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● Links 30/03/2022: Ubuntu MATE 22.04

Posted in News Roundup at 7:59 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxDistributionsDevices/EmbeddedFree Software/Open SourceLeftovers

GNU/Linux

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ A guide for developers on how to convert XML files to JSON

• Modern-day technology is bringing innovation and improvements to present responsive solutions in development. In the process, open data sharing solely relied on the XML programming language. Over time, various programming languages have emerged like XML,

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

=> ↺ 33 Excellent KDE Plasma Widgets (Updated 2022)

•  After desktop hopping for many years, most of our crew prefer KDE Plasma 5. It’s a lightweight (yes modern versions are lightweight) and responsive desktop which is full-featured and beguiling to the eye. In our opinion, one of the aspects that stands KDE Plasma head and shoulders above its desktop peers is extensibility. Plasma lets you configure the desktop to your specific preferences.

• KDE Plasma widgets (also known as plasmoids) are a smart way of customizing the desktop. There are an abundance of widgets available that act like building blocks, constructing a desktop that’s perfect for your needs and requirements. We’ve tried the vast majority of KDE Plasma widgets.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

=> ↺ ’Extension Manager’ GNOME App Adds New Features, New Icon

•  Version 0.3 of this one-stop-shop for finding, installing, configuring, updating, and removing GNOME extensions on GNOME Shell intros a set of changes that, together, bolster the app’s capabilities.

• First up, the app gains an all-new, GNOME-friendly icon…

• Plus, this version of the app let you to read user reviews and see star ratings on extension listing pages — a fast and effective way to discover if an extension is as good as its blurb suggests…

Distributions

IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

=> ↺ AlmaLinux vs Rocky Linux: Which One to Choose?

•  Both AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux emerged in response to Red Hat’s December 8, 2020 announcement stating that it will discontinue CentOS based on RedHat releases.

• First and foremost, open source is all about making sure users have a choice. AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux are identical RHEL-rebuilds, just like CentOS was. So, in terms of performance, they should be the same.

• Both distros are prime candidates for the role of CentOS replacements. From a technical perspective, they both aim to be 1:1 compatible forks of RHEL. Therefore, the choice between these two is mostly made for ideological reasons.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

=> ↺ Ubuntu MATE 22.04 Release Notes

•  Ubuntu MATE 22.04 is the culmination of 2 years of continual improvement to Ubuntu and MATE Desktop. As is tradition, the LTS development cycle has a keen focus on eliminating paper cuts but we’ve jammed in some new features and a fresh coat of paint too The following is a summary of what’s new since Ubuntu MATE 21.10 and some reminders of how we got here from 20.04. Read on to learn more

• I’d like to extend my sincere thanks to everyone who has played an active role in improving Ubuntu MATE for this LTS release From reporting bugs, submitting translations, providing patches, contributing to our crowd funding, developing new features, creating artwork, offering community support, actively testing and providing QA feedback to writing documentation or creating this fabulous website. Thank you! Thank you all for getting out there and making a difference!

Devices/Embedded

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

=> ↺ Samsung Galaxy A Quantum is receiving Android 12 update – GSMArena.com news

=> ↺ T-Mobile, Verizon, Sprint & AT&T Android 12 update tracker: Eligible…

=> ↺ Our Xiaomi 12 video review will run you through the new Android in 5 minutes | TechRadar

=> ↺ Galaxy A71 5G is now getting Android 12 and One UI 4.1 update – SamMobile

=> ↺ HMD Global Launches Android 12 Update for Nokia XR20 – Phandroid

=> ↺ Google building Bluetooth tracker detection into Android – 9to5Google

=> ↺ Google appears to be adding Bluetooth tracker detection to Android

=> ↺ The Best Android Games To Play In 2022

=> ↺ 7 Best Crypto Wallets For Android

=> ↺ How Apps Influence Health Choices – Best Android Apps To Improve Your Wellbeing

=> ↺ Android tablets? Chromebook tablets? How Google thinks both can thrive | Computerworld

=> ↺ Samsung on Android updates: ‘Continuous OS upgrades is at the centre of what a consumer demands’ | Technology News,The Indian Express

=> ↺ Older Android phones are finally dropping permissions for barely-used apps

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Web Browsers

Mozilla

=> ↺ An Early Look at New Features in Thunderbird 102

•  You can’t try them yet, but they will debut later this year as part of the Thunderbird 102 release. This update will be the next major release of the suite following last Augusts’s (rather sizeable) Thunderbird 91 release (minor releases have been issued since then).

• In a Twitter thread — communication form du jour these days — the Thunderbird team showcase a bunch of features coming to Thunderbird 102. These include a new spaces toolbar, a brand new address book, and initial out-of-the-box support for Matrix, the decentralised chat protocol.

• Thunderbird’s proposed ‘spaces toolbar’ could have the biggest impact in use, particularly for those who use a lot of what Thunderbird has to offer. The team say the new toolbar, pictured to the left in the screenshot below offers an “easy, convenient way to move between different activities in the application”.

=> ↺ Thunderbird 102 is Getting Several Exciting New Features! Here Are 7 of Them

• Thunderbird is undoubtedly one of the best email clients for Linux.

• It is an open-source offering from Mozilla Foundation and a reliable email client with robust features.

• With the recent updates, it has received some visual improvements along with feature additions.

Leftovers

=> ↺ Landscapes of the Mind

• “What I Saw,” an exhibition of drawings by Joseph E. Yoakum at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, is a homecoming of sorts. His work’s first appearance in the city was in a small group show at the same museum in 1971. That show, mounted in a members-only area of the museum, featured mostly works on paper by, among others, then-up-and-coming conceptual artists such as Iain Baxter, Mel Bochner, and Dan Graham, as well as a print portfolio by the renowned draftsman Saul Steinberg (best known for his New Yorker cartoons), and drawings by the abstract painters Michael Venezia and Jack Whitten. And then there was, as the MoMA press release of that day called him, “Joseph Yoakum, an 80-year-old American Indian,” who “shows drawings of landscapes based on the memories of his trip around the world.” Yoakum was the only one among the show’s 13 artists whose age or ethnicity was mentioned, and the description of him as Native came from his own unverifiable self-description, according to which he was a Navajo (pronounced, by him, “Nava-Joe”).

=> ↺ who you calling boring, punk?

• Now is a great time for the web! I’ve seen more interesting projects turn up in the last year than I can count, and I feel like we’re just getting started. Weblogs, community sites, real world experiments. RSS, XML, web services. And more and more.

=> ↺ Jim Carrey Slams ‘Spineless’ Oscars Audience for Will Smith Standing Ovation: ‘I Was Sickened’

• Carrey said Smith “should’ve been” escorted out of the Oscars ceremony after he slapped Rock. King noted that Chris Rock declined to file a police report about the incident, but Carrey claimed that was only because the comedian “didn’t want the hassle.”

