Tor Browser 11.5a9 is now available from the Tor Browser download page and also from our distribution directory.
Tor Browser 11.5a9 updates Firefox on Windows, macOS, and Linux to 91.8.0esr.
Online security is one of those topics that seems to pop up everywhere, all the time. And yet, studies and polls regularly reveal that many people are still guilty of very basic mistakes when it comes to securing their online existence.
As the ancient Romans said repetitio est mater studiorum ("repetition is the mother of study"), so in this article we will tackle a few very simple things that you can do today to improve your online security.
Some containers just aren't meant to be connected directly to the internet. After all, you wouldn't want your ISP knowing which Linux distribution you download and share.
If like me you have your BitTorrent client installed as a container on a homeserver to make sure it's always connected but you don't want to route your other containers through a VPN, you'll probably want to use a VPN-in-a-container and route your BitTorrent client through it.
I already had a similar solution using OpenVPN but it was time for an upgrade. Oh yes, it's Wireguard time.
As VPN provider, I use Mullvad.
Monitoring your 3D-Printer with a Raspberry Pi is nothing new, thanks to applications like OctoPrint. However, maker Kutluhan Aktar managed to tackle the process himself using a microcontroller with his Raspberry Pi Pico-powered 3D printer monitor. This project connects the Pico to the internet to relay notifications about the data it tracks and is housed inside a custom printed T-800 Terminator-shaped shell.
As of early 2022, one of the limitations of libvirt is that it doesn't support making snapshots of virtual machines that use UEFI instead of BIOS booting. Since various people want to get rid of BIOS booting, this is a problem on several levels. Fortunately it's possible to sort of get around this, in one of two ways; the difficult and I believe incomplete way that I haven't gotten working, and the easier way that I have. All of this assumes that you're using the normal QEMU/KVM backend for libvirt (which supports UEFI via OVMF).
One^wTwo days late for 4/20, I return to discuss equipment authorization. This is a direct followup to my last post about unlicensed radio. I apologize for my uncharacteristic decision to actually provide a promised follow-up in a prompt manner, and give you my assurances that it's unlikely to happen again. I will return to my usual pattern of saying "this is the beginning of a series" and then forgetting about the topic for two years.
But equipment authorization is sort of an interesting topic, and moreover I think I really shortchanged the last post by not going into it. Because ISM bands and other so-called "Part 15" bands are unlicensed, the limitations that exist on usage of those bands stem pretty much entirely from the equipment authorization process. I also think I shortchanged the last post a bit by not providing some background on the regulatory structure, so here that goes first: [...]
If you are acquainted with WhatsApp, you will not need a comprehensive introduction to Telegram because it is a similar type of service. Users may install Telegram on their smartphone, just like WhatsApp, and register using their mobile phone number to talk with other Telegram users. It allows you to quickly exchange and download photographs, videos, documents, and files. It is also possible to make video and phone conversations, as well as establish polls, groups, and channels for people to engage. Telegram is especially popular due to the latter feature.
One of the prominent aspects that make Telegram popular is its subscription system for channels, which works similarly to YouTube: you may subscribe to channels in Telegram based on your preferences. If the channel operator adds fresh content, it will appear in the conversation overview. Users may effortlessly pick and forward uploaded material to relatives and friends. This identifies the user or channel from whom the material originated. You may rapidly uncover new channels for your own interests this way. It also includes broadcast features, similar to WhatsApp.
OrangeHRM is one of the most widely-used open-source human resource management tools on the market. With features such as management for employee information, employee absence, recruitment, as well as employee performance evaluation tools and other features required for general human resources management.
Today we are looking at how to install FireFox 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.
Joomla is a free, open source and one of the most popular Content Management System (CMS) around the world which allow the users to create or build their own website and applications.
It is built on PHP and stores its data on an SQL-based database engine on the backend such as MySQL/MariaDB.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Joomla 4 on your Ubuntu 22.04 OS.
Most Linux Distributions use open-source fonts to substitute Microsoft’s iconic typefaces like Arial, Courier New, and Times. Red Hat created the Liberation family to replace these similar-looking but different sizes — all you have to do is select your preferred font when editing documents so that they’ll be readable without any disruptions!
For users who want to install Microsoft fonts and want the option to use them in LibreOffice, the following tutorial will teach you how to install Microsoft fonts on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish.
Ubuntu Kylin is the official Chinese version of Ubuntu however supports English. It has been described as a “loose continuation” to its parent operating system with some differences in appearance and functionality. Still, most importantly, it’s explicitly designed for approval in mainland China, but international users are welcome to use it.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Kylin Desktop Environment on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish using the command line terminal.
For those not familiar with MATE Desktop Environment, it continues GNOME 2. It is famous for being lightweight, fast, and stable that runs on Linux and most BSD operating systems. MATE is also an excellent choice for a lower-end system or those looking to remain efficient on system resources. Also, a dedicated Ubuntu MATE edition exists for this desktop environment, enticing users to switch from Ubuntu altogether.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install MATE Desktop Environment on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS using the command line terminal.
As we all know, Java is a very popular programming language and software platform. Thus, Java is indispensable for many Linux developers and professionals who need it to either develop applications or run other applications already created.
Java is available for installation on Linux without too many problems. In this case, we will opt for the OpenJDK version, which is community maintained and fully compatible with the Oracle version.
So let’s go for it.
SQLite is a free, lightweight relational database management system (RDBMS) in a C library. SQLite is not a client-server database engine. Instead, it is embedded into the end program. Primarily all programming languages support SQLite, which how languages embed the program is with a file with .sqlite3/.sqlite/.DB extension. The software is a popular choice for local/client storage such as web browsers, Android devices, etc. The list is quite extensive.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install SQLite 3 with Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish using the command line terminal.
Kate is a powerful and intuitive editor that may be the perfect fit for you. With its robust yet straightforward interface, Kate offers everything from word processing to development tools in one place – which saves time! And with 200+ languages available onboard alongside plugins galore (think code hooks), this tool will help maximize productivity, whether it’s coding or content creation.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Kate Text Editor on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish using the command line terminal with various installation options to install the text editor.
Apache Maven is an open-source tool that allows the building automation of your java projects. It can also be used for projects in C#, Ruby, etc. Its most famous usage would likely involve Java development! The maven project comes from the Apache Software Foundation, where they were previously part of the Jakarta Project before moving on their own.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Apache Maven on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish using APT or downloading the archive and manually to install Maven using the command line terminal.
Qlipper is a lightweight, open-source, and cross-platform clipboard history applet, which helps the user to get back any copied path. The key task of Qlippper will not consume many resources on your PC while monitoring it for recent data that can be used again later if needed!
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Qlipper Clipboard Manager on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish with Ubuntu’s default repository with the command line terminal along with some tips on how to use it.
KDE runs a whole bunch of Continuous Integration (CI) builders. These try to build KDE software from version control all the time, and are triggered by commits from developers. We might quibble over the name “CI”, but at least we know most of the time that the code compiles and the tests run and pass. Here’s the KDE FreeBSD overview page.
Ditch the scripts and erase the elaborate terminal commands ‘cos the following GTK4 app makes it super easy to create your own dynamic wallpapers to use in GNOME 42 (and above).
Woah, woah: not the old kind of dynamic wallpapers. Awesome though those timed slideshows were/are I’m fully aware apps to create them aren’t new (though weirdly I’ve never written about any ðŸâÂðŸÂȉâ¬Âââ¢âï¸Â).
Anyway, this is a new Dynamic Wallpaper creator for GNOME 42.
To recap: vanilla GNOME 42 comes with a proper standardised dark mode implementation that all modern GNOME apps respect. It’s pretty cool. As part of that whole thing new dynamic wallpapers were implemented. These change based on which which theme mode is active.
