As we increasingly move to Ubuntu 22.04, enough of our machines now have the Linux kernel's somewhat new Pressure Stall Information (also) that I've been investigating adding PSI information to our per-host dashboards in our metrics setup. In the process I realized that I didn't understand the PSI information as well as I needed to, so here are some notes.
While it's supposed to be relatively easy for games with anti-cheat like BattlEye and Easy Anti-Cheat to get working on Linux and Steam Deck, some developers are having issues like Fatshark with Warhammer: Vermintide 2.
Valve put out a new upgrade for Proton Experimental on June 30th which brings some nice looking fixes to Linux desktops and Steam Deck. This is the special opt-in version of Proton you can try, which often gets the newest features and fixes first before rolling out to the main series of Proton (currently Proton 7).
It's been a little while since checking how well the top 100 most played games on Steam work on Linux and the Steam Deck, so here's a fresh run over the list for you.
Dice Tribes: Ambitions is a pretty interesting looking strategy survival game mix, where you move dice around to keep your tribe and village going. It might not sound or even look like much but it seems like it might surprise you with the mechanics involved.
 With this release, Nitrux 2.2.1 ships with the default 5.18.6 XanMod kernel, which is the successor to 5.17.12, which was not implemented with the previous release 2.2.0 due to the failure of the package broadcom-sta-dkm while building, but with this release, you can have the stable version of the 5.18.6 XanMod kernel.
In my never ending quest to have oksh support every C compiler in existence, I have ported two more C compilers to OpenBSD. They are chibicc and kefir. As always, let's review them and at the end I'll have links to unofficial ports so that you can play around with these C compilers.
It’s wonderful hearing from people in the community about what learning and teaching digital making means to them and how it impacts their lives. So far, our community stories series has involved young creators, teachers, and mentors from the UK and US, India, Romania, and Ireland, who are all dedicated to making positive change in their corner of the world through getting creative with technology.
Raspberry Pi has introduced a successor to last year’s Pico, a $4 microcontroller based on the RP2040 chip the company designed itself. The new model is called the Pico W. It’s basically the same hardware, but it adds, as the name suggests, an 802.11n Wi-Fi radio, making it useful for putting together IoT projects and the like. It’s also more expensive than the standard Pico, coming in at $6.
Today, Raspberry Pi announced the Pico W, a new $6 version of the Pico that includes WiFi.
I’ve also provided an ISO image of X2100 BIOS updates. It’s based on Intel’s FIT utility and it’s a lot easier than reading through pages of readme just to try to pull off a BIOS update. It’s not the easiest of course but it’s much easier than trying to run complex commands in Linux.
How to Join Multiple Data Frames in R?, you can find it useful to connect many data frames in R. Fortunately, the left join() function from the dplyr package makes this simple to accomplish.
It got me thinking about the other pivotal points in my career. Especially the first one. I started writing it down as an exercise for myself. These are the type of stories I seek out in blogs in podcasts (such as John Lam's!), so I hope you'll enjoy it too.
Here we go, this is the story of how I got into computing.
Most importantly, he highlighted the virtues common to science and civil liberties that are needed to deal with these challenges: freedom of speech, skepticism, constraints on authority, openness to opposing arguments, and an acknowledgment of one’s own fallibility.
The two of us, a cognitive scientist and a civil liberties lawyer, are presenting this lecture to the public at a time when Sagan’s insights are needed even more urgently than they were when originally expressed. We do so with the kind permission of Ann Druyan, Sagan’s widow and longtime collaborator.
In Hungary, although women make greater use of the healthcare system and live an average of six years longer than their male counterparts, gender discrimination nevertheless permeates doctors' offices and research facilities. Unsolicited procedures, misdiagnoses, symptoms attributed to hysteria, and obstetric violence – the combination of these is not only harmful to women's bodies and psyches, it also places yet another heavy burden on society as a whole.
These initiatives — especially those around remote/hybrid working, new digital services for customers and citizens, and increased outsourcing of remote vendors/suppliers — have created an explosion of human and machine identities, often running into hundreds of thousands per organization.
