The Document Foundation, which operates the popular open source productivity suite LibreOffice, is positioning the suite's newest release, v25.8, as a strategic asset for digital sovereignty, targeting governments and enterprises seeking independence from foreign software vendors and cloud infrastructure.
The Document Foundation released the update last week with zero telemetry architecture, full offline capability, and OpenPGP encryption for documents, directly addressing national security concerns about extraterritorial surveillance and software backdoors. The suite requires no internet access for any features and maintains complete transparency through open source code that governments can audit. Government bodies in Germany, Denmark, and France, alongside national ministries in Italy and Brazil, have deployed LibreOffice to meet GDPR compliance, national procurement laws, and IT localization mandates while eliminating unpredictable licensing costs from proprietary vendors.
"It's time to own your documents, own your infrastructure, and own your future," the foundation wrote in a blog post.
After a judge warned that the Federal Trade Commission's probe into Media Matters for America (MMFA) should alarm "all Americans"—viewing it as a likely government retaliation intended to silence critical reporting from a political foe—the FTC this week appealed a preliminary injunction blocking the investigation.
The Republican-led FTC's determined to keep pressure on the nonprofit—which is dedicated to monitoring conservative misinformation—ever since Elon Musk villainized MMFA in 2023 for reporting that ads were appearing next to pro-Nazi posts on X. Musk claims that reporting caused so many brands to halt advertising that X's revenue dropped by $1.5 billion, but advertisers have suggested there technically was no boycott. They've said that many factors influenced each of their independent decisions to leave X—including their concerns about Musk's own antisemitic post, which drew rebuke from the White House in 2023.
In the time since, the toxic content has started coming from within X, via backlash-inducing outputs from its chatbot Grok. For MMFA, advertisers, agencies, and critics, a big question remains: Can the FTC actually penalize advertisers for invoking their own rights to free expression and association by refusing to deal with a private company just because they happened to agree on a collective set of brand standards to avoid monetizing hate speech or offensive content online?
It's all self-justifying bullshit just to let Trump get whatever he wants regardless of how blatantly illegal it is and how instantly they'd clamp down on it if a democrat tried it
Shortly after the Trump administration took office, it started canceling grants for things it had disagreements with: funding for pandemic preparation, efforts to diversify the scientific workforce, efforts that targeted minority health issues, and more. These terminations were challenged in court, and a consolidated case was heard in the District of Massachusetts, pitting the government against individual researchers, organizations that represent them, and states that host research institutions.
The result was a decisive win for the scientists. As the ruling explained, the government's termination efforts violated a statute against "arbitrary and capricious" policies, resulting in a stay that both blocked implementation of the policy and restored the flow of research funding.
That stay remained intact through appeals that brought it to the Supreme Court, which released its ruling on Thursday. As the result is a complicated split among the Justices, the stay against the policy itself remains intact. However, a slim majority decided that government funding issues are required to be heard by a different court and cannot be issued as part of the same ruling. So, researchers who lost their funding due to the now-defunct policy will remain de-funded.
Such a genius that he can only survive with massive public handouts. Let him fund his own shit.
Starlink operator SpaceX isn't getting the broadband money it demanded from state governments despite the Trump administration rewriting the rules of a $42 billion grant program. Instead of directing the lion's share of money to Elon Musk's space and satellite company, early results indicate that states still plan to deploy fiber broadband networks to most of their unserved households.
When the Trump administration announced its overhaul of the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program in March, estimates published by The Wall Street Journal suggested that SpaceX could receive $10 billion to $20 billion under the new rules. Musk clearly expected a big windfall; as we've written, SpaceX alleges that Virginia and Louisiana violated the Trump administration's rules by allocating most of the money to fiber providers instead of Starlink's satellite service.
Assuming Virginia and Louisiana don't back down, SpaceX has indicated it will ask the Trump administration to reject their grant proposals. SpaceX might end up filing similar objections in many other states after more of them reveal their plans. A third state, West Virginia, revealed its plan on Tuesday, and SpaceX isn't likely to be happy with it.
Windows 11 users will receive significant UI refinements and AI improvements starting next month as Microsoft prepares its September feature drop followed by additional updates through fall. The update, Windows Central reports, will bring customizable lock screen widgets globally after months of European exclusivity, photo grid views in Windows Search, and a redesigned Windows Hello authentication interface.
Copilot+ PCs will gain a revamped Recall application with workflow suggestions and File Explorer AI integration through Click To Do. October and November releases will introduce a larger, customizable Start menu allowing removal of the Recommended section and expanded dark mode support for legacy File Explorer dialogs.
