Leftovers

• Matt Webb ☛ Singing the gospel of collective efficacy (Interconnected)

  Similarly we all love when the swifts visit (beautiful birds), so somebody started a group to get swift nest boxes made and installed collectively, then applied for subsidy funding, then got everyone to chip in such that people who couldn’t afford it could have their boxes paid for, and now suddenly we’re all writing to MPs and following the legislation to include swift nesting sites in new build houses. Etc.

  It’s called collective efficacy, the belief that you can make a difference by acting together.

• Dan Q ☛ How an RM Nimbus Taught Me a Hacker Mentality

  It’s been said that when faced with a new piece of technology, a normal person asks “what does it do?”, but a hacker asks “what can I make it do?”.

  This kind of curiosity is integral to a hacker mindset.

• Ava ☛ re: no one has any hobbies now / the 4 types of blog

  Blogging for 1.5 months is not a long time. It takes a while for people to notice you and to find your tribe.

• Annie Mueller ☛ Feeling something is okay I guess

  The world remains and here we are, in it.

  What can we do to make it better?

• Science

  • The Conversation ☛ 2026-01-22 [Older] From lunar nights to Martian dust storms: why batteries struggle in space

  • The Conversation ☛ 2026-01-23 [Older] Proposed new mission will create artificial solar eclipses in space

  • The Conversation ☛ 2026-01-26 [Older] Moore’s law: the famous rule of computing has reached the end of the road, so what comes next?

  • The Conversation ☛ 2026-01-26 [Older] What an ancient jellyfish can teach us about the evolution of sleep

  • The Conversation ☛ 2026-01-23 [Older] A century ago, John Logie Baird achieved a landmark moment in television history. The viewers weren’t convinced

  • Interesting Engineering ☛ US declassifies top secret spy satellites that tracked Soviet threats

    The NRO’s JUMPSEAT spy satellites reached a highly elliptical orbit (HEO) between 1971 and 1987, meaning the final satellite was launched to orbit almost 40 years before the program was declassified.

• Career/Education

  • Coalition for Networked Information ☛ Call for 2026 Entries: Library Publishing Directory and IFLA Library Publishing SIG Database

    The Library Publishing Coalition (LPC) and the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA) Library Publishing Special Interest Group (LibPub SIG) are partnering to survey the landscape of scholarly publishing in libraries across the globe. LPC is seeking submissions for the 2026 edition of the biennial Library Publishing Directory. IFLA’s Library Publishing Map of the World is a first-of-its-kind online database of global library publishing initiatives. Together, we invite you to share information about your library’s scholarly publishing activities.

  • Pro Publica ☛ Two Alaska School Districts Are Suing the State, Claiming It’s Failing to Fund Public Education

    The plaintiffs are seeking to force the state to fulfill its constitutional obligation and requesting a court-ordered study to determine what it costs to educate students.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • The Conversation ☛ 2026-01-21 [Older] I developed an app that uses drone footage to track plastic litter on beaches

  • JURIST ☛ New York judge drops death penalty charges for Luigi Mangione

    The trial will now proceed on Counts One and Two, which charge Mangione with causing the death of Brian Thompson under two federal stalking laws. The maximum penalty for each count is life without parole. Federal prisoners are not eligible for parole under the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984.

  • The Conversation ☛ 2026-01-26 [Older] Iran’s biggest centres of protest are also experiencing extreme pollution and water shortages

• Proprietary

  • CRN ☛ Google Cloud Confirms President’s Exit After Short Tenure

    After less than a year as President of global Customer Experience of Google Cloud, Hayete Gallot has departed the $61 billion cloud company.

  • Computing UK ☛ Oracle could cut thousands of jobs - AI spending raises financing concerns

    Oracle could cut as many as 30,000 jobs and sell off major assets as it grapples with the ongoing cost of expanding its AI infrastructure, according to an investment banking report.

