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NEWS
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21.01.2025
Trump 2.0: A New World Order
He's back. And this time he means business. If only the left had got their house in order.
20.01.2025
Welcome To The Era Of Gangster Tech Regulation
President Donald Trump is being sworn in today, and we are about to find out what happens when the government is actually as corrupt as our most brain-rotted conspiracy theorists imagine.
"Trump Inauguration, Awash in Cash, Runs Out of Perks for Big Donors," The New York Times reported, somewhat inaccurately. Sure, the Trump people ran out of VIP tickets, but that's not what the donors were buying. This is pure, obvious corruption - the kind that used to trigger shame, back when we were a populace that could still experience that emotion.
Our tech overlords all have problems, and they want to buy the solutions. I guess it was easier than making products people actually like.
"First Buddy" Elon Musk spent at least a quarter of a billion dollars electing Donald Trump. Corporations and wealthy donors have sent half a billion more since he was elected. Amazon, Google, Uber, Microsoft, and Meta donated $1 million each to Trump's inauguration, as did Apple's Tim Cook and OpenAI's Sam Altman. (Joe Biden's inauguration hardly received this kind of largesse.) "In the first term, everybody was fighting me," Trump said in December. “In this term, everybody wants to be my friend."
Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg, the three wealthiest men on Earth, are reportedly attending the inauguration; they were to be seated with elected officials and cabinet nominees, before the ceremony was moved indoors. (Cook is also reportedly attending.) Musk will have office space in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next to the White House, according to The New York Times.
So what are these men buying?
20.01.2025
Forget Trump - Agreeing To A Ceasefire Was Netanyahu’s Own Calculation
Almost immediately after the announcement that Israel and Hamas had agreed to a ceasefire in Gaza, a consensus emerged in the international and Israeli media: pressure and threats from President-elect Donald Trump is what led Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to finally agree to a deal that had been on the table since May 2024. The story about Steven Witkoff, Trump’s envoy to the Middle East, who arrived in Jerusalem on Saturday morning and informed Netanyahu that he had no intention of waiting until the end of Shabbat to speak with him, is fast becoming folklore.
19.01.2025
The PC Is Dead: It's Time To Make Computing Personal Again
For a while - in the ’80s, ’90s, and early 2000s - it felt like nerds were making the world a better place. Now, it feels like the most successful tech companies are making it worse.
Internet surveillance, the algorithmic polarization of social media, predatory app stores, and extractive business models have eroded the freedoms the personal computer once promised, effectively ending the PC era for most tech consumers.
18.01.2025
"I Have Nothing To Hide" - The Dangerous Myth About Privacy
It's become a default response from many to overreaching surveillance.
When did privacy start being about having something to hide? It used to simply be about having the right to decide for ourselves who gets access to our data. But over the past decade we've lost that choice, and so much of our personal and sensitive information is shared without our knowledge or explicit consent.
In this video I want to give you a list of arguments you can use in response to anyone who dismisses the importance of privacy because they "have nothing to hide".
18.01.2025
Disroot & DeGoogle
Disroot is a project that was born from the personal need to communicate, share and organize ourselves within our circles through tools that met a series of fundamental criteria for us: they had to be open, decentralized, federated and above all respectful towards freedom and privacy. None of the most popular solutions complied with them, but in our search we found some very interesting projects that did. And since we thought that they should be available to all those with similar ethical principles, we decided not only to group these applications and share them with others, but also to manage them according to those values. That's how Disroot started.
Disroot aims to change the way people are used to interact on the web. We want to encourage and show them not only that there are open and ethical alternatives but also that it is the only possible way to break free from the walled gardens proposed and promoted by proprietary software and corporations, either through our platform, others that have similar values and goals or even their own projects.
We are convinced that we can build together a truly independent network, focused on the benefit of the people and not on their exploitation.
17.01.2025
Journalists Interrupt Blinken With Questions About US Support For Israel
Two journalists interrupted Secretary Antony Blinken’s remarks at the State Department by shouting questions about US support for Israel. They were removed from the briefing room, one walking out and one being carried by security officers.
