0:29 Linux Innards 1:08:28 Vibrations From the Ether 1:15:03 Check This Out 41:09 Announcements
0:48 Linux Innards 33:54 Check This Out 37:44 Announcements
In our Innards section we discuss Linux Mint Debian Edition 5 “Elsie”
First up in the news, Mint 21 will have a new graphical upgrade tool; Fedora plans to remove BIOS and XOrg; Gnome43 reworks adwaita tools; a Sony engineer makes exFAT 73% faster; and Alibaba previews a 128-core Armv9 server processor.
Then in our Wanderings, Joe is Board of school runnings, Norbert is looking for a MATE, Moss blew up Kodi; and Bill is browsercasting.
Join Hackaday Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Assignments Editor Kristina Panos for a free-as-in-beer showcase of the week’s most gnarly but palatable hacks. But first, a reminder! Round 2 of the 2022 Hackaday Prize comes to an end in the early hours of Sunday, June 12th, so there’s still enough time to put a project together and get it entered.
Debian Community News is sharing our response to the WIPO UDRP harassment from Jonathan Cohen, Charles Fussell.
The response contains a number of confidential emails, including one from the missing Arjen Kamphuis and we hoped to send it directly to the administrative panel.
We believe our response is so strong that Debian Project Leader Jonathan Carter will totally capitulate and withdraw the complaint from WIPO. If he withdraws the complaint, we believe he must resign as DPL.
Corruption in the WIPO email systems
Unfortunately, there are problems with the WIPO mail servers. When we previously tried to communicate with WIPO by email, we received errors like this:
: host mx10.unicc.org[193.223.57.49] refused to talk to me: 554 Blocked - see https://ipcheck.proofpoint.com/?ip=78.46.198.153Do we have to go to Geneva and pay somebody a bribe just to accept our response?
The trend for making cyberdecks has seen the Raspberry Pi emerge as a favourite for these home-made computer workstations, with the all-in-one Raspberry Pi 400 providing a particularly handy shortcut to integrating the computer and keyboard components. There’s still the question of the cyberdeck chassis and screen though, and it’s one that [bobricius] has answered in what may be the simplest manner possible, by means of a riser PCB from the expansion port holding a 320Ãâ240 SPI display.
Often, I've thought about the move towards discrete forms of communication. The idea of all the pertinent points of a certain *conversation context* being apparent within the *discrete* conversation itself fascinates me. To achieve such a thing, all or most exterior information would need to be reiterated. By *reiterated*, I mean that whereas many points would be known from a context outside of the *discrete* conversation, such as from past conversations, hearsay, gossip or even cultural myth, **all** would need to be concretely reiterated.
In most conversation, contextual clues are omitted. Events that are ostensibly known to participants are glossed over or unspoken. Contrastingly, a *discrete* conversation could be packaged up as its own entity and be understood once again in any future context. In the current epoch of communication via messages which are "eternally" saved in some clunky server apparatus sitting in a damp basement in ÃÅeské BudÃâºjovice, forcing participants to remain within bounds of *discrete* conversation would simplify comprehension for anyone caring to take a look in the future.
Nothing would be left for a participant to guess at or assume. The chance of miscommunication is diminished, or perhaps entirely avoided.
A recent Politico article (5/20/22) had the headline, “How Gen X Became the Trumpiest Generation.” Yet the article’s focus seems to be mostly on Iowa state Rep. Cherielynn (“Cherie”) Westrich, a former rock singer who got into politics at age 50 as a solid supporter of Donald Trump.
Stewart platforms are pretty neat, and not seen in the wild all that often, perhaps because there aren’t a vast number of hacker-friendly applications that need quite this many degrees of freedom within such a restricted movement range. Anyway, here’s an interesting implementation from the the curiously named [Circular-Base-Stewart-Platform] YouTube channel (no, we can’t find the designer’s actual name) with a series of videos from a few years ago, showing the construction and operation of such a beast. This is a very neat mechanism comprised of six geared motors on the end of arms, engaging with a large internal gear. The common end of each arm rides on the central shaft, each with its own bearing. With the addition of the usual six linkages, twelve ball joints, and a few brackets, a complete platform is realised.
The decimation of the family farmer and ruination of the rich land, however, did not elicit sweetness in Mellencamp’s music. Resembling a monstrous storm system, the 1980s brought devastation to small and midlevel farmers via a convergence and confluence of factors from Wall Street, the Federal Reserve, the international export market, and Washington, D.C. Throughout the Midwest, by the early 1980s, the value of farmland had fallen by 60 percent because of a drop in agricultural need and increased production. Jason Manning, a historian at Southern Illinois University, summarizes the cruel jokes and awful coincidences that collaborated to kill the family farmer:
Farm foreclosures rose with the same velocity and rapidity as the price of the crops on those farms plummeted. The boots bruising the farmers already on the ground came from a simultaneously dysfunctional and disengaged federal government. President Reagan claimed a “free market” philosophy to excuse policy indifference in the face of citizen collapse. So-called “faith” in the market’s corrective measures compelled Reagan to sleep on the sofa while the roof off the house started burning. The Ayn Rand–inspired surrender to the “invisible hand”—to use Adam Smith’s term—proved to be cynical maneuvering to disguise corporate favoritism. Due to old laws legislators wrote during the Great Depression, which Reagan made no attempt to correct, modify, or destroy, substantial subsidies went to agribusinesses and factory farms. Large corporations, already unaffected by the Midwest farm crisis, received millions in governmental aid that could have gone to families facing foreclosure, bankruptcy, and homelessness.
