I'm announcing the release of the 5.18.8 kernel.
All users of the 5.18 kernel series must upgrade.
The updated 5.18.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-5.18.y and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser: https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-s...
thanks,
greg k-h
Embroidered shirts are great custom gifts and can also be a great way to show your love for open source. This tutorial will demonstrate how to design your own custom embroidered polo shirt using Inkscape and Ink/Stitch. Polo shirts are often used for embroidery because they do not tear as easily as t-shirts when pierced by embroidery needles, though with care t-shirts can also be embroidered. This tutorial is a follow on article to Make More with Inkscape and Ink/Stitch and provides complete steps to create your design.
Go for one of the best methods given here to install DarkTable on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy JellyFish or 20.04 LTS Focal fossa to start editing your pictures.
Open source Darktable software is one of the best alternatives to Adobe Lightroom at least in the free category to provide similar functions when it comes to Mac and Linux. Users also can have its executable binary for Windows available on its official website.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Robo 3T on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Robo 3T (formerly Robomongo) is the free lightweight GUI for MongoDB enthusiasts. Robo 3T supports various operating systems such as Windows, and Linux, macOS.
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 Robo 3T MongoDB GUI on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 22.04 and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS, and more as well.
In most enterprise systems where software release cycles consist of separate environments like dev, stage, live, having multiple environments that can be dynamically configured is common. An application may have three different sets of database credentials for authentication. Each set of credentials would be respective to an instance for a particular environment. This approach essentially allows software developers to interact with a developer-friendly database when carrying out their day-to-day coding.
Kubernetes secrets is used to store very sensitive data in your Kubernetes cluster. Secrets are native Kubernetes resources saved in the cluster data store (i.e., etcd database) and can be made available to your containers at runtime. Managing these secrets is a challenging process so in this guide we will explore how to use External Secrets to simplify that.
If you are looking for an alternative to Adobe Photoshop without burning a hole in your pocket, then go for the GIMP, which is totally free to use, and importantly, it’s available for all major platforms like Microsoft Windows, macOS, Chrome OS, and, of course, Linux.x
EndeavourOS is a rolling-release Linux distro based on Arch Linux. Although the project is relatively new, having started in 2019, it's the successor to an earlier Arch-based distro called Antergos, so it's not quite as immature as its youth might imply. It's a little more vanilla than Antergos was – for instance, it uses the Calamares cross-distro installer.
EndeavourOS hews more closely to its parent distro than, for example, Manjaro, which we looked at very recently. Unlike Manjaro, it doesn't have its own staging repositories or releases. It installs packages directly from the upstream Arch repositories, using the standard Arch package manager pacman. It also bundles yay to easily fetch packages from the Arch User Repository, AUR. The yay command takes the same switches as pacman does, so if you wanted to install, say, Google Chrome, it's as simple as yay -s google-chrome and a few seconds later, it's done.
The Source-to-Image (S2I) toolkit allows you to easily build application container images for OpenShift deployment. Red Hat provides S2I images for a number of languages including Node.js. For example, this is the image for Node.js 16.x. To learn more about using the Red Hat images versus other Node.js images, check out the Building good containers section of the Node.js reference architecture.
If you have an application with a package.json that includes an npm start command, deploying that application using nodeshift (which supports S2I) can be as easy as running nodeshift in the directory with the package.json. It will package your application and deploy to your current OpenShift project.
Super easy, right? Well, most of the time. It might get a bit more complicated if your application uses native add-ons that need additional libraries not installed in the Node.js container image. For example, if you want to use the odbc package, you will need some ODBC libraries and the odbc client for the database you want to connect to. More specifically, if you want to use the odbc package with the MySQL database, install the additional libraries through the following RPMs...
Parallelism describes a software's ability to spawn multiple processes to execute tasks in tandem. It also applies to Ansible's default ability to interact with numerous hosts simultaneously.
Skills development and talent management are both challenges and opportunities that span every industry vertical and role – for companies of all sizes. These challenges are being exacerbated throughout the pandemic as most companies fundamentally shift certain business practices and subsequently fill new or emerging roles, particularly in IT.
DevOps Institute's Upskilling IT 2022 Report and Survey researched global and regional must-have IT skill capabilities and learned that insufficient resources and skill gaps are the top global challenge. From a global perspective, 40 percent of our respondents said that the resource and skill shortage is one of their top three challenges today.
The most acute skill gaps are relative to cognitive, technical, process, and framework skills. To identify skill gaps, we leverage eight skill capabilities. Our survey explored the position that business leaders and individuals had toward each of them relative to the gaps they saw. The cognitive skill capability includes analytical capabilities, quantitative and statistical knowledge, statistics, data modeling, and knowledge in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, all essential skills for digital transformation and digital business growth.
