Many websites related to Linux and open source software have high technical content and often have less attention for the actual use and the things you can do with this operating system. But some of us just have other expectations. As a beginner or every day user in the Linux and Open Source world, you have different information needs than an experienced, highly skilled Linux user or developer. But also Linux users who use their computer for example for content creation, are less interested in the technical backgrounds, and have mostly different needs. In this artcle I give my thoughts on 10 great Linux websites for beginners and everyday users.
First up in the news: Vanessa is finally here, so is the Linux kernel version 5.19, which was published from an M1 Mac by Linus Torvalds
In security and privacy, Sale of over a billion Chinese users’ data found, DuckDuckGo is (finally) blocking Microsoft trackers, and Linux 6.0 to have run-time verification for running on safety critical systems
Then in our Wanderings, Bill is hearing things, Moss is losing power, Joe is soldering on, and Norbert is taming the fox
I have had email communications with Muthukrishnan, Realtek wifi not working, but it does work on a different Linux distribution. He has investigated firmware, but narrowed the problem down to a missing kernel driver. This is part of one of his emails:
The issue appears to be that CONFIG_RTL8XXXU is not set in the kernel config setting. Since the firmware for my laptop is RTL8723BU, it appears to be not loading it at the time of booting.
Calibre is known for being a very efficient eBook manager and with important features to be ranked as one of the best. We can also deploy Calibre Server on Ubuntu 22.04 and thus have a more private management and accessible from anywhere.
One of the main advantages of deploying our eBook server with Calibre is that it will be accessible using the Internet. This will also allow you to share it with family and friends without problems, and finally, you can read your eBooks from the web.
So let’s get started.
PDB i.e. Pod Disruption Budget is a method to make sure the minimum number of Pods are always available for a certain application in the Kubernetes cluster. That is a kind of one-liner for explaining PDB. Let’s dive deeper and understand what is PDB. What does PDB offer? Should I define PDB for my applications? etc.
Opera is a freeware, cross-platform web browser developed by Opera Software. As a Chromium-based browser, Opera offers a clean, modern web browser that is an alternative to the other major players in the Browser race. Opera has created a sleek and lightweight browsing experience using the Blink layout engine. In addition, Opera has built-in features such as an ad blocker, battery saver, and free VPN. With these features, Opera provides users with an efficient browsing experience that is both fast and private. As more and more people are looking for alternatives to the major browsers, Opera is poised to become a leading player in the browser market.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Opera Browser on Linux Mint 21 LTS series that includes the stable, beta, and development (nightly) branch with steps to install, update and remove the browser using the command line terminal.
MySQL is a relational database management system based on SQL (Structured Query Language). It is one of the most widely used database software for several well-known applications. MySQL is used for data warehousing, e-commerce, and logging applications, but web database storage and management is the most commonly used feature. MySQL has been in production use for over 20 years and is considered one of the most secure and reliable database systems. Despite this, it has several drawbacks that should be considered before using it for any mission-critical applications. One such drawback is that it does not support transactions across multiple tables, which can lead to data inconsistency in the event of a failure. Additionally, MySQL does not support some of the more advanced features in other database systems, such as stored procedures and triggers. MySQL is an excellent choice for many applications, but it must be aware of its limitations before using it in a production environment.
In the latest release of MySQL 8.0, the database management system brings new features and security updates. This new release of MySQL adds support for joins with larger data sets, better performance when importing large files, and various improvements to InnoDB, SQL mode, named ‘strict sql_mode,’ which will make MySQL more compliant with the SQL standard. In addition, there are performance enhancements for DML statements and replication and several new security features. With these improvements, MySQL 8.0 provides a more robust and secure platform for managing data.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install MySQL 8.0 on Rocky Linux 9 using the command line terminal with instructions on how to secure the MySQL service, update, and, if necessary, remove.
If you wish to install Akaunting for a demo on a local server or for permanent use on a cloud/hosting VPS server, this article will walk you through the procedures for installing Akaunitng on Ubuntu, Debian, and other comparable Linux distributions.
Akaunting is a free and open-source accounting software accessible on GitHub that runs on PHP and MySQL. As a result, there is no need to utilize any client or install accounting software on every device in a business or household. Once installed, any user who wants to use the Akaunting for a small and medium company or for personal use may access it locally or remotely through the internet and browser.
It has a web interface, comparable to certain WordPress-based websites, and the setup method is likewise similar. As a result, it is not only user-friendly but also a gadget. Yes, it is also compatible with cellphones and tablets.
We will show you how to install Akaunting, a free open-source accounting software, on Ubuntu 22.04/20.04 LTS.
Darkstat is an easy to use, low-resource, cross-platform, web-based network traffic analyzer application. For managing Linux servers, this is a great tool. It can analyze network traffic, calculates statistics concerning usage, and serves these reports over the HTTPS.
This tool has an integrated web server. Darkstat also supports IPv6 protocol and asynchronous DNS resolution. Because of low-resource usage, it can keep running in the background and collect data and then present that data in a comprehensible format in its integrated web server.
Let’s take a look at how to install Darkstat and then we will get into its uses.
Chromebook runs by ChromeOS, which is completely different from other operating systems. So those who are shifted to Chromebook from Windows or Mac need to know some common tips to improve their productivity for operating Chromebook.
For instance, you might want to save some files on your Chromebook. To do this, you have to know how to save and retrieve files from your Chromebook. This is why in this guide, we are going to show a simple trick to manage and access files on Chromebook. We think this topic is essential when you are using a Chromebook for work or school purposes.
So allow us only a few minutes to learn how to save files and retrieve files from the drive on your ChromeOS.
Good news for Linux and Steam Deck fans, the yuzu team have worked to bring the installer for the Nintendo Switch Emulator over to Linux properly.
Horizon Chase Turbo is a very highly rated retro racing game from developer AQUIRIS and today it sees a huge free upgrade. This is to celebrate the 7th anniversary of the franchise.
Hollow Knight developer Team Cherry has announced that an update due to go live on Monday, August 15th will bring a much needed change to the saving system.
Valheim is due to get a huge upgrade at some point, which most players are now waiting on and Iron Gate have given the smallest of teasers on it again. Their team took a bit of a break recently they mentioned in a new update post, but they said they're now back at their desks working away on the next update.
Love Resident Evil and want to get a whole lot of it? Humble Bundle have put up the Resident Evil Decades of Horror bundle and it's a pretty full collection. Going over each game I'll list the Steam Deck Verified rating plus either Native Linux status or ProtonDB ranking so you've got the full picture.
While I was briefly away camping, Valve released a few Steam Deck Beta updates so here's a round-up of what's new in case you also missed it.
This feature is possible with the support by Thunar's lead developers - Alexander Schwinn (alexxcons), Sergios - Anestis Kefalidis (SKefalidis) and Yongha Hwang (MShrimp4).
Though KDE’s goal-setting process is still ongoing, contributors have started working on Plasma accessibility in a major way! As of Plasma 5.26, all Plasma widgets will be fully compatible and usable with a screen reader, thanks to Fushan Wen with assistance from Harald Sitter!
It’s been three months since my last post about the ongoing transition to KDE Frameworks 6, so another update is long overdue given how much has happened since.
QML Porting
While the main attention had been on porting build system and C++ code so far, meanwhile QML code has also moved into focus. QML code is generally harder to port, due to the lack of compile-time checking and the lack of conditional code based on the Qt version.
Only seeing mistakes at runtime means for every single change we need to ensure to manually exercise the affected code paths. That is much easier to do if everything else is fully working, ie. in the current Qt 5 codebase.
That however is only an option for changes that result in code that works with both Qt 5 and Qt 6. Changes that only work with Qt 6 can’t be done at all yet due to the lack of version-based conditional code (such as the C++ prepocessor gives us).
The 4rd update of Sparky 6 – 6.4 is out.
