● 06.10.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 10/06/2022: Games and Fortran Newsletter

Posted in News Roundup at 5:54 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

• Are you wanting to get some hardware from Linux vendor System76 but they don’t currently ship to you, or it’s expensive to do so? Well, you’re in luck! They’re coming to Europe. System76 make a lot of hardware including desktops, laptops, servers and a keyboard now too (which I reviewed).

Games

• Divinity: Original Sin 2 – Definitive Edition from Larian Studios recently became Steam Deck Verified. Plus, we have a longer talk from Swen Vincke, the Founder and Creative Director of Larian Studios.

• Back in April the Zombie shooter Back 4 Blood added experimental support for the Steam Deck, and they’re continuing the support along with a new patch.

• Arietta of Spirits, a story-driven action-adventure game with easy to approach game mechanics, has a new update out that makes it run better on the Steam Deck.

• The Battle Report Update is out now for Dota 2, with the majority of it being for Dota Plus but there’s also some of the usual balancing changes and a nice improvement for people using the Vulkan renderer.

• Ready for your next set of new games? Humble Bundle have some good choices in their Capcom Summer Bundle and Humble Choice. I’ll give you a breakdown of what to expect on the Steam Deck from each, along with ratings from ProtonDB for desktop / laptop Linux players.

• It’s now confirmed that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge will be launching on June 16, using FNA and it will have a Native Linux version.

Distributions and Operating Systems

Open Hardware/Modding

• The Compu-tor, designed by [Henry Edwards], is one of those things that doesn’t neatly fit into any categories. It is a clamshell-type portable computer, although unlike most laptops, it doesn’t come with a built-in battery. It has a sleek custom-designed case, but lacks the futuristic sci-fi looks typical of a cyberdeck. The keyboard can act as an input device, but can also turn into a musical instrument.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Programming/Development

• Welcome to the June edition of the monthly Fortran newsletter. The newsletter comes out at the beginning of every month and details Fortran news from the previous month.

Leftovers

• A good deal of this crisis was helped by the coming to power of former defence minister Gotabaya Rajapaksa who, in turn, named his older brother, Mahinda, also a former president, prime minister.  Their 2020 election victory was thumping, decisive, and corrupting.  Graft and nepotism set in.  Quixotic decisions to cut taxes eroded state revenue.  COVID-19 began its seemingly inexorable march of infection.

• Showing a developed streak of obliviousness to the developing storm around them, the Rajapaksas even went so far as to ban chemical fertilizers as part of a drive to make farmers embrace organic agriculture.  To do so during this crisis battered and bruised the country’s agrarian sector.

• Virtual green screens are pretty neat, but for results, nothing beats the real thing. But what if you have limited space? [Fred Emmott] had about 30 inches behind his desk to work with, and shares what it took to make a green screen work reliably in a limited space.

Science

• While most of us have been content with swing and sliding doors for the vast majority of our needs around the home, the revolving door remains popular in a wide variety of contexts.

Hardware

• Long before the idea of hot dog-shaped iPhone cases, Otter Boxen, or even those swappable Nokia face plates, people were just as likely to express themselves with their landline phones. Growing up at my house in the 80s, the Slimline on the kitchen wall was hidden inside a magneto wall set from the early 1900s, the front of which swung out to reveal the modern equipment behind it. Back in my bedroom, I had the coolest phone ever, a see-through Unisonic with candy-colored guts. Down in the basement was my favorite extension, tactility-wise: a candy apple-red wall unit with dimly-lit circular push buttons that were springy and spongy and oh-so fun to dial.

• Buying broken gear for cheap is time honored hacker tradition, and while we might not always be successful in reviving it, rarely do we come away empty handed. There’s always parts to salvage, and you can’t put a price on the knowledge to be gained when poking around inside an interesting piece of hardware. So we’re not surprised at all to hear that [Tomas Pavlovic] jumped at the chance to grab this faulty HP-48S calculator for a couple bucks.