Science

=> ↺ Climate Research Shouldn’t Be Funded by Fossil Fuel Companies

• As student organizers, we’ve seen the power of divestment come to bear by helping secure historic commitments from our universities—including the world’s richest school, Harvard—to sever their endowments from the companies driving climate breakdown.

=> ↺ Lack of Research on Rise of Suicides Among Asian American Youth – Validated Independent News

• To attest to the lack of research, at present only one study, published in the early 2000s, examines Asian American mental health. Since this data was collected, the Asian American population has grown by 72 percent. Turning a blind eye to suicide among Asian Americans could lead to an endemic in a rapidly growing community that has limited resources for countering suicidal behavior.  Moreover, a 2018 study published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health found a positive correlation between suicidal behavior and specific countries or regions of origin. This study specifically noted the risks for young women of South Asian origin. This example addresses the importance of intersectional considerations, for the experiences of a South Asian woman could differ drastically from that of an East Asian woman or those of an Asian man. To the knowledge of the researchers, “this is the first study providing a literature overview on suicidal behaviour and specific risk factors both in migrants and ethnic minorities”— once again supporting the need for more data collection.

Hardware

=> ↺ Building A DIY Flight Yoke For Flight Simulator

• Flight yokes are key to getting an authentic experience when playing a flight simulator, but [Michel Rechtin] didn’t want to pay big money for a commercially-available solution. He ended up building a design using a lot of parts he had laying around, which saved money and worked out great.

=> ↺ Fifty Motored Paraglider Partly Flies, Partly Glides

• If there’s one thing you can count on [Peter Sripol] for, it’s for defining the the aviation category of “Don’t Try This At Home.” In the video below the break, [Peter] displays his latest terror of the skies: A powered paraglider backpack that has fifty electric motors. Does it fly? Yes. Was it a success? Eh… mostly.

=> ↺ Cute Oscilloscope Uses LEDs For Display

• Oscilloscopes were once commonly called CROs, for the fact that they relied on cathode ray tubes for display. Since then, technology has moved quickly, and oscilloscopes these days almost entirely rely on modern screens like LCDs. However, [lonesoulsurfer] went a different route with this fun DIY build, creating an oscilloscope with a low-resolution LED display.

=> ↺ You Can Turn Soft Drink Bottles Into Handy Solar Lamps

• Solar lights are a popular garden decoration. Of course, they’re available cheaply from most hardware and garden stores, but if you’re more of the DIY type, you might like to build your own. [opengreenenergy] has done just that, using recycled materials for a cheap and simple design.

=> ↺ Non-Contact Probe Works Better With A Little More Complexity

• Non-contact voltage probes have been around a while and some test equipment now has them built-in. This is one of those things that you probably don’t think about much, but surely it isn’t that hard to detect AC voltage. Turns out there are a lot of circuits floating around that can do it and [nsievers51] tried a bunch. Many didn’t work very well, but the best used a 4069 CMOS hex inverter. A dollar store flashlight provided power, a case, and an LED and the result was a good-looking and effective probe.

=> ↺ Converting Your Bike To Electric: Why You Should, And When You Shouldn’t

• A decade ago I was lucky enough to work for an employer that offered a bicycle loan scheme to its employees, and I took the opportunity to spend on a Brompton folding bike. This London-made machine is probably one of the more efficiently folding cycles on the market, and has the useful feature of being practical for longer journeys rather than just a quick run from the train. A 3-speed hub gearbox is fine for unhurried touring, but sadly my little folder has always been a bit of a pain on the hills. Thus around the start of the pandemic I splashed out again and bought a Swytch electric upgrade kit for it, and after a few logistical and life upheavals I’ve finally fitted it to the bike. I’ve ridden a few electric bikes but never had my own, so it’s time to sit down and analyse the experience. Is an electric bike something you should have, or not?

=> ↺ LED Kaleidoscope Uses Induction Power Magic

• The kaleidoscope was first invented back in the early 1800s, with the curio known for showing compelling psychedelic patterns as light passes through colored glass and is reflected by mirrors in a tube. [Debra] of Geek Mom Projects recently gave the classic toy a thoroughly modern twist with her own build. (Thread Reader Link).

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

=> ↺ Texans Have Been Traveling to Oklahoma for Abortions, But a New Ban Looms There

=> ↺ Covid-19 Coverage for the Uninsured Is Ending

• At the stroke of midnight last Tuesday, the US government stopped covering the cost of Covid-19 testing and treatment for the uninsured. Funding for the Covid-19 Uninsured Program, established at the outset of the pandemic, had run dry, and Congress had failed to replenish it. The uninsured can now be subject to ruinous medical bills after a Covid-19 hospitalization, a threat that will surely drive some to avoid seeking care; notably, one testing company has said it plans to charge uninsured patients $125 per Covid-19 test, a fine that will deter testing and hence disease control efforts. In two weeks, Covid-19 vaccine administration for the uninsured will also no longer be reimbursable, likely reducing timely access to vaccination. With yet another pandemic wave looming on the horizon, the evaporation of support for a disadvantaged population at elevated risk of Covid-19 could worsen the spread and impact of this virus.

=> ↺ Doctor fired from ER warns about effect of for-profit firms on U.S. health care

• Patients seeking emergency treatment at the busy Overland Park Regional Medical Center in Kansas near Kansas City, Missouri, didn’t know their safety was potentially at risk. But the medical director of the emergency department saw the danger in 2012 and for years urged his bosses to address it by adding staff members.

• Then he was fired.

=> ↺ How switching to EVs would improve health in the US

• A major shift to electric vehicles and a clean power grid in the US could save tens of thousands of lives over the next few decades, according to a new report by the American Lung Association.

• The drop in pollution from tailpipes and power plants would prevent up to 110,000 premature deaths by 2050, the report projects. It would also avoid 2.78 million asthma attacks and 13.4 million lost workdays. All in all, that would amount to $1.2 trillion in public health benefits.

Integrity/Availability

Proprietary

=> ↺ Hackers Gaining Power of Subpoena Via Fake “Emergency Data Requests”

• There is a terrifying and highly effective “method” that criminal hackers are now using to harvest sensitive customer data from Internet service providers, phone companies and social media firms. It involves compromising email accounts and websites tied to police departments and government agencies, and then sending unauthorized demands for subscriber data while claiming the information being requested can’t wait for a court order because it relates to an urgent matter of life and death.

