With Russia’s attack on Ukraine, various things have been affected economically and geopolitically.
While we do not discuss anything about the war here, the victims of war need support to survive. Many organizations and individuals have come forward to join humanitarian causes to support the Ukrainian people.
Even the Zorin OS creators announced to donate all their recent profits to help the cause.
SecureDrop Application and Monitor Servers will be updated to SecureDrop 2.2.1 automatically within 24 hours of the release. As with previous releases, we recommend that you update your Tails workstations to the latest version of Tails and the latest version of SecureDrop. Please see our upgrade guide for instructions.
mintBackup is a simple and easy-to-use personal data backup and restore tool for Linux Mint, which offers features such as selecting the directory to store your backup file, excluding files and directories, and selecting hidden files and directories. It also supports saving a list of applications installed on your system.
mintBackup comes preinstalled on Linux Mint, to open it, simply search for the “backup”, in the system menu and click on the application called Backup Tool.
Hello, friends. Yum is one of the most important package managers out there because of things like Yum history. So, we will use yum history to find out package information about installed or uninstalled packages on the system. In addition to this, yum history is used to verify transactions that have been made with this program.
Creating presentations for educational or work presentations was always monopolized by proprietary tools. However, thanks to CSS/HTML we now have other more flexible tools. That’s why, in this post, you will learn how to install RevealJS on Ubuntu 20.04 / Debian 11.
In this tutorial post, we will show you the method to run processes in the background. After this article, you will learn to Start a Linux Process or Command in Background.
Are you having an issue or getting the error message ‘temporary failure in name resolution’ on your terminal while trying to ping a website or while trying to update a system or apps in Linux then you are at the right place as we will show you the solution for this error.
Libre has managed to climb the ranks in recent years and is now notorious for its various software. It offers its very own word processor, spreadsheet program, presentation maker, database tool alongside several others aimed at making the life of the daily user more efficient.
This brief tutorial explains how to turn off breadcrumbs in WordPress based on different theme scenarios. Breadcrumbs are visible links showing the hierarchical structure of your site based on the current content the visitor is reading.
After reading this tutorial, you will know how to disable breadcrumbs on your website. All steps in this article include screenshots, making it easy for all WordPress users to follow them.
qBittorrent is an open-source peer-to-peer Bittorrent client which is available for all platforms: Windows, Linux, macOS, FreeBSD, and OS/2. You can use this as an alternative to €µTorrent.
Over 700 creators have joined in support to donate their work. All proceeds from this bundle will be split between the following charities: [...]
Proton compatibility with Windows games is going to be an ongoing improvement for many years, and Proton Experimental is where all the latest comes in first for Linux and Steam Deck.
Yes, even a fair few games that Microsoft / Xbox publish will work out of the box on the Steam Deck. As Xbox Game Studios announced in a post on Steam, it shows just how much of a shift the Steam Deck is causing for Linux gaming as a whole to have them talk about it.
If you believed that Valve was going to stop at supporting only SteamOS on the Steam Deck, well you might want to revise your opinion. They have just released some (but not all) drivers to make it easier to support Windows on the Steam Deck.
Roger (radky in the forum) is working on JWMDesk 3.5, with new features and compatibility with EasyOS 3.4.1+. Roger has designed JWMDesk to work in most pup derivatives, which is a formidable task, and I take my hat off to him for doing it.
The March 5th 2022 release of DietPi v8.2 comes together with a new image for UTM, Proxmox, VMware ESXi, Odroid C4, some improvements to Roon software packages, Docker, Chromium, Deluge and a number of enhancements and bug fixes for several software install options.
My current FreeBSD laptop is a 2020 14" HP Spectre x360, which uses Intel’s 11th Gen CPU and “Evo” platform, although I previously also had the 13" 2020 version with a similar setup (but lacked working audio on non-Windows). This article isn’t specific to HP: your shiny-new Lenovo ThinkPad, Dell XPS, or Framework Laptop can also apply.
One thing with FreeBSD is that unlike Windows or desktop Linux, the default configuration is poorly optimized for laptops that are newer than your ancient ThinkPad T420, or maybe a T460s.
Having run FreeBSD on TigerLake on-and-off since December 2020 on two laptops, there are a few things to keep in mind. These are: [...]
The firmware is available via fw_update(8).
This patch adds initial 11ac support to the iwx(4) driver. This means that 80MHz channels can be used. No other 11ac features are enabled yet.
This is not yet a patch which could be committed. Apart from debug prints which need to go, there is a known issue found by dv@ where this patch causes a firmware error, sysassert 0x20101A25. The reason for this is not known. It would help to get more testing to see if more clues can be found based on where this error pops up. I cannot reproduce the error myself.
Do you want to learn more about Gentoo and contribute to your favourite free software project?! Once again, now for the 10th time, we have been accepted as a mentoring organization for this year’s Google Summer of Code!
The GSoC is an excellent opportunity for gaining real-world experience in software design and making oneself known in the broader open source community. It also looks great on a resume. Some initial project ideas can be found here, but new projects ideas are also welcome. For new projects time is of the essence: they have to be worked out, discussed with the mentors, and submitted before the April 19th deadline. It is strongly recommended that contributors refine new project ideas with a mentor before proposing the idea formally.
The Elive Team is proud to announce the release of the beta version 3.8.26
This is probably the last version that we release based on Buster in order to move to Bullseye, so we wanted to release a last very stable and featured version first! If you want to manually upgrade to bullseye you can already do it following this small howto
I’ve published release 0.1 of v-i, my installer for Debian based on vmdb2. It’s entirely non-interactive, dangerous, unhelpful, but fairly fast. It will remove all data from your drives. See the initital announcement for more, or the README. There is now a pre-built image available, see the tutorial.
Zorin OS 16.1 is now available to download.
As the first point release issued since the release of Zorin OS 16 back in august of last year Zorin OS 16.1 is “packed with improvements to help users work better, updates to apps and system-level software, and support for new hardware.”
Chief among the updates is LibreOffice 7.3. This is the latest version of the popular open source office suite and it boasts improved compatibility with and faster opening of Microsoft Office files, a better dark mode, and a slate of smaller tweaks aimed at improving functionality and performance.
Zorin OS 16.1 was released with security patches, new software and the team aims for a better cause.
Zorin OS is popular because it gives the perfect starting point for Windows users in their Linux journey. Thanks to its simple design, elegant selection of packages and out of the box Windows looks, it’s one of the popular and sought after Linux Distribution today for all users.
Coming after almost two months since Zorin OS 16, this first point release is now available for download and upgrades for those who are already running the 16.0 version.
We first wrote about the Pockit modular Linux computer with hot-plugging magnetic blocks about a year ago. The system was based on a STM32+ESP32 mainboard with a socket for an optional Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3 and included magnets and electrical contacts to snap and hot-plug modules/blocks while the computer is running.
The developer (Anil Reddy) has made good progress with the project and added the option to use a Raspberry Pi CM4 with Pockit (provided you can find one) to improve performance, for example for computer vision. Other changes include support for AI accelerators, an improved dashboard, home automation integration, and more.
