After months of testing, the stable version of AlmaLinux has been released.
If you are not familiar with the operating system, it is a fork of the popular Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system that aims to be a no strings attached alternative to it with regular community-driven updates on offer.
This is a series highlighting best-of-breed utilities. We cover a wide range of utilities including tools that boost your productivity, help you manage your workflow, and lots more besides.
We’ve recently relaunched our coverage of Android apps. We recommend the best free Android apps with a very strict eligibility criteria. We’ve received praise from many people but also ruffled a few feathers). This article recommends software that’s useful for Android users, but it’s native Linux software.
scrcpy is a free and open source screen mirroring application that lets you control an Android device from your desktop computer. The screen content is streamed as H.264 video, which the software then decodes and displays on the computer. The software pushes keyboard and mouse input to the Android device over the server.
All Linux distributions come with a default terminal application or terminal emulator. This terminal emulator is actually bundled with the Linux desktop environment and looks and feels different in different desktop environments. But there are many more Linux terminal emulator apps, regardless of your desktop environment or distribution.
These alternative terminal emulators for Linux offer unique features that either improve functionality or aesthetics. So here’s a list of 5 of the best terminal emulator apps for Linux. You can even test different Linux distros online without installing them by following our guide on the topic.
You can delete a line in Vim with dd i.e. pressing the d key twice. But what if you want to delete all the lines in Vim?
You cannot do Ctrl+A and use Del key like you do in a regular text editor. That's not how Vim works.
There is no straightforward keyboard shortcut for this. However, you can use the dG keys if you are at the beginning of the file.
You've been working on your Linux system for a couple of hours and everything is okay. Then, you click on another link, open another web app, and everything freezes. If you spend any time running web applications on your older laptop, there's a chance that you might have run into this problem before.
What if there was a way to solve these situations quickly, without having to shut down your system? Well, the SysRq key combination is there to help you out. Let's take a closer look at how you can utilize this key combination to prevent thrashing on your computer.
You've been working on your Linux system for a couple of hours and everything is okay. Then, you click on another link, open another web app, and everything freezes. If you spend any time running web applications on your older laptop, there's a chance that you might have run into this problem before.
What if there was a way to solve these situations quickly, without having to shut down your system? Well, the SysRq key combination is there to help you out. Let's take a closer look at how you can utilize this key combination to prevent thrashing on your computer.
Nmap Port Scanner (“Network Mapper”) is a free and open source (license) utility for network discovery and security auditing. Many systems and network administrators also find it useful for tasks such as network inventory, managing service upgrade schedules, and monitoring host or service uptime.
Nmap uses raw IP packets in novel ways to determine what hosts are available on the network, what services (application name and version) those hosts are offering, what operating systems (and OS versions) they are running, what type of packet filters/firewalls are in use, and dozens of other characteristics.
It was designed to rapidly scan large networks, but works fine against single hosts. Nmap runs on all major computer operating systems, and official binary packages are available for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. In addition to the classic command-line Nmap executable, the Nmap suite includes an advanced GUI and results viewer (Zenmap), a flexible data transfer, redirection, and debugging tool (Ncat), a utility for comparing scan results (Ndiff), and a packet generation and response analysis tool (Nping).
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install CodeIgniter on Debian 10. For those of you who didn’t know, CodeIgniter is an open-source Application Development Framework for building websites using PHP. It is a very powerful framework that allows you to easily create full-featured web applications. CodeIgniter provides a set of useful libraries used for performing various operations like sending emails, uploading files, managing sessions, and more. Lightweight but powerful, CodeIgniter enables developers to write their applications much more quickly.
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 through the step-by-step installation of the CodeIgniter on a Debian 10 (Buster).
eDEX-UI Terminal is a fullscreen, cross-platform terminal emulator and system monitor that looks and feels like a sci-fi computer interface.
Heavily inspired from the TRON Legacy movie effects (especially the Board Room sequence), the eDEX-UI project was originally meant to be “DEX-UI with less €« art €» and more €« distributable software €»”. While keeping a futuristic look and feel, it strives to maintain a certain level of functionality and to be usable in real-life scenarios, with the larger goal of bringing science-fiction UXs to the mainstream.
Jenkins provides CI/CD functionality, making sysadmin and developer lives easier. See how to install and set up this useful service.
In need of a new game for the weekend? Here's our quick tip for you! You're in luck as Tate Multimedia have made their 2.5D action arcade motorbike combat game Steel Rats completely free to claim and keep. This is not a Free Weekend like Steam usually has, instead it's a 100% discount so you can keep it. This offer only lasts until April 4 at 10AM UTC so be sure to grab it before then.
art of rally, easily one of the best games from 2020 is getting another big free update with the Kenya expansion that's confirmed to be releasing Summer 2021. See also: some thoughts on the game.
We're getting quite a bit with this one with 4 new cards, 6 new tracks and there's going to be an addition free-roam area to drive around in and chill. This is in addition to the updates already released late last year adding in more cars, ghost cars to race against and more. Awesome to see even more coming as it's such a gem.
Tall Story Games have announced a fun little Easter Egg hunt in the demo for their upcoming point & click adventure game Luxy Dreaming. It gives you the chance to appear in the game! Quite a fun idea giving players a chance that's practically once-in-a-lifetime to be immortalised in pixel-art.
If you do manage to find the Easter Egg you will be entered into the prize draw to become an NPC. The developer said you will not only get a pixel-art representation but you will also become an integral part of the game's story and gameplay. You will also get a free digital copy of the full game, a high-resolution digital artwork of their character and a mention in the game's credits to boot.
LuGus Studios have announced their hacking themed tactical narrative-driven hacking RPG, Midnight Protocol, will be releasing this Summer and they have a new trailer.
"Midnight Protocol is a tactical narrative-driven RPG set in a near-future filled with labor automation, big data, controversial AI applications, legal grey zones, and the nebulous nature of online identity. You assume the mantle of a prominent hacktivist, ‘Data’, who recently got doxxed and has been targeted for blackmail by a shadowy branch of government."
Not only have they announced the Summer 2021 release window, they also announced that they've teamed up with Iceberg Interactive as publisher to help with QA, marketing and so on so they can focus more on development.
This is wonderful! Texel Raptor, developer of the absolutely fantastic theme park building game Parkitect have announced a new Beta is available that brings in cross-platform online multiplayer.
In the current stable release, the online multiplayer which is relatively new is locked per-platform but they did say since it was added they would be exploring how to get it all synced up across Linux, macOS and Windows. This fresh Beta was released yesterday April 1 (it's not an April Fools), which any owners on Steam can opt into and test it out.
In this video, I am going to show how to install AlmaLinux OS 8.3.
A nonprofit organization launched this week to oversee future development of AlmaLinux, a distribution of Linux based on code originally contributed to the open source CentOS project. At the same time, CloudLinux, which created AlmaLinux in response to a decision by Red Hat to pull financial support for CentOS, announced that a stable version of the operating system is now available. CentOS itself was based on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) distribution that is made available via a subscription. Jack Aboutboul, community manager of AlmaLinux, said AlmaLinux is the result of the $1 million that CloudLinux committed toward creating a distribution of Linux based on a CentOS project used by hosting providers, such as CloudLinux, to run RHEL-compatible applications at a lower cost. AlmaLinux OS is a binary compatible fork of RHEL 8, which the foundation pledged to update to maintain that compatibility.
MX Linux 19.4 is the fourth refresh of the MX Linux 19 release, consisting of bugfixes and application updates.
MX Linux is a popular and fast Linux distribution based on Debian stable release. It popularity growing every day. MX Linux comes with the XFCE desktop environment as standard. One of the best things about MX Linux is the variety of custom tools that have been built to make the life of the user easier.
MX Linux 19.4 brings the latest Debian 4.19 Linux Kernel for both 32 bit and 64-bit packages.
The AHS (Advanced Hardware Support) build now features the 5.10.24 kernel, as well as a new updated firmware and mesa package. The KDE ISO has also been updated, and being based on AHS, also has the 5.10.24 kernel and updated firmware and mesa packages.