• Hardware hacks have something in common with renovations that involve taking down a wall: until one actually gets started and opens things up, there’s no telling what kind of complications might be lurking. [voussoir] has a project that demonstrates this nicely: modifying a rechargeable mouse to use USB-C instead of micro-B turned out to have quite a few little glitches in the process. In fact, changing the actual receptacle was the simplest part!

• Are you one of those people who hoards cardboard for someday, and then periodically breaks it all down and puts it out for recycling because you haven’t done anything with it yet? Well, load up a new blade in the utility knife and fire up that hot glue gun, because the [Cardboard Ninja]’s gonna show you how to make a shelving unit from the biggest box in your collection.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren led a group of lawmakers Thursday in unveiling legislation that would expand Social Security’s modest annual benefits by $2,400 and ensure the program is fully funded for the next 75 years.

• The benefit boost under the Social Security Expansion Act would be funded by lifting the cap on the maximum amount of income subject to the Social Security payroll tax. This year the cap was $147,000—meaning millionaires stopped paying into the program in late February.

• The voters of Oregon’s Fifth Congressional District made it clear that they will no longer tolerate elected officials who put the interests of Big Pharma over the lives of their own constituents. And the rest of Americans are not far behind.

• Research published Wednesday in the medical journal JAMA estimates that close to half of all new brand-name prescription drugs launched in the U.S. in 2020 and 2021 came with an original price tag of at least $150,000 a year, a finding that sparked fresh calls for Congress to rein in the pharmaceutical industry’s virtually unchecked power to drive up costs.

• “Prescription drug spending in the U.S. exceeded half a trillion dollars in 2020.”

• More than 400 advocacy groups on Thursday urged the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization to cancel its partnership with an industry lobby group representing the world’s largest manufacturers of toxic pesticides.

• “Use of hazardous pesticides is inconsistent with the rights protected by the United Nations.”

Security

Privacy/Surveillance

• Whether phishing attempts or stolen passwords, attackers use many different tricks to access your emails and steal your important data.

Defence/Aggression

• SIPRI’s latest report shows that the US remains the world’s leading arsenal. President Biden, speaking at a Lockheed plant in Alabama where the Javelin antitank missile is made for export to Ukraine, proclaimed that such weapons make us “the arsenal of democracy.” I’ll come back to that shortly. But first, here are some findings on the global arms situation along with my assessment of its larger implications.

• As Russia presses victory in the Donbass, U.S. and U.K. missiles threaten a new stage in the conflict, writes Christopher Nineham.

• Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is abhorrent and deeply concerning. It is an unprovoked, unjustifiable outrage and a heinous violation of international law that will have long-lasting and tragic consequences. The Russian aggression, military bombardment, and deployment of troops to Ukraine should end immediately.

• No good can ever come from war and military escalation. As Globetrotterjournalist Vijay Prashad said at the People’s Forum in February, “War is never good for the poor. War is never good for workers. War itself is a crime.” The international community needs to redouble its efforts to find a diplomatic solution that ensures peace and protects the lives of people in Ukraine and in other countries afflicted by war.

• I just wish Professor Snyder would stick to history.

• According to an old chestnut, the past is a foreign country.  Even so, similarities between then and now frequently interest historians more than differences.  Few, it seems, can resist the temptation to press their particular piece of the past into service as a vehicle for interpreting the here-and-now, even when doing so means oversimplifying and distorting the present.  Historians of twentieth-century Europe, Snyder among them, seem particularly susceptible to this temptation.  Synder’s mid-May op-ed in the New York Times offers a case in point.  “We Should Say It,” the title advises. “Russia Is Fascist.”

• Weapons companies don’t mind. Their stocks are soaring. U.S. weapons exports exceed those of the next five leading weapons-dealing countries. The top seven countries account for 84% of weapons exports. Second place in international weapons dealing, held by Russia for the previous seven years, was taken over in 2021 by France. The only overlap between significant weapons dealing and where wars are present is in Ukraine and Russia — two countries impacted by a war widely recognized as outside the norm and meriting serious media coverage of the victims. In most years no nations with wars present are weapons dealers. Some nations get wars, others profit from wars.