    Research published by TD Cowen suggests Big Red is weighing significant money-saving measures, including potential layoffs of between 20,000 and 30,000 staff, to help fund the construction of new datacentres linked to its large AI contracts.

    The research note says investors are increasingly concerned about how Oracle will finance its rapid build-out, particularly following a $300bn, five-year agreement to supply computing power to OpenAI.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ Fact check: Are ICE fakes trying to drown out real videos?

      Amid these incidents, social media has been flooded with a mix of authentic eyewitness videos and AI‑generated fakes, complicating efforts to understand what actually happened. The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department warned it had seen a rise in AI-generated images and video in connection with its forces, adding it "does not participate in proactive immigration enforcement activities." DW Fact check investigated several viral clips.

    • Hackaday ☛ Writing An Optimizing Tensor Compiler From Scratch

      The Python-based front-end implements low-level NumPy-like operations, with development still ongoing. As for why Yet Another Tensor Library had be developed, the reasons were that most of existing libraries are heavily focused on machine learning tasks and scale poorly otherwise, dynamic flow control is hard to implement, and the requirement of writing custom kernels in e.g. CUDA.

    • Seth Godin ☛ AI ads are neither

      But Amazon turned this into a tax. By incorporating barely concealed ads as search results, they corrupted the value of their shopping search engine. They confused consumers at the same time they stole margin from suppliers and ultimately increased the price that everyone pays for just about everything. Amazon sellers don’t want to buy more ads. In fact, they only do it because they have no choice.

      When AI starts to incorporate ads, the corruption and lack of trust will only increase.

    • Riccardo Mori ☛ →The real AI problem no one is talking about | Riccardo Mori

      I’m still not sure whether the doom-and-gloom scenario of ‘AI’ is coming for our jobs is really going to materialise in full-dystopian mode, bringing that high level of disruption Dykstra talks about. But even if we talk in hypotheticals, this is a problem worth considering. If entire categories of workers lose their job, they stop gaining money. If they stop gaining money, they stop spending money, and that means that other people or companies will stop earning revenue. That whole loop Labour → Wages → Income → Consumption → Revenue → Labour, etc. is going to fall apart.

    • Josh Allan Dykstra ☛ The Real A.I. Problem No One Is Talking About (Who Buys Your Stuff, Robots?) – Josh Allan Dykstra

      I don’t want to minimize the impact of A.I. taking jobs (it’s just beginning and it’s going to be enormously disruptive) AND there’s actually a bigger question lurking in the background, namely: What kind of economic system tries to eliminate human labor without replacing income… and still expects the world to keep functioning as-is?

      I’m not hearing this talked about enough, so we’re going to talk about it today.

      Here’s the crux of it: if A.I. works the way capital hopes it will, capitalism won’t break because A.I. fails. It’ll break because A.I. succeeds.

      Why?

      Because if you’re running a business, you can’t fire your customers and then expect them to buy your stuff.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ The job losses are real — but the AI excuse is fake

      Even the most mainstream financial press is starting to admit that claiming your layoffs are AI at work is a fake excuse to sound good to investors.

    • Tautvilas Mečinskas ☛ A new worrying amalgamation of [cryptocurrency] scams and vibe coding emerges from the bowels of the internet in 2026

      2025 was the breakthrough year when software creation became easy. AI models became much better and even doing a "ralph loop" on a simple prompt in a few hours could produce copious amount of working code. As a result you have burned through thousands of dollars of tokens to get some barely working "product" but you had no idea who or why would use it. In order to develop it into proper product you would have to learn how to code, product development, marketing and so on. But what if there was an easy way to "dump it" on unsuspecting masses?

    • India Times ☛ An AI pioneer warns the tech 'herd' is marching into a dead end

      The reason, he said, goes back to what he has argued for years: Large language models, the AI technology at the heart of popular products like ChatGPT, can get only so powerful. And companies are throwing everything they have at projects that won't get them to their goal to make computers as smart as or even smarter than humans. More creative Chinese companies, he added, could get there first.

