 Nowadays, programming contributes a lot to education to make learning more exciting and easier. We are not only talking about creating many programs like an online paper writing service that undoubtedly facilitate the learning process. But also, the creation of various handy programs and extensions, virtual classes and interactive tutorials, operating systems, and distributions.
Today we will talk about how Linux contributes to education and which of its distributions are very useful for teaching.
The Linux operating system, by its nature, is very malleable, so we can adapt it to any need and task, such as education.
The purpose of an operating system is to act as an intermediary between our computer and us. To do so, it uses its programs, drivers, and libraries. In addition, we install other programs and tools to edit videos, download files, edit documents, or surf the Internet.
 As a known computer geek among my friends and acquaintances, people sometimes gift me with their old computers. They no longer want them because they are slow, so they give them to me and ask me to wipe their hard drives before taking them to the electronics recycling center a few blocks from my house. I always suggest that their three-to-five-year-old computers are still good, but they seem intent on spending money rather than learning a new operating system.
I have several old computers gifted to me. One, in particular, a Dell Optiplex 755 with a 2.33 GHz Core 2 Duo processor and 8GB of RAM, is particularly interesting. Its BIOS is dated 2010, so it is around 12 years old. It is the oldest computer I have, and I keep it quite busy. I have had it for several years, and it never slows down because I use Linux on it—Fedora 35 right now.
My Fedora office workstation has wound up with a complicated network setup and to go with it, a complicated set of policy based IP routing rules that are intended to create interfaces with dual identity routing and isolation (see also). Right now, my workstation is on two public networks and a shifting number of internal "sandbox" RFC 1918 networks that are behind firewalls, serves as the Wireguard endpoint for my home machine's connection, and now has a NAT'd virtual network for virtual machines. The result of this accreting complexity is that I spent a bunch of today fighting with my policy based routing rules. So now I have some thoughts on keeping things straight here.
What experience leads Eric to make this recommendation?
OpenBSD 7.1 has been released with a change that will set the CPU to max speed when plugged to the wall. This brings better performance and entirely let the CPU and mainboard do the frequency throttling.
However, it may doesn't throttle well for some users, resulting in huge power usage even when idle, heat from the CPU and also fan noise.
As the usual "automatic" frequency scheduling mode is no longer available, I wrote a simple utility to manage the frequency when the system is plugged to the wall, I took the opportunity to improve it, giving better performance than the previous automatic mode, but also giving more battery life when using on a laptop on battery.
KDE Gear âšâ¢Ã¯Â¸Â 22.04 brings you all the updates added to a long list of KDE apps over the last four months. KDE programs allow you to work, create and play without having to submit yourself to extortionate licenses and intrusive advertising, or surrender your privacy to unscrupulous corporations.
Below you will discover a selection of the changes added in the last four months to software designed to make your life better. But remember, there is much, much more: games, social media apps, utilities for communicating, developing and creating stuff… All these things have been worked on to give you more stability and boost your productivity.
If you want to see a full list of everything we have done, check out the complete changelog.
 KDE Gear (formerly KDE Applications) 22.04 is here with the recently released Kalendar app, a modern calendaring and task managing application for your KDE Plasma desktop environment that features an attractive interface and also works on the Plasma Mobile platform for mobile devices.
KDE Gear 22.04 brings many improvements to the Dolphin file manager, which now shows thumbnails for EPUB and Krita (.kra) files, and lets you drag and drop things from the Ark archive manager onto items in Dolphin’s Places panel.
 Software can produce waste in many ways. Software that reduces this waste is software that is more sustainable. User autonomy and transparency, the pillars of Free and Open Source Software, are factors that the Blauer Engel ecolabel recognizes as critical for sustainable software.
I can illustrate with some examples.
A computer may be rendered hardly usable, or not usable at all, due to inefficient software design, feature creep, and other forms of software bloat that users may not need or even want. Yet vendors force users to buy newer, more powerful hardware. When updates for a device, like a mobile phone or tablet, are discontinued, most people discard the device as e-waste because continued use would be a security risk. This e-waste can have huge environmental costs.
Three years ago I published, Rebuilding My Personal Infrastructure With Alpine Linux and Docker, in which I described how I was hosting various applications using an Alpine Linux host and Docker on a virtual machine at Vultr. I thought it would be good to write a follow-up on how this worked out.
AlmaLinux has released a beta for version 9 of its eponymous Linux distribution aimed at RHEL refuseniks still reeling from the dumping of CentOS by Red Hat.
The beta was released last night for x86_64, aarch64, ppc64le, and s390x architectures, "achieving architecture parity with upstream," according to the team.
The beta of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 9 turned up in November 2021 and so here we are with AlmaLinux OS 9 beta, codenamed Emerald Puma. A stated goal of AlmaLinux is 1:1 binary compatibility with RHEL, filling the gap left by Red Hat's discontinuation of CentOS in favor of CentOS Stream.
 BIGTREETECH Raspberry Pad 5 is a carrier board for the Raspberry Pi CM4 module with a 5-inch 800Ãâ480 display and mainly designed as a control panel for 3D printers, but also usable for other HMI applications.
The carrier board also exposes a 40-pin GPIO header, and offers Gigabit Ethernet, HDMI video output, a MIPI CSI port for a camera monitoring the prints, a USB Type-C port, as well as three USB 2.0 ports for further peripherals expansion.
So, yeah, if you run Debian's rngd with -S0, it'll be perfectly fine for a week or so, and then it'll go into a tight loop that'll tie up one of your CPUs from then until the process is stopped for some reason. Lovely.
If you've tried running it this way on your Raspberry Pi for similar card-preserving reasons, you might want to go look and see if you have a rngd that's eating a core. If your uptime is more than a week, I bet it is.
Sheesh.
Ubuntu may be the most popular version of desktop Linux, but it's not the best option for keeping up with the latest software. New Ubuntu releases come out every six months, with most of the software frozen in time until the next release. To receive the latest updates as soon as they're available, many people turn to a rolling release distribution, such as Arch Linux.
Now you don't have to ditch Ubuntu to stay on the bleeding edge of software updates. There's a new version, called Rolling Rhino, that brings the rolling release experience to your Ubuntu desktop.
 Coming less than a month after the previous Ubuntu kernel security update, the new kernel update is here to address CVE-2021-43976, a security vulnerability discovered by Brendan Dolan-Gavitt in the Marvell WiFi-Ex USB device driver, which could allow a physically proximate attacker to cause a denial of service (system crash).
Try these simple ten tips after installing Ubuntu 22.04 LTS "Jammy Jellyfish" (GNOME Edition)
 Dubbed by Canonical as the “Jammy Jellyfish,” Ubuntu 22.04 LTS has been in development for the past six months and comes as an upgrade to the Ubuntu 21.10 (Impish Indri) release, as well as to the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa) long-term support release.
Ubuntu 22.04 LTS comes with the latest GNOME 42 desktop environment with the triple buffering patch included, yet it still uses apps from the GNOME 41 stack due to compatibility issues between GTK4 apps included in the upstream release and Ubuntu’s Yaru theme.
 TUXEDO Stellaris 15 continues to provide maximum performance in a compact and portable form factor with a matte black aluminum chassis and ships with Intel’s high-end “Alder Lake” Core i7-12700H and i9-12900H processors with clock speeds of up to 4.7 GHz and 5.0 GHz respectively.
The laptop also comes with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti graphics card in its highest TGP configuration with up to 175 watts and 16 GB GDDR6 graphics memory.
The trouble with using a Raspberry Pi is now I have another computer I have to maintain: apply package updates, upgrade the OS, worry about wearing out the SD card, etc. Raspberry Pi OS was great for getting the project off the ground but I wanted to slim it down so it was running the bare minimum amount of software. I also wanted it to run from RAM so that I didn’t have to worry about the SD card wearing out or file-system corruption from unclean shutdowns.
The aim was to turn the Pi into a glorified microcontroller that I could feel comfortable running for years without needing to worry about applying updates etc. Yes it’s still possible that there is a vulnerability in the limited amount of software it runs but I feel like I’ve reduced the attack surface enough that I can happily let this thing run and it’ll be fine.