• In many cases, when nations increase their military spending, it’s understood as fulfilling a commitment to the U.S. government. The Prime Minister of Japan, for example, has promised Joe Biden that Japan will spend a lot more. Other times, its a commitment to NATO that’s discussed by weapons-buying governments. In U.S. minds, President Trump was anti-NATO and President Biden pro-NATO. But both advanced the identical demand of NATO members: buy more weapons. And both had success, although neither has come anywhere close to boosting NATO in the way that Russia has.

• The New York Times’ slogan “All the News That’s Fit to Print” has appeared on the paper’s front page since 1897. But a comparison of Times coverage of the 2022 Ukraine War and the 2003 invasion of Iraq shows that the same kinds of news don’t always fit on the front page.

• This article deals with US imperialism since World War 2. It is critical to acknowledge that US imperialism emanates both ideologically and materially from the crime of colonialism on this continent which has killed over 100 million indigenous people and approximately 150 million African people over the past 500 years

• The exact death toll of US imperialism is both staggering and impossible to know. What we do know is that since World War 2, US imperialism has killed at least 36 million people globally in Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Indonesia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, the Congo, Chile, El Salvador, Guatemala, Colombia, Haiti, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Chad, Libya, East Timor, Grenada, Honduras, Iran, Pakistan, Panama, the Philippines, Sudan, Greece, Yugoslavia, Bosnia, Croatia, Kosovo, Somalia, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Palestine (see Appendix).

• Zeneta Everhart, whose 21-year-old son, Zaire Goodman, survived the May 14 Buffalo shooting by a white supremacist that left 10 Black people dead, testified before the House Oversight Committee Wednesday.

• NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, back to camera, meeting with U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin on June 1. (NATO) By Craig Murray / CraigMurray.org.uk I was in Turkey to try to fu…

• A lot has changed for Sergey Kiriyenko since Russia began its all-out war against Ukraine. Already the Kremlin’s domestic policy czar, Kiriyenko has now managed to get closer to President Vladimir Putin and expand the scope of his powers. In addition to acting as the Kremlin’s point man in the Donbas and other Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine, sources tell Meduza that Kiriyenko’s subordinates have also been tasked with developing a “post-war image” for Russia. One idea in the mix is to present Russia as a “continent of freedom” for right-wing conservatives — one that preserves the spirit of “old Europe.” As it happens, Kiriyenko wouldn’t be averse to leading this “continent” himself.

• The Kremlin is planning to annex the Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia regions of Ukraine and combine them into a single federal district within Russia, three sources close to the Putin administration told Meduza.

• The House committee investigating Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election and the deadly January 6 insurrection at the Capitol holds its first public hearing Thursday night in primetime, as five members of the far-right Proud Boys are indicted for seditious conspiracy. These hearings will provide voters with a choice between those who will want to continue to defend free and fair elections and those who want to take away the will of the people,” says Kristen Doerer, managing editor of Right Wing Watch, who previews what to expect.

• The U.S. House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol plans to hold its first of six public hearings at 8:00 pm ET on Thursday—a event that will be livestreamed on the panel’s YouTube channel and aired by most major television networks.

• “The committee will present previously unseen material documenting January 6th, receive witness testimony, and provide the American people an initial summary of its findings about the coordinated, multi-step effort to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and prevent the transfer of power,” the panel said. “The committee will also preview additional hearings.”

• The Massachusetts congressional delegation—currently nine representatives and two senators—is fairly unusual in the American political landscape of 2022 in being composed of members of a single party, the Democrats. Only five other states can make that claim (Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island), while nine states have all-Republican delegations (Alaska, Arkansas, Idaho, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming), according to Smart Politics.

• Humiliated, Russia has retreated from Kyiv as well as the country’s second largest city, Kharkiv, and adopted a new goal—the seizure of Donbas in Ukraine’s east to form a land bridge to Crimea, which Moscow annexed in 2014, followed by a planned partition of the country. The U.S. and NATO, which like Moscow expected the Russian invasion to quickly win, have increased shipments of heavy weapons for the new phase of the war.