Don’t confuse these with Ubuntu 22.04 and Pop!_OS 20.04’s separate-wallpaper-for-dark-mode capability; it’s along those lines but a lot more finessed.
TempleOS had interesting new ideas about how different kinds of data like text, images, and 3D models could be freely mixed at a low level, and how the programming environment mixed shell commands and programs, but it was a very limited system overall. It did not end up being a practical system, nor even all that promising for future development. But it struck a nerve, because, despite its impracticality, it had two extremely important ideas: [...]
Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux) is a type of Mandatory Access Control (MAC) in the Linux kernel. It can prevent software from performing unexpected — such as abusive or malicious actions — on your Linux systems. However, … it’s also an unmanageable mess, and I have a much greater understanding of why people recommend that people disable it.
SELinux is one of many layers of security that helps protect your Linux servers (and desktops) from the lions, and tigers, and bears — oh, my! SELinux policies specify which programs, sockets, and files are allowed to interact with each other. It requires everything on the system to be properly labeled with a security context that gets enforced through a policy that maps which labels are allowed to interact.
The 2022 X.Org Developers Conference is being held in conjunction with the 2022 Wine Developers Conference. This is a meeting to bring together developers working on all things open graphics (Linux kernel, Mesa, DRM, Wayland, X11, etc.) as well as developers for the Wine Project, a key consumer of open graphics.
Details on how to join us are available in Attending XDC 2022 section of the website.
The schedule timezone of the conference is UTC-6, unless you set "Use my timezone" setting in your user preferences along with your current timezone.
If you’re interested in the intersection of the right to repair with law and policy, you’ll want to set aside some time for the next two Fridays to attend a great, two-part symposium hosted by Berkeley Law on the Emergent Right to Repair.
The 2022 edition is about Open, Privacy, and Trust. The event is organised in a hybrid manner: both in-person and online for those cannot go to Ghent, Belgium.
 Versatility is at the core of React Native’s function as an open-source User Interface software framework with its capability of developing applications for multiple operating systems. React Native does this by allowing developers to utilise Reactjs with native platform capabilities.
One of the things that make React Native a viable framework is its API which makes applications stable. Being its key strength, it helps in achieving the primary goal of ironing out the kinks or possible issues in application development.
However, these advancements do not spare React Native from the need for improvement. To fairly assess its potential, here is a rundown of the pros and cons of developing through the framework.
On Monday, software developer Drew DeVault announced a systems programming language called Hare, describing it as "simple, stable, and robust." We've all heard that before – but there may be something in this.
More than 300 programming languages have existed at one time or another. Hare aims to serve as an alternative to C – arguably the most significant programming language of the past 50 years.
DeVault and about 30 project contributors have been working on Hare for about two and a half years. They've now let their rabbit loose so developers can run with it.
"Hare uses a static type system, manual memory management, and a minimal runtime," explained DeVault in a blog post. "It is well-suited to writing operating systems, system tools, compilers, networking software, and other low-level, high performance tasks."
With the advent of the Jamstack, so many of websites require a build step of some kind before a functioning website can be born.
Build steps are great. I use them all the time. But they do come at a cost.
This post explores the new type-based optimizations in Erlang/OTP 25 where the compiler embeds type information in the BEAM files to help the JIT (Just-In-Time compiler) to generate better code.
When the transition to USB-C began, we were all promised a better life. Connections would be faster and simpler. One connection to end all connections. The reality of what happened couldn’t be further from that dream. Contents
USB-C is a mess. The way manufacturers implement and communicate its features is confusing — and downright misleading at times. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be.
Many sci-fi movies and TV shows feature hand-held devices capable of sensing all manner of wonderful things. The €µ Spec Mk II from [j] is built very much in that vein, packing plenty of functionality into a handy palm-sized form factor.€
[Mark Rober] has a bird feeder in his back yard. Also, squirrels who eat the seed. So, as one does, he built a nine part squirrel obstacle course with a reward of walnuts at the end, and filmed them beating the course.
[Stanislaw Pusep] has gifted us with the Pianolizer project – an easy-to-use toolkit for music exploration and visualization, an audio spectrum analyzer helping you turn sounds into piano notes. You can run his toolkit on a variety of different devices, from Raspberry Pi and PCs, to any browser-equipped device including smartphones, and use its note output however your heart desires. To show off his toolkit in action, he set it up on a Raspberry Pi, with Python code taking the note data and sending color information to the LED strip, displaying the notes in real time as he plays them on a MIDI keyboard! He also created a browser version that you can use with a microphone input or an audio file of your choosing, so you only need to open a webpage to play with this toolkit’s capabilities.
In surveying the history of utopian thinking, Mumford distinguished between utopias of escape and utopias of reconstruction. Viewing the trend toward dehumanizing gigantism emerging in modern times, Mumford conceived a utopian vision of regional decentralization where possibilities for living a fullness of human life could be reconstructed.
“Neither utopias of escape nor of reconstruction can be achieved, but the utopias of reconstruction provide a set of references against which society can evaluate its existing values and technology,” Thomas and Agatha Hughes explain. “Mumford did not hesitate to draw on his knowledge of utopias to conceptualize a utopian regionalism, not expecting that it would be realized, but using the utopian vision as a measuring rod of progress and as an idealized goal . . . Utopian visions were for him engines of change.”[1]
Soccer fans in Portland continue to stand up for justice and accountability in the face of brazen evasions and PR-crafted apologies from the front office of the city’s clubs, the Timbers and Thorns. Many diehard supporters have had enough.
In 1901, the “Nobel Prizes” began awarding these gifts, which were referred to as Nobel “laureates.” Initially, there were five awards: Chemistry, Physics, Physiology/Medicine, Literature, and Peace. Then, in 1968, the Academy added Economics to the list. Curiously, even though these were some heavy-duty subjects, there has never been a Nobel Prize in Mathematics.
Prizes are always held in Stockholm, Sweden, and the ceremonies are conducted in Swedish and English. The sole exception to that rule—per Alfred Nobel’s wishes—is that the Nobel Peace Prizes are held in Oslo, Norway, and are conducted in Norwegian and English.
Newsletters are the latest shiny thing that a lot of content creators are gravitating toward. Myself included. But last week I decided to kill off my newsletter after producing it for around 18 months.
It all started with a single tweet on Friday night: "Dear microbreweries, Maybe instead of your 12th double IPA, mak[e] a f**king Pilsner."
[Sam Battle] known on YouTube as [Look Mum No Computer] is mostly known as a musical artist, but seems lately to have taken a bit of shine to retro telecoms gear, and this latest foray is into the realm of the minicom tty device which was a lifeline for those not blessed with ability to hear well enough to communicate via telephone. Since in this modern era of chatting via the internet, it is becoming much harder to actually find another user with a minicom, [Sam] decided to take the human out of the loop entirely and have the minicom user talk instead to a Raspberry Pi running an instance of MegaHal, which is 1990s era chatterbot.€ The idea of this build (that became an exhibit in this museum is not obsolete) was to have an number of minicom terminals around the room connected via the internal telephone network (and the retro telephone exchange {Sam] maintains) to a line interface module, based upon the Mitel MH88422 chip. This handy device allows a Raspberry Pi to interface to the telephone line, and answer calls, with all the usual handshaking taken care of. The audio signal from the Mitel interface is fed to the Pi via a USB audio interface (since the Pi has no audio input) module.
A Merkle tree is a tree of interconnected hashes. When one leaf node changes, the hash of each parent up the chain also changes, and ultimately, the root hash changes.
Peer-to-peer networks often use Merkle trees. It allows each peer to efficiently ensure that no data was lost or modified in transit. Receivers can verify small chunks of data when they are sent by checking them against a small set of hashes. The complete data set isn't needed for this verification.