=> ↺ The Latest Moral Panic Focuses On Discord

• Techno moral panics are back in fashion, it seems. There have been multiple (misleading) stories about “kids and social media“, and then there are always attempts to dive into specific “new” services. Last fall, it was all about the kids and their TikTok challenges. But, Tiktok is so last year. So now CNN is back again, and this time the target of its moral panic is Discord. It has a whole scary article about “the dark side of Discord for teens.”

=> ↺ How Your Shadow Credit Score Could Decide Whether You Get an Apartment

• Kim Fuller needed to move. Her 83-year-old mom was struggling to get around the narrow, three-story row house they shared in Baltimore. Heart problems made climbing the stairs too arduous, cutting the older woman off from the kitchen where she’d loved to cook.

• Fuller, 57, found an apartment complex 3 miles away that billed itself as “luxury living” for people 55 and older, and she applied for a unit in early 2021. She figured she’d be approved: Her salary as a mental health services coordinator for the state of Maryland met the income requirements. She’d never been evicted and had brought her credit score up to 632 — which is considered fair — after a health crisis had forced her to file for bankruptcy eight years earlier.

=> ↺ A [intruder] stole $625 million from the blockchain behind NFT game Axie Infinity

• Roughly $625 million worth of cryptocurrency has been stolen from Ronin, the blockchain underlying popular crypto game Axie Infinity. Ronin and Axie Infinity operator Sky Mavis revealed the breach on Tuesday and froze transactions on the Ronin bridge, which allows depositing and withdrawing funds from the company’s blockchain.

=> ↺ FTC Sues to Stop “Deceptive” TurboTax “Free” Ad Campaign

• With millions of Americans scrambling to file their taxes in the next few weeks, the Federal Trade Commission asked a federal court late Monday to intervene to stop Intuit from claiming in ads that Americans can file for “free” using the company’s TurboTax software.

• The FTC began investigating TurboTax in 2019 in response to ProPublica stories describing how users had been lured into using the software with promises of free filing, only to discover later they had to pay fees to finish the process.

=> ↺ FTC sues Intuit over TurboTax ‘free’ filing ad campaign

• The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) on Tuesday announced it was suing Intuit, the owner of TurboTax, for allegedly deceiving consumers with “bogus” advertisements pitching free tax filings that millions of Americans do not qualify for.

• The FTC is also asking a federal court to immediately halt “deceptive advertising” immediately, the agency said in a statement.

• Agents argue that TurboTax has for years published misleading advertisements leading consumers to believe they can file taxes for free through the company, when in actuality, two-thirds of filers in 2020 could not qualify for the free filing.

=> ↺ Ubiquiti files case against security blogger Krebs over ‘false accusations

• Ubiquiti, a maker of wireless LAN and WiFi routers and access points, has filed a case against former Washington Post employee Brian Krebs, who publishes a security blog, alleging that he falsely accused the company of “covering up” a cyberattack by intentionally misleading customers about “a so-called data breach and subsequent blackmail attempt in violation of US federal law and SEC regulations”.

=> ↺ Zoom sacks sec researcher for posting Okta breach report on Twitter

• The Mandiant report was leaked to American website TechCrunch by Demirkapi earlier and the site carried a report based on it.

• iTWire has contacted both Zoom and Demirkapi for comment. Mandiant was recently acquired by Google.

• The Mandiant report showed that the Okta breach had been carried out using credentials stolen from customer service firm Sitel.

• The document showed that Sitel kept its passwords in a spreadsheet which was on its internal network.

Security

Privacy/Surveillance

=> ↺ Podcast Episode: Securing the Internet of Things

=> ↺ a Microsoft booster

• Window Snyder is the founder and CEO of Thistle Technologies. She’s the former Chief Security Officer of Square, Fastly and Mozilla, and she spent five years at Apple focusing on privacy strategy and features for OS X and iOS. Window is also the co-author of Threat Modeling, a manual for security architecture analysis in software.

=> ↺ EU/US Say They’ve Agreed To A New Privacy Shield… That Doesn’t Seem To Deal With Any Of The Problems Of The Old One

• Last week, the EU and the US announced something important that sounds pretty boring — a new “privacy shield” agreement. You should know it’s important, because in the midst of dealing with everything else, including the Russian invasion of Ukraine, President Biden actually made a public statement with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen to announce it (in a speech that also included talk about the Russia/Ukraine situation). Here was the key bit:

=> ↺ How a Few Thoughtless Words about Privacy Led to Huge Political and Economic Headaches for the US and EU political and economic headache

• As the New York Times reported in 2015, Schrems was a 24-year-old student studying at the Santa Clara School of Law in California, when lawyers from Silicon Valley came to talk to students about their companies’ approach to privacy. Schrems was “taken aback” when he heard them say that they didn’t take Europe’s privacy laws very seriously, since companies rarely faced any significant penalties for breaking them.

=> ↺ Ukraine Government Confirms It Is Using Clearview AI To Identify… Dead Russian Soldiers?

• Last week, Reuters broke the quasi-news that Clearview had offered its tech to the war effort in Ukraine. According to statements made solely by the company and its CEO, Hoan Ton-That, the Ukraine government was using Clearview’s 10-billion facial image database (all scraped for free from the open web) to identify dead bodies, point out Russian traitors within their midst, and (somehow) combat misinformation.

=> ↺ EU, US strike preliminary deal to unlock transatlantic data flows

• “I am pleased that we found an agreement in principle on a new framework for transatlantic data flows. This will enable predictable and trustworthy data flows between the EU and U.S., safeguarding privacy and civil liberties,” she said.

• Biden said the framework would allow the EU “to once again authorize transatlantic data flows that help facilitate $7.1 trillion in economic relationships.”

=> ↺ Facebook owner Meta puts plans to build Dutch data centre on ice

• Facebook owner Meta said on Tuesday it was suspending plans to build a giant data centre in the Netherlands, following political opposition.

• The move comes a week after the Dutch Senate passed a motion asking Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s government to “use its powers” to temporarily block construction of the site in the northern town of Zeewolde, 50 km east of Amsterdam.

Defence/Aggression

=> ↺ Ukrainian Climate Activists Say They Don’t Want the US’s Fracked Gas Exports

=> ↺ For the Sake of Humanity, Let’s Abandon American Exceptionalism

• Three years after the end of World War II, diplomat George Kennan outlined the challenges the country faced this way: We have about 50% of the world’s wealth, but only 6.3% of its population. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security.

=> ↺ NATO Notes

• But while I sharply and emotionally oppose the waging of war by Vladimir Putin, or by anyone else, I believe that hypocrisy must also be opposed, above all when it creates an atmosphere further increasing those very dangers I have mentioned.