• Sections of the Left have seized on this aid and declare that the war was always or has become an inter-imperialist one. As a result, they often find themselves supporting the establishment’s calls for the US to broker a ceasefire and negotiate a settlement. They are mistaken about the nature of the war, misunderstand the current phase of it, and in the process betray Ukraine’s struggle for national liberation from Russian imperialism.

• The Malian government is now accusing French troops of perpetuating a massacre in the West African country. Consequently, on April 23, the Russian Foreign Ministry declared its support for Malian efforts, pushing for an international investigation into French abuses and massacres in Mali. “We hope that those responsible will be identified and justly punished,” the Ministry said.

• In its coverage, Western media largely omitted the Malian and Russian claims of French massacres; instead, they gave credence to French accusations that the Malian forces, possibly with the help of ‘Russian mercenaries’ have carried out massacres and buried the dead in mass graves near the recently evacuated French army Gossi base, in order to blame France.

• U.S. President Joe Biden was urged Thursday not to meet with Saudi Crown Prince and de facto ruler Mohammed bin Salman without securing “tangible progress to alleviate some of the most egregious rights violations” committed by the kingdom.

• Failure to do so, 13 human rights organizations wrote in a joint letter to the U.S. president, could “embolden the crown prince to commit further violations of international human rights and humanitarian law.”

• With the whole Congressional January 6th Committee effort moving into prime time this week, this is probably pretty far down on the list of issues around it, but apparently Twitter is quietly fighting demands from the Committee to reveal internal communications.

• The House of Representatives on Wednesday approved new gun control measures, including raising the minimum age for the purchase of most semiautomatic rifles to 21 and banning high-capacity magazines. The new rules passed the House in a 223-204 vote, but are doomed in the Senate, where a bipartisan group is working on passing a much more limited set of reforms. The vote took place after a House committee heard harrowing testimony from people affected by recent gun violence, including an 11-year-old survivor of the Uvalde school massacre who watched her classmates get killed. “I grabbed a little blood, and I put it all over me’,” Miah Cerrillo told lawmakers in her testimony. “And then I grabbed my teacher’s phone and called 911.” We feature excerpts of Cerrillo’s testimony, along with the parents of 10-year-old victim Lexi Rubio and Dr. Roy Guerrero, Uvalde’s only pediatrician.

• Last week I took a break from watching the devastating coverage of the Uvalde, Tex., school massacre. I have family there and I watched as long as I could. But a day came when it started to feel morbid and even voyeuristic, not like bearing witness. So I stopped. I bought some Kate O’Brien novels I’d been longing to read. And I reread my Kindle version of The Body Keeps The Score.

• Our hearts have been pierced over and over by the horrific events that occurred at the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. Especially heart wrenching were the phone call cries, “send the police,” from that 10-year-old girl trapped in the room with the murderer and surrounded by the dead and dying bodies of her classmates. She made three 911 calls. See Breaking Points at about 7:30 mins. Apparently, she or another student, was told on a call to yell out, “We need help” perhaps with the idea that some of the nineteen heavily armed police just outside the door might hear and come to the rescue. Too bad for her, the only one who came to her was the shooter who promptly killed her.

• “They were at places that seemed safe—but few spaces in America are guaranteed safe anymore.”

• The United Nations is demanding an independent investigation into charges of rape and sexual assault committed by Russian soldiers in Ukraine since the start of the invasion. We speak with Pramila Patten, the U.N.’s special representative on sexual violence in conflict, who is just back from Ukraine and told the Security Council Monday about multiple shocking reports of rape and assault — all of which Russia has since denied. “We are dealing with a crime which is chronically underreported,” says Patten, who emphasized the need to establish safe spaces for victims to come forward and ensure no perpetrators be granted amnesty through a potential ceasefire or peace agreement. We also speak with Oksana Pokalchuk, executive director of Amnesty International Ukraine, whose organization is investigating the alleged war crimes.

