If you are using Computers for while, you must be familiar with the word “Firewall”. We know that things do seem complex from the surface but through this tutorial, we are going to explain the basis of IPTable and the use of basic commands so that even if you are a networking student or want to deep dive into networks, you can benefit from this guide.
For new Linux users, reinstalling the operating system is a hurdle. It’s funny, but I’ve seen many Linux users manually install packages and applications from their previously installed Linux system into their freshly installed Ubuntu Linux system.
I used to be one of them, and you might be too. So, let’s forget the time we have wasted and learn today how to backup a list of installed packages and restore them on a freshly installed Ubuntu system.
The Linux operating system is associated with various distributions whose design and development footprints are focused on meeting different user requirements. One such distribution is Manjaro Linux.
Since it is based on the Arch Linux operating system, this free and open-source Linux distribution prioritizes accessibility and user-friendliness as its major design parameters. The Pacman package manager and its rolling release update model are also key identifiers of Manjaro Linux.
Angular CLI is a powerful tool that allows developers to quickly create and deploy Angular applications. It provides a number of commands for quickly creating and deploying ng-based applications. We will also cover some of the features of Angular CLI.
Here’s a possible scenario. Your system received a kernel update but somehow things are not working as smoothly as previously.
You realized that if you boot into the older kernel (yes, you can downgrade kernel), things are back to normal.
That makes you happy with a little inconvenience. You have to manually select the older kernel at each boot.
This problem was faced by an elderly It’s FOSS reader. The new kernel update in Linux Mint wasn’t working as expected. Booting into the older kernel ‘fixed’ the issues but choosing the older kernel at each boot was a problem.
Removing the new kernel (while using the older kernel) is not a good idea because the new kernel will be installed and used with the next system updates.
So, I suggested booting into the older Linux kernel by default. How to do that? That’s what I am going to show you in this tutorial.
Not every day, a new Linux distribution appears on the horizon, so we’re happy to present you SpiralLinux – the new kid on the block. So, in the following lines, we will try to shed as much light on this new Linux distribution as possible for our readers.
SpiralLinux is a Debian-based distribution focusing on simplicity and out-of-the-box usability in all major desktop environments. It was created and is maintained by the same person that created and maintained GeckoLinux, an openSUSE-based distribution.
SpiralLinux, like GeckoLinux, is available in an astonishing eight different editions that cover practically all of the most popular desktop environments in Linux today. These include...
Because of the TNSR architecture and fast vector processing capabilities in VPP, the WireGuard implementation in TNSR is much faster than the standard in kernel Ubuntu / Linux WireGuard implementations.
 The hardware and software specifications of the device will depend on the answers to the survey. First, it’s not sure we’ll get a RISC-V laptop since respondents will first be asked for the type of product, so we may end up with a fairly powerful RISC-V mini PC or/and SBC first instead.
You’ll also be asked for your use case, preferred Linux operating system (Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, others), desktop environment, as well as software packages you may need such as LibreOffice, Chromium or Firefox browsers, GIMP, Thunderbird, and so on. As a side note, they’ll select 5 winners from the respondents and send them on VisionFive RISC-V SBC with the results announced sometime in July on RVSpace community. If you don’t need to enter the draw, you do not need to leave your name and email to complete the survey.
OSOM and Nothing have quickly become two of the most fascinating companies operating the smartphone space in recent years. Nothing is the latest project from OnePlus co-founder, Carl Pei, while OSOM is largely composed of former Essential employees looking to launch their own thing in the wake the company’s messy dissolution. That Pei purchased Essential’s IP felt like another nice cosmic connection between the two.
Fittingly, both young hardware startups are making news this week, though these announcements have only highlighted how differently their paths have diverged. There was, after all, never an easy time to launch a smartphone, but a spate of external forces amid chip shortages and supply chain shutdowns have further raised the barrier of entry. For Nothing, that means being selective about launch markets and adopting a OnePlus-style invite system.
Firstly, An open-source software toolkit called Solana Mobile Stack (SMS) enables the creation of native Android apps based on the Solana blockchain. The Mobile Wallet Adapter, a protocol for connecting mobile Solana wallets, is part of the package. It will function on all mobile devices, not just Android ones, claims the company.
Nonetheless, Keeping private keys, seed phrases, and other sensitive data secure on Android is now possible through the Seed Vault feature. Seed phrases are essentially the passwords that unlock crypto funds, and the company is providing a custody solution to keep them secure. SMS offers Solana Pay for Android, a platform that permits mobile payments.