17.01.2025
Trump's Inauguration Set to Bring In $250M From Billionaires & Corporations
The ultra-rich have donated a record-shattering amount of funds to the 2025 Trump-Vance Presidential Inaugural Committee, with contributions from major corporations like Apple, Chevron, Citigroup, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Google, Pfizer, Microsoft and the pharmaceutical lobby. On Monday, Meta's Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon's Jeff Bezos will attend Trump's inauguration with the world's richest man, Elon Musk, and a slew of other wealthy individuals tapped to join the new White House administration. "What's even more concerning than the total amount being spent is the size of the donations that are coming in from corporations and billionaires, all of whom - just about all of whom - want something from the Trump administration," says Craig Holman, Public Citizen's Capitol Hill lobbyist, who is pushing for new legislation to regulate donations to the inauguration ceremony. "They are buying influence with the Trump administration, so we're going to see scandal after scandal follow this inauguration. And reform often comes on the heels of scandal."
16.01.2025
The Devastating Impact Of 15 Months Of War On Gaza
The Israeli response to Hamas’s attacks on 7 October 2023 has killed tens of thousands, left most schools and hospitals in ruins, and caused long-term damage to agricultural land in the territory.
Palestinians killed in Gaza: 46,707
Children confirmed killed in Gaza: 13,319
Palestinians reported buried under rubble in Gaza: 11,000
Palestinians injured in Gaza: 110,265
Palestinians displaced in Gaza: 1.9 million (90% of the population)
Attacks on healthcare facilities during the war: 654
Health workers killed: 1,060
Schools damaged or destroyed: 534 (95% of schools)
Children out of formal education: 660,000 (all school-age children)
Homes damaged or destroyed: 436,000 (92% of total)
15.01.2025
Why The West Is Wrong About Hamas
As a young, idealistic Palestinian American, raised with Western-articulated values, I once asked Ismail Abu Shanab - one of the founders of Hamas - many questions about the movement’s goals and strategy.
Abu Shanab, a US-educated engineer, was one of the most senior leaders of Hamas when I met him in 1998 in Gaza. That conversation - along with other personal encounters I have had with leaders of the movement, deepened my understanding of Hamas - and I came to view it not as a monolithic entity, but as a complex, principled movement grounded in Islamic values and committed to the Palestinian cause.
Despite these principles, Hamas is frequently misrepresented in Western discourse, where it is reduced to a caricature of violence and extremism. Equating Hamas with groups like ISIS is not only inaccurate but also deeply Islamophobic.
Hamas is a national liberation movement, comparable to Algeria’s National Liberation Front or South Africa’s African National Congress, indigenous resistance movements that freed their people from centuries of European colonial barbarism.
Its roots are deeply tied to Palestinian society, functioning as both a resistance movement and a social organization, and since 2006, as an elected government - despite a partially successful US-orchestrated coup against it and severe sanctions and siege imposed by Israel’s sponsors and allies, aimed at ensuring its failure.
14.01.2025
Israeli Historian Says Zionism Is Entering Its Last Phase
Israeli historian Ilan Pappe has told Al Jazeera that he believes there are many factors, from a Trump presidency to international isolation, that show Zionism is entering its “last phase” before its collapse.
13.01.2025
Soon Keir Will Be Replaced By A Sad, Automated Voice. Will We Notice?
""We are at a pivotal moment in history. AI is not just a tool for the future, it is already reshaping our lives in profound ways.” No kidding. That’s just a couple of sentences out of an entire speech written by ChatGPT when it was asked to come up with one on AI in the style of Keir Starmer.
Much of it wasn’t a million miles away. OK, AI hasn’t yet learned Starmer’s particular gift with language. The unfortunate persistent note of regret. As if he knows he can’t help making even the most interesting subjects just a wee bit dull. What should be engaging too frequently dies on the tongue. It’s his cross to bear. Integrity he can do with ease. Enthusiasm takes a little longer.
But watch this space. AI is developing exponentially. Give it a few months and it won’t be just the speechwriters in No 10 who will be out of a job. We won’t even need Keir to deliver his own orations. Just a rather sad, slightly disconnected automated voice. We won’t know the difference.
