● 03.31.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 31/03/2022: GNU Poke 2.3 and Ubuntu Kernel Fix

Posted in News Roundup at 6:02 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxDistributionsDevices/EmbeddedFree Software/Open SourceLeftovers

GNU/Linux

=> ↺ Want to Work in IT? 6 Reasons to Check out Linux – ClearanceJobs

• There are hundreds, if not thousands, tutorials and videos on Linux distributions, with many different perspectives. It would be unfair to list one over the others, but there is enough information in this article to give your search a kick-start. I compare Linux to a golf club you can use for many different shots, depending on where you sit on the course. It may be a good thing to start sooner than later putting Linux into your bag.

Audiocasts/Shows

=> ↺ BSD Now 448: Controlling Resource Limits

• Controlling Resource Limits with rctl in FreeBSD, It’s always DNS, Google Summer of Code in BSD Projects, Rsync Technical Notes – Q4 2021, Userland CPU frequency scheduling for OpenBSD, and more.

=> ↺ FLOSS Weekly 674: Janus WebRTC – Lorenzo Miniero, Meetcho

• Lorenzo Miniero of Meetecho and the author of the Janus open source WebRTC server, joins Doc Searls and Jonathan Bennett for an informative conversation regarding live streaming and broadcasting, new and better ways to bring in network devices, OBS, virtual and hybrid events, WHIP, the open source future of real time communication, and much more.

=> ↺ The Linux Link Tech Show Episode 949

• Joel is ready to blast off on a new adventure

Applications

=> ↺ How to Use Password Store to Manage Your Passwords in Linux – Make Tech Easier

• Password Store is a simple UNIX program that uses the GNU Privacy Guard (GPG) and Git to secure and manage passwords for your Linux system. It is simple, lightweight and fast. However, this simplicity means that accessing Password Store’s database to fetch your passwords can be a bit of a pain. However, if you are using Emacs, there is a way to seamlessly automate this process for you.

• To help with that, password-store is also an Emacs package that serves as a front end to the Password Store program. Similar to its back end, password-store is simple and light. More importantly, you can easily extend its features by using a number of plugins done by its community.

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ How to Install Ntopng on Debian 11 | LinuxHostSupport

• In this blog post, we are going to install Ntopng on Debian 11 OS and explain in step-by-step detail the installation process.

• Ntopng is a web-based application for tracking the network traffic on your server. It is free and open-source and supports different operating systems like Linux, Windows MacOS and etc. Ntopng is a very useful monitoring tool that shows, multiple graphs in the GUI such as network usage, analytical data, bandwidth utilization, apps and etc. Also, Ntopng analyzes the traffic and sorts it by source/destination.

• Installing Ntopng on Debian 11, is a very easy and straightforward process in just a few steps. Let’s get to work!

=> ↺ How to install Adminer on Rocky Linux 8 / Alma Linux 8 – Unix / Linux the admins Tutorials

• In this post, you will learn how to install Adminer on Rocky Linux 8 / Alma Linux8.

• Adminer is a basic MariaDB, SQLite, and PostgreSQL client that allows us to do operations on databases created with some of these engines.

• It is effortless to use and as light as a single PHP file. We can use it to quickly visualize data and although it doesn’t have great features, it can still help us in a pinch.

• As it is made in PHP, it is necessary to have a web server and install the language. In addition to this, you have to install a supported database manager.

• Let’s install it because it is easy and useful.

=> ↺ How To Install and Setup ADB Tools on Linux – ByteXD

• If you have used an Android phone for some time, you will notice that there are certain features and capabilities that you cannot access or perform. These include sideloading apps, taking screenshots in applications that forbid that (e.g. Telegram has such a feature), installing custom ROMs, removing unnecessary Google or manufacturer apps, creating frequent backups, etc.

• Fortunately, there is a way that you can bypass all that and do anything you wish to do with your phone using the Android Debug Bridge (ADB). This post will guide you on Installing ADB and Fastboot Android Drivers on Linux.

=> ↺ Install and Setup Rsyslog Server on Ubuntu 22.04 – kifarunix.com

• In this tutorial, you will learn how to install and setup rsyslog server on Ubuntu 22.04. Rsyslog is a multi-threaded implementation of syslogd (a system utility providing support for message logging), with features that include…

=> ↺ Enable Compression with Redis

• Remote Dictionary Server, or Redis for short, is a lightning-fast in-memory database that stores values in key-value pairs. It is mainly used as a caching mechanism for databases such as SQL and Document databases.

• Since Redis is an in-memory database, the space used is critical and needs to be heavily monitored. One strategy to improve and optimize memory performance for Redis is to use compression.

• By default, Redis does not provide compression for any data stored. Hence, compression techniques are implemented on the application.

• Let us discuss a few techniques you can use to optimize memory performance in Redis.

=> ↺ How to get started with scripting in Python | Enable Sysadmin

• Learn to use functions, classes, loops, and more in your Python scripts to simplify common sysadmin tasks.

=> ↺ How to get started with Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security for Kubernetes | Enable Sysadmin

• RHACS monitors runtime data on containers to help you uncover potential vulnerabilities during product testing.

=> ↺ How to Install MariaDB Server in Rocky Linux

• The name MariaDB needs no introduction as its track record on numerous web-based and desktop-based projects speak for itself. The maturity in MariaDB’s performance delivery also makes it an ideal candidate for data analytics due to its columnar database solution. Therefore, if you are aiming for large-scale real-time analytics, MariaDB has your back.

• Rocky Linux being a Red Hat Enterprise downstream as a result of it being Centos’ fork makes it an ideal server environment to run web-based projects that require the reputation of MariaDB database management prowess.

=> ↺ How to Increase VM Virtual Disk Space on VirtualBox

• VirtualBox makes it possible for Linux users to explore the horizons of what all the Linux operating system distributions and their associated software have to offer.

• The use and exploration of VirtualBox to run and test the performance of other operating system architecture and distributions build the confidence index of a user that wants to take/put that particular operating system into a production environment.

=> ↺ How to Add Accent Colors in Ubuntu 22.04

• Traditionally, Ubuntu has always used orange and aubergine accent colors. If you want to add a different color theme without changing the Yaru theme, the option is provided with a third party theme called Yaru colors.

• But this is changing with Ubuntu 22.04. Starting with the new upcoming LTS, you’ll be able to change the accent color of your Ubuntu desktop without any additional tool.

• The option is available right in the system settings.

=> ↺ How to Install Laravel PHP Framework with Nginx and Free Let’s Encrypt SSL on AlmaLinux 8

=> ↺ How to install Deepin desktop on Manjaro Linux | FOSS Linux

• Manjaro is a Linux-based distro in three different versions of desktop environments, namely KDE Plasma, XFCE and GNOME. But since it’s Linux-based, you can also get any other desktop supported by Linux and add it to your Manjaro installation. This opens the door to various options like Deepin, Budgie, Cinnamon, LXQT, LXDE, etc.

• One of these additional options that can be experienced on Manjaro is the Deepin desktop. It provides a great desktop experience for new and old Linux users alike. Deepin is loaded with features that make it stand out from the other options. It comes with many applications and an amazingly intuitive UI experience that has made it one of the most popular GUIs on Linux in recent times.