 I started my career in product design, when "product" meant a real thing that you could hold in your hand. When I moved into digital design 15 years ago, I was excited to design digital products that added value to people's lives without any environmental impact. They didn't waste energy, didn't have any wasteful packaging and didn't end up as waste in landfill sites at the end of their lives.
Therefore, I was surprised to later learn that digital products can be wasteful. In this article, I explore how applying a zero waste mindset to digital design and development can help you create an internet that's better for people and the planet.
 The internet has rapidly transformed the way we communicate. Since body language and verbal tone are not conveyed in text messages or e-mails, we’ve developed alternate ways to convey nuanced meaning. The most prominent change to our online style has been the addition of two new-age hieroglyphic languages: emoticons and emoji.
Emoji originated from the smiley, which first evolved into emoticons, followed by emoji and stickers in recent years. Smiley first appeared in the 1960s and is regarded as the first expression symbols. Smiley is a yellow face with two dots for eyes and a wide grin which is printed on buttons, brooches, and t-shirts.
BigBlueButton is an open source web conferencing solution for online learning that provides real-time sharing of audio, video, slides, whiteboard, chat and screen. It also allows participants to join the conferences with their webcams and invite guest speakers.
One of the knocks that woodworkers get from the metalworking crowd is that their chosen material is a bit… compliant. Measurements only need to be within a 1/16th of an inch or so, or about a millimeter, depending on which side of the Atlantic you’re on. And if you’re off a bit? No worries, that’s what sandpaper is for.
Weir and Lipinski were disgusted.€ They said she should not be there.€ It was so unfair to the other skaters.€ They were too sickened to even watch her.€ What happened?€ The Empire and its allies, based on a highly questionable positive drug test, declared her a “doper.”€ She was booed, harassed.€ And she finally (literally) fell.€ The Russians should obviously not have the first female Olympic quad jumper.€ The Russians were taking far too many gold medals.€ This whole spectacle was an intersection of hegemonic American world politics and ruthless patriarchy.€ Women athletes had become enemies, and thus victims, of Empire. USA!€ USA!
The US has always had a need to be first—to put it mildly.€ Any coverage of Olympic or international games I’ve ever watched features US athletes and almost never anyone else.€ President Jimmy Carter got the ball rolling with his 1980 boycott of the Olympics in the Soviet Union.€ Under Carter the Cold War had worsened because of factors like American criticism of Soviet alleged abuses of human rights and the Afghan crisis—therefore the controversial move to ignore the Olympics’ so-called non-political philosophy.€ American views of Russian athletics did not improve:€ the alleged Russian Doping Scandals began around 2008 and are still going. In 2008, Russian track and field athletes were suspended from competition because of supposed doping, cheating, cover-ups, even “state-sponsored” doping.
When I saw the date today, I remembered that on this day back in 1981, I met Jim Davis [1], creator of Garfield [2]. And of course I've already written about this [3]. But thinking about it, I'm not sure what to make of this—that it's been 22 years since I last wrote about it, which is longer than the time between the actual event and writing about it the first time (19 years). It's also sobering to think it's been 41 years since I met him, and I still remember it like it happened yesterday.
Oh boy, where to start? Well we're buying a house and moving to a new town. The main purpose of this move is to eliminate my wife's awful commute and that goal will be fulfilled with this new house's location. We are all excited that her commute will be cut from 1.5-2 hours down to around 15 minutes. But that's not the only thing we're excited about with the move. The new house is in a really nice location close to just about everything we will want to go to. Within walking distance there are 3 coffee shops, a kombucha shop, a bakery, numerous good restaurants, a really nice park with playground and splash pad, a lake with a nice walking path all the way around it, a post office and more things yet to be discovered. Within easy biking distance there are 2-3 breweries, more restaurants and many different parks and lakes.
Yesterday was my 28th trip to Medieval Times, the dinner theater show with jousting knights, falcons, horse dancing, and community-theater quality sword fights. It is one of my favorite things on earth and if you haven't had the opportunity to enjoy it before, I hope you do in the future.
When we see a world-class musician flawlessly play challenging music, it can be tempting to imagine that they were always able to do so. A moment's thought makes it obvious that they must have had to spend huge amounts of time practising basic techniques in order to reach that level. What's less obvious is that they have to continue spending considerable amounts of time simply to maintain that technique, let alone expand it.
In contrast, in programming, we have only a haphazard notion of how one should go about obtaining sufficient technique to become good enough to write good software; and we have almost no notion of continued practise to maintain or expand that technique. Often overtaken by life events – notably, though not only, the requirement to earn money to support a family – many programmers implicitly finish the bulk of their learning early on, and some stop learning entirely.
This time the researchers found a significant difference in the results: Both groups expressed positive associations with words like “practical” and “useful,” but the group that had been primed to feel uncertain (because members were unsure whether they would receive a bonus) expressed more negative associations with words suggesting creativity.
The reasons for this implicit bias against creativity can be traced to the fundamentally disruptive nature of novel and original creations. Creativity means change, without the certainty of desirable results.
“We have an implicit belief the status quo is safe,” said Jennifer Mueller, a professor of management at the University of San Diego and a lead author on the 2012 paper about bias against creativity. Dr. Mueller, an expert in creativity science, said that paper arose partly from watching how company managers professed to want creativity and then reflexively rejected new ideas.
“Leaders will say, ‘We’re innovative,’ and employees say, ‘Here’s an idea,’ and the idea goes nowhere,” Dr. Mueller said. “Then employees are angry.”
Muslim women born between 1971-74, who would have completed school before the 1994 ruling, were around 13 per cent less likely to graduate from high school than their non-Muslim peers.
This gap shrunk to just seven per cent among women born between 1987-90 who spent their education with some form of veil ban in place.
Prof Maurin, whose findings were presented at the 75th economic policy panel meeting earlier this month, added: “When comparing women in the Muslim group to those in the non-Muslim group, the data reveals a very significant increase in educational attainment in the Muslim group for the cohorts that attended middle school and reached puberty after the ban.
Official Earth Day campaigns and projects aim to increase environmental literacy and bring together like-minded people or groups to address issues such as deforestation, biodiversity loss and other challenges.
All throughout April, people celebrate Earth Day. During the month, there are all kinds of classes, events, volunteering opportunities, and more that allow people to get more involved in taking care of the planet and learn more about it. Because there's so much to do, it can be overwhelming to figure out what's worth going to. But we're here with a list of some of the best Earth Day 2022 events and attractions being held around the world.
Syracuse University assistant professor and hydrology expert Sam Tuttle provides six takeaways from the report that he views as the most important elements ahead of Earth Day (April 22). He is available for future interviews and questions.
Earth Day 2022 centers on the theme Invest in Our Planet, calling for individuals to “act (boldly), innovate (broadly), and implement (equitably).” In celebration, we have compiled several collections that address these areas—and today, in our first piece in the series, we focus on “innovating broadly.” These books below explore how cutting-edge technology—such as artificial intelligence, nuclear power, and carbon capture—can be used to confront climate change and help secure a more sustainable future.
Languages rise and fall with history, in nations and university language departments alike. In 1980, when Roman Koropeckyj stepped into his classroom at Harvard to teach Polish, he was “gobsmacked” by the dozens of students awaiting him. The Polish trade unionists of the Solidarity movement, who were defying Soviet oppression on the opposite side of the planet, had inspired Americans to learn.
Another one of those linguistic flashpoints arrived in February, when Ukraine’s staunch resistance to a massive Russian invasion drew admirers around the world. The Ukrainian language hasn’t been taught at UCLA’s department of Slavic East European and Eurasian Languages and Cultures “in a number of years” due a lack of demand, said Koropeckyj, a professor in the department. He and a Ukrainian-born colleague told the department chair it might be time to teach Ukrainian again.
LED cubes were once an exercise in IO mastery, requiring multiplexing finesse in order to drive arrays of many LEDs. Going RGB only increased the challenge. This build from [DIY GUY Chris] shows how much easier it is these days, when every LED has a smart addressable controller on board, and serves as a great sci-fi prop to boot.