It’s an auspicious moment for retrocomputing fans, as it’s now four decades since the launch of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. This budget British microcomputer was never the best of the bunch, but its runaway success and consequent huge software library made it the home computer to own in the UK. Here in 2022 it may live on only in 1980s nostalgia, but its legacy extends far beyond that as it provided an entire generation of tech-inclined youngsters with an affordable tool that would get them started on a lifetime of computing.
The ozone layer is a precious thing, helping protect the Earth from the harshest of the sun’s radiative output. If anything were to damage this layer, we’d all feel the results in a very short order indeed.
There have been multiple reports recently concerning the impacts of the extended pandemic lockdowns on the computer industry in China. DigiTimes articles on this topic, bookending the weekend, appear to provide evidence that the laptop industry is under particular stress in April. According to industry insiders, laptop makers have a lot of worries about their own operations as well as over the wide range of components they rely on during production. However, a sudden and drastic downturn in the Chromebook market might help them make the most of sourcing supplies.
Chemical-based photography can seem like a dark art at times, but it needn’t be so. [Dan K] developed the Simple Enlarger to help spread the idea that classical photographic darkroom tools are fundamentally quite easy to understand and build.
There is a significant difference between lying about a particular action or product and a disinformation campaign to undermine public trust in a democratic republic. A classic example of the former is how the tobacco industry lied or created doubt about€ scientific findings that demonstrated that smoking caused lung and cardiac diseases.€ Up to the€ mid-Fifties,€ the tobacco industry had succeeded in elevating smoking to€ be one of the most popular, successful, and widely used items of the early 20th century.
In response to the mounting evidence that smoking cigarettes damaged one’s health, the tobacco industry hired the nation’s leading public relations firm. The industry followed the consultant’s advice and focused its efforts on disrupting the usual processes of knowledge production in medicine, science, and public health. Consequently, the leading tobacco companies embraced the scientific discourse that assumes there is always more to know.
Scientists have identified a link between exposure to “forever chemicals” and liver damage, as well as a potential connection to non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, in a study published on Wednesday.
Exposure to such compounds — also known as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances or PFAS — was associated with elevated levels of a liver enzyme called ALT, which serves as a biomarker for liver damage, the scientists concluded in an Environmental Health Perspectives article.
Lately, however, those bonds have frayed as Apple has shown an increasing willingness to ignore the things pro-level users want from their products. These users need two things: power (beefy CPUs, lots of fast memory and disk space for storage, high-end graphics cards) and flexibility (lots of ports to plug specialized hardware into, room inside the case to add expansion hardware and replace defective parts).
U.S. wireless company T-Mobile hasn’t had what you’d call a stellar track record on privacy or security. Last year, the company was forced to acknowledge that hackers had obtained the personal details (including social security numbers) of more than 53 million T-Mobile customers, the sixth time the company had been meaningfully compromised in as many years.
After a record-breaking 2021 with annual revenue of $257 billion — the first time it has gone over $200 billion for a year — Google’s parent company reports in a filing (pdf) that it has started off 2022 with Q1 revenue that’s up 23 percent from the same period last year, reaching $68 billion.
However, with expenses up compared to 2021, its net profit actually dropped to $16.4 billion compared to last year’s $17.9 billion. Research and development costs for the quarter rose by over $1 billion compared to Q1 2021, going from $7.485 billion to $9.1 billion. As the New York Times notes, last year the company had a $4.8 billion gain in its stock holdings, and in Q1 2022 it recorded a $1.07 billion loss.
The FBI on Wednesday alerted food and agriculture companies to be prepared for ransomware operatives to potentially attack agricultural entities during planting and harvest seasons — a time frame the feds warned is more likely to draw the attention of ransomware actors bent on leveraging the sector at its most vulnerable, including now as the spring planting season gets underway.
The FBI’s notice to industry asserted that ransomware hackers are bent on “disrupting operations, causing financial loss, and negatively impacting the food supply chain,” and noted there were ransomware attacks against six grain cooperatives during the fall 2021 harvest, along with two attacks in early 2022 against targets the bureau did not name that could affect the planting season by disrupting the supply of seeds and fertilizer.
He added that the system attack also affected several other hotels in Finland, but said he did not know which ones, as such arrangements are kept between hotels and the supplier.
The attack took place between 10 and 14 February, according to the firm, which said it became aware of the data breach on 9 April.
An in-depth report on Israeli malware manufacturer NSO Group has (again) exposed the company’s lies about its activities (and the activities of its customers).
YouTube advertising sales for the first three months of 2022 grew 14%, to reach $6.87 billion — missing Wall Street expectations by more than $600 million and representing a major cooling off from the torrid pace the video giant had seen during the COVID pandemic.
Madogaz Musa Abdullah still remembers the phone call. But what came next was a blur. He drove for hours, deep into the Libyan desert, speeding toward the border with Algeria. His mind buckled, his thoughts reeled, and more than three years later, he's still not certain how he made that six-hour journey.
Russia's top diplomat warned Monday that NATO countries are "pouring oil on the fire" in Ukraine and heightening the chances of a full-blown nuclear conflict by continuing to dump advanced weaponry into the war zone, comments that came after top U.S. officials vowed to provide Kyiv with another $700 million in military aid.
In an interview on Russian state television, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said the possibility of nuclear war "should not be underestimated" and added that "under no circumstances should a Third World War be allowed to happen."
Amid ongoing concerns that Russia's ongoing invasion of Ukraine could lead to far broader and possibly nuclear warfare, high-level demands for a diplomatic resolution to the conflict hit a critical moment Tuesday with the United Nations chief in Moscow for an in-person meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin and other officials.
Ahead of his meeting with Putin, Secretary-General António Guterres held a press conference with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov—who said Tuesday that NATO nations were risking "World War III" by continuing to flow arms into Ukraine.
Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin provided a revealing and disturbing glimpse into a darker element of US policy at a press conference held April 25 at the Poland/Ukraine border. The press event followed a trip to Kyiv by Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Austin.
Dozens of governments outside Europe and North America have been reluctant to censure Russia, and many more have refrained from joining multilateral sanctions. China has tacitly supported the Kremlin since its February affirmation of a Sino-Russian friendship with “no limits.” A few others have backed Russia vocally, among them Belarus, which has served as a staging ground for the Russian invasion.
Meanwhile, other governments have sat on the fence. Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro said pointedly that his country “will not take sides.” Indian leaders have reaffirmed their policy of nonalignment, implying that their nation will seek to stay out of the fight. South Africa, Pakistan and numerous other nations are following a similar path.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine first took their troops through the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone, where they rolled armored vehicles across radioactive terrain, also trampled by foot soldiers who kicked up radioactive dust, raising the radiation levels in the area.
As the Russians arrived at the Chornobyl nuclear site, it quickly became apparent that their troops were unprotected against radiation exposure and indeed many were even unaware of where they were or what Chornobyl represented. We later learned that they had dug trenches in the highly radioactive Red Forest, and even camped there.
The independent Russian outlet Mediazona has published a new report analyzing available data on Russian military casualties in Ukraine. Using open Russian sources, the journalists found 1,744 reports of Russian military fatalities — a number noticeably higher than the official death toll (1,351) reported by the Russian Defense Ministry on March 25.€
Face it, we’re living in a world that, while anything but exceptional, is increasingly the exception to every rule. Only the other day, 93-year-old Noam Chomsky had something to say about that. Mind you, he’s seen a bit of our world since, in 1939, he wrote his first article for his elementary school newspaper on the fall of the Spanish city of Barcelona amid a “grim cloud” of advancing fascism. His comment on our present situation: “We’re approaching the most dangerous point in human history.”
One adjective often, and correctly, used for Putin's invasion is "delusional." Even if he manages to pound Ukraine into scorched rubble, he'll still be further than when he began from anything resembling victory.€
The authorities in Moldova’s breakaway region of Transnistria have reported a number of explosions in the last 24 hours, deeming them terrorist attacks. The blasts occurred just days after a senior Russian commander said that capturing southern Ukraine would provide Moscow with a land bridge to Transnistria. Moldovan President Maia Sandu condemned the explosions following an urgent meeting of the country’s Security Council on Tuesday. In turn, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that Moscow is “closely monitoring” the situation in Transnistria.