Second update to deepin OS Twenty released on March 31 highlighted as Beautiful and Wonderful. This article is a collection to all of its download links, several countries' mirrors, torrents and checksums so you and friends can quickly grab it and test it out on your computer. Simply click a link between links below and enjoy. Happy downloading!
Ubuntu 21.04 final beta was officially released. Features images for the Ubuntu Desktop, Server, and Cloud products, and also the Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu Budgie, UbuntuKylin, Ubuntu MATE, Ubuntu Studio, and Xubuntu flavors.
Ubuntu 21.04 code name “Hirsute Hippo”. As a non-LTS release, it has only 9-month support.
Prefer the light mode appearance? Here’s how to change the system tray menu, date & time menu, notifications, and other top panel drop-down menus from dark to light in Ubuntu 21.04.
Different to previous Ubuntu releases, Ubuntu 21.04 now has top-panel menus in dark mode. It’s good for those prefer the dark themes. However, light mode fans need to change the Gnome Shell theme to get better experience.
Finally, Ubuntu 21.04 Beta, which goes with the codename ‘Hirsute Hippo’, is out and available for the masses. It is the latest interim release after Ubuntu 20.10 (Groovy Gorilla), released on October 22, 2020.
For users not familiar with the Ubuntu lifecycle and release cadence – Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu projects’ development) publishes new releases of Ubuntu regularly, enabling its users, the business community, and developers to plan for upgrades and access to more recent packages. Ubuntu version numbers are also based on the Year and Month (YY.MM) of release. For example, Ubuntu 20.10 was released in the year 2020 October (20.10). Ubuntu comes in two major releases...
The Ubuntu Studio team is pleased to announce the beta release of Ubuntu Studio 21.04, codenamed Hirsute Hippo.
While this beta is reasonably free of any showstopper DVD build or installer bugs, you may find some bugs within. This image is, however, reasonably representative of what you will find when Ubuntu Studio 20.10 is released on October 22, 2020.
Ubuntu 21.04 beta is available for public testing. It may not be the most exciting release, but it's interesting with the goodness of hippos.
By the end of this column, I hope to persuade you to at least try something else: a new type of [Internet] navigator called a private browser. This kind of browser, from less-known brands like DuckDuckGo and Brave, has emerged over the last three years. What stands out is that they minimize the data gathered about us by blocking the technologies used to track us.
I decided not to post this on April Fools Day since a lot of people were hoping the last post was a mistimed April Fools prank, and it wasn't. For one thing, I've never worked that hard on an April Fools joke, even the time when I changed the printer READY messages all over campus to say INSERT FIVE CENTS.
Anyway, the beta for the final TenFourFox Feature Parity Release, FPR32, is now available (downloads, hashes, release notes). This release adds another special preference dialogue for auto reader view, allowing you to automatically jump to reader view for subpages or all pages of domains you enter. I also updated Readability, the underlying Reader View library, to the current tip and also refreshed the ATSUI font blocklist. It will become final on or about April 20 parallel to Firefox 88.
I received lots of kind messages which I have been replying to. Many people appreciated that they could use their hardware for longer, even if they themselves are no longer using their Power Macs, and I even heard about a iMac G4 that is currently a TenFourFox-powered kiosk. I'm willing to bet there are actually a number of these systems hauled out of the closet easily serving such purposes by displaying a ticker or dashboard that can be tweaked to render quickly.
Planning to release EasyOS 2.6.2 Dunfell series soon, which will have this SM.
The guide is intended for Portuguese speaking users who wants to begin their first contact with LibreOffice and needs a manual that expounds all the software’s features and allows them to immediately start some sophisticated tasks.
The Getting Started Guide describes the important concepts that guided the development of LibreOffice and presents each of its modules: spreadsheets (Calc), presentations (Impress), vector drawings (Draw), texts (Writer), equations (Math), and databases (Base). In addition to these modules, there are several chapters describing important concepts common to all modules such as styles, printing, electronic signature, macros, exporting in various formats, redacting, and document classification.
I found this on the Internet and I consider it an important reflection. An important read. And a departing point for discussions.
Trying to Understand the Lynching of Stallman: for an Uncompromising Defense of Free/Libre Software
Some people taking part in the mob lynching RMS for sure hate his guts. Because he is “weird” and they think he is “creepy”, because he doesn't obey to any of the social conventions of our times, because he isn’t considerate towards them, etc. anti-conformists, anarchists and neuro-divergent people often face this kind of hate.
Some take part because they want to get the social credit of being on the side of “justice”.
Maybe they fear that such lynching could happen to them as well, so they hope they are buying their place in “paradise” by encouraging and fueling the mob. (Historical examples may actually prove otherwise…)But most importantly, what many of the lynchers hate is Richard’s uncompromising way of defending Free/Libre software, therefore his way of pointing out their own contradictions.
What Richard shows by his lifestyle and speaks loudly about -without filters- is the compromises that they are making by using, nurturing and promoting technology that is actually harmful to basic human rights and basic dignity.
Along with many in the free and open source software world, the Fedora Council was taken aback that the Free Software Foundation (FSF) has allowed Richard Stallman to rejoin their Board of Directors given his history of abuse and harassment. The Fedora Council does not normally involve itself with the governance of other projects. However, this is an exceptional case due to the FSF’s stewardship of the GPL family of licenses, which are critical for the work we do.
In keeping with our values, we will stop providing funding or attendance to any FSF-sponsored events and any events at which Richard Stallman is a featured speaker or exhibitor. This also applies to any organization where he has a leadership role.
RMS has been kicked off the GCC Steering Committee while FSF management team members are resigning
Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia
[...]
During grad school, he learned about Richard Stallman's Emacs Manifesto promoting free software and a sharing economy and had seen successes of the open-source movement. Believing that knowledge is our most important resource, he was as intrigued by the motivations of people to volunteer their time and knowledge as by the opportunity to reach massive populations.
Two common tasks that new programmers need to learn are how to read from and write to files stored on a computer. Some examples are when data and configuration files created in one application need to be read by another application, or when a third application needs to write info, warnings, and errors to a log file or to save its results for someone else to use.
Version control is an inseparable part of software developers' daily lives. It's hard to imagine any team developing software without using a version control tool. It's equally difficult to envision any developer who hasn't worked with (or at least heard of) Git. In the 2018 Stackoverflow Developer Survey, 87.2% of the 74,298 participants use Git for version control.
Linus Torvalds created git in 2005 for developing the Linux kernel. This article walks through the git stash command and explores some useful options for stashing changes. It assumes you have basic familiarity with Git concepts and a good understanding of the working tree, staging area, and associated commands.
At its most basic level, GitOps is a development approach that uses a code version control system, often Git, as the basis for defining and controlling a DevOps workflow and synchronization across systems.
While GCC 11 is seeing its first stable release in the form of GCC 11.1 in just a few short weeks, GCC 10.3 is imminent as the latest point release for those on the current GCC 10 stable series.
GCC 10.3 is a bug-fix release to last year's GCC 10 feature release. GCC 10.3 delivers on a half-year worth of bug fixes to this free software compiler. The GCC point releases tend to be mostly mundane but there are some back-ports worth mentioning like the AMD Zen 3 (znver3) tuning work and other hardware-specific target work but for the most part is largely just genuine compiler bug/regression fixes.
A license incompatibility in an extensively used open source library has led to breaking the popular web development framework Ruby on Rails (RoR).
A developer pointed out his GPLv2 licensed code was being improperly used inside a MIT licensed Ruby library called mimemagic. The issue was quickly sorted by re-releasing mimemagic as GPLv2. To prevent further misuse mimemagic’s developer also yanked the older MIT licensed releases of the library.
I've released version 1.1.6 of plocate with some minor fixes; changelog follows.
These opinions are derived from years of using and/or running SQL and other databases primarily as backends for web apps or web APIs. My experience is largely with these kinds of applications, which tend to have relatively predictable data access patterns, and care about low latency, high throughput, and some degree of high availability. I acknowledge that this is not the only purpose that SQL engines are used for, but it’s the one I have experience with and it’s a very common one these days.
