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● 03.22.23

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● Links 22/03/2023: GNOME 44 “Kuala Lumpur”

Posted in News Roundup at 9:36 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

=> ↺ 8 steps to refurbish an old computer with Linux

• We live in a remarkable era. It wasn’t so long ago we were all chained to the “upgrade treadmill,” forced to buy expensive new personal computers every few years.

• Today, with the benefit of open source software, you can break out of that cycle. One way is to refurbish old computers and keep them in service. This article tells you how.

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ How to Install Latest NodeJS and NPM in Linux

• In this guide, we shall take a look at how you can install the latest version of Nodejs and NPM on RHEL-based distributions such as CentOS, Fedora, Rocky & AlmaLinux and Debian-based distributions such as Ubuntu & Linux Mint.

=> ↺ How to Run Angular Apps Using Angular CLI and PM2

• Angular CLI is a command-line interface for the Angular framework, which is used to create, build and run your application locally while developing.

• It is designed to build and test an Angular project on a development server. However, if you want to run/keep your applications alive forever in production, you need a Node.js process manager such as PM2.

=> ↺ NixOS Series #5: How to set up home-manager on NixOS?

• Here’s how you can easily set up the home-manager to install/remove packages on NixOS.

=> ↺ 4 Useful Tools to Troubleshoot DNS Name Resolution Problems

• DNS (Domain Name System) is the phonebook of the internet. A Domain name is a unique alphanumeric address that users type in the URL bar in the browser in order to access a website.

=> ↺ How to Install Angular CLI on Linux

• Angular is an open-source, popular, and highly-extensible front-end application development framework, used for building mobile and web applications using TypeScript/JavaScript and other common languages.

=> ↺ How to deploy a service to a Docker Swarm cluster

• Docker Swarm is a way to create a cluster for container deployment. Jack Wallen walks you through installing a Docker Swarm cluster and then deploying and managing a service to the cluster.

Games

=> ↺ Warside is a pixel-art turn-based tactics game much like Advance Wars

• Love turn-based tactics and classics like Advance Wars? You should keep an eye on Warside, as it’s firmly channelling that same energy. It looks pretty great and with full cross-platform multiplayer on top of the story campaign, it’s certainly piqued my curiosity.

=> ↺ Colourful retro platformer Frogun Encore announced for Summer 2023

• Frogun Encore is the follow-up to Frogun from Molegato and Top Hat Studios, Inc. that was released in 2020, giving more family-friendly retro inspired 3D platforming. Designed much like classics from the PlayStation 1 / Nintendo 64 era, the original reviewed reasonably well, so hopefully they will be working to address any sticking points from the original.

=> ↺ Upcoming city-builder HexLands sounds like a relaxing time

• HexLands from Portgate Studios has been announced with a new Steam page live, taking inspiration from the likes of Islanders, Dorf Romantik and Sid Meier’s Civilization.

=> ↺ EmulationStation Desktop Edition 2.0 is out now

• EmulationStation Desktop Edition is a great front-end open source app for managing various emulators. A big 2.0 release went up recently too! What does it support? It works with the likes of various Commodore Amiga, Google Android, various Apple models, various Arcade machines, various Atari machines, various Nintendo machines and the list goes on for quite a while.

=> ↺ Mask of the Rose set to release on June 8th

• Mask of the Rose, the incredibly stylish upcoming dating sim visual novel from Sunless Skies creator Failbetter Games is set to now release on June 8th.

=> ↺ Big Ambitions drops Native Linux support shortly after the Steam release

• After being in Beta for a while for pre-orders, Big Ambitions, a role-playing business sim from Hovgaard Games (who previously developed Startup Company) launched in Early Access on Steam and then dropped Native Linux support.

=> ↺ 3DS, Wii U eShop Shutdown Leaves Archivists In The Wind, Hobbyists Pick Up The Pieces

• A little over a year ago, we discussed Nintendo’s shutdown of the eShop for its 3DS and Wii U consoles. That shutdown ended up being delayed due to a metric ton of outcry from the gaming public, but that was only a stay of execution. In a matter of days, those shops will be discontinued, preventing anyone from purchasing any titles in those stores. Many of the titles that are original to those consoles are not available anywhere else. Nintendo has made some vague noises about them becoming available on modern consoles, but all of those plans live at the pleasure of Nintendo executives. Coupled with its extremely litigious nature on matters of intellectual property, that’s how you get to my nicknaming Nintendo as “the Disney of the video game industry.”

Desktop Environments/WMs

GNOME Desktop/GTK

=> ↺ GNOME 44 “Kuala Lumpur” Officially Released, This Is What’s New

• Code-named “Kuala Lumpur” in recognition of the work done by the organizers of GNOME.Asia Summit 2022 conference, GNOME 44 introduces a GTK4 port of the Epihaphy (GNOME Web) web browser, a file chooser grid view for apps that use the standard GTK file chooser, as well as support for adding a WireGuard VPN directly from the Network panel.

• GNOME 44 continues to improve the Quick Settings feature introduced in GNOME 43 by implementing a submenu to the Bluetooth button to more easily and quickly connect or disconnect peripherals, adding descriptions to buttons to easily see their status, and implementing a new feature called Background Apps via a new background monitoring service in XDG portals 1.16.0.

Distributions and Operating Systems

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

=> ↺ Meet the Canonical Ceph team at Cephalocon 2023

• Date: April 16-18th, 2023

• Location: Amsterdam, Netherlands

Devices/Embedded

=> ↺ NVIDIA debuts Jetson Orin Nano Developer Kit

• Today, NVIDIA unveiled their latest Developer Kit based on the Jetson Orin 8GB module designed for Robotic and Smart Vision applications. This new development kit delivers up to 40 TOPs of AI performance and it can be preordered for $489.00.

=> ↺ Hands-On: NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano Developer Kit

• NVIDIA’s Jetson line of single-board computers are doing something different in a vast sea of relatively similar Linux SBCs. Designed for edge computing applications, such as a robot that needs to perform high-speed computer vision while out in the field, they provide exceptional performance in a board that’s of comparable size and weight to other SBCs on the market. The only difference, as you might expect, is that they tend to cost a lot more: the current top of the line Jetson AGX Orin Developer Kit is $1999 USD

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

=> ↺ Google copies one more Samsung design idea for Android 14 – SamMobile

=> ↺ How To Enable Earthquake Alerts On Your Android Smartphone

=> ↺ Major Android manufacturers form an alliance to make switching phones easier

=> ↺ Every Samsung device that will get four Android OS upgrades

=> ↺ Free Fire OB39 update APK download link for Android devices

=> ↺ OnePlus 11R is an alternate Android flagship, with surprisingly few compromises – Hindustan Times

=> ↺ Billions of Android users can unlock hidden perks by tapping out 12-letter code – find secret Google menu today | The US Sun

=> ↺ Nokia C12 Pro Price: Nokia C12 Pro smartphone comes with Android 12 Go edition, 4000mAh battery. See details – The Economic Times

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

=> ↺ Why your open source project needs a content strategy

• If you search for content strategy in your favorite search engine, I bet that you find that it is a term more strongly associated with marketing content than with technical content. However, a technical content strategy is a powerful way to align stakeholders around content goals for your open source project. In this article, I explore the benefits of technical content strategy and how having one can improve the user and contributor experience of your community projects.

• When developing a content strategy, you should consider your goals. The goals differ depending on the user. For the marketing team, the goal of content strategy is to attract and connect with existing and potential customers by using content. Marketing content strategists aim to engage customers and develop relationships with the brand.

=> ↺ Results of 2023 elections of OSI board of directors

=> ↺ Microsoft Infiltrated OSI Board of Directors After Rigged Elections

• The polls just closed, the results are in. Congratulations to the returning directors Aeva Black… [Microsoft]

Leftovers

=> ↺ Gwyneth Paltrow appears in a Utah court for a trial over a 2016 ski crash

• The trial is being live streamed on YouTube.

=> ↺ David Price

=> ↺ By George

=> ↺ Staying Alive in a Country of Death

• “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.”

• So screamed the character Howard Beale in the 1976 movie “Network,” a prescient commentary on the corporate capture and slow suffocation of America. Howard was a prime-time news anchor who’d had enough. To some of his viewers, he was having a mental breakdown on national television. To others, he saw the country as clearly as a prophet, saw it for exactly what it was: a fetid cabal of the rich obsessed with money at the expense of human life and dignity.

=> ↺ I’ve been employed in tech for years, but I’ve almost never worked

• When Twitter fired half of its employees in 2022, and most tech giants followed suit, I wasn’t surprised. In fact, I think little will change for those companies. After being employed in the tech sector for years, I have come to the conclusion that most people in tech don’t work. I don’t mean we don’t work hard; I mean we almost don’t work at all. Nada. Zilch. And when we do get to do some work, it often brings low added value to the company and its customers. All of this while being paid an amount of money some people wouldn’t even dream of.