Lobe pumps are perhaps most popularly known for their use in Rootes-type superchargers, but they can pump water, too. [Let’s Print] demonstrates this ably with a 3D-printed design that can pump with the best of them.€
Scambos is a lead principal investigator for the Science Coordination Office of the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration (SCO project). How many glaciers in the world have a team of scientists dedicated to an international collaborative research effort?
Answer: Thwaites is the single most dominate factor influencing the integrity (survival) of every coastal city in the world, and it is clearly at risk.
The human-caused climate crisis is pushing crucial glaciers in Antarctica to lose ice at a rate not seen in more than 5,000 years, according to a new study published Thursday.
Researchers at the University of Maine, the British Antarctic Survey, and Imperial College London found that the Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet could cause global sea level rise of up to 3.4 meters, or over 11 feet, in the next several centuries due to their accelerated rate of ice loss.
What else can be said about a nation devoid of substantive dialogue on pertinent issues of education, but brimming with ideas about how to arm educators, ban books, and outlaw select curriculum? Over the last two centuries, public schools in the U.S. have strayed from the locally controlled laboratories of democracy that Horace Mann and John Deweyenvisioned; discussions about curriculum have been reduced to vapid partisan debates, and teachers have been transformed from professionals who empower democratic citizens to overworked and poorly paid employees tasked with serving management.
The professional neutering of educators was made possible by national education policies such as No Child Left Behind and Common Core which promised – but did not deliver – improved student learning. Instead, these policies disempowered teachers and created a nation of bubble fillers: citizens who can make the best choice when given a limited set of options. Such skills will prove useful to students who engage in America’s defunct electoral system, but they will have little applicability elsewhere. Regardless, the public was led to support these corrosive education policies thanks to slick propaganda such as the federal government’s 1983 report Nation at Risk, the 2010 documentary Waiting for Superman, and the former Chancellor of District of Columbia Public Schools Michelle Rhee, who oversaw the collection of questionable if not outright false data to justify a national campaign to disempower teacher unions and public schools.
I was having a wonderful week until I heard these words from my eighth-grade science teacher: “If you haven’t heard about Covid-19, cases are rising so there’s a possible chance we’ll be out of school, and if it gets worse, we might not come back.” My friends and I didn’t seem to pay attention until she gave us all a packet of homework.
In the last week of her life, my mother extracted a promise from me. "Make sure," she said, "that Orion goes to college."
Plastics are wonderous materials, much loved for their ability to elastically deform and spring back to their original shape. They’re a category of materials perfect for creating things like living hinges and similar mechanisms, and this 3D-printed snap action device shows that off admirably.
Watching movies on the big screen is fun, but getting out to the cinema or drive-in can be a hassle. It’s possible to get the same experience at home with a little creativity, as shown in this DIY projector screen build by [The Hook Up].
When we think of robotics, the first thing that usually comes to mind for many of us is some sort of industrial arm that’s bolted to the floor, or perhaps a semi-autonomous rover trudging its way across the dusty Martian landscape. While these two environments are about as different as can be, the basic “rules” are pretty much the same. Being on firm ground ground gives the robot a clear understanding of its position and orientation, which greatly simplifies tasks such as avoiding collisions or interacting with nearby objects.
Of all the pundits weighing in on social media's effects on young people, teen voices are often heard the least. Parents worry about the safety of their children. Social media companies worry about their ad revenue, user base, and potential regulations. Policymakers push for regulations that protect teens. All the while, we watch from the sidelines as these groups fight over the future of our social media practices, but we want in.
At the outset of their federal criminal trial for hijacking vast swaths of Internet addresses for use in large-scale email spam campaigns, three current or former executives at online advertising firm Adconion Direct (now Amobee)€ have pleaded guilty to lesser misdemeanor charges of fraud and misrepresentation via email.
The Third Party doctrine has helped invert/pervert probable cause. Third parties (Google, AT&T, Facebook, etc.) gather tons of data that can be useful to law enforcement. When cops are looking for suspects but have no idea who to suspect, they turn to these third parties. In some cases, they can get plenty of data with nothing more than a subpoena.
Amid seemingly intractable legislative inertia after the latest of thousands of U.S. mass shootings, youth-led activists are set to reprise the 2018 March for Our Lives protest against gun violence and congressional inaction with events in Washington, D.C. and hundreds of cities and towns in the United States and abroad this Saturday, June 11.
"The 'solutions' of arming teachers, bulletproof doors, all that stuff: It's nonsense."
Forty years, and the memory is as vivid as ever. It was a beautiful spring day. The United Nations Second Special Session on Disarmament was about to get underway, and we were determined to be heard. The arms race had to stop, we said; nuclear weapons had to be abolished—and instead of endlessly pouring extravagant amounts of money into military budgets, it was time to put our national treasury to use meeting the needs of our communities.1Leslie Cagan served as the coordinator of the June 12, 1982, mobilization.
In the Treatment Center unit at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, opposite from only slightly bleaker Hospice Unit across the hall, I’ve been visiting with Shon Miller regularly for nearly two decades. Shon, chronically ill in a hospital bed from osteomyelitis and, relatedly, paraplegic from police gunfire, always greets me with an enormous, toothy smile and refers to me as “Mr. Billy,” though I have told him for many years that he can drop the “Mister.” He asks after my wife and daughters and reminds me to treasure them. He wants to hear about the lawyers and investigators who once worked on his case: “How’s Ms. Lucy? What about Ms. Cassy? I haven’t heard from her since last Christmas when I got a card.”