I was able to do so because I was keenly aware of the specific characteristics of the neighborhood, because the house had changed price twice already (-7% first, and another -6% after that) and was unlikely to change the price again, and because it was very likely to be rented soon. I knew all of this thanks to a couple of predictive models and a few weekends of scraping real estate data.
This is how I did it.
Welcome to the April 2021 edition of the monthly Fortran newsletter. The newsletter comes out at the beginning of every month and details Fortran news from the previous month.
You can use custom React hooks to solve many different real-world problems in your React projects.
The life of the Surrealist painter and writer Leonora Carrington has, through time, shrunken into a myth. She was born in Lancashire, England, the daughter of a wealthy mill owner, and expelled from two Roman Catholic boarding schools as a child. In 1935, she was presented as a debutante at Buckingham Palace and, two years later, she met the Surrealist painter Max Ernst in London, and ran away with him to Paris. After the outbreak of the Second World War, Ernst was arrested by the French gendarmerie and imprisoned; Carrington fled to Spain, had a mental breakdown, and was sent to an asylum. She then escaped to America and embedded with Surrealist expats in New York, where, among other things, she took a shower fully clothed in the presence of Luis Buñuel and covered her feet with mustard in front of André Breton. She moved to Mexico City in 1942 and lived there for over half a century—dying in 2011 at the age of 94.
Plotted this way, the typical sketch of Carrington’s biography tends to service two rather emaciated themes: rebellion and mental illness. The trouble is that neither says much about her life or work.
My answer to Forrest Palmer:
Collapse is only inevitable by choice, and only if civilization is defined as being the present Western-Capitalist paradigm. There are no PHYSICAL limitations to fashioning a comfortable, equitable, intelligent, culturally rich, and ecologically harmonious (which is more than merely sustainable) world civilization. All the barriers are literally mental, and literally failures of personal moral character.
which comes to mind each time
I see them kiss a dog on the mouth.
The video software company Vimeo has named its slate of board of directors ahead of its planned spinoff from IAC.
Among the board members: Film directors Spike Lee (Da 5 Bloods) and George C. Wolfe (Ma Rainey's Black Bottom), who will join a board that also includes multiple IAC executives, technology investors, and finance executives. IAC CEO Joey Levin will be the chairman of Vimeo's board.
IAC announced its intention to spin off the Vimeo business late last year, valuing it at $2.75 billion. The company says it expects to complete the spinoff in the second quarter of 2021.
The need to be productive is ingrained in who we are as human beings on some level. We oftentimes have to do yoga and meditate and breathe deeply in order to consciously slow down our minds and bodies, but when we do it helps us focus and be more productive when the time comes. Instead of constantly moving and doing, we should take periods of thoughtful breaks... or veg out in front of the TV or a sunset. And sleep at night! Then, when we're ready again, we can tackle that to-do list. Rinse and repeat.
Check out all installments in the OppArt series.
On Wednesday, the Association for Computing Machinery, the world’s largest society of computing professionals, said Dr. Aho and Dr. Ullman would receive this year’s Turing Award for their work on the fundamental concepts that underpin computer programming languages. Given since 1966 and often called the Nobel Prize of computing, the Turing Award comes with a $1 million prize, which the two academics and longtime friends will split.
Dr. Aho and Dr. Ullman helped refine one of the key components of a computer: the “compiler” that takes in software programs written by humans and turns them into something computers can understand.
"This kind of legislation... introduces more problems and more politics," said one historian critic. "It is telling people how to think, not to think."
Republican state legislators in South Carolina on Wednesday introduced a bill that would require public school students to receive conservative historical education consistent with the "principles and concepts" of former President Donald Trump's 1776 Commission Report, a move that ignores the widespread rebuke of historians and progressive activists that accompanied its initial release.
Sebastian Lukács Gorka, the infamous Nazi pin-wearing former Trump “deputy assistant for strategy” turned right-wing talk radio host who hawks fish-oil pills, was appointed to a post at the National Security Education Board by former President Donald Trump. That wasn’t especially surprising. But it’s difficult to explain why, after 60-plus days in power, the Joe Biden White House has yet to toss Gorka out or replace him, although it has clearly attempted to hose out Trump leftovers.
However, of all the racist, sexist, classist things children are exposed to, decades-old children’s books seem pretty low on the list. Consider our de facto segregated public schools and neighborhoods, our crumbling de facto segregated public housing, our shocking rates of child poverty, ill health, and low literacy, and the shocking violence of everyday life to which so many children are exposed. Given these serious—and growing—problems, it’s not whataboutism to wonder why these old books get so much attention. Is it because attacking old books is easier than making the social and economic changes that would improve the actual lives of real children and their parents? It doesn’t cost money to take a few volumes out of the classroom. But to provide schools with real libraries, with professional librarians and adequate budgets—let alone school nurses, counselors, art teachers, music teachers, and all the other things children need—will require billions we collectively decided some decades ago to spend on tax cuts for the rich, unnecessary war planes, and ourselves.
Intel’s move also marks the start of a new era of public funding for chipmaking in America that could dangerously distort the market. The industry is lobbying for $50bn of federal support over the next decade, which it says is necessary to spur construction of 19 new fabs, requiring $280bn of private investment. Mr Gelsinger’s bet puts Intel in the vanguard of America’s mission to strengthen its position as a semiconductor superpower. But if it does not play its cards carefully, it could be the first Silicon Valley firm to suffer the curse of being a national champion.
[ Orac note: Orac regrets that there hasn’t been a new bit of Insolence, either Respectful or not-so-Respectful, in nearly a week. The universe got in the way. Fortunately, to get started again, Orac has found a tasty bit of woo called COVID Light Therapy. He also hopes to get back on a more regular posting schedule (or even more frequent than what has been the norm the last few weeks) beginning on Monday, right after the Easter holiday.]
The U.S. belief in its exceptionalism isolates it from the rest of the world on the issue of vaccines. Firstly, its self-declared goal is to reserve its vaccine supply for itself till it has vaccinated its population and only then provide vaccines to other countries. This is similar to the famous—or infamous—analogy of putting on oxygen masks in the depressurized cabin of an aircraft: “You put on your own first, and then… help others.” So exports of the mRNA vaccines—produced by Moderna and Pfizer—from the U.S. to other countries for the next six months are unlikely, except for some amounts going to its close European allies and Israel. Secondly, the ultra-cold chain requirement and the high cost of the vaccine precludes these mRNA vaccines from being used by most of Asia, Africa and even Latin America. Thirdly, the U.S. and other rich countries refuse to consider allowing dilution of the profits that companies obtain through their intellectual property rights over the vaccines. Even if vaccine production is idling in many countries, they cannot produce the successful vaccines, as proprietary knowledge to produce these vaccines will not be shared by the companies.
Vaccine production is not just about patents but also other forms of intellectual property, such as trade secrets. Reverse engineering the whole vaccine technology during a raging epidemic is not a worthwhile option. That is why South Africa and India, supported by a large number of countries and civil society groups, have asked for a temporary waiver of certain TRIPS obligations on copyrights and related rights, industrial designs and patents during the COVID-19 pandemic. Predictably, it has been opposed by the rich countries: the U.S., the UK, the European Union, Japan and Australia. Profits for Big Pharma trump human liveseven during a global epidemic.
As the United States seeks to end its coronavirus crisis and outrun variants, public health officials recognize it is essential for as many people as possible to get vaccinated. Making that easy is a major part of the plan. According to the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, the vaccine is supposed to be free to everyone, whether they’re insured or not. And the Biden administration has directed all vaccination sites to accept undocumented immigrants as a “ moral and public health imperative.” But this promise has not always been fulfilled, ProPublica has found.
At vaccination sites around the country, people have been turned away after being asked for documentation that they shouldn’t need to provide, or asked to pay when they owed nothing.
"It turns out that people are actually in poverty mostly because they are not paid enough for their work to be able to afford rent, food, and other necessities of living."
"So many people over decades have told me that the causes of—and solutions to—hunger need to be studied endlessly before we can determine what needs to be done. So, I was gobsmacked to learn that ending hunger was really as simple as making sure hungry people could afford enough food. Who knew?"
