A coordinated online campaign has reportedly encouraged users to alter fuel station information on digital maps across Russia, creating confusion among drivers.

The activity involves changing station statuses by marking locations with available fuel as empty or showing closed stations as operational.

Supporters of the campaign claim the effort is designed to disrupt travel decisions, increase uncertainty, and create additional pressure around fuel availability.

• A tire chemical called 6PPD-Q, already blamed for killing salmon, was examined for possible links to Alzheimer’s disease in a new computer-based study.
• Using computer models, researchers found that the chemical can latch onto several proteins associated with Alzheimer’s and reach brain regions involved in the disease.
• No patients or animals were tested; the study rests entirely on computer predictions and reused datasets, so it cannot prove the chemical causes Alzheimer’s.

Comments

Hi,

using Cachyos kde I've been making a python script that will move the mouse to a position -> click -> move mouse back to the original position. I can get this working with x11, but it fails with wayland.

Do you know any way to programatically move the mouse and click that works with wayland?

Thanks

Basically, the title. It's an old Toshiba flat screen. I successfully "taught" the keyboard the power button code. The keyboard will turn the TV off, but not on. The power button on the remote is just one button, a toggle, like normal. Of course, the remote will turn the TV on and off, by pressing that one button. I can't imagine what is wrong, it must be the same code for on and off, right? I mean, the things aren't that complicated.

Thank you.

EDIT: It works if I program a button on the keyboard other than the power button. So I programmed button "C1" as the power button and for whatever reason, that button will turn the TV on and off. Weird. It's the keyboard treating the power button differently.

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I don't and have never believed it because I really don't think our government is that smart to pull off something like that.

Scott Metzger | Bluesky | Patreon

cross-posted from: https://infosec.pub/post/49260475

Texas ICE Killing Darkens: Rep Says Witnesses Pressured to Self-Deport

Video Source

The Family has launched a GoFundMe to help with funeral and burial costs, legal expenses, etc.

Burst water mains. Evacuated hospitals. In a closed-door simulation, insurers played out their response to a mass disruption by China’s Volt Typhoon hackers—and found a nightmare scenario.

lmao

Is the greatest inside joke in the industry…

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/8933482

If you are ever confronted by a toad, you soon see why there is little chance of confusing it with its froggy cousin.

I realised this after discovering a glorious, warty specimen settled on damp concrete in the garage one autumn. It was not only its copper-coloured eyes, squat boxer face and bumpy, waterproof skin — allowing it to survive away from water for longer — but its size that impressed. Wild toads can live for more than a decade; this creature may have been as old as my son.

After some deliberation (and Googling) I moved my toad to a pile of logs and fallen leaves near the pond. It was silent as I transported it, in gloved hands to protect its skin from mine, which meant it must have been a female: only male toads squeak when picked up.

Sadly, a report recently found that the chance to perform a toad relocation may become rarer than ever. Led by Dr Silviu Petrovan of the University of Cambridge in collaboration with the charity Froglife last October, it used one of the biggest data-sets ever gathered for amphibian population trends; between 1986 and 2021, a dedicated team of volunteers counted migrating toads during the spring breeding season. The findings were sobering: over the past 40 years, the UK population has declined by nearly half. The common toad (Bufu bufo), now reassessed as ‘near threatened’ in England and Scotland, may soon need a new name.

'In 2025, 275 active patrols helped almost 135,000 toads complete their lust-driven journey to reproduce'

(Image credit: Getty Images/Westend61)

One of two species native to Britain, the common toad has a place in our culture not enjoyed by the natterjack, whose home on sandy coasts and modest population has meant few of us will ever encounter one. The common toad, however, has had a near-ubiquitous presence in Britain since the last Ice Age: a study of frog and toad bones at Repton in Derbyshire found evidence of local populations as far back as the 8th century. The excavation concluded there was a toad boom in the 14th century, which might explain why the creature begins then to creep from folklore into literature.

From magic and medicine to myth, toads have been linked always to the suspicious and powerful: a toad is the first ingredient Shakespeare’s witches drop into their cauldron in Macbeth, the 15th-century Scottish poet Robert Henryson makes his toad treacherous and Milton’s Paradise Lost has Satan himself choosing to inhabit one for his disguise.

As with all folklore, there is confusion: what is bad is also powerful and power is something people try to harness. Across medieval Europe, women were advised that a toad effigy clamped between the knees during childbirth could ease labour pains. Meanwhile, toads were thought to carry a jewel in their heads that changed colour to warn of poison and protect against evil — or, as Shakespeare wrote in As You Like It, the toad was ‘ugly and venomous, wears yet a precious jewel in his head’.

Exquisite houses, the beauty of Nature, and how to get the most from your life, straight to your inbox.

These ‘toad-stones’, mentioned since the Middle Ages, became especially popular between the 14th and 17th centuries. They were, in fact, often fossilised fish teeth, but that did not stop people believing the proper way to extract one was to sit a toad on a red cloth until it belched the stone up, to be caught and set into a ring or amulet for luck.

'Frequently one comes upon shapeless masses of 10 or 20 toads rolling over and over, one clinging to another without distinction of sex'

Two toads, inspiring enough for George Orwell.