  • Social Control Media

    • The Nation ☛ How Online Frat Mobs Target Sexual Assault Survivors

      On December 19, Kowalski posted a series of videos on Instagram, drawing tens of millions of views. In these posts, she sought to restore vital context and background to the trauma of her abuse—describing the conditions of the assault, detailing her inebriated state, and emphasizing that it wasn’t possible for her to consent to sex. Almost immediately, her comment sections were flooded with a disturbingly coordinated pattern of harassment. Fraternity-affiliated accounts tagged fellow brothers and other digital onlookers, joking about the number of alleged assailants, and volunteering to join the mob.

    • FAIR ☛ Social Media Working to Protect ICE Clampdown in Minneapolis — FAIR

      If you took these claims at face value, you would expect that we would have a more neutral and less government-controlled social media in 2026. Instead, we have a social media oligarchy that is now working directly in the interests of the Trump administration’s national police state.

    • Daniel Pocock ☛ Australia's top nurse takes on Musk, Zuckerberg & rogue health influencers, birthkeepers

      It is interesting to compare Bernice's work to the Code of Conduct gaslighting that plagues open source software organizations. In the attack on Sonny Piers, the snobby set published a big statement telling us he is banned indefinitely and it was "for cause", without stating what the cause is. It looks like they copied the phrase "for cause" from some random news report and thought it sounds like a nice way to scare everybody. In the case of Emily Lal, we can actually read the documents from Bernice and from the coroner and everybody can understand exactly what Lal is accused of and hopefully that will help other people to avoid doing the same thing over again.

    • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Threads’ margin is the Eurostack’s opportunity

      Which brings me to Threads, Meta's latest social media network. Threads is built on Activitypub and Mastodon, these being open/free, auditable and trustworthy protocols, designed to support "federated" social media. That's social media that runs on servers managed by lots of different entities, whose users can all connect to one another no matter which server they use. Meta was clearly excited by the prospect of enclosing and conquering this open upstart, but also nervous at the prospect that its users would find, in federation, an easy path to escape from Meta's clutches.

    • El País ☛ So addictive that it leads to trial: Social media takes the stand

      A dozen hearings in Los Angeles are trying to determine whether platforms like Facebook aim to become addictive for young people — and whether that is a crime

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • The Register UK ☛ Cyberattack on Poland's power grid could have been lethal

      In a report published this week, Dragos said it is working with one of the 30 or so facilities affected by the attacks, allegedly carried out by Russian intelligence.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Scoop News Group ☛ FBI expands AI-powered biometric, facial recognition capabilities, inventory shows

      The FBI more than doubled its AI use cases in the past year, according to the Department of Justice’s 2025 inventory posted Friday. Many of those uses are enabling law enforcement activities, from biometric and facial recognition capabilities to data synthesis and triage.

      In 2024, the FBI had 19 AI use cases overall with 15 designated as helping to aid “law and justice.” Last year, the DOJ division accumulated 50 AI use cases total, and 27 of those were categorized as law enforcement.

    • Meduza ☛ Russia is racing to assign every visitor a ‘trust level,’ collecting everything from your biometrics to your medical history

      According to the documents posted online, the “digital profile” system will be a vast repository of information about individual foreign nationals and stateless persons entering, exiting, and residing in Russia. Various federal agencies will be required to feed their existing data on foreigners into a single, centralized database operated by the Interior Ministry.

      Officials will compile a unique dossier for every foreigner, assigning a “trust level” based on the availability of the individual’s biometric data (photos and fingerprints).

    • Sedishj Authority for Privacy Protection ☛ Administrative fine against Sportadmin

      The Swedish Authority for Privacy Protection (IMY) has supervised the company Sportadmin following an IT attack in which a large volume of personal data was leaked. The review shows that Sportadmin did not have an appropriate level of security to protect the personal data the company processed. IMY therefore decides to impose an administrative fine of SEK 6 million.

