We’ve crafted an enormous range of articles showcasing the finest free and open source Linux software. We cover games, graphics, education, multimedia, security, and tons more. And there’s other computer related areas that we also regularly dive into such as programming, hardware, Android, and more.
Many of these articles are published in a series. It therefore makes sense to collate all of these series into a central location. This helps you to quickly find what you are looking for, as well as introducing you to a profusion of interesting and informative material.
We’ll first showcase our on-going series. We frequently publish new articles in these series.
 We are busy working on the bug reports folks are filing about the Plasma 5.25 beta, and as of right now, we’re down to 15. Working on these is a great way to make a difference quickly!
In addition, features that didn’t make it into Plasma 5.25 are starting to land in 5.26. There’s some very cool stuff this week, so let’s jump in...
 Avnet RZBoard V2L is an Arm Linux SBC for AI vision applications that’s about the size of a business card (or a Raspberry Pi), and powered by a Renesas RZ/V2L Cortex-A55/M33 processor with an on-chip DRP-AI accelerator.
The board also comes with 2GB DDR4, 32GB eMMC flash, 16MB QSPI flash, Gigabit Ethernet, WiFi 5 and Bluetooth 5.0, multiple USB ports, MIPI DSI/CSI interfaces, as well as a Pi HAT compatible 40-pin GPIO header.
The oldest form of television used a spinning disk with a progression of holes — a Nipkow disk — to slice the image into lines for display. They’re surprisingly simple machines and capable of unexpectedly high-quality images despite their relatively low resolution. Even better, in an age of microcontrollers and bright LEDs, making one that works is not the chore it might once have been. [James Provost] has created one that uses an Arduino Mega and a set of 3D printed parts, so there’s no excuse for not having a spinning disk TV on your shelf.
Keyboards with wells like the Maltron, the Kinesis Advantage family, and everything dactyl-esque out there are great. Trust us, we know this firsthand. But if you want to build your own curvy girl, how the heck can you implement that shape without 3D printing, clever woodworking, or access to tooling and plastic molding equipment? Well, there is another way. Over on twitter (translated) (Threadreader: Japanese, English), [tsukasa_metam] has achieved the key well effect by stacking up PCBs to create a skyline of vertically-staggered keys.
I don't know exactly what happened, maybe it's just the summer, but my pens started failing one after another around September '21. I used a Jinhao 51A as a daily driver for a very long time, and these pens are extremely durable if you replace the soon-to-be-rusty screw early on. For some unknown reason, my beloved 51A became a super dry and unreliable writer, and nothing worked: I tried to flush the pen, switch to a syringe-filled cartridge and use a wetter ink. I even tried other fountain pens I have, and they had similar issues.
Despite the fact that we’ve been doing them for years now, it’s still hard to predict how a Hack Chat will go. There’s no question it will be an hour of interesting discussion of course, that much is a given. But the dynamics of the conversation can range from a rigid Q&A, which isn’t exactly unexpected when you’ve only got a limited amount of time with a subject matter expert, to a freewheeling hangout with a group of people who all happen to be interested in the same thing.
[deshipu] aka [Radomir Dopieralski] has been building educational handhelds for a good part of a decade now, and knows how to design hardware that makes for effective teaching. Today, we are graced with the PewPew LCD project, latest in the PewPew student-friendly handheld series, powered by CircuitPython.
Some of the hacks we see make us wonder why they aren’t already a commercial product, and this electric toothbrush turned rechargeable flashlight is one of them. Sure, these things exist, but we haven’t seen one with a dedicated charging stand. They usually just take micro USB or whatever, so it’s on you to remember to plug it in. How great would it be to have a fully-charged flashlight always at the ready, especially one in a position to illuminate the room? Although [wannabemadsci] makes it look easy, this conversion took quite a bit of doing.
Plenty of gamers around these parts require an expensive PC to play games, often spending thousands of dollars for a gaming machine. Believe it or not, though, there are entire classes of games that don’t require any electronics at all, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t benefit from the addition of some neat gadgets. This Settlers of Catan game uses custom LCD tiles with a built-in custom mesh network.
“In a century of Palestinian struggle against colonialism, land, in all of its forms and meanings, has constituted the ethos of our struggle and culture,” said Soheir Asaad in a recent webinar held in honor of Palestinian Land Day that Palestinians commemorate on March 30 every year. Asaad works as an advocacy team member for the Rawa Fund that supports local, community-led solutions to the issues Palestinians face. She was the moderator of a free online webinar on April 5 titled, Blossoming in Palestine: Community Organizing Around Land.
“The Zionist dispossession of our land, theft of natural resources, and ethnic cleansing have been part and parcel of a systematic, holistic targeting of the very existence of a Palestinian society,” she said during the webinar.
Ever since the antivaccine movement rose to previously unattained prominence as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, resistance to COVID-19 vaccine mandates (not to mention to all public health mandates to slow the spread of the coronavirus, such as masks and “lockdowns”), and the increasing affinity between antivaxxers and fascists, those of us who have been following the antivaccine movement have become increasingly concerned that anti-COVID-19 vaccination has been metastasizing to cover all vaccines. Unsurprisingly, it’s been doing exactly that. The endgame of the antivaccine movement has always been the elimination of all vaccine mandates of any kind, and increasingly right wing politicians are pushing for laws and policies that bring us closer to such a world.
While a lot of the scandals surrounding “big tech” have been overblown, one that hasn’t been discussed enough is Silicon Valley companies’ abuse of user two-factor authentication data. If you’ve been napping, two-factor authentication (preferably of the email variety) helps protect your accounts from being compromised by hackers.
Massachusetts’ highest court has upheld the collection of mass cell tower data, despite recognizing that this data not only provides investigators with “highly personal and private” information but also has the potential to reveal “the locations, identities, and associations of tens of thousands of individuals.”
