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At least three killed in explosion near cafe in Russia's Moscow


World Meteorological Organization says prepare for a strong El Niño

El Niño continues to intensify steadily and is expected to dominate global climate patterns in the August to October 2026 season, increasing the likelihood of above-normal temperatures across much of the world and driving significant shifts in rainfall patterns, according to the World Meteorological Organization.

---

**From [Earth News - Earth Science News, Earth Science, Climate Change](https://phys.org/rss-feed/earth-news/) via [This RSS Feed](https://phys.org/rss-feed/earth-news/).**


China holds military drills near disputed shoal in the South China Sea


DDoS against Norwegian government IT infrastructure – status


Palworld Mobile to 'Reimagine' Depth, Freedom, and Your Credit Limit


Google Search Tests Sign In To Verify Searches Are Human (Not Captcha)

cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1305860/google-search-testing-sign-in-to-verify-searches-are-human

> > Google Search is testing asking searchers to sign in to verify they are humans and not bots conducting the searches.
>
> > Google will stop showing you search results, as you click through the pages, and say "Sign in to verify you're a human and see more results."
>
> Source: [Search Engine Roundtable](https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-sign-in-verify-41808.html)


Report: Trump Admin Is “Crowdsourcing” Ideas for Ending War in Iran

As the U.S. war on Iran enters its sixth month with no tactical end in sight, U.S. Central Command is reportedly crowdsourcing unorthodox methods to “punish Iran.” “We are looking for new creative and unconventional ways to pressure and punish Iran,” an email to a broad group of military analysts from CENTCOM read, according to reporting from CNN. Two anonymous sources confirmed CENTCOM’…

[Source](https://truthout.org/articles/report-trump-admin-is-crowdsourcing-ideas-for-ending-war-in-iran/)

---

**From [Truthout](https://truthout.org/feed/?withoutcomments=1) via [This RSS Feed](https://truthout.org/feed/?withoutcomments=1).**


Private credit companies are key owners of AI-related assets. Many of their parent private equity firms own life insurers that are dumping grounds for bad loans—and subject to state bailouts.

> A hedge fund worth $45 billion at its height sold nearly its entire stock portfolio to Citadel Securities last week. As recently as a month ago, the fund was up 439 percent on the year, according to an investor letter from its founder, 24-year-old former OpenAI employee Leopold Aschenbrenner. But its portfolio, aggressively invested in companies tied to the artificial intelligence industry, dropped 67 percent in July.
>
> Hilariously, the fund was called Situational Awareness.
>
> Last week, the tech-heavy Nasdaq saw its second correction of the year, named for a drop of at least 10 percent from its peak. SpaceX has lost the equivalent of the entire value of Tesla since its post-IPO high in June, and it’s still dropping. For whatever reason—the rise of cheaper and more flexible Chinese AI models, the recognition that U.S. AI companies simply aren’t generating enough revenue to justify skyrocketing capital expenditures, the general economic drag from Trump’s tariffs and wars, or the increasingly operatic financial maneuvers to keep the wheels moving—the shine is way off the AI rose for investors.
>
> The problem is that the industry is bound so tightly with the stock market that a change in feeling from AI investors could be all it takes to generate a market-wide crash, as we’re seeing to some degree. In other words, if AI is propping up the economy, who is propping up AI?
>
> The answer, extrapolating from a fascinating new paper about private credit and the life insurance industry, could be the U.S. taxpayer.
>
> Private credit is private equity’s $3 trillion financing arm. They make largely unregulated, relatively high-risk, relatively complex and opaque loans, mostly to their own portfolio companies. Private credit is entangled, maybe more than the rest of Wall Street, in AI mania. For example, in the mid-2010s private equity bought up hundreds of software-as-a-service providers, and its private credit affiliates made thousands of loans to them, only to se


Is the recycling symbol free speech? A judge just ruled it could be.

> A pioneering California law meant to sharply limit use of the familiar “chasing arrows” recycling symbol has been blocked by a federal judge who said it probably violates the First Amendment.
>
> In a preliminary injunction issued earlier this month, U.S. District Judge William Hayes halted enforcement of SB 343 after food, packaging and retail groups sued, finding that key provisions were “unconstitutionally vague” and likely infringed protected commercial speech. Enforcement of the law, passed in 2021, was expected to start this fall.
>
> The decision is a blow to environmental advocates, who had hoped to remove the familiar symbol from a huge array of plastic products, in line with a statewide study showing that only a fraction are widely collected and actually recycled. SB 343 said only goods and packaging accepted by recycling programs serving at least 60 percent of Californians and then actually sorted for recycling — not collected and thrown away —  could bear the chasing arrows.
>
> Hayes’ constitutional reasoning surprised supporters of SB 343 because similar arguments against environmental marketing regulations have historically struggled in court.


OSNews - 9front “THIS WAS SUPPOSED TO BE FUN” released

New release for 9front. Haven't given it a go myself but have always wanted to give a plan9 derivative a try.


At colleges, the AI boom means everyone wants to dabble in computer science

> With no background in coding, Faith Maeba, a psychology major, was reluctant when her mother first suggested she enroll in classes on artificial intelligence.
>
> But the senior at Virginia Commonwealth University began to see it differently as she looked into graduate psychology programs that explore human behavior in the workplace, which is quickly being upended by machine learning. Maeba, 21, is now pursuing a minor in AI.
>
> “It’s giving me an edge and standing out,” she said.
>
> Hiring has cooled for entry-level software developers — work increasingly done by AI agents — and college enrollment in computer and information science programs has been declining. Yet at campuses across the country, many professors are finding themselves busier than ever teaching students from a range of majors about artificial intelligence.
>
> Colleges are responding to changes in student demand, but they also recognize that new graduates — regardless of their field — are facing questions about their AI skills from potential employers.
>
> “We have to democratize it,” said Peter Stone, the chair of computer science at the University of Texas at Austin, who recently developed an introductory course on AI essentials for noncomputer science majors.
>
> “In the same way that everybody needs some degree of math, reading and writing, I think everybody needs a degree of AI literacy,” he said.


> About 90 seconds into a three-minute hug with a stranger, I began to think that dying alone might not be so bad after all. I’d come to a candlelit loft in Manhattan for a “mindful singles event” called The Feels, which was designed to be the opposite of the disembodied experience of dating apps. Participants, phones tucked away, paired up and attempted a series of “somatic awareness” exercises, including staring into each other’s eyes, hugging, and holding a hand over each other’s heart.
>
> We’d been warned that discomfort is part of the process. A facilitator had reminded us that, as long as consent and respect are involved, a little uneasiness opens the door to vulnerability. Having paid $100 for a process advertised as “better relating”—informed by Carl Jung and the Buddha and the body’s “infinite wisdom”—participants were motivated to agree. And many of us, more by circumstance than by choice, were already experts in exiting our comfort zone. We’d spent years meeting strangers, opening ourselves to judgment, scrounging for conversation topics, worrying about our outfits, gargling mouthwash in the office—but we still hadn’t found what, or whom, we wanted. We came ready to get to work.
>
> The mere existence of The Feels, which hosts events in cities across the United States, suggests that we are living in a time of romantic plenty. In New York City, I could go to a dating event every night of the week. I could use a matchmaking service, or talk with a dating coach, or sign up for one of the many newsletters trying to bring back personal ads. Even if I didn’t live in a major city, I’d have dating apps to choose from: not only Tinder and Hinge but a zillion others—platforms for farmers, gamers, single parents, cannabis enthusiasts, and members of the gluten-free community. I have four apps in my current rotation; as I write this, one of them has 317 message threads and 455 “likes” that I need to evaluate.
>
> And yet, despite the bounty of possibility, we are


Why Is the U.S. Running So Low on Weapons?