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine provoked a wave of backlash among members of the Communist Party (KPRF). Communist legislators from regional parliaments and members of the party’s youth organization have publicly spoken out against the war, condemning it as “imperialist” and contrary to Marxist-Leninist principles. While some have quit the KPRF in protest, others have been expelled for breaching “party discipline.” Meduza looked into what’s happening inside the KPRF’s regional branches and learned why some of Russia’s Communists oppose the war against Ukraine.
But the impact will stay with us for years to come. Over the past several weeks, the internet became a toxic platform for survivors of domestic abuse as people€ trivialized, harassed, and threatened€ Amber Heard.
As a social worker who works with survivors of gender-based violence, I often hear how difficult it is for my clients to come forward because they fear nobody will believe them. The highly public shaming of Ms. Heard could make that much worse.
You might think that the€ risks of global nuclear annihilation€ would merit at least a few of the more than 25,000 words officially released on Biden’s behalf during the 100 days since his dramatic speech to a joint session of Congress. But an evasive pattern began from the outset. While devoting much of that speech to the Ukraine conflict, Biden said nothing at all about the heightened risks that it might trigger the use of nuclear weapons.
A leader interested in informing the American people rather than infantilizing them would have something to say about the need to prevent nuclear war at a time of escalating tensions between the world’s two nuclear superpowers. A CBS News€ poll€ this spring found that the war in Ukraine had caused 70 percent of adults in the U.S. to be worried that it could lead to nuclear warfare.
Society’s terrifying plunge into divisiveness, brutality, violence, ongoing habitat destruction, species extinction now moving at warp speed – all is beginning to feel inevitable. I recognize inevitability, along with all the valid-sounding excuses that go with it, from a particular viewpoint, having experienced it interpersonally, in my marriage with Orin, and eluded its fatalism many times over. As long as love remains unreal, which is to say, as long as the god Eros stays within the bounds we assign to him, with its winners and losers, the plunge into fragmentation and chaos is inevitable. Love’s power is only found in honesty. Hopelessness has to be confessed in order for love to do it’s work.
These thoughts came to me as Orin and I celebrated our 45th wedding anniversary Memorial Day weekend. Bringing my marriage into this conversation may appear as absurd as bringing love into it. But if I’m to stick to honesty, grounding my political opinion in non-negotiable reality, it is relevant. No longer are marriage or staying married, or even monogamy required in order to avoid social disapproval. It’s all good, as we say. But if we are going to drop our white man’s forked tongue when we talk about returning to local, sustainable living within our true pluralistic condition, about withdrawing from the system bent on catastrophe and building the new, etc., won’t commitments, vows, covenants become once again relevant? Won’t archaic qualities of loyalty, preservation, patience, forgiveness, etc, have to come back into vogue? But, in the society we have, shaped by secular liberal culture and its ever-expanding freedoms, such voluntary circumscription is unimaginable.
Dozens and dozens of other countries are able to craft a balance between public safety and gun rights, but not the US. Only in two countries in the world can a teenager legally acquire a semi-automatic rifle without a license: the US and Yemen. In Philadelphia, teens say that it is easier to get a gun than cigarettes. With each passing year in the US, there are more guns and fewer gun safety regulations. Just last year, Texas Governor Greg Abbott approved a law which allows Texans to carry a handgun in public without a license or training.
In most of the world, there are common sense gun safety policies which contribute to lower rates of gun violence. Figure 1 illustrates that the US gun homicide rate is a multiple of the rate in most other countries. Of the nine countries selected to illustrate the range of deviation between the US and the world, the closest is Nigeria. Still, the US firearm homicide rate is roughly twice Nigeria’s. It is nine times the rate in Senegal. The worst comparison for the US is Japan. The US rate is over 200 times the rate in Japan. There are over a hundred other countries with lower rates of gun violence than the US. In other words, there are a plethora of other examples of how to craft more sensible gun safety policies.
After securing independence from British rule, Ireland embraced a policy of military neutrality to avoid fighting in imperialist wars. However, because the Irish elite embraced the British model, Ireland found a place in the pan-European sphere of accumulation. The Irish state has already disgraced those who fought against British imperialism by striving for full integration into this sphere, which was once led by Britain and has been led by the United States since the end of the Second World War. Joining NATO would be a full abandonment of its anticolonial history.
In Sidecar, Lili Lynch recently broke down the problematic nature of Finland and Sweden’s desire to join NATO. She wrote that, for Sweden, “joining the West” means “binding oneself to a US-led power bloc and simultaneously doing away with any nominally socialist institutions – a process that has already been underway for decades.” For Ireland, it means binding oneself and doing away with any nominal claim to anticolonial legitimacy. With this motion, the Irish state is not only abandoning the rest of the colonial world but actively seeking to solidify its position of colonial superiority.
In the days following the horrific school massacre in Uvalde, Texas, firearm€ stocks rose. Gun buyers, conditioned to fear new restrictions, tend to run out and buy more weapons after shootings like this one.
They seem to believe that lawmakers will respond to mass shootings by making it harder to buy a gun. After all, when other consumer products are found to be a danger to humans, they’re regulated.
There have been at least 30 mass shootings since 19 children and two teachers were murdered at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Tex., on May 24. While Americans contend with their collective grief, national gun-control organizations have called for a wave of lobbying and peaceful protest, embracing the Tinkerbell theory of political action.1
If you didn’t live through these actual events and have only heard about them or read historical narratives, the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 is part of the West’s collective memory. Despite the euphoria at the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, the Cold War never ended. As the United States continues to send more and more upgraded weapons to Ukraine and with Sweden and Finland knocking on the door of NATO, we are fast approaching Cold War 2.0.