The strikers faced enormous police state violence too. They were beaten and teargassed. One 16-year-old boy, Larry Payne, was shot and killed by police during one of the demonstrations. Martin Luther King, Jr, along with other civil rights activists, traveled to Memphis in solidarity with the strikers. It was there that he delivered the speech where he said:€ “I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we, as a people, will get to the promised land.”€ Dr. King was assassinated one day later.
Toward the end of his life, King’s rhetoric was considered too radical by many white “moderates” or liberals. This, and his stand against the imperialistic war against Vietnam and militarism, made him a pariah to polite, white, bourgeois society. In fact, at the time of his death 75% of Americans disapproved of his antiwar and pro-labour stances. King terrified the ruling class because he called for revolutionary socio-economic changes that defied the capitalist hegemony.
The United States relies heavily on imported uranium, with Russia supplying about 16 percent in 2020. The uranium business with Russia, however, includes not only imports but also enrichment services provided by the Russian state corporation Rosatom, which accounts for 23 percent of total enrichment services in the United States. It’s unclear what is included in the 16 percent mentioned above. If this is only uranium mined in Russia, it is not all the uranium sold to the United States by Russia.
In 2013, Rosatom acquired Uranium One, a Canadian uranium mining company. The story made the news and was discussed in the Senate in relation to concerns that Russia, particularly in the wake of its seizure of Crimea, had taken over American uranium deposits through a Canadian firm. Yet Russia in fact purchased Uranium One to gain access to vast deposits in Kazakhstan, a world leader in uranium mining and supplies. Whether the uranium mined in Kazakhstan and exported by Uranium One to the United States is labelled as Canadian or Kazakh, the profits nevertheless go to Russia.
Despite an election campaign warming up, Senator Zed Seselja found time to tell Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare that Australia remained dedicated to supporting the security needs of the Solomon Islands, and would do so “swiftly, transparently and with full respect for its sovereignty”.€ The Pacific country remained a friend, part of the “Pacific family”.€ He went on to “respectfully” urge the Solomon Islands to reject the security pact with China and “consult the Pacific family in the spirit of regional openness and transparency, consistent with our region’s security frameworks.”
Having not convinced Honiara to change course, a range of reactions are being registered.€ David Llewellyn-Smith, former owner of the Asia Pacific foreign affairs journal The Diplomat, took leave of his senses by suggesting that a Chinese naval base in the Solomons would see “the effective end of our sovereignty and democracy”.€ In a spray of hysteria, he suggested that this was “Australia’s Cuban missile crisis”.
Alex Vitale, a professor of sociology and coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College, has followed the politics of law enforcement for years. The author of The End of Policing—a book that Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) inadvertently helped turn into a bestsellerduring the recent Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Ketanji Brown Jackson—explained to me in an interview that “we’ve seen a big increase in the number of police on the subway with the new mayor, Eric Adams, and that did not play a role in preventing this [shooting] from happening.”
Indeed, New York police, with all the resources of modern technology, surveillance and weaponry at its disposal, had to embarrassingly turn to the public for help. “We routinely overestimate the effectiveness of policing as a solution to our problems,” said Vitale.
The French military has accused Russian mercenaries in Mali of staging a mass grave using real bodies in an apparent attempt to frame French forces and discredit Paris’s counterterrorism operation in the region.
Images gathered by an intelligence overflight conducted by the French Armed Forces last week and shared with Foreign Policy show around a dozen white men in combat fatigues—thought to be operatives from the Kremlin-linked Wagner Group—shoveling sand over a pile of bodies partially buried near the site of the former French military base in Gossi.
A woman suicide bomber from a Pakistan separatist group killed four people, including three Chinese nationals, in an attack on a minibus carrying staff from a Beijing cultural programme at Karachi University on Tuesday.
The Baloch Liberation Army -- one of several groups fighting for independence in Pakistan's biggest province -- claimed responsibility, saying it was their first suicide attack by a woman assailant.
Chinese targets have regularly been attacked by separatists from Balochistan, where Beijing is involved in huge infrastructure projects as part of its Belt and Road Initiative.
The separatist Baloch Liberation Army (BLA) said it attacked the vehicle carrying the Chinese staff, and that the suicide bomber had been a woman.
The group opposes Chinese investment in Pakistan, saying locals do not benefit.
Marjorie Taylor Greene can’t spell or tell the truth. But those are not the reasons the name of the Republican representative from Georgia should be stricken from the 2022 midterm election ballot. Amid all the controversy, scandal, and bad theater surrounding Greene, a simple fact is indisputable: When the Republican Party’s most fanatical member of Congress gave aid and comfort to the January 6 insurrectionists, she violated Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution.
That violation is explicitly disqualifying, no matter what Greene and her defenders may claim.
“Marjorie Taylor Greene testified under oath that she could not remember telling Trump or his chief of staff to declare martial law to try to keep Trump in power, but her own texts reveal that she did exactly that,” Fein said in a statement.
In a fresh report, the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, or UNDRR, found that between 350 and 500 medium- to large-scale disasters took place globally every year over the past two decades.
That is five times more than the average during the three preceding decades, it said.
Ukrainians have been suffering from the consequences of economic restructuring driven by the International Monetary Fund (IMF)—from a rise in mortality linked to rapid privatization after the collapse of the Soviet Union, to the commodification of agricultural land and sixfold increases in energy bills.
An Armenian member of the Turkish Parliament from the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) has said he has faced an unprecedented level of backlash due to a motion he submitted on Friday asking the legislature to declare the mass killings of Armenians over a century ago a genocide, the BBC Turkish edition reported.
“I have been submitting this motion for seven years and have never faced this kind of backlash. It was possible to talk about such issues in Turkey before, and this was the step I took for an issue about which the president issues a message of condolence every year,” said HDP lawmaker Garo Paylan.
Turkey categorically rejects the 1915-16 killings of more than a million Armenians as genocide.
We speak with human rights and environmental lawyer Steven Donziger, who was released Monday from nearly 1,000 days of house arrest as part of a years-long legal ordeal that began after he successfully sued Chevron on behalf of 30,000 Ecuadorian Amazonian Indigenous people. Donziger calls his misdemeanor sentencing and arrest “a retaliation play by Chevron and some of its allies in the judiciary,” meant to intimidate other human rights advocates and lawyers from pursuing environmental justice. “Chevron tried to use me as what I would say is a weapon of mass distraction so people wouldn’t focus on the environmental crimes they commited in Ecuador,” continues Donziger, who says, “I didn’t really understand freedom until it was taken away.”
Five months ago, the Stockholm-based International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance pointed to another crisis, this one centered on the United States. For the first time, the think tank moved the U.S. out of its “democracy” category, classifying us instead as a “backsliding democracy.” On this issue, sober-minded elected officials, scholars, analysts, and others have for months been raising ever louder alarms. An attempted hijacking of the U.S. electoral process, they say, is under way.
These environmental and political warnings present us with two terrifying prospects: one, that continued abuse of the ecosphere could render much of the Earth unlivable for humans and myriad other species, and two, that the United States’ current political drift toward autocratic rule could accelerate, dashing any hope of attaining a just, pluralistic democracy. These crises are intertwined. Either we find meaningful responses to both, or we fail dramatically on both.
For any company, being seen as trustworthy is critical to success. This is even more true for banks, whose core business is based on being entrusted with funds from customers and investors to manage responsibly and reliably. To be trustworthy means that you make good on your promises and that, if you make a commitment, you then follow through on it. That's why it's so troubling that every major US bank has failed to take meaningful steps to follow through on their commitments to spur climate action.
