Last sunday I finally decided it's time to leave Windows properly behind. I had Windows installed on my PC just in case I want to dualboot back to it.
But almost year has been gone by since I switched to Kubuntu and.. Nope. I didn't boot Windows single time during this ~11 months.
Also I switched to Fedora because things went wrong with partition resizing...
Join Hackaday Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Managing Editor Tom Nardi for a review of all the tech that’s fit to print. Things kick off with an update about the Hackaday Prize and a brief account of the 2022 Vintage Computer Festival East. Then we’ll talk about an exceptionally dangerous art project that’s been making the rounds on social media, a smart tea kettle that gave its life so that others can hack their device’s firmware, some suspiciously effective plant grow lights, and the slippery slope of remote manufacturer kill switches. We’ll wrap things up with some thought provoking discussion about personal liability as it pertains to community repair groups, and a close look at what makes synthetic oil worth spending extra on.
Most servers don't need a graphical interface, but sometimes they can be a big help. Here's how to install a desktop environment in Ubuntu Server.
Linux is used by many professionals in many fields. One of them is programming and specifically in science-oriented programming. That’s why today, you will learn how to install GNU Octave on Ubuntu 20.04. This programming language will help you to work with numbers focused on calculations related to various sciences.
PHP is a programming language used for developing web applications. You must install PHP packages on a Ubuntu system to run the application written on it. Generally, it is used to create e-commerce websites, blogs, and API applications.
We will use the Ondrej PPA for installing PHP on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS system. Which contains PHP 8.1, 8.0, 7.4, 7.3, 7.2. 7.1, 7.0 & PHP 5.6 packages. You can install any of them version as required for your application. The new application developers are suggested to use latest PHP version ie PHP 8.1.
In this tutorial, you will learn how to install PHP on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS system. This tutorial is also compatible with Ubuntu 20.04, and 18.04 systems.
Want to share your files over local network or transfer file from one PC to another PC? Here are a few commonly used ways to do the job in Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.
Today we are looking at how to install Kdenlive 22.04.0 on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.
This guide explains what is Cockpit tool and how to install Cockpit in various Linux distributions, and finally how to manage and administer Linux servers using Cockpit via a web browser.
The saga of the IPv6 transition continues to surprise us all. RFC 2460, the first complete effort at a specification of the IPv6 protocol, was published in December 1998, more than twenty years ago.
The entire point of IPv6 was to specify a successor protocol to IPv4 due to the prospect of running out of IPv4 addresses. Yet we ran out of IPv4 addresses more than a decade ago. This transition to IPv6 has been going on for 20 years now, and if there was any urgency that was instilled in the effort by the prospect of IPv4 address exhaustion, then we’ve been living with exhaustion for a decade now. So perhaps it’s time to ask the question: How much longer is this transition going to take?
This was the question that was put to a panel at the recent ARIN 49 meeting, and, predictably, there was no clear consensus as to what the answer might be. I’d like to explore this question here in a little more detail.
Key exchange is a mechanism where two parties (Alice and Bob) can agree on the same number without an eavesdropper being able to tell what it is. X25519 is the name of one method of key exchange, by doing point operations on the Curve25519 elliptic curve: [...]
Global Positioning System is, without a doubt, one of the most useful inventions of the late 20th century. It made it significantly easier for ships, airplanes, cars, and hikers to figure out where they are with high degree of accuracy.
One of the most exciting aspects of this system are the satellites surrounding Earth. Here’s a current constellation of active satellites, you can drag the view around to see it from different angles: [...]
GoLang (also referred to as Go) is an open-source statically typed programming language developed by Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson at Google and launched in November 2009.
GoLang is known to be 3x faster than the python programming language and supports memory safety, garbage collection, structural typing, and CSP-style concurrency.
Stick with us to learn “how to install GoLang in Ubuntu Linux in 5 simple steps“.
Hello, fellow Geminauts, Tildezens and whoever else stumbles upon this post.
I love text-based things, and I love games, and I love creating stuff. So, I guess, coming up with this project makes a lot of sense.
In this post I will describe what I have in mind, what I already have done, and share links and screenshots. I hope this will be interesting for some at least!
Why would one design a new ISA? With RISC-V and MIPS being open ISA with great support, there is not much point in doing so. Personally, I mostly did this for fun and artistic aspiration. I had a few ideas trotting in my head about what a fun ISA could be. I did want wanted to make a simple ISA, but rather a family of ISA for 8-bit, 16-bit, 32-bit, 64-bit, or even more bit-having processors that all share the same instruction set. At first, I even wanted to be able to make a processor with exotic word sizes but I scrapped that idea. I also wanted a Von Newman architecture and having instructions being a single indexable amount of memory. Those three needs combined meant that I needed to have instruction on only 8 bits. This is quite low, even some 8-bit computers use 16 bits instructions.
This is all wonderful but as already hinted in the introduction getting Shazam to work on Linux is more of a workaround. It’s also unlikely that there will ever be a Linux version of Shazam, it seems as though the team behind the app are not working on it. And yet sometimes you are busy working on a laptop when you hear a song play in a movie, TV show or in your neighbour’s house. Your phone might not be at hand and you might not want to put your laptop down and go hunt for it. This is where Mousai comes in handy.
However, thanks to data protection laws, sites are now obliged to inform users about cookies (trackers) and cannot track them without the user’s consent.
But designers have learned to get around this law and are using different design techniques to make users accept all cookies (trackers) anyway.
I’m targeting designers, not companies, in this article. I need to write another article about companies. I think each designer is responsible for their own design and must ensure that their design is ethical.
Now, let’s examine the cookie consent window designs of two companies (N26 and Revolut) and learn about the design techniques they use.
Arti is our ongoing project to create a working embeddable Tor client in Rust. It’s not ready to replace the main Tor implementation in C, but we believe that it’s the future.
Right now, our focus is on making Arti production-quality, by stress-testing the code, hunting for likely bugs and adding missing features that we know from experience that users will need. We're going to try not to break backward compatibility too much, but we'll do so when we think it's a good idea.
I've got into a situation with PG I've never been into before. There is a financial reports table, containing some description of a transaction, with columns like date, amount and comment. And this comment field is often used to search for something case-insensitively. This is done best using where lower(comment) like '%some words%' using trigram index: [...]
There are only a few apps I use every day and shell — ZSH — is one of the most used. It’s been that way since the beginning of the ’00s and back then I spent a lot of time configuring my prompt to be a good balance between compact/readable and useful. I found that I dislike fancy two-line prompts, information on a right-hand side (because of its awkward behavior), and stuff like that. So the result looks like that: [...]
It’s no secret that we think flexures are pretty cool, and we’ve featured a number of projects that leverage these compliant mechanisms to great effect. But when we saw flexures used in a six-DOF positioner with micron accuracy, we just had to dig a little deeper.
A problem facing architects when designing complex three-dimensional structures lies in their joints, which must be strong enough to take the loads and vector forces applied by the structure, yet light enough not to dominate it. Many efforts have been made to use generative design techniques or clever composites to fabricate them, but as Dezeen reports, a team at MIT are exploring an unexpected alternative in the form of naturally occurring tree forks.
Watching television today is a very different experience from that which our parents would have had at our age, where we have high-definition digital on-demand streaming services they had a small number of analogue channels serving linear scheduled broadcasting. A particular film coming on TV could be a major event that it was not uncommon for most of the population to have shared, and such simple things as a coffee advert could become part of our common cultural experience. Behind it all was a minor miracle of synchronised analogue technology taking the signal from studio to living room, and this is the subject of a 1952 Coronet film, Television: How It Works!€ Sit back and enjoy a trip into a much simpler world in the video below the break.
New Orleans, La.—The crush of fans pressing their way into Gentilly Boulevard gate at 11 am last Friday revealed a pent-up desire, at last satisfied: The New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival was back.
Fire season is upon us. There’s no off-season anymore. 24/7 takes on paradoxically darker and brighter—and ever hotter—connotations.