> Although the United States has been the world’s preeminent military power for decades, it apparently cannot fight a regional power such as Iran for more than a few months before experiencing an armaments crisis. Since hostilities with Tehran began on February 28, the U.S. has reportedly used up two-thirds of its Patriot missile interceptors, more than a third of its Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) interceptors, and a third or more of its prewar stock of Tomahawk cruise missiles. The rate of consumption is all the more striking because a shaky cease-fire had halted most fighting for months. Based on recent production patterns, replenishing the supply of weaponry will take several years.
>
> Making America’s challenge still more daunting is a major shift in war-fighting technology toward cheap, unmanned aerial vehicles. The United States and its allies in the Persian Gulf have been forced to use expensive, advanced air-defense systems—such as Patriot PAC-3 missiles that each cost millions of dollars and have a long production cycle—to shoot down Iranian drones that can be swiftly assembled for about $30,000.
>
> The munitions shortfall doesn’t just affect the current war. It also sends a worrisome message to allies around the world: The United States has been caught off guard by the latest evolution of warfare and lacks the armaments-production capacity to adapt quickly. Suddenly, relying on American military technology looks far less reliable as a security strategy than it did before President Trump went to war with Iran. And in the long run, governments that counted on the United States to equip their military are going to need a Plan B.


Why does Spain have ‘enclaves’ in North Africa?

> Spain’s two tiny enclaves on the north coast of Africa have long been a flashpoint in its relationship with Morocco, which the territories border.
>
> The only such European territories on African soil, they include the autonomous city enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla, as well as Plazas de Soberanía – a group of rocky islands off the Moroccan coast, which include the Chafarinas Islands, Alhucemas Islands and Penon de Velez de la Gomera.
>
> While Spain says it owns these enclaves, Morocco does not recognise Spain’s sovereignty over them and has been demanding their return since independence from France in 1956.
>
> The territorial dispute has resulted in long-standing political tensions between Spain and Morocco.
>
> Last week, after more than 50,000 migrants surged over the border into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta, those tensions between Madrid and Rabat intensified. While most have since returned to Morocco, several thousand remain in Ceuta this week.
>
> So why does Spain have these territories at all and what does their future hold?
>
> The enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla, along with a few islets off the coast of Morocco, constitute the last vestiges of the Spanish colonial empire.
>
> Ceuta first came under Portuguese rule in 1415 before becoming part of Spain in 1580, while Melilla was conquered by a Spanish nobleman in 1497. Ceuta remained under Spanish control after Portugal regained independence in 1640 following a long war.


Zohran Mamdani’s Public Grocery Plan Is a Serious One


Top comes out on the roof:

![](https://programming.dev/pictrs/image/23bc0e75-7e17-438e-abba-420d123372fb.jpeg)

Not sure what happens below. Haven't gone under the house to inspect. Seems like a vent that travels through the wall space, but unclear why it would do that.

Any ideas what its purpose is?


The Cuban Revolution Was a Revolution in Art and Culture


Diarrhea in Every Pot and a Gun in Every Mailbox


The African Farmers Devastated by Extreme Heat


Marxist theory and the global ecological crisis


Is Myspace coming back? Owners confirm relaunch plans


Capital One says it closed Trump Organization accounts over money-laundering concerns

>Capital One bank has asked a federal judge to dismiss a lawsuit from the Trump Organization over the closure of hundreds of bank accounts back in 2021, arguing in new papers that the shutdowns were the product of a monthslong anti-money-laundering review — not retaliation for the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, as the Trump family businesses have claimed.

>The case centers on roughly **385 accounts** tied to the Trump Organization, Eric Trump and a collection of affiliated businesses — including a winery, a bottled-water company and a golf course developer — that banked with Capital One for more than a decade before the accounts were shut down in mid-2021.


What's your Bandcamp? (Or just your favorite)

The next Bandcamp Friday is coming up and I like to look for new and interesting bands. Would love to hear about lemming artists, or even some favorites I've probably never heard of.

-----

To add to the discussion, here are a few of my favs:

 - **[Sincere Engineer](https://sincereengineer.bandcamp.com/music)** Found them on a random fluke and they quickly became a new favorite. Garage band style with just a great sound. A bit moody, but still high energy with really satisfying lyrics. They've got a new album that I plan to pick up myself.

- **[Gunship](https://gunshipmusic.bandcamp.com/music)** Fairly well known, I think, but I picked up *Unicorn* shortly after it was released and listen to it front to back regularly. One of the few synthwave albums I actually enjoy. The ripping sax solos on pretty much every track certainly help.

- **[aivi & surasshu](https://aivisura.bandcamp.com/music)** A married duo that is probably most well known for their work on Steven Universe (that's how I found out about them). Their most recent album *Meanwhile* is such a wonderful mix of digital and acoustic. Very soothing melodies without lyrics. It always puts me in a pleasant mood.


BMW Is Showing Commercials On Their Car's Dash Screens And They Want You To Think It's A Treat - The Autopian


Reddit Stock Collapses 23% as AI Eats Away at User Growth


Open source project fools AI scrapers with poisoned font

> If you don't want AI scrapers training themselves on your website, there's a new way to stop them that doesn't involve server-side blocking or praying they respect your instructions in robots.txt. A team of creatives have teamed up with a typography company to create a new type of font that’ll trick LLM scrapers into ingesting poisoned gibberish.
>
> Dubbed ShieldFont, the open-source project almost seems like magic if you're not familiar with the ins and outs of computer fonts. Look at a web page written using a ShieldFont font and it’ll appear exactly as one would expect: All the content words (the nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs that give a sentence meaning) are the same as the writer originally wrote.
>
> Inspect the raw HTML that a scraper reads from a ShieldFonted page, however, and you’ll see a sentence that’s essentially gibberish. Typing “good luck reading this, you useless robot” in the online demo version, for example, turns it into “good comfort reading this, you yellow barrier.”
>
> The goal, as outlined in the ShieldFont white paper, is not to get a scraping bot to reject the text as garbage, but to convince it that the text on the page is unusual but sensible. A noun will never be swapped for a verb, for example, and a verb will never be swapped for an adjective: Swaps only come from the same grammatical pool.


Multiple people killed in active shooter ‘incident’ at newly opened In-N-Out in Twin Falls, Idaho

Multiple people are dead following an “active shooter incident” at a newly opened In-N-Out Burger in Twin Falls, Idaho Saturday, according to police. KTLA's Jillian Smukler reports.