But the labor of caregiving — as essential as it is — is severely undervalued and carried out by some of the nation’s most vulnerable workers.
Ninety-two percent of domestic workers are women, and more than half are women of color. The typical domestic worker is paid just $12 per hour, including overtime, tips, and commissions — nearly 40 percent less than the typical non-domestic worker.
Brazil now accounts for about a quarter of all COVID-19 daily deaths worldwide, more than any other country, and its overall death toll of more than 310,000 is surpassed only by the United States. Far-right Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro faces intense pressure to abandon his opposition to vaccinations, lockdowns and mask-wearing. Dr. Miguel Nicolelis, professor of neurobiology at Duke University and former coordinator of the largest scientific COVID-19 task force in Brazil, says Bolsonaro “has played on the side of the virus” by opposing any efforts to control the outbreak. “Since the beginning, he downplayed the severity of the pandemic.”
Mumbai Police on Wednesday booked unidentified persons for allegedly launching a "malware attack" on the information technology system of the Maharashtra Industrial Development Corporation (MIDC) which had impacted its database servers, police said. The "ransomware attack" was detected on March 21 after the MIDC's applications went down at 02300 hrs, as per the complaint.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (busybox, ldb, openjpeg2, spamassassin, and underscore), Fedora (kernel, kernel-headers, and kernel-tools), Mageia (privoxy, python and python3, and rpm), openSUSE (ovmf, tar, and tomcat), SUSE (curl, firefox, OpenIPMI, and tomcat), and Ubuntu (openexr).
For those wondering about the state of speculative execution vulnerabilities and what software-based mitigations are required for Intel's new Rocket Lake processors, here is the rundown along with benchmarks when disabling those present Linux kernel mitigations.
The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 172. This version includes the following changes:
* If zipinfo(1) shows a difference but we cannot uncover a difference within the underlying .zip or .apk file, add a comment and show the binary comparison. (Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#246) * Make "error extracting X, falling back to binary comparison E" error message nicer.
Never let a good crisis go to waste. The federal government is always on the lookout for expansion opportunities and a bad actor known colloquially as "Current Events" keeps handing the government what it's looking for.
Where initially employees working at home might be asked to leave on their webcams so that supervisors could check on what they were up to, or to log every absence from their home desk, there is now a move to use AI. Facial recognition is applied to check who is at the desk, and activity is monitored for “breaches” such as unauthorized absence, or the use of a mobile phone. If the AI detects a breach, it takes a photo and sends it to a human manager for further action.
The Supreme Court has unanimously decided that Facebook text message alerts don’t violate laws against unwanted auto-dialed calls. The court ruled that a lower court defined illegal “robocalls” too broadly and that the term should only apply to systems that generate lists of numbers and call them indiscriminately, not a system that simply stores numbers and automatically calls them.
The lawsuit involves text messages that notify Facebook users of an attempted login. Its plaintiff, Noah Duguid, sued after receiving unwanted, erroneous notifications despite not having a Facebook account. Duguid argued that Facebook was violating the 1991 Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA). An appeals court agreed, but the Supreme Court interpreted the law’s definitions differently.
Given this context, the general thrust of Admiral Faller’s testimony is unsurprising: the US is under attack, and SOUTHCOM is defending it valiantly, but will need even more money to keep doing so. “The very democratic principles and values that bind us together,” he argues in the written version of his testimony, “are being actively undermined by violent transnational criminal organizations (TCOs) and [China] and Russia.” Iran also aims to “take advantage of the nascent, fragile democracies in the region and look to exploit the region’s resources and proximity to the United States.” Finally, “malign regional actors” are “opening the door” to foreign influence and criminal organizations. However, Faller offered little evidence that these threats are really as dire as he made them out to be.
Despite describing Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela as “malign regional actors,” and Iran as one of several “threats,” these four countries take up just 2 of the 22 pages in Faller’s written testimony, filled mostly with details like an Iranian-run Spanish-language news channel in the region (the US runs one as well). Of the seven sentences in the Venezuela section, six describe the country’s humanitarian crisis and don’t even attempt to portray it as a threat. Though US-Venezuela sanctions policy relies on the White House officially describing Venezuela as “an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States,” SOUTHCOM apparently has little to share about how this could be true.
Two tidbits of note regarding the United States and its well-fed war machine, the first regarding a familiar problem child: the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. Coming in at an overall and still-growing project cost of $1.7 trillion, the F-35 was intended to be a kind of flying junk drawer, filled to bursting with neat technological tools to solve any dilemma a hypersonic weapon of mass destruction may encounter.
As retaliation against Democrats taking control of Congress and the White House in the 2020 election, lawmakers in 47 states are filing record-shattering numbers of bills to restrict voting access across the country. Since mid-February, the Brennan Center for Justice reported on Thursday, lawmakers have introduced 108 bills restricting voting on top of the 253 bills they had already filed at the Brennan Center’s last count.
The war in eastern Ukraine, which is now in its seventh year, saw its deadliest incident of 2021 last Friday when four Ukrainian servicemen were killed. This latest escalation comes amid a gradual erosion of the ceasefire that’s been in place since last July. Both Kyiv and Moscow have acknowledged that tensions are on the rise in the region, though the Kremlin continues to shift any and all blame on to Ukraine. Meanwhile, Kyiv and Washington’s top brass are sounding the alarm over the apparent build up of Russian troops along Ukraine’s borders. Moscow maintains that these are routine military movements that “should not concern anyone.”
Imagine what could be achieved if just a portion of the money spent on military expenditures were pooled into a global fund, and redirected towards ending hunger and massively investing in public health systems.
If nations had a referendum, asking the public if they want their taxes to go to military weapons that are more efficient in killing than the ones we currently have, or if they would prefer the money to be invested in medical care, social services, education and other critical public needs, what would the response be?€
Could the U.S. and China face an unintended blowup in the western Pacific in the Biden years?
The leaders of China and the United States certainly don't seek a war with each another. Both the Biden administration and the regime of Chinese President Xi Jinping view economic renewal and growth as their principal objectives. Both are aware that any conflict arising between them, even if restricted to Asia and conducted with non-nuclear weapons—no sure bet—would produce catastrophic regional damage and potentially bring the global economy to its knees. So, neither group has any intention of deliberately starting a war. Each, however, is fully determined to prove its willingness to go to war if provoked and so is willing to play a game of military chicken in the waters (and air space) off China's coast. In the process, each is making the outbreak of war, however unintended, increasingly likely.
Militarism is embedded in the infrastructure of the nation state.
Will Joe Biden end the endless wars or won't he?
Joe Biden entered the White House with some inspiring yet contradictory positions on immigration and Central America. He promised to reverse Donald Trump’s draconian anti-immigrant policies while, through his “ Plan to Build Security and Prosperity in Partnership with the People of Central America,” restoring “U.S. leadership in the region” that he claimed Trump had abandoned. For Central Americans, though, such “leadership” has an ominous ring.
Although the second half of his plan’s name does, in fact, echo that of left-wing, grassroots organizations like the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador ( CISPES), its content highlights a version of security and prosperity in that region that’s more Cold War–like than CISPES-like. Instead of solidarity (or even partnership) with Central America, Biden’s plan actually promotes an old economic development model that has long benefited US corporations. It also aims to impose a distinctly militarized version of “security” on the people of that region. In addition, it focuses on enlisting Central American governments and, in particular, their militaries to contain migration through the use of repression.
Jurors in Minneapolis heard another series of dramatic testimonies during the third day of the murder trial of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin for killing George Floyd. A teenage clerk named Christopher Martin at the Minneapolis convenience store outside which Floyd was killed told jurors during questioning that he felt guilty for reporting the fake $20 bill to his manager, who called the police on George Floyd. Jurors also heard a recording of Charles McMillian, who witnessed George Floyd’s death last year, approaching Chauvin to say, “I don’t respect what you did,” as Floyd’s body was being loaded into an ambulance. We air dramatic excerpts from witness testimony on the third day of the murder trial in Minneapolis.