It is a quarterly updated point release of Sparky 6 “Po Tolo” of the stable line. Sparky 6 is based on and fully compatible with Debian 11 “Bullseye”.
The MI05-00K is a Mini ITX board specialized for embedded networks applications and developed by Jetway. This motherboard comes with an Elkhart Lake Quad-processor enabled with support for SSD storage, LTE and WIFI.
The processor found in this motherboard is the Intel Celeron J6412 Elkhart Lake quad-core processor (4C/4T) which features a base frequency of 2.0 and a max frequency of 2.6GHz. The motherboard only provides one DDR4 SODIMM slot (up to 16GB @3200MHz.).
Yesterday, SB Components Ltd launched an Automation Kit platform based on the Raspberry Pi Pico with Long Range support. This LoRa based platform can be used in embedded applications that require long-range connectivity and low power such as smart agricultural apps, smart homes, etc.
The Automation Kit Platform consists of four products, an 4-channel relay board based on Lora and RP2040 MCU, an 8-channel relay board based on LoRa and RP2040 MCU, an USB Dongle based on LoRa and RP2040 MCU and a Raspberry Pi HAT based on LoRa.€
Since joining the Raspberry Pi Foundation as a Code Club Community Manager for Scotland earlier this year, I have seen first-hand the passion, dedication, and commitment of the Scottish community to support the digital, personal, and social skills of young people.
James knew immediately that he wanted to use Raspberry Pi Pico for his VK-Pocket camera project. Moreover, composite video out, which Pico supports, was essential for driving the CRT (cathode ray tube) display he culled from an old video camera. “Raspberry Pi Pico was my first choice for this build. I love these things”, he exclaims! “They’re a full Linux PC in a microcontroller form factor. I’ve put them in all sorts of builds, from animatronic heads to robotic insects.” [Yes, we want to hear more about these projects, too - Ed].
Flight paths are pre-planned on a tablet and parsed on board by the Raspberry Pi. Each flight lasts 60 minutes and the drones have an operating altitude of 300-500 metres. Cruising speed is 50km per hour, and they’re capable of scanning a 184km2. Constant contact with the base station is maintained and the drones have a 100km range.
The drones are 102cm x 59cm x 59cm and weigh 2kg. They cost around €1000 to build. They are designed to be launched like a paper plane. You just throw them out into the air and they take flight.
The one I had the most fun making was the dynamic bicycle headlight. I strapped a battery-operated projector to the handlebars of my bicycle and wired up a Raspberry Pi to read a sensor on the wheel and display my speed in the projector’s beam down ahead of me. The best part was when I was troubleshooting it, I had to log into its Raspberry Pi wirelessly via SSH. I thought it was crazy to be remotely logging into my own bicycle to get diagnostics and upload new code.
The rollback journal is a simple trick to simulate atomicity and isolation and to provide durability to a database. Simple tricks are the best kind of tricks when you write a database so it's a great place to start.
When you write documentation, whether that's for an open source project or a technical writing project, you should have two goals: The document should be written well, and the document should be easy to read. The first is addressed by clear writing skills and technical editing. The second can be addressed with a few simple changes to an HTML document.
HyperText Markup Language, or HTML, is the backbone of the internet. Since the dawn of the "World Wide Web" in 1994, every web browser uses HTML to display documents and websites. And for almost as long, HTML has supported the stylesheet, a special addition to an HTML document that defines how the text should appear on the screen.
You can write project documentation in plain HTML, and that gets the job done. However, plain HTML styling may feel a little spartan. Instead, try adding a few simple styles to an HTML document to add a little pizzazz to documentation, and make your documents clearer and easier to read.
I am incited to respond at first because way “back in the day” I wrote A Primer to Postmodernity and used it as a text in my modernity/postmodernity class in both pre-millennial and millennial worlds. With all impunity I concocted a Europe travel program “Is This a Postmodern World?” and that went on for 15 years. I double downed on all that with A Postmodern Reader, which Linda Hutcheon and I edited, and then Postmodernism: The Key Figures, edited with Hans Bertens. From 1991 to 2009, I was the SUNY Press series editor for Postmodern Culture.
So, yeah, I nourished what Saad calls a parasite. But I didn’t think what I was describing was a parasite but rather a kind of disclosure of what finding truth and reality amounted to, how reason was inside and not outside our life-worlds, and how we put words to world, how unreliable that linkage was, and how terribly bad we were at facing the consequences of all that. It’s sad to tragic that we are more easily persuaded by straw man tactics than engaged in pursuing the politics of such tactics and then setting out to do the hard work of seeing ourselves and our world as clearly as we can. If I didn’t think we needed to re-tailor our thinking on basic foundational levels and, most importantly, that it could be done, I’d tend my garden as Voltaire suggested.
It just so happens I have a little something I wrote a while ago about Mr. McCullough.€ It’s from the book about unlearning white supremacy that I am finally close to finishing.€ It’s part of a section on the transmission of white values.€
The path now led gently down to the headlands above the North Sea, a blue plain stretching towards a horizon flecked by oiler tankers. To our left Whitby Abbey, the setting of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, glowered, as Gothic ruins tend to do even on a sometimes sunny day like this one.
Alan’s concentration was elsewhere. He was on his phone to a piper. He’d called him two hours earlier with an urgent request: could he identify a melody that Alan, now fifty-six years old, had heard repeated dozens of times twenty-nine years earlier when he had led a group of cyclists from Land’s End on the Southwest tip of England to John o’ Groats at the very top of Scotland? After ten grueling days on the bicycles, Alan had secretly organized for two pipers to surprise the cyclists by playing the peloton over the last rise and down to the sea. That euphoric feeling of ceremonial arrival had stayed with Alan lo these three decades and the tune had too. I suspected that the tune was the feeling, and vice-versa.
Julius Eastman was good at turning insults into titles for his work. Example: In 1977, Eastman was 36 and, though respected in avant-garde circles for the boldly experimental music he’d been making for more than a decade, was struggling to sustain himself in New York City. “If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?” his mother asked him, and Eastman used the question as the name for his latest piece, composed at the request of conductor Lukas Foss for the Brooklyn Philharmonia (later upgraded to the Brooklyn Philharmonic). If his mother’s taunt was only teasing—a loving maternal prod—Eastman used it for a fiercer purpose. Over the entirety of its 20-minute-plus duration, the composition states and restates the chromatic scale in blunt scoring—hammering and hammering, relentlessly. It feels less like an inquiry, teasing or otherwise, than a nearly physical assault. The title, a question founded on imposed expectations, imposes expectations of its own, setting up the listener for a piece of musical rumination or commentary. Yet the music provides something altogether different: a form of aural violence that batters the brain into numb submission.
National Education Association president Becky Pringle on Thursday warned that the U.S. teacher shortage has spiraled into a "five-alarm crisis," with nearly 300,000 teaching and support positions left unfilled and policymakers taking desperate—and in some cases, questionable—measures to staff classrooms.
Pringle told ABC News that teachers unions have been warning for years that chronic disinvestment in schools has placed untenable pressure on educators as they face low pay and overcrowded classrooms.
Reading is, after all, a matter of decoding symbols in a way that makes them meaningful to the reader, which ideally approximates - but can never identically reproduce - the way they were meaningful to the writer who coded them.
BUT The internet has made the entire world a library with no exits and no supervisors.
The global chip shortage has not made the life of the electronic design engineer an easy one, as products have been designed around whatever parts are available rather than the first choices. This has manifested itself in some unexpected ways, including as [CNX software] investigates, products whose multiple-choice bill of materials has led to mistakes being made in manufacture.
We’ve seen enough DIY robotic platforms here on Hackaday to know that most of them take the literal and figurative path of least resistance. That is, they tend to be some type of wheeled rover. But of course, there are plenty of other forms of locomotion, should you want to take on something a bit more challenging.
