Last week I half destroyed my Linux VM and almost had to restart the entire Linux from scratch project and today I hope I don't somehow do the same.
Linux kernel is complicated. And I am not even talking about the code.
The code itself is complicated but you do not need to bother with that. I am talking about the release schedule of a Linux kernel.
How often a new kernel version is released in a year? How long a kernel is supported? There are LTS (Long Term Support) kernels. How long the LTS Linux kernels are supported?
The thing is that while these questions may seem simple, the answer is not.
There is no one answer to these questions and it needs some explaining to do and that’s what I am going to do in this article.
Dronecode Foundation Program Manager Ramon Roche talks about the various open source components available to drone developers.
Today we are looking at how to install AnimeEffects on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.
This tutorial will only work on Chromebooks with an Intel or AMD CPU (with Linux Apps Support) and not those with an ARM64 architecture CPU.
The OTRS – Open Ticket Request System, also known as Open Technology Real Services, is a well-recognized ticket system that is used by many notable companies to process customer inquiries. The community edition is free and open-source and available to use without paying any fees. Here we learn the steps and commands to install OTRS on AlmaLinux 8 or Rocky Linux 8 servers.
The software is written in Perl and the users can start it with a server having dual-core 2GHz CPU and 4GB RAM. Software requirements need are Nginx or Apache2 + mod_perl2 or a higher Web server; for storing Databases- MySQL 5.0 or higher, MariaDB PostgreSQL 9.2 or higher, or Oracle 10g.
While PowerShell is now a cross-platform project that runs on Windows, Linux and Mac systems, the management tool still needs a helping hand to work across these different OSes.
More Linux workloads continue to take up more infrastructure workloads traditionally held by Windows Server, such as Active Directory domain controllers. However, the management tools in Windows tend to be just that, and the spectrum of available tools may not support Linux. It's easy enough to use PowerShell to get information from Window Server systems, but despite PowerShell's cross-platform abilities, this work has always been more difficult with Linux servers. Rather than learning Bash scripting, administrators can tap their PowerShell skills to write code to gather information from Linux machines. A PowerShell module named Posh-SSH helps to bridge this administrative divide with a set of cmdlets to provide additional functionality to work with Linux systems.
While I was visiting the YouTube channel Logos by Nick, I noticed that he outlined five common GIMP mistakes that beginners make. Let's look at these:
1. Editing the wrong layer - Sometimes you're editing and the outcome isn't what you expected. It could be because you have the wrong layer chosen. In one of my first GIMP tutorials, I was manipulating two different layers to remove parts of each and merge the rest. Having the wrong layer chosen would have messed up everything I was trying to do.
2. Not adding alpha channels - Any time you want transparency in your creation, you need to have an alpha channel, which is what does that. If you start with a jpg image, you will need to add an alpha channel. The jpg file format doesn't handle transparency at all. Right click on the image in the Layers dialog, then select Add alpha channel. If you're going to work with this for a while, be sure to save it as a GIMP .xcf file, as it will save all your layers. If you need the transparency, you can export it as another image format, such as .png.
The Wine development release 6.21 is now available.
What's new in this release (see below for details): - WinSpool, GPhoto, and a few other modules converted to PE. - Better support for inline functions in DbgHelp. - Beginnings of a MSDASQL implementation. - Various bug fixes.
The source is available from the following locations:
https://dl.winehq.org/wine/source/6.x/wine-6.21.tar.xz http://mirrors.ibiblio.org/wine/source/6.x/wine-6.21.tar.xz
Binary packages for various distributions will be available from:
https://www.winehq.org/download
You will find documentation on https://www.winehq.org/documentation
You can also get the current source directly from the git repository. Check https://www.winehq.org/git for details.
Wine is available thanks to the work of many people. See the file AUTHORS in the distribution for the complete list.
Wine 6.21 is out as the latest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software for enjoying Windows games and applications on Linux.
Wine 6.21 isn't a particularly exciting release especially for gamers, but has a random assortment of work. Arguably most significant is the start of an MSDASQL implementation. MSDASQL is the Microsoft OLE DB provider for Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) drivers. MSDASQL allows for accessing / connecting to the many different DBMS data sources out there that sport ODBC drivers from Oracle to Microsoft Access and more.
Keep in mind that this blog only covers the tip of the iceberg! Tons of KDE apps whose development I don’t have time to follow aren’t represented here, and I also don’t mention backend refactoring, improved test coverage, and other changes that are generally not user-facing. If you’re hungry for more, check out https://planet.kde.org/, where you can find blog posts by other KDE contributors detailing the work they’re doing.
The brainchild of Matthias Ettrich, KDE stands for Kool Desktop Environment, at least according to the "KDE Timeline" on the KDE website. The interview in the April 2003 edition of Linux Journal gives a slightly different accounting of where the KDE name came from, however. Whatever the history of the name is, KDE has found a niche in the Linux world, and given Linux users everywhere access to a modern, customizable, rich, and full featured desktop environment.
Today, KDE is a stable and popular Linux desktop environment. To say it's full featured would be an understatement. In fact, for some users, there's "too much" eye candy (a.k.a. flash, sparkle and glitz), and it distracts from performing necessary computing tasks. But many others find great solace in using KDE and all of its features. It is one of the most popular desktop environments out there for Linux. In fact, it is the "flagship" desktop environment for PCLinuxOS.
One of my customers needs to have builds done on arm64 hosts, but they lack the necessary hardware to do so in house and procuring such hardware can be very difficult due to vendors EoL some hardware without the replacement hardware being ready to ship. Currently they already have Jenkins configured with a couple of amd64 build agents that do most of the building, so we wanted something we could just drop in to their existing infrastructure. So we started evaluating different options like Equinix Metal (formerly Packet.net) and AWS ec2. Both provide nice options for being able to fire up a host and do a build and then shut it off when the build is complete.
The software and hardware worlds are constantly evolving, so one can never get too comfortable. For decades now, much of the world has grown accustomed to the x86 architecture forming the basis of the personal computer, but the continued growth of the 64-bit ARM architecture presents a new challenge to this notion. Large-scale changes of this type are inevitable, so it is important for a project of the scale and scope of FreeBSD to be proactive about supporting the hardware platforms of the future, and letting go of the platforms of the past.
The RISC-V architecture is FreeBSD’s youngest supported platform, and despite its age it has a lot of momentum behind it. This article will introduce t his history of the platform, and why this support is important for the FreeBSD project.
I tend to be a late adopter of technology, with an attitude of "don't fix what ain't broken." So even though I was aware of PCLinuxOS's shift to Network Manager, I continued using the time-tested combination of PCC (PCLinuxOS Control Center) and net_applet because they were working well on my local systems.
However, my primary desktop PC was one of the machines affected by an update involving the glitchy 1.33.2-1 version of networkmanager on Sept. 16, 2021, which wiped out all network connectivity (until Texstar and yodelu could provide a corrected package [1.33.2-3]). At that point, I realized that I needed to learn more about Network Manager. In addition to browsing forum posts, I read parnote's article, "Network Manager: The Low-Down On Getting Up To Speed" in the July 2021 issue of The PCLinuxOS Magazine.
Paul's article is an excellent starting point, with a discussion of Network Manager's history, why its implementation in PCLinuxOS will benefit us, and a detailed procedure for making the switch. I recommend that you read the article to gain a better understanding of Network Manager (NM).
Once you have an overview of NM, you can follow the steps in this tutorial. I have tried to distill parnote's article into a quick-and-dirty cheat sheet which is (hopefully) easy to follow.
Marketing departments and lawyers. Do we really need them?
Without them, things might actually be simpler. Without the marketing department getting involved, we might actually be able to buy just shampoo, for example. But with them, we can only buy "invigorating shampoo," "refreshing shampoo," "moisturizing shampoo," or "energizing shampoo." I don't know about you, but I don't buy shampoo based on whether it invigorates, refreshes or energizes me. I buy shampoo to clean my hair. As for moisturizing, nearly all shampoos have to be used with water, so I don't need it to be "moisturizing" either. In fact, I don't know of anything more moist than the water that I must use the shampoo with.
On 10/22/2021 Softmaker FreeOffice was released, another office suite option for Linux. Our beloved operating system is reasonably well served in this area, with several options: Softmaker FreeOffice, OnlyOffice, LibreOffice, Calligra suite, and OpenOffice is still maintained by the Apache Foundation.
Fedora Workstation 35 introduced a new session manager to PipeWire called WirePlumber. So what does a PipeWire session manager do and what makes WirePlumber special? To answer that question we talk to George Kiagiadakis. George is the main author of WirePlumber and can tell us what exciting things will be possible going forward with WirePlumber in place as the new official PipeWire session manager.
