The second-generation TUXEDO Pulse 15 is up for pre-order with shipping expected in late July, which comes with the powerful AMD Ryzen 7 5700U that TUXEDO have pushed up to 35w.
Among Us works quite nicely on the Steam Deck but what about if you want to get some mods going? It's actually surprisingly easy to do so here's how to do it.
Tiny Tina's Wonderlands from Gearbox has now launched on Steam with its Epic Exclusive period now over and it's looking pretty good on Steam Deck and Linux desktops. Note: 2K sent over a key.
Crowsworn is an upcoming grim fantasy action-platformer metroidvania inspired by the likes of Hollow Knight, Bloodborne, and Devil May Cry. It's been in development for a while and a fresh trailer has arrived.
FIREFIGHT RELOADED is a Half-Life 2 mod that gives you fast-paced horde-mode FPS gameplay with a ton of customizations and features inspired by other Source Engine mods.
Ahead of the release of Stray on July 19th, Stray has become the most wishlisted game on Steam and it has been fully Steam Deck Verified. Good news for Steam Deck fans and Linux desktop gamers, since it should work great on both.
Cat lovers and adventure game aficionados alike may want to keep an eye on this one, as the point and lick (get it?) game Nine Noir Lives releases September 7 along with Native Linux support.
You wouldn't know this looking at the Steam page for ARK: Survival Evolved but Studio Wildcard have now put their Native Linux version behind a Beta on Steam as they now prefer Linux users to play with the Proton compatibility layer.
An opinion article about Cutefish OS development discontinuation, its future, best road ahead with additional details.
The ECM-TGUC from Avalue, is a 3.5” Single Board Computer powered by Intel’s 11th Gen Core processors. Unlike other SBCs, this one has the processor and chipset mounted on the back of the board to lower temperature and free up space.
The ECM-TGUC accommodates the following onboard Tiger Lake processors using 10nm architecture...
[Sebastian] and [Stefan Shütz] had a ISEL EP1090 CNC machine at home, sitting unused, and they decided to bring it to life. With pretty good mechanical specs, this CNC looked promising – alas, it was severely constrained by its controller. The built-in CPU’s software was severely outdated, had subpar algorithms for motor driving programmed in, and communication with the CNC was limited because the proprietary ISEL communications protocol that isn’t spoken by other devices.The two brothers removed the CPU from its PLCC socket, and went on to wiring a grbl-fueled Arduino into the controller box.
Bad art is doing very nicely these days, and the reason is that people want a message. An early symptom was the galloping first-personism of movie reviewers: “I feel…” was a hard-to-beat gambit, since who can refute a feeling? A more impartial claim was suggested by the successor locution “It feels like…”—where the “it” meant that the feeling in question ought to move anyone. The broad-church piety was harder to challenge than a mere first person. Meanwhile, negative judgments were on the way to becoming prohibited so long as the work wore its good intentions on its sleeve.
Did you know that water can drip UP instead of down? It’s true! Okay, okay- it’s a bit of an optical illusion, but one that’s mesmerizing no less, and it’s one that is especially awe-inspiring for kids. As [Science Buddies] explains in the video below the break, it’s also achievable for anyone with some basic supplies.
When we routinely carry devices holding tens or hundreds of gigabytes of data, it’s sometimes a shock to remember that there was once a time when 650 MB on a CD was a very big deal indeed. These now archaic storage media came first as silver pre-recorded CD-ROMs, then later as recordable CD-Rs. Most people eventually owned CD writer drives, and some fancy ones came with the feature of etching pictures in the unused portions of the disc.
Videoconferencing has been around in one form or another for quite a while, but it took the pandemic to thrust into prominence with just about everyone. In a way, it has been the delivery of something long-promised by phone companies, futurists, and science fiction writers: the picture phone. But very few people imagined how the picture phone would actually manifest itself. We thought it might be interesting to look at some of the historical predictions and attempts to bring this technology to the mass market.
The iCE40 series of FPGAs gets a fair bit of coverage on these pages, largely due to its accessibility (thanks to huge efforts in reverse engineering and open tool chains) and likely also due to Lattice Semiconductors’ attitude to open source in general. Whilst these devices are small and rather limited, you can’t really beat them for a first foray into the subject. They’re plenty beefy enough for many of the simpler FPGA applications. [TinLethax] over on Hackaday.IO has plenty of experience with the devices, and has added another tool to our collective iCE40 arsenal, namely iCEBlaster, a USB mass storage device (MSC) style bootloader for drag-n-drop bitstream loading. The days of needing dedicated special programmers are starting to be numbered, with many chips now presenting a USB mass storage device to the host in order to upload the firmware image.