Lanner IIoT-I530 is a fanless machine vision IPC (Industrial PC) powered by a choice of Intel Tiger Lake UP3 processors and equipped with six PoE+ or LAN ports for IP cameras, as well as two 2.5GbE ports.
The embedded computer also comes with up to 64GB DDR4 RAM, two COM Ports, four USB 3.0 ports, dual HDMI output, digital inputs and outputs, as well as M.2 sockets for WiFi 6 or/and 5G connectivity, plus NVMe SSD storage.
If you’ve ever wanted to build a large format plotter but didn’t have the floor space, maybe put it up against the wall and make it cute. That’s the idea behind Fumik, the wall-drawing robot. As you might expect, the little device is just a motion base with a pen. We hope there’s paper against the wall since not everyone wants computer-generated art on their drywall.
Like a lot of folks who enjoy tinkering with technology, I now have a small but growing collection of Raspberry Pi boxes around my house. I've used them for various projects: A PiHole network ad blocker, an OctoPi 3D print server, and a Minecraft server, among others.
However, the most custom project I've done is setting up a Raspberry Pi to act as a web server to host my own blog site, mandclu.com. I got the idea while researching for an interview I did a couple of years ago.
The project has evolved significantly since it started, so I thought it would be interesting to share.
This security and maintenance release features 1 bug fix in addition to 3 security fixes. Because this is a security release, it is recommended that you update your sites immediately. All versions since WordPress 3.7 have also been updated.
WordPress 5.9.2 is a security and maintenance release. The next major release will be version 6.0.
You can download WordPress 5.9.2 from WordPress.org, or visit your Dashboard ââ â Updates and click “Update Now”.
The Zettelkasten Method is an amplifier of your endeavors in the realm of knowledge work. It is highly effective, and many people report they have more fun, one even comparing it to the addictive nature of games like World of Warcraft, and have an easier time doing knowledge work overall. But this only comes as a result of putting in a high level of consistent effort.
When it comes to open source software, the Open Source Initiative’s definition is quite clear: there must be “no discrimination against persons or groups” and “no discrimination against fields of endeavor.” Each of these criteria applies to the license of said open source software, while the distribution of that same software may be a different matter entirely, argues Press.
“There’s a difference between the code and the repositories where we collaborate on the code, versus the distribution channels where that code gets distributed,” said Press in an interview. “Just because you have the free permission to pull down the source code itself, versus, say, pull down a Dockerized application so that I can spin up an entire infrastructure ecosystem within my firewall and it all just works at the click of the button, those are two completely different things. Having more control over that distribution channel, that doesn’t really impact the nature of what the scope of these licenses are talking about.”
For better understanding of the inputs and outputs of an Arduino program they must be displayed in an organized manner. For displaying the data of the Arduino code, the most viable option is the 16Ãâ2 LCD because it is easy to interface with Arduino boards. To display the data and to make it more readable or understandable, we can take the help of the customized special characters that can be created by the user. For example, creating the symbols that indicate temperature, pressure or symbol for identification of any type of data. We have created some special characters and displayed them on the LCD in this discourse.
When programming the Arduino learners come across various types of errors and sometimes it becomes difficult to troubleshoot the error code. The error codes mostly come when the Arduino program is compiled, and these errors are displayed in the output menu of the Arduino IDE which is at the bottom of the software. The Arduino IDE also indicates on which line of the code the error exists and it also suggests suitable actions for rectifying the error. The most common error beginners face is the “not declared in this scope” and we have discussed why such type of error arises and how we can fix this error.
Leonardo and I are thrilled to announce the first CRAN release of dtts. The dtts package builds on top of both our nanotime package and the well-loved and widely-used data.table package by Matt, Arun, Jan, and numerous collaborators.
In a very rough nutshell, you can think of dtts as combining both these potent ingredients to produce something not-entirely-unlike the venerable xts package by our friends Jeff and Josh—but using highest-precision nanosecond increments rather than not-quite-microseconds or dates.
Two years ago, I wrote a post with a handful of grievances about Rust, a language that I then (and still) consider my favorite compiled language.
In the two years since I’ve gone from considering myself familiar with Rust, to comfortable in it, to thinking in Rust even when writing in other languages (sometimes to my detriment). So, like two years ago, this post should be read from a place of love for Rust, and not a cheap attempt to knock it.
I recently found a use for the <meter element: an element to represent a scalar measurement within a known range. (That’s the unappealing language the HTML Standard uses to describe a horizontal gauge bar.) However, I was dismayed to discover that different web browsers have vastly different interpretations of a vaguely defined aspect of the <meter element. Here’s what I found and the workaround to get the same behavior in all browsers.
[...]
The first browser rendering (value="3") is shown as a short orange bar in Chrome 99, Safari 15, and Firefox 98 (current versions). The second rendering (value="7") is shown as a long green bar in Chrome and Safari, but Firefox shows a long orange bar.
So, why isn’t the first bar colored red and the second green in all browsers? Alternatively, why aren’t both bars orange everywhere? Both values are set on the exact segment boundary but with different results. The underlying question is where, exactly, are the boundaries for the three color segments?
Applications frequently are required to generate invoices, reports, ID cards, and much more in PDF format. There are Java libraries and tools that developers can use to generate PDFs, including the popular JasperReports. While sophisticated, using these programs can be complicated because they support a wide range of documents.
This article introduces a simpler tool, the open source wkhtmltopdf utility. I will show you how to use wkhtmltopdf to solve a common scenario: You have an HTML form, parameterized to accept input data, and you need to produce a PDF from the data in that form. You will learn how to set up your data and make a call to the wkhtmltopdf utility from a Spring Boot web application. We'll use Red Hat's Universal Base Image (UBI) 8 as a base image to simplify the application build, then deploy the final image into Red Hat Openshift 4.
We have just merged curl’s 246th command line option: --remove-on-error (with this commit). To be included in the upcoming curl 7.83.0 release.
This command line option is quite simple and does exactly what the name suggests. If you tell curl to download something into a local file and something goes wrong in that transfer – that makes curl return an error – this option will make curl remove that file rather than leaving the leftovers on disk in a possibly partial file.
Julie (Renate Reinsve), the protagonist of Norwegian director Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person in the World, comes into focus in the film’s second chapter, “Cheating.” After excusing herself from a swanky publishing event for her comic-book artist boyfriend Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lie), she crashes a wedding reception on her way home. Julie effortlessly blends in with the guests and eventually meets Elvind (Herbert Nordrum), another loner at the party, with whom she flirts all night. Julie and Elvind mutually agree not to cheat on their respective partners, but they gleefully toe the line of infidelity without crossing it. The two part the next morning without learning each other’s surnames.
[10p6] wondered what it would be like if Atari had used a standardized keyboard across its 16-bit and 32-bit computer lines in 1985. Imagination is fun, but building things is even better, and thus they set out to create such a thing. Enter the Universal Atari Keyboard Case.
Large mechanical seven-segment displays have a certain presence that you just don’t get in electronic screens. Part of this comes from the rather satisfying click-click-clack sound they make at every transition. Unfortunately, such a noise quickly becomes annoying in your living room; [David McDaid] therefore designed a silent electromechanical seven-segment clock that has all the presence of a mechanical display without the accompanying sound.