As a concept, digital transformation is not new. We have been inching closer to – and talking about – a totally integrated digital workforce since the dotcom boom. But as new technologies emerge daily, volatile markets drive executive leadership to tighten budgets, and “efficiency” outpaces “growth” for the most frequently seen buzzword in your email inbox, there is an increasing pressure to maximize the ROI of your digital transformation.
Ultimately, digital transformation is a game of accurate trend predictions and timely disruptions with the goal of preparing your business for the most success possible in the digital future. If you feel as though your digital transformation efforts have slowed, here are five ways to get the engine revving again.
Ubuntu Touch OTA-23 comes more than four months after the Ubuntu Touch OTA-22 software update to add more improvements and fix various issues that prevent you from using your Ubuntu Phone device on a daily basis.
Highlights include FM Radio support for BQ E4.5 Ubuntu Edition, BQ E5 HD Ubuntu Edition, and Xiaomi Note 7 Pro smartphones through the FM Radio App, enables wireless display support for Halium 9 and later devices, as well as hardware decoding support on the Jingpad ARM-based Linux tablet in the Media Player App.
With our online courses programme, launched in 2017, we made it our mission to provide computing educators with the best possible free training we can design. Five years on, here are some of the key stats about the courses’ impact:
Drums are an exciting instrument to learn to play, but often prohibitive if there are housemates or close neighbors involved. For that problem there are still electronic drums which can be played much more quietly, but then the problem becomes one of price. To solve at least part of that one, [Jeremy] turned to using an Arduino to build a drum module on his own, but he still had to solve yet a third problem: how to make the Arduino fast enough for the drums to sound natural.
Version 102 of the Thunderbird email client has been released.
It’s been a game of Us and Them for a long time. I could tell you tales that would shake your heart, and you could tell me tales of Paine that try men’s souls right back at me. And we’d be shaking together in the bubbled artificial snowstorm on Skid Row, sharing Christmas toasts like little unintentional Commies around a barrel fire, a brown bag containing our open secret — Thunderbird’s ‘good medicine’. Hi, how are ya?
And it’s been a story of derailed trains of thoughts, smoke pouring out of boxcar doors, as the Bard from Duluth would say, and catastrophes of piled up depression, folks walkin’ round in loco-motion, dazed and confused (op. cit.), believing in things they should have known better about, ending up where they started, not knowing for the first time, as TS Eliot posits, but in front of the same carnival barker they experienced in the aptly-named Erie, Pennsylvania — a name that itself conjures up property ownership (Penn’s Woods). Fuck it, you’ll say around the fire; it’s all a racket. L’chaim, bottom’s up.
When at a loss for words—during, perhaps, a time of want or desire, when one’s body is overwhelmed by light, as if by the effect of Ketamine or MDMA, when overwhelmed by the weight of the moment, the silence, the look of disappointment in a lover’s eyes— what do we call the moment, then, when the words are finally summoned, like a sparkle of fireflies, and by grace, by the mercy of the night, what was damaged has been restored? Freire spoke that one reads the world before they read the word, which suggests that the first stage of language is in the experiencing of a thing to the point of knowing; in this knowing, then—of song sparrows and house sparrows, of catbirds and European Starlings, of a lover’s wants and needs, one could say, genuinely, that knowing to the point of the words conjuring themselves is, perhaps, the truest form of love.
In Los Angeles, my lover drove me to the airport. It was mid-summer, and along the highway, the neon sun poked through a grove of palm trees, its corona pink with a thick haze of smog. In my youth, in the hope of producing a kind of love, I attempted to acquire the words to conjure a new world—of which I was god—not god as in God, but yes, as in the creator. After watching the television series WandaVision, I see now how foolish a person can seem when they want to be loved. Maybe foolish isn’t the word. Anyway, we stopped to eat ramen a few miles from the airport, and when we returned to the car and sat inside, she leaned into me and whispered the words, Don’t go. I whispered back,I don’t want to go. And yet I did. I flew back to LaGuardia on a red-eye flight. What is the word for the kind of sadness that comes from having to leave a place where one is loved? What is the word for a lover who says,I don’t want to go but goes?
