● 05.03.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 03/05/2023: More Predictions of Xbox Demise/Doom and More Dirty Tricks From Microsoft

Posted in News Roundup at 8:37 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

• It is our pleasure to announce that the NovaCustom NV41 Series laptop has become the fifth Qubes-certified computer for Qubes 4.X!

• The NV41 Series is a 14-inch laptop from NovaCustom, a European vendor known for their highly customizable, Linux-friendly laptops. This 12th Generation Intel Core (Alder Lake) laptop comes with Dasharo coreboot open-source firmware, USB-C charging, the latest Intel Xe graphics, and up to 64 GB of memory.

Server

• Kubernetes 1.20 introduced the ContainerResource type metric in HorizontalPodAutoscaler (HPA).

• In Kubernetes 1.27, this feature moves to beta and the corresponding feature gate (HPAContainerMetrics) gets enabled by default.

• The ContainerResource type metric allows us to configure the autoscaling based on resource usage of individual containers.

• In the following example, the HPA controller scales the target so that the average utilization of the cpu in the application container of all the pods is around 60%.

Kernel Space

• Despite Morgan’s frustration with his new operating system, those close to him still insisted that it was the superior OS for everyone.

• This update brings changes and better support for the Radeon RX 7000 (RDNA 3) graphics cards. ROCm is AMD’s compute stack, similar to what NVIDIA and Intel offer with the CUDA, oneAPI, and Level Zero options.

Applications

• When it comes to package management on Linux systems, two popular tools are YUM and APT. YUM, short for Yellowdog Updater Modified, is commonly used in Red Hat-based distributions like CentOS and RHEL. On the other hand, APT, which stands for Advanced Packaging Tool, is widely used in Debian, Ubuntu, and their derivatives. Understanding the differences between these package managers can help you effectively manage software installations and updates on your Linux system. Additionally, if you are working with NVIDIA GPUs and need to determine the CUDA version installed on your Linux machine, there are specific commands you can use to retrieve this information.

• YUM and APT are widely used package managers on Linux systems, each with its own set of features and characteristics. Understanding the differences between them can help you choose the appropriate package manager for your specific Linux distribution. Additionally, being able to determine the CUDA version installed on your Linux machine is essential when working with NVIDIA GPUs for parallel computing purposes. By using the provided commands, you can easily retrieve the NVIDIA driver version and the installed CUDA version on your Linux system.

• This article focuses on selecting the best free astronomy software available for Linux.

Instructionals/Technical

• You probably use some bash builtins fairly often whether or not you think of them as builtins or simply as commands. After all, bash builtins are commands, but not implemented as separate executables. Instead, they are part of the bash executable. In other words, they are “built into” bash, thus the term “bash builtins”.

• OpenZFS is a cost-effective open source storage solution for Educational institutions.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Laravel on Fedora 38. Laravel is a popular PHP web framework that is designed for building web applications with a simple and elegant syntax. If you’re a PHP developer or planning to build web applications using PHP, Laravel is a great choice.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install DokuWiki on Rocky Linux 9. Are you looking for powerful and customizable wiki software to create and maintain documentation? Look no further than DokuWiki — the open-source wiki software that is easy to install and highly flexible.

• This quick tip shows how to run Python programs from the Linux command line.

• Podman is a Linux-native tool for deploying applications using Open Container Initiative (OCI) containers and container images. It supports multiple container image formats, including Docker images and OCI container images.

• In computing, encryption is a popular and most times the recommended technique of hiding information in a secretive format.

Games

• Between 2023-04-26 and 2023-05-03 there were 34 New Steam games released with Native Linux clients.

Distributions and Operating Systems

SUSE/OpenSUSE

• New SUSE CEO Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen has officially taken the reins at the enterprise Linux company – saying on his first day that the company needs to be “agile and unafraid to evolve” as it continues to grow.

• SUSE, which provides enterprise Linux Operating Systems, container management and storage, reported ARR of $655 million in Q1, up 11% year-on-year and continues to eye acquisition opportunities in “high-growth adjacent markets” after buying Kubernetes specialist Rancher for a reported $600 million in 2020.

• Van Leeuwen is a Red Hat veteran now set to go head-to-head with his former employer.

• He takes over from Melissa di Donato who left the company in late March.