As a result, many organizations are now facing the consequences of unsecured digital acceleration, including greater risk exposure to ransomware threats and vulnerabilities across the software supply chain.
The pushback against this surveillance tool, known as a reverse keyword search, is being closely watched by privacy and abortion rights advocates, who are concerned that it could soon be used to investigate women who search for information about obtaining an abortion in states where the procedure is now illegal.
In documents filed Thursday in Denver District Court, lawyers for the 17-year-old argue that the police violated the Constitution when they got a judge to order Google to check its vast database of internet searches for users who typed in the address of a home before it was set ablaze on Aug. 5, 2020. Three adults and two children died in the fire.
Examples of large botnets such as the well-known Mirai and more recent Fronton—which consist of Internet-connected IoT devices—have caused significant damage, and have given IoT a terrible reputation when it comes to security. Governments have started to take note, and the passage of the IoT Cybersecurity Improvement Act of 2020 in the US, while welcome, has only begun to tackle this issue. On the privacy front, our connected devices and appliances are delivering potentially hundreds of discrete data points per day to companies without any meaningful limits on or insight into what they are doing with this data. And homeowners who wish to add smart devices to their homes are often directed to install apps which control these devices, but also deliver data to third parties without notification.
Mozilla provides a useful tool, *privacy not included, to search your own smart devices for what they may be sending to the cloud. If, for instance, you own a Furbo Dog Camera with Dog Nanny, you are subject to a privacy policy which states Furbo can “collect any audio, video or pictures you create, upload, save or share” and “collect video and audit information of individuals when they pass in front of the camera or speak when the Furbo Dog Camera is on.” Unfortunately, this policy is not atypical. Researchers at Northeastern University and Imperial College London found in a survey of IoT devices across the industry that 72 of the 81 they looked at were sending information to third parties.
The nuances of adding connected automation and functionality to the home while preserving one's privacy and security seems an obtuse and difficult task. Many otherwise enthusiastic consumers have encountered untold frustrations, and become victims of the failures of a data-hungry industry. The myriad of difficulties has even prompted users to abandon smart devices altogether.
Orphan Annie's Secret Society produced decoders (variously called "Super Decoder pins", "Telematic Decoder Pins" and other names from year to year) from 1935 through 1940. From 1941 through 1949, the decoders were rebranded as "Code-O-Graphs" and distributed by Captain Midnight's Secret Squadron. These years corresponded to Ovaltine's sponsorship of the respective programs. Although the decorative elements and mechanical designs varied, the underlying cryptographic principles were the same for all the decoders.
Yet Erdogan told reporters at an impromptu press conference held as the summit ended that the memorandum did not mean Turkey would automatically approve the two countries' membership.
A special French court on Wednesday found 20 men guilty of involvement in the Islamic State terrorist attacks on the Bataclan theater, Paris cafes and France's national stadium in 2015 that killed 130 people in the deadliest peacetime attacks in French history.
The 10-month trial largely centered around Salah Abdeslam, whom prosecutors believed to be the sole surviving member of the Islamic State extremist cell that carried out the attack, which also targeted restaurants, bars, and the national sports stadium. Abdeslam was found guilty of all the charges against him, including murder as part of an organized terrorist gang. He was not accused of killing anyone himself (prosecutors said his suicide belt malfunctioned, but Abdeslam has claimed he changed his mind about going forward with the attack).
Chief suspect Salah Abdeslam was found guilty of murder and attempted murder in relation to a terrorist enterprise. The court found that his explosives vest malfunctioned, dismissing his argument that he ditched the vest because he decided not to follow through with his part of the attack on the night of Nov. 13, 2015.
The other nine attackers either blew themselves up or were killed by police that night.
In all there were six distinct attacks carried out by 10 people, Abdeslam was the only survivor after his suicide vest malfunctioned.
He was refused authorisation to seek parole, meaning that he faces the prospect of dying in prison. The life-means-life sentence is extremely rare in French law and had only ever been handed down four times before.