Collective memory should never be ignored. In 2005, Vladimir Putin said about the 1900’s: “The collapse of the Soviet Union was the biggest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” Greater than the two world wars in which tens of millions of Russians died? Evidently it was for him. In the United States, the Civil War continues, with Southern states only recently being ordered to take down their Confederate flags over 100 years after the surrender of General Robert E. Lee at Appomattox Court House in April 1865.
The security firm is said to have been hired by US intelligence operatives to monitor Julian Assange and his associates during his time in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.€ In all likelihood, if we are to take the evidence of UC Global’s former head of operations, Michel Wallemacq, seriously, Ecuador’s intelligence services were also involved.
The allegations were given a very dramatic airing in the initial extradition trial of Assange at the Old Bailey in London, when two former UC Global employees were called to testify for the defence.€ One of the two gave testimony on the rather seedy task of pilfering “a nappy of a baby which according to the company’s security personnel deployed at the embassy, regularly visited Mr Assange”.
During my days in Moscow, I had no fixed itinerary of where to ride my bike or what to see. The weather, chilly with fleeting moments of sun and clouds, made it nicer to ride around than to pause at some of the city’s outdoor cafés (most are around Red Square). Had I been forced to ride on the roads, I am sure I would have given up on the bicycle, as Moscow traffic is as aggressive as the country’s foreign policy, and as deadly. But with the city’s expansive sidewalks open to cyclists, I was free to go anywhere, and never once did I draw a scowl from the police or other Moscow justices of the peace.
With Russia now laying waste to Ukraine, I think back on my Moscow bicycle days as if they took place in a time warp. I no more thought of the city as the capital of evil than, for example, I did of Washington, when I went there during the halcyon days of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. At the same time, there was a foreboding coloring my visit to Moscow.
+ Though the exploding head tests were enough to convince Defense Secretary Robert McNamara to rush the rifle into mass production, the results were almost certainly cooked. The AR-15/M-16 was never a match for the AK-47. In the humid and wet conditions of Vietnam, the M-16 tended to corrode and rust. It routinely jammed and misfired. Many grunts in that war started using AK-47 taken from captured or killed Vietnamese soldiers. € “We called it the Mattel 16 because it was made of plastic. At that time it was a piece of garbage,” according to former Marine Jim Wodecki. € (See: Misfire: the Tragic Failure of the M16 in Vietnam by Bob Orkund and Lymon Dureya.)
+ Dr. Roy Guerrero, a pediatrician who treated the victims at the emergency room of Uvalde’s hospital, testifying before Congress on what he saw: “Two children, whose bodies had been so pulverized by the bullets fired at them, over and over again, decapitated, whose flesh had been so ripped apart, that the only clue to their€ identities was their blood-spattered cartoon clothes still clinging to them, clinging for life and finding none.”
Harvey concluded in her article that Europe’s dependency on Russian oil and gas exports had allowed Putin to weaponize those assets, but argued that this did not cause the war, a logic that recurs in media accounts. But the quandary remains: Why would a calculating politician like Putin put his lucrative oil and gas trade with Europe at risk by resorting to war? This article examines the chronic weaknesses of Russia’s own petro-state to offer an alternative context on Putin’s turn to war, as well as strategies that might help end the war.
On the one hand, Russia is a hydrocarbon powerhouse – second only to the United States and Saudi Arabia, but internal contradictions have long plagued the nation’s rise to world-class status.€ Energy scholars often refer to a “resource curse” that plagues many petro-states. In short, to build your economy too tightly around oil and gas is a very bad idea for democracy and social development.€ All that revenue flowing in can fuel corruption, while the magic of black gold leads politicians to neglect other sectors of the economy.
Dubya’s Criminal and Moronic “Mission Accomplished from God”
I will never forget George W “Is We Reading Yet?” Bush walking down the long red White House carpet and screwing up his idiot face to order the criminal, mass-murderous, and imperialist invasion of Iraq on the basis of the openly false and idiotic claims that Iraq (a) menaced the US and the world with weapons of mass destruction and (b) was allied with Al Qaeda. Bush Junior later had to change his “justification” for the Crime of the Millennium to the equally moronic claim that the US had invaded Iraq to spread freedom and democracy.
Moral Crusades and Cold Wars
Popular support for US involvement in Ukraine is based on a persuasive moral crusade most forcefully advanced by Joe Biden and other leading Democrats. Biden’s speech in Poland was one of those defining moments framing future wars as a repeat of past ones. On behalf of the “Free World,” Biden placed Ukraine “on the front lines” in “the perennial struggle for democracy and freedom.”
And then there’s the Scylla and Charybdis facing Global South leaders: violate western sanctions, somehow import Russian wheat and get clobbered financially and politically by the U.S. and EU or don’t import and let the people starve. In fact, this exact, awful choice smacked 14 countries in the face in mid-May. That’s when the U.S. claimed that Russian ships with “stolen Ukrainian grain” had sailed.€ Washington announced this to mostly African nations. What were those African leaders supposed to do? Vainly try to refute the claim or refuse the wheat and let people die slow, agonizing deaths from hunger? Meanwhile, western propaganda, aka the mainstream media, shrieks with hysterical pugnacity about Russia using food as a weapon of war. Quite a racket Washington has going, based on lies, coercion and extortion; a horrible counterpoint to the needless slaughter of Ukrainian troops – needless, because Kiev’s patron, the U.S., could speed the end of this promiscuous death by promoting peace negotiations. Biden refuses to do this. Despite his recent murmurings about a negotiated settlement, one doesn’t get the feeling Biden has yet put any oomph into it.