According to Standford and NVidia researchers, VR adoption is slowed by the bulky headsets required. They want to offer a slim solution. A SIGGRAPH paper earlier this year lays out their plan or you can watch the video below. There’s also a second video, also below, covers some technical questions and answers.
In a world where it seems like everyone’s face is glued to a device screen, the idea that wireless service might be anything other than universal seems just plain silly. But it’s not, as witnessed by vast gaps in cell carrier coverage maps, not to mention the 70% of the planet covered by oceans. The lack of universal coverage can be a real pain for IoT applications, which is a gap that satellite-based IoT services aim to fill.
Almost all of the baby foods that parents in the United States feed their children, whether purchased at the store or prepared at home, contain detectable amounts of toxic heavy metals that can impair brain development, according to new research published Thursday, which led to renewed demands for improved regulation.
"Every day that the FDA delays is another day babies' developing brains are harmed by toxic chemicals."
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is urging states and localities to beef up security around proprietary devices that connect to the Emergency Alert System — a national public warning system used to deliver important emergency information, such as severe weather and AMBER alerts. The DHS warning came in advance of a workshop to be held this weekend at the DEFCON security conference in Las Vegas, where a security researcher is slated to demonstrate multiple weaknesses in the nationwide alert system.
Israel’s foremost purveyor of malware, NSO Group, has undergone nearly a yearlong reckoning. A leak last summer appeared to show NSO customers were routinely targeting journalists, activists, members of opposition parties, and, in one case, the ex-wife of a Dubai ruler.
The removal of features from Autodesk products would appear to be turning into something of a routine at this point, with the announced removal of local simulations the latest in this series. Previously Autodesk had severely cut down the features available with a Personal Use license, but these latest changes (effective September 6) affect even paying customers, no matter which tier.
However, sometimes companies struggle with understanding or feeling fully protected by those policies. According to a recent study from Blackberry and Corvus Insurance, a high percentage of companies said they would hesitate to get into business with organizations that aren't covered by cyber insurance, recognizing its importance. However, just 14 percent of small and medium-size businesses have policies that cover over $600,000, restrictions that led more than half of respondents to say they hoped for more financial assistance from the government, particularly when attacked by a nation state. Many companies said there's a lack of transparency from some firms about what is actually covered by their policies, which are constantly getting more expensive.
For much of the last decade, Vladimir Putin has attempted to compensate for various shortcomings (like a less sophisticated real world military) by launching cyber and propaganda attacks on much of the world. And while this, for a while, resulted in a mythology that Russia was in a league of its own when it comes to hacking and cybersecurity, the reality isn’t nearly that exciting.
Versions of a cross-platform instant messenger application focused on the Chinese market known as 'MiMi' have been trojanized to deliver a new backdoor (dubbed rshell) that can be used to steal data from Linux and macOS systems.
There are usually a few cyberthreat trends that seem to emerge as important themes at each year’s Black Hat conference. And this year, the increase in Linux threats may be one of them.
CISA and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have released a joint Cybersecurity Advisory (CSA), #StopRansomware: Zeppelin Ransomware, to provide information on Zeppelin Ransomware. Actors use Zeppelin Ransomware, a ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS), against a wide range of businesses and critical infrastructure organizations to encrypt victims’ files for financial gain.
CISA has added two new vulnerabilities to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog, based on evidence of active exploitation. These types of vulnerabilities are a frequent attack vector for malicious cyber actors and pose significant risk to the federal enterprise. Note: to view the newly added vulnerabilities in the catalog, click on the arrow in the "Date Added to Catalog" column, which will sort by descending dates.ââ¬Â¯
This vulnerability could allow a remote attacker to obtain sensitive information. For updates addressing lower severity vulnerabilities, see the Cisco Security Advisories page.
Security gaps in older, unprotected Windows desktop versions of Boeing’s Onboard Performance Tool (OPT) could make certain Electronic Flight Bags (EFB) more susceptible to attack. In particular, OPT’s use of plain text configuration files and SQLite databases, means an attacker with physical access to an EFB could modify files directly on the device.
While the likelihood of exploiting such gaps is low given existing regulations governing the use and employment of EFBs and Crew Resource Management procedures, if data modification occurs, and the resulting miscalculations are not detected during the crew’s required cross check or verification process, an aircraft could land on a runway too short or take off at incorrect speeds potentially resulting in a tail strike or runway excursion.
Boeing released OPT version 4.70 and issued a service bulletin to operators to enhance the application’s security features and minimize the potential for manipulating OPT data. It is important that operators employing EFB solutions, including those that contain OPT, harden their devices and implement physical access controls in accordance with relevant aviation regulations.
For more than a decade I have been thundering against a lot of the bad practices that have permeated the software development industry, one such practice is to blindly trust code when using third party libraries, frameworks or packages. For about the same amount of time I have listened to all the reasons why time is money and we need to build something quickly, and we haven't got the time to do security or X, Y and Z. But alas, now such companies are beginning to pay the price, a very costly and extremely damaging price!
The Australian Federal Court has fined Google $60 million for misleading consumers about collection and use of personal data on Android phones between January 2017 and December 2018.
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission initiated court action over the issue in October 2019. The court found that Google LLC and Google Australia Pty Ltd, which together make up Google, had breached Australian consumer law.
The facility is in the Northern Territory. It’s the occasionally controversial spy facility that Aussies and Yanks use to help battlefield soldiers and pilots all over the globe map out their strategies. It’s Pine Gap, a six-part Netflix series that streamed for one season (2018). Working together to keep Us safe — and don’t you forget that, as Duane “Lump It” Clarridge used to say to the world on behalf of the gloves-off element in government.
The series features secrets — theirs and ours — as they put it. Obama once said he loves being in the trenches with the Aussies — a little patronizing platitudinous reference to the Anzac legend — because he reckons they have Our backs. The series says otherwise. There’s a mole in the midst as the group operates to stop a terrorist plot and the aggression of China in the South China Sea. Also, presumably to be provocative, there’s an “unlikely” coupling of a African-Amerian intelligence officer and an Aussie Girl that comes across to the knowing as a homage-paying to the brassy days of Brisbane circa 1942 when racism caused a major riot, and some details of the scene tell of Black GIs moving off in the night from bars with white women. (See my flash fiction story, “The Battle of Brisbane,” that depicts the scene,)
Unity partners with CACI International. Unity was awarded an exciting three-year multi-million dollar contract to Advance the Development of Smart Human Machine Interfaces by CACI International. This win is the single largest Digital Twin Solutions deal for Unity to date and is a strategic deal that helps to solidify Unity as the preferred real-time 3D platform for future systems design and simulation programs across the US Government.
Two out of twelve official history books in Turkey contain questionable content. This was revealed by the exiled Turkish journalist Abdullah Bozkurt in the Middle East Forum.
Tom Engelhardt ponders whether we will find some way to write America's story that won’t end in the fall not just of this imperial power but of humanity itself?
Russia denounced Zelensky’s demand as irrational.
Last week, Mediazona reported that Kremlin-linked catering tycoon Evgeny Prigozhin was personally recruiting Russian convicts to fight as mercenaries in Ukraine. In the words of one inmate, Prigozhin offered “not only money, but acquittal and a clean record” to convicts who agreed to enlist in the Wagner Group — a notorious private military company that he is said to finance.