  • Confidentiality

    • EFF ☛ Introducing Encrypt It Already

      Today, we’re launching Encrypt It Already, our push to get companies to offer stronger privacy protections to our data and communications by implementing end-to-end encryption. If that name sounds a little familiar, it’s because this is a spiritual successor to our 2019 campaign, Fix It Already, a campaign where we pushed companies to fix longstanding issues.

• Defence/Aggression

  • YLE ☛ Yle's new satellite images reveal: Russia upgrading Soviet-era garrison in Petrozavodsk

    Russia has begun to clear out a Soviet-era garrison in Petrozavodsk. There are plans to build new barracks in the area, allowing a significant expansion of Russian troops near the Finnish border.

  • Digital Music News ☛ US TikTok App Uninstalls Jump 150% Following Transfer

    Across social media, users have shared their reasons for uninstalling TikTok, with many citing the platform’s updated privacy policy. The language makes clear that TikTok may collect data including “citizenship or immigration status,” “racial or ethnic origin,” and “sexual orientation.” However, CNBC notes that this aspect of the privacy policy isn’t new and can also be found in an archived version from August 2024.

  • YLE ☛ Finland looks to end "uncontrolled human experiment" with Australia-style ban on social media

    With the smartphone restriction in schools widely considered to have been a success, Finland's government has now set its sights on social media platforms.

    Prime Minister Petteri Orpo (NCP) said earlier this month that he supports banning the use of social media by children under the age of 15.

  • The Register UK ☛ Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

    You don't need a DEA warrant or a Justice Department subpoena to see the trend: Europe's 90‑plus‑percent dependency on US cloud infrastructure, as former European Commission advisor Cristina Caffarra put it, is a single‑shock‑event security nightmare waiting to rupture the EU's digital stability.

    Seriously. What will you do if Washington decides to unplug you? Say Trump gets up on the wrong side of the bed and decides to invade Greenland. There goes NATO, and in all the saber-rattling leading up to the 10th Mountain Division being shipped to Nuuk, he orders American companies to cut their services to all EU countries and the UK.

  • YLE ☛ APN Podcast: To ban or not to ban — Finland's social media conundrum

    Public health authority THL has also updated its recommendations on kids' use of social media, while a poll this week found two-thirds of Finns support a ban.

    "We see a rise in self-harm and especially eating disorders. We see a big separation in the values of young girls and boys, which is also a big problem in society," researcher Silja Kosola tells APN.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • TwinCities Pioneer Press ☛ Huge cache of Epstein documents includes emails financier exchanged with wealthy and powerful

    The documents show Epstein exchanged hundreds of friendly texts with Steve Bannon, a top advisor to President Donald Trump, some months before Epstein’s death.

  • New York Times ☛ Release of Three Million Epstein Pages Falls Short, Survivors Say

    Mr. Blanche said that many of the pages that were reviewed were duplicates, and that roughly 200,000 pages were redacted or withheld after Justice Department lawyers determined that they were protected by various legal privileges, including attorney-client material. One small tranche of papers, from a law firm involved with an Epstein-related case, still has to be dealt with, Mr. Blanche said.

• Environment

  • teleSUR ☛ Sweden and Finland Call to Ban Maritime Services to Russian Energy Carriers

    On Thursday, Sweden and Finland called on the European Union (EU) to ban maritime services to Russian energy carriers, seeking to curb the “ghost fleet” that allows Moscow to circumvent oil sanctions.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • H2 View ☛ EU earmarks €176m for hydrogen infrastructure from €650m energy funds

      Selected by the European Commission as Projects of Common and Mutual Interest (PCI/PMI), they will receive funds from the Connecting Europe Facility to help finance development.