Russia, like the U.S. before it in Iraq in 2003, started a ghastly war. But Moscow was most surely, most deliberately provoked by NATO and the U.S. – unlike the U.S.’s many wars of choice in this century. Any equivalence to Moscow’s invasion, despite western hocus pocus about Russia expanding its quondam empire, is astonishing hogwash. However dreadful Russia’s war in Ukraine, what the U.S. did in Iraq was worse. How did Baghdad provoke Washington in 2003? Did it array troops on the border of North Dakota and dispatch battleships to the Gulf of Mexico? Did it threaten to ally with Mexico and reconquer Texas? Did it support over eight years a Mexican slaughter of 14,000 residents of the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area, as Ukraine did to the citizens of the Donbas? No. Iraq was thousands of miles away from the U.S. and posed zero threat to this country, as Washington’s mendacious rulers knew all too well.
Donald Trump “engaged in a massive effort to spread false and fraudulent information to convince huge portions of the U.S. population that fraud had stolen the election from him,” Congressmember Liz Cheney, vice chair of the House select committee investigating the January 6 attack, said during Thursday’s primetime hearing. “This was not true.” We air excerpts from her presentation, which included a new video of Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner dismissing concerns about the campaign to overturn the 2020 election as mere “whining.”
The House committee investigating the January 6 insurrection held its first public hearing Thursday night, televised in primetime by all major networks except Fox News. We spend the hour featuring excerpts from the hearing, starting with Committee Chair Bennie Thompson’s opening statement, in which he argued January 6 was the “culmination of an attempted coup” by Donald Trump, comparing the insurrection to the ransacking of Washington, D.C., by British forces more than two centuries ago.
The previously unseen video footage, testimony, and documentary evidence presented during a primetime U.S. House hearing Thursday night made the case that the January 6 assault on the Capitol last year was part of an organized attempt—spearheaded by former President Donald Trump—to subvert the results of the 2020 election and install an illegitimate government.
Aired live by virtually every major news network except Fox News, the most-watched channel in the United States, the hearing opened with a statement from the chair of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, which has been wielding congressional authority to probe the 2021 insurrection and the role that Trump, his White House staff, his outside allies, and Republican lawmakers played in the violent attempt to prevent certification of President Joe Biden's election win.
As the hearings of the special House Committee investigating the insurrection on Jan 6, 2021 get under way this week, a wide array of organizations and experts are weighing in on the importance of these hearings, and their potential impact on the public's understanding of the events surrounding the insurrection. These are important points because too many of us have a warped view of what actually happened that day. But opinion about the past is going to be hard to change.
If a hearing falls in prime time, but it isn’t shown on Fox, does it make a sound?
The public hearings of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol got underway last night. It’s a television show, and self-consciously so. The first day’s hearings were broadcast in prime time, and the committee consulted a television news producer about its presentation. Instead of the usual congressional format where witnesses are asked questions in five-minute increments by a rotating cast of House members, the committee adopted a narrative style for the proceedings and included a lot of pre-made videos. Watching it was more like watching a “true crime” drama on a network like Investigation Discovery than watching a normal congressional hearing on C-SPAN.
"Ok, we know Scott Perry. Who were the other members of Congress who asked Trump for a pardon?"
"We look forward to all participants in this insurrection being held accountable."
But as you approach the edge of the ice sheet, a sense of tremendous underlying power emerges. Cracks appear in the surface, sometimes organized like a washboard, and sometimes a complete chaos of spires and ridges, revealing the pale blue crystalline heart of the ice below.
As the plane flies lower, the scale of these breaks steadily grows. These are not just cracks, but canyons large enough to swallow a jetliner, or spires the size of monuments. Cliffs and tears, rips in the white blanket emerge, indicating a force that can toss city blocks of ice around like so many wrecked cars in a pileup. It’s a twisted, torn, wrenched landscape. A sense of movement also emerges, in a way that no ice-free part of the Earth can convey – the entire landscape is in motion, and seemingly not very happy about it.
Pension schemes run by BP and Shell have yet to bring in net zero targets for their investment portfolios despite the fossil fuel giants’ “green” marketing, new analysis has found.€
The report, from the Make My Money Matter campaign, casts further doubt on the companies’ climate commitments, after experts have found the companies’ own net zero goals to be insufficient.
In a YouTube video posted in May, Stremousov stated his intention to have Kherson join Russia, declaring, “We will integrate as much as possible into the Russian Federation. All those citizens in the Kherson region will have the right to obtain Russian citizenship [and] Russian passports so they can be a part of a state that has the potential to provide stable social assistance and security.”
Official annexation, like in Crimea, would play into the Kremlin’s strategy of highlighting the local support for Russia in southeastern Ukraine and portraying Ukraine’s government as ineffective across much of its border region. Additionally, Russia would likely use annexation to legitimize nationalizing the valuable Ukrainian energy infrastructure that Russia currently holds.
When I look out my window here in Cameron Parish, Louisiana, I see hundreds of marsh birds: ospreys, pelicans, ducks, ibis, terns, roseate spoonbills — beautiful wildlife that now is under attack, as in many areas along the Gulf Coast.
It's shameful when leaders prioritize saving a floundering institution and obscene corporate profits over saving lives.