12.01.2025
MagPi Magazine - Issue 149
We introduce Raspberry Pi 500, the all-new computer-in-a-keyboard, and its partner, the Raspberry Pi Monitor. Together, they form the best desktop environment for coding and computing. Plus! Compute Module 5 brings the latest Raspberry Pi 5 technology to industrial environments!
11.01.2025
Korean Scientists Develop Next-Gen Lithium-Sulfur Battery
A research team led by Professor Jong-sung Yu from the DGIST Department of Energy Science and Engineering, under President Kunwoo Lee, has developed a groundbreaking technology to dramatically improve the charging speed of lithium-sulfur batteries. The team introduced an innovative nitrogen-doped porous carbon material to overcome the slow charging limitations that have stalled the commercialization of lithium-sulfur batteries.
Lithium-ion batteries, while essential for eco-friendly technologies like electric vehicles, face challenges due to their limited energy storage capacity and high production costs. In contrast, lithium-sulfur batteries have emerged as a promising alternative, offering higher energy density and benefiting from the affordability of sulfur as a key material. However, their commercial viability has been hampered by inefficient sulfur utilization during rapid charging, leading to reduced battery capacity.
10.01.2025
Hack Your Way Out Of The Wrong Reality
For two decades, scientists have seriously considered whether we’re living in a simulated universe.
A computer scientist at the University of Louisville explores ways that humans could try to hack our way out of this reality and enter the baseline reality.
So far, techniques ranging from all the world’s religions, along with the immense complexity of the Large Hadron Collider, seem to have no effect on our theoretically simulated reality.
09.01.2025
Jim McGovern Slams Trump On Taking Panama, Greenland & Canada
At a news conference Tuesday, President-elect Donald Trump renewed his threats against Gaza, Greenland, Canada and the Panama Canal as he continues to push an agenda of extreme U.S. imperialism. Democratic Congressmember Jim McGovern calls Trump's comments "outrageous," "ridiculous" and, ultimately, a distraction from his planned abandonment of social services. We also discuss social networking behemoth Meta's announcement that it is ending its fact-checking program, in what's being seen as a capitulation to Trump and conservative media disinformation campaigns, and how President Biden's unqualified support for Israel's assault on Gaza violates multiple U.S. human rights laws.
Trump on Tuesday did not dismiss the possibility that the U.S. could use military force to acquire the Arctic island or the Panama Canal.
08.01.2025
France To Trump: EU Won't Let You Invade Greenland
French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot said Wednesday that the EU won't allow other countries to attack their sovereign borders, in response to U.S. President-elect Donald Trump's refusal to rule out military force to take Greenland.
"It is out of the question that the European Union would let other countries ... attack its sovereign borders, whoever they are," Barrot said on French radio.
Barrot added that he did not believe Trump would actually invade Greenland.
"If you're asking me whether I think the United States will invade Greenland, my answer is no. But have we entered into a period of time when it is survival of the fittest? Then my answer is yes," Barrot said.
Trump on Tuesday did not dismiss the possibility that the U.S. could use military force to acquire the Arctic island or the Panama Canal.
07.01.2025
Israel Extends Closure Of Al Jazeera Office In Occupied West Bank
Last September, Israeli forces raided Al Jazeera's Ramallah office and issued an initial 45-day closure order.
Staff were instructed to leave the premises and take their personal belongings. Later, Israel's government announced it was also revoking the press credentials of Al Jazeera journalists in the country.
The move followed a decision in May to ban Al Jazeera from broadcasting from Israel. The network's offices were also closed for 45 days; an order that has been extended several times.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government has long been at odds with Al Jazeera. Since the start of Israel's war on Gaza last October, the network has faced repeated attempts to silence its reporting through arrests, imprisonment and attacks on its journalists.
Al Jazeera has condemned and denounced Israel's orders on its office in Ramallah.
In a statement in September, the network said: "The raid on the office and seizure of our equipment is not only an attack on Al Jazeera, but an affront to press freedom and the very principles of journalism."
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