    • Interesting Engineering ☛ One-way heat diode could help batteries run cooler and last longer

      The technique, known as thermal rectification, could extend battery life in cell phones, electric vehicles, satellites, and even improve AI data center efficiency.

    • Dedoimedo ☛ The Matrix and the silly use of humans as fuel

      There are many many many reasons why humans aren't useful as fuel.

      First, the humans are mostly water. That makes them rather impractical, even as kindling. Plus there are much better, energy-dense alternatives out there. Really. Soooo much better. You don't need any fancy calculations to realize this. But let's.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • The Conversation ☛ 2026-01-21 [Older] Horses really can smell fear, new study claims, and it changes their behaviour

  • Overpopulation

    • [Old] Medium ☛ Overshoot: Why Civilizational Collapse Is Closer Than You Think

      The idea that collapse lies at the end of the century is a byproduct of models constrained by consensus politics, median probability estimates, and the exclusion of many known feedback loops. It is a polite fiction sustained by institutions afraid to speak the full truth: collapse is not coming in 2100. Collapse is already underway.

      What we are witnessing now — record-shattering temperatures, megafires, flooding cities, collapsing fisheries, insect die-offs, ice sheet destabilization — is not the beginning of a crisis. It is the midpoint of one. And what is framed in media and politics as a “climate emergency” is in fact only a symptom of a deeper, more systemic pathology: ecological overshoot. Climate change is not the root of our predicament. It is one among many cascading signals that our civilization has breached the fundamental limits of the biosphere.

    • [Old] World Economic Forum ☛ Our civilization’s survival depends on collective action

      The UN estimates an additional 1.6 billion people will live on Earth by 2050. Population growth is one of the dominant drivers of civilizational collapse because resources are finite. Earth Overshoot Day, which fell on 1 August 2024, marks the moment when humanity has exhausted nature’s budget for the year. We currently consume 1.7 Earth budgets per year.

      These stark realities echo the warnings from Jared Diamond’s New York Times bestseller Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, published 20 years ago this month.

      Diamond identified eight processes that lead to unintended ecocide – or ecological suicide – that caused past civilizations of humans to fail: deforestation and habitat destruction; declining soil health like erosion, fertility and salination; challenges managing freshwater resources; over hunting; over-fishing; invasive species; human population growth; increased per capita environmental impact.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Daniel Stenberg ☛ GregKH awarded the Prize for Excellence in Open Source 2026

    I had the honor and pleasure to hand over this prize to its first real laureate during the award gala on Thursday evening in Brussels, Belgium.

  • The Register UK ☛ Ex-Google engineer convicted of stealing AI secrets

    Google employs various physical and network security measures, including security guards, cameras at building entrances, badge-based building access restrictions, guest registration and accompaniment requirements, network data loss prevention monitoring, device identification and authentication, and network activity logging.

  • Security Week ☛ White House Scraps 'Burdensome' Software Security Rules 

    The US Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has issued Memorandum M-26-05, officially revoking the previous administration’s 2022 policy, ‘Enhancing the Security of the Software Supply Chain through Secure Software Development Practices’ (M-22-18), as well as the follow-up enhancements announced in 2023 (M-23-16).

    The new guidance shifts responsibility to individual agency heads to develop tailored security policies for both software and hardware based on their specific mission needs and risk assessments.

  • 404 Media ☛ Erotic Parody 'Melania: Devourer of Men' Sales Surge on Amazon Amid Documentary Flop

    The $75-million, Amazon-funded Melania Trump documentary is tanking at the box office, but a 2018 erotic thriller that depicts the First Lady as a sexual monster is rocketing up Amazon’s sales charts. Melania: Devourer of Men is currently an Amazon bestseller, sitting at number 3 in the “political thrillers & suspense” category in the Kindle store. A general search for "Melania" on Amazon returns a banner ad for the documentary, the First Lady's memoir, and the erotic thriller as the top results.