• Both mass media and social media are flooding us with heart-breaking depictions of death, sorrow and destruction in Ukraine. When they are truthful I cannot object. But nor can I overcome my inherent leaning toward occasional skepticism and suspicion; last week a video on Germany’s public TV channel ZDF showed a Russian tank lumbering through Ukraine – and carrying a big red Soviet flag with hammer and sickle – so obviously outdated. It’s hard to believe this was a mistake.

=> ↺ Ukraine and Russia; Flags and Wars

• For weeks now, I have only glanced once a day at the major media news giants reporting about international news. Every war crime in the book, and Russia has committed many in Ukraine, is laid at Russia’s feet. The morning on which I write a meteorologist at an Albany, New York news station, a meteorologist adept in his reporting of the climate disaster, notes that a building on the Empire State Plaza is now decked out in the colors of Ukraine. The lights from windows of a building there glow in blue and yellow. Why that plaza was never adorned with the colors of Iraq or Yemen is quite understandable since the US and its allies never commit war crimes and when they do, well, the media does the Judeo-Christian thing and turns the other cheek and the violations of the rules of war go on with abandon. Julian Assange attempted to report on some of those violations of the US and he has not seen freedom. Recall the Geneva Convention, the UN charter, and simple human decency? They vanished in the post-World War II race to rule the world by whatever means possible, and mostly by the rule of cash and violence.

• Here, in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts, a road leads steeply up to a spot overlooking a valley and hills rising sharply to the second highest mountain peak in Massachusetts, Mount Everett. It’s a great walk because of the relatively steep angle. These foothills of the Appalachians have become home to countless numbers of second-home owners from the greater New York metropolitan area who have lots of money to spare, some of that money made possible by generous tax cuts to the near wealthy and wealthy. Large homes dot the landscape with much open land surrounding them. Houses can sell for well over $1 million. Reaching the top of the hill a few days ago, it astounded me that one such second home now flew the Ukraine flag with its blue and yellow colors. The US flag flew only feet away.

=> ↺ When Jim Crow greeted black veterans

• There’s a piece of legislation sitting in the House Veterans Affairs Committee — H.R. 5905 — that cuts a swath 75 years deep into American history and attempts to undo the sort of wrong we’re no longer supposed to talk about in the classroom. Introduced in November by Reps. James Clyburn and Seth Moulton, the bill, called the Sgt. Isaac Woodard, Jr. and Sgt. Joseph H. Maddox GI Bill Restoration Act of 2021, would give black veterans of World War II, or . . . uh, their descendants . . . the benefits of the famous GI Bill, signed by FDR in 1944, that they were denied at the time.

• Belated thank you for your service!

=> ↺ Beyond Deterrence

• You might say: odd time to bring this up, when possibly the only thing keeping Mr. Putin in check is the nuclear arsenals of the West, just as the only thing keeping us from giving even more military aid to Ukraine is Russia’s nuclear arsenals.

• The major powers are still firmly wed to the paradigm that it is nuclear deterrence that will prevent catastrophe rather than cause it. They see the risk of fundamental change as unacceptable—even as the potential of nuclear war between Russia and the West may be rising to the Cuban Missile Crisis level.

=> ↺ Time is Ticking: Israel’s Balancing Act in Ukraine is Likely to Backfire

• From the first day of the war, Israel somehow became involved. Top Israeli officials, including the country’s Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, began calling their Ukrainian and Russian counterparts. Initially, some in the media surmised that Israel is concerned because of the large Jewish populations in both Ukraine and Russia.

• However, the headlines quickly moved on, with terms such as ‘Israeli oligarchs’, ‘Jewish oligarchs’, and other combinations of Israel-friendly oligarchs dominating the news. Business interests quickly began replacing the supposed concern over the safety and welfare of ordinary Ukrainians.

=> ↺ Exposing Fake Anti-Imperialism on Ukraine

=> ↺ What is “Unbelievable” Violence?

• The kind of violence I fear perpetuating is one that values some children’s lives, namely those of Ukrainians, at the expense of others, namely the more than 450 million other children around the world who today live in conflict zones deemed to be worth little or no media coverage.

• For weeks now, the ubiquitous mass media has implored us to react – because the events at hand are beyond tragic: more than one hundred Ukrainian children killed and 1.5 million having fled to other countries.  We are shown haunting images: a memorial of empty strollers in Lviv; a Romanian “toy bridge” that connects to the Ukraine.

=> ↺ Who’s Enabling Putin’s Enablers?

=> ↺ Uprising for Black Lives Drove Cancellation of Joint US-Israeli Police Trainings

=> ↺ Is Russia Punishing Kharkiv for Resisting? “Brutal Assault” Reduces Homes & Schools to Rubble

• Ukrainian and Russian officials have begun a new round of peace talks in Istanbul, Turkey. Meanwhile, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres called for a humanitarian ceasefire to end the war, which began when Russia invaded Ukraine 34 days ago. The Guardian’s Emma Graham-Harrison speaks to us from Lviv, just back from reporting in bombed-out Kharkiv, one of Ukraine’s largest cities bordering Russia, where Putin’s army has launched one of its most brutal coordinated attacks. Graham-Harrison describes how the Russian military is “pummeling” civilian neighborhoods because they have not yet been able to take over Kharkiv.

=> ↺ “Plot to Overturn the Election”: Frontline/ProPublica Report Shows How Trump’s Lies Became GOP Dogma

• A federal judge ruled Monday that former President Trump and his lawyer John Eastman “likely” committed multiple felonies in their bid to block certification of Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory in the 2020 election, ordering them to turn over hundreds of emails to the House committee investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol. Despite the court order and numerous revelations coming out of the January 6 committee, some two-thirds of Republican voters believe Biden’s election was illegitimate. “The stolen election myth is animating the Republican base to this day,” says Frontline correspondent A.C. Thompson, whose new documentary, “Plot to Overturn the Election,” premieres today on PBS and tracks how lies about election fraud made their way to the center of American politics. “They believe that there has been a historic fraud that deprived Trump of his right to rule this country.”

=> ↺ Progressive Caucus Says Pay-For Concerns ‘Evaporate’ When It Comes to Pentagon

• The leadership of the Congressional Progressive Caucus voiced opposition to President Joe Biden’s $813 billion military budget request on Monday and lamented that the question so often asked of critical social spending measures—”how will we pay for it?”—is never applied to soaring Pentagon outlays.

• “The Pentagon remains unable to pass an audit, and its history of waste, fraud, and abuse continues to misuse taxpayer dollars.”

