● 04.03.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 03/04/2023: Tux Paint 0.9.29 and Krita Plans

Posted in News Roundup at 7:28 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Applications

• Every website on the internet uses HTML language and relies on using an editor to build the website. The HTML editor is a platform to edit and create the website’s content.

• A great way to make HTML content is often through a WYSIWYG editor, short for “What You See is What You Get.” These editors work similarly to a word processor, creating the HTML for you and giving you a preview of what to expect.

• Additionally, we must remember that the WYSIWYG HTML editors are open-source products for everyone. With open-source HTML editors, the concept goes beyond being a fee-to-use software.

• Open-source means users can access the program’s source code and undertake modifications depending on the circumstances. Some open-source WYSIWYG HTML editors also allow modified versions of their programs to be shared or sold as long as they are under the same licenses as their original counterparts.

• Tux Paint 0.9.29 is here about ten months after Tux Paint 0.9.28 to introduce fifteen new Magic Tools, including Maze for generating random mazes, Googly Eyes for sticking eyeballs on your masterpieces, Fur for painting fur onto a drawing, as well as Circles and Rays for applying brush stroke effects.

• The list of new Magic Tools included in this release continues with 3D Glasses, a tool that lets you create 3D pictures that can be viewed with those red/cyan anaglyph glasses, Color Sep, a tool that separates selected colors, Double Vision, a tool that simulates diplopia, as well as Saturate and Desaturate, a tool to increase and decrease color saturation.

Instructionals/Technical

• Here are a few interesting use-cases for these options: [...]

• What if we desired something a little bit extra, like applying a box-shadow to the sticky header as soon as the page is scrolled? I thought it was worth sharing one solution that has worked well for me to accomplish this goal. Check out the following CodePen demo. As soon as the page is scrolled, a shadow fades in below the header.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Microsoft SQL Server on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Microsoft SQL Server is a relational database management system developed by Microsoft.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install BlueMail on Rocky Linux 9.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install XanMod Kernel on Debian 11.

• If you are a Linux administrator or trying to become one, you must gather strong knowledge related to cron jobs and cron logs. The Linux System Administrator is responsible for running the scheduled tasks (known as jobs) and ensuring they work perfectly fine by monitoring their results. This verification of successful job execution is done by the Crontab logs, which are automatically created by the system. This post will act as a guide to show you all you need to know about cron logs that will help you become a Linux System administrator. What are Crontab Logs in Linux? Crontab…

• Are you tired of not getting security updates? Is your old MacBook getting sluggish and you want to provide a new life to it? Look no further: Liberate it with Linux!

• The command history helps you view commands you’ve previously run inside the terminal. Here’s how you can manage the command history on Linux.

• On Linux, every command you type gets saved in the history file. The history command lets you view and reuse those commands without having to retype them. You can navigate through the history list using the Up and Down keys. However, there may be times you want to delete some commands from the history or permanently disable the history saving feature.

• Fortunately, Linux lets you control command logging features, such as disabling it temporarily or permanently, deleting the entire history, or preventing certain commands from being saved in the history list. Let’s see how.

Games

• Between 2023-03-26 and 2023-04-02 there were 120 new games validated for the Steam Deck. We use a number of variables to include titles in this Best Steam Games list, such as popularity, ratings, trends and more.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Like in 2021 and 2020, no members of the Krita team actually died from the ongoing pandemic. This feels a bit miraculous, but there it is. The year was pretty awful, though, with the Krita maintainer getting long COVID (that’s me, Halla…) and being too sick to do anything four days out of seven — and various other upheavals we’re not going to detail because that would not be safe, or would be too private to talk about, we really had a really tough year.

• The years before 2022 were mostly marked by us trying, sometimes desperately, to keep on top of the number of bug reports flowing in. A lot of bug reports, it has to be said, are basically not actionable. That’s not to blame the reporter who went through the lengths needed to register and then write up their problem. Which is really an admirable amount of effort. But too often, the problems are with the OS support for tablets, display drivers… And plain misunderstandings. And cries for user support. But there are now more open bug reports than a year ago.

