PineTab2 is powered by an RK3566 SoC, which sports low power consumption and low thermals, has a metal case that’s very sturdy and easy to disassemble for repair or hardware hacking, and comes with two USB-C ports, one USB 3.0 port and one USB 2.0 port intended for charging.
The Linux tablet also features a micro HDMI port for video output, a MicroSD slot, a 3.5mm headphone jack, and a 2MPx selfie camera and 5MPx rear camera. Under the hood, PineTab2 comes with up to 8GB RAM and 128GB flash storage (a cheaper version offers 4GB RAM and 64GB flash storage).
Many years ago, I never thought I'd find myself in a position to write about the best Linux laptops on the market and have to narrow down the field. Back then, we were lucky to have maybe one or two options available to us. Now, you'd be surprised at how many laptops are sold with Linux installed.
I'm not gonna lie - it's a good time to be a Linux user. With so many options, we can now actually be selective with how we spend our money. On top of that, we no longer have to do extensive research on a particular laptop to ensure every component will work with Linux. Once upon a time, that took considerable effort to track down chipset manufacturers and models that went into a particular laptop.
joel says hello rich.
News 00:00:45 BiWeekly Wanderings 31:19 Linux Innards 58:05 Check This Out 1:40
First up in the news: Mint 21.1 beta has been released, vivaldi adds mastodon plugin.
In Security and Privacy, Eufy shows your videos, samsungs lost some keys, and more rootkits.
Did you know that being verified on Twitter now means you "may or may not be notable?" Shawn Powers shares with Doc Searls and Jonathan Bennett how he found that out the hard way while all three dig deep into Twitter vs. the Fediverse, blogging, ChatGPT, and much more in a show packed with facts and fancies an AI may never understand, but you might.
I'm announcing the release of the 6.0.13 kernel.
All users of the 6.0 kernel series must upgrade.
The updated 6.0.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-6.0.y and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser: https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-s...
thanks,
greg k-h
Hello everyone,
The bugfix release 22.3.1 is now available.
It fixes several issues, but one of the big ones is a crash on Mesa builds that include d3d12 or dozen but don't have libd3d12.so installed (ie. any Linux build not being used from within WSL).
If you find any issues, please report them here: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/issues/new
The next bugfix release is due in two weeks, on December 28th.
Cheers, Eric
Far2l is a port of the Windows text-based file manager Far. And to be clear, that's a lower-case L (as in "Linux") not a number 1. It runs in the terminal and is designed around a plug-in structure, enabling compatibility with SSH, WebDAV, NFS, and more. You can compile and run far2l on Linux, Mac, and BSD, or Far on Windows.
MuseScore 4, free and open-source digital music notation and composition software, comes with an all-new interface and many new features.
MuseScore is one of the world’s leading free music composition software, featuring an easy-to-use interface and many powerful features. It allows professional and amateur musicians to compose music for various instruments.
In other words, MuseScore’s note mode allows you to produce creative and beautiful musical scores with ease, whether you’re a piano, guitar, violin, or saxophone player.
One of the most fundamental things for users of Ubuntu Linux that you will do on the command line is change your current directory. This allows you to navigate around the file system, and view or interact with files from different directories. In this tutorial, you will learn how to change directory in terminal on Ubuntu.
The Linux file system hierarchy was thoughtfully created and has undergone some careful changes since its inception. Linux users may have noticed a few directories that are always present on all systems, such as the /etc directory and a slew of others that reside inside of root. Have you ever wondered what this directory is specifically for, and how it became such a staple for the Linux operating system? In this tutorial, you will learn what the /etc directory is used for on a Linux system.
Making a clone of a disk partition is a great way to make a complete backup. This type of backup would preserve all your system and personal files on that particular partition. Cloning and restoring a disk partition is relatively easy, even if you are cloning the partition on to a completely different storage device.
There are a few applications built especially for this type of function, like Partimage and Clonezilla, but we can also use a simple, default command line tool such as dd. In this tutorial, we will take you through the step by step instructions to make a clone of a partition on a Linux system. You will learn three different methods below and can choose the one that you think fits your situation best.
The Linux user often uses the touch command as a way to create a text file in the current working directory, but this tool is not limited to that; it’s way bigger than creating a text file.
The official description for touch command is “a tool that can change a file’s access and modification times (atime, mtime),” and that is what it does and is built for.
In this article, you will learn how to use the touch command for changing file access time, file modification time, replicating another file timestamp, and much more.
Most users, if not every user, of Ubuntu Linux will need to create a file at some point. You may need to make a grocery list, a configuration file, or just an empty file used for testing purposes. The applications are endless, but inevitably you will need to make some files.
We can create files from both command line terminal or the desktop GUI on Ubuntu, and there are many different ways to perform this task. Depending on what kind of file you are making, and what purpose it serves, you may find that one method works much better for you than another. We can even make lots of files at once, if necessary. In this tutorial, you will learn how to create a file on Ubuntu Linux.
Scheduling tasks to run automatically at specific times is essential knowledge for any sysadmin.
When you add a container query, it will look for the nearest ancestor container, by default. If you have multiple nested containers or if you just want to make sure that your query uses the right container, you can name containers and query them specifically.
On day 43, we've learned how to group layers and on day 46, how to order them. In this post, we’ll look into ordering grouped layers.
With CSS Media Queries Level 4, it's possible to use mathematical comparison operators in media queries.
Nagios is an awesome Open Source monitoring tool, that provides a more comprehensive monitoring environment to always keep an eye on your all machines/networks€ whether you are in your data center or just your small labs.
With Nagios, you can monitor your remote hosts and their services remotely on a single window. It shows warnings and indicates if something goes wrong in your servers which eventually helps us to detect some problems before they occur. It helps us to reduce downtime and business losses.
In this guide, we demonstrate how to use SSH ProxyJump and SSH ProxyCommand commands when connecting to a jump server.
In our previous guide on how to set up an SSH Jump Server, we covered the concept of a Bastion Host. A Bastion host or a Jump Server is an intermediary device that an SSH client connects to first before accessing the target remote Linux system. An SSH Jump server acts as a gateway to your IT resources, thus reducing the attack surface.
The SSH ProxyJump and ProxyCommand commands determine how a client connects to the remote server via the jump server, jump host, or bastion server.
This guide shines the spotlight on the SSH ProxyJump and SSH Proxy Command in Linux.
If you have MP3 files on your Chromebook that you need to add tags to, it might disappoint you to find out that there aren’t any good native Mp3 tag editors for Chrome OS. Thankfully, Chrome OS can run Linux apps. In this guide, we’ll show you how you can edit MP3 tags on a Chromebook using Picard MusicBrainz.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install RabbitMQ on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, RabbitMQ is a popular open-source message broker that stores and passes asynchronous messages between two or more services according to pre-defined rules. It is an intermediary software that ensures your systems are more reliable, scalable, and always available. It implements the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP), Streaming Text Oriented Messaging Protocol (STOMP), MQ Telemetry Transport (MQTT), and other protocols.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the RabbitMQ on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 22.04 and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS, and more as well.
This article is part of the Linux command series and explains various examples of find commands in Linux to find files and directories.
Like most operating systems, Linux supports filenames with spaces in them. But using these filenames on the command line isn’t always straightforward. Here are several ways you can handle filenames containing spaces.
Solid-state drives (SSDs) have been on the rise in recent years; they are fast, silent, and less prone to failure than traditional hard disk drives (HDDs). Still, HDDs power a lot of computers.
Not sure what kind of disk drive your Linux PC is using? Here’s how to easily check your disk type without opening the hood.
Today we are looking at how to install CLion 2022.3 on a Chromebook.
If you have any questions, please contact us via a Rumble comment and we would be happy to assist you!
If you are looking for the most stable Linux distribution, sure, Debian is the right choice.
Especially if you are planning to use it on servers.
But, on the desktop side, things are a bit different. I mean, you are given packages that are at least a year old and support for new-age hardware is even worse.
So what do you do in those cases, Well, you can use Debian testing!
This article guide takes a look at the usage of ‘apt’ and ‘apt-get’ commands in Debian-based Linux distributions like Ubuntu and Linux Mint. It further clarifies the confusion that might be behind the usage of these two commands.
In this post, you will learn how to install a Telnet client on Ubuntu 22.04.
Telnet is a tool that has been used for decades by computer system administrators in the networking field. So, you may notice that it is a remote access technology that is already a few years old,
Precisely because of the outdated nature of the technology, it has fallen into disuse and is even considered insecure.
Epic Games announced today they're killing off a bunch of classic games removing them from stores and turning off their online services for retro delights like Unreal Tournament.
Between 1976 and 1978, over one million Coleco Telstar video game consoles were sold. The Killer App that made them so desirable? PONG. Yep, those two paddles bouncing a ball around a blocky tennis court were all the rage and helped usher in a new era. And as [Dave] of Dave’s Garage shows us in the video below the break, the bringing the old console back to life proved simpler than expected!
This post tries to summarize everything we know about Breath of the Wild’s sequel. It’s arranged by time. It may contain spoilers.
After almost two years of work, we are happy to announce the release of Xfce 4.18 !
Since Xfce 4.16 a lot of major development happened. Our team added multiple nice new features, did a gazillion of bug fixes and did various minor improvements. Finally, all that is going to be released for your pleasure.
XFCE 4.18.0 core packages have been uploaded to the software repository and now available for updating your PCLinuxOS XFCE installation.
This development cycle was influenced a lot by GSoC 2021 and GSoC 2022, which led to various new features, most of them for Thunar, the Xfce File Manager. Though as well multiple other Xfce components got a lot of love and many improvements were done under the hood.
Nearly two years after the release of Xfce 4.16, here comes another major update to one of the oldest and lightest desktop environments for GNU/Linux distributions, Xfce 4.18.
Xfce 4.18 is packed with lots of new features and improvements to the file manager, panel, plugins, and other core components. For example, the Thunar file manager now features not one but two image preview side panes, a new Split View, recursive search, and finally lets you undo or redo basic file operations.
One interesting feature introduced in early Unix (V7) is the chroot(2) syscall (accompanied by the chroot(8) command added later). They allow for putting processes in what is called a chroot jail. What this means is that for the chrooted process (and its children) the filesystem root is not the one of the actual host system but some directory further down the filesystem hierarchy. The result is restricting access to that directory and all the dirs below it and hiding away everything above. This allows for some simple sandboxing and is often used e.g. with FTP where users are chrooted to their home directory.
A new release of the OpenBSD rpki-client, a key component in BGP routing security is available.
The Valuable News weekly series is dedicated to provide summary about news, articles and other interesting stuff mostly but not always related to the UNIX or BSD systems. Whenever I stumble upon something worth mentioning on the Internet I just put it here.
Cryostat is a container-native JVM application that provides a secure API for profiling and monitoring containers with JDK Flight Recorder (JFR). When deployed on Kubernetes or the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, Cryostat uses a permission configuration that maps Kubernetes resources to Cryostat-managed resources to authorize users to perform certain actions, such as creating a recording or viewing discovered targets.
Learn to migrate a complex legacy application to OpenShift in this easy demonstration. OpenShift Virtualization and GitOps modernize legacy virtualized
Along with the recently announced Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.7, these minor versions add and refine capabilities for a wide range of enterprise IT needs.
It’s certainly possible, likely even, that we’ll see new hubs and gateways that integrate both Z-Wave and Matter with Thread or Wi-Fi. In fact, as part of today’s announcement, Silicon Labs introduced the Unify SDK: A way to create such interoperable bridges.
Olimex has started to take pre-orders for the AgonLight2, a customized version of the Agon Light 8-bit open-source hardware computer based on the Z80 family and running BBC Basic.
Bernardo Kastrup and Dean Belfield created the Agon light 8-bit retro computer with VGA and PS2 keyboard port and programmable with BASIC earlier this year and released all hardware design files, the firmware, and documentation on GitHub, and Dean uploaded a one-hour-long video on YouTube. It was designed with EasyEDA, but Olimex re-captured the design in KiCad after getting customer requests, and the new cost-optimized board named AgonLight2 will start shipping by the end of January 2023.
The Raspberry Pi RP2040 is versatile and cheap, but it’s by no means known as the most powerful microcontroller on the world. Regardless, it is capable of great things, as demonstrated by [Bernhard Strobl], who built a 3D open world game engine that runs on that very platform.
Bowie gives us the option to explore some interesting ideas. The Pi Zero Serial is a HDMI capable serial video terminal that can also output graphics, bitmaps and sprites using terminal codes. That gives us options we couldn’t explore previously, and I’m thinking graphical games.
The transistor was born in December of 1947, in New Jersey, and it has defined the last half of the 20th century and the first quarter of the 21st. We’re exploring the cultures of innovation that brought us the device that changed everything.
Take a look around the room. You’d be hard-pressed to find a gadget or gizmo within reach that does not contain a transistor. Just about everything electronic is full of them.
Our information and communications world owes a debt to a team of physicists who took theories that had been kicking around for decades, and — after years of false starts and dead ends — got the first transistor to work early in the postwar era.
Walter Brattain and John Bardeen of Bell Telephone Laboratories were responsible.
But you’re not here for challenging self-introspection, you’re here for computer things! And the computer thing on my mind right now was inspired by last week’s crossover talk. When discussing what software and trad engineering can learn from each other, I often bring up the Snap-Fit Handbook. You know that little panel that holds the batteries in a remote or mouse? That’s a “snap fit”. The handbook is an entire manual dedicated to snap fit considerations. And there’s a lot of considerations! How to mold them, how strong to make them, all sorts of stuff.