Geert Wilders, the Netherland MP who had earlier supported former BJP spokesperson Nupur Sharma, reacted to the Udaipur horror where a Hindu tailor, identified as Kanhaiya Lal, was beheaded by two Muslim men Riyaz Attari and Ghous Mohammed for a social media post related to Nupur Sharma. "The only answer is that we ALL stand up Now and say ‘I Support Nupur Sharma’, because they can't kill all of us," the controversial MP, known for his Islamophobic [sic] comments, tweeted.
At a quarter after one o’clock on the night before Oslo’s pride parade is scheduled to take place, a 42-year-old Iranian-born man shouts “Allahu akbar!” and starts shooting wildly and randomly at people in and around London Pub, the city’s largest gay bar. In all, he kills two people and wounds twenty-one. And within a few hours the police have a theory as to why he committed these latest barbaric acts: he has psychiatric problems.
Yes, “psychiatric problems” - the euphemism of choice for Islamic terrorism. [...]
At the start of 2022, St. Petersburg Governor Alexander Beglov seemed under more pressure to step down than ever before. In addition to facing constant criticism, Beglov was quarreling with local elites and struggling to resolve endemic issues related to snow and garbage removal. But after Russia began its all-out war against Ukraine on February 24, everything changed. Beglov became one of the most outspoken supporters of the invasion and started giving bellicose speeches about fighting purported Ukrainian “Nazis.” In addition, the St. Petersburg undertook to rebuild Mariupol — a city that has become emblematic of Russian war atrocities after Moscow’s forces effectively razed it to the ground. Meduza special correspondent Andrey Pertsev unravels how the Kremlin’s so-called “special military operation” in Ukraine helped Alexander Beglov shore up his position in St. Petersburg and get back in Putin’s good graces.
Some European leaders have struck a cautionary note. Poland’s prime minister, for instance, said recently: “Putin is counting on the fatigue of the West. He knows that he has much more time because democracies are less patient than autocracies,” repeating what Xi Jinping said to Biden shortly after Biden took office. There’s something to that warning, because despite appearances and concrete cooperation, the alliance is not entirely of one mind on at least three issues: energy, food, and the way forward on Ukraine.
Ending Energy Dependence on Russia
The city of Uvalde, Texas, the scene of the horrific shooting in an elementary school last month, has been forceful in its unwillingness to release public records related to the tragedy that took the lives of 19 children and two adults.
The city’s blanket denial took me back 25 years to my own battle for records with another Texas town coping with a tragedy.
There were a few things the Buffalo and Uvalde mass shooters who killed a combined 31 people had in common: Both used AR-15-style rifles bought legally. Both were just 18 years old. But perhaps most overlooked in the corporate press as a shared characteristic worthy of commentary: They were both male.
June 26 was the UN’s International Day in Support of Torture Victims. There are no credible government statistics on the use of torture in Russia, nor does the country’s Criminal Code include a separate article on torture; an organization called the Crew Against Torture is one of the few agencies working to help Russians who have been tortured. In their 22 years of work, the group’s lawyers have won criminal convictions for 159 law enforcement employees, but only six of those have come from Chechnya, the region the lawyers say is the worst offender. Meduza tells the story of one of the Crew Against Torture’s recent cases: that of the Yangulbayev family, a sworn enemy of Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov.
Janine Jackson interviewed Raed Jarrar about Joe Biden’s trip to Saudi Arabia€ for the June 24, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
The House’s inquiry into the January 6 Capitol attack is shedding light on the role members of Congress played in Donald Trump’s scheme to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. Americans now know that several Republican members of Congress were so wrapped up in Trump’s coup attempt that they sought preemptive pardons to protect them from prosecution for what they obviously understood to be a criminal conspiracy.
“If people aren’t going to do their job, then we’re here to do it for them,” said Nick Bezzel, of the Elmer Geronimo Pratt Pistol & Rifle Gun Club, after being told for the second time today that officials in Brookhaven, Mississippi wouldn’t meet with him and other armed black activists.