Fedora Family / IBM

• Modern versions of the C++ programming language have a feature known as lambda expressions. This article shows how you can debug lambda expressions using GDB, the GNU Project Debugger. Even if you’re not interested in debugging lambdas, the techniques presented here are useful for many other debugging situations.

• Engaged employees are more productive and less likely to quit. But creating engagement is easier said than done. A recent study by Gartner found that only 13% of employees feel completely satisfied with their experience at work.

• While HR initiatives like active listening and career progression are important for the mid- to long-term employee journey, IT plays an important role from day one to ensure that all employees have the tools and resources they need to be productive. IT teams and HR must work together to create an organizational culture in which employees can thrive.

• Here are 6 things business and IT leaders can do to improve workplace culture.

Debian Family

• On Friday, I announced my intention to give away some Debian domains to help increase diversity of voices in the Debian Community.

• Some people have already made expressions of interest. To ensure the best results for the community, I plan to take a few days to review all the candidates.

• One of the top questions: which domains are actually available?

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

SaaS/Back End/Databases

• The PoWA team is pleased to announce the release of the version 4.1.4 of powa-web, the User Interface for the PoWA project.

Programming/Development

• We’ve just passed an important milestone for diffify: our app for tracking Python and R package releases has just turned 1 year old!

• Back in the dawn of time, which is four decades ago in computer science and which was before technical computing went mainstream with the advent of Unix workstations and their beefy server cousins, the computer science students we knew at college had taught themselves BASIC on either TRS-80s or Commodore VICs and they went to college to learn something useful like COBOL and maybe got a smattering of C and Pascal, or occasionally even RPG, for variety.

• PaleoClim (Brown et al. 2018, Scientific Data) is a set of high-resolution paleoclimate surfaces covering the whole world. The data is derived from HadCM3, one of the major ‘general circulation models’ that is used to forecast climate change, turned backwards to ‘predict’ conditions for key climate periods in the past.

Leftovers

Science

• “It is terrifying.”

• One of the wildest planets ever found.

• A new way to live in orbit.

• The risks are “profound”.

Hardware

• The Internet Society of Zimbabwe is a brave institution. They are calling for something that will make them unpopular with many. The Internet Society, Zimbabwe Chapter is calling for an additional tax on all gadget imports – an electronic waste tax. The rationale behind the call for the tax is solid.

• Taiwan-based Wistron is reportedly winding up its India operations.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• People across Senegal have enjoyed thieboudienne, the national dish, since at least the 19th century. Made with stuffed fish, rice, vegetables and a variety of West African spices, the savory dish’s recipe has traveled across Sub-Saharan Africa.

• A report says more than a quarter-billion people in 58 countries faced acute food insecurity last year

• June 24, 2022, was a warm and quiet day in my neighborhood. School had been out for two months, yet I remember feeling more stressed than normal. I anxiously stared at my phone: The Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision was coming out that day.

• If you’re a regular Corbett Reporteer, then by now you’re aware of the danger to human health caused by water fluoridation. But are you aware of the chlorine and other potentially toxic and carcinogenic substances in your tap water?

• Here’s how it works.

• Rīga has opened its free-access drinking water faucets for the season. Twelve of those were installed in the capital parks last year, and more are to come this year. Water in these faucets is clean, high-quality, safe for use, and regularly checked, the municipal company Rīgas ūdens (“Riga Water”) said on May 2.

• America’s mental health is not good. One in five adults in the country suffers from mental illness, and only about half of those people have received any treatment, according to Mental Health America (MHA), the US’s oldest community-based nonprofit focused on identifying mental health needs.

• What is a ‘normal’ gut?

• Could it work in humans?

• Crossing the uncrossible.

Proprietary

• Unity Software – the company behind the widely used Unity game engine – has announced its third round of layoffs in under 12 months, this time affecting 600 jobs, equating to approximately 8% of its total workforce.

• “As world builders, our greatest responsibility is to inspire and invite joy,” Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer said at the New York Game Awards in January. “It feels like today, seeking joy is an act of defiance.” In February, Microsoft lived up to that ideal with the stealth release of Hi-Fi Rush, a beautiful rhythm-based action platformer about an aspiring rockstar who uses a robotic arm to fight back against a rogue corporation. Tango Gameworks’ latest did spark joy, and also felt a bit rebellious by virtue of eschewing much of the bloat weighing down so many modern blockbusters.