 I have already used free and open source software, for example the Linux distribution Ubuntu as part of my studies, or Eclipse even before my studies. However, I have not yet participated in such a project myself.
Apart from the questions, I would also like to thank you again for the support and recognition of my achievements.
Microsoft Visual Studio is an integrated development environment. It is used to develop computer programs, as well as websites, web apps, web services and mobile apps.
Visual Studio is proprietary software and is not available for Linux. We recommend the best free and open source alternatives.
A massive 5.9-magnitude earthquake that struck southeastern Afghanistan early Wednesday has killed more than 1,000 people, according to local officials, though the death toll is expected to rise. The earthquake comes as the United Nations reports nearly half of Afghanistan’s population already faces acute hunger. Thousands more have been injured and lost their homes along with everything they own. “Many more will be dead, and we are now rushing with aid,” says Jan Egeland, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council. He says he agrees with the Taliban government that U.S. sanctions on Afghanistan are making it more difficult for aid organizations like his to supply critical resources to Afghans.
After a massive earthquake killed more than 1,000 people and leveled entire villages in southeast Afghanistan, the Biden administration on Wednesday faced fresh calls to return the roughly $7 billion in central bank assets it seized from the war-torn and impoverished nation as it attempts to recover from the catastrophe.
"Aid organizations have long cited the frozen assets as well as the sanctions regime as insurmountable barriers to ensuring Afghans receive basic needs and emergency aid," tweeted the advocacy group Afghans for a Better Tomorrow. "[President Joe Biden] should move quickly and decisively at this critical moment; time is of the essence."
Since we all see plenty of ASCII art in Geminispace but nobody talks about how to make any, I figured this might be more interesting than my least interesting post here.
Multispectral imaging, or photography using wavelengths other than those in ordinary visible light, has various applications ranging from earth observation to forgery detection in art. For example, titanium white and lead white, two pigments used in different historical eras, look identical in visible light but have distinct signatures in the UV range. Similarly, IR imaging can reveal a painting’s inner layers if the pigments used are transparent to IR.
Where today we talk broadly of climate change and it’s various effects, the conversation was once simpler. We called it “global warming” and fretted about cooking outside in the summer and the sea level rise that would claim so many of our favorite cities.
On astronomical telescopes of even middling power, a small “finderscope” is often mounted in parallel to the main optics to assist in getting the larger instrument on target. The low magnification of the finderscope offers a far wider field of view than the primary telescope, which makes it much easier to find small objects in the sky. Even if your target is too small or faint to see in the finderscope, just being able to get your primary telescope pointed at the right celestial neighborhood is a huge help.
Before smartphones exploded on the scene in the late 00s, there was still a reasonable demand for pocket-sized computers that could do relatively simple computing tasks. Palm Pilots and other PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants) were all the rage in the ’90s and early ’00s, although for cutting-edge tech from that era plenty of these devices had astronomical price tags. This Arduino-based PDA hearkens back to that era, albeit with a much more accessible parts list.
MIT complains that designing a robot hand is time-consuming and takes a lot of iterations. They want to improve that using a unique approach by giving a modular hand tactile sensors. They claim this can reduce the design time down to minutes for many practical applications. For example, cutting paper. You can see a video about the paper below as well as read the text itself.
At first glance, this gorgeous retro-styled audio player built by [Max Kern] could absolutely pass for the genuine article. But then you take a closer look and realize that the “tape” it’s playing is actually an animation running on a 320 x 240 IPS display, and the Play and Rewind buttons on the front aren’t the chunky electromechanical affairs of yesteryear but actually cleverly repurposed MX keyboard switches.
Ninety-six years ago, J.W. Guiberson, a San Joaquin Valley cotton grower, explained a primary goal of the country’s biggest agricultural interests. “The class of labor we want,” he said, “is the kind we can send home when we get through with them.”
We have to recognize the fundamental social realities behind our most pressing crises, in order to have any hope of ever facing and dealing with them.€ Summer 2020 saw a righteous global awakening against structural racial injustice and death.€ Summer 2021 as well as 2022 terrifying onslaught of floods, drought and killing heat, adding up to an awakening to the imminent disasters – not mere “risks” – of climate catastrophe.€ As the late, great John Trudell[i]taught us, sometimes it’s in our interests to deal with the things that are in front of us.€ Yes, let’s.€ First some new language for new challenges.
“Normal”
A House-approved bill to continue funding a free school lunch program for low-income families hit a roadblock Thursday after at least two Senate Republicans—including a lawmaker who objects to a Biden administration policy banning discrimination against LGBTQ+ students—moved to thwart the measure.