ââ°Â What do you call a group of people united by grief? A family. Or at least that’s the formulation that has been dancing through my mind as I pondered where to begin. This is, after all, the frame that Kendrick Lamar offers from the outset on his long-awaited fifth album, Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers. When my friend Tim and I talked about the record, he told me that he’d misheard its title as “Mr. Morales and the Big Steppers,” which sounds like the name of a late-’70s family band that I would love. Later that day, in my group chat, another friend, Kyle, shared the abstract of a paper that he’d just presented, in which at one point he says something like “What’s important to remember is that funerals are also reunions.” I hear these lines on repeat, resounding in the background as the beat builds, while I play Kendrick’s album, trying to find a foothold.
Isn’t it the work of those of us who work to make new toolswith the tools we are given, hammering matter into matter more adapted to the hand than to the memoryof a hand, less to the past than to the path to what comes next?
And isn’t it the work of the next adaptation in part to evincespecifically by being what it is, regardless of detail and whether it wants to or not, the matter of persistence through change,the hammering of being into time, which is itself the work?
American schools are soft, you say? I know what you mean. I taught college for 15 years, so I've dealt with my share of still-teenagers fresh out of high school. Many of them inspired me, but some had clearly earned high marks too easily and needed remedial help in math, English, or other subjects. School discipline had been too lax perhaps and standards too slack, because Johnny and Janey often couldn't or wouldn't read a book, though they sure could text, tweet, take selfies, and make videos.
Gracing the pages of legacy media over recent years, a particular take has been presented as a rational, bipartisan solution to inequality at elite universities: enrollment expansion. “Many well-known public universities have expanded the number of students they serve without sacrificing quality,” writes Jeffrey Selingo in The Washington Post. “But for too long, our most selective schools have benefited from public funding and billions of dollars in tax breaks while acting more like exclusive clubs than institutions with a responsibility to educate our nation’s growing population.”
For some power users, the one-hundred-and-something keys on regular keyboards just aren’t enough for their everyday tasks. Macro keypads are a popular way of extending one’s input capabilities, and there are almost as many examples as there are power users. [Ulrich]’s latest project, dubbed the LowPow E-Ink ShortKeyboard, is a beautiful and meticulously documented design for a macro pad that includes several unusual features.
Universal Serial Bus has been the de facto standard for sending information to and from computer peripherals for almost two decades, but despite the word “universal” in the name this wasn’t always the case. Plenty of competing standards, including USB, existed in the computing world in the decades before it came to dominance, and if you’re trying to recover data from a computer without USB you might have to get creative with how it’s done.
It’s fair to say that right now is probably the worst possible time you could choose to design a new piece of hardware. Of course the reality is that, even in the middle of a parts shortage that’s driving the cost of many components through the roof (if you can even find them), we can’t just stop building new devices. In practice, that means you’ll need to be a bit more flexible when embarking on a new design — it’s like the Stones said: “You can’t always get what you want / But if you try sometime you’ll find / You get what you need”
The UK Health Security Agency says that the poliovirus was probably brought to London by somebody who had recently been vaccinated overseas with the live virus. Polio was once close to eradication, but vaccination campaigns in countries like Nigeria and Pakistan were hampered by fear that they were a bid by the CIA to sterilise Muslim men.
This conspiracy theory was given a boost when the CIA used a vaccination campaign in Pakistan – against hepatitis rather than polio, so far as I recall – as a way of getting the DNA of local children to see if any of them had the same DNA as Osama bin Laden. This would be evidence that he was hiding in the locality.
How do the potatoes in that sack keep from sprouting on their long trip from the field to the produce section? Why don’t the apples spoil? To an extent, the answer lies in varying amounts of irradiation. Though it sounds awful, irradiation reduces microbial contamination, which improves shelf life. Most people can choose to take it or leave it, but in some countries, they aren’t overly concerned about the irradiation dosages found in, say, animal feed. So where does that leave non-vegetarians?
Google has announced a new feature for its productivity suite that could help lure customers away from Microsoft 365. As explained in its latest blog entry (opens in new tab), users will now benefit from the ability to edit Microsoft Office files from within Google Workspace (née G Suite) without the need for an internet connection.
There are weekly updates and developments taking place in the Cardano ecosystem. Thus, Altcoin Buzz covers some of these updates and developments from the fourth week in June to keep readers informed.
On December 7, 2021, Google announced it was suing two Russian men allegedly responsible for operating the Glupteba botnet, a global malware menace that has infected millions of computers over the past decade. That same day, AWM Proxy — a 14-year-old anonymity service that rents hacked PCs to cybercriminals — suddenly went offline. Security experts had long seen a link between Glupteba and AWM Proxy, but new research shows AWM Proxy’s founder is one of the men being sued by Google.