  • Wired ☛ Nvidia’s Campaign to Sell AI Chips to China Finally Pays Off

    Beijing reportedly approved the sale of hundreds of thousands of Nvidia H200 chips to Chinese AI companies—the culmination of a dramatic shift in US tech policy.

  • Benny Siegert ☛ Rust in the Kernel, and other odd decisions

    My email inbox is like the pile of documents on my desk. Things that I wanted to get back to ends up moving towards the bottom, into the never-ending pile of … stuff. For the first time in a while, I have looked at the bottom – and found an inquiry from someone who had seen my presentation at FOSDEM 2024.

    They had a question for me, which I am going to paraphrase below. I am going to reproduce my answer here because it may be interesting for others.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • CPJ ☛ Saudi Arabia arrests program host Mohamed El-Sayed

    “The arrest of Mohamed El-Sayed is the latest example of Saudi authorities detaining journalists without legal justification, formal charges, or disclosure of their place of detention, while denying them contact with their families or access to legal counsel,” said CPJ Regional Director Sara Qudah. “Saudi authorities must immediately disclose the reasons for his arrest and his current whereabouts.”

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • TMZ ☛ Don Lemon Calls On Journalists To Push Back On Corporate Interference

    Don thanked all his friends in the media for reaching out and having his back, but he went a step further and said they need to stand up to corporations that are putting their paws on the news and trying to exert influence and bend the knee to Trump.

  • MinnPost ☛ Journalists arrested

    “Independent journalists Georgia Fort and Don Lemon were arrested by federal agents in connection with their role in documenting an anti-ICE demonstration in a St. Paul church during a service on Jan. 18,” the Minnesota Star Tribune reports. “Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote on X that the arrests of Fort and Lemon were at her direction. Bondi said she also ordered the arrests of politician and Black Lives Matter-Minnesota co-founder Trahern Crews and DFL activist and former state House staffer Jamael Lundy,the intergovernmental affairs manager for the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office. His wife is St. Paul City Council Member Anika Bowie.”

  • Variety ☛ Don Lemon Speaks Out After Release From Jail: 'I Will Not Be Silent'

    “I have spent my entire career covering the news. I will not stop now,” he said. “I will not stop ever. Last night, the DOJ sent a team of federal agents to arrest me in the middle of the night for something that I have been doing for the last 30 years, and that is covering the news. The First Amendment of the Constitution protects me and countless other journalists who do what I do. I stand with all of them, and I will not be silenced. I look forward to my day in court.”

  • Maine Morning Star ☛ Federal agents arrest journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort for filming protest at St. Paul church

    “Instead of investigating the federal agents who killed two peaceful Minnesota protesters, the Trump Justice Department is devoting its time, attention and resources to this arrest, and that is the real indictment of wrongdoing in this case,” Lemon’s attorney, Abbe Lowell, wrote in a statement.

  • Vox ☛ Don Lemon, Georgia Fort arrested over Minnesota church protest

    What’s the context? The Trump administration tried and failed to charge Lemon at least twice prior to Friday’s indictment by a grand jury. Shortly after the protest, a federal magistrate judge refused to sign an arrest warrant for Lemon; when the Trump administration appealed that decision, it was also rejected by a federal district court judge and by a federal appeals court panel.

  • Press Gazette ☛ Mill Media journalist faces £10,000 county court bill after exposé

    Freelance journalist Cormac Kehoe is also being sued personally for £250,000 in libel damages alongside editor Joshi Herrmann and publisher Mill Media Ltd.

    The publisher of newsletter-based local news website The Londoner has been hit with a flurry of legal letters since writing about the alleged activities of Claudio De Giovanni.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Unconstitutional Arrest of Independent Journalists, Including Don Lemon and Georgia Fort, Fits Lawless Pattern of Escalation by Trump Administration

    Don Lemon and Georgia Fort are both independent journalists who have been covering the community response to ICE and Border Patrol violence in Minnesota. Fort went live on Facebook early Friday morning to share that agents were at her door to take her into custody. Her attorney confirmed to The Minnesota Star Tribune that they were federal law enforcement agents.