In the wake of new federal data showing that U.S. inflation rose again in May after decelerating slightly the previous month, progressive lawmakers, economists, and union leaders on Friday tried to hammer home their argument that corporate profiteering is a major driver of the price hikes that are eroding workers' modest wage gains and heightening economic pain nationwide.
"While families are feeling the sting of soaring energy costs, oil and gas companies are cheering the nearly $100 billion in profits they've already made this year off families' pain at the pump," said Dr. Rakeen Mabud, chief economist at the Groundwork Collaborative.
Each Summit of the Americas, like the one taking place in Los Angeles June 6-10, offers an opportunity for people from Latin America and the Caribbean to assess the state of unity—or division—in the face of U.S. imperialism and corporate power.
"I have said that any man who attempted by force or unparliamentary disorder to obstruct or interfere with the lawful count of the electoral vote should be lashed to the muzzle of a twelve-pounder gun and fired out of a window." —General Winfield Scott, 1861
Press freedom and antitrust advocates on Friday derided both Facebook and corporate media beneficiaries of the tech titan's multimillion dollar spending spree following reporting that the company is rethinking its investments amid increasing regulatory pressures and a shift away from news partnerships.
"For years, Facebook has sucked advertising dollars away from newspapers and news magazines."
Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez warned Thursday night that the U.S. stands "on the precipice... of fascism" and that an attack on the Capitol like the one that occurred on Jan. 6, 2021 could happen again.
Ocasio-Cortez's (D-N.Y.) comments in an Instagram Live video followed the first prime-time hearing held by the U.S. House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol.
In the last decade of the Cold War, triumphalist anti-communists often gloated over the fact that the Soviet Union had degenerated into a gerontocracy. To be sure, the United States was presided over by a doddering Ronald Reagan, but he was surrounded by a staff, and a cabinet that was reasonably robust. The Politburo, by contrast, seemed to offer up nothing but sickly and wheezing old men, whose occasional disappearance from public life was unconvincingly ascribed to a cold.
In recent years, voting rights advocates and state lawmakers have made significant strides in restoring voting rights to U.S. citizens with felony convictions.
A lot of people seem to have a similar relationship with the Democratic Party. Sure, they say, the Democratic Party has lied to us over and over—about stopping Climate Change, about offering Americans a public option for health care, about fixing our broken immigration system, about reinstating the assault weapons ban, about getting money out of politics, about passing gun control, etc., etc., but they are really nice people! They recycle, most of them! They support bike lanes, some of them!
Sure the Democrats have abandoned the working class and sold out to Wall Street, but it could be a lot worse! Remember Donald Trump? Remember how he tried to build a wall across the Mexican Border, much like the wall Barack Obama, Chuck Schumer, and Hillary Clinton voted for?
U.S. President Joe Biden was openly rebuked on Thursday by some of the Western Hemisphere's leaders over his decision to exclude Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela from this week's Summit of the Americas, while outside, progressive activists continue to hold protests and teach-ins.
"The countries in the world are saying: Look, we are sick of this."
Since 2015, the US has aided and abetted the Saudi-led coalition (“SLC”) at war in Yemen with intelligence sharing, logistics, target spotting, arms sales, replacement spare parts for coalition warplanes, and (until November 2018) in-flight refueling for coalition warplanes.€ Neither Obama, Trump, nor Biden sought congressional approval for the US role in the war.€ Jayapal and DeFazio wrote in The Nation in February that US involvement in Yemen is in “clear violation of Article I of the Constitution and the War Powers Resolution of 1973, which grants Congress the power to declare war and authorize US military involvement.”
This is the third attempt to enact a War Powers Resolution to end US assistance to the Saudi-led military coalition which has been destroying Yemen for the past seven years.€ The Senate tabled an earlier WPR in March 2018.€ Congress passed a WPR for Yemen in 2019, but it was vetoed by President Trump.
The headlines in the United States have all been about Ukraine, inflation and gun violence. Biden’s trip was designed to prove that the United States is in fact focused on one thing above all: China, China, China.
The strengthened alliance with South Korea is a signal to Beijing that the more accommodating era of the Moon Jae-in administration is over. The Quad meetings are part of a strategy of countering China’s ambitions in the region including its ports and bases along the Asian littoral. And the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework is a deliberate effort to roll back China’s considerable economic ties with its neighbors.
Petro and Márquez will now enter a second round of voting against the far-right ticket of Rodolfo Hernández and Marelen Castillo on June 19. Opinion polls suggest it will be a close race between the two tickets, although there are fears that the right-wing will interfere, possibly with violence, to prevent a left-wing victory in Colombia.
The last few times that the left came near the Palacio de Nariño, where the president works and lives, violent outbreaks during the election process put that possibility to rest.
Yet it’s not just about greed for gold but part of a terrible worldwide pattern that has a more acute and visible form in Bolsonaro’s Brazil. In the city of Umbaúba—two years to the day after George Floyd was asphyxiated by a white police officer in Minneapolis—a Black motorcyclist Genivaldo de Jesus Santos, 38, was stopped by five highway police. Although they were told by witnesses that he had been diagnosed as having schizophrenia, they pepper sprayed him, kicked him, stamped on his head, shoved him into the back of a police car, and then threw a gas bomb inside. When Genivaldo stopped struggling and screaming, the police drove off with him. He was dead on arrival at the hospital, but the police report said he “became unwell” on the way to the police station. Genivaldo de Jesus Santos was murdered one day after police raided the Vila Cruzeiro favela in Rio de Janeiro and killed 26 people, and one year after a raid on the Jacarezinho favela in which at least 28 people were executed. Such lethal police violence is commonplace, and to such an extent that the Brazilian Forum of Public Security estimates that police (Rio’s best “social insecticide”according to one police commander) killed 6,416 people in 2020, 80% of them Black: almost 18 people per day, 14 of them Black.