On the morning of February 24, thousands of Russian troops poured into Ukraine in a full-blown invasion. Pavel Filatiev was one of them. The 33-year-old paratroop spent two months on the front line before resigning from the army for health reasons. Now, he openly opposes the war. In a new book titled “ZOV” (after the symbols painted on Russian military vehicles), Filatiev offers an inside look at the state of the Russian army in the lead-up to the war and details his experience in the early days of the invasion. The following translated excerpts from his book were first published (in Russian) by the investigative journalism outlet iStories.€
Especially since the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by frenzied supporters of Donald Trump, most of the “new civil war” talk has focused on far-right groups like those involved in the attack, and on the armed militias, estimated to be about 30,000 strong, that tend to identify as conservative nationalist, Christian nationalist, or white supremacist.€ Many of their members are war veterans, current or former police officers, or security personnel, and they know how to use the weapons of war.€ Of course, some leftists also have a capacity for organized violence. They have not been much in evidence lately, but one assumes that if a new civil war begins, they will make their presence felt.
We need to talk sensibly about the potential of a nation like the U.S. for serious political violence, but this isn’t easy to do so.€ “It can’t happen here” is obviously too glib and complacent, while “It will happen here” is alarmist and demoralizing.€ The questions that most need thoughtful discussion are these: € What are the most important causes of serious political violence in wealthy nations like the United States? € Can these conditions be altered so as to make civil war less likely? € If so, how do we go about preventing the violence?
Peace activists around the world often choose August 6th and 9th each year to grieve anew the human suffering and devastation caused by dropping atomic bombs on the undefended Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which lacked military significance. Among other things these atomic attacks were ‘geopolitical crimes’ of ultimate terror, with scant combat justification, and intended mainly as a warning to Soviet leaders not to defy the West in the peace diplomacy at the end of World War II.
These August dates marking the utter destruction of these two cities are treated as events giving rise to what has been widely known as the nuclear age. This awful beginning can never be forgotten or redeemed, although ever since the explosions in 1945 the solemnity of these occasions has been overshadowed outside of Japan by widespread fears that a nuclear war might occur at some point and a quiet rage continues to build around the world that the nuclear weapons states, above all the U.S., have stubbornly defiantly refused to take steps to fulfill pledges to seek a reliable path to nuclear disarmament in good faith.
The press largely plays along, conditioned to the rhythms of mass slaughter. Gaza is being bombed because Gaza was bombed before and emerged from the rubble and craters. The question of why is rarely asked. Of course, Gaza is being bombed for the same reasons as last year, for the same objectives as the years before that.
Yet the objectives for the bombing of Gaza will never be realized. Gaza cannot be eliminated. Gaza will exist. Therefore it must always be bombed. The question is not why. But, like some macabre moveable feast, only when. Is it time? Time to bomb Gaza again? It must be. Yes, look, there’s the bomblight! It came early this year.
Israel's latest military assault on the Gaza Strip—codenamed Operation Breaking Dawn—spanned three days in early August and killed at least 44 Palestinians, including 16 children. According to the Israeli government, the attack was a "preemptive" operation against the Palestinian Islamic Jihad group—which is as creative an excuse as any for spontaneously bombing people for no apparent reason.
The benefits of democracy in the United States have never been shared equally, despite ongoing rhetoric claiming otherwise. African Americans, women, some immigrant groups, the formerly incarcerated and other marginalized populations have, at different times, been denied equal citizenship.
In the 60s I attended high school with Zionists who taught me about “the land without a people for the people without a land” and other lies.
It was not until after I graduated high school and then met college students in the 70s from other countries like South Africa, Iran and Algeria, that I learned the truth about Palestine.
It’s an admittedly perverse hobby likely driven by my own history of childhood trauma and the resulting need to gain some sense of control over the horrors of a violently uncontrollable universe, but it also ultimately drove me to become a downright evangelical anti-imperialist and anarchist once I realized the very basic fact that states kill. It is their most defining attribute. A monopoly on the use of grotesque behavior and the insanity of war is how they justify their very existence. All of them, in ways big and small. Not one of them is special. Every team in this blood sport sucks.
But I can honestly say that in my 34 years as a compulsive antiwar nerd, I have never seen a war more horrifically insane than the rapidly expanding mess in Ukraine. There have been plenty of wars that are more violent. There are about a dozen raging in Africa as we speak that make the carnage of Bucha look downright quaint by comparison, but I’ve never in my lifetime seen a war that is more pointlessly dangerous.
Graphic by MintPress News\ By Kit Klarenberg / MintPress News By now, many will be familiar with Project€ MKULTRA. For decades, the CIA conducted highly unethical experiments on humans in order…
This latest disaster – the largest oil fire in Cuba’s history – comes at a time when Cuba is currently undergoing an energy crisis due to soaring global fuel costs, as well as over-exploited and obsolete infrastructure. The raging fire will undoubtedly further exacerbate the electricity outages that Cubans are suffering from as a result of the on-going energy crisis that is occurring in the middle of one of the hottest summers on record globally.
Almost immediately, the Cuban government requested international assistance from other countries, particularly its neighbors that have experience in handling oil-related fires. Mexico and Venezuela responded immediately and with great generosity. Mexico sent 45,000 liters of firefighting foam in 16 flights, as well as firefighters and equipment. Venezuela sent firefighters and technicians, as well as 20 tons of foam and other chemicals.
Four€ of the eight tanks at the storage facility have been€ impacted€ by these fires. By August 8, Matanzas Governor Mario Sabines Lorenzo also€ confirmed€ that€ three tanks€ had been compromised. Clouds of dust now hover over the island. Elba Rosa Pérez Montoya, Cuba’s minister of Science, Technology, and Environment (CITMA), said that scientists from various backgrounds were monitoring the situation to see if the smoke resulting from the fire will lead to any negative health effects for the residents of the surrounding areas. As of that point, she€ said, “We have no evidence that there are effects on human health.” Nonetheless, strange substances have been detected in the water supplies in Yumurí Valley, Matanzas. Diosdado Vera, an 89-year-old farmer,€ showed€ journalist Arnaldo Mirabal Hernández the unusual color and odor of the water in an old bathtub that serves as the water source for her cows. “There are approximately 3,200 particles in the air right now,” said CITMA Minister Pérez Montoya. “The clouds have sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide, among other substances that are falling on Matanzas, Mayabeque, and Havana.” Meanwhile, Pérez Montoya€ said€ that a team of scientists is investigating the strange substances found in the Yumurí Valley.
This tragedy has also had immediate repercussions for the entire population in the province of Matanzas and the whole island of Cuba since it affects their€ electricity supply€ and access to health care, which already are strained under the weight of the U.S. blockade, due to lack of availability of spare parts and scarcity of medicines in Cuba, respectively.
Not so fast. Many events continue to demonstrate the opposite. Take, for example, the Arab League two-day meeting in Cairo on July 31 – August 1. The meeting was largely dominated by discussions on Palestine and concluded with statements that called on Arab countries to reactivate the Arab boycott of Israel, until the latter abides by international law.
The strongest language came from the League’s Assistant Secretary-General who called for solidarity with the Palestinian people by boycotting companies that support the Israeli occupation.
Anytime someone’s accused of “exploiting civil unrest to recruit followers,” there’s likely some Red-baiting involved.€ € If you hear about people “known for swooping into town and leeching off of existing…grassroots efforts across the country,” you’re probably hearing more of the same. These are variations of the old “outside agitators” theme, first directed (I think) at communists (or alleged communists) such as the Freedom Riders, swooping down from the north on segregated southern communities and “exploiting” black unrest to further their own (communist) cause in the early 1960s.
Obviously, those making such accusations do not embrace the Marxian dictum that the fruit of the battle is not in the immediate result of the struggle, but in the increasing unity of those struggling—around truly revolutionary politics. Or the Leninist dictum that the revolutionary party becomes involved in all kinds of struggles, on the premise that the masses learn through such struggles how capitalism is the fundamental problem, and how it needs to be overthrown. At least they do so if guided by revolutionary leadership.
High rates of gun violence in the U.S. result from several enabling factors, including Supreme Court decisions conflating the historical reliance on state militias with the unrestrained “constitutional right” to bear arms; Congress’ reluctance to pass effective gun control legislation; easy availability of guns and manufacturers’ effective promotion of high caliber weapons; and parents’ lenient behavior towards their children’s possession of arms.