The case is Commonwealth v. Perry, and in it the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) addressed the constitutionality of “tower dumps” of cell site location information (CSLI).
A “tower dump” occurs when a phone company provides law enforcement with data on all devices that connected with a specific cell tower during a specified period of time. Because each cell tower covers a particular geographic area, police can infer from the data that the device owners were in that area at the time. Tower dumps can identify hundreds or thousands of phones—or, in this case, “more than 50,000 individuals . . . without any one of them ever knowing that he or she was the target of police surveillance.”
We are happy that the Tor Project is again participating in Google Summer of Code. Mentorship programs are very important for open source projects as they help us have one more way of bringing new contributors to our projects. Starting in June this year we will have the following mentors and their projects working with a contributor from Google Summer of Code:
This project will bring back Tor Weather. It is an email notification service that relay operators can subscribe to and choose which notifications they want to receive about their relay.
It’s not just the private sector leaking data at alarming rates! Well, it is still the private sector, but it’s leaking data on behalf of the government! So… somewhat different. But still alarming.
If there’s one lesson we should draw from the horror at the Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Tx, it's that we cannot rely just on school guards, calling 911, or tepid “solutions” by extremist politicians to safeguard our school children. Or to protect people in supermarkets, houses of worship, or any other public settings targeted for mass carnage.
The country’s centrist corporate media have decided what this year’s primaries are mainly about: Donald Trump.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott garnered headlines late Thursday indicating that he plans to "skip" the National Rifle Association's annual meeting in Houston on Friday and instead travel to Uvalde, where a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers at an elementary school earlier this week.
But a look beyond the headlines reveals that Abbott is not actually skipping the event. In an apparent attempt to have it both ways, the governor recorded video remarks that will be played at the gun lobby's convention as he holds a press conference with local officials and grieving residents in Uvalde.
A new Science editorial calls on scientists to get up from "the sidelines" of the national gun control debate and debunks arguments frequently used by right-wing politicians and media personalities to reject tightening limits on firearm access.
"A nation of children threatened by gun violence does not have a future," it states.
"Together we rise," reads the motto on a wall of the Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. The school serves about 600 students in the second thru fourth grades. Over ninety percent are Latinx. Nineteen children between the ages of nine and eleven and two of their teachers were murdered there Tuesday, by an 18-year-old gunman armed with a semiautomatic AR-15 rifle. The shooter, Salvador Ramos, was killed at the school by a U.S. Border Patrol agent. At a news conference on Wednesday, Texas Governor Greg Abbott, a Republican who consistently rejects gun control, blamed the shortage of mental health services for the atrocity.
The SWAT squad got to the school in force quite promptly, but then, to the consternation and fury of neighbors and parents — who were screaming at them to “Stop it! and “What are you doing — get inside the building!” — they stayed safely back. (In fact, if they did anything at all it was fight off and tackle frantic€ parents trying to get to the school!)
An unarmed Amadou Diallo was slaughtered 47 years ago while standing on his front stoop, hit by 40 bullets fired by four frightened police undercover officers.
My father was proud of my service. Somehow my mother knew that my last months in Vietnam were awful. She knew at a glance I was changed, but was thrilled that her only son had returned home. A few weeks later, when the last of my army pay was gone, I applied for unemployment, filling out the forms as best I could. What was my last job? US Army, Vietnam. Why did I leave? Rotten pay. Hazardous conditions. What did that previous job qualify me to do? I read maps and plotted artillery fire on people trying to kill me.
Would my answers offend those who read them? I hoped so, but the clerk was not amused. My Army skills were not suited to civilian life, she said. Silently, I screamed, € “No shit, Sherlock!” I was officially categorized as “miscellaneous.”
In his essay, Mr. Patel harkens back to his personal awakening to America’s systemic racism in college. With consciousness raised, he saw his father’s purchase of a Subway sandwich franchise – instead of starting his own shop – as a justified response to “the wound…of American racism, ” since, as his father knew, white people are not “going to buy sandwiches from a brown guy from India named Sadruddin.” Some 29 years later the writer now sees the other side of his father’s franchise choice: though an acknowledgment of racism, it had allowed his father to achieve the financial basis that among other things, got his children their college educations. The writer, whose children in turn face not only racism, but also anti-Muslim attitudes, concludes, ”I want [my children] to derive their identity from loving Islam, not hating Islamophobia.”
I overwhelmingly agree with him. But perhaps because I’m not a vulnerable brown, Muslim person, but white, middle class, liberal-raised, I fear I must say, “Yes…but.” On behalf of liberal brethren who may read in the father’s story a blessing of the bourgeois melting pot, I must hold out for a little more “noticing what’s bad.” For isn’t the danger in disguising one’s brownness and strange name in the corporate blandness of the Subway franchise, suburban schools, etc., how brown immigrants become white, leaving racism fairly well intact? By no means do I critique the choices made by people who must navigate their lives in the capitalist, racist, Islamophobic context. But now, with fascism on the rise, don’t we have to submit the pragmatic choices we make to live according to what we can afford, to a higher standard? The targets of racist hate can hardly be faulted, but how do we deal with the fact that achieving affluence and “whiteness” will not change the pre-conditions for racism, the petri dish for intolerance, that are structural and systemic in America?
I mention the above to show that I am not unfamiliar with guns. Indeed, back when I was nineteen and thought the revolution was coming, I would go into the woods in Howard County, MD. and shoot beer cans lined up on a log—the same thing I did when my father first introduced me to shooting. Never in my life did I even think about shooting people, which is why I realized that my role in that revolution that never came would most likely involve unarmed situations.