Indigenous people. Black people. Favela dwellers. LGBTQI+ community. Brazil has the highest number of homicides in the world, most of them hate crimes against certain groups. In 2017, a transgender woman, Dandara dos Santos was lynched by eight adults and four adolescents and then shot in Fortaleza, Ceará. A video of the murder went viral in the social networks. In the 2018 trial only five of the killers were sentenced. Although transphobia has been a crime since 2019, Brazil has led the world for thirteen consecutive years in terms of the highest numbers of trans murders, and the numbers are rising. Every 48 hours a trans person is killed and 82% of trans victims are Black. The real dimensions of violence against LGBTQI+ people can only be guessed at because, reflecting the subhuman status given to the victims, official data is scant where it exists and rarely registers underlying motives. However, from 2015 to 2017, data from SUS, the universal healthcare system, recorded 22 attacks per day, and most of the victims were Black.
In reality, this stormy summit began with a large diplomatic stumble for the United States, when several Latin American presidents announced that they would not participate in the summit because of the exclusion of Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, as dictated by the White House, while the U.S. State Department still claims the open and unrestricted nature of the meeting’s call. Its website says, “Throughout, the United States has demonstrated, and will continue to demonstrate, our commitment to an inclusive process that incorporates input from people and institutions that represent the immense diversity of our hemisphere, and includes Indigenous and other historically marginalized voices.”
Hypocrisy seems to be the glue of this summit, and mainstream U.S. media and analysts declared the June 6-10 meeting a failure before it even started. On June 7, the Washington Post assured readers that “This week’s Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles will be remembered for its absences rather than its potential agreements,” focusing its attention on Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who was the most mentioned political figure in U.S. networks and media on June 7 and 8, even more than U.S. President Joe Biden, according to statistics from Google Trends. Richard N. Haass, who was the adviser to former Secretary of State Colin Powell and director of policy planning for the State Department, summed up the disaster superbly in a tweet: “The Summit of the Americas looks to be a debacle, a diplomatic own goal. The U.S. has no trade proposal, no immigration policy, and no infrastructure package. Instead, the focus is on who will and will not be there. Unclear is why we pressed for it to happen.”
“I hope this hearing will remind everyone how fragile our democracy is, how important it is to defend it, and to hold any and all insurrectionists accountable,” said Congresswoman Ilhan…
The January 6 committee released new footage Thursday night showing a detailed timeline of the day of the insurrection. We feature the video they played that shows how Proud Boys and Oath Keepers marched from the National Mall — where Donald Trump delivered a speech pressuring Mike Pence to recertify the election results to deliver him a victory — to the Capitol Building to chants of “Hang Mike Pence,” before they violently pushed through police barriers and broke into the government building chanting “Nancy.”
The white supremacist Proud Boys group and the far-right, anti-government Oath Keepers militia played an instrumental role in planning for a violent insurrection on the Capitol, according to the January 6 House committee, which aired new testimony from witnesses and the groups’ leaders in its first public hearing Thursday night. British filmmaker Nick Quested was embedded with the Proud Boys and shared his footage with the committee. As the first of two live witnesses, he said he was “confused” when “a couple of hundred of Proud Boys were marching toward the Capitol.”
The second witness who testified live in the first primetime hearing of the House select January 6 committee was Capitol Police officer Caroline Edwards, who suffered a traumatic brain injury as she tried to hold the line outside the Capitol with fellow officers. She was with officer Brian Sicknick, who she said appeared to have been sprayed in the face and was extremely pale. Sicknick died the next day. Sicknick’s fiancee sat behind Edwards as she testified. Edwards said the pro-Trump mob included Proud Boys leader Joseph Biggs, who is now facing federal seditious conspiracy charges. “What I saw was just a war scene. It was something like I’d seen out of the movies. I couldn’t believe my eyes. There were officers on the ground. You know, they were bleeding,” recalled Edwards. “I was slipping in people’s blood. … It was carnage. It was chaos.”
The GrayZone has revealed leaked emails that show the British government’s involvement with private actors plotting to take down GrayZone and asking who is behind Consortium News, writes Joe Lauria…
The legendary consumer advocate and former presidential candidate speaks to “Scheer Intelligence” host Robert Scheer about the shreds of democracy left in America.
In remarks made to the ADL Virtual National Leadership Summit, ADL’s CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt, engaged in a range of misconceptions and distortions that are beyond the scope of this short piece to address. Early in his presentation, he equated antizionism with antisemitism, a strategy now used to deflect criticism of Israel’s gross violations of Palestinian human rights, shielding Israel from any accountability. However, perhaps most disgraceful was the false moral equivalence he drew between antizionism—which he regards as a form of extremism—and white nationalism. He states: “Antizionism as an ideology is rooted in rage. It is predicated on one concept: the negation of another people, a concept as alien to the modern discourse as white supremacy.”
Hence, in Mr. Greenblatt’s view, those of us—progressive Jews and others— who speak critically of Israeli policy, in defense of Palestinian human rights, and equality between Jews and Palestinians are antizionists and hence, antisemites and extremists, as evil in our intent and impact as white supremacists. If ever an argument existed that undermines the fight against antisemitism, it is this one with its false assertions, false equivalencies, and forced division within the Jewish community, and between Jews and other progressive groups.