Gun violence is the leading cause of death for children and young adults in the U.S. According to researchers at the University of Michigan, deaths related to the use of firearms increased 30 percent between 2019 and 2020, overtaking car accidents as the No. 1 cause of death among them. The country is now, virtually a war zone.
To the River Alma
Because I was wet from biking in the rain, I decided to search for a taxi to drive me, my bicycle, and my bags to the battlefields of the Alma River, which are along the Crimean Black Sea coast.
The state has tended to stand down while a neighborhood is roiled with xenophobic violence. When it does move in, after the destruction, removal of people from their homes and killing have stopped, it usually arrives to arrest migrants rather than the perpetrators of the attacks. It is overwhelmingly impoverished and working-class African and Asian migrants who must face this pincer movement from the mob and the police.
The severity of the situation in South Africa first came to global attention in May 2008 when€ xenophobic violence, sometimes intersecting with ethnic sentiment,€ took 62 lives. At the time, the country was ruled by Thabo Mbeki, a man with deep and genuine Pan-African commitments. But by the end of 2007, Jacob Zuma’s path to the presidency was clear, and the ethnic chauvinism he had introduced into the public sphere was rampant. The limited social support offered by the state was increasingly understood to be tied to identities such as ethnicity, nationality and claims to be part of long-established communities.
One year after the Taliban seized power again in Afghanistan, we look at the new government’s crackdown on women’s rights while millions of Afghans go hungry. We speak to journalist Matthieu Aikins, who visited the capital Kabul for the first time since the U.S. evacuation one year ago. He writes the country is being “kept on humanitarian life support” in his recent article for The New York Times Magazine. The Biden administration’s economic sanctions are causing Afghanistan to spiral into a financial crisis, making the U.S. “at once both the largest funder of humanitarian efforts in Afghanistan and one of the main causes of the humanitarian crisis with these sanctions,” says Aikins.
Amid heightened global fears of a nuclear war or accidental catastrophe, Veterans for Peace this week urged President Joe Biden to review its recommendations for U.S. policy related to weapons of mass destruction.
"Our Nuclear Posture Review is a blueprint for a world of peace and cooperation."
A jury in California has convicted a former worker at Twitter of spying for Saudi Arabia by providing the kingdom private information about Saudi dissidents. The spying effort led to the arrest, torture and jailing of Abdulrahman al-Sadhan, who ran an anonymous satirical Twitter account. His sister, Areej al-Sadhan, and the lawyer for the family, Jim Walden, are calling on the Biden administration to push for his release. “The brutality of the Saudi officials have no limits,” says Areej al-Sadhan. “Twitter and other social media companies have more than a little responsibility for what’s happening, not just with respect to Abdulrahman’s case and the case of other disappeared Saudi human rights activists and outspoken dissidents, but across a much broader array of misconduct,” says Walden.
As soon as today, President Biden is expected to sign into law a budget reconciliation bill with historic climate provisions. Writing these words brings an almost surreal mixture of sheer joy and relief that I know many of you share. Yes, the bill has some real flaws and there’s lots more that will be needed in the years to come; but for today, let’s savor this long-awaited and hard-fought progress, and give thanks for the tremendous effort of so many millions of people that it’s taken to secure it.
First among forces pushing masses of people northward is the environmental crisis. The role of climate change in reducing soil productivity and food availability and in predisposing already beleaguered people to migrate is of great concern.
One assumption here is that capitalist systems of production and consumption have been central to causing the climate to change for the worse. Another is the need for war on capitalism so as to stave off more climate change and cope with its fallout. That hasn’t happened in the industrialized northern countries.
Many of the desert plants do indeed resemble ocean creatures: coral-like cactus and urchin-like succulents. Although it is commonly thought of as desolate and emptiness, the high desert steppe is incredibly abundant and alive. 350 species of wildlife and insects depend just on sagebrush herself.
The sagebrush sea is one of the largest continuous landscape types in North America, but only 5% of the area receives protection at the federal level, making it the least protected landscape in the USA.
As news of record-breaking heat around the world makes its way onto our screens, it’s clear some heat waves are made to matter more than others. The general dearth of TV news reporting on climate disruption in the Global South is particularly stark when it comes to heat waves, a conversation that is centered around Britain and Europe, as opposed to India and other non-Western countries.
In a single week in July, more than 100 million Americans, from Massachusetts to Arizona, were under excessive heat warnings or advisories as temperatures soared into the triple digits. Thousands were forced to evacuate their homes in California as the Oak Fire burned near Yosemite National Park. And at least 100 people had to be rescued when record-level rains flooded St. Louis, Mo. This article originally appeared in Nexus Media News and was made possible by a grant from the Open Society Foundations.
While welcoming U.S. House lawmakers' passage of the Inflation Reduction Act on Friday, climate campaigners and some progressive lawmakers said the $740 billion bill does not do nearly enough to address the worsening climate emergency.
"This bill is not perfect. It contains some troubling provisions, including some that risk expanding fossil fuel extraction and use."
Scientists have been underestimating how rapidly the Arctic is heating up compared to the Earth as a whole, according to a new study which found the region is growing hotter nearly four times faster than the global average.
"We were frustrated by the fact that there's this saying that the Arctic is warming twice as fast as the globe. But when you look at the data, you can easily see that it is close to four."
A major exporter of U.S. liquefied natural gas is “seeking to greenwash” its operations in order to portray gas exports as a climate solution and clear the way for further expansion, according to a new report.
Global demand for gas has soared in the wake of Russia’s war in Ukraine, sparking a scramble by U.S. gas exporters to increase export volumes, with the backing of the Biden administration. But building out LNG infrastructure to address an energy crisis is at odds with governments simultaneously trying to slash emissions to address the climate emergency.
Climate and Indigenous activists on Friday applauded the reinstatement of an Obama-era moratorium prohibiting new coal leases on all public lands until after the completion of a thorough environmental review.
"The coal leasing program on public lands is harmful to wildlife, waterways, our fragile climate, and taxpayers' pocketbooks."
Clearcuts along the McKenzie River wihtin the perimeter of the Holiday Farm Fire.€ Look at the lower right corner for the blue color of Cougar Reservior in both images. Note the green (unburned or lightly burned) in the northeast corner of the burn perimeter where ther is no significant logging evident.
Most of the area within the fire’s perimeter had been extensively logged, providing an excellent actual life model of why “fuel reductions” and “active forest management” are ineffective when there is extreme fire weather. Between September 8 and 9th, the fire grew to over 105,000 acres, driven by high winds. Here is a link to a video taken on September 10 of the community of Blue River, which was destroyed by the blaze.
Without the support of a single Republican, Democrats in the U.S. House on Friday gave final passage to a $740 billion piece of legislation that includes historic investments in renewable energy development, a minimum tax on large corporations, and a landmark requirement for Medicare to directly negotiate the prices of a subset of prescription drugs.
Democratic proponents of the bill and outside groups have hailed the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) as the most significant climate action measure ever passed by U.S. lawmakers, even though the package contains substantial handouts to the fossil fuel industry alongside the slew of tax incentives and subsidies for green energy that could substantially curb greenhouse gas emissions.
One of the nation’s biggest residential “clean energy” lenders has suspended making loans to homeowners in Missouri, citing economic conditions and a new state law that mandated more consumer protections and oversight.
Ygrene Energy Fund, based in California, said it will also stop lending in California, but will continue lending to homeowners in Florida, where it can make loans for wind and hurricane protection, a more viable business. No other states have large residential Property Assessed Clean Energy programs, although dozens of states allow them for commercial borrowers.