"The USDA waivers provided essential flexibility for families to get food and to ensure schools can keep providing nutritious meals for children across the country."
Experts are warning of a pending global food shortage due to the climate crisis, blocked grain shipments amid the Ukraine war, and a lack of humanitarian aid. Joining us from Mogadishu, Somalia, Jan Egeland, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, says poorer countries in Africa aren’t able to financially compete with richer countries to afford basic staples like wheat. Egeland calls on G7 countries to take immediate action to prevent a global famine — which he believes is still stoppable.
The war in Ukraine has upset the global food market, and the surprising reason is not that Ukrainian wheat isn’t being harvested, but rather that it can’t leave the country. With Russia blockading sea ports, the only way out for Ukrainian grain is by train. And this exposes the long-hidden patchwork of railway tracks and train standards: trains can’t simply cross the border from Ukraine to Poland on their way to a sea port because the tracks don’t match.
We speak with food systems experts Sofía Monsalve Suárez and Rachel Bezner Kerr about how to prevent a looming global food shortage. The global food crisis “is not a food shortage crisis” yet, says Suárez, secretary general of FIAN International, a human rights organization working for the right to food and nutrition. “The problem is access to food, that people don’t have money to pay for food, that people are jobless.” Both guests call for a fundamental “transformation” of the global food system, away from food trade systems and instead toward domestic production and food sovereignty.
By slashing inpatient psychiatric care, New York has left people with too few places to turn for treatment of serious mental health conditions, state Attorney General Letitia James said at a hearing held by her office Wednesday.
James called the hearing following reports by THE CITY and ProPublica on New York state’s failure to provide mental health care to children and adolescents. Our investigation found that state officials have closed nearly one-third of the beds for children in state-run psychiatric hospitals since 2014, under a “Transformation Plan” rolled out by former Gov. Andrew Cuomo. During the same period, nonprofit groups shut down more than half of the beds in New York’s residential treatment facilities for kids, in large part because state payments were too low to keep the programs running.
U.S. consumers face a parade of major privacy and security problems. Poorly secured routers, Internet things devices with zero privacy and security safeguards, major telecom network vulnerabilities, a massive unaccountable adtech and telecom hyper-surveillance apparatus (often unaccountably linked to government), all operating in a country that can’t seem to pass a privacy law for the Internet era because Congress is too corrupt.
We are not yet sure how companies may respond to law enforcement requests for any abortion related data, and you may not have much control over their choices.€ But you can do a lot to control who you are giving your information to, what kind of data they get, and how it might be connected to the rest of your digital life.
If you are worried about legal pressure, the most important thing to remember is to keep these activities separate from less sensitive ones. This can be done many ways, but the underlying idea is to keep that information compartmentalized away from other aspects of your "regular" life. This makes it harder to trace back to you.€
Choosing a separate browser with hardened privacy settings is an easy and free start. Browsers like Brave, Firefox, and DuckDuckGo on mobile are all easy-to-use options that come with hardened privacy settings out of the box. It's a good idea to look into the “preferences” menu of whichever browser you choose, and raise the privacy settings even further. It's also a good idea to turn off this browser's features to remember browsing history and site data/cookies. Here’s what that looks like in Firefox’s “Privacy and Security” menu:€
The biggest trackers on the internet, including Google, Facebook, and Amazon, are all vertically integrated. This means they own multiple parts of a supply chain - specifically, the digital advertising supply chain, from the apps and websites that show ads to the exchanges that sell them and the warehouses of data that are used to target them. These companies harm users by collecting vast amounts of personal information without meaningful consent, sharing that data, and selling services that allow discriminatory and predatory behavioral targeting. They also use vertical integration to crush competition at every level of the market, preventing less-harmful advertising business models from gaining a foothold.
The DAA specifically targets vertical integration in the digital advertising industry. The bill categorizes ad services into, roughly, four kinds of business:
In broad strokes, the bill would prevent any company that makes more than $20 billion per year in advertising revenue from owning more than one of those components at a time. It also creates new obligations for advertising businesses to operate fairly, without self-preferencing, and prohibits them from acting against the interests of their clients. The bill is complex and nuanced, and we will not analyze every provision of it here. Instead, we will consider how the main ideas behind this bill might affect the internet if enacted.
Well, this is an unwelcome development.
Under the new ETIAS system, Frontex processes application forms from travelers from visa-free countries. The border agency is to develop an algorithm to determine their risk. A court ruling may have brought those plans crashing down.