The Internet of things — aka the tendency to bring Internet connectivity to devices whether they need them or not — has provided no shortage of both tragedy and comedy. “Smart” locks that are easy to bypass, “smart” fridges that leak your email credentials, or even “smart” barbies that spy on toddlers are all pretty much par for the course in an industry with lax privacy and security standards.
Ever since it came into effect, we’ve been calling out how the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was an obviously problematic bit of legislation. In the four years since it’s gone into effect, we’ve seen nothing to change that opinion. For users, it’s been a total nuisance. Rather than take the big US internet companies down a notch, it’s only harmed smaller (often EU-based) internet companies. Multiple studies have shown that it hasn’t lived up to any of its promises, and has actually harmed innovation. And don’t get me started on how the GDPR has done massive harm to free speech and journalism.
On Monday, June 27, a Russian airstrike on a shopping mall in Kremenchuk, a city in Ukraine’s Poltava region, killed at least 20 civilians; dozens more are still unaccounted for. Kyiv called the strike a terrorist act and an “unintentional attack on a civilian target.” Russian officials initially claimed the attack was a “Bucha-style false flag,” but the Russian Defense Ministry soon acknowledged that a strike had indeed occurred. In Russia’s telling, however, a strike “on a foreign munitions warehouse” caused some of the weapons stored there to detonate, damaging a nearby defunct shopping mall. Meduza explains the holes in Russia’s story.
Congresswoman Liz Cheney on Tuesday revealed some attempts to intimidate witnesses cooperating with the House committee investigating the January 6, 2021 insurrection and signaled that the panel plans to share additional details at future hearings.
"You don't tamper with witnesses like this if you have nothing to hide."
Democracy defenders responded to Tuesday's testimony by a former Trump administration aide before the January 6 committee by demanding that the former president and his co-conspirators be held to account in the face of increasingly incriminating evidence of their culpability for the 2021 insurrection.
"Hutchinson's testimony blows any notion of plausible deniability surrounding January 6 out of the water."
A former aide to ex-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows testified to the House January 6 committee that former President Donald Trump furiously demanded that security be lifted to allow his armed supporters to march on the U.S. Capitol on the day of the 2021 insurrection, telling his aides that "they're not here to hurt me."
"This was a classic coup attempt. Trump wanted to lead an angry, armed mob into the Capitol. Worse than we knew."
Mark Meadows, former President Donald Trump's chief of staff, sought a presidential pardon related to last year's January 6 insurrection, Cassidy Hutchinson told members of Congress during sworn testimony on Tuesday.
Hutchinson, who served as Meadows' special assistant, testified during a last-minute hearing of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol.
As NATO holds its Summit in Madrid on June 28-30, the war in Ukraine is taking center stage. During a pre-Summit June 22 talk with Politico, NATO's Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg bragged about how well-prepared NATO was for this fight because, he said: "This was an invasion that was predicted, foreseen by our intelligence services." Stoltenberg was talking about Western intelligence predictions in the months leading up to the February 24 invasion, when Russia insisted it was not going to attack. Stoltenberg, however, could well have been talking about predictions that went back not just months before the invasion, but decades.
The war in Ukraine is the culmination of a 30-year project of the American neoconservative movement.€ The Biden Administration is packed with the same neocons who championed the US wars of choice in Serbia (1999), Afghanistan (2001), Iraq (2003), Syria (2011), Libya (2011), and who did so much to provoke Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The neocon track record is one of unmitigated disaster, yet Biden has staffed his team with neocons. As a result, Biden is steering Ukraine, the US, and the European Union towards yet another geopolitical debacle. If Europe has any insight, it will separate itself from these US foreign policy debacles.€
Don’t think I’m writing this as a lament, however. I’m lucky. I have a good, safe life and follow events there from the comfort of my New York apartment. For Ukrainians, the war is anything but a topic of study. It’s a daily, deadly presence. The lives of millions of people who live in or fled the war zone have been shattered. As all of us know too well, many of that country’s cities have been badly damaged or lie in ruins, including people’s homes and apartment buildings, the hospitals they once relied on when ill, the schools they sent their children to, and the stores where they bought food and other basic necessities. € Even churches have been hit. In addition, nearly 13 million Ukrainians (including nearly two-thirds of all its children) are either displaced in their own country or refugees in various parts of Europe, mainly Poland. Millions of lives, in other words, have been turned inside out, while a return to anything resembling normalcy now seems beyond reach.
No one knows how many non-combatants have been slaughtered by bullets, bombs, missiles, or artillery.€ And all this has been made so much worse by the war crimes the Russians have committed. How does a traumatized society like Ukraine ever become whole again? € And in such a disastrous situation, what could the future possibly hold?€ Who knows?