=> ↺ New Documentary by Frontline and ProPublica Reveals Origins of the Stolen Election Myth

• Tonight, PBS stations across the U.S. will premiere “Plot to Overturn the Election,” a collaboration between ProPublica and Frontline. (The documentary will also appear at pbs.org/frontline.) “Plot to Overturn the Election” examines the roles and impact of key members of the movement to spread the belief that the 2020 U.S. presidential election was rigged. The documentary also explores how members of the movement helped launch and fund the audit of Arizona’s vote count and how they are working to influence future elections, in part by supporting secretary of state candidates who share their views that America’s voting systems are irredeemably corrupt.

=> ↺ ‘Refusing to kill people isn’t a crime’ The Russian National Guard is firing officers who refuse to join the war in Ukraine.

• On March 24, Pavel Chikov, a lawyer from the international human rights organization Agora, reported that 12 Russian National Guard officers from Krasnodar who were participating in military exercises in Crimea had refused to follow their commander’s orders to join the war in Ukraine. The officers were subsequently fired, though they’ve challenged the decision in court and are seeking to have their employment reinstated. Meduza spoke with Krasnodar-based lawyer Mikhail Benyash, who’s representing the officers in court, about the case and its possible consequences.

=> ↺ Negotiators allegedly poisoned during Russia–Ukraine talks

• A peace negotiator from the Ukrainian delegation, lawmaker Rustem Umerov, was poisoned in early March and temporarily unable to participate in the talks with Russia, investigative outlet Agentstvo reported on Monday, March 28, citing three sources from both parties.

=> ↺ Ukraine’s 10-point plan Journalist Farida Rustamova obtained the full list of Kyiv’s proposals to Moscow on March 29

=> ↺ Biden Wants to Give 163 Times More to US Military Than to Global Pandemic Response

• One day after President Joe Biden asked Congress to approve a record-shattering $813 billion U.S. military budget, public health advocates are lamenting that his Fiscal Year 2023 spending blueprint requests roughly 163 times less funding to help mitigate the Covid-19 pandemic on a global scale.

• “Ending the pandemic is a choice.”

=> ↺ Controlled explosion of World War II bomb in Dudelange

• The road was closed and the army’s bomb disposal unit took the bomb to a nearby field, where it was disposed of in a controlled explosion around 4.45pm.

=> ↺ 8-hour gap in Trump’s Jan. 6 White House phone records

• The gap extends from a little after 11 a.m. to about 7 p.m. on Jan. 6, 2021, and involves White House phone calls, according to one of the people. Both spoke to The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the ongoing investigation.

=> ↺ White House records turned over to House show 7-hour gap in Trump phone log on Jan. 6

• Internal White House records from the day of the attack on the U.S. Capitol that were turned over to the House select committee show a gap in President Donald Trump’s phone logs of seven hours and 37 minutes, including the period when the building was being violently assaulted, according to documents obtained by CBS News’ chief election & campaign correspondent Robert Costa and The Washington Post’s associate editor Bob Woodward.

=> ↺ Two men found guilty of planning a terrorist attack on the Tour de France

• On Monday, the Copenhagen Court found two 23-year-old men guilty of attempted terrorism. A 40-year-old woman facing the same charge was acquitted, but found guilty of other lesser charges.

• The court placed emphasis on the discovery of numerous effects that are used to make bombs and the men’s movements on social media and the internet – which linked them to Islamic State

=> ↺ China to Host Multilateral Talks on Taliban-Ruled Afghanistan

• Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin told reporters Tuesday that Taliban Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov will also attend the two-day meeting. The Indonesian and Qatari foreign ministers will attend as guests, he added.

Environment

=> ↺ Climate Groups Say Planetary Impacts of Crypto Mining Could Be Reduced by 99%

• A simple switch in the way bitcoin is coded could reduce the power-hungry cryptocurrency’s energy use by 99%, dramatically reducing its environmental impact.

• “The ‘currency of the future’ is dragging us into the past when it comes to the urgent battle to save the climate.”

=> ↺ Opinion | We Should Be Fighting the Climate Emergency, Not Another War

• What do a six-year-old in the United States and an 85-year-old in Russia have in common besides being on opposite sides of a war?

=> ↺ Opinion | ‘Blue Carbon’ Sinks: Can the Ocean Save the Planet?

• Marine Technicians Margot Buchbinder and Luis Hernandez unlock a chain-link gate at Point Molate, a natural headland on San Francisco Bay, and drive to the water’s edge along a degraded road, part of what was once a World War II Navy fuel depot. From here, they climb down concrete blocks and boulders in the fading light of dusk.

=> ↺ Opinion | Time to Rethink the ‘Green Revolution’

• A critical new donor-funded evaluation of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) has confirmed what African civil society and faith leaders have claimed: “AGRA did not meet its headline goal of increased incomes and food security for 9 million smallholders.”

=> ↺ The Five Plagues Testing Humanity

• Sophia, the goddess of internationalism, began by proudly pointing to the accomplishments of humanity. “Behold the United Nations,” she said, not for the first time. “See how all the peoples of the world cooperate across borders, languages, and cultures.”

• Nikolai, the god of nationalism, whose followers believed that fortified borders and high walls make good neighbors, scowled. “It’s just a talking shop where I see lots of my people getting all up in each other’s faces.”

=> ↺ Global Food Shortages: How Does Your Garden (or Pantry) Grow?

• Biden says food shortages “are going to be real,” although he seems to see them as an opportunity to increase US grain production and food exports rather than a real threat to Americans’ own well-being.

• After a year of continuing his predecessor’s “trade war” policies, Biden seems to be getting some free trade religion, which is nice, but he may be under-estimating the scope of the problem.

=> ↺ Tornadoes and Climate Change: Why Dixie is the New Tornado Alley

• What causes tornadoes?

• Tornadoes start with thunderstorms. Think of the thunderstorm as the parent of the tornado. When atmospheric conditions favor the development of severe storms, tornadoes can form.

=> ↺ Barry Rosenberg: a Fearless Force for Wild Nature

• I met Barry at one of Ned Fritz’s anti-clearcutting gatherings in the mid-80s. Fritz was a grizzled Texan who hated clearcuts and his annual meetings in the 80s and 90s played a huge role shaping what became the national “Forest Watch” movement of grassroots activists across the country, a movement I played a small role in helping to start, mainly by giving it a name.

• Unlike many of the professional environmentalists and experts-for-hire, Barry knew nearly every acre of the forests he was fighting to protect. He’d walked the mountainsides, surveyed the age and conditions of the forest stands, knew how the creeks ran, where the salmon and trout spawned, and where the grizzlies denned. Barry mapped the forests in his head and beware the Forest Service ranger who presumed to know them from a GIS or computer-generated forest plan.

=> ↺ ‘Radical’ Renewable Transition the Key to Fighting Energy, Climate Crises

• Tackling the current energy crisis in the short term and combating the climate emergency in the long term both require rapidly phasing out fossil fuels, a global group that promotes renewable energy said Tuesday.