The fish escaped into the Mississippi River, then continued their spread into other rivers and beyond. Their population grew quickly, and they began to crowd out native fish species, outcompeting them for food (different carp species feed on plants, plankton, on up in size to endangered freshwater snail species). Invasive carp are also thought to lower water quality, which ultimately harms underwater ecosystems and can kill off other native species like freshwater mussels. (The fish were once collectively called “Asian carp,” but state governments and federal agencies now refer to them as “invasive carp” because of concerns over bigotry toward Asian culture and people.)
Federal, state and local officials have since spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to keep the invasive fish in check, and most importantly, out of the Great Lakes. If the fish swim into Lake Michigan, they could threaten the commercial fishing and tourism industries, which together are responsible for billions of dollars of economic activity. Other methods for controlling the fish include physical barriers, poisons, removal and the introduction of predators.
The Supreme Court just gutted a major policy tool the US might have used to tackle climate change. Its decision today on West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency essentially says that the EPA shouldn’t be allowed to determine whether the US gets its electricity from clean or dirty sources of energy.
That derails previous efforts by the agency to transition the US away from fossil fuels to clean energy sources like wind and solar by regulating the power sector. With the new decision, the agency might be able to push a power plant to install technology to reduce its emissions on-site, but it can’t influence states’ decisions on where they get their energy from in the first place. To make things worse, the premise of the court’s decision could erode any federal agency’s ability to regulate industry in order to tackle climate change and even other major issues.
It’s not just chilli peppers. Mustard producers in France and Canada said extreme weather caused a 50% reduction in seed production last year, leading to a shortage of the condiment on grocery store shelves. Blistering heat, stronger storms, droughts, floods, fires and changes in rainfall patterns are also affecting the cost and availability of staples, including wheat, corn, coffee, apples, chocolate and wine. The climate crisis is increasing the intensity and frequency of extreme weather events – and it’s putting food production at risk.
“Almost everything we grow and raise in the US is facing some climatic stress,” said Carolyn Dimitri, nutrition and food studies professor at NYU.
This year, Car Free Avenue area will be located between Uueturu intersection and Kaarsild. Unlike the Car Free Avenue of the past two years, this year 1+1 lanes of vehicle traffic will continue to move through the area on the side of the city center park on weekdays, and a speed limit of 30 km/h will be established.
The street space on the river-side will be open to pedestrians, and four temporary pedestrian crossings will be added to the Car Free Avenue carriageway to ensure safe crossing.
The area will be close to vehicle traffic on weekends until 14 August (Friday 6 p.m. – Sunday 11:59 p.m.), total closure to motor vehicles will take place from July 8–19, when WRC Rally Estonia events will be taking place on the Vabaduse Avenue section.
Yet the White Mesa mill in southern Utah is still converting uranium ore into yellowcake, a condensed powder. For decades the facility has seemed a relic of the region’s boom times. But two things have conspired to breathe new life into America’s uranium industry.
First, climate concern has begun to change the politics around nuclear power, which does not emit carbon. Roughly 20% of the power produced by American utilities comes from nuclear, making it the country’s largest source of clean energy. To speed decarbonisation, the Biden administration wants to prop up America’s existing nuclear plants and incentivise the development of new advanced reactors. Proponents of nuclear power argue that its steady, baseload power will be needed to keep the lights on when the sun doesn’t shine or wind doesn’t blow. There are signs that this argument is catching on. California is considering delaying the closure of its last nuclear plant, which is the state’s largest single source of electricity.
Second, Russia’s war in Ukraine has many countries squirming over their reliance on Russian energy. According to the Energy Information Administration, a government agency, 14% of America’s uranium imports in 2021 came from Russia (and a further 43% from Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan). Russia is the only commercial supplier of the type of uranium needed to fuel new reactor designs, which aim to reduce costs and safety concerns.