Distributions and Operating Systems

New Releases

• Slackel 7.6 “Openbox” has been released. It is more than a year since the last Slackel release.

• It includes Linux kernel 6.1.20 and the latest updates from the Slackware “Current” tree.

• The new version is available in 64-bit and 32-bit versions.

• The 64-bit iso image supports booting on UEFI systems.

• Ubuntu Touch is the privacy and freedom-respecting mobile operating system by UBports. Today we are extremely happy to announce the release of Ubuntu Touch OTA-1 Focal, the very latest update to the system! OTA-1 will be available on the following supported Ubuntu Touch devices:

• I’m pleased to announce that Porteus Kiosk 5.5.0 is now available for download.

• Major software upgrades in this release include: Linux kernel 6.1.20, Google Chrome 108.0.5359.124 and Mozilla Firefox 102.9.0 ESR. Packages from the userland are upgraded to portage snapshot tagged on 20230318: link.

Devices/Embedded

• MYIR MYC-YG2LX is Renesas RZ/G2L CPU module with up to 4GB DDR4, 32GB eMMC flash, and various I/Os such as gigabit Ethernet, USB 2.0, camera and display interfaces accessible through 222 castellated holes, and designed for advanced HMI, IoT edge gateways, and other embedded devices with video capabilities.

• MYiR Tech provides a Linux BSP based on the 5.10.83 kernel with OS images, driver source code, demo applications (charging pile application, PLC controller, engineering machinery scene), and a toolchain.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Week highlights: new releases of Blender, QCAD, Qtractor, first pre-release of Inkscape 1.3, new features in GIMP, FreeCAD, Ardour.

• CmykStudent added initial support for the QOI file format that is intended to be a replacement for PNG with lossless compression and faster encoding. There was an earlier plugin for GIMP 2.10by Piotr Fusik, that served as an inspiration.

Licensing / Legal

• A simple framework based on my short taxonomy of open source strategies (specifically applied to machine learning models).

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Data

• New Yorkers don’t know where our nearest defibrillators are, so when people have heart attacks, we lose people we could save. A new NY City Council bill aims to open that data. We need your help to improve it and get it passed. Submit written testimony by 10am ET on Sunday, April 2nd.s

Leftovers

• Here at Hackaday, we love a good art piece, whether that involves light or sound. Combining both is a sure-fire way to get our attention, and [Eirik Brandal] did just that with his Void Extrusion piece.

• A kitchen timer is one of those projects that’s well defined enough to have a clear goal, but allows plenty of room for experimentation with functionality and aesthetics. [Hggh]’s exploration of the idea is a clean, Brutalist kitchen timer.

Science

• More than meets the eye…

Hardware

• I recently received a ThinkPad X201 to start using as my daily driver. I purchased the X201 to replace my existing X260. Although some might look at this as a “downgrade” in terms of specs and hardware, I would have to disagree.

• The X201 is an absolute masterpiece in laptop hardware design and only faulted by some of the constraints set by the motherboard, namely the lack to support more than 8GB of RAM. Other than that, I think it’s perfect. Well…almost perfect. There is one small annoyance: [...]

• Those of us who build our own electronics should have some idea of the process used to assemble modern surface-mount printed circuit boards. Whether we hand-solder, apply paste with a syringe, use a hotplate, or go the whole hog with stencil and oven, the process of putting components on boards and soldering them is fairly straightforward. It’s the same in an industrial setting, though perhaps fewer of us will have seen an industrial pick-and-place line in action. [Martina] looks at just such a line for us, giving a very accessible introduction to the machines and how they are used. Have a look, in the video below the break.

• It’s always great fun to build your own robot. Sometimes, though, if you’re doing various projects or research, it’s easier to buy an existing robot and then use it to get down to business. That was very much the role of the Willow Garage PR2, but unfortunately, it’s no longer in production. However, as covered by The Robot Report, the design files have now been released for others to use.

• Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang told his Japanese counterpart on Sunday that Tokyo’s new export controls on semiconductor equipment will only further drive Beijing’s quest “to become self-reliant”.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• 2006: Founding member Heather Flores wrote and published Food Not Lawns, How to Turn your Yard into a Garden and your Neighborhood into a Community, and from there, new local chapters starting popping up! Since then, Heather has traveled all over the US, helping new chapters get off the ground, hosting local seed swaps, and making tons of great friends!

• “We’re seeing increasing numbers of people who no longer have that sort of basic language using their hands, in the way that — only five or ten years ago — people used to,” he said.

• “There is a language of touch that is easy to overlook or ignore,” said Dr. Roger Kneebone, professor of surgical education at Imperial College London. “You know if someone has learned French or Chinese because it’s very obvious, but the language of touch is harder to recognize.” And just like verbal language, he thinks it’s easier to acquire when you’re young: “It’s much more difficult to get it when you’re 24, 25 or 26 than when you’re 4, 5 or 6.”

• Dr. Robert Spetzler, former president and chief executive of the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, agreed. “Think about the difference between someone who has learned to ski when they were a little kid and someone who spent a long time, perhaps even the same amount of time, skiing as an adult,” he said. “That elegance that you learn when very young, doing that sport, can never be equaled by an adult learning how to ski.”

• The result wasn’t close. City Hall said on its website about 103,000 people voted, with 89% rejecting e-scooters and just 11% supporting them.

• Turnout was very low. The vote had been open to all of Paris’ 1.38 million registered voters

• Many years ago, long before the COVID-19 pandemic upended everything and turbocharged the antivaccine movement beyond anything any of us had ever seen or predicted, the central conspiracy theory of the antivaccine movement (as I like to call it) was that vaccines caused autism, and the CDC and FDA were covering up the evidence. In retrospect, that version of the central conspiracy theory seems almost quaint compared to the current version centered around COVID-19 vaccines (particularly mRNA vaccines), in which antivaxxers claim that these vaccines are killing, sterilizing, and inducing “turbo cancers” in millions, but the CDC and FDA (plus, Anthony Fauci) covered up the evidence that was apparently so obvious that experts missed all the signals that people with no training in medicine, epidemiology, or vaccinology could find. Back then, after having been a blogger for a couple of years, I had come to dread April, at least when it came to antivaccine misinformation. The reason was simple. April is National Autism Awareness Month, and I could always count on the antivaccine movement to ramp up its misinformation linking a combination of the MMR vaccine, “too many vaccines too soon,” and mercury from the thimerosal preservative that used to be used in a number of childhood vaccines before 2001 as the cause for the “autism epidemic.” Sure, often the vaccines were not the only thing blamed for rising autism prevalence. Often processed foods, wifi, and a number of other supposed “causes” were thrown in as well, but always at the center of causes that conspiracy theorists blamed for the increasing prevalence of autism were vaccines. Last week, unsurprisingly, the same thing happened before April 1 even arrived.

• The cochlear is key to human hearing, and it plays an important role in our understanding of complex frequency content. The Visual Ear project aims to illustrate the cochlear mechanism as an educational tool.

• Energize and focus.

Proprietary

• Everyone is tumbling over themselves making predictions about AI. It’s going to free us from menial work, it’s going to dismantle our education, we all won’t have to learn things anymore because the AI will do it for us, criminals will trick us with it, crooks will create endless amounts of disinformation with language models, and the AI will escape and become dangerous in the real world. Who knows.

Security

• On the 13th of March, 2023, the Kali Linux team announced the availability of a new version of their security-focused Linux distribution, named “Kali Linux Purple”.

• TikTok general counsel says company is trying to make it physically impossible for any government, including China, to access to U.S. user data.

Privacy/Surveillance

• While many apps collect vast troves of user data, sometimes without explicit consent, experts say e-commerce giant Pinduoduo has taken violations of privacy and data security to the next level.