• “The energy transition is far from being on track and anything short of radical action in the coming years will diminish, even eliminate, chances to meet our climate goals.”

Energy

=> ↺ US Oil Firms Set to Reap Up to $126 Billion in Extra Profits Amid War on Ukraine

=> ↺ As Consumers Pay, Oil CEOs Refuse to Testify to Congress About Soaring Prices

• As people across the United States face record-high gas prices—compounded by rising grocery bills and prices for other essentials—executives at three major oil companies are refusing to testify before Congress about what their firms could do to lessen the burden on U.S. households, leaving Democratic lawmakers and consumer advocates to condemn the companies for profiting amid lower and middle-class people’s financial pain.

• Rep. Raúl M. Grijalva (D-Ariz.), who chairs the House Natural Resources Committee, had invited the CEOs of EOG Resources Inc., Devon Energy Corp. and Occidental Petroleum Corp. to testify next week, only to be rebuffed Tuesday by the executives, who have personally profited off gas prices which averaged $4.24 per gallon on Monday.

=> ↺ US Oil Companies Set to Reap Up to $126 Billion in Extra Profits Amid War on Ukraine

• A new analysis released Tuesday estimates that U.S. oil and gas corporations are poised to rake in windfall profits of up to $126 billion this year as they exploit Russia’s deadly assault on Ukraine to raise prices at the pump.

• Conducted by Oil Change International, Greenpeace USA, and Global Witness, the analysis uses a database that tracks the fossil fuel industry’s production economics to assess how much money the industry is set to make as a result of high global oil prices.

=> ↺ Climate change: Wind and solar reach milestone as demand surges

• Fifty countries get more than a tenth of their power from wind and solar sources, according to research from Ember, a climate and energy think tank.

Finance

=> ↺ Bernie Sanders Wants WWII-Style Tax on 95 Percent of Corporate Windfall Profits

=> ↺ Progressives Revive Push for Medicare for All at House Hearing

• Progressive U.S. lawmakers, public health advocates, and universal healthcare campaigners testified Tuesday at the first congressional hearing on Medicare for All legislation since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.

• “We need Medicare for All now and we will not stop fighting until we have it.”

=> ↺ Alabama Amazon Workers Were Forced to Work as Mysterious Gas Filled Warehouse

=> ↺ Manchin Blasted for Opposing Biden’s Plan to Tax US Billionaires

• Just a day after U.S. President Joe Biden officially unveiled a plan to boost taxes on wealthy Americans, Sen. Joe Manchin on Tuesday signaled that he intends to block progress on yet another White House priority.

• “Billionaires purposefully don’t take incomes—they borrow against their wealth to fund their lifestyles (buy, borrow, and die.)”

=> ↺ 1,000+ Professors Endorse Call to Cancel All Federal Student Loan Debt

• More than 1,000 professors from colleges and universities across the country—including prominent institutions such as Columbia, Yale, and Berkeley—released a letter Tuesday endorsing calls for President Joe Biden to use his executive power to cancel all outstanding federal student loan debt.

• “President Biden has the complete legal authority to eliminate student loan debt on his own.”

=> ↺ The Rise of the Centibillionaires!

• Of course, it won’t be all bad. At least “trillionaire” is easy to say.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

=> ↺ Biden’s Unhinged Call for Regime Change in Russia

• They were nine words about Russian President Vladimir Putin that shook the world: “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”

• With a reckless genie out of the bottle, no amount of damage control from the president’s top underlings could stuff it back in. “We do not have a strategy of regime change in Russia, or anywhere else, for that matter,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken told reporters on Sunday. Such words might plausibly have less than full weight; Blinken was chief of staff at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when, in mid-2002, then-Senator Biden wielded the gavel at crucial hearings that completely stacked the witness deck in support of the subsequent U.S. invasion of Iraq, with the explicit goal of regime change.

=> ↺ Orbán: We have no responsibilities in this war

• The Hungarian Prime Minister gave a campaign speech disguised as an interview on Monday evening, addressing the most pressing current issues, especially in light of the parliamentary elections which are to be held this coming Sunday. Translation by Andrea Horváth Kávai

=> ↺ Hungary cancels the V4 meeting over other members’ protest of its Ukraine policy

=> ↺ Opinion | Ukraine War Cannot Justify Biden’s Too-Damn-High Pentagon Budget

• The Biden administration’s FY 2023 proposal for national defense, released on Monday, far exceeds what is needed to provide a robust defense of the United States and its allies. At $813 billion, it is substantially more — adjusted for inflation — than spending at the height of the Korean or Vietnam wars, and over $100 billion more than peak spending during the Cold War. The $800 billion-plus figure for national defense includes the Pentagon budget, work on nuclear warheads at the Department of Energy, and smaller defense-related outlays at a number of other federal agencies.

=> ↺ Coalition Urges Biden to ‘Maximize’ Efforts to Achieve Diplomatic End to Ukraine War

• More than a dozen progressive organizations sent a letter to U.S. President Joe Biden on Tuesday, urging his administration to do everything in its power to bring about a diplomatic solution to the war in Ukraine and to avoid doing anything that would cause a further escalation, which they warned might lead to a direct military clash between NATO and Russia, both flush with nuclear weapons.

• “Compromise is difficult given Russia’s actions, but compromise is necessary to diplomacy and will save lives.”

=> ↺ Clarence Thomas Backed Trump in Court While Ginni Thomas Backed Coup Attempt

=> ↺ Ginni & Clarence Thomas vs. Democracy: He Sided with Trump in Court While She Backed Coup Attempt

• The January 6 committee investigating the deadly attack on the Capitol is reportedly deciding whether to interview Ginni Thomas — the Republican activist and wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas — about her efforts to overturn Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss. The move comes after a series of Thomas’s texts were made public in which she urges Donald Trump’s then-Chief of Staff Mark Meadows in the weeks following the election to take action to prevent a Biden victory. Justice Thomas is the only justice who dissented in the Supreme Court’s decision a few months ago that led to the release of White House documents around January 6. We speak with Ian Millhiser, senior correspondent at Vox, who calls Ginni Thomas “a cheerleader at the highest level” for the attempt to overturn the election. “When you’re a judge, you can’t sit on a case where your wife has an interest,” says Millhiser. “If Clarence Thomas knew that his wife was potentially implicated in this scandal, I think he should have recused himself from this case.” Millhiser’s latest piece is headlined “Clarence Thomas’s long fight against fair and democratic elections.”

=> ↺ Opinion | Clarence Thomas Should Resign and Ginni Thomas Should Be Prosecuted

• In 1969, Richard Nixon and congressional Republicans took down the Supreme Court’s most liberal member, Abe Fortas, threatening to send his wife to prison. There’s a lesson here for today’s Democrats and Clarence Thomas.