The Internet of Things adoption is growing faster than ever before. As connected devices become more affordable, they find their place in many aspects of our lives. Users worldwide can benefit from a large ecosystem of IoT solutions. However, this rapid growth comes at a cost. Different IoT edge devices have different interfaces, speak different languages and many are not supported soon after manufacturing. Over time, this presents challenges not only to usability, but also to security and privacy.
If you haven’t seen the earlier stages of the project, they’re definitely worth checking out. The short version is that [Sasa] has developed a watering system that uses I2C to communicate with soil moisture, temperature, and light sensors as well as to control solenoids that allow for individual plants to be watered as needed. An ESP32 serves as a bridge, allowing for the sensors to be read and the water to be dispensed via an HTTP interface.
It’s tempting despite news of stubbornly higher-than-ideal COVID infection figures, to imagine that just maybe the world might be returning to some semblance of pre-pandemic normality.
There are probably almost as many DIY CNC designs as there are DIY CNCs. And there’s nothing wrong with that! We really liked [maxvfischer’s] documentation on GitHub for a machine he made based on a design by [Ivan Miranada].
In addition to a complete bill of materials, there are Fusion 360 files and very good instructions. There are several tips that seemed like they would help even if you were building similar machines.
The machine uses HTD5M belts instead of the more prevalent lead screw design. Everything slides on MGN12H slides. There are detailed photographs covering not just the tricky parts but even how to extend the stepper motor wires.
Yes, thanks to open source tech development, you absolutely can. If you are a little handy, you can cut the costs of solar power even further by building your own systems of any size and budget, and To Catch the Sun guides you on exactly how to do it. To Catch the Sun is a brand new book I co-authored with the legendary open source appropriate technology hacker and Appropedia founder Lonny Grafman. Built on open source MediaWiki and Semantic MediaWiki, Appropedia is the largest wiki dedicated to developing and sharing collaborative solutions in sustainability, poverty reduction, and international development through the use of sound principles and appropriate technology. Together we are something like the double-O 7 team of the solar world. A bit like James Bond, Lonny Grafman from sunny California, is an adventurer taking his students from Humboldt State University all over the world to build solar photovoltaic systems in the most challenging conditions. I am perhaps more Q-like, developing open source solar photovoltaic technology quietly from my labs deep in the north at Western University in Canada. Together we provide ways to make solar work for you in just about any contex
Current extensions to the Google Chrome browser use the Manifest V2 framework. Starting January 17, 2022, no new extensions utilizing Manifest V2 will be accepted in the Chrome Web Store, according to an article on TechSpot. Then, one year later in January 2023, all Manifest V2 extensions will cease working. In the interim, Google will release Manifest V3, which has been "in the works" for years. While Manifest V2 could be exploited to create malware and retrieve sensitive data, Manifest V3 addresses security and performance concerns of V2.
One side effect of the switch to Manifest V3 is that most current ad blockers will cease to function, or at best, be seriously crippled. Most ad blockers rely on intercepting or blocking the webRequest API. Manifest V3 replaces access to the webRequest API with declarativeNetRequest (DNR, which in medical terms means Do Not Resuscitate). For comparison, Mozilla has stated that they will mostly adapt Manifest V3, but they will not replace webRequest API with Google's new declarative NetRequest.
Google is an advertising company. As such, they lose BILLIONS of dollars in advertising revenue from users utilizing ad blockers. Citing privacy and security concerns, Google thinks it can fool developers and users into supporting their move to Manifest V3 and blocking access to the webRequest API. But anyone who is potty trained will realize that it's all about money.
The intent, said Rep. Rene Plasencia, the subcommittee chair, was to continue a push toward low-cost, no-cost and open access to e-textbooks, a trend running in tandem with the increased digitization of media.
“The education industry is moving in that direction, rightfully so,” he said. “We want to make sure that we’re proactively, as a body, making sure we are engaging in that conversation and not an impediment to any growth that is possible.”
In June, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed HB 847, which created the Florida Postsecondary Academic Library Network. The network consolidated a range of resources and responsibilities for the operation of a centralized library system in Florida, allowing for the coordination and operation of an online distance-learning catalogue and centralized advising services for all 40 public higher education institutions in the state.
A man has been arrested on suspicion of fraud after a vicar said he returned home to find it had been stolen and sold by someone else.
Reverend Mike Hall was alerted to suspicious activity after his neighbours rang him in August to inform him people had been entering his house in Luton, Bedfordshire while he was away.
It is alleged that while he was working in Wales his identity was stolen by fraudsters who impersonated him in order to sell the property, thought to be worth €£130,000 and which he had owned for 30 years.
The solicitors involved in the property transaction said there was an ongoing police investigation and that it was inappropriate to comment further.
It is the root cause of our problems with China. It's why some people don't want to get vaccinated. It's why some people still gleefully follow Donald Trump. It explains why Congress can't get together in a bipartisan fashion to deal with infrastructure, health care and gun control. It's why we have problems understanding climate change. It explains voter suppression. It's why "critical race theory" has become controversial, why elements of our population on the left and right are at war with each other and why some believe the earth is flat and the Holocaust didn't occur. It's why some of us believe we're still the "No. 1" nation in the world when — other than having the largest military — we clearly lag behind other major nations in many critical factors. More than anything else it explains why we fail.
The United States is a nation of militantly ignorant people, arrogant in their beliefs, unable to change their minds and unwilling to try. We lack education.
And the lack of education in this country is such a problem that national security adviser Jake Sullivan described it this week as a critical issue for our national security. "I do consider it a national security problem," he told me during a White House briefing on Tuesday. "In fact, it's Dr. [Jill] Biden who has repeatedly said — and the president frequently quotes her — that any country that out-educates the United States will outcompete the United States, and that is a fundamental national security issue."
Sir Ken Robinson takes on standardization in his Ted Talk, Escaping Education’s “Death Valley”:
One of the effects of the current culture has been to de-professionalize teachers … the dominant culture of education has come to focus on, not teaching and learning, but testing … in place of curiosity, what we have is a culture of compliance. Our children and teachers are encouraged to follow routine algorithms, rather than to excite that power of imagination and curiosity.
The UNICEF has stressed that this is the only way to help to reopen the schools for Afghan girls in the country, according to the news agency.
Notably, the schools and universities have been shut in Afghanistan since the takeover of Kabul by the Taliban.
Disease mongering makes patients into de facto drug reps who tell the doctor both the condition they have and the exact med they need –– it makes a mockery of medical school education. A current example of disease mongering is AbbVie’s promotion of the obscure-to-barely-existent condition of “exocrine pancreatic insufficiency” whose ads include voices brazenly leading the witness (or patient) by asking “Could I have EPI?”
Another insidious drug maker ruse, seen currently, is the marketing push for “early treatment.” If you suspect you have an advertised disease (we hope) don’t wait –– treat it now! (Before the symptoms go away says one of my doctor colleagues.)
The Covid-19 pandemic is a global health emergency that requires a coordinated and mobilized medical response, one based not only on public health expertise but also principles of social cooperation and solidarity. But in the United States cooperation and solidarity are almost alien values in a nation rent by growing political divisions and more substantively defined by extremes of wealth and class inequality.
Last week, ProPublica published an investigation documenting the failures in the U.S. food safety system that allowed the spread of a type of salmonella known as multidrug-resistant infantis. The bacteria has sickened tens of thousands of people, but outdated government policies and pushback from trade groups have left federal agencies with little power to stop infantis from spreading through the poultry industry.
Our reporting relied on public records requests and dozens of interviews, the bread and butter of journalism. But I also made use of a type of data ProPublica has never before tapped into: publicly available genomic sequencing data.
Since I haven’t written about homeopathy in a while, I feel obligated to begin this post with my characterization of homeopathy, which is that it is The One Quackery To Rule Them All. Unsurprisingly, the last time I discussed homeopathy was when naturopaths were promoting its use to treat COVID-19—because of course they were, and, as I said at the time, quacks gonna quack and grifters gonna grift—but homeopathy has found its way into the public conversation yet again. The reason is that it was announced this week that Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers has tested positive for COVID-19. That an NFL quarterback tested positive for the disease is not, in and of itself, big news. What is big news is this, reported on NFL.com:
The trouble is not just in Delhi. In winter the Himalayas trap the combined exhaust of the 600m people who populate the sprawling Indo-Gangetic Plain. From diesel pumps for irrigation to cremation pyres and from coal-fired power plants to gas-guzzling SUVs, the smoke combines in a toxic stew that can hang for weeks in the season’s typically windless conditions. Big provincial cities such as Lucknow and Patna are just as sooty as Delhi. So are many rural areas.