It’s obviously a damning statement that killing children in their schoolhouses, churchgoers in their churches and Black and Latino people in the places where they shop is something that happens with relative frequency in the United States. What’s even more damning, however, is that so many politicians essentially support this sociopathic behavior. Sure, they may make statements deploring the bloodshed and tragedy, but they sure as hell don’t do a damn thing about ending it. In their minds, there is nothing to be done about men (yes, it’s usually men) walking into a school wearing a bulletproof vest and carrying an arsenal more suitable to an invading soldier and murdering a couple dozen people. Then again, politicians claim there is also nothing to be done about hiring young men, arming them to the teeth and sending them off to kick in the doors of innocent families and killing everyone inside. It’s American democracy, goddammit. Take it in the face or we’ll kill you.
Moscow’s Alexander Kudryashov Theater Company is an independent troupe staging low-cost plays for intimate audiences. Inside the company, Alexander Kudryashov plays the “roles” of playwright, director, and actor. His new play, “Bye, Dad,” tells the story of his late father, a veteran of the Second Chechen War. And it’s a rare example of theater that feels appropriate in wartime. It’s also a remarkably candid work, even though the author himself avoids speaking of his feelings. Theater critic Anton Khitrov shares his thoughts about the play.
Twenty-four-year-old Dmitry Paramoshkin signed a contract with the Russian army in 2020, near the end of his conscription term. “It just sort of happened that way. They said there’d be exercises, [parachute] jumps, we’d ride around, and do that kind of stuff. So, I went ahead and did it,” he told the news website Fontanka. On February 25, 2022, Dmitry and his fellow soldiers were told that they were headed to Crimea to join planned military drills. When they arrived, they were given new orders: go to Kherson and then Mykolaiv. Paramoshkin was later captured after invading Ukraine, held prisoner for several weeks, and returned home to St. Petersburg in a prisoner exchange. Now he says he plans to return to the fight, confident that Russia will prevail.
Since the start of the war, St. Petersburg resident Alexey Lakhov has been sending complaints to various government agencies requesting that they remove pro-war symbols from public spaces. St. Petersburg news outlet Bumaga recently published a story about Lakhov and his small acts of protest. With their permission, Meduza is publishing a translation below.
Despite failing to capture Kyiv at the outset of the war, the Kremlin is reportedly considering a second assault on Ukraine’s capital, as Russian troops appear to be on the verge of seizing the entire Donbas region. Sources tell Meduza that advances in the east and expectations that Moscow can win a war of attrition against Kyiv and its Western allies have revived hopes in the Putin administration that a full-scale victory is possible in Ukraine before the end of the year.
For several days now, Russian forces have been trying to capture Lyman — a strategic railway hub in Ukraine’s Donetsk region. Russia is seeking to gain a foothold in Lyman in the hopes of pushing its offensive towards the cities of Slovyansk and Kramatorsk. Russian troops began storming Lyman on May 24, and Denis Pushilin — the head of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) — claimed full control of the town on the morning of May 27. In turn, Ukrainian officials said that Lyman is “mostly controlled” by Russian troops and fighting is ongoing. To find out what life is like for Lyman’s remaining residents, Meduza spoke to their relatives who left the town before it came under occupation.€
The possible move is raising questions about whether it’s a first step toward inserting troops into direct combat in Ukraine.
Shortly before the massacres in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas, we spoke with author and journalist Mark Follman about the epidemic of mass shootings in the United States. Follman is the author of the new book “Trigger Points: Inside the Mission to Stop Mass Shootings in America,” in which he closely examines how a community-based prevention method called “behavior threat assessment” can help prevent mass shootings. The method “brings together collaborative expertise, primarily in mental health and law enforcement” to recognize behavioral signs in perpetrators that often lead to shootings. Follman also discusses the “copycat” issue among mass shooters and explains why he thinks it’s harmful for the media to sensationalize perpetrators of mass shootings.
My father was stationed with a PT boat squadron in the Aleutian Islands during World War II. He’d been drafted at thirty-seven years old (such things happened in that war) and found himself a petty officer in charge of supply. He was gone by the time I was six so I only saw him at intervals as per the custody agreement, particularly later in life. He’d tell the same two stories as if I’d never heard them before. One was losing his shaving kit in the snow and being unable to find it because of a blizzard. The other was the day a survivor of a sunk Japanese mini-sub found an American Navy uniform and slipped into to the line in the base chow hall. He was starving. They captured him immediately, of course. For some reason, those two stories had to be told over and over again.
I’ve€ never understood the story with the shaving kit. Was it about something lost and irretrievable in his life? Was it about his fear of the danger of blizzards where a man can be as easily lost?
As the U.S. and the G7 (comprising Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States) insist that cutting off food exports from Ukraine poses the biggest threat to world food security, rather than admitting the far more powerful negative effect of Western sanctions against Russia, their propaganda does immense damage to the world’s understanding and capability of avoiding a looming global food disaster.
The G7 and the Approaching Food Disaster
Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February, the White House has attempted to rally support for sanctions against Russia and isolate it diplomatically. While the Biden administration had little hope that India would adhere to imposing these sanctions, New Delhi has openly explored ways to circumvent them and has also refrained from condemning Russia at the United Nations.
But India has trodden carefully, refusing to show any support for the Russian invasion and, instead, has been calling for dialogue between Russia and Ukraine to resolve the conflict. In addition to not wanting to offend Ukraine, a country that India also has good relations with, New Delhi does not want to be seen as endorsing Russia’s actions or straying from India’s traditional foreign policy of nonalignment.