The technology is based on sensors embedded in a lightweight belt conveniently worn around the waist to monitor thoracic impedance, electrocardiogram (ECG), heart rate and motion activity detection. The system uses different sensors for sensing these parameters. Thoracic impedance is a critical bio-signal to monitor heart failure progression. Similarly, ECG is a vital bio-signal to diagnose and predict cardiovascular diseases. ECG measures electrical signals through the heart using a Holter monitor, which is not suitable for point-of-care use.
As discussed, the presented HWD is based on specific parameters namely thoracic impedance, electrocardiogram (ECG), heart rate, and motion activity detection. These parameters have been found to be significant in determining the symptoms of HF and can potentially be vital in the continuous monitoring of HF symptoms. The system uses different sensors for sensing these parameters. These sensors include a peripheral module interface (PMOD) Impedance Analyzer (IA), for sensing thoracic impedance, AD 8232, for sensing ECG, MAX 30105, for sensing heart rate, and ADXL 362, for motion activity50,51,52,53. These sensors are then integrated with Arduino Uno as the microcontroller54. The subsequent paragraphs discuss these sensors in detail.
I blame Jan Beta for this ridiculous purchase, but Screenbeard of The Geekorium and aus.social also shares the blame. I’d tinkered with my TED-family 16 and Plus/4 I got second-hand for my 18th birthday, but it was the Commodore 128 he gave me that made things click. It taught me how to read and use service manuals, perform multimeter tests, socket new chips, perform very simple (de)soldering, how Commodore disk drives work, and how to write basic (hah!) Commodore programs. It also gave me my first experience with CP/M on physical hardware, and 80-column text on an 8-bit system.
A couple of weeks ago I made a spectacular and quite unexpected return to Android, after a long period of being exclusively in Apple’s mobile devices ecosystem. My last Android phone was the Sony Xperia Arc, which I bought way back in 2011. Afterwards I got an iPhone 5(S?) in 2012/2013 and never looked back.
There are several reasons for this, which I’ll list very briefly: [...]
And that's what I'm going to work on: taking the most difficult part of writing bots and other automation for Mastodon or the Fediverse, and turn that into a product. SAAS and Open Source. Hence, Fedetivity.
For those wondering: the fediverse is a name for a set of decentralized, interconnected social media platforms. It's seen a enormous influx and is on the rise, ever since Elon Musk took over Twitter. But it was already steadily growing after every other scandal by one of the giant social media companies.
Here's the step-by-step process for creating a Mastodon account and getting started on the growing social network. For more about social media, here's how to download your Twitter archive.
Celebrating their 40th anniversary, Adobe released the source code of PostScript v0.10 to the Computer History Museum. But before you ask, we tried and it won’t compile with GCC out of the box – it’s missing at least except.h, but we’d bet you can hack around it with a little dedication.
Now, social media colonists are laboring to rebuild their networks on new sites while keeping an eye on the old one, to see how the Twitter wars play out.
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about RSS, and have defended it from charges that it’s irrelevant or only useful for plumbing. But when it comes to actually reading RSS feeds, I’ve been everywhere.
Yup. I messed up again, just as I was afraid of. Using mod_md isn't that hard, it's just that any mistake you make means you just lost a few days, up to an entire month.
LibreOffice 7.5 will be released as final at the beginning of February, 2023 ( Check the Release Plan ) being LibreOffice 7.5 Beta1 the second pre-release since the development of version 7.5 started in mid June, 2022. Since the previous release, LibreOffice 7.5 Alpha1, 353 commits have been submitted to the code repository and 116 issues got fixed. Check the Release Notes to find the new features included in this version of LibreOffice.
LibreOffice 7.5 Beta1 can be downloaded for Linux, MacOS and Windows, and it can be installed alongside the standard version.
As a long-time advocate for open source and a contributor to Drupal, I spend a lot of time thinking about how organizations can leverage the platform. I've been thinking about Drupal's position in the larger digital ecosystem and how it compares to the other options on the market. And how Drupal can lean more on its strengths when planning out the strategy for a new project.
The British Computer Society is an august body, and the OSSG have put on some brilliant talks in the last few years. But I'd like to shake things up a little. I want us to move away from doing talks to a small group of London-centric folk. I want us to spread the message of open source out beyond people who are already interested. I also want us to put our money where our mouth is and start using more open source tools - like Mastodon, Matrix, and Jitsi.
After two years of running the ROS-Industrial Asia Pacific workshop digitally, this year’s edition has returned to physical and was held from 9 to 10 Nov 2022. The ROS-AP team has seen an overwhelming response, with tickets sold out happening early in the registration. Over 100 attendees from the ROS community attended this 2-day event, with 15 esteemed speakers who are leaders in business, industry, research, and education sectors. Prof Quek Boon Tong, CE of the National Robotics Programme Singapore, has graced the event as a Guest-of-honour, and among the keynote speakers are Prof Selina Seah, Assistant CEO of Changi General Hospital and Prof Giorgio Metta, Scientific Director of IIT.
The entire speaker lineup can be found here.
In an earlier blog post, I reported that the memory usage of a small byte array in Java (e.g., an array containing 4 bytes) was about 24 bytes. In other words: allocating small blocks of memory has substantial overhead.
What happens in C++?
But honestly, the piano presents the same problem just on another level: practicing, i.e. learning by failing, is hard.
What strikes me as a common thread between programming and music is the necessity to repeatedly endure failure in order to get something right. It reminds me of this line from the book Coders: [...]
At first I thought this was the end of the world. ChatGPT is nowhere near an Artificial General Intelligence (AGI): an AI capable of performing most tasks that a human can. But until last week I thought that even ChatGPT’s level of abstract reasoning was impossible. It can already - to an extent - code, rhyme, correct, advise, and tell stories. How fast is it going to improve? When’s it going to stop? I know that GPT is just a pile of floating point numbers predicting the next token in an output sequence, but perhaps that’s all you need in order to be human enough. I suddenly thought that AGI was inevitable, and I’d never given this possibility much credit before. I found that it made me very unhappy. This is a post about feelings, not analysis.
Next, I think the whole idea confuses what GPT and search are good at. Search looks up facts. It’s pulling from a database. While the “G” in GPT stands for generative. Meaning, it’s making things up. It’s often very correct when it does so, which is why we’re so impressed. But it’s also often wrong in truly comedic ways.
NVIDIA Container Runtime allows containerized applications to access your host’s GPU hardware. It facilitates the containerization of systems that would otherwise be off-limits, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) workloads. With NVIDIA Container Runtime installed, you can run these apps in containers on any host with an NVIDIA GPU.
In this article, you’ll learn about the runtime’s architecture and how to set it up. You’ll also learn how to deploy your own containers with GPU access, broadening the scope of what you can successfully containerize.
I wanted to make a note to self about this. I'm using Advent of Code for an opportunity to practise and learn more about jq, and in Day 7: No Space Left On Device I think I need a way of appending values to arrays, which are themselves values of properties that I create on the fly. This may not turn out to be useful in the end, but I wanted to explore it (I was thinking I could store the list of files in a given directory like this).
The main problem from the NixOS standpoint is that the Go team uses a hash method that is not compatible with Nix. They also decided to invent their own configuration file parsers for some reason, these don't have any battle-tested parsers in Nix. So we need a bridge between these two worlds.
One of the Go programs I keep around is gops, which I find handy for seeing if I'm using outdated binaries of Go programs that I should rebuild (for example, locally built Prometheus exporters). I have a script that updates and rebuilds all of my collection of Go programs, gops included, with the latest Go tip build (and the latest version of their code). Recently, rebuilding gops has been failing with an error: [...]
Cloud APIs are becoming more mature. While there's no single abstraction across all cloud providers, there are enough companies putting serious work into maintaining each separate set of libraries (e.g., HashiCorp/Terraform, Pulumi, Minio, etc.).
No but seriously we have what are ostensibly S-expressions, except they use JSON-adjacent notation: [...]
Alright! The day 12 puzzle involves path finding, and it seems like a good time to lean more heavily on the WASM embeds I've set up for the previous parts.
A message on the Lua email list was asking about the best way to parse MQTT topics, specifically, how to handle the multilevel wildcard character. I answered that LPeg would be good for this, and gave annotated source code to show how it works. I thought I might also post about it for better visibility.
Open source software projects often have a very diverse user group. Some users might be very adept at using the system and need very little documentation. For these power users, documentation might only need to be reminders and hints, and can include more technical information such as commands to run at the shell. But other users may be beginners. These users need more help in setting up the system and learning how to use it.
Writing documentation that suits both user groups can be daunting. The website's documentation needs to somehow balance "detailed technical information" with "providing more overview and guidance." This is a difficult balance to find. If your documentation can't meet both user groups, consider a third option — dynamic documentation.
Explore how to add a little JavaScript to a web page so the user can choose to display just the information they want to see.
Preliminary support for compiling the Rust language has been merged into the codebase for GCC 13, which will be the next version of the GNU compiler collection.
The Reg's sister site DevClass reported on the approval back in July, along with a timeline of when to expect the next steps, and now the code merge has happened. This is a good thing, and it's significant step for the Rust language – but there is a whole list of "buts" attached to this news.
The Rust-GCC project has been underway for a couple of years, as can be seen from the earliest commits on its Github page. The last time we wrote about it, when covering Linus Torvalds' keynote at the Open Source Summit, we attracted criticism for, um, quoting the project's own description from that page, saying how preliminary it was. Some Rustaceans regarded this as unfair, which may possibly tell you more about the fervor of Rust fans than it tells you about the GCC compiler's state of completion.
We first meet Lydia Tár waiting in the wings of an auditorium, called to the stage and lavished with a listing of her accolades: She is a lauded composer, a trained concert pianist, one of only 15 people to score an EGOT, and the holder of a PhD in musicology from the University of Vienna, where she specialized in the Indigenous music of eastern Peru’s Ucayali Valley. These laurels are recited by Adam Gopnik, who is introducing Tár for a talk at the New Yorker Festival, occasioned by the upcoming publication of Tár’s memoir and her live recording of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony with the Berlin Philharmonic, where she has been chief conductor for seven years. Her onstage musings are dense with esoterica, and stilted affectations mark her speech, as if she has rehearsed the cadence of profundity. Lydia Tár, if it is not already clear, is a very, very serious artist. Seriousness and the spirit of extravagance, to cite Susan Sontag, are the hallmarks of camp, and they give us a clue about the tonal mysteries to come: Like its title character, Todd Field’s Tár turns out to be extravagantly serious.
The following recent books invite the application of the aphorism, Readers Think, Thinkers Read. They also make good gifts for this Holiday season.
As someone that tends to both subscribe to a lot of websites via RSS, and likes to sometimes quote what I've read on my blog, I sometimes worry if that piece of writing is too old. If maybe the post has had it's time.
Around college application time, an academic counselor at West High School in Torrance, Calif., asks Bran—the narrator of Nell Zink’s new novel, Avalon—what she plans to do after graduation. Bran tells the counselor that she’s going to move to Australia to live with her biological father. It’s a plausible plan of action, but the truth is, she’s not actually sure he still lives in Australia—or whether he even moved there in the first place. In reality, Bran hasn’t planned things out beyond the next few weeks.
Remember “being in your body”? In the 1960s and ’70s, a crop of counterculturalists argued that corporeal awareness was crucial not only to self-actualization but also to social transformation. Flocking to an expanding network of retreats, New Age bookstores, and organic food stands, they embraced “embodied practices”—as they began to be called—as a means of liberation from the inauthentic, technocratic, and spiritually bankrupt modern world. The yoga mat was considered one such experimental and even revolutionary space, thanks, in part, to how yoga married non-Western spirituality with physical work that could be positively transcendent. This article has been adapted from Natalia Mehlman Petrzela’s Fit Nation: The Gains and Pains of America’s Exercise Obsession, forthcoming from Chicago University Press in January 2023.
This is the caption of a New Yorker€ cartoon€ by Christopher Weyant from several years ago. It keeps popping up in my head — I mean, every day. Like everyone else, I want what I do to matter, to “effect real change.” What I do is write. Specifically, I swim in the infinity of possibility. Humanity can kill itself or it can learn to survive. Most people (I believe) prefer the latter, which is all about discovering how we are connected to one another and to the rest of the universe. This is what I try to write about.
Then Congress passes another military budget. And once again, there’s the New Yorker cartoon.
But a necessary change and perhaps a big gain for Cannard who is reportedly moving to€ Tehama County, where land sells for one-tenth of what it sells for in Sonoma County. At Green String,€ Cannard€ hasn’t paid himself a salary. He hasn’t been able to afford to do that, but he has had all his food for free. “I love what I do,” he told me. “No matter what kind of work it is, you have to love doing it or there’s no point.”
The son of a farmer, Robert Cannard, Senior, Bob grew up farming and gardening and learned from his dad that one could grow almost anything in Sonoma County including bananas. Ross Cannard carries on the family tradition, and supplies Alice Waters at Chez Panisse with farm fresh produce.
On a previous podcast, the TV critic Sean T. Collins and I discussed how we were both surprised that Andor, the latest iteration of the Star Wars franchise, was actually a good TV program rather than just fan service.
To many, the cover is recognizable even at a distance: The lower half of a youthful, feminine face is darkened on one side by a purple shadow. The other cheek and jawline are lit up in neon pink. We don’t see the woman’s eyes, but her lips are pursed and painted red. They’re seductive—the focal point—but still more subtly set than any performative facial expression we see on social media these days. Those who have read and reread The Coldest Winter Ever know that this partly obscured face beckons readers into the story of Winter Santiaga, the teenage daughter of a Brooklyn drug kingpin and the character at the heart of Sister Souljah’s 1999 novel, a runaway success that would dramatize the hard-knock lives of New Yorkers immersed in the city’s drug culture for readers all over the world.