• What is happening right now in tech may be one of the greatest market inefficiencies—or even deceptions—in history. I am writing this article because I think outsiders deserve to know what’s really going on in the field.

=> ↺ David Graeber is dead but the bullshit jobs are still there

• In an interview with the French daily “Le Monde”1, David Graeber recalled that “[bullshit jobs] have multiplied exponentially in recent decades. To be convinced of this, one only has to listen to employees who are aware of the low utility of their jobs (…): the consultant, whose reports are not read by anyone, the assistant stirring the air because his boss needs to justify his hierarchical position, the business lawyer earning money solely thanks to the errors of the system… Millions of people today suffer from a terrible lack of meaning, coupled with a feeling of social uselessness. This may seem paradoxical: in theory, the market economy, which is supposed to maximize profits and efficiency through competition, should not allow these useless jobs to exist. ».

=> ↺ Brother Leaves Voicemails from CPEP

=> ↺ Letters From the April 3/10, 2023, Issue

• He Was a Mensch

• To say I loved Victor adds little to the commentary, as most everyone felt the same [“Remembering Victor Navasky,” February 20/27]. He was very kind and deeply respectful, fervent in his beliefs yet as lighthearted as one can be while aware of so much injustice, and consistent in integrity and principle. In the years I worked with him, I never saw any hypocrisy, so unusual in a person connected to politics and power.

=> ↺ Info Sought On A Forgotten Cuban Radio

• Some of the daily normalities of life in the Cold War seem a little surreal from our perspective in 2023, when nuclear bombers no longer come in to land just down the road and you can head off to Poland or Czechia on a whim. Radio amateurs were one of the few groups of civilians whose activities crossed the geopolitical divide, and even though an operator on the other side from ours couldn’t buy a shiny Japanese radio, their homebrew skills matched anything we could do with our Western soldering irons.

=> ↺ Icicle Patterns With Custom Gantry

• [Cranktown City] uses a number of custom-built linear rails used as gantries for various tools in the shop. The first is on a plasma cutter, which is precise but difficult to set up or repair. Another is for mounting a camera, and while it is extremely durable, it’s not the most precise tool in the shop. Hoping to bridge the gap between these two, he’s building another gantry with a custom bearing system, and to test it he’ll be using it to create patterns in icicles hanging from an eave at his shop.

Education

=> ↺ The Internet Archive Is a Library

• The Internet Archive, a nonprofit library in San Francisco, has grown into one of the most important cultural institutions of the modern age. What began in 1996 as an audacious attempt to archive and preserve the World Wide Web has grown into a vast library of books, musical recordings and television shows, all digitized and available online, with a mission to provide “universal access to all knowledge.”

• Right now, we are at a pivotal stage in a copyright infringement lawsuit against the Internet Archive, still pending, brought by four of the biggest for-profit publishers in the world, who have been trying to shut down core programs of the archive since the start of the pandemic. For the sake of libraries and library users everywhere, let’s hope they don’t succeed.

=> ↺ Local Efforts to Resist Right-Wing Attacks on Education Need National Support

=> ↺ Demanding Respect for All School Workers, LA Teachers Shut Down 2nd-Largest School District in US

• An estimated 65,000 teachers and school staffers from across Los Angeles walked picket lines in the rain on Tuesday as the city’s public school district employees went on strike—but more than half of the picketers were staging the walkout in solidarity, protesting conditions that don’t directly affect them.

=> ↺ Silicon Valley School District Files Laughable, Vexatious RICO Claims Against Big Social Media… But Not Facebook Or Instagram

• Back in January, we wrote about the Seattle public school district filing an absolutely laughable lawsuit against basically all of big social media, based on a bunch of misread and misunderstood studies, and general moral panic that social media must be “bad” for kids. In February, we wrote about the school district in Mesa, Arizona filing a very similar lawsuit (using the same law firm). We wondered if we were going to see a flood of such lawsuits.

Hardware

=> ↺ The 1.5TB microSD card is here but your wallet can’t handle it

• Micron’s 1.5TB microSD card can handle five years of continuous 24/7 high-quality recording and its average time between failures (MTBF) is around 2 million hours. This makes this little SD card suitable for video security platforms. That is its intended purpose, not to stick it in a smartphone.

=> ↺ 3D-Printed Parts Don’t Slow Down This Speedy Printer

• Truth be told, we generally find speed sports to be a little boring. Whether it’s cars going around in circles for hours on end or swimmers competing to be a few milliseconds faster than everyone else, we just don’t feel the need for speed. Unless, of course, you’re talking about speedy 3D printers like “The 100”, which claims to produce high-quality prints in a tenth the time of an ordinary printer. In that case, you’ve got our full attention.

=> ↺ Dispense 60 Bolts In 2.3 Seconds

• We’ve covered a number of projects that assist makers who need to fill orders for their small businesses, or kitting. [Helmke] has sorted thousands of pieces of hardware that they include with 3D printed parts sold online. They have been developing an alternative, a modular system for sorting and packaging specific quantities of parts.

=> ↺ Fresh PCBs For The Quickshot II And II Plus Joysticks

• The Quickshot II was released by Spectravideo in 1983 for the Commodore 64 and compatible systems, with the Quickshot II Plus following the next year. After decades of regular use, it’s quite understandable that these old-timers may be having some functional issues, but as long as the plastic parts are still good, [Stephan Eckweiler]’s replacement PCBs may be just the thing that these joysticks need to revitalize them for another few decades.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

=> ↺ Covid-19 report based on China samples puts suspicion back on raccoon dog origins

• DNA from raccoon dogs appeared in samples taken from the Wuhan market linked to early Covid-19 cases in 2019.

=> ↺ Italy orders probe into TikTok over dangerous content

• The Italian Competition Authority said its probe, which targets Irish company TikTok Technology Limited, a subsidiary of Chinese-owned TikTok, was sparked by videos of young people “adopting self-harming behaviour”, including the “French scar challenge”.

=> ↺ Former Trump official says TikTok ‘disguised as candy’ but is ‘cocaine’

• “The way TikTok is programmed, it preys on children,” he said. “It’s disguised as candy, and it’s actually cocaine. And I think this is coming out everywhere.”

=> ↺ We Cannot Countenance Windowless Bedrooms

• First of all, I won’t bother to dissect Fijan’s hypothetical floor plans because I think an architectural analysis misses the point of why this sucks. However, I will say a clever architect is capable of arranging space—even difficult-to-work-with space—in such a way that they can avoid obvious problems like windowless bedrooms. That is literally their job. Second, windows are obviously not the reason rents are high. The reasons rents are high are not in any way architectural, but rather are fundamentally political. Pretending otherwise is a convenient distraction from the realities imposed on the city by predatory developers and landlords, poor urban planning and land use practices leading to low supply, a lack of renter protection, and the G-word—gentrification. Pretty much everywhere, rent used to be cheaper and, guess what, those buildings, at least post–tenement laws, had windows.

=> ↺ What an Epic Women’s Strike Can Teach Us Over 70 Years Later

• The 53 women and children packed into Grant County Jail on June 16, 1951, were not normally ones for civil disobedience. But eight months into what would become New Mexico’s longest-lasting strike, they felt they had little choice but to put their bodies on the line to demand an end to racially discriminatory labor practices at the Empire Zinc Mine in the tiny town of Hanover.1

=> ↺ UK Stokes Health, Nuclear Fears With Decision to Send Ukraine Depleted Uranium Shells

• Dismissing a warning from Russia that it would regard the deployment of Western depleted uranium munitions in Ukraine as an act of nuclear war, a top British defense official said Monday that the United Kingdom will send DU armor-piercing tank rounds to Ukrainian homeland defenders—a move condemned by peace campaigners in the U.K. and beyond.

=> ↺ Black Residents of Cancer Alley Sue Local Government for Discrimination in Siting Chemical Facilities

• A discrimination lawsuit filed Tuesday in the Eastern District of Louisiana alleges that the St. James Parish Council steered polluting facilities into Black neighborhoods along the Mississippi River. As a result, Black residents there are forced to breathe in more pollution and face a higher risk of related health problems, according to the suit filed by Inclusive Louisiana, Mount Triumph Baptist Church, and RISE St. James.

• “We’re being ignored and we have to do whatever we have to do to stop it,” said Myrtle Felton, a lifelong resident of St. James Parish and co-founder of Inclusive Louisiana, a community group focused on environmental injustices.

=> ↺ You can now purchase medicines in Spain using a Finnish electronic prescription

• The use of Finnish electronic prescriptions in Europe is expanding. Spain is the latest country to join the scheme. In the first phase, six regions in Spain will be included in the service.