It’s been a bit since we’ve talked about 3D printing, which I mostly took to mean that the world realized that there was no massive threat here and that we all collectively decided to make this a non-controversy. Early on there was some noise made about larger companies viewing the ability for the public to manufacture certain things at home with these printers being a copyright, patent, or trademark concern. And sure, there was some of that. Especially when it came to guns. But, by and large, 3D printing has become a full on thing for hobbyists and maker communities.
Did you ever feel like your laptop’s GPU was sub-optimal, or perhaps that your laptop could use a SAS controller? [Rob Rogers] felt like that too, so now he has the only Dell Latitude business-class laptop that’s paired with an AMD RX580 GPU – and more. Made possible because of a PCIe link he hijacked from the WiFi card, he managed to get a SAS controller, a USB 3.0 expansion card, the aforementioned GPU and a dual-port server network adapter, all in a single, desk-top setup, as the video demonstrates.
As you may have noticed, I’ve been working with an STM32 ARM CPU using Mbed. There was a time when Mbed was pretty simple, but a lot has changed since it has morphed into Mbed OS. Unfortunately, that means that a lot of libraries and examples you can find don’t work with the newer system.
This year marks the anniversary of the most popular selling home computer ever, the Commodore 64, which made its debut in 1982. Note that I am saying “home computer” and not personal computer (PC) because back then the term PC was not yet in use for home computer users.
Crystals, at least those hawked by new-age practitioners for their healing or restorative powers, will probably get a well-deserved eye roll from most of the folks around here. That said, there’s no denying that crystals do hold sway over us with the almost magical power of their beauty, as with these home-grown copper acetate crystals.
[Robert Murray-Smith] presents for us an interesting electronic device from years gone by, before the advent of Silicon semiconductors, the humble metal oxide rectifier. After the electronic dust had settled following the brutal AC/DC current wars of the late 19th century — involving Edison, Tesla and Westinghouse to name a few of the ringleaders — AC was the eventual winner. But there was a problem. It’s straightforward to step down the high voltage AC from the distribution network to a more manageable level with a transformer, and feed that straight into devices which can consume alternating current such as light bulbs and electrical heaters. But other devices really want DC, and to get that, you need a rectifier.
“THEY TALK WHILE WE CONTINUE TO DIE.”
Out of context, those words written on a piece of cardboard that hung in a Massachusetts window in November 2021 read like a rallying cry for any number of movements.€
Montanans voted overwhelmingly to approve Initiative-190 in 2020 to legalize adult recreational marijuana use. In fact, tens of thousands more Montanans supported recreational pot than voted for Senator Steve Daines, Governor Greg Gianforte or Congressman Matt Rosendale. If “bipartisan support” means anything to the politicians that continually blather about it, the vote for legalizing recreational pot indisputably garnered votes from across the political spectrum.
While medicinal marijuana has been legal in Montana since the voter approved passage of I-148 in 2004, adult recreational use only became legal in January of 2022. In a 2020 study titled “An Assessment of the Market and Tax Revenue Potential of Recreational Cannabis in Montana,”the University of Montana’s Bureau of Business and Economic Research predicted total sales of recreational pot would be a whopping $217 million this year, producing $43.4 million in state and local tax revenues. That number was predicted to rise to $259.8 million in sales and $52 million in tax revenues by 2026.
The Biden administration on Wednesday appealed a federal judge's ruling that struck down a mask mandate for public transportation.
After a Florida-based judge appointed by former President Donald Trump killed the mask mandate on Monday, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) said Tuesday that it would appeal the decision if the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) determined the policy was still necessary given the current state of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Public health advocates including people who have lost loved ones to the Covid-19 pandemic are calling on the Biden administration to act with more urgency to challenge the federal court ruling which lifted the mask mandate for public transportation on Monday.
The national group Marked by Covid—which was started by the daughter of a man who died of the disease after Arizona's Republican governor claimed in June 2020 that "it was safe to resume normal activities"—circulated a petition asking supporters to tell the White House and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that they must appeal the ruling.
The administration argued that masks qualified as "sanitation" under the law, but Mizelle disagreed, opting for a much narrower definition of the term that would exclude measures like face coverings. Legal experts say her interpretation missed the mark.
"If one of my students turned in this opinion as their final exam, I don't know if I would agree that they had gotten the analysis correct," said Erin Fuse Brown, a law professor at Georgia State University.
"It reads like someone who had decided the case and then tried to dress it up as legal reasoning without actually doing the legal reasoning," she added.
After all, as the ER’s medical director, Chien was a legend, someone about whom everybody spoke in reverential terms. Santa Clara Valley Medical Center in San Jose, California, often referred to as VMC, was the sort of place where violent assault at the hands of patients was a near-daily occurrence. Kamara, a nine-year ER nurse at the facility, had watched the 300-employee department chew up and spit out plenty of lackadaisical suburban doctors, and when he worked his first shift with Chien in 2016, he did not have high hopes. Twelve hours later, he was a believer.
Around 250 hectares of land that should normally lie fallow to benefit biodiversity have been exceptionally cleared for agricultural use amid fears of wheat shortages related to the war in Ukraine.
Ericsson in disclosing its first quarter results for 2022 could not estimate the impact of what actions the US Department of Justice (DOJ) might take when assessing the breach notices the DOJ issued relating to the Deferred Prosecution Agreement.
Both Brave and DuckDuckGo have taken aim at Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), either blocking Google’s tracking or allowing users to bypass AMP directly and visit the actual home pages themselves.
Brave said this week that the company is implementing a new policy, called “De-AMP,” which will rewrite links and URLs to prevent users from vising AMP pages and instead direct them to the publisher’s site. In cases where that’s not possible, De-AMP will simply step in and do the redirecting itself. The new feature is rolling out on Brave’s Nightly and Beta versions and will be enabled by default in Brave 1.38 for the desktop and Android.
Brave is rolling out a new feature called De-AMP, which allows Brave users to bypass Google-hosted AMP pages, and instead visit the content’s publisher directly. AMP harms users' privacy, security and internet experience, and just as bad, AMP helps Google further monopolize and control the direction of the Web.
Brave will protect users from AMP in several ways. Where possible, De-AMP will rewrite links and URLs to prevent users from visiting AMP pages altogether. And in cases where that is not possible, Brave will watch as pages are being fetched and redirect users away from AMP pages before the page is even rendered, preventing AMP/Google code from being loaded and executed.
De-AMP is now available in our Nightly and Beta versions and will be enabled by default in the upcoming 1.38 Desktop and Android versions, and will be released on iOS soon after. If you are on Nightly or Beta and do not see the feature enabled, you may need to restart your browser for the changes to take effect.
Last week, Zoom announced its plans to add emotion detecting tech to its virtual meeting platform, something it apparently felt would facilitate the art of the deal. Here’s Kate Kaye, breaking the news for Protocol.
After COO Greg Peters addressed the latest price hike for subscription plans, Hastings shared that Netflix is looking at ways to offset the cost for users. If it does make such a move, Netflix would be one of the last big streaming services to get into the ad game.
This update greatly improves our support for bridges, which let people quickly and easily circumvent this sort of censorship. A bridge is a Tor server, generally with a secret IP address so it's harder to block, that just forwards traffic onto the Tor network for people. So if you live in Moscow and you can't connect to Tor because your ISP is blocking the IP addresses of public Tor nodes, you can configure OnionShare (or Tor Browser) to use a bridge. This way you'll connect to an IP address that isn't blocked, thus bypassing the censorship.
He claims [scammers] pulled it off by getting hold of his secret 12-word “seed phrase” which is important to get into the [cryptocurrency] wallet and must not be shared with anyone.
Little did he know, MetaMask stores a seed phrase file on iCloud automatically from his iPhone.
So scammers must have gone in and swiped it, before emptying his account.
“Don’t tell us to never store our seed phrase digitally and then do it behind our backs,” Iacovone said.
“If 90 percent of the people knew this I would bet none of them would have the app or iCloud on.”