When last new material graced this blog, it was about how antivax pediatrician Dr. Paul Thomas had launched a legal assault on the Oregon Medical Board because it has disciplined him for cases in which his antivaccine activism applied to his practice had endangered the health of his patients. Specifically, in a bid to intimidate the members of the Board, Dr. Thomas had sued them each personally for a total of $35 million. Even though it was a highly dubious lawsuit with little chance of success, Dr. Thomas’ lawsuit didn’t need to succeed, however. It just needed to impose anxiety, expense, and effort on members of the Board, which would allow it to serve as a deterrent to their further action, as well as a warning to physicians and lay people who might want to sit on a state medical board and use that position to apply penalties. The idea behind suits like Dr. Thomas’, of course, is to make members of state medical boards fear personal financial and professional ruin for doing the right thing. Enter Richard Jaffe, Esq.
The chilling effect of abortion bans that have entered into force in at least 10 states since Roe v. Wade was overturned in late June is already reaching patients who need medication for a variety of health concerns, including pain management during IUD insertions and arthritis.
Dr. Alexandra Weiss Band, an obstetrician and gynecologist in New Orleans, filed an affidavit in the New Orleans Civil District Court on July 5 in a case challenging Louisiana's law banning nearly all abortions, regarding her experience trying to fill a prescription for a patient who has having an IUD inserted.
Environmental and public health advocates renewed calls to ban glyphosate after a recently published U.S. report revealed the cancer-linked herbicide—which is the active ingredient in Bayer's popular Roundup weedkiller—was found in the urine of more than 80% of study participants.
"Monsanto lobbyists achieved the full-scale poisoning of our planet for profit."
T-Mobile hasn’t been what you’d call competent when it comes to protecting its customers’ data. The company has been hacked numerous different times over the last few years, with hackers going so far as to ridicule the company’s lousy security practices.
Cops have been running to Google for years, warrants and subpoenas in hand, asking the data behemoth to give them info they can sift through to find criminal suspects. Location data is a big one. Comparable to cell phone tower dumps, geofence warrants allow law enforcement to obtain a certain amount of data on every phone in an area, allowing them to work backwards towards probable cause to seek identifying data on possible suspects. But the only “probable cause” needed for the original, Google-enabled search is the (strong) probability Google has data responsive to the request.
The internet is about speech. That’s basically all the internet is. It’s a system for communicating, and that communication is speech. What’s becoming increasingly frustrating to me is how in all of these attempts to regulate the internet around the globe, policymakers (and many others) seem to ignore that, and act as if they can treat internet issues like other non-speech industries. We see it over and over again. Privacy law for the internet? Has huge speech implications. Antitrust for the internet? Yup, speech implications.
The problem with gathering tons of sensitive data and storing it indefinitely is sooner or later someone with even worse intentions is going to come looking for it. And China’s massive surveillance apparatus collects oh so much data.
Visa-free entry to the United States will be tied to a new requirement. Officials there want to be allowed to conduct automated searches for fingerprints and facial images in national databases of EU states. In Brussels, questions now abound about the EU’s jurisdiction.
Software developers are usually told to ‘never write your own cryptography’, and there definitely are sufficient examples to be found in the past decades of cases where DIY crypto routines caused real damage. This is also the introduction to [Francis Stokes]’s article on rolling your own crypto system. Even if you understand the mathematics behind a cryptographic system like AES (symmetric encryption), assumptions made by your code, along with side-channel and many other types of attacks, can nullify your efforts.
It has been a particularly sad 4th of July. In Highland Park, Illinois, a young gunman opened fire on a parade with a high-caliber rifle, killing 7, wounding at least 47 others and traumatizing many more. In the same weekend, more than 50 people were shot in New York City. It is conceivable that those shootings were made possible because of a loose interpretation of the Second Amendment to the Constitution. €
President Biden is on the cusp of going off to Saudi Arabia as one part of his upcoming Middle East trip. One of the failures of Mr. Biden has been completely disengaging the US from the Saudi-led war on Yemen, which he had pledged to do. Although there has been a successful two-month ceasefire, the war could flare back up at any time. The Biden administration has vowed only to provide the Saudis with “defensive” weaponry, but there is no firm definition for such things in the US legal code.
As President Joe Biden prepares to visit Saudi Arabia this week, peace and human rights campaigners on Monday decried a report that his administration is considering lifting its amorphous ban on the sale of "offensive" U.S. weaponry to the repressive monarchy.