It’s not a question you ask yourself every day, but it’s one that the [Brick Experiment Channel] set out to answer: how fast can you spin a LEGO wheel by hand? In their typical way, they set about building an increasingly complex contraption to optimize for the very specific case of maximum RPM.
[Vaibhav Chhabra], the co-founder of Maker’s Asylum hackerspace in Mumbai, India, starts his Remoticon talk by telling a short story about how the hackerspace rose to its current status. Born out of frustration with a collapsed office ceiling, having gone through eight years of moving and reorganizations, it accumulated a loyal participant base – not unusual with hackerspaces that are managed well. This setting provided a perfect breeding ground for the M19 effort when COVID-19 reached India, mixing “what can we do” and “what should we do” inquiries into a perfect storm and starting the 49 day work session that swiftly outgrew the hackerspace, both physically and organizationally.
Ladies and Gentlemen, Sentient robots, Travellers from the distant future, or Aliens from the outer rim, it’s time to enter the 2022 Hackaday.io Sci-Fi Contest!
Every high school physics student knows€ c, or the speed of light, it’s 3 x 10^8 metres per second. More advanced or more curious students will know that this is an approximation, and the figure of 299,792,458 metres per second that forms the officially accepted figure comes from a resonance of the caesium atom from which is derived a value for the second.
The House of Representatives late Wednesday approved a $1.5 trillion government spending package that includes $782 billion in U.S. military funding, the largest portion of the must-pass omnibus legislation.
"Military, weapons, and detention contractors are the biggest winners in this budget," the National Priorities Project (NPP) at the Institute for Policy Studies said in a statement. "In recent years, more than half of all military spending has gone to for-profit, private contractors. The new spending bill promises to continue this windfall, providing for even more expensive weapons system than the Pentagon requested, and promising to continue lucrative contracts for immigrant detention and surveillance."
Experts warned Thursday that U.S. lawmakers' failure to swiftly pass coronavirus relief funds amounts to an active decision to prolong a pandemic that has killed nearly a million Americans—and 6 million people worldwide—over the past two years and continues to wreak global havoc.
"Congress must immediately restore the $5 billion in global Covid funding requested by the White House."
Justice campaigners across the globe plan to mark the two-year anniversary of the World Health Organization declaring the coronavirus crisis a pandemic on Friday with die-ins and rallies to protest the intellectual property policies fueling what critics call "vaccine apartheid."
"Pharma's monopoly grip on Covid vaccines... puts us at risk for the next deadly variant."
What do the dead become but reflections of ourselves? Close to a million people have died in the United States during the Covid-19 pandemic—lives that are lost to me because I did not know them, their histories, their joys and disappointments, their fears and desires. So, for me, they get added to all the dead who came before them. Too many to name. From AIDS, from hepatitis C, from MDR-TB—all the epidemics that have taken friends, family, colleagues since my 20s. But then death, suddenly, comes for people you know, and in that moment, the numbness abates, the sorrow and anger rise up.
The scandal is the most extensive miscarriage of justice in British legal history.
The criminal prosecutions, civil actions and extortions, resulted in criminal convictions, jail sentences, false confessions, defamation, severe loss of income, indebtedness and insolvency, marriage break-up, and suicide. Several died before they could be€ cleared in subsequent legal proceedings.
“We are a company and not a government or a country,” Brad Smith, Microsoft’s president, noted in a blog post issued by the company on Monday, describing the threats it was seeing. But the role it is playing, he made clear, is not a neutral one. He wrote about “constant and close coordination” with the Ukrainian government, as well as federal officials, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the European Union.
So far, experts who have watched the Russian cyber assaults have been confused at their lack of success, as well as the lower tempo, intensity and sophistication of what Russian-government hackers are known to be capable of.
Ukrainian defences have proved resilient, said one European official who was briefed this week by the Americans at a [NATO] meeting, and Russian offences have proved mediocre. He said the reason was that, so far, Russia has held back its elite corps in the cyber arena, much as it has on the battlefield, perhaps by underestimating the Ukrainians.
Big Tech has responded to Russia's invasion of Ukraine by offering assistance to Ukrainians, stymieing Russia's disinformation campaigns and shuttering the services Moscow's military can use on the ground, moves that make the industry a de facto participant in the hostilities.
Sure, there are some ports for Thunderbolt, Ethernet, whatever. But look at those two little rectangles to the left of the HDMI. Those two beautiful rectangles.
These, my friends, are a new invention called “USB-A”. I’m told you can use these to connect mice and keyboards to your computer, though I’ve always just used the PS/2 port for that. The plugs only appear to go in one way, which seems like a bit of a design oversight. But overall, I’m excited to see where this standard will take us.
Last month, the NY Times published a really great article by (the always innovative) tech reporter Kashmir Hill, in which she tested out a bunch of those location tracking tools by hiding them (with permission) on her husband, Trevor Timm, executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation. It was a great and eye-opening article, looking both at how well (mixed bag) some of those tracking tools worked, and how easy (often much more than you’d expect) it was to hide them on someone. Here’s just a snippet, though the whole article is worth reading.
The case is United States v. Chatrie, and addresses a controversial tool called a geofence warrant. The police issued the warrant to Google seeking information on every device within the area of the robbery during a one-hour period. The geographic area was about 17.5 acres (about 3 and a half times the footprint of a New York city block) and included a church, a chain restaurant, a hotel, several apartments and residences, a senior living facility, a self-storage business, and two busy streets.
Google’s initial search identified 19 devices, with a total of 210 individual location points. Google assigned anonymizing identifiers to each device and provided their locations to the police. Following a three-step process designed by Google, the police expanded the time period to two hours to get additional location information for 9 of the devices. Ultimately, police obtained detailed, identifying subscriber information for three devices. One of those belonged to the defendant.
Mr. Chatrie filed a motion to suppress the geofence evidence, and, after several hearings and extensive expert testimony, the court issued a thorough, 63-page order holding the warrant was unconstitutional. The court held that it’s not enough for the police to allege that a crime was committed and the perpetrator used a cellphone. If the police want to get information on every device in the area, they must also establish probable cause to search every person in the area, something that’s likely impossible in a busy area like this one.
Strong privacy laws should help everyday people protect and manage their privacy. They should cover the companies and practices that pose the most potential for harm. They should be easy for people to use, so protecting our privacy doesn’t become an additional part-time (or full-time) job. They should ensure that people aren’t penalized if they choose to protect their privacy. And they should give people the tools to stand up for themselves if companies trample their privacy rights.
Beginning in 2019, HSI sent eight administrative subpoenas to these financial services companies asking that they turn over all records for money transfers over $500 to or from California, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and Mexico. Each administrative subpoena sought records for six-months at a time. In response, Western Union and Maxi provided 6.2 million financial records, including personal information such as names and addresses, to HSI. All of the information was entered into a database called Transaction Record Analysis Center (TRAC), which is run by a non-profit and facilitates law enforcement access to bulk financial data for 5 years. According to Sen. Wyden, HSI terminated the program in January 2022 after his office contacted HSI about it.