Before Russia launched its full-scale war against Ukraine, Ukraine’s state railroad company, Ukrainian Railways, was often criticized for being ineffective and suspected of corruption. Now, Ukrainian Railways is providing shelter for millions of refugees, transporting foreign leaders on official visits to Kyiv, and delivering humanitarian and military cargo to towns throughout Ukraine. Even Russian propagandists have marveled at the efficiency with which the company has mobilized its railroads. Meduza spoke to Ukrainian Railways head Oleksandr Kamyshin about the changes the company has made since the start of the war, the fight against Russian collaborators in the company, and the task of storing Russian soldiers’ bodies in refrigerator cars.
U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro of Texas urged the FBI on Thursday to investigate law enforcement's response to the deadly elementary school shooting in Uvalde, a demand that came as local police officers faced growing scrutiny and anger over their actions during the massacre and contradictory statements in its wake.
"The people of Uvalde, of Texas, and of the nation deserve an accurate account of what transpired," Castro, a Democrat, wrote in a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray. "However, state officials have provided conflicting accounts that are at odds with those provided by witnesses."
Just as prison reform tends to keep pace with the expansion of the bloated system, the gun argument in the US keeps pace, barely, with each massacre.€ With each round of killings, a script is activated: initial horror, hot tears of indignation of never again, and then, the stalemate on reform till the next round of killings can be duly accommodated. “It isn’t enough to reiterate the plain truth that the assault weapons used in mass shootings must be banned and confiscated,” observes Benjamin Kunkel.€ “Instead, every fresh atrocity must be recruited into everyone’s preferred single-factor sociological narrative.”
In Uvalde, Texas, a teenage gunman (they do get younger) made his way into an elementary school and delivered an unforgettable May 24 lesson.€ When he had finished at Robb Elementary School, 19 children and 2 adults had perished.€ But even this effort, in the premier league ranking of school killings, failed to top the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut in December 2012.€ On that occasion, 26 lost their lives.
When it comes to gun massacres in the U.S., the public often anticipates — and wants— a “tipping point” in which bloodshed would be so shocking and intolerable, anti-gun violence laws would be enacted. At the top of the list for most gun safety advocates would be better background checks and the banning of military-style weapons such as “assault weapons” and large capacity magazines.
But if the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre in which 26 were killed, 20 children, the 2016 Orlando nightclub killing in which 49 people were killed and the 2017 Las Vegan massacre in which 60 were killed and 411 were wounded, weren’t tipping points, what are? Many thought when a member of Congress itself, Gabby Giffords, an Arizona representative, was shot in 2011, Congress would realize gun violence had come home to roost in their own nest but nothing happened. Despite the years and even decades-long efforts of anti-gun violence advocates writing in “From Bullet to Bullhorn,” massacres like that at Robb Elementary School are quickly forgotten and no gun safety laws are passed.
For nearly a decade, U.S. officials watched with alarm as a shadowy network of Russian mercenaries connected to the Kremlin wreaked havoc in Africa, the Middle East and most recently Ukraine.
A number of them now say they wish the U.S. government had done more.
NATO’s war in Libya was its first major military operation in Africa, but it was not the first European military footprint on the continent. After centuries of European colonial wars in Africa, new states emerged in the aftermath of World War II to assert their sovereignty. Many of these states—from Ghana to Tanzania—refused to allow the European military forces to reenter the continent, which is why these European powers had to resort to assassinations and military coups to anoint pro-Western governments in the region. This allowed for the creation of Western military bases in Africa and gave Western firms freedom to exploit the continent’s natural resources.
Early NATO operations stayed at the edge of Africa, with the Mediterranean Sea being the major frontline. NATO set up the Allied Forces Southern Europe (AFSOUTH) in Naples in 1951, and then the Allied Forces Mediterranean (AFMED) in Malta in 1952. Western governments established these military formations to garrison the Mediterranean Sea against the Soviet navy and to create platforms from where they could militarily intervene in the African continent. After the Six-Day War in 1967, NATO’s Defense Planning Committee, which was dissolved in 2010, created the Naval On-Call Force Mediterranean(NOCFORMED) to put pressure on pro-Soviet states—such as Egypt—and to defend the monarchies of northern Africa (NATO was unable to prevent the anti-imperialist coup of 1969 that overthrew the monarchy in Libya and brought Colonel Muammar Gaddafi to power; Gaddafi’s government ejected U.S. military bases from the country soon thereafter).
It wasn’t difficult to assess China in the past because Beijing has had to deal with a hostile Soviet presence along a long international border since WWII, which required extensive military deployments and resources.€ This is no longer the case.€ € While Biden was in Japan last week, Russia and China conducted a major exercise in the Pacific, flying strategic bombers over the Sea of Japan and East China Sea.€ The joint exercise demonstrates the success that Beijing and Moscow are having in coordinating military policy against the interests of the United States.
The United States was particularly fortunate that, despite its full-scale warfare against North Vietnam in the 1960s, the Sino-Soviet dispute provided the Johnson and Nixon administration with a free hand in Southeast Asia. The dispute led to a bloody confrontation along the Amur and Ussuri rivers in 1969.€ The Johnson administration was slow to understand the nature and intensity of the Sino-Soviet dispute, but the Nixon administration moved adroitly to ensure that Washington would have better relations with both Beijing and Moscow than the two leading communist powers had with each other.
Cole Wist was a Republican state House member in Colorado with an A grade from the NRA. Then, in 2018, he supported a red flag law, sponsoring a bill to allow guns to be taken away — temporarily — from people who pose an immediate threat to themselves or others.
Wist lost his seat in the legislature that year in the face of an intense backlash from Rocky Mountain Gun Owners, a gun rights organization in Colorado that boasts it accepts “no compromise” as it battles “the gun grabbers.” The group campaigned against him, distributing flyers and referring to him on social media as “Cole the Mole.”