One of the biggest, most destructive fires in New Mexico’s history is sweeping through the mountains east of Santa Fe, having already engulfed more than 160,000 acres. The Calf Canyon and Merit Peak Fires began as separate blazes but merged ten days ago. Elsewhere in the American Southwest dozens of smaller fires rage.
One thing he explained was that large birds like ducks and eagles travel typically by day, navigating by land features, whereas songbirds and warblers fly at night and navigate off the stars. Some birds, weighing barely an ounce, fly 450 miles a day for a week straight, sometimes over long stretches of open water, just to get back home to their natural breeding grounds. He described how the shapes of certain land masses, like in the Middle East can funnel large numbers of birds into narrow corridors.
When it was time for questions, one woman asked, “For the birds that fly during the day and navigate by what they see on land, will the ones flying over Ukraine be able to make it?”
The Iranian government is threatening to execute a Swedish-Iranian academic to thwart a trial against an Iranian official accused of war crimes, a leading non-profit organisation has said.
Ahmadreza Djalali was arrested and charged with espionage during an invited visit to the University of Tehran in 2016. Sentenced to death in 2017, he has been held in solitary confinement for months at a time and is suffering serious health problems.
The cathode-ray tube is having a bit of a revival at the moment in the public consciousness, as people who grew up with these screens suddenly see the distinct advantages they hold in certain use cases, often related to the things they display. (Sometimes, though, the CRT becomes a bit of a villain in the story, something that a confused contributor to TechRadar found as he struggled to get his set working because he couldn’t find a compatible remote.) Of course, the electron guns that we brought into our homes by the millions were primarily used as television sets, but they also had other uses—or at least other novel methods of use—worth highlighting. And with that in mind, today’s Tedium highlights inventive and novel uses of the good ol’ CRT.
yesterday on my way home i walked by someone singing a song from my childhood outside the train station and i dropped them $2 and they smiled at me, and i think that's such a nice experience! to be fair it wasn't a really old song. i think it was a mashup of 'i want it that way' and some other songs, but it reminded me of really warm nights in the living room with my family just goofing around, and the entire childhood stuff.
It took me back to my time in Korea.
To be perfectly honest, at least part of the reason why I initially moved to Korea was some kind of desire to discover more about Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism. I wanted to move to a society that had been shaped by these historical movements in the same way I believed my own had been shaped by Christianity (specifically, Catholicism).
While I did indeed learn more about these traditions and the subtle influences they *can* have on social order, the predominant social force I learned the most about was, of course, capitalism (and also some even more dogmatic forms of Christianity!).
From fonts to animated movies, curves and surfaces constitute fundamental building blocks of many geometrical designs. Over the course of this blog post I’ll explain how this model of a mask can be very smooth despite being described by a limited number of small points that you can drag around to change the mask’s shape: [...]
This article will use Marx’s own writings and secondary sources to trace the history of Karl Marx as a student of technology starting with Nathan Rosenberg’s seminal essay in 1976[1] through Amy Wendling’s work in 2011.[2] The essay will provide a historiography of Marx and how scholars have analyzed his perceptions of technological development and how it relates to his ongoing objective critiques of capitalism. Peter Novick famously stated in his Introduction that objectivity in history could be like “Nailing jelly to a wall,” but this essay will argue that Marx was a dedicated student of technology and wasn’t speculating in subjectivity on the topic.[3]
Over the last two years, Republicans argued that President Biden, who made a campaign promise to cancel student debt, does not have legal authority to fulfill that pledge, insisting that the tens of millions of Americans currently crushed by student loans should be forced to pay them down. But now, amid new reports that Biden is considering a partial jubilee, Republicans are backing a bill that would prevent the president from pulling the trigger – a tacit acknowledgment Biden appears to have the power to finally make good on his promise.
On paper, chording — that’s pressing multiple keys to create either a single character or a whole word — looks like one of the best possible input methods. Maybe not the best for speed, at least for a while, but definitely good for conserving the total number of keys. Of course, fewer keys also makes for an easier time when it comes to building keyboards (as long as you don’t have to code the chording software). In fact, we would venture to guess that the hardest part of building your own version of [CrazyRobMiles]’s Pico Chord Keyboard would be teaching your fingers how to work together to chord instead of typing one at a time.
Mylar has a lot of useful properties, and as such as see it pop up pretty often, not just in DIY projects but in our day-to-day lives. But until today, we’ve never seen a piece of Mylar jump up and try to get our attention. But that’s precisely the promise offered by ElectriPop, a fascinating project from Carnegie Mellon University’s Future Interfaces Group.
The bane of life for anyone who possesses a well-used pile of spanners is the humble nut and bolt. Durable and easy to fasten, over our lifetimes we must screw and unscrew them by the million. When they do their job they’re great, but too often the seize up solid, or more alarmingly, gradually undo themselves over time due to vibration or thermal stress. There are a host of products such as locking nuts or thread sealant to deal with this problem, but the Fraunhofer Institute have an idea which might just remove the worry surrounding important fastenings. Their work has resulted in a solar-powered bolt with an embedded sensor that phones home when the connection loosens, allowing an engineer to be dispatched with a spanner to tighten it up.
Millets have been around since 3000 BC and are believed to be among the earliest domesticated plants, long serving as a staple crop for millions of farmers, particularly in India, China and many parts of Africa.
Sometimes dubbed "nutri-cereals" due to their high levels of iron, fiber and certain vitamins, they are still grown in more than 130 countries. Yet they only play a significant role in the diets of some 90 million people in Africa and Asia, and are often regarded as food for the poor.
By comparison, around half the global population relies on rice, and more than one-third on wheat.
The newly minted subsidiary intends to dump roughly one million gallons radioactively contaminated nuclear reactor waste water into Cape Cod Bay, which happens to be a part of the protected Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary. The million gallons are stagnating in the shutdown Pilgrim reactor’s waste fuel pool, formerly used to cool extremely hot uranium fuel rods which are taken from the reactor core (at around 5,092 degrees Fahrenheit) when fresh fuel is emplaced.
Holtec’s pollution plan has produced such a tsunami of public opposition that Massachusetts Senator Ed Marky convenes a congressional subcommittee field hearing in Plymouth, Massachusetts Friday, May 6, to air questions about an array of vexing problems with decommissioning the Pilgrim reactor, which is on the northwest shore of Cape Cod Bay. Markey is Chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Subcommittee on Clean Air, Climate, and Nuclear Safety.
Governments around the world are eagerly returning back to pre-pandemic conditions by relaxing preventative restrictions, lifting mask mandates and pulling back public funding. Dr. Abraar Karan, infectious disease fellow at Stanford University School of Medicine, says these moves are overly optimistic and that the U.S. is not prepared for new variants spreading around the country. “We’re trying to say it’s over. It’s not true,” he says. “As time goes on, immunity wanes, and we will begin to see more severe cases.”
The World Health Organization says the coronavirus pandemic has now caused an excess of 15 million deaths globally. We look at how staggering death counts reveal broader political failures to protect public health and close the international vaccine gap. “Western governments and rich corporations who are based primarily in the West have done very little to advance vaccine inequity or to help the entire world end this pandemic faster,” says Achal Prabhala, coordinator of the AccessIBSA project, who adds that many poor countries have also not used all the policy tools at their disposal.
The antivaccine movement has have long promoted a narrative going back to as long as the concept of immunity due to vaccines has existed that vaccine-induced immunity is somehow “inferior” to “natural immunity.” Of course, as I like to respond, vaccine-induced immunity is every bit as “natural” as “natural immunity” resulting from infection and recovery from infection. Even better, whatever its duration and robustness relative to post-infection immunity (the more correct term for “natural immunity”) vaccine-induced has the advantage of not requiring a person to suffer through the disease and face the risks of severe complications and death. Yet antivaxxers have long fetishized “natural immunity” as far superior to vaccine-induced immunity, even when it isn’t, which goes along their narrative that portrays vaccines as somehow “unnatural,” “dirty,” and “contamination” of their “purity of essence.” So it comes as no surprise that Martin Kulldorff, one of the three scientists who authored the Great Barrington Declaration and currently the “scientific director” of an astroturf anti-public health think tank billed by its founder as the “spiritual child of the Great Barrington Declaration,” the Brownstone Institute.