=> ↺ How to install Roblox PC version and Roblox Studio on a Chromebook

• Today we are looking at how to install Roblox PC version and Roblox Studio 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.

=> ↺ How to install additional spell check dictionaries for Flatpak apps

• Flatpak apps run inside a separate and isolated environment from your main system. This environment separation is what helps make apps portable between different Linux distributions. However, it also changes the approach required to complete tasks like installing multiple spell checker dictionaries for bilingual users.

• By default, Flatpak downloads app-specific locale data (including translation files, locale and format settings, and dictionaries) for each app matching your system locale. However, Bilingual users likely want to install more than one dictionary for their spellchecker.

• On Linux, you usually achieve this by installing additional dictionaries through Linux your distribution’s package repository. System dictionaries aren’t accessible to Flatpak apps inside their isolated Flatpak runtimes. You could tweak overrides for individual Flatpak apps to grant them access to the system dictionaries. However, there’s a better solution.

=> ↺ How to Install Netdata with Nginx on Alma Linux 8

=> ↺ How to Fix Horizontal Green/Blue Lines on Youtube in Chrome or Chromium on Linux with Intel Graphics Drivers

=> ↺ How to Create a Static Website Using Amazon S3

=> ↺ How To Install LXDE Desktop on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS – idroot

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install LXDE Desktop on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, LXDE (Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment) is a lightweight desktop environment that is designed to be fast and easy to use. With LXDE, users can have the best of both worlds i.e. latest software upgrades without having to compromise with systems’ performance.

• This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the LXDE (lightweight X11 desktop environment) on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.

=> ↺ How To Install gThumb on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS – idroot

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install gThumb on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, gThumb is an image viewer and browser for the GNOME Desktop. gThumb provides many useful features, such as filesystem browsing, slide show, image catalogs, web album creation, camera import, image CD burning, batch file operations, and much more.

• This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the gThumb image viewer on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.

=> ↺ How to Install Cachet Status Page System on Ubuntu 20.04 | LinuxCloudVPS Blog

• In this blog post, we are going to explain how to install Cachet Status Page System on Ubuntu 20.04 OS.

• Cachet is an open-source status page system that allows us to track the downtime of our system outages. Cachet is written in PHP and can be installed very easily on every Linux system. In the next paragraphs, we will install Cachet with LAMP stack and the Composer as an application-level package manager for PHP.

• Installing Cachet on Ubuntu 20.04 should take up to 15 minutes. Let’s get started.

=> ↺ How to Install and Configure LibreNMS on Ubuntu 20.04 – RoseHosting

• LibreNMS is a free and open-source network monitoring system built in PHP and MySQL which uses the SNMP protocol. It is a community-based fork of the Observium network monitoring tool. This tool is also a user-friendly monitoring system, it is easy to understand and use. It uses MySQL as its database backend and uses SNMP to discover remote clients.

• It supports a wide range of network hardware and operating systems including, FreeBSD, Cisco, Linux, HP, etc. In this tutorial, we will show you how to install and configure LibreNMS on Ubuntu 20.04.

Games

=> ↺ The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe launches April 27 | GamingOnLinux

• Quite a long time after originally planned, The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe is now confirmed to launch on April 27.

• The developer says it’s an “expanded re-imagining” of the original from 2013, which was a surprisingly amusing first-person exploration game. All of the original content is here but there’s a big expansion with new content to explore, new choices and new secrets. It’s also gone through a visual overhaul, added accessibility features, localization of in-game text and content warnings. Plus, the fab voice work of Kevan Brighting returns.

=> ↺ XOW Xbox One Controller Driver: Solving the High CPU Usage Issue

• Not too long ago I explained why the Xbox One gamepad is one of the greatest gamepads available right now – and I alluded to the fact that it works very nicely with the xow driver when using the USB dongle to connect to the gamepad (which has less latency compared to using the Bluetooth mode).

=> ↺ Steam Deck gets a big Client update, plus Deck OS and BIOS BETA update | GamingOnLinux

• Two big updates arrived for the Steam Deck last night, so let’s go over all that’s changed as it’s quite exciting. Firstly, the main Steam Deck Client update brings some really nice goodies.

=> ↺ Unity games crashing with Proton on Linux or Steam Deck? Check your USB devices

• Curiously, it seems Proton 7 and Proton Experimental are having problems with Unity games recently but there’s a possible temporary workaround for you. This is the same across Linux desktop and Steam Deck, as it’s a problem somewhere with Proton.

• Recently, while trying to capture footage from the Steam Deck for the GamingOnLinux YouTube channel I came up against a problem. Certain Unity games wouldn’t load, and instead would present me with a Unity error screen with a loading bar and then just quit. There was a bug report open from others also seeing a similar issue. Proton 6.3-8 would work but for some games, that had other issues that Proton 7 solved.

Distributions

G/Parted

=> ↺ GParted 1.4 released • The Register

• GNOME Partition Editor version 1.4 was released this week by lead maintainer Curtis Gedak.

• GParted is a graphical dynamic partition management tool for Linux. In other words, it does useful things like non-destructively expand or shrink disk partitions while they contain data. It’s not unfair to describe it as a FOSS recreation of the late lamented PartitionMagic.

• It is a Gtk-based graphical wrapper around the GNU parted libraries, which do the critical filesystem-resizing part.

• GParted not only puts a pretty graphical face on the parted command-line tools, but it adds worthwhile functionality of its own, too: creating both MBR and GPT partition tables and partitions, moving partitions, copying partitions (both on a single physical drive, and from drive to drive).

=> ↺ GNU Parted – News: parted-3.4.64 released [alpha] [Savannah]

Screenshots/Screencasts

=> ↺ Fedora 36 Beta Run Through – Invidious

• In this video, we are looking at Fedora 36 Beta.

=> ↺ Fedora 36 Beta

• Today we are looking at Fedora 36 Beta. It comes with Gnome 42, Linux kernel 5.17, and uses about 1.4 GB of ram when idling.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

=> ↺ Ubuntu Users Get Small Linux Kernel Security Update with Only Two Flaws Patched

• The new Linux kernel update comes just a few days after the previous Ubuntu major update one and only patches two flaws, namely CVE-2022-1055, a use-after-free vulnerability discovered in the network traffic control implementation, and CVE-2022-27666, a security issue discovered in the IPsec implementation that could lead to a heap-based buffer overflow. Both of these flaws could allow a local attacker to crash the vulnerable system by causing a denial of service or possibly execute arbitrary code.

=> ↺ The Telco Podcast | Ubuntu

• We are heavily involved in the telecom ecosystem, working up the stack with silicon vendors, SDK providers, network function creators, service providers and UE/CPE manufacturers. This gives us a lot of exposure on what’s goin on in the industry and we decided to share that insights.

• That’s why we are announcing a start of The Telco Podcast, which you can find on https://anchor.fm/thetelcopodcast and on your favorite platforms like Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

=> ↺ LXD vs Docker | Ubuntu

• When talking about containers, a common confusion for potential users of LXD is that LXD is an alternative to Docker or Kubernetes. However, LXD and Docker are not competing container technologies, and they tend to serve completely different purposes. In this blog, we’ll briefly discuss the differences and the suitable use cases for both.