In a pair of class actions filed this week, passengers from each coast quibbled with United Airlines and Delta Air Lines' policies charging extra for window seats that are not actually beside windows, instead offering a view of a blank aircraft wall. From a report: "Delta indicated to the plaintiff and class members that the particular seats they chose had a 'window'; even though Delta knew full well they did not," the plaintiffs taking on Delta said in an 18-page complaint filed in federal court in New York, accusing the airline of false advertising and deceptive business practices.
Half of Delta's fleet of nearly 1,000 aircraft comprises Boeing 737s, Boeing 757s and Airbus A321s -- all of which have at least one wall-adjacent seat with no window, according to the plaintiffs. It's where vertical air conditioning riser ducts are located, making putting a window there impossible, the competing Alaska Airlines explains on its website. But unlike Alaska and others, the plaintiffs complain, Delta advertises the seats as having a window, offering them as a "window seat" option on its seat map during checkout.
In Seminole County, a woman is suing a raw-milk producer Keely Farms Dairy and the retailer where she allegedly bought it, claiming that the unpasteurized milk caused a bacterial infection that killed her 20-week-old fetus. She said she’d been buying the milk for months without incident. When she noticed the label said something to the effect of “for consumption by animals,” the seller allegedly told her it was just a “technical requirement to sell ‘farm milk.’”
Soon after, her toddler reportedly drank some. Within days, he was violently ill, crippled by diarrhea, vomiting, high fever, and dangerous dehydration, according to the lawsuit. He was rushed to the hospital multiple times as doctors tried to stabilize him. Ultimately, surgeons allegedly had to operate for intussusception, a life-threatening condition where the intestine folds over itself, cutting off blood flow and risking tissue death. The procedure can require removing sections of the intestine, leaving lifelong digestive complications. Tests allegedly confirmed the worst—infections with both E. coli and campylobacter, two bacteria notorious for causing severe gastrointestinal disease and, in young children, potentially permanent bodily damage.
Florida health officials have linked Keely Farms Dairy to at least 21 bacterial illnesses across northeast and central Florida since January. Six victims were kids under age 10, and seven people were hospitalized, with at least two cases suffering severe complications. State rules say raw milk can be sold only for animal consumption and must be labeled as such—which it was. That didn’t stop people from apparently marketing it for humans, anyway.
Joseph A. Ladapo, Florida’s surgeon general, shown in 2021.
Raw milk used to be a niche product for homesteaders and food purists. But in the post-pandemic culture wars, it’s become a conservative badge of honor—a way to thumb your nose at the “nanny state” and reject public health authority. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., our anti-science health and human services secretary, is a fan of it. And right-wing influencers pitch it as “natural” and “traditional,” dismissing government data showing it’s far more likely to carry dangerous bacteria. The Food and Drug Administration and public health warnings? Just liberal elites trying to keep you down.
Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo—one of Gov. Ron DeSantis’ most loyal flunkies—has fed that narrative. In response to this outbreak, he posted on X, “Floridians have the freedom to make informed health choices. I support the decision to consume raw milk when sought for potential health benefits and protective factors. Be aware of your source and know the risks.”
A woman seems to have lost her fetus—supposedly the ultimate conservative tragedy—and Ladapo shrugs. He talks about the “potential benefits” of raw milk but cites no evidence (hence “potential”). He tells people to “be aware” of their source, as if ordinary consumers can inspect a dairy themselves or would know what to look for. That’s the point of food safety inspections. And if even he acknowledges that “risks” are real enough to require awareness, why is he encouraging the practice at all?
Meanwhile, the lawsuit may be the only thing that challenges this nonsense. If dairies and resellers start paying out for every child hospitalized and every pregnancy lost, maybe the right’s raw-milk fad will dry up. Until then, the Florida GOP is quite literally defending the freedom to poison children.
Slashdot reader darwinmac writes: Volkswagen is offering a subscription model for extra horsepower on its ID.3 electric cars. Want to bump your ride from the standard 201 bhp to the full 228 bhp? That will be about £16.50 per month or £165 per year, or a one-time £649 "lifetime" fee that is tied to the car, not you. If you sell it, you have to pay again.
VW defended this to the BBC by saying you are basically paying for a sportier experience without buying a higher powered model upfront, calling it "nothing new." Nothing changes mechanically. You are just paying VW to essentially flip a boolean somewhere in the car's software.
Corey Lewandowski, the pugnacious brawler who once managed Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign, will just not go away. No, literally. He has apparently exceeded the 130 days he can serve as a “special government employee”—but he’s not leaving.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump shakes hands with Corey Lewandowski before he speaks at a campaign rally on Oct. 23, 2023, in Derry, New Hampshire.