On June 12, Muslim activist Javed Mohammed, a member of the Welfare Party of India, tasted such retributive justice in witnessing the family home demolished by the Prayagraj Development Authority (PDA). The actions were also inflicted on two other homes belonging to individuals accused of throwing projectiles after Friday prayers. Similar measures have been implemented in Saharanpur and Kanpur.
As with all such brutal, state-sanctioned BJP thuggery, the measure is given a legal gloss in victimising the occupants. They are the ones in the wrong, without the valid construction permits, or paperwork. The PDA insists that Javed was notified on May 10 to have his illegal construction razed by June 9. But this claim was only made in a rude note that demanded he vacate the premises by 11 am on June 12.
Ignorance might be bliss, arguably in some situations, but not in this case. Here, ignorance can be catastrophic as western audiences are denied access to information about a critical situation that is affecting them in profound ways and will most certainly impact the world’s geopolitics for generations to come.
The growing inflation, an imminent global recession, a festering refugee crisis, a deepening food shortage crisis and much more are the kinds of challenges that require open and transparent discussions regarding the situation in Ukraine, the NATO-Russia rivalry and the responsibility of the West in the ongoing war.
Cassidy Hutchinson, who served as a special assistant to former President Donald Trump's chief of staff Mark Meadows, is expected to testify Tuesday before the House committee investigating the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Although it had not been scheduled to meet again until next month, the panel announced Monday that it will hold its sixth public hearing on Tuesday at 1:00 pm ET to "present recently obtained evidence and receive witness testimony."
A network of dark money has transformed the Supreme Court into an illegitimate and partisan institution. The same court that overturned Roe v. Wade—ending nearly 50 years of abortion rights—could gut one of the few laws available to private citizens to challenge corporate corruption.
At this political moment, when we hardly have time to process one outrage before the next washes over us, it seems as if the best escape might be to seek refuge from the tumult in a park.
With the goal of hammering out a declaration to protect the oceans and their vast resources from exploitation, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres on Monday opened the body's Ocean Conference by warning that the world faces "an ocean emergency."
"The ocean must become a model on how we can manage the global commons for our greater good."
By Basav Sen, climate policy director at the Institute for Policy Studies, and Tejal Mankad, digital and social media manager at Fossil Free Media.
Since early spring, we have been following the heatwaves searing India and Pakistan with horror.€
The daughter of Chinese immigrants, Melissa Lin Perrella sees a direct line from her childhood in a small town in Central California in the 1980s to her work on the front lines of environmental justice.1This article is copublished with Nexus Media News and was made possible by a grant from the Open Society Foundations.
Vegetation responds to climate, and today’s climate is considerably different than even a couple of hundred years ago when we were coming out of the cool, moist climate of the Little Ice Age.
We are in the worse drought in over a thousand years. We are seeing record high temperatures. Average wind speeds are increasing. These factors are responsible for the increase in wildfire spread and severity. For instance, for every 1-degree rise in temperature, fire risk is increased by up to 25%. Wind impact is also exponential, with high winds responsible for every large fire across the West.
“Carbon dioxide removal is essential to achieve net zero [greenhouse-gas emissions],” Diána ÃÅrge-Vorsatz, vice-chair of the working group that produced the nearly 3,000-page UN climate panel report. (Source: UN Climate Report: Carbon Removal is Now ‘Essential’, MIT Technology Review, April 4, 2022)
“Removing the greenhouse gas from the air will likely be necessary, along with radical emissions cuts, to keep temperatures from rising 2€°C,” Ibid.
Twelve years after the disastrous BP explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, Gulf communities still face enormous risks because of offshore drilling and the onshore impacts in their backyards—a web of leaking pipelines and flaring chemical facilities choking the air. Yet, our community still found a way to celebrate our land and advocate for its protection during the Gulf Gathering for Climate Justice and Joy in Baton Rouge, Louisiana earlier this month.€
"The G7 countries have once again proved that they are morally bankrupt and have no real intention to solve the climate crisis and take responsibility for this crisis caused by their disproportionate use and relentless support for fossil fuels."
"The G7... has prioritized filling the pockets of the fossil gas industry over protecting peoples' lives."
The California legislature was close to passing a bill that would require the state’s two massive pension funds to divest from fossil fuels, but on June 21 the legislation was killed by one Democratic assemblyman who has accepted tens of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from the energy industry.