=> ↺ Getting started with Juju and Charmed Operators: three awesome videos | Ubuntu

• Getting started with software can be confusing – depending on the complexity of the software, of course. Despite the extensive documentation available for Charmed Operator SDK and Juju some just prefer to watch video material to start with. So, let’s take the opportunity to have a look at available tutorials and presentations available on the Internet.

=> ↺ The Keys to Successful Bug Reporting | Ubuntu

• A key principle of open source computing is the ability for users to directly engage with development efforts, the primary avenue being through the use of bug reporting.

• Bug reports are a critical component to the success of open source projects world-wide, though how to write one successfully can be, admittedly, somewhat vague. In this article, we interviewed Ubuntu extraordinaire, Sebastien Bacher, and with his insights we will explore many of the “do’s” and “don’ts” in writing concise and effective bug reports on Launchpad.

• Now, what separates a poor bug report from a great one may seem at first obvious, but it’s important to remember that not everyone has experience in this regard, and even for those that do, there is nuance to effective technical communication. It’s important to remember that there is a human being on the receiving end of every bug report, and oftentimes the difference between a fixed bug and one that sits idle comes down to how you communicate your issue. The developer reading your report needs to: 1) understand your issue thoroughly, 2) ideally be able to reproduce your issue, and 3) be able to communicate with you about any further steps needed to test and/or resolve the issue at hand.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Web Browsers

=> ↺ Talked curl on software engineering radio | daniel.haxx.se

• What it’s been like to look after the curl project for the past 25 years. We talked about the history of cURL, libcurl, whether C was the right choice, portability, some key events in those 25 years, implementing protocols, why HTTP is not so simple, rust libs, the Polhem Prize, security issues, feature requests, random support requests, code on Mars, Apple OS adoption, cars stuck in production lines, Android OS, 8 week release cycles, release cycle joy, breakdown of bug types, 1000 committers, 250 command line options, user bases, determination, json, libSSH2, c-ares, HTTPbis, HTTP/2, QUIC, Mozilla, OpenSSL, wolfSSL, DNS, FTP, the cURL book, testing, CI/CD, favorite command line options that you might not know about, and making sure that you don’t give up on that idea or project you are working on.

=> ↺ Performance Tool in Firefox DevTools Reloaded – Mozilla Hacks – the Web developer blog

• In Firefox 98, we’re shipping a new version of the existing Performance panel. This panel is now based on the Firefox profiler tool that can be used to capture a performance profile for a web page, inspect visualized performance data and analyze it to identify slow areas.

• The icing on the cake of this already extremely powerful tool is that you can upload collected profile data with a single click and share the resulting link with your teammates (or anyone really). This makes it easier to collaborate on performance issues, especially in a distributed work environment.

=> ↺ This Week In Rust: This Week in Rust 436

=> ↺ The 7 Best Browsers for Old and Low-End Computers

• Modern web browsers offer exceptional performance, are more reliable, and offer tons of customization options. However, all this comes at the cost of system performance. While not an issue with modern systems, modern browsers like Firefox, Chrome and Edge may not support or work smoothly on legacy hardware.

• If you can live without all the bells and whistles of new-age browsers, there are many great bare-bones web browsers to consider. Here we show you the best lightweight web browsers to help you browse the web smoothly on your older hardware.

FSF

=> ↺ LibrePlanet 2022 Opening Remarks

• To start the LibrePlanet 2022 conference off, campaigns manager, Greg Farough, gave opening remarks, introduced the day’s events and other activities outside of the main conference, and asked participants to report which countries they were attending from.

=> ↺ Sunday Welcome Address

• At the beginning of the 2022 LibrePlanet conference on its second day, outreach and communications coordinator, Devin Ulibarri, gave opening remarks, and introduced the day’s events, in addition to mentioning measures taken by the FSF tech team to resolve Saturday’s technical difficulties, which included an added audio-only stream for users with low bandwidth and improvements made to how the “low-res” stream is generated.

=> ↺ FSF Award ceremony & Saturday Closing notes

• The Free Software Foundation (FSF) announced the recipients of the 2021 Free Software Awards, which are given annually at the FSF’s LibrePlanet conference to groups and individuals in the free software community who have made significant contributions to the cause for software freedom. This year’s recipients of the awards are Paul Eggert, Protesilaos Stavrou, and SecuRepairs. As the ceremony was conducted virtually this year, each winner selected the person they wished to present them the award.

GNU Projects

=> ↺ GNU poke 2.3 released [Savannah]

• I am not that happy to announce a new release of GNU poke, version 2.3. This fixes a little bug in diagnostics that broke the 32-bit testsuite, making 2.2 the shortest lived poke release to date. See the file NEWS in the distribution tarball for a list of issues fixed in this release. The tarball poke-2.3.tar.gz is now available at

• https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/poke/poke-2.3.tar.gz.

• GNU poke (http://www.jemarch.net/poke) is an interactive, extensible editor for binary data. Not limited to editing basic entities such as bits and bytes, it provides a full- fledged procedural, interactive programming language designed to describe data structures and to operate on them. Happy poking!

=> ↺ GNU poke, the free extensible editor for structured binary data

• This talk is titled “GNU poke, the free extensible editor for structured binary data,” and was presented at LibrePlanet 2022 by José Marchesi.

• José is a GNU hacker and maintainer. He is currently employed by Oracle as the Tech Lead of their toolchain/compilers team.

• This talk is about GNU poke, which is an interactive editor for binary data. Not limited to editing basic entities such as bits and bytes, it provides a full-fledged procedural, interactive programming language designed to describe data structures and to operate on them. José will discuss these features and more.

Leftovers

=> ↺ A Visit to Uni

• Over lunch I toured the campus, which has grown quite a bit even since my time there. Class is in session, so all the buildings were open. I hadn’t stepped foot in many of them in seven years.

• The experience was very odd. Several memories came back to me, some of which I hadn’t thought about since the start of my undergraduate education over a decade ago. A lot of them were very pleasant memories. But as the day progressed, more and more memories came back, and an increasing number of them were memories I realized I hadn’t thought about for a reason.

Hardware

=> ↺ What’s That AccessUSB Menu In My LG SmartTV?

• One boring evening, [XenRE] was looking through service menus on their LG Smart TV (Russian, Google Translate), such menus accessible through use of undocumented IR remote codes. In other words, a fairly regular evening. They noticed an “Access USB Status” entry and thought the “Access USB” part looked peculiar. A few service manuals hinted that there’s a service mode you could access with an adapter made out of two back-to-back PL2303 USB-UART adapters – a few female-female jumper wires later, serial prompt greeted our hacker, and entering ‘debug’ into the prompt responded with some text, among it, “Access USB is NOT opened!!!”.

=> ↺ Solar Harvesting Is Better With Big Capacitors

• The sun is a great source of energy, delivering in the realm of 1000 watts per square meter on a nice clear day. [Jasper Sikken] has developed many projects that take advantage of this power over the years, and has just completed his latest solar harvesting module for powering microcontroller projects.

=> ↺ #FreeDMO Gets Rid Of DYMO Label Printer DRM

• DYMO 550 series printer marketing blurb says “The DYMO® LabelWriter® 550 Turbo label printer comes with unique Automatic Label Recognition™”, which, once translated from marketing-ese, means “this printer has DRM in its goshdarn thermal stickers”. Yes, DRM in the stickers that you typically buy in generic rolls. [FREEPDK] didn’t like that, either, and documents a #FreeDMO device to rid us of yet another consumer freedom limitation, the true hacker way.