A significant percentage of shareholders at three of the biggest U.S. banks voted Tuesday to endorse first-of-their-kind resolutions urging the companies to stop supporting new fossil fuel development amid a worsening climate emergency.
"Big banks have a responsibility to address their massive contribution to the climate crisis and protect their shareholders from climate risk."
Advocacy groups on Tuesday blasted new efforts by U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin to strike a deal with the GOP on climate legislation after months of the West Virginia Democrat preventing the House-approved Build Back Better Act from reaching President Joe Biden's desk.
"The White House and Democratic leadership must push for the solutions we need, not merely what pleases Joe Manchin."
Indigenous leaders have called on Citigroup to stop financing oil and gas projects in the Amazon, saying the bank’s activities contradict its climate pledges by putting the threatened ecosystem at greater risk.€
Citigroup, a leading financier of the fossil fuel industry, has sought to position itself as a climate leader in the past year, pledging to slash emissions from its portfolio to net zero by 2050, and announcing a coal phase-out.
Fidelity will soon start allowing eligible individuals to save a portion of their 401(k) in Bitcoin, the company announced Tuesday. Employees will only gain access to the option if their employer signs off the option, which Fidelity says will start rolling out in mid-2022.
Bitcoin mining uses more electricity than all the electricity consumption done by Sweden, according to a report by University of Cambridge. In a new campaign launched, a group of climate activists wants Bitcoin to change its algorithm from Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake to reduce climate consumption.
The campaign called: “Change the Code, not the Climate” aims to make Bitcoin switch its algorithm, which will significantly reduce the competition to mine [cryptocurrency] coins. Ultimately, reducing Co2 footprint released by using expensive devices for [cryptocurrency] mining.
“We are hopeful today’s agreement will combine with our other Canada lynx victories to give this snow-dependent big cat a fighting chance at survival in the face of our warming climate,” said John Mellgren, general counsel at the Western Environmental Law Center. “We have had to push the Fish and Wildlife Service for every inch of progress on Canada lynx recovery efforts, and are hopeful the agency is beginning a new chapter of good-faith recovery efforts for this ecologically significant and iconic wild cat.”
Critical habitat is area designated by the federal government as essential to the survival and recovery of a species protected by the Endangered Species Act (ESA). Once designated, federal agencies must make special efforts to protect critical habitat from damage or destruction. In 2014, the Service designated approximately 38,000 acres of critical habitat for threatened lynx, but chose to exclude the lynx’s entire southern Rocky Mountain range, from south-central Wyoming, throughout Colorado, and into north-central New Mexico. These areas are vital to the iconic cat’s survival and recovery in the western U.S., where lynx currently live in small and sometimes isolated populations.
Driven in part by the war in Ukraine, the price of wheat has jumped by 45 per cent and oil by 40 per cent. Meanwhile, water shortages have pushed the cost of a 200 litre jerry can up 400 per cent since the start of the year, from around $1 to $5.
In an interview with the Telegraph, Kate Foster, the British ambassador to Somalia, said this price hike was disastrous for families who already spend between 60 and 80 per cent of their income on food, warning that the situation was “really rapidly deteriorating”.
Despite regional turmoil, Jordan enjoys relative stability compared to its neighbors in the Middle East. However, the Kingdom’s long-running issue of water scarcity, which ranked second globally, could threaten that continued stability. Water scarcity exacerbates existing systemic issues such as poverty and public health crises, which Jordan currently contends with. The Kingdom is suffering from an unprecedented youth employment rate of 48.1% as of November 2021 and is struggling to meet the pandemic-induced public health demands. As the effects of environmental changes continue to develop, Jordanians may increasingly feel the impacts of water scarcity in Jordan in the next decade.
Last week Egypt turned to the IMF for the third time in six years to apply for a loan as the cash strapped nation reels from an 11-year autocratic regime, a climate crisis and now the Russian war.
Impact on food insecurity across the MENA region has been one of the big talking points as the conflict unfolds in Ukraine and Cairo has not escaped this. The price of cooking oil, petrol and wheat has soared in Egypt since the fighting began.
Egypt is the world's largest importer of wheat with Russia and Ukraine accounting for 80 per cent of imports and 73 per cent of its supply of sunflower oil. At the beginning of March, a packet of five loaves of bread in Egypt had already risen from five Egyptian pounds to 7.5 EGP.
Such population doomsaying is not limited to billionaires. Paleontologist Henry Gee argued in November that our species is destined for extinction — and soon. Low genetic variation, declining fertility and habitat degradation imperil Homo sapiens, Gee claims, warning that “[t]here comes a time in the progress of any species, even ones that seem to be thriving, when extinction will be inevitable, no matter what they might do to avert it.”
Even if agriculture is dehydrated to quench residential thirst — depleting produce shelves across the nation — Californians may be forced to ration water anyway, because the same officials who are pleading for, or mandating, water usage reductions are simultaneously pursuing polices that invite even more demand for water. Without regard to the reality of climate change’s chronic droughts and wildfires, Newsom along with his fellow illusionists in Sacramento are essentially forcing local communities to increase their populations.
"The developing world is at the brink of a perfect storm of debt, food, and energy crises."
"Instances of civil unrest are brewing in all corners of the world."
Capital One tried to cause me to miss a dispute deadline in my case against Batteries Plus Bulbs in Gurnee, Illinois.
The account representative which I spoke to about my dispute with Batteries Plus Bulbs over defective car key and wiping my remote control, and then trying to charge me for the key and programming fee anyway told me to expect documents in the postal mail to reply to, and they didn’t come.
Finally, I logged into my account and noticed a document available to view, which are normally boring “We’re updating your account terms.” things that nobody reads.
Condemning the Biden administration's seizure of U.S.-held Afghanistan Central Bank funds as "a deep and grave injustice" that will worsen the humanitarian crisis already being suffered by millions of Afghans, several civil society groups have filed official statements in federal court demanding President Joe Biden's executive order regarding the funds be overturned.
"Releasing these funds back to the Afghan people is a critical step in addressing the conditions imposed on Afghans."
"We need more people who will lose their minds if they're missing pieces."
Hundreds of faith-based and civil rights groups and leaders across the United States on Tuesday called on members of Congress to "fiercely reject" a "dangerous" bill that would codify a rule used to deport more than 1.7 million asylum-seekers under pretext of the Covid-19 pandemic.
"Lawmakers have a moral imperative to oppose this legislation and any anti-asylum proposal that would keep Title 42 in place."
Grassroots progressive groups on Tuesday urged Democratic congressional leaders to ignore Republicans, right-wing members of their own party, and neoliberal economists who are pushing lawmakers to hit the brakes on federal spending as inflation surges to levels not seen in decades.
"Pulling back on effective, popular investments will not solve the problems we face."
After President John F. Kennedy appointed his brother as Attorney General, Republicans freaked out and passed an anti-nepotism law against presidents hiring family members.€
Workers in the marijuana industry joined union representatives and Democratic lawmakers Tuesday for a round table discussion about a growing push to organize workplaces in the sector and about federal legislation to protect workers' rights in all industries.
Reps. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) and Donald Norcross (D-N.J.). met with employees from marijuana businesses in New Jersey, where legal sales for recreational use began last week.
“My Kevin.” That’s what disgraced former president Donald Trump has called House minority leader Kevin McCarthy—and there’s no indication he’s given up possession of the GOP toadie. Although even I thought, briefly, that might change after tapes emerged last week of McCarthy telling House GOP colleagues in the wake of the January 6 insurrection that he was considering asking Trump to resign. Since the audio came out, a senior Republican aide called McCarthy “a bald-faced liar” to Politico, since he’d insisted that never happened. But “bald-faced liar” is a term of endearment to Trump, who lied his way to business fame and to the White House.