Writing in the December 2021 Foreign Affairs, a group of famously disputatious diplomatic historians agreed on one thing: “Today, China and the United States are locked in what can only be called a new cold war.” Just weeks later, the present mimed the past in ways that went well beyond even that pessimistic assessment as Russia began massing 190,000 troops on the border of Ukraine. Soon, Russian President Vladimir Putin would join China’s Xi Jinping in Beijing where they would demand that the West “abandon the ideologized approaches of the Cold War” by curtailing both NATO’s expansion into Eastern Europe and similar security pacts in the Pacific.
As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine loomed in late February, the New York Times reported that Putin was trying “to revise the outcome of the original Cold War, even if it is at the cost of deepening a new one.” And days later, as Russian tanks began entering Ukraine, the New York Times published an editorial headlined, “Mr. Putin Launches a Sequel to the Cold War.” The Wall Street Journal seconded that view, concluding that recent “developments reflect a new cold war that Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin have initiated against the West.”
The Committee for Isolation Moderation offers the following definitions often used to describe the different structures of world order:
The Committee acknowledged, “the Cold War era between the end of World War II and the falls of the Berlin Wall [1989] and Soviet Union [1991] was bipolar in nature and resulted in relentless competition between the United States and the Soviet Union, with much of the rest of world forced to choose a side or being caught up in proxy wars between the two sole superpowers.”
It is not an easy read. For sixties era lefties, The Russians are coming, again, they will be sharply reminded of their struggles half-a-century ago. They will be reminded, bitterly so, of how ruthlessly leftists were attacked and destroyed – the Soviet Union was perceived, it seems, as the evil wellspring of anti-capitalist thought and action. To destroy Russia was to destroy the source of the disease. To destroy Russia was to vanquish hopes for a socialist alternative to predatory capitalism.
And lefties may well be shaking their heads at the fierceness, extent and depth of the venom directed at Russia. Kuzmarov and Marciano begin their text with reference to Norman Jewisons’ movie parody of Cold War paranoia, The Russians are coming, The Russians are coming, in 1966. Well, here we are 100 years after the Russian Revolution of 1917, and the charges against Russia are relentless: they invaded Georgia, attempted to subvert the Ukrainian government, annexed Crimea and engaged in cyber warfare by attempting to interfere in the US presidential election in 2016. Hey, these guys are aggressive! They want to reassert power throughout the region! They are working to fracture the power structures of Germany and France! They want to destroy America! Putin is a self-confessed imperialist! Hysterical attacks against Russia and Putin fly mercilessly from the pens of hacks writing for the New York Times and less prestigious news sources. €
From his first days in office, Joe Biden and his national security advisers seemed determined to revive America’s fading global leadership via the strategy they knew best—challenging the “revisionist powers” Russia and China with a Cold War–style aggressiveness. When it came to Beijing, the president combined the policy initiatives of his predecessors, pursuing Barack Obama’s “strategic pivot” from the Middle East to Asia, while continuing Donald Trump’s trade war with China. In the process, Biden revived the kind of bipartisan foreign policy not seen in Washington since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.
On June 16 Justin Trudeau spoke with Rwandan president Paul€ Kagame about this week’s Commonwealth Summit in Kigali. Half the government’s readout about the discussion was devoted to opposing a foreign invasion. It read, “the two€ leaders exchanged views on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and noted that the invasion was contrary to foundational principles of the Commonwealth. Prime Minister Trudeau reiterated that the invasion was an affront to the fundamental principles of sovereignty, territorial integrity, self-determination, and international law, and expressed that it is important for the Commonwealth summit to provide an opportunity for member countries to stand up for democracy and denounce Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.”
Recently, Rwandan-backed rebels instigated fighting that has caused over€ 170,000 Congolese€ to flee their homes since November. Reportedly, Rwanda has€ deployed 500€ troops to assist the M23 rebels. According to the UN, M23 is€ planning an attack€ on the major eastern city of Goma in the coming days. On Friday Rwandan forces killed a Congolese soldier on the border between the two countries and Congo has€ closed€ the border.
This piece was first published in large part at Common Dreams on January 13, 2011; it has been updated in light of the latest horrific Supreme Court ruling.
Russia's invasion of Ukraine constitutes a crime of aggression under international law. Putin's regime launched an attack on a sovereign country that posed no direct threat to the Russian Federation. Russian forces have pounded cities into submission, thousands of civilians have been killed, and millions have fled as refugees.€ € €
The National Rifle Association's decades-long campaign against even the most basic and popular firearm regulations scored another victory Thursday when the right-wing U.S. Supreme Court struck down a key New York state gun control law, a ruling that could spell doom for similar statutes across the country.