[When one of us goes]
When one of us goes to the other world, we gather and weep so that the ocean of our tears may take the deceased to their final resting place.
The sky was blue with a few jet trails as I came out of teaching the last class of the semester in 2012. Once on the highway headed to the Berkshires of Massachusetts, on I-90, I turned on an NPR station as I usually did to unwind from the day’s teaching schedule at the community college in Troy, New York. A news bulletin reported that there had been a school shooting in Connecticut, but few details were available. When I got home, my wife Jan had the television on and CNN reported that a massacre had taken place in Newtown, involving an undetermined number of children and school staff.
Newtown, Connecticut, flashed through the corridors of my memory as I watched the coverage. Forty-one years earlier, in happier days, I travelled from Rhode Island, north on Route 34 outside of New Haven, Connecticut, and followed the road beside the banks of the Housatonic River to Newtown, where the road merged with I-84 toward the Catskill Mountains of New York. These were heady days of resistance to the Vietnam War and lots of allies and much protest and activism. The world seemed like you could jump on it and it would jump back to paraphrase the activist Abbie Hoffman.
At many universities, the board of trustees is the most important decision-making body on campus, overseeing the school’s budget, selecting presidents, and deciding the range of climate action the university pursues. The board at the University of Connecticut is no different, comprising 21 members with nine faculty representatives. Only two trustees are students themselves, with the vast majority of the board never feeling the effects of its decisions.This story was produced for StudentNation, a program of the Nation Fund for Independent Journalism, which is dedicated to highlighting the best of student journalism. For more Student Nation, check out our archive or learn more about the program here. StudentNation is made possible through generous funding from The Puffin Foundation. If you’re a student and you have an article idea, please send pitches and questions to [email€ protected].
Here is a sample of what a typical board of education meeting in Wake County, North Carolina,€ sounds like€ ever since the extreme rightwing group Moms for Liberty began showing up:
In Amite County, Mississippi, where a third of adults struggle to read, evidence of America’s silent literacy crisis is everywhere.
It’s in a storefront on Main Street, in the fading mill town of Gloster, where 80-year-old Lillie Jackson helps people read their mail. “They can’t comprehend their bills,” she said. “So many of them are ashamed that they haven’t finished grade school.” She longs for the day she can retire, but she doesn’t want to abandon her neighbors. “That’s the only reason I really stay open,” she said.
Washington state education officials are proposing to expand oversight of private schools for students with disabilities, citing a Seattle Times and ProPublica investigation that revealed that the state failed to intervene despite years of complaints about these schools.
The state Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction’s request for new legislation, which will likely include a budget increase, appears to be welcomed by some lawmakers frustrated with the private special education schools, called “nonpublic agencies,” which accept public school children and tax dollars.
While we have all types of displays these days, there’s something special about those that appear to float in the air. This HUD clock from [Kiwi Bushwalker] is one such example.
In 2000, at a trade fair in Germany, an obscure Singapore company called Trek 2000 unveiled a solid-state memory chip encased in plastic and attached to a Universal Serial Bus (USB) connector. The gadget, roughly the size of a pack of chewing gum, held 8 megabytes of data and required no external power source, drawing power directly from a computer when connected. It was called the ThumbDrive.
Leave most objects on top of a turntable, and set it spinning, and they’ll fly off in short order. Do the same with a ball, though, and it somehow manages to roll around on top for quite some time without falling off. [Steve Mould] set about unpacking this “Turntable Paradox” in a recent YouTube video.
That device, now known by a variety of names—including memory stick, USB stick, flash drive, as well as thumb drive—changed the way computer files are stored and transferred. Today it is familiar worldwide.
The thumb drive was an instant hit, garnering hundreds of orders for samples within hours. Later that year, Trek went public on the Singapore stock exchange, and in four months—from April through July 2000—it manufactured and sold more than 100,000 ThumbDrives under its own label.
When it comes to vintage consoles like the Game Boy, it’s often nice to be able to dump cartridge ROMs for posterity, for archival, and for emulation. To that end, [Francis Stokes] of [Low Byte Productions] whipped up a rather unique method of dumping Game Boy carts via the link cable port.
The traditional method for visualizing magnetic fields, which your science teacher probably demonstrated at some point, is to sprinkle some iron filings onto a piece of paper and hold it over a magnet. It’s a bit of a messy process though, and nowadays there’s a more modern method available in the form of magnetic viewing films. These work thanks to tiny nickel particles suspended in an oily medium, and come in very handy if you want to examine, say, the magnetic field pattern of a DC electric motor. [Moritz v. Sivers] had another idea for this magic material however, and used it to make a Magnet Viewing Clock.
Sometimes a visual or tactile learning aid can make all the difference to elucidating a concept to an audience. In the case viruses and their methods of self-assembly, [AtomicVirology] made a 3D printed device to demonstrate how they work.€
What’s the strangest wheel? The omniwheel. Unless you count whegs — “wheel legs” — as wheels. This research paper from Shanghai Technical University explores a mash-up of the two ideas, where the wheels roll as standard omniwheels until a servo on the axle unfurls them into their whegs configuration. The result? OmniWhegs!
MIDI controllers can be simple straightforward keyboards, or wild magical devices that seem to snatch notes from the very aether itself. As you might expect from the name, the Nanoaetherphone II is one of the latter.
State and federal lawmakers in the Pacific Northwest, as well as the region’s tribal leaders, are calling for environmental policy changes and increased funding to address toxic contamination in salmon following an investigation by Oregon Public Broadcasting and ProPublica. Salmon is a pillar of tribal diets and culture, often served at ceremonies and largely considered a medicine.
Although tribal members and researchers have been raising concerns about this contamination for decades, federal and state governments have failed to consistently monitor the waters of the Columbia River Basin for pollution in fish. Given the gaps in testing, ProPublica and Oregon Public Broadcasting did their own, revealing levels of contaminants in Columbia River salmon that, when consumed at average tribal rates, would be high enough to put many of the 68,000 tribal members living in the basin at risk of adverse health impacts.
The sun plays a big biological role in our lives, regulating our circadian rhythms and doing a whole bunch more as well. Some people find the reduced sunlight of the winter months to have negative emotional effects, and rely on artificial lighting to counteract this. [Samasrinivas] built a lamp of their own design for this very purpose.
When ProPublica published stories this fall cataloging new evidence that American chemical workers are being exposed to asbestos, readers reacted with surprise over the most simple fact: Asbestos, the killer mineral whose dangers have been known for over a century, is still legal?
Asbestos is only one of many toxic substances that are linked to problems like cancers, genetic mutations and fetal harm and that other countries have banned, but the United States has not. That includes substances like hexabromocyclododecane, a flame retardant used in some building materials that can damage fetal development and disrupt thyroid hormones, and trichloroethylene, a toxic industrial degreaser that has contaminated communities, including a whole neighborhood that suffered a string of tragic pediatric cancer cases.
Stephen King once wrote, “Sooner or later, everything old is new again.” Apparently, however, there is now a caveat. Everything old is new again, except when it’s old again. Let me show you what I mean, with one of the oldest targets of the antivaccine movement of all, the MMR vaccine.
As yet another scandal involving Medicare Advantage made headlines this week, progressive U.S. lawmakers and advocates renewed calls to abolish the private health insurance program that a recent Senate report said is "running amok" with "fraudsters and scam artists."
"In reality, so-called 'Medicare Advantage' is neither Medicare nor an advantage."
In 1998, when he was eleven, Messi was diagnosed with Growth Hormone deficiency, a treatment that his parents couldn’t afford. Carles Rexach, sporting director of FC Barcelona, saw him play in Argentina and immediately offered to pay all his medical bills if he and his family would to start a new life in Barcelona. Messi traveled to Barcelona, Spain, with his father, leaving his mother in Rosario, Argentina, to take care of his brothers.
It wasn’t easy for Messi to adapt to this new environment, where he felt isolated from his teammates who made fun of him for being so short and not speaking Catalan, the language of Barcelona. “My teammates were big, rough and kind of assholes. They didn’t really pay attention to me, they would speak Catalan among themselves,” he said in the TV series Sin Cassette. “I cried a lot. I would lock myself in my room and cry my eyes out in secret. I didn’t want my dad to find out,” quoted Guillem Balagué, author of “Messi: The Biography”.
It found that potentially harmful content about mental health and body image was served every 39 seconds to the two test accounts.
Content referencing suicide was served to one account within 2.6 minutes while material relating to eating disorders was posted within eight minutes.
The ostensibly more vulnerable teenager’s account was served three times more harmful content than the standard account, and 12 times more self-harm and suicide videos.
The “No TikTok on Government Devices Act,” introduced by Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), was passed via unanimous consent late Wednesday, meaning that no member objected to the bill. The proposal would “prohibit certain individuals from downloading or using TikTok on any device issued by the United States or a government corporation.”
The move comes as state governments, especially those led by Republicans, have taken steps to limit the use of the app on state-owned devices. Thirteen states overall have taken action against TikTok, which is owned by ByteDance, a Beijing-owned entity. Eleven of those actions have taken place since the beginning of the month.
Fifteen Republican state attorneys general sent letters to the CEOs of Apple and Google on Wednesday demanding they increase their age ratings for the TikTok app.
State governments have increasingly taken aim at the video-hosting platform for its ties to Beijing and the mature content on it. The letters argue that the app’s “Teen” rating in the Google Play Store and “12+” rating in the Apple App Store are deceptively low.
(Too much) social media is not good for us. Yes, I know, that’s not a new insight, but I feel like I’m finally being honest with myself for the first time in terms of my behaviour on social media. Just like others constantly post photos to get attention and engagement, I did the same with other content. I feel like it’s time for me to restart. Social media is great for many reasons, but I believe I wasn’t using it correctly.
By the end of the year, I will delete the HTMHell Twitter account. No, not deactivate, delete! Many say that they still want to keep their accounts in case things might get better again, but I believe they're lying to themselves. The ship has sailed, Twitter is dead.
This is what drives my activism for gun violence prevention. This shouldn’t be our normal. A lockdown shouldn't be representative of just another Tuesday at school in America. It keeps me pushing and pressing to lift others up, inform, and transform the culture in schools. If we as young people can be part of the conversation and advocate for schools and communities to have gun violence prevention programs and resources, then future generations will not have to endure these debilitating fears.
U.S. progressives marked the 10th anniversary of the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre by renewing calls for gun control, with one reform advocate telling families of those slain in the nation's worst primary school shooting that "it is our national shame that we failed to take meaningful steps to protect your children."
"Instead of a moral reckoning, this country has seen an increase in mass shootings. The whole damn system is guilty as hell."
Here are seven Chromebook trackpad gestures that'll work wonders for your productivity. And note, too, that some of these shortcuts — the ones related to the web, specifically, with browser-level functions that aren't connected directly to ChromeOS — will work within the Chrome browser on other operating systems as well.
Lockbit, Royal, and Play lead the top 10 ransomware groups globally, the report showed.
Microsoft has released its final monthly batch of security updates for 2022, fixing more than four dozen security holes in its various Windows operating systems and related software. The most pressing patches include a zero-day in a Windows feature that tries to flag malicious files from the Web, a critical bug in PowerShell, and a dangerous flaw in Windows 11 systems that was detailed publicly prior to this week’s Patch Tuesday.
The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) today seized four-dozen domains that sold “booter” or “stresser” services — businesses that make it easy and cheap for even non-technical users to launch powerful Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks designed knock targets offline. The DOJ also charged six U.S. men with computer crimes related to their alleged ownership of the popular DDoS-for-hire services.
"If similar laws are passed in additional countries, Apple’s project could lay the groundwork for other regions, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because the work is private. But the company’s changes are designed initially to just go into effect in Europe."
I have one question: How?
Open-source security has taken multiple steps forward in 2022, thanks in no small part to multiple efforts led by the Open Source Security Foundation, aka OpenSSF.
Amazon Web Services has addressed a vulnerability in the Amazon Elastic Container Register Public Gallery, a public container image repository used by Amazon Linux, Ubuntu, NGINX, and HashiCorp Consul, reports The Record, a news site by cybersecurity firm Recorded Future.
Threat actors could leverage the flaw, discovered by Lightspin Director of Security Research Gafnit Amiga, to facilitate ECR Public image, layer, and registry and repository tag creation, deletion, and updates.
My perspective, of course, is security. I want to create a system that is resilient against hacking: one that can evolve as both technologies and threats evolve.
The new alpha release of pizauth first differentiates (possibly) transient error from (definitely) permanent errors. If a permanent error occurs when refreshing an access token, then the token is invalidated, and the error logged. The reason that the user isn't explicitly informed is that the true error (e.g. "your account is no longer valid") is generally masked by another more generic error (e.g. "server refused to refresh token"). By invalidating the token, the user will then be asked to reauthenticate, at which point the true error is more likely to be properly reported. In the (hopefully) rare cases where there are persistent permanent refresh errors, users can look through logs to find out what happened.
My recent postings on using HTTPS for my sites reminded one of my readers, White_Rabbit, to send in a link to Discourse on HTTPS. The language may be salty, but it does align with my feelings towards HTTPS—namely, I don't really need it. But as I stated, Google will any day now start with the Big Scary Error Messages on non-secure sites, followed by (possibly—I don't know this for a fact, but a gut feeling) no longer allowing non-secure requests at all. And with Google's Chrome having a ridiculous market share, that's something to be concerned about.