• I’ve just finished going through the more than 60 presidential statements, documents and communiques about the war in Ukraine that the White House has released and posted on its website since Joe Biden’s State of the Union address in early March. They all share with that speech one stunning characteristic—the complete absence of any mention of nuclear weapons or nuclear war dangers. Yet we’re now living in a time when those dangers are the worst they’ve been since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

• Congressmen Jared Golden of Maine and Kurt Schrader of Oregon were the only two House Democrats on Wednesday to vote against a package of gun control measures framed by party leadership as “commonsense measures that will make an enormous difference to save lives.”

• “Who wouldn’t vote to raise the age to take weapons of war out of the hands of teenagers?”

Environment

• Leading up to the next global climate summit in November, a report released Thursday uses climate mis- and disinformation related to last year’s conference to spotlight emerging strategies that impede action and to offer Big Tech and government clear solutions.

• “Far from helping to mitigate this issue, tech platform systems appear to be amplifying or exacerbating the spread of such content.”

• As residents of the Southwestern United States prepare for dangerously high and potentially deadly temperatures in the coming days, a leading climate scientist is warning that there can be no reprieve from extreme heat until society ends its reliance on planet-scorching fossil fuels.

• The National Weather Service (NWS) has issued excessive heat warnings and advisories for more than 30 million people in Arizona, Nevada, and California through the weekend.

• In a clear show of support for the youth who have been fighting for a landmark U.S. constitutional climate case since 2015, the People vs. Fossil Fuels coalition this week launched a petition urging the Biden administration to “end its opposition to Juliana v. United States proceeding to trial.”

• “We need to advocate powerfully for the rights of our living, breathing children to be recognized in our courts.”

• Big Tech platforms are spreading climate disinformation “with impunity” but have the tools to solve this crisis, a new report has said today.

• “Deny, Deceive, Delay: Documenting and Responding to Climate Disinformation at COP26” was launched on Thursday at the Bonn Climate Change Conference.

• As the hope for timely legislative action to address climate change has dwindled over the past year, high-profile union victories in coffee shops, warehouses, and outdoor recreation stores have catalyzed a renewed sense of worker power. Instead of seeing the climate fight as siloed from the labor movement, Matthew Huber, a geography professor at Syracuse University, argues that working-class struggle has ecological stakes and that union power can be harnessed to disrupt the production of fossil fuels.

Energy

• In March, President Biden and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced a joint task force with the goal of getting Europe off Russian gas and onto more of America’s fracked gas. Most Russian gas reaches Europe via pipeline, so getting U.S. gas to Europe will involve liquifying it and then shipping it across the Atlantic. And as shipments of liquified natural gas (LNG) from the United States increase, so too do the threats from an unwelcome intruder inherently part of America’s natural gas mix — radioactivity.

• That’s because government figures indicate that much of the gas that will be shipped to Europe may come from the Marcellus and Utica, black shale formations in Ohio, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania. About 40 percent of natural gas produced in the United States comes from these formations, and, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, they have particularly high radioactivity levels.

• A boom in U.S. liquefied natural gas exports driven by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine could add a staggering 90 million tons or more of planet-heating greenhouse gases annually, a report published Thursday revealed.

• “A dramatic increase in global dependence on LNG could be risky, from a climate perspective.”

• An explosion at a major liquefied natural gas plant in Texas on Wednesday heightened fears of pollution and other impacts in nearby communities—and served as the latest example of the threat the booming LNG industry poses to the climate.

• “Freeport LNG really doesn’t care about us. This is not the first fire.”

Wildlife/Nature

• Which is kind of an odd thing to say about a legal action to truck an elephant from one human keeper to another.

• The Nonhuman Rights Project says the zoo’s pen is too small. I’m not brushing off the concern. A sanctuary is (or should be) better than a zoo. But if that’s the point, we’re talking about animal husbandry standards. Is that nonhuman personhood, or just a case of meet-the-new-boss? Focusing on a being in permanent captivity cannot help but make a problematic case for personhood.

Finance

• As usual, the profit-driven concerns of big business and their result—a remarkably selective historical amnesia—fuel the silence about alternative anti-inflation policies. So too do the right-wing ideological blinders that now constrict U.S. politics. Yet, policy alternatives always exist, no matter how desperately partisans promoting one policy seek to obliterate debate and discussion of others. The narrow dogmatism of U.S. politics these days is on full display around the issue of an anti-inflation policy focused on raising interest rates.