This practice presents real-world harms to people who, for good reason, would like to keep private the transfer of money and the identifying information that goes with it. Sharing financial and other personally identifying records of domestic violence survivors, asylum seekers, and human rights activists could expose them to danger, particularly given that TRAC allows hundreds of law enforcement agencies unfettered access to these records.€
Moreover, this kind of bulk surveillance is illegal. By statute, these administrative subpoenas must seek records “relevant” to an agency investigation. Simply put, there is no way these broad requests for bulk records would turn up only documents “relevant” to specific investigations; instead it put everyone who transferred money, including U.S. persons, under surveillance.
The update follows through on iRobot’s promise that its iRobot Genius software will make your robot smarter at no extra cost to you. Smart mapping, which is done without a camera, lets the vacuum learn your home’s floor plan, so you can direct it specifically where to clean using the iRobot Home app or a voice assistant, such as Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Assistant. Prior to the update, the i3 could map your home to show you where it cleaned on its run, but it couldn’t remember the maps and use them for future cleaning.
On Thursday, just eight months after the measure took effect, lawmakers approved a bill to lift the blanket ban. The legislation would allow police agencies to use the technology in certain circumstances, including to help identify an individual when they have reasonable suspicion that the person committed a crime. Under the bill, facial recognition also could be used for a variety of other uses, including to help identify crime victims or witnesses, sex trafficking victims and unidentified bodies in morgues.
But science fiction is (as usual) way ahead of the tech narrative-generation machine. In sf, we've generally fallen out of love with the tycoon – where these business titans appear, they are revealed to be bumbling sociopaths whose unique talent is in ignoring their consciences as they cheat, crush and loot their way to power.
It's time to start thinking about the tech giants this way. It's time to recognize that the reason that the tech giants of yesteryear – DEC, Sun, Commodore, Silicon Graphics, etc – rose and fell is that we banned them from buying their way to eternal rule. The muscular antitrust that began its slow decline with Ronald Reagan (accelerating with every administration thereafter) prevented dominant firms from merging, acquiring, or spending their way to the top of the heap. Antitrust once blocked companies' below-cost predatory pricing to fend off rivals, horizontal mergers that increased industry concentration, and, importantly, vertical mergers that gobbled up the supply chain.
The White House has reportedly put under consideration a plan floated by climate activist and author Bill McKibben for the U.S. to mass-produce heat pumps to be sent to Europe to lessen its reliance on Russian fossil fuels while also addressing the planetary emergency.
"We can and should do this."
Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota issued a statement Thursday explaining why she was one of just two Democrats to vote against House legislation that would enshrine a sweeping ban on Russian energy imports—including oil, gas, and coal—into U.S. law.
"There is no meaningful principle at play in a decision to ban Russian oil but seek it from Saudi Arabia instead."
Could the Russian invasion of Ukraine escalate to nuclear war? It’s unlikely but not impossible. That should terrify us.
Without insurance, no new polluting energy project can be built, or even financed. Chubb, an insurance giant based in NYC, is one of the biggest providers of these insurance policies, underwriting the risks of digging new coal mines, building tar sands pipelines, and expanding oil and gas drilling in sensitive ecosystems across the world.
Vladimir Putin's war on Ukraine is horrific and barbaric. Yet it could still be ended with a diplomatic solution in which Russia withdraws its forces in exchange for Ukraine's neutrality. Putin signaled his openness to this possibility in his recent call with French President Emmanuel Macron: "this is first and foremost about demilitarization and neutrality of Ukraine, to ensure that Ukraine will never pose a threat to Russia." Translated into action, this could mean that NATO and Ukraine would forswear Ukraine's future membership in the Alliance if Russia immediately withdraws from Ukraine and forswears future attacks.
The conception that the war started on February 24 of this year is like viewing the “invasion” by the US and its allies of Normandy in June 1944 against the “sovereign” and “democratic” Vichy French as the start of World War II. Never mind that the Vichy government was a puppet of the Nazis; that the opportunities to negotiate had long been rejected; that the war had been raging for years; and that the only option for stopping the Nazis was militarily.
The US imperial army
When President Joe Biden decided to withdraw the U.S. military from Afghanistan last year, much of America's news€ media came down on him like a ton of bricks. Republicans piled on, calling the withdrawal an "unmitigated disaster."
Amid new reports Thursday of noncombatants killed and wounded by Russian attacks on Ukrainian civilian infrastructure, human rights advocates joined United Nations officials in expressing their horror and accusing Russia of possible war crimes.
"We don't understand how it's possible in modern life to bomb a children's hospital. People cannot believe that it's true."
His bravado against overwhelming odds is a shining example of a battle for freedom and national dignity, a true mouse that roared, and refuses to surrender, often telling Western allies that salute him that he is a target of assassination.
“He is standing strong, but pleaded for more help,” Rep. Jim Hines, D-Conn., told€ The New York Times€ after hearing Zelensky on a Zoom call to about 300 members of Congress last week. “Planes, oil embargo, continued military aid.”
Indeed, “We, the People” agreed that after the Soviets chased out the Japs (along with the now-hated Kim family’s help) that Korea would be handed back to the Koreans, but “We, the People” reneged, leading to the split-state horror of today. And when “We, the People” occupied Okinawa permanently, “We, the People” told the Japs Never Again, and that “We, the People” would now be their overseers, and would defend Taiwan (next door) against the Chinese and no one was to touch our friendly little “spark plugs” the Phillipinos. America was the new Clint Eastwood in town, and the Chinese and Soviets were the Ugly and the Bad. The Asian Pivot is actually 75 years old. If we’d let Kim have South Korea instead of bringing a war still in play (only an armistice keeps the peace), they’d have been united again, as they had before the war for thousands of years, and probably happily eating Mickey D burgers. If we’d let the Chinese have Taiwan, they’d be united now. The occupation of Okinawa would be pointless. That’s the point.
So, what’s this got to do with Ukraine, you might wonder.€ In a word, my friend: Hegemony.
Hungary’s government issued a decree on Monday allowing NATO troops to be deployed in western Hungary and weapons shipments to cross its territory by land or by air to other NATO member states.
The decree was signed by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and published in the official gazette on Monday.
There is a discursive nervous tic all over social media at the moment, including from prominent journalists such as Guardian columnist George Monbiot. The demand is that everyone not only “condemn” Russian president Vladimir Putin for invading Ukraine, but do so without qualification.€
Most consequentially, key Russian banks have been cut out of the SWIFT payments messaging system, making financial transactions much more difficult. The United States, European Union and others also moved to freeze Russian Central Bank reserves. And U.S. President Joe Biden is weighing a total ban on Russian oil imports.
These sanctions are aimed at generating opposition from both Russian President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle and everyday Russians. As a scholar who studies regime change, I believe the risk is that they will actually drive the Kremlin’s weak opposition further into obscurity.
This is a developing news story... Check back for possible updates...
Talks between Ukraine and Russia's top diplomats ended Thursday without a ceasefire deal or an agreement to establish a humanitarian corridor allowing civilians to flee the besieged city of Mariupol, where hundreds of thousands of people have been trapped for days in rapidly deteriorating conditions.