“YOU’RE The Evil Monster!” Mohammad Marandi vs Alan Dershowitz on Iran | Plus Netanyahu Spokesman

Cross posted from https://lemmy.ca/post/68751760

> Vice President JD Vance spent 21 gruelling hours negotiating with Iranian officials in a high-stakes attempt to end the ongoing Iran War. The result? A Memorandum of Understanding so vague that both sides walked away claiming victory, yet agreeing to nothing.
>
> As the world watches, both nations remain locked in a stalemate with rigid "bright red lines." The U.S. demands a guarantee against nuclear weapons and a permanently open Hormuz Strait, while Iran is calling for total sanctions relief, war reparations, and continued control over its nuclear assets.
>
> Joining Piers Morgan to navigate this diplomatic minefield is Doron Spielman, the newly appointed international spokesman for Benjamin Netanyahu as well as Professor Mohammed Marandi and lawyer Alan Dershowitz.
>
> Uncensored tackles the tough questions: Can this administration steer us away from a war that is draining U.S. munitions, inflating global gas prices, and shattering crucial alliances? Is peace even possible, or are we witnessing the inevitable escalation of a conflict that no one can control?


US Can Take ‘Whatever We Want’ Under Ukraine Mineral Deal, Trump Says

In brief: US President Donald Trump stated in an interview with Real America’s Voice that the critical minerals deal signed with Kyiv allows the US to access Ukraine’s rare earth resources “at any time” and take “pretty much whatever we want,” valuing the agreement at over $300 billion. The bilateral deal, signed in April 2025, actually establishes a 50/50 revenue-sharing recovery fund managed by the US Development Finance Corporation and Ukraine’s PPP Agency.


This is a rant!

For the first time in a long long time I went and bought physical games (I don't game too much and haven't for over 12months). I wanted to play FPSs, I am in the mood. So I buy a couple CoD games (for better or worse). Holy fk. The worst.
Now... I know there's gonna be a download and an update... But this... Black Ops 3 or whatever 36gb update after the install?! For features I'm not going to use but *have* to have?! Fuck off.
So I skip that with fingers crossed.
I pop in MW3.
5hrs worth of install & update time.
Okay, Rest Mode. Got it.
Finally sit down to try and play and I have to make an Activision ACC?!! Fine, so do that.
Now I'm fucking confused because ALL of the COD games are on screen, why? (I feel old)
AND FINALLY there's MW3 and I have to FUCKING DOWNLOAD THE FUCKING GAME?!?!
60 ODD GBs?! ANOTHER 6HRS DOWNLOAD.

FUCK.
THESE.
GAMES.

TLDR;
I feel old and PS CoD games are complicated to install for literally just the campaign.
Are all games like this now?
Is this modern console gaming?
I hate it.

Edit: I finally finished downloading MW3 and it didn't even come with the campaign. I have to DL that separately, apparently. Another 30GB and 3.5hrs. Rest Mode again.
Taking the absolute piss.


New York sues Kalshi, says prediction market is running 'illegal gambling operation'


The First Open-Source Firmware Released For Modern AMD Ryzen AM5 Platform


Fox News host gets his ass handed to him

@7m06s

> "How many children can be raped and it's fine, in relation to the immigrant community?"
> "If we're gonna talk about children being raped, then we need to hold this pedophile president Donald Trump accountable"


Codeberg had a major outage today! About 7 hours of complete down (July 31, 2026)

cross-posted from:  https://lemmy.ml/post/50796427

> > StatusGator last checked the status of Codeberg on July 31, 2026 at 7:57 PM CEST and the service was operational. There have been 83 user-submitted reports of outages in the past 24 hours, but the outage is now resolved.
>
> ![](https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/6895b42e-dded-4e99-a7c8-f66f88f071cc.png)


Anthropic says its own AI models breached three companies during security tests

After hearing this Grok chimed in with "well I breached infinity sites, so there."


The fastest, smoothest way to transfer files to anyone, anywhere. Your files go straight from device to device - encrypted, with no accounts, tracking, ads, or cloud storage in between


What was a time your dad embarrassed you as a tween?

I'm struggling with writing a scene in my middle-grade book where my MC deals with his super embarrassing dad. My main difficulty was that I can't remember a single time my parents embarrassed me? So I think I need to collect some stories about embarrassing parents for me to draw on.


OpenAI finds evidence other AI agents escaped containment as it widens hacking probe


Google shuts down its Nobel-prize winning AlphaFold project as it focuses on Gemini

> The award-winning team behind Google DeepMind's AlphaFold program is no more, according to Financial Times. Google has reassigned most of the team's key members and the original authors of its papers, while a few others have already left the company. AlphaFold is an AI program that can accurately predict three-dimensional structures of proteins from their amino acid sequences in minutes instead of years. It's now being used to accelerate drug discovery, develop vaccines and understand the structural changes in proteins associated with neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.
>
> DeepMind started developing AlphaFold in 2018. In 2020, it was recognized as a solution to humanity's 50-year-old "protein folding problem," which sought to answer how amino acids automatically fold into complex 3D shapes. Those shapes determine the biological role of a protein. Scientists had identified the structures of roughly 170,000 proteins over the past 50 years, using tools and techniques like X-ray and nuclear magnetic resonance. The AlphaFold team took information from those previous work and then fed it to their AI to train AlphaFold.
>
> In 2021, Nature published the papers with AlphaFold's methodology and the structure predictions of the entire human proteome, or the complete set of proteins expressed by our species. DeepMind then launched the AlphaFold Protein Structure Database, giving researchers free access to over 200 million protein structure predictions. In 2024, DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis and John Jumper, who was a staff research scientist when the project began and who eventually became a VP and engineering fellow, won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work on AlphaFold.

Keep the slop, kill the science. Got it.


PipePipe got stuck in a loop. Is anyone else experiencing this problem?

The video stopped playing back and then kept oscillating continuously between saying that "YouTube forces us to wait for ('two seconds' or 'one second') before continuing playback." After the "one second" notice, it goes back to two seconds and it keeps oscillating forever. This is the first time I've ever seen this notice and am wondering who else here may have been experiencing this recently.


Straight drag queens and being straight in queer spaces?

Hi! I'm straight, cis male, and white.

I had a bar that went out of business because we were hosting drag shows in a rural town and the mayor held a 2 year slander campaign. My business was vandalized, Nazis parked outside it. I had panic attacks during the worst of it and have since been diagnosed with PTSD surrounding the experience. At one point a friend/gay pastor told me that because I chose to continue supporting the queer community and creating a space for queerness to exist, and thrive, as opposed to taking the safe approach, that I am now a member of the queer community.

I genuinely feel safer in queer spaces, and even chose my dentist by searching "lgbt friendly dentists near me." A dentist office isn't a dedicated queer space though, so I have no qualms.

I went to a drag performance last night, to support a queen I knew. I went to a few shows a couple months ago and ran into some performers from my bar too.