Janine Jackson interviewed the National Priorities Project’s Lindsay Koshgarian about the People Over Pentagon Act for the June 24, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Officials said that OneCoin was not backed by any secured, independent blockchain-type technology as other crypto currencies are.
Instead, they said, it was a classic Ponzi scheme, in which early investors are encouraged to find others and then paid out by receipts from later investors.
In letters to Apple and Google, shared by Carr on Tuesday, he said TikTok’s “pattern of conduct and misrepresentation regarding the unfettered access that persons in Beijing have to sensitive U.S. user data” puts the app “out of compliance” with the companies’ app store policies.
SpaceX requested regulatory approval from the FCC in March of last year to allow Earth Stations in Motion (ESIM) Starlink terminals to be used in moving vehicles. To tap into the system and receive broadband internet coverage, customers must purchase a personal ground-based antenna, or user terminal, that is designed to connect with any orbiting Starlink satellites that happen to be overhead. Up until now, those dishes have had to remain in a fixed location in order to access the system.
Electronic voting machines from a leading vendor used in at least 16 states have software vulnerabilities that leave them susceptible to [cracking] if unaddressed, the nation’s leading cybersecurity agency says in an advisory sent to state election officials.
The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency, or CISA, said there is no evidence the flaws in the Dominion Voting Systems’ equipment have been exploited to alter election results. The advisory is based on testing by a prominent computer scientist and expert witness in a long-running lawsuit that is unrelated to false allegations of a stolen election pushed by former President Donald Trump after his 2020 election loss.
Using data from the election system, I precisely reproduce the major anomalies, explain their cause, and verify that they have been corrected. I also uncover other errors affecting specific down-ballot contests that have not been corrected, despite the unusual attention focused on the results, one of which may have changed the outcome of a local contest. Based on this analysis, I refute misinformation about the incident, concluding that it was not the result of a security breach but rather a series of operator errors compounded by inadequate procedures and insufficiently defensive software design. These events offer lessons for improving election administration and highlight the value of rigorously investigating election technology incidents for enhancing accuracy and public trust.
Exploitation of these vulnerabilities would require physical access to individual ImageCast X devices, access to the Election Management System (EMS), or the ability to modify files before they are uploaded to ImageCast X devices. Jurisdictions can prevent and/or detect the exploitation of these vulnerabilities by diligently applying the mitigations recommended in this advisory, including technical, physical, and operational controls that limit unauthorized access or manipulation of voting systems. Many of these mitigations are already typically standard practice in jurisdictions where these devices are in use and can be enhanced to further guard against exploitation of these vulnerabilities.
“These conspiracy theories are based on the reality that elections are less secure than they need to be,” Halderman said. “But they’ve changed one fact. The fact they’ve changed is whether there’s any evidence at all that the 2020 election was stolen by [cracking]. They’ve just invented the assertion that there is such evidence, when there is not.” In Georgia, the ballots were counted three times, once by hand, and—as the Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, told Trump, when the President insisted that votes has been cast in the names of dead people, that ballots for Biden had been counted multiple times, and that signatures had been forged on mail-in ballots—no credible evidence of widespread fraud was found. This was also the case in Arizona, after the protracted Cyber Ninjas recount. An Associated Press review of six battleground states found fewer than four hundred and seventy-five potentially fraudulent ballots, too few to swing the outcome, even if all of them had been for Biden, which they were not.
Since 2016, when it became clear that Russian actors had breached parts of our voting systems, election security has largely focussed on preventing foreign intervention. That threat has not gone away. But measures that are politicizing election administration, replacing nonpartisan administrators with ideologues, along with demands for bogus “audits” and the kinds of vigilantism bolstered by “stop the steal” and other baseless election fraud narratives, are conspiring to increase the domestic threat, too.
Meta had already told employees that a slowdown was coming. In May, the company froze hiring across a number of teams, including teams working on shopping and video chatting products. The company’s stock has cratered over the past five months, as investors worry about slowing growth and expensive investments in the metaverse that may take years to pay off. Meta didn’t have a comment for this story.
acebook-owner Meta Platforms Inc is bracing for a leaner second half of the year, as it copes with macroeconomic pressures and data privacy hits to its ads business, according to an internal memo seen by Reuters on Thursday.