Until very recently, the prospect of nuclear weapons use by a major nuclear power has appeared relatively remote, enabling other issues—terrorism, climate change, Covid—to dominate the global agenda. But that period of relative immunity to Armageddon has drawn to a close and we have entered a New Nuclear Era, in which the risk of nuclear weapons use by the major powers has reemerged as a daily fact of life. We may yet escape their use and the resulting human catastrophe, but only if we oppose the nuclearization of world affairs with the same vigor and determination as has been devoted to overcoming the climate crisis.
More than five dozen advocacy groups on Wednesday pressured Congress to cut off U.S. military support for the Saudi-led war and blockade on Yemen, highlighting that it "has helped cause the deaths of nearly half a million people and pushed millions more to the edge of starvation."
"Unfortunately, the U.S. continues to provide critical support for the coalition's war effort and blockade, which has led to one of the world's worst humanitarian crises."
The war in Ukraine has led Europe and the U.S. to launch an unprecedented economic blockade against Russia, deepening the rift between the putative “East” and “West” and seemingly giving rise to the return of a bipolar geopolitical world. But there is at least one regional power with significant experience balancing East and West: Turkey. The republic immediately condemned Russia's aggression against Ukraine, but has also refused to participate in sanctions against Russia. Meduza took a closer look at how Turkey has been trying to engage in economic and traditional diplomacy, overcome its own domestic political crisis, and reduce its dependence on Russia.
Sergiy Volyna, commander of the Ukrainian Navy's 36th Separate Marine Brigade, which is currently mounting a last stand against Russian invaders from the Azovstal metalworks plant in Mariupol, released a video in which he calls on world leaders to evacuate the civilians and soldiers still hiding in the plant to a different country. Volyna posted the video on his Facebook page.
It’s been a week since the sinking of the Russian missile cruiser Moskva. The Ukrainian side reported that it struck the Black Sea Fleet’s flagship with two Neptune anti-ship cruise missiles on April 13. In turn, the Russian Defense Ministry claimed that the Moskva sustained “serious damage” after an unexplained fire caused ammunition on board to explode; as a result, the warship allegedly sank while being towed to port in “stormy” waters. How many crew members were aboard the cruiser at the time remains unknown (though presumably they numbered in the hundreds). The Russian authorities have yet to confirm any casualties. Indeed, contrary to reports that dozens of sailors were killed, Moscow asserts that the entire crew was saved. Meduza spoke to the mothers of two Moskva crew members, who — despite the Russian Defense Ministry’s statements — haven’t contacted their loved ones since the warship sank.
The war in Ukraine has been going on for two months, the list of sanctions against Russia continues to grow, and the Russian authorities are still trying to convince the world (and themselves) that the war won’t have any serious consequences for Russian citizens. In their telling, for example, the Russian economy is sure to hold strong, and the exodus of Western companies is a “historic opportunity” for Russian business owners. According to Russian government insiders, all of these messages are part of a carefully planned media campaign to “spread positivity.” Here’s how it works.
Daniel Falcone: € How far back historically does one go to contextualize what is happening right now with the war? Do you go back to1991 or 2014? Do you go back close to the Interwar Period or WWII?
Lawrence Davidson: You can go back to Napoleon if you want. Russia’s view of the West has been shaped by a series of invasions.
Over the past several weeks, German politicians and journalists have debated the question of German guilt and responsibility for the war — including for the catastrophes in Bucha and Mariupol. The most difficult questions have been addressed to Germany’s president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who has spent years cultivating a special relationship between Russia and Germany. Indeed, it’s hard to explain now why Germany, which supported sanctions against Russia in 2014 for the annexation of Crimea and the invasion of the Donbas, didn't divest from Russian energy years ago —€ in fact, its dependence has only grown in recent years. As a result, Berlin, fearful of wrecking its own country's industry, feels unable to give up Russian petroleum even now — hence Ukrainian allegations that Germany is funding Russia's war.
Even after Ukraine’s surprisingly strong defense forced a Russian retreat from the northern suburbs of the capital, Kyiv, Putin only appears to be doubling down with plans for new offensives in Ukraine’s south and east. Instead of engaging in serious negotiations, he’s been redeploying his battered troops for a second round of massive attacks led by General Alexander Dvonikov, “the butcher of Syria,” whose merciless air campaigns in that country flattened cities like Aleppo and Homs.
So while the world waits for the other combat boot to drop hard, it’s already worth considering where the West went wrong in its efforts to end this war, while exploring whether anything potentially effective is still available to slow the carnage.
Good for all of them.
Among many of those, from left anti-imperialists to paleo-conservative realists, the discourse hinges on forgoing war for diplomacy. Let’s not send more weapons; let’s instead encourage negotiations! Negotiate, don’t escalate.
A pair of bomb blasts at a boys’ school in Kabul left at least six people dead on Tuesday, the latest in a series of attacks on the minority Shiite Hazara community in Afghanistan. While no group has claimed responsibility, it follows a pattern of aggression by ISIS-K, the Islamic State affiliate, against Shiites in Afghanistan, as well as Pakistan. “Governments, not only the Taliban, have failed to come up with a strategy where they could provide security to the Hazaras and Shias,” says Afghan journalist Bilal Sarwary. “I call it a great betrayal towards people who are extremely committed to a bright future of Afghanistan.”
The U.S. has hit a record number of apprehensions at the border shared with Mexico, arresting over 1 million asylum seekers in the past six months alone. We speak with immigration attorney Erika Pinheiro about the Biden administration’s unequal treatment of different nationalities, as refugees from countries like Haiti, Cuba and Cameroon face harsh restrictions on asylum, but Ukrainian refugees seem to be receiving special treatment and even exemption from Title 42. “Asylum is supposed to be a universal standard protecting individuals fleeing persecution from any country, but in practice it’s always been a political tool wielded by the United States to favor those fleeing regimes that the United States opposes,” says Pinheiro.
I am an aerospace engineer who studies space and defense systems, including hypersonic systems. These new systems pose an important challenge due to their maneuverability all along their trajectory. Because their flight paths can change as they travel, these missiles must be tracked throughout their flight.
A second important challenge stems from the fact that they operate in a different region of the atmosphere from other existing threats. The new hypersonic weapons fly much higher than slower subsonic missiles but much lower than intercontinental ballistic missiles. The U.S. and its allies do not have good tracking coverage for this in-between region, nor does Russia or China.
The Russian war in Ukraine has dominated headlines in the United States and Europe. It has been presented as a generation-defining event and as a pivot in geopolitics that will cleave world history into a before and an after just like September 11.
Calls are growing for Texas to stop the approaching execution of Melissa Lucio, who says she was wrongfully convicted of killing her toddler Mariah in 2007. We speak to one of Lucio’s attorneys, Vanessa Potkin of the Innocence Project, who says Lucio was coerced into making a false confession within hours of her daughter’s death and deserves a new trial based on new evidence and misleading expert testimony. There has also been historic bipartisan support for Lucio, with Texas lawmakers demanding Governor Greg Abbott commute her sentence or delay the execution until a new trial can be held.
A study published Wednesday in the journal Nature Communications warns that attempting to fight the climate crisis using geoengineering—a method often promoted by the fossil fuel industry—could have the devastating consequence of exposing a billion additional people in vulnerable countries to the mosquito-borne disease malaria.
"Simulations found that a billion extra people were at risk of malaria in the geoengineered world."
It appears Tunnel Fire is burning through a part of the scar of Schultz Fire, which burned over 15,000 acres of forest and was the largest wildfire in Arizona in 2010. The Schultz Fire led to floods that damaged or destroyed 85 homes and killed a 12-year-old girl, Shaelyn Wilson, who fell into a wash and was swept away by the water carrying boulders and wreckage.
The National Weather Service issued a Red Flag Warning for parts of northern Arizona, including Flagstaff, between 11 a.m. and 8 p.m. Thursday due to high winds and low humidity.
Tony Merriman, a meteorologist with NWS Flagstaff, told The Arizona Republic that the area is expected to have high winds with gusts up to 35 mph. Merriman said that the winds, coupled with low humidity, create an environment where a wildfire could quickly grow out of control.