A March 6 New York Times article entitled "Ukrainians Find That Relatives in Russia Don't Believe It's a War" provides accounts of Ukrainians—distressed and in the midst of evacuations—calling their Russian relatives. They find out that their relatives tend to deny that bombs are raining on Ukraine, and revert to Russian propaganda on the need of Russia to liberate the country from a gang of drugged-up Nazis.
In the first six weeks of 2022, five journalists were assassinated in Mexico. Two of those, Margarito Martínez and Lourdes Maldonado López, were colleagues of Jorge Nieto’s in Tijuana. Nieto, a journalist and fixer with 19 years of experience in the region, spoke with me in Spanish from Brisbane, Australia, where he has been reporting remotely since the beginning of the pandemic. The thousands of miles separating Nieto from his home have made it safer for him to discuss the violent conditions that have claimed the lives of his friends and threaten independent journalism in Mexico.
How different this sense of potential damage is than that expressed when, in the wake of 9/11, America went to war globally with its invasion of Afghanistan and its war on terror.€ As the president of that moment, George W. Bush, insisted so confidently in 2001, Americans should simply “go shopping” and not be distracted by the country’s distant battles. As he later put it, “We will fight them over there so we do not have to face them in the United States of America.”
At the heart of those claims was the thought that foreign wars could be fought by a great power without damage at home — or put another way, that the theaters of conflict for the Global War on Terror were somehow eternally separable from the daily lives of Americans. But tell that to the country that elected Donald Trump as president 15 years later and has been coming apart at the seams ever since.
It is unavoidable. In Ukraine Putin is maximizing suffering and targeting those who are most precious and vulnerable.
It is also nothing new. Civilian casualties are considered among the many costs of war. On the whole noncombatants (despites laws to the contrary) are killed in much greater numbers than combatants, and women and children make up an overwhelming majority of those numbers.
The prolonged, costly nightmare of Australia’s submarine policy took another turn on March 6.€ The Defence Minister Peter Dutton could barely contain his excitement with the announcement that the Morrison government would soon be unveiling which nuclear-powered submarines it would acquire. “We will have an announcement within the next couple of months about which boat we are going with, what we can do in the interim.”
To the ABC’s Insiders program, Dutton oozed unsubstantiated hope.€ “Both the US and UK understand the timelines, they understand what is happening in the Indo-Pacific, and they are very, very willing partners.”€ The minister was even willing to wager that the submarines would be operational before 2040, when his career and those of his colleagues will be confined to the dust of history.€ “We are going to acquire the capability much sooner than that.”
Russian forces reportedly killed at least three people when they bombed a children’s hospital in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol on Wednesday, shelling a humanitarian corridor and breaking a ceasefire deal that was was meant to allow residents to flee. The actions constitute a violation of international humanitarian law and, therefore, a potential war crime, says David Miliband of the International Rescue Committee. The mayor of Mariupol says there have been over 1,200 civilian deaths since the start of the war. Russian forces have also cut off the city’s water supply and electricity. “This is a strangulation of the city,” says Miliband.
We go to Moscow to look at the growing antiwar movement in Russia, where activists are risking a brutal crackdown to oppose their government’s assault on Ukraine. Arshak Makichyan is a climate activist who recently joined protests against the invasion and says the actions of the Russian government do not reflect the will of the people. He says Russian citizens suspect President Vladimir Putin could declare martial law soon, as part of a broader campaign to suppress dissenting voices. Meanwhile, U.S. sanctions have unintended consequences on peace activists, whose access to virtual private networks and foreign social media platforms has been hurt, leaving them less able to find alternative sources of information. “It’s difficult and dangerous to fight this regime,” says Makichyan.
Poland continues to be a vital destination for refugees fleeing the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine, who risk cold winter temperatures and travel for days to cross the border into safety. Humanitarian aid relief workers are calling for the European Union to put more pressure on Russia to agree to a ceasefire and find a diplomatic solution to end the war. Speaking from Lublin, Poland, Becky Bakr Abdulla of the Norwegian Refugee Council says that as the world focuses its attention on Ukraine and Russia, refugees from countries such Syria, Afghanistan and Yemen are experiencing less hospitable treatment. “Let’s not also forget tens of millions of other refugees and displaced people around the globe that need equal amount of support,” she says.
The Russian military invasion of Ukraine has devastated civilian centers such as schools and hospitals. Over 2.2. million people have fled the country, resulting in a dangerous refugee crisis in Europe as Russia refuses to guarantee the “humanitarian corridors” promised for civilians to safely evacuate. “What we’re talking about is repeated attacks on civilian infrastructure, which is illegal under international law,” says Bel Trew, independent correspondent for The Independent, who has been reporting on civilians being targeted in other Ukrainian cities.
The Ukrainian resistance is drawing droves of foreign fighters to Kyiv — including an award-winning Russian writer who long interpreted the Kremlin for American readers. “I have burned my bridges,” says Sergei Loiko. “If I go home, they will try me as a traitor and put me behind bars for 15 years.”
During the debate on Wednesday, MEPs underlined the crucial role that batteries have in the transition to a circular and climate-neutral economy and for the EU’s competitiveness and strategic autonomy. The draft legislation was adopted on Thursday with 584 votes in favour, 67 against and 40 abstentions.
MEPs are in favour of overhauling the current legislation to take into account technological developments.
They propose stronger requirements on sustainability, performance and labelling, including the introduction of a new category of “batteries for ‘light means of transport’ (LMT)”, such as electric scooters and bikes, and rules on a carbon footprint declaration and label. By 2024, portable batteries in appliances, such as smartphones, and batteries for LMT must be designed so that consumers and independent operators can easily and safely remove them themselves, MEPs say.
Unveiling a new report on the devastating impacts of pollution, a United Nations expert on Thursday called for "urgent and ambitious action" to ensure that everyone on the planet experiences "a safe, clean, healthy, and sustainable environment."
"Pollution and toxic substances affect the enjoyment of many human rights, especially the right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment."
Congressional Democrats on Thursday introduced the bicameral Big Oil Windfall Profits Tax to target price gouging by profit-gorging fossil fuel companies amid Russian President Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine.
"We need to curb profiteering by Big Oil and provide relief to Americans at the gas pump—that starts with ensuring these corporations pay a price when they price gouge."
With gas prices surging even higher in the wake of the White House's new prohibition on U.S. imports of Russian fossil fuels, progressive lawmakers on Wednesday night called on Congress to swiftly pass legislation to prevent Big Oil from further price-gouging, ramp up investments in a clean energy transition, and raise wages and lower the costs of necessities for working households.
"Putin's war is causing gas prices to rise, but this is no excuse for large oil companies to pad their bottom line with war-fueled profits."
Iitate is approximately 50 kilometers away from the nuclear site, but quickly became one of the most radioactively contaminated places as a result of the Fukushima disaster. Yet, residents were told little and it took more than a month for an evacuation order to be issued for Itate. Many did not leave until late June.