• Microsoft is warning IT admins of upcoming changes to Outlook and Teams that will ignore default browser choice for links. The change has angered some IT admins, especially ones at small businesses.

Linux Foundation

Security

• The European Commission is promoting the Cyber Resilience Act, a draft regulation on the strengthening of cyber-security rules aimed at ensuring more secure hardware and software products. Unfortunately, as often happens, the Commission’s approach seems to reflect a strictly business-oriented vision, based on the vertical and centralized model of the Big Tech companies developing proprietary software. This regulation poses a very serious threat to free software, as evidenced by a letter cosigned by a group of organizations from the European free software ecosystem.

• IT security, as long as it serves users and is controlled by them, is an important condition for exercising computer freedoms as a whole. The various free software development methods, which, following scientific methods, are based on, among other things, transparency, reproducibility, and collaboration are much more conducive to security than a model based on a top-down and opaque approach. In any case, security per se cannot be a sufficient excuse to justify reducing fundamental freedoms. Any “security” measure must meet the principles of proportionality and strict necessity. This holds as true for IT as it does for everything else.

• If the EU’s new Cyber Resilience Act truly wants to improve the EU’s digital security landscape, it must do more than introduce an industry certification scheme: true IT security requires long-term software support, transparent and safe vulnerability handling and disclosure, and an acknowledgment of the essential role of free and open software communities in Europe’s digitisation.

• .

• A subgroup of China-linked hacker group APT41 is using a new ‘stack rumbling’ DoS technique to disable security software.

• Open source BGP implementation FRRouting is affected by three vulnerabilities that can be exploited to cause disruption via DoS attacks.

• New reporting from Wired reveals that the Department of Justice detected the SolarWinds attack six months before Mandient detected it in December 2020, but didn’t realize what they detected… and so ignored it.

• I’m a sucker for a good documentary, but the recent Netflix MH370 piece had me shouting at the screen.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Open banking can be described as a perfect storm for cybersecurity. At one end, small startups with financial acumen but little or no security expertise or resources, are rushing new products to market.

• The European Commission’s plan for a “security-related information sharing system between frontline officers in the EU and key partner countries” should be scrapped, says a paper signed by 10 organisations, including Statewatch, who warn that it may aid political repression and underpin human rights violations.

• KOSA is just one of several pieces of children’s safety legislation that has received growing attention from civil society groups.

• Delhi HC issued directions to search engines, MeitY, and Delhi Police in cases of Non-Consensual Intimate Images dissemination.

• Civil, human and free speech rights groups are voicing concern over proposed laws that would weaken encryption and put at-risk groups in danger.

• A huge proposal from the FTC: The Federal Trade Commission proposed changes to the agency’s 2020 privacy order with Facebook after alleging that the company…

Defence/Aggression

• Experts say an Islamic State group affiliate’s recent actions in northeast Mali signal that the group has entered a new phase and believes it is unchallenged by the military-led government. The extremists seized the northeast Malian town of Tidermene on April 10 without a fight.

• Eight children and one security guard were shot dead and several other children and one teacher were wounded in a shooting spree at a school in Serbia’s capital, Belgrade.

• The suspect fired into a crowd at the school in Belgrade with his father’s handgun, the police said. A security guard was also killed in the shooting.

• Palestinian activist Khader Adnan, who has been affiliated with the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PJI) group, died Tuesday in an Israeli prison following a hunger strike that lasted 86 days. In response to his death, armed supporters fired rockets from Gaza towards southern Israel.

• A former lieutenant colonel says the army lacks the stomach for war, as anti-war comments circulate online.

• Lawmakers wave Tibetan flag, call for end of China’s ‘concentration camps’ in Xinjiang.

• Terrorist groups in the Lake Chad Basin are embracing a mix of off-the-shelf technology, from satellite modems and social media accounts to laptop computers and drones, to augment their recruitment and activities across the region.

• Due to the rapid increase in the number of attempts to illegally cross the Latvian-Belarusian border as well as the Lithuanian-Belarusian border, the state of emergency has been extended on the border for the seventh time. It is now in force until August 10, 2023, according to a government decision on May 2, LSM reports.

