Many voters believe, with good reason, that none of this would have happened without Biden’s assent. Biden has continued to speak of Israel’s attack on Palestinian civilians using the absurd language of “self-defense”. He has insulted Jewish Americans and the memory of the Holocaust by invoking them to justify the slaughter. And though his White House repeatedly leaks that he is “privately” dismayed by Israel’s conduct of the war, he has done little to stop the flow of US money and guns that support it.

Even after the US state department issued a vexed and mealy-mouthed report on Israel’s conduct, which nevertheless concluded that it was reasonable to assess that Israel was in violation of international humanitarian law, the Biden administration has continued to fund these violations. That state department report was published on 10 May. The Biden administration told Congress that it intends to move forward with a $1bn arms sale to Israel. “OK, [Israel] likely broke the law, but not

Worth reading in full but here's some snippets:

In 1985, hundreds of Columbia students, led by the four-year-old Coalition for a Free South Africa (CFSA), initiated a blockade of Hamilton Hall in the center of campus – the same hall peacefully occupied and renamed by students on Tuesday.

The protest lasted for three weeks, drawing worldwide support. The administration photographed, videotaped and threatened student activists with disciplinary charges and expulsion. Five months later, after years of dragging its feet, the university divested from companies implicated in apartheid South Africa.

In 2013 and 2014 a successful campaign by the Columbia Prison Divest students forced the university to divest from the private prison industry. Underlining the linkages of struggles, Students Against Mass Incarceration (Sami) sought the advice of Students for Justice in Palestine.

...

Omar was a Palestinian student activist on campus at the time, supporting the Free South Africa Movement

After the interview aired, Lehrmann was charged with sexual intercourse without consent, but the trial was abandoned in 2022 due to juror misconduct and not revived due to fears about Higgins’ mental health.

Without a trial and a means to clear his name, Lehrmann turned to defamation action, claiming that Network Ten and “The Project” presenter Lisa Wilkinson damaged his reputation by providing enough information in the program for him to be identified, though he was not named.

Network Ten and Wilkinson chose to fight the charge, mounting a truth defense, meaning that to win, the network’s lawyers needed to prove that on the balance of probabilities the rape happened.

Lee found Monday that the two had sex that night, but Higgins was so inebriated she couldn’t possibly have given her consent – and that Lehrmann didn’t seek to obtain it.

“I’m satisfied that it is more likely than not that Mr Lehrmann’s state of mind was such that he was so intent upon gratification to be indiffe

Proponents of AI and other optimists are often ready to acknowledge the numerous problems, threats, dangers, and downright murders enabled by these systems to date. But they also dismiss critique and assuage skepticism with the promise that these casualties are themselves outliers — exceptions, flukes — or, if not, they are imminently fixable with the right methodological tweaks.

Common practices of technology development can produce this kind of naivete. Alberto Toscano calls this a “Culture of Abstraction.” He argues that logical abstraction, core to computer science and other scientific analysis, influences how we perceive real-world phenomena. This abstraction away from the particular and toward idealized representations produces and sustains apolitical conceits in science and technology. We are led to believe that if we can just “de-bias” the data and build in logical controls for “non-discrimination,” the techno-utopia will arrive, and the returns will come pouring in. The arg

But the ban – last updated in 2003 – only applies to traditional television channels and not to streaming television delivered over the internet. With audiences increasingly switching off traditional broadcast channels, the UK’s big political parties are preparing to take advantage of the loophole and pay millions of pounds to insert themselves into living rooms.

Tom Edmonds, who ran digital advertising campaigns for the Conservatives in the 2010s, said politicians were desperate to pay to access screens. He said if British broadcasters did not run such ads, US tech companies would happily take the money. “You are going to see political ads on your TV. A lot of it will go on YouTube because you can get it in HD on your TV,” he added.

In the past, British political parties did not have enough money to buy campaign adverts. But Labour and the Conservatives are set to take advantage of **a little-noticed rule change announced last year by Michael Gove, which will increase the amount

Maybe, to the extend that we are institutionalists, we need to recognize that our vote doesn't free us from any other obligations between elections. Maybe we need to recognize the ways our commitment to institutions that abuse others have caused abused people to despair and mistrust us. Maybe we need to admit how we were wrong about the nature of our institutions, how we believed they protected and benefitted everyone simply because they protected and benefitted us. Some of us, if we are particularly unthreatened by fascism and particularly benefitted by supremacy, might need to realize that listening and following are more effective anti-fascist actions for us now than speaking and leading.

Or maybe, to the extent that we are anti-institutionalist, we need to recognize that our anti-institutional alignment doesn't mean we aren't still culpable to the degree we are, and recognize that if we are taking that alignment primarily to evade culpability, we're still aligning ourselves spir

If I have the right zoom level to make the text in the feed a sensible size, the font size in the threads is too small to read easily. Correct the zoom level in the thread and the font size in the feed becomes way too large.