Jurors in Minneapolis heard another series of dramatic testimonies during the third day of the murder trial of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin for killing George Floyd. A teenage clerk named Christopher Martin at the Minneapolis convenience store outside which Floyd was killed told jurors during questioning that he felt guilty for reporting the fake $20 bill to his manager, who called the police on George Floyd. Jurors also heard a recording of Charles McMillian, who witnessed George Floyd’s death last year, approaching Chauvin to say, “I don’t respect what you did,” as Floyd’s body was being loaded into an ambulance. We air dramatic excerpts from witness testimony on the third day of the murder trial in Minneapolis.
Jurors in Minneapolis have heard another day of testimony in the trial of former police officer Derek Chauvin, who is on trial for killing George Floyd last May by kneeling on his neck for nine minutes and 29 seconds. One of the most dramatic moments of the trial on Wednesday occurred when Charles McMillian, who witnessed George Floyd’s death last year, rewatched a police bodycam clip of George Floyd begging for his life after he was handcuffed by police. McMillian broke down in tears and was unable to speak for several moments. Jurors were also shown police bodycam footage of the bystanders who attempted to save George Floyd’s life as officer Chauvin kneeled on his neck.
After the third dramatic day in the murder trial of former police officer Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis, we speak with Mel Reeves, who has been following the case as community editor at the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder, the oldest Black-owned newspaper in the state. Reeves discusses the testimony heard so far, and juror selection, and says more is at stake than just what happened to George Floyd. “It is political. The system of policing is on trial,” says Reeves. “You can see now how the police operate when they run into Black people.” We also speak with Rashad Robinson, president of Color of Change, who says the defense is following a familiar strategy of blaming the victim. “This is what they do in trial after trial, is work to put the community and work to put the victim on trial, to make the victim someone who deserved to be killed.” Robinson also describes the influence of police unions on preventing police accountability.
Hale disclosed documents shedding new light on the U.S.’s secret remote assassination program, including how the Obama administration decided who to place on its “kill lists,” internal criticisms of the program, and accounts of civilian casualties.
More than a week after jihadis staged a deadly raid on the northern Mozambican town of Palma, survivors streamed Thursday into the port of Pemba, the capital of gas-rich Cabo Delgado province.
Scores of relatives huddled outside the port, straining to spot family members disembarking from boats arriving from Palma, about 200 kilometers (120 miles) away.
The study finds 120 low- and middle-income economies will owe more than $1 trillion in debt service payments this year. It reports 72 countries, classified as vulnerable, are responsible for more than half that accumulated debt.
UNDP administrator Achim Steiner says these 72 countries are facing sovereignty or liquidity challenges that will crowd out important socioeconomic expenditures crucial for the well-being of their people.
The UK faces growing pressure not to expand Heathrow airport but to respect the 1.5€°C limit agreed on global heating.
In a significant challenge to the United Kingdom’s Supreme Court, several leading climate scientists have said a recent ruling it made on the expansion of London’s main airport, Heathrow, will cause serious damage to the global environment, urging it to rule that the government must respect the 1.5C limit internationally agreed to rein in€ global€ heating.
"The Federal Reserve must do its job, steering the economy away from disaster by ending fossil fuel finance."
Dozens of green groups and 25 progressives in Congress sent a pair of letters Thursday to Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell calling for much bolder efforts to protect U.S. financial institutions and the economy from risks posed by the climate crisis.
The world needs "to stop focusing on dates and numbers" and recognize that taking immediate action is what must be done, says the 18-year-old Swedish climate leader.
Global climate leader Greta Thunberg in a new interview published Wednesday expressed frustration with inadequate future climate targets by world governments that fail to address the urgency of the climate crisis.
"As long as countries do not put the right energy policies in place, the economic rebound will see emissions significantly increase in 2021. We will make the job of reaching net zero harder."
For the past year, climate campaigners and experts have urged heads of state around the world to "build back better" in the wake of the economic devastation wrought by the Covid-19 pandemic.
"Climate chaos is here. We cannot wait."
A group of Indigenous youth activists rallied in the nation's capital on Thursday to demand President Joe Biden reject fossil fuel pipelines including Line 3 and the Dakota Access Pipeline.
Blinken told Dana Bash on CNN that the U.S. must work with its allies—a jab at Trump who supposedly didn’t do so. Especially its closest NATO allies, with whom it must coordinate to “confront China” as Beijing’s GDP comes to equal the U.S. figure. He added that the Nord Stream II project was just one issue on which allies can disagree. It is a virtual admission of defeat.
Why does the U.S. oppose Nord Stream II? It was opposed by the Trump administration too. Trump, whose soul (Marx would say) is the “soul of capital,” argued that the Germans should buy (more expensive) U.S. gas to help pay back America after ripping off its taxpayers for decades. Blinken’s approach is different. He trashes the agreement because it helps the sanctions-strapped Russia by expanding the market for its prime trade good, and reduces German dependence on U.S. for its energy supply.
Bighorn sheep acquired their name for the large circular horns of the mature rams. They are strongly associated with mountain terrain, particularly steep hills and cliffs, which protect them against predators. They graze upon grasses and other plants. In general, bighorns are associated with drier parts of the West where they can obtain their forage, even in winter.
Bighorns tend to be found in regions with limited snowfall like deserts or places where snow does not accumulate like windy ridges. For instance, bighorn sheep in Montana’s Absaroka Beartooth Wilderness and Wyoming’s Absaroka Range, and the Wind River Range all winter at 10,000-12,000 feet. At these elevations, they survive on south-facing slopes and wind-blown mountain tops.
The Trump administration’s vastly inflated timber production targets still drive U.S. Forest Service projects, which include adding and opening more logging roads in areas crucial for grizzly bear recovery. The targets also include logging in Roadless Areas and places where trees are hundreds of years old. In fact, the agency plans to cut whole swaths of forests to create “openings” that look pretty much like clearcuts from decades long past.
Opening abandoned roads in Roadless Areas undermines the very purposes of their protection, which includes providing strongholds for threatened and endangered species. Roadless Areas near and along the Idaho/Montana border provide essential stepping stones for wandering grizzlies leaving the official recovery zones within the Cabinet-Yaak and North Continental Divide Ecosystems. Without safe passage, grizzly bears cannot find new territory or new mates, furthering genetic isolation. Instead of improving Roadless Areas and increasing habitat security for grizzlies, the Forest Service continues to push damaging projects that impede connectivity and recovery.
What's happening: In 2017, Mt. Sinai Medical School epidemiologist Shanna Swan co-authored a sweeping meta-analysis that came to a startling conclusion: Total sperm count in the Western world had fallen 59% between 1973 and 2011.
Together with falling testosterone levels and growing rates of testicular cancer and erectile dysfunction, that translated into a 1% increase per year of adverse reproductive changes for men, according to Swan.
The system is working splendidly for taxing workers. For taxing wealth gains, not so much.
University of Southern California law professor Ed McCaffery uses three words to describe how America’s wealthy avoid income tax: Buy – Borrow – Die.
"Governments need to provide everyone with a fair shot—enabling all individuals to reach their potential."
If governments don't close the gap between society's richest and poorest members—which was growing before and has exploded during the coronavirus crisis—by€ raising wages for low-income workers, taxing wealthy households, and using the increased revenue to improve social welfare, they should expect diminished trust in government and increased social polarization and unrest.
President Joe Biden is exploring the possibility of canceling student loan debt of up to $50,000 per debtor, his chief of staff Ron Klain said on Thursday. Biden has asked Education Secretary Miguel Cardona to compile a memo detailing how he could legally do so as president.
The president has signaled he supports forgiving $10,000 per borrower but Democrats and activists are pressing him to make it $50,000 or more.
As a key White House official revealed Thursday that President Joe Biden has requested information on his authority to cancel federal student loan debt, progressive lawmakers and activists doubled down on their calls for the administration to go far beyond the $10,000 per borrower plan that he has previously floated.
"President Biden's $100 billion infrastructure plan acknowledges an important fact about broadband today—it is an essential service, like water and electricity, and our public policy should reflect that fact."
President Joe Biden's newly unveiled infrastructure plan includes $100 billion to boost broadband access across the nation—a provision that drew strong praise from digital rights advocates.