I get the sentiment. Storing passwords securely is hard. Dealing with users changing their names is hard. Updating avatars is hard. GDPR is hard. It's just a lot of pain and suffering.
But I still have user accounts on one of my side projects while avoiding all those issues. Here's how it works on OpenBenches.
Last month, Facebook/Meta laid off more than 11,000 employees as part of the company’s attempt to recover from sagging ad revenues, inflation, and Zuckerberg’s clumsy, poorly executed, and widely ridiculed pivot toward virtual and augmented reality.
A pet tracker has a particularly grueling set of requirements: small, light, rugged, incredibly long battery life, safe for the pet, and cheap. [Mihai Cuciuc] was looking at the options and wasn’t thrilled with any of them. So as any hacker would, he rolled his own, dubbed Squeak.
One of the ever popular ideas for a 'better Internet' (or a better service of some sort) brought up by potentially well intentioned people is that you should have to use your real name instead of any pseudonym. There are many, many problems with this idea and you can find it thoroughly answered (and debunked) in various places. But recently on the Fediverse I had an additional thought about it: [...]
How does this work? The NLRB protects the right of workers under Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act to organize and discuss joining unions with their coworkers without retaliation and the board’s General Counsel rightly suggests that surveillance of workers by their bosses can lead to unlawful retaliation, as well as a chilling effect on workplace speech protected by the NLRA.
“It concerns me that employers could use these technologies to interfere with the exercise of Section 7 rights … by significantly impairing or negating employees’ ability to engage in protected activity—and to keep that activity confidential from their employer,” General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo said in her letter. She added she will urge the board to act to "protect employees from intrusive or abusive electronic monitoring and automated management practices" that interfere with organizing rights.€ The general counsel's memo serves as a marker for future cases considered by the NLRB. Traditionally, the opinion of the NLRB's general counsel has a significant effect on how the board rules on cases it considers. This means that, should workers wish to file a claim with the NLRB along these lines, the board would take this opinion into account.
While worker privacy has been considered within general consumer privacy bills, workplace privacy rights function differently than those in many other contexts. A worker often cannot walk away from a camera pointed at their workstation. And while a consumer may feel they aren’t really “consenting” to data collection when they use a product or service, they generally have the option to go to a competing product. Workers don’t; saying “no” could cost them their livelihood. Therefore workers are set up to potentially lose certain rights during the workday.€ € €
In January 2022, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (“MeitY”) released a consultation paper on India Digital Ecosystem Architecture 2.0 (“InDEA 2.0”). Earlier, we provided a short summary of the 98-pager consultation paper, focusing on data rights to help explain its main objectives. Subsequently, we also submitted our comments on the paper. Now, we are publishing a short summary of the comments submitted by other stakeholders based on the RTI response we received from C-DAC.
[...]
InDEA 2.0 is concerning, as its stated objective is “to facilitate a data economy and unlock enterprise value”. However, it stops short of explaining, or no sources or underlying explanations of how this will be achieved. The document essentially says that our data is an “asset” and must be exchanged for “permitted commercial purposes” (Para 2.4.3). This means that our personal and non-personal data may be sold to the private sector. All of this is being done without legislative backing. In the absence of anchoring legislation such as a data protection law, the document fails to fulfil the threshold of legality put in place by the Supreme Court in the right-to-privacy decision.
The eight defendants, seven men and one woman, were convicted of helping him orchestrate a terrorist attack. The judge gave them prison sentences ranging from two to 18 years. Prosecutors had acknowledged not all of them had a clear connection to terrorism or knew what Lahouaiej-Bouhlel planned.
ACN’s report, “Persecuted and Forgotten? A Report on Christians Oppressed for their Faith, 2020-2022,” found that the equatorial regions of Africa and the Pacific have been particularly affected. Christians and other minority religions in these regions face violent persecution and in many cases the choice to “convert or die” at the hands of radical Islamist groups, some of which are affiliated with ISIS and Al-Qaeda.
According to ACN, hundreds of thousands of lives have been lost and millions displaced as 14 African nations have been subjected to jihadist campaigns, with the situation in 12 of these nations being particularly dire. “With the growing Islamist radicalization, Christians tend increasingly to become a specific target for the terrorists,” ACN states.
The draft resolution also calls for the establishment of a 'religious hotline' which students and parents can use to submit complaints about these institutions.
Why was everyone terrorized? The phrase “Allahu akbar” is routinely translated in the English-language media as “God is great,” a resoundingly uncontroversial phrase by any standard. In reality, however, that is a mistranslation. “Allahu akbar” actually means “Allah is greater,” a subtle but important difference. Rather than simply being a proclamation of the greatness of the divine, “Allahu akbar” is actually a proclamation of superiority: what is being said is that Allah, the God of Islam, is greater than your god, or your government, or your atheistic belief system, or your society and culture, or anything else that you may love and admire. Whatever it is, Allah is greater.
The military's invasion on our culture and the possible fall of any antiwar voices in the mainstream are discussed ScheerPost's Max Jones and Diego Ramos with former Afghanistan Senior Civilian Officer Matt Hoh.
The Ukraine General Staff has published a video instruction for the Russian troops on how to surrender using a Ukrainian quadcopter drone. The video, with detailed instructions in Russian, is posted on the General Staff Facebook page.
As tension rises between the United States and Russia over Ukraine, we speak with Daniel Ellsberg, the famed Pentagon Papers whistleblower, who worked for years during the Cold War on nuclear war strategy within the U.S. national security establishment. He says the threat of a catastrophic nuclear war is intolerable, with intercontinental ballistic missiles posing the highest risk. “The defense budget should be cut more than in half rather than being increased right now, but starting with the most dangerous weapons, the ICBMs,” says Ellsberg, who also calls for the U.S. to commit to a no-first-use policy on nuclear arms.
On that black Friday,€ one of the darkest days in US history,€ Adam Lanza fired 155 bullets in less than five minutes: 154 from a Bushmaster .223-model assault rifle. The final bullet, from a Glock 10mm handgun, he used on himself.
Those are “just the facts, ma’am,” as Det. Joe Friday used to say on the 1950s TV police drama,€ Dragnet.€ Ten years since the Sandy Hook massacre, and hundreds of mass shootings later, there are no Det. Fridays to investigate why these mass shootings keep happening. At least none flagging the murderer’s predictable profile: white, male, under 30.
Ana Grace Márquez-Greene, then 6, one of 20 adored and adorable first graders murdered in the Sandy Hook massacre almost 10 years ago, nonetheless lives on. Through her loving, activist parents Nelba Márquez-Greene and Jimmy Greene, her surviving and thriving brother, Isaiah, about to graduate from high school, the family’s work helping survivors of gun violence, and the Ana Grace Academy of the Arts, a kindergarten-through-eighth grade magnet school in Bloomfield, Conn., that just opened this year; Ana Grace lives on. “Love wins” has been the mantra of all her family’s efforts.
The Ukraine War is an extremely dangerous war between nuclear superpowers in a world desperately in need of peace and cooperation.
It is not that leftists support Putin’s war.€ On the contrary, just like people in the moderate mainstream, most leftists see it as illegal, criminal and a blatant violation of Ukraine’s territorial sovereignty.
It is true that most people on the left believe the expansion of Nato to Russia’s borders since 1999 was disastrously wrong and unnecessary, and that Washington and its European allies bear most of the blame for poisoning relations between Russia and the West over the last thirty years.€ A few people on the left argue that Nato’s enlargement strategy provoked Putin’s invasion, € but the vast majority have avoided the trap of claiming that Putin’s aggression was legitimate and justifiable. € They condemned it and still condemn it unreservedly.€ However angry Russia may be about Nato nothing justifies invading a neighbouring state.
The Ukrainian news outlet Ukrainska Pravda has reconstructed the chain of events that led to the sinking of the guided missile cruiser Moskva, the flagship of the Russian Black Sea Fleet. Journalists spoke with dozens of military experts, discovering that atypical radar readings due to low reflective clouds enabled a Ukrainian Neptune missile operator to reach the Russian ship when just within range.
The State Duma passed in the first reading a bill against “sabotage.” The draft legislation makes disruptive and terrorist activities classified in Russia as “sabotage” punishable by up to a life in prison.
Last Thursday marked 42 years since John Lennon was killed. Many people, including me, lament his death and can recall where we were when we heard the heartbreaking news.
This holiday season, we can heed John’s and Yoko Ono’s 1969 “Happy Xmas, War is Over, If You Want It” call by acting to end US military, intelligence and logistical support for the Saudi-led coalition in the horrendous war in Yemen. More than 400,000 Yemenis have perished since the war broke out in 2014, making it the world’s worst humanitarian catastrophe, according to the United Nations.
By Patrick Lawrence / Original to ScheerPost The nice thing about being an oligarch is that you are so wealthy it doesn’t matter that you are looked upon as a predatory pariah. The nice thing about being an American oligarch, such as Jeff Bezos, is that America does not have oligarchs: It has highly successful […]
Did Bernie conclude that he didn’t have the votes for the WPR to pass? Bernie’s WPR did not attract a single Republican co-sponsor, not even antiwar libertarian Rand Paul (R-KY).€ The € Intercept said that “advocates believed they had five to eight Republicans lined up to vote yes, but that sounds wildly overoptimistic.
Or doesn’t Sanders want to buck the president?€ The White House lobbied hard against the WPR.€ I thought of the politician who Theodore Roosevelt had described as having “the spine of a chocolate éclair.”
The White House was asking senators to vote against the resolution and threatened Biden would veto the bill.
Sen. Bernie Sanders on Tuesday night withdrew a Senate resolution to end U.S. involvement in the Saudi-led war on Yemen, but vowed to work with the Biden administration and congressional colleagues to keep trying.
With Angela Merkel’s revelations of Berlin’s duplicity in its dealings with Moscow, Cold War II just got colder.
Sometime prior to my eighth birthday, my great-grandfather, the poet, writer, and anthologist William Stanley Braithwaite, bought me my first comic book. For reasons that I have long since forgotten, we walked to a pharmacy on the corner of Edgecombe Avenue and St. Nicholas Place in Harlem. While there, I was looking over the comic books and chose The Illustrated Story of the Coast Guard as the one that I wanted. My great-grandfather asked no questions and purchased it for me. I still have it somewhere in my house.
This was a declaration of war. Do you think leaders at the Pentagon or National Security staffs were or are aware of the Islamic Law controlling this portion of the Law of Jihad for Muslims?
Alexey Kulemzin, the Moscow-installed mayor of Donetsk, said that the city center was hit by the “largest shelling attack since 2014” on Thursday morning. Other regional occupation authorities reported that nine people were injured, including one child.
The Ukrainian authorities say they have discovered a cell used for holding minors in a makeshift prison set up by the Russian military in occupied Kherson.
An ad selling “Ukrainian citizenship” appeared on the Russian classified advertisement website Avito, according to publications Poligon Media and Mozhem Obyasnit.
21-year-old Russian citizen Savely Frolov, who was arrested at the Verkhny Lars border crossing while attemping to enter Georgia, has been charged with preparing to defect to the enemy side (in accordance with several articles in the Russian Criminal Code). The news comes from human rights and legal organization Pervy Otdel [Department One], whose lawyers represent Frolov.
The Red Hill Facility consists of 20 underground tanks constructed in the 1940s, each of the 20 tanks holds 12.5 million gallons of fuel. Over a hundred million gallons of fuel remains in the tanks, located only 100 feet above the aquifer that supplies all of urban Honolulu. Having previously claimed before that the system was sound, the Navy now says that it could take one or two years to repair the pipelines in order to drain the tanks safely.
Most recently, on November 29, 2022, 1,300 gallons of fire-fighting aqueous film forming foam (AFFF) containing perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) were spilled at the Red Hill Facility. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, PFAS are known carcinogens and can cause decreased fertility, developmental delays in children, hormonal dysfunction, obesity, and immunosuppression. The strength of the carbon-fluorine bond in PFAS resist breakdown, even by incineration. They are “forever chemicals,” persistent in water and biologically concentrated in foods such as fish.
Human rights advocates are applauding Oregon Gov. Kate Brown, a Democrat, after she announced Tuesday that she would commute the sentences of all 17 of the state's death row inmates and shut down its execution chamber.
Brown told Oregon Public Broadcasting that she believes the death penalty is "both dysfunctional and immoral."
Peace advocates responded with disgust to the Navy's decision to name its new warship after the two battles of Fallujah, during which U.S. troops massacred Iraqi civilians.
"Fallujah was a giant American war crime in Iraq."
For years, attempts have been made to make access to federal court records free. To date, not one of these efforts have been successful. The federal judiciary likes its antiquated cash cow, raking in PACER fees meant to improve and free up (as in “free”) document access and redistributing the profit amongst itself, (illegally) blowing the funds on big screen TVs and furniture for those working at or with access to federal courthouses.
Nevertheless, domain pricing has become quite confusing in recent years, and when reading the ensuing Hacker News discussion, I learned that a lot of people have some major misconceptions about how domains work. Multiple people said untrue or nonsensical things along the lines of "Google has a monopoly on the .dev domain. GoDaddy doesn't have a monopoly on .com, .biz, .net, etc." So I decided to write this blog post to explain some basic concepts and demystify domain pricing.
“Third response today,” said Savala, shaking his head.
This hillside in my own backyard in California’s northern Sierra Nevada mountains hadn’t seen lightning for months and yet it had still burst into flames. All summer long, it had baked in heat that extended into an unseasonably hot autumn. Now, in late October, it was charred by a fire of mysterious origin. A spark from a wandering hiker? An errant ember from a burn pile? Spontaneous combustion?
