may violate federal labor law.
There’ll be time enough for backyard barbeques once fathers take the lead in establishing “Dads Demand Action to Raise Healthy Boys,” following in the footsteps—a decade late—after “Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense,” launched the day following the mass murders at Sandy Hook.
In recent years, a growing number of men have been questioning conventional definitions of manhood and masculinity, so it’s an apt moment—with the scourge of male mass shootings fresh in our minds—for fathers and other men to reinvent Father’s Day. A day more about raising healthy boys and girls than about flipping ‘burgers and ‘dogs on the grill, as fun as that may be.
And more from the writer: “The simplification of the continent may have helped when it was necessary to claim that Africa had culture and history-we Africans ourselves spoke of one Africa. But then we built differentiated identities and voices, we have been plural since forever.”
Here again we can note that it is possible to speak big lies with partial truths. Remember an anthological Washington Olivetto ad, which reconstructed a terrible figure with flattering references?€ The video of the ad spoke with images in dots on the screen: “This man took a destroyed nation. He restored its economy and restored pride to its people. In his first four years in office, the number of unemployed fell from six million to nine hundred thousand people. This man made the Gross Domestic Product grow 102% and the per capita income double. This man loved music and painting. And as a young man, he imagined pursuing a career in the arts.” Then the points were reduced and the image of Hitler came up, to conclude: “You can tell a pack of lies by telling only the truth.” Here’s the video clip:
Brazilian police and a local Indigenous association are denying reporting Monday that a pair of bodies were found in the Amazon in the search for Dom Phillips and Bruno Pereira.
Police in a Texas border town used stay-at-home orders in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic to unlawfully stop and arrest a high school senior driving to his mother’s house, according to a civil rights lawsuit that has its first hearing this week.
Socrates Shawn, then 18, was commuting between his divorced parents’ homes when he was pulled over in April 2020 by a police officer in Progreso, a town of about 4,800 residents in the Rio Grande Valley.
A new report on asset forfeiture arrives at the same conclusions every other report on the subject has: forfeiture makes money for cops, does almost nothing to stop illegal activity, and rarely, if ever, results in criminal convictions. (via CJ Ciaramella at Reason)
Progressives demonstrated outside the United Kingdom Home Office in London after judges on Monday greenlit right-wing Prime Minister Boris Johnson's widely condemned plan to expel some asylum-seekers to Rwanda.
"Deporting refugees to Rwanda has nothing to do with tackling people-trafficking and everything to do with whipping up hate and stoking division."
We’ve noted a few times how there’s an absolutely historic amount of money being thrown at the “digital divide” this year. The broadband infrastructure bill alone designates $42 billion to expanding broadband access. Billions more in COVID relief money started flowing this week courtesy of the Treasury Department.
Net Neutrality is a very simple proposition: it's the idea that your ISP should send you the bits you request when you click links as quickly and efficiently as it can. The opposite of neutrality is net discrimination, which is when your ISP demands bribes from the services you want to use, and punishes the companies that refuse to pay by slowing down their connections to you.
No one wants this, for fairly obvious reasons, which left Pai with a dilemma: as a matter of law, he couldn't just kill off Net Neutrality; first, he had to seek public comment on the proposal, and the public didn't want Net Neutrality dead. When John Oliver did an episode about this, 1.5m people commented in the docket, melting the FCC's servers.
Don’t think this headline is hyperbole; as this post will explain, it is not.
“The problem with letting a few companies control whole sectors of our economy is that it limits what is possible by startups,” Oliver said. “An innovative app or website or startup may never get off the ground because it could be surcharged to death, buried in search results or ripped off completely.”
Specifically, Oliver noted two bills making their way through Congress aimed at reining in these anti-competitive behaviors, including the American Choice and Innovation Act (AICO) and the Open App Markets Act.
The 12th Ministerial Conference of the World Trade Organization kicked off in Geneva on Sunday amid mounting protests against rich nations' refusal to support a patent waiver for coronavirus vaccines and therapeutics, obstruction that has left billions of people around the world without access as Covid-19 continues to spread and take lives.
While WTO Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala voiced "cautious optimism" that member countries will ultimately reach an agreement on patents and other key items on the body's agenda, civil society groups warned that the intellectual property text currently on the table represents such a departure from South Africa and India's original proposal that it can't even be called a waiver.
The US “Copyright Claims Board” starts accepting its first claims this week. The tribunal, which is part of the Copyright Office, allows parties to resolve "small" copyright disputes relatively cheaply outside of the federal court system. Damages available under these claims are capped at $30,000 and the entire process takes place online, without the need to hire an attorney.
Former operators of pirate IPTV service SetTV were previously ordered to pay $90 million in damages after losing a DISH Network piracy lawsuit. A second lawsuit ensued when DISH discovered that the men had violated an injunction by launching a new pirate platform called ExpediteTV. That lawsuit has now concluded with a second injunction attached to a $130 million damages award.
One of deep-seated problems with copyright is that its supporters believe everything created should be “owned” by someone and protected from being “stolen” by others. We’ve already written about how that’s€ a bad fit for writing music, and NBC News has a fascinating story about how the same issue is plaguing a very different world – that of€ indigenous languages€ (pointed out by€ D. J. Mary on Twitter). It concerns the€ Lakota language, one of many native American languages that are at risk of extinction because so few people speak them fluently. In recent years, there have been increasing efforts to create language resources from the surviving speakers, to prevent the language and its culture being lost, and to produce learning materials. The long and interesting article discusses the details of the dispute between the Lakota Language Consortium and some Lakota language speakers, like Ray Taken Alive:
Third, publishers have resisted repeated attempts to make their contracts with universities more transparent. A 2014 analysis showed that the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor paid Elsevier $2.16 million (€£1.77 million) for the exact same package of journals sold to the University of Wisconsin, Madison for $1.22 million. Yale, with about 12,500 students, paid Springer $711,564 for the same package that the University of Texas, Austin, with more than 50,000 students, purchased for $481,932.
Scientific publications need to get back to their original goal of distributing the best scientific information to the largest audience at the lowest cost. To replace the expensive, dysfunctional system, we need a national or global digital library that will edit and post peer-reviewed scientific papers.
This will require multi-institutional consortia and a substantial expansion of university libraries and professional librarians. Oversight will also be needed – and could be provided by a distinguished non-profit entity, similar to the national academies. Subcommittees representing the interests of each academic discipline should define the content of the new electronic publications and appoint their editors and editorial boards.