Mr. Hasegawa himself stayed on in Itate for five months after the disaster, tending to his cows until all of them were put down. Meanwhile, he kept a visual record of conditions there, taking more than ten thousand photos and 180 videos (in Japanese).
Nigel Farage’s campaign for a “Net Zero Referendum” is led by and backed by climate science deniers, despite his repeated claims to care about the environment, DeSmog can report.
This week the GB News host and former UKIP leader said he was launching a campaign for a public referendum on the UK’s net zero policies, under the slogan “Vote Power, Not Poverty”.€
“It is like it’s an environmental war zone,”€ Traditional Chief Shirell Parfait-Dardar of the Grand Caillou/Dulac Band of Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Tribe,€ told me outside her new home in Chauvin, Louisiana, about 70 miles southwest of New Orleans.€
On August 29, Hurricane Ida destroyed the dream home she and her husband had almost finished building. The stormed slammed into Louisiana with maximum sustained winds of 150 mph, just shy of a Category 5 hurricane.€
A new governance body set up to regulate how private companies offset carbon emissions has failed to appoint Indigenous board members months after pledging to do so, amid ongoing concerns over representation in the carbon marketplace.
The Integrity Council for Voluntary Carbon Markets (IC-VCM), which launched last year, has acknowledged it is “essential” to represent the communities that are home to the majority of “nature-based projects”, which carbon trading relies on.
This was pretty much business as usual in the twilight of the fossil-fuel age. Oil and gas have long been controlled by petro-state thugs who use their money and power in unsavory ways, from throttling global economic growth to sabotaging international agreements to reduce carbon emissions (and if inquisitive journalists like Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi ask too many questions, they end up cut into pieces with a bone saw). Meanwhile, Western leaders ritualistically vow to break their dependence on fossil fuels with hollow calls for “energy independence,” while at the same time showing no reservations about invading Middle Eastern countries like Iraq to secure oil supplies. Here in the U.S., rallying cries like “Drill, baby, drill” just fatten the bottom line of Big Oil while deepening our addiction to fossil fuels.
Fears of a potential radiation leak at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant are growing after a power cut at the site. Without electricity it will be difficult to cool ponds that contain hazardous nuclear waste and to filter the air inside the vast containment building that houses the remains of the reactor that was destroyed during an infamous disaster at the site in 1986.
Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, warned in a tweet that reserve diesel generators will operate for only 48 hours. “After that, cooling systems of the storage facility for spent nuclear fuel will stop, making radiation leaks imminent,” he wrote.
A magna cum laude graduate from Harvard and Radcliffe, and now an associate professor at the University of Toronto’s Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design, Wolff learned heaps when she worked at the San Francisco Exploratorium from 2007 to 2014. Before that, she served as a research and design consultant in New Orleans and also as a Fulbright-Hayes Scholar in the Netherlands. She has delivered lectures from Amsterdam to Zurich and from Berkeley to Sydney, Australia.
In the Mississippi Delta, in the Netherlands and elsewhere, as Wolff explains in her books and in her essays, nature and culture have conspired to create recipes for disaster: “inevitable cities in impossible places.” Still, her work suggests ways to avoid the kinds of catastrophes that the author Raymond Dashmann spelled out in his depressing 1965 book,€ The Destruction of California. Prognosticators have been echoing him ever since then.
More than 150 environmental groups on Thursday urged federal lawmakers to make "bold investments" to stem the biodiversity crisis by increasing the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's budget for endangered species conservation by more than $400 million in the 2023 fiscal year.
"Tragically, hundreds of species are being left at the brink of extinction simply because there isn't enough money to recover them."
Many of the most profitable U.S. corporations are raising prices under the pretext of inflation to boost profits and shareholder returns at the expense of consumers, an analysis published Thursday revealed.
"Despite what they claim, these highly profitable businesses do have a choice, and they're choosing to fatten their bottom line rather than keep consumer prices stable."
As Major League Baseball and the MLB Players Association announced Thursday that they'd come to terms on a new collective bargaining agreement, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders welcomed news that the 99-day lockout was over and the full 162-game season would be saved and promised to introduce a bill aimed at ending the "baseball oligarchs'" antitrust exemption.
While Sanders (I-Vt.) said in a statement that he is "delighted to see an agreement reached so that the Major League Baseball season can start," he slammed the "unacceptable behavior" of team owners, who he said "negotiated in bad faith for more than 100 days in a blatant attempt to break the players' union."
It seems like the price of everything from used cars to ground beef is up these days, and right-wing politicos and pundits are all over President Joe Biden for failing to stop the pain. But one wonders: What would these GOP squawkers do if they were in charge?
Janine Jackson interviewed Debt Collective’s Braxton Brewington about student loan debt cancellation for the March 4, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Walmart+ is basically Walmart’s solution to Amazon Prime. If you’re going to exclusively shop at Walmart, it’s not really a bad idea. For $98 a year, you get unlimited free delivery of any order size (which saves gas, which is EXPENSIVE), and you get 5 cents a gallon off at Murphy or Walmart gas stations (which can be nice since it stacks on top of your credit card rewards. I get 5% back at gas stations already).
But the dumbest feature is the awkward “scan and go”.
It does not work like Amazon’s stores where you just scan things with your phone and then walk out.
[...]
Some teller at the bank told me it’s easier to deposit a check with an app. I says to the guy, I says…. “You realize you’re recommending that I help put you out of a job with an app that barely works, right?”
He stares blankly for a second. “Corporate makes us say this.”
It used to be rare for mail-in ballots to be thrown out in Texas, but thanks to the GOP's new voter suppression law, more than 27,000 of them were flagged for rejection during the state's recent primary election, according to a new analysis published Wednesday by The Associated Press.
For Texans who cast ballots by mail, the initial rejection rate was 17% across 120 counties, based on preliminary figures reported by election officials after votes were counted in the state's March 1 primary. Although Texas has 254 counties, the vast majority of the nearly three million people who participated in the nation's first primary of 2022 reside in the 120 counties that provided early data.
Florida is poised to establish a first-of-its-kind police force dedicated to stopping and investigating so-called "voter fraud" following the passage on Wednesday of a bill further overhauling the state's voting system, a year after sweeping changes to election laws sparked outcry among voting rights advocates.
"So now we're criminalizing certain acts around the elections process that most folks, particularly in the Black community, have long held as a way to assist those in need."
But, as President Biden has done many times in public speeches and addresses, he failed to engage the people as his allies to confront his policy opponents in Congress.
All his priorities – social safety net protections, rebuilding community infrastructure or public works, more aggressive action against climate crises, and paying for these programs by repealing the Trump tax escapes for the large corporations and the super-rich, are being blocked by 50 GOP Senators and two Democratic Senators.
Albania will rename a street in its capital Tirana where the Russian and Ukrainian embassies are located as Free Ukraine to honour Ukraine's resistance to war, the mayor said on Sunday.
Since Russia invaded Ukraine, NATO member Albania has joined other European countries in introducing economic sanctions and banning Russian aircraft from its air space.
Spotify has suspended premium service in Russia after the country launched its war on Ukraine — a move that the audio streaming powerhouse expects to result in a loss of about 1.5 million paying customers in the first quarter of 2022.