On Tuesday I lost all hearing in my left ear over the course of three hours. I had that otherwise common, ephemeral tinnitus that one sometimes experiences for 3-4 seconds. I had an unusual number of bouts, and they started lasting progressively longer. Then hearing just never returned.
The technique involves injecting shellcode directly into Windows event logs. This allows adversaries to use the Windows event logs as a cover for malicious late stage trojans, according to a Kaspersky research report released Wednesday.
Researchers uncovered the campaign in February and believe the unidentified adversaries have been active for the past month.
A ransomware group believed to have strong ties within Russia said Wednesday that it will release files it took from the Bulgarian government agency responsible for refugee management, a nation that has reportedly hosted hundreds of thousands of fleeing Ukrainians.
Yesterday, a large majority of Members of the European Parliament opposed the Parliament’s plans to register their presence by processing their fingerprints. By 420:202:15 votes they called on the Bureau to “develop an alternative solution that does not involve the processing of biometric data”. For example, an electronic attendance register could rely on Members badges or their mobile phones, and it could come with random and periodic checks by human monitoring.
Some of these apps share data with third parties.
Exactly what the apps do with the period data is unclear, but some third parties feed that information back to the big tech companies like Google, Meta and Amazon.
Cooper Quintin, senior staff technologist at the EFF, told the BBC: "We strongly suggest that the developers of period tracking apps start thinking about the amount of data they are storing about their customers, and especially the ways that data could one day be used or misused in the future to cause harm, or be a tool of surveillance.
In response, SafeGraph agreed to stop selling data about Planned Parenthood visitors. But it also defended its behavior, claiming “SafeGraph has always committed to the highest level of privacy practices ensuring individual privacy is NEVER compromised.“ The company, it continued, “only sell[s] data about physical places (not individuals.)”
This framing is misleading. First, SafeGraph for years did sell data about individuals—and then remained closely tied to a business that still did so. Second, the aggregated location data that SafeGraph now sells is based on the same sensitive, individual location traces that are collected and sold without meaningful consent.€
Last year, EFF reported public records showing that SafeGraph had sold 2 years of “disaggregated, device-specific” location data about millions of people to the Illinois government, starting in January 2019.
I started climbing to get a better look and soon found myself alone on a golden hill dotted with alligator junipers and mesquite. Brilliant vermilion flycatchers fluttered between the branches. The road, though, was Border Patrol all the way. Atop the hill opposite mine stood a surveillance tower. Since it loomed over our campsite, I’d been looking at it all weekend. It felt strangely like part of French philosopher Michel Foucault’s panopticon — in other words, I wasn’t sure whether I was being watched or not.€ But I suspected I was.
After all, that tower’s cameras could see for seven miles at night and its ground-sweeping radar operated in a 13-mile radius, a capability, one Border Patrol officer told me in 2019, worth “100 agents.” In the term of the trade, the technology was a “force multiplier.” I had first seen that tower freshly built in 2015 after CBP awarded a hefty contract to the Israeli company Elbit Systems. In other words, on top of that hill, I wasn’t just watching some unknown event developing; I was also in the middle of the border-industrial complex.
Sweden said Friday it was reintroducing temporary border controls at ferry terminals, airports, road crossings with other countries and other entry points to the Scandinavian nation because there “still is a serious threat to public order and internal security."
The Swedish government said the temporary controls would start immediately and last until Nov. 11, meaning travelers will have to show passports and visas during the 6-month period.
On the anniversary of the Dersim Genocide, the Human Rights Association (IHD) Headquarters issued a written statement.
The statement noted that military operations against Dersim began with a decision of the Council of Ministers dated May 4, 1937, within the framework of the "Tunceli Law" numbered 2884 and dated December 25, 1935, and that "tens of thousands of Kurds/Alevis were massacred during these operations. Military actions lasted until 1938, and the topography of Dersim was substantially depopulated by forced displacement as a result of the mass slaughter.”
The Human Rights Association (ðHD) Central Office released a statement today (May 4) and marked the anniversary of the Dersim Massacre, which began in eastern Turkey on May 4, 1937 and continued in 1938. The ðHD has underlined that the massacres committed in Dersim constituted a genocide, underlining "the need to face the genocide".
The Association has also recalled that President and Justice and Development Party (AKP) Chair Recep Tayyip Erdoßan apologized for the Dersim massacre in 2011, when he was the Prime Minister.
The content of the 13-page document is quite vague, mentioning the exchange of information in the field of international defence and security policy, military education, military hydrography and medicine. This new episode of Russia’s diplomatic offensive in Africa, in the aftermath of the invasion of Ukraine and subsequent Western sanctions, follows the refusal from many African countries, Cameroon included, to condemn Moscow at the UN General Assembly.
The mission involved specialists arriving at a country following its invitations, “where they scan networks with the goal of building the host countries’ resilience and share any new information about threats with government and private industry circles back in the US”, according to the Bloomberg news website.
The mission in Lithuania “was moved up in the queue” due to the threat posed by Russia, according to Hartman.
The United States has previously deployed its cyber teams to countries including Estonia and Ukraine.
The secretary of the National Security Council of Ukraine, Oleksiy Danilov,€ said€ Hungarian authorities were informed about a full-scale attack on Ukraine beforehand by the Russian President. “Hungary openly declares its cooperation with the Russian Federation. Moreover, Putin warned [them] in advance that there would be attacks on our country,” Danilov said. He also believed Hungary had plans for part of the territory of Ukraine.
The Hungarian embassy in Kyiv took to€ Facebook€ and wrote they are “outraged” by the allegations that Budapest was warned in advance about Russia’s plans to go to war. “The statement by Oleksiy Danilov, head of the National Security and Defense Council (NSDC), ‘contains accusations that are false and unfounded, and incite hatred against the Hungarian people and Hungary in Ukrainian public opinion, which is suffering from war’,”- the embassy’s social media post reads.
Well, I am hardly going to sort these matters out fully, but I have chosen the late Stephen F. Cohen’s book, War with Russia? From Putin and Ukraine to Trump and Russiagate (2022) as a companion to get a handle on the demonization of Putin (one of several core themes). We appear to be stumbling around in the darkness; maybe Cohen can beam some light into€ this darkness shrouding our understanding of the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
Cohen is well-qualified to be our guide. He was a professor of Russian Studies and History at New York University (1998-2011) and Princeton University (1968-1998), where he directed the Russian Studies program. He was good friends with Gorbachev, and there is an affectionate photo in the book having dinner at one of Gorbachev’s favourite restaurant in Moscow.
Ali’s book, titled Winston Churchill: His Times, His Crimes, is both a biography of one of humanity’s greatest criminals and a history of that criminal’s times. Like most humans with power both granted to them and taken by them, Churchill’s personal biography is tied up in the story of the times he lived in. As he rightly should, Ali spends most of his narrative detailing and discussing Churchill’s military, political and diplomatic actions as a member of the British Empire’s ruling class. In this discussion, Churchill’s racism and misanthropy is revealed. Obviously, those aspects of his personality informed his actions as a military man and politician. In addition, they informed the nature of Britain’s ruling elites as surely as their arrogance and sense of genetic superiority informed Churchill’s estimation of himself.
The litany of crimes here is long. Churchill seems to have never missed an opportunity to stroke his ego. If he could do so while attacking a perceived enemy of the Empire—whether that enemy was a miner in Britain’s pits, an Irish Republican, a citizen of India, a Soviet revolutionary or another of the Empire’s enemies—so much the better. In Ali’s telling, it becomes clear that Churchill preferred fascism to any kind of communism and considered those who opposed his dear and glorious empire to be his personal enemies. All that said, this is a political biography above all else. Churchill’s particular psychopathies underlie the narrative but are not the basis of it. Likewise, his personal life is mentioned primarily in terms of his political actions. In a manner similar to others whose political personas are rightly or wrongly larger than life, Churchill comes across as a man whose politics were the foundation of his person and whose person defined his politics; politics of arrogance and prejudice that they were.