=> ↺ A New Wrinkle On Wooden Ribbon Microphones

• Not too many people build their own microphones, and those who do usually build them out of materials like plastic and metal. [Frank Olson] not only loves to make microphones, but he’s also got a thing about making them from wood, with some pretty stunning results.

=> ↺ Visit The World’s Largest Computer Museum: The Heinz Nixdorf

• Most stories in the history of computing took place in one of a small number of places. The wartime code-breaking effort in Bletchley Park led to Colossus, the first programmable electronic computer. Various university campuses in Britain and the US were home to first-generation computers like ENIAC, EDVAC and the Manchester Baby in the late 1940s. Silicon Valley then stole the limelight with the home computer revolution in the 1970s. Naturally, all of these places have their museums celebrating their local achievements, but the world’s largest computer museum is not found in Silicon Valley or on the campus of a famous university. Instead, you have to travel to a small German town called Paderborn, which houses the Heinz Nixdorf Museumsforum, or HNF.

=> ↺ Fancy Wire Loop Game Is A Beauty In Brass

• The simple wire-loop game is often built as a fun project to teach students about electronics. [W&M Levsha] built their own version, showing off their fine crafting and machining skills and branding it as a sobriety test with the playful name “Breathalyzer.”

=> ↺ Replaceable Batteries Are Coming Back To Phones If The EU Gets Its Way

• Back in the day, just about everything that used a battery had a hatch or a hutch that you could open to pull it out and replace it if need be. Whether it was a radio, a cordless phone, or a cellphone, it was a cinch to swap out a battery.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

=> ↺ Funds for COVID Testing, Treatment, Vaccines Are Evaporating. Congress Must Act.

=> ↺ She’s Supposed to Protect Americans From Toxic Chemicals. First, She Just Has to Fix Trump’s Mess and Decades of Neglect.

• A few days after the inauguration of President Joe Biden, Michal Freedhoff settled into her cramped home office in a suburb of Washington, D.C., to get to work as the nation’s new top chemical regulator.

• It was a key role, charged with protecting Americans from toxic substances used in agriculture and manufacturing. But going back decades, the office had gained a reputation for being captured by the companies it regulated. Under the Trump administration, the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention, like many federal agencies, had taken a hard turn away from science. Important new rules, years in the making, had been delayed or diluted.

=> ↺ Opinion | It’s Farmworker Awareness Week. Here’s What Those Who Feed Us Deserve.

• Few workers play a more intimate role in our lives than the farmworkers who plant, pick, package, and ship the food we put on our tables. But unfortunately, few are more vulnerable.

Integrity/Availability

Proprietary

Pseudo-Open Source

Privatisation/Privateering

Linux Foundation

=> ↺ Secure software supply chains: good practices, at scale

• The genesis for the content in this article is work done to implement secure supply chain patterns and practices for a Contino customer. The core goals for the effort were; implement a pipeline agnostic solution that ensures the security of the pipelines and enables secure delivery for the enterprise. We’ll talk a little about why we chose the tools we did in each section and how they supported the end goal.

=> ↺ This Tech Leader is Harnessing Collective Action to Green the Grid

• Shuli Goodman talks a lot about building the next generation of clean energy, but she doesn’t just mean erecting fields of solar panels and wind turbines. As the director of Linux Foundation Energy (LF Energy), launched by the nonprofit Linux Foundation in 2018, she’s interested in another kind of infrastructure that she says will be essential to moving the world’s grids away from fossil fuels and cutting carbon dioxide emissions: open-source software.

Security

Privacy/Surveillance

=> ↺ School-Issued Technology Poses Surveillance Risks for Students – Validated Independent News

• Student surveillance by school-issued tech devices is “taking place – at taxpayer expense – in cities and school communities throughout the United States,” Kshetri reported. Eighty percent of teachers and 77 percent of high school students “reported that their schools had installed artificial intelligence-based surveillance software on these devices to monitor students’ online activities and what is stored in the computer,” he noted.

Defence/Aggression

=> ↺ Two Orthodox Christian Countries at War: A Brief History of the Orthodox Church

• Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople, a leading authority of the Eastern Orthodox Church, quickly condemned the “unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.”

• By contrast, Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, has supported the war, which he claimed in a sermon was a struggle to defend “human civilization” against the “sin” of “gay-pride parades.”

=> ↺ ‘Anybody would be scared’ Russian state news aired a refugee’s testimony about ‘atrocities’ committed by Ukraine’s Azov battalion. The video came from the FSB.

• A video making the rounds on Russian state media of a refugee from Mariupol recounting the alleged “crimes” of soldiers from Ukraine’s ultranationalist Azov regiment was distributed by the FSB’s Public Relations Center. This was reported to Mediazona by two sources who received the press release.

=> ↺ Everything we know about the alleged poisoning on March 3 According to Bellingcat, the BBC, and the Wall Street Journal, Roman Abramovich and two other negotiators suffered symptoms that point to chemical attacks.

• Three people who took part in talks between Russia and Ukraine early this month experienced symptoms consistent with those of chemical weapons poisoning, reported Bellingcat on March 28. According to the investigative outlet, one of the people affected was businessman Roman Abramovich.

=> ↺ ‘Putin already captured the Russians and the Belarusians. I hope he doesn’t capture the Ukrainians.’ Thousands of Belarusians moved to Ukraine after the 2020 protests. Now, many are being forced to move again.

• After the 2020 protests in Belarus, hundreds of thousands of people fled the country. Some moved to Europe, but many chose Ukraine as their new democratic home. Now, with war on their doorstep, they’re being forced to choose between hiding, fighting against Russia, and fleeing even further into Europe. They told their stories to Meduza.

=> ↺ After Horrific Bombardment for Weeks, Moscow Announces Mariupol Cease-Fire to Evacuate Civilians

• Russian officials on Wednesday said they would implement a cease-fire and open a humanitarian corridor out of the embattled Ukrainian city of Mariupol, where thousands of civilians have reportedly been killed over the past five weeks of relentless attacks.

• The Russian Defense Ministry said that a humanitarian corridor from Mariupol to Zaporizhzhia via the Russian-controlled port of Berdiansk would be open Thursday at 10:00 am local time, Al Jazeera reports.

=> ↺ Russia Conducting ‘Witch Hunt’ Against War Critics, Says Amnesty

• The human rights group Amnesty International warned Wednesday that the government of Russian President Vladimir Putin has launched a “witch hunt” against critics of Moscow’s deadly assault on Ukraine, hitting anti-war protesters with criminal charges over peaceful demonstrations and prosecuting activists for condemning the invasion on social media.

• “These shameful prosecutions are flagrant violations of the right to freedom of expression.”