Heavy fighting is continuing in eastern Ukraine as Russia attempts to seize the entire Donbas region, where fighting began in 2014. We speak to independent journalist Billy Nessen, who just left the city of Severodonetsk, where Russian shelling has exponentially increased. He says a possible Russian capture of Severodonetsk would be a “big propaganda victory for Russia,” but predicts that Ukrainians are not yet at the point where they are willing to concede.
George W. Bush returns to the news with a tad too much honesty, lifting a veil on Washington’s dirtiest open secret: the Biden Democrats have become the Bush Republicans.
"How Do You Sheep?," a new original cartoon by the inimitable Mr. Fish, takes a closer look at the inaction of those with whom we rely upon for guidance in these troubled and bloody times.
America has been involved in a crisis of conscience for some time. Most of our recent political controversies have ended in denunciations and upheavals that seem off the charts by the standard of all previous American experience outside war. Consider the right-wing birther movement, which questioned the authenticity of President Obama’s citizenship, and the left-liberal Russiagate scandal, which accused President Trump of being a Russian agent. The loudest voices leveling these charges came from people with no interest in evidence. Rather, the accusations served their purpose within the factions that constitute the “base” of the major parties.1
Texas gubernatorial contests have been unbalanced for decades, as increasingly reactionary Republicans have elbowed their way onto center stage—drawing all the energy and attention to themselves—while Democrats have struggled to get off the sidelines. Even when they have had dynamic candidates, like Wendy Davis in 2014, Democrats have had a hard time building the coalitions that are necessary to compete with a Republican machine that has so dominated the ballot that no Democratic gubernatorial contender since 1994 has won more than 43 percent of the vote.
In the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Assistance’s A Policymaker’s Guide to Hate Crimes (1997), the government tried to pare down the definition and reporting of hate crimes, relying on watchdog groups like the ADL to a large extent, and also resorting to the ACLU’s moderated position, whereby the latter organization opposed the St. Paul ordinance challenged in R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul but supported the Supreme Court decision upholding the law in Wisconsin v. Mitchell (both to be discussed later). As the BJA’s manual summarizes, the ACLU draws a distinction between constitutionally protected speech and that intended to harm or threaten, so that penalty-enhancing hate crime statutes, “If properly drawn…do not punish protected speech or associations; rather, they reflect the heightened seriousness with which society treats criminal acts that also constitute invidious discrimination and are intended to or have the effect of depriving persons of legal rights or the opportunity to participate in their community’s political or social life simply because of their race, religion, gender, national origin, sexual orientation, or other group characteristics.” As discussed later, I do not subscribe to this distinction, which appears to me unsustainable, but aside from my philosophical disagreement there is also the question of the degree to which censoring the alt-right or any supremacist movement is likely to have the opposite of the intended effect, by giving more power to the movements than they would otherwise have.
The new criminal category of hate crimes is problematic because it ventures into the area of thought as well as conduct, since a hate crime, in order to be so constituted, must have the element of premeditation in terms of prejudice, without which it would be an ordinary crime. To separate thought from action becomes especially difficult when a person may be allied with a “hate group,” which presumes that he or she no longer has the independence of mind to choose his or her own course of action and is instead blindly swayed by the group. Verbal salvos by alt-righters online quickly lead to conclusions about the general state of prejudice, manifesting in violent action, in the United States as a whole. To the extent that hate crimes statistics are collected, reported on, and magnified in the general perception, they may actually be leading to the ossification of the very prejudices it was their ostensible intent to prevent. Rather than seeking to dissolve economic and class barriers, as has been true of liberal democracy at its best throughout its history, if the focus turns to removing prejudice from minds (as a way of forestalling the odious category of hate crimes), then society’s attention might well have shifted from procuring the attainable to tilting after the impossible. The alt-right’s recent demise is best seen in this perspective. Following the ADL’s model, many states have adopted the doubling of the normal punishment of a crime if ethnic intimidation is in play, and increased penalties are also at stake if institutional vandalism can be shown, again as per the ADL’s model statutes.
+ I understand why gun sales go up after mass killings in the US. No matter how much $$, arms and gear is poured into police agencies, they won’t be there to protect you or your kids. They’ll wait outside until the shooting stops, then outline the bodies in chalk & mop up the blood We are on our own inside one of the most violent societies that’s ever existed, a society whose cultural & economic structures pit us against each other for survival. The tragedy is that being armed makes it more likely that you or someone in your family will die from a gunshot.
+ Many€ of the same politicians who just sent $40 billion in weapons to Ukraine are lamenting the domestic slaughter from military-style assault weapons at home without pausing for a second to contemplate any possible connection between the two…
An orange-hued ex-United States president who was accurately described as “the most dangerous criminal in human history” by the world’s leading intellectual runs free, with no serious threat of meaningful prosecution after he tried to overthrow the government and cancel an election he clearly lost. His election cancellation efforts included an attempted putsch – an assault on the legislative branch as it prepared to certify the ex-president’s defeat – was coordinated with fascist paramilitaries and thugs and elected members of the president’s party inside Congress. The attempted coup was easily predicted by observers who had paid attention to the wannabe dictator’s open contempt for democracy and the rule of law and to his recurrent embrace of political violence as a legitimate tool for staying in power.
The aspiring fascist strongman sat atop the most powerful and dangerous state in world history for four years, his tiny fingers on a giant nuclear arsenal, causing no small anxiety for his top generals. In his last year in power, he actively opposed medical science and public health recommendations to criminally deny and spread a deadly pandemic. He tried to enlist the national U.S. military in the suppression of a Black civil rights protest he absurdly called “Marxist” and accused of trying to “destroy our nation.” He embraced the symbols and legacy of an earlier national secession and Civil War sparked by slaveowners to preserve the life of a vast regional social system based on the enslavement of Black people.