North Korea’s nuclear program has been the perennial threat that concerns South Korea, East Asia, and the United States. Some pundits are even suggesting that the nature of this threat has recently changed—that North Korea is no longer just interested in possessing nuclear weapons in order to deter attacks by other countries. Instead, as Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin argues, North Korea is now seriously considering using nuclear weapons for offensive purposes as part of an effort to take over the Korean peninsula.
This seems far-fetched. Pyongyang has difficulty even maintaining control of its own territory. Having seen Russia’s embarrassing failure to take over Ukraine, a considerably weaker country, the North Korean government can’t seriously believe that it could invade and control South Korea, a considerably stronger country.
In the lead up to Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the authorities in the self-proclaimed “Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics” announced mass evacuations to Russia. Now, after ten weeks of all-out war, roughly a million Ukrainians have been forced to flee to Russian territory. As Meduza reported previously, civilians living in areas occupied or blockaded by Russian troops have been forcibly evacuated to Russia and brought to “filtration camps.” In mid-April, the Russian Cabinet allocated nearly 439 million rubles ($6.5 million) from the country’s reserve fund for the accommodation of these refugees. However, in a number of Russian regions, public-sector employees are being urged to donate part of their paychecks to purported “fundraisers” in support of displaced Ukrainians.
Kyiv, Ukraine—After Russian attacks targeted infrastructure all across Ukraine earlier this week, damaging critical rail lines in the western part of the country, a bus bound for Kyiv was full when it departed from Warsaw an hour before midnight on Wednesday.
The Ukrainian news outlet Ukrayinska Pravda reported Thursday that British Prime Minister Boris Johnson used his surprise visit to Kyiv last month to pressure President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to cut off peace negotiations with Russia, even after the two sides appeared to have made tenuous progress toward a settlement to end the war.
Citing unnamed sources from Zelenskyy's "inner circle" and advisory team, Pravda reported that "Johnson brought two simple messages to Kyiv":
Global human rights group Amnesty International on Friday called for accountability "up the chain of command" in Russia for war crimes the organization says it has documented in extensive interviews and on-the-ground research in Ukraine.
"Hierarchal superiors... who knew or had reason to know about war crimes committed by their forces, but did not attempt to stop them or punish those responsible, should also be held criminally responsible."
Hundreds of cops across the United States have been taught by individuals who espouse far-right extremist views, according to a new investigation that was published Friday to sound the alarm on a burgeoning and unregulated private training industry.
Reuters identified five law enforcement trainers who have been hired by police and sheriffs' departments nationwide despite their support for right-wing militia groups, including the Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, and Three Percenters; the QAnon conspiracy, which baselessly claims that Democrats and Hollywood stars belong to a cabal of Satanist pedophiles and cannibals; and former President Donald Trump's "Big Lie" that the 2020 election was stolen.
A New York Times report that the United States has been providing real time intelligence to the Ukrainian army with the specific purpose of killing Russian generals brings America a long step closer to actual war with Russia.€
In late April, Russian Internet giant Yandex announced it was selling its news service, Yandex.News, and its personal recommendations service, Yandex.Zen, to the social networking company VKontakte (VK). VK is run by Vladimir Kiriyenko, son of Russian presidential administration First Deputy Chief of Staff Sergey Kiriyenko. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began, these products (just like Yandex overall) have faced a barrage of criticism for misleading millions of users by withholding credible information about the war while leaving up inaccurate information from pro-Kremlin sources. Meduza special correspondent Svetlana Reiter tells the story of how a once-progressive news aggregator ruined Yandex’s reputation, caused an employee exodus, and landed its deputy CEO on sanctions lists.
The Kremlin denies it vociferously, but Western analysts and state officials warn that Vladimir Putin could declare Russia’s full military mobilization as soon as May 9, when the country celebrates the USSR’s victory in World War II. Ben Wallace, the UK’s secretary of state for defense, says such an announcement wouldn’t surprise him, adding that Putin could claim that Russia is now at war “with Nazis all over the world,” necessitating mass conscription. Meduza asked Pavel Chikov, the head of the human rights group Agora, who would be affected by a full mobilization and whether it would still be possible to avoid being drafted in Russia’s armed forces.
Following the brutal killing of an unarmed black man (George Floyd) by a Minnesota police officer (convicted murderer Derek Chauvin), protests against police violence erupted around the country.
In 1919, the renowned British economist John Maynard Keynes wrote The Economic Consequences of the Peace, a book that would prove controversial indeed. In it, he warned that the draconian terms imposed on defeated Germany after what was then known as the Great War—which we now call World War I—would have ruinous consequences not just for that country but all of Europe. Today, I’ve adapted his title to explore the economic consequences of the (less than great) war now underway—the one in Ukraine, of course—not just for those directly involved but for the rest of the world.
The EU Justice Agency is to be allowed to store and process personal and biometric data for the first time. Eurojust will also be authorised to analyse digital evidence, but it does not actually have a mandate to do so.
On September 1, 2004, terrorists took 1,128 people hostage inside a school in the North Ossetian town of Beslan, including children, parents, and teachers. 333 people were killed and 783 were injured, making the siege one of the largest terrorist attacks in Russian history. Hostage No. 281 on the list compiled by Beslan teachers after the siege was then-15-year-old Alexey Viktorovich Ptakh. In 2022, his name appeared on a different list: the list of soldiers in the 34th Brigade from Vladikavkaz, which, according to the Ukrainian Defense Ministry, is participating in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Meduza special correspondent Svetlana Reiter spoke with Alexey Ptakh’s mother, Tatyana, about how her son ended up in the war.
Aiding Ukraine’s defense Russian invasion, “Would lead to consequences you have never seen”. President Putin February 24, 2022
Threats to use nuclear weapons are as old as nuclear weapons. Threats to use nuclear weapons may even be their main function. Increasingly bellicose statements by Putin and Russian State media during Russia’s hot war in Ukraine are unprecedented, and must be taken seriously.
When Atwood penned her famous book in 1985, she could not have imagined just how prescient it would be seen decades later. Then the Hulu series was produced. It differed in many significant ways from the book. The character of Offred, for instance, did not have the same agency or defiance as the one in the television series. She was a witness to the brutality of the Republic of Gilead, but she didn’t actively participate in resisting it as Elizabeth Moss’ portrayal did. Although the series was powerful, well written and well acted, the book presents us with a more universal experience of a person living under authoritarian cruelty.
But it came in the time of Trump. A time of unmasked misogyny. Resistance, or even the facsimile of it, became a popular rallying call. Now, we watch stupefied at the continuing resurgence of fascism, dressed up in the guise of Christianity, in the same nation that would eventually become Atwood’s fictional Gilead. The recent leak of a€ US Supreme Court draft opinion may be one of those prophecies foretold.
Though UNRWA was not established as a political or legal platform per se, the context of its mandate was largely political, since Palestinians became refugees as a result of military and political events – the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people by Israel and the latter’s refusal to respect the Right of Return for Palestinians as enshrined in UN resolution 194 (III) of December 11, 1948.
“UNRWA has a humanitarian and development mandate to provide assistance and protection to Palestine refugees pending a just and lasting solution to their plight,” the UN General Assembly Resolution 302 (IV) of December 8, 1949 read. Alas, neither a ‘lasting solution’ to the plight of the refugees, nor even a political horizon has been achieved. Instead of using this realization as a way to revisit the international community’s failure to bring justice to Palestine and to hold Israel and its US benefactors accountable, it is UNRWA and, by extension, the refugees that are being punished.
Manipulation of the news around Russia’s war on Ukraine is aimed to prevent public opinion from seeking a lasting peace for both Ukraine and the region. The aim of this information war is to prolong the war to serve the interests of those who wish to promote it. How does one know what constitutes facts and what constitutes lies, and how can one learn to explain events without being accused of justification?
Causes Leading to War
There are two conflicting narratives about Ukraine. The first narrative – the idealistic, legal point of view that is repeated frequently by the West – is that Ukraine is a sovereign country that can independently choose its foreign policy. If it wishes to be closer to Europe, either joining the European Union or NATO, that is its choice. As a sovereign nation since 1991, Ukraine is free and independent.