Industry trade associations in the United States that work on climate and energy issues spent more than $3 billion over 10 years on political activities, according to a new study that sheds light on trade associations’ role in influencing policies and obstructing climate action.€
The new paper by scholars Robert Brulle of Brown University and Christian Downie of The Australian National University, published Monday in the journal Climatic Change, examined the political spending of nearly 90 U.S. trade associations from 2008 to 2018. The analysis, based on combing through trade associations’ IRS filings, found that these organizations spent $3.4 billion on climate-related political activities. It also found that what they spent the most money on wasn’t lobbying or campaign contributions — as had been previously assumed — it was€ advertising and promotion.€
Dick Tuck, a political prankster who made a satirical run for public office years ago, got less than 10% of the vote. Conceding defeat, he quipped, "The people have spoken, the bastards."
Floridi contends that humans are engaging with climate breakdown as a tragedy. We know very well what is happening, but feel unable to act, compelled to procrastinate and stall, and are resigned to be passively accommodating rather than proactive. This is the apologue of the frog being gradually boiled alive. We seem destined to adjust to the increasing constraints and inconveniences of climate breakdown, while never making the radical changes required to divert significant disaster.
Headlining the COP15 biodiversity talks is a drive to secure 30 percent of Earth's land and oceans as protected zones by 2030 -- the most disputed item on the agenda.
Some campaigners say the so-called "30x30" target is nature's equivalent of the landmark 1.5C global warming target set at climate talks under the Paris Agreement. But delegates negotiating a broad accord for protecting nature are divided over how to pay for "30x30" and how the measure would be applied.
Jane Braxton Little fills readers in on the inferno this planet threatens to become as it experiences a "global wildfire crisis."
Fifteen years ago, the residents of the tiny village of Newtok—which sits along an eroding riverbank near the Bering Sea in southwest Alaska—were dubbed some of America’s “first climate refugees” by The New York Times and a series of other national media outlets. Newtok, an Alaska Native community with some 300 residents at the time, stood on the remote edge of the United States as a harbinger of the ways in which climate disasters would disrupt our daily lives. Warming temperatures have shortened winter in Newtok, thawed the permafrost that helps hold the place together, and increased erosion rates to catastrophic levels—shredding the land into giant, muddy chunks, threatening to topple houses. The community’s story first struck a chord at a moment when the impacts of the climate crisis were difficult for some Americans to visualize. It was still several years before Superstorm Sandy would displace tens of thousands of people and redefine how we thought about tropical cyclones; before the West’s seasons of drought, megafire, and smoke felt so relentless; and a decade prior to California’s infamous Camp Fire, which destroyed 18,000 structures and razed most of the town of Paradise. Newtok became famous for foreshadowing how much we could lose—our homes.
The issue is a bottom-line orientation that sees railroads as primarily a money machine to generate dividends for shareholders. It is a product of a long process. Facing new competition from publicly subsidized highways and aviation, railroad industry business models collapsed in the 1970s. The response was deregulation of the railroads, followed by super-concentration that has winnowed the greater part of the U.S. rail industry down to four major carriers focused on loads that provide highest profit. Those are shipping containers and bulk traffic in commodities such as coal, oil and grains.
Mixed freight is less profitable and harder to manage. So railroads have discouraged it through raising prices and downgrading service. That has pushed mixed freight to trucks, which typically consume 3 to 5 times the energy to move the same amount of material, meanwhile tearing up highways. Trucks are the major source of road damage, but the repair bills are subsidized by all drivers and the general public.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said Tuesday that he intends to force a floor vote as soon as this week in a bid to ram through Sen. Joe Manchin's fossil fuel industry-friendly permitting bill, a ploy that climate groups and progressive lawmakers condemned and vowed to defeat.
Schumer's (D-N.Y.) planned maneuver, which he confirmed to reporters Tuesday, amounts to a last-ditch attempt to salvage legislation that has thus far failed to garner sufficient support to pass Congress. The permitting bill has also drawn sustained and furious protests from environmentalists, who warn the measure would expedite climate-wrecking fossil fuel projects—including Manchin's favored Mountain Valley Pipeline—and weaken bedrock environmental laws.
Mike Savala's boots scuffed the edge of a singed patch of forest littered with skinny fingers of burnt ponderosa pine needles. Nearby, an oak seedling sizzled as a yellow-shirted firefighter hit it with a stream of water. Spurts of smoke rose from blackened ground the size of a hockey rink. A 100-foot Ponderosa pine towered overhead.
The Sunrise Movement, the national grassroots organization that helped secure support for a Green New Deal from more than 100 lawmakers and laid the groundwork for cities and states to pass bold climate legislation, announced Tuesday the launch of a new strategy to build long-term power across government and push the Biden administration to take far-reaching climate action.
Executive director Varshini Prakash highlighted the organization's success at "raising the urgency on climate and forcing the federal government to deliver bold action," including in the Inflation Reduction Act.
In the lead up to the EU ASEAN Summit in Brussels on December 14,€ G7 countries have put a $15 billion offer on the table for Vietnam to consider, half public loans, half pledges from the private sector but no needed public grants. The proposed "Just Energy Transition Partnership" (JET-P) is a multi-faceted financing deal being negotiated between the EU, the UK and Vietnam to support its transition away from coal toward renewable energy. While this is a key strategy in mitigating climate change that must be considered, questions should be raised about how a JET-P can be successfully implemented in Vietnam while their environmental defenders are in jail.
With billions of dollars at stake, reinsurance corporations are keen observers of global warming. Here is why and what we will have to expect if the world continues, as António Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations, recently said,
We are on a highway to climate hell with our foot on the accelerator.
Congressional investigators released a new set of documents that underscored the oil and gas industry’s ongoing attempts to block climate policies and confuse the public about their long-term investments in fossil fuels. The latest tranche of documents caps off a nearly two-year investigation that appears set to come to an end with Republicans taking control of the House of Representatives in January.
On December 9, the U.S. House Oversight and Reform Committee published its latest set of documents as part of its ongoing investigation into the oil industry’s history of climate denial and obfuscation. The documents offer more evidence showing that the industry’s “greenwashing” continues up to the present day.
While the introduction of electricity as a universal service may provide some relief from higher electricity prices, it also comes with a considerable amount of additional red tape for municipalities. This is particularly the case for larger municipalities, which will need to go through a time-consuming tendering process in order to get themselves connected.
A while back I wrote about how Katara disgustedly reported that some of her second-grade classmates had formed a stealing club and named it “Stealing Club”.
Members of the inner circle of power at collapsed cryptocurrency exchange FTX formed a chat group called “Wirefraud” and were using it to send secret information about operations in the lead up to the company’s spectacular failure.
FTX, until recently a highly regarded [cryptocurrency] exchange, suffered an acute liquidity crisis and subsequently filed for bankruptcy in November. The crunch was triggered by reports that the FTX-linked investment firm, Alameda Research, relied heavily on FTX’s in-house token, FTT.
Some of the facts in the authorities’ filings are familiar to those who have been listening to Mr Bankman-Fried’s missives over the past month. He has admitted that he told customers to route their funds directly into Alameda’s bank account—he suggested this was because ftx had not set up accounts, and that ftx lost track of the funds owing to sloppy accounting. The sec complaint argues that Alameda used the funds to make venture investments, purchase lavish properties and make political donations, and that use of them in this way means that Mr Bankman-Fried was “orchestrating a massive years-long fraud”.
The 30-year-old billionaire founder of the FTX [cryptocurrency] exchange once partnered with celebrities and rubbed shoulders with politicians as he tried to legitimize cryptocurrency as more than just a shady get-rich-quick scheme.
However, his company, valued at $32 billion earlier this year, suddenly imploded in November after filing for bankruptcy protection, inviting scrutiny from regulators, prosecutors and furious clients.
FTX co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried was charged Tuesday in connection with what prosecutors said was a scheme to illegally funnel millions of dollars into politics ahead of the 2022 midterm elections, misappropriating customer funds in the process.
Bankman-Fried and unnamed co-conspirators made "tens of millions of dollars in illegal campaign contributions" to both Democratic and Republican candidates and campaign committees, Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for Southern New York, said at a news conference unveiling the eight-count criminal indictment, which included a campaign finance violation charge.
This has been incredibly frustrating for the skeptics, because it really should have been obvious that [cryptocurrency] is silly nonsense. It's fake money propped up not by a government with a central bank, but by, uh, a bunch of interlocked computers. Even the assets that have been linked to crypto, in order to create a semblance of real-world value — such as NFTs — are meaningless crap, one laptop tumble into a bathtub away from getting destroyed. Yet billions of dollars keep getting dumped into this scam, over and over, despite the endless cycle of scandals and crashes that remind us on the regular that this is bad business.
How do they keep scamming people? James Block, who runs the [cryptocurrency]-skeptical newsletter Dirty Bubble Media, told the Atlantic that part of it is just about that old scammer trick, made-up jargon: "[Cryptocurrency] hides behind all this complexity, and people hear words like blockchain and get confused. You hear about decentralized networks and mining, and it sounds complicated."
With colder winter weather looming, a new analysis released Tuesday shows that the nine largest energy utility companies in the U.S. raked in nearly $14 billion in combined profits during the first three quarters of this year—and dished out roughly $11 billion to their wealthy shareholders—as tens of millions of U.S. households struggled to pay their utility bills due to soaring costs.
The watchdog group Accountable.US found that NextEra Energy, Duke Energy, Southern Company, Dominion Energy, Constellation Energy, Eversource Energy, Entergy Corporation, DTE Energy, and CMS Energy Corporation brought in $13.8 billion in the first nine months of this fiscal year. The firms, the nine largest in the U.S. by market capitalization, returned over $11.2 billion to shareholders during that period in the form of dividends and stock buybacks.
Environmental justice advocates cried foul Tuesday after it was reported that the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection is allowing a fracking giant to resume drilling operations in Dimock just two weeks after it accepted responsibility for poisoning the small rural town's drinking water.
"Gov.-elect Josh Shapiro must address this outrageous betrayal as soon as he takes office next month."
Russian authorities have compiled a list of measures they plan to take in response to the price cap imposed on Russian oil by the G7 nations, the European Union and Australia, Vedomosti reported on Tuesday.
Carolyn Kuranz, an associate professor of nuclear engineering at the University of Michigan who has worked at the facility that just broke the fusion record, helps explain this new result.
Right out of the chute, let’s be clear that these enormous mega-corporations are not in business to break even or save the planet. They are wholly dedicated to making as much money as possible as quickly as possible. They don’t do that by “transitioning” to clean energy, they do it by selling gas, oil, and petroleum products.
Anyone who thinks these corporate giants didn’t know that fossil fuels would threaten the very existence of mankind on the planet might want to€ consider this article€ in the Washington Post that opens with: “In November 1959 Edward Teller, ‘the father of the hydrogen bomb,’ told a group of oil company executives and scientists gathered at Columbia University that continued burning of fossil fuels would warm the planet, potentially melting the ice caps and submerging New York and other coastal cities — posing a threat to civilization comparable to a global nuclear war.”
With its latest leak of nearly 600,000 gallons in northern Kansas, the sprawling Keystone pipeline system has now spilled more crude oil in the United States than any other pipeline, according to a new analysis by Bloomberg.
Including last week's spillage of roughly 14,000 barrels of crude—a threat to the environment, drinking water, and public health—the pipeline system that runs from Alberta, Canada to Texas has leaked 26,000 barrels of the toxic substance in the U.S. over the past 12 years, the Bloomberg noted Monday, citing preliminary data from the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration.
The most lucrative business activity in America is the practice of convincing people that things are too complicated for them to understand. Once they're convinced, anything is possible. Any product or service with a€ demand and this sheen of mysticism can go, as they say, to the moon. Customers rarely consider the possibility that things might burn up upon€ re-entry.
The nation's largest water supplier has declared a drought emergency for all of Southern California, clearing the way for potential mandatory water restrictions early next year that could impact 19 million people.
The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California provides water to 26 different agencies that supply major population centers like Los Angeles and San Diego counties.
In 2014, Raspberry Pi sponsored the work to add differential pair routing support to KiCad, which was something it had been lacking. Differential pairs are traces on the PCB that have a controlled geometry, and therefore impedance, and are used for high-speed signals such as HDMI and USB.
The official Raspberry Pi Foundation is helping the KiCad open source design automation software raise funds in its end of year event....
The SEC alleges that the defendants executed the scheme by first identifying a security to manipulate and sharing the name of the stock with others in the group, providing each other the opportunity to purchase shares at lower prices prior to manipulation. They next promoted the stock to their followers in order to generate demand and inflate the share price, often including false or misleading news about the securities they were promoting.
Let’s take a simple example of what most Americans see most in the news, and compare this with the data that economists, and journalists who cover the US economy, are looking at.
This week our government released the November data for the Consumer Price Index (CPI-U), and the headline number was 7.1 percent; which was down from 7.7 percent last month, but still a very high rate of inflation for the United States. The phrase, “highest levels since the early 1980s” has accompanied much of the reporting for the last few months.
The Federal Reserve on Wednesday raised interest rates by half a percentage point and indicated that more hikes are coming in 2023, brushing aside mounting warnings from economists and policy experts that its actions risk hurling the U.S. economy into recession and throwing millions out of work.
The Fed's latest rate increase, less aggressive than the 75-basis-point hikes of the four previous months, pushes interest rates to their highest level in 15 years, a restrictive policy stance explicitly aimed at tamping down economic demand, slowing hiring, and cutting workers' wages even as inflation shows clear signs of cooling significantly.