=> ↺ US Congress and the Armed Conflict in Ethiopia

• The unfolding Russian assault on Ukraine is pushing other global conflicts into the shadows, but the latter keep festering nonetheless. Some of these will also have important geostrategic consequences. One of them is the still ongoing armed conflict in Ethiopia, initiated by the TPLF (Tigray Peoples Liberation Movement) with a massive and unprovoked attack (in the night of 3-4 November 2020) and kept alive by it. The USA has not played an enlightening role in the conflict, primarily blaming the federal government for the violence. Politically, the US efforts over the past 1,5 year were even marked by undue interference and sanctimoniousness. US policy circles have not shown honest understanding of the war, of its context, and of the means to help end it. The State Department as well as USAID (which is self-admittedly an arm of US foreign policy) have rarely sided with Ethiopian government efforts to bring this conflict to an end and seem to have condoned the TPLF – incorrectly equating it with the Tigrayan people.

• But the US Congress has not stayed far behind. The latest gaffe about to be produced by the USA is discussion and voting on the HR6600 Bill, proposed in Congress on 4 February 2022 by a Democratic Party representative (T. Malinowski, of New Jersey) and a Republican Party representative (Ms. Young Kim, of California). It is up for consideration in Congress tomorrow. The initiative is surrealistically called the ‘Stabilization, Peace, and Democracy’ bill. In practice, it will produce more of the opposite: destabilization, hindering peace, and undermining democracy in Ethiopia. Here is why.

=> ↺ Vladimir Putin Made a Terrible Mistake, and His Concessions on Ukraine are a Sign of His Weakened Position

• This is being done “to create the necessary conditions for future negotiations” according to Alexander Fomin, Russia’s deputy defence minister attending the peace talks in Istanbul.

• An agreement looks like a possibility for the first time since the Russian invasion of Ukraine on 24 February. Fomin said the withdrawal was taking place because Ukraine has agreed to neutrality and a non-nuclear status.

=> ↺ Make Peace, Not War, in Ukraine

• The Ukraine War is best interpreted as a two-level war. In the active combat zones of Ukraine, it is a devastating war between Russia and Ukraine producing an increasingly severe humanitarian crisis that includes massive civilian displacement refugee flows and internal movements away from embattled cities and throughout the country.

• This primary war phenomenon interacts with an ongoing secondary proxy war pitting Russia against the United States, with Russia trying to impose its will on Ukraine and the U.S. pursuing several geopolitical objectives. These include revitalizing and strengthening NATO and mobilizing unity in Europe by inflaming anti-Russian sentiments, which as during the Cold War rested on fear and loathing of Russia, then the Soviet Union. There is no military engagement at this point in the proxy war, although its indirect confrontations are at risk of escalating dangerously, even putting inhibitions on nuclear threats and risks to their greatest test since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Perhaps, It should be appreciated that the fog of war is denser in the secret sessions of proxy war advisors and leaders than even what is hovering over the Ukrainian battlefields. Strategic objectives in this two-level war are confusing, being neither coherent nor consistent, and because there are no current images of death and destruction, the very real negative effects of the proxy war tend to be ignored, such as prolonging the killing, delaying a ceasefire.

=> ↺ The UK’s Photo-Op Response to the Ukraine Crisis

• A possible trap, because £1.9m/$2.5m has been given to the Tory party by Kremlin oligarchs since BoJo came to power.

• London/”Londongrad” property markets and banks are flush with Russian money, while BoJo has turned a blind eye during this time.

=> ↺ Afghanistan Facing ‘Total Collapse’ as Biden Refuses to Release Central Bank Assets

• An international aid group warned Wednesday that Afghanistan is on the brink of complete collapse as the Biden administration and European governments refuse to release the war-torn nation’s central bank reserves, depriving the economy of critical funds as millions face poverty and starvation.

• In a statement ahead of an international donor conference for Afghanistan, the International Rescue Committee (IRC) said the country “is now the world’s largest-ever humanitarian appeal, requiring a staggering US$4.47 billion in humanitarian aid—quadruple the needs at the start of 2021 and more than is required for either Syria or Yemen.”

=> ↺ US veteran who volunteered to fight for Ukraine describes ‘suicide mission’

=> ↺ ‘A Failure’: Critics Rebuke Biden for Nuclear Posture Review Update

• Nonproliferation advocates on Wednesday expressed disappointment after the Biden administration released a summary of its latest Nuclear Posture Review, which fails to depart from decades of dangerous U.S. first use policy.

• “We live in a new era and sticking to the status quo is not going to make us safer. We have to get rid of nuclear weapons.”

=> ↺ ‘A Living Nightmare’: UN Says Russia Used Cluster Bombs in Ukraine At Least 24 Times

• The United Nations asserted Wednesday that Russian forces have used cluster munitions to bomb areas populated by civilians at least two dozen times since invading Ukraine on February 24—attacks which may constitute war crimes, according to international human rights experts.

• “For more than one month now, the entire population of Ukraine has been enduring a living nightmare,” said U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet. “The lives of millions of people are in upheaval as they are forced to flee their homes or hide in basements and bomb shelters as their cities are pummeled and destroyed.”

=> ↺ Why Spill Any Blood?

• As for subsequent wars started by Washington, I supported the FMLN in El Salvador and the Sandinista in Nicaragua. Like the Vietnamese freedom fighters, their struggle was a defensive struggle that was a direct response to the murderous nature of the governments they opposed. Naturally, these governments were supported and maintained by Washington. Although my ideal approach to overthrowing such governments would be nonviolent, it was apparent that nonviolence in any of those wars would have only given the oppressive regimes an easier path to the killing fields they seemed intent on creating.

• Here’s a little story that I hope helps explain that previous paragraph. In 1981 I was arrested and detained along with a couple of thousand other people during a protest against the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant in Avila, California. The detention center was an unused army camp near San Luis Obispo and was a fairly relaxed affair for a jail. There were no bars and we were free to walk around in certain areas of the camp during the day. Roll call was taken once in the morning. The detainees included a few popular figures—Jackson Browne, Wavy Gravy, Robert Blake, and Reverend Cecil Williams, to name just a few. Jackson Browne and Wavy Gravy organized a talent show while they were being held that featured Browne singing and playing a guitar lent to him by one of the California National Guard called up to guard the detention center. Robert Blake didn’t stay long. Reverend Williams spent his time in detention conversing with anyone who approached him.

=> ↺ The Death Spiral of Globalization

• There’s no doubt that the war in Ukraine is an unmitigated tragedy — not just the horrific loss of lives and destruction of entire cities, but the return of a land war in Europe where, after thousands of years of wars, there was hope the world had seen the last of senseless invasions and the needless slaughter of innocents.

• Fink posits that the Ukraine war will be the final straw that breaks the back of globalization due to the economic sanctions that have resulted in Russia’s isolation from the global marketplace. In turn, he says the resulting breakdown in global supply chains from the war, as well as the global pandemic, will “prompt companies and governments worldwide to reevaluate their dependencies and reanalyze their manufacturing and assembly footprints.”

=> ↺ America’s No-Fly Zone

• This informational No-Fly Zone is now being tested by what The Empire calls the “war” in Ukraine.  Its efficacy is proved by the “news” on all mainstream media.  No independent thought, no factual information, no honest relation of events, and above all, no unbiased, sound analysis of the actual motivation of this “war” is allowed or even admitted to exist.  The Empire’s fairy stories, absurd and poisonous, are the only stories Americans—rendered appallingly stupid and bovine or, at minimum, childishly gullible and amoral—are fed and, predictably, they have wholeheartedly embraced them.  A mental No-Fly Zone is impermeable; reality cannot penetrate it.  It has to be truth-proof in order to protect the wholly bogus, dimwitted self-justification underneath it.