Since Greenwald—a former Salon columnist, and after that a Pulitzer-winning reporter for the Guardian — departed from The Intercept in September 2020, he’s become a stalwart defender of Fox, and Carlson in particular. As Carlson has gained in viewership and impact—he’s the most widely watched cable news host in the US—his commentary and political positions have come under increased scrutiny. With that attention has come intense criticism. But he has Greenwald in his corner, who has let forth a flood of pro-Carlson arguments, primarily delivered on Twitter, his medium of choice.
Shortly before the May 14 massacre in Buffalo that left 10 dead, the alleged shooter, 18-year-old Payton Gendron, published a 180-page manifesto online. The post explained that he targeted the Tops Market grocery store because the neighborhood was majority Black, in an act of political violence aimed at striking fear into nonwhite US residents. Gendron’s ideological outlook was highly influenced by the racist conspiracy theory known as the “Great Replacement” which holds that whites in the US are being systematically replaced by people of color in a demographic change that’s being masterminded by a cabal of elites.
The incumbent PM Scott Morrison led the Coalition opposed by the Labor party behind the candidacy of Anthony Albanese. At the end of the day, Labor overwhelmed by capturing the two most significant burning issues: (1) climate change (2) political integrity (What a gorgeous setup for US Dems).
According to NBC News, polling in the lead-up to the election showed that 8 out of 10 Australians wanted significant climate policies from the government. Seventy percent (70%) said climate change was already impacting the country. The environment was the prevailing issue on social media; it captured more interests than the economy or corruption. (Source: Australia’s ‘Climate Election’ Shows Shifting Priority For Voters, NBC News, May 23, 2022)
"Any further delay in concerted global action will miss a brief and rapidly closing window to secure a liveable future." —IPCC Sixth Assessment Report, Feb. 2022
Stressing that concrete action—not just lofty rhetoric—is still needed, climate groups cautiously applauded G7 climate ministers on Friday for vowing to cut off new public financing for fossil fuels by the end of the year, a move that would help tackle a major source of oil and gas industry funding.
A 39-page communique issued Friday by the environment ministers of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States pledges to end "new direct public support for the international unabated fossil fuel energy sector by the end of 2022, except in limited circumstances clearly defined by each country that are consistent with a 1.5€°C warming limit and the goals of the Paris Agreement."
Warsaw, Poland—A few weeks ago, I watched in amazement as my country’s prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, announced that Poland was implementing Europe’s “most radical plan” to “move away from Russian hydrocarbons.” He said that while other European countries had seen Russia “as a business partner,” Poland had long understood that Russia was using gas “as an instrument of blackmail.” In response to its invasion of Ukraine, Poland would no longer import any Russian fossil fuels: We would find our energy sources elsewhere.
Ahead of next week's 50th annual United Nations Stockholm environmental conference in Sweden, a global coalition of parents, grandparents, and caregivers on Friday joined thousands of worldwide advocates calling on countries to back a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty to "give children a liveable planet."
"Our children deserve to live in a world that is safe. A world in which they have opportunities and choices and are not struggling from one disaster to the next."
A new study I coauthored confirms that apex predators in Asia currently face the greatest threat from roads, likely due to the region’s high road density and the numerous apex predators found there. Eight out of the 10 species most impacted by roads were found in Asia, with the sloth bear, tiger, dhole, Asiatic black bear and clouded leopard leading the list.
The outlook for the next 30 years is even more dire. More than 90 percent of the 25 million kilometers of new global road construction expected between now and 2050 will be built in developing nations that host critical ecosystems and rich biodiversity areas. Proposed road developments across Africa, the Brazilian Amazon and Nepal are expected to intersect roughly 500 protected areas. This development directly threatens the core habitats of apex predators found in these regions and will potentially disrupt the functioning and stability of their ecosystems. This is particularly concerning where road developments will impact areas of rich biodiversity and where conservation gains have been so painstakingly achieved.
Organizers with the Debt Collective are planning a rapid response demonstration at the White House Friday following reports that President Joe Biden has reached a decision to cancel $10,000 of student debt for some borrowers—a plan that doesn't go as far as his campaign promise, which critics had already denounced as inadequate.
"$10K, no way," tweeted the Debt Collective, the nation's first union of people who owe debt. "Don't go small, cancel it all!"
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Friday joined economic justice advocates in rebuking President Joe Biden's reported plan to cancel just $10,000 in federal student loan debt for a means-tested selection of borrowers, warning the proposal is too little for those who need it most while excluding many desperate for relief.
"$10,000 [of] means-tested forgiveness is just enough to anger the people against it and the people who need forgiveness the most," the New York Democrat said. "We can do better."
The Washington Post reported on Friday morning that the Biden administration is finally considering a concrete policy of student debt cancellation, but not the one for which activists have been fighting for years. The Post reports that the White House is considering canceling just $10,000 per person in student debt, under a means-tested regime which would limit forgiveness to Americans who earned less than $150,000 in the previous year, or less than $300,000 for married couples filing jointly.€
My generation was sold a pipe dream about what a degree could mean for our future. I wanted so badly for this dream to come true that I leapt at the opportunity to take out loans.
What I didn’t know then was just how much the cost of higher education was soaring — and that colleges were hiking prices to take advantage of the federal government’s willingness to help poor and low-income students like me cover tuition.
This fall, Dems bank on the overturning of Roe v. Wade, something they have done zero to stop, over decades, to electrify their base and keep them in their congressional offices. In short, Democrats and Biden hope their failure to protect women’s rights will sidetrack voters’ attention from the gigantic, super-duper menace of inflation. It threatens their base more than anybody, being, as many of them are, on fixed or low incomes, but these politicos’ only plan is distraction, so these people forget about being robbed by the soaring cost of living. Good luck. And what a lousy program! One that’ll probably flop, as all eyes, Democrat and Republican, fixate on rising prices. Nowhere are those more evident than at the pump.
