In summary, it is a snap confinement level that provides complete isolation, up to a minimal access level that’s always deemed safe. Strictly confined snaps can not access files, networks, processes, or any other system resource without requesting specific access. Strict confinement uses security features of the Linux kernel, including AppArmor, seccomp, and namespaces to prevent applications and services from accessing the wider system.
Spotify provide a semi-official app for the service. But third-party clients are available for Spotify Premium users. Spotify blocks API access to their audio for non-premium members.
We recently reviewed spotify-qt, a lightweight graphical Spotify client written in C++. For this review, we’re looking at Spotify TUI. It’s a Spotify client for the terminal written in Rust.
A very exciting aspect of using the Linux operating system is the infinite number of packages we can install and explore. However, to install and use a package on a Linux operating system, we are presented with two approaches.
The first approach is to use the package manager associated with your Linux distribution to search and install a targeted application package. The second approach is to download the source code associated with the targeted application package, compile, and install it.
We don't like AppArmor, in large part because it doesn't work in our environment; the net effect of allowing AppArmor to do anything is that periodically various things break mysteriously (for instance, Evince stops working because your $XAUTHORITY is on an NFS mounted filesystem). We do our best to not install AppArmor at all, and if it gets dragged in by package dependencies, we try to disable it with a heaping helping of systemd manipulation: [...]
CodeWeavers, the company that works on Proton with Valve and supports Wine development, has announced the released of CrossOver 22.0.0. This is their special proprietary interface for helping users across Linux, macOS and Chrome OS work with applications and games designed for Windows on their platform of choice.
SD GUNDAM BATTLE ALLIANCE is a brand new release from ARTDINK and Bandai Namco Entertainment. The good news is that it works out of the box at release on Steam Deck and Linux desktop. Battle Alliance is pretty much a hack and slash, blended together with some Anime visual novel story elements in between missions. Available to play solo or online with up to 2 others.
One Lonely Outpost is an upcoming sci-fi colonization life and farming sim that was crowdfunded on Kickstarter. It was due this year but it's now delayed but it seems progress is good.
Valve are now testing a new version of the Steam app for Android and iOS, which comes with a much more modern design and a QR code login system too.
Spider-Man Remastered is an absolutely awesome game and it's great on both Steam Deck and Linux desktop! A new patch is out with plenty of fixes. This Deck Verified title has no doubt been sucking away plenty of your time right?
I had the pleasure of speaking to Brodie Robertson recently on the subject of Linux Gaming, Steam Deck and all sorts of things for you to sit back and chill with. This was over on Brodie's Tech Over Tea channel.
GNOME has come up with a tool that lets users provide anonymous insights about their configurations, extensions, and GNOME-tuned settings.
This should help GNOME learn more about user preferences and make better decisions to enhance the user experience.
Interestingly, an intern at Red Hat (Vojtech Stanek) created this tool.
The tool (gnome-info-collect) is a simple terminal program that you need to download, install, and run to share the data with GNOME.
In August 2021, the CentOS Automotive SIG launched and held its first meeting with 36 participants. We had no infrastructure, no solid architectural plans, and no documentation - just a very motivated group that very quickly grew beyond Red Hat and into the automotive community.
[...]
While we are proud of this work so far, it is just the beginning as we develop our relationships with other communities, including SOAFEE and Eclipse SDV, and further refine AutoSD.
The Bajiu Lite is a FPGA development board with an open-source RISC-V development environment called CRiscV. The open source CRiscV software seems to be based on VexRiscv customized for the Bajiu Lite board. The product has been developed by Dragon Li Studio and it will be launched via CrowdSupply.
The Bajiu Lite product page doesn’t clearly specify which FPGA is integrated on the board. However, the image displayed for the Bajiu Lite seems to feature the Trion T20F169 from Efinix. The product page mentions that the board can achieve frequencies greater than 150MHz with low power consumption (unspecified).€
How fast can a Raspberry Pi Pico go? Well, apparently the answer is 1 GHz if you freeze it and give it over twice the voltage it normally gets. Oh, one catch. After a few minutes, the chip will fry itself.
Multispectral imaging can be a useful tool, revealing all manner of secrets hidden to the human eye. [elad orbach] built a rig to perform such imaging using the humble Raspberry Pi.
There’s more to light than what meets the eye – literally. Visible light is a very small subsection of the entire electromagnetic spectrum, but it’s all we can see with our own eyes. The other bands of light exist on either side of visible light on the spectrum. Gamma rays, x-rays, ultraviolet on one end, then infrared, microwaves and radio waves on the other; all invisible to us, but able to be studied and detected through years of discovery and research. And radio is the name of the game today because August 20th is National Radio Day! We’re gonna do a deep dive on all things radio and show you how you can master this invisible method of communication at SparkFun!
When people ask me what I love most about open source, my answer is simple: It's the openness. With open source, the work that community developers and contributors do is in the public domain for all to see and benefit from. I couldn't love that philosophy more.
How many people can say that about the fruits of their labor? How many, perhaps 50 years from now, can look back and say, "Check out the code I wrote that day that hundreds/thousands/tens of thousands benefited from." I find that infinitely more exciting than working on software that's hidden from most of the world.
German wholesale electricity prices in August 2022 are extremely high with an average of 397 Euro / MWh (EPEX day ahead prices until 19th of August). That is more than 10 fold the average prices in 2019 (38.3 Euro / MWh) and 2020 (31 Euro / MWh).
Whether you heard it in person at rstudio::conf(2022) or caught the news through the internet grapevine, RStudio PBC is rebranding itself to – Posit PBC.
The C and C++ languages offer little protection against programmer errors. Errors do not always show up where you expect. You can silently corrupt the content of your memory. It can make bugs difficult to track. To solve this problem, I am a big fan of programming in C and C++ using sanitizers. They slow your program, but the check that memory accesses are safe, for example.
In 1981, the CD was presented at the Berlin Radio Exhibition. The first industrially produced discs rolled off the production line on August 17, 1982, and legend has it that the ABBA album "The Visitors" was burned on them. Perhaps it was also a recording of Richard Strauss' "An Alpine Symphony," conducted by Herbert von Karajan, who had outed himself as a big fan of the CD from the very beginning, describing it as "a miracle." Another legend says it was waltzes by Chopin that were pressed onto the first CDs.
I wondered about what their lives growing up must have been. Bialik does not go there. That would have blurred the film’s€ clear€ focus.
Wouldn’t you know it, a reporter wouldn’t get some grand metaphorical, utopian vision transcending this veil of vicissitudes. I get a simile of them.
Just recently, however, that situation has changed drastically in an entirely unexpected way. When I started publishing criticism in 1980, almost all of the art I saw and wrote about in New York was by white men. The many Black artists were not prominently discussed. Indeed, it wasn’t until 1997 that I first reviewed a Black artist’s show. Starting soon after World War Two the American armed forces were integrated – to use that old fashioned verb. And then Black players appeared in Major League baseball and African-American stars in opera. But the art world, which took a while to support women, was very slow to support Black people. In the past couple of years, however, in a long overdue development rather suddenly that has changed. Black artists (many of them not young), curators, writers and even collectors are in the news. And the theorizing of Greenberg and his successors at October has been entirely superseded.
We’re guessing that among Hackaday’s readership are plenty of futurists, and while the past might be the wrong direction in which to look when considering futurism, we wouldn’t blame any of them for hankering for the days when futurism was mainstream.