• I will present three other anti-inflation policies that do not entail interest rate increases—there are many more—that could and should be part of today’s policy discussions. All have precedents in U.S. history. For the first, we return briefly to World War II. U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration grasped the risk of inflation during this period as the supply of many consumer goods shrank relative to the demand for them. The war effort was diverting many productive resources away from consumer goods and toward munitions and other defense products. Had the government allowed the market to handle the prospective shortage of consumer goods, an inflation of their prices would have resulted. Rich Americans would have bid up the prices of scarce consumer goods, rendering them unaffordable for middle- and lower-income people. That is how markets work. They favor the rich (who return the favor by funding economists and others to promote markets as marvels of “efficiency”).

• Unfortunately, our politics is such that it is now a partisan matter as to whether rich people should have to pay the taxes they owe. This comes up in many contexts, but perhaps most strikingly with the estate tax.

• Just to be clear, the only people who owe any money at all under the estate tax are very rich. The current tax has a $12.06 million dollar exemption, per person. That means a couple can pass along $24.12 million to their kids without paying a dime in estate tax.

• Another day, our attention focuses on the problem arising due to the lack of infant formula and the trouble it poses for new new-born infants, including deaths.  And we ask, how do “they” get away with it?

• These are but two examples of the social crises that seem to arise every day and appear to come out of nowhere. And, after a day or so of media attention, it seems to disappear, superseded by yet another headline grabbing crisis.  Other crises have come and gone, like pharmaceutical industry’s role in widespread opioid addiction or airline crashes.

• When thousands of families were forced to move out of the ABLA Homes public housing complex two decades ago, Chicago and federal leaders promised they would be able to come back to new housing and a revitalized community on the city’s Near West Side.

• Most of the residential buildings at ABLA would be demolished. But, officials said, thousands of new homes for both poor and more affluent families would be built to replace them. The pledge was part of a 10-year plan to “transform” public housing citywide and offer a model to other cities.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• June 11 March for Our Lives.

• Chaac is frail. Centuries without proper oblation have drained the Mayan rain god of his power. Across the Yucatán, the sacred cenotes, or sinkholes, where his worshippers once presented offerings of gold and jade and human remains are now swimming with tourists. Most of his relics were dredged from the water decades ago and taken to the metropoles, where they’re exhibited as artifacts to apostates—if not hidden away entirely in secure, climate-controlled facilities. The deity who oversaw the natural cycles of life is now curtailed and well-contained.

• Paris—Rachel Keke knows her way around a picket line. On a recent Saturday morning, at a branch of the supermarket chain Monoprix in a well-to-do Paris neighborhood, the 48-year-old housekeeper traded hugs with workers and supporters gathered outside. Nearly everyone wearing the red union vests of the General Confederation of Labor (CGT) seemed to recognize her—and when Keke took the mic, she spoke with the confidence and convictions of someone who has herself been through a grueling battle with the boss.

• In the end, it wasn’t close. Chesa Boudin, poster child for the progressive prosecutors’ movement around the United States, was voted out as San Francisco district attorney in a recall election that will have huge ramifications for national politics over the coming months and years.

• 60,000 voters had cast ballots demanding that the controversial DA leave office. 40,000 wanted him to keep his job and continue to do what he started, which was to reform a criminal injustice system that favored the wealthy and punished the impoverished. San Franciscans were proud that their local story made the national news, though they seemed to be more focused on the Warriors than the recall.

• On the afternoon of Election Day I worked the phones at Boudin’s headquarters on Noe Street off Market. I wanted to contribute to the cause and I saw myself as a participant journalist operating on the inside, not the outside. A couple of photographers took pictures, but there were no journalists around to observe and ask questions. Cellphones and laptops dotted tables. Flyers filled brown paper bags. The floors needed to be swept and mopped, though no one besides me seemed to notice. And no one besides me observed that Boudin’s headquarters was reminiscent of the SDS national headquarters in Chicago where I spent part of a summer writing New Left propaganda about George Jackson and Huey Newton, whom Eldridge Cleaver described as “the baddest motherfucker ever to step inside history.”