It’s probably not a huge coincidence that Financial Awareness Day, August 14, is also the anniversary of the Social Security Act (SSA). The SSA was signed by President Roosevelt in 1935 and eventually established unemployment, retirement, and health care benefits, along with support options for the disabled and more. Both Financial Awareness Day and the SSA draw attention to the importance of financial health, giving you a chance to create a plan that helps you stay out of debt and enjoy retirement one day — instead of worrying about bills.
Russia’s use of “parallel imports” to make up for lost supply chains could cause an electronics shortage in the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU), according to distributors and retailers who spoke to Kommersant.
Compared to what?
Still, one signal that something really good must be in the nonsensically titled Inflation Reduction Act is the fact that no Republican senators voted for it. Nowadays, the extreme right has the entire Republican edifice on its hands and knees, almost in a fetal position in a deadly chokehold, and they’re not about to risk voting for anything that smacks of help for ordinary Americans. Plus, as for climate-type legislation, they detest mention of global warming. It gives ‘em the willies.
The big issue here is that corporate profits are not a well-defined concept. There are a thousand issues that arise in determining profit, which depend to a substantial extent on judgement calls by accountants. Depreciation of capital is the most obvious problem, but there are many others.
While profits are something that we cannot see, returns to shareholders can be easily seen. This is simply the increase in market capitalization, plus whatever money is paid out in dividends. This information is readily available on dozens of financial websites.
The middle class was an opaque shade designed to cover real class differences existing in the United States. Much of the Left had always said as much, but their argument was diminished in the wake of World War Two when Washington and Wall Street, and Big Labor paid off the white working man with decent salaries and a good chance of a life with more than the basics needed to exist. Indeed, this is when the middle class became the popular notion it still is in some quarters of US society. The working class had disappeared into the suburbs and were resurrected in the media and their own minds as the new middle class. The ruling elites looked on approvingly while simultaneously encouraging this belief and continuing their never-ending chase for maximum profit.
Everything was good in the land. A polity existed that ensured social stability and focused on the personal much more than the political. Sociologists from Vance Packard to C. Wright Mills examined and discussed this middle class in books discussing their easy manipulation by advertisers and the goods they sold. Some of those goods were to make tasks easier—washing machines and dryers, power tools, power lawn mowers—and some were to enhance leisure—televisions, hi-fis, air-conditioning. All of them were designed to make lots of money for those who owned and ran the industries manufacturing these goods.
Wisconsin Lieutenant Governor Mandela Barnes formally secured a key Democratic nomination in his bid for the US Senate Tuesday. The win for Barnes came after three top Democratic rivals, who had spent roughly $25 million on their campaigns, acknowledged in late July that Barnes was ahead, folded their campaigns, and endorsed the lieutenant governor.
Days before Russian troops poured into Ukraine in a full-scale invasion in late February, 400 deputies in the State Duma voted to ratify an agreement on “friendship, cooperation, and mutual assistance” between the Russian Federation and the self-declared Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics. The document would become one of Russia’s formal justifications for its “special military operation” (though the pact didn’t take effect until after the invasion began). The lawmakers who endorsed the agreement won their parliamentary seats in September 2021, which were the first elections in a decade that weren’t streamed online using webcams. Russia’s Central Elections Commission said it lacked the funds to offer video transmissions at all polling stations. Direct access was limited to monitors from the parties participating in the elections, candidates, and the local election commissions themselves. Almost a year later, however, Meduza has obtained an archive of video footage from polling stations during those elections. A group of independent video monitors (whose names we are withholding for safety reasons) has analyzed the records and concluded that the number of stuffed ballots cast in September 2021 could have surpassed 17 million.
And quite eagerly. Republicans nationwide have vocalized support for negating elections they lose and replacing electors they don’t like. The supreme court, dedicated to the destruction of what little democracy remains in the very oligarchic U.S., plans to hear Moore v Harper, a case based on a crackpot theory, which would grant state legislatures lots more power over federal elections. Those are GOP-gerrymandered state legislatures, you know, the ones who have rammed through model legislation written by that reactionary corporate gargoyle, the American Legislative Exchange Council, laws that, for instance, scrap plastic bag bans, or that overturn long-settled labor norms, or that slap oil pipeline protestors with multi-year prison sentences, or that make it legal for the supposedly acceptable people to ram their SUVs into a crowd of leftwing protesters, or that allow any lunatic to carry a semi-automatic weapon of war in public. Any normal court would decline to hear this bizarre case. But this is no normal supreme court. It’s a collection of partisan hacks, way out of line with its predecessors.
Since Moore v Harper could constrict state courts and state constitutional power to control gerrymandering, based on what Adam Serwer in the July 23 Atlantic called “a crank legal premise called the ‘independent-state-legislature theory,’” which way do you think the troglodytes on the supreme court will go? They’ll eviscerate state court power. That also likely entails allowing state legislatures to overturn federal election results.
This article has five goals: (1) to bring some historical perspective to this controversy; (2) to summarize the action of the Supreme Court in this case; (3) to describe the subsequent legislation passed by conservative state legislatures; (4) to consider the adverse impacts on women’s health; and (5) to show how this kind of action of the Supreme Court, uninformed by medical science, intrudes upon the role of the medical profession as caregivers as they try to act in the best interests of their patients.
In the wake of the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade, there has been plenty of attention paid to the kinds of data that companies keep on us, and how they could be exposed, including to law enforcement. Many internet companies seemed somewhat taken by surprise regarding all of this, which is a bit ridiculous, given that (1) they had plenty of time to prepare for this sort of thing, and (2) it’s not like plenty of us haven’t been warning companies about the privacy problems of having too much data.
It’s bad enough that Democrats function as the Republi-fascists’ enabling partner in numerous ways (see this, this, this, and this): demobilizing the majority working-class non-Republican electorate though cringing subordination to corporate, financial, and military-industrial authority; legitimizing right-wing agendas and narratives by embracing them; relentlessly seeking bipartisan cooperation with a militantly partisan neofascist party (the post-republic/-bourgeois-democracy Republicans); refusing to attack archaic minority rule institutions and practices that inflate the Republifascists’ power (including the Electoral College, the preposterously malapportioned, unrepresentative, and powerful nature of the U.S. Senate, the Senate filibuster, the absurd nine-member Supreme Court, judicial review, and states’ rights); failing to forthrightly and properly punish the putschist Trump for trying to install himself as a dictator; refusing to properly name the “late fascist” menace for what it is; keeping people off the streets by channeling everything into the killing confines of the nation’s right-tilted electoral politics; playing the bourgeois identitarian card with an irrational “wokeness” that is just the other “left” side of the Republi-fascists’ revanchist, anti-science, identitarian, and truth-canceling coin (see this essay’s postscript for further reflections on the objectively reactionary woke syndrome).
In 2004, as I watched the variety of better known democrat candidates for a U.S. Senate seat in the Illinois primary and felt it was a sort of embarrassingly corrupt version of the Keystone cops, I asked a local democrat insider what the Hell were they thinking. He advised me to look into this guy named Obama. The key selling point for Obama seemed to be that he was Constitutional scholar who had entered politics after being a community organizer in Chicago. As I was still foolish enough at that time to think that it might be possible for a democrat to not be so Clintonianly insulting, I figured Obama the unknown was probably a good message to send to the party.
As I watched the democrat’s convention in Boston that year, it quickly dawned on me that I had been played. With the awareness that the democrats kept all of the real progressive activists corralled outside of earshot, I listened to Obama’s loudly touted speech. The abundance of platitudes and the slick delivery in his performance immediately raised flags. I still thought that maybe, maybe, maybe he might surprise me and I was still gullible enough to think he and the imagined progressive democrats probably would be better than the openly sadistic republicans and their conservative democrat allies.
This deformed pidgin tongue, spoken by all San Francisco’s rulers – Pelosi, U.S. Sen. Feinstein, Vice President Harris, Governor Newsom – begins with the command: “Make no mistake about it …” a phrase probably going back to the dim origins of the Republic, but former California Gov. Pat Brown never failed to use it to signal the arrival of his next bumbling platitude.