"Biden is considering resuming offensive weapon sales to one of the most brutal dictators on the planet: Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince MBS."
Working on behalf of Middle East Christians with the French Catholic aid organization SOS Chretiéns d’Orient, Goodarzy during multiple trips to Syria and the wider Middle East personally saw the dark side of the post-2011 “Arab Spring.” Contrary to naïve Western beliefs in a wave of Muslim democracy replacing despots, jihadists quickly established dominance over the revolts in places including Syria against tyrants such as Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. Christians in Syria and the broader region, who have long suffered Islamic repression since jihadists conquered the Middle East in the seventh century, had to align with Assad and other unsavory, unlikely allies in self-defense.
Russia’s pro-government media regularly reports on the Russian military’s “achievements” in Ukraine, but mentions of the specific commanders responsible are extremely rare. Judging by reports from Russia’s propaganda outlets, it would seem that the generals themselves spend all their time either receiving medals from Vladimir Putin or giving medals to their subordinates. That, Meduza has learned, is no accident: Putin is personally opposed to the idea of any top military leaders getting too much glory as a result of the war in Ukraine.
On May 27, 2021, the Moscow authorities showed up at the apartment where 19-year-old Libertarian Party member Vsevolod Osipov lived with his mother. After searching the premises, they arrested Osipov for “blocking the roads” at a January 31 rally in support of opposition politician Alexey Navalny. At the police station, one officer looked familiar to Osipov. He soon realized the man had infiltrated the Libertarian Party and protested alongside him in January as an undercover agent —€ and that the man now wanted him to do the same thing.
In Ukraine, the activists protesting the Russian invasion are dismantling Pushkin’s statue mounted in various cities and changing the name of a village called Pushkino. Removing the Pushkin remnants is a new longing to realign Ukraine from Russia to US-Europe — the home of the French language, German beer brewed under Reinheitsgebot, and the U.S. militaristic capitalism. The Western press is promoting Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, as “a hero of our time,” comparing him with Churchill, Havel, and Walesa.
The Russians see Zelensky as a wretched version of Prinz Myschkin, summoning death through brave rhetoric and poor calculus. For most Russians, tearing Ukraine away from Russia is a much more severe offense than the Russian invasion of Ukraine, like Dostoevsky’s logic in The Idiot that a state-sponsored execution of a killer is a far graver offense than murder. Besides dreams, Ukraine shares a much deeper heritage with Russia than France, Germany, England, and the U.S.
What is the White House and the Department of Commerce thinking? China is not Venezuela nor is it Russia, a weak and dependent economy with a GDP smaller than Italy. Do these brazen Bidenites realize the consequences of a grand list of technologies and knowhow being barred from China?
As the dominant imperial world power, the U.S. is struggling to understand how to deal with an aggressive rising power like China building spheres of influence around the world through exports, loans, development contracts, and technical assistance. It’s okay that we have military bases in over 100 countries whose leaders know the U.S. as the premier overthrower of elected governments with policies displeasing to Washington and Wall Street.
Today, the Wagner Group, a shadowy Russian company engaged in the thriving mercenary business, is perhaps the leading private enterprise partner in global military ventures. Employing as many as 10,000 military personnel, it is headquartered in the Russian town of Molkino, right beside a military base run by the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency. It relies heavily on the Russian government’s approval and military infrastructure for its far-flung operations.
The Wagner Group was reportedly founded in 2014 by Dmitri Utkin, a Russian military veteran who so admired Hitler that he named the mercenary organization after the führer’s favorite composer. The financial backing for the Wagner Group, however, came from Yevgeny Prigozhin, a Russian oligarch with close ties to President Vladimir Putin. With many Russian veterans eager to pay off debts and secure employment, recruitment proceeded rapidly. The Wagner Group’s first significant operation came later that year, as the Russian government dispatched about a thousand of the company’s armed soldiers, wearing unmarked uniforms, into the Luhansk and Donetsk regions of Ukraine to bolster an uprising of pro-Russian separatists.
Washington and its allies seek either to remain hegemonic and weaken China and Russia or to erect a new Iron Curtain around these two countries, writes Vijay Prashad. Both approaches could lead to …
The massive expansion of NATO, not only in Eastern and Central Europe but the Middle East, Latin America, Africa and Asia, presages endless war and a potential nuclear holocaust.
Civil rights advocates on Monday demanded justice after a 15-year-old boy was killed by a fire during a police attack on a home in New Mexico's largest city.
"This is a systemic statewide problem mostly affecting people of color who are disproportionately victims of police violence."