While it is definitely a first-world problem that you don’t want to manually turn on your windshield wipers when it starts raining, it is also one of those things that probably sounds easier to solve than it really is. After all, you can ask a four-year-old if it is raining and expect a reasonable answer. But how do you ask that question of a computer? Especially a tiny cheap computer that is operating pretty much on its own.
In the White Mountains of New Hampshire, I gathered last week with a group of antiwar activists where we talked of the grim issues confronting the globe. Nuclear war, conventional war, drone war, Climate Catastrophe, American Imperialism, our Culture of Militarism. The world is in a dire, cataclysmic state. We are, it seems, a hairsbreadth from annihilating ourselves.
Relax, kick back, enjoy life.
The topics that follow multiplication include division, fractions, area, perimeter, angles, telling time, and other things I promptly forgot how to do as soon as I graduated from high school. You get a vertical progression of lessons that build on each other as you go along.
An overwhelming 94 percent of teachers and education workers in Columbus, Ohio voted to go on strike Monday. They are demanding smaller class sizes, safe school buildings, and fully-funded arts, mu…
Evaluating the performance of 3D printers and component upgrades is a more difficult than it may seem at first glance, and subjective observations can lead to incorrect conclusions. To objectively determine the maximum flow rates of different FDM 3D printer hotends, [MirageC] is developing a robust testing standard backed by more than just visual observations.
In many ball sports like golf, football and tennis, controlling the ball’s spin is an important skill. Expert players can make golf balls curve around obstacles, launch footballs towards goal posts from impossible angles, or confuse their opponents by making a tennis ball bounce in a completely unexpected direction.
Ratcheting screwdrivers can help you work faster, even if their bulk means they’re not the best option for working in tight spaces. [ukman] decided to build a similar device of his own, relying on a slightly different mechanism — an overrunning clutch.
The New York Times today reported that a San Francisco-based tech worker named only “Mark” — who ironically works for an unnamed tech company in content filtering — was banned by Google LLC for “a severe violation of Google’s policies and might be illegal” after his son became ill and photos were taken of his son. In this case, the child had an issue with his penis and after being asked by a medical professional, his wife had taken photos and sent them online through his Google account for a consultation.
Google’s AI and filtering tagged the photos as child abuse without taking into context the situation. An incorrect or out-of-context block from Google is not greatly surprising. What happened next, though, is arguably appalling.
"One thing that you won't see is something called a leading pedestrian interval," Sharp said. "And basically, what that means is we've programmed our traffic signals to give pedestrians a few-second head start when they get into the crosswalk during their pedestrian phase without having to worry about turning vehicles."
"Senior Trump administration officials undermined public health experts because they believed doing so would benefit the former president politically."
"Politicians may think they know better than doctors, but doctors should not have to try to figure out how to be lawyers in order to save lives."
The alert comes from the Cyber Security Industry Advisory Committee (IAC) i its Annual Report 2022, with Chairman and Telstra CEO Andrew Penn commenting that deteriorating geopolitical tensions, the expansion of hybrid work outside traditional corporate firewalls and adaptive offenders saw cybercrimes including ransomware, mobile malware and business email compromise (BEC) significantly increase this past year.
"Movies and Series Scraper" is a nifty tool that allows people to watch and download films and TV series without much hassle. The developer shares the code for free, but when he noticed that someone had "stolen" his work, he asked GitHub to remove the infringing copy from the platform.
The DuckDuckGo email service has been in closed beta, but the company just removed the waitlist and made the service open for all. The service is called Email Protection, though in practice it works more or less like any web email system. DuckDuckGo provides users with a forwarding service—a “PCWorldMichael@duck.com” address, for example. Emails sent through this alias will have embedded tracking cookies and other methods of observation removed, and users will get reports on which companies have attempted to track the message.
Over the last few years, students have rarely had the option to opt-out of using remote proctoring tools, and have been essentially coerced into allowing a third-party, and their school, to collect and retain sensitive, private data about them if they want to pass a class. This opinion, though it is not binding on other courts, is an important one. Any student of a state school hoping to push back against room scans in particular could now cite it as persuasive precedent. As of yet, however, there has been no judgment or injunction, which means what specifically Cleveland State will have to do is not fully determined.€
Russian President Vladimir Putin's "special military operation" into neighboring Ukraine began on Feb. 24, with Russian forces invading from Belarus, to the north, and Russia, to the east. Ukrainian troops have offered "stiff resistance," according to U.S. officials.
The Russian-held Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant suffered a "complete disconnection" from Ukraine’s power grid Thursday for the first time in its 40-year history, officials said.
The last two working power units at the site in southern Ukraine were disconnected after shelling sparked fires nearby, Ukraine’s national energy company, Energoatom, said.
In a public appeal on Wednesday, August 24, Pope Francis commented on six months of war in Ukraine by “implore[ing] peace from the Lord for the beloved Ukrainian people.” After warning of “the risk of a nuclear disaster in Zaporizhzhia” and recalling the children orphaned and forced from their homes by the war, Francis mentioned “the innocents who are paying for madness, the madness of all sides,” alluding specifically to Daria Dugina as “that poor girl blown up by a bomb under her car seat in Moscow.”
A Russian missile strike on a train station in Chaplyne, Dnipropetrovsk region, has killed at least 15 people and injured 50 others, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said during a speech at the UN Security Council on Wednesday.€
Russian missile attacks on the town of Chaplyne, Dnipropetrovsk region, killed more than two dozen people on Ukraine’s Independence Day, Ukrainian officials reported on Thursday, August 25.€
Parts of Ukraine’s Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions lost power on Thursday after the security system at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant was triggered, according to occupation authorities. Kherson also reportedly lost water and cell service.
Kremlin-organized “referendums” on Ukraine’s occupied territories joining Russia are unlikely to take place on September 11, five sources close to the Putin administration told Vedomosti.
It’s now been six months since Vladimir Putin launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine and internal crackdown that has effectively turned Russia into a dictatorship. In this time, the Russian anti-war movement has been all but crushed: activists and independent politicians are behind bars or in exile; ordinary people are being prosecuted en masse for attempting to speak out against the war (or in support of peace); “unreliable” artists are seeing their concerts and exhibitions canceled; military censorship reigns supreme and the independent press has been driven out of the country. Together with the human rights media project OVD-Info, Meduza presents a breakdown of the Russian authorities’ six-month-long effort to stamp out dissent once and for all.€
In April, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs declared Ukraine one of the most mine-contaminated countries in the world. According to an estimate from the country’s State Emergency Service, mines and other explosives may contaminate up to half of the country’s territory. Ukraine’s Interior Ministry has predicted that fully demining the territory that’s been mined as of August will take between five and 10 years. In the Kyiv and Chernihiv regions, where the mines are most dense, demining teams have defused over 100,000 explosives since the Russian army’s retreat in April. At Meduza’s request, Ukrainian photographer Pavel Dorogoi traveled to the Kyiv, Chernihiv, and Sumy regions, where demining operations are currently underway, and described what he saw. In addition, Ukrainian journalist Vasily Kalyna spoke to sappers in the regions about what it's like to spend so much time just one wrong move away from death.
Sparse in its description of Kampen’s personal life and the postwar society he came of age in, the novel in its telling creates an awareness in the reader of his emotional and mental state. Extraordinarily ordinary except for his Nazism, one lesson of the novel is the ordinariness of those who become enchanted with the potential and appeal Nazism offers to certain individuals. As we know, that potential can propel those who have succumbed to the appeal to incredibly destructive and deadly acts. In the novel Red Milk, however, the only certain death is that of Gunnar Kampen. Indeed, the novel’s opening chapter is a brief description of the immediate aftermath of his passing. Two policeman examine his person after Kampen is found murdered on a train in Cheltenham Spa on the edge of the Cotswolds in the county of Gloucestershire, England.