• In the Ukraine fable, it began its function by denying malevolent expansion of the NATO contraption to Russia’s borders, when the U.S. had solemnly promised not to do that.  NA, after all, stands for North Atlantic.  Did it anyway.  Then, when Putin—our eternal Beelzebub—told the U.S. that the deceitful NATO push to its borders, and its arming Nazi Azov Battalion and Right Sektor attacks on Lugansk and Donetsk was not acceptable, and asked for mutual understanding to provide security guarantees for all parties, he was dissed and insulted by our vacuous imbeciles.

=> ↺ Gunmen Kill 19 at Mexican Cockfighting Party

• So long as millions and millions of working Mexicans continue to live under the tyranny of seven to ten dollars a day, which is Mexico’s “legal” minimum wage, a number of them will keep on taking a chance on crime.

• Working people in Mexico have families to feed but often can’t do that fully. We’re talking about the basic necessities of food, medicine, housing, and school for their kids. But they all have smart phones or know someone who does, so they’re well aware they’re getting screwed and they’re angry.

=> ↺ Biden Won’t Release Afghanistan’s Central Bank Assets, Even in Face of Collapse

=> ↺ With All Eyes on Ukraine, the Fight Against Climate Change Is Falling Behind

=> ↺ Noam Chomsky: Russia’s War Against Ukraine Has Accelerated the Doomsday Clock

=> ↺ Is a Peace Deal Near? Ukraine Won’t Join NATO in Return for Russian Withdrawal, Security Guarantees

• The United Nations says more than 4 million refugees have now fled Ukraine as Russia’s invasion nears its sixth week. Russia announced plans Tuesday to “fundamentally” cut back military operations near Kyiv and the city of Chernihiv, but Ukrainian officials say Russian forces continue to carry out strikes in or near both cities. Meanwhile, the outlines of a possible peace deal have emerged in talks between the two sides, with Ukraine offering to become a neutral country and remain nuclear-free in exchange for security guarantees. But Ukrainian officials stress a deal can only be reached once Russia withdraws its forces from the country. For more, we go to Kyiv to speak with Peter Zalmayev, director of the Eurasia Democracy Initiative, who says Ukrainians remain “very skeptical” of the Russian president’s intentions. “Ukrainians are very much ready to negotiate, but the question is if Vladimir Putin continues to cling to his obsession to try to control all of Ukraine and control its politics and to install a puppet regime.”

Environment

=> ↺ Despite Net-Zero Promises, Big Banks Are Dumping Trillions Into Fossil Fuels

=> ↺ Destruction of Amazon Rainforest Accelerates as Elections Loom in Brazil

=> ↺ Scientists to Biden: World Needs ‘Rapid Transition From Fossil Fuels to Renewable Energy’

• “In this moment of climate emergency,” five scientists began a new open letter to U.S. President Joe Biden, “we write with utmost urgency to advise you and your administration to halt recent moves towards increasing fossil fuel production and instead take bold action to rapidly reduce fossil fuel extraction and infrastructure.”

• “The president’s fossil fuel expansion takes us deeper into climate catastrophe.”

=> ↺ Transition to Zero-Emission Vehicles Would Deliver $1.2 Trillion in Public Health Benefits: Report

• A new report details how a nationwide transition to a zero-emission transportation sector and renewable electricity generation would bring $1.2 trillion in public health benefits to the United States over the next three decades.

• “The shift to zero-emission transportation and electricity generation will save lives and generate massive health benefits across the United States.”

=> ↺ Facebook’s Boosting of Climate Lies Pushes ‘Skeptics’ Toward Denial: Report

• Despite pledging to fight climate disinformation, Facebook’s algorithm continues to amplify deceptive and misleading content—pushing users who express doubts about anthropogenic climate change toward outright denial, according to a new report released this week by Global Witness.

• “Our investigation shows how worryingly easy it is for its users to be led down a dangerous path that flies in the face of both science and reality.”

Energy

=> ↺ Coal Trains and Climate Protest: It’s Spring in New England

• The coal trains are rolling through New England again. You can see them as you stand on a street corner in Worcester, Mass., or any number of towns along their route, headed to the last coal-fired power plant in the region—Merrimack Station, on the banks of the Merrimack River in Bow, N.H.

=> ↺ Opinion | Big Oil Should Pay Windfall Tax to Offset Pain at the Pump

• There’s one group of people who aren’t worried about high gas prices this month: Big Oil executives.

=> ↺ Green Groups Decry US Energy Panel’s Reversal on Gas Pipeline Climate Reviews

• By Jessica Corbett, Common Dreams. Originally published on Common Dreams.

• U.S. climate activists were outraged after a federal regulatory agency on Thursday, March 24 walked back plans to consider the planet-heating emissions and environmental justice impacts when weighing whether to approve new fossil fuel infrastructure.

=> ↺ Anti-Net Zero MP Backs ‘Laughable’ Report Urging Renewables be ‘Wound Down’

• A Conservative MP leading a backbench revolt against UK climate policy has endorsed a report calling for renewable energy to be “wound down” completely. 

• South Thanet MP Craig Mackinlay, who chairs the Net Zero Scrutiny Group (NZSG) in parliament, is quoted in the press release for the report Taking Back Control: Addressing Britain’s Energy Crisis, which was released over the weekend and covered in the Telegraph newspaper. 

Wildlife/Nature

=> ↺ Hope for Coral Reefs

Finance

=> ↺ Opinion | Truck Drivers Are Grossly Underpaid and Work Under Immoral Corporate Bosses

• The recent traffic-clogging protests in Canada, Washington, D.C., Europe and elsewhere by long- and short-haul truck drivers were about them being angry over having to comply with COVID-19 vaccine mandates—right?

=> ↺ Airport Workers Protest Across US Demanding ‘Living Wage’ and Right to Union

• Contracted airport workers—including baggage handlers, cabin cleaners, security officers, and wheelchair agents—in more than 20 U.S. cities staged coordinated demonstrations Wednesday to call for higher wages, better benefits, and the right to unionize.

• “As an immigrant who spent 10 years in refugee camps, I’ve faced plenty of hardship in my life, but none as great as the last two years.”

=> ↺ ‘Healthcare Is a Human Right’: Sanders Announces Medicare for All Senate Hearing

• Just a day after a panel in the U.S. House of Representatives met to discuss universal healthcare legislation, Senate Budget Committee Chair Bernie Sanders announced that he plans to hold a Medicare for All hearing this May.

• “The momentum to guarantee healthcare as a human right is real here in Congress.”

=> ↺ Despite ‘Splashy’ Net-Zero Vows, Big Banks Dumping Trillions Into Fossil Fuels

• Flouting their public vows to put themselves and their clients on a path to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions, the world’s 60 largest private banks have provided a total of $4.6 trillion in financing for the fossil fuel industry since the Paris Agreement entered into force in 2016.

• That’s according to the latest edition of Banking on Climate Chaos, an annual report that tracks the banking industry’s funding of oil and gas initiatives that are threatening global hopes of reining in carbon pollution and averting climate disaster.