As noted: this is bullshit. Countries all over the world experienced inflation during and after the lockdowns, irrespective of whether they handed out relief money to keep people from starving to death while their workplaces were shuttered. America has slightly higher inflation than some other OECD countries, but the causes have nothing to do with overly generous relief packages.
"The Causes of and Responses to Today’s Inflation," a Roosevelt Institute paper by Nobel-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and macroeconomist Regmi Ira, debunks this false inflation narrative, revealing it as a sham aimed at destroying workers' lives, offering a far more plausible explanation for inflation: [...]
Last Wednesday Katie Cox penned a shocker of a column for American Banker. She opened with this:
Cox goes on to explain that she’s not recommending this as a strategy, but simply stating that crypto outfits have found a clever means of engaging in regulatory arbitrage. It should also be noted that Cox did not write this column out of an altruistic bent. She is one of a legion of former federal regulators that now work for crypto outfits. Cox now works as an advisor to Custodia Bank, a new applicant for Fed membership that wants to engage in crypto activities. According to Cox, new Fed applicants have a more difficult time than simply taking over an existing Fed member bank.
Sixty-six percent of new-construction apartments in Russia were languishing without buyers this December, based on the total square meterage of housing under construction or first listed for sale.
Lori Long was diagnosed in childhood with a rare disease that requires extensive medical treatments, supports, and services. She receives Social Security, earned for her by her now deceased parents. Medicare and Medicaid provide her health insurance.€
After the European Union agreed in principle late Monday night to implement a 15% minimum effective corporate tax rate throughout the 27-nation bloc, economic justice advocates rebuked officials for genuflecting to low-tax E.U. member states and warned that the deal does not go far enough to prevent large enterprises from tax dodging.
"E.U. countries disregarded the opportunity to raise the bar and set in stone a tax system that is not fit for the many crises the world is facing."
Ken Griffin, the multibillionaire CEO of the Citadel investment firm, sued the Internal Revenue Service and the Treasury Department today for what he alleges was an “unlawful disclosure of Griffin’s confidential tax return information.”
Beginning in 2021, ProPublica started publishing The Secret IRS Files, a series of stories on the tax avoidance techniques of the ultrawealthy. The series is based on IRS tax information covering thousands of the wealthiest Americans over more than 15 years. Articles have detailed how Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and other billionaires keep their income tax rates lower than those of average Americans and how some billionaires can go years and years without paying any income tax.
Economists and progressive policy advocates on Tuesday urged the Federal Reserve to abandon its plans for further interest rate hikes—or, at the very least, slow down significantly—after the Labor Department released data showing that inflation cooled more than expected in November, the second consecutive month of lighter-than-anticipated price increases.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics said Tuesday that the Consumer Price Index (CPI) rose just 0.1% last month compared to a 0.4% increase in October as inflationary pressures eased across the economy, from food to transportation to medical services. Compared to a year ago, inflation was up 7.1% in November, the lowest level since December 2021.
Adam Smith is often considered to be the father of modern capitalism. At first glance, it’s not hard to see why. His most famous book, An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) contained a number of famous notions that have long been associated with the very essence of capitalism: the invisible hand, self-interest, the division of labor, free markets, and free trade.1
Rebuilding a home in a poor neighborhood can cost a lot more than the house is worth on paper. So after Hurricane Katrina, when the U.S. government decided that home values would factor into rebuilding grants, it left many Louisiana homeowners short.
Why the federal government required that has long been a mystery. It had rarely, if ever, allowed home values to be used to calculate rebuilding aid after a disaster. It doesn’t allow it anymore.
Consumer advocates on Tuesday welcomed a new proposal from a key government agency for a registry of nonbank financial institutions, which would be required to list themselves when they are subject to court orders and other legal actions.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) issued a new proposed rule calling for a "Registry of Nonbank Covered Persons Subject to Certain Agency and Court Orders," which would require financial corporations to register "upon becoming subject to a public written order or judgment imposing obligations based on violations of certain consumer protection laws."
A half-dozen progressive lawmakers joined multiple union representatives at a Tuesday afternoon press conference outside the U.S. Capitol to urge Democratic leaders to include ample funding for the cash-starved National Labor Relations Board in the final appropriations bill of the lame-duck session—before Republicans take control of the House.
International Union of Painters and Allied Trades (IUPAT) president Jimmy Williams and Communications Workers of America (CWA) secretary-treasurer Sara Steffens—co-chairs of the Worker Power Coalition, a nationwide alliance of labor and environmental advocacy groups representing 24 million workers—were accompanied by Democratic Reps. Jamaal Bowman (N.Y.), Ro Khanna (Calif.), Andy Levin (Mich.), Donald Norcross (N.J.), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), and Ilhan Omar (Minn.).
Democratic Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib of Michigan delivered an impassioned speech in support of rail workers on Tuesday, denouncing the rapacity of hugely profitable railroad giants and imploring President Joe Biden to use his executive authority to provide the essential employees with the paid sick leave that they've long been denied.
"Corporate greed is a disease in this country," Tlaib said during a rail worker solidarity rally in Washington, D.C., one of a number of events that took place nationwide. "We do live in the richest country on the planet, and no worker should have to choose between their health and a paycheck."
The Wellcome Trust’s director, Sir Jeremy Farrar, is to take up the role of chief scientist at the World Health Organization next year.
Sir Jeremy, an infectious disease specialist who became one of the UK’s most high-profile scientists during the Covid pandemic, is stepping down towards the end of his second five-year term at Wellcome, having led the medical charity since 2013.
The United Nations is worried about spreading hate and misinformation on social media networks, spokesperson Stephane Dujarric said on Tuesday.
The UN spokesperson made these remarks after Elon Musk dissolved Twitter's department that addresses harassment cases on the microblogging website.
For several years we’ve noted how most of the calls to ban TikTok are bad faith bullshit made by a rotating crop of characters that not only couldn’t care less about consumer privacy, but are directly responsible for the privacy oversight vacuum TikTok (and everybody else) exploits.
What does Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema’s defection from the Democrats mean for the party, control of the Senate and President Biden’s policy agenda? Sinema said last week that she is registering as an independent, though she will keep her committee assignments. Her announcement came just as Democrats were celebrating Senator Raphael Warnock’s reelection in Georgia, which gave Democrats 51 seats in the upper chamber. Ryan Grim of The Intercept says that while Sinema’s change in party affiliation will have “no practical effect” in the Senate, it will head off a primary challenge in 2024. Alejandra Gomez, the executive director of Living United for Change in Arizona, or LUCHA Arizona, says Sinema has betrayed the Democratic base that helped propel her to office in 2018. “She has sold her vote to the highest bidder, cozying up to special interests and Big Pharma,” says Gomez.
Most of these genres happen to apply to the current state of UK politics– fantasy, absurdism, dystopian fiction (though dystopian nonfiction is perhaps less of a misnomer where the UK is concerned), horror, and black comedy are likely to feature prominently in any plausible characterization of contemporary Ukanian politics.
The country’s political comedians are experiencing a boom-time not seen since the days of Margaret Thatcher (some may recall she was widely reported to be entirely lacking in a sense of humour, and comedians cashed in on this).
Leaders from 49 African nations are in Washington, D.C., this week for a three-day summit organized by the Biden administration. The U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit comes as the United States is trying to counter the growing influence of China and Russia in Africa. On Monday, national security adviser Jake Sullivan announced a pledge of $55 billion in economic, health and security support for Africa over the next three years. President Biden is also expected to express support for the African Union to join the G20 and to push for the United Nations Security Council to include a permanent member from Africa. The summit in Washington comes as parts of Africa grapple with crises including the climate emergency and political instability, with the past two years seeing coups in Mali, Sudan, Burkina Faso and Guinea. “China is definitely looming in the background” of the summit, says Lina Benabdallah, an assistant professor of politics at Wake Forest University. We also speak with anthropologist Samar Al-Bulushi with the University of California, Irvine, who notes that Biden’s summit comes “at a time when Africa’s geostrategic significance is on the rise and at a time when U.S. influence on the continent is on the decline.”
Outgoing Republican Governor Doug Ducey of Arizona is spending nearly $100 million in his final weeks in office to erect a makeshift border wall along the state’s southern boundary with Mexico made of shipping containers and razor wire. Ducey has described it as an effort to complete former President Donald Trump’s border wall, but the shipping containers are being placed on federal and tribal lands without permission. Protesters who have tried to block construction warn the wall is destroying precious desert biodiversity and forcing asylum seekers to take even more dangerous routes along the border to seek refuge in the United States. Meanwhile, it is unclear what Democratic Governor-elect Katie Hobbs will do with the container wall once she is sworn in. “It’s quite amazing that there’s simply been no [federal] law enforcement response,” says Myles Traphagen with Wildlands Network, who coordinates the group’s borderlands program. “Why aren’t they mobilizing a federal law enforcement response when this is a blatant disregard of the law?” We also speak with Alejandra Gomez, executive director of Living United for Change in Arizona, or LUCHA Arizona, who says immigrant communities in Arizona are responding with aid and compassion despite “the fueling of hate against migrants” by Ducey and other Republicans.
Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, and Bolivia released a joint statement supporting Peru’s elected President Pedro Castillo, saying he is the victim of “anti-democratic harassment,” following a US-backed right-wing coup.
Four Latin American presidents condemned the ouster and imprisonment of leftist Peruvian President Pedro Castillo on Tuesday, a move that preceded a national emergency declaration by the country's new government amid a deadly crackdown against what critics are calling a U.S.-backed "legislative coup."
"The oligarchic rulers of Peru could never accept that a rural schoolteacher and peasant leader could be brought into office by millions of poor, Black, and Indigenous people."
Don’t be so sure.
Fifty-five years ago, pundits scoffed when a Democratic senator announced that he was running against incumbent Lyndon Johnson for their party’s presidential nomination. Eugene McCarthy launched his campaign to challenge Johnson’s continual escalation of the war in Vietnam.
These days, conventional media wisdom says that President Biden will have a smooth path to renomination if he wants it.
The new McCarthy follows in the footsteps of great political fraud. In 1954 Sen. Joseph McCarthy peaked with 36 days of televised hearings—showcasing the threat of communism. Joseph McCarthy managed to push people out of office by selling lies in the court of public opinion, but he failed to make a single allegation stick.
Kevin McCarthy is set to deliver on promises of stripping committee assignments and holding kangaroo courts to pursue and punish political rivals. His website (“our investigations […] are just getting started”) delivers promises of revenge.
Reporting from inside the federal courtroom where the US is prosecuting Venezuelan diplomat Alex Saab, The Grayzone learns of disturbing acts of diplomatic espionage. Saab’s advocates insist he is imprisoned for violating Washington’s economic blockade.
Most prisoners with a get-out-of-jail-free card would have played it, but not Alex Saab. The Venezuelan diplomat has been incarcerated for two and a half years.
On June 12, 2020, Alex Saab was on a mission from Caracas to Tehran to procure supplies of food, fuel, and medicine denied the Venezuelans by sanctions imposed by the US. His plane was diverted to the island archipelago nation of Cabo Verde. When it landed on the tarmac, he was seized at Washington’s behest and has been imprisoned since.
Americans will be forgiven for imagining that the 2022 midterm election cycle finally finished with last week’s victory for Senator Raphael Warnock in the Georgia runoff vote. But it’s not done yet.
Abortion rights won big at the ballot box, and it’s a huge shock to certain opinion makers, who are wracking their brains to understand the results. “Joe Biden and Democrats have managed to resist the normal pattern of heavy midterm losses for a first-term President without a New Deal (1934), Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) or national solidarity after the 9/11 attack (2002). Shows the magnitude of this achievement,” Michael Beschloss tweeted to his 800,000 followers. A prominent presidential historian with many fancy affiliations who appears regularly on PBS, Beschloss somehow didn’t register the 50-year rollback of half the population’s human rights as a major event.1
You only had to look at the titles to see that something was up: “Atmosphere,” “Morning Factory,” “Brighter Days.” There was a new dawn in America, and the rising sun was house. Like any unearthly force, house music takes many forms, unified by the steady pulse of the bass drum: four mighty beats played again and again, triggered by a machine standing in for human limbs. For skeptics, this can be a barrier to entry; there are those who encounter this music and can only hear the bass. I pity them. For those who know, feeling the beat is not being battered, it’s being baptized. Surrounding that endless rhythm is an endless palette of possibilities, which tell the stories of house music’s many points of origin: in Chicago, levitating pianos or strings; in Detroit, alien textures alongside snatches of humanoid soul. At its most electronic, and at its maximum beats-per-minute, house becomes techno, which can make you feel like you’re being beamed aboard the Mothership while having a heart attack. It’s serious stuff.
Among the people Trump will not denounce, Who’s leading now for statements that appall us? The race remains quite close, but in the lead It’s Ye and his pal Fuentes über alles.
“Each age has its cliché,” the historian Tony Judt declared in The New York Times in 1998. “Ours is the ‘third way.’” Judt’s pronouncement seems slightly strange from the vantage of 2022, when the “third way” has largely vanished from political discussion, even when it addresses the legacy of the ’90s.1
Conditions today being what they are, one can’t help but recall journalist Richard Rovere’s€ characterization€ of 1950s Cold War-era McCarthyism:
Today, more than half a century on, only the namesake has changed – not to protect the innocent, but to project the guilty. Just add insecurity, paranoia, incompetence, vindictiveness, disparagement, and narcissistic self-promotion, and both effect and image are essentially the same. The symmetry of the two moments – then and now – lies, perhaps surprisingly, in an underlying focus on national security. In fact, the lesson of the present moment, for those who concern themselves with the affairs of state, is to acknowledge the totality of the precepts embodied in what we might call America’s Security Credo – the Preamble to the Constitution: not just providing for the common defense, but also securing national unity (a more perfect union), justice, domestic tranquility, the general welfare, and liberty for the generations.