The climate crisis is here, and heartbreak is all around us. The early promise of dramatic action from President Biden is sinking in the old mud bog of fossil-fuel politics. Meanwhile, despite 40 years of warnings from scientists and the decline in the cost of clean energy, carbon pollution is still increasing and the world is heating up as fast as ever. The final sentence of last February’s U.N.’s latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report on the impacts of that warming is stark and unequivocal: “Climate change is a threat to human well-being and the health of the planet. Any further delay in concerted global action will miss a brief and rapidly closing window to secure a livable future.” Or as U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres put it after an IPCC report on the mitigation of climate change was released this month: “Investing in new fossil fuels infrastructure is moral and economic madness.”
The world may be facing a devastating “hidden” collapse in insect species due to the twin threats of climate change and habitat loss.
UCL’s Centre for Biodiversity & Environment Research has carried out one of the largest-ever assessments of insect declines around the world – assessing three-quarters of a million samples from around 6,000 sites.
Several previous studies have investigated changes in insect biodiversity, with some highlighting declines and others showing turnover in species composition without net declines1,2,3,4,5. Although research has shown that biodiversity changes are driven primarily by land-use change and increasingly by climate change6,7, the potential for interaction between these drivers and insect biodiversity on the global scale remains unclear. Here we show that the interaction between indices of historical climate warming and intensive agricultural land use is associated with reductions of almost 50% in the abundance and 27% in the number of species within insect assemblages relative to those in less-disturbed habitats with lower rates of historical climate warming. These patterns are particularly evident in the tropical realm, whereas some positive responses of biodiversity to climate change occur in non-tropical regions in natural habitats. A high availability of nearby natural habitat often mitigates reductions in insect abundance and richness associated with agricultural land use and substantial climate warming but only in low-intensity agricultural systems. In such systems, in which high levels (75% cover) of natural habitat are available, abundance and richness were reduced by 7% and 5%, respectively, compared with reductions of 63% and 61% in places where less natural habitat is present (25% cover). Our results show that insect biodiversity will probably benefit from mitigating climate change, preserving natural habitat within landscapes and reducing the intensity of agriculture.
The study published in Nature is the first to identify that an interaction between rising temperatures and land use changes, is driving widespread losses in numerous insect groups across the globe.
Lead author Dr Charlie Outhwaite (UCL Centre for Biodiversity & Environment Research, UCL Biosciences) said: “Many insects appear to be very vulnerable to human pressures, which is concerning as climate change worsens and agricultural areas continue to expand. Our findings highlight the urgency of actions to preserve natural habitats, slow the expansion of high-intensity agriculture, and cut emissions to mitigate climate change.
The combined pressures of global heating and farming are driving a "substantial decline" of insects across the globe, according to UK researchers.
They say we must acknowledge the threats we pose to insects, before some species are lost forever.
But preserving habitat for nature could help ensure vital insects thrive.
As I write this, it’s 83 degrees Fahrenheit in Washington, DC, and I can’t help but long for those years when I was a kid, when spring felt like spring and seasons were demarcated. Each year, summer-like temperatures arrive all too soon during spring, thanks to human-induced climate change. Research finds that even if we halt heat-trapping emissions, we’ll be locked into a summer season that consumes half of the year by 2100. While that may seem far in the future, the current conditions are enough to cause alarm.
Take the case of General Motors (GM), who apparently envision “a world with zero crashes, to save lives; zero emissions, so future generations can inherit a healthier planet; and zero congestion, so customers get back a precious commodity – time.”
Recall this is the same company that backed President Trump to the hilt to undermine America’s already poor environmental policymaking — a foul legacy they have been quick to distance themselves from now that the Democrats are back in charge. Indeed, GM’s commitment to degrading our ecosystems is matched only by their efforts to attack their employees organising in their factories.
California’s energy mix was powered 97% by renewable energy on Sunday, April 3 at at 3:39 p.m., the highest contribution of renewables to the state’s grid on record, according to David Knowles at Yahoo News.
A new online tool launched Wednesday by a U.S.-based advocacy group details how international public finance is continuing to fuel the climate emergency rather than sufficiently funding a just transition to clean energy.
"Between 2018 and 2020, G20 international public finance institutions provided at least $63 billion per year ($188 billion in total) for oil, gas, and coal projects."
In other words, consumer interest may be waning, with trading volumes falling significantly lately. After all, companies like Coinbase, which is still the number one US crypto company by market cap, rely on transaction fees to make money.
When ‘Bitcoin maximalists’, as you call them, wax lyrical about the inability to print money (and celebrate this inability as Bitcoin’s feature, rather than its bug), they are being terribly unoriginal – banal, I dare say. Capitalism nearly died in 1929, and tens of millions did die in the war that ensued, because of this toxic fallacy that underpinned the Gold Standard then and Bitcoin now. Which fallacy? The fallacy of composition, as John Maynard Keynes called it.
Its essence is a tendency to extrapolate from the personal realm to the macroeconomic one. To say that if something is good for me – if a practice is sound at the level of my family, business, etc. – it must also be good for the state, government, humanity at large. For example, yes, parsimony is a good thing for me, personally. If I can’t make ends meet, I need to tighten my belt; otherwise, I shall sink more and more into debt. However, the exact opposite holds for a macroeconomy: If, in the midst of a recession, the government tries to tighten its belt as a means of eliminating its budget deficit, then public expenditure will decline at a time of falling private expenditure. And since the sum of private and public expenditure equals aggregate income, the government will be – inadvertently – magnifying the recession and, yes, its own deficit (as government revenues fall). This is an example of one thing (belt-tightening) being good at the micro-level and catastrophic at the macro level.
As inflation and economic disruption increase around the world, ostensibly stable governments look to increase controls on cryptocurrency. In particular, states loathe what they call "unhosted wallets," meaning cryptocurrency that is totally owned and maintained by an individual, as opposed to a regulated business that they can control.
The European Union is making moves to crack down on such self-hosted cryptocurrency wallets. What they are proposing would be equivalent to making businesses maintain dossiers on anyone who chooses to pay with cash. It's an incredible ratchet in financial surveillance and an unjustifiable attack on individual privacy.
If you ever needed reasons not to buy NFTs, here are a few. And remember, friends don't let friends bet on stock markets, currency exchanges, or NFTs.
Escudilla was a mountain that one could see from almost any quarter in northern Arizona, and what made it special was the big bear. Leopold wrote of how whenever anyone rode up on Escudilla, they often encountered the tracks of Bigfoot and they always thought of the bear.
Then one day, a government trapper came to the area, seeking to slay dragons and predators to make the country safe for cows. Unfortunately, Bigfoot occasionally killed a cow, so Bigfoot became his target. Finally, after a month’s effort, he killed the grizzly.
Ringed seals tend to choose quiet, wind-sheltered spots on the shoreline when they lie in the sun. The archipelago live stream will be provided by two different cameras, each at slightly different positions. The camera angles can also change in line with wind direction and the seals' positions.
Sara Inés Lara, leader of Colombia-based bird conservation organization Fundación ProAves, got her first taste of conservation’s potential more than 30 years ago. She grew up in one of the most biodiverse places in the world, seeking refuge in the forests, mountains, and pools of the Andes. Then, in 1998, she learned about the yellow-eared parrot.
The college-educated elite is today’s Democratic Party’s base. That’s why Joe Biden ran on the campaign promise of forgiving their student loan debt. (And like nearly all of his campaign promises he never had any intention of actually keeping that promise.)
Basically student loan forgiveness would be a big handout to the college-educated class (costing between $373 billion and $1.6 trillion, depending on the plan); if Democrats fail to keep this promise they risk alienating a substantial part of their base, which could mean even bigger losses at the polls in 2022 and 2024.
Mexican lawmakers this week passed legislation to nationalize lithium, a mineral needed to manufacture rechargeable batteries for electric vehicles and other devices.
Mexico's Senate approved the mining reform bill by a margin of 87 to 20, with 16 abstentions, on Tuesday, one day after it was advanced by the country's lower house of Congress.
It's so disappointing to see people who don't realize they're being used to deliberately divide people. Smart, caring, thoughtful people whose hearts are umdoubtedly in the right place so frequently get caught up in culture-war bullshit that is just so obviously designed to divide people or to create new subcultures and identities for capitalists to market to.