=> ↺ Multicultural children need support from an early age

Proprietary

=> ↺ Majority of zero-day flaws exploited in 2022 were in Microsoft, Google and Apple products: Report

• Zero-day vulnerabilities in software products offered by major tech companies like Microsoft, Google, and Apple were largely exploited by hackers in 2022, according to information security firm Mandiant. The report found that operating systems were the most exploited product type, followed by browsers and network management products. Chinese state-sponsored cyber espionage groups were found to have exploited the most zero-day vulnerabilities, with North Korean and Russian actors also among the hackers exploiting the security flaws. The report tracked 55 zero-day vulnerabilities in 2022.

=> ↺ US Citizen Hacked by Spyware

• The New York Times is reporting that a US citizen’s phone was hacked by the Predator spyware.

=> ↺ Global cybersecurity skills gap increasing: report

• More organisations were impacted financially due to breaches: Nearly 50 per cent of organisations suffered breaches in the past 12 months that cost more than US$1 million to remediate, which is up from 38 per cent of organisations compared to last year’s report.

Pseudo-Open Source

Openwashing

=> ↺ Stanford Researchers Create ChatGPT Clone for Just $600: Introducing Alpaca AI

• According to the story by Interesting Engineering, they have unveiled an AI model called Alpaca that works as well as the ChatGPT but was trained for only $600. This low-cost solution to create a model of this power is made possible by an open-source language model called LLaMA 7B from Mark Zuckerberg’s company, Meta.

Security

Privacy/Surveillance

=> ↺ TikTok hits 150 million US monthly users, up from 100 million in 2020

• Senate Intelligence Committee chair Mark Warner, who is cosponsoring legislation to give the administration more powers to ban TikTok, said at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast that he did not think TikTok U.S. data was safe.

=> ↺ Web fingerprinting is worse than I thought

• But companies found another way to uniquely identify you across different sessions and websites without using cookies or other persistent storage. It’s called web fingerprinting. Fingerprinting is a more sophisticated approach to identify a user among millions of others. It works by studying your web browser and hardware configuration. Many websites use a fingerprinting library to generate a unique ID. This library collects data from multiple JavaScript APIs offered by your web browser. For example, websites can see web browser version, number of CPUs on your device, screen size, number of touchpoints, video/audio codecs, operating system and many other details that you would not want a typical news website to see.

• All of these values are combined to generate a unique ID. Surprisingly, each user’s device and browser specifications differ so much that they get a unique ID among millions.

• I did not think web fingerprinting is serious until I came across a company which is actually selling fingerprinting as a service to other websites. I tried their demo and shocked how accurate it is. Many ecommerce websites use it because these fingerprinting companies sell it, saying it prevents credit card frauds and increases security of the websites.

=> ↺ Forget A TikTok Ban, We Need To Regulate Data Brokers And Pass A Real Privacy Law

• We’ve noted for a while now how the great TikTok moral panic of 2023 is largely a distraction. It’s a distraction from the fact we’ve refused to meaningfully regulate dodgy data brokers, who traffic in everything from your daily movement habits to your mental health diagnosis. And it’s a distraction from our corrupt failure to pass even a baseline privacy law for the internet era.

=> ↺ TSA Confirms Biometric Scanning Soon Won’t Be Optional Even For Domestic Travelers

• Ah, mission creep. The government loves it. Keeps people employed, keeps citizens on their toes, keeps privacy-focused sites in business, etc.

=> ↺ ORG and the3million challenge Government in the High Court over the Immigration Exemption

• Campaigners have a second judicial review hearing in the High Court on Tuesday 21 March 2023 to challenge the Government over the immigration exemption in the Data Protection Act 2018.

Defence/Aggression

=> ↺ Why Would China Be An Enemy?

• I am completely at a loss as to why the UK should seek to join in with the US in considering China an enemy, and in looking to build up military forces in the Pacific to oppose China.

=> ↺ War Made Easy: Norman Solomon on How Mainstream Media Helped Pave Way for U.S. Invasion of Iraq

• As we continue to mark the 20th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, we look at how the corporate U.S. media helped pave the way for war by uncritically amplifying lies and misrepresentations from the Bush administration while silencing voices of dissent. Longtime media critic Norman Solomon says many of the same media personalities and news outlets that pushed aggressively for the invasion then are now helping to solidify an elite consensus around the Ukraine war. “In the mass media, being pro-war is portrayed as objective. Being antiwar is portrayed as being biased,” he says. Solomon is author of War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death and the forthcoming War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine.

=> ↺ Criminals at Large: The Iraq War Twenty Years On

• The arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court for Russian President Vladimir Putin came at an opportune moment.  It was, if nothing else, a feeble distraction over the misdeeds and crimes of other leaders current and former. Russia, not being an ICC member country, does not acknowledge that court’s jurisdiction.  Nor, for that matter, does the United States, despite the evident chortling from US President Joe Biden.

• Twenty years on, former US President George W. Bush, former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, and Australia’s own John Howard, the troika most to blame for not just the criminal invasion of a foreign country but the regional and global cataclysm consequential to it, remain at large.  Since then, Bush has taken to painting; Blair and Howard have preferred to sell gobbets of alleged wisdom on the lecture circuit.

=> ↺ Hungary Obstructs EU Statement On Putin’s International Warrant

• Hungary has used its veto power to block a joint statement by European Union member states on the arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court against Russian President Vladimir Putin, Bloomberg reported on March 21, quoting sources familiar with the matter.

=> ↺ Belarusian Supreme Court Rejects Darya Losik’s Appeal Against Her Two-Year Prison Term

• The Supreme Court of Belarus has rejected an appeal filed by Darya Losik, the wife of jailed RFE/RL journalist Ihar Losik, against a two-year prison term she was handed in January for giving an interview to an independent media outlet.

=> ↺ Jailed Belarusian RFE/RL Journalist Losik May Be In Solitary Confinement

• Jailed RFE/RL journalist Ihar Losik may still be in solitary confinement, sources told RFE/RL’s Belarus Service, following a rights-group report that he had been taken to hospital after cutting himself with a sharp instrument to protest against orders given to him by prison guards.

=> ↺ In America’s Creed, Blessed Are the Warmakers

• In April 1953, newly elected President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a retired five-star Army general who had led the landings on D-Day in France in June 1944, gave his most powerful speech. It would become known as his “Cross of Iron” address. In it, Ike warned of the cost humanity would pay if Cold War competition led to a world dominated by wars and weaponry that couldn’t be reined in. In the immediate aftermath of the death of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, Ike extended an olive branch to the new leaders of that empire. He sought, he said, to put America and the world on a “highway to peace.” It was, of course, never to be, as this country’s emergent military-industrial-congressional complex (MICC) chose instead to build a militarized (and highly profitable) highway to hell.

=> ↺ Aces and Eights: Dealing Death in Iraq

=> ↺ The Chechens Fighting on the Ukrainian Side: Acrylic Paints and Urban Combat

• Muslim fighters from Chechnya have a reputation for brutality, and thousands of them are fighting for the Russians in Ukraine. But some have also joined Kyiv in the effort to fend off Putin’s troops. What is driving them?

=> ↺ Russian authorities raid homes of Memorial employees in connection with ‘rehabilitating Nazism’ charges — Meduza

• Russian law enforcement officers searched the homes of multiple employees of the human rights group Memorial on Tuesday morning in connection with felony charges of “rehabilitating Nazism” that were filed against the organization earlier this month.

=> ↺ NATO-Ukraine Commission to be convened despite Hungarian opposition

=> ↺ Denmark to add war crimes to criminal code

• Denmark is to give international war crimes a specific paragraph in its criminal code, ending its position as one of the last European countries not to have specific laws on war crimes.

=> ↺ Government Mendacity and Media Complicity Made the Catastrophic Iraq Invasion Possible

• As mainstream U.S. media outlets pause to remember the U.S. invasion of Iraq, it’s clear that there’s a lot they hope we’ll forget – first and foremost, the media’s own active complicity in whipping up public support for the war.

• But the more you dig into mainstream news coverage from that period, as our documentary team did last week when we put together this five-minute montage from our 2007 film War Made Easy, the harder it is to forget how flagrantly news networks across the broadcast and cable landscape uncritically spread the Bush administration’s propaganda and actively excluded dissenting voices.

=> ↺ Xi and Putin agree to advance their strategic partnership, as Kishida makes surprise trip to Ukraine

• Mr Xi told Mr Putin the two countries have enjoyed “deepening political mutual trust and convergence of interests”.

=> ↺ Prospects of a US Led Peace Movement in Ukraine and Looking Back at The US War in Iraq 20 Years Later – The Project Censored Show

=> ↺ For 20 Years, Team Bush Has Escaped Prosecution for Their War Crimes in Iraq

• One year after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the International Criminal Court charged him with war crimes.