That’s according to Spotify CFO Paul Vogel, who spoke at Morgan Stanley’s 2022 Technology, Media and Telecom Conference on Wednesday. According to a Spotify spokesperson, the loss of its business in Russia is not material: The country represents less than 1% of total revenue.
A glowing profile of Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman in the Atlantic (3/3/22), promoting him as a reformer in the notoriously repressive kingdom, has raised questions about the magazine’s ethical integrity.
They made absolutely no attempt whatsoever to contact me or my spouse. They told me to wait for a mailer, which never arrived, and then I ended up going to the Census website to voluntarily be counted.
According to the Census Bureau, Trump’s crooked Census under-counted black, Native American and Hispanic people especially, and over-counted non-Hispanic whites.
Latino Americans were significantly undercounted in the 2020 U.S. Census, according to an analysis released Thursday by the Census Bureau—a result which advocacy groups said was what former President Donald Trump's administration intended to happen when it attempted to change the decennial survey.
"This was intentional."
A royal source said the spreading of the misheard conversation around the world on social media had been “unfortunate”, but added the “video speaks for itself” in correcting the record.
The design change, which lets you swipe between your Home (algorithmically served) and Latest (reverse chronological) timelines, was announced Thursday. To set it up, you tap the sparkle icon in the top right corner, and you’ll see the option to pin your “Latest timeline,” and if you select that, you’ll see both “Home” and “Latest Tweets” tabs at the top of the iOS app. If you use pinned lists on the iOS app, the layout might look familiar. The feature is available first on iOS, and it’s coming “soon” to Android and the web, Twitter says. (The company began testing the feature in October.)
In the post, the embassy claimed “the maternity house was long non-operational” and alleged it had been used by Ukrainian “armed forces and radicals.” The post also included two photos presumed to be related to the bombing with the word “FAKE” in red printed over the images, according to a screenshot included by The Guardian.
Here is what the war looks like to Russians, based on a review of state news articles, channels on the popular chat app Telegram, and input from several disinformation watchdogs who are monitoring Russia’s propaganda machine.
The war in Ukraine is being fought not only with tanks and missiles, but also with propaganda and censorship. It’s true that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s brutal and unprovoked invasion is not going well on the ground. And Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has given the performance of his life in videos that have kept the world riveted to his nation’s fierce resistance. But even so, Putin appears to be winning the information war where it counts: at home, and in China.
Tennessee has long been home to a truly astounding amount of First Amendment violations, some of which were enabled by courts’ willingness to entertain far too many bogus defamation lawsuits. And Daniel Horwitz has been a constant thorn in these courts’ sides, securing wins for clients facing bogus lawsuits.
According to Pixar, Disney edits out LGBT characters or references from all movies that Disney publishes.
Unofficially, there’s been a “gay month” at Disney World for years, and they’ve never balked at taking the money. Disney also had absolutely nothing to say about the anti-gay bill that passed in Florida this month that has schools out kids to homophobic parents who very well might kill them or put them on the street.
I can still remember my aunt talking with my mother about how “grossed out” she was that there were men showing affection for each other at Disney World in the 90s “in front of the children”.
Lu Xiaoyu, an assistant professor of international relations at Peking University, wrote an article last week urging common sense. “Being seen as an ally of Russia will be a step towards losing global popular support,” he wrote in the article, which was widely reposted on WeChat. The original article can no longer be found.
Weibo and Tencent Holdings, which owns WeChat, did not respond to requests for comment on why such material had been removed or accounts suspended.
The United Nations’ Department of Global Communications instructed staff of the international organisation not to refer to the situation in Ukraine as a “war” or “invasion”, in a move to balance political sensitivities as powerful member state Russia cracks down domestically on those who use the words.
Instead, UN staff were instructed to use the terms “conflict” or “military offensive” to describe Russia’s invasion of its neighbour, which has killed hundreds of civilians and forced two million people to flee the country.
In an email to a staff mailing list on Monday with the subject line “Ukraine crisis communications guidelines”, the director of the United Nations Regional Information Centre instructed employees not to describe the situation as a war and not to add the Ukrainian flag to personal or official social media accounts or websites.
The blocking of VOA’s VK page was preceded by Russian efforts to block Voice of America’s website in Russian, as well as other news websites and social media platforms that refused to submit to Moscow’s censorship orders. This is another indication of the country’s efforts to muzzle the free press and keep their own citizens in the dark about the war in Ukraine.
When the legislation against “fakes” was introduced, it became clear that we would need to leave, that we wouldn’t be able to work in Russia anymore.
I opened this newsroom to get away from censorship, to be independent. If we stayed, we would have had to start censoring ourselves. And if we didn’t, members of our newsroom would be imprisoned. That’s why we decided to evacuate our journalists from Russia.
However, while we’ve left the country, we do not want to, and will not, stop working. We want to make sure that people can still read about what is actually taking place. Working from outside Russia is the only thing that makes sense.
Qualified immunity has been heavily criticized for what it allows law enforcement officers to get away with. The Supreme Court-created doctrine excuses officers from civil rights lawsuits even when it’s been shown rights were violated… so long as the rights violation hasn’t been previously ruled a rights violation by other courts with jurisdiction over the case. That means cops are free to violate rights repeatedly until a court rules otherwise, clearly establishing the violation.
A new law passed Thursday that effectively bans the naturalization of Palestinian spouses of Israeli Jews was condemned by human rights advocates in Israel and around the world, some of whom called it the latest manifestation of an apartheid regime.
"Israeli apartheid is a crime against humanity."
ST. MARTINVILLE, La. —€ Lawyers and a judge gathered in an East Baton Rouge juvenile courtroom last October for an update on a teenager detained after joyriding in a stolen car. The teen appeared on a screen, alongside a caseworker who stunned everyone by describing conditions in the lockup where he was held.
The 15-year-old was being kept in round-the-clock solitary confinement. He was getting no education, in violation of state and federal law, nor was he getting court-ordered substance abuse counseling, according to two defense attorneys present. And no one in the room that day — not the judge, not the prosecutor, not the defense lawyers —€ appeared to have heard of the facility where Louisiana’s Office of Juvenile Justice was holding him, the Acadiana Center for Youth at St. Martinville.
Across the Southwest, states are reconsidering how they approach welfare, with several legislatures enacting or considering new laws to ensure that more assistance is made available to low-income families struggling to afford rent, child care, groceries and diapers. The moves follow months of ProPublica reporting on punitive and outdated welfare policies in this part of the country and come amid a yearslong surge in the region’s cost of living.
In New Mexico, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham on Wednesday signed into law a budget that will allow an estimated $6.96 million in child support to go directly to children instead of to the government. Until now, the state had intercepted these dollars as reimbursement for the custodial parent previously having received welfare, as ProPublica reported in September.
Two Planned Parenthood affiliates sued the state of Missouri today, seeking to prevent the Republican-led state from kicking them out of the Medicaid program because they offer abortions.