The South Carolina Supreme Court on Wednesday granted a temporary stay of execution to a condemned prisoner who was set to be the first in the state to be killed by firing squad.
The Associated Press reports the Columbia court paused the state's scheduled April 29 killing of 57-year-old Richard Bernard Moore, who was found guilty of the 1999 murder of Spartanburg convenience store clerk James Mahoney. The state high court said it would release further details later.
U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders has not ruled out a third run for the White House if President Joe Biden does not run in 2024, according to a top aide's campaign memo viewed by The Washington Post.
"The central fact remains true, which is that Sen. Sanders is the most popular officeholder in the country."
Another Ramadan, another attack on Palestinian worshipers at the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in occupied East Jerusalem. In explaining the Israeli attacks, the majority of Euro-American politicians, media analysts, and commentators, exemplified in this predictably inane CBC report, are emphasising the "high tensions" that come along with the confluence of three major religious events, and framing Israeli actions as a response to the "Palestinian terrorist attacks" in four Israeli cities.
For a while there in 2019, it seemed like a month couldn’t go by without (then) Rep. Devin Nunes suing some critic or another (including, somewhat infamously, a satirical cow). After kicking it off by suing mocking livestock, he quickly moved on to suing news organizations. A big one was suing CNN, a favored punching bag of Republicans, which he sued in December of 2019.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Haughton played drums with the Arresting Officers, one of the most influential neo-Nazi bands of the time, which was named for the belief that arresting officers had the best jobs since they could assault people of color. He also played for Break the Sword, another neo-Nazi punk band around the same time. Beyond music, Haughton had connections to members of the Aryan Republican Army, a neo-Nazi gang that robbed twenty-two Midwest banks in the mid-1990s and is suspected of having helped to fund the Oklahoma City Bombings. Haughton’s direct connections to the neo-Nazi skinhead scene appear to have ended around January 1995, when he joined the Philadelphia Police Department, where he worked until December 2017.
This imbalance in priorities is a result of corporate lobbying influence on transportation policies. “For the oil and gas industry in particular,” Sen reported, “highway-centric transportation is a gift that keeps on giving.” Political contributions by the oil and gas industry totaled $140 million in the last election cycle alone, with hundreds of millions more since 2012.
St. Jude has long been a fundraising juggernaut, raising a combined $7.3 billion in the five previous fiscal years, including $1.7 billion in 2019 and $2 billion in 2020. As ProPublica documented, in 2019 St. Jude raised more money than “the rest of the top 10 children’s hospitals for cancer—combined.” As a result, St. Jude’s massive reserve account grew by 58 percent during that time period. On average, twenty percent of St. Jude’s revenue went to its reserve fund, thirty percent went to its fundraising operations, and the remaining fifty percent went to caring for patients.
Lawmakers and criminal justice reform advocates are calling for clemency for Melissa Lucio, a woman who is set to be executed by the state of Texas on April 27, 15 years after being convicted of murdering her two-year-old daughter—a conviction that resulted from a misunderstanding of an accident and a coerced false confession, Lucio's attorneys say.
Lawyers with The Innocence Project are calling on the Texas Board of Pardons to recommend that Republican Gov. Greg Abbott either commute Lucio's sentence or establish a reprieve of at least 120 days so authorities can examine evidence that was not available to jurors during Lucio's trial in 2007.
“You are wearing people out,” complained Senator Joe Manchin at a March 4 hearing of the US Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, which he chairs. The West Virginia senator, who reportedly receives $500,000 a year from the coal company he founded and that’s now run by his son, was reprimanding three commissioners of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the little-known, immensely powerful agency that regulates the interstate transmission of electricity, methane gas, and oil. FERC’s approval is required before private companies can install an oil or gas pipeline, build a liquid natural gas terminal, or construct other types of fossil fuel infrastructure. In the past, that approval has almost always been given: Since 1999, FERC has approved 99 percent of the gas industry’s project applications, which is no small reason why the planet is dangerously overheating.
I have been engaged in grassroots work for the rights and well-being of Afghan women for two decades. Given the takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban on August 15, 2021, the question I am wrestling with—which every women’s rights activist who has worked in Afghanistan is wrestling with—is: What do we do now? Do we refuse to work in Afghanistan because this would require engaging with the Taliban, whose brutal history we know intimately and whom we fought for over two decades?
In the 1970s, a new kind of Democrat began to appear on the scene. For a while, they went by different names. At first, they were the “Watergate Babies,” a misnomer because their primary opponent was not the Republican Party of Nixon, but their own. Then, as the 1980s came into view, they became the “Atari Democrats.” Young and elite-educated, they promised to make the postindustrial economy grow by encouraging entrepreneurship, investing in the burgeoning tech sector, and giving the market freer rein. Writing in 1982, Charles Peters of the Washington Monthly called them “neoliberals.” In 1984, when they decided to form an organization, the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC)—following the brief, meteoric rise of one of their own, Colorado Senator Gary Hart, in that year’s Democratic presidential primary—they embraced the label “New Democrats.” They aimed at nothing short of remaking the Democratic Party as it had been constituted for the previous half century: to reorient its electoral base away from organized labor and the Black working class, and toward affluent knowledge workers and white suburbanites; to make “leaner” a welfare state they believed had grown fat and to refashion the role of government in accordance with the logic of the market.
This would entail embracing universal social democratic programs in ways that mitigate shame-slinging identity-group oriented politics on one side, and political pigeonholing practices on the other. And it concerns avoiding according the top-priority ideological position to an aspirational – ‘all-struggles against oppression’ uniting – intersectional socialism, wherein a second-class status is imputed to large-scale identity groups that are believed to hold the most societal privilege.
Simultaneously, it’s about coming to terms with a politics where socialists veer away from each other in practice, more than in their front-stage discourse, regarding which large-scale identity groups to give the highest priority to (e.g., the working-class or the racially oppressed). On the flipside, it’s about reconnecting through a majoritarian-oriented – ‘all large-scale identity groups’ freedom and equality struggle-sharing – focus on opposing the comparatively smaller-scale identity groupings of the 1%, and self–described white supremacists and ultranationalists.
One of the most basic functions of data journalism is to independently verify government officials’ claims.
So when Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and state officials started to boast that Operation Lone Star — a now multibillion-dollar initiative launched in March 2021 to battle cross-border crime — had resulted in thousands of arrests, multiple drug seizures and numerous referrals of unauthorized immigrants to the federal government for deportation, we asked for the underlying data. It was immediately clear that examining the operation’s achievements would be a challenge.
As this week’s drama unfolds on Twitter, many brows have, no doubt, been raised. The Securities and Exchange Commission is already probing Musk’s past misuse of social media.
Gene Munster of Loup Funds suggests Musk could get help from politically aligned private equity sources, as “[c]ompanies that have a political basis are winning investor support.” Tesla board members such as Larry Ellison, the Oracle founder who has donated to Morgan Ortagus, the Trump-endorsed candidate for Tennessee’s 5th Congressional District, could also be of interest as private equity partners.
The prime minister referred to the fact that the right-wing Mi Hazánk has made it into parliament a novel development, and admitted that for now he isn’t sure what to expect from them. It may not be by accident though, that Orbán has recently often spoken about uniting the nation beyond party lines, and about peaceful disagreement. The position of Mi Hazánk is not an easy one: being a constructive opposition may lead to becoming boring, and choosing a non-conformist approach may lead to taking Fidesz on head-on.
For years, as ever-bigger corporate combines grabbed ever-bigger chunks of market power, America's political, media and academic establishment scoffed at critics, drowning them out with jolly rounds of "Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah." But the concentration of corporate power can no longer be dismissed, for it's all too real. It wreaks real havoc on entire economic sectors, workaday families, communities and our nation's essential uniting value of fairness. Pontificators of the status quo can coo all the free-enterprise platitudes they want, but a rising grassroots majority (including supposedly conservative farmers and ranchers) is experiencing corporate repression firsthand. Those families are doing their own kitchen-table tabulations and realizing that the game has been deliberately rigged against them. A mad-as-hell moment is percolating at the grassroots.