Manuel Oliver, whose 17-year-old son was killed in the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, interrupted President Joe Biden on Monday as he delivered a speech hailing the recent passage of a gun-safety package that critics warn is far too tepid to substantially reduce raging gun violence in the U.S.
"We have to do more than that!" Oliver, one of a number of gun violence survivors and family members in attendance at the White House ceremony, yelled out as Biden said passage of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act marks "meaningful progress."
Leaked internal records have brought new insights into ride sharing firm Uber's close connections with high-ranking leaders around the world.
Among other things, the documents show that the firm systematically broke laws to establish its business in new markets.
In early 2015, European regulators were closing in on Apple, Amazon and Google, accusing the U.S. tech titans of unfair competition and abuse of sweetheart tax deals.
Executives at Uber Technologies Inc. took notice; they feared that their company could be next, newly leaked documents show. As it expanded its footprint around the globe, the ride-hailing giant had devised ways to save millions of dollars in taxes by routing profits through Bermuda and other tax havens.
Collaery, a sagacious and well-practiced legal figure, has been the subject of interest under section 39 of the Australian Intelligence Services Act 2001 (Cth), which covers conspiracies to reveal classified information.€ It all began when he was, in the natural order of things, consulted by former intelligence officer Witness K.€ Witness K has been convicted for revealing the existence of a 2004 spying operation conducted by the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS) that led to the bugging of cabinet offices used by the Timor-Leste government.
The operation was instigated at the behest of Australia’s corporate interests.€ At the time, Canberra was involved in treaty negotiations with Timor-Leste on the subject of accessing oil and gas reserves.€ East Timor’s crushing poverty and salivating need for hard cash did not interest Australia’s own resource companies and the desk bureaucrats in Australia’s capital.
It's the hallmark experience of summer 2022. You're rolling down your local street, heat waves shimmering off the asphalt, breeze blowing through open car windows. But when you stop at the light, an impossible number catches your eye. Huge and stark, the sign proclaims "REGULAR: $4.95." It was $4.70 just last week!
The first truly global order originated when Portugal began the European age of exploration around 1420. With the European invasion of the Western Hemisphere and opening of a sea route to Asia by the end of the century, “Europe’s overseas empires finally brought all the continents into sustained contact, allowing the formation of history’s first true world order,” McCoy writes in To Govern the Globe: World Orders & Catastrophic Change. € Together, Spain and Portugal created what McCoy describes as the Iberian order. It was to last beyond the height of their empires until the British world order succeeded it with the final defeat of Napoleon, consummated in the 1815 peace conference known as the Congress of Vienna.
The current U.S. world order began in 1945 when Britain passed the torch to its Anglo offspring on the western side of the Atlantic. In both his recent works, McCoy projects the U.S. order’s end date around 2030, though current global events may be accelerating that timetable.
Underscoring the need for meaningful action to address the fossil fuel-driven climate crisis, the Washburn Fire that started last week in California's Sierra Nevada mountains has scorched more than 2,300 acres and remains 0% contained as of Monday morning, and the growing blaze is threatening hundreds of ancient sequoias in Yosemite National Park.
In addition to endangering more than 500 mature giant sequoias, the wildfire—burning on the southern end of the park, including in the historic Mariposa Grove—has also put the community of Wawona in jeopardy, prompting evacuation orders and a partial closure of Highway 41. Smoke from the fire is negatively affecting air quality as far away as the Bay Area, located about 200 miles to the west.
In a€ Washington Post€ op-ed,€ Biden defended his controversial planned meeting with Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud (known as MBS), saying it is meant not only to bolster U.S. interests but also to bring peace to the region.
It seems that his trip will not include Yemen, though if this were truly a “sensitive” visit, he would be stopping at one of Yemen’s many beleaguered refugee camps. There he could listen to people displaced by war, some of whom are shell-shocked from years of bombardment. He could hear the stories of bereaved parents and orphaned children, and then express true remorse for the complicity of the United States in the brutal aerial attacks and starvation blockade imposed on Yemen for the past eight years.
A speedy transition to electric heat pumps in homes and businesses in Oregon could translate into lower utility bills and faster reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, according to a new report.€
Those findings bolster calls from environmental groups, who are asking state regulators to end consumer subsidies that allow utilities to expand gas infrastructure.€
Yellowstone was also set aside to protect all citizens’ public access, an act of democracy. In the post-Civil War era, where the country fought a fierce battle about civil rights for all citizens, Yellowstone was open to entry by all Americans. It was a significant step toward recognizing that all people had certain “inalienable rights,” including access to natural landscapes. In retrospect, Yellowstone also became a place where the “inalienable rights” of non-humans are considered and given protection.