The company must “prioritize more ruthlessly” and “operate leaner, meaner, better executing teams,” Chief Product Officer Chris Cox wrote in the memo, which appeared on the company’s internal discussion forum Workplace.
Petro, who ran on a platform to tackle inequality, is a former rebel soldier who, at the age of 17 joined a now-defunct guerilla group called M-19 and was briefly imprisoned and tortured. His election is viewed as part of the ongoing “pink tide” in Latin America where a wave of left-leaning, but not-hardcore-communist leaders have succeeded in taking power through democratic elections.
Perhaps even more impressive than Petro is his running mate, Francia Márquez, the nation’s first Afro-Colombian vice president and a celebrated environmental activist.
The Bible describes “sin” as a transgression of the law of God€ (1 John 3:4) and rebellion against God€ (Deuteronomy 9:7; Joshua 1:18).
In the year 590, Pope Gregory the Great specified the seven deadly sins...
“We beat him,” boasted left-wing leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon. “He has no majority. And since he has no principles, he’s already starting to belly dance in front of anyone who wants to help him govern. You will see that he’ll end up polishing Madam Le Pen’s shoes.” The results of France’s parliamentary elections made for a jubilant and punchy Mélenchon, who was basking in the crowd of supporters gathered outside the Parisian concert hall where France’s new left-wing alliance celebrated the June 19 runoff vote.
The fact that the National Assembly is now more representative of voters’ wishes is hardly a crisis. In 2017 Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s leftwing La France Insoumise (LFI) won 17 seats, the far-right Front National eight, and the Greens one — in other words, three parties that represented 40% of the electorate held only 4.5% of the seats between them. That suited Macron: it allowed him to govern as he saw fit. But now he’ll have to work with other people besides his chief of staff. This should only bother those who hoped he would reform France’s pension system in the same way that he cut rail workers’ employment rights, made the labour code more flexible and tightened conditions for unemployment benefits.
Thanks to Mélenchon’s new electoral strategy the leftwing alliance now has more seats — four times more for LFI — without increasing its share of the vote. But Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (RN) has done even better, multiplying its MPs by ten. Not thanks to any novel political initiative, but simply because RN voter numbers have been steadily increasing as the party’s appeal has grown and it has lost its stigma. Parliamentary elections hadn’t favoured it till now, but this time its vote has doubled — from 8.75% in 2017 to 17.3%. Le Pen herself got 2.5 million more votes in the presidential second round than in 2017.
What a dumb news cycle. As we noted, mainly driven by the preferred political spam mongers for Republicans, a study from some computer scientists was completely misrepresented to argue (falsely) that Google was deliberately censoring Republican politician emails. As we’ve repeatedly noted, the study actually found that while a clean Gmail account would flag more Republican emails as spam than Democrats, (1) the reverse was true of the two other most popular web-based email providers, Yahoo and Outlook, and (2) the researchers found that if someone actively manages their spam flags, that this discrepancy disappears in Gmail.
Emotion rules the American political scene and so many now tend to shoot from the hip without even knowing why.
Ghislaine Maxwell was sentenced to 20 years in prison for€ conspiring€ with Jeffrey Epstein to sexually abuse minors on Tuesday. Her lawyers have stated€ they will appeal the sentence.€
Those who tend to see the manipulation of the background powers behind both Covid and the vaccinations are more likely to believe Russian disinformation. The most common fake news and conspiracy theories about Russian aggression against Ukraine – for example that the war was not started by Russia, but by Ukraine and America, or that the Ukrainian leadership are Nazis enjoy significant popularity in Hungarian society. Fidesz and Mi Hazánk voters believe in pro-Moscow conjectures to almost the same extent, opposition voters much less so.