The second narrative – aligned with Realpolitik – is that major powers have spheres of influence around their borders. While there are no legal bases for this position, it is customarily recognized that countries such as the United States, China and Russia cannot have hostile threats close to them. Major powers have stated this and acted on its assumptions throughout history.
At the same time, from the outset of these events there was much more limited international support for the American-led punitive response by NATO featuring harsh sanctions amounting to ‘economic warfare,’ shipment of weaponry to the beleaguered country, dehumanization of Putin and Russo-phobic propaganda, along with silence about recourse to diplomacy. In the background was the related internal struggle within Ukraine between the dominant force in the Western part of the country and the Russian-speaking Ukrainians in the Donbas East.
As Russian military operations proceeded, perceptions of the core conflict began to change. What seemed at first a simple war of aggression, to be followed by belligerent operation, is now becoming a geopolitical war between the United States and Russia, with strategic goals quite apart from the outcome of events in Ukraine, as well as heightening costs of the encounter for the entire world, including the people of Ukraine and especially the extreme poor everywhere. And while Washington bears the main responsibility for this shift, the Russian response by way of veiled threats of recourse to nuclear weaponry emanate from Moscow and Putin. Yet the essential character in this elevation of the war strategy to a geopolitical level of engagement is to care less about bolstering Ukrainian resistance to Russian aggression and far more about inflicting defeat on Russia and the renewal of post-Cold War transatlantic unity by the revitalization and expansion of the NATO alliance with Russia once more the enemy of Western democracy. This geopolitical war has much larger strategic consequences and risks than the initial proxy war between Russia and the United States that concerned the future of Ukraine.
The development in question is U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s ominous comments after returning from a visit to Kyiv. Austin said that the U.S. wants to see€ “Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine.” Austin also said that Washington thinks Ukraine can “win” its war with Russia if it receives proper weapons and support from the West.
Questions For Your Liberal Imperialist Aunt
That requires that we look anew to history and the Constitution, which, Justice Alito is quite correct, does not include the word ‘abortion’ (or ‘space travel’ or ‘automobile’ or even ‘woman’) but does include ‘slavery’.
When I first wrote that opening paragraph, in 2012, my friend and sister Pamela Bridgewater, who’d been their impetus, was alive. She was starting cancer treatments, which ultimately failed. At that moment, though, she was intending to revise her legal writings on reproductive liberty and the legacies of slave breeding into a book that would speak a common language to women, particularly the class of women whom she’d escorted to safety while doing clinic defense in Florida, Wisconsin, DC. She was a legal scholar, a professor, an activist, a sex radical, a diva. Pamela was fire.
On May 10, Daniel’s support team is hosting an online meeting for supporters to write letters together to Hale in prison.
As we approach one year of Daniel Hale’s incarceration, his support team invites you to a night of reflection and solidarity on Tuesday, May 10, at 7:30pm EST: “We miss him so much and community helps us and him keep his fighting spirit – forever in pursuit of justice – alive.” Register here.
I have a confession to make. So focused on the existential threats of climate change, biodiversity decline, soil loss, population growth, antibiotic misuse, and other slow-to-unfold ways humanity can destroy itself, I spend little time thinking about the instantaneous way: nuclear annihilation.
Campaigners within and beyond the Philippines on Friday applauded a new government report that backs accountability for major polluters driving the climate emergency and its associated negative impacts on human rights.
"We enjoin all Filipinos to stand up for climate and environmental justice, and ensure our elected officials in the next administration take this to heart."
In November 2018, the Green New Deal became a rallying cry for climate activists when members of the Sunrise Movement occupied House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's office and adopted the slogan as their unifying message. A few months later, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), who had joined the young activists in Pelosi's office, brought this message to Congress when she partnered with Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) to introduce their Green New Deal resolution. More manifesto than binding legislation, the resolution laid out a vision of an equitable clean energy transition for the United States.
Located in Campia (not far from Oliveira de Frades, a town famous for bikes), a group of investors from Portugal, Germany, and Taiwan launched the firm in 2018.
The company believe manufacturing of hi-tech bicycle components is poised to return to Europe, after decades of supply from firms in China and Taiwan.
Construction is underway on an 8.9 MW floating bifacial solar array at a water treatment facility in New Jersey.
NJR Clean Energy Ventures, a unit of New Jersey Resources, claims the project will be the largest floating solar array in the U.S. once it's completed.
The US Treasury Department announced on Friday that it’s sanctioning Blender.io, essentially cutting the Bitcoin mixer off from the US financial system (legally speaking, anyway). The department alleges that the service, which lets people obfuscate the record usually kept by the blockchain, was used by North Korea to “support its malicious cyber activities and money-laundering of stolen virtual currency.”
The sanctions, imposed by the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, are the first ever on a digital asset mixing service. The new sanctions also point to the growing use of digital assets to perpetuate illegal acts by state actors and individuals.
The oil and gas industry wants to play a word-and-picture association game with you. Think of four images: a brightly colored backpack stuffed with pencils, a smiling teacher with a tablet tucked under her arm, a pair of glasses resting on a stack of pastel notebooks, and a gleaming school bus welcoming a young student onboard.
Hawaii lawmakers put the state on the path to making history after the Legislature passed a resolution Thursday endorsing a document called the "Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty."
"Hawaii is taking our own bold actions for climate change resilience and to move off fossil fuels."
Unsurprisingly, however,€ this “historic and bold” action plan reveals a doubled down commitment to business-as-usual programs and policies that exacerbate the climate crisis and its damaging effects on forests and communities; increase threats from wildfires, and open the door to new, extreme and unproven technologies to be unleashed on wild forests–all in the service of timber, oil and gas, mining, biotechnology and other industries.
Carbon Offsets:€ One of the major themes running through the EO is an emphasis on forests as carbon sinks that will offset carbon emissions.€ € This model of forests as offsets, however, has been widely€ debunked€ for enabling ongoing pollution. In this way, it simultaneously exacerbates climate injustice because this ongoing pollution largely occurs in low income communities, and threatens the very existence of forests by sidestepping the dire need to curb forest-killing emissions.
Brazil's space research agency revealed Friday that deforestation in the country's Amazon rainforest last month shattered the previous record for April, a development one conservation campaigner called "very scary" and an indication of the criminal level of environmental destruction occurring under the administration of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro.
"The Amazon is controlled by landowners, illegal loggers, and miners. Crime is the reality."
The Hawaii Legislature on Thursday unanimously passed landmark legislation appropriating $600 million for the state’s Native Hawaiian homesteading program, a chronically underfunded initiative that has long fallen short of its promise to return Native people to their ancestral land.
The amount represents the largest one-time infusion of money in the program’s 101-year history, and it’s more than seven times the record amount that state lawmakers approved last year. The majority of the funds will go toward the development of nearly 3,000 lots, most of them residential, on Hawaii’s main islands.
The MOC between Estonia and Japan reflects the willingness of these two highly developed digital societies to share their knowledge and experience, Sutt said according to a ministry press release.
"Digital development and sustainability are important drivers of economic growth in both Estonia and Japan," he said. "Digitalization leads to a more efficient use of resources, but it cannot come at the expense of security. Therefore, the cooperation agreement places a strong emphasis on cybersecurity, secure digital identification, secure cloud solutions, data protection and the secure use of data."
Free Speech for the People responded to the decision by sending a letter to Raffensperger, arguing that Beaudrot’s ruling “betrays the fundamental purpose” of the 14th Amendment and “gives a pass to political violence as a tool for disrupting and overturning free and fair elections.”
On both sides of the Atlantic, [Internet] users face the same issues of disinformation and online harm, amplified by the same powerful digital platforms. But despite increasingly similar governance ideas, transatlantic collaboration on a comprehensive digital regulatory regime is not in the cards, given the disparities in the U.S. and European legal systems, norms and priorities, along with starkly different time frames.
Two weeks ago, the European Union reached a deal on the final terms of its landmark regulation, the Digital Services Act. The EU leads the way on what it hopes will become the global standard, following in the footsteps of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the EU’s privacy and data protection regime. The United Kingdom is not far behind, with the possible adoption of its massive Online Safety Bill (OSB) early next year.