Senate Bill 1173 would have required the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS) and the California State Teachers’ Retirement System (CalSTRS), the two largest public pension funds in the country, to divest from fossil fuels. CalPERS and CalSTRS, which manage pensions for state employees and teachers, together hold more than $9 billion in fossil fuel investments.
British biomass giant Drax is lobbying the Californian government to play host to its first ever “carbon negative” power plant outside of the UK, despite concerns about the sustainability of the energy source.
Drax has long-standing plans to launch the world’s largest bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) plant in North Yorkshire, but the former coal-fired power generator now appears to have California in its sights.€
Ricardo’s theory drove policy and political power for two centuries fortifying the corporate and conservative proponents of alleged “free markets” (See:€ Destroying the Myths of Market Fundamentalism) and “free trade.” The theory’s endurance was remarkably resistant to contrary obvious empirical evidence. Whether Ricardo envisioned it or not, “free trade” became an instrument of colonialism, entrenching poor nations in the extraction and exportation of natural resources while becoming almost totally dependent on western nations’ value-added manufactured products. “Iron ore for iron weapons,” as one observer summed it up. Tragically, too often, the weapons came with the invaders/oppressors.
Fast forward to today’s supply chain crisis disrupting the flow of commerce. Why does the world’s largest economy and technology leader have a supply chain problem forcing businesses and consumers to helplessly wait for simple and complex goods to arrive at our shores? Why did we find ourselves in March 2020 desperately waiting on an Italian factory to sell us simple protective equipment to safeguard patients, nurses, and physicians to address the pandemic’s deadly arrival? Answer – the touted theory of comparative advantage embedded in so-called “free trade.”
The global aid group Oxfam International slammed the G7 on Tuesday for failing to respond anywhere near adequately to a global food crisis that has pushed as many as 323 million people worldwide to the brink of starvation.
"Corporate profits have soared during Covid-19. This food crisis is big business."
Besides geographic and population differences between Caribou and the Bronx, there are considerable cultural differences that have had significant political consequences today. People from rural Maine, I am told, are hard-working and respectful. The state’s motto “Dirigo,” which means “I lead,” combined with the Polar Star on the state seal give an impression of stability and trust.
And the people from the Bronx? Being sceptical if not cynical is a necessity for survival on the streets in the `hood. While the era of “the Bronx is burning” has passed, The French expression “C’est le Bronx,” to describe chaos is still used. People from the Bronx have an inherent lack of confidence in others. Street smarts are not synonymous with stability and trust.
In times like this, I find myself suspicious of language. The very act of stringing sentences together seems to aid and abet inertia; there is something far too "business as usual" about paragraphs. On Friday I sweated in a sea of protestors. We gathered to share our grief, our rage, our exhaustion. What was missing was a plan. The sound system wasn't working, or was too weak to reach most of the crowd; we stood and listened to the distant crackle of magnified anguish we couldn't quite make out, and we cheered when others cheered, and we read each other's signs, and we fervently, ironically, sadly, gratefully agreed. But now what?
’Twas said that finding wise advice Was something Donald Trump had mastered. So who’d he listen to that night? Just Rudy Giuliani, plastered.
Opposition politician Ilya Yashin has been sentenced to 15 days in prison by a judge at Moscow’s Khamovniki District Court, Mediazona reported on Tuesday. Yashin stands accused of disobeying officers’ lawful demands after he allegedly insulted and swore at police in a park early Tuesday morning. According to journalist Irina Babloyan, who was with Yashin at the time of his arrest, the allegations are false.
On Monday, Ukrainian newspaper Ukrainska Pravda published an article about former Ukrainian Human Rights Commissioner Lyudmyla Denisova’s final months of work. Denisova was dismissed by Ukraine's parliament in May after losing a vote of no-confidence. Not long ago, though, Denisova was one of the Ukrainian officials most frequently cited by the media. Among other topics, she often spoke about crimes committed by the Russian military.
On Tuesday, June 28, the Russian State Duma approved the second reading of a generalized draft law on “foreign agents.” The bill, titled “On monitoring the activities of individuals under foreign influence,” was submitted to the State Duma back in April and passed the first reading on June 22. Ahead of the second reading, Russian lawmakers and senators made amendments to the bill that not only broaden the grounds for designating individuals and organizations as “foreign agents,” but also impose additional restrictions on those who have already been blacklisted. Ahead of the bill’s third reading on Wednesday, Meduza breaks down what’s new (and what’s not).
