Mideast envoy Steve Witkoff and U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee toured a Gaza Humanitarian Foundation distribution site in Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city, which has been almost completely destroyed and is now a largely depopulated Israeli military zone.

WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. hiring is slowing sharply as President Donald Trump’s erratic and radical trade policies paralyze businesses and raise doubts about the outlook for the world’s largest economy.

U.S. employers added just 73,000 jobs last month, the Labor Department reported Friday, well short of the 115,000 expected.

Worse, revisions shaved a stunning 258,000 jobs off May and June payrolls. And the unemployment rate ticked higher to 4.2% as Americans dropped out of the labor force and the ranks of the unemployed rose by 221,000.

Bot-driven inflation of internet statistics may just become an inevitable part of digital life.

Y'all, the UK's law about needing an ID to be on any social media platform over 10,000 users is the canary in the coal mine. Similar laws have already been proposed by US states and other countries. On a long enough timeline, this is coming for us all.

So, with that in mind, I want to get in early with some good old fashioned forum sites. You know, the kind that have no app and don't need my Fing ID to let me sign up.

Any topic welcome as long as the community is active and strong.

cross-posted from: https://endlesstalk.org/post/92550159

Trump said on his Truth Social platform on Friday that he had told his team to fire Erika McEntarfer, the Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, who was nominated by Joe Biden in 2023 and began her role in January 2024.

“I have directed my Team to fire this Biden Political Appointee, IMMEDIATELY,” the president wrote.

“She will be replaced with someone much more competent and qualified. Important numbers like this must be fair and accurate, they can’t be manipulated for political purposes,” Trump said, claiming without evidence that McEntarfer had massaged figures to help the former president.

In a Thursday speech, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) chairman Paul S. Atkins announced “Project Crypto,” an initiative to modernize the country’s securities rules and regulations to move financial markets on-chain.

“Under my leadership, the SEC will not stand idly by and watch innovations develop overseas while our capital markets remain stagnant,” he said at an America First Policy Institute event in Washington D.C. His plan includes measures to reshore crypto businesses that have left the country and to ensure that “archaic rules and regulations do not smother innovation and entrepreneurship in America.”

Less food is going into Gaza now than during most other times in the war. Hundreds of Palestinians have been killed while heading toward aid sites. Many others are suffering from serious malnutrition, and Gazan health officials say scores have died from it.

https://archive.ph/ZnGMu

The New Orleans City Council is considering Ordinance 35,137 that would authorize the continued use of the live facial recognition system implemented by Project NOLA. Project NOLA, a non-profit organization, runs a centralized surveillance system that has equipped New Orleans with more than 200 facial recognition cameras at various establishments and residential locations. The program, run by a former officer, was until recently, sending law enforcement live, real time alerts of people identified by facial recognition from predetermined lists. The use of Project NOLA’s live facial recognition system by the New Orleans police was a clear violation of a preexisting 2022 city council ordinance that limited the use of facial recognition technology to searches involving specific cases with violent crime. The 2022 ordinance did not allow for the use of live facial recognition or the mass deployment of the technology. Despite the police’s clear violation of the ordinance, the New Orleans City Council is considering a new ordinance to sanction the mass deployment of live facial recognition.

The possibility that New Orleans will officially implement mass surveillance via facial recognition would be an about-face that would see New Orleans go from a 2020 ordinance that rightly banned facial recognition because of the heightened risk of false positives for Black people to embracing a dystopian future of a dragnet facial recognition surveillance that treats everyone as a suspect. This opens the door to a level of intrusion that we’ve only seen in authoritarian governments. The intrusion will not stop at our faces, Project NOLA can not only track faces, but also clothing, cars, and bikes. The kind of surveillance presents a real threat to our privacy, civil liberties, and undermines our democratic values.

The use of live FRT surveillance would make everyone a suspect and go against democratic values. This type of mass surveillance would undermine individual freedoms and citizens’ ability to freely engage in social and political activity. The European Court of Human Rights unanimously concluded that highly intrusive technology (e.g. real-time dragnet facial recognition surveillance) is incompatible with the ideals and values of a democratic society governed by the rule of law. Mass deployment of live facial recognition suppresses dissent and disproportionally targets marginalized groups.

Sanctioning the indiscriminate use of live facial recognition would destroy the previous guardrails around this technology and would be the first major American city to specifically allow live facial recognition.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/49042391

I was sick of always fighting with WordPress to get a local set up to develop a plug-in or update the theme for a client, so I made a dev container.

As per the README, this supports:

• Automatic database dump import and site URL rename
• Automatic WordPress theme and plug-in loading from .zip, wpackagist or directory
• Mounting of a user-provided uploads directory

It also means your IDE automatically gets access to a WordPress installation for easy auto complete of WordPress functions and features when writing PHP code.

Theoretically, it can also easily be converted into a normal container if you don't use VSCode by setting up /workspace as a mount. Dev containers are unfortunately a bit broken with JetBrains products, and this container will not launch.

Contributions welcome!

MASERU, Lesotho (AP) — The southern African nation of Lesotho has had its U.S. export tariff reduced from a threatened 50% to 15% but its crucial textile industry still faces massive factory closures, officials said on Friday.

Despite a reduction announced by U.S. President Donald Trump, the country’s textile sector says it remains at a competitive disadvantage and faces ongoing factory closures and job losses.

In April, the Trump administration announced a 50% tariff on imports from Lesotho, the highest among all countries.

The tariffs were paused across the board but the anticipated increase wreaked havoc across the country’s textile industry, which is its biggest private sector employer with over 30,000 workers.

About 12,000 of these workers work for garment factories exporting to the U.S. market, supplying American retailers like Levi’s and Wrangler.

The Associated Press reported this week that clothing manufacturer Tzicc has seen business dry up ahead of the expected tariff increase, sending home most of its 1,300 workers who have made and exported sportswear to American stores, including JCPenney, Walmart and Costco.

Text Version.

• العربية
• Francis
• Deutsch

• US-backed Israeli forces and private contractors have put in place a flawed, militarized aid distribution system that has turned aid distributions into regular bloodbaths.
• The dire humanitarian situation is a direct result of Israel’s use of starvation of civilians as a weapon of war—a war crime—as well as Israel’s continued intentional deprivation of aid and basic services, which amounts to the crime against humanity of extermination, and acts of genocide.
• States should press Israeli authorities to immediately stop using lethal force as crowd control against Palestinian civilians, lift Israel’s unlawful sweeping restrictions on the entry of aid, and for the United States and Israel to suspend this flawed distribution system.

What are you like obsessed with me or something?