We drove along the Worontzov Road, which bisects the battlefield, and the driver stopped so that I could walk up some steps to a forlorn Russian monument on Causeway Heights, where some of the Russian guns were positioned. By then it was clear that I had lost my audience, or at least my driver.
According to the United Nations, the current situation in Afghanistan is “unparalleled.” Over 24 million people require humanitarian assistance to survive, and approximately€ 95 percent€ of the country’s population has insufficient food.€ Malnutrition€ is on the rise, with many Afghans resorting to€ selling body parts€ to feed their families.
You see, dearest motherfuckers, this is the problem I have with the Gloria Steinem School of Second Wave Feminism. The whole idea of success is predicated on women rising to the top of a tower of bones built by centuries of institutionalized heterosexist chauvinism. The result is women like Hillary Clinton, Margaret Thatcher and Nancy Pelosi, who are supposed to inspire women like me by leading an empire just like the ass-grabbing barbarians they replaced or rather just joined on their mountaintop of fractured skulls and filthy money.
In large measure, this dismal state of affairs is the consequence of the deepening fractures in the global environmental movement, a large swath of which has desperately embraced nuclear power as an atomic shield–dubious though it will prove to be–against cataclysmic climate change.
As historian Seth Kershner€ points out,€ after US troops were withdrawn from Vietnam and the draft ended in 1973, “high schools became the answer to the Pentagon’s manpower problems.” € While the armed forces beat a strategic€ retreat from the Ivy League and some elite private colleges, enrollment in public high school Junior ROTC programs (JROTC) mushroomed. About half a million teenagers now get military training in 3,500 schools around the country, many of which serve poor and working-class students.
But in January 1951, during the Korean War, I was drafted – and required to sign that I was never in any of those on that long, long list. Should I risk years in prison by admitting my infamy? Or sign and, by staying mum, hope to survive two army years with no one checking up? I signed.
For the uninformed reader, the article succeeds in finding a balanced language between two equal sides. This misleading moral equivalence is one of the biggest intellectual blind spots for western journalists. If they do not outwardly champion Israel’s discourse on ‘security’ and ‘right to defend itself’, they create false parallels between Palestinians and Israelis, as if a military occupier and an occupied nation have comparable rights and responsibilities.
Right wing Israeli politicians such as former prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu and even centrist politicians like caretaker Prime Minister Yair Lapid have fulminated against any US renewal of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal or Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). As with the loony Right wing in the US (increasingly the only Right wing there is), they typically allege that the JCPOA will allow Iran to develop a nuclear weapon. Since the treaty makes it virtually impossible for Iran to develop a nuclear device, this charge literally makes no sense.
"The American people have made it clear that they prefer diplomacy with Iran—a strategy that is not only popular but one we know works."
"Decisive victory for either side looks remote. The only possible solution is a process of negotiation."
The U.S. described the strikes, carried out by Central Command (CENTCOM) forces in eastern and northeastern Syria, as retaliation for August 15 rocket attacks on a base housing American military personnel. CENTCOM blamed "Iran-backed groups" for the attacks.
"We know two things for sure about cluster munitions: They are indiscriminate weapons, and 98% of causalities are civilians."
Five years ago this month, white supremacists murdered Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, Virginia, spurring Joe Biden to run for president and later sign a bill named after Heather to fight hate crimes. Five years ago this month, Hurricane Harvey devastated ââ¬â¹Ã¢â¬â¹Texas and Louisiana, and Congress responded with a $15 billion relief bill. And five years ago this month, the Burmese military launched a genocidal attack on Rohingya Muslims. But mass atrocities continue in my native land and the U.S. has done little to stop it. It’s time for the U.S. to take bold action to end impunity and create peace, security, and stability in Burma.
During one of my€ interviews€ with Abts and Haynes, I asked how they deal with the thorny but inevitable question of genre. While they acknowledged that they are a “jam band,” they also insisted that they are a “rock and roll band.” Abts was particularly insistent that there is improvisation with Mule, but not “noodling.” “We have actual songs,” he said. Haynes said that while all the labels they’ve seen have some applicability – “hard rock,” “jam rock,” “blues rock,” “Southern rock” – none of them quite fit. Rather than tailor one of the already existing suits, Mule has crafted something of its own. It is best to merely call their music, “Mule’s music,” and leave it at that. Almost their own genre, Haynes said that they try to take a cue from Miles Davis, who he described as inventing new forms, confusing and frustrating critics. “By the time everyone caught up to what Miles was doing,” Haynes said, “and started praising it, he was moving onto something else.”
"The impact will depend entirely on results."
"The perilous nature of what unfolded today should not be underestimated."
This spring, bail reform was weakened even further, while progress in other states is threatening to unravel under the pressure of rampant misinformation campaigns at a tremendous human cost. So why, despite the reality that caging and torturing people only compounds harm, does our society continue to look to these institutions to bring us “safety”? Why, despite the extraordinary success of these policy changes, do people still perceive modest reforms as “disasters”?
The answer lies in the concept of manufactured consent.
The future of America’s national forests is being shaped now. The Biden administration is developing a system to inventory old-growth and mature forests on federal land that the president wants to be completed by next April. But given the immediate threats facing many of these forests and their importance to slowing climate change, bold action is required immediately to preserve not just old-growth and mature trees but entire national forest ecosystems comprising thousands of interdependent species.
They say the plant near the border with Finland, is burning an estimated $10m (€£8.4m) worth of gas every day.
Scientists are concerned about the large volumes of carbon dioxide and soot it is creating, which could exacerbate the melting of Arctic ice.
The analysis by Rystad Energy indicates that around 4.34 million cubic metres of gas are being burned by the flare every day.
The western United States is, famously, in the grips of its worst megadrought in a millennium. The Colorado River, which supplies water to more than 40 million Americans and supports food production for the rest of the country, is in imminent peril. The levels in the nation’s largest freshwater reservoir, Lake Mead, behind the Hoover Dam and a fulcrum of the Colorado River basin, have dropped to around 25% of capacity. The Bureau of Reclamation, which governs lakes Mead and Powell and water distribution for the southern end of the river, has issued an ultimatum: The seven states that draw from the Colorado must find ways to cut their consumption — by as much as 40% — or the federal government will do it for them. Last week those states failed to agree on new conservation measures by deadline. Meanwhile, next door, California, which draws from the Colorado, faces its own additional crises, with snowpack and water levels in both its reservoirs and aquifers all experiencing a steady, historic and climate-driven decline. It’s a national emergency, but not a surprise, as scientists and leaders have been warning for a generation that warming plus overuse of water in a fast-growing West would lead those states to run out.
In a natural state, sagebrush steppe is considered superior to coniferous forests for carbon sequestration. While western forests burn every 125 to 700 years (depending on the tree species), releasing the vast majority of their carbon, the carbon in sagebrush grasslands is sequestered underground, in the dense, deep root networks of shrubs and native bunchgrasses. Even when there is a fire, the majority of the carbon stays safely in the soil. One federal scientist has even argued that carbon banking is “the highest and best use” of sagebrush steppe habitats.