• Over the past 24 hours, on the border of Latvia-Belarus, illegal immigrants attacked a Latvian border guard, which is considered to be an emergency, Guntis Pujāts, chief of the State Border Guard, told LETA and Latvian Radio on May 2.

• A local People’s Defense Force says 2 of its troops also died in a battle.

• The leaders of Kosovo and Serbia have pledged to work together to locate people who went missing during the 1998-99 war in Kosovo.

• Former Moldovan Prime Minister Iurie Leanca is among eight people charged in a corruption case over a concession that gave control of the country’s main airport to a company associated with businessman Ilan Shor, who fled Moldova in 2019 after the election of pro-Western President Maia Sandu.

• Taiwan’s National Security Bureau is monitoring the drone situation closely.

• The recent defence strategic review has much to recommend it. Even the publicly released unclassified version is the boldest statement of Australian strategic policy in many decades.

• On April 7, Foreign Policy published its biweekly “It’s Debatable” column featuring Scowcroft Center deputy director Matthew Kroenig and Emma Ashford assessing the latest news in international affairs.

• China is stepping in to fill the void—with ramifications for Washington’s global AML/CFT and sanctions efforts.

• A recent militant attack in central Mali illustrated the extreme challenges facing the United Nations peacekeeping mission, known as MINUSMA, and its uncertain future in the violence plagued country. Three suicide car bombs and heavy gunfire shattered the early morning silence in the town of Sévaré in the Mopti region on April 22.

• A Palestinian hunger striker died in Israeli custody on Tuesday, sparking an exchange of fire between Israel and armed groups in Gaza, before three Palestinian officials said the sides had agreed to a ceasefire.

• The Israeli military traded fire with Gaza militants Tuesday in a flare-up of violence following the death in Israeli custody of a Palestinian prisoner on hunger strike.

• A man suspected of killing five neighbors in Texas over complaints of noise he was making by firing his gun outside at night was arrested in a neighboring town on Tuesday after a massive, four-day manhunt, a county sheriff said.

• Myanmar’s junta on Wednesday announced it had pardoned more than 2,000 prisoners jailed under a law used widely in its crackdown on dissent since seizing power more than two years ago.

• The UN’s humanitarian chief has arrived in Sudan’s main seaport, as thousands of Sudanese and foreign nationals gather there, hoping to flee the conflict-torn east African country

• ADF STAFF Rub two objects together long enough, and you’ll eventually produce enough heat to start a fire. Such is the case with the violence that erupted on April 15 after years of political and personal friction between Sudan’s rival military leaders.

• The battle has sent 100,000 refugees fleeing across borders. Now, neighboring South Sudan says both sides have agreed to name representatives to peace talks, but neither side has publicly confirmed.

• Warring generals in Sudan have agreed “in principle” to a seven-day ceasefire, the government of neighbouring South Sudan said Tuesday, after regional envoys denounced repeated violations of previous truces.

• The 26 royal treasure artefacts which France pledged to return to Benin in 2021 are expected to make their homecoming to Abomey, the former seat of the Danxomè kingdom, in about five years. To ensure the treasures are displayed in the best possible conditions, Benin’s National Agency for the Development of Touristic Heritage is currently training 100 artisans on restoration techniques for royal palaces in the area, where the museum for the cultural artefacts will established.

• A terror group’s campaign is more likely to escalate into a civil war when the state it operates in uses repressive tactics and when the group diversifies its attack strategies. Although about 70% of terror groups end their campaigns within a year of the first attack, some continue fighting for decades.

• South African commitments to continental peacekeeping as part of government’s foreign policy falls squarely on the shoulders of the SA National Defence Force (SANDF) and has seen more than R2 billion spent in the Democratic Republic of Congo since the 2019/20 financial year.

• The United Nations will stay in Afghanistan to deliver aid to millions of desperate Afghans despite the Taliban’s restrictions on its female staff, but funding is drying up, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said on May 2.

• Dialogue between Yerevan and Baku is key to achieving lasting peace in the South Caucasus, U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said ahead of the second day of a U.S.-hosted meeting of delegations from Armenia and Azerbaijan aimed at reaching “lasting peace” in the region.

