But on his first day in office, Donald Trump scrapped Biden’s clean energy and environmental programs, which he lambasted as woke, anti-American liberal hoaxes.

The 2022 cash injection came through the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), Biden’s landmark climate and infrastructure legislation, and was designed to help revitalize and strengthen former coal communities over the long haul.

It was the largest investment in Appalachia since the 1960s’ “war on poverty” under Lyndon Johnson.

but like many blue-collar regions is now part of the loyal Maga base who believed Trump when he pledged to resuscitate coal country and put American first.

Trump has won big in West Virginia in the past three general elections, securing every county in 2024 with an average of 70% of the vote – the highest percentage any party has won in the state’s history. His vote share was even larger in rural counties including Clay and Wayne, which Huntington straddles.

So you'd expect anger at Trump but you'd be wrong !

yet many of those interviewed by the Guardian blame Washington politics generally rather than Trump.

Families are combing hospitals hoping to find their loved ones as about 200 people still listed as missing, and at least 128 killed

An outpouring of grief was set to sweep Hong Kong on Saturday as an official, three-day mourning period began with a moment of silence for the 128 people killed in one of the city’s deadliest fires.

City leader John Lee, along with senior ministers and dozens of top civil servants, stood in silence for three minutes on Saturday morning outside the government headquarters, where the flags of China and Hong Kong were flown at half-mast.

Hours before that, citizens placed flowers near the charred shell of Wang Fuk Court, the residential complex that burned for more than 40 hours.

Self hosting helps make the internet more decentralized, but at the end of the day someone else owns that series of tubes.

This is probably a pipe dream, but I think it would be cool if we self hosted not just servers but networking infrastructure as well.

I have an extra class amateur radio license and one of the many niches within the ham radio hobby I'm interested in is packet radio and wireless mesh networking.

Packet radio could technically refer to any RF communication that uses packets, including wifi, but I mostly see it used to refer to the AX.25 protocol, which works like an old-school dial-up modem in that it converts data into audio tones that are transmitted using FM or single sideband radios built for voice communication. AX.25 is used mostly nowadays in Amateur Packet Reporting System (APRS) which is used to report location and status info. There's a website, aprs.fi, where you can track vehicles sending their location or weather stations reporting conditions and so on.

In the olden days there were tons of bulletin boards hosted over AX.25 all over the globe that you could reach either directly or through repeaters. There are a few hangers on, and I even hosted one for a while but nobody visited. You could by hardware terminal node controllers (TNCs) that had a BBS feature, and nowadays there are a few software TNCs available.

Several Wifi frequency bands overlap with ham bands, and various projects have arisen that modify commercial wifi gear to turn them into mesh nodes forming a wireless wide area network, operating under FCC part 97 rules rather than the unlicensed part 15 rules that they use out of the box. This allows higher power and channels otherwise off limits to wifi stations. The project I'm most familiar with is Amateur Radio Emergency Data Network (AREDN) which uses a fork of openWRT firmware. I've tried a couple times to get the other hams in my area interested in setting up a network, but it's slow going.

There are also ham-adjacent projects like Meshtastic that I'm not as familiar with.

This barely scratches the surface of what's out there. The ham bands are explicitly non commercial and there are limits on what you can transmit and how much bandwidth you can use, but I dream of a day when everyone's wifi router meshes with all the other routers in the neighborhood which is connected to all the other neighborhoods in the city which is connected via repeaters to all the other cities and so on. Sure it would be slow, but we'd be communicating on our own system that only costs as much as the hardware you run it on.

Immediate software change on ‘significant number’ of jets to result in disruption to half the worldwide fleet

Airlines around the world cancelled and delayed flights heading into the weekend after Airbus announced on Friday that it had ordered immediate repairs to 6,000 of its A320 family of jets in a recall affecting more than half of the global fleet.

The European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA), which is the main certifying authority for A320 aircraft, issued the instruction on Friday night as a precautionary action, saying that “safety is paramount”.