    Also arrested were local political candidates Trahern Jeen Crews and Jamael Lydell Lundy. The government alleges that Lemon and Fort violated federal law while engaged in the constitutionally protected activity of covering a Jan. 18 protest inside St. Paul church. The federal government’s case for arresting Lemon had been rejected last week by a magistrate judge.

  • CPJ ☛ Minnesota reporters recount ICE actions, community solidarity: ‘I know it’s going to be dangerous’

    Videos taken by journalists and bystanders— of arrests, protests, and, most notably, the fatal shootings of Alex Pretti and Renée Good — have circulated widely in recent weeks, telling the story of what’s happening on the ground.

    The recent arrests by federal authorities of Don Lemon, a former CNN anchor and freelance journalist, and Georgia Fort, an Emmy-winning local reporter, in relation to their coverage of a protest against immigration operations in Minnesota also marks the increasing risks that journalists face when covering immigration operations.

  • Mike Brock ☛ The Crisis, No. 9 - by Mike Brock - Notes From The Circus

    But what Don Lemon was doing was First Amendment protected activity.

    A journalist entered a public building during a newsworthy event with a camera. He asked questions. He documented. He witnessed. That is not a crime. That has never been a crime. That cannot be a crime if the First Amendment means anything at all.

    Two federal judges already said so. The DOJ’s original complaint was rejected by Magistrate Judge Douglas Micko, who refused to sign it. The DOJ appealed. Chief Judge Patrick Schiltz—a former Scalia clerk, a George W. Bush appointee—rejected it again.

    Two judges. One a Bush appointee who clerked for the most conservative justice of his generation. Both said: there is no case here.

    The DOJ arrested him anyway.

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Don Lemon Arrested After Filming Minneapolis Church Protest

    The judge rejected charges against Lemon.

    Abbe Lowell, an attorney for Lemon, released a statement following Lemon’s arrest Thursday night, which took place while he was in Los Angeles ahead of the Grammy Awards on Sunday.

    “Don has been a journalist for 30 years, and his constitutionally protected work in Minneapolis was no different than what he has always done,” Lowell wrote. “The First Amendment exists to protect journalists whose role it is to shine light on the truth and hold those in power accountable. There is no more important time for people like Don to be doing this work.”

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • Maine Morning Star ☛ Public overwhelmingly backs bill to restrict ICE access to schools, hospitals, child cares

    “The bottom line is this,” Mills said in a statement, “while the federal government ignores the constitutional rights guaranteed to us all, Maine will defend them — and this bill accomplishes that.”

    Earlier Thursday, U.S. Republican Sen. Susan Collins said ICE had ended its large-scale operation in Maine, which began just over a week ago. DHS did not confirm an end to its operation, instead saying in a statement that the agency “will continue to enforce the law across the country, as we do every day.”

  • MoveOn ☛ MoveOn Statement on Weak CR With Zero ICE Accountability

    “Leader Schumer should ask the Minnesotans who are watching their neighbors get killed in cold blood if a deal with no plan to stop ICE is enough right now.”

  • PHR ☛ Physicians for Human Rights Call for Protection of Health Care Workers in Iran 

    The Islamic Republic of Iran must immediately stop the persecution, physical harm, and detention of all medical professionals who are reportedly being targeted for treating people injured during the recent protests, said Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) today.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Iran Is Facing Its Deepest Crisis Since the 1979 Revolution

    We spoke to Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, a scholar of contemporary Iranian politics, about the development of the protests, the response of Iran’s rulers, and the possible consequences of US military aggression. Eskandar is an assistant professor of the international relations of the Middle East at the University of St Andrews and the author of Revolution and Its Discontents: Political Thought and Reform in Iran. This is an edited transcript from Jacobin’s Long Reads podcast. You can listen to the interview here.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ ICE Detention Contractors Are Reaping Massive Profits

    The largest immigrant deportation and prison contractors in the US are expecting an epic payout this year: for every $1 that they donated to GOP campaigns in 2024, these private companies stand to reap more than $11,000 in increased annual revenue.