Brave Search has rolled out a new feature that makes it easier to find conversations from forums like Reddit in your search results. This means you’ll no longer have to add “Reddit” to your searches when you’re looking for thoughts from actual humans, not empty answers from websites just trying to get clicks.
Kushner, the famously incompetent real estate developer whose name has become synonymous with nepotism, was frequently accused of doing the bidding of the Saudi royal family while he “served” as senior adviser in an administration headed by his wife’s father. Kushner ardently defended the prince, known as MBS, in the face of an international outcry over the grisly murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, which US intelligence agencies determined had been approved by the monarch. Kushner dismissed concerns about the horrific assault on Yemen by the Saudi military. He arranged to expand US military support for the dictatorship. And he pushed to dramatically increase US weapons sales to the Saudis, promoting a $110 billion deal even as outrage over the Khashoggi murder mounted.
But while that pitch has made Arsenal one of the most talked-about campaign shops in Republican politics, workers inside the company tell a different story. Six former employees who spoke to The Verge described a chaotic working environment, rife with internal bullying, toxic HR practices, and an intense culture of secrecy. That uncertainty has seen three employees leave the company in the last two weeks, and many insiders suspect the company’s problems are just beginning.
Most urgently, some contractors say they aren’t being paid. Karl Slater started doing freelance editing work for Arsenal in May 2021 — but he quickly noticed irregularities in the way the company handled money.
Right wing think tanks (like ALEC and TPPF) are pushing laws that would prevent state agencies from contracting with financial companies unless they prop up fossil fuels, and Texas has already signed into law an implementation of their model bill.
Whether Internet has fueled conspiracy fantasies or not, virtually all conspiracy fantasies have a few common parameters that practically all of them share. Perhaps one of the most important signifier of conspiracy fantasies is the fact that those who create and believe in conspiracy fantasies are convinced that nothing happens by chance – not in society, not in politics, not in the economy, and not in history.
Secondly, conspiracy fantasies connect things that are not connected. The fact that something can happen “out of the blue” is impossible to comprehend for the advocates of conspiracy fantasies, and even more so for those who invent, sell, and broadcast conspiracy fantasies.
States including Iowa and Michigan issued bans on book donations, in 2021 and 2018, respectively. Similar efforts to block book donations to prisoners in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Washington only failed after “public outcry,” Skopic reported. Advocates of book donation bans cite smuggling of contraband as the justification for restrictions, even though a 2018 study found that most contraband items in prison came from prison guards and staff.
At that moment, I had a long-overdue realization: How we as Americans approach restrictions on literature curriculums is not only flawed but also wholly reactionary. My experience at that meeting and others convinced me that the problem is not that we disagree but how. We need to shift focus away from reflexive outrage about restrictions and bans and toward actual discussions of the merits and drawbacks of the individual books.
On 9 March, Russia’s Ministry of Internal Affairs reportedly ordered Saint Petersburg State University to expel 13 students who participated in anti-war protests, in what academics have said is an escalation of the crackdown on free speech.
While no official figures exist, hundreds of students have likely been expelled for their opposition to the war, estimated Vladimir Ashurkov, a Russian activist and executive director of the Anti-Corruption Foundation, a Moscow-based non-profit established by opposition politician Alexei Navalny.
A British judge on Wednesday officially approved the U.S. government's request to extradite WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who faces espionage charges for publishing classified material that exposed war crimes by American forces.
"The charges against Assange should never have been brought in the first place."
Mark Summers QC, an attorney for Assange, asserted there were “fresh developments” in the case and bemoaned the fact that the defense was not permitted at this stage to raise this evidence, according to Computer Weekly’s Bill Goodwin.
This article was funded by paid subscribers of The Dissenter Newsletter. Become a monthly subscriber to help us continue our independent journalism.A British magistrates court ordered the extradition of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to the United States and sent the request for his extradition to Home Office Secretary Priti Patel for approval. The order came a little more than a month after the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom refused to hear Assange’s appeal. In December, the UK High Court of Justice granted the US government’s appeal and overturned a district court decision that spared Assange. Chief Magistrate Senior District Judge Paul Goldspring contended he was “duty-bound” to send the extradition request to Patel. Goldspring also told Assange he had a right to appeal if the Home Office approved the extradition before issuing the order.
Mark Summers QC, an attorney for Assange, asserted there were “fresh developments” in the case and bemoaned the fact that the defense was not permitted at this stage to raise this evidence, according to Computer Weekly’s Bill Goodwin.
Commenting on the court's decision, Amnesty International secretary-general Agnès Callamard said: "The UK has an obligation not to send any person to a place where their life or safety is at risk and the government must not abdicate that responsibility.
In a hearing at Westminster Magistrates Court, the judge who oversees extradition requests authorised the case to be sent to Priti Patel.
The Wikileaks founder is expected to appeal to the High Court if she approves his extradition.
Mr Assange is wanted in the US over documents leaked in 2010 and 2011.
First introduced in April 2021 by state Rep. Luke Meerman, R-Coopersville, House Bill 4705 requires state public bodies to record audio for all meetings, excluding closed-session meetings, and to make them available to the general public. The bill amends Michigan’s 1976 Open Meetings Act, which requires legislative and governing bodies to make certain meetings open to the public in a place that is accessible to everyone.
The bill requires all public bodies, such as state licensing boards, commission panels and other governing boards — including the University of Michigan’s Board of Regents — to provide either a sound-only capture or audio and video recordings of their meetings. The bill also requires these recordings to be available for at least one year following the date of the meeting in a format that would comply with a Freedom of Information Act request. FOIA provides citizens with the ability to request and access public agency records and information.
God help you if you lie to a cop. We’re not even talking about court, where everyone swears to tell the whole truth, etc. before being subjected to testilying by law enforcement officers.
Seoul—April 15 marked the 91st day of a dramatic confrontation at Hyehwa station in the middle of the South Korean capital. Disability rights activists, many of them in wheelchairs, have been staging subway protests to demand accommodations on public transit. And on this day the demonstrators chained themselves to each other and to a portable ladder, reenacting a 2001 protest where activists chained themselves to the subway tracks. Now they shouted, “Pass a budget for disabled citizens! No rights without a budget!” They boarded trains in groups, which requires transit workers to install and uninstall wheelchair ramps, thus causing delays. A few of the activists had recently shaved their heads in public, a monkish ritual of sacrifice.
Lee Hyoung-sook, who leads a local advocacy group, was among those with her head shaved. At Gyeongbokgung station, she tried to board the train en route to Hyehwa station. Subway workers brought out a ramp so her wheels wouldn’t get stuck in the large gap between the platform and the car. Four more wheelchair users waited their turn to board in other sections of the train. While workers moved their one ramp around to get every wheelchair activist on board, the subway doors kept closing in on them. “Fellow citizens, we sincerely apologize for the inconvenience,” Lee told her fellow passengers.
Apparently, it’s not enough to prevent hundreds or thousands of people with “no known affiliation” with terrorist groups from flying — a list that includes children who have yet to enter kindergarten. Even though the TSA long ago admitted (albeit, not publicly) the threat to airline flights was almost nonexistent, it still needs to look like it’s doing something useful to ensure continued funding.
Parents forcibly separated from their children during then-President Donald Trump's "zero tolerance" immigration crackdown continue to suffer enduring trauma and should be justly compensated by a Biden administration that's instead defending its predecessor in court, according to a report published Tuesday by a prominent human rights group.
"Separated families continue to endure significant distress, functional impairment, and mental health disorders."
Sen. Bernie Sanders, one of the labor movement's most vocal champions in Congress, is planning to visit Amazon workers in New York City on Sunday as a second Staten Island warehouse prepares to vote on whether to form a union.
Voting at the 1,500-employee LDJ5 facility, which is located across the street from the JFK8 warehouse that scored a historic union win earlier this month, is set to begin on April 25, a day after Sanders' (I-Vt.) planned visit.