Recent months have seen gas prices in the $7 a gallon range in some places. Generally, however, they hover at about $4.50 per gallon for regular gas. If affordable electric cars had flooded the market along with the infrastructure for charging them and if consumers had the spare cash to purchase them, these astronomical gas prices would be great for the environment. But that’s still a dream world, and these prices instead merely emaciate the wallets of people who can’t afford them. Because they exploded in the supermarket, too. It’s not just meat – it’s fruits, vegetables, bread, all the essentials.
When Hawaii lawmakers moved this month to pump $600 million into the state’s Native Hawaiian homesteading program, they said they wanted to help those who are most in need. The problem: They didn’t say whom, exactly, they had in mind.
Now, the state Department of Hawaiian Home Lands, the agency that oversees the long-troubled program, faces the difficult task of setting priorities and crafting a plan for how to spend the single largest injection of funds in the history of the century-old initiative. Under the program, anyone who is at least 50% Native Hawaiian is entitled to lease land for $1 a year and to either build or buy a home there. DHHL officials could use the new appropriation for a variety of measures, from developing residential lots to acquiring land to offering mortgage and rental subsidies.
When Ohio voters head to the polls on August 2 for a special primary election, the state legislative candidates on the ballot will be running under districts deemed unconstitutional by the state Supreme Court.
Ohio's high court struck down proposed state legislative districts as illegal Republican gerrymanders on five separate occasions, but a federal court is poised to implement a previously rejected set of maps as its Saturday deadline is expected to pass without action from right-wing lawmakers in charge of the redistricting process.
Progressive challenger Jamie McLeod-Skinner was officially declared the winner Friday in the Democratic primary for Oregon's 5th Congressional District, ousting right-wing incumbent and Blue Dog Coalition member Rep. Kurt Schrader, a leading obstructionist in the U.S. House.
In interviews throughout the primary campaign, McLeod-Skinner dubbed Schrader the "Joe Manchin of the House," pointing to his initial vote against the American Rescue Plan and his opposition to congressional Democrats' efforts to lower sky-high prescription drug prices.
A survey done by CEU’s Democracy Institute following April’s elections found that while the EU finished first among the countries which are most liked by Hungarians, Russia is the least likable, and Ukraine the second least likable country among Hungarians. Fidesz voters tend to be more critical towards the EU, while those in favour of the opposition feel this way about Russia. Those whose vote in the April ‘22 elections was influenced by the Russia-Ukraine war tend to lean towards Russia. Hungary seems to be unique in Europe in that the more one identifies as a right-winger, the more they support Russia’s politics.
The 1970s were a pivotal decade, and not just because it saw the end of the Vietnam War, the resignation of Nixon, and the death of both the psychedelic hippie movement and the very political (and sometimes violent) SDS.€ Most consequentially, the 1970s were when the modern-day Republican Party was birthed.
Three senators, when asked why the U.S. is the world’s gun violence capital, were puzzled:
Perhaps this writer can enlighten Senators Hawley, Romney and Braun.
The recent mass murders in Buffalo and Uvalde are sickening, horrifying, and extraordinarily frustrating. And part of that is because, as The Onion keeps having to point out, we live in a world where the underlying message is: ‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.
After the leak of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s venomous draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, activists took to the streets and money flooded into Democratic Party coffers, as the party’s leaders vowed to make Republican extremism on abortion a defining issue in this fall’s critical congressional elections.
No redistricting year in modern times, in New York at least, has ever been like this one. A quasi-independent commission deadlocked, supposedly allowing the Democrat-run legislature to draw new congressional and state legislative districts. A Republican legal challenge led to all of those lines’ getting tossed in late April when the court appointed Jonathan Cervas, a postdoctoral fellow in the Institute for Politics and Strategy at Carnegie Mellon University and an expert on electoral politics, as special master to draw maps that didn’t violate the state Constitution’s anti-gerrymandering clause.
A new political action committee backed by a major New York hedge fund and Democratic politician turned cable news commentator Bakari Sellers plans to spend more than $1 million in a bid to oust progressive second-term Michigan Democrat Rashida Tlaib from the U.S. House of Representatives in November's midterm elections.
"It's flattering that billionaires who know nothing about our district are so scared of our movement."
Colombia has never had a Leftist president. For over 200 years since independence Colombia has been ruled with an iron fist by a small oligarchy, whose interests are necessarily expressed through far-right politics: security (for property), religion, anti-socialism, ultra-individualism and dependence on the United States to stay in power.
The US-funded Colombian military/police protects the couple dozen wealthy families that have dominated the country, who have been referred to as the “narco-oligarchy.” For decades Colombia has received far more foreign aid than any other country in the hemisphere. Because of this “special relationship” and the regional role it plays for the US, Colombia has often been referred to as “the Israel of Latin America.”
Trial testimony reveals Hillary Clinton personally approved serious election misinformation. Is there an anti-Trump exception to content moderation?
Last week, the Department of Homeland Security announced that it was temporarily deactivating its Disinformation Governance Board, a “working group” ostensibly designed to help the government develop strategies to combat fake news. Around the same time, the board’s head, Nina Jankowicz, whose troubling past has been highlighted by many, including me in The Nation, tendered her resignation.
It’s 2022 and yet we still haven’t received a nationwide blessing from the country’s top court that recognizes a First Amendment right to record public officials carrying out their public duties. In most cases, this involves cops, whose public activities are far more public than those of most other public servants.