• A court in Kazakhstan’s largest city, Almaty, has posthumously convicted five men who were shot dead during unprecedented antigovernment protests in January last year.

Environment

• Three environmental advocacy groups and one Native American organization Monday sued the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), alleging the agency failed to undertake a thorough environmental impact analysis after a SpaceX rocket exploded in Boca Chia, Texas, last week.

• The Green Party of the United States (GP) leaders said that the re-introduction of the Green New Deal (GND) resolution by Rep. Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Markey was unfortunately yet another step away from the initial vision of the Green Party, whose candidates were the first ones to campaign nationally for a GND in 2010.

• European Commission Speech Berlin, 02 May 2023 Whatever disagreement we may have between countries, or whatever conflicts there may be, this is an issue that transcends all other issues, that transcends all conflicts. We should work towards COP28 in that understanding.

• The use of artificial intelligence (AI) has a major influence on climate action, climate change mitigation and the work of environmental defenders. It offers potential benefits, for example when it is used to enhance high-resolution mapping of deforestation, coral reef loss, and soil erosion.

• Bhumikorn “Bhu” Kongtaveelert’s ’25  mixed-media solo exhibition displayed a timely and powerful example of art inspired by the climate crisis, weaving in personal aspects of family life.

• A Jesuit priest and a scientist are appearing before a court in Munich charged with coercion in connection with a climate protest last year

• The United Nations forecasting agency says “a new spike” in global temperatures is likely.

Energy/Transportation

• Plug Power on Monday (May 1) unveiled its new high-power stationary hydrogen-powered fuel cell system for commercial electric vehicles (EV) fleets.

• Demand for electric vehicles continues to climb in Australia but overall the auto industry is only marginally ahead of last year’s market performance.

• One of the world’s largest producers of lithium for the electric car industry is expanding its processing plant in Western Australia, bringing 1000 construction jobs.

• Over the past months, the Latvian government has treated the plan to build a liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal in Skulte, Latvia, as urgent, and then withdrawn from the project. Experts’ thoughts on whether Latvia needs its own terminal differ, Latvian Radio reported on May 3.

• BP, the British oil giant, announced a first quarter profit of $4.96 billion on Tuesday (May 2). The figure, lower than the same period last year, shows prices stabilizing from the volatility that drove 2022′s record-breaking profits across the oil and gas industry, but it also signals continuing growth.

• The future value of companies is at stake as regulators, companies and governments grapple with sustainability and consumer protection. Federal Minister for Financial Services Stephen Jones warned a business audience that sustainable business must start in the boardrooms and in investment decisions, not marketing departments.

• Wind turbines are crucial for addressing climate change, but when they’ve reached the end of their lives, turbine blades could add up to a lot of waste. Now new research, published in Nature, could represent a first step toward building renewable-energy infrastructure that doesn’t end up in a landfill.

Wildlife/Nature

• Dry weather, poor firefighting equipment have made it difficult to contain the blazes.

• A member of a non-profit turtle protection group found the animal floating in a Hanoi lake last Sunday, the local economic department head Phung Huy Vinh told VN Express.

Overpopulation

• A failure to harness the energies of the world’s largest population will not just be a tremendous missed opportunity. It will also be a millstone weighing down India’s future.

• Women rightly complain about low contraceptive use among men, and that too little research goes into improved contraception for men. But here is one simple and safe method that deserves more attention, in all countries.

Finance

• It looks likely to be a long grind for Hollywood writers who have gone on strike to preserve pay and hang on to job security

• Amid scrutiny for its ticketing practices, Live Nation/Ticketmaster CEO Michael Rapino’s compensation package tops $139 million.  Rapino signed a new agreement with Live Nation to continue his employment through 2027.

• French trade unions on Tuesday announced a new nationwide day of protests on June 6 against President Emmanuel Macron’s decision to increase the retirement age by two years to 64.

• Lithuania’s gross domestic product (GDP) has declined for a second consecutive quarter, meaning the country is now going through a technical recession. What does it mean, and can it be equated with an economic crisis?

• European Commission Press release Brussels, 02 May 2023 Cohesion Policy funding in 2021-2027 is expected to support the creation of 1.3 million jobs, and to increase the EU’s GDP by 0.5% on average by the end of the decade, and up to 4% in some Member States.