=> ↺ Investigation Belies UK Claim That No Civilians Were Killed in Iraq-Syria Bombings

• British airstrikes targeting Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria likely killed dozens of noncombatants despite claims by U.K. military leaders that no civilians died during such bombings, a major investigation by the monitor group Airwars and The Guardian revealed on Tuesday.

=> ↺ “Jaw-dropping”: Experts stunned after report reveals new tape of Trump pressuring Georgia official

• A Fulton County grand jury heard a previously unreported recording of former President Donald Trump pressuring a top Georgia Republican to help overturn his election loss in the state, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

=> ↺ Finland still purchasing gas from Russia

• According to data from Finnish Customs, Gasum has purchased a total of 175 million euros of [fossil] gas from Russia since February 2022.

=> ↺ Putin the Pariah: War crimes arrest warrant deepens Russia’s isolation

• The warrant states that Putin “is allegedly responsible for the war crime of unlawful deportation of population (children) and that of unlawful transfer of population (children) from occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation. There are reasonable grounds to believe that Putin bears individual criminal responsibility for the aforementioned crimes.”

• The ICC is a comparatively new international organization. It was created in July 1998 and formally established in 2002. At present, 123 countries have ratified its statute. They include all the countries of South America, all EU countries, most of Oceania, and roughly half of Africa. All these countries are now theoretically committed to arresting Putin. No sovereign immunity will shield him.

=> ↺ Flouting War Crimes Charges, Putin Visits Occupied Ukrainian Territory

• Kyiv, Ukraine—Two days after a warrant was issued for his arrest by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for forcibly deporting Ukrainian children to Russia, Vladimir Putin toured Russian-occupied Ukrainian land in Crimea and Mariupol. The visit was a brazen show of disrespect for the court and for the victims of Putin’s crimes, as the Russian president strolled by the sites of some of the most horrific human rights abuses so far in this war: the bombings in Mariupol of a theater-turned-shelter that killed 600 people and a maternity ward that killed at least one pregnant woman.

=> ↺ ‘I don’t understand why you’re beating me’ Moscow police respond to art event with violence, rape threats, and pro-war slogans — Meduza

• On March 19, Russian police disrupted an event at Open Space, a popular co-working and event space in Moscow, that was dedicated to comic books created by artist Sasha Skochilenko, who’s currently in prison on felony charges of spreading “disinformation” about the Russian military. According to the independent outlet Agentstvo, the speakers at the event didn’t talk about the war in Ukraine; the discussion was dedicated to mental health and Skochilenko’s art. The officers physically beat attendees, threatened to rape them, and set up a bulletin board with messages like “Ukraine is part of Russia.” The St. Petersburg-based outlet Bumaga spoke to one of the victims, a friend of Skochilenko’s named Alexey Belozerov. With Bumaga’s permission, Meduza is publishing a translation of Belozerov’s account.

=> ↺ Caught off guard How the ICC’s arrest warrant for Putin threw a wrench in the Kremlin’s plans for 2023 — Meduza

• Since the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant against Vladimir Putin on Friday, the Kremlin has done its best to appear unfazed. But multiple sources close to the Russian authorities have told Meduza that the Putin administration was not expecting the court’s announcement, and that the severe restrictions the warrant puts on the president’s ability to travel abroad could poke holes in the image he tries to project at home.

=> ↺ Ukraine Security Service charges popular blogger and Tolstoy dynasty member Artemy Lebedev with justifying Russian aggression — Meduza

• The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) has published a press release detailing the suspicions against the popular Russian blogger Artemy Lebedev.

=> ↺ Russia’s Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin gives Christian name to river in historically indigenous Yamalia — Meduza

• Russia’s Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin has given an order to rename a river that runs through the historically indigenous Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug, the largest oil-and-gas producer in the country.

=> ↺ ‘Productive forgetting’ Historian Todd Shepard reflects on Russia’s war against Ukraine through the prism of the Algerian War and France’s decolonization — Meduza

• From 1954 to 1962, France waged a bloody war in Algeria, primarily against the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN). France’s eventual defeat in the Algerian War would become a landmark moment in the history of twentieth century decolonization. However, Paris relinquishing its claim to Algeria hinged on the power of forgetting rather than postwar justice and reconciliation. In an interview with researchers Friedrich Asschenfeldt and Sebastian Hoppe, historian Todd Shepard — a professor at John Hopkins University and the author of the award-winning book, The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France — reflects on Russia’s war against Ukraine through the prism of the French-Algerian experience. 

=> ↺ Ukrainian cargo ship crew rescues Russian sailors who were shipwrecked while attempting to circumnavigate the globe — Meduza

• The Russian Ocean Way is a trimaran whose Russian crew is attempting to sail around the entire globe. On March 16, the boat was shipwrecked off the coast of Chile. Unable to repair the ship’s damaged steering mechanism, the sailors sent out a distress signal. They soon received a response from the Sounion, a cargo ship whose captain lived in Mariupol until he was forced to leave by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

=> ↺ Kremlin edits video of Putin’s Mariupol visit to remove woman’s cry of ‘It’s all for show!’ — Meduza

• The Kremlin’s press service has edited its official video of Vladimir Putin’s purportedly spontaneous meeting with Mariupol residents, removing a portion during which a woman’s voice could be heard shouting “It’s not real! It’s all for show!” in a previous version.

=> ↺ At least three civilians dead after Russian drone strikes on multiple Ukrainian regions — Meduza

• Russia used Iranian-made Shahed drones to launch airstrikes on multiple Ukrainian territories early Wednesday morning, Ukraine’s General Staff has reported.

=> ↺ Russian forces reportedly repel naval surface drone attack in Sevastopol Bay — Meduza

• Russia’s Black Sea Fleet repelled an attack from multiple naval surface drones in the Sevastopol Bay Wednesday morning, according to Mikhail Razvozhayev, the annexed city’s Russian-installed governor.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

=> ↺ Andrew Tate Built an Empire on Bullshit. Here’s the Real Story

• In one case, a supporter of the Tates showed up at the American accuser’s mother’s house snapping photos. “They are doing everything they can to silence them,” says Haley McNamara, the vice president of the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE), an anti-trafficking organization working with some of the Tates’ alleged victims. “It’s a very serious safety concern. It’s something that is likely preventing other survivors from stepping forward.”

• For now, the campaign continues to work. More than 200,000 people have signed a petition begging for the brothers to be released, and have made supportive TikTok videos outside the jail. Earlier this month, the calls for Andrew’s release grew to a fever pitch when reports surfaced that he had cancer, which many of his supporters faithfully tweeted. Tate’s spokesperson later told us that while a “dark spot on his lung” was found during a medical consultation before his arrest, no official diagnosis has been made.

Environment

=> ↺ ​New Biden Monument Designations Don’t Make Up for Disastrous Willow Approval: Critics

• Conservation advocates on Tuesday credited yearslong campaigns led by Indigenous groups and other frontline organizers with pushing President Joe Biden to designate two new national monuments in the southwestern U.S., but they also emphasized that the gesture cannot negate the environmental damage that the White House set in motion last week when it approved ConocoPhillips’ Willow oil drilling project.

=> ↺ ‘An Act of Climate Denial’: Biden Faces Anti-Willow Protests After IPCC Report

• Further emboldened by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s fresh call for rapid emission cuts, campaigners are planning to rally outside the U.S. Interior Department on Tuesday morning to protest the Biden administration’s approval of a massive oil drilling project that—if completed—would spew millions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year.

=> ↺ Remembering Mozambican Rapper Azagaia: Police Crack Down on Protests After Death of Cultural Icon

• We speak with Dipti Bhatnagar, climate justice activist based in Mozambique, about the recent death on March 9 of the popular rapper and cultural icon Azagaia. He was just 38 years old. He inspired many with his music and sang about injustice, including mistreatment of people by the authorities, as well as about poverty and social injustice. Azagaia’s death has sparked protests in Mozambique which authorities have violently suppressed.

=> ↺ U.N. Warns “Climate Time Bomb Is Ticking” as Cyclone Freddy Death Toll Tops 560 in Malawi & Mozambique

• In a major new report released Monday, the United Nations is calling for immediate and drastic cuts to greenhouse gas emissions in order to stop global warming. The “final warning” by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change comes as the death toll from Cyclone Freddy just swept through southeast Africa, killing hundreds of people and displacing hundreds of thousands more. Climate justice activist Dipti Bhatnagar with Friends of the Earth Mozambique describes it as “yet another reminder that climate impacts are not in the future but very much happening to our communities right now.” We also continue our conversation with environmental activists Bill McKibben, co-founder of 350.org, and Ben Jealous, executive director of the Sierra Club.