• South Dakota is a Republican, red state, where conservatives have for decades controlled the governorship and the legislature. But the voters have regularly used citizen-initiated referendums and constitutional amendments to advance progressive proposals: increasing the minimum wage, legalizing marijuana, defending abortion rights, and cracking down on corporate influence.

• In the wake of U.S. President Joe Biden’s proposal Wednesday to establish a new policy framework aimed at propelling the Western Hemisphere’s recovery from the coronavirus crisis and countering China’s growing influence in the region, economic justice advocates are emphasizing that any fresh pact must not repeat the failures of existing “free trade” agreements.

• “The corporate-centered free trade agreements currently in place throughout the region have been a disaster for working families both at home and abroad.”

• Did Viktor Orbán simply appoint a shadow cabinet member to get EU funds, or does he really intend to completely restructure the supervision of the domestic spending of funds expected from the European Union, which the EU is still withholding? What will be the role of Tibor Navracsics now that he’s returned to the government and what will be the role of the equally experienced returnee, János Lázár in ensuring that Hungary gets access to funds that have mainly not been brought home so far due to corruption concerns? We have looked at how the new government structure might shape relations with the EU and most importantly, the reduction of concerns about the rule of law.

• Why is the system unable to protect those whose partners are making their lives a living hell? Today, more than 200,000 women in Hungary are in a relationship in which they are victims of physical and/or sexual violence. Almost half of all Hungarian women suffer some form of physical and/or sexual abuse in their lifetime, and on average one woman loses her life every week as a result of domestic violence. Violence against women may be the most common human rights violation worldwide, and domestic violence is the most common yet least reported crime. What does it mean to say that abuse is systemic? What makes it difficult to leave an oppressive relationship? Why is the system unable to protect those in need? This article – part one of a five-part Telex series – explores these questions.

• Now that the verdict in the Depp-Heard trial is in, the media spectacle of the case may finally begin to die down.

• They tend to cause accidents, their regulation is in a gray zone and is completely useless. Making it effective would require a lot of work, effort or time or a combination of these – there is no easy solution for anyone looking for a reassuring and effective solution to urban wild boars. In Balatonfűzfő the situation has reached a breaking point.

• As Democrats scramble to craft their midterm strategy amid rising fears of a GOP takeover, Sen. Bernie Sanders on Thursday implored the party’s leadership to offer voters an honest assessment of the role Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema played in tanking the popular Build Back Better agenda—and make clear that a larger Democratic majority is necessary to push it over the finish line.

• “You really can’t win an election with a bumper sticker that says: ‘Well, we can’t do much, but the other side is worse.’”

Civil Rights/Policing

• It’s everywhere! “BIPOC.” You cannot seem to get away from it. We both remember when the preferred reference to those on the receiving end of racist and national oppression was “people of color.” Then suddenly we became BIPOC—a change urged by many as a specific form of enlightenment.

• As a result of CIA’s censorship, I joined a lawsuit with four former federal employees to end the government’s suppression of our writings on national security issues.  Last month, the Supreme Court allowed to stand a court ruling that denied our case, which had been presented by lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union.  The government has a legitimate interest in protecting bona fide secrets, but the CIA’s review system is opaque, exceeding legitimate security boundaries, and compromising free speech.  The Haspel case exposes the dangers of government censorship; the failures of the Senate’s confirmation process; and the CIA’s ability to avoid accountability for its transgressions.

• At the closing of Haspel’s hearing, the chairman of the intelligence committee, Richard Burr (R/NC), told her that “you have acted morally, ethically and legally over a distinguished 30-year career.”  Surely the members of the committee knew of Haspel’s role in torture and abuse.  This would be particularly true for the senior Democrat on the committee, Diane Feinstein, who led the committee’s investigation of the CIA program.