In recognition of its significance to planetary heritage, Yellowstone is a designated World Heritage Site and International Biological Reserve. But whether these attributes will continue to function is questionable unless we recognize that Yellowstone’s boundaries are insufficient to preserve its ecological integrity into the future.
This March, when the Biden administration presented a staggering $813 billion proposal for “national defense,” it was hard to imagine a budget that could go significantly higher or be more generous to the denizens of the military-industrial complex. After all, that request represented far more than peak spending in the Korean or Vietnam War years, and well over $100 billion more than at the height of the Cold War.
Most of us had no idea who the bank and investment CEOs were, whose criminal or misguided decisions set off this national financial catastrophe. They were the ones who€ did€ take the Federal Reserve bailout millions and promised top-to-bottom operational reforms.
Nobody in our group had bothered to Google their identities because pillorying CEOs would have taken the focus off their institutions. CEOs might come and go, but the company’s culture and policies would live on. And that’s what we wanted to change even if the outfit went under.
Voters in the United States overwhelmingly support Democratic proposals to expand Social Security for all recipients to cover higher costs of living and oppose Republican proposals to completely end the federal program—established during the New Deal era to improve economic security for retirees, people with disabilities, and widows and widowers—before the end of the decade.
That's according to a new survey conducted from June 17-21 and published Monday by Data for Progress, which found that a whopping 83% of likely voters support expanding Social Security benefits to keep up with rising costs, including 86% of Democrats, 84% of Republicans, and 79% of independents.
Did the Biden officials know what they were doing when they announced a broad expansion of€ export controls€ on China? China is the world's second-largest economy, which is intricately intertwined with the economy of the U.S. and other nations. This is mainly due to U.S. multinational companies exporting huge slices of our manufacturing economy to China for its cheap labor.
Public health advocates on Monday said a newly-reported discussion between Pfizer executives and investors illustrated exactly why efforts to protect people's health must not be seen as a driver of profits, as the company's views on waning Covid-19 mitigation tactics came to light.
As Kaiser Health News reported last week in an article about the pharmaceutical company's outsized influence over the federal government as the U.S. navigates the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, executives spoke openly in a May 3 earnings call with investors about the benefits of lifted mask mandates and rising demand for Paxlovid, the company's antiviral medication.
Last month, 54 years after the historic Poor People's March on Washington, thousands—including many of my UCS colleagues—gathered in Washington, D.C., for the Poor People's & Low-Wage Workers' Assembly and Moral March on Washington. The march was held by of a broad coalition of organizations, including faith groups, the labor movement, activists, advocates, and scientists, working together across a variety of issues.
Some 80 percent of Turkey’s Gen Z, those born after 2000, say they will not vote for the ruling Justice and Development Party, according to a study by Gezici Research.
Gen Z will make up 11.8 percent of Turkey’s voting adult population by the time the June 2023 elections roll around.
Santiago—“It was a peculiar decision,” Manuela Royo said, trying to explain why she decided to run to become one of the 154 delegates who would draft a new Chilean Constitution. I met Royo at the lavish Former National Congress Building in Santiago where the Constitutional Convention took place. She said she never envisioned herself in politics. It was, she said, water that led her here, and now the Constitution that she helped write establishes access to clean water as a human right. The delegates presented President Gabriel Boric with the proposed Constitution on July 4. Now there is just one more step for the document to become law: It needs to pass in a referendum on September 4.
“The writer and literature Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa has said by way of a sentence that Colombians voted wrong because we elected a former M-19 guerrilla as the country’s new president. ‘If he acts in legality, welcome’ he said with a gesture of skepticism and deep distrust and, as if he had already made his judgment about what is going to happen to Colombia, he dropped his ultimatum by concluding that the election of an ex-guerrilla to the presidency endangered the legality that Colombia has had for years. ‘There is a legality that has been maintained all these years despite the fact that the guerrillas represented something else’, he concluded in his diatribe.
The Nobel Prize winner’s verdict on Colombia may sound good in Madrid, in front of his followers, but not in Bogota. Here his opinion is light, unfair and disrespectful to the 11 million Colombians who exercised their right to vote. His opinion is based on stigma and moral disqualification and turns Colombians who voted for Gustavo Petro into suspicious beings, who cannot be trusted”.