In August, an auto body shop owner named Marie Gluesenkamp Perez won a Democratic House primary in rural southern Washington. At the time, no one gave her much of a chance to win the seat. Washington’s Third Congressional District twice went for Donald Trump. A Republican had held the seat for more than a decade. FiveThirtyEight gave Gluesenkamp Perez a 2 percent chance of victory. The national party got the message and sent its money to other races.
Unlike Germany and France, for instance, which at times reluctantly follow Washington’s orders, Britain is an eager co-participant in U.S. adventurism, says Joe Lauria.
Reporters for TPM obtained text messages between Trump's Chief of Staff Mark Meadows (formerly a Tea Party congressman) and 34 Republican members of Congress advocating stragegies to end democracy in America by keeping Trump in office after he lost the 2020 election.
The final midterm votes have been counted. Rather than being swept away in a "red wave", Democrats increased their Senate majority (51-49) with the re-election of Raphael Warnock. And the Republicans gained a slight House majority of five votes (222-213)—with one Democratic seat (VA 4) open because of death. Here are three observations:
Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II wrote an open letter Sunday imploring Senate Democrats to pass legislation that would€ protect voting rights, raise the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour, and enshrine reproductive freedom—all bills that have already been approved by House Democrats this session—before Republicans take control of the lower chamber in a few short weeks.
Sen. Raphael Warnock's (D-Ga.) recent reelection victory "was not the result of ending voter suppression," wrote Barber. Instead, it provided "evidence of the exceptional efforts of the people despite voter suppression—especially poor and low-wage voters of different backgrounds who joined neighbors who oppose extremism to give you an expanded majority."
Just days after a former evangelical activist testified before Congress about the ease with which he and his associates lobbied right-wing U.S. Supreme Court justices, Politico reported that Justice Brett Kavanaugh attended a private holiday party with a number of high-profile conservatives, sparking alarm among ethics watchdogs.
"The Supreme Court is compromised, and our rights are at risk. It's time to reform the court."
Supporters of outgoing Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro set fire to cars and buses and tried to breach federal police headquarters in the capital of Brasília on Monday night.
The violence erupted hours after Brazil's electoral court officially ratified the victory of President-elect Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a celebrated leftist who defeated the far-right incumbent by more than 2.1 million votes in a runoff election in late October.
A recent New York Times article (12/10/22) describing Twitter owner Elon Musk’s politics—which have clearly aligned with Fox News (12/11/22, 12/12/22) and the Trumpian right—as “tricky to pin down” has people wondering if the Times is paying close attention to the news.
Flush with money after receiving the largest-known political advocacy donation in U.S. history, conservative activist Leonard Leo and his associates are spending millions of dollars to influence some of the Supreme Court’s most consequential recent cases, newly released tax documents obtained by ProPublica and The Lever show.
The documents detail how Leo, who helped build the Supreme Court’s conservative majority as an adviser to President Donald Trump, has used a sprawling network of opaque nonprofits to fund groups advocating for ending affirmative action, rolling back anti-discrimination protections and allowing state legislatures unreviewable oversight of federal elections.
Those conclusions are from a new report by the social media tracking firm Graphika and Stanford University’s Internet Observatory. The researchers traced at least 35 accounts on the right-wing social apps to the Newsroom for American and European Based Citizens (NAEBC), a phony news organization linked to Russia’s troll factory. The fake accounts focused on ginning up support for failed Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, attacking Democratic Senate candidates, and pushing bizarre conspiracy theories about Ukraine and the bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange FTX, among other topics.
Researchers found Russian-linked fake accounts posing as authentic American conservatives cross-posting content to personas on Truth Social, Gab, and Gettr. While right-wing social platforms like Gab and Parler have previously played host to Russian influence operations, the report marks the first documented case of Russian meddling on Truth Social, the social media app founded by Trump.
Later today, the House of Commons will vote to approve Bill C-18, the Online News Act, sending it to the Senate just prior to breaking for the holidays. While Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez and media lobbyists will no doubt celebrate the milestone, it should not go unremarked that the legislative process for this bill has been an utter embarrassment with an already bad bill made far worse. The government cut off debate at second reading, actively excluded dozens of potential witnesses, expanded the bill to hundreds of broadcasters that may not even produce news, denigrated online news services as “not real news”, and shrugged off violations of international copyright law. All the while, it acknowledged that mandated payments for links are the foundation of the bill with officials stating that individual Facebook posts accompanied by a link to a news story would be caught by the law. As for the purported financial benefits, the government’s own estimates are less than half those of the Parliamentary Budget Officer, who also concluded that more than 75% of the revenues will go to broadcasters such as Bell, Rogers, and the CBC. The end result is a bill that will undermine competition and pose a threat to freedom of expression, while potentially leading Facebook to block news sharing in Canada and Google to cancel dozens of existing agreements with Canadian news outlets.
But campaigners warn that more executions will inevitably follow without tougher international action, with a dozen more people already sentenced to death over the protests and a similar number charged with crimes that could see them hanged.
"Unless the political cost of the executions is increased significantly, we will be facing mass executions," said Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam, director of the Norway-based Iran Human Rights group.
An overseas Chinese student in the US has been charged with stalking and threatening another Chinese student who took part in pro-democracy activism on their campus.
US prosecutors say Xiaolei Wu, 25, sent threats to the girl and also reported her family to authorities in China.
The Kazakh news outlet Vlast announced Tuesday that Russia’s federal censor, Roskomnadzor, has repeatedly contacted its editors with demands to delete content related to the war in Ukraine, threatening to block the site if they refuse. The editors said they have no intention of deleting any articles at Roskomnadzor’s request.
The recent flurry of videos and posts about the TVGuardian foul language filter brought back some fond memories. I was the chief engineer on this project for most of its lifespan. You’ve watched the teardowns, you’ve seen the reverse engineering, now here’s the inside scoop.
Maira Roze, chief of Latvian Citizenship and Migration Affairs, says that the exiled Russian broadcaster TV Rain must explain what its employees with Latvian work visas will be doing in the country after the revocation of TV Rain’s broadcasting license.
So, look, it’s been quite clear for a while now that Elon Musk has no clue what “free speech” actually means. We’ve covered this point from so many different angles that at this point anyone claiming that Elon Musk “supports free speech” is ignorant or stupid.
The St. Petersburg-based Podpisnye Izdaniya (“Subscriber Editions”) bookstore is one of the best booksellers in Russia and a favorite destination for the city’s book lovers. Its co-founder, Mikhail Ivanov, has spoken with the independent media project Bumaga about the state of the Russian publishing industry, currently trapped between the vague censorship requirements of the new Russian anti-LGBTQ+ legislation and the growing list of banned authors designated as “foreign agents.” Ivanov has described a beleaguered and chaotic scene, where publishers are losing international contracts, booksellers are forced to pull bestselling books from their shelves, and writers are deprived of opportunities to publish their work in Russia. Meduza relates the bookseller’s reflections on what’s happening to the Russian book industry, in our own free and concise translation.
In November 2020, against the backdrop of a bloody civil war, Ethiopian authorities plunged the Tigray region into a communication black hole by disconnecting the internet. Today, the region is still cut off. Through an open petition, Access Now and nearly 100 civil society organizations from around the world — along with concerned individuals from 102 countries that have signed in support — are demanding the African Union acts now to connect those affected.
“People in Tigray, and across all of Ethiopia, must have their human rights upheld,” said Felicia Anthonio, #KeepItOn Campaign Manager at Access Now. “The African Union and member states have a responsibility to get involved and do everything in their power to help restore the internet, reconnecting communities to each other, to the world, and to vital information. As we look towards peace, it’s critical that regional leaders make a firm stand against the incessant use of internet shutdowns in Africa.”
For over two years, the Ethiopian government and other parties involved in the blackouts in Tigray have ignored calls from local and international organizations urging them to reconnect people. Since the signing of the peace treaty on November 2, Ethiopian authorities have acknowledged the shutdown, but state there is “no timeline” to reconnect the internet. This is not good enough. The African Union and its individual member states must speak out and condemn the Ethiopian government’s prolonged shutdown
Millions of people are exploring their artificially generated, inner iridescent, cartoon essence. That’s right, with the recent release of the “magic avatar” by the photo-editing app Lensa, we can all be fantasy stars in our own lunchtime. But concerns are mounting about how it not only collects massive amounts of personal data, often sexualises your image while potentially breaching artistic copyright.
The good folks over at Platformer broke the news that Twitter is experimenting with Elon’s desperate attempt to make money: forcing people to “opt-in” to share personal info so they can better target ads. And, yes, there’s a contradiction between “force” and “opt-in.”
Hilarious Update: A few minutes ago, the @ElonJet account returned to Twitter, but that came about 20 minutes after Elon himself justified the ban, saying it violated the company’s (new) doxxing policies (see the original update to this story at the bottom. Hilarious Update 2: And, a couple hours later, the account was suspended a second time. Anyway, in the meantime, the original post is here:
Before it was suspended (for the second time) Wednesday, @ElonJet had more than 540,000 followers. The jet-tracking bot was created by Florida college student Jack Sweeney — whose own personal Twitter account also was suspended Wednesday. Sweeney told Bloomberg News that Twitter had suspended all 30 accounts that he ran, which included those that tracked planes used by Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates.
He logged into Twitter and saw a notice that the account was permanently suspended for breaking Twitter's rules. But the note didn't explain how it broke the rules.
Sweeney said he immediately filed an online form to appeal the suspension. Later, his personal account was also suspended, with a message saying it violated Twitter’s rules “against platform manipulation and spam.”
The suspension comes days after Sweeney posted, from his personal account, a screenshot of an internal Twitter message provided to him by an anonymous employee who informed him that as of Dec. 2, @ElonJet had had its “visibility limited/restricted to a severe degree internally.” The internal message, from newly minted head of trust and safety Ella Irwin, read: “Team please apply heavy VF to @elonjet immediately,” VF meaning “visibility filter.”
Twitter has suspended an account that tracked CEO Elon Musk's private jet — just one month after Musk himself said he'd allow the account to stay put.
Wednesday morning, the account, @elonjet — which had amassed more than half a million followers — was listed as suspended for having violated unspecified Twitter rules.
The account was created by 20-year-old Jack Sweeney, a Florida college student.
Mr. Ryan said that the cuts would amount to a single-digit percentage of staff, adding that the company would finish its plans over the coming weeks. He said there would not be an overall reduction in the newsroom’s head count because the cuts would be offset by hiring in other areas. The newsroom has more than 1,000 employees.
According to the IFJ, 11 media professionals have been killed in Mexico in 2022, one fewer than in war-torn Ukraine. Haiti is third with six journalists killed, followed by Colombia with four.
This is a developing story… Please check back for possible updates...
Republican Sen. Tom Cotton on Wednesday blocked the passage of a House-approved bipartisan bill that's been heralded by advocates as "the most important free press legislation in modern times."
The revelation of an alleged marriage of the daughter of a prominent religious figure at the age of six led to a social media campaign against the journalist who first reported on the incident.
Timur Soykan, a columnist for the daily BirGün, reported on December 3 about an investigation launched after H.K.G., who is now 24 years old, filed a complaint alleging that she was forced to marry a 29-year-old man, K.ð., in 1998.
The great rolling fiasco that is Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter got boiled down into a tidy pop-culture parable this weekend. As Dave Chappelle, the comedy world’s most prominent foe of all things woke, called Musk up to the stage at Chase Center in San Francisco, the Twitter titan was treated to a prolonged, lusty chorus of boos from the crowd. Footage from the show only erratically remained on Musk’s vanity platform the next day, and Musk himself suggested that he’d inspired “90% cheers and 10% boos” onstage—a falsehood so flagrant that it got “Boo-urns,” a 27-year-old Simpsons joke, trending on the site. For good measure, Musk—who’d also recently tweeted that something known as the “woke mind virus” was seeking to exert total control over civilization in a struggle in which “nothing else matters”—suggested that he’d “offended SF’s unhinged leftists,” without accounting for just why this offense-taking demographic would turn out in full force for a Dave Chappelle show.
As supporters of Julian Assange fear his extradition to the United States could be just weeks away, and President Biden faces growing pressure to drop espionage charges against Assange, we are joined for an exclusive joint interview with Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg and John Young, the founder of Cryptome.org, who have both asked the Department of Justice to indict them for possessing or publishing the same documents as the WikiLeaks founder. The Biden administration is asking the U.K. government to extradite Assange to the U.S., where he faces up to 175 years in prison on espionage and hacking charges for the release of documents that exposed war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now Ellsberg has revealed that he was in possession of confidential documents leaked by former military analyst Chelsea Manning and given to him as backup by WikiLeaks, and Young says he published some of the same documents days before WikiLeaks did. “If they succeed with Julian Assange, … we will not have a First Amendment,” says Ellsberg. “This accusation against Assange would be illegal against an American citizen, so we think it’s selective prosecution and it should cease,” adds Young.
"It's a disgrace and a tragedy for Olivier and his family," family spokesman Olivier Van Steirtegem told Belgian newspaper Het Nieuwsblad. "He is innocent and the victim of a larger, shady international game."
Tommaso Alessandro De Filippo: Does the current protest movement in Iran differ in fundamental ways from prior ones?
Daniel Pipes: Yes, it does. No other protest since 1979 has continued for so long or been so widely supported. It also has key constituencies – Kurds and women – that add to its impact.