The most recent reports from the IPCC (made up of the world’s leading climate/environmental scientists) are, like many before them, exasperated, infuriated calls for action – radical urgent action. And yet despite the warnings and pleas, made by scientists, activists, concerned citizens, over decades, little of substance is happening and still ‘the environment’ is not the top priority for governments. Yes, awareness is growing and some changes are underway: Dozens of countries have committed to achieving Net-Zero (not actual zero) greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) by 2050, or 2060 as with China. But there is a gaping chasm between political rhetoric and policies/action to meet their commitments – the ‘Implementation Gap’ is huge. As Antonio Guterres put it, “Government and business leaders are saying one thing, but doing another. € Simply put, they are lying.” The US has just passed a major climate change bill – inadequate by most assessments, but better than nothing, so too has Australia’s new government, which seems keen to throw off the country’s reputation as an environmental liability, – also totally inadequate, but like the US step, better than nothing.
We had done our nonviolent direct action preparations and it was a good thing because quickly confronting us were some mighty irritated truckers, private security officers, and management types from Biltmore Farms and Pratt & Whitney. Mostly, we just stood silently with our banner and signs through it all. Oddly, the Buncombe County police officers were fairly chill, chatting us up and asking if we really wanted to get arrested (not especially) or if we intended to resist arrest (not at all).
"The kinds of deadly heatwaves that have been rarities in the midlatitudes will become annual occurrences."
Researchers at University of Exeter in England found that aerosols from the smoke created by the fires caused the highest temperatures in the Earth's stratosphere in decades and likely created a hole in the ozone layer over most of Antarctica.
In tests, the team demonstrated that the new battery cells can withstand hundreds of charge cycles, and charge very quickly – in some experiments, less than a minute. The cells would cost just one sixth of the price of a similar-sized lithium-ion cell.
They can not only operate at high temperatures of up to 200 €°C (392 €°F) but they actually work better when hotter – at 110 €°C (230 €°F), the batteries charged 25 times faster than they did at 25 €°C (77 €°F). Importantly, the researchers say the battery doesn’t need any external energy to reach this elevated temperature – its usual cycle of charging and discharging is enough to keep it that warm.
The new battery architecture, which uses aluminum and sulfur as its two electrode materials, with a molten salt electrolyte in between, is described today in the journal Nature, in a paper by MIT Professor Donald Sadoway, along with 15 others at MIT and in China, Canada, Kentucky, and Tennessee.
Take a look at Drupal, the open-source content management system. Based on Statista, there are 937,000 websites using this CMS. In 2018, the average server power consumption was 250 watts. Assuming that each Drupal website on average occupies 10% of such a server, the total energy consumption of all the Drupal side would be approximately 205.2 Million kilowatt hours (kWh) per year. If we can reduce the energy consumption of Drupal by making improvements to the core application by 1%, we could save 2 Million kWh per year, or as much as 187 single-person households consume per year (a US residential utility customer consumes on average 10,715 kilowatt hours per year).
The regulation will phase out the sale of new gasoline-powered cars, trucks and SUVs in the nation's most-populous state, culminating in a total ban of new sales of the vehicles by 2035. The ban will not prevent people from using gas-powered vehicles or apply to the used car market, but California officials say it will dramatically cut the state's climate-warming emissions and famously dirty air by speeding the transition to electric vehicles.
The government supported the draft proposal submitted by the Minister of Economic Affairs and Infrastructure today to accelerate the transition to renewable electricity, with the goal of producing all electricity consumed in Estonia from renewable energy sources by 2030.
This spring, a small group of professional golfers — led by former superstars Greg Norman and Phil Mickelson — decided to turn the game that has made them fabulously rich into an unsporting game of SleazeBall.
Across the border in Nevada, desert is under threat of being developed in the name of fighting climate change. In the rich and biodiverse Dixie Valley, located in the middle of sacred Shoshone and Paiute lands, a massive geothermal project called the Dixie Meadows Geothermal Development Project faced a fierce legal challenge this past year. Geothermal, like hydroelectric dams, is often cited as a renewable energy source, since the technology harnesses heat from the earth to produce electricity, which in theory (as long as it doesn’t stop raining, surprise!), is endless.
After walking seven days from the Bolivian mining town of Huanuni, Elder Mamani arrives in La Paz with a group of fellow unemployed miners demanding jobs. While wandering through the city, Elder struggles to breathe. He wheezes, coughs, and nearly faints—his lungs, we learn, are degraded from dust in the tin mine. Eventually, Elder comes upon Mamá Pancha, his self-proclaimed godmother and a fixture of the Rodriguez market in El Alto. She helps him find work hauling vegetables; at night, he sleeps in the street, his body broken. El Gran Movimiento, Kiro Russo’s second feature film, follows the deterioration of Elder’s health and the efforts of Mamá Pancha and her friend Max, a local prophetic figure and jester, to heal him.
I was an outlier in that respect, as were many others from the generation of baby boomers that is now reaching its eclipse. Guilt was a motivator of many, coming from middle-class backgrounds with enough comfort to drive us into action. Direct action was also a powerful force for many of us. Dr. Willard Gaylin wrote a significant article€ “Feelings: Our Vital Signs”, in which he posits the theory that some feelings work to keep us honest and are sometimes a check on behavior, something some of us in the baby boom generation had jettisoned with little thought as personal and collective liberation was so important to us. Dr. Gaylin researched war resistance during the Vietnam War and he had written about it. Dr. Gaylin’s€ In Service to Their Country: War Resisters in Prison€ (1970) was a treatment of one of the most significant but under-reported issues from the Vietnam Era. Dr. Gaylin also wrote (with others) about the limits of official actions in€ Doing Good: The Limits of Benevolence€ (1978) as a critique of official actions through social policy toward the elderly, children, and physically and emotionally challenged people.
"Failure at these talks will jeopardize the livelihoods and food security of billions."
When Kamine and her organization began working with Oyler in 2009, 85 percent of the students weren’t making it through 10th grade, she said. Today, the school has a 92.7 percent graduation rate, and 70 percent of graduates go to college, despite the district’s€ continued€ high poverty rate.
The rich man that’s unable to find happiness because he doesn’t realize the goal of life is altruism/nirvana/love/enjoying-the-moment/god is beyond cliche.
[...]
This in turn tempts many people, especially young people, to swear off the making of money as a valuable goal.
In itself, this can be fine if you smell your goals well enough from an early age. If you are certain that what you want is to hobo-backpack across the globe thrice, or have a quiet cliffside Mediterranean restaurant, or seek enlightenment ... then yeah, you probably shouldn’t aim to make money.
But there’s also a typology of a person that is young, doesn’t have a clear set of “meanings” for their life in mind, yet chooses not to focus on money because it seems to be inherently meaningless.
I’d single out this: a type of person that feels like there are meaningful things to do, but they are unachievable. Things like settling on Mars or the Arctic, stopping violence, eliminating poverty, curing disease and death, eliminating “evil”, “solving” human biology, or physics, or finding a perfect system of metaphysics.
This results in a lot of intellectual meandering in the best-case scenario and in depressive behavior in the worst-case scenario: It leads anywhere from doing a bachelor's in philosophy and a Ph.D. in a quantitative field, to being lethargic, and staying in bed watching Youtube(TikTok?) all day.
If you count yourself among such people, I want to try and persuade you that money might actually be a generator of meaning if pursued and thought about properly.
[...]
Nor is there a clear number for the “amount of money you need in order to achieve a paradigm shift”. For some people, having 200k worth of savings might be enough to shift their paradigm to “now I can live frugally off savings and dedicate my life to joining a deworming project in Africa”. Others might need 50m to shift their paradigm to “now I can lead the world into colonizing space and solving last-mile clean energy delivery issues”.