In 2002, John Judis and Ruy Teixeira published The Emerging Democratic Majority. In it, they argued that natural demographic trends would make the long-term dominance of the Democratic Party almost inevitable, a prediction that proved immensely comforting to American liberals. Judis and Teixeira assumed that the Democrats could maintain their enormous majorities among minority voters. That, along with other evidently irreversible trends, like the expansion of higher education, the mass entry of women into the workforce, and the spread of secular, tolerant cultural norms, could be understood as pushing politics in a Democratic direction.
Insulin is an old drug that can be produced as a cheap generic, which is the case almost everywhere else in the world. A monthly supply of insulin in Canada costs $12, in Germany $11, and in Italy $10. In the United States, it costs on average around $100, and in many cases, people are paying several hundred dollars a month for their insulin. This is a tremendous burden on people, especially when they are retired or unable to work because of their medical condition.
The reason that drug companies can get away with charging high prices for an old drug is that they have made modifications, for which they hold patent monopolies. While these modifications may be of limited value, they allow the companies to charge patent monopoly prices, if they can convince doctors to prescribe the modified versions for their patients.
Last week, a€ Post€ front-page article charged that Russia and Iran were “testing U.S. red lines in the Mideast, and that their “provocative” acts were designed to exploit Washington’s preoccupation with Ukraine and China.€ The reference to Russia was particularly gratuitous because the Kremlin’s role in the Middle East has been limited to a military presence in Syria for the past fifty years as Washington was able to exclude Moscow from most diplomatic dealings in the region.€ Russia’s only access to air and naval facilities in the Mediterranean has been in Syria, which has been the case since 1970, a decade before Moscow and Damascus signed their Treaty of Friendship.
Fifty years ago, moreover, Syria was a functioning nation-state able to inflict military setbacks on Israel in the first ten days of the October War of 1973.€ Syria can no longer be considered a functioning nation-state; it can only inflict damage on itself.€ Moreover, Russian President Vladimir Putin has shown signs of impatience with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who lacks the leadership skills of his father, former president Hafez al-Assad.€ The fact that the United States still deploys hundreds of soldiers in Syria creates the possibility of a clash between Russian and American forces; thus far, their deconfliction channel has worked to avoid such conflict.
We live in a time when it's become a boring cliché to say that democracy is under attack. Whether it's an ultra-reactionary Supreme Court, a nationwide Republican assault on voting rights, a MAGA movement that hopes to put an amoral power addict back in the presidency in 2024, a gathering backlash against women's rights and LGBTQ rights, or the very structure of an oligarchical, billionaire-dominated political economy, circumstances in the U.S.—and abroad—are hardly encouraging for people who value democracy and human rights. It seems that things get bleaker every year, so much so that it can be difficult to have any hope at all.
Reproductive rights advocates on Monday formally submitted more than 753,000 signatures in support of a citizen ballot initiative that, if approved in November, would enshrine abortion rights in the Michigan state constitution.
"We'll stop at nothing to make sure people have access to the essential healthcare they deserve."
President Joe Biden confirmed Sunday that his administration is considering declaring a public health emergency to help protect abortion access as Republican-led states—unleashed by the U.S. Supreme Court—move swiftly to ban the procedure outright.
Speaking to reporters, Biden said a public health emergency declaration is a step he's asked "the medical people in the administration to look at." Specifically, the president said he requested guidance on whether he has "the authority to do that and what impact that would have."
Recently, I told my friend Mimi that, only weeks from now, I was returning to Reno to help UNITE-HERE, the hospitality industry union, in the potentially nightmarish 2022 election. “Even though,” I added, “I hate electoral politics.”
Further solidifying the U.S. Republican Party's ties to Hungarian authoritarian leader Viktor Orbán, the American Conservative Union has invited the prime minister to speak at right-wing political activists' annual conference in August.
Orbán will join allies of former President Donald Trump including Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) and Fox News host Sean Hannity—and likely Trump himself—at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) from August 4-7, three months after "CPAC Hungary," the group's auxiliary meeting in Budapest where the prime minister advised conservatives to take control of the U.S. media to increase their power.
San Francisco voted on June 7 to recall its district attorney, Chesa Boudin, a reformer who had challenged the traditional “lock ’em up” policies of big-city prosecutors. The margin was initially reported as a lopsided€ 61%–39% landslide, in what major news media across the country reported as a blow to progressive Democrats.
A New York Times/Siena College poll released Monday indicates that President Joe Biden's support among his own party's base is eroding, with 64% of Democratic voters saying they would prefer a different candidate in 2024.
Asked whether they "think the Democratic Party should renominate Joe Biden as the party's candidate for president in 2024" or pick a different candidate, nearly two-thirds of Democratic respondents opted for the latter while just 26% said the incumbent should be renominated.
