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Students staged protests at several Iranian universities on Saturday, marking the start of a new semester with clashes between demonstrators and pro-government factions, according to local news agencies and posts on social media.

The unrest coincided with mourning ceremonies, traditionally held after 40 days, for those killed during January’s anti-government demonstrations.

They saw thousands lose their lives in the most severe domestic upheaval since Iran's 1979 Islamic Revolution.

...

A video, reportedly from Tehran's Sharif University of Technology, showed marchers condemning Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as a “murderous leader” and advocating for Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of Iran's deposed shah, to assume a new monarchical role.

...

Protests were also held in Beheshti and Amir Kabir universities in the capital Tehran and Mashhad University in the northeast, according to videos published by rights group HAALVSH, which Reuters could not verify.

In the western town of Abdanan, a hotspot for protests, demonstrators chanted "Death to Khamenei" and "Death to the dictator" after the arrest of an activist teacher, according to rights group Hengaw and social media posts.

...

January 8 and 9 were the most deadly 48 hours of the protests, when security forces began firing lethal rounds on protesters under the cover of an internet blackout.

A network of doctors inside Iran estimates the national death toll could exceed 30,000 people. This far outstrips the regime’s figure of 3,117 dead reported on Iranian state TV.

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Lobsters.

We’ve been searching for a memory-safe programming language to replace C++ in Ladybird for a while now. We previously explored Swift, but the C++ interop never quite got there, and platform support outside the Apple ecosystem was limited. Rust is a different story. The ecosystem is far more mature for systems programming, and many of our contributors already know the language. Going forward, we are rewriting parts of Ladybird in Rust.

A Palestinian child died on Sunday while waiting for Israel to approve his exit from Gaza for medical treatment amid an ongoing healthcare crisis in the enclave, whose medical infrastructure has been destroyed by Israel’s genocidal war.

Nidal Abu Rabeea’s family told Al Jazeera that they had medical referral documents approved to receive treatment abroad, but he was left waiting for 14 months to be allowed out of the enclave of 2.3 million Palestinians, most of whom are displaced.

“Israel closed the crossings and killed my son,” said Iman Hamdouna, his mother, adding that her son struggled with an enlarged liver and high fever for months before his death. He was two and half years old.

Hospitals in Gaza, operating with critical shortages due to curbs imposed by Israel, could not help him and cannot help thousands of other sick and wounded Palestinians who need higher levels of medical care.

“Human rights are under a full-scale attack around the world” as the powerful trample on international law, according to United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.

“The rule of law is being outmuscled by the rule of force,” he said at the opening of the UN Human Rights Council’s annual session in Geneva on Monday.

Guterres stressed that “this assault is not coming from the shadows or by surprise. It is happening in plain sight – and often led by those who hold the greatest power.”

He did not mention specific situations although he did voice outrage at Russia’s war in Ukraine, where he said more than 15,000 civilians had been killed in four years of violence.

“It is more than past time to end the bloodshed,” he said.

As Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi emerged from his plane at Ben Gurion airport outside Tel Aviv on July 4, 2017, his Israeli counterpart, Benjamin Netanyahu, waited for him at the other end of the red carpet laid out on the tarmac.

Minutes later, the leaders hugged. Speaking at the airport, Modi said his visit was a “path-breaking journey” – it was the first time an Indian prime minister had visited Israel. Netanyahu recalled their first meeting in New York in 2014, where, he said, “we agreed to break down the remaining walls between India and Israel”.

Nine years later, as Modi prepares to fly to Israel on February 25 for his second visit, he can largely claim to have accomplished that mission, analysts say. A relationship that was once frowned upon in India, and then carried out clandestinely, is now one of New Delhi’s most public friendships. Modi has frequently described Netanyahu as a “dear friend”, despite the International Criminal Court having issued an arrest warrant in late 2024 for the Israeli premier over alleged war crimes carried out during Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza.

Indian diplomats and officials have justified the country’s pivot towards Israel as a “pragmatic approach” – Israel, with its tech and military expertise, has too much to offer to be ignored, they argue – balanced by efforts from New Delhi to strengthen ties with its Arab allies.

Yet, it has come at a cost, analysts say: to Palestine, and India’s relationship with it, and, according to some experts, to India’s moral credibility.

Welcome again to everybody. Make yourself at home. In the time-honoured tradition of our group, here is the weekly discussion thread.

☭ Matrix homeserver and space
☭ Theory discussion group on /c/theory@lemmygrad.ml
☭ Find theory on ProleWiki, marxists.org, Anna's Archive

Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky continues to send out a firm message of defiance.

When we met this weekend in the government headquarters in Kyiv, he said that far from losing, Ukraine would end the war victorious. He was firmly against paying the price for a ceasefire deal demanded by President Vladimir Putin, which is withdrawing from strategic ground that Russia has failed to capture despite sacrificing tens of thousands of soldiers.

Putin, Zelensky told me, has already started World War Three, and the only answer was intense military and economic pressure to force him to step back.

"I believe that Putin has already started it. The question is how much territory he will be able to seize and how to stop him... Russia wants to impose on the world a different way of life and change the lives people have chosen for themselves."

A lobbyist who examined journalists on behalf of an influential thinktank has now been accused of recently investigating a Guardian reporter.