The NRA has spent big in recent years to fill state and federal courts—including the Supreme Court—with judges that are hostile to gun regulations. In 2017, the gun lobby dropped $1 million on ads supporting former President Donald Trump's nomination of Justice Neil Gorsuch, a successful campaign that it repeated in subsequent years to ensure the confirmation of Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.
Ready, aim, fire:
“Today, the Supreme Court made it clear that it cares more about protecting the interests of the gun lobby than American lives.”
In a decision with sweeping and grave implications for gun control laws across the country, the right-wing U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday struck down New York state's restrictions on the concealed carry of firearms in public.
Slate legal reporter Mark Joseph Stern warned that the high court's 6-3 decision—penned by Justice Clarence Thomas—"goes so, so far beyond concealed carry."
Amid Moscow's thermonuclear saber-rattling during Russia's invasion of Ukraine, state parties to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons on Thursday condemned "any and all nuclear threats" while calling on more countries to sign and ratify the landmark accord.
"This is the strongest condemnation of nuclear threats by a multilateral U.N. conference."
In its attempt to swallow Ukraine whole, Russia has so far managed to bite off only the eastern Donbas region and a portion of its southern coast. The rest of the country remains independent, with its capital Kyiv intact.
Ukraine is fighting for its territory and, ultimately, its survival. The West has come to its aid in defense of international law. But the stakes in this conflict are far more consequential than that.
There have been two tragic, horrifying incidents of Judeo-terrorism in the past few days.€ The first was the€ stabbing murder of Ali Hassan Harb€ by an Israeli settler in the village of Iskaka close to the town of Salfit.€ He was a 27-year-old electrical engineer who’d graduated three years earlier.€ In his spare time, he liked to help out with his family’s agricultural work.
Westinghouse lands in Ukraine to ink new nuclear deal.
The House committee investigating the January 6, 2021 attack on the United States Capitol revealed Thursday that half a dozen Republican lawmakers sought preemptive pardons from then-President Donald Trump after they tried to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
According to the committee, Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) emailed the White House five days after the deadly insurrection requesting preemptive pardons for Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), himself and "every congressman or senator who voted to reject the electoral college vote submissions of Arizona and Pennsylvania."
President Joe Biden's attempt to address the climate emergency through executive action received a potential boost this week from Rep. Cori Bush of Missouri and other Democrats on the House Appropriations Committee.
Thanks to what The Intercept described as a "last-minute, behind-the-scenes effort by Bush," the fiscal year 2023 Energy and Water Development and Related Agencies spending bill includes $100 million for the domestic manufacturing of clean energy. If approved, the new funding would give the president resources to accelerate the production of solar panels, heat pumps, and other green technologies.
Spain has urged the European Union to leave an arcane energy treaty that protects fossil fuel investors at the expense of maintaining a habitable planet.
At issue is the 1994 Energy Charter Treaty (ECT), an obscure agreement whose investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanism enables fossil fuel corporations to sue governments over anticipated economic losses stemming from plans to move away from coal, oil, and gas.
Nothing about the proposal to create a “town center” in the coastal bedroom community of Gautier, Mississippi, made sense to Becky Montgomery Jenner.
The mall that once functioned as the town’s community hub is literally a shell of its former self, with a rusting metal structure covering a concrete slab where shoppers once browsed. In its place the city wants to create a downtown where people can live, shop and dine.
New large-scale fossil fuel projects have become mostly unworkable in the Pacific Northwest, with dozens canceled over the past decade due to fierce opposition from local communities. But the industry’s blitz is not yet over. Instead, rather than building new pipelines, it is seeking to expand existing infrastructure in a way that will provoke less pushback.
Since 2012, an estimated 55 coal, oil, and natural gas projects have been proposed for the Pacific Northwest — encompassing Oregon and Washington, as well as British Columbia. But more than 70 percent of them have been defeated, according to a recent study from the Seattle-based Sightline Institute.
On Monday,€ June 13 Yellowstone and southern Montana experienced its worst natural disaster in modern times, with the possible exception of the 1959 Hebgen Lake Earthquake. Following a dry and mild winter, unusually heavy late spring snowfall (6 feet over Memorial Day Weekend) in the Absaroka and Beartooth Mountains north and east of Yellowstone left the landscape primed for a massive flood. And over the weekend of June 11 and 12 the skies delivered a killer punch in the form of torrential rain – an entire summer’s worth in 3 days. And atmospheric river aimed at Yellowstone like a warm water hose, dousing the wet spring snow pack with a vertical flood of rain. This heavy rain on the deep snow brought 8 inches of water out of the mountains in a hurry, swelling rivers and creeks to unheard of ferocity, altering the course of many rivers and demolishing everything in the way.