Last week, the conservative justices on the Supreme Court succeeded once again at reading the first clause of the Second Amendment out of the Constitution. That Amendment starts with the line: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State,” but conservative justices have rendered that phrase meaningless. Now, those same conservatives are coming for the First Amendment. That Amendment starts with: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” But after the court’s latest opinion, it’s hard to imagine what kind of government display of religion this court would actually strike down. That is, as long as it’s a display of Christian fundamentalist religion.
Now that the Supreme Court has overturned Roe v. Wade, we cannot rely on the federal courts to keep clinic doors open. Make no mistake, the ACLU and our partner organizations will litigate whenever and wherever we can to protect abortion rights. In the aftermath of the decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, there will be hundreds of restrictive laws and statutes for lawyers to scrutinize. Litigation, even in losing battles, can be useful. It can focus public attention and galvanize popular opinion. Good litigators will bring smart litigation to keep abortion legal in as many places as possible for as long as possible. If opponents are trying to take away our fundamental rights, we should make it as difficult as possible.
Harlem, New York City—We are used to hearing “Say her name” as a protest chant aimed at raising up the names of Black women killed by police. But on June 20, “Say her name: Brittney Griner” rang through Harlem as several dozen people marched from the Adam Clayton Powell Jr. State Office Building to Harlem’s Harriet Tubman statue. The protesters were demanding that the US government do whatever it takes to negotiate the freedom of WNBA all-star Brittney Griner, who is in a Russian prison facing a 10-year sentence. Griner was arrested at the Moscow airport for allegedly having cannabis-derived vape cartridges in her bag. But make no mistake: She is a political prisoner.
Law enforcement agencies have access to very powerful digital tools. Thanks to companies with eyes on market expansion but very little consideration of moral or ethical issues, cops have the power to completely compromise phones, turning them into unwitting informants… or worse.
Under pressure to respond forcefully to the Supreme Court's decision to strike down Roe v. Wade, Vice President Kamala Harris on Monday said the White House is not currently discussing the idea of using federal property to ensure access to abortion services for those living in states that have banned or are moving to ban the procedure.
Asked specifically about the proposal during an interview with CNN's Dana Bash, Harris initially dodged the question, saying the Biden administration is looking to "do everything we can to empower women to not only seek but to receive the care where it is available."
Lawmakers and rights advocates mourned the loss of life and decried the United States' inhumane immigration system late Monday after an abandoned tractor-trailer rig containing at least 50 dead people and 16 survivors—including four children—was discovered in San Antonio, Texas.
Local authorities said it appears that the rig, which was found after a worker in the area heard a yell for help, was being used for a smuggling operation. Citing one law enforcement official, The Texas Tribune reported that evidence suggests "people were trying to jump out of the tractor-trailer because some of the deceased were found along several blocks."
Where I grew up, prayer filled the crisp, smoggy air at the first sight of day. The chorus of azans sounding from surrounding mosques brought the world back to life. Walking to school, women in vibrant saris jostled past with orange garlands made of marigolds in tow. They'd drape them at temples to thank their gods; and I thanked mine on my knees before bedtime.
Since the U.S. Supreme Court's reactionary majority struck down Roe v. Wade€ last Friday, Facebook and Instagram have been swiftly removing posts informing people that they can obtain federally approved abortion pills through the mail while ignoring posts offering to mail guns.
An Associated Press reporter's Facebook post that said, "If you send me your address, I will mail you abortion pills," was removed within one minute on Monday, according to the news outlet.
Abortion rights activists, journalists, and legal observers in recent days have been attacked and detained by police at demonstrations against the U.S. Supreme Court's reversal of Roe v. Wade.
"It's clear that this excessive use of force was unnecessary and unacceptable!"
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Monday shrugged off condemnation from Republicans over the guidance she's offered to her millions of social media followers in recent days, explaining how to procure abortion pills and protect their digital privacy in the event that they need abortion care.
Former Washington Examiner reporter John Gage, who praised the U.S. Supreme Court ruling which overturned Roe v. Wade and stripped the right to abortion care from millions of Americans last week, posted on his Twitter account Monday that the New York Democrat was sharing information "about how people can skirt abortion bans."
People deserve the right to choose the circumstances (if any) under which they have children. The ability to terminate a pregnancy is essential to reproductive justice. State abortion restrictions represent undue interference in what should be private medical decisions, and are a form of reproductive injustice that threatens the agency and bodily autonomy of women and others who can become pregnant.
Reproductive justice and economic justice are fundamentally linked. The availability of abortion has direct consquences for the financial security of pregnant people and their families. There is ample evidence showing that abortion access has positive “downstream social and economic effects,” including increases in wages, educational attainment, and job opportunities. In their dissenting opinion, Justices Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagen acknowledged these costs, writing that the court’s ruling means that “from the very moment of fertilization, a woman has no rights to speak of. A State can force her to bring a pregnancy to term, even at the steepest personal and familial costs.” Abortion access is also a workers’ rights issue, as the right to control one’s body feeds directly into the right to control one’s labor.