Lewandowski has been a frequent presence at the Department of Homeland Security, acting as the de facto chief of staff for Secretary Kristi Noem and amassing power at DHS. He’s fired people, signed off on billions of dollars in grant funding, demanded that employees take polygraph tests, and went to war on employees with pronouns in their bio. Quite the busy boy for someone with no official role.
In order to get around the 130-day limit, it appears that he’s just not clocking in, instead sliding in with other employees so he doesn’t have to swipe his badge. It’s totally great and cool to learn that government building security is so lax that it’s no problem for someone to get in without a badge.
Lewandowski has been keeping his own time, and according to him, he’s only worked 69 days (nice) since January 2025. The administration believes it is an undercount, but thus far, the White House hasn’t taken any action to remove the squatter.
Lewandowski’s employment status is the same as Elon Musk had, but Musk really did leave at the 130-day mark after launching his DOGE disaster. Of course, that departure got very messy when he started feuding with Trump.
Lewandowski draws no salary as an SGE, so it’s not like he’s clinging to this for the cash. But if he leaves, he can’t continue consolidating his power at DHS. He probably wouldn’t be able to accompany Noem on trips to Israel, Chile, Argentina, Costa Rica, Colombia, El Salvador, and Mexico, even if he is her not-at-all-secret boyfriend.
It would be kind of weird to bring your boyfriend to high-level meetings with overseas diplomats or let him steer no-bid government contracts to cronies, as Noem has done with Lewandowski. But hey, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is letting his wife help run the Pentagon and bringing her to sensitive meetings with foreign military leaders, so maybe Lewandowski could just keep tagging along with Noem while she cosplays as a firefighter, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent, and a border patrol cowgirl.
The real problem for Lewandowski isn’t the 130-day limit. If the White House wanted him to stay, they’d engage in complicated appointment shenanigans to let him do so, just like they did with Trump’s former personal attorney Alina Habba in her role as Acting U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey. There, the White House has strung together various short-term ways to keep her in her job despite not being confirmed by the Senate. But it’s Trump who doesn’t want Lewandowski in an official role, and it’s not like there’s any way around that.
Reportedly, Trump refused to let Lewandowski become Noem’s official chief of staff because he was worried about the optics of him working for someone he is romantically involved with. There’s also the small matter of both Noem and Lewandowski being married to other people, neither of whom ever seem to be mentioned.
So, possible romantic entanglements keep you out of the administration, but inciting people to kill police officers is no problem. Being a far-right troll who represented Andrew Tate? Totes cool. Hanging with white supremacists? You get to lead the U.S. Institute of Peace!
No one knows if the White House will bring the hammer down on Lewandowski, but maybe he can just officially move in with Noem rather than keeping an apartment across the street. It’s no chief of staff job, but at least he’d save some money on rent.
The dates of Aug. 11-12 marks the eighth anniversary of the neo-Nazi protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, billed as “Unite the Right.” After that event, the bigoted ideas and beliefs of that group of racists has now been integrated throughout the federal government thanks to President Donald Trump.
The rally came less than a year after Trump was sworn in on Jan. 20, 2017. The event, where some chanted “Jews will not replace us” was meant as an assertion of white supremacy, which had been handed a lifeline with Trump’s 2016 election win. The protest soon descended into blood and death after a neo-Nazi drove his car into a crowd of counterprotesters, killing Heather Heyer and injuring 35 others.
It was in the aftermath of that murder that Trump infamously praised neo-Nazis as “very fine people” and spent the next four years on a rampage of racism and bigotry. Notably, former President Joe Biden has repeatedly cited the open display of racism and Trump’s blessing of the rally as a key factor that motivated him to run for president in 2020, ultimately defeating Trump.
For most of his time in the public eye, both as a reality TV star and then as a politician, Trump has stoked the fires of racism and inspired acts of violence. Now back in the White House after his 2024 election win, Trump has integrated the views of the hatemongers who marched eight years ago throughout his administration.
Elon Musk
World’s richest man Elon Musk launched the second Trump term, celebrating his massive financial investment in the Republican candidate and his party, with a Nazi salute at an inauguration event. Musk, who has allowed social media platform X to become a breeding ground for bigoted Nazi content, led the Department of Government Efficiency at Trump’s behest.
DOGE also worked as a refuge for bigotry’s true believers, where figures like staffer Marko Elez was hired despite his documented past online of pushing racist ideas.