By the time Leamsy Salazar sat down in front of a video recorder in a lawyer’s office in Dallas, he had grown accustomed to divulging state secrets. After swearing to tell nothing but the truth so help him God, he recounted that he was born in Venezuela in 1974, enlisted in the army and rose through its special operations ranks. He described how in 2007 he became the chief of security for Hugo Chávez, the Venezuelan leader whose electoral victories had been challenged by outside observers and opposition parties. After Chávez died in 2013, Salazar said he provided intelligence on top Venezuelan officials involved in drug trafficking to American law enforcement agencies, which had helped him defect.
After about 45 minutes of Salazar telling his life story, the lawyer questioning him, Lewis Sessions, abruptly changed the course of the conversation. “I want to take a moment to get off the track,” said Sessions, the brother of Republican Rep. Pete Sessions of Texas. “Why are you here? What has motivated you to come forward?”
The United States and Cuba held their highest-level talks in four years last week in Washington, where they discussed the soaring numbers of Cubans immigrating to the U.S. We speak with Cuba’s Deputy Foreign Minister Carlos Fernández de Cossío, who participated in the talks. He says the U.S. has failed to implement the mutually set immigration goals between the two countries, which, paired with economic sanctions on the island, has resulted in “irregular and uncontrolled migration” of Cubans to the U.S. “If the United States would have fulfilled its commitment of granting 20,000 visas a year, it would perfectly have avoided thousands of Cubans reaching the border of the United States,” says Fernández de Cossío, who blames the Biden administration for upholding the same destructive policies as the Trump administration, which applied maximum economic sanctions starting in 2019 to “make life as difficult as possible” in Cuba. He also speaks about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, saying “this war could have been avoided,” and calls out the U.S. for pushing “double standards” under the guise of international human rights law.
The Reedy Creek Improvement District is, as you’ve probably heard by now, 38.5 square miles of land in Orange and Osceola Counties owned by the Walt Disney Company. In 1967, the man himself decided to build an amusement park in the area, but he wanted — and got — something in return: Self-governance.
Disney ran Reedy Creek as, essentially, its own polity. It taxed itself to build roads and provide services normally provided by government elsewhere.€ And it largely got to do things its way instead of Tallahassee’s way.
Our understanding of how we ought to be governing ourselves in a globalized, interdependent world beyond competing nation-states has pressed our thinking to the point where we can characterize the “new structure of a constituted cosmopolitan society” by its “three arenas and three kinds of collective actors” (ibid.). The earliest model of the nation-state recognizes only one player and “two playing fields—domestic and foreign policy or internal affairs and international relations” (ibid.).
A single actor dominates the first level, the “supranational arena” (ibid.). This means that the international community must walk a rather delicate tightrope towards creating an “institutional form in a world organization that has the ability to act in a carefully circumscribed policy field without taking on the character of a state” (ibid.). The UN will require reformation: it “must focus not only on strengthening core institutions but also on detaching them from the extensive web of special UN organizations, in particular those networked with independent international organizations” (ibid.). The communicative infrastructure of the reformed UN must tie NGO deliberative learning processes pretty tightly to circuits of communication within national parliaments (and other “representatives of a mobilized world public” (p. 323).
To make history into a narrative, the journalist yoked together archival material, old reporting of his, and new, immersive research conducted over the past few years, which included flying a plane with the instructor who trained a 9/11 perpetrator. He also devotes pages to Elián González, a Cuban immigrant who became a political token; the Supreme Court case Bush v. Gore; and the dot-com bubble.
I spoke with Rice about the cult of early-aughts political personality, ironic coincidences, and the benefit of writing this book from a historical remove. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The father of woman killed by ISIS asks the U.S. Supreme Court to consider a case involving algorithms, terrorism, and free speech. As YouTube celebrates its 17th birthday, the game-changing user-generated video platform once known for funny pet videos and other benign content continues to attract criticism for its alleged role in fostering extremism. Ample evidence casts doubt on the idea that social media platforms are radicalizing American youth, but high-profile anecdotes about bad turns allegedly inspired by YouTube, Facebook, and other sites make it hard to combat such claims. Now one such story may come before the Supreme Court—and threaten a foundational internet speech law.
The case (Gonzalez v. Google LLC) involves a man whose daughter was killed in a 2015 ISIS attack in Paris. The grieving father, Reynaldo Gonzalez, sued YouTube's parent company, Google, under the U.S. Anti-Terrorism Act. Gonzalez claims that ISIS posted recruitment videos on YouTube, that YouTube recommended these videos to users, and that this led to his daughter's death.
In the first round of voting on April 10, Muslims had voted massively for the radical left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon, with 69%. Catholics, on the other hand, gave 55% of their votes to the incumbent president. In terms of turnout, 79% of Catholic voters went to the polls, while only 58% of Muslims cast their vote to elect the President of the Republic.
The European Union on Tuesday warned Elon Musk that Twitter, now owned€ by Tesla's chief executive, must comply with the bloc's new law€ that aims to halt the online spread of hate speech and other illicit content, or risk substantial fines€ or a continent-wide ban—possibly foreshadowing a€ global regulatory fight over€ the social media platform.
"If Twitter does not comply with our law, there are sanctions."
For all the talk of how Elon Musk wanted to buy Twitter to make it more supportive of free speech, there remain a ton of questions about what it will actually mean in practice. I’ve explained why his conception of free speech is incredibly naïve and his ideas around content moderation are not just outdated but counterproductive. Unfortunately, when most people talk about Twitter and “free speech” it’s the content moderation aspects that they’re referring to.
The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, is set to become the new owner of Twitter after the company’s board agreed to sell the influential social media platform for $44 billion on Monday. Musk, who describes himself as a “free speech absolutist,” tweeted, “I hope that even my worst critics remain on Twitter, because that is what free speech means.” We speak with tech industry watchdog Jessica González and Evan “Rabble” Henshaw-Plath, who was part of the team that launched Twitter in 2006, about what the buyout means for the future of digital media and journalism. “Musk or no Musk, Twitter has work to do to ensure that it stops amplifying bigotry, calls to violence, hate speech and conspiracy theories,” says González. Henshaw-Plath says he senses Musk has “no idea what he’s getting into,” and discusses the activist roots of Twitter.
After nearly a month of ups and downs, including a hostile takeover offer, Elon Musk has finally become the new owner of Twitter. Musk calls himself a “free speech absolutist”, and has declared that “free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated.”
It’s a high ideal that has been invoked repeatedly over the years by executives of the Internet’s biggest companies.
“The extreme antibody reaction from those who fear free speech says it all. By “free speech”, I simply mean that which matches the law. I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law. If people want less free speech, they will ask the government to pass laws to that effect. Therefore, going beyond the law is contrary to the will of the people,” he wrote on his Twitter feed.
It should be noted that ‘free speech’ and ‘censorship’ rules are different in each country. In the United States, the first amendment protects freedom of speech and the press. In India, while Article 19(1)(a) of the Constitution ensures freedom of speech and expression the first amendment ensures “reasonable restrictions” on the same.
Given Twitter is a global service, it will have to follow the idea of free speech as ‘defined’ by each country’s laws, at least if one goes by Musk’s definition for now. It should also be noted that the law in many countries may not necessarily ban certain kinds of hate speech or deem it illegal. Would Twitter then ‘ban’ such speech, is what is not clear. Just how does Twitter plan to deal with ‘censorship’ now that Musk is in charge remains unclear, especially with regard to its existing content moderation.
On 23 April, two days before Musk landed his Twitter deal, the European Union agreed its Digital Services Act (DSA), which will grant it the right to police how platforms moderate content, halt the spread of disinformation, and keep users safe. If platforms don’t conform, it could open them up to bans or sanctions of up to 6 per cent of their global turnover. Twitter’s 2021 revenue was $5.08 billion, meaning Musk would have to hand over up to $304.8 million if fined.