The US Federal Aviation Administration also issued an emergency airworthiness directive for certain Airbus planes, requiring the aircraft to replace or modify specific software.

The fix mainly involves reverting to earlier software and is relatively simple, but must be carried out before the planes can fly again, according to the bulletin to airlines seen by Reuters.

"Nobody will make concessions on the territories, because it’s our land and we stand here," one soldier told NBC News about the proposal's call for Ukraine to cede land to Russia.

From his position on the eastern front lines, the original peace plan backed by Donald Trump looked more like a proposal for Volodymyr Rzhavskyi’s surrender.

“It’s not a plan. It’s a real capitulation. There is nothing to discuss here,” said Rzhavskyi, a senior sergeant serving near Pokrovsk, a supply hub under intense pressure from Russian forces for some 18 months.

While Ukrainian officials fought for changes to the 28-point plan that emerged last week, NBC News spoke with soldiers in the country’s embattled military who expressed frustration at the idea Moscow would be handed its hard-line demands but also hope that they might soon be able to return to their lives.

cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/5853903

Opinion piece by Natalia Morozova, a lawyer for Memorial Human Rights Defence Centre.

Archived version

Remember how everyone recently laughed at the UN for publishing a tearful report saying that no one reads its reports? Well, I can tell you about a fresh report that will sadly be read by even fewer people than any UN document.

Because each of its 224 pages is filled with blood and torture. In every third paragraph, someone is being beaten or electrocuted. And when there’s no beating or torture, there’s a tedious explanation of Russian missile guidance systems and why international law prohibits using such systems at night for strikes on cities — even if the missiles are supposedly high-precision and aimed strictly at military targets.

This report from the Memorial Human Rights Center, titled “Ukraine: War Crimes of the Russian Aggressors,” presents the results of our trip to Ukraine in January 2025.

To give our report even a chance of getting as many views as the UN’s work, I won’t spoil where exactly we were, why we went or what we saw. But I will explain why it’s still worth reading, even if we were slow to publish.

At a time when peace plans, amnesties for war criminals and lifting various sanctions are being discussed, it is crucial to know and remember what Russia is doing in the occupied territories.

For example, Russian soldiers gouged a man’s eye out because they found a blue-and-yellow discount card from the Ukraina supermarket in his wallet. The card, they claimed, indicated sympathy for Nazism.

Other Russians mockingly staged a mass execution of several dozen people the day before withdrawing from Kherson.

Others went a step further by actually executing three brothers simply because the eldest had once served in the Anti-Terrorist Operation (the Ukrainian mission to defend its territorial integrity in 2014-2018). The middle brother miraculously survived after a bullet hit him in the jaw. He crawled out of what was literally a mass grave, made his way back to the village by back roads and told them everything.

Russian soldiers also stole cars and engaged in other forms of looting and torture as brutal as their imagination can concoct. Always with taunts of “fascist” and “Banderite scum,” and the words, “And what made you think you can live better than us?”

...

This is the terror Russia establishes in the occupied territories.

...

Imagine being forced [as an inmate in a Russian penal colony] to stand motionless from six in the morning until eight in the evening without shifting your weight or leaning on anything. Move, and they beat you. This goes on for months while you develop varicose veins, ulcers or gangrene. This is how they torture people at the notorious Penal Colony No. 10 in Mordovia. In addition, prisoners have dogs set on them, suffer beatings and are forced to memorize “Katyusha” and the Russian national anthem.

...

We can now afford to say we warned you.

Although, as the dissident Alexander Esenin-Volpin liked to say, we did not “put logic into this system.” Therefore, it is pointless to look for it: a pattern of brutality is unmistakably visible from Chechnya through Georgia and Syria to Ukraine.

cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/5853903

Opinion piece by Natalia Morozova, a lawyer for Memorial Human Rights Defence Centre.

Archived version

Remember how everyone recently laughed at the UN for publishing a tearful report saying that no one reads its reports? Well, I can tell you about a fresh report that will sadly be read by even fewer people than any UN document.