Stephen Miller, who works as the architect of Trump’s most venomous anti-immigrant policy, has a documented history of promoting white supremacist ideas and literature.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who Trump hired after watching him for hours as a host on Fox News, has made clear he doesn’t like Muslim people and has denigrated women serving in the military.
Paul Ingrassia
There are bigots and people with close affiliations to notable hate figures littered throughout the Trump administration.
Paul Ingrassia, who the Anti-Defamation League slammed for praising Nazi extremists, is a White House liaison. White House Office of Management and Budget communications director Rachel Cauley was on the board of the Patriot Freedom Project, a nonprofit that advocated for the release of Jan. 6 rioter Timothy Hale-Cusanelli—who infamously posed as Hitler in a series of online photos, not to mention spouted his rhetoric. Ed Martin, who works at the Department of Justice following an appointment by Trump, also voiced support for Hale-Cusanelli.
On policy, Trump has created a bigot’s paradise. Since the first day his administration has been focused on attacking and erasing gains made following the Civil Rights Movement and era. He has sought to reintroduce discrimination in federal contracting, pushed to purge civil rights and pro-diversity language, and has even overseen the removal of acknowledgements of civil rights advances.
At the same time, Trump has pushed policies like a ban on transgender military service, turning away Americans who have volunteered to serve in positions where they could be injured or killed in service of their country.
Trump’s integration of the ideas the “Unite the Right” rallygoers are in favor of is so complete that Nazis have gone to the media to make their appreciation known. Dalton Henry Stout of the group Aryan Freedom Network recently told Reuters Trump has “awakened a lot of people to the issues we’ve been raising for years.”
Stout also told the outlet that Trump is “the best thing that’s happened to us.”
Neo-Nazi groups are praising President Donald Trump for bringing their bigoted ideas and rhetoric into the mainstream of American politics. Over the years, multiple Democratic leaders have warned about this possibility.
Reuters reported on Friday that the Aryan Freedom Network, a Texas-based white supremacist group, is pleased with the direction that Trump has taken the country in. Co-leader Dalton Henry Stout told the outlet Trump has “awakened a lot of people to the issues we’ve been raising for years” and described the head of the Republican Party as “the best thing that’s happened to us.”
The white supremacists told Reuters they love Trump’s repeated praise of “Western values,” his attacks on DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) initiatives, and his opposition to immigration. Trump’s parroting of their brand of hate has reportedly increased interest and recruitment in the group.
White supremacists march in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017.
Aryan Freedom Network describes itself as a “white racialist” group and has called for white people to “take back our land.”
The unity between the Trump-led MAGA movement and previously ostracized white supremacist groups has occurred alongside a rise in white supremacist violence. In 2020, 13% of extremist demonstrations and violent acts involved white nationalists, according to data from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data project, as reported by Reuters. That has grown every year since, and by 2024, almost 80% of those events involved white supremacists.
In the future, it will be more difficult to obtain data on white supremacist violence because the Trump administration has cut or scaled back federal programs collecting such data and countering such domestic terrorism. Naturally, that is a boon to the movement.
It probably isn’t a coincidence that the most visible instance of political violence with white supremacist overtones was the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. That insurrection was led by pro-Trump forces and initiated by Trump as a way to overturn his loss to Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election. At the beginning of his second term, Trump pardoned many of the offenders, thereby sanctioning their violent acts.
Echoing the white supremacist movement, Trump has repeatedly sought to erase gains made during the historic Civil Rights movement. His administration has purged acknowledgement of milestone accomplishments by Black, Latino, and LGBTQ+ Americans.
Pro-Trump rioters try to break through a police barrier at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021
As part of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency’s attack on government agencies, racists loyal to Trump benefactor Elon Musk were installed and supported in the administration. Most notably, as part of Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has been deployed to engage in street-level thuggery to harass, manhandle, and abuse migrant populations and the communities that support them.
In one of the more open endorsements of the type of white supremacy that groups like Aryan Freedom Network espouse, Trump has gone about restoring statues and military base names meant to honor pro-slavery Confederates.
The administration’s allies are on a neo-Nazi kick as well. Musk has allowed pro-Nazi content to flourish and thrive on his social media site, X, formerly Twitter. Musk has expressed support for Nazi-affiliated parties around the world, including the extremist Alternative for Germany party.
On Fox News, host Greg Gutfeld recently argued that conservatives should tell each other “What up, my Nazi? Hey, what up, my Nazi?” to mock Americans’ sensitivities to racism. Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, one of the biggest Trump backers in media, posted a meme on Wednesday that argued “We Are ALL Hitler” after Musk and Trump were criticized for making Nazi-style salutes.