Julian is a pioneering journalist, publisher, author. As a journalist he has received some of the highest awards in the field; as a publisher he devised an ingenious system whereby whistleblowers could anonymously submit information about war crimes, crimes against humanity, corruption, and much more, that WikiLeaks published for all to read and use; as an author he wrote books, blogs, essays that reveal his perspicacity and prescience, his polymathic interests, and his humanism. He is also an ardent crusader for peace and justice who has been nominated eight times for the Nobel Peace Prize.
If an Australian journalist who was never under US jurisdiction can be dragged out of the Ecuadorian embassy in London where he had been granted asylum and locked up in a British prison awaiting a decision as to whether he will be extradited to the US to face charges under the specious Espionage Act, then can anyone whose words may displease the status quo be safe anywhere in the world?
The economists join Robert Scheer on "Scheer Intelligence" to discuss how their new book documents the extent to which American prosperity is founded on immigration—and raises questions about how we treat immigrants today.
Wednesday marked two years since George Floyd was murdered by former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, setting off worldwide protests against police violence. But has anything in Minneapolis changed? We spoke with longtime local activist Robin Wonsley Worlobah, who is also now Minneapolis’s first Black democratic socialist city councilmember. Wonsley Worlobah says the mayor has “not enacted any meaningful and effective oversight over one of the most dysfunctional, racist and violent policing departments in the country right now.” She says a big-business, pro-police coalition worked with politicians to build a multimillion-dollar campaign against the Black Lives Matter movement, successfully preventing any changes to the city’s police budget and public safety system. “If there was a way to go backwards, we’ve done it.”
The gains and setbacks in the movement for Black lives prove how racism is woven deeply into the fabric of capitalism and US society.
For five years now, I’ve covered Colin Kaepernick’s exile from the National Football League. For five years, I’ve bayed at the moon about how the NFL chose to “blackball” a quality quarterback because he had the temerity to care enough to protest police violence during the national anthem. For five years, I’ve written about the terrible quarterbacks finding job after job while Kaepernick had his nose pressed up against the window. For five years, I’ve written about how Kaepernick has been training six days a week for a possible shot at returning, even when so-called experts said that day would never come.
There are staggering numbers of women helping to drive the anti-abortion fight. Currently at the center of the action is Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch. She petitioned the Supreme Court to review Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which, according to the recently leaked court opinion, will result in Roe v. Wade being overturned. Fitch uses her own story of raising three children as a divorced, single working mother to justify her anti-abortion position: that overturning Roe will “empower” women, giving them a chance to “redirect their lives.” Fitch disregards the fact that the majority of women who seek abortions are already mothers and that working parents in the United States are disadvantaged by the lack of government-mandated parental leave and subsidized child care.
Starting his fourth consecutive term, Hungarian Prime Minister, Viktor Orban has declared a “state of emergency” in the Central European country. The measures are allowing Orban to expand his powers originally claimed over the coronavirus pandemic.
In a video posted to the prime minister’s Facebook page, the nationalist leader explains that the war next door poses a constant threat to Hungary and it is putting the Hungarian people’s “physical security at risk”, and “threatens the energy and financial security of the economy and families.” As a "result of the events in Ukraine," Orban announced that a “state of danger” would come into effect allowing his right-wing government to “protect Hungary and families”. The move came after Fidesz passed a constitutional amendment on Tuesday allowing a state of emergency to be declared when wars or other humanitarian catastrophes are taking place in neighboring states.
Look: there are very real issues with the state of the internet today, including the amount of power a few companies have. But that doesn’t mean any solution is a good solution. Unfortunately, Senator Amy Klobuchar, whenever given the option, seems to put forth the worst possible plan. It’s mind boggling.
Jayde was crawling steadily towards this goal — until all of a sudden, we couldn’t find her formula anywhere. We spent hours scouring the internet, social media, and stores. As the national shortage took hold, none could be found.
When I was on my last can of formula and crying in the empty aisles of the grocery store, I desperately posted online about Jayde’s needs. I’m fortunate that my network of friends, family, and colleagues were compassionate and responsive to my pleas.
The technologies we humans use to do these things are ever-changing, but the basic concepts aren’t. Software that promotes new types of social networking is a terrible fit for the patent system, which hands out hundreds of thousands of 20-year monopolies each year on inventions that are supposedly new, but often aren’t. No one should be able to patent an “invention” that simply describes a method of finding like-minded people.€
Unfortunately, that seems to be just what happened with a patent we looked at recently. A patent troll called Wireless Discovery LLC sued eight different social and dating apps for patent infringement, claiming that they infringe U.S. Patent No. 9,264,875, which claims “location-based discovery” based on people’s “personal attributes.” Wireless Discovery, which was created just before its patent was granted in 2016, sued eight different online dating apps in April—most of them small apps.€
Wireless Discovery lawyers say that a simple combination of basic computing services is enough to infringe their patent. Its claim chart makes it explicit what is required to infringe the ‘875 patent. For its lawsuit against the dating network Zoosk, the claim chart describes how:€
There are millions of people consuming pirated content but the supply side is much more limited. A lot of content originates from The Scene and organized P2P release groups. In addition, there are also solo 'hobbyist' uploaders. Today we speak with a Pirate Bay VIP music uploader with more than 3,000 releases under his belt.
After the main domain of privacy-focused anti-censorship tool Tor was blocked by Russian authorities last December, digital rights activists stepped in with a successful legal challenge. TorProject.org is now unblocked but as part of a new legal process, prosecutors are restating and broadening their case. Tor Browser must be banned and deleted from Google Play, they insist.
There are lots of ways content makers can respond to copyright infringement. From going fully legal and suing, to attempting to threaten to sue to scare the hell out of the “pirates”, to seeking government intervention that would negatively impact all kinds of innocent folks, to trying (and failing) to curb piracy using DRM, none of these are particularly good strategies.
