cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/8607436

China is home to some of the most brutal deserts on earth, stretching across 2.6 million square kilometers of land so dry, so scorching, and so hostile that billions of tons of sand swallow entire farms and villages every single year. For decades, the desert kept winning, advancing into productive land, burying roads within hours, and sending massive dust storms across East Asia every spring. For a country with 1.4 billion people to feed, losing farmland to sand wasn't just an environmental problem. It was a threat to the entire nation.

But what China did next is one of the most extraordinary stories of the 21st century. Starting with nothing more than dry straw pushed into shifting sand, China launched the largest land reclamation project in human history, planting 66 billion trees, investing over 50 billion dollars, and engineering an entirely new kind of farming system in the middle of the world's most unforgiving terrain. Today those same dead deserts produce 30 million tons of food every year, power hundreds of thousands of homes with solar energy, and even raise fish in a place with almost no water. This is the full story of how they did it.

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cross-posted from: https://lemmings.world/post/46198506

The US and Israel are "actively working" to strip Jordan of its historic custodianship of Jerusalem's Al-Aqsa Mosque complex, and are pursuing a new arrangement that would see the management of the revered Muslim site closely align with Israeli interests, multiple sources have told Middle East Eye.

US, Jordanian and Palestinian officials, as well as western and Gulf Arab sources, told MEE that under the plan, championed by President Donald Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, who has no official role in the administration, and the US ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, the authority of the Jordanian-backed Islamic Waqf would abruptly end and a new body created by the Israeli government would declare the Al-Aqsa Mosque a "multi-faith centre".

According to the officials, all of whom requested anonymity to discuss sensitive matters, the "new arrangement" would grant Jews "equal access" to the Muslim site and formally allow large-group Jewish prayer

The main reason I started implementing NearLink was simple: I was tired of constantly syncing data between my own devices through traditional server-based flows.

For a messenger focused on privacy, routing Favorites through a cloud backend felt wrong.

How NearLink works

NearLink allows you to sync your Favorites (notes and saved chats) directly between devices.

My personal use cases:

• Fast transfer of images, videos, and files between devices over LAN
• Synchronization of Favorites (saved chats and notes)
• QR-based local authorization between devices
• Faster testing workflow without creating separate accounts for every device

I intentionally limited this system to local networks only in order to reduce unnecessary external attack surface.

Other updates in v1.6-beta

• NearLink Authentication
  QR-based login designed for local network environments

• Per-chat locking
  Chats with individual passwords

Release

Full release notes and binaries are available on GitHub:

https://github.com/wardcore-dev/onyx/releases/tag/v1.6-beta

Community

If you're already using ONYX, you can join the official news channel inside the app using this token:

12e01467-c154-447b-84f8-133ae76684a1

Feedback is welcome.

I kinda just assumed all mammals have belly buttons. But then I realized, I've given many dogs many belly rubs, and I've never noticed a navel. So whats the deal with that? We're not the only one's that got em, right?

https://github.com/gary-host-laptop/ushiro https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/%E5%BE%8C%E3%82%8D-ushiro/

Every image a website doesn't want you to have is still there — just gated. Ushiro drops you behind the scenes to find it. Background images, clickable decoys, alternative resolutions, inline SVGs, base64 chunks, shadow DOM. If it rendered on your screen, you can take it.

I forked behind! extension and added a little extra touch, plus some improvements

cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/shit/p/1150997/wanna-be-rich-enough-so-i-can-hold-my-laptop-like-this

Original title (LT): Skyrybos karo metu (Divorce During War)

Vilnius 2022. High-flying executive Marija (Žygimantė Elena Jakštaitė) chooses the worst possible moment for an honest conversation with her husband Vytas (Marius Repšys) about divorcing - just one day before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine goes into full scale. Now they must navigate the process of separation as it collides with a refugee and mid-life crisis.

https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/1529024-skyrybos-karo-metu

It is built on the security-first pipeline behind Project Hummingbird's existing container catalog, with the foundational project itself being something Red Hat introduced as an early access program for subscribers back in November 2025.

The main idea behind the project is to ship a catalog of minimal, hardened, distroless container images kept at near-zero CVE status. When a vulnerability gets patched upstream, the build pipeline finds it, rebuilds the affected image, and ships it.

Fedora Hummingbird is applying the same logic but to a full-size operating system, using a Konflux-based build pipeline, drawing over 95% of packages from Fedora Rawhide.