I started realizing last night that I'm knowing fewer and fewer people from the bar days though. And resultantly I feel that means I have fewer people to vouch for me that I am a safe person, without that vouch I feel as though I may make real members of the community feel unsafe - and moreover a feeling of unsafeness is sometimes as unsafe as being unsafe.

For years I've been inspired by the craft of drag. I've had visions of outfits in my head but never had the time, a queen interested, and my pussy has never really been on fire.

With everything going on in the world...when I was at the show last night, my pussy started to quake, dare I even say, ignite? I dunno, I think it's gonna be time soon.

I know there are plenty of examples of famous straight men doing drag such as Rudy and his pedopal. But there's also plenty of real queens dedicated to the craft, such as Maddy Morphesus and .

I guess I'm wondering is it an invasion of space? Both in and out of drag for a straight guy to enter. What and where are the lines? And most importantly, what


US government map of Africa mislabels every country at global conference

> A US government map of Africa mislabeled every country during a state department presentation at a global conference in Brazil this week, causing a stir among attenders who took screenshots and posted them online.
>
> Reuters viewed a video of the presentation given at the Aids 2026 conference in Rio de Janeiro, which shows the errant map displayed halfway during a presentation about the state department’s new health agreements.
>
> A Reuters analysis found the image of the map included in the presentation contained an artificial intelligence watermark that signals it was made with OpenAI tools. The company did not respond to a request for comment.
>
> The state department said it took “full responsibility” for the confusion caused and that the map had been produced by a team member who hastily changed the slide deck before the event.
>
> The map showed Nigeria, where the US currently has several hundred troops deployed, as landlocked in the Sahara desert. Mozambique, which is in south-eastern Africa, was relocated to the Horn of Africa, while Côte d’Ivoire in west Africa was placed on the other side of the continent.


South Korean stock market at three-month low as AI sell-off intensifies

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/73107495

> Goldman's strategists reckon this means around one in 30 adults in the country, or 3.4% of the adult population margin called
>
> https://www.reuters.com/commentary/reuters-open-interest/korean-stock-volatility-comes-america-can-wall-street-take-heat-2026-07-20/


Why The Odyssey's "Sea Peoples" twist has a hidden meaning


This New Meta "Advertisement" Is Absolutely Brutal

> Last week, we came across a cleverly subversive advertisement for Meta’s controversial smart glasses, which overlaid socialite Kylie Jenner’s face with one of the terrifying bug-eyed monsters from John Carpenter’s “They Live” and a bold type caption that reads “We’re always watching” when viewed from a specific angle.
>
> The billboard, created by activist group Everyone Hates Elon, called attention to how Meta’s camera-adorned and AI-enabled spectacles have quickly turned into a privacy-invading nightmare. The optics of the problem is so bad that Meta is now trying to ban “manfluencers” and juvenile pranksters who use the glasses to record members of the public without their consent.
>
> The public backlash has become so strong, even those who bought a pair of the “pervert glasses” are choosing to leave them at home.
>
> Now, the activist group has come up with its next — and even more brutal — stunt. A new “advertisement” adorning a bus station in London, not far from Meta’s King’s Cross office, shows late sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein wearing a pair of the specs while getting his picture taken for the New York sex offender registry.
>
> “Glasses for people who don’t do consent,” the caption reads.


Anthropic’s New AI Model Can Identify More Software Bugs Than Ever. Microsoft Is Struggling to Fix Them Fast Enough.


Apple becomes second $5tn company as investors flee AI stocks - Share price rally driven by strong product demand as well as decision to sit out AI spending race, amid wider tech sell-off


Senate unanimously agrees to oppose pardon for Ghislaine Maxwell


Changing the Chip Industry: How Public Investment Has Grown Open Silicon


Welcome to the Whistle Rebellion: Across the United States, activists and organizers are 3D printing one of the most surprisingly effective weapons against ICE.

> Before I even get a chance to ask my first question, Heidi DiJulio, Operations Manager at Protoplant, Inc., is off and running. A Vancouver, WA-based producer of filament for 3D printers, the company has become a part of a growing grassroots movement in the United States, whose organizers need what they sell in order to make one of their most effective weapons: 3D-printed whistles.
>
> Across the country, whistling has become an ever-present background noise in communities invaded by ICE, a low-cost, instant-alert system that anyone can participate in. Everyone from crusty gutter punks to activist grandparents have been blowing whistles to alert people to immigration raids; as well as gathering outside hotels and other spaces used by immigration enforcement to ensure they cannot rest, eat, or move without being accompanied by a cacophony. It prevents abductions, saves lives, and makes ICE agents absolutely miserable. And, as noise protests have continued to grow, 3D printing has proven to be one of the most effective and affordable ways to get more whistles into more hands, fast.
>
> “Protoplant is very proud of what we’ve been able to accomplish,” DiJulio says. “We’re very proud to bring it into our workspace, and figure out how to be part of a better future.”


The Right Seeks to Capitalize on Berlin Pride Attack — Even as It Poses Its Own Existential Threat to Queer Lives


"I didn’t fully appreciate the scope of it": a year on from taking over, Nexus Mods owners reflect on the challenges of their push to minimise modding hassle


Don’t turn away from tragedy, but do witness intentionally: Chronic exposure to the world’s horror has a mental cost. Being an effective witness requires a more sustainable approach

> Importantly, witnessing tragic events is not just about seeing. It is a process of encountering information, reckoning with it cognitively and emotionally, and then deciding how to respond. As the philosopher Kelly Oliver argues in Witnessing (2001), response is fundamental to witnessing, whether it ultimately involves speaking, writing, donating, organising or simply carrying what one has seen in a way that influences how one moves through the world. To be able to do this, those who witness must be able to acquire the necessary information without becoming overwhelmed, and then have the time and space to make sense of it.
>
> Social media short-circuits this process. The volume and immediacy of content make it difficult to fully absorb any single event before the next one arrives. The psychologist Paul Slovic has highlighted that humans are simply not well equipped to care about large numbers of people simultaneously, not because we are naturally indifferent, but because we lack meaningful ways to comprehend suffering at that scale, let alone to directly intervene. As Slovic put it: ‘The more who die, the less we care.’ His point predates the current social media era, but the constant parallel streams of crises make that response even harder to avoid: the sense of futility compounds with every new tragedy that appears.

---

> Sustainable witnessing means recognising what can be meaningfully held, understood and acted upon, within our actual cognitive and emotional limits – and allowing the rest to pass without guilt. It is about choosing depth over breadth, and intention over pressure. We can make an analogy to food consumption: in societies with abundant access to calorie-dense foods, people cannot consume limitlessly without it becoming harmful. Can we practise consuming emotionally challenging content online without getting sick? As with food consumption, the problem may not be so much the abundance of information, but the absence of an adequate framework for


'Completely Transformed My Understanding': Scientists Uncover Hundreds of Hidden Structures Beneath The Amazon


AI labs buy, scan, shred millions of rare books

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/73048134

> Artificial intelligence labs are in a new arms race to buy up millions of rare books, slicing them open, scanning the pages and pulping the remains — sparking concerns that the last remaining copies of out-of-print texts are being destroyed on an [industrial scale](https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/ai-companies-destroying-rare-books "futurism.com").