The New Ecological and Social People’s Union[2][3] (French: Nouvelle Union populaire écologique et sociale, NUPES[a]) is a left-wing alliance of political parties in France led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon.[4][5] Formed on May Day 2022, the alliance includes La France Insoumise (LFI), the Socialist Party (PS), the French Communist Party (PCF), Europe Ecology – The Greens (EELV), Ensemble! (E!), and Génération.s (G.s), and their respective smaller partners.[6][7] It was the first wide left-wing political alliance since the Plural Left in the 1997 French legislative election.[8] Over 70 dissident candidates who refused the accord still ran.[9]
Government repression isn’t the only threat to free speech, though. Well-funded corporations and individuals have been able to abuse our court system to quash the constitutional rights of those they disagree with, by filing Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation, otherwise known as SLAPPs. These lawsuits aren’t meant to win on the merits—they’re meant to put financial pressure on a defendant, thus quashing their constitutional rights.€
EFF supports action to limit these harassing lawsuits, including passing strong anti-SLAPP laws at both the state and federal level. While California has strong anti-SLAPP protections, many other states don’t. In 2018, we joined forces with other civil society groups to create Protect the Protest, an anti-SLAPP task force to fight against SLAPPs.€
Since then, awareness of the SLAPP problem has grown. In 2020, the Uniform Law Commission published its Uniform Public Expression Protection Act (UPEPA), a model anti-SLAPP bill for states to follow.€
For years, so many in authority knew the scale and severity of the crimes being perpetrated against young British girls but did nothing to stop it. Instead of arresting rapists, officers went to great lengths to hide the grooming gang epidemic. Police often targeted people trying to rescue their children. Furthermore, anyone reporting on the Islamic migrant grooming gang epidemic was often harassed and intimidated by the state.
Rather than taking steps to protect British children, police, social workers, teachers, neighbors, politicians, and the media deliberately downplayed the severity of the crimes perpetrated by the grooming gangs to avoid being accused of “Islamophobia” or racism.
President Biden is hosting an event today at the White House with victims of gun violence to mark the signing of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, and one of the participating high-profile shooting survivors who will attend is former Arizona Congressmember Gabby Giffords, who survived a 2011 assassination attempt. As mass shootings continue to plague the United States, we speak to the directors of “Gabby Giffords Won’t Back Down,” a new documentary premiering this week that follows Giffords as she fights to recover from the 2011 attack, and her subsequent advocacy for gun safety legislation. Giffords was just honored last week with the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her activism. The film follows “the fight that this woman has had to come back herself and then to come back as a public figure fighting to try to do something about the epidemic of gun violence in our country,” says Julie Cohen, co-director of “Gabby Giffords Won’t Back Down.” Former President Barack Obama, who attempted to pass gun safety legislation with Giffords’s help but failed, is featured in the documentary during a moment that qualified as “the most disappointed and the angriest he had ever been as president,” adds fellow co-director Betsy West. Cohen and West also directed “My Name Is Pauli Murray” and the Academy Award-nominated ”RBG.”
Did the Biden officials know what they were doing when they announced a broad expansion of€ export controls...
When Moath al-Alwi found himself in a windowless steel cell in Guantánamo’s Camp 6, he asked his guards for scraps of cardboard. After experiencing years of interrogation and torture, “low-value” detainees like al-Alwi were permitted by authorities during the Obama administration to create art. As the former detainee Mansoor Adayfi describes in his 2021 memoir Don’t Forget Us Here, al-Alwi fashioned the cardboard into a window frame and hung it on his cell wall. He painted it with a view east to Mecca, with “the sun rising over a vast blue sea.”
If it’s your first visit to Guantánamo Bay, you might be forgiven for expecting the world’s most notorious prison site to look more like a garrisoned penal colony than a sleepy suburb in Southern California. But when you realize that the actual detention facility is tucked away in a far corner of this 45-square-mile naval base, and that what you can and cannot see will be determined almost completely by the same US government that invited you to observe the military commissions here, you arrive at the conclusion that your week on this occupied spit of Cuban territory will probably be a little strange.1
Cops kill pets. This is an inarguable fact. None other than the US Department of Justice has declared the (unofficial) War on Dogs to be a law enforcement epidemic. If a cop encounters a family dog while doing cop stuff, chances are the dog is going to die.
Although the Court’s 2021-22 rulings on qualified immunity for police who engage in official misconduct were largely overshadowed by its politically polarizing rulings on abortion, gun ownership and religion, they were no less devastating.