Yellowstone is well known and infamous for being one of the biggest and most powerful volcanoes on Earth. Fears of a mega eruption here are genuine but low on the scale of likely disasters. But not many predicted the events of Monday the 13th of June.
In the high-stakes world of high-speed, short-term securities trading, investors can reap massive payouts but often face higher tax rates due to the nature of their business. But one of America's richest men somehow earns billions from speedy trades while paying a tax rate lower than many middle-class Americans.
Among dozens of Wall Street billionaires whose tax returns ProPublica examined, one stood out: Jeff Yass of Susquehanna International Group.
In just a little over six months, the number of Starbucks outlets where workers are represented by a union has spiked from zero to 165.
Amazon Labor Union President Chris Smalls addressed the crowd at the Friday night plenary.
Workers at an Augusta, Maine Chipotle have formed an independent union: Chipotle United. This is a clear indication that the unionization wave that started with Starbucks and Amazon is only growing…
Rampant inflation is a reminder that there are more and more of the working poor in the world's public services. Yet governments have the means to finance quality public services: the richest people and the multinationals must be made to contribute.€
A half-century long power play, led by corporations, Wall Street, governments, and central banks, has gone badly wrong.
Lex Fridman Podcast Conversation between Richard Wolff and Lex Fridman exploring questions surrounding Marxism, communism, capitalism, socialism, human nature, ec…
Photograph Source: wandererwandering –€ CC BY 2.0 By Michael Hudson / CounterPunch The Federal Reserve Board’s ostensible policy aim is to manage the money supply and bank credit in a way that maint…
Change in housing and rent prices in Cambridge and Boston since 1997 (source: “How Harvard’s Expansion Affects the Communities Around It”).
In addition to displacing community members by fueling the rise in local housing, rental, and living costs, Berklee College of Music has taken grotesque steps to prevent these displaced community members from so much as being physically present in spaces they once called home, which the campus occupies. In 2018, Berklee installed what have been called “homeless spikes” upon the ledge of one of its buildings on the corner of Massachusetts Ave and Boylston St, in an effort to prevent unhoused community members from being able sit or lie down upon the building’s ledge (see image below). A petition calling for the removal of the “homeless spikes” notes: “This ledge is known as a traditional spot for several homeless people, so the spikes are clearly designed to deter the homeless from congregating there.”
From the start, the link between the world’s premier football (or soccer) competition and the gulf state was an odd one.€ Qatar and the World Cup are as connected in kinship as gigantic icebergs and parched desert sands.€ But money was the glue, prestige the aim, and there was much glue to go around when it came to securing the rights to host the competition.€ What was lacking was a football tradition, an absence of sporting infrastructure, and the presence of scorching weather.
The central figure in this effort of bald graft over distinguished merit was Mohamed Bin Hammam, Qatar’s football grandee and construction magnate.€ From his position as a member of the executive committee of the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), he is said to have acted, on occasion, more like “the head of a crime organisation” than a mere board official.€ All the time, he risibly claimed that he was a fan of reform, calling for “more transparency in FIFA.”
Especially well planted in the mainstream political mind is this defeatist, don’t rock-the-boat kind of thinking. Changes to problems in our systems and structures that are popular, in the majority even, often go unaddressed because the solution, no matter how obvious, may seem like some kind of impossible mission. In a state of social depression brought on by the failure to address obvious problems the modern mind can quickly go from skepticism, to cynicism, to pessimism, to complete withdrawal and quite acceptance of the unacceptable. We live, as Thoreau said, “lives of quiet desperation”.
But before we give in total surrender, let’s try to remember that everything that once seemed impossible but is today, the way we’ve always done it, started out as a revolutionary idea followed by a proposition of action, followed by action. Certain human rights, ending the reign of kings, flying to the moon and back are all ideas that once looked like something impossible to achieve and I’m sure that those who first uttered support for those previously un-tried, un-done ideas or events were questioned for being so overly optimistic or maybe just down-right crazy. Still, these once impossible ideas gained ground and succeeded either entirely or at least to some extent, whereas doing nothing, because nothing requires anything of anyone, would have guaranteed failure in human rights, democratization of governments or going into space.
Lieutenant governors are like airbags: designed to be ignored except in the case of a crash. Perhaps that’s why so little attention has been paid to the contest that will take place on June 28, when New York’s Democratic voters will pick a nominee (which in this state usually means the eventual winner).