Wealth can result in a paradigm shift, both for people and companies. But if you read about people or companies that made an impact assisted by their assets, one thing of note is that the paradigm shift usually didn’t come until they realized they had the assets to pursue new “unimaginable” goals.
Finally, there’s the oft-repeated but true line: wealth is inflow minus outflow. Many people that we think of as rich are dirt poor once you account for taxes and monthly expenses. Money is useful when it opens up degrees of freedom in the socio-economic environment, it’s useless when spent on status goods and other zero-sum games (e.g. housing in large cities).
Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers is a longtime advocate of this cruel approach.€ Earlier this summer,€ Summers cheered the idea of throwing millions out of work when he suggested that the Fed should “raise interest rates enough that the economy will slip into recession.” More recently, he€ doubled down: “My worst fear would be that the Fed will continue to be suggesting that it can have it all in terms of low inflation, low unemployment, and a healthy economy.”
“Freedom Dreams: Black Women and the Student Debt Crisis,” a new short documentary from The Intercept, profiles Black women educators and activists struggling under the weight of tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of dollars in student loan debt. It is directed by Astra Taylor and Erick Stoll, narrated by former Ohio state Senator Nina Turner, and was supported by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project. “A system where Black women do not have to be subject to crushing debt is a system that would benefit everyone,” says Shamell Bell, one of the women featured in the film.
In a much-anticipated move, President Biden has signed an executive order Wednesday for student debt relief that could help more than 40 million borrowers by canceling up to $20,000 of their federal loans. Many advocates for canceling student debt say Biden’s plan doesn’t go far enough, while Republicans decry the plan as “student debt socialism.” We speak to Astra Taylor, writer, filmmaker and co-director of the Debt Collective, a union for debtors and one of the original advocates for a debt jubilee that would cancel all student debt. Despite the mixed reaction, “this is incredibly significant when you think about where we began as a movement not that long ago,” says Taylor, who also notes that debt strikes and the fight for full cancellation will continue.
India Walton and Sam Rosenthal examine Joe Biden's student debt forgiveness plan and find it wanting.
One of the most unpleasant arrangements in the current structure of student debt in the US is the government charges interest rates for it that are much higher than corresponding rates charged by banks holding their share of the total debt.€ Government rates range from 4.99% to 7.4% while bank rates are around 3.2% (fixed) to 1.3% (variable).€ The differential in rates is clearly designed to push students to ‘consolidate’ their annual education loans with the US Dept. of Education to private banks. Thus, the private banking sector is given a significant cut of the student debt pie. Loans for both go up annually and are will rise in 2022-23 and after as general interest rates rise by Federal Reserve actions.
President Biden’s student debt plan will provide relief to some 43 million borrowers of all races—and it is a particularly important step towards narrowing the racial wealth divide.
As a presidential candidate, Joe Biden was hardly bullish on student debt cancellation. He was cajoled by progressives and his presidential primary opponents into adopting a more forceful student debt cancellation stance, one which ultimately helped win him the support of young voters.
+1. This Happened and is Happening Here
We speak with one of the reporters who this week exposed the secretive Chicago industrial mogul who has quietly given $1.6 billion to the architect of the right-wing takeover of the courts — the largest known political advocacy donation in U.S. history. The donor is Barre Seid, who donated all of his shares in his electronics company, Tripp Lite, to the nonprofit group run by Leonard Leo, who helped select former President Trump’s conservative Supreme Court nominees. “This transaction was all structured in a way that really gamed the rules around donations to nonprofits,” says Andrew Perez, a reporter for The Lever, who co-authored an exposé about Seid headlined “Inside The Right’s Historic Billion-Dollar Dark Money Transfer.”
Such views only see China as a muddled confection, a perception of willing blindness and special investment.€ Be it of fear, condescension or optimism, Australian governments have shifted violently over the years in their approach.€ The Australia of Gough Whitlam, in recognising the People’s Republic of China in December 1972, invested the country with, as James Curran puts it, “a sense of euphoria and liberation: that Australia could chart a new foreign policy that did not necessarily look instinctively to its great and powerful friends.”
A Yekaterinburg court placed former mayor and outspoken opposition politician Evgeny Roizman under a “ban on certain activities" at his arraignment hearing on Thursday, according to local media. The politician was arrested earlier this week on felony charges of discrediting the Russian army.
House Homeland Security Committee Chair Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) and Rep. Yvette Clarke (D-N.Y.), chair of a cybersecurity subcommittee, are demanding that Twitter respond to allegations from a whistleblower about major security deficiencies that the Democrats said could pose national security threats.
The Democrats sent a letter to Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal on Thursday asking for details about security flaws identified in whistleblower Peiter Zatko’s complaint, and about action Twitter took in response to warnings raised by Zatko during his time at Twitter or after his departure.
Ms Deprez gave the keynote speech at the Legislation Editing Open Software (LEOS) webinar on 21 June. In her introduction, she anticipated that multilingualism and artificial intelligence will form part of the future of law-making tools in the European Union.
This insight is in line with the Commission’s open source strategy and is a great encouragement for us at the Open Source Programme Office (EC OSPO). Ms Deprez recognised the significance of the open source approach in LEOS, and highlighted its potential in the digital transformation of law-making for the Commission and beyond.
By establishing a working culture based on open source – the core aim of the strategy – other organisations can be partners in the design, development and roll-out of LEOS. This allows LEOS' development to go faster and creates a much richer solution in collaboration with Member States.
They also introduced a bill that would require Big Tech to disclose “any U.S. or foreign government requests or recommendations regarding content moderation.” That legislation was introduced in the Senate last year after press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters that the White House was “flagging problematic posts” for social media companies.
Mark Zuckerberg has admitted that Facebook algorithmically censored the 'Hunter Biden laptop' story for a week.
Zuckerberg admitted it on 'The Joe Rogan Experience' podcast. Mark said that he did so because of a general request from the FBI to restrict election misinformation.
During the podcast, Joe asked Zuckerberg how Facebook handles controversial issues...like the Hunter Biden story and whether it was censored.
During an appearance on Joe Rogan's podcast Thursday, Zuckerberg provided new details on Facebook's handling of a controversial report alleging that the laptop contained evidence that then-presidential candidate Joe Biden's son was engaged in influence peddling. Zuckerberg's disclosure renewed anger by conservatives who've accused law enforcement, mainstream press and social media of trying to quash information damaging to President Biden.
"This isn't just insane, it's election interference," Republican Representative Andrew Clyde of Georgia tweeted. He added that Zuckerberg should be required to testify under oath before the House Oversight Committee.
Islamabad [Pakistan], August 26 (ANI): Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam-Fazl (JUI-F) chief Maulana Fazl-ur-Rehman has claimed that the international media is supporting Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) chief Imran Khan, after the former premier condemned the attack on author Salman Rushdie.
In a statement on Wednesday cited by The Nation, the JUI-F leader asked the United Nations on what ground was the UN expressing sympathy with Imran Khan.
Attack On Salman Rushdie: Salman Rushdie, 75, was stabbed by a 24-year-old New Jersey resident identified as Hadi Matar, a US national of Lebanese origin, on stage last week.
The Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees oversees the Wikimedia Foundation's operations. Community trustees and appointed trustees make up the Board of Trustees. Each trustee serves a three year term. The Wikimedia community has the opportunity to vote for community-and-affiliate selected trustees. Two candidates will join the Board of Trustees. The selected candidates will first be shortlisted by the affiliates and finally selected by the community.