Thierry Breton, the EU’s commissioner for the internal market, has already indicated that the bloc is prepared to enforce its regulations. “Elon, there are rules,” he said in an interview with the Financial Times today.
As people express their concern over the fact that Twitter may henceforth be an unmoderated platform, Musk offered a clarification on what he means by free speech. In a tweet on Wednesday, the industrialist said, “By ‘free speech’, I simply mean that which matches the law. I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law. If people want less free speech, they will ask the government to pass laws to that effect. Therefore, going beyond the law is contrary to the will of the people.”
A day after advocating free speech on Twitter that Elon Musk has now bought following a $44 billion deal, Musk on Wednesday explained what he meant by 'free speech', as his earlier proclamation left Twitter users high and dry as they did not understand what Musk actually meant by free speech on Twitter. In a clarification tweet, Elon Musk said by free speech, he meant that which matches the law. "I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law, he said hinting that his earlier tweets on free speech led to 'extreme antibody reaction' from those who fear free speech.
Musk named his priorities in a press release, echoing earlier statements he’s made about potential changes. “Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,” he said. “I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans.”
In other words, he’s got four main ideas for unlocking Twitter’s potential, and every single one is a huge can of worms. Let’s break them down one at a time.
State of play: Before he announced he had made an offer for Twitter, Musk had talked about the things he would want to change about the social media platform, from adding an edit button to limiting content moderation.
The European Union has said its new online rules will "overhaul" the digital market, including how tech giants operate.
Once they come into force, there will need to be greater transparency around why content is recommended to users, or why they are being targeted with certain ads, for example.
How might Mr Musk change things? He has said that he will publish Twitter’s code, including its recommendation algorithm, in a bid to be more transparent. He proposes to authenticate all users and to “defeat the spam bots”. And he will be “very cautious with permanent bans”, preferring “time-outs”, he told TED. This suggests a reprieve for Mr Trump and other banned politicians, as advocated by groups including the American Civil Liberties Union, which counts Mr Musk as one of its largest donors.
The marriage of the world’s richest man and one of the most influential social media platforms — of which he is an active user -— has left questions about how the company will be run, what it means for American politics and the dissemination of information in general.
x Here are five things we’ll be watching as details of the company’s new makeup become public: [...]
Conversations about free speech and cancel culture have created a cottage industry for public figures willing to use language that many people might find offensive. At the highest valuations, celebrities like Joe Rogan have been able to build some of the most popular individual brands in America — in Rogan’s case, amid calls for him to be deplatformed for everything from vaccine misinformation to a number of since-deleted episodes in which the host routinely says the n-word.
MacDonald is likely the most famous artist in a budding genre of his own creation: right-wing protest rap. On YouTube, songs with titles like “Snowflakes” (by MacDonald), “Rittenhouse” (by Tyson James, a “politically incorrect Christian”), and “Patriot” (by Topher, featuring the “Marine Rapper”) regularly go viral and even reach the charts, to the confusion or ignorance of industry players. One of MacDonald’s latest projects is a joint album with “hick-hop” rapper Adam Calhoun, released in February. Calhoun hails from Illinois and has a laconic flow and crude lyrics; he is to One America News Network what MacDonald is to Fox News. In his 2018 track “Racism,” he juxtaposes stereotypes among various kinds of white and Black Americans, using the n-word with impunity. Incredibly, the song remains on YouTube, where it’s been viewed 16 million times.
Twitter was flooded with user reports of high-profile accounts’ losing thousands of followers in the hours after news broke that Tesla CEO Elon Musk would purchase the social network. The company said Tuesday that the “fluctuations in follower counts” came from “organic” account closures.
According to an NBC News report published Tuesday, the follower numbers for some of Twitter’s most-followed accounts, including former President Barack Obama, singers Katy Perry and Taylor Swift all dropped by hundreds of thousands. Obama, who is Twitter’s most-followed user with 131.7 million followers, saw his follower count fall by 300,000 since Monday. Perry, who has 108.8 million followers, lost 200,000.
The outpouring of horror lays bare the employee revolt Musk is likely to face as he seeks to overhaul Twitter, despite having revealed relatively little about his plans for the company so far.
The report, issued on 21 April, named actors from China, Russia and North Korea, either as part of state-sponsored groups or individuals who were affiliated to a state, as being among the highest number who were involved in these attacks.
It is common for security firms to name the countries which the US has on its enemies list — usually Russia, China, North Korea and Iran — as being the main source of attacks.
Mandiant has a reputation for attributing attacks, be they mounted through the use of zero-days or not. The company was recently acquired by Google, but the transaction has yet to be finalised due to some concerns expressed by the Security and Exchange Commission.
Hey, finally time for a little bit of good news in the world of free speech: the Kentucky General Assembly recently passed the Kentucky Uniform Public Expression Protection Act. It’s a kind of anti-SLAPP bill that is based on a model bill, the Uniform Public Expression Protection Act (UPEPA), and similar to a bill passed in Washington State already, and very similar to bills proposed in a few other states as well. On Wednesday, Kentucky’s governor, Andy Beshear, signed the bill into law.
What’s more, the decision about what online content is “clearly unlawful” is not always straightforward, and generally courts are best placed to assess the lawfulness of the online content. While social media users may be held responsible for failing or refusing to comply with a court order compelling them to remove or block information, they should not be required to monitor content on their accounts to avoid liability, nor should they be held liable simply when they get notified of allegedly unlawful speech on their social media feeds by any method other than a court order. Imposing liability on an individual user, without a court order, to remove the allegedly unlawful content in question will be disproportionate, we argued.Finally, the Grand Chamber should decide whether imposing criminal liability for third party content violates the right to freedom of expression, given the peculiar circumstances in this case. Both the applicant and the commenters were convicted of the same offence a decade ago. EFF and Media Defence asked the Grand Chamber to assess the quality of the decades-old laws—one dating back to 1881—under which the politician was convicted, saying criminal laws should be adapted to meet new circumstances, but these changes must be precise and unambiguous to enable someone to foresee what conduct would violate the law. € €
Subjecting social media users to criminal responsibility for third-party content will lead to over-censorship and prior restraint. The Grand Chamber should limit online intermediary liability, and not chill social media users’ right to free expression and access to information online.
Of even greater concern, however, is that the new “Islamophobia” office would target “propaganda efforts by state and nonstate media ‘to promote racial hatred or incite acts of violence against Muslim people.’” As noted above, Islam is not a race, so “racial hatred” against Muslim people is not even possible. But if the way that the word “Islamophobia” has been used up to now is any indication, what is considered to be propaganda or incitement will be based entirely on subjective criteria, and include even reporting about jihad activity and honest analysis of its motivating ideology.
Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas) noted this, saying: “It is so vague and subjective that it could be used against legitimate speech for partisan purposes. Even the term ‘phobia’ [connotes] irrational fear, not discrimination.”
The text will need to be finalised at technical level and verified by lawyer-linguists, before both Parliament and Council give their formal approval. Once this process is completed, it will come into force 20 days after its publication in the EU Official Journal and the rules will start to apply 15 months later.
From 23 to 27 May, a delegation from the EP’s Internal Market Committee will visit several company headquarters (Meta, Google, Apple and others) in Silicon Valley to discuss in person the Digital Services Act package, and other digital legislation in the pipeline, and hear the position of American companies, start-ups, academia and government officials.
The results of the survey entitled "Attitudes to media freedom and independence in Central Europe" were officially presented in Prague today. Telex is among those attending, and here is a brief summary of the results.
This article was funded by paid subscribers of The Dissenter Newsletter. Become a monthly subscriber to help us continue our independent journalism.On April 20, a British judge approved the extradition of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange to the U.S., to face trial under the Espionage Act. Home Secretary Priti Patel will now decide whether to sign off on the decision.