If there’s one consistent, invariable, seemingly eternal loadstar guiding the antivaccine movement, it’s that it’s always the vaccines. Autism? Vaccines. Autoimmune disorders? Vaccines? Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS)? Vaccines. Just death? Vaccines. I was thinking of the last two examples when I came across an article by—who else?—Mike Adams written for his Natural News conspiracy site entitled Sudden vaccines deaths are now so common they’ve assigned a SYNDROME name for it: Sudden Adult Death Syndrome (SADS):
It’s no secret that China wants to erase from history the student protests at Tiananmen Square, and the resulting massacre by the government, but it keeps proving more and more difficult in the internet age. Even with China’s infamous Great Firewall. The latest example is really quite striking.
We spent a few years warning people about the terrible EU Terrorist content regulation law, but as of this week, it’s now in effect, and websites will have one hour to remove any terrorist content that is flagged to them by any government official. If they fail to remove the content, they could face fines up to an astounding 4% of global revenue.
In news that will surprise basically no one, Truth Social, Trump’s social network that was pitched as being about bringing free speech back and not doing any “viewpoint discrimination,” even as its terms of service promised it would be heavily moderated, is now banning users for trying to spread some “truths” about the January 6 hearings.
Journalists and staff of civil society groups in the UK could be sentenced to life imprisonment for offences committed under the government’s proposed new National Security Bill.
Ginni Thomas, the right-wing activist and wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, lobbied far more Arizona state lawmakers than previously known to try to overturn the state's 2020 election results—a revelation that reignited calls on Friday for Justice Thomas to recuse himself from cases related to the election.
"As obvious as the symmetry between Clarence and Ginni Thomas' work was three weeks ago, it's even more glaring now."
Janine Jackson interviewed Liliana Segura about the Supreme Court and innocence for the June 3, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz made it clear Thursday that he does not intend to hold good-faith negotiations with Starbucks Workers United—the union that has won elections at more than 140 coffee shops nationwide since December—potentially exposing the corporation to a fresh legal fight with the National Labor Relations Board.
When asked by Andrew Ross Sorkin of the New York Times if he could ever see himself "embracing the union," Schultz responded tersely: "No."
"They fucked with the wrong uncle."
That was how Amazon Labor Union (ALU) president Christian Smalls responded Thursday after the e-commerce behemoth's management reportedly fired Pasquale "Uncle Pat" Cioffi, an organizer credited with convincing hundreds of hesitant employees to support the unionization effort at the JFK8 fulfillment center in Staten Island, New York.
After “black power” expressed insurgent America’s racial awakening in the late 1960s, racial capital’s inevitable, brutal whitelash prevented the “beloved community”, from transcending our dominant, generalized common cultural understanding of race, and – crucially – what can(‘t) be done about it.[1] We got stuck with no “left” theory of race that works together with class, and the MAGA GOP death cult filling that space. Just because liberal Democrats are mostly afraid to talk about it doesn’t mean it’s not true.
That late 60s/mid-70s Nixon-era “safe streets” dogma, at the core of the racist obscenities of war on drugs and mass racial incarceration, froze our aspirations, dreams and mental roadmaps in place. Now we have mass-predatory MAGA reaction, directed from power centers of our society, wielding those archaic dogmas like weapons. Liberals muttering “polarization” like some kind of pathetic incantation. Some melting and reforming is long overdue.
Correctional officer James Fike already had been suspended twice when the Illinois Department of Corrections began investigating allegations that he had beaten a man who was incarcerated at Pontiac Correctional Center, in a small town in central Illinois, in 2016.
The man, Jamale Douglas, was in trouble for holding open the slot in his cell door where staff deliver food trays. When Douglas refused to pull his arm out of the slot, staff said they called in a special tactical team to remove him from his cell.
She did run back up the steps to leave the McDonalds before fleeing.
I guess that’s what they meant by Big Mac Attack.
The kicker is that DoorDash apparently has insurance that would have paid out, and still has to, and she still got “fired” (“removed from the platform”), but now police are looking for her for fleeing the scene of an accident involving property damage, which is a Class A Misdemeanor.
For years we’ve written about how unchecked telecom and media monopolization and consolidation results in all manner of problems, from sparse broadband connectivity to high prices. We’ve also discussed how the speed of that consolidation over the decades, combined with Wall Street’s insatiable thirst for quarterly returns at any cost, comes with a sacrifice of competent customer service.
Last week, New York State became the first state to pass right to repair legislation. The bill was the culmination of years of consumer frustration with repair monopolies, obnoxious DRM, shrinking repair access, high repair costs, and impossible to find tools, parts, and documentation. While the bill only covered some consumer electronics, activists hope it expands to additional sectors (auto, medical).
Game developer Bungie and Elite Boss Tech, a creator of cheating software for the popular Destiny 2 game, have reached an agreement to end a copyright infringement lawsuit. The stipulated consent judgment, in which Elite Boss Tech admits thousands of violations of the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions, includes a permanent injunction and statutory damages of $13.5 million.
We have written several times about the “true fans” idea as an alternative approach to the traditional remuneration models employed by the copyright industry players, such as publishers, recording companies and film studios. It’s a simple approach: get the people who really love an artist’s work to support it directly, and in advance, rather than indirectly through buying things after they’ve been created. If that sounds rather soft and utopian, it’s not: it can also€ be run as a business, as this story on Axios makes clear: