Using #Madblog as the easiest way to spin up an Indieweb/ActivityPub-compatible blog.

Zero db, zero JS, entirely hosted on text files.

Dubai has only ten days of fresh food left after the closure of the Straits of Hormuz has cut the United Arab Emirates (UAE) off from all its imports, including food. In Abu Dhabi, with the prospect of the region becoming unliveable, real estate prices are also collapsing.

As bne IntelliNews reported, the Hormuz chokepoint could kill Dubai, a hub of investment and business in the region. The Gulf countries don’t have any water and don’t produce much food for their combined population of around 60mn people. Fresh products in particular like vegetables and fruit are almost all imported. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) closed the Straits of Hormuz to oil exports on March 2, but the embargo also effectively blocked all food imports at the same time.

The Emirates imports between 80% and 90% of its food, with roughly 70% of food shipments to Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries normally passing through the Strait of Hormuz on the 100- odd ships that traversed the Straits until a week ago.

...

The rules-based order was always partly a legitimation device for American hegemony, but it was a device that required European buy-in — and that buy-in gave Europe real leverage. Trump has abandoned the legitimation mechanism entirely. He does not need Europe’s moral endorsement because he has dispensed with the need for legitimacy altogether. Power is its own justification. That is precisely what makes the European establishment’s eager compliance so self-defeating.

Sánchez is dragging Europe’s centre-left toward articulating a foreign policy grounded in international law, genuine multilateralism, and the understanding that the international order is rebuilt through principles consistently applied, not selectively invoked. What makes the S&D shift notable is that arguments long dismissed as too radical — when made by voices like Yanis Varoufakis — are now coming from governing parties.

Source

Using #Madblog as the easiest way to spin up an Indieweb/ActivityPub-compatible blog.

Zero db, zero JS, entirely hosted on text files.

Ten players from Jamaican side Mount Pleasant have been denied a visa to enter the United States for Wednesday's Concacaf Champions Cup tie against LA Galaxy.

cross-posted from : https://lemmy.zip/post/60552836

cross-posted from : https://lemmy.zip/post/60504440

Coming face to face with a probable psychopath was enough to make Dr Leanne ten Brinke rethink her career choices. Early in her 20s, while studying forensic psychology in Halifax, in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia, Ten Brinke was volunteering at a parole office, which would hold weekly group meetings for released sex offenders. “Most of the men showed contrition,” says Ten Brinke. “They really seemed to recognise the damage that they had done.” Except for one. The treatment programme seemed “like a game to him”, she says. One week, in a discussion about the impact their crimes had on victims, this rapist stared at Ten Brinke and, smiling slightly, started to say how much his victim looked like her, “and how I was ‘his type’. Clearly he was trying to scare me, and he did.”

It put her off a career working with convicted criminals, but she remained fascinated with “dark personalities” – psychopathy, mainly, but also narcissism, machiavellianism (manipulating and exploiting others) and sadism. From politics to business to the media, it wasn’t as if there was a shortage of people to study. There were selfish, callous, impulsive and manipulative people everywhere, often presenting as gregarious and charming. “It started to occur to me that these traits aren’t just confined to an underworld. These traits appear in all aspects of our lives,” she says.

Now associate professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, Canada, Ten Brinke says these people could be in our families, or living next door. They’re the trolls online. They’re at work, at school, leading our institutions and our countries.

Instead of being specific conditions that one either has or hasn’t, psychopathy and other personality disorders are now thought to exist on a continuum, says Ten Brinke. It is estimated that 1% of the general population have clinical levels of psychopathy (scoring highly on the PCL-R, the psychopathy checklist assessment commonly used for diagnosis). Other studies have suggested that up to 18% have “elevated” levels – what we may call “dark territory”, as Ten Brinke puts it in her new book, Poisonous People: How to Resist Them and Improve Your Life. Within the prison population, the instance of clinical psychopathy is about 20%. However, these dark personalities – who are potentially the most dangerous and likely to reoffend – are particularly good at convincing parole boards to release them, probably because they can be so persuasive.

I’m just curious 🧐 I like precision in my subtitling and obsess over the specifics of certain words, could be my autism, could not be.

New York just proposed the most invasive state-level age verification bill the US has seen. Senate Bill S08102 would extend age verification requirements down to the device itself: internet-connected devices, operating system providers, and app stores would all be required to implement what the bill calls “age assurance” before users can access their own hardware and software ecosystems.

Edit:

Meta is one of the lobbyists for the age verification bill.

Into the Metaverse: The Money and Motivations Behind Meta’s App Store Gambit

In May 2025, Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) and Representative John James (R-MI) introduced the App Store Accountability Act (ASAA), a bill that would require app stores to verify users’ ages and obtain parental consent for users under 18. Meta has bankrolled a wildly expensive lobbying campaign to enact ASAA and its state-level analogs, and instead of recoiling in horror at taking kid privacy advice from Meta, some lawmakers are credulously going along with it.

Confirmed by Bloomberg : Meta Clashes With Apple, Google Over Age Check Legislation

The struggle has pitted Meta Platforms Inc. and other app developers against Apple Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google, the world’s largest app stores. Lobbyists for both sides are moving from state to state, working to water down or redirect the legislation to minimize their clients’ risks.

This year alone, at least three states — Utah, Texas and Louisiana — passed legislation requiring tech companies to authenticate users’ ages, secure parental consent for anyone under 18 and ensure minors are protected from potentially harmful digital experiences. Now, lobbyists for all three companies are flooding into South Carolina and Ohio, the next possible states to consider such legislation.

in addition, there are Over 50 Child Advocacy Groups Unite to Demand App Store Accountability

cross-posted from : https://lemmy.zip/post/60507556

The rules-based order was always partly a legitimation device for American hegemony, but it was a device that required European buy-in — and that buy-in gave Europe real leverage. Trump has abandoned the legitimation mechanism entirely. He does not need Europe’s moral endorsement because he has dispensed with the need for legitimacy altogether. Power is its own justification. That is precisely what makes the European establishment’s eager compliance so self-defeating.

Sánchez is dragging Europe’s centre-left toward articulating a foreign policy grounded in international law, genuine multilateralism, and the understanding that the international order is rebuilt through principles consistently applied, not selectively invoked. What makes the S&D shift notable is that arguments long dismissed as too radical — when made by voices like Yanis Varoufakis — are now coming from governing parties.

The government's key superannuation reforms are set to soon become law after passing the Senate on Tuesday night, which will see major amendments for low income earners, and those with super balances above $3 million.

and then they fight over who gets to settle the bill

And I'm all out of chick ass

PDF.

After the website archive.today launched a DDoS campaign against a small blog in January 2026, a request for comment was started. After the discovery of tampered archives, consensus was reached to deprecate the site used almost 700 thousand times on the English Wikipedia.

Paraguay’s Chamber of Deputies on Tuesday approved a defense agreement allowing the temporary presence of U.S. military and civilian personnel inside its borders, widely seen as a victory for the Trump administration, which has sought to strengthen its presence in Latin America.

The Status of Forces Agreement, or SOFA, was approved by a large majority of lawmakers and now awaits the signature of President Santiago Peña to take effect. Peña, one of Trump’s closest allies in the region, is expected to sign the deal in the coming days.

Signed by both countries in Washington in December, the agreement establishes a legal framework for the presence of U.S. security forces in Paraguay for training, joint exercises, and humanitarian assistance. It also authorizes the United States to have criminal jurisdiction over its personnel while in the country.

cross-posted from: https://piefed.social/c/science/p/1861949/idaho-once-dropped-76-beavers-from-airplanes-don-t-worry-they-had-parachutes

Ben Goldfarb, author of Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter (seriously, that's the title of the book), notes that, “If you were to pick the least aerodynamic animal imaginable, beavers would be high on the list. They’ve got these thick, chunky, pear-shaped bodies.... The incongruity of this very land-bound animal soaring through the sky is just inherently comedic to people.”

I'll say.

In order to help train its AI models, Meta (and others) have been using pirated versions of copyrighted books, without the consent of authors or publishers. The company behind Facebook and Instagram faces an ongoing class-action lawsuit brought by authors including Richard Kadrey, Sarah Silverman, and Christopher Golden, and one in which it has already scored a major (and surprising) victory: The Californian court concluded last year that using pirated books to train its Llama LLM did qualify as fair use.

You'd think this case would be as open-and-shut as it gets, but never underestimate an army of high-priced lawyers. Meta has now come up with the striking defense that uploading pirated books to strangers via BitTorrent qualifies as fair use. It further goes on to claim that this is double good, because it has helped establish the United States' leading position in the AI field.

Meta further argues that every author involved in the class-action has admitted they are unaware of any Llama LLM output that directly reproduces content from their books. It says if the authors cannot provide evidence of such infringing output or damage to sales, then this lawsuit is not about protecting their books but arguing against the training process itself (which the court has ruled is fair use).

Judge Vince Chhabria now has to decide whether to allow this defense, a decision that will have consequences for not only this but many other AI lawsuits involving things like shadow libraries. The BitTorrent uploading and distribution claims are the last element of this particular lawsuit, which has been rumbling on for three years now, to be settled.