The Kentucky Republican vowed to fight the president's proposal "every step of the way."
Objecting specifically to the plan's call for a corporate tax increase, Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said Thursday that no members of his caucus will support President Joe Biden's newly released infrastructure package.
As he prepared to take office, President Joe Biden called out corporate corruption as a threat to national security. “I will lead efforts internationally to bring transparency to the global financial system, go after illicit tax havens, seize stolen assets, and make it more difficult for leaders who steal from their people to hide behind anonymous front companies,” Biden wrote in Foreign Policy.
But if he intends to crack down, he should start with a long look in the mirror. The United States has now become the global center for money hiding and illicit wealth storage. And Delaware, the state Biden represented in the Senate for 36 years, is the go-to destination for plutocratic tax dodgers and criminal money launderers.
President Biden’s $2 trillion American Jobs Plan proposes a credible down payment on meeting the nation’s long-neglected physical infrastructure needs—$621 billion for roads, bridges, public transit, rail, ports, waterways, airports, and electric vehicles—and it nods in some meaningful ways to the climate concerns raised by campaigners for a more ambitious Green New Deal. The plan, which the president outlined Wednesday, also seeks vital investments in clean drinking water, housing, and high-speed broadband Internet services. But the boldest component of the president’s agenda is its $400 billion commitment to fund the care infrastructure of a just and humane society.
“This plan is historic, transformative,” says Ai-jen Poo, the cofounder and executive director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, who for years has been working to convince policy-makers that improving the circumstance of caregivers for the elderly and people with disabilities must be seen as a critical infrastructure investment.
"That may be an eye-popping figure for some people," said the New York Democrat, but "we're the wealthiest nation in the history of the world."
Members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus made clear Wednesday that while President Joe Biden's roughly $2.3 trillion infrastructure proposal is a welcome start, they believe the final package must be far more ambitious if it is to truly transform America's fossil fuel-dominated energy system and bring the country into line with crucial climate targets.
"Unless we tax the world's billionaires, the legacy of the pandemic will be accelerated concentrations of wealth and power."
A new analysis out Thursday morning shows that the world's 2,365 billionaires have seen their collective fortunes grow by $4 trillion during the coronavirus pandemic, a staggering windfall that prompted demands for a global wealth tax aimed at curbing inequality and funding key priorities such as the lagging international vaccination effort.
The cost of vaccinating the world is estimated at $141.2 billion.
As over 2.8 million people have died globally from Covid-19 in the past year, the wealth of the world’s billionaires has surged.
Isn’t there a better way?
A Ferrari is surely a wonderful sports car, but let's be honest: Most of us couldn't afford the day-to-day maintenance, let alone the sticker price, and these beautiful creatures are hard to drive on America's pothole-plagued streets, and a massive pain in the butt to repair when they break down. So you can imagine the raised eyebrows earlier this year when a top U.S. Air Force general compared the F-35 Lightning II stealth fighter jet—decades and hundreds of billions of dollars into a lifetime that will cost taxpayers $1.7 trillion—to that Italian dream machine.
A right-wing extremist ideology has taken hold of the Republican Party, and the United States has become a locus for the revitalization of white supremacy, the normalization of state violence, the reproduction of the carceral state and staggering forms of economic inequality.
"We have a president who is trying to pressure the armed forces into serving his coup-mongering, authoritarian delusions," said one elder statesman as lawmakers pursue impeachment.€
Beset by political, public health, and environmental crises amid an emerging progressive consensus for his impeachment, historic Cabinet turnover, and soaring Covid-19 deaths, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro on Thursday faced a chorus of calls to resign.€
"It's clear that the Republican Party believes the only way they can win future elections is to keep millions of Americans from casting their ballots."
As Republican lawmakers in nearly every U.S. state introduce hundreds of voting restriction bills, Texas took center stage Thursday after its Senate approved a measure€ opponents say disproportionately targets minority and urban voters by limiting when, where, and how people can vote.
"Democrats have a mandate from voters to move forward on their own... Delay carries enormous risk, just as it did in 2009."
With dozens of Republican-authored voter suppression measures advancing through state legislatures across the country, progressive advocacy groups are imploring Democratic lawmakers to stop dragging their feet and immediately abolish the Senate rule that is obstructing an ambitious plan to shield the franchise from the GOP's onslaught.
This week, both Coca-Cola and Delta Air Lines released statements condemning the recently passed Georgia law that makes it harder to vote and potentially suppresses votes that are cast. The strongly worded statements released by the companies gained them headline after headline about their supposed opposition to the bill.
When we first reported that handing a slice of pizza to a voter waiting three hours in a line is now a felony in Georgia, other media quickly picked up the story, highlighting the cruelty of Georgia Republicans making predominantly Black voters suffer from hunger and thirst in lines the GOP deliberately made long by closing polling stations in majority-Black precincts.
Covering the Rev. Raphael Warnock’s and Jon Ossoff’s Georgia Senate runoff campaigns early this year, I witnessed Democrats running not two but three races, the third being the frantic, multifront effort to beat back GOP attempts at voter suppression. Out-of-state conservative activists tried (and mostly failed) to disqualify hundreds of thousands of absentee ballot requests. Officials in a majority of Georgia counties also tried (and mostly failed) to erect new voting obstacles. Democrats like Atlanta Representative Bee Nguyen were running around helping to fix absentee ballots with problems (like a signature in the wrong place).
And Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who’d otherwise mostly acted fairly from November through January, insisted he’d prosecute anyone who provided food or drink to voters on long lines (an activity known as “line warming”) on that cold January election day, under state rules prohibiting offering “gifts or bribes” to voters. “I’ve got tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of pizza and scarves and hot chocolate and water,” New Georgia Project director Nsé Ufot told me. “We are going to get those things to Georgians—we’re preparing for a showdown.”
The Peoples DA Coalition, made up of over 30 local justice organizations, worked for over a year to “create a District Attorney’s office that is ethical, equitable, compassionate, and accountable to all of its constituents so that we may end the era of mass incarceration in New Orleans.”
Immediately upon taking office, New Orleans District Attorney Jason Williams showed why he is on the way to becoming a progressive prosecutor. He established a vigorous civil rights unit to review questionable convictions, began to reduce the instances where the prosecution required cash bail, quit using Louisiana’s habitual offender law, mostly stopped prosecuting juveniles in adult court, dismissed hundreds of low level drug cases, and granted new trials to dozens of people convicted by non-unanimous juries. More changes are coming.
The bill bans platforms from censoring a “user, a user’s expression, or a user’s ability to receive the expression of another person” based on their viewpoints or geographical location, according to its text. The measure also requires social media companies to publicly disclose information regarding their practices around how they target content for users, promote content and services and moderate content.
The Texas Senate early Thursday approved a bill that would prohibit social media companies with at least 100 million monthly users from blocking, banning, demonetizing or discriminating against a user based on their viewpoint or their location within Texas.
Senate Bill 12, sponsored by Republican state Sen. Bryan Hughes of Mineola, was approved after 2 a.m. Thursday. The measure, which would apply to Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, among others, would also require the companies to disclose their content moderation policies, publish regular reports about the content they remove and create an appeals process for user content that has been taken down.
An interview on Facebook of former President Donald Trump, conducted by his daughter-in-law Lara Trump (who also posted the video to her page), was removed by the company for promoting the “voice” of the former chief executive, who was banned from the social media site earlier this year over fears of him inciting violence.
Inconsistent Policies Harm Speech in Ways That Are Exacerbated the Further Along the Stack You Go
Facebook has been swearing for many months that it will do a better job of rooting out “dangerous content.” But a new report from the Tech Transparency Project demonstrates that it is failing miserably. Last August, Facebook banned some militant groups and other extremist movements tied to violence in the U.S. Now, Facebook is still helping expand the groups’ reach by automatically creating new pages for them and directing people who “like” certain militia pages to check out others, effectively helping these movements recruit and radicalize new members.€
These groups often share images of guns and violence, misinformation about the pandemic, and racist memes targeting Black Lives Matter activists. QAnon pages also remain live despite Facebook’s claim to have taken them down last fall. Meanwhile, a new leak of Facebook’s internal guidelines shows how much it struggles to come up with consistent rules for users living under repressive governments. For example, the company forbids “dangerous organizations”—including, but not limited to, designated terrorist organizations—but allows users in certain countries to praise mass murderers and “violent non-state actors” (designated militant groups engaged that do not target civilians) unless their posts contain an explicit reference to violence.