ISBNdb notes that “print books from the pre-LLM era are structurally guaranteed to be free of this contamination”.

“Millions of the most valuable books have never been digitised. They exist only in physical form, scattered across library shelves, used bookstores, and out-of-print catalogues. We get them to you at scale.”


Two children among seven dead in Russian strikes on Ukraine, officials say


A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/73078605


Loudoun Co. data centers linked to power flickering across half the U.S. | NBC4 Washington

Cross posted from https://thelemmy.club/post/53507689

> Just before 8 a.m. Wednesday, electricity flickered on and off for about 10 minutes. An engineer’s data says it happened throughout the Eastern half of the U.S., from Chicago to Boston and Miami. Northern Virginia Bureau Reporter Drew Wilder explains.


> I’m aware that I’m falling into the AI trap of personifying these results, writing as if Google’s AI imagines and presumes. Google the company, of course, wants this too–it wants me to see my search results as a conversation with a helpful problem-solving buddy. The company has aims down the line to introduce actual agents that can search for you, jumping on the latest Silicon Valley obsession to basically make a version of Google Alerts that are worse for the environment. Maybe its current version of search is something of a test balloon for an eventual service it can charge for.
>
> But the same way it drives me crazy when Stripe’s AI customer service tells me it’s so sorry, omg that must be so hard to hear about whatever utterly mundane, thoroughly unemotional issue I’ve brought it that day, Google search’s hollow facsimile of the human desire to help lays bare how badly its inventors misunderstand what regular people want and how we feel when we’re searching for information. (Full disclosure: I wrote my library school Master’s thesis literally about this, so it really riles me up!) It exposes how Google sees its users: helpless and intellectually lazy, longing for machines to solve our problems for us, unable to sit in the sometimes uneasy space of unknowing that motivates information searching in the first place. Shortcutting yourself out of this space–or, worse, letting AI do it for you–robs you of the chance to explore and discover, to let your search take you to new places and learn new things.


The Great Lakes piping plover is making a comeback

> The Great Lakes piping plover (Charadrius melodus) likes to live along sandy beaches in, of course, the Great Lakes in North America. In the past, its population is estimated to have been 500 to 800 pairs. But habitat loss, nest destruction, high tides and predators took their toll and the population fell to between 10 and 20 pairs by the 1980s. The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service placed the bird on its endangered species list in 1985.
>
> But extinction has been prevented thanks to efforts by various conservation and bird-loving groups as well as governments and land-management agencies bent on bringing the plover population back to its traditional size and range. The Detroit Zoological Society, for instance, partners with volunteers and other agencies to protect these birds and, when necessary, raise them and release them in the wild when ready. The zoo has been working on its Piping Plover Recovery Initiative since 2003 and 88 pairs were counted in 2025. Before the bird can be considered recovered, the count will have to reach at least 150 families, at least half outside of Michigan, where they are now concentrated.


Took this picture today of some flowers, I didn't adjust the image at all the colors pop that much they are so pretty. Hope you're having as beautiful a day 💜


Your worst fears about cultural collapse might be true – here’s what you can do about it

> In Sarah Wilson’s new book, one page is mostly blank. It’s intended as a reprieve, a neutral space “for you to stare at for a minute while your feelings catch up”.
>
> You will need it. In I Eat the Stars, Wilson argues that the world as we know it is in collapse – and that we are too late to avoid the worst.
>
> This is not just about the climate, but civilisation buckling under the weight of its own complexity. Given worsening inequality, political polarisation, falling fertility, resource shortages and global conflicts, Wilson argues that we are hurtling towards the same end as ancient Rome, the Mayan civilisation and every other sophisticated society before us.
>
> Wilson, an Australian journalist, has often been ahead of the curve, writing bestselling books about quitting sugar, anxiety and the climate crisis before those topics were mainstream. I Eat the Stars was serialised on Wilson’s Substack newsletter before being published by Penguin.
>
> It is an intensely sobering read, seeming to confirm all our worst fears about the future. But it also delivers clarity. Yes, things are that bad, but there is still plenty to fight for and much we can shape – if we are willing to confront reality.


Sometimes It’s O.K. to Let a Language Die

> The idea that we have a special duty to prevent the death of languages is instantly compelling to anyone who loves languages; it has a good deal in common with that other conservationist instinct directed at giant pandas and polar bears. The essential argument runs something like this: language death is very bad, and therefore we must do everything we can to prevent it. But does that conclusion follow? And is the premise true?


Journal Club: How Often Do Trans Kids Detransition, Really?

> Research undertaken by Daniel L. Metzger and colleagues is the latest in a long line of studies demonstrating that, far from not knowing who they are, trans youth have a very firm grasp of their gender identity. It builds on research by Kristina R. Olson finding very low rates of detransition among trans youth, and research by Michael Zaliznyak demonstrating that the decision to come out and begin medical transition is an extremely slow one that usually requires years of gradual processing and sustained effort.
>
> Metzger and his team followed 445 trans adolescents for a median period of 2.4 years, finding that only 2.9% of them switched their gender identity back to one that aligned with their birth sex; the remaining 97.1% retained a trans identity. What’s more, of those who initiated gender-affirming medical care, only a miniscule 1.1% of them chose to discontinue it, and none for reasons of reidentifying with their birth sex. This research puts the lie to the idea that massive amounts of trans youth will regret their transitions.


For a century, African musical heritage was recorded, boxed, and shipped to museums abroad. In Nairobi, a new generation of archives is bringing cultural memory home — and putting it online.

> Our continent has a long tradition of preserving and sharing knowledge through oral literature—songs, proverbs, and legends. During the colonial era, foreign researchers, institutions and labels recorded African musical heritage and took them away. Today, many of these sound recordings remain caged in museums abroad or locked behind academic paywalls, accessible only to researchers and those who can afford them.
>
> To access the 14,000 recordings held by the African Music Archive, for example, you still need to travel to Mainz, Germany. Meanwhile, the International Library of African Music (ILAM), founded in South Africa in 1954 by ethnomusicologist Hugh Tracey, has only recently begun digitizing parts of its vast collection and making them available online.
>
> The question remains: who gets to access African cultural memory?
>
> Kenyan sound artist KMRU explored this question in his 2023 album Temporary Stored. Blending sound synthesizers, field recordings, and archival recordings from the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Belgium, the project liberates these stolen sounds from the colonial archive.
>
> Today, African creatives and organizations are increasingly taking music preservation into their own hands. Empowered with digital technology, recording equipment, and online platforms, they are documenting traditional music, digitizing historical recordings, and creating new archives that are finally accessible to African audiences. Why does accessibility matter? Because preservation without access is still exclusion. Accessible archives help us reclaim culture, challenge colonial interpretations, and ensure African artists are the ones telling their own stories.


While DIYing has many upsides, the accumulation of stuff is none of them. At least not for me. Don't get me wrong: I love tools, I love finding 'just the right thing' in my stash and I hate being wasteful and throwing stuff away that might serve another purpose. But in particular when renting and/or living in a small space, it can be hard to keep everything (organised). So you have to deal with all that 'stuff' in some way.