• In a detailed investigation, CNN spoke to half a dozen cybersecurity teams from Asia, Europe and the United States — as well as multiple former and current Pinduoduo employees — after receiving a tipoff.

• The move comes days after a group of artificial intelligence experts and industry executives, along with Twitter CEO and OpenAI confounder Elon Musk wrote an open letter to the US Federal Trade Commission calling for a six-month pause in training systems more powerful than OpenAI’s newly launched model GPT-4.

Defence/Aggression

• Well-known Russian military blogger Vladlen Tatarsky was killed by a bomb blast in a St. Petersburg cafe on Sunday in what appeared to be the second assassination on Russian soil of a figure closely associated with the war in Ukraine.

• From Iraq War veterans to a young Mike Tyson and her own brother’s battle with AIDS, Grinker’s photographs open a window from the personal into the political.

• Thirty named journalists at three major papers are covering “bombshell” revelations about Russian cyberattacks in a manner worth examining.

• On 20 March 2023, China’s President Xi Jinping and Russia’s President Vladimir Putin spent over four hours in private conversation. According to official statements after the meeting, the two leaders talked about the increasing economic and strategic partnership between China and Russia…

• Wagner mercenary group founder Evgeny Prigozhin said in a video posted Sunday night that his fighters have captured the administration building in Bakhmut, the city in Ukraine’s Donetsk region where Ukrainian and Russian forces have been locked in combat for months.

• Daria Trepova, a St. Petersburg resident born in 1997, has been arrested on suspicion of murdering pro-Kremlin “war correspondent” Vladlen Tatarsky, reports Interfax, citing a source with knowledge of the situation. Trepova was brought to the investigator.

• An explosion occurred on the evening of April 2 in the St. Petersburg cafe Street Food Bar No. 1, reports Interfax, citing local emergency services. The explosion killed one person and injured another 15. “According to the latest information, a gas cylinder may have exploded in the cafe,” said emergency services. There was no fire following the explosion.

• Sergey Lavrov, Russia’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, and Antony Blinken, U.S. Secretary of State, spoke on the phone on April 2, reports Russia’s Foreign Affairs Ministry.

• Twenty years ago, Noam Chomsky published a bestselling book called Hegemony or Survival. Since then, the stark choice he posed has only become more urgent. Depending on how humanity responds to the challenges of ecological destruction and imperialistic war, in the coming decade that terrifying question “Hegemony or survival?” may well be answered.

• As the public’s attention is fixated on the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine, a new breed of warfare has been quietly and insidiously creeping into existence. This asymmetric warfare is characterized by the weaponization of natural spaces such as the geographical space between Colombia and Panama, El Tapón del Darién, against impoverished migrants of color. Staying informed about sudden and extreme global events is crucial, but we must resist being distracted from more insidious and subtle transformations and forms of violence happening around the world. The ongoing inhumane war waged by the world’s wealthiest nations against the planet’s impoverished peoples, currently manifesting in El Darién, also deserves our unwavering attention.

• Six people were wounded in a strike by Ukraine’s Armed Forces on annexed Melitopol, reports Interfax, citing the Russian-appointed administration. Emergency services of the annexed part of Zaporizhzhia say that residential buildings and a gas line were damaged in the strike.

• Six people were killed and eight were wounded in missile strikes on the city of Konstantynivka, in the Donetsk region, reports presidential adviser Andriy Yermak.

• In the wake of the Nashville shooting, even as mourners gathered at the first funeral – of a 9-year-old “shining light” – and thousands of Tennesseans demanded their lawmakers “Do Something!”, GOP goons still staunchly, blindly refuse to act on or even acknowledge our national gun carnage. It’s “premature” to talk of gun control, they say; we need more doors, cops, cameras, Jesus. “You guys are banning books,” says the rest of America. “Dead kids can’t read.”