Disbarred former Trump attorney and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani made headlines this week after accusing a grocery store worker of assaulting him. Subsequently released surveillance video indicated Giuliani had exaggerated significantly — and current Mayor Eric Adams called him on it, noting that making a false police report is a crime.
The Supreme Court’s recent assault on our rights has gone far beyond Roe and Dobbs. The Supreme Court quietly issued a 6-3 ruling recently on Shinn v. Martinez Ramirez, siding against two Arizonans on death row who sought to challenge their convictions in federal court after receiving shoddy legal support. The majority’s rationale, which was based on a 1996 federal law, was that state sovereignty and legal expediency must be protected at all costs.
Unfortunately, those costs are clear. The Court’s ruling slashed Americans’ constitutional right to effective counsel by eviscerating the life-saving accountability mechanism that allows people to appeal unjust rulings. The six conservative justices have plainly prioritized the legal system’s power to convict and kill over our human right to live.
In response to a police investigation, Muhammad’s family instantly produced a certificate indicating that he is “mentally ill”—a tactic on regular display in Egypt whenever a Muslim is caught after attacking a Christian, to get him the most lenient sentencing. But as the report notes,
“If he is mentally ill, why does he exclusively target Copts? Is it sensible to promote the ‘psychopath’ narrative in every single incident against the Copts—as if the mentally ill only see and try to kill Copts?”
The Criminal Court last week sentenced a man to death after convicting him of murdering his divorced wife with scissors while at the Sharia Court in Rusiefeh in March 2021.
More Christians are killed for their faith in Nigeria than in any other country worldwide — at least 4,650 in 2021, and nearly 900 in the first three months of 2022 alone.
According to the UK-based human rights foundation Christian Solidarity Worldwide, Kaduna state has become "an epicenter of kidnapping and violence by non-state actors, despite being the most garrisoned state in Nigeria.”
Let’s hear it for Protestant fundamentalists (American variety) yet again. Was there ever a more pragmatic bunch? After centuries of howling No Popery and denouncing the Whore of Rome, they’re now trying to give us a US Supreme Court that will, in the probable event of Alito’s confirmation, boast no fewer than five Roman Catholics, a clear majority: in order of arrival on the bench: Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas, Roberts and, most likely, Alito.
You can see why the conservative Christians don’t trust Protestants when it comes to matters of Choice or any of their other cherished issues. The two Protestants on the Supreme Court are the Justices they hate most: a liberal Republican, John Paul Stevens and a libertarian, David Souter.
They rightly chided Republicans, who have boasted for nearly 50 years that their political project would overturn Roe v. Wade. In that time, Republicans successfully advocated for€ 1,000 restrictions€ on abortions. But on the other side of the ideological spectrum, the Democratic Party also focused blame on the Green Party’s Jill Stein voters, Bernie Bros, Susan Sarandon followers, and Bad Faith Podcast subscribers. The Democratic Party’s analysis relied on attacking their left flank in defense rather than engaging in introspection about what they could have done to prevent Roe’s reversal.
A more substantive and introspective review would look back to then-Senator Joe Biden, who has a long history of questioning the legitimacy of the Roe decision, for aiding Roe foe Justice Clarence Thomas to the court. Indeed, it is hard to imagine Thomas becoming a Justice in 1991 without Biden leading a rhetorical assault on Anita Hill, who accused Thomas of sexual harassment. At the time, Biden was so confident that Thomas would not overturn Roe that he accused those who claimed otherwise of experiencing a “failure of logic.”
Ironically, history is central to the Roberts Court assault on rights.€ € Better yet it is the abuse of history in its method of legal analysis and reasoning.
Starting back with Ronald Reagan’s Attorney General Ed Meese conservative jurists, including Justice Antonin Scalia and the members of the Federalist Society, argued that the Constitution should be interpreted in light of the intent of the framers.€ Such an approach, asking us what a bunch of slaveholders, bankers, and land speculators who were White and Christian thought about the rights of average people such as women, the poor, and people of color most certainly would doom their rights.€ That is why Justices such as € Earl Warren, William Brennan, and others argued that rights need to be looked at in terms of the evolving standards of decency that mark the maturing of society.€ We need to read our Constitution with an evolving political morality that reflects political sensibilities reflective of today, not fixed in stone in 1787.