The Democratic Party's governing body is reportedly considering a plan to bar its consultants from anti-union activity following backlash over revelations that Amazon hired Global Strategy Group—a prominent Democratic polling firm—to assist its union-busting campaign in New York City.
"Democrats should ban consultants from not just specifically working on anti-union activity, but also working for actively anti-union corporations."
Workers at an Apple store in Atlanta filed for a union election with the National Labor Relations Board on Wednesday, becoming the first to do so at any of the Silicon Valley giant's 272 retail locations across the United States.
"Somebody has got to be the first to do something."
An Apple retail store in Atlanta has filed for a union election with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). The workers at the Cumberland Mall store, which includes salespeople, technicians, creatives, and operations specialists, would be represented by the Communications Workers of America (CWA). More than 70 percent of the group of about 100 eligible workers signed the union authorization cards, according to a news release — the minimum required is 30 percent.
If a majority of the workers vote to unionize, the store would be the first unionized Apple store in the US. Their petition now goes for formal review by the NLRB.
I’m working on a web-based side project in my spare time. The great thing about side projects is you get to make all the choices and question the common wisdom. Recently I’ve been building out the sign-up flow and I started thinking about usernames—specifically the characters that they may be comprised of.
I poked around a few sites to see what they did: Twitter, GitHub, Discourse all restrict your username to a mostly ASCII alphanumeric character set, perhaps with -, _, and . thrown in.
Spitz said he believes the gun was pressed against Lyoya's head when the officer fired.
Lyoya was killed after a traffic stop in western Michigan on April 4. He and the white officer physically struggled on the ground before the 26-year-old refugee from Congo was shot.
The Arabic word for slave, "abd", is often used in Sudan to refer to people whose perceived roots are thought to be African instead of Arab - and is a derogatory term used to describe black people.
The comment, about three hours into the hearing, had nothing to do with the trial being aired on Sudan TV and the YouTube and Facebook pages of the Sudan News Agency (Suna).
Just a thought that came up now that I tried out Gopher a bit myself, and enjoyed browsing around via Lagrange and Kristall, as well as bombadillo and sacc, of course …
Maybe it’s a weird personal flaw or something, but one of the most fascinating things in business to me is watching one-time pesky disruptors inevitably pivot into powerful turf protectors. As well as all the executive finger-pointing, shenanigans, and denialism that process usually entails.
But on Wednesday, the day after the streamer disclosed it had lost subscribers for the first time in a decade — and forecasted losses in the millions during the second quarter — Netflix’s reputation as a top-performing stock appeared to shatter. The company’s shares tumbled more than 35 percent, and schadenfreude ensued in some entertainment industry corners, with I-told-you-so’s on offer from executives who’d expressed skepticism of the streamer’s seemingly limitless potential for growth.
But the Netflix hangover is also overhanging other big entertainment and streaming stocks. Competitors like Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, Paramount and Roku all dropped between 5 and 8 percent at market close on Wednesday.
Higher Ground, President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama’s media company, is ending its exclusive podcast deal with Spotify and is shopping for other partners in the podcasting space, Variety has confirmed.
The Obamas are exiting their exclusive pact with Spotify, originally inked in 2019, after being frustrated with the company’s exclusive terms — primarily, they want to have their podcast programming distributed as widely as possible, according to two sources familiar with the situation. Higher Ground also has disagreed with Spotify over how many of its shows would feature the former president and first lady, as first reported by reported by Bloomberg.
Home automation company Insteon appears to have quietly shut down without warning. The abrupt service termination left users with broken smart home setups and plenty of questions.
A PCMag reader, who has an Insteon hub and several dimmer and appliance plug-in switches, directed us to a forum post on openHAB.org in which multiple people were complaining about losing access to their Insteon hubs, which now display a solid, red LED.
Revolv, Iris, Insignia, Staples Connect, Wink, and now Insteon and iHome: the graveyard of dead or dying smart home ecosystems that promised so much yet failed to deliver is getting crowded. Smart home company Insteon has apparently turned off its cloud servers for good, according to unconfirmed reports from Stacey on IoT, and device maker iHome has also shut down its servers, confirming to The Verge that its iHome cloud services were terminated on April 2nd.
This feels like a good time for a reflection on the state of the smart home. Is it all over? Or is this cloud carnage simply necessary to clear the way for a brave new world, one where the smart home is no longer a curiosity but something that actually matters?
What those companies mentioned above have in common is a reliance on a proprietary cloud server to deliver at least part of the experience customers signed up for. When the company’s business model changed and the cost of running that cloud was deemed unnecessary, consumers were left in the lurch.
First investigated by IoT reporter Stacey Higginbotham, Insteon’s community forums appear to be down and a number of its high-profile executives have removed all reference to their Insteon employment from their LinkedIn profiles.
IT Pro has contacted Insteon for clarification but did not receive a response.
Insteon CEO Rob Lilleness has removed all references to his Insteon employment from his profile, nor can any mention of Smartlabs, Insteon’s parent company, be found either.
But what happens when the lighting failure is not simply an isolated bad driver or a broken trim? What happens when an entire system of lighting products simultaneously goes defunct because the smart lighting manufacturer and gatekeeper to its cloud servers just disappears without notice?
That’s exactly what happened to an estimated 1 million+ installations of smart home products from Insteon. According to multiple reports, the company’s smart home products stopped working, leaving users with broken smart home setups. And company executives have reportedly scrubbed their LinkedIn profiles, too.
Is your Insteon smart home system down? I’m getting reports from dozens of Insteon users that as of Friday their smart home hubs have stopped working. So far, none of them have heard from the company, and Insteon’s Twitter account hasn’t been updated since June 2021. I reached out to Rob Lilleness, the president and chairman of Smartlabs, the company that owns Insteon and have not yet heard back.
This hasn’t been a good week for the smart home as yet another connected device service seems to have disappeared. It appears anyone using Insteon products has faced a dead-end as the company’s cloud service has gone silent. So too has the company up to this point. What are Insteon device owners and service users to do?
The first thing is: If you have an Insteon hub, make sure you don’t factory reset it! Doing so will render your Insteon hub useless because it won’t be able to connect to the Insteon servers.
As the editorial notes, the worst patent abuses occur with prescription drugs. Drug companies routinely garner dozens of dubious patents for their leading sellers, making it extremely expensive for potential generic competitors to enter the market.€ The piece points out that the twelve drugs that get the most money from Medicare have an average of more than fifty patents each.
The piece suggests some useful reforms, but it misses the fundamental problem. When patents can be worth enormous sums of money, companies will find ways to abuse the system.
What is it about producing champagne that turns you into a trademark bullying jackwagon? Readers here will know that the Comite Champagne, or CIVC, is purely a trademark bully for champagne producers out of France, policing the rest of the world to ensure nobody dares call anything not produced by one of its constituents anything remotely resembling “champagne.” But this ownership culture that must certainly have been learned from the top down in this micro-industry has also spilled over at the winery level.
Creative Commons’ Open Culture Remix Art Contest #CCSharesCulture is open until 30 April 2022. So there’s still plenty of time to remix existing art and turn it into something fresh and exciting under the theme “Love Culture? Share Culture!”
For the first time ever, Netflix has reported a drop in subscriber numbers. The streaming giant lost over 200,000 subscribers during the first quarter of the year and expects to lose two million more in the next quarter. While this drop isn't blamed on piracy, illegal downloading and streaming pose a serious concern in the competitive streaming business.
The Motion Picture Association and the Intellectual Property Office of the Philippines have committed to developing a piracy monitoring system and "rolling site-blocking regime" to disrupt access to pirate sites. The promise is to provide a transparent system but according to the US government, a lack of transparency in the Philippines is a barrier to trade.
This digital workshop will continue the work of the newly released paper “Towards Better Sharing of Cultural Heritage — An Agenda for Copyright Reform”. We will bring together policy experts and open culture enthusiasts from around the world to help shape the first ever CC Open Culture Guide for Policymakers.
Creative Commons’ Open Culture Remix Art Contest #CCSharesCulture is open until 30 April 2022. So there’s still plenty of time to remix existing art and turn it into something fresh and exciting under the theme “Love Culture? Share Culture!”