For the past few days, the VLC media player ban has been the talk of the town. Some suggest it may be because Chinese hackers use it as a medium to hack into computers in India. However, some claim that the government has nothing to do with the ban. The truth is neither the government nor the people at Videolan are aware of what’s happened to VLC.
Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, said the “country of origin” of the accounts was the United States, while Twitter said the “presumptive countries of origin” for the accounts were the United States and Britain, according to the report.
Peiter Zatko, Twitter’s head of security who was terminated by the company in January, said in a whistle-blower complaint that the firm had deceived the public by misrepresenting how it fights spam and hackers. That violated a 2011 agreement that Twitter had struck with the Federal Trade Commission, which had barred the company from misleading users about its security and privacy measures, he contended.
In his complaint, which was filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on July 6, Mr. Zatko accused Parag Agrawal, Twitter’s chief executive, and other executives and directors of “extensive legal violations” and acting with “negligence and even complicity” against hackers. Mr. Zatko also sent the complaint and supporting documents to the Justice Department and the F.T.C.
The stakes have been raised, and the handsomely compensated consultants who craft campaigns have moved beyond mere false advertising into CIA-style PsyOp schemes, manipulating Republican voters into supporting the most extreme choices in GOP primaries, then turning around and denouncing the extremist recipients of their largesse as, well, too extreme. In the process, the Democratic leadership and their hired guns have helped shift the nation’s political center of gravity – already in dangerously weird territory – even further to the Right.
As you may recall, in his response to Twitter’s lawsuit trying to force him to fulfill the terms of the purchase agreement he made, Elon Musk relied on the findings of a tool called Botometer to argue that there were more bots on Twitter than Twitter was claiming. Again, I have to remind everyone, as much as Musk keeps insisting this case is about bots and spam, the actual case has nothing at all to do with bots or spam, and if you think it does, you’ve been lied to.
Last week, two media polls announced results that seemed almost willful efforts to portray the public as extremists.
Earlier this week, the popular Australian news publication Crikey, published what it is referring to as “The Lachlan Murdoch letters.” Lachlan Murdoch, as you likely know, is one of Rupert Murdoch’s sons, and who has increasingly been taking over the worst aspects of Murdoch’s approach to dividing society and profiting off of the carnage: namely Fox News.
Janine Jackson interviewed Project South’s Azadeh Shahshahani about the Biden administration’s Central American plan for the August 19, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Reliable Sources, on air for over 30 years, wasn’t axed because of lackluster ratings. While CNN‘s audience has shrunk since Trump left office, Reliable Sources was far from the network’s weakest link; CNN‘s highest-rated Sunday show, it recently outperformed even CNN‘s weekday primetime programming (Mediaite, 7/2/22). Instead, many observers pointed to both Malone and Licht’s “centrist”-leaning desires, and Stelter’s willingness to criticize both men, as probable factors in his firing.
We know, for example, that the U.S. government has consistently lied about its war-making and imperialism, lying both to get us into wars and about the wars it’s fighting. Indeed, there seems to be nothing the U.S. military and intelligence communities won’t lie about; they’ve lied about targeting U.S. citizens for extrajudicial murder, they’ve lied about their use of torture, they’ve lied about violently meddling in other countries’ sovereign affairs, and they’ve lied about illegally, unconstitutionally spying on us and our representatives. Like Winston Smith, they’ve changed facts and figures and destroyed or buried the truth over and over on matters of the utmost importance to democracy and a free society—these concepts they honor only as means to cynically manipulate us and, paraphrasing Tolstoy, debauch us in their patriotism. All of the flag-waving and pledging of allegiance is a way to switch off your critical faculties and sense of questioning and curiosity. As in Oceania, if they’re protecting us from dangerous foreign powers, if we’re permanently besieged, how can we question them?
In July and August 2022, Twitter and Meta removed two overlapping sets of accounts for violating their platforms’ terms of service. Twitter said the accounts fell foul of its policies on “platform manipulation and spam,” while Meta said the assets on its platforms engaged in “coordinated inauthentic behavior.” After taking down the assets, both platforms provided portions of the activity to Graphika and the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) for further analysis.
Our joint investigation found an interconnected web of accounts on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and five other social media platforms that used deceptive tactics to promote pro-Western narratives in the Middle East and Central Asia. The platforms’ datasets appear to cover a series of covert campaigns over a period of almost five years rather than one homogeneous operation.
These campaigns consistently advanced narratives promoting the interests of the United States and its allies while opposing countries including Russia, China, and Iran. The accounts heavily criticized Russia in particular for the deaths of innocent civilians and other atrocities its soldiers committed in pursuit of the Kremlin’s “imperial ambitions” following its invasion of Ukraine in February this year. To promote this and other narratives, the accounts sometimes shared news articles from U.S. government-funded media outlets, such as Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, and links to websites sponsored by the U.S. military. A portion of the activity also promoted anti-extremism messaging.
According to the report, Twitter and Meta removed a group of accounts from their platforms earlier this month, citing their platform manipulation and coordinated inauthentic behavior rules. Analyzing the accounts’ activity, researchers found that the accounts have been carrying out campaigns to criticize or support foreign governments (sometimes the same governments, in what feels like an attempt to sow division) and offer takes on culture and politics for years. The report says this was sometimes done by sharing links to news sites backed by the US government and military.
The DEF CON Voting Village made headlines for giving hackers access to voting machines and putting election vulnerabilities on full display when it first launched in 2017.
But in the era of the “Big Lie,” the unfounded theory of election rigging in 2020, the village has another — and possibly more challenging — mission.
The researchers found that psychologically “inoculating” internet users against lies and conspiracy theories — by pre-emptively showing them videos about the tactics behind misinformation — made people more skeptical of falsehoods afterward, according to an academic paper published in the journal Science Advances on Wednesday. But effective educational tools still may not be enough to reach people with hardened political beliefs, the researchers found.
Since Russia spread disinformation on Facebook during the 2016 election, major technology companies have struggled to balance concerns about censorship with fighting online lies and conspiracy theories. Despite an array of attempts by the companies to address the problem, it is still largely up to users to differentiate between fact and fiction.
It turns out that these fears and misunderstandings of our eight-legged friends are reflected in the news. Recently, more than 60 researchers from around the world, including Dr. Scott, collected 5,348 news stories about spider bites, published online from 2010 through 2020 from 81 countries in 40 languages. They read through each story, noting whether any had factual errors or emotionally fraught language. The percentage of articles they rated sensationalistic: 43 percent. The percentage of articles that had factual errors: 47 percent.
These findings, published on Monday in the journal Current Biology, revealed a vast and interconnected web of misinformation. Errors, which tended to cluster in sensationalized stories, would shoot around the world in days, from India to China to Poland to Argentina to the United States. This would often start on a regional level, where a story would be amplified by national and international news outlets. According to misinformation scientists, this is a defining characteristic of modern misinformation: the magnification of small errors that support a certain narrative. It is there in both spider news and political news.
As for the dons who have nixed books from their reading lists or allowed students to opt out of “difficult” literature, they would do well to reflect on Rushdie’s conception of literature as a means to “explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit”. Ought students be spared any graphic account he might subsequently write of the low place in the human spirit to which his refusal to be silenced has reduced him?
Surely not. Depriving our students of access to the full range of human experience in the name of protecting them only, ultimately, does them harm.