A California judge on Friday tossed out former President Trump’s lawsuit that sought to lift his Twitter ban.
U.S. District Judge James Donato, who was nominated by former President Obama, said in his ruling that Trump’s claims that Twitter’s ban against him violated the First Amendment did not hold much water, given that the amendment only applies to the government violations of the right and not private company abridgments.
Specifically, Nvidia violated Section 17(a)(2) and (3) of the Securities Act of 1933 and the disclosure provisions of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, according to the SEC.
“The SEC’s order also finds that Nvidia’s omissions of material information about the growth of its gaming business were misleading given that Nvidia did make statements about how other parts of the company’s business were driven by demand for crypto, creating the impression that the company’s gaming business was not significantly affected by cryptomining,” the SEC said.
Translation: The crowd shouted “Allah Akbar” surrounding the blissful Macron
[YLE] followed a chat thread on WhatsApp, in the Russian language, about plans for Sunday's event. The discussion, involving around 70 people, used aggressive language and nationalist themes.
Some of the chat participants suggested carrying out violence against potential counter-protesters, with a few saying they were considering bringing firearms.
Elon Musk's Twitter takeover has sparked fears that the platform may now be more vulnerable to Beijing's influence, amid an ongoing overseas influence and infowar campaign by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
Last week, the New York State Court of Appeals, the highest court in the state, invalidated the House and state Senate districts that had been drawn by the Democrat-controlled legislature. The ruling was a shock to the state’s political class, which did not expect such a legal challenge—initiated by Republicans—to succeed in a court where six of seven judges are registered Democrats. The court decision threw the task of drawing new maps to a court-appointed special master, who will have until May 24 to produce new House maps. To comply with this timeline, the judges ordered federal and some state primaries to be shifted from June to August.
Every Friday, Hungary’s prime minister gives an interview on one of the state-owned radio stations. Since the independent media has not had a chance to interview him for many years, these weekly radio interviews are the only opportunity to find out what the leader of the country thinks about current events, how he sees his opponents and any issues at hand. Here's a brief summary of the most important points he touched on this morning.
J.D. Vance secured Ohio’s Republican US Senate nomination Tuesday not by impressing the voters of Ohio but by winning the favor of one man. Vance was Donald Trump’s candidate, which is all that matters anymore in a Republican Party where Trump’s wish is the electorate’s command.
The party has so far made a net gain of 75, gaining seats from Labour and Conservatives in areas as far ranging as Burnley, Hastings, Hackney, Somerset, Plymouth and South Tyneside. The party also saw an historic eight wins in Wales including in Newport, Monmouthshire and Neath Port Talbot.
Sen. Joe Manchin voted against his own party's climate action proposal once again this week, joining the Republicans in their effort to reroute billions of dollars from a climate fund to develop weapons systems at the Pentagon.
The West Virginia right-wing Democrat was the only member of his party to vote for a motion filed by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) to gut the Green Climate Authorization Act, a bill introduced last year by Rep. Adriano Espaillat (D-N.Y.).
Janine Jackson interviewed Copwatch Media‘s Josmar Trujillo about hyper-policing for the April 29, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
More disruptively for the world at large, China is growing more willing to adopt Russian arguments about how to organise a global security order. On April 21st Mr Xi presented a new “Global Security Initiative” to the Boao Forum for Asia, a Chinese gathering of bigwigs. Mr Xi’s initiative is dense, brow-furrowing stuff. He calls for a security order that is “common, comprehensive, co-operative and sustainable” and declares humanity “an indivisible security community”. This slab of party-speak is sprinkled with bromides about respecting sovereignty and territorial integrity that sound rich coming from a friend of Mr Putin’s.
Mr Xi’s speech is a code. Governments from Europe to Japan and Australia should take it seriously, for it is China’s latest bid to delegitimise the American-led defence alliances and treaties that have guaranteed their security for decades. Much of Mr Xi’s new initiative builds on “Asia for the Asians” arguments that China has promoted in its home region for years. In a commentary on his boss’s Global Security Initiative, China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, traced the lineage of common, comprehensive, co-operative and sustainable security back to a “New Asian Security Concept” offered by Mr Xi in 2014 to the Conference on Interaction and Confidence-Building Measures in Asia (CICA), a multinational forum.
Speaking at the Free State Foundation’s Annual Policy Conference, Carr stated that he is “very glad to hear” of Musk’s purchase but that speech reform online should not depend upon trusting a billionaire owner and thus Section 230 reform should still take place.
Pratasevich was the editor of Nexta, a popular channel on the Telegram messaging app that was a key factor in organizing protests in Belarus after President Alexander Lukashenko won a disputed sixth term in August 2020.
Sapega ran another Telegram channel that published the personal data of civil servants and military personnel who took part in mass repressions of the protests.
Western countries denounced the plane diversion as tantamount to air piracy by Belarus. The European Union banned Belarusian airlines from its air space and airports as part of sanctions against the country.
In a series of follow-up tweets, Dillon explained that the account would be restored in 12 hours, but that the countdown won't begin until the tweet was deleted, which he refused to do. On Monday morning, Dillon further added while the offending tweet remains live, The Babylon Bee is unable to post anything new.
"We're not deleting anything. Truth is not hate speech. If the cost of telling the truth is the loss of our Twitter account, then so be it," Dillon tweeted.
After images of Kniazev, a stage name, went viral on Vietnamese social media on Monday, multiple Vietnamese media organizations reported on Tuesday that Lam Dong police arrested Kniazev because of the sign. Protests of any kind in one-party Communist Vietnam, an ally of Moscow, are rare and quickly snuffed out.
When Elon Musk announced his bid to buy Twitter last month, he said he wanted to make the social network a beacon for free speech. But as Musk scrambles to pull together funding for the $44 billion deal, the billionaire is also planning to accept financing for the deal from two countries that have historically restricted freedom of speech: Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
On Thursday, an SEC filing revealed new financiers for Musk’s takeover plan, which include Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal and Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund. Both countries impose harsh censorship to quash dissent: A Qatari law states that spreading “false or malicious news” can land you in prison for five years, while in Saudi Arabia, critics of the government have faced arrest and even murder. Saudi Arabia ranks number 166 out of 180 on the World Press Freedom Index, while Qatar ranks number 119, according to Reporters Without Borders.
Audio used by permission of event organizers and parents of the minors.
Jonathan Greenblatt, the ADL's CEO, in a speech just given to the ADL Virtual Leadership Summit, proclaims, among many other falsehoods, that anti-Zionism is "predicated on the negation of another people" and devotes considerable time to attacking organizations that are committed to Palestinian justice.€ His speech was grounded in extreme defamation, in a blatant distortion of history, and in a breath-taking lack of any moral compass.
It once seemed that Jonathan Greenblatt, whatever his other shortcomings, knew his right foot from his left. Now, the Anti-Defamation League CEO appears to have become disoriented.
This one is just absolutely bizarre. The Attorneys General of Missouri and Louisiana are now suing President Joe Biden and a whole bunch of his administration, including press secretary Jen Psaki, Dr. Anthony Fauci, DHS boss Alejandro Mayorkas, and newly appointed Disinfo czar Nina Jankowicz, in a nearly incomprehensible complaint that the Biden administration forced social media sites to take down information, mostly before it was in office. Also, apparently Section 230 is both bad and the Biden support for repealing it violates the 1st Amendment. Or something. It really does not make much sense at all.
The mother of Daunte Wright, who was fatally shot by a suburban Minneapolis police officer, says was injured while she was briefly detained by one of the same department’s officers after she stopped to record an arrest of a person during a traffic stop
Dr. Werner Spitz performed a separate autopsy at the request of the family and announced the findings on April 19. He, too, said a shot to the head killed Lyoya. He believes the gun was pressed against the head.
“It's highly significant that Dr. Steve Cohle found the identical findings of Dr. Spitz,” said Lyoya family attorney Ven Johnson, referring to the county medical examiner.