• Ukraine’s top security agency has notified a top Orthodox priest that he is suspected of justifying Russia’s aggression amid a bitter dispute over a famed Orthodox monastery. Metropolitan Pavel is the abbot of the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra monastery, Ukraine’s most revered Orthodox site. He has strongly resisted an order from Ukrainian authorities for the monks to vacate the complex. Earlier in the week, the metropolitan cursed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, threatening him with damnation. Facing a court hearing in the Ukrainian capital, he strongly rejected the claim by the Security Service of Ukraine that he condoned Russia’s invasion. The SBU asked a court on Saturday to put him under house arrest pending an investigation.

• Sixteen Alaska Native men have been honored for rescuing the crew of a U.S. Navy patrol plane shot down over the Bering Strait by Soviet fighter jets nearly 70 years ago. With that belated honor, The Associated Press is republishing its story filed July 3, 1955, from Oakland, California, detailing the arrival of seven of the injured Navy crew members who were flown from Alaska after their plane was shot down by Soviet MiGs the previous month. Four other crew members did not need to be transported for care, and all 11 survived after being rescued by Alaska National Guardsmen on St. Lawrence Island.

Environment

• “The plastic gets transferred through the food chain,” Gopalakrishnan said. “The big fish, at last, may have an accumulated amount of plastic.”

• Gopalakrishnan and Kashian said they plan to eventually take their algae-microplastics experiment into the field.

• Vice President Kamala Harris has visited a farm outside Zambia’s capital that’s using new techniques and technology to boost its vegetable crop as she highlighted ways to secure food supplies in an age of global warming. She walked past rows of peppers and inspected a drip irrigation system and called it ““an example of what can be done around the world.” In the United States, conversations about climate change usually revolve around replacing fossil fuels with clean energy. In Africa, the focus is on expanding access to food. Rising prices stemming from the Russian invasion of Ukraine have been damaging to poor countries, and global warming is expected to bring more challenges in the coming years.

Energy/Transportation

• Over the weekend, water flow at the Pļaviņas hydroelectric power plant (HES) has reached levels too high for full energy production and the overflow gates are now open, Latvenergo told newswire LETA on April 2.

• Today, a multidisciplinary investigation – involving almost 100 scientists from around the world and 66 centers and institutions – details how the image of a human-horse was a constant among the Indo-American tribes on the plains of the United States during the first half of the 17th century, before the rest of the European colonizers arrived.

• When you don’t pay tax, you can afford to pay more in a corporate takeover. That’s Brookfield’s magic. Not a cent in income tax paid by Brookfield’s BPIH on $16bn in total income over 8 years.

• The tax haven specialists are now pouncing on Origin Energy in a binding $18.7 billion takeover just a year after snapping up Victorian energy transmitter Ausnet for just shy of $10bn. They had a crack at AGL too. Like Hong Kong billionaires Michael Kadoorie (EnergyAustralia) and Li-ka-Shing (Spark and CKI) they know Australia’s regulators are ripe for gaming. They know super-profits are on the corporate menu for over-charging Australian consumers.

• Evacuation orders have been lifted in small sections of Tomioka, a town just southwest of the wrecked Fukushima nuclear power plant, in time for the area’s popular cherry blossom season. Prime Minister Fumio Kishida joined a ceremony there on Saturday. An earthquake and tsunami in March 2011 triggered triple meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Massive amounts of radiation spewed from the plant, causing more than 160,000 residents to evacuate from across Fukushima. Surveys show many former residents have decided not to return because they have found jobs and educations and built relationships elsewhere.

Wildlife/Nature

• [Scott Cutler] has a young cat, [Cygnus], that loves to run on a cat wheel and [Scott] had some some important questions about [Cygnus]’s usage of the cat wheel like, how often it’s used, what direction is preferred and how fast does [Cygnus] go. To answer these questions, [Scott] put some telemetry sensors onto the cat wheel and analyzed the results.

• The Vidzeme region court in Cēsis has charged a man with a hefty fine of EUR 50,000 for the deliberate destruction of at least ten eggs of an endangered species, the black-headed gull (Chroicocephalus ridibundu), Latvian Radio reported on April 2.

• No brain, no problem.