=> ↺ Court Rules Greta Thunberg, Others Can Sue Sweden for ‘Insufficient Climate Policy’

• A Swedish court on Tuesday ruled that hundreds of youth climate activists including Greta Thunberg can collectively sue Sweden for the government’s “insufficient climate policy.”

=> ↺ Swedish court to hear young people’s climate lawsuit against the state

• Three hundred young people including activist Greta Thunberg will get to make their case after a Swedish court agreed to hear their lawsuit accusing the state of climate inaction.

=> ↺ British Head of Deep Sea Authority Accused of Pushing for ‘Reckless’ Mining

• As delegates from 36 countries convene in Kingston, Jamaica for a summit on the deep sea, a number of diplomats are accusing the administrative head of the United Nations-affiliated International Seabed Authority of trying to push the body to approve a mining application without first finalizing regulations on how the project should move forward.

=> ↺ ‘Climate Homicide’: Experts Say Big Oil Should Be Held Criminally Liable for Disaster Deaths

• Fossil fuel corporations—the primary drivers of the climate emergency—are facing dozens of civil lawsuits that could see them pay billions of dollars for knowingly unleashing environmental destruction.

=> ↺ Senior Climate Activists Rally Across US to ‘Stop Dirty Banks’

• Thousands of seniors outraged at big banks for continuing to underwrite the expansion of coal, oil, and gas projects took to the streets in cities across the United States on Tuesday to demand that financial institutions “stop funding climate chaos.”

Energy/Transportation

=> ↺ Why the electric bicycle is gaining popularity in Denmark

• Denmark is known as a cycling nation, but an increasing number of people in the Nordic country are opting for an electric motor on their bicycle.

=> ↺ Danish parliament set to vote through relaxed work permit rules

• Denmark’s parliament is expected to vote on Thursday to make changes to Denmark’s foreigners law designed to make it easier to for companies to hire internationally.

Wildlife/Nature

=> ↺ New Mining Push Threatens Bitterroot and Salmon Rivers

• Rising tensions between the US and China have led the Biden Administration to announce a campaign for production of rare earth minerals used for production of electric vehicle batteries, parts for jet engines, computer chips and more. Securing a Made in America Supply Chain for Critical Minerals is touted as “Breaking Dependence on China and Boosting Sustainable Practices.” However, ramping up production of rare earths has ramifications for some of America’s most iconic wildlands and rivers.

• For example, existing and projected cobalt mining in the Panther Creek area in Idaho affects roadless wildlife and fish habitat just outside of the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness near the Main Fork of the Salmon River. In another area a special mining district was grandfathered inside the Frank and now this vast Wilderness and its salmon and bull trout populations are threatened by potential mining.

=> ↺ The latest from Arte: After last year’s brutal wildfires, this year, European countries prepare for summer together

=> ↺ North Korea removes fishing restrictions in the Yellow Sea

• Authorities promise a ‘great wind’ of freshly caught fish, but people doubt the fish are for them.

Overpopulation

=> ↺ Flagship UN report extolls win-win water partnerships to avert global crisis

• Globally, two billion people do not have safe drinking water and 3.6 billion lack access to safely managed sanitation, the report found.

• The global urban population facing water scarcity is projected to potentially double from 930 million in 2016 to between 1.7 and 2.4 billion people, in 2050.

• [...]

• The commodification of water will “derail achievement of the SDGs and hamper efforts to solve the global water crisis”, the experts said.

=> ↺ UN warns against ‘vampiric’ global water use

• The report, published by UN Water and Unesco, warns that “scarcity is becoming endemic” because of overconsumption and pollution, while global warming will increase seasonal water shortages in both areas with abundant water and those already strained.

• Richard Connor, the lead author of the report, said that about 10% of the global population “currently lives in areas that are high or critical water stress”.

=> ↺ UN warns ‘vampiric’ water use leading to ‘imminent’ global crisis

• “If nothing is done, it will be a business-as-usual scenario — it will keep on being between 40 percent and 50 percent of the population of the world that does not have access to sanitation and roughly 20-25 percent of the world will not have access to safe water supply.”

=> ↺ ‘Vampiric’ water use leading to ‘imminent’ global crisis, UN warns

• That high number does not even take into account pollution from pharmaceuticals, chemicals, pesticides, microplastics and nanomaterials.

• To ensure access to safe drinking water for all by 2030, current levels of investment would have to be tripled, the report says.

Finance

=> ↺ Warren, Sanders Call for End to Rules Letting Billionaire Dynasties Dodge Taxes

=> ↺ What Elizabeth Warren, Larry Summers, and Paul Krugman All Got Wrong About SVB

• When Silicon Valley Bank went down, many progressives, and much of the media, immediately pointed to malfeasance, special pleading and regulatory failures—a conditioned response with a strong pedigree. But if those were the real causes, then SVB (and Signature, and First Republic) would have been isolated cases. It’s clear now that they were not. A systemic crisis is unfolding—with a systemic cause.

=> ↺ Elizabeth Warren Is Right: Jerome Powell Should Be Held to Account

• The fallout from the collapse of California’s Silicon Valley Bank continues to rock financial and political circles. There is plenty of finger-pointing and blame-laying going on. But Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren reminds us that a lot more attention needs to be paid to the role that Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell played in the collapse that continues to shake confidence in the banking system.

=> ↺ “Stop Dirty Banks”: Bill McKibben & Ben Jealous on Ending Big Bank Funding for Fossil Fuel Expansion

• We speak with Third Act founder Bill McKibben and Sierra Club executive director Ben Jealous about protests they’ve organized today across the United States to demand the four biggest banks — Chase, Citi, Wells Fargo and Bank of America — stop financing the expansion of fossil fuel projects.

=> ↺ Biden DOL Praised for Historic Suit Over Using Debt Threat to Stop Workers From Quitting

• Workers’ rights advocates are applauding the Biden administration this week for filing a historic lawsuit against a Brooklyn-based healthcare staffing agency for coercive contracts that allegedly violate federal labor law.

=> ↺ New York Times Tries for Pulitzer Prize in Irresponsible Reporting on Bank Crises

• By The Center for Economic and Policy Research The New York Times seems to think it is a newspaper’s job to promote bank panics wherever possible. It would be difficult to explain its reporting on the Silicon Valley Bank’s (SVB) collapse any other way. Last week it ran a piece implying that Silicon Valley’s tech sector was […]

=> ↺ Banking Crisis 2023: Deep Origins and Future Directions

• It’s more than a week since the collapse of the Silicon Valley Bank, the 16th largest bank in the US at the time of its collapse and reportedly a source of funding for half of all the tech start ups in the US.

• It’s now become clear the more general banking crisis that has emerged is not due simply to a rogue, mismanaged bank that over-extended itself during the recent tech boom and then somehow mysteriously imploded in just 72 hours, March 7-9, until seized by the FDIC on the morning of March 10, 2023.

=> ↺ Corporate Greed Is a Root Cause of Rail Disasters Around the World

• On February 25, Greece experienced its deadliest rail disaster ever when a freight train ran headlong into a passenger train coming towards it on the same track, killing 57 people. This tragic accident, near the city of Larissa, occurred just weeks after the East Palestine, Ohio rail disaster, and while the outcomes are different, the root cause is the same: corporate greed and deregulation. 

• While two trains colliding on the same tracks might seem unfathomable to Americans, it shouldn’t be. A similar accident occurred in Texas in 2016, a year after the U.S. rail industry refused to meet a Congressionally mandated deadline for installing a safety system called positive train control, which would have prevented the accident.

=> ↺ Danish banks ’well equipped’ for financial instability

• Denmark’s banking sector is well equipped to deal with potential instability should uncertainty seen at some international banks reach Denmark, according to a national risk assessment council.

=> ↺ UK Rail Union Accepts Improved Pay Offer

• Turnout in the RMT ballot was nearly 90 percent, with 76 percent voting to accept the new offer covering pay, jobs and conditions. The vote means “the end of the trade dispute” with Network Rail.

=> ↺ The French Prepare National Strike Against Pension Reform

• Trade unions warned that there would be mass protests if President Macron approved this reform, which requires citizens 43 years of contributions to receive a full pension.

=> ↺ IMF Reaches Staff-Level Deal With Somalia

• Authorities are committed to continuing to improve revenue collection and make room for priority spending while containing discretionary expenditure pressures in 2023.

=> ↺ Senate Dems Urge Treasury Chief to Crack Down on Rich Tax Dodgers

• Four U.S senators this week called on Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen to use her existing authority to go after American billionaires and multimillionaires who “use trusts to shift wealth to their heirs tax-free, dodging federal estate and gift taxes.”

=> ↺ Critics Warn Another Fed Rate Hike Would Be the ‘Straw That Breaks the Camel’s Back’

• Federal Reserve policymakers convened Tuesday for a two-day meeting that will culminate in a decision with major implications for the U.S. and global economies, which have been jarred by recent banking sector chaos and growing fears of a broader financial crisis.