Former President Donald Trump's "brazen attempt" to use the Justice Department to overturn his loss in the 2020 presidential election is set to be a major focus of the House January 6 committee's hearing on Thursday.
The panel's fifth public hearing will feature testimony from former Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and his deputy€ Richard Donoghue.
The former Labour Party leader sits down with Declassified for his most candid interview yet – on the British media, UK military and intelligence services, Israel, Keir Starmer, Julian Assange and …
At the end of June, for the second time since the Spanish state joined NATO in 1982, the Atlantic Alliance will hold a summit meeting in Madrid. It so happens that each of these two Madrid summits constitutes a major defining moment in the history of the organization.
When talking about the situation facing women today or feminism, we rarely mention those who are not only disadvantaged because of their biological gender but also marginalized because of their ethnicity, gender identity, or physical health. Currently, one of the most important questions regarding disadvantaged women is how exactly the different disadvantages interact with one another and whether there is some more fundamental catalytic factor behind them. Why does the case of Roma women concern us all? Poverty, women, and Hungary in 2022.
Having tanked his party's effort to expand Medicare and close the Medicaid coverage gap, Sen. Joe Manchin is now dangling his support for an extension of Affordable Care Act subsidies as massive premium hikes loom for millions of people who buy insurance on the exchanges.
Insider reported Wednesday that Manchin has "signaled he's open to extending enhanced subsidies under the Affordable Care Act, a move that would help Democrats avert a huge political threat in the November midterms."
The bipartisan congressional commission investigating the January 6 coup attempt has found strong evidence that Donald Trump is a criminal. As the hearings reveal, the former president illegally plotted to stay in office after the American people voted to boot him out.
When I arrived at the Kingsborough Houses in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighborhood on a warm day in May, motorcycles and cars were speeding recklessly along the paved areas that the public housing residents use as walkways. Pedestrians yelled at the young men as they raced by. To be sure, the youth were engaging in unneighborly behavior, but as Jamell Henderson, 36, a tenant organizer who has lived here since he aged out of foster care, told me, the problem is one of resources: to restrict vehicles to residents and delivery trucks would require either a guard or an electronic system. Both cost money, which the New York City Housing Authority is unlikely to provide. Read editor D.D. Guttenplan on why the left should keep its eyes trained on Ana María Archila.
Returning to the political realm, does any of that apply to so-called conservatives today?
When Mitch McConnell refused even to hold hearings on Merrick Garland’s nomination to the Supreme Court on the specious grounds that it couldn’t be considered in a presidential election year, what manner of existing views, conditions or institutions was he maintaining?
A federal court ruling allowing Arkansas to penalize government contractors that support boycotts of the Israeli government was decried as "dangerous" and a threat to First Amendment rights on Wednesday, as civil liberties defenders vowed to appeal the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The 8th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that an Arkansas law does not violate Americans' constitutional rights by requiring state contractors with contracts of $1,000 or more to reduce their fees by 20% if they refuse to sign a pledge saying they won't support the Boycott, Divest, and Sanction movement (BDS).
Last week we wrote about a truly silly bill, introduced by a bunch of Republican Senators, that would basically ban email providers from letting political mailings go to spam. It’s quite a move to make it a key part of your political platform that politicians need to get special rights to spam people, but, alas, this is about the extent of today’s Republican party, a pathetic shell of what it once was.
For a while now, as Democrats have insisted that the two main antitrust bills that have been able to scrape together bipartisan support won’t have any impact on content moderation, we keep pointing out that the only reason they have Republican support is because Republicans want it to impact content moderation. After all, Ted Cruz was practically gleeful when he talked about using this bill to “unleash the trial lawyers” to sue over moderation.
This post analyzes California AB 587, self-described as “Content Moderation Requirements for Internet Terms of Service.” I believe the bill will get a legislative hearing later this month.
The recent news that British courts approved Julian Assange’s U.S. extradition is the occasion for this letter. Mr. Assange is one of the most astute publishers, activists, and intellectuals of my generation; I write imploring you to drop all charges against him and other Wikileaks affiliated individuals– past, present, and future.
I was born in 1970. Easy access to my parents’ Time Life photo book series had me opposing the Vietnam War by elementary school. The pictures said it all. I pursued anti-war activism in college during the Persian Gulf War, and as a CSU Sacramento junior faculty member in the early 2000’s, I lectured on the failed foreign policy leading to Afghanistan and Iraq invasions. All of this work relied on excellent journalism pursued outside official U.S. media channels.