In response to the Supreme Court’s recent assault on female bodily autonomy, numerous U.S. corporations have issued statements stating they’ll be paying for employee abortion travel. You’re to ignore, apparently, that many of these same companies continue to throw millions of dollars at the politicians responsible for turning the Supreme Court into a dangerous, cruel, legal norm-trampling joke:
My usual disclaimer: This column is not about abortion. I’m not going to try to tell you that it’s right or wrong, or that it should be legal or illegal. You’ve probably got opinions on that. They’re probably not going to change. I’m not going to try to change them.
I’m less interested in abortion itself than I am in the quality of arguments about it. And I see a truly silly argument being advanced by supporters of the€ Dobbs€ ruling. Let’s call it “the argument from decentralization.”
Let’s face it: There is a possibility that the Uvalde police got scared when they learned that there was a armed killer nearby. It’s possible that what went through their minds was: “Heck, I’m too young to die. I’ll wait until someone else goes in there after that guy.”
But defense against murderers, rapists, and other people committing violent acts is the big reason we have police. That’s their job. Why else do we need them — to arrest people for smoking marijuana, having sex with a prostitute, or playing in a poker game?
Over the last few weeks, we’ve written quite a bit about the American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICOA), which has become the central push by a bunch of folks in Congress to create a special antitrust bill for “big tech.” There are some good ideas in the bill, but, as we’ve been highlighting, a major problem is that the language in the bill is such that it could be abused by politically motivated politicians and law enforcement to go after perfectly reasonable content moderation decisions.
Late last year we discussed a plainly stupid trademark lawsuit brought by Dairy Queen, which makes tasty frozen snacks, and W.B. Mason which is a strange combination of furniture and grocery store. At issue was the latter’s attempt to trademark some bottled water it sells under the brand “Blizzard Water”. Notably, W.B. Mason had sold water under that brand since 2010 without issue and it was only when Dairy Queen caught wind of the trademark application that it decided to sue over the potential for confusion with its blizzard ice cream products.
I had to rewrite this post before it got published. I originally began it with some whimsy in response to the absurdity that copyright cases like these always engender. The idea that people could ever use their rights in previous expression to forbid someone else’s subsequent expression is almost too absurd to take seriously as an articulation of law. And, according to the Supreme Court, at least in the past, it wasn’t the law. Fair use is supposed to allow people use pre-existing expression to say new things. In fact, if the new expression did say new things, then it is absolutely should be found fair use.
With music consumption having long ago moved to a streaming model in many parts of the world, it sometimes feels as though, just like the rotary telephone dial, kids might not even know what a radio was, let alone own one. But there was a time when broadcasting pop music over the airwaves was a deeply subversive activity for Europeans at least, as the lumbering state monopoly broadcasters were challenged by illegal pirate stations carrying the cutting edge music they had failed to provide. [Ringway Manchester] has the story of one such pirate station which broadcast across the city for a few years in the 1970s, and it’s a fascinating tale indeed.
A person who works in my office building is in the process of writing a novel. He has already completed a first draft and is working with an editor to prepare it for publication. Recently he asked me if I would like to read his current version of the novel, and I agreed.
In late May last year I lamented that I had few locally located friends, which can be difficult when you need someone's help.
I ended up in a similar position this year; illness is going through the family and I'm not properly well yet. There was a couple of days when we were all sick and I needed some groceries, in much the same way as then.
My online bank account has the worst banking website I've ever seen. It's pretty, for sure, but so slow and bloated. Stuff moving around all over the place. I couldn't figure out how to actually register for an account. The advisors for their online chat seemed to have gone missing. So I'm probably going to go back to my branch and open an account in person.
[...]
This is the typical case of prioritising looks over functionality, something that those using Gemini or Gopher will never need to worry about (mercy). Just as governments propose and militaries dispose, I think we have a case here that management and marketing are not taking input from developers themselves. I'm sure we've been in these situations before, where those in charge are not taking advice from the poor schmucks that have to implement the ill-informed ideas.
This is all in complete contrast to when I was walking around an airport one time. There were a couple of people sitting behind a desk. It wasn't a check-in desk or information desk, but some other kind. I don't remember its function. What I do remember, though, was seeing a torn-off strip of paper. On that strip of paper were letters on the far right, followed by information like passenger name and telephone number.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.