  • Breach Media ☛ What Canadians can learn from U.S. resistance to ICE terror

    With ICE agents in the U.S. waging a campaign of terror, author and activist Harsha Walia puts the anti-migrant state violence in the context of a global rise in xenophobia.

  • Wired ☛ After Minneapolis, Tech CEOs Are Struggling to Stay Silent

    I won’t go into the particulars of a private conversation. But it will surprise no one to hear what was mutually understood on that streetcorner: We were two people stunned at what had happened and shared the same unspoken belief that it was not good.

  • Wired ☛ Silicon Valley Tech Workers Are Campaigning to Get ICE Out of US Cities

    Even as Big Tech CEOs curry favor with President Trump, Silicon Valley employees are calling on their bosses to use their influence to help stop his immigration policies.

  • Robert Reich ☛ The Untimely Death of Civil Rights in America

    Today, the Justice Department announced it would finally conduct a civil rights investigation into the death of Alex Pretti, the VA nurse who was gunned down in Minneapolis last Saturday by federal agents.

    It was a sharp reversal from the Department’s previous decision, to leave it up to the Department of Homeland Security to conduct a narrow inquiry into whether proper procedures were followed.

  • Kelly Hayes ☛ The Muscle Memory of Care

    Author’s Note: I was scheduled to speak at a neighborhood assembly in Chicago this weekend — an event focused on shared reflection, solidarity with Minneapolis, and renewed pathways into local organizing. I was looking forward to being there. Unfortunately, I’ve fallen ill and can’t risk exposing my neighbors. What follows is the speech I would have delivered in person.

  • Chuck Grimmett ☛ Breaking the ICE

    I searched through my old posts here, and my first reference to my unequivocal support of open borders was in 2009. My disdain for ICE follows directly from that belief, bolstered strongly by how those masked thugs are terrorizing communities, executing people in the streets, and abducting children.

  • Newsweek ☛ Germany issues formal travel advisory for US

    The advisory asks people to check out local media, stay away from crowds of people in which violence could possibly occur and note existing ID requirement in several states. "Keep calm and follow the instructions of the authorities and local security forces," added the statement.

    Last March, Germany updated its travel advisory for the U.S. to emphasize that a visa or waiver allowing entry does not guarantee citizens to enter the U.S. after several of its citizens were detained at the border.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Inside Towers ☛ Michigan Town Still Waiting as County Broadband Rollout Stalls

    No broadband construction occurred in Bridgewater during 2025, and local officials have been unable to reach Mercury Broadband LLC, the company responsible for the project. Unlike other townships funded through county programs, most of Bridgewater’s buildout falls under the federal Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF), leaving the county with little authority to intervene.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Disenshittification Nation

    No, all I have for you today is a plan to make Canada tens of billions of dollars, by offering products and services that people want and will pay for, while securing the country's resiliency and digital sovereignty, and winning the trade war, and setting the American people free, and launching our tech sector into a stable orbit for decades.

    So once again, I'm sorry. So, so sorry.

    I want to start by telling you a tariff story. It's not the story that started last year. It's a story that goes all the way back to the early 2000s. Indeed, the very start of this story dates back to 1998.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Copyrights

  • David Revoy ☛ Welcome to Silly Studios, a new publisher! - David Revoy

    Silly Studios will publish Pepper&Carrot book 1 to book 4 in Italian (a worldwide first!) and English. They'll launch a Kickstarter campaign for it very soon. You can read the pre-launch page here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sillystudios/pepperandcarrot-1-4 and click on the "Notify me on launch" if you are interested in it.