Warsaw, Poland—The refugee center that Dr. Tade Daniel Omoshoto set up in a southwestern residential neighborhood of Warsaw doesn’t look like much. A nondescript building with a white plaster front and an iron gate, it was previously a bare-bones hostel with six rooms with bunk beds, fluorescent lights, and no decoration. But for African refugees coming from Ukraine, it is a place to rest after an arduous journey. He walks me through, showing me 20 simply made beds that can be stretched to accommodate 10 more. There are only three boys from Nigeria staying there, all medical students from Kyiv University under 20 years old. Omoshoto’s phone rings, and he says, “Sorry, I have to take this.”1
Ann Arbor’s Human Rights Commission is calling for creation of a new city ordinance requiring police to collect and report specific details of traffic stops.
The commission voted unanimously Wednesday, March 9, to approve a resolution asking city officials for a local law requiring the Ann Arbor Police Department to make a wide range of data about traffic stops in the city available to the public.
Flipkart has apologised for a marketing misfire which saw the e-commerce platform promoting kitchen appliances on Women's Day. On International Women's Day 2022, which was observed yesterday, Flipkart sent out a message that many social media users found to be tone-deaf and sexist. "Dear Customer, This Women's Day, let's celebrate You. Get Kitchen Appliances from Rs 299 [sic]," read the message. The message reinforced negative stereotypes about women belonging in the kitchen, many social media users felt.
In January, at the start of the U.N. International Decade of Indigenous Languages, Peters spoke with Teen Vogue about the importance of protecting Indigenous mother tongues, and how Dakota is connected to health, climate change, and tribal sovereignty.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Explain why a colleague described working for the U.S. Attorney’s Office as “human misery.”
Last fall we had a whole series of blog posts explaining just how dangerous Rep. Jerry Nadler’s SHOP SAFE bill would be. It’s one of those bills that if you just hear what it’s about — stopping the sale of counterfeit goods online — sounds good. But only if you don’t understand how basically anything actually works in the real world, including the laws around liability and counterfeiting. SHOP SAFE would upend concepts related to intermediary liability and basically lock in Amazon as one of the only companies that could probably handle the massive compliance costs associated with SHOP SAFE.
The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) has big decisions to make in its effort to implement the new federal broadband infrastructure program. If done right, and with the right state policies in place, a great number of Americans will obtain access to multi-gigabit broadband in the coming years.
Fun fact: about 2,950,000 new subscribers signed up for broadband last year, and roughly 95 percent of them signed up with the biggest cable companies (primarily Comcast and Charter). These two cable giants’ market share continues to grow not really because they’re good — but because they’re the only option countless Americans have if they want modern-era broadband speeds.
We’ve already noted how several of the business decisions to shut down integral parts of the Internet to “punish Putin” aren’t really punishing Putin, but the Russian public.
The company, owned by Chinese internet giant ByteDance, said it is paying SoundOn creators 100% of the royalties for music in the first year and 90% after that, with no administrative fees. TikTok said artists will be compensated “based on how often your music is used in TikTok videos,” but didn’t say specifically how much it will pay per listen.
On Valentine’s day, an open letter from the CEOs of Deutsche Telekom, Telefónica, Vodafone, and Orange surfaced. In the letter, the heads of Europe’s biggest telecommunications providers called “for large content platforms to contribute to the cost of European digital infrastructure that carries their services.” Claiming that the current situation is “not sustainable” for their companies, they argued that “Europe will fall behind” if this situation is not addressed.
The request for large platforms to pay telecom providers to carry their content is not new. In 2011, the same group (absent Deutsche Telekom) attempted to levy charges on Google and other content providers, suggesting an overhaul of how data travels across the internet. In 2013, Orange struck a deal with Google under which Google would pay an undisclosed amount to the carrier for the traffic sent across its networks.
For years, telecom operators have tried to catch up with innovation, but with little real success. In the beginning, it was their inability to identify ways to diversify their centralized business models within the internet’s more decentralized environment. Instead, they have used their political capital to keep pushing, unsuccessfully, for proposals based on the simple idea that everyone else should have to pay up. They even went as far as the
The basic claim in these lawsuits is broadly the same: that portions of songs by the famous musicians are similar to those of pre-existing works. What this ignores is the fact that all art builds on what came before: every tune, chord and cadence that is part of the today’s standard musical vocabulary, was invented by someone at some point in history. Furthermore, in the past, before copyright corrupted many people’s views about the creative process, it was not only common but expected for musicians to borrow and re-use existing melodic ideas – great composers like Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven all did so throughout their lives.
The recording industry has not only sought to re-define this practice as plagiarism, it also tries to police its view through a constant flow of often costly legal actions. Seeking to penalise musicians that draw inspiration from existing works, companies not only impoverish society through the loss of new variations put together using music’s toolkit, they also demonstrate clearly that copyright is antithetical to creativity.
In January, I performed with a group of musicians and dancers at the Salle Jacques Brel, a 400-seat venue on the outskirts of Paris. We’d rehearsed a program of Haitian-based music and dancing for two days, were excited to be playing again—it was my first gig in Paris since the pandemic—and honored to be included in a festival line-up with such great musicians as David Murray, Sylvie Courvoisier, and William Parker.
Welcome to episode 12 of Open Culture VOICES! VOICES is a vlog series of short interviews with open GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) experts from around the world. The Open Culture Program at Creative Commons aims to promote better sharing of cultural heritage in GLAMs collections. With Open Culture VOICES, we’re thrilled to bring you various perspectives from dozens of experts speaking in many different languages on what it’s like to open up heritage content online. In this episode, we’re joined by€ Maja Drabczyk, Head of Policy and Advocacy at Centrum Cyfrowe in Poland. Maja is a sociologist, researcher, manager of cultural projects in the field of heritage and new technologies. She is passionate about investigating and further strengthening the social value of cultural heritage institutions, and supporting both cultural and educational sectors in shaping their, user-focused, digital strategies.
Welcome to episode 11 of Open Culture VOICES! VOICES is a vlog series of short interviews with open GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) experts from around the world. The Open Culture Program at Creative Commons aims to promote better sharing of cultural heritage in GLAMs collections. With Open Culture VOICES, we’re thrilled to bring you various perspectives from dozens of experts speaking in many different languages on what it’s like to open up heritage content online. In this episode, we’re joined by Alwaleed Alkhaja, Senior Intellectual Property Librarian at the Qatar National Library. Alweed manages the Library’s open access fund and serves as its representative on the SCOSS Board. Before joining the Library, Alwaleed worked in open access publishing with QScience.com / HBKU Press. He holds a Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from the Göttingen / International Max Planck Research School, and an MBA from the Alliance Manchester Business School.
This week the piracy investigation unit of the MPA revealed that in 2019, 1,400 pirate sites existed in North America but by 2021, that number had reduced to 238. "We will find you and shut down your servers," pirates were warned. Soon after, the Alliance for Creativity revealed the "shut down" of two more "streaming sites" but that isn't quite the full picture. Some pirates are well prepared.
European football federation UEFA wants Ukraine to offer effective protections against live streaming piracy. Ideally, pirated streams should be taken offline within 105 minutes, before "the damage is fully inflicted." The comments were made while many Ukrainians fight for their lives. UEFA is aware of the situation and notes that the requests are subject to a resolution of the military conflict.