The doctrine of qualified immunity was intended to insulate government officials from frivolous lawsuits, but the real purpose of qualified immunity is to ensure that government officials are not held accountable for official misconduct.
That New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen struck down New York state restrictions on what items its citizens can carry on their bodies, and that supporters of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision see it as offering protection from violence,€ shows the inconsistencies in the very divisions entrenched by the Court.
Gerald Ford noted in a 1974 Presidential address that those realizing that “a government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have” are nonspecialists who “are a lot better economists than most economists care to admit.” Giving the Supreme Court outsize power to override the legislative and executive branches of government has likewise been the sort of blunder in political strategy made by the most devoted political strategists.
How about them dismal, dollar-drenched, danger-free Dems! Part 1 of this two-part series detailed and denounced Democratic Party and “liberal” appeasement of US-American fascism in relation to the fascist insurrection and coup attempt of January 6, 2021. Now we examine the core Dem mission of Keeping People Off the Streets and sheep-dogged into the killing confines of right-tilted US Minority Rule electoral politics in regard to the recent Christian-fascist US Supreme Court’s cancellation of women’s half-century constitutional right to an abortion.
An Actual Fighting Abortion Rights Organization
We have done many, many posts explaining how, unfortunately, it seems the idea of a person owning the things they’ve bought has become rather passe. While in the age of antiquity, which existed entire tens of years ago, you used to be able to own things, these days you merely license them under Ts and Cs that are either largely ignored and clicked through or that are indecipherable, written in the otherwise lost language known as “Lawyer-ese”. The end result is a public that buys things, thinks they retain ownership over them, only to find out that the provider of the things alters them, limits their use, or simply erases them from being.
It amazes me that the narrative is still out there about how China is an “intellectual property thief” and that the US and other western nations need to “convince China to respect intellectual property.” We heard that for decades, but for over a decade now, we’ve been pointing out that China responded to all that scolding by massively ramping up its efforts to obtain patents for Chinese companies, and then using those patents to sue western companies. That is, just as we predicted, all the screaming to pressure China into “respecting IP” was literally handing China a protectionist weapon. Which it’s been using. A lot. To the point that some US officials have started freaking out, and arguing that the US should ignore Chinese attempts to enforce its patents.
A veteran in the BitTorrent scene has resurrected the iconic BitTorrent tracker Demonii. The public tracker, which doesn't host any torrent files, was run by the original YTS group before it was shut down by the MPA. Demonii wasn't targeted by this shutdown and has now been handed over to a new owner, who was surprised to see millions of peers still connecting to it.
Recording industry group BPI has announced that its program to block pirate sites via court injunctions in the UK will expand to mobile networks, starting with industry leader EE. Tests on EE connections currently yield mixed results but given the complex nature of the UK's major mobile networks, coupled with the parameters of existing injunctions, plenty of questions remain unanswered.
So on Saturday night at 2100, I got a notification from my airline that my flight from Wyoming to Denver the next day was 6hrs delayed. It might as well have been canceled because I would then miss my other two flights. So I called the airline and got a refund for the first leg of the journey and hurried to bed. I then woke up at 0200 and was on I80 at 0207 headed for Denver. It took me about 4€½ hours to drive to the airport. I arrived in time to catch what would be my second flight -- to Houston, Texas.
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The third flight is to Panama City, Florida. We board on time. We take off. I dozed off for a bit. I was awoken by a deafening whistling sound. I looked up startled and made eye contact with the flight attendant. She looked very concerned. Then the phone rang and she answered it, had a quick conversation with the pilot. She then announced on the intercom that we were returning to Houston.
Now, I was in row 2. On this plane rows 1 and 2 only have one seat. Accross the isle is the galley. The flight attendant came over to me and the guy in row 1 and in a quiet voice told us we were responsible for opening the emergency exit if landing ended up badly. We were also instructed to help the other passengers and if anything happened to her, to carry her body to safety. We were decompressing and the pilot was dropping altitude.
I found my zen. It wasn't a bad time. Just loud.
When we landed in Houston we found out that around the windshield in front of the pilot, the seal had failed. Once we climbed in altitude this allowed air to rush into the cockpit. Had the pilot not dropped altitude immediately, the oxygen masks would have dropped. The pilot may have permanently damaged her hearing due to the volume of the sound hitting her in the face.
NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has produced the deepest and sharpest infrared image of the distant universe to date. Known as Webb's First Deep Field, this image of galaxy cluster SMACS J0723.3-7327 is overflowing with detail.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.