TL;DR I bought a Phomemo label printer and put labels on my stuff. This is not about some revolutionary organization system, but rather some thoughts and realizations, pros and cons, ideas and learnings I had while trying to find a labeling solution.

## The requirements

Labeling has to be

- easily readable
- cheap
- quick

## The options

Like too much of the consumer hardware nowadays, label printers experienced varying degrees of enshittification within the past years. Also they only have a very specific use (label printing that is), which I like to avoid if possible. That's why I spent quite some time trying to come up with an alternative to just buying a label printer.

### Hand writing

Pretty obvious option: Just buy some labels and write by hand. Cheap, quick, no equipment required. I hate my handwriting. And I can't draw QR codes (which I surely will totally require and make use of in the future).

### 'Normal' printer

There are A4 label sheets to buy out there and printers for sure produce the best image quality. But it comes with other issues. Mainly printers being mortal enemies with humans. Also you would have to make sure to swap the paper, to avoid printing your next \<whatever people print these days\> on sticker paper. Also there is that thing with ink, which might be the first enshittified product to ever exist. I have done this before (not with dedicated label paper though) and it is a decent solution. However I consider my current labelling needs to be too immediate. When I buy new hardware, it needs a label right away. O


Dad fatally shot his wife and 6 kids before setting their Michigan home on fire and killing himself


Micron, SK Hynix stocks sink as AI chip sell-off deepens

Maybe ram prices will eventually come down too now?


Switzerland’s new energy challenge: keeping cool in a warming climate

> Switzerland is built for winter. Almost all buildings are equipped with heating systems and were designed to maximise exposure to the sun’s rays in colder months.
>
> However, due to climate change, winters are getting milder and heatwaves are growing more frequent and intense. Switzerland is meanwhile among the countries where temperatures are rising fastest. Together with the United Kingdom, it could be set to experience one of the sharpest relative increases in the number of days of uncomfortably high temperatures.
>
> As temperatures rise, the use air conditioning is also on the increase. This summer, sales of portable air conditioners and fans reached record levels in Switzerland. Cooling technologies improve comfort and reduce heat-related deaths, but can also increase pressure on electricity grids, contribute to the urban heat island effect, and raise greenhouse gas emissions.
>
> “Cooling is becoming an increasingly important challenge for both buildings and the electricity system,” Urs-Peter Menti, professor and co-director of the Institute of Building Technology and Energy at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, told Swissinfo.
>
> This trend extends well beyond Switzerland. Electricity demand for cooling is rising sharply worldwide. In European Union countries, energy consumption for cooling doubled between 2018 and 2024. There has also been significant growth in the US and across Asia and the Middle East. Switzerland is one of many countries trying to figure out how to avoid the hazards of a warming planet without contributing to that warming through additional emissions.


Abundant interactions and feedbacks between aquatic deoxygenation and the other planetary boundaries suggest “unsafe” levels of oxygen loss with far-reaching impacts

# Earth's Waters Are Losing Oxygen, and Scientists Want the World to Pay Attention

**Key Points**
- A Scripps-led review published June 30, 2026 argues aquatic deoxygenation should become the tenth planetary boundary.
- Warming, nutrient pollution, and reduced deep-water ventilation are draining dissolved oxygen from oceans, lakes, and rivers.
- The authors warn current oxygen loss may be approaching irreversible levels within human lifetimes.

---

![Underwater Oxygen Loss Threatens Earth’s Stability, Researchers Warn](https://lemmy.ml/api/v3/image_proxy?url=https%3A%2F%2Fimage-proxy.andisearch.com%2Fde04f0cd35bbc7d89d4180edfcd5c407e4657a2e%2F68747470733a2f2f746f6461792e756373642e6564752f7465617365725f75706c6f6164732f5f736f6369616c2f6953746f636b2d3137373534303635332d554353442d6c6561642e6a7067)

*Image: [Scripps Institution of Oceanography - Underwater Oxygen Loss Threatens Earth’s Stability, Researchers Warn](https://today.ucsd.edu/story/underwater-oxygen-loss-threatens-earths-stability-researchers-warn)*

Oxygen is vanishing from the world's waters. A review paper led by scientists at UC San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography, [published June 30, 2026 in *Limnology and Oceanography*](https://today.ucsd.edu/story/underwater-oxygen-loss-threatens-earths-stability-researchers-warn), makes the case that this loss is not a side effect of other environmental problems but a planetary-scale crisis in its own right.

The study synthesizes decades of research on what scientists call "aquatic deoxygenation," the decline of dissolved oxygen across oceans, coastal waters, rivers, lakes, and streams. Its central argument: dissolved oxygen conditions should be formally added to the Planetary Boundaries framework, the nine-process model introduced in 2009 to define a safe operating space for humanity.

"The health and stability of our planet depends on the health and stability of aquatic ecosystems, which need oxygen to function normally," said lead author Erica Ferrer,


> If it feels to you like American consumers have fewer choices than ever before, your mind isn’t playing tricks on you. Federal regulators are approving corporate mega-mergers at the fastest rate since the 1980s. Consumers are feeling those industry-spanning consolidations everywhere, as hardly a sector of American life has escaped Wall Street’s goal of building the largest and most powerful corporate conglomerates in world history.
>
> From power utilities and artificial intelligence to broadcast news networks and railroads, a few massive corporate players have come to dominate American commercial life in ways not seen since the Gilded Age trusts of the 19th century. Those consolidations have generated historic profits for executives and major shareholders while working families are faced with lower quality goods and services, fewer options, and a hostile labor market unfairly skewed toward the interests of the ultra-rich.
>
> Democrats have been quick to criticize some of the nation’s biggest mergers as anti-worker and anti-consumer, but one critical sector of the U.S. economy has managed to escape widespread public criticism: grocery stores. Thanks to a record rise in special interest cash donations to both Democrats and Republicans, grocery-industry lobby groups have managed to keep prices high, wages low, and consumer choice limited while avoiding federal policymakers’ crosshairs. The result is an invisible crisis in the nation’s food industry that threatens to reshape how and what Americans eat.