Tom Harper, a senior director at the US public affairs company Apco, was the author of a 58-page report examining the journalists behind a 2023 Sunday Times story about undisclosed donations to Labour Together, the thinktank that was instrumental in Keir Starmer’s Labour leadership victory.

His report, which was commissioned by the thinkthank, claimed – without evidence – that the story was based on data hacked from the Electoral Commission, which it linked to Russia.

The report also examined the religious and ideological positions of some of the journalists and sources involved.

According to the Sunday Times, Harper has since been examining Henry Dyer, an investigations correspondent at the Guardian, who has been reporting on the revelations. It said Harper had been making inquiries about Dyer as recently as last week, and suggesting – without any evidence – he could have been part of a wider pro-Russia campaign.

My current internet setup is like this (which is common for most people).

fiber line from ISP <-> ISP fiber modem <-> Personal wifi router <-> switch

This is working fine with no issues. But I need to power two devices. I want to reduce this to a single device.

fiber line from ISP <-> Modem+Firewall PC <-> Switch <-> AP1,AP2...

From my initial research, what I need is an SFP module which can be attached to a PC which supports SFP. OPNsense should be able to handle most SFP modules.

What is the community's take on this? Is this worth the effort? Can I find a mini-PC which supports SFP? Will it be cost effective?

If you’re anything like my parents, you probably wouldn’t even understand most of the content that floods my social media, no matter how hard I try to avoid it.

Here’s a recent example from Instagram: “Do y’all females ever tell ur homegirls ‘Sis chill you letting too many dudes hit?’” Essentially, that means: “Women – do you ever tell your girlfriends that they’re whores and need to stop letting so many guys fuck them?” The reel, posted by a 19-year-old man, appeared on my Instagram feed without me wanting to see it, or ever interacting with any other similar content. The comments that followed were pure misogyny. “Women see body count as a leaderboard and they try to outdo each other,” was one of them. Translation: all women are competitively promiscuous.

Consider the use of the word “female” in these posts. It is not a neutral term here, it is a term of abuse. It’s used by teenage boys to degrade us and equate us to animals. Boys are never described as “males”, but girls are always “females” – the equivalent of sows or calves, creatures that are less than human. We’re also “thots” (whores), “community pussy” and “bops”. “Bop” stands for “been over passed” and is a derogatory term used by boys to refer to a girl they’ve decided has been “passed around” or had too much sex. Sexual equality has ceased to exist online. It’s absolutely fine for boys to have sex, but when girls do, they are called worthless and referred to as objects. “When community pussy tries to insult me, I just want to beat that bitch up.” That’s a message I saw on TikTok.

I’m a 15-year-old schoolgirl and like most teenagers I spend a fair portion of my spare time on social media, often scrolling through short-form videos on apps such as Instagram or TikTok. All of my friends use those apps, and many spend multiple hours a day on them. I actively try to avoid online misogyny, but I am met with it incessantly whenever I open my mainstream social media apps. It only takes a few minutes before there’s subtle or overt misogyny, such as comment sections on a girl’s post filled with remarks about her body, videos made by men or boys captioned with a degrading joke, and even topics such as domestic violence or rape, trivialised and laughed about.

As a seven-year-old boy is treated for polio at a hospital in Malawi, the country has launched a major vaccination campaign to stem an outbreak of the disease.

The effort in Malawi, one of the world’s poorest countries and badly hit by the aid cuts, has seen an astonishing 1.3 million children already vaccinated against the disease in just four days after emergency supplies were airlifted in by the World Health Organization (WHO) just over a week ago.

Malawi declared the outbreak after the virus was detected in two “environmental samples” taken from two sewage plants in Blantyre, the country’s second-largest city and where the only known victim lives.

A single case of polio is considered dangerous, particularly in areas with low vaccination rates, because it is a highly infectious virus that spreads silently and as many people have very mild symptoms. It causes permanent, irreversible paralysis or death in a small but significant percentage of cases, especially in children. Malawi has not had a case of wild poliovirus since 2022.

Just a small little goober?

A lil' blimgus?

An eebly deebly?

Hey can I borrow five dollars?

-Karl Marx

Former CIA Director David Petraeus said if the Trump administration decides to carry out strikes on Iran amid escalating tensions and threats between President Trump and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, it “will not bring about regime change, sadly.”

The retired general said in an interview that aired Sunday on the “Cats Roundtable” radio show hosted by John Catsimatidis on WABC 770 AM that Khamenei is “such an ideologue, he’s so hard-lined, that it appears that he may not budge on the issues that really matter,” which could prompt Trump to take military action.

“Look, candidly, I’m all for taking the missile program down further or [bringing] damage to the security forces, but we should be very clear-eyed,” Petraeus said. “This will not bring about a regime change, sadly.”

School was canceled in several Mexican states and local and foreign governments alike warned their citizens to stay inside, as widespread violence erupted following the army’s killing of the powerful leader of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel.

Nemesio Rubén Oseguera Cervantes, known as “El Mencho” was the boss of one of the fastest-growing criminal networks in Mexico, notorious for trafficking fentanyl, methamphetamine and cocaine to the United States and staging brazen attacks against government officials who challenged it.

He was killed during a shoot-out in his home state of Jalisco as the Mexican military attempted to capture him. Cartel members responded with violence across the country, blocking roads and setting fire to vehicles.