Starbucks' union-busting management garnered little public sympathy Friday after it complained in a letter to the White House that labor organizers—including Laura Garza of Starbucks Workers United—were invited to meet with President Joe Biden but official company "representatives" weren't.
"We are deeply concerned that Workers United, which is actively engaged in collective bargaining with us and trying to organize all our stores and our +240,000 partners (employees), was invited to the meeting while not inviting official Starbucks representatives to discuss our view on the matter," A.J. Jones, senior vice president of global communications and public affairs at Starbucks, wrote in a letter to Steve Ricchetti, counselor to the president.
Putting cops in schools is a terrible idea. It tends to encourage school administrators to abdicate their disciplinary duties and allow cops to decide which school policy violations should be treated as criminal acts.
Less than two days after Israel's highest court upheld orders for what anti-apartheid campaigners called the "ethnic cleansing" of eight Palestinian hamlets in the West Bank, Israeli authorities on Friday announced the advancement of nearly 4,000 new Jewish-only settlement homes in the illegally occupied territory.
"It is an indicator that Israel is violating international law with impunity and without accountability, and it shows that the international community is using double standards."
Passover is a perfect example of this sequence.
Always a favorite of mine, this spring holiday passed a few weeks ago. Across the country, Jewish families gathered to commemorate the story of the Jews’ escape from slavery in Egypt with beautiful food and well-worn prayers and songs. Chanting rapid-fire rounds of “Chad Gadya” with my family never gets old.
The justice system loves a stacked deck. Well, certainly the prosecutorial side loves it. Courts are, at best, ambivalent. Occasionally, this behavior gets called out.
As the Supreme Court is poised to strike down Roe v. Wade, we speak with law professor Michele Goodwin, who has written extensively about how the criminalization of abortion polices motherhood. She discusses how on the eve of the court’s oral arguments in the Dobbs case in November, she wrote about how an abortion saved her life. She describes how the U.S. has historically endangered and denied essential health services to Black and Brown women, and calls new abortion restrictions “the new Jane Crow,” warning that they will further criminalize reproductive health and encourage medical professionals to breach their patients’ confidentiallity and report self-administered abortions to law enforcement.
As the U.S. Supreme Court's right-wing majority appears poised to overturn landmark decisions protecting reproductive rights and more, experts are warning that the GOP's war on abortion will lead to interstate legal battles that threaten to "tear America apart," as New York Times opinion columnist Michelle Goldberg put it on Friday.
"We will have two wildly different abortion regimes in this country."
The U.S. Supreme Court building in Washington, DC is truly august, its Corinthian columns and ornate pediments reminiscent of ancient Rome's Temple of Mars Ultor, erected by Emperor Augustus to commemorate Mars, the god of war, in his role as avenger. Augustus employed the imperial design to convey that a new order had arrived after quelling a civil war that had consumed the region for fifty years. Two thousand years later, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito has unleashed his own form of vengeance, from within the Supreme Court's columned walls, revealed in a draft opinion he authored, leaked by a person or persons not yet publicly known then published by Politico.
A group of abortion providers who had just flown home to California from a conference with colleagues huddled together in the airport to process the news. In Washington, D.C., reproductive justice activist Renee Bracey Sherman cried on the metro. On a farm in Illinois where she raises goats while coordinating travel for abortion patients in the region, Alison Dreith took half a Xanax and went to bed, understanding that she needed to be rested for the next day—for the next decade.
Meanwhile also in Seattle on April 21, baristas struck at the Chinatown-International District store. Earlier that month, employees at two other Starbucks walked out. At April’s end, workers voted to unionize stores in Wisconsin and North Carolina. So with pickets popping up all over the place, workers on strike, and vociferous employee complaints about being overworked, underpaid and shocking stories of threats and retaliation against union leaders, Starbucks’ corporate image took a dive lately, to say the least. The corporation’s founder, Howard Schultz, didn’t help matters by proclaiming in early April that his companies were being “assaulted” by unions.
According to Vice News, Schultz issued this memorable lament “the very same day the company fired a union organizer at a store in Arizona.” In fact, it has fired quite a few organizers across the nation and quite shamelessly plays dirty. Remember that Schultz was the guy heading Hillary Clinton’s 2016 list to lead the labor department, if she ascended to the white house. Good to know, in case you still harbored the delusion that the Clintons are in any way, or ever were, friendly to unions.
More than half a dozen managers at Amazon's JFK8 fulfillment center in Staten Island were abruptly fired Thursday, a month after workers at the warehouse made history by overwhelmingly voting in favor of unionizing.
"Hard to interpret this as anything other than a message to other Amazon managers: don't let your workers unionize."
Prosecutors have an obligation to turn over evidence — exculpatory or otherwise — to criminal defendants. They often don’t. In rare cases, this refusal to play by the rules results in dismissals or sanctions. But, for the most part, they tend to get away with it, allowing the government to stack the prosecutorial deck in its favor to obtain easy, illegitimately obtained wins.
There has been a trend over the past decade or so in which a very specific part of America’s political spectrum appears to be simultaneously advocating for “free speech” in ways that have nothing to do with the American system while also attacking all kinds of other speech and insisting that speech not happen. Hypocrisy isn’t something new to American politics, of course, but the levels at which this is occurring are starting to get damned ridiculous. For example, the phrase “stick to sports” has entered into the popular lexicon. It existed prior to recent times, of course, dating back at least as far as Muhammad Ali, Jackie Robinson, and Billie Jean King. But the reactions to figures such as Colin Kaepernick and LeBron James, who was told by one cable news anchor to “shut up and dribble,” has taken a tone that just doesn’t fit with modernity.
At Bloom Trail High School in Chicago’s south suburbs, the student body is diverse: About 60% of the 1,100 students are Black or multiracial. Another 27% are Latino. And 12% are white.
But when you look at the group of students who get ticketed for misbehavior at school, the diversity vanishes.
My parents came to this country from India nearly 60 years ago. Like countless other immigrants, they came seeking freedom, economic opportunity, and the American Dream for themselves and their children.
The American Dream means a lot of different things. But for older Americans, it looks something like having financial security, the ability to retire at 65, and an advanced health care plan.
The stunning leak of Justice Alito’s draft ruling overturning Roe v. Wade has, in dramatic fashion, pushed California and its Western neighbors to the fore of the movement to protect access to abortion. Over the past week, Governor Newsom has vowed to both codify the right to an abortion in the state’s Constitution and make the state, which has had legal abortions since 1967, something of a sanctuary for those from other parts of the country seeking abortions.
So as a human with reproductive organs, the leaked draft of a Supreme Court opinion overruling€ Roe v. Wade€ — and the constitutional right to abortion — is obviously personal to me. But it’s personal for another reason, too.
I come from a line of pro-choice advocates. My late grandmother, Eileen Alperstein, was on the board of a Planned Parenthood chapter. She fought to get an ad placed in€ The New York Times€ to shine a light on the issue, well before€ Roe€ v. Wade€ was settled.
As always, I’ll refrain from sharing my own opinions on abortion as such. I’m not interested in convincing anyone of anything there, if for no other reason than that I’m not firmly convinced myself.
I won’t refrain from sharing my opinions on poor arguments, though. Both in general and on abortion specifically, they’re quite possibly my top pet peeve.€ And the worst argument I’m hearing right now is … the envelope, please …
Ironically, while in the process of trashing women’s privacy rights, the Supreme Court is miffed that its privacy rights were violated.
In any event, the good news is, that the leaked proposed opinion will likely not be the final opinion.€ The bad news, however, is that whatever the final opinion looks like, the Court’s conservative majority will probably overturn Roe, leaving decisions on abortion to be made by each state.
The subject matter was positively incendiary: the potential overturning and judicial eradication of Roe v Wade, a 1973 decision which has generated a literature both for and against its merits of herculean proportions.€ In its draft form, Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health entertains a full-throated attack on the decision that had legalised abortion via constitutional fiat, even if the original grounds centred on privacy.