=> ↺ Making Sense of the Latest Global Banking Crisis

• The banking crisis that hit Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) last week has spread. We recall with a shudder two recent financial contagions: the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, which led to a deep Asian recession, and the 2008 Great Recession, which led to a global downturn. The new banking crisis hits a world economy already disrupted by pandemic, war, sanctions, geopolitical tensions, and climate shocks.

=> ↺ Reckless Capitalist Banks Rescued by Government Socialism – Again!

• Once again, government socialism—ultimately backed by taxpayers—is saving reckless midsized banks and their depositors. Silicon Valley Bank (S.V.B) and Signature Bank in New York greedily mismanaged their risk levels and had to be closed down. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), in return, to avoid a bank panic and a run on other midsized banks went over its $250,000 insurance cap per account and guaranteed all deposits—no matter how large, which are owned by the rich and corporations—in those banks.

=> ↺ Regulation is Not a Mantra

• An item in Ezra Klein’s NYT column last weekend really grabbed by attention. Ezra cited a Wall Street Journal column that claimed that the Federal Reserve Board’s stress tests would not have detected Silicon Valley Bank’s (SVB) problems, because its stress tests did not consider interest rate risk.

• This struck me as close to crazy. How could a stress test not consider interest rate risk? I recalled the stress tests that the Fed and Treasury performed very publicly in March of 2009, in the middle of the financial crisis. These tests did not consider interest rate risk for the simple reason that, at that point in time, soaring interest rates seemed about as likely as a Martian invasion.

=> ↺ The Disastrous Deregulation Merry-Go-Round

• The recent bank crisis that saw the collapse of the Silicon Valley and Signature Banks is now being blamed on the deregulation bill passed by Congress and signed into law by President Trump in 2018. Just to keep the record straight, the measure was supported by numerous Democrats as well as Republicans, including Montana’s Senators Democrat Tester and Republican Daines.

=> ↺ Curbing Bad Behavior of Bank CEOs Isn’t as Hard as They Make It Seem

• Greg Becker, the deposed chief executive of Silicon Valley Bank, is facing growing demands to cough up the millions of dollars he raked in from stock sales soon before the bank’s sudden demise.

=> ↺ The Fed Now Has Another Reason to Halt Anti-Worker Rate Hikes

• The debate over the Federal Reserve’s proper course of action for the rest of 2023 was getting a little stagnant in recent months. The argument centered on whether inflation’s persistence was really a sign of an overheated economy that still needed cooling or if it was due to stubbornly large—but dampening—ripples stemming from the huge pandemic and war shocks of previous years. The recent failures of Silicon Valley and Signature banks and chaos in other corners of the banking sector definitely provide a new twist to this debate.

=> ↺ From Mass Evictions to Education Cuts, Dem Warns GOP Austerity Would Cause ‘Irreparable Damage’

• The top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee on Monday released letters from federal agencies that together provide a detailed look at the implications of the House GOP’s proposed budget cuts, which would take an axe to programs that help millions of people make rent, feed their families, and afford childcare.

=> ↺ China’s graduates hit back as Communist Party tells them not to be picky over jobs

• The party’s youth wing says having a degree shouldn’t stop young people rolling up their sleeves.

=> ↺ Philadelphia Aims to Start Guaranteed Income Program for New Parents by 2024

=> ↺ Philadelphia Will Pay $9M to Settle George Floyd Protesters’ Suit Over Brutality

=> ↺ Nationwide Protests Demand End of Big Bank Funding for Fossil Fuel Expansion

=> ↺ New Assessments From Federal Agencies Underscore Harm of GOP Budget Cuts

=> ↺ Enlightenment From Below

• The late David Graeber was an anarchist, an activist, and an anthropologist—and a master storyteller. Throughout his career, he explored issues of power, freedom, and social justice, usually over a lengthy period of time, and he embedded his analysis in rich, evocative anecdotes. In Debt: The First 5,000 Years, he chronicled the “everyday communism” that is the basis of human society and the ways in which various kinds of debt came to overlay it as a lever of power and injustice. In The Dawn of Everything, cowritten with David Wengrow, he proposed nothing less than an alternative origin and history for human civilization. Everything Graeber wrote was simultaneously a genealogy of the present and an account of what a just society might look like.1

=> ↺ Senators Had Questions for the Maker of a Rent-Setting Algorithm. The Answers Were “Alarming.”

• After a ProPublica investigation last year, a group of senators demanded answers from a real estate tech company that helps landlords set rents across the country.

• The investigation revealed how some of the nation’s biggest landlords share proprietary information with RealPage, a Texas company whose software uses the data to recommend rent prices for available units. Legal experts say the arrangement may facilitate cartel-like behavior among landlords, who could use the software to coordinate pricing.

=> ↺ ATMs Running Low on Cash and Even Out of Cash (Manchester, England)

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

=> ↺ UEFA decides to allow flags with Greater Hungary map and Árpád stripes at Hungarian team’s matches

=> ↺ ‘Another step up the ladder’ Putin accuses ‘the collective West’ of ‘starting to use weapons with nuclear components.’ What he’s talking about is depleted uranium. — Meduza

• In a joint press-conference with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin said that British military aid to Ukraine is forcing Moscow to respond to the “collective West’s” determination “to continue its war with Russia to the last Ukrainian.”

=> ↺ Twin chefs resign from Moscow’s once Michelin-rated Twins Garden restaurant — Meduza

• Ivan and Sergey Berezutsky, the two celebrity-chef brothers behind Moscow’s Twins Garden restaurant, are leaving the establishment. An Instagram announcement posted by Ivan Berezutsky on Tuesday marked his last day at the restaurant that made him an international celebrity.

=> ↺ TikTok Updates Rules; CEO on Charm Offensive for US Hearing

• The TikTok app has come under fire in the U.S., Europe and Asia-Pacific, where a growing number of governments have banned TikTok from devices used for official business over worries it poses risks to cybersecurity and data privacy or could be used to push pro-Beijing narratives and misinformation.

=> ↺ TikTok, Facing Possible U.S. Ban, Claims It Has 150 Million American Users

• That’s amid a backdrop of the White House’s apparent demand that ByteDance, the Beijing-based internet company that controls TikTok, divest its ownership stake in TikTok or face a U.S. ban. ByteDance has not indicated whether it is considering complying with the U.S. demands. Meanwhile, pending congressional legislation, which has bipartisan support, would grant President Biden the authority to ban TikTok under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.

=> ↺ Speaker McCarthy’s Largesse

• He let Marjorie Taylor Greene with the gavel preside. He gave Carlson the tapes of the riotous day. All the wackos are on the committees they craved. One must wonder what else he might now give away.

=> ↺ Patrick Lawrence: Trump & the Stormy Deep State

• We keep coming face-to-face with the wreckage of the Russiagate years, when the 45th president threatened the national security apparatus for, possibly, the first time since Kennedy fired Allen Dulles as C.I.A. director in 1961.

=> ↺ Amazon announces 9,000 more layoffs, including from successful AWS division

• The job cuts would mark the second largest round of layoffs in the company’s history, adding to the 18,000 employees the tech giant said it would lay off in January. The company’s workforce doubled during the pandemic, however, in the midst of a hiring surge across almost the entire tech sector.

=> ↺ Accenture to acquire Bengaluru-based industrial AI firm Flutura

• Accenture said it plans to bring Flutura’s capabilities to clients in the energy, chemicals, metals, mining, and pharmaceutical industries Global professional services company Accenture on Tuesday said it is acquiring industrial artificial intelligence (AI) company Flutura for an undisclosed sum.

• Bengaluru-headquartered Flutura will strengthen Accenture’s industrial AI services to increase the performance of plants, refineries, and supply chains while also enabling clients to accomplish their net zero goals faster.

=> ↺ Chatbots’ ‘alarming’ output prompts US Senator to query tech giants on safety

• As Microsoft, OpenAI, Google and other technology companies accelerate the release of chatbots and other artificial intelligence-based tools to the public, a US Senator is demanding answers about how they intend to protect kids from harm.

=> ↺ Legal Experts Say Trump Witness’s Testimony May Backfire on the Ex-President

=> ↺ New Utah Law for Abortion Clinics Effectively Amounts to a Ban, Experts Say

=> ↺ Idaho Hospital Will Stop Delivering Babies as Providers Flee After Abortion Bans

=> ↺ GOP House Chairs Jordan, Comer and Steil Demand Info on Bragg’s Trump Inquiry

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

=> ↺ Tucker Carlson’s True Lies

Censorship/Free Speech

=> ↺ ‘Winnie the Pooh’ film pulled from Hong Kong cinemas

• Public screenings of a slasher film that features Winnie the Pooh were scrapped abruptly in Hong Kong on Tuesday, sparking discussions over increasing censorship in the city.