=> ↺ Opinion | Mega-Billionaires and the Gushing Upward Redistribution of Wealth

• The word “billionaire” didn’t even exist until 1844. Fifty years later, we got “multibillionaire.” And for the next 127 years, that was enough. 

=> ↺ How the Student Debt Crisis Hurts Women

• Today, women hold over two-thirds of America’s trillion-dollar student debt. Each holds, on average, $31,000 in student debt before their career even begins, and because of the persistent gender wage pay gap, it takes years longer for women to pay their debt back. All of these obstacles are growing at a time when women, for the first time, seek higher-level degrees more often than men. Despite hard-work and aspirations, it is fundamentally harder for women borrowers to afford their monthly payments and rise above this debt, no matter how educated or experienced they are. 

=> ↺ Texas Gov’t Threw Millions At ‘Border Enforcement.’ Stats Show It Was A Waste Of Money.

• Never mind the economy. The real inflation is coming from government agencies seeking to justify their waste of taxpayers’ money.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

=> ↺ The Venomous Trial of Judge Jackson

• These senators shamed their Senate Judiciary Committee and themselves during hearings to determine Jackson’s credentials to replace Justice Stephen Breyer on the Supreme Court. She had been vetted by the panel three times for previous judicial positions, the last time about a year ago when she was nominated for the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C.

• Yet they repeatedly badgered Jackson and bore down on her inappropriately unmercifully, bullied her, paying little heed to her position as an appellate judge with a golden reputation and the first Black to be nominated to the high court. She deserved far more respect.

=> ↺ Rights Groups Herald Reported End to Cruel Title 42 Expulsions

• Human rights defenders on Wednesday welcomed the White House’s reported plans to soon end the use of Title 42, a public health measure both the Biden and Trump administrations used to turn away asylum-seekers at the southern border for the past two years.

• “The decision is an overdue recognition that all people fleeing violence and persecution have the right to seek protection.”

=> ↺ Opinion | Enough. It Is Time for Merrick Garland to Act on Trump’s Coup Plot

• I know you’ve heard this before—that accountability is coming for Donald Trump and his cronies for triggering the Jan. 6th insurrection—but this time, something new and different has happened. On March 28, Federal District Court Judge David O. Carter ruled that Trump and former Chapman University law professor John Eastman “more likely than not” committed two felonies in their efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election: obstruction of an official proceeding of Congress, and conspiracy to defraud the United States. 

=> ↺ Opinion | A Five-Alarm Emergency for Voting Rights and Democracy

• “Voter suppression” is a divisive and highly politicized term. But for the slate of bills Republicans are pushing across the country, it’s the only correct one.

=> ↺ South Korea’s New Foreign Policy of One Yes and Two Nos

• But perhaps the greatest impact the new conservative administration will have is in the arena of foreign policy. The quickest way of summarizing the likely approach of the incoming government is “two Nos and one Yes.” Yoon will be saying “no” to both North Korea and China while embracing the United States with a big “yes.”

• At a deeper level, Yoon will be steering South Korea away from an effort to balance major powers in the Asia-Pacific region and toward greater alignment with U.S. foreign policy. The Biden administration is looking forward to greater coordination between South Korea and Japan in countering North Korea and containing China.

=> ↺ Facebook Hiring of GOP Firm Seen as Proof of Growing Ties to ‘Republican Political Machine’

• The new revelation Wednesday that Facebook hired one of the largest Republican consulting firms in the United States to carry out a public attack campaign against rival platform TikTok was seen as further evidence of the social media behemoth’s growing alliance with the GOP political apparatus.

• “This story tends to indicate that Facebook is just part of the Republican political machine now.”

=> ↺ Why Keep Politics Out of the Oscars?

• God must be a screenwriter. Who else might have scripted the most compelling Oscar drama in years? Delivering “the slap heard ’round the world” if not the Oscar Night universe, Will Smith redeemed himself and embarrassed everyone else, not least the presumed injured party—his wife, Jada Pinkett Smith—when on live television he stormed the proscenium to physically assault a nonplussed Chris Rock for making a lame schoolyard joke.

=> ↺ The Oscars: Awkward Spectacle

• At first, the slap seemed like a mildly hokey pre-staged bit. After all, it followed a mildly hokey joke involving Smith’s wife Jada Pinkett, who has partial hair loss due to alopecia, and Ridley Scott’s 1997 film G.I. Jane, which starred Demi Moore who sported a buzz cut. (Incidentally, that was the second mildly hokey joke at Scott’s expense of the evening.) But when the US broadcast picture froze and the sound cut out the post-slap, it soon became clear that it wasn’t a gag. International broadcasts aired the incident uncensored, which immediately cleared things up for people watching at home. Recovering from the slap, Chris Rock tried to laugh it off by remarking, “Will Smith smacked the shit out of me.” Smith bellowed, “Keep my wife’s name out of your fuckin’ mouth,” at which point the Academy audience realized the severity of the situation. Rock, sheepish and in shock, agreed but also noted: “It was a G.I. Jane joke.” To his credit, this is technically true.

=> ↺ The blaming game in the Hungarian campaign: who’s “working for the Russians”, and who “for the Ukrainians”

=> ↺ Putin’s hackers gained full access to Hungary’s foreign ministry networks, the Orbán government has been unable to stop them

=> ↺ The war in Ukraine drives a wedge between Poland and Hungary

• While Poland vehemently supports Ukraine’s bid to join NATO, Hungary is interested in Ukraine being a broad buffer zone between it and Russia. The Russian question has long been a political taboo in Hungarian-Polish relations. Translation by Charles Hebbert

=> ↺ The Money Trail to the Ginni Thomas Emails to Overturn Biden’s Election Leads to Charles Koch

• A total of 29 emails were obtained by Woodward and Costa, with the bulk of the emails occurring in just the month of November 2020, raising questions as to how many more emails are still out there from Thomas to the White House from December 1, 2020 through January 20, 2021 when Biden was sworn in.

• Much of the current news debate around the emails is focusing on whether Clarence Thomas should recuse himself from cases involving groups with which his wife is involved and whether the Select Committee should subpoena Ginni Thomas to testify. While those are certainly important issues, what has thus far been ignored is the smoking gun trail that leads directly to the doorstep of billionaire and right-wing Republican political mastermind, Charles Koch, the Chairman, CEO (and majority owner with the heirs of his deceased brother David) of the fossil fuels conglomerate Koch Industries.

=> ↺ Ocasio-Cortez Calls for Clarence Thomas to Resign Over Wife’s Ties to January 6

=> ↺ Opinion | Ginni Thomas’s Texts: A ‘Coup in Search of a Legal Theory’ and Judicial Malfeasance

• U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has written that he and his wife, Virginia (“Ginni”), are “one being—an amalgam.” Repeatedly, he has called her his “best friend.” Immediately after President Donald Trump lost the November 2020 election, Ginni Thomas joined the effort to overturn it. Since then, her husband has been hearing cases arising from the January 6 insurrection.