Nearly immortal incumbents like Pelosi and Feinstein put us to sleep to hide the tidal wave of bribery that has been washing over Congress since former Rep. Tony Coelho, chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and Democratic Party Whip, ducked charges and left the House for Wall Street in 1989.€ The effort to raise enough money to keep your party in power in the House soon erases all memory of the needs and desires of constituencies, replacing them with “honest graft.”
This is a developing story… Please check back for possible updates...
Former U.S. President Donald Trump is being investigated for potential violations of the Espionage Act, obstruction of justice, and unlawful removal of government records, according to the warrant authorizing the recent federal search of Mar-a-Lago, which was released Friday.
"Today and everyday is 1776. Never give up our freedoms. Never let the left steal them away. Be a watchman on the wall and stay guard every single second of every single day because the left will stop at nothing until they destroy our faith, our families, and our freedoms."—Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, April 23, 2022 on€ Twitter.
South Korea and the European Union's critiques of electric vehicle tax credit provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act—which U.S. President Joe Biden is expected to sign into law as soon as Friday—have sparked urgent calls for a global "climate peace clause" whereby nations would agree not to use archaic trade mechanisms to undermine the emission-reduction policies of other countries.
"It's time to end this circular firing squad where countries threaten and, if successful, weaken or repeal one another's climate measures through trade and investment agreements," Melinda St. Louis, Global Trade Watch director at Public Citizen, said in a statement Thursday.
FBI agents were reportedly seeking to recover classified nuclear weapons documents and other items when they raided Donald Trump's Florida home earlier this week, a move that set off an immediate firestorm of backlash from the former president's far-right loyalists.
According to the Washington Post, which cited unnamed people familiar with the Justice Department's ongoing investigation, it's unclear whether the nuclear documents were among the dozen boxes of material that FBI agents seized from Trump's Mar-a-Lago residence on Monday.
We don’t know if former President Donald Trump ever studied Joseph Goebbels, but he certainly does practice Goebbels’ methods.
[...] The faux news channel used a meme of Reinhart, in which his face was superimposed over that of pedophile Jeffrey Epstein (now dead) getting a foot rub on a private plane from his partner-in-crime Ghislaine Maxwell (now imprisoned). [...]
Many legal scholars warn support for the theory from the Supreme Court could bring chaos to upcoming elections
This week on CounterSpin: A Texas court has told Alex Jones to pay some $49 million dollars in damages for his perverse, accusatory talk about the Sandy Hook elementary school massacre being a “big hoax”—the jury evidently not believing Jones’ tale that he was suffering a weird and weirdly profitable “psychosis” when he told his followers that no one died at Sandy Hook because none of the victims ever existed, nor were they evidently moved by his subsequent claim that he did it all “from a pure place.”
The past two election cycles have seen an explosion of attention given to “echo chambers,” or communities where a narrow set of views makes people less likely to challenge their own opinions. Much of this concern has focused on the rise of social media, which has radically transformed the information ecosystem.
The attack happened at about 10:45 a.m., shortly after Mr. Rushdie took the stage to deliver a lecture at the Chautauqua Institution, a community in western New York that offers arts and literary programming during the summer.
Rushdie was visiting the institution to discuss how the United States serves as asylum for writers in exile with Henry Reese, co-founder of City of Asylum, a residency program for writers in exile, according to the Chautauqua Institution's event page.
Rushdie has written 14 novels, including The Satanic Verses, one of his most popular books, which resulted in death threats [sic] against the author from Iran's leader in 1989.
Rushdie is the author of The Satanic Verses, a book banned in Iran as many Muslims consider it to be blasphemous. A year after it was published in 1988, Iran’s leader at the time, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa calling for Rushdie’s death.
Salman Rushdie, the author whose writing led to death threats from Iran in the 1980s, was stabbed in the neck, police said, as he was about to give a lecture Friday in western New York.
"Salman Rushdie has been targeted for his words for decades but has never flinched nor faltered."
The total reward for the author’s death offered by the foundation stands at $3.3 million, with Sanei saying "these days are the most appropriate time to carry it (Rushdie's murder) out."
Khomeini's original fatwa on Rushdie was condemned in the West as incitement to murder and an assault on freedom of speech.
The author came out of hiding in 1999 after Iran's foreign ministry assured Britain that Iran would do nothing to implement the fatwa. In 2005, current supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei renewed the fatwa, saying Rushdie was considered an apostate whose murder was authorized under Islam.
A group of Georgia mothers has been trying to get certain library books banned by reading sexually graphic passages aloud at school board meetings. Now, after the board barred one of the mothers from attending, the group is claiming in a federal lawsuit that their First Amendment rights have been violated.
In essence, members of the group, which has dubbed itself the Mama Bears, are arguing that they’re being censored — in their own pursuit of censorship.
When sites cooperate with government agencies, it leaves the platform inherently biased in favor of the government's favored positions. It gives government entities outsized influence to manipulate content moderation systems for their own political goals—to control public dialogue, suppress dissent, silence political opponents, or blunt social movements. And once such systems are established, it is easy for government—and particularly law enforcement—to use the systems to coerce and pressure platforms to moderate speech they may not otherwise have chosen to moderate.
For example, Vietnam has boasted of its increasing effectiveness in getting Facebook posts removed but has been accused of targeting dissidents in doing so. Similarly, the Israeli Cyber Unit has boasted of high compliance rates of up to 90 percent with its takedown requests across all social media platforms. But these requests unfairly target Palestinian rights activists, news organizations, and civil society, and one such incident prompted the Facebook Oversight Board to recommend that Facebook “Formalize a transparent process on how it receives and responds to all government requests for content removal, and ensure that they are included in transparency reporting.”
Issues with government involvement in content moderation were addressed in the newly revised Santa Clara Principles 2.0 where EFF and other organizations called on social media companies to “recognize the particular risks to users’ rights that result from state involvement in content moderation processes.” The Santa Clara Principles also affirm that “state actors must not exploit or manipulate companies’ content moderation systems to censor dissenters, political opponents, social movements, or any person.”€
Recent reports suggest that efforts to establish a Self-Regulatory Grievance Redressal Board (“the Board”), led by the Internet and Mobile Association of India (“IAMAI”), is underway. Despite civil society and experts raising several concerns around such a self-regulatory mechanism, Meta (formerly Facebook) and Twitter have voiced support in favour of a Self-Regulatory Body (“SRB”), whereas Google expressed concerns. IFF has obtained a draft version of a “Code For Establishing A Self Regulatory Grievance Redressal Board” (“the draft Code”). We are making this draft Code public in the wider interest of the citizens of India.
[...]
We strongly oppose the creation of such an industry wide SRB. In today’s environment, self-regulation will lead to SMIs establishing extra caution and discretion in the case of politically controversial content, ultimately resulting in self-censorship and a vast chilling effect. Any efforts to self-regulate cannot be based on IT Rules, 2021 which restrict fundamental rights and are under challenge before the Supreme Court of India. Self-censorship has already been noticed with OTT platforms, where multiple shows on these on-demand video streaming platforms had been censored or cancelled in view of the IT Rules, 2021 before Constitutional Courts intervened. Any such model of regulation will likely have a substantial impact on citizens’ digital rights, result in economic harm, and also negatively impact freedom of speech and expression, and access to information.
We speak to Walden Bello, the longtime Filipino activist and former vice-presidential candidate. He was arrested Monday on “cyber libel” charges, which he says was just a tactic by the new administration to suppress his vocal criticism of them. The arrest took place just weeks after the inauguration of Ferdinand Marcos Jr., the son of the former U.S.-backed dictator. Bello says people are “worried that this is a foretaste of things to come. … They don’t respond to criticisms. Instead, they use the law and they use instruments of intimidation to silence you.”