• Film distributor VII Pillars Entertainment announced on Facebook that the release of “Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey” on Thursday had been canceled with “great regret” in Hong Kong and neighboring Macao.

=> ↺ Anti-porn bills in 8 states could force device makers to censor sexual material

• In interviews with NBC News, the authors of the original blueprint legislation ​​ — representatives from the National Center on Sexual Exploitation and Protect Young Eyes, both advocacy organizations focused on child safety — said that the original intention of the model bill was to compel device manufacturers to automatically turn on adult filters for web browsers and not other applications. Those filters were already on phones, but not on by default, in 2019 when the draft legislation was first created.

• But Chris McKenna, founder and CEO of Protect Young Eyes, acknowledged that the legislation could also end up applying to other device-level filters created in recent years that some might consider more invasive.

=> ↺ Why I Decided to Update the Language in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Children’s Books

• As Ursula’s literary executor, I recently faced a similar decision. My mother, known for her young adult and adult novels, also wrote several children’s books. A multigenerational fan base has kept her Catwings books in print in the US since the 1980s. I was excited to move the books to a new publisher last year.

• As we began work on the new editions, I received an unexpected note from the editor: “I’m writing to propose several minor changes to the language… to remove words that now have a different connotation than when the books were originally published.” The words in question were “lame,” “queer,” “dumb,” and “stupid,” a total of seven instances across three books.

=> ↺ Peer Review as Shadow Cancelling

• Fake reviews, vindictive editors, ignorant reviewers, “moderation” without reading, rejections for want of “a critical theory lens,” retention of submissions for a year without review, and defamation. If you think I gathered these abuses of peer review in only “woke” fields, think again. They’re problems in the hardest of sciences. And if you think academics can avoid these abuses by keeping out of politics, think again. Submissions are being rejected for their subjects or conclusions.

• I received more stories of abuses than were released for publication, because of fears of professional retaliation. I will publish here only stories from academics prepared to go on the record, including myself.

=> ↺ Indian state extends internet ban in hunt for Sikh separatist

• The blackout extension came after supporters of Amritpal Singh were filmed vandalising India’s consulate in San Francisco. A similar disturbance also took place in London.

• Authorities in the northern state of Punjab launched a major search on Saturday for Singh, who has risen to prominence in recent months demanding the creation of Khalistan, a separate Sikh homeland.

=> ↺ Antisemitism On Twitter Has More Than Doubled Since Elon Musk Took Over

• In the days after Elon Musk took over Twitter in October 2022, the social media platform saw a “surge in hateful conduct,” which its then safety chief put down to a “focused, short-term trolling campaign.” New research suggests that when it comes to antisemitism, it was anything but.

=> ↺ Opposition activists arrested in Phnom Penh after online comments about king

• The comments on Facebook seemed to compare Prime Minister Hun Sen with King Norodom Sihamoni.

=> ↺ Appeals Court Says Nope To Florida Governor’s ‘Stop Woke’ Law, Denies Request To Lift Injunction Against It

• Playing to a crowd no one should desire to associate with, Donald Trump understudy Ron DeSantis has been saddling his constituents with a variety of noisy, performative legislation.

=> ↺ Anti-Corruption Foundation: Navalny’s penal colony pays double market prices for cabbage and onions — Meduza

• IK-6, the penal colony where the opposition politician Alexey Navalny is serving his sentence in Russia’s Vladimir region, is paying double the market prices, or even higher, for the food it purchases from wholesale vendors. This is the subject of a new investigation published by Navalny’s associates at Anti-Corruption Foundation.

=> ↺ Self-described ’non-existent’ anti-Putin partisan movement Black Bridge claims responsibility for fire that killed four at FSB Border Service building — Meduza

• The anti-Putin partisan movement Black Bridge has claimed responsibility for setting the fire at an FSB Border Service building in Rostov-on-Don that killed at least four people last week.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

=> ↺ French journalist kidnapped in 2021 is freed in Mali

• French journalist Olivier Dubois who had been kidnapped in Mali has been freed, France’s Liberation newspaper reported.

=> ↺ Head Of Disbanded Nobel Winner Memorial In Moscow Faces Possible Charges After Allegedly Discrediting Armed Forces

• An investigation has been opened into the head of the disbanded Memorial Human Rights Center in Moscow, Oleg Orlov, over the alleged discrediting of Russian forces involved in the Kremlin’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine, the group said on March 21.

Civil Rights/Policing

=> ↺ What Justice Really Means for Sexual Assault Survivors

• When the notorious predator Harvey Weinstein was twice convicted of sexual assault and sentenced to prison, he joined the estimated 1 percent of rapists who are actually punished for their crimes. Making an example of him is certainly instructive to the wider community that has tolerated such abuses for years, but it may provide cold comfort to the survivors of his abuse. This is because survivors’ visions of justice often differ greatly from the resolution that the criminal justice system offers. Rather than simply punishing one particularly egregious offender, they want their communities to hold everyone who enabled his crimes to be held accountable. As Daniel, a survivor of childhood sexual abuse by a Catholic priest in the Boston archdiocese, told me, he wanted some consequences for Cardinal Bernard Francis Law, who had knowingly covered up hundreds of cases over decades. “I’d like to see him stripped of his position of authority, his big diamond ring and his scepter and all that. I’d like to see him do something humbling, community service that’s not schmoozing, not fun, not glamorous. They should sell his mansion and give the proceeds to victims.”

=> ↺ State of No Dissent: Liberals, Labor double down on protest laws despite Coco judgement

• Labor and Liberal parties doubled down on their support for harsh anti-protest laws after a District Court judge overturned a 15 month prison sentence given to activist Deane Violet Coco last year. Wendy Bacon has the story.

• The Perrottet government’s response to a NSW District Court Judge Mark Williams decision to overturn harsh sentences given to Violet Coco and her co-accused firefighter Alan Glover was to commit monitoring the laws and consider making them even stronger if it wins the NSW election on Saturday. 

=> ↺ Advancing Parole Board Reform in Alabama

• In the “land of the free” and “home of the brave,” and perhaps nowhere more than in Alabama, the overuse of incarceration—physically and psychologically ripping families apart instead of doing more to address the root causes of crime—has to change.

• The insidious, inhuman harm mass incarceration inflicts affects us all. But by the same token, it’s important to acknowledge, especially as Alabama sets course on building a billion-dollar prison, it’s poor Black and brown families at every turn who suffer most in our criminal “justice” system. Disproportionately it’s poor Black and brown men and women whose futures some Alabama officials are conspicuously conscribing in outrageously overpriced, to-be-built, cells.

=> ↺ Some Good News for the Women of Honduras

• When the news first came out, we were in shock. Then came a slow calm of disbelief. This is an old habit inherited from the 2009 coup, when every time we thought the repression would ease up and that the world was not going to put up with such nonsense in the 21st century, the regimen imposed new measures. One of those was the executive decree that prohibited the emergency contraception pill (ECP), aimed at the rights of all women.

• We learned to normalize bad news, as if it were a change in the weather, with impassiveness and resignation.

=> ↺ Suit says Meta board ‘turned blind eye’ to human trafficking

• A shareholder lawsuit filed late Monday accuses board members of Instagram and Facebook parent Meta of shirking their duties by ignoring human and sex trafficking on the tech giant’s social platforms.

• The suit filed in the Court of Chancery in the US state of Delaware calls for Mark Zuckerberg, along with other executives and board members, to be ordered to institute reforms and pay damages.

=> ↺ Channel crossings: People smugglers are ‘settling in Britain, renting houses and investing profits in UK businesses’

• He said that migrants arriving at the camps near Calais and Dunkirk would quickly be introduced to intermediaries acting on behalf of smugglers, and would then choose which to go with.

=> ↺ BBC Disciplined Commentator Who Spoke Out Against UK’s Anti-Immigrant Law

=> ↺ Civil Rights Organizations File Amicus Brief in Support of EFF Lawsuit Against Discriminatory SFPD Surveillance

• At the height of the George Floyd protests in 2020, the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) spied on thousands of demonstrators in real time by using a business district’s network of over 300 cameras. The SFPD targeted protests against police brutality led by Black people and other people of color, chilling future racial justice protests by making people less likely to come out in the future out of fear of reprisals from police. The SFPD’s surveillance also violated San Francisco’s Surveillance Technology Ordinance—fought for by marginalized groups—which requires city agencies to get the Board of Supervisors’ approval before using surveillance technology. The SFPD failed to get Board approval, so EFF and the ACLU of Northern California sued San Francisco on behalf of three community organizers and the case is now on appeal.