A federal judge on Tuesday voided a Trump campaign non-disclosure agreement, ruling that it was too vague to be legally enforceable.
U.S. District Court Judge Paul Gardephe, a George W. Bush appointee, ruled that the Trump campaign cannot enforce its overly broad NDA against Jessica Denson, a former Hispanic outreach director who was ordered to pay nearly $50,000 after she filed a sexual discrimination and harassment lawsuit against the campaign in 2017 and criticized Trump on social media. Though the ruling only applies to Denson, her attorneys argued that it invalidates every campaign NDA.
Last month it did. Since then, a population that had grown accustomed to some democratic norms has faced the horror of isolation (limited internet has been restored, but Facebook, Twitter, and other sites have been blocked) and persecution. What began with a crackdown on peaceful protests has led to a campaign of terror in which the military has begun to systemically massacre its own people, including children as young as five. “We are being brutalized,” says Darko C., an indie-rock musician whose work bringing out the vote in the past election has now forced him into hiding in Myanmar. When Darko (not his real name, but the one under which he performs) reached out to Rolling Stone, he was desperate for the world to know what was really happening in his country. “I want people to be aware of this, because I believe in people. I don’t believe in institutions or organizations, but I have hope in people to intervene in this madness.”
"On the statues, what we were looking at was whether we had memorials and statues where the language on them was so abusive that there was no way of putting it in context. I'm very kind to say that we've reviewed all the statutes, for instance, here at Canterbury, and that there was nothing that needed changing. Around the Church of England, I think there's been one or two that were really terrible. They'll go into a museum and there'll be an explanation on why we now disagree with this person who 200 years ago had a statue put up there. But we cannot cancel history. We cannot cancel differences of opinion. Particularly in universities, it seems to me very, very dangerous because you start with cancelling some views that you dislike and very quickly, you are cancelling everyone who disagrees. It's a very dangerous process.”
About the case of Batley Grammar School and the protests after a teacher showed prophet Mohammad’s cartoons in his classroom…what do you think about the way things have been handled? Is there a conflict about freedom of speech?
“I don’t know the details about that case. In this country we abolished the blasphemy laws not long ago, in the past twenty years, and the Church of England was one of those who supported the abolition of the blasphemy laws. Because we feel that blasphemy is, I believe, a morally bad choice, in the sense of denigrating other people’s faith in a bad way, but it should not be a criminal matter.”
“Yes, there can be a conflict in-between and in some parts of the world, you have to be very careful what you say because people feel very, very strongly. But in this country, I think, we have to hold on to freedom of speech. We have very good relationships with Muslim leaders across the country. Many of them are very upset by the cartoons that were shown but also many of them have said no violence, no threats, make it clear that you disagree strongly, but no violence, no threats. In other words, exercise your freedom of speech, but don't prevent other people exercising their freedom of speech.”
“I think shutting down freedom of expression of religion, which is happening in various parts of Europe at the moment, is entirely wrong as well. We have to speak freely. I'm much more towards the US end of the spectrum on freedom of speech than I am elsewhere towards the other end. I think we have to be open to hearing things we really dislike. There was someone the other day who was saying “the Archbishop of Canterbury who believes in fairies at the bottom of the garden”. Well, obviously, I entirely disagree with his assessment of the Christian faith, or the person of Jesus Christ. But I'm very glad that he feels able to say that, and I don't want to threaten them for saying it. I don't think he should be threatened.”
Qualified immunity is pure judicial cancer. This fact cannot be ignored. What began as a limited defense for decisions made in the heat of the moment has become the de facto response to civil rights lawsuits. The Supreme Court -- which conjured this new Section 1983 ejection seat out of thin air -- has only made it worse over the past few decades.
Homeless people in Russia have their own terms for things — people who aren’t homeless are “domestic” people, while they themselves are “street” people, or simply “bums.” Meduza’s special correspondent Irina Kravtsova spent several days with homeless people in St. Petersburg, asking them the most obvious questions “domestic” people usually have: Why can’t they just update their documents, get a job, and rent a place to live? According to Igor Antonov, who’s worked with homeless people for years, questions like these underestimate the extent to which life on the street can transform a person. When it comes down to it, returning to a “normal life” is easier said than done.
Confronted with the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (JDA), published on March 25, 2021, it is tempting—especially for Jews at this time of year—to ask: Why is this definition of anti-Semitism different from all other definitions?
Actually, the question to ask is more specific. In 2016, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), an intergovernmental body, produced its “working definition of antisemitism.” The IHRA definition has been endorsed by the secretary general of the United Nations and adopted by governments, political parties, public agencies, universities, and other bodies (including numerous Jewish organizations) in countries around the world. The European Parliament has called upon all member states to adopt the definition. The JDA is written, in large part, as a response to the IHRA text. So, a better question might be: How is the JDA different and why does the difference matter? In short: Why the JDA?
“The Employee Free Choice Act will pass by the end of the year” – Vice President Biden at Pittsburg Labor Day rally, 2009
If President Biden and his Democrat-controlled Congress pass the Protect the Right to Organize Act (PRO Act), Biden could confidently brag about being the most pro-labor President since FDR.
Although the second half of his plan’s name does, in fact, echo that of left-wing, grassroots organizations like the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador ( CISPES), its content highlights a version of security and prosperity in that region that’s more Cold War-like than CISPES-like. Instead of solidarity (or even partnership) with Central America, Biden’s plan actually promotes an old economic development model that has long benefited U.S. corporations. It also aims to impose a distinctly militarized version of “security” on the people of that region. In addition, it focuses on enlisting Central American governments and, in particular, their militaries to contain migration through the use of repression.
Linking Immigration and Foreign Policy
It’s an old story. The US government consistently avoids any kind of honest analysis of issues like this. Because we’re top o’ the world and want to stay that way, the rule is, concede nothing. Plus, anything in today’s virtual and legalistic world can be made so damned confusing that getting anything done become impossible. Thus, it becomes a military problem. Last Friday, Bill Maher had a libertarian editor of€ Reason€ magazine on his show. Maher made a bald statement that the issue with refugees at our southern border had to do with one thing: “Drugs.” The libertarian interrupted him: “No! It’s€ The Drug War!” A famous weed smoker, Maher agreed wholeheartedly.
Here’s the bottom line: One cannot make sense out of the influx of poor refugees north to the US border without significantly factoring in imperial/military involvement between the United States and the tiny, poor nations of Central America. It all started with the notorious 1954 coup in Guatemala, during which the CIA did a number of things to bamboozle the citizens of Guatemala in a classic coup that removed a duly-elected progressive reform president, replacing him with a ruthless military general. The government ushered in quickly established itself as a cruel military machine that has ruled Guatemala ever since with an iron hand covered by a weak fig leaf of democracy. In the 1970s and ‘80s, hundreds of thousands of Mayan Guatemalan peasants were slaughtered in upland Guatemala; for the victims, it was a€ holocaust€ that led to the creation of a peasant liberation army.
EFF had filed an amicus brief in the case, Frasier v. Evans, asking the court to affirm the existence of the right to record the police in the states under the court’s jurisdiction (Colorado, Oklahoma, Kansas, New Mexico, Wyoming, and Utah, and those portions of the Yellowstone National Park extending into Montana and Idaho).
Frasier had used his tablet to record Denver police officers engaging in what he believed to be excessive force: the officers repeatedly punched a suspect in the face to get drugs out of his mouth as his head bounced off the pavement, and they tripped his pregnant girlfriend. Frasier filed a First Amendment retaliation claim against the officers for detaining and questioning him, searching his tablet, and attempting to delete the video.