Progressive powerhouse Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez warned Thursday that the United States is "witnessing a judicial coup in progress," a reaction by the Democratic congresswoman to a raft of highly consequential Supreme Court rulings and the justices' scheduled hearing of a critical voting rights case.
"All our leaders—regardless of party—must recognize this constitutional crisis for what it is."
There is no reason, in fact or in law, to erase the constitutional right to abortion. In their collective dissent, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan said the majority “has wrenched this choice from women and given it to the States.” They wrote that the court is “rescinding an individual right in its entirety and conferring it on the State, an action the Court takes for the first time in history.”
Welcome to the Supreme Court of the United States, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson! As the first Black woman to serve on the high court, you will bring not only your brilliance but also your unique life experience to an institution that has never centered the needs or rights of Black women, to say the least. Unfortunately, you’re being sworn in with the dumpster fire of this last term still blazing in the background.
I am not a lawyer. I am an epidemiologist with an interest in how laws, policies, and regulations affect health outcomes. But, as a scientist, I can’t help noticing when current events combine to produce what is known as a natural experiment. Whenever politicians or six Supreme Court justices (aka politicians in judicial drag) make decisions that affect our lives, there is always a before and an after. In some places laws, policies and regulations don’t change, while in others they do, and we can exploit this kind of variation to understand the public health effect of what these people—some elected, some unelected—have done to us.
The Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization means that millions of young people across the country will be forced to live in a country in which they have fewer rights to bodily autonomy than their parents and grandparents.
The union’s dealings with Activision Blizzard, moreover, have been contentious, with the union filing several unfair labor practice charges against the company with the NLRB and Activision Blizzard throwing up potential roadblocks to the Raven Software election before it took place.
After obtaining the broadest injunction ever seen in a US streaming piracy lawsuit, several media companies argued that Cloudflare should be held in contempt of court for non-compliance. Negotiations are now underway to end this dispute but it appears that can only be achieved if the court agrees to modify the injunction, which was previously described as a "power grab".
The Premier League has obtained an injunction that requires Irish ISPs to block illegal streams of matches during the 2022/23 season. The decision from the High Court was made under the Copyright Act 2000 and represents the third extension of a groundbreaking 2019 injunction targeting ISPs Eircom/eir, Sky, Virgin and Vodafone.
When I repeatedly use Nintendo as something of a virtual punching bag, it pisses off some of the company’s loyal fans. This has never made sense to me. Those fans should be pissed at Nintendo and all the different avenues the company takes just to make sure being a Nintendo fan is as difficult as possible. After all, it’s not like I’m just making this stuff up. Nintendo really is the Disney of the video game world when it comes to being an IP protectionist bully.
In this case ~degrowther talks about choosing vi over Emacs, and wonders what effect that choice might have had over the years. Personally, I chose Emacs, then vim with tmux, then Spacemacs, and now I'm using Doom Emacs. So I probably don't have a lot of insight into the effects of using different editors, apart from it being fun to learn a new one occasionally.
But it did get me thinking about the choices and circumstances that act as pivots in our lives. Things that change our path for years or decades. Sometimes these points are obvious, but other times they are only clear in retrospect. The biggest pivot I've experienced was when a friend of mine wasn't feeling well one day. Nothing particularly bad (this was long before Covid), but enough that when I met him to ski he was lying down on a couch in the bar of one of the lodges. I was still new in town and hadn't found work yet, so I took the opportunity to go down to the front desk and fill out a job application. Within a week I had a job at that lodge. Someone I worked with at the lodge got me my next job, and I moved to Alaska for the first time. I made lifelong friends at these jobs. I got other people jobs where I worked. At least two of those people met their now-spouses. Other friends helped me move and find work again after I was finished with seasonal jobs, which is where I met my wife.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.