Rushdie is not only seen as a symbol of freedom, however, but also as the living avatar of la loi de la liberté de la presse (the law for freedom of the press), an act that dates back to 1881 and permits free speech in almost all circumstances. These days it is illegal in France to incite racial hatred, deny crimes against humanity such as genocide, or publish hate language on social media. Otherwise, all forms of speech and thought are effectively lawful, including blasphemy.
India was among the first countries to ban his novel, The Satanic Verses, after Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa in 1989 calling for his death following its publication.
While literary writers in the U.S. increasingly face online threats, they rarely metastasize into actual physical attacks, said Karin Deutsche Karlekar, who directs the Writers at Risk program at PEN America. Authors routinely make public appearances with little or no security.
Such was the case with Rushdie. The India-born writer became the target of a Fatwa by Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini in the late 1980s, over his depiction of the Prophet Muhammed in his book The Satanic Verses, and was forced into hiding.
As openDemocracy co-founder Anthony Barnett recently argued, 1989 was a year of epochal change for the left, facing as it was a new world defined by globalising capitalism and the end of Soviet communism. The so-called Rushdie affair contributed to this recalibration: age-old commitments to civil liberties and secularism were restated, with calls for the repeal of blasphemy laws, the separation of church and state and an end to state aid for religious schools. New groups formed by Black and Asian writers, scholars and activists emerged to express solidarity with Rushdie; the voices of feminist women of colour, organised around Southall Black Sisters and Women Against Fundamentalism, were amplified, bringing greater attention to the unique oppressions of fundamentalist religion and uniting feminists across ethnic and religious lines.
Alongside the left’s support for Rushdie’s freedom of speech and its refusal of extremist religion was an equally firm condemnation of racism and Islamophobia, in particular the weaponisation of the Rushdie affair for reactionary ends. While Women Against Fundamentalism fiercely opposed the oppression of women by reactionary fundamentalism, they equally challenged the racist opportunism of the National Front, who briefly sought to hijack pro-Rushdie counter-protests; Voices for Rushdie sought to challenge the tendency to treat the Muslim communities of Britain as monolithic, disloyal and prone to extremism.
The Post reported Matar saying of Rushdie: “I don’t like the person. I don’t think he’s a very good person. I don’t like him very much. He’s someone who attacked Islam, he attacked their beliefs, the belief systems.”
As he said in 1996, as part of a speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors that was read aloud by Tina Brown on Friday: “I want to suggest to you that citizens of free societies, democracies, do not preserve their freedom by pussyfooting around their fellow-citizens’ opinions.”
"He's been a constant, indefatigable champion of words and of writers attacked for the purported crime of their work," said the day's first speaker, PEN CEO Suzanne Nossel.
"Today, we will celebrate Salman for what he has endured, but even more importantly, because of what he has engendered — the stories, characters, metaphors and images he has given to the world."
Since November 2016, the Met made 579 referrals for the removal of “potentially harmful content” from social media platforms and 522 of these were removed, predominantly from YouTube. More specifically, in 2021 the Met referred 510 music videos to YouTube for removal and the platform removed 96.7%, and a report from the€ New York Times€ notes that YouTube removed 319 videos in 2020 following requests from the police force. At the same time, popular YouTube channels have advised artists to censor content that could be deemed offensive to avoid potential removal once the video goes live.
Would you be surprised to find out that the censorial, moral panic bill based on hype and nonsense, but very likely to pass in California and potentially change how the internet functions… was actually written by a British noble with a savior complex?
To make your job as a parent easier, we’ve combined expert-approved tips and created a four-step guide to introducing parental controls in your home. It encompasses everything you need to explain parental restrictions to children, secure their devices, and keep them safe online. They may not like it initially — but they’ll thank you later.
There’s presumptive access to court records under the First Amendment. But that presumption presumes a lot of other things, as this recent Sixth Circuit Appeals Court ruling demonstrates. Just because something is open doesn’t necessarily mean it’s accessible. But the Sixth Circuit has decided access (no matter how limited) is still access, and that’s all that matters.
The report, titled Impunity and Denial in the face of Extreme Violence against the Press Persists, said that there were 331 verbal, online and physical attacks against journalists and the media in the first six months of 2022. Article 19 highlighted that the figure is 51.8% higher than in the first half of 2016, when former president Enrique Peña Nieto was in his fourth year in office, as President López Obrador is now.
The report noted that the five most common kinds of aggression were intimidation and harassment, with 101 cases; threats, with 66 cases; illegitimate use of public power, with 45 cases; physical attacks, with 29 cases; and the blocking or alteration of content, with 28 cases.
Reporters Tuomo Pietilaina and Laura Halmi, and the paper's acting manager at the time, Kalle Silfverberg, have denied wrongdoing.
He is the "alleged intellectual author of Margarito's murder" and head of a cell of the once-powerful Arellano Felix drug cartel, Mejia told reporters, without revealing the suspected motive.
When it comes to online trolls, Pakistan has ranked among the top five worst offenders monitored by the Coalition For Women in Journalism or CFWIJ. The global non-profit has analyzed digital threats in 132 countries for the past two years.
Today, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, met with Julian Assange’s wife, Stella Assange, and Mr. Assange’s Spanish lawyers, Baltasar Garzón and Aitor Martínez, at the Palais Wilson in Geneva.
‘Clearing House’ axed two years after we revealed controversial unit was vetting Freedom of Information requests.
Closing your laptop at 5 p.m. Doing only your assigned tasks. Spending more time with family. These are just some of the common examples used to define this latest workplace trend. Some experts say it's a misnomer and should really be defined as carving out time to take care of yourself.
China’s state media defended the country’s increasingly costly zero tolerance approach to Covid-19, saying inactivity from “lying flat” would be disastrous, as outbreaks in its tourism hotspots abate.
The market may be even more discouraging to recent graduates and other jobseekers than the official figures suggest, said Dorothy Solinger, a professor emerita at the University of California, Irvine, who studies unemployment in China.
China’s “unemployment statistics are notoriously wrong,” Solinger told VOA Mandarin. “I’m surprised they’re announcing that it’s this high now, but it makes me think it may be even higher.”
China’s recently reported record-breaking 20% youth unemployment rate has obscured an equally worrying trend among its younger generation: Even those employed are increasingly burned out and “quitting while remaining in the office.”
The headline-grabbing news last week that China’s unemployment rate for those aged 16-24 hit a never-before-seen high for the country, at 19.9% — meaning one in five youth cannot find work — was an unwelcome addition to the country’s array of economic difficulties.
"They're reaping what they're sowing at the moment, and what they've sown for the last two years has not been great for the job market," said Zak Dychtwald, CEO of the Young China Group, a consulting firm that does market research on youth in China.
The market may be even more discouraging to recent graduates and other jobseekers than the official figures suggest, said Dorothy Solinger, a professor emerita at the University of California, Irvine, who studies unemployment in China.
China's "unemployment statistics are notoriously wrong," Solinger told VOA Mandarin. "I'm surprised they're announcing that it's this high now, but it makes me think it may be even higher."
Oklahoma plans to execute a person a month for the next two years, starting today. We get an update from Connie Johnson, former state senator and murder victim family member with the Oklahoma Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, and speak with world-renowned anti-death-penalty activist Sister Helen Prejean. “Our death penalty is broken. It always was from the beginning,” Prejean tells Democracy Now! “I recognize that this is torture and an abuse of human rights. In time, with our help, as we continue to get the word out, the American people are going to see that, too. And we are going to end this thing.” Oklahoma has a history of botched executions, wrongful convictions and prosecution misconduct. “We get it wrong here often,” says Johnson. “We don’t want anyone executed.”