The affiliation between Trump and the neo-Nazi right was a topic of concern raised by then-Vice President Kamala Harris during her presidential campaign last year.
“I think it’s a tragedy that we have someone who wants to be president who has consistently over the course of his career attempted to use race to divide the American people,” Harris said last September.
Another reminder to stay the fuck away from Google
As Gemini is increasingly woven into the fabric of Google, the way the chatbot accesses and interacts with your data is in a constant state of flux. Today, Google is announcing several big changes to how its AI adapts to you, giving it the ability to remember more details about your chats for improved answers. If that's a concern, Google also has a new temporary chat option that won't affect the way Gemini thinks about you.
You might recall several months back when Google added a "personalization" option to the Gemini model selector. This mode leaned on your Google search history to customize responses, a feature that did not seem to appeal to many Gemini users. Google later dropped that mode, but a new attempt at customization is now rolling out. Gemini is getting an option called Personal Context. When enabled, the chatbot will remember details about your past conversations, adapting its replies without being specifically prompted.
Google claims Personal Context will produce more relevant responses, particularly when you ask the chatbot to make recommendations. This is separate from the saved instructions feature, which allows you to provide explicit instructions for Gemini to be used in crafting outputs. This does have the potential to make Gemini feel more engaging, but that's not always a good thing. AI chatbots that get too friendly with the user can reinforce misconceptions and lead to delusional thinking, something we've seen distressingly often with AI models.
America has a motorcycle problem. Whereas the rest of the world views two-wheeled motorized transportation as transportation, the US sees motorcycles and scooters as toys. They're not something you use to commute to work or run errands. Instead, they're for riding to the coffee shop on weekends. This is a flawed line of thinking, and I'll tell you why, using two motorcycles as examples.
But first, hear me out. I live in Los Angeles, which is famous for its hellacious traffic. For motorcyclists, it's also famous because you get the ability to legally split lanes (i.e., ride between cars on the lane-dividing lines) and filter (i.e., ride between vehicles at a stoplight to get to the front), as well as its consistently gorgeous climate with a 365-day riding season. These factors aren't the case in every major city, but many of the benefits of motorcycling still apply elsewhere with the right gear and a can-do attitude.
The Italian
First, the 2025 Ducati Monster SP. This Italian beauty seemingly has everything you'd want in a fun motorcycle. It's lightweight, at just 412 lbs (187 kg) fueled. It's powerful, with a 937cc L-twin that produces 111 hp (83 kW) and 69 ft-lb (94 Nm) of torque. It features an upright and comfortable riding position, along with very good suspension and brakes courtesy of Ohlins and Brembo, respectively.
Good. A business model built on theft has to have consequences
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: AI industry groups are urging an appeals court to block what they say is the largest copyright class action ever certified. They've warned that a single lawsuit raised by three authors over Anthropic's AI training now threatens to "financially ruin" the entire AI industry if up to 7 million claimants end up joining the litigation and forcing a settlement. Last week, Anthropic petitioned (PDF) to appeal the class certification, urging the court to weigh questions that the district court judge, William Alsup, seemingly did not. Alsup allegedly failed to conduct a "rigorous analysis" of the potential class and instead based his judgment on his "50 years" of experience, Anthropic said.
If the appeals court denies the petition, Anthropic argued, the emerging company may be doomed. As Anthropic argued, it now "faces hundreds of billions of dollars in potential damages liability at trial in four months" based on a class certification rushed at "warp speed" that involves "up to seven million potential claimants, whose works span a century of publishing history," each possibly triggering a $150,000 fine. Confronted with such extreme potential damages, Anthropic may lose its rights to raise valid defenses of its AI training, deciding it would be more prudent to settle, the company argued. And that could set an alarming precedent, considering all the other lawsuits generative AI (GenAI) companies face over training on copyrighted materials, Anthropic argued. "One district court's errors should not be allowed to decide the fate of a transformational GenAI company like Anthropic or so heavily influence the future of the GenAI industry generally," Anthropic wrote. "This Court can and should intervene now."
In a court filing Thursday, the Consumer Technology Association and the Computer and Communications Industry Association backed Anthropic, warning the appeals court that "the district court's erroneous class certification" would threaten "immense harm not only to a single AI company, but to the entire fledgling AI industry and to America's global technological competitiveness." According to the groups, allowing copyright class actions in AI training cases will result in a future where copyright questions remain unresolved and the risk of "emboldened" claimants forcing enormous settlements will chill investments in AI. "Such potential liability in this case exerts incredibly coercive settlement pressure for Anthropic," industry groups argued, concluding that "as generative AI begins to shape the trajectory of the global economy, the technology industry