Censorship/Free Speech

=> ↺ Why Moderating Content Actually Does More To Support The Principles Of Free Speech

• Obviously over the past few years there’s been all of these debates about the content moderation practices of various websites. We’ve written about it a ton, including in our Content Moderation Case Study series (currently on hiatus, but hopefully back soon). The goal of that series was to demonstrate that content moderation is rarely (if ever) about “censoring” speech, and almost always about dealing with extremely challenging decisions that any website has to deal with if they host content from users. Some of that involves legal requirements, some of it involves trying to keep a community focused, some of it involves dealing with spam, and some of it involves just crazy difficult decisions about what kind of community you want.

Civil Rights/Policing

=> ↺ 121 Million Unintended Pregnancies Per Year Reveals ‘Global Failure’ on Women’s Rights: Report

• The United Nations sexual and reproductive health agency on Wednesday said global policymakers have utterly failed to uphold women’s rights as it reported that despite the wide availability of contraception in wealthy countries, nearly half of all pregnancies around the world—121 million per year—are unintended.

• “Nothing is more fundamental to bodily autonomy than the ability to decide whether or not to become pregnant,” said the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA) in its new report, titled Seeing the Unseen. “Yet for too many, the most life-altering reproductive choice is no choice at all.”

=> ↺ US Plans to Arrest Migrants at Southern Border as It Welcomes Ukrainian Refugees

=> ↺ Portland Soccer Feels the Power of Protest

• An eerie silence descended upon the stadium as the Portland Timbers’ Major League Soccer match against the visiting Orlando City SC got underway last Sunday. Normally, the Timbers feature what is arguably the most rambunctious supporters’ group in the league: the Timbers Army. But as chants broke out from the north end of the stadium, members of Timbers Army waved their arms to silence them. This conspicuous quiet was part of a planned protest: five minutes of silence to spotlight the pattern of abuse—from allegations of domestic violence to sexual coercion—that the club’s front office has overlooked and allegedly even attempted to cover up.

=> ↺ In Every Corner of Palestine, There Is a Story of Dispossession

• Today is Land Day in Palestine—a day that commemorates the moment 46 years ago when Israeli forces shot and killed six Palestinians with Israeli citizenship who dared to protest the Israeli regime’s confiscation of tens of thousands of dunams of Palestinian land.

=> ↺ Civil Rights Faces

=> ↺ How Europe’s Anti-Migrant Policies Gave Rise to “Absolutely Horrific” Refugee Prisons in Libya

• Western countries have opened their doors to millions of Ukrainians fleeing the war in their homeland, presenting a model of how refugees should be welcomed. But their experience stands in stark contrast to how African refugees are treated when attempting to reach Europe to escape war, hunger and despair. In her new book, “My Fourth Time, We Drowned: Seeking Refuge on the World’s Deadliest Migration Route,” author Sally Hayden details how a single message from an Eritrean refugee held in a Libyan detention center led her on a years-long journey to document the human rights disaster on Europe’s doorstep. She says that since a 2017 European Union agreement with Libya to stop migrants before they cross the Mediterranean, many refugees have been imprisoned in hellish detention centers run by armed groups with little care for the safety or well-being of the people inside. “Tens of thousands of people have been locked up in detention centers that Pope Francis, among many others, have compared to concentration camps,” says Hayden. “The situation is absolutely horrific.”

=> ↺ U.S. Prepares to Arrest Surge of Migrants at Southern Border as It Welcomes 100,000 Ukrainian Refugees

• As the U.S. says it will welcome up to 100,000 Ukrainian refugees fleeing the Russian invasion, immigration officials say they’re preparing for a surge of migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border as it ends the Trump-era pandemic restriction Title 42 in response to humanitarian outcry. We speak with Guerline Jozef of the Haitian Bridge Alliance about how Haitian refugees are treated, and with award-winning journalist Maria Hinojosa about the Haitians she met in a migrant caravan. Jozef says President Biden’s pledge to welcome Ukrainian refugees, while necessary, is a painful display of the double standard faced by Haitian immigrants and other people of color seeking humanitarian relief in the United States. “Why is it that when it comes to people of color, Black and Brown people, we must continue to push and beg to validate our humanity?” asks Jozef. Hinojosa has been reporting on migration for her podcast series “The Moving Border” and says the Biden administration is “appeasing” anti-immigrant forces in the U.S. by continuing rejections, deportations and detentions at the southern border. “What we are seeing is … white supremacy in the context of refugees and desperate people,” says Hinojosa.

=> ↺ Cops Are Being ‘Trained’ To Use Literal Witchcraft To Find Dead Bodies

• We [waves flattened palm parallel to the floor in circular motion meant to demonstrate the encompassing nature of the rest of this sentence] the People of this United States have seen some shit. This faaaaaaaaaaarrrr surpasses anything we’ve seen before.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

=> ↺ AT&T Fumbles: the Tyranny of Big Telecom

• Postmodern America is a telecom enabled nation.  In the U.S., there are more telecom subscribers — 518 million subscriber to wireless, wirelines and cable services – than people; for 2021, the Census Bureau estimates the U.S. population at 332 million.

• Tele-connectivity mediates, electronically facilitates, nearly every aspect of contemporary communications — whether private, education, business, health or government; whether voice, internet, social media or streaming; whether online retail, distant learning or Zoom meeting; and whatever the content, be it the latest news headline, a presidential address, a promotional offering, a dating service listing or a porn flick.  And telecommunications make nearly every place and person on the globe nearly instantaneously accessible.

Monopolies

Copyrights

=> ↺ LiquidVPN Ordered to Pay Filmmakers $14m in Copyright Damages

• A group of filmmakers has won over $14 million in damages from VPN provider LiquidVPN. The default judgment finds the company guilty of copyright infringement and DMCA violations, in part by promoting the Popcorn Time app. The order also awards $250,000 in trademark damages in favor of 42 Ventures, which owns the Popcorn Time trademark.

=> ↺ TV Boss Threatens Mastercard & Visa Over Support For Pirate Sites

• When his new legal streaming service launched in 2021, producer and cinema investor Moshe Edery asked consumers to “leave the pirates and come to the Zionists.” When millions didn’t, Edery hatched plans to take down a number of pirate sites, including the most popular in Israel. In a warning to Mastercard, Visa and American Express, Edery says he will come for them too, if they don’t withdraw their support for piracy.

=> ↺ Publishers Seem To Believe Their Outsized Sense Of Entitlement Should Trump Democracy

• One of the striking features of the copyright industry is its insatiability. No matter how long, broad and strong copyright becomes, the copyright world wants it to be yet longer, broader and stronger. It seems companies simply cannot conceive of any point where there is “enough” copyright in the world.

=> ↺ Bungie Sues Does Over ‘Destiny’ DMCA Takedowns, Slams YouTube’s DMCA Process

• In our somewhat limited discussions about video game publisher Bungie, our remarks about the company certainly haven’t always been positive. And perhaps that colored my thinking when I recently wrote about a DMCA takedown blitz occurring among the Destiny community, with all kinds of uploads from fans being on the receiving end of takedowns on YouTube. But Bungie insisted it wasn’t them, a claim bolstered by the fact that some of Bungie’s own official videos on its channel also got hit with takedowns. Still, the statement from the company about all of this left some room for interpretation, with Bungie indicating that these takedowns weren’t happening at “the request” of Bungie, leading plenty of folks to assume this was an automated copyright enforcement bot or a 3rd party enforcement agency going rogue.

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