Orbán has declared war on liberal democracy and in doing so appeals not only to anti-communists, right-wing Christians, nativists, and homophobes, he also provides a model of Christian nationalism for those conservatives in the United States such as Donald Trump, Tucker Carlson, and Ron DeSantis who want to hollow out liberal democracy from the inside.[5] Orbán has not only emerged as a global spokesperson for Nazi ideology, he has also imposed his authoritarian rule not through the force of overt oppression, but through the destruction of civil society. Orbán’s notion of “illiberal democracy” is a laboratory for an updated form of fascism that trades in corruption, corporate cronyism, repression, religious fundamentalism, the control of the media, hatred of refugees, a war on women, transgender people, and an attack on critical education and advocates of climate change.[6] The historian Heather Cox Richardson lucidly captures the anti-democratic elements at work in Orbán’s notion of “illegal democracy.” She writes:
Black veterans were a large part of what made the summer of 1919, in the words of this historian David F. Krugler, “the year that African Americans fought back.”
While naturally condemning the terrorists’ heinous acts of mass murder, other more thoughtful voices of reason in that period of hysteria and bloodlust reflected on why young men would sacrifice their lives while slinging a few stones at the empire, taking thousands of innocents with them. It certainly wasn’t the aforementioned “freedoms” that motivated them to commit such acts of terror, nor was it the 72 virgins waiting for them in paradise, or the fact their countries aren’t US.
That's how Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) responded after the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) on Wednesday accused Starbucks of unlawfully withholding raises and benefits from thousands of workers at unionized and unionizing shops in an effort to repress a nationwide organizing campaign.
The artist is as well turned-out in the portrait that accompanies the text. Dressed in rumpled jeans and a denim shirt, Heizer stands beneath an azure sky, soft clouds scudding overhead. With his head bent slightly forward of his hips, his eyes are shaded by a stiff, clean, wide-brimmed hat. The artist as visionary, a prophet who fifty years ago retreated to this vast, arid terrain and became one with it. Reads the photograph’s cutline: “This land is in my blood.”
In a letter to congressional Democrats and a statement to media outlets, Alphabet-owned Google reiterated its efforts to combat misleading advertisements and search results along with confirming that the company will clearly label whether medical facilities provide abortions.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart instructed the Justice Department to publish the document by noon ET on Friday. The judge's order came just hours after federal prosecutors gave him a sealed copy of the affidavit with proposed redactions.
Last year, Zachary Norris was driving home from a hike in the Bay Area with his wife, his two children, and a friend when seven police cars converged behind him and ordered him to pull over. The officers approached him with guns drawn. He got out of his car and dropped to his knees. The police, he said, separated him from his family and pulled him into the back of one of their vehicles. Someone had swapped his car’s license plate with another—a common tactic used to evade law enforcement. An automatic license plate reader had identified Norris’s car as belonging to a suspect in an armed robbery.
Judge B. Lynn Winmill of Idaho's Federal District Court ruled that the state's near-total ban on abortion care violates the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act of 1986 (EMTALA), siding with the U.S. Department of Justice.
"Vast swaths of the nation, especially in the South and Midwest, will become abortion deserts that, for many, will be impossible to escape."
Marco Rubio may be a bumbling excuse for a US senator, but when it comes to Florida politics, he’s no fool. A career politician and failed presidential contender, Rubio is campaigning this year for a third term as Florida’s senior senator. And he’s running scared.
Four years ago, the Laredo Police Department arrested a citizen journalist for the crime of receiving an answer to a question she asked.
I have tuned in to two IANA Root KSK signing ceremonies this year. The last one was held last Wednesday. The Root KSK ceremony is where representatives come together to sign the new keys for the root DNS servers. These are the servers at the heart of the DNS protocol. The root servers let you find TLD-level servers. Cloudflare has a great blog post on what the root servers are and how the ceremony works. The ceremonies are often quite long but if I know one is on I will tune in.
The update is that the cable landed in Cape Town, South Africa on the 8th of August. The West Indian Ocean Cable Company (WIOCC) which has some kind of partnership with Google on the Equiano cable is quoted saying: [...]
Via a subsidiary called CFE Telecomunicaciones e Internet para Todos (CFE Telecommunications and Internet for Everyone), the state-owned utility is offering a range of plans. The cheapest is a three-day, 30-peso (US$1.50) plan that comes with 4 gigabytes of mobile [Internet], 250 minutes of call time and 125 text messages.
We’ve frequently noted how stupid it is that we’ve ceded a major communications platform to robocalling scammers and scumbags. We’ve noted for just as long that many regulatory “solutions” to the robocall problem have been dumb and half-hearted. Every six months the FCC will announce some new plan they promise will demolish robocalls, and every single time the result is muted at best.
Free connectivity is now available at around 3,000 of the 12,000 payphones in Telstra's network.
The first problem with “keeping honest people honest” is that it’s an oxymoron. The very definition of an honest person is that they can be trusted even when nobody is checking up on them. Nothing needs to be done to keep honest people honest, just as nothing needs to be done to keep tall people tall.
The second problem is more substantial. To the extent that “keeping honest people honest” involves any analytical thinking, it reflects a choice to build a weak but conspicuous security mechanism, so that people know when they are acting outside the system designer’s desires. (Mr. Attaway essentially made this argument at today’s hearing.) The strategy, in other words, is to put a “keep out” sign on a door, rather than locking it. This strategy indeed works, if people are honest.
The lawsuit — which is part of a new strategy by Lina Khan, the F.T.C. chair, to be more forward-looking in antitrust enforcement — is considered a long shot by many legal experts because it involves an acquisition in a nascent market with many start-ups. In the past, most antitrust court cases involved more mature markets and focused on how a merger can lead to higher prices for consumers.
Still, a promise is a promise, so it doubtless shocked public option advocates to learn that for Biden this promise was more on the order of something he might dream of doing maybe as an afterthought if he gets reincarnated as the parliamentarian in a millennium or two. Because supporters naturally would have figured that something so popular had a chance; but it’s popular for precisely the reason Biden finds it radioactive and that powerful lobbyists killed it – a public option would save people money. It might even – horrors! – make health care affordable. The only question is, why did Biden mention it in the first place, when he knew darn well he would never deliver?
Xbox’s management team’s inability to put out a clear public message regarding exclusive titles is becoming a real thing. When the season of acquisitions kicked off last year and Microsoft bought up Zenimax/Bethesda studios, the muddled messaging began. First were conflicting statements over the exclusivity of those studios’ titles, then came Microsoft saying those titles would be “first/better” on Xbox, before finally landing on at least one title from Bethesda going as an Xbox exclusive. The confused messaging continued after Microsoft announced it was looking to acquire Activision Blizzard, with some vague messaging about how that studio’s games would be handled.
But this is also technological nonsense. The program that checks to see whether other programs are approved by the manufacturer is also running on an untrusted adversary's computer (with DRM, you are the manufacturer's untrusted adversary). Because that overseer program is running on a computer you own, you can replace it, alter it, or subvert it, allowing you to run programs that the manufacturer doesn't like. That would include (for example) a modified DRM program that unscrambles the manufacturer-supplied video, audio or text file and then, rather than throwing away the unscrambled copy when you're done with it, saves it so you can open it with a program that doesn't restrict you from sharing it.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.