• With his May 1 rescue of First Republic Bank from regulatory receivership, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon has further burnished his image as the finance sector’s white knight and the keeper of his company’s mythical fortress balance sheet.

• The cost of leasing one of the roughly one million rent-stabilized apartments across the Big Apple may rise by as much as 7 percent next year.

• Despite the high demand for safe and affordable housing in İstanbul, an estimated 450,000 to 750,000 houses remain unoccupied.

• Moves to lift EU sanctions on Belarusian fertiliser exports, seen as a cash cow for the Minsk regime, are seeing backlash from the Baltic states and Poland.

• They say the Shein Group must verify that its apparel does not use Uyghur forced labor.

• Reuters reports that the inaugural campaign events for Biden, 80, will be intimate, small-group gatherings of about 40 major donors.

• America’s big cities are failing. With high rates of homelessness, rampant crime and poor leadership going unchecked, urban residents are fleeing for the suburbs in droves.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Incident report does not explain why he was prevented from boarding flight to Thailand

• The key bilateral relationship is ‘complicated’ and ‘competitive,’ Nicholas Burns said.

• Taiwan has diplomatic ties with only 13 countries as China tries to isolate island

• Hundreds of protesters have gathered in Paraguay’s capital for the second straight day of demonstrations alleging that this weekend’s presidential elections were marred by fraud, a claim that President-elect Santiago Peña, electoral authorities and international observers roundly dismissed

• ‘It seems to be a normal thing for them to come to my office with huge money.’

• Twitter recently changed the pricing of its API, with WordPress ending its Jetpack social sharing feature with the platform as a result.

• China’s foreign minister met Myanmar’s junta chief in Naypyidaw on Tuesday, officials said, the highest-ranking Chinese official to meet the country’s top general since a coup more than two years ago.

• China is Myanmar’s closest ally amid international sanctions on junta.

• We talk to Paul Kemp-Robertson, Chief Brand Officer of the creative intelligence firm.

• The government’s plan to slash the number of democratically elected seats in District Councils is “very disappointing,” Hong Kong’s Democratic Party chief has said. Lo Kin-hei, chair of the city’s largest pro-democracy party, said on Tuesday that he had low expectations regarding the reforms, but the announcements were “even worse” than what he had envisioned.

• Sarah Ebner says Substack has proved people are willing to pay for newsletters.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• Google said in 2021 that it would stop running ads alongside videos and other content that denied the existence and causes of climate change.

• Seeking to shape public opinion has long been part of diplomatic checklists the world over.

• Last month saw Fox News, the US cable channel controlled by Rupert Murdoch, pay out $787.5 million to settle a defamation lawsuit with Dominion Voting Systems, over the network’s airing of voting fraud claims made around the 2020 US election by Donald Trump and his associates.

Censorship/Free Speech

• According to both Beijing and Hong Kong officials, freedom of the press has survived unscathed since the national security law came into force in June 2020. But prominent independent outlets have shut down one after another and journalists have been detained on national security and sedition charges.

• Gov. Kevin Stitt, recently vetoed a bill that would continue funding for the statewide PBS station, claiming that the national network has been indoctrinating young children with LGBTQ propaganda.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• The Constitutional Court of Romania declared the new cybersecurity law constitutional despite criticism from civil society about the repercussions for investigative journalists, security companies, and for regular citizens.

• Hong Kong continues to languish near the bottom of the Reporters Without Borders (RSF) press freedom ranking released on Wednesday’s World Press Freedom Day. The city ranked 140th among the 180 regions in the international media watchdog’s latest ranking, trailing behind Colombia and Cameroon. China ranked 179th, just above North Korea.

• FRANCE 24 and its sister radio RFI have joined a group of 30 African and international news organisations and monitors in an appeal for press freedom in Mali and Burkina Faso. The news outlets and rights groups call on the authorities of these two countries and the international community to put an end to the pressure and threats against national and foreign journalists. They urge the transitional governments in Mali and Burkina Faso to respect their countries’ international commitments to uphold freedom of expression, in particular the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights.

Civil Rights/Policing

• The Pentagon said Tuesday it will deploy more troops to help provide security at the US-Mexico border as officials fear a surge in migrant crossing attempts when Covid-19 immigration restrictions end on May 11.