• This January, Asian Americans Advancing Justice – Asian Law Caucus (ALC) and Black Movement Law Project (BMLP), along with 18 other civil rights and grassroots organizations, filed an amicus brief in support of our lawsuit. These organizations detailed SFPD’s long history of spying on San Francisco’s communities of color and political dissidents. In the 1890s, for example, SFPD’s “Chinatown Squad”—one of the country’s earliest police forces used explicitly to address a panic over “ethnic crime”—was raiding Chinese homes and businesses and in some cases physically destroying them with axes. This was shortly after the city spent two decades surveilling Chinatown and mapping every room of every building there.

• A century later, in the 1970s, SFPD rebranded the “Chinatown Squad” as a “Gang Task Force,” which ultimately lost a class-action lawsuit for dragnet surveillance and arrests in Chinese communities. Around the same time, the SFPD’s Intelligence Unit wiretapped and spied on meetings of groups that fought for civil rights or against imperialism. After 9/11, the police chief called for recreating the Intelligence Unit and joked publicly about Arab residents of the city blowing up buildings. Shortly after, a civil rights coalition uncovered records showing that SFPD stopped auditing its intelligence gathering and secretly agreed to share information with the FBI.

=> ↺ Airlines want even more people put on the no-fly list

• Undeterred by the manifest unfairness of the US government’s current no-fly list, some airlines and their allies are apparently renewing a campaign they began last year to get Congress to create yet another extrajudicial procedure by which the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) could put even more people on the US no-fly list.

• Seriously? Can anyone really think that the way to make the current bloated and bigoted no-fly list more fair is to add even more names to it? That what the TSA needs is more authority to impose arbitrary and judicially unreviewable sanctions on disfavored members of the traveling public? That the branch of the government best qualified to exercise the power to make decisions that restrict people’s rights and in some cases would cost them their livelihood, perhaps for life, is the TSA?

• This is exactly the wrong way to go. If a bill to protect air travelers is going to be reintroduced and considered in Congress, it should be the Freedom to Travel Act.

=> ↺ As New York Pays Out Millions In Police Misconduct Settlements, Lawmakers Ask Why They Keep Happening

• Nearly two decades ago, the New York Police Department drew national headlines for its violent response to protests outside the 2004 Republican National Convention. Officers wrapped demonstrators in orange mesh netting and shipped them off to a dirty Manhattan pier, where they were fingerprinted and held, some for more than 24 hours.

• The protesters sued, and after years of tense litigation, the city settled what the New York Civil Liberties Union then called the “largest protest settlement in history” — an $18 million payout to resolve claims that the police had violated the civil rights of about 1,800 people.

=> ↺ Have a Student in New Mexico Schools? Here Is What to Know About How School Discipline Works.

• This is a guide to school discipline in New Mexico and Gallup-McKinley County Schools. You can print and share a short copy of this guide.

=> ↺ European Parliament joins lawsuit against Hungary over anti-gay law

=> ↺ The Gypsies just stand there silently, as if waiting for God to bless them too

=> ↺ Pakistani Women Are Not All Right

• The country’s annual march for women’s rights was a defiant act of self-assertion that once again sparked panic and condemnation from conservatives.

=> ↺ Eva: Gender gap in party preferences has continued to widen in Finland

• THE DIVERGENCE of party preferences among men and women has increased in Finland.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

=> ↺ BitTorrent For Language Models

• In the old days of the Internet, FTP was sufficient for downloading the occasional file. But with the widespread use of computer audio and video, it was easy to swamp an FTP server so — eventually — BitTorrent was born. The idea was you would download bits and pieces of a file from different places and, in theory, people would download bits and pieces that you have if they need them. Now Petals wants to use this same method with language models. These AI language models are all the rage, but they take significant computer resources. The idea behind Petals is like BitTorrent. You handle a small part of the model (about 8 gigabytes which is small compared to the 352 gigabytes required), and other people have other parts.

Monopolies

=> ↺ Google denies destroying ‘chat’ evidence in US antitrust lawsuit

• Alphabet Inc’s Google has denied intentionally destroying evidence in the U.S. Justice Department’s antitrust lawsuit over the company’s search business, in a response to the government’s bid for sanctions in federal court.

• The Justice Department last month alleged Google failed to preserve certain internal corporate “chat” communications. The DOJ said Google told U.S. investigators in 2019 that the company had put a hold on allowing auto-deletion of those instant messaging records.

=> ↺ WGA Would Allow Artificial Intelligence in Scriptwriting, as Long as Writers Maintain Credit

• But contrary to some expectations, the guild is not proposing an outright ban on the use of AI technology.

• Instead, the proposal would allow a writer to use ChatGPT to help write a script without having to share writing credit or divide residuals. Or, a studio executive could hand the writer an AI-generated script to rewrite or polish and the writer would still be considered the first writer on the project.

=> ↺ DeSantis Privately Called for Google to Be “Broken Up”

• Florida governor Ron DeSantis has frequently railed against “Big Tech.” He has accused Google, Facebook and Twitter of silencing conservative voices.

• But in private, DeSantis has gone even further.

=> ↺ DeSantis Privately Called for Google to Be ‘Broken Up’

• In previously unreported videos from a closed-door Teneo Network conference, Florida’s Republican governor takes his anti-big tech rhetoric beyond what he has said publicly.

Patents

=> ↺ ‘Appalling’: Biden Administration Declines to Force Big Pharma to Cut Price of Prostate Cancer Drug

• Patient advocates on Tuesday blasted the Biden administration’s refusal to compel the manufacturer of a lifesaving prostate cancer drug developed completely with public funds to lower its nearly $190,000 annual price tag.

Copyrights

=> ↺ Christian Dawson — Open Culture VOICES, Season 2 Episode 7

• Open Culture VOICES is a series of short videos that highlight the benefits and barriers of open culture as well as inspiration and advice on the subject of opening up cultural heritage. Christian Dawson is the Executive Director of the MHz Foundation which provides technology tools for GLAM institutions and organizations to improve their open access programs. Christian has worked with numerous organizations which now share their collections openly thanks to the work of the MHz Foundation and Curationist.

=> ↺ RIAA Hunts Pre-Release Music Pirates Behind UnreleasedSounds.gg

• Music streaming apps like Spotify offer more than 100 million tracks but for some, nothing sounds better than leaked, unreleased music. ‘Unreleased Sounds’ is a site dedicated to this type of content and already linked to many high-profile leaks. After an artist, linked to Avicii, asked fans not to buy “stolen” music last year, the RIAA now wants to know who’s behind the site.

=> ↺ Internet Archive’s Copyright Battle with Book Publishers Nears Climax

• A copyright lawsuit filed by major book publishers against the Internet Archive is set to define the boundaries of digital book lending. The parties shared their positions at a New York federal court yesterday. The Internet Archive claims that its library is protected by fair use and does no harm to rightsholders. For their part, the book publishers see massive infringement and damages.

=> ↺ Why Link Taxes Like Canada’s C-18 Represent An End To An Open Web

• Well, here we go again. For years now, the legacy news industry, often led by lobbyists for Rupert Murdoch, have been pushing a bizarre plan to tax links on the internet. The entire rationale for this plan seems to be “news organizations used to be rolling in easy money, they failed to innovate with the times, and now Google and Meta are rolling in easy money, so we should just make Google and Meta give news orgs cash.”

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

=> ↺ 🔤SpellBinding: DLOPRYU Wordo: SCART

=> ↺ degree crisis

• I feel burnt out and unenthusiastic about my degree. My grade average currently is 1.5 (not the American kind where 4 is good, but the reverse, so I am actually pretty good so far). This current assignment is absolutely horrible and it’s pushing me to my limits in a bad way that is entirely unneccessary. I just can’t look at this document anymore. I spent 2 months working on it and I am done. I have lost all oversight over it, it confuses me, I fight to get back into the topic mentally every day. Specific parts have been written by me so long ago they don’t even feel like mine and I forget they exist in the document. I lost the plot, because I’ve been looking so much at this that I cannot see it with a fresh, curious mind anymore. I am beaten.

=> ↺ Taking visions with ChatGPT

• Artificial intelligence has some good things to say, surprisingly, but it is by no means perfect. But it can be a useful tool (or a “mirror”) to help clarify my thoughts.

=> ↺ A brief statement regarding my past involvement in a cult

• This is a brief statement from me regarding my past involvement in a dubious religious sect, and to clarify the present status.

• Some readers may recognize me as a de facto “leader”-like figure in a quasi-religious movement, so-called “Filianism.”

Technical

Internet/Gemini

=> ↺ Ben’s Gemcast Episode 47

• • Fedora 38 and Debian Stable * Computer Upgrades * Iraq vs. Ukraine * GoToSocial

• Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter. Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. Permalink  Send this to a friend

=> Techrights

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