This has long been a problem and I'm not sure why this is suddenly irritating me more than usual. Is it just me? Is there a setting I'm missing?

E2A: It's likely a browser issue. I've found a workaround, thanks all.

Archive link

Summary linked, long version here: https://www.jfsa.org.uk/uploads/5/4/3/1/54312921/origins_of_a_disaster_-_summary_-_eleanor_shaikh.pdf

Both hosted by jfsa.org.uk, the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance website.

Driven by wider political agendas which included the protection of Japanese inward investment in UK plc, Blair ruled that the Post Office must purchase a salvaged version of Horizon. Insufficient work had been done to determine the viability of this option and the Post Office itself was adamantly opposed to the idea. Right up until the day before the Prime Minister’s decision, the Post Office were vociferous; they wished to terminate Horizon and start afresh with a new supplier. In any event, they argued they would need months to assess his chosen solution:

‘POCL believe that the hardware and software is probably sub-optimal as the platform for providing network banking and Modern Government services, but would need several months' work to have a clear view.'

And all the others, thanks.

"Vennells’s incentive payments add up to £2.2m over the course of her time in charge. She may note that when James Crosby, former boss of HBOS, gave up his knighthood in 2013 after a parliamentary committee found he “sowed the seeds” of destruction at the bank, he volunteered to surrender 30% of his pension entitlement. Those were the days before clawback clauses but Crosby was nodding to the principle that giving up a gong is not enough. In a post-clawback world, matters should be simpler: the rules are meant to insist on repayment of bonuses. If the relevant clauses aren’t triggered in Vennells’s case, when would they be?

"None of which is to deny that the rotten saga goes further than her. The politicians with oversight roles of the state-owned Post Office clearly have questions to answer, as do the relevant executives at Fujitsu, supplier of the dodgy IT software. But, among the business crew at the top of the Post Office over the years, the two chairs

As the Post Office (Horizon/Fujitsu) scandal is getting more coverage this week, I thought this accountancy blog (which talks about an accompanying video, for those who like video) might be of interest. I've been following this story for years but this is the first thing I've read that gets into the detail of what went wrong with the software.

The Post Office trial is one of the few cases where an in-depth examination of system failures is made public and so it’s a valuable lesson to learn from. Even simple problems like maintaining a stock balance become complex when part of a distributed system. Techniques like ACID transactions can reduce the likelihood of errors but real implementations will sometimes fail. When a system processes a large number of transactions, this small probability of failure can add up to frequent errors. I hope that the presumption that computers operate correctly is revisited, and the factors revealed by the Post Office trial are taken into account when doi

The Conservative peer Michelle Mone has acknowledged for the first time that she was involved with a company that was awarded government PPE contracts worth £200m during the Covid pandemic.

Lady Mone’s husband, Douglas Barrowman, has also acknowledged for the first time that he was involved in the company, PPE Medpro.

A representative of Barrowman told the Guardian that the Isle of Man-based businessman was an investor in PPE Medpro, and chaired and led the operation to supply personal protective equipment.

The admissions raise questions about years of denials from the couple. Until now, Mone and Barrowman have consistently and emphatically denied to the Guardian, via lawyers, that they were involved in the company.

The investigation is ongoing. I very much hope this admission is a sign that it is getting somewhere.

In the August 6, 1945 edition, under the blaring headline: FIRST ATOMIC BOMB DROPPED ON JAPAN; TRUMAN WARNS FOE OF A ‘RAIN OF RUIN,’” the New York Times traced the simultaneously terrifying and wondrous development of the atomic bomb, its scientific history, and the race between the Allies and the Germans to build it and use it first.

Somewhere below the fold, buried in a long paragraph, this sentence appeared, as if highlighted in neon: “The key component that allowed the Allies to develop the bomb was brought to the Allies by a female, ‘non-Aryan’ physicist.”

I scanned the next paragraph looking for the name of this “non-Aryan” woman. No name. No photo. Nothing.

These periodic episodes of killing and destruction, which Israeli commentators and politicians cynically call “mowing the lawn,” have been a price Israel was willing to pay to avoid being pushed toward a two-state solution. We chose to “manage” the conflict through a combination of brute force and economic incentives, instead of working to solve it by ending our perpetual occupation of Palestinian territory.

Many of my Palestinian human rights partners who organize nonviolent protests are targeted and harassed by the Israeli military. I believe these policies have the goal of preventing pressure for a Palestinian state and permitting Israeli settlement development and creeping annexation in the West Bank.

For years, many of us on the left in Israel have been warning that we will never have peace and security until we find a political agreement in which Palestinians achieve freedom and independence. It isn’t just human rights activists taking this position: Even Ami Ayalon, the for

More conspiracy nutjobbing from the Tories.