Because each of its 224 pages is filled with blood and torture. In every third paragraph, someone is being beaten or electrocuted. And when there’s no beating or torture, there’s a tedious explanation of Russian missile guidance systems and why international law prohibits using such systems at night for strikes on cities — even if the missiles are supposedly high-precision and aimed strictly at military targets.

This report from the Memorial Human Rights Center, titled “Ukraine: War Crimes of the Russian Aggressors,” presents the results of our trip to Ukraine in January 2025.

To give our report even a chance of getting as many views as the UN’s work, I won’t spoil where exactly we were, why we went or what we saw. But I will explain why it’s still worth reading, even if we were slow to publish.

At a time when peace plans, amnesties for war criminals and lifting various sanctions are being discussed, it is crucial to know and remember what Russia is doing in the occupied territories.

For example, Russian soldiers gouged a man’s eye out because they found a blue-and-yellow discount card from the Ukraina supermarket in his wallet. The card, they claimed, indicated sympathy for Nazism.

Other Russians mockingly staged a mass execution of several dozen people the day before withdrawing from Kherson.

Others went a step further by actually executing three brothers simply because the eldest had once served in the Anti-Terrorist Operation (the Ukrainian mission to defend its territorial integrity in 2014-2018). The middle brother miraculously survived after a bullet hit him in the jaw. He crawled out of what was literally a mass grave, made his way back to the village by back roads and told them everything.

Russian soldiers also stole cars and engaged in other forms of looting and torture as brutal as their imagination can concoct. Always with taunts of “fascist” and “Banderite scum,” and the words, “And what made you think you can live better than us?”

...

This is the terror Russia establishes in the occupied territories.

...

Imagine being forced [as an inmate in a Russian penal colony] to stand motionless from six in the morning until eight in the evening without shifting your weight or leaning on anything. Move, and they beat you. This goes on for months while you develop varicose veins, ulcers or gangrene. This is how they torture people at the notorious Penal Colony No. 10 in Mordovia. In addition, prisoners have dogs set on them, suffer beatings and are forced to memorize “Katyusha” and the Russian national anthem.

...

We can now afford to say we warned you.

Although, as the dissident Alexander Esenin-Volpin liked to say, we did not “put logic into this system.” Therefore, it is pointless to look for it: a pattern of brutality is unmistakably visible from Chechnya through Georgia and Syria to Ukraine.

"A job listing reveals the first details of Google’s fusion of Android and ChromeOS. "

"We know a little more about Google’s long-gestating plans to combine the best parts of Android and ChromeOS into a single OS thanks to a job listing for a product manager to work on 'Aluminium OS.' The job ad describes it as 'a new operating system built with Artificial Intelligence (AI) at the core.'"

European Council data showing that 17 percent of people with disabilities experience violence, compared to eight percent of those without disabilities.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.today/post/42655760

Thousands of demonstrators gathered in the western German city of Giessen on Saturday as the far-right Alternative for Germany’s new youth organization was set to kick off its founding convention.

Groups of protesters blocked or tried to block roads in and around the city of some 93,000 people in the early morning. Police said they used pepper spray after stones were thrown at officers at one location.

The new youth organization of the anti-immigration Alternative for Germany, or AfD, is to be set up in a meeting at Giessen’s convention center. Its predecessor, the Young Alternative — a largely autonomous group with relatively loose links to the party — was dissolved at the end of March after AfD decided to formally cut ties with it.

More in the article.

In December 2024, Amnesty concluded that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza by three of those acts – including deliberately inflicting on Palestinians conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction.

In an update on Thursday, Amnesty said: “Israel continues to severely restrict the entry of supplies and the restoration of services essential for the survival of the civilian population.

“Despite a reduction in scale of attacks, and some limited improvements, there has been no meaningful change in the conditions Israel is inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza and no evidence to indicate that Israel’s intent has changed.”