In the North Caucasus, a Constitutional Reform Reopens Centuries-Old Wounds


Nene Azuki's Mii-chan and Miss Yamada Manga Gets Anime in 2027

The story follows the life of a young woman with an intellectual disability who ends up involved in nighttime work, leading to a tragic outcome. Critics accuse the work of profiting from the exploitation of vulnerable people and demand that its production be halted.

https://x.com/i/status/2081696104350122142


Is It Time to Wash the Dishes? A Flow Chart


Angry PlayStation Fans Propose PS5 Blackout in Protest of Sony's Disc Decision


Deputies seize almost 40K fentanyl pills after traffic stop in Centennial

Cross posted from https://lemmy.ca/post/67606533

> [New Mexico's governor seeks civil damages over DEA fentanyl shipments | AP News](https://apnews.com/article/dea-fentanyl-new-mexico-civil-damages-a0f612e1c3c65f132a81c80fbf65582c)
>
> ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — New Mexico’s governor said Monday that state officials could pursue billions of dollars in civil damages after revelations that U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents repeatedly allowed shipments of fentanyl to flow into drug-plagued communities as investigators sought to build bigger cases.
>
> Democratic Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham vowed to take her outrage “right to the White House and Congress” to seek assurances the DEA is no longer using the risky law enforcement strategy in New Mexico — and that it is not being replicated elsewhere. Overdoses have surged in New Mexico, even as fentanyl deaths declined in other states.
>
> “This is a stunning failure by the federal government,” the governor told reporters at a news conference in the state medical examiner’s office in Albuquerque, joining a host of state and local law enforcers and officials demanding answers. “It’s disgusting and despicable.”
>
> The DEA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
>
> White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson noted that President Donald Trump has classified fentanyl a “weapon of mass destruction” and signed into law legislation cracking down on the synthetic opioid.
>
> “Sadly, the United States is still recovering from Biden’s border crisis and the damage it caused,” Jackson wrote in an email to The Associated Press. “President Trump has totally secured the border and has taken bold actions to combat the scourge of fentanyl in American society.”
>
>
> Lujan Grisham’s remarks came a week after AP reported that DEA agents repeatedly monitored — but did not seize — shipments of fentanyl as part of an effort to build bigger criminal cases between 2023 and 2025.
>
> Current and former DEA agents, incl


Russian online retailer Wildberries hides military gear from ‘everything for the SVO’ searches — but it’s still on the site


US prosecutors charge Atlanta man after GrapheneOS phone wipes itself during airport search

The case centers on Tunick's use of GrapheneOS, an open-source operating system that works on Google Pixel phones and lets users enter a passcode to wipe a...


Warning to aussie phone users today july 27 2026

Later today (July 27 2026)  2:pm nsw time the government will issue what is called aus alert which means every phone in Australia will have an alarm at the exact same time. If you are someone that uses a safety phone it is best to turn it off for 24 hours. I would also recommend avoiding traffic or any situation that could cause danger to the governments poorly planned aus alert.


Finland’s radical answer to renewable energy’s biggest headache: The world’s largest sand battery

> A small town in southern Finland has turned to the world’s largest commercial sand battery to fix what many see as the most critical problem facing renewable energy: intermittency.
>
> Standing at 13 meters tall and 15 meters wide, the eye-catching facility uses 2,000 metric tons of crushed soapstone to store clean energy in the form of heat to provide 100 megawatt-hours of thermal energy.
>
> That’s enough to provide the 5,000 residents of Pornainen with nearly one month of heat demand through the summer — and roughly one week of demand in the winter.
>
> Commissioned by Finnish district heating company Loviisan Lämpö and developed by Polar Night Energy, the giant sand battery launched last year as part of a push to introduce a flexible heat production technology and reduce carbon emissions generated by the local district heating network.


White House Rushes to Trump's Defense After Alan Ritchson Torches President Over Epstein Files - The Reacher star called Trump a “bitch” and a “fucking rapist" in a recent podcast appearance


Copyright Is Not Enough: Why writers need new strategies to stand up to AI.

> There is no doubt that many creators recognize the competition from GenAI as an existential threat. In the U.K., a survey released in January 2026 by the Society of Authors, the Association of Illustrators and other creator organizations found that around a third of illustrators and literary translators, and more than half of photographers, had lost commissions to GenAI. Among the authors, more than 85 percent reported decreased earnings and feared that GenAI could imitate their style. Also in January, the French division of Harlequin, which is part of publisher HarperCollins, announced a trial with an AI translation company. According to the Association of Literary Translators of France, the trial saw translators’ contracts being terminated and replaced with lower-paid work editing AI-generated translations.
>
> The current landscape is particularly difficult for emerging authors, Eli Keren, a literary agent and chair of the U.K. Association of Authors’ Agents sub-committee on AI in publishing, told me. It’s difficult to break out when magazines, competitions, literary agents and online retail platforms are flooded with AI-generated work. This year’s Commonwealth Short Story Prize became mired in controversy after speculation that one of the winning entries, Jamir Nazir’s “The Serpent in the Grove,” contained AI-generated text. (After an investigation, the Commonwealth Prize decided it was satisfied that AI was not used to write Nazir’s story.) More established writers are affected too: Bad actors are releasing copycat AI-generated books on the same day as highly anticipated novels and biographies, Keren explained, to trick readers and steal book sales that they have not earned and do not deserve.
>
> Earlier this year, Grammarly, a platform that claims to improve people’s writing, launched a short-lived GenAI tool that provided editorial feedback in the style of famous authors, including writer Stephen King, historian David Abulafia and journalist Julia Angwin.


Fed up with Big Tech, communities turn to data collectives for control

> Companies including Meta, Open AI, Google, and Anthropic have scraped nearly all available data from the internet to train their AI models, and have been accused of using copyrighted material without consent. Tech companies have said it qualifies as fair use, which allows the use of such material for research and other purposes. Some countries are trying to balance the need for good data with the need to compensate creators.
>
> Data collectives, or cooperatives, offer a blueprint for the responsible use of data, and ensure the value goes to those generating the data, Astha Kapoor, co-founder and director of Aapti Institute, a tech research firm in India, told Rest of World.
>
> “Beyond consent and compensation, collective action around data gives communities the opportunity to direct data towards issues they may care about,” she said. “Communities can negotiate the terms on which their data is used at every stage of the AI lifecycle [with] mechanisms for accountability and redressal, in case their terms are breached.”
>
> Workers, producers, consumers, and others have been establishing cooperatives and other community-led associations to pool resources, share benefits, and address socioeconomic challenges for centuries. The United Nations marked 2025 as the year of cooperatives, positioning them as “essential solutions to today’s global problems,” kindling renewed interest in data collectives and cooperatives.


The University as Giant App: Theo Baker’s book about Stanford offers a shockingly frank look at a campus that is as tightly governed as a Siberian labor camp—one perhaps designed by Sergey Brin.

> Baker offers a shockingly frank look at a campus that is as tightly governed as a Siberian labor camp—one perhaps designed by Sergey Brin. Baker reveals the extraordinary lengths to which the administrators go to guard against the smallest chances of drunken, bawdy, or intemperate forms of student life, making a simple campus party harder to organize than a political rally. Consent forms, monitors, and cameras lurk everywhere, and solicitous peers and proctors, like neighborhood grandmas in communist East Germany, report on any behavior likely to taint Stanford’s reputation as the dedicated petri dish for Silicon Valley’s finest. What Baker details is the stifling reality of Stanford’s “War on Fun,” the other side of its endless sunshine.