I recently interviewed Ms. Dahlmans about these issues. She currently writes (in Dutch only) for the conservative political news site PAL NWS, and is studying Islam at the Melbourne School of Theology, where she will be starting her thesis.
While his pursuers continued to surround him at a safe distance, the man finally knelt down with his hands above his head in front of the police officers, who threatened him with their service weapons. Le Dauphiné
The case has moved to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, where oral arguments were heard last month, and where a ruling by that court is expected this fall. It may well go to the U.S. Supreme Court.
When President Barack Obama created the program by executive action ten years ago, he was responding to political and moral pressure stemming from legislative failures to enact meaningful immigration reform over several decades. The last major reform, signed by President Ronald Reagan in 1986, had allowed 2.9 million immigrants to advance on a path toward citizenship.
On Thursday, the California Senate’s appropriations committee was set to review a collection of anti-internet bills to see which ones should move forward. It decided to drop one that was particularly terrible: AB 2408, which would allow basically any California prosecutor (local or state-level) to sue companies for “addicting” kids (with addiction being extremely loosely defined). This was a very silly bill, that would have resulted in all sorts of frivolous litigation over basically any feature of social media, based on the extremely faulty belief that social media is designed to be “addictive.” The decision not to move forward with the bill is about the only good news that happened. And even as some are foolishly whining about this decision, should that bill have moved forward, it would have been a fundamental disaster for the internet.
As the Federal Trade Commission on Thursday launched a long-awaited rulemaking process, progressive watchdog groups urged the agency to swiftly implement digital privacy measures that would shield internet users in the United States from the predatory data practices on which technology firms and other corporate actors rely for profit-maximization.
"Tech giants are right to be worried that accountability finally may be coming."
Over the last few months, Republican politicians have been working on a nonsense plan to force their spam into your inboxes. This kicked off following some Republican operatives misunderstanding (whether through their own cluelessness, or on purpose) a study about political spam and how different email providers deal with it. Since then, Republicans have been screaming about how Google is trying to silence their campaign emails — even though their emails tend to be a lot more spammy. And then you have GOP digital marketing people being so clueless that they misconfigure their email settings, and blame Google for it, rather than realizing it was their own fault (the party of personal responsibility is no longer, it seems).
“Experience the out of this world flavor of Impossible [TM] Sausage,” the “Old Country Store” announced in an August 1 Facebook post, accompanied by a photo of two of the plant-based patties.
Responses across thousands of comments vary from gratitude to “meh, I’ll stick with the real thing” to … well, here’s a somewhat representative sample from commenter “Barry Deaton”:
As many people have heard by now, an online controversy erupted when the aptly-named Cracker Barrel restaurant chain added a "meatless sausage" option to its breakfast menu, a document whose otherwise unhealthy options have arguably mass-produced more arterial cholesterol than any other industrial gourmandizing operation on Earth.€
We have long lamented how the current method for many streaming platforms to enforce copyright laws, be they via automated systems like ContentID at YouTube or DMCA reporting platforms, is wide open for fraud, abuse, and mistakes. There are a huge swath of posts just on ContentID you can go check out if you’re not aware of how completely borked this all is, but you can also look at specific examples such as a video getting flagged for infringement due to birds singing in the background. It’s a full on mess and it doesn’t appear to be getting any better.
Software sold by market leaders tend to be primary purchases for regular consumers. Brand comfort is important but so too is affordability, especially when pirate copies are available for free. Some find a middle ground with purchases of discounted activation keys but, as a new Microsoft lawsuit shows, that can amount to copyright infringement for buyers and sellers alike.
As part of an ongoing piracy liability lawsuit, Internet provider WOW! must share the personal details of 375 subscribers with a group of filmmakers. Dozens of targeted subscribers, who are seen as the most prolific pirates, have filed objections at the Colorado federal court. While privacy concerns are understandable, the subscribers themselves don't appear to be at risk.
They went from available and inexpensive to unavailable and expensive. Does anyone know where to get an RPI 3 or 4 for a good price in the US?
The schooling system has goals that are not beneficial for the growth and development of anyone participating in it. I am speaking from personal experience here, as I do not know how other schooling systems are, aside from what I have heard about them.
Ignoring the power tripping teachers and other of the many questionable practices and doings of schools, the most important thing is the "how." How is the information transmitted in order to facilitate deeper understanding and further transmission? The most common method is giving a book and repeating, or consuming, the information, forcefully drilling it into your brain, until you can play it back word by word. The additional trauma aside, this method is woefully inefficient and you forget most of the information in a few days, due to it being in your short memory.
We’re all familiar with solar cells, be they photovoltaic, or for heating water. But they are only the more common ways of converting the sun’s energey into usable power, and to the extended list there is now an addition courtesy of [Dennis]. He’s using the sun to drive the pyrolysis of biomass waste, releasing hydrogen fuel.
While Mendel’s work is central to modern genetics, and his use of experimental methods and observation is a model for science, it also set off the dark side with which genetics has been inextricably linked:€ eugenics and racism. But eugenics was much more than race “science.” It was also used to argue the superiority of the elite and dominant races, and in countries like India, it was used as a “scientific” justification for the caste system as well.
People who believe that eugenics was a temporary aberration in science and that it died with Nazi Germany would be shocked to find out that even the major institutions and journals that included the word eugenics as part of their names have continued to operate by just changing their titles. The Annals of Eugenics€ became€ the€ Annals of Human Genetics; the Eugenics Review changed its€ name€ to the Journal of Biosocial Science; Eugenics Quarterly€ changed€ to Biodemography and Social Biology; and the Eugenics Society was€ renamed€ the Galton Institute. Several departments in major universities, which were earlier called the department of eugenics, either became the department of human genetics or the department of social biology.
It seems Solderpunk has been inactive for a long time, other than a gemlog post a few months back. How will this affect the future of gemini, if at all?
I don't think it should affect Gemini at all. We should give Solderpunk time, and also not expect that everything must be done so quickly. The last spec update was in January, and some months later Solderpunk posted on the official gemini news. People have lives outside of Gemini. The post from a few months ago suggested he intends on finishing things up eventually.
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If anything, the community can *have conversations* about the clarifications already being talked about on the Gitlab and each individual comes to a conclusion that, for example, this is how we can do IRIs correctly or in a way that is intended by the spec and sticks with the original spirit of Gemini as outlined by Solderpunk. I would be fine with that, and this is similar to what happened within Gopher. But, I suggest we don't do this so early on either.
While I get the gist of these and understand the frustrations behind them I fundamentally disagree.
What any and all of these statements boil down to is that you shouldn't release any software unless it has substantial financial investment and a long development time behind it. Any single-developer projects would be banned from being made available at all, as would any project relying on volunteer effort that isn't commercially profitable enough.
It's not that us small time developers don't care about these issues; it's that we want to build tools that work for us, using the limited time we often have to do it. And it's okay to think "hey, this was pretty useful. Maybe I should publish it just in case someone else has a similar need?" That must be the minimum threshold for releasing something.
Maybe something we release becomes more popular over time and we receive pull requests, patches, or requests for features. Maybe we have the time and inclination to continue development on the tool.
One thing I wanted to do while I was first making RocketCaster, a gemini service I started in February for searching for and subscribing to podcasts, was have some sort of way to surface popular or trending podcasts. PodcastIndex does have an API endpoint for that, but I wasn't happy with its results and scrapped the idea.
It wasn't until recently that I started thinking about it again but realized that all the cool podcasts that I listen to regularly I learned about through word of mouth. So if I wanted to build something to serve useful podcast recommendations, word of mouth between podcast fans should be the focus.
I've spent a couple of days figuring out and implementing a simple vector-graphics game support library. And I got an Asteroids-like ship flying around and firing, using the keyboard.... It looks f***ing cool!
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.