Rights groups and concerned citizens the world over have urged Patel to halt the extradition, on the grounds that Washington’s case against Assange amounts to the criminalization of entirely legitimate journalistic activities, and puts global press freedom at risk.
WikiLeaks promptly released the war logs that were published by a host of media organisations and exposed human rights abuses by occupation forces besides the increased fatality counts in Iraq. Later, WikiLeaks also published then presidential candidate and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s aide John Podesta’s emails before the 2016 presidential elections. While the WikiLeaks portal was maintained and sustained by hundreds of volunteers, the site was represented publicly by its founder and director Julian Assange. In December 2018, the website also published a searchable database of more than 16,000 procurement requests that were made by US embassies around the world.
Assange is wanted in America to answer 18 criminal charges over WikiLeaks publications.
In 2010, the portal published thousands of classified files and diplomatic cables that shook the world.
A coalition of more than 70 groups representing patients, healthcare workers, unions, and others launched a new campaign Tuesday aimed at pressuring the Democratic-controlled U.S. Senate to finally approve legislation to bring down out-of-control prescription drug costs and rein in the pricing power of Big Pharma.
Joined by Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.), the campaigners held a press conference in the nation's capital urging the Senate to pass—by May 30 at the latest—the drug-price provisions that the House approved in November as part of the Build Back Better package.
Overcoming increasingly aggressive opposition from the company's management, workers at more than 30 Starbucks locations across the U.S. have now voted to unionize as the wave of organizing spurred by historic wins in Buffalo just four months ago continues to mount.
On Monday, workers at a Starbucks shop in the township of Hopewell, New Jersey voted unanimously to unionize and join Workers United, an affiliate of the Service Employees International Union. The store was the 30th Starbucks location to unionize in the U.S. and the first in New Jersey.
After U.S. President Joe Biden on Tuesday used his clemency powers for the first time—well over a year into his presidency—criminal justice reform advocates called on him to go even further to tackle mass incarceration.
"If we are to be a nation of second chances and justice for all, then the president must lead through his action—and clemency is a powerful way to lead."
Environmental and Indigenous rights defenders on Tuesday welcomed a Brazilian court ruling that will continue to block a Canadian company from building what would be the South American nation's largest open-pit gold mine in the Amazon rainforest.
"Belo Monte already has had a major impact on the Xingu. A second project could mean the death of the local peoples."
An Istanbul court on Monday sentenced Turkish civil rights activist and philanthropist Osman Kavala to aggravated life in prison, setting off a wave of strong global condemnation.
"This egregious sentence is a death knell for Turkey's democracy."
Until this week, Maine was the only state that had no public defenders. But a last-minute push by state lawmakers has succeeded in securing money to hire Maine’s first public defenders. Now it will have five.
The decision, which will cost Maine lawmakers nearly $966,000, is a small first step for a state that The Maine Monitor and ProPublica found had regularly contracted private attorneys with criminal convictions and histories of professional misconduct to represent the state’s poor. The investigation also found that the Maine Commission on Indigent Legal Services, or MCILS, routinely failed to enforce its own rules and allowed the courts to assign 2,000 serious criminal cases to attorneys who were not eligible because they had too little experience or had not applied to work on complex cases.
Advocates and Democrats who support sweeping student debt cancellation welcomed reporting Tuesday that President Joe Biden is exploring options for loan forgiveness after extending a pandemic-related pause on payments earlier this month.
"This is what happens when you fight."
Your neighborhood is in darkness. Your household is asleep.
Suddenly, you’re awakened by a loud noise.
Five New York City pension funds, the New York State Common Retirement Fund, and the Illinois State Treasurer joined the initial launch of the effort. All are long-term Amazon shareholders, with 1.7 million in combined Amazon shares valued at approximately $5.3 billion.
They have launched a campaign website aimed at other institutional investors calling for a vote against the reelection of Daniel Huttenlocher and Judith McGrath. As the only long-term members of the Amazon Leadership Development and Compensation Committee overseeing human resources—the third committee member joined only last year—they are being targeted for years of voting to approve pay hikes for top managers while turning a blind eye to all the workplace violations. This campaign follows earlier demands by the New York City pension funds in 2020 that the Amazon board provide more leadership during the pandemic to protect the health and safety of its workers.
Speaking to RFA, Tibetan researchers living in exile called the move a further push by China to weaken the Tibetan people’s ties to their national culture and identity.
Pema Gyal, a researcher at London-based Tibet Watch, said that recent years have seen China’s government impose the use of Mandarin Chinese in Tibetan schools and religious institutions. “But now these policies are being enforced on all Tibetans.”
“This is an attempt to Sinicize Tibet’s language and culture,” Gyal said.
On March 30, 2022, Vincent Hervouët spoke on the programme L’Heure des Pros 2 about Emmanuel Macron’s denial of the demands of some farmers, the CCIE reports. “In his account of the farmer who killed a burglar in Longré in the Charente department at the end of March, he lists the various problems faced by farmers, in particular the robberies and looting. Then he continues by accusing Muslims of stealing sheep during Ramadan and before the Aid festival,” it says. Apart from being wrong, Vincent Hervouët clearly targets the Muslim community, according to CCIE, and supports a racist view that has long been entrenched, especially since Sarkozy spoke of sheep being slaughtered in the bathtubs of Muslims.
The success of the program dedicated to distributing $42.5 billion to states from the infrastructure bill will depend on the work that states do, reiterated the head of the agency tasked with managing the money.
“Their [the states] success is our success,” Alan Davidson, head of the Commerce department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration, said Monday at a legislative and policy conference hosted by the National Telecommunications Cooperative Association.
The vacation rental market will increase 20% in 2022 due to demand for accommodation from digital nomads, according to the CEO of a vacation rentals chain.
Javier Cárdenas Ibarra, founder and CEO of Rotamundos, told the newspaper El Universal that many foreigners are staying in Mexico for extended periods due to their ability to work remotely.
The idea that there is a link between the exclusivity period on patents and higher drug prices is about as noncontroversial as a view can be. It is the easy question on an ECON 101 exam on monopolies, supply and demand. Yet, somehow, this has come under attack thanks to big PhRMA and their minions. Unfortunately they have found a sympathetic advocate in the Senate who believes the unbelievable.
A couple of weeks ago, a police transparency activist caught something on video: a cop trying not to get caught on video. That isn’t the interesting part. Lots of cops hate being recorded, even by their own cameras.
When it comes to fan-created video games utilizing established IP, the vast majority of instances tend to result in a narrow set of responses from the original creators or publishers. The Nintendo route is to go fully nuclear as often and immediately as possible, destroying any and all attempts. Take 2 follows a similar path, albeit one that also includes actual lawsuits. Sega, on the other hand, mostly ignores fans creating their own games using Sega IP, even occasionally slightly endorsing this behavior. And that’s… sort of it. Nuke or ignore.
It really feels like we shouldn’t have to have discussions about how companies should handle information that leaks onto the internet in 2022. Or, to be more precise, we should at least not have to remind them that attempting to re-bottle the leak-genie just isn’t going to work and will almost certainly have the opposite, AKA Streisand, effect. Every time we go through this, some company doesn’t like some information or footage that gets leaked out, tries to bury it with takedown requests or IP bullying, and ends up shooting news coverage of the leak into the stratosphere.
The Court of Justice of the European Union has dismissed Poland's request to annul Article 17 of the Copyright Directive. The Court finds that the legislation, which could boost the use of 'upload filters,' does not violate freedom of expression, as long as they can sufficiently distinguish between illegal and legal content. This effectively puts an end to years of opposition.
Zone-Telechargement and Tirexo, two of the most popular pirate sites in French-speaking regions, have announced they will shut down. The original Zone-Telechargement was shut down by French police in 2016, but in common with many 'branded' pirate platforms, later returned to regain millions of monthly visitors.