=> ↺ ‘A New Low’: CBS News Slammed for Hiring Mick Mulvaney as Contributor

• CBS News faced a firestorm of criticism Tuesday for making Mick Mulvaney a contributor, with one opponent calling the network’s decision to hire the ex-aide of former President Donald Trump “a new low.”

• “Mulvaney is a discredited liar and crackpot.”

=> ↺ Trump Beats Both Biden and Harris in Hypothetical 2024 Run: Poll

• If the 2024 election were held today, former President Donald Trump would beat both President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.

• That’s according to a new Harvard CAPS-Harris Poll survey, which finds that if the incumbent and his predecessor were to face off again, 47% of voters would support Trump while 41% would back Biden. Harris fares even worse in a hypothetical match-up, with just 38% of voters saying they would choose her, compared with 49% who would pick Trump. Twelve percent of voters remain undecided.

=> ↺ ‘This Is A Tipping Point’: Justice Thomas Must Resign, AOC Says

• Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Tuesday became the latest Democratic lawmaker to demand that U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas resign in the wake of new revelations that his wife, right-wing activist Ginni Thomas, pushed at least one Trump administration official to try to overturn the 2020 election.

• If Thomas does not step down, said the New York Democrat, his conduct “could serve as grounds for impeachment.”

=> ↺ ‘Time for Congress to Act’: Watchdog Groups Urge Passage of Stock Trade Ban

• Citing reports of “suspicious stock trades” at the start of the pandemic and a “crisis of institutional legitimacy,” a diverse group of 19 organizations on Monday urged Congress to pass legislation banning individual stock trading by federal lawmakers.

• The demand was delivered in a letter to U.S. House leaders from organizations including Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), Public Citizen, and the Revolving Door Project. It was sent amid growing momentum for such a ban—a prohibition that the groups frame as clearly needed in light of “the routine and bipartisan failures to comply with the STOCK Act.”

=> ↺ ‘Possible Coverup’ Alleged as Jan. 6 Logs Show 457-Minute Gap in Trump Calls

• Internal White House documents handed over to a House panel investigating the January 6 Capitol attack show a gap of seven hours and 37 minutes in former President Donald Trump’s call logs from that day, raising suspicions that Trump allies are illegally concealing his phone records from lawmakers.

• The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward and CBS News’ Robert Costa reported Tuesday that “the lack of an official White House notation of any calls placed to or by Trump for 457 minutes on January 6, 2021—from 11:17 a.m. to 6:54 p.m.—means the committee has no record of his phone conversations as his supporters descended on the Capitol, battled overwhelmed police, and forcibly entered the building, prompting lawmakers and Vice President Mike Pence to flee for safety.”

=> ↺ WATCH: First House Hearing on Medicare for All Since Pandemic Struck

• The House Oversight Committee on Tuesday is scheduled to hold the first hearing on Medicare for All legislation since the coronavirus pandemic struck in 2020, exposing deep and fatal flaws at the heart of the United States’ for-profit healthcare system.

• Set to begin at 9:00 am ET, the hearing will examine Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) and Debbie Dingell’s (D-Mich.) Medicare for All Act and will feature testimony from a number of experts and advocates, including Be a Hero co-executive director Ady Barkan, emergency physician Uché Blackstock, and economist Jeffrey Sachs.

=> ↺ Right Is Right

=> ↺ Mexico Takes on the the United States’ Gun Goliaths

• On August 4 of last year, the Mexican government filed a lawsuit in US Federal Court against 10 US gun manufacturers, including Glock, Colt, and Smith & Wesson. The suit accuses the gunmakers of knowingly “facilitating the trafficking” of massive quantities of firearms to Mexico’s notoriously violent drug cartels. This is the first time that a foreign government has sued the US gun industry. And though the fate of the suit remains far from clear, it is a striking challenge to the gun industry’s long-standing legal protections.

Censorship/Free Speech

=> ↺ English free speech bill stalls but ministers ‘remain committed’

• Controversial legislation on free speech on English campuses has stalled in Parliament due to dwindling political support, some in the sector suggest, although the bill’s supporters and the Department for Education insist ministers “remain committed” to new laws.

• The Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill had its first reading in the House of Commons in May 2021. Committee stage for the bill concluded in September 2021, but there is still no date for the report stage to start, and the bill is still to be introduced to the House of Lords.

=> ↺ Opinion | Digitally Disappeared: YouTube Has Deleted Six Years of My Show

=> ↺ Hedges: On Being Disappeared

• The entire archive of On Contact, the Emmy-nominated show I hosted for six years for RT America and RT International, has been disappeared from YouTube. Gone is the interview with Nathaniel Philbrick on his book about George Washington. Gone is the discussion with Kai Bird on his biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Gone is my exploration with Professor Sam Slote from Trinity College Dublin of James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” Gone is the show with Benjamin Moser on his biography of Susan Sontag. Gone is the show with Stephen Kinzer on his book on John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles. Gone are the interviews with the social critics Cornel West, Tariq Ali, Noam Chomsky, Gerald Horne, Wendy Brown, Paul Street, Gabriel Rockwell, Naomi Wolff and Slavoj Zizek. Gone are the interviews with the novelists Russell Banks and Salar Abdoh. Gone is the interview with Kevin Sharp, a former federal judge, on the case of Leonard Peltier. Gone are the interviews with economists David Harvey and Richard Wolff. Gone are the interviews with the combat veterans and West Point graduates Danny Sjursen and Eric Edstrom about our wars in the Middle East. Gone are the discussions with the journalists Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi. Gone are the voices of those who are being persecuted and marginalized, including the human rights attorney Steven Donziger and the political prisoner Mumia Abu Jamal. None of the shows I did on mass incarceration, where I interviewed those released from our prisons, are any longer on YouTube. Gone are the shows with the cartoonists Joe Sacco and Dwayne Booth. Melted into thin air, leaving not a rack behind.

Civil Rights/Policing

=> ↺ Biden Gets a Chance to Get the Refugee Issue Right

• Until the presidency of Donald Trump, the United States had more often than not played an historic role as a world leader in refugee admissions.  For decades, the United States resettled more refugees than all other countries combined.  About 3.5 million refugees have been admitted since 1975, when the words of Emma Lazarus on the Statue of Liberty meant something.  But Trump slashed refugee admissions to their lowest levels in decades, and destroyed the resettlement bureaucracy in the process.  Only several thousand refugees entered the United States during the four years of the Trump administration, and 6,600 in Biden’s first full year in office.