In addition to refusing to affirmatively recognize the First Amendment right to record the police, the Tenth Circuit held that even if such a right did exist today, the police officers who sought to intimidate Frasier could not be held liable for violating his constitutional right because they had “ qualified immunity”—that is, because the right to record the police wasn’t clearly established in the Tenth Circuit at the time of the incident in August 2014.
The Virginia Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that the city of Charlottesville can legally remove statues of Confederate Civil War generals, overturning a lower court ruling.
The startling images have appeared in one news report after another: children packed into overcrowded, unsafe Border Patrol facilities because there was nowhere else to put them. As of March 30, over 5,000 children were being held in Border Patrol custody, including more than 600 in each of two units in Donna, Texas, that were supposed to hold no more than 32 apiece under COVID-19 protocols.
But as the Biden administration’s Department of Health and Human Services scrambles to open “emergency” temporary facilities at military bases, work camps and convention centers to house up to 15,000 additional children, it’s cutting corners on health and safety standards, which raises new concerns about its ability to protect children, according to congressional sources and legal observers. And even its permanent shelter network includes some facilities whose grants were renewed this year despite a record of complaints about the physical or sexual abuse of children.
The repeal of a law that shielded New York police misconduct records from public view has prompted a delayed deluge of records -- one temporarily slowed by the expected litigation from police and police reps who wished to put this transparency genie back in the bottle.
Moscow prosecutors are looking into Alexey Navalny’s non-profit, the Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK), for alleged extremist activity. This was reported by FBK director Ivan Zhdanov during live broadcast on the YouTube channel “Navalny Live” on Thursday, April 1.
Since he’s been imprisoned in Pokrov’s Penal Colony No. 2, Russian opposition politician Alexey Navalny has lost eight kilograms (about 17.6 pounds). This was reported on his Telegram channel on Thursday, April 1 — the day after he declared a hunger strike.€ €
Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov has declined to comment on opposition politician Alexey Navalny going on hunger strike to protest the conditions of his imprisonment.
Rostov-on-Don’s Public Monitoring Commission (ONK), the local watchdog group tasked with monitoring the observance of prisoners’ rights, has refused to visit 66-year-old Yuri Zhdanov in pre-trial detention.
Mainstream media today pretend that€ King's€ anti-militarism pronouncements€ were never uttered,€ but that was not the case in 1967. Condemnation was swift, emphatic and widespread.
The anniversary of his assassination always brings a flood of tributes to Martin Luther King Jr., and this Sunday will surely be no exception. But those tributes—including from countless organizations calling themselves progressive—are routinely evasive about the anti-militarist ideals that King passionately expressed during the final year of his life.
The modern smartphone is a technological wonder, cramming into its compact form factor multiple functions -- phone, pager, computer, camera, calculator, diary, multimedia player, radio, TV, clock, maps, GPS, voice recorder, eBook reader, gaming device, WiFi hotspot, flashlight etc. etc. -- that required over a dozen separate devices a couple of decades ago. No wonder, then, that most people want one, and would like to buy a model that offers all these features. However, in many parts of the world, the price of a good smartphone represents a big chunk of their annual wages. The obvious solution is to take out a loan, but that typically requires a credit rating, and many people in those countries lack a credit history, and may not have a bank account. To get around that problem, companies have come up with a new kind of smart loan for the "unbanked", as they are known. A fascinating article on the Rest of the World site, about the Indian Datacultr app, explains how the system works:
The exponential growth of facial recognition tech over the past decade is cause for concern. The tech is unproven and caters to pre-existing biases. The biggest beneficiaries of the tech explosion are the usual suspects: white guys over the age of 35. Cops claim it's a godsend -- a tool that gives them what they need to close cases, even when it's usually just doing what they've always done: deciding any minority "fits the description."
You might recall that pre-merger T-Mobile used to make fun of the wireless sector's repeated failures in the TV space, such as Verizon's massive Go90 face plant. Of course, at the same time, T-Mobile was busy planning its own streaming TV efforts. Launched just last fall, T-Mobile's TVision TV service was supposed to truly disrupt the stodgy TV sector (something already happening at the hands of countless platforms). T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert explained it like this last October:
Lada Malova has spent the first four years of her 20s behind bars, and she’s only halfway through her eight-year sentence. Before prison, when she was still a teenager, Malova€ became an online celebrity in the “Dvach” community by broadcasting her life as a user. Since being locked up for supposed drug possession and attempted dealing, she’s developed multiple serious illnesses. Malova’s mother and lawyers now say the young woman could die in prison, but the authorities have refused, so far, to consider her release. Meduza takes a closer look at her story.
Traditionally, the FCC credulously relied on monopolistic ISPs to self-report coverage and service, which allowed these giant businesses to paint a deceptive , deeply flawed portrait of broadband service where everything was generally just fine. It was not fine. It is not fine. The pandemic demonstrated how millions are left behind € or stuck with second-rate service, in a digital age where every aspect of a thriving, prosperous life turns on the quality of your broadband. Just look at the filings from Frontier’s recent bankruptcy and see how mismanagement, misconduct, and poor service are standard industry practice. It's not just Frontier, either: recurring horror stories of ISPs n ot delivering upon their basic promise of service by upload throttling customers or even harassing customers seeking to cancel service demonstrate that ISPs don't think of us as customers, but rather as captives to their monopolies .
Last Wednesday, the White House announced a plan to invest $100 billion in building and improving high-speed broadband infrastructure . It's overdue. Last February, Consumer Reports released a survey which found that 75% of Americans say they rely on the internet to carry out their daily activities seven days a week . EFF€ has€ long advocated for broadband for all , and today we are part of a mass movement demanding universal and affordable access for all people so that they may be full participants in twenty-first century society.
Trump's FCC, under the chairmanship of former Verizon executive Ajit Pai, threw away citizen comments opposing the 2017 net neutrality repeal. It's taken years to learn what was in those comments.
One consistent point of pride for the Trump FCC, like many Trump agencies, was its active disdain for real world data. It didn't matter how much data showed that US broadband was expensive and spotty due to monopolization (and there's a lot of data clearly proving that point), the Trump FCC didn't care. It didn't matter that surveys showed that net neutrality was popular among consumers. Guys like Ajit Pai believed that the US broadband sector was perfectly healthy and competitive and you make things even more wonderful by gutting already fairly feckless regulatory oversight even further.
In response to President Joe Biden’s new infrastructure “American Jobs Plan,” including $100 billion for broadband projects, many in the broadband industry are applauding the administration’s effort to bridge the digital divide, but with some caution and criticism as well.
A group of U.S. senators earlier this month said in a letter to the White House that the current high-speed standard of 25 megabits per second and upload speeds of up to 3 megabits is insufficient, urging support for a goal of 100 megabits per second.
Unlike the American Rescue Plan, the $1.9trn covid-relief bill that Democrats waved through Congress, this legislation will spark fights. Conservative Democrats dislike the prospect of cutting Republicans out of the negotiations and adding to the national debt, currently 130% of GDP. Hence the decision to raise corporate taxes to pay for the building boom. The jobs plan seems designed to sway wavering moderates—chiefly Democrats who could easily torpedo the president’s ambitions, but perhaps even a tempted Republican. The bill lavishes funds on traditionally bipartisan concerns such as broadband expansion and worker retraining. (He will introduce the second half of the package, focusing on “social infrastructure”, later in April.)
A group of movie companies is continuing to put pressure on the Popcorn Time app and VPN.ht. After filing a copyright infringement lawsuit earlier this month, they are now asking the court to freeze the VPN provider's PayPal funds. In addition, the movie outfits want the Popcorntime.app domain locked, to prevent it from being transferred.
In January, Riot Games and Bungie sued the operator of GatorCheats in a US court, claiming that the cheat maker provided copyright-infringing tools designed to disrupt the gaming environments of Valorant and Destiny 2. According to a new filing in the case, the parties have agreed to settle, with GatorCheats required to pay $2 million and abide by the terms of an injunction.
6.€ € € The proposed accompanying measures in the consultation document are an inadequate response to the harm posed by term extension. Measures that result in new licensing systems for works that would otherwise remain the public domain under the Berne Convention standard or that involve narrowly tailored exceptions that are not widely available to all Canadians are certainly insufficient and potentially harmful.