• Millions of workers could end up with no representation after only 15% of Mexico’s unions made a May 1 deadline for contract confirmation votes.

• ‘Anti-socialist crime’ can lead to up to two years in labor camp

• Hollywood’s writers are putting their pens down until they get a better offer for their new contracts, a move that will rattle the US entertainment industry and that was a hot topic on the Met Gala’s red carpet last night (May 1).

• “…over 35,000 employees are still in the process of negotiating…”

• Tehran police say legal cases have been filed against prominent Iranian cinema and television actresses for appearing at a public event without wearing a hijab.

• Belarusian lawyer Anastasia Lazarenka, who consulted activists jailed for taking part in mass protests challenging the official results of an August 2020 presidential election, has been put on trial herself as the regime’s crackdown on dissent continues.

• U.S. and Mexican officials on Tuesday agreed on new immigration policies meant to deter illegal border crossings while also opening up other pathways ahead of an expected increase in migrants following the end of pandemic restrictions. Mexico — despite sharing a 1,951-mile border with the U.S. — had been notably absent from the rollout last week of a fresh set of border control efforts, including the creation of hubs outside the United States where migrants could go to apply to legally settle in the U.S., Spain or Canada. The first centers will open in Guatemala and Colombia.

• Every person deserves equal, effective treatment and safety, especially when in crisis. In such a vulnerable circumstance, people need professionals trained to provide support and care.

• But too often, when a person is experiencing a mental health crisis, 911 dispatchers send armed police officers as a default response. We don’t send armed police when someone is experiencing a heart attack, but we do when a person is experiencing suicidal ideation. That doesn’t make sense.

• Recent decisions from the U.S. Supreme Court are, to use a complex legal term, not great. In many areas, from abortion to voting rights to tribal sovereignty, the current court has curtailed civil rights and individual freedom, even at the expense of longstanding precedent. In other areas, such as policing and qualified immunity, the court has shown that it can move very slowly, or not at all, when it is apparently unbothered by harsh and legally indefensible precedent.

• This erosion of our most cherished rights is disturbing, but we are not without hope. The ACLU has long worked in both federal and state courts — and the latter are now more important than ever. To make the most of the opportunities that state constitutional law and state courts present, the ACLU is launching a new State Supreme Court Initiative. This is our first legal program that focuses on a type of court rather than a particular subject matter. We are its first two attorneys, and we’re excited to get started.

• The Hong Kong Police Force (HKPF) has announced to scrap the minimum height and weight requirements for new recruits as part of its latest bid to step up recruitment efforts amid more than 5,000 vacancies.

• The Supreme Court of Nepal Tuesday instructed the government to legally recognize same-sex marriage. They further recommended a five-step plan in order to allow same-sex couples and non-cisgender individuals to get married in line with a 2015 court-ordered report, which has not yet been acted upon by the government.

• Uganda’s Parliament Tuesday passed the Anti- Homosexuality Bill of 2023, subject to amendments to five clauses as proposed by President Yoweri Museveni. Parliament submitted the bill, which imposes harsher penalties on same-sex conduct, to the Attorney General for Museveni’s approval.

• China has prevented increasing numbers of people from leaving the country as part of efforts to tighten controls under President Xi Jinping, a human rights group said Tuesday.

• A Minnesota state court Monday convicted former police officer Tou Thao of aiding and abetting second degree manslaughter in the death of George Floyd. Thao was one of the four police officers present at the 2020 arrest that resulted in Floyd’s death.

• A new order Monday implemented amended the law regarding legal aid in family cases in the UK to include those with parental responsibilities as well as prospective guardians.

• Australian federal Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus Monday announced that $14.7 million will be dedicated to improving sexual assault laws across the country. Dreyfus stated that the main focus is on ensuring the criminal justice system and process do not further harm sexual assault victims.

• Social media illustrated some of the perils of unchecked technology.

Monopolies

Copyrights

• Ed Sheeran expressed the toll the Marvin Gaye copyright infringement case has had on him, saying he’s “done” with music if he loses. British singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran, who returned to the stand once again on Monday to testify for a Manhattan jury, says he’ll be “stopping” music if he’s found liable…

• I was pleased to appear yesterday before the Senate Standing Committee on Transportation and Communication on Bill C-18.

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