(Image credit: Getty Images/Stephan Gehrlein/500px)

Modern literature has given the poor old toad a gentler reputation. In his superb 1946 essay Some Thoughts on the Common Toad, George Orwell describes the creature after hibernation as having ‘a very spiritual look, like a strict Anglo-Catholic towards the end of Lent’. The essay credits the toad — not the cuckoo — as the herald of spring. His description of toad copulation brings to mind a particularly lively urban Saturday night, with the creature entering ‘a phase of intense sexiness. All he knows, at least if he is a male toad, is that he wants to get his arms round something and if you offer him a stick, or even your finger, he will cling to it with surprising strength and take a long time to discover that it is not a female toad. Frequently one comes upon shapeless masses of 10 or 20 toads rolling over and over, one clinging to another without distinction of sex’.

My own re-homed toad did not hop into her new refuge, but crawled, stretching her limbs across the leaves like an aged yogi. The glands in her bumpy skin contain toxins that deter predators, meaning that, unlike the frog, she can stroll away from trouble rather than leap. I never saw her again, nor any sign of the alien-like double-rowed strings of eggs she might have left clinging in the pond. Around St Valentine’s Day, amorous toads leave hibernation and begin their migration to ancestral breeding ponds, sometimes many hundreds of feet away. Most return to the very pond of their birth, using chemical signals and magnetic orientation to find their way — regardless of whether a new A-road now crosses their route. The long, jelly-like strings of eggs hatch within days. It takes two or three months for a tadpole to become an inch-long toadlet, which must then brave cars and predators as it leaves the water to find new ground for feeding and hibernation.

Toads return to the same ponds, which means when those ponds are drained or built over it breaks a link that is both ancient and ecological. Although a toad’s skin may look tough enough for a witch’s cauldron, it is porous. Agricultural pesticides seep through it, poisoning the animal, at the same time as killing off its food sources, such as spiders, beetles, worms and slugs. The creatures that prey on pesticide-poisoned toads are also affected, hedgehogs and otters among them, which often skin the toad inside out to avoid its toxic glands. Climate change, too, plays its part. Last year saw the driest spring in more than a century, disrupting hibernation and the availability of a toad’s choice of food, and milder winters cause toads to wake too soon, losing body condition and producing fewer eggs.

Why should we care about the much-maligned toad, apart from the fact that a world with one hiding in your garage is richer than a world without? The answer lies in the natural cycle. As with birds and insects, the decline of once-common species sends ripples along the food chain. As Froglife’s report notes: ‘It is not extinction, but the population decline of abundant species that will have the most serious ecological consequences. Abundant species tether food webs, account for much of the interaction diversity in a given community, and carry out ecosystem services’.

There is some good news. Froglife reports that, although toad populations crashed by 68% per cent between 1985 and 2013, efforts in the past eight years have brought ‘regional recoveries’, reducing the total decline to under half. Much of this is thanks to the Toad Patrols — volunteers who literally carry toads across roads by the bucketful. In 2025, 275 active patrols helped almost 135,000 toads complete their lust-driven journey to reproduce.

'It would be a shameful thing to have created a landscape that in only 40 years manages to kill off a creature that has survived 400 million, through the extinction of the dinosaurs to the Industrial Revolution'

It takes two or three months for a tadpole to become an inch-long toadlet, which must then brave cars and predators as it leaves the water to find new ground for feeding and hibernation.

(Image credit: Getty Images/Naturfoto Honal)

Community-led action can sound worthy, but futile. In fact, there is precedent in the revival of another creature once commonly squashed on tarmac: the hedgehog. As rural populations continue to fall, urban hedgehogs are making a comeback. The excellently named HogWatch project has seen dramatic rises in hedgehog populations in Highgate Wood, north London, in only eight years, thanks solely to citizen action. In October 2024, the National Hedgehog Conservation Strategy—launched by the People’s Trust for Endangered Species and the British Hedgehog Preservation Society — became the world’s first of its kind, providing a frame-work for NGOs, government, landowners and communities. The Hedgehog Street campaign has already recruited more than 100,000 ‘hedgehog champions’.

Are toads the new hedgehogs? Let’s hope so. It would be a shameful thing to have created a landscape that in only 40 years manages to kill off a creature that has survived 400 million, through the extinction of the dinosaurs to the Industrial Revolution.

In the meantime, anyone with a garden can help. Despite not being able to build amphibian tunnels for commuting juveniles, Jenny Tse-Leon, head of conservation and Impact at Froglife, says that ‘the restoration and creation of more and better-connected ponds and habitats such as woodlands and grasslands are essential to their survival’. No matter the size of your garden, a small pond, log pile, stones or even an upturned flowerpot can become a summer refuge and a winter hibernaculum.

One day, perhaps, the sight of a toad making its slow, dignified way through the garden may become as common as it once was — and our children, too, might move one from a garage to a bed of leaves and see for themselves why these characterful creatures have long been woven into the fabric of British culture.

Unesco report shows children lost out to servicing debt in 113 countries, with 18 spending five times more on loans

education than they did repaying debt last year, according to the UN, at the same time as global aid to education is predicted to decline by up to 30%.

More was spent on servicing foreign debt than on education in 113 developing countries in 2025, according to research by the UN’s culture and education agency, Unesco. In sub-Saharan Africa, countries spent 3.6 times more on debt than education.

The situation is likely to be exacerbated by funding cuts, the agency warned. Low- and lower-middle-income countries have already lost 21% of the aid to education they were receiving in 2023 and could lose up to 30% by 2027. Some countries – including Afghanistan, Mali, Niger and Liberia – have already lost more than 40% in three years.