Such an inner illumination of processes was never the intention of the US Supreme Court.€ For over two centuries, it had not seen the like of this.€ For the most part, whatever their persuasion, the justices have kept religiously mum on the issue of a case till final publication.€ In an address to the American Constitution Society, given on June 15, 2012, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was not giving anything away to the audience about what fate awaited the Affordable Care Act.€ The justices had originally voted on the matter on March 30.€ By mid-June, opinions had already been drafted and circulated in the judicial conclave.€ “Those who know don’t talk,” teased Ginsburg. “And those who talk don’t know.”
When Politico (5/2/22) published a leaked draft Supreme Court opinion that would, if handed down by the Court, overturn Roe v. Wade and undermine the foundation for many privacy rights enjoyed by Americans today, it was a headline story across US news outlets. But in the flood of coverage, too many elite media outlets focused on the leak itself and treated the issue as a political football, rather than centering the real-world implications the opinion would have for everyday people.
The leaked majority opinion in Dobbs overturning€ Roe v. Wade is troubling on many fronts—the least of which is the leak of which so many are focusing on.€ The first problem is of course what it does—it is the first time in American history the Supreme Court overturned one of its own constitutional precedents in order to take away rights.€ In my research, the Supreme Court has only overturned about 145 of its own constitutional precedents over time.€ Notably, Brown v. the Board of Education declaring segregation unconstitutional€ overturned Plessy v Ferguson’s “separate but equal doctrine.”€ Lawrence v. Texas reversed Bowers v Hardwick which ruled that gays and lesbians have no right to sexual privacy.
Dred Scott was a horrible decision, but it did not create less rights for African-Americans; they already had none and the decision simply made that point clear. Dred Scott perhaps correctly reflected the intent of the constitutional framers, many of whom in fact were slave owners. Our hero worship of the framers often ignores this fact or that as many have argued, the Constitution was a document engulfed by slavery and racism and as Thurgood Marshall once pointed out, the opening words of it—We the people—hardly was inclusive.
When U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, in a draft opinion obtained and published this week by Politico, detailed his justifications for overturning Roe v. Wade, he invoked a surprising name given the case’s subject. In writing about abortion, a matter inextricably tied to a woman’s control over her body, Alito chose to quote from Sir Matthew Hale, a 17th-century English jurist whose writings and reasonings have caused enduring damage to women for hundreds of years.
The so-called marital rape exemption — the legal notion that a married woman cannot be raped by her husband — traces to Hale. So does a long-used instruction to jurors to be skeptical of reports of rape. So, in a way, do the infamous Salem witch trials, in which women (and some men) were hanged on or near Gallows Hill.
+ Overturning€ Roe is just the first thread pulled in what will be a much greater unraveling, which will take place over the next decade.
+€ Alito’s draft opinion in Dobbs. v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which wipes away a fundamental right to bodily autonomy and sets the groundwork for abolishing dozens of other personal rights, also exposes how fraudulent and cynical the GOP rhetoric about individual liberty has become, from vaccines to guns. We’re seeing a deeply reactionary ideological agenda come to fruition and the Alito Court (I guess we should call it that now) is going to be the wrecking ball that smashes any legal impediments to its completion. The fact that it has taken place even as the rightwing has repeatedly lost the popular vote in national elections shows how broken our political system is and how weak–often complicit–the opposition and often majority party has been for the last 50 years. Things are going to get much worse before they get better, if–given the runaway pace of climate change–they get better…
It’s all about politics, not honest debate about policy, as the minority Republican Party with the support of conservative judges its presidents nominated erodes more American freedoms, little by little – everything from limiting voting rights to permitting what can be taught and read in schools and libraries.
They’re conducting a war on privacy with conservative judges at the spearhead, the Constitution be damned. It’s a living document, not some tombstone in America’s backyard. Proof? The 27 amendments of 33 passed by Congress and sent to the states for ratification.
Supporters of Federal Communications Commission nominee Gigi Sohn and other critics of the telecommunications industry's efforts to thwart her U.S. Senate confirmation this week called out not only those behind the smear campaign but also Democratic leaders.
"Dem leadership is nowhere to be found defending their nominee."
We’d already noted how telecom and media giants are engaged in a last ditch attempt over the next few weeks to derail Biden’s nomination to the FCC, Gigi Sohn. Sohn is widely admired by folks on both sides of the aisle, and is eminently qualified on stuff like expanding access to affordable broadband, media consolidation, consumer protection, privacy, and media diversity.
Our latest report details the Internet landscape in Bulgaria, Moldova and Romania, giving an overview of the current level of development and capacity for future growth. We examine the countries' major market players, Internet number resource holdings and transfers, IPv6 readiness, the relationship between different networks in the countries, their international connectivity to the global Internet, access to K-root, traffic paths and routing security.
By subscribing to public cloud offerings, an organization can focus on its core business and not worry about the physical infrastructure or traditional skillset of support staff. Outsourcing to cloud operators who maintain the platform means your customers/employees/partners can access services without your company needing to host on physical premises. However, it is changing the traditional technical culture of organizations, with trained and skilled resources declining in enterprise organizations.
Lagrange v1.13.3 supports spartan!
The Massachusetts-based pharmaceutical giant Moderna disclosed in a financial filing this week that it received another $300 million in U.S. government funding for coronavirus vaccine development in March even as the company hoarded its technology from the world—and attempted to undermine a critical vaccine project in South Africa.
"The corporation must give it back by sharing the tech with others and make this vaccine available to everyone, everywhere."
ISPs and other companies — or the defendants — could still contest the order. But it’s not clear the biggest players are going to. AT&T declined to comment on whether it would dispute the decision, and Verizon didn’t respond to a request for comment. (Charter didn’t immediately respond to a more recently made request.) Comcast also declined to say whether it would push back on the injunction but offered slightly more detail. “We only recently learned about it and the implications and are still examining it,” said spokesperson Sena Fitzmaurice.
Welcome to episode 28 of Open Culture VOICES! VOICES is a vlog series of short interviews with open GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) experts from around the world. The Open Culture Program at Creative Commons aims to promote better sharing of cultural heritage in GLAMs collections. With Open Culture VOICES, we’re thrilled to bring you various perspectives from dozens of experts speaking in many different languages on what it’s like to open up heritage content online. In this episode, we hear from Mariana Ziku, an art historian and curator with specialization in digital humanities. Her research focuses on intangible, audiovisual and documentary heritage. Mariana is a co-founder and programme curator of the Biennale of Western Balkans, where she works on promoting intangible and natural heritage through art, technology and open knowledge.
Welcome to episode 27 of Open Culture VOICES! VOICES is a vlog series of short interviews with open GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) experts from around the world. The Open Culture Program at Creative Commons aims to promote better sharing of cultural heritage in GLAMs collections. With Open Culture VOICES, we’re thrilled to bring you various perspectives from dozens of experts speaking in many different languages on what it’s like to open up heritage content online. In this episode, Simon Tanner, Professor of Digital Cultural Heritage at King’s College London, joins us to share his insights on open GLAM. Simon is a digital humanities scholar with a broad interest in cross-disciplinary thinking and collaborative approaches that reflect a fascination with interactions between memory institution collections (libraries, museums, archives, media and publishing) and the digital domain. As an information professional, consultant, digitization expert and academic, he helps major cultural institutions across the world transform their impact, collections and online presence.€
The U.S. Copyright Office has launched a public consultation to evaluate whether it's wise to make certain technical protection measures mandatory under the DMCA. The Office hopes to hear all relevant stakeholders and the public at large in what may become a de facto review of the recently introduced SMART Copyright Act.
Major entertainment industry groups representing film studios, record labels, videogame developers and publishers have signed a deal with internet service providers in Sweden to simplify the blocking of pirate sites. The signatories will also work together to help form clear legislation that will pave the way for a streamlined administrative site-blocking regime.
There are all sorts of silly and made up reasons to be mad at Disney, but those shouldn’t take away from the many legitimate ways in which Disney is a terrible, awful company. For years, it was one of the most aggressive in pushing for ever expanded copyrights, and was one of the chief lobbyists pushing to extend copyright in all sorts of directions. To be honest, over the last two decades, some of the other big Hollywood/media companies have gotten even more aggressive than Disney, but Disney has certainly remained aggressively awful.