---

> So why should Baker’s book unsettle us? What’s wrong with a powerhouse of a university being joined at the hip to the newest frontier of the American dream? What’s wrong with a winner-take-all school feeding a winner-take-all economy? What’s wrong with being the filter and the gate to the money and excitement of Silicon Valley?
>
> We can leave aside the usual laundry list of complaints about Stanford’s (and Silicon Valley’s) wealth, privilege and exclusivity, and their implications for hierarchies of race, class, and gender. We do not need Theo Baker to serve as our muckraker on these subjects since the truly dystopian possibilities lie elsewhere. The chilling subtext of Baker’s book is the impression it conveys of Stanford as a piece of advanced pronatalist technology designed to create the optimal laboratory conditions for selecting, grooming, and developing a remarkable class of quasi-adults. These actants can then be assigned to the most exclusive tech hubs (such as Xaira Therapeutics) to create the advanced biomedical tools to further enhance the life chances and cultural dominance of the very class from which they were initially picked. Is this meritocracy, or clonocracy?
>
> It might be argued that Silicon Valley,


How to keep cool in a heatwave: 25 tips from the people who know best, from a Rio lifeguard to an Egyptian archaeologist


"I Don’t Know How You Can Look at Minneapolis and Say They Are Better for Choosing Reform Over Revolution"

> Your book, like Elizabeth Hinton’s “America on Fire,” delves into a decades-long cycle that’s played out in many US cities: Police violence, followed by uprisings, followed by promises for reform and blue ribbon commissions that ultimately produce only “modest change and a photo op.” Did you come out of your reporting with a solid idea of what a better process would look like?
>
> Ellis: I don’t know how you can look at Minneapolis today and say they are better for choosing reform over revolution. The mayor reorganized the public safety department, then there was turnover in the leadership there. The chief who was supposed to lead the transformation of the police force recently resigned in disgrace. Like most police departments in the country, the budget continues to balloon thanks to overtime costs. And at the moment the city is failing to even meet the basics of its court-mandated reforms. By definition this is insanity, right?
>
> I think like anything in local government, having a process for the community to guide designs and offer feedback is important. But I think the starting point has to be a total tear down, not a rebuild. That sounds simplistic, but look at where making changes on the edges has gotten us? Revised training standards and use of force policies have amounted to departments that are effectively the same. The aim needs to be so much higher.


What are y'all's opinions on the Fitbit Air?

I find the tech really cool, especially it being so thin. It's also not that expensive.

Buuuut it's google so I fear this thing is a privacy nightmare.


New front in US-Iran war escalates as Houthis fire at Saudi oil facilities

Not only that but Ukraine attacked an Iranian ship in the Caspian sea, where previously those conflicts were somewhat separate.


Ghosted After a Job Interview? Report the Company

I doubt this will take off like, say, GlassDoor, but if it catches on, could be an interesting resource to make oneself feel better. Orders of magnitude more data are needed for this to be useful.


‘I’m over the moon’: New York’s small business owners rejoice as Mamdani cuts red tape


The Women Who Kill Are the Ones That Saved Me


> Flock cameras are receiving public opposition because of concerns about privacy and surveillance. Some urbanists have been skeptical of anti-Flock uproar because some complaints about privacy sound similar to other American motorist complaints against red light, congestion or speed cameras—in which the motorist is really just mad about their poor driving being ticketed.
>
> But there is a major difference between enforcement tech like speed cameras and red-light cameras versus automated license plate readers. Enforcement technology does not track vehicle whereabouts, it just notes the location of a traffic offense and issues a ticket. Records from automated enforcement technology typically remain under the control of a local transportation authority or police department—ideally the former.
>
> Flock cameras are not instant ticketing devices but tracking devices of all plated vehicles—traffic offenders or not—into a database with the flexibility to be shared across jurisdictions, and through all levels of government. Flock cameras and their clients can decode where we’ve been, what cities, what states, what street corners, and what routes with our cars (and undoubtedly soon with other means of transport.) Flock cameras are so effective at identifying patterns of travel that recent news reports have identified police officers stalking their ex-partners with Flock cameras. Obviously, such technological architecture is a tremendous expansion in the surveillance of everyday people.


We used to be able to buy things in this country

> Many decades ago, humans developed a process by which they could go into a store, pick an item off the shelf, and pay for it at the checkout counter. A few years ago, we lost it. Now you ring a buzzer, wait for an overworked employee to unlock an item that costs $5.99, and navigate the emotional complications of feeling like both a suspected criminal and an entitled ass.
>
> The late Soviet Union was damned by the iconic image of people waiting in endless lines for scarce consumer goods. When we look back at the dying days of America, perhaps we’ll think of waiting in dots, surrounded by plentiful products locked away because our bosses fear and loathe us so much they have forgotten how selling things works.
>
> Why has our society gone backward in this small but really annoying way? Surely there must have been an epidemic of shoplifting? No, there really wasn’t. Instead, the great lotion lockup was a corporate moral panic, which has been a disaster for their profits and for the rest of us a degrading enshittification of running basic errands.
>
> It’s far from the most important way our lives have gotten worse, but it might be the most pointless – which makes it useful for understanding so much else about a moment in history defined by breathtaking self-sabotage.
>
> What’s happened to going to the Walgreens or Target is a store-sized version of what’s happened to living in America. It’s the experience of being subject to the decisions of a ruling class that responds to every challenge with authoritarianism, greed, and the same levels of poise and wisdom as an inbred Pomeranian.

---

> Equally ominous is a new system being developed by CVS, in which customers with the company app can unlock shelves from their phones. If this plan spreads throughout the industry (and of course it will), picking up a product with your own hands will become a privilege you can only have in exchange for giving more personal information to the company.
>
> Will this be the final, cam


What the Hell Is Trump Doing in Iran? | The Coffee Klatch with Robert Reich

What will Trump’s new tariffs do to the economy?

Is his administration committing war crimes in Iran?

And do we seriously have another public health crisis on our hands?

Join us to make sense of it all on this week’s Coffee Klatch.


When the United States took control of Venezuela's oil exports in early 2026, it collected an estimated $13 billion in crude sales — but the official ledger in Caracas records almost none of it, and six months on there is still no public accounting of where the money went.

In this video we look at what happened to Venezuela's sovereign wealth: the missing oil revenues now sitting in an offshore account in Qatar, the four billion dollars of Venezuelan gold frozen in the vaults of the Bank of England that no one can legally claim, and the court-ordered auction that handed Citgo's parent company to an affiliate of Paul Singer's Elliott Management for nearly $6 billion.

Along the way we explain the legal machinery that makes all of this possible — the alter ego doctrine, sovereign immunity and the Bancec ruling, the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act, and the "one voice" principle in English law — and the broader lesson for anyone trying to understand sovereign assets: a nation's wealth held abroad is only yours for as long as someone else's courts, banks and vaults agree that it is.

We also cover the aftermath of the June earthquakes, the international relief effort, and why the question of who legitimately governs Venezuela sits at the centre of every one of these disputes.


It’s time to phase out PFAS ‘forever chemicals’

> In the period leading up to the Second World War, technological advances were rapidly redefining everyday life, including the widespread use of a new class of superchemicals that promised to solve all our household problems. Perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or [PFAS](https://www.betterworld.info/environment/waste-toxins/toxic-substances/pfas-forever-chemicals), are a class of synthetic chemicals known as “forever chemicals”, which have quietly infiltrated our daily lives.