Finance

• There is a standard tale of politics where conservatives want to leave things to the market, whereas the left want a big role for government. The right likes to tell this story because it advantages them politically…

• A report says McDonald’s has closed its U.S. offices for a few days as the company prepares to inform employees about layoffs.

• The Wall Street Journal cited an internal email from the Chicago-based fast-food giant saying U.S. corporate staff and some employees overseas should work from home while the company notifies people of their job status.

• McDonald’s did not immediately reply to emailed requests for comment. The report said McDonald’s would inform its employees this week about staffing decisions that are part of a wide restructuring of the company announced earlier.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Early Sunday, Musk tweeted that the Times’ check mark would be removed. Later he posted disparaging remarks about the newspaper, which has aggressively reported on Twitter and on flaws with partially automated driving systems at Tesla, the electric car company, which he also runs.

• Other Times accounts such as its business news and opinion pages still had either blue or gold check marks on Sunday, as did multiple reporters for the news organization.

• The New York Times was among news media companies, firms and charities that had already lost their blue tick and were tagged as verified business accounts with a gold tick under Musk’s new system.

• To retain the gold tick after the rollout of the subscription service dubbed Twitter Blue, these groups would have to pay a monthly fee of $1,000 in the United States, and $50 for each additional affiliated account.

• The New York Times said it would not pay for a verified business account and would subscribe for a blue tick only for journalists finding it essential for their reporting needs.

• With Chicago’s closely watched mayoral runoff just two days away, the campaign of progressive Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson debuted an ad on Sunday featuring expert and parent testimony on conservative candidate Paul Vallas’ education record, including his stints managing school districts in Chicago, Philadelphia, and New Orleans.

• Last Thursday’s big news story was the indictment of Donald Trump, with banner headlines in all the papers that still print on paper. The phrase I saw most often was “uncharted territory,” (and occasionally “unchartered territory”), which is somewhat true: we’ve never had a former president, much less one seeking election, under indictment. But, truth be told, it seems like these waters were fairly easy to predict. It’s been obvious for many years that Trump disregarded rules and laws, acted on whims and appetites, and was a greedy skinflint; him ending up in trouble for tax evasion to cover up an affair with a porn star seems unlikely only in its details.

• When Donald Trump steps before a judge next week to be arraigned in a New York courtroom, it will not only mark the first time a former U.S. president has faced criminal charges. It will also represent a reckoning for a man long nicknamed “Teflon Don,” who until now has managed to skirt serious legal jeopardy despite 40 years of legal scrutiny. The spectacle that is sure to unfold will mark an unprecedented moment in American history. But on a personal level, the indictment pierces the cloak of invincibility that seemed to follow Trump through his decades in business and in politics, as he faced allegations of fraud, collusion and sexual misconduct.

• Sudan’s military leaders and pro-democracy forces have said they will delay the signing of an agreement to usher in a civilian government. The postponement of the signing comes as key security reform negotiations between the Sudanese army and the country’s powerful paramilitary forces appear to have reached a deadlock. A meeting will be held Saturday “to set a new date for signing the final political agreement.” Sudan has been mired in chaos after a military coup removed a Western-backed power-sharing government in October 2021. Last December the military and numerous pro-democracy groups signed a preliminary deal vowing to restore the transition.

• British travelers are facing hours-long lines as they try to cross the English Channel. The Port of Dover in England blamed the delays on bad weather, heavy traffic and processing delays by French authorities. Saturday is the first day of a two-week spring vacation for most schools in Britain. While the port says bus passengers are facing the longest wait times, video showed long lines of cars and trucks as well. The port also warned ferry passengers of severe delays and said it was “deeply frustrated” by the situation, which has become a regular feature of cross-channel travel since Britain’s exit from the European Union.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• Video-sharing platform Rumble, flush with cash after a $400 million investment, is pushing toward its goal of becoming the YouTube for American conservatives, even as it faces criticism for allowing misinformation and conspiracy theories to proliferate.