Last week a bipartisan bill was introduced in the House of Representatives to curb foreign influence in the US political process. This bill comes on the heels of Ret. Gen. John Allen’s resignation from his post as president of the Brookings Institution—the most prominent left-leaning think tank in the US—after being accused by the FBI of secretly lobbying on behalf of Qatar and obstructing the government’s investigation into his alleged lobbying and influence activities on behalf of the Qataris. This bombshell news and congressional action should send shockwaves through the national security community.
Summer 2008. Senator Barack Obama would soon be elected president, after defeating Senator Hillary Clinton in a tough primary fight (and then beating Senator John McCain more easily). The energizing Democratic clash drove a progressive surge, in voting, political engagement, and feminism.
In early June, Brooklyn-based writer Ashoka Jegroo documented on Twitter the chaos outside an abortion clinic in Manhattan. Anti-abortion protesters were guided through the streets by the New York City Police Department as they sought to harass and intimidate people who were coming to have abortions. In the series of videos, the police are seen shoving pro-choice protesters who were protecting patients from the mounting aggression of abortion opponents. Nearly every officer in the video has their backs to the anti-abortion marchers and their focus appears to be on monitoring the pro-choice counterprotesters and patient defenders.
Legals experts warned law enforcement agencies will have "zero incentive" to ensure that a person being arrested is read their Miranda rights after the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday handed down a ruling the ACLU characterized as a "dangerous" assault on long-established protections.
"The warnings mandated by the Supreme Court in Miranda have been part of the fabric of law enforcement interactions with the public for more than 60 years."
Model state legislation proposed by a leading anti-choice group would impose felony charges for a broad new set of activities related to abortion.
People who have never even been charged with a crime can have their life savings taken away. That’s civil asset forfeiture.
A new poll out Thursday reveals that the confidence the American people have in the U.S. Supreme Court is at an all-time low—dropping 11 points since the right-wing majority took hold last year and amid major rulings, including the expected overturning of Roe vs. Wade, unpopular with the voting public.
Just 25% of Americans have "a great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in the Supreme Court, down from 36% one year ago.
The opening of Mona Mansour’s engrossing three-part epic about Palestinian displacement, The Vagrant Trilogy, was postponed for the last two years. But there’s also a sense in which its run at New York’s Public Theater was delayed by 33 years. In 1989—two and a half years into the First Intifada, which had brought the violence of the Israeli occupation into American living rooms via the nightly news—Joseph Papp, the Public’s founder and, at the time, its head, abruptly canceled a touring production of a play called The Story of Kufur Shamma, an elegiac drama about a Palestinian man on a 40-year quest to find the relatives and neighbors who’d been forced to abandon their village in 1948. Papp withdrew the work, by a theater company from East Jerusalem, because, he said then, he didn’t want to offend Jewish audiences, and because he hadn’t presented any Israeli plays at his theater.
We’ve been highlighting the one big problem with Amy Klobuchar’s AICOA antitrust bill being that it has a trojan horse to enable lawsuit challenges over content moderation — and that this is the main reason why Republicans are supporting it. Still, with a big push to get the bills over the finish line, Adam Conner and Eric Simpson at the Center for American Progress did a big analysis of AICOA and the related Open App Markets bill that has similar content moderation concerns, and decided to recommend both bills, brushing aside the concerns.
Hundreds of public health and civil society organizations have denounced the World Trade Organization for approving a text last week that they say leaves in place intellectual property barriers that will continue to limit global access to COVID-19 vaccines, tests and treatments. We host an in-depth discussion about the WTO’s move, and what should come next, with two global health justice advocates, Mihir Mankad and Fatima Hassan. Mankad, who attended the WTO meeting and is a senior adviser for global health advocacy and policy for Doctors Without Borders, says the agreement “may ultimately cause more damage than good.” Hassan, founder and director of Health Justice Initiative in South Africa, believes Global South countries were “bullied into silence” by richer countries during the WTO negotiations.
The saga of Ed Sheeran and the copyright case over his Shape of You song may finally be coming to a close. The case, brought by Sami Chokri, was very thin, largely centering on a two-word refrain line repeated 3 times both Sheeran’s song and Chokri’s Oh Why. Sheeran prevailed, with the court stating that there was absolutely nothing to suggest that Sheeran was influenced, even subconsciously, by Chokri’s song. After the win, Sheeran noted publicly how dumb this all is and how dangerous the culture of settlement-seeking copyright lawsuits has become for the creative industries. It’s bad enough, apparently, that Sheeran has stated he now video records all creative sessions so that those videos can be used to defend against inevitable future suits.