Across this whole region, reckon researchers from the University of Chicago in a recent study, air pollution is likely to reduce life expectancy by an average of more than nine years. Research published late last year in the Lancet, a medical journal, estimates that in 2019 alone some 1.67m Indians died from the effects of pollution, accounting for one in six of the country’s deaths. The authors put the cost to India of lost productivity at some $36.8bn, in addition to $11.9bn spent on treating illnesses caused by pollution, equal to a total of 1.8% of GDP. They emphasise that these are conservative estimates.
Alphabet Inc's Google has invested $1 billion in CME Group and has struck a separate deal to move the futures exchange operator's trading systems to the cloud, the companies said on Thursday.
Under the terms of the 10-year partnership between Google and CME, the Chicago-based exchange operator will begin moving its technology infrastructure to Google Cloud next year.
Earlier this week, Facebook made the somewhat shocking announcement that it would be shutting down its facial recognition systems. But now, Facebook’s parent company, Meta, has walked that promise back a bit. A lot, really.
Meta is not planning to hold back its use of facial recognition technology in its forthcoming metaverse products. Facebook’s new parent company told Recode that the social network’s commitment does not in any way apply to the metaverse. The metaverse will abide by its own rules, thank you very much. In fact, Meta spokesperson Jason Grosse says the company is already experimenting with different ways to bring biometrics into the metaverse equation.
Remote proctoring software is, essentially, spyware that students are forced to install, typically as a browser plug-in or a computer program. Invasive features like keystroke logging, screen recording, network traffic monitoring, and video and audio recording are common. Many of the programs also collect tons of biometric data through eye-movement tracking and facial recognition. Online other types of data — like passwords or credit card numbers — biometric information cannot be changed. Once it is [cracked], there is almost nothing a person can do about it.
Another issue with e-proctoring: bogus accusations. In 2020, the California Bar Exam saw high rates of flags for potential cheating, with over one-third of the 9,000 test-takers facing such accusations. Ultimately, 90% of the students were cleared.
Facebook is testing ways for creators to make money through Facebook Groups, such as users paying fees for exclusive access to content or conversations within subgroups, the company said on Thursday.
U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib and the peace group CodePink were among those who condemned Friday's killing by Israeli forces of a 13-year-old Palestinian boy in the illegally occupied West Bank.
"It is precisely efforts to seek justice for victims like Mohammed that Israel wants to eliminate by targeting human rights groups."
Get it right: in Amerika, guns, self-defense, and political violence are for white Whiskey Rebels, racist white mobs, racist white cops, George Zimmerman, Kyle Rittenhouse, and the January 6th marauders, NOT Denmark Vesey, Black sharecroppers, Black Panthers, Milton Hall, Philando Castille, Brionna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery. And this is as it was always supposed to be under the Second Amendment.
It was darkly fitting to begin writing this review on Halloween. Historian Carol Anderson’s new book The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America is hauntingly well-matched to terrifying current events. Anderson argues that U.S. domestic gun policy is plagued by a longstanding and ferocious racial double standard. It has always been about enforcing Black powerlessness and white rule. The holy Second Amendment rights “to bear arms” and “a well-regulated militia” have always been “for whites only” in American history. As Anderson shows, the amendment’s “for whites only” character is by design, a feature, not a bug. It’s not something that can be fixed by extending the amendment’s “freedoms” to people of color. Those “freedoms” are tools of white supremacy, no small part of why America’s contemporary Republifascists are so enamored of their “Second Amendment rights.”
Defending the Indefensible
The National Interest identifies Hawkins as “a former economics professor who served on the professional staff of the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee.”€ He alleges that Yemen peace activists are biased against the Saudi-led coalition and biased in favor of Yemen’s Houthi rebels.
In the summer of 2019, Elimar Depaula, 19, worked as a paralegal in the D.C. suburbs. At night, she was a student, taking online college classes. On August 8, she and her boyfriend went for a drive to visit a friend. Depaula’s boyfriend, at the wheel, accidentally cut off another driver. The other driver was incensed; he tailgated Depaula and her boyfriend, yelled at them, brandished a gun in anger, and eventually fired his weapon, shooting Depaula. This story was produced for Student Nation, a program of the Nation Fund for Independent Journalism, which is dedicated to highlighting the best of student journalism. For more Student Nation, check out our archive or learn more about the program here. StudentNation is made possible through generous funding from The Puffin Foundation. If you’re a student and you have an article idea, please send pitches and questions to [email€ protected].
Kennedy and Nixon, the two presidents whose terms were cut short, had made the mistake of defying the U.S. military establishment, on Cuba and Vietnam respectively. The other eleven modern presidents subordinated themselves and served their full terms in office unmolested. Even Trump, who hurled vulgar insults at the military, ended up doing what they wanted. Every time he signed an order that was out of line, they talked him out of it, delayed it, changed it, ignored it, or lied to him by saying they had carried it out.
At the core of the military establishment are the Pentagon, big tech firms and weapons manufacturers led by Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrup Grumman, Raytheon, and General Dynamics. Elsewhere in the government, it includes the Congress, Supreme Court, White House, Departments of Energy, State, Treasury, and Homeland Security, CIA, FBI, National Security Agency, and fifteen other intelligence agencies, AID, and the National Endowment for Democracy. Playing supporting roles are big media, foundations, think tanks, universities, consultants, Democratic and Republican parties, and private security services contractors.
Authors wait their whole lives for I-told-you-so moments like these. But mine passed without accolades, awards, or adulation.
Being way ahead of the pack is supposed to bring honors and rewards, isn’t it? Imagine the response if, for example, a writer had predicted the 9/11 attacks.
Perhaps the best known of those operations is the series of covert actions, eavesdropping, spying and otherwise using its power to disrupt and destroy the groups it had targeted known as COINTELPRO. For a covert government operation, COINTELPRO’s details are fairly well known today. This is in large part due to the late Senator Frank Church and his staff who conducted several weeks of congressional hearings in the mid-1970s. Those hearings exposed the lengths the FBI and other federal agencies went through to destroy the Black liberation movement, other third world movements, the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement and even the women’s and gay liberation movements. Although the operation titled COINTELPRO had pretty much ended by the time Mr. Church conducted those hearings, these types of activities by the FBI did not. Indeed, as books by Aaron Leonard and others attest, various leftist and Black liberation groups were heavily surveilled and infiltrated throughout the 1970s. Other texts have confirmed the infiltration of groups opposed to the US wars in Central America in the 1980s and of certain radical environmental groups into the 1990s. Although less documentation exists, it is fair to assume that groups organizing against NAFTA and the World Trade Organization were also infiltrated by the FBI in the 1990s and early 2000s. Once the 9-11 attacks occurred and the PATRIOT Act was passed, the level of FBI activities in this regard increased exponentially. A big difference is that now many of the actions FBI agents undertook while COINTELPRO was in place were illegal and now they are not. The PATRIOT Act and subsequent laws made certain of that.
Recently, a book titled Nixon’s War at Home: The FBI, Leftist Guerrillas, and the Origins of Counterterrorism was released. As the title suggests, the text is about the birth of counterterrorism as a weapon of the US state. The author Daniel Chard is a history professor currently at Western Washington University in Bellingham. His central argument in this book is that the federal government’s obsessive battle against ultra-left organizations engaged in violence during the late 1960s and 1970s was not only the beginning of counterterrorism as a strategy, but in fact the first time it was named as such. Chard’s argument is essentially sound. He discusses the attempt by the Nixon White House to centralize control of all US law enforcement and intelligence agencies under the President. This attempt is an established fact; the name of this plan was the Huston Plan after its author, Tom Huston, a young ideologue who hated the antiwar and Black liberation movements as much as the rest of the Nixon White House. The plan failed in its original conception, in large part because FBI Director Hoover feared losing his power. This is well-documented and Chard enhances this understanding. However, this is also where I differ from Chard’s explanation.
The response from Morrison was one of shameless dissembling.€ Making sure that Australian audiences and the news waves would only pick up select gobbets, he told the press that the French president had attacked, or “sledged” Australia and its good burghers.€ He expressed concern about “the statements that were made questioning Australia’s integrity and the slurs that have been placed on Australia”.€ He was “not going to cop sledging at Australia.”
A full reading of Macron’s words in the brief encounter suggests nothing of the sort.€ Australia and France were bound up in history and blood enriched ties going back to two world wars.€ “Your country was shoulder to shoulder with us during the wars.€ You had fighters with us when our freedom was at stake.€ We have, we do have the same values.”€ He respected “sovereign choices” but it was also vital to “respect allies and partners.”€ It was the conduct of the Australian government he had issue with, something that Macron thought “detrimental to the reputation of your country and your Prime Minister.”
A week earlier, on United Nations Day, the Biden White House€ announced€ that the United States is committed “to the original vision and values enshrined in the United Nations Charter” which involved “creating a rules-based international order” and ensuring “adherence to international law.”€ The declaration was made two months after a US drone strike in Kabul€ killed€ ten civilians, including seven children.€ As the International Red Cross€ points out, the “arbitrary deprivation of the right to life” includes “unlawful killing in the conduct of hostilities, i.e., the killing of civilians and persons€ hors de combat€ not€ in the power of a party to the conflict not justified under the rules on the conduct of hostilities.”€ Consequently, according to Washington’s “rules-based international order”, it is unlawful to kill civilians.
But all the Pentagon has done about the Kabul kid-killing is to eventually and with reluctance admit that it did indeed slaughter an innocent man and many of his family — and it is most unlikely that anything would have been divulged if it hadn’t been for the work of the€ New York Times, which smelled a rat.€ € The Pentagon’s€ inquiry€ into the killings was a farce and the finding, released on November 3, was that there had been “no violation of law, including the Law of War”.
Your steadfast Musical Patriot is generally out of earshot of the melodic memes of militias and malcontents, deaf to the clangorous chords of the distempered clavier. But sometimes a seething sonic surge is so powerful that it reaches even to that moral and musical high ground I’ve so long defended.
Before offering any judgements on two chart-topping “Let’s Go Brandon” tracks, however, let me remind the world that Musical Patriotism is unwaveringly opposed to nationalism, exceptionalism, and power chords on Sunday. The Musical Republic is a place where all children sing, where the body politic dances to the beat of the Good, and from which Andrew Lloyd Webber is forever banished. Unlike the nations of the G7 (that unstable, testosterone-laced, white-keyed named dominant chord), our pacific Commonwealth has no bombastic national anthem, but resounds instead with uplifting music of independent thought and unpredictable beauty whose craft is admired through the rational consensus of its critically-minded, yet always fair citizenry.
True, the international community has a political, and even legal, frame of reference regarding its position on the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Unfortunately, however, it has no genuine political mandate, or the inclination to act individually or collectively, to bring this occupation to an end.
This is precisely why the announcement on October 27 by Israel that it has given a ‘final approval’ for the building of 1,800 housing units and initial approval for another 1,344 will unlikely be reversed anytime soon. One ought to keep in mind that this decision came only two days after an earlier announcement that the Israeli government had advanced construction tenders for 1,355 housing units in the occupied West Bank.
It’s been a rough time for German media giant Axel Springer. The company ousted the top editor at Bild, one of its most influential right-wing newspapers, over sexual harassment charges (New York Times, 10/18/21). Right before the pandemic, the group’s majority owner, the US-based investment firm KKR, delisted the stock from the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, taking the company private (Wall Street Journal, 1/24/20). And at the company’s biggest US outlet, Politico, journalists have sought to unionize (New York Times, 10/29/21).
The local self-defense groups have been helping Niger's military to fight extremists who have stepped up attacks on civilians this year blamed on Islamic State-linked militants.
A jihadi attack in Niger's volatile tri-border zone with Burkina Faso and Mali has killed dozens of members of a self-defense militia, local sources told AFP on Thursday.
The assault took place on Tuesday at Adab-Dab, a village about 55 kilometers (32 miles) from Banibangou in the western region of Tillaberi, a source said.
After months of delays, the European Union, Iran and the U.S. announced Wednesday that indirect talks to resuscitate the deal would resume on Nov. 29 in Vienna.
The nuclear deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, promises Iran economic incentives in exchange for limits on its nuclear program, and is meant to prevent Tehran from developing a nuclear bomb. Tehran insists its program is peaceful.
National redistricting experts said that the influence effort, which appears to have been timed to a series of public hearings on draft maps released in October, underscores the difficulty independent redistricting commissions in other states have faced in attempting to divorce politicians from the process of drawing new congressional and state legislative district boundaries.
In mid-October, Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin had asked the prefect of the Sarthe region to order a closure of the mosque because the sermons propagated “armed jihad, martyrdom, the committing of acts of terrorism and the use of violence” (according to the Interior Minister). The closure for six months was made public on October 26. The order said, among other things, that a man had gathered worshippers at the mosque in September 2022 and declared that the creators of the Muhammad cartoons published in Charlie Hebdo “deserve death”. “This was also the case after the murder of Samuel Paty in October 2020,” the document says.
Cypriot-Dutch author, cultural campaigner and activist Tasoula Hadjitofi became a refugee at age 15 when Turkish troops invaded Famagusta, the city of her birth, in 1974. For several decades, she has collected artefacts and other symbols of cultural heritage that has been looted and stolen to bring them back home to Cyprus. Referring to the liberation of prisoners from Nazi concentration camps in 1945, Hadjitofi said:
"Cypriots fought alongside the allies as British troops during the liberation of the Jews and other prisoners, for Cyprus was then a British colony. There are no poppies for those heroes on Holocaust Memorial Day in the United Kingdom or in Cyprus and little is known anywhere about them. Most of these forgotten heroes died quietly and took with them so many untold stories. Perhaps a handful are still around? Their stories must be told and their courage must be honored."
"The historical ties are strong between Israel and Cyprus," added Hadjitofi. "I do hope that our Jewish brothers and sisters worldwide are watching attentively the Islamisation of northern Cyprus by Turkey, as well as the destruction of the Christian and Jewish sites in the occupied area. And for the sake of our shared heritage, historical and current struggles for freedom, as well as fundamental principles, they must do their best to stop them."
Whether they are or not now, it is likely that some Afghan jihadis did enter the United States with the refugees and that we will be hearing from them sooner or later. One of Biden’s handlers has admitted that ten of the Afghan evacuees have already been detained as risks to national security. How many more have managed to navigate through the Biden administration’s shoddy vetting processes (this is a regime that doesn’t even acknowledge that Islamic jihad terrorism exists, much less knows how to spot warning signs of jihadist sympathies) and are now in the United States? We will find out sooner or later, and if not in Northern Virginia over the Halloween weekend, then sometime soon, somewhere in the United States.
Police in Northern Virginia are on a heightened state of alert as a new law enforcement alert warned of a potential threat against malls and shopping centers located just outside of Washington, D.C. The threat originated with ISIS and is the basis for the alert, sources told CBS News.
So no one can understand the Qur’an by simply reading it. There must be auxiliary commentators, exegetes, in order to find meaning in the words of Allah. Robert Spencer guides us through the mire of this contradictory and perplexing work using all the tools of exemplary scholarship.
Ms Thunberg said: "It is not a secret that COP26 is a failure. It should be obvious that we cannot solve a crisis with the same methods that got us into it in the first place."
She said: "We need immediate drastic annual emission cuts unlike anything the world has ever seen.
"The people in power can continue to live in their bubble filled with their fantasies, like eternal growth on a finite planet and technological solutions that will suddenly appear seemingly out of nowhere and will erase all of these crises just like that.
"All this while the world is literally burning, on fire, and while the people living on the front lines are still bearing the brunt of the climate crisis."
She described the UN climate change summit as a "two-week long celebration of business as usual and blah, blah, blah" to "maintain business as usual" and "create loopholes to benefit themselves".
A rise of 3€°C in global temperatures above pre-industrial levels by 2100 would be disastrous. Its effects would be felt differently around the world, but nowhere would be immune. Prolonged heatwaves, droughts and extreme weather events could all become increasingly common and severe. Worryingly, slow progress from governments in cutting emissions make this an uncomfortably plausible scenario. This film shows what that world would look like.
Speaking on the sidelines of the summit meeting, known as COP26, the 18-year-old Ms. Thunberg said the event was “sort of turning into a greenwash campaign, a P.R. campaign,” for business leaders and politicians.
“Since we are so far from what actually we needed, I think what would be considered a success would be if people realize what a failure this COP is,” Ms. Thunberg said.
"Many are starting to ask themselves what will it take for the people in power to wake up. But let's be clear: they are already awake. They know exactly what they are doing."
GLASGOW, SCOTLAND — The former president of the COP26 climate talks has brought a delegation including four oil companies and tobacco giant Philip Morris to the summit currently taking place in Glasgow, Scotland.
Former UK energy and climate minister Claire O’Neill’s World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) is running a series of events at the conference on private sector efforts to tackle climate change.
This is a series of annual special reports for CMD from guest contributor Alex Carlin about his observations at the United Nations climate conference. — CMD Editors
I just now arrived in Glasgow for another UN Climate Conference, and I must say that it feels very good to be back in this stimulating international environment where you constantly meet fascinating colleagues from every corner of the globe, fighting shoulder to shoulder in the midst of this dire drama of survival we find ourselves in.
Since 1995, the countries that have signed onto the UNFCCC have met every single year (except in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic), attempting to come up with an action plan to stem the climate crisis. But still, every year, the world’s greenhouse gas emissions keep going up. And for a fortnight that started on October 31, world leaders will try to come up with an action plan yet again. More than 100€ heads of government€ and some 30,000 delegates are now gathered and deliberating in Glasgow in the most recent international attempt to implement the Paris agreement goals. CNBC€ called€ the summit “humanity’s last and best chance to secure a livable future amid dramatic climate change.”
“We face a stark choice: Either we stop it or it stops us,”€ said€ United Nations (UN) Secretary-General António Guterres in his opening remarks at the start of the World Leaders Summit of the COP26. “It’s time to say ‘enough.’ Enough of brutalizing biodiversity. Enough of killing ourselves with carbon. Enough of treating nature like a toilet. Enough of burning and drilling and mining our way deeper. We are digging our own graves… We need maximum ambition from all countries on all fronts to make Glasgow a success.”
But if this isn’t enough, British prime minister Boris Johnson in March this year decided that the already large amount of nuclear weapons in the UK stockpile should be upped to 260, thereby ending in a heartbeat a slow but peaceable trend of incremental reduction. Hardly a word was said by the public about this, an increase incidentally which Britain pays the Americans to build and then lease back from.
I went to Stirling Castle therefore with a ponderous turn of mind. The freshly formed International Forum for Understanding was hosting an event at the castle concentrating as part of COP26 on the nuclear-climate nexus, using the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as its roadmap and with a plan to explore at the gathering the existential threat of nuclear warfare and its swiftly following environmental impact. Coincidentally, Stirling Castle happens to be close to where Stirling University CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) supporters occasionally stop the nuclear weapon convoy on its way to or from the abovementioned bases. It is also one of the finest castles in Scotland, a settlement first recorded in the 7th and 8th centuries. It was in Scotland I first came across people from CND at the proposed site for Torness Nuclear Power Station. The anti-nuclear protest fell on deaf ears. Construction began shortly afterwards.
After nearly a week of speeches, negotiations and protests at the COP26 U.N. climate summit, we speak with Meena Raman, head of programs at Third World Network, who says developing countries need more time and resources to adapt to the climate crisis and end the use of fossil fuels. Without a just transition that addresses inequality, she says, many countries will continue to suffer from both poverty and environmental devastation. “When the rich world has not been able to phase out fossil fuels, … it’s really dubious to preach to the developing world that they have to get out of fossil fuels,” says Raman.
Prime Minister of Barbados Mia Mottley addressed the audience at the U.N. climate summit in Glasgow this week. “We must act in the interests of all our people,” she said. “If we don’t, we will allow the path of greed and selfishness to sow the seeds of our common destruction.” She implored global leaders to “try harder” to keep global temperatures at 1.5 degrees Celsius, as anything above this would mean “a death sentence” for vulnerable island countries, including Barbados.
Youth activists are taking to the streets outside the U.N. climate summit in Glasgow to demand world leaders do more to avert a climate catastrophe. The protest is being organized by Fridays for Future, an international movement of students which grew out of Greta Thunberg’s climate strike outside the Swedish parliament in 2018. We hear from Elizabeth Wathuti of Kenya. “Over 2 million of my fellow Kenyans are facing climate-related starvation,” Wathuti said earlier this week. “The decisions you make here will determine whether the children will have food and water.”
And yet, the planet has so far only warmed 1.2€° Celsius (2.2€° F) since pre-industrial times. We already have the technology we need to convert our energy systems to clean, renewable energy, and doing so would create millions of good jobs for people all over the world. So, in practical terms, the steps we must take are clear, achievable and urgent.
The greatest obstacle to action that we face is our dysfunctional, neoliberal political and economic system and its control by plutocratic and corporate interests, who are determined to keep profiting from fossil fuels even at the cost of destroying the Earth’s uniquely livable climate. The climate crisis has exposed this system’s structural inability to act in the real interests of humanity, even when our very future hangs in the balance.
The richest people on the planet, representing a small sliver of the total population, are emitting carbon dioxide at a rate that's imperiling hopes of keeping global heating below 1.5€°C, prompting fresh calls for government action to rein in "luxury" pollution and combat the intertwined crises of inequality and climate change.
New research by the Institute for European Environmental Policy (IEEP) and the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) shows that by 2030, the carbon footprints of the wealthiest 1% of humanity are on track to be 30 times larger than the size compatible with limiting global warming to 1.5€°C by the end of the century, the Paris Agreement's more ambitious temperature target.
“Crimes against humanity” is a well-established entity under international law that includes acts that are purposefully committed as part of a widespread or systematic policy directed against civilians. These crimes can be actions carried out in times of war or peace. The charges of mass homicide and genocide against Bolsonaro are based on his policies leading to the decimation of indigenous groups in the Amazon due to of his refusal to adequately protect them.
The Brazilian Congressional panel, leading the accusation, asserts that Bolsonaro intentionally let the coronavirus pandemic rip through the country, resulting in over 600,000 Brazilians deaths. This is second only to over 700,000 deaths in the U.S. In Brazil, the congressional panel recommended charges against 77 other people, including three of president Bolsonaro’s sons and several current and former Brazilian government officials.
Alarmingly missing in all the formulas about carbon budgets and zero net emission pledges is the level of greenhouse gas (ghg) concentration in the atmosphere (measured in parts per million CO2, or parts per billion methane), and the dynamic complexity of the climate system, especially the effect of amplifying feedbacks.[1] Hansen clearly explained the basic facts to the public in his 2009 book Storms of My Grandchildren: the truth about the coming climate catastrophe and our last chance to save humanity. Real Zero, Not Net Zero” does follow from the science. Real Zero is the demand made in Nigeria by the Oilwatch International network members, community representatives from oil regions, non-governmental organizations, community-based organizations, and by academia and the media.
What does James Hansen [2] explain about the Earth’s climate system? First, science indicated that steep reductions should have been implemented immediately to prevent positive feedbacks that would eventually cascade global heating beyond human control. By 1988 there was enough CO2 emitted by fossil fuels to increase heat-trapping to a dangerous level. As is well known, English industrial production was built on coal. By the early 19th century, living conditions in England dramatically deteriorated as industrial production inflicted horrific treatment on labourers, chillingly described by Engels [3]. England succeeded in reorganizing the global economy, causing massive human fatalities and environmental ruin… Mike Davis meticulously writes about this in The Late Victorian Holocaust. Andreas Malm [4] documents how there were other equally good energy options at the beginning of the industrial revolution, but entrepreneurial ambition and deceit undermined these alternatives.
"Are we fighting to save ourselves and our living planet or are we fighting to maintain business as usual? Our leaders say we can have both, but the harsh truth is that is not possible."
As the ongoing COP26 climate summit draws attention to the financial institutions that enable fossil fuel companies to keep wrecking the planet, a pair of progressive U.S. senators on Friday introduced a bill that would force big banks to stop pouring money into the destructive industry.
"Regulators' refusal to rein in Wall Street's reckless risk-taking drove our economy off a cliff in 2008, and now, Wall Street's climate-risky behavior could lead to an even bigger financial disaster."
The United Nations climate summit known as COP26 has convened in Glasgow, Scotland after being delayed a year by the COVID-19 pandemic. The COP is a proceeding of the UNFCCC–the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. But the United Kingdom, hosting COP this year, has thrown up entry barriers that are proving insurmountable for many activists and observers from the Global South. Critics point out that this will be the whitest and most privileged COP since the first in 1992, due to vaccine apartheid and the UK's obstructive visa requirements. An estimated 30,000 people have converged on Glasgow to attend the summit, and thousands of climate justice activists, mostly from Europe, are arriving to organize outside the summit compound, demanding action.
"Would climate leaders build 399 new coal plants in the U.S.?"
"The fact that dozens of LNG and pipeline projects are being seriously considered for approval by the Biden administration is deeply alarming."
Some of the best news out of Glasgow so far is that the US media is finally paying serious attention to the climate crisis. We'll see if it lasts, now that US president Joe Biden and other world leaders have left for home. Indeed, by Wednesday, the third day of the UN COP26 climate conference, US mainstream news coverage was starting to diminish. But it's usually during the second, closing week of these conferences that the key agreements are or are not reached, so the true test is what comes next.
As President Joe Biden aims to assure the world that the United States will fulfill its promise to slash its greenhouse gas emissions in half from 2005 levels by the end of the decade, a new report published Friday reveals that the members of the U.S. Senate who would have to pass climate legislation are heavily invested in the fossil fuel industry.
Sludge reports the households of at least 28 U.S. senators—in both the Democratic and Republican caucuses—hold a combined minimum of $3.7 million and as much as $12.6 million in fossil fuel investments.
Of course, the people of these islands and atolls are not “farther away” from the sites where these nuclear tests were conducted. They live there and have suffered from the consequences of these tests. In 2006, Florent de Vathaire, a research director at the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research (Inserm), looked at the records from Polynesia and€ found€ direct evidence of—among other matters—thyroid cancer due to the nuclear explosions carried out by France. Unutea Hirshon, then president of the commission of inquiry of the French Polynesia Assembly, called upon the French government for “transparency.” France, she€ said€ in 2006, “has knowingly concealed the importance and extent of the radioactive fallout following the nuclear tests at Muroroa and Fangataufa.” Compensation has been€ minimal; justice has been absent.
Climate Change and Nuclear Power
The Adams campaign didn't immediately respond to a request for additional comment.
Global emissions from fossil fuels have now rebounded to pre-pandemic levels. So it’s particularly significant that on Wednesday, at the UN climate conference COP26 in Glasgow, at least 25 countries agreed to end public subsidies for overseas oil and gas development and extraction starting at the end of 2022. China, Japan and South Korea, all heavily involved in funding fossil fuels abroad, have all signed on. In addition, more than 23 countries have committed to ending coal altogether.
Hopes that a deforestation pledge signed by over 120 countries at the ongoing COP26 summit could protect "the lungs of our planet" further dimmed after Indonesian officials suggested that the country won't actually follow through on the commitment.
"The ongoing development of [the president's] era should not cease in the name of carbon emissions or in the name of deforestation," Environment Minister Siti Nurbaya Bakar wrote on social media. "Forcing Indonesia to zero deforestation in 2030 [is] obviously inappropriate and unfair."
It was not the first time that Secretary General Guterres had acknowledged the biodiversity crisis gripping our planet in such a prominent manner. In September, during his address to the 76th session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, he used similar language to deplore the “shocking biodiversity loss.”
For many years now I have been urging policy makers and the public to recognize that the intensifying biodiversity crisis is just as significant and consequential as the climate crisis. To hear the UN Secretary General, begin his remarks at COP26 with a reference to devastating biodiversity loss was reassuring. Such public acknowledgements of the current crisis are desperately needed to convince people that the time to act is now.
The fact that we even had a domain name we owed entirely to the foresight of one of our tech-savvy donors, who told me that even though we were both too dumb to realize it now, we’d thank him for it one day. He reserved the CounterPunch domain in 1997. We didn’t start using it for another year when the cruise missiles started shattering the night in Belgrade. The war went on for 78 days and nights, roughly four fortnights. The web allowed us to cover Clinton’s war in real-time. Cockburn said he was willing to try it as an “experiment,” fully expecting it to fail. He had just one condition: that he never had to learn how to post a piece. Thus management of the CounterPunch website fell into my hands by default. I used a primitive software program called Pagemill for the first few years and it looked primitive, like scribblings by Cy Twombley. There was no time to take any classes or seminars. “Just get it up as fast as you can, Jeffrey,” Cockburn said. “And no complaints.” I knew nothing then about HTML, hyperlinks, analytics or even how to load a photo. I still don’t know much. I’d loved my archaic Pagemill program. It was web design for simpletons. I threw a tantrum the day I was forced to give it up for the damnable Dreamweaver, which was far too complex for my sophomoric skill set.
Nevertheless, people came. Came by the thousands and then the 10s of thousands. They came from all over the world: Brazil, South Africa, New Zealand, Iceland, South Korea, India. By the 2000 presidential elections, CounterPunch had gone global. Even so, we had no idea how to make the website pay for itself or to help support CounterPunch. For years, we didn’t have a shopping cart or any way to take credit card orders or sell subscriptions online. We simply asked people to mail in a check to the office in Petrolia. In a couple of years, our readership had grown from 5,000 print subscribers to 150,000 viewers a day on the website.
Unfortunately, in 2017, the Trump tax plan, which was supported by every Republican, moved us in exactly the wrong direction. The vast majority of the tax breaks in that proposal went to the wealthiest people in our country and the largest corporations – the people who needed it the least – and resulted in a $2 trillion increase in our national debt.
One of the negative aspects of the Trump tax plan was to limit deductions on state and local taxes to $10,000. That resulted in millions of middle class and working class Americans being forced to pay more in federal taxes. That was a regressive and unfair proposal, and this Congress must rectify it.
I’m not referring to red states versus blue states, or racial or ethnic divisions. What I mean is that the United States, where countless corrupt billionaires and dictators have stashed their loot, is not a single tax haven, but many separate tax havens.
The€ Pandora Papers, released in October, show that the United States is€ second only to the Cayman Islands€ in facilitating illicit financial flows. But it’s not a simple picture.
How long did we think this would go on for? Millions of lives full of monotony, drudgery and economic lack and hardship, while billionaires jaunt off to the upper atmosphere in penis shaped rockets to the cheers of most mainstream media. But along with what we are witnessing there is a disconnect.
I have written a lot about how wealthy liberals in the US have affixed blinders to their political senses before and since the last election cycle. Biden won, that is all. But his political agency has been stymied at every turn, often by members of his own party. And few liberals seem to be aware that Trump is rising meteorically in popularity among the 74+ million Americans who voted for him last time. 74+ million votes, and there are only 133 million Americans eligible to vote. He has the Republican arm of the ruling duopoly in his tight grip. How many Republican lawmakers have seen their popularity and influence suffer gravely for simply condemning the January 6th€ coup attempt
History has been rewritten almost daily this week, almost immediately as it occurs. A Wall Street Journal€ editorial on November 4 spun its view of what is at issue for the Democratic Party: “Voters warn Democrats to walk away from the Sanders-Pelosi agenda.” The Democrats’ own leadership quickly agreed with this take, playing the blame game against the Progressive Caucus for insisting on economic reforms that opinion polls have reported are precisely what voters say they want.
But these are not the policies that the party’s major donors want. What really is at issue is just whom the Democratic Party (and their duopoly partners the Republicans too, of course) supports: corporate lobbyists and the Donor Class, or wage-earning voters seeking economic policies that benefit them as employees, consumers and debtors.
At the root of the Democrats’ problem is rightward drift. The 50-yard line of American politics has moved so far right that Richard Nixon would be considered a liberal Democrat today. How did we get here? In part it’s due to the moderates who control the party leadership—not just because they don’t fight for liberal values hard enough (though that’s true), but because of an intended consequence few people focus upon: their campaigning reinforces the right.
Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle wrote an essay a few weeks ago that’s still rattling around in my brain. It’s about a topic that students of politics often wonder about: what’s the smartest way forward for Democrats?
It's the Democratic Party's job, and Biden's job in particular, to beat a highly unpopular lobby that has poisoned the planet, not to surrender to it.
Biden’s $1.5 trillion ten-year infrastructure proposal, still awaiting Congressional approval, was reduced to $1 trillion and rewritten to exclude any serious measures aimed at addressing catastrophic fossil fuel-induced global warming. Largely limited to repairing roads, bridges, tunnels, and water pipes via funding to various private corporate construction entities, measures for government initiatives at constructing efficient safe, clean energy alternatives to fossil fuel were eliminated outright, but with a faint pledge that these would be included in Biden’s follow-up social spending bill that today has similarly been eviscerated.
For the ruling corporate elite, with monopolized gas pump prices at $5 per gallon, notions of creating an alternative energy system are comparable to demanding that the predatory lion species convert to a vegetarian diet, or better, that the largely monopolized military-industrial complex and fossil fuel industries lead the fight for a peaceful world.
In 988, Prince Vladimir was undecided about which of the three great monotheistic religions to bring to his Russian realm. He sent envoys to the lands of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. The envoys returned with stories of the three faiths.
Plenty of pundits will tell you Tuesday’s disappointing election results for Democrats nationwide represented a resounding rejection of progressive ideals, but Greg Casar would invite them to consider what happened in Austin, Tex.
According to legend, Vladimir rejected Judaism and Islam because of their dietary restrictions. The envoy who returned from Byzantium, meanwhile, spoke of the beauty and pomp of the services in the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. As a result, Vladimir chose what would become Orthodox Christianity and forced his subjects to convert accordingly. Today, more than a thousand years later, Russia remains a predominantly Orthodox nation.
Now, imagine that the ruler of a contemporary country must decide on what political system to adopt. She sends envoys to the capitals of three different realms: Washington, Brussels, and Beijing. A month later, the envoys return full of stories.
This is a developing story... Please check back for possible updates.
At least some members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus on Friday afternoon rejected a plan put forth by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to hold a€ floor vote on the bipartisan physical infrastructure bill while delaying final passage of the Build Back Better Act that would invest in social infrastructure and climate action.
Unlike UNESCO-recognized Ohrid, Bitola is a small North Macedonian city (more a town) of little distinction, although it does have the ruins of a Greco-Roman city (Heraclea Lyncestis) and an Atatürk Museum (the Turkish war hero and leader was in school here in 1896-98, when it was the Ottoman garrison town of Monastir).
Because the bus stop was close to Heraclea, I decided to walk there before checking into my hotel, knowing that the ruins would close at 4 p.m.
“Dems Vow to Plow Forward on Biden Agenda, Even After Election Faceplants,” announced Politico‘s top headline (11/3/21) the day after the election.
Given the disquieting events that Facebook has been accused of facilitating, some people are naturally skeptical of the idea of transforming the platform into an immersive playground where we might experience, say, racist screeds or body dysmorphia even more vividly. Instead Zuckerberg has offered up a different kind of horror: a frictionless world where nothing unpredictable, or unmonetizable, ever occurs. His metaverse is inhabited by smoothed, presumably neutered cartoon figures who converse in phrases like “Yo,” “This is wild” and “Let’s get together real quick for a debrief.” And if that all becomes overwhelming, Zuckerberg assures us, we may “teleport to a private bubble to be alone.” Alone in a bubble: This is the dream of the future. The reality will surely be much worse.
Danchenko is a Russia analyst who reported in the Steele dossier the infamous pee tape claim that Trump asked “a number of prostitutes to perform a ‘golden showers’ (urination) show in front of him,” although no evidence has been revealed to back that claim up. Trump denies the allegation. Danchenko was arrested as part of a special counsel inquiry being led by John H. Durham, who is looking into whether there was any wrongdoing in the FBI’s investigation of the Trump administration’s ties with Russia. The charges against Danchenko are not yet known but are expected to be unsealed sometime on Thursday, according to The Washington Post, which spoke with people familiar with the matter.
The analyst, Igor Danchenko, was a primary researcher for claims that went into the so-called Steele dossier, a compendium of rumors and unproven assertions suggesting that Mr. Trump and his 2016 campaign were compromised by and conspiring with Russian intelligence officials to help him defeat Hillary Clinton.
In a 39-page indictment obtained by the special counsel, John H. Durham, a grand jury accused Mr. Danchenko of five counts of making false statements to the F.B.I. about his sources for certain claims in the dossier.
Facebook is facing mounting pressure from advocacy groups to weed out climate misinformation on its platform and be more transparent about the extent of the false or misleading claims.
A pair of reports released this week amid the United Nations climate summit in Glasgow found scores of accounts spreading climate misinformation and raised questions about the tech giant's efforts to combat such content.
A graphic video of two people attacking a man with weapons has been viewed thousands of times in social media posts that claim it was filmed during a spate of violence against Muslims in the Indian state of Tripura. The claim is false: the video has circulated in news reports since May about an unrelated incident in Bangladesh.
As a climate activist who grew up as part of an indigenous community in the Amazon rainforest, she spoke to world leaders about the direct impacts of climate change that her tribe is already experiencing.
Like many school board races this year, the one in May in Corvallis, a left-leaning college town in the northwest corner of the state, was especially contentious, swirling around concerns not only about the coronavirus pandemic but also the teaching of what Mr. Al-Abdrabbuh called the “dark history” of America’s struggle with race. Even months later, Mr. Al-Abdrabbuh, the chairman of the school board, is still taking precautions. He regularly speaks to the police and scans his driveway in the morning before walking to his car. He often mixes up his daily route to work.
“I love serving on the school board,” he said. “But I don’t want to die for it.
We then need to ask ourselves: What does censorship really achieve?
The answer is nothing. Censorship has become that normalized cultural staple, rooted in primitive conservatism, that the world has outgrown, but nobody dares to question.
If you don’t play these records, [Internet] radio will play them.
Instead of its baseless fight with censorship, the NBC should focus on monetization of content and other profitable matters for Nigerian artists, not censorship of harmless music. Instead, it also wants to put Nigerian social media users in a chokehold of morality.
There are more potentially harmful things in the Nigerian society than words like ‘alcohol’ and ‘bad,’ or even euphemism like ‘banana’ and ‘cassava’ or even profanity like ‘fuck.’
Peng Shuai, 35, a former Wimbledon and French Open doubles champion, on Tuesday accused retired Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli of pressuring her into having sex, according to screenshots of a since-deleted post from Peng's verified account on Weibo, China's Twitter-like social media platform.
CNN could not independently verify the authenticity of the more than 1,600-word post, and has reached out to Peng for comment, as well as China's State Council Information Office, which handles press inquires for the central government.
The JSN calls for particular transparency as to the grounds on which merely considering the publication of a story or preparing an article for publication could be punishable, without the story being published.
The PTY has echoed the JSN's position.
The role of NAFTA in this story was highlighted last week in CounterPunch by Ron Jacobs, reviewing Justin Akers Chacon’s new book, The Border Crossed Us: The Case for Opening the U.S.-Mexico Border. So here, let’s look at the destruction of Mexico’s state capitalism, the ensuing impoverishment of millions of its people and the case for an amnesty for immigrants in the U.S., referencing Chacon’s book. Amnesty first.
The 1986 amnesty for migrants in the U.S. taught capitalists a lesson they never forgot: newly minted Mexican and Central American citizens joined unions in droves. The owning classes lost their leverage over workers, namely keeping them immobilized and super-exploited by criminalizing them, as the formerly undocumented left for better jobs with higher pay. This ate into profits. After all, having an enormous pool of labor terrorized into accepting miserable compensation, dangerous and squalid working conditions, endless unpaid overtime, wage theft, abuse, humiliation and sexual assault, all due to the looming threat of arrest and deportation – such a sweet deal for capitalists was worth billions of dollars. After they lost it in 1986, they decided, never again.
The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has finally found some law enforcement officers not worthy of qualified immunity. The First and Fourth Amendment violations were too egregious to be ignored, even with a lack of precedential decisions on point to work with.
This is one of the most horrendous -- and one of the most American stories -- I have ever read. It encompasses a lot of distinctly American issues, ranging from law enforcement violence to the disturbing ability of private individuals and entities to reliably summon law enforcement and bring about the destruction of others.
Today, America has not one, but six guests in our national home babbling about their integrity.
They are the six extremist Republican judges who now control our Supreme Court, and it’s a bit unsettling to hear them go on and on, almost frantically pleading with us to believe in their judicial impartiality.
Only one Black juror, along with 11 white jurors, has been selected to hear the murder trial of three white men who fatally shot Ahmaud Arbery, an unarmed 25-year-old Black man who was jogging through the suburbs of Brunswick, Georgia. The defendants — Gregory McMichael, his son Travis McMichael, as well as their neighbor William “Roddie” Bryan — claim they were attempting a citizen’s arrest when they chased and killed Arbery. Prosecutors asked Judge Timothy Walmsley to reinstate eight Black potential jurors, arguing defense lawyers struck them because of their race. The judge declined to change the jury’s racial makeup before the start of the trial Friday. We speak to attorney Benjamin Crump, who is representing the Arbery family. “There was intentional discrimination,” he says. “I don’t know how you can conclude anything else.” We also speak with Crump about the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse, the white teenager who faces seven charges, including homicide, for fatally shooting two men and wounding a third amid racial justice protests last year in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Crump represents Jacob Blake, the Black man whose shooting by police sparked the protests.
The idea of citizen’s arrest laws back to Europe in the 13th century and was brought to the British North American colonies along with English common law. In the British colonies and the new United States, citizen’s arrest melded with efforts to prevent slave escapes with the formation of slave patrols and fugitive slave ads that offered bounties for the return of freedom-seekers who, if caught, were frequently brutally punished. Fugitive slave vigilantism was even incorporated into the United States Constitution with the agreement that all states would return captured slaves to bondage. Federal Fugitive Slave laws were passed in 1793 and 1850 and ruled constitutional by the Supreme Court in the 1842 Prigg v. Pennsylvania decision. The 1850 law requires that northerners, including free Blacks, must assist in the recapture of slaves or face heavy fines. The law also denied constitutionally guaranteed due process rights to escaped slaves.
Allowing ourselves to fall into the trap posed by locked-down computers and giant social media sites increases the effectiveness of efforts by some in the NSA to spy on and control us. Sifting through and controlling information and ideas expressed on Facebook is much easier than doing the same with millions of individual websites on the Internet and decentralized networks. Please be willing to recognize the seriousness of our situation and make at least some small effort to improve our online freedom. Even small actions taken by many can block a tyranny being put in place by a few.
Cory Doctorow has a great speech up, The coming war on general computation, delivered at the the 28C3, the recent Chaos Computer Congress in Berlin. (He’s also written an article based on the transcript.) Doctorow explains that how the copyright interests want general purpose computers to be regulated, or hobbled, so that people cannot evade copyright restrictions and copyright circumvention prohibitions. (Why Doctorow is not yet a complete copyright abolitionists is a mystery to me.) He has an interesting point at around 45:00 about how the Internet and technology only provides an incremental benefit to the state, since they are already organized enough to be in charge, but can provide a more qualitative change–a “phase shift”–for the subjects of the state, in helping them to better organize and fight the state.
General-purpose computers are astounding. They're so astounding that our society still struggles to come to grips with them, what they're for, how to accommodate them, and how to cope with them. This brings us back to something you might be sick of reading about: copyright.
But bear with me, because this is about something more important. The shape of the copyright wars clues us into an upcoming fight over the destiny of the general-purpose computer itself.
Since becoming crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman has attempted to change the international image of the ultra-conservative kingdom. But he has also intensified a crackdown on human rights activists and political dissidents.
I know, I know. It’s the last thing you want to hear about. Twenty years of American carnage in Afghanistan was plenty for you, I’m sure, and there are so many other things to worry about in an America at the edge of… well, who knows what? But for me, it’s different. I went to Afghanistan in 2002, already angry about this country’s misbegotten war on that poor land, to offer what help I could to Afghan women. And little as I may have been able to do in those years, Afghanistan left a deep and lasting impression on me.
For four years, her family have lived in an Afghan displacement camp in northwestern Badghis province, surviving on humanitarian aid and menial work earning a few dollars a day. But life has only gotten harder since the Taliban took power in Afghanistan on August 15.
As international aid dries up and the country's economy collapses, they're unable to afford basic necessities like food. Her father already sold her 12-year-old sister several months ago.
The latter would be well worth discussing, as would the Church’s earthly commitment to a migration policy that upholds human rights or measures against climate change. But it is empty talk if the core – the commitment to one’s own faith – is missing. And commitment in this case means defence: not against weak people in need of help, but against self-confident young men who despise this society in general and their once culture-shaping Christian faith in particular.
The Iranian Parliament is set to decide soon on whether women should be allowed into soccer stadiums, a move pushed hard in recent years by FIFA, the world governing body for the sport.
Women have been banned from attending soccer matches in stadiums for four decades in the conservative Muslim nation.
What do this atrocity, and Wenisch’s punishment, tell us?
[...]
Fifth, the justice in this case might not have been obtained, had the murdered little girl’s mother not had as her lawyer Amal Clooney, who is now, for obvious reasons, the most famous human rights lawyer in the world. That led to media attention that insured the case would not disappear from view, but would be decided by German judges. Who knows how many other Yazidis have been tormented and murdered, but their families never obtained justice because they lacked the services of someone like Amal Clooney?
For leaving a Yazidi girl enslaved in Iraq to die of thirst, German jihadist Jennifer Wenisch was sentenced by a Munich court to just ten years in prison. Together with her husband, also a member of ISIS, Wenisch had bought a Yazidi woman and her daughter as slaves (the participation of European citizens in their slavery has been documented). The little girl had urinated on her mattress and Jennifer decided to hang her on the window in the sunlight, making her slowly die in front of her mother's eyes.
The prosecutor had asked for a life sentence. But ten years are enough for "justice" and the vile decadence of a fetishist West spouting a perverted "humanitarianism".
Meanwhile, critics of Islam in Germany must hide. Die Welt tells us that the Soura Film Festival in Berlin, dedicated to Lgbt cinema, had a documentary on the liberal Ibn Rushd-Goethe mosque in the German capital. But the Turkish lawyer Seyran Ates, who created the mosque, was accused of "Islamophobia" and so they kicked out the founder of the only mosque in Europe that welcomes women without headscarves and sexual minorities.
Elon Musk's Starlink has finally exited beta, but chip shortages may mar the low-orbit broadband satellite venture's big day. The company has technically stopped calling Starlink a beta product, but warns in a new FAQ on its website that users expecting shipments of their new satellite dishes may be waiting a while:
For years we've watched major cable TV providers lose traditional cable TV subscribers hand over fist to cheaper, more flexible streaming alternatives. It was a trend that only accelerated during COVID. Don't feel too badly for companies like Charter and Comcast however; the companies' growing monopoly over faster fixed-line broadband across huge swaths of the country have allowed them to recoup their pound of flesh via broadband fees (or unnecessary usage caps) without much in the way of repercussion.
Called RTL+, the service will offer up more than 60,000 hours of video content — including historic drama Faking Hitler, starring Lars Eidinger and Moritz Bleibtreu and crime procedural The Allegation, which recently won the Dior Grand Prize at the CanneSeries festival — in combination with tens of thousands of ebooks from Penguin Random House (a subsidiary of RTL parent company Bertelsmann), thousands of podcasts and audiobooks from Bertelsmann-owned AudioNow, digital magazines and articles from Bertelsmann’s Gruner + Jahr publishing group (including science imprint Geo and newsmagazine Stern), as well as some 73 million songs on demand, supplied through a deal with French-owned music streamer Deezer.
From healthcare to agriculture, tech industry giants seem intent on expanding their influence across every sector of the global economy. Left unchecked by the powers that be in Washington, the big four tech companies—Amazon, Google, Apple, and Facebook—will continue to swallow up vast new swaths of the economy, and this is precisely what is at stake in Biden era antitrust policy and enforcement.
The lawsuit stands out because of Mr. Zuckerberg’s personal involvement, Mr. Reback said in an interview. He called Mr. Zuckerberg “the monopolist’s C.E.O.” and said the Facebook founder had engaged in “anticompetitive conduct to an extent not seen since Bill Gates,” one of the founders of Microsoft.
Defunct photo app Phhhoto is suing Meta, formerly Facebook, on antitrust grounds, claiming the social media platform feigned interest in working with it, but then copied its features and hid its name from search results, effectively driving it out of business.
Phhhoto’s technology allowed users to capture five frames “in a single point-and-shoot burst,” which could be looped into a short video (a phhhoto) to be shared either on its platform or Instagram. Sound familiar? That’s because, according to Phhhoto, Facebook copied Phhhoto’s main feature and released it on its Instagram platform as Boomerang in 2015, after blocking Phhhoto from Instagram’s API and from being pre-populated in Instagram posts.
At times I've been at odds with Senators Pat Leahy and Thom Tillis regarding their view on intellectual property (though Leahy has a good history on patent law -- Tillis... not so much). However, kudos to both of them for recognizing a very, very real problem in the way in which Judge Alan Albright has been engaged in what's been called jurisdiction selling.
As Pfizer and Moderna continue to rake in massive profits from their Covid-19 vaccines while denying shots to poor countries, Oxfam America on Thursday filed shareholder resolutions pressuring the U.S.-based companies to share their vaccine recipes to help boost worldwide production and end the pandemic.
"Pfizer's and Moderna's inability to produce enough vaccines threatens global public health and the world economy."
While progressive advocates are still optimistic that a limited drug pricing provision will be included in the Build Back Better Act, the Washington Post on Friday detailed the "massive, months-long advertising, lobbying, and political donation blitz" that Big Pharma and its allies carried out to kill a stronger and overwhelmingly popular proposal that would have done more to protect Americans from the industry's deadly price gouging.
"What we're trying to do is defying one of the most powerful special-interest lobby groups in Washington, D.C."
We have a loooooooooong list of stories about copyright troll Richard Liebowitz and his never-ending antics in court. As we noted earlier this summer, he's been getting suspended from practicing law in courts all around the country (while also piling up more and more sanctions). And while he'd already been suspended in various NY federal courts, he's now been entirely suspended from practicing law in the state of New York. The NY state courts were following up on the federal court in the Southern District of New York suspending Liebowitz, and sought to impose a reciprocal suspension.
All major Dutch Internet providers have signed a landmark site-blocking agreement with anti-piracy group BREIN. After a decade-long legal battle over a Pirate Bay blockade, ISPs now agree that if a court orders one provider to block a site, the others will follow suit. BREIN is not wasting any time and has already filed the legal paperwork to target six additional sites.
Following an investigation carried out by Danish anti-piracy group Rights Alliance, a man from Denmark has been handed a suspended prison sentence for digital textbook piracy. The case was referred to the State Prosecutor for Serious Economic Crime (SÃËIK) after the 28-year-old man was given the opportunity to stop his activities but carried on regardless.
Search the Techdirt pages for the term "mashup" and you will see a metric ton of ink spilled on the topic. Most of those posts deal with the copyright implications of mashup creators, be they for music or literature. It is, frankly, a tortured landscape largely littered with the metaphorical bodies of artists creating new and interesting artwork by combining previous works to create something new. Music is the easiest entry point for those not in the know. Take the music from one song and lyrical output from another, put them together, and you get something new and interesting. When done well, the results are mind-blowing. As are the constant attacks from original creators and rightsholders that seem to see such mashup work as a threat to the originals.