• Its monthly active user base rose to 80 million at the end of December, more than double the year-earlier figure, the company said on Thursday.

• And although it posted a net loss of $11.4 million, annual revenues – mostly from advertising – quadrupled in the past 12 months to $39.3 million.

Censorship/Free Speech

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• Station head Najia Sorosh denied there was any violation, saying there was no need for the closure and called it a conspiracy. The Taliban “told us that you have broadcast music. We have not broadcast any kind of music,” she said.

• Sorosh said at 11:40 a.m. on Thursday representatives from the Ministry of Information and Culture and the Vice and Virtue Directorate arrived at the station and shut it down. She said station staff have contacted Vice and Virtue but officials there said they do not have any additional information about the closing.

• More than 30 press freedom groups and news organizations, including the Journal, The New York Times, BBC, The Associated Press, The New Yorker, Time and The Washington Post, signed a letter Friday to Anatoly I. Antonov, Russia’s ambassador to the U.S., expressing concern about “a significant escalation” in your government’s anti-press actions.

• “Russia is sending the message that journalism within your borders is criminalized and that foreign correspondents seeking to report from Russia do not enjoy the benefits of the rule of law,” they said.

• Russia has not provided any evidence to back up the accusations, and Mr. Gershkovich, and his employer have denied the allegation. Russian state media said Mr. Gershkovich was being held at a prison in Moscow to await trial after being transported from Yekaterinburg, a city 900 miles away in the Ural Mountains where he was arrested. He is the first American journalist detained on espionage charges since the end of the Cold War and faces up to 20 years in jail.

• Meanwhile, an ominous tweet Gershkovich posted in July — eight months before he was detained — foreshadowed his terrifying fate.

• “Reporting on Russian is now also a regular practice of watching people you know get locked away for years,” he eerily tweeted on July 12, 2022.

• By Keith B. Richburg This is a question being heard more frequently since the city’s chief executive and his team have decided that the main problem stalling Hong Kong’s re-emergence onto the global stage after three years of political turbulence and pandemic isolation is negative news stories.

Civil Rights/Policing

• The university’s Board of Regents is seeking a preliminary injunction and temporary restraining order to end the Graduate Employee’s Organization strike that began on Wednesday, arguing that the walkout in the middle of the semester is “jeopardizing a student’s ability to take final exams, complete necessary course work, graduate” and complete educational degrees.

• In recent weeks, Hong Kong has been gripped by a series of headlines, often tragic ones, starring women as victim or protagonist. Abby Choi’s murder made front-page news locally and around the world on February 24.

• Following Steven Donziger’s appeal to the appointing of three special prosecutors to his controversial contempt of court case, every justice, with the exception of Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, refused to give Donziger a hearing for his appeal and let the conviction stand, raising concerns about constitutional rights. Here is the dissent by Justices […]

• The latest round in the fight between Starbucks and its nascent barista network — Starbucks Workers United (SBWU) — came to a head on Wednesday with the appearance of former CEO and current board member Howard Schultz at the Senate Committee on Housing, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP).

• Just days after former CEO Howard Schultz appeared before a Senate committee to face questioning over the company’s brazen union-busting campaign, Starbucks fired a worker credited with sparking the organizing drive that has resulted in nearly 300 unionized shops across the United States.

• Former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson announced Sunday that he will run for the White House in 2024, casting himself as a “different” kind of Republican than Donald Trump and his most fervent GOP allies.

Monopolies

Copyrights

• MicroG is a free-as-in-freedom alternative to proprietary Google services, including the Play Store. Vanced, a popular app that provided an ad-free YouTube experience, relied on microG to operate, something also true for successor ReVanced. In a scheme to damage microG and Vanced-style apps, imposters masquerading as microG have targeted almost two dozen sites with DMCA notices.

• Copyright holders have sent hundreds of DMCA notices flagging alleged copyright infringements on Europa.eu, the official website of the European Commission. The EU seems unable to deal with a recurring piracy spam problem on its own portal, up to the point that Google has begun removing Europa.eu search results.

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