• The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruled that Hungarian authorities’ use of a handcuff and a leash on an Iraqi asylum seeker was ‘inhuman and degrading’. The Iraqi man arrived at the transit zone at the Serbian Border in 2017 with his children and his pregnant wife, who was dealing with a ‘high risk’ pregnancy. The woman was taken to different hospitals on numerous occasions. “Ten days after they arrived in the transit zone, her husband went with her and was handcuffed and attached to a leash in full view of their children,” the European court paper reads. “He was made to remain in handcuffs throughout the hospital visit while acting as interpreter for his wife.” For the first three months of the asylum proceeding, there was reportedly no progress in their case, which resulted in a hunger strike by the pregnant woman.

• According to court documents, the Iraqi family was allegedly forced to leave Iraq after the national security services tortured the father.

• The federal government has unlimited money to burn. That’s how we end up here with the federal government being told for a second time that it can’t walk away from a civil lawsuit just because it unilaterally decided to stop violating the plaintiff’s rights.

• A ruling by the right-wing majority on the U.S. Supreme Court Wednesday “will have far-reaching consequences” for people who accuse federal agents of violating their constitutional rights, the ACLU warned after the court ruled against a man who wanted to sue a U.S. Border Patrol agent who entered his property without a warrant and used excessive force.

• “This ruling leaves victims of police violence by CBP agents without an effective remedy for justice and puts everyone’s liberty at risk.”

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Antitrust and telecom experts warned anybody who’d listen that the Sprint and T-Mobile merger (which reduced the number of major U.S. wireless players from four to three) would eventually result in layoffs and higher prices for everybody. The layoffs were quick to arrive (T-Mobile laid off more than 5,000 employees before the ink was dry), though the price hikes were slower to materialize. At first.

Monopolies

• Here’s my solution to the formula shortage: Men should breastfeed. Sure, it will take dedication and hard work, also industrial-strength estrogen and other meds, a doctor, a lactation consultant, and I don’t know what else; but if a handful of trans women can do it, I’m sure regular old cis men can figure it out. Headline: “Breast Hero Dad: ‘I Begged Her Not to Use Formula, but She Wouldn’t Listen!’”

Patents

• As public health advocates prepared a global day of action to demand an end to Covid-19 vaccine inequity, international campaigners reported that the inaction by the World Trade Organization and several wealthy countries has led to the deaths of nearly 30,000 people per day since talks about widely distributing vaccines began 20 months ago.

• “It is incomprehensible that we are still debating whether or not it’s a good idea for poorer countries to be able to produce their own vaccines, tests, and treatments for this and any future pandemics.”

Trademarks

• While trademark disputes regularly annoy me for a variety of reasons which I cover on this site, the most annoying ones of all are usually over trademarks that the USPTO never should have granted in the first place. Remember the Square Donuts thing? That mark was descriptive. ESPN’s “Saturday Night Football” mark? Also descriptive. Or the time a company managed to trademark the term “Legal Hackers” as it was the company’s name? Yeah, you guessed it: descriptive.

Copyrights

• Could Paramount Pictures have actually lost the copyright to Top Gun, even as it was releasing a new Top Gun movie? That’s the claim in a new lawsuit that goes pretty deep into the copyright weeds, touching on two ridiculous topics that we like to write about on Techdirt: termination rights and movie rights.

• We’ve been talking about the problems of the US government setting up a copyright trolling small claims court for over a decade now. But, Congress finally passed a law to create one (with no debate and no hearings) by sneaking it into a “must-pass” funding bill at the end of the year in 2020. It’s taken a year and a half but the Copyright Office is finally set to launch it sometime next week.

• Successful lawsuits filed by several Israel-based media companies against three pirate streaming sites are proving tricky to wrap up. A US court previously issued orders for all ISPs to block the sites and instructed third-party service providers to cease doing business with them. The plaintiffs say that since Cloudflare is refusing to comply, the company should be held in contempt of court.

• New research published by the EU Intellectual Property Office shows that piracy remains prevalent among EU youth. The lack of affordable content is most often cited as motivation. Interestingly, piracy rates among university-educated respondents are almost double that of those who enjoyed little to no schooling.

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

----------

➮ Sharing is caring. Content is available under CC-BY-SA.