• Unfortunately, the Biden administration initially followed Trump’s refugee foot-dragging in terms of vetting, screening, and approving refugees.  When Secretary of State Antony Blinken was asked two weeks ago whether any Ukrainian refugees will be brought to the United States, he said only that he would “look” into it.  When Vice President Kamala Harris was asked a similar question more recently, she merely looked to the President of Poland and remarked with laughter, “A friend in need is a friend indeed.”  It took domestic and international pressure before President Joe Biden announced that the United States would accept 100,000 Ukrainian refugees and others fleeing Russia’s war on Ukraine.  This is the least he could do after his administration thoroughly bungled the refugee situation on the way out of Afghanistan, and Russian President Vladimir Putin pursues his wanton and mindless destruction of Ukraine.

=> ↺ No Corporate Law and Power Questions for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson

• Senators, who should have known better, declined to raise the important questions about corporate personhood, or the provision of equal rights for corporations with human beings in a Constitution that never mentions “corporations” or “companies.” The Constitution is all about “We the People.”

• Ignoring the immense power of global corporations over the rule of law, the immunities and privileges these companies use to escape the law and harm people with impunity, and the power of corporations under the 2011 Citizens United case to spend unlimited amounts of money to independently support or oppose candidates for public office were taboo subjects.

=> ↺ As Scrutiny Of Law Enforcement Increases, Legislators Are Trying To Criminalize Filming Of Police Officers

• It appears several legislators haven’t learned anything from the months of anti-police violence protests that spread across the nation in the wake of the murder of George Floyd by Minnesota police officer Derek Chauvin.

=> ↺ BuzzFeed Doesn’t Deserve Its Newsroom

• Was it all a dream? In the harsh light of 2022, the early years of my time working at BuzzFeed—the boozy launch parties of each new vertical, the iPads distributed as holiday swag, the taco Tuesdays, the soft-serve ice cream machine, the celebrity cat visits—begin to take on a hallucinatory quality. When I started as a 24-year-old associate editor for BuzzFeed’s new food section in the fall of 2012, having been poached from an assistant job at Bon Appétit, the newsroom was a curious experiment in venture capital-backed digital media, still just beginning to expand and generally mentioned for its smart politics and tech coverage in the same breath as a limp zinger about cats and “listicles.” (They were just lists, OK?)

=> ↺ ‘Prestige Doesn’t Pay the Bills’: Condé Nast Workers Announce New Union

• Employees across Condé Nast publications on Tuesday announced they are following in the footsteps of their colleagues at The New Yorker and other company outlets and forming a union to “create a better, more equitable workplace.”

• “If Condé wants to attract the best talent in the business, they have to stop relying on prestige and provide equitable pay and benefits.”

=> ↺ Asylum Requires Traveling to a Border

• The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) issued new interim rules today for the adjudication of asylum and other claims by a new class of “asylum officers” at US ports of entry, borders crossings, and airports.

• These new rules won’t help most asylum seekers.

• Did you ever wonder why desperate asylum seekers often travel on overcrowded and leaky boats or try to trek across waterless deserts, and regularly lose their lives?

=> ↺ Wisconsin Supreme Court Sees Nothing Wrong With Cops Acquiring Evidence A Court Had Already Suppressed

• I guess we can’t have nice things. You know, little things… like adherence to the Fourth Amendment. In Wisconsin, the state’s top court says [PDF] cops don’t need to worry too much about suppressed evidence if there’s another way to acquire it. (via Courthouse News Service)

=> ↺ That Unfinished Oscar Speech

• Perhaps at this moment you are saying to yourself what the hell has all this got to do with the Academy Awards? Why is this woman standing up here, ruining our evening, invading our lives with things that don’t concern us, and that we don’t care about? Wasting our time and money and intruding in our home.

• I think the answer to those unspoken questions is that the motion picture community has been as responsible as any for degrading the Indian and making a mockery of his character, describing his as savage, hostile and evil. It’s hard enough for children to grow up in this world. When Indian children watch television, and they watch films, and when they see their race depicted as they are in films, their minds become injured in ways we can never know.

=> ↺ Staten Island Amazon workers chart their own path in union drive

• Employees of Amazon’s main Staten Island, N.Y., facility had been organizing for safer working conditions for more than a year when they decided to form a union last April.

• When it came to picking what nationwide organization to join, the leaders of what is now the Amazon Labor Union (ALU) decided to stick with what had worked for them thus far and forgo affiliation in favor of staying independent

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

=> ↺ Elon Musk’s Starlink Gets Even More Expensive

• We’ve noted for a while now how Elon Musk’s Starlink low-orbit satellite broadband service isn’t going to be the miraculous revolution many people think. For one thing, the service can currently only provide service to a maximum of around 800,000 subscribers globally. For context, around 20-40 million people in the U.S. lack broadband, and 83 million live under a broadband monopoly (usually Comcast).

Monopolies

Copyrights

=> ↺ DMA: EU negotiators split on whether text covers remuneration for rightsholder

• The publishers have been calling for a general extension of FRAND to social media and search engines in line with the mandate of the European Parliament, as they see these measures as not only applying to remuneration but also, for instance, access to data.

• According to the final text, the ‘gatekeepers’ designated under the DMA will have to publish how they apply the FRAND principles in practice with their general access conditions. The Commission would then consider the compliance of such conditions against the regulation, while an alternative dispute settlement mechanism would handle day-to-day complaints.

• For the Commission, this system would avoid them being overflowed with claims. However, the dispute resolution mechanism is another key demand from publishers, who have been calling for binding arbitration if no agreement is reached between the rightsholders and platforms, as is currently the case in Australia.

=> ↺ Copyright Is Indispensable For Artists, They Say; But For All Artists, Or Just Certain Kinds?

• One of the central “justifications” for copyright is that it is indispensable if creativity is to be viable. Without it, we are assured, artists would starve. This ignores the fact that artists created and thrived for thousands of years before the 1710 Statute of Anne. But leaving that historical detail aside, as well as the larger question of the claimed indispensability of copyright, a separate issue is whether copyright is a good fit for all creativity, or whether it has inherent biases that few like to talk about.

=> ↺ Canada’s Supreme Court Denies TekSavvy’s Site Blocking Appeal

• The first pirate site blocking order in Canada remains in place. Internet provider TekSavvy petitioned the Supreme Court to hear the case but this request was denied. Copyright holders are pleased with the outcome, but Teksavvy fears that it will open the floodgates to more site blocking requests.

=> ↺ Russian ‘Loop Hero’ Dev Approves Piracy After Sanctions Hobble Steam

• Russia-based game developer Four Quarters is against the war in Ukraine but in common with other companies, still feels the effects of sanctions. In response to local credit card issues affecting Steam, the indie dev is encouraging people to fire up a VPN and pirate hit game ‘Loop Hero’ instead.

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