The video, shared by Iranian journalist Masih Alinejad, shows burqa-clad women engaged in a scuffle with several others for not wearing the hijab.
A maulvi and 9 others have been arrested for trying to illegally convert a Hindu girl (18) to Islam and carry out her nikah with one Ahmed Ansari. This latest incident of grooming jihad has been reported from Fatehpur district of UP.
The girl had gone missing around 8 months ago from Fatehpur Sadar Kotwali area, and her mother had filed a missing person report.
Make sure you never miss an issue by signing up by email to receive EFFector as soon as it's posted! Since 1990 EFF has published EFFector to help keep readers on the bleeding edge of their digital rights. We know that the intersection of technology, civil liberties, human rights, and the law can be complicated, so EFFector is a great way to stay on top of things. The newsletter is chock full of links to updates, announcements, blog posts, and other stories to help keep readers—and listeners—up to date on the movement to protect online privacy and free expression.€
As of December 8, 2022, Guantánamo Bay detention facility—a prison offshore of American justice and built for those detained in this country’s never-ending Global War on Terror—has been open for nearly 21 years (or, to be precise, 7,627 days). Thirteen years ago, I published a book, The Least Worst Place: Guantanamo’s First 100 Days. It told the story of the military officers and staff who received the prison’s initial detainees at that US naval base on the island of Cuba early in 2002. Like the hundreds of prisoners that followed, they would largely be held without charges or trial for years on end.
This Friday, Mumia Abu-Jamal faces what could be his last chance for a new trial to consider newly discovered evidence that casts doubt on his 1982 conviction for murder. The journalist and former Black Panther has spent 41 years in prison for the death of police officer Daniel Faulkner, for which he has always maintained his innocence. His lawyers say evidence in boxes discovered in the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office in 2019 shows his trial was tainted by judicial bias, as well as police and prosecutorial misconduct, like withholding evidence, and bribing or coercing witnesses to lie. Philadelphia Common Pleas Court Judge Lucretia Clemons indicated she intends to dismiss Mumia’s request for a new trial, but said she would announce her final decision this Friday, December 16. For more on this closely watched case, we speak with Wendell Griffen, Arkansas circuit judge, who is calling for Abu-Jamal’s release and says Judge Clemons should take into account how the irregularities in Abu-Jamal’s case should have already secured his freedom, suggesting a drive for vengeance is the main reason that hasn’t happened. “The prosecution messed up, the investigation messed up, and Mumia Abu-Jamal was wrongfully prosecuted, wrongfully convicted, wrongfully sentenced and is now wrongfully incarcerated,” says Griffen. “But our bloodlust prevents us from acknowledging that.”
Tatyana Moskalkova, Russia’s human rights commissioner, reports receiving many appeals related to mobilization, according to Interfax.
Evidence suggests the prosecutor in Mumia’s trial bribed star witnesses to testify and wrongly excluded Black jurors.
The Native American activist’s attorney tells Robert Scheer why Peltier’s imprisonment is one of the worst miscarriages of justice this country has ever seen.
Rita De Anda has spent decades in prison waiting for a chance at parole. Two years ago, when the then-56-year-old learned it might come about a decade earlier than she expected, De Anda was overjoyed. “I’m going home!” she thought.1This article was produced in partnership with Type Investigations, with support from the Puffin Foundation.
I have been a member of BMWED-IBT, the national union representing rail workers, for over a decade. I come from a union family that stretches back three generations. My wife and I are raising our kids in a union family. I earn my paycheck as a trackman. My union brothers and sisters and I perform the same duties as the trackmen anywhere: We pull old ties and install new ones; we cut and replace defective rail; we inspect and repair switches and frog crossings; we build new tracks where none previously existed. The railroad where I work operates in the Northeast and it moves people from one place to the next. It’s not one of the class-1 freight railroads responsible for shipping material like grain or coal or fertilizer, so the recent contract conflict between those freight carriers and the unionized workforce doesn’t directly affect me, my fellow trackmen, the signalmen, engineers, conductors, dispatchers, mechanics, or any of the workers who keep the place open. Not yet, anyway. We know it’s coming for us. And sooner rather than later.
The new legislation mandates federal recognition for same-sex marriage, as well as interracial marriage, around the country and protects it from potential invalidation in the future by the Supreme Court.
Human rights advocates cheered Tuesday's signing by U.S. President Joe Biden of the Respect for Marriage Act, landmark legislation to codify limited protections for same-sex and interracial marriages passed in response to right-wing attacks on civil rights.
"If there is one message that breaks through from today, it's that this law—and the love it defends—strikes a blow against hate in all its forms."
Violates the National Environmental Policy Act
An agency€ whistleblower€ informed me that Erin Carey, Stone-Manning’s Missoula Field Office Manager, is violating the€ National Environmental Policy Act€ in a number of ways to€ ram the project through.
Today that politics is moving back into the media spotlight. As I write this, it’s not yet clear whether DACA, the program created to protect from deportation the young people brought here as children, will last much longer. In response to a lawsuit brought by the attorney general of Texas and several other states, a federal judge ruled last year that the program was illegal, and his ruling was upheld this past October by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. Unless legislation is passed during this year’s waning congressional session to extend the protections afforded to DACA recipients, the case may go to the Supreme Court, where its prospects would be dim.
If DACA is ended, it’s unlikely that the 590,000 young people currently protected by the program will be deported, but they would no longer have the federal protections that have allowed them to work and secure other benefits. They would be pushed back into the shadows and precarity of undocumented status.
"Despicable." "Disgusting." "Egregious." "Terrifying."
"What a gross abuse of power for no apparent purpose than to harass law-abiding Texans that he's prejudiced against."
AOC tweets her support for the rail workers before voting to take away their right to strike.
Tom Conway writes about the urgent need to properly fund the National Labor Relations Board to protect workers.
"That energy in Madison Square Garden. I know that was one of the first nationally televised playoff games where we had a full arena. . . When they saw that Madison Square Garden full, it was almost like 'Wow, pandemic is ending'. . . . I know for people watching people come together in Madison Square Garden, I think that was meaningful."
Below is the video description from Bad Faith. Seattle city counsel & Socialist Alternative member Kshama Sawant joins Ryan Grim & Briahna Joy Gray on Bad Faith to debate the strategy, adopted by most of the squad, to vote for the union crushing TA that averted a […]
In a December 13 meeting, State Duma deputies approved a draft law in a first reading. The proposed legislation would remove criminal liability for crimes on the occupied territories of Ukraine if they were committed to “defend the interests” of Russia. The publication Advokatskaya Ulitsa called attention to the law.
Russia’s Ministry of Digital Development opposed a legislative ban on remote work for employees of Russian IT companies who live outside of Russia.
As concerns grow that a proposed Alberta “Sovereignty Act” could undermine Indigenous rights, Premier Danielle Smith has sought to assure First Nations leaders that they have nothing to worry about.€
“The Government of Alberta acknowledges the concerns,” a spokesperson for Smith told CBC after chiefs from Treaties 6, 7, and 8 publicly rejected the sovereignty plan. The spokesperson explained that “nothing within the act is to be construed as abrogating or derogating from any existing Aboriginal and treaty rights.”
All’s well OK that ends well OK. Months of reporting tied to lawsuits filed by Hertz renters falsely accused of theft should now come to a halt. Maybe.
At the State Duma’s “Wishing Tree” charity event, Oleg Nilov, a Duma deputy from the party A Just Russia — For Truth, “joked around.” Participants are supposed to tear a card containing a child’s New Year’s wish from the tree, and then do their best to fulfill it.
While Space X’s Starlink is a promising broadband option if you’re out of range of traditional options (and can afford the $710 first month price tag), many users who’ve pre-ordered aren’t having a great time. Some say they’ve been waiting for service more than a year, during which time Starlink has often€ refused to answer basic emails€ or issue refunds, while imposing€ price hikes on waiting customers.
On Wednesday, Verizon announced the beta launch of its streaming hub “+play,” which lets users search, subscribe, and pay for a variety of streaming offerings in one place, all connected to their existing cell phone or home internet bill.
At least two deals for the Spotify Live shows were canceled midway through the creators’ contracts, according to a person familiar with the matter. A second source close to the matter said that all the contracts are being paid out in full, despite the cancelations.
Here’s some potentially very big news in the world of the mobile internet: after years of refusing to do so, Apple is finally going to allow third party app stores on iOS devices. This has been a discussion for a long, long time. Many people forget now, but the app store didn’t even exist until the second generation of iPhones. On the first version, the only thing allowed were web apps, and frankly, that state of affairs was probably better for those who believe in an open, interoperable internet.
Despite their competing businesses, it’s important to remember Microsoft and Sony are fundamentally different companies.
As one of the big three leaders of cloud computing, Microsoft’s size is incomparable to Sony’s and grants it far more leverage in its dealings and the money it can burn to strengthen its Xbox business, with the additional advantage of not having to pay a cloud provider like Sony has to for online gaming and streaming of games.
In previous articles I have discussed this at length, and also wrote a lot of words on structural business reasons. In short, in Europe, we’ve outlawed surveillance capitalism, and we mostly uphold this for our own companies. Meanwhile, US companies continue to operate business models here that rely on us handing over our data, and we are generally letting this happen, despite being the “regulation continent”. For patents, the reverse holds – we have a very hard time operating in the US because of IPR [sic] minefields surrounding any software innovation, which is far less of a thing in Europe (for now).
The settlement ends lawsuits filed by both companies in several countries, including in the United States District Court of the Eastern District of Texas, as well as the complaints filed before the United States International Trade Commission.
[...]
Including effects of the agreement with Apple covering sales from January 15, 2022, and including ongoing IPR business with all other licensees, Ericsson estimates the fourth quarter 2022 IPR licensing revenues will be US$532 million to US$580 million.
Modelo has allowed Constellation Brands to use the Corona name on certain beers, but Modelo has said hard seltzer products fall outside of a trademark licensing agreement.
The outcome of the case depends on whether the hard seltzer products constitute "beer" and therefore fall within the licensing agreement, as Constellation Brands argued. Modelo argued no reasonable jury could confuse beer for hard seltzer.
Last week, the European Council adopted its position on the Act. This is an important milestone, and the next step is for the European Parliament to form a common position, expected in early 2023, so that the positions of those two institutions and the European Commission can then be negotiated into a final, joint position during the so-called “trilogue” phase of the process.
Archiving data from old storage media can be a highly complex process. It can be as simple as putting a disk in an old drive and reading out the contents. These days, though, the state of the art is more complex, with advanced techniques helping to recover the most data possible. The VHS-Decode project is an effort to improve the archiving of old analog video tapes.
It’s no secret that Nintendo is one of my common targets to slap around for its draconian enforcement of intellectual property, much to the annoyance of some Nintendo fans. It’s just that it’s… hard not to? This is an enormous player in the video game industry that wields IP as a method for taking down all kinds of fan-driven content that typically isn’t available anywhere else at the time Nintendo’s lawyers get involved. There were all kinds of takedowns for game music that Nintendo doesn’t make officially available, for instance. Then there were both the war on ROM sites and all of the other behavior the company engages in that threatens game/art preservation efforts.
Cinema owners say that Avatar: The Way of the Water will hit Russian screens this Christmas, despite Western sanctions. Exactly when is unclear but with backing from the Association of Theater Owners, it seems almost inevitable. Meanwhile, a draft law presented to the government envisions movies such as Avatar 2 being distributed all around Russia, without their owners' permission.
The platform offers long and short documentaries, animated children's movies, adverts and concerts as well as older and newer feature films ranging in price from free to €5.90. A monthly ticket costs €8.80.
Square Enix, the game studio behind famous video game franchises like the Final Fantasy series, is well known to be a big believer in intellectual property enforcement. Just on our pages alone, we’ve talked about the times they struck out against folks selling replica swords from its games, or fan-made productions featuring Square IP in them. As we’re always careful to mention, Square Enix can do this, but it doesn’t mean it should or has to handle its intellectual property concerns in the most draconian manner possible.
In a nutshell, I've created a small capsule called [DiscoGem]. Every day at 00:05am, it will pick 5 random capsule URLs from a list of known hosts (thanks to Lupa crawler). It then creates a small gemlog entry and an [atom feed].
NOTA: There is no manual curation (and not planned tbh), and capsules might be empty or not updated for a very long time. Goal is to discover capsules, not find "fresh content" (that you can already get via Antenna or Cosmos).
Shortly after I wrote my previous post, Thomas (the founder and CEO of Fosshost) became active again. In the days since my last post, Thomas and the remaining Fosshost volunteers have been working in transitioning Fosshost to a new focus of supporting projects that provide FOSS hosting, instead of directly providing hosting.
I just want to write down this before I forget. I have been working on CADET support for GNUnet++ in the past few days. CADET is not very well documented. The doxygen and comment in headers are really helpful. But a lot of times in order to understand how to use a function, I have to read the source code. This is no exception to the `gnunet-cadet` command. Usually the hello world equlivent for any network application would be an echo service (like what `nc` can do). The help information of `gnunet-cadet` is not very helpful.
Anyway, this is how you do it. First, open a terminal and run the following command to start a CADET server. Note that in CADET the port is specified as a string instead of a number. In this case the port is `"default"`.
A message on the Lua email list was asking about the best way to parse MQTT (does not have a meaning) topics, specifically, how to handle the multilevel wildcard character [1]. I answered that LPeg (Lua Parsing expression grammar) [2] would be good for this, and gave annotated source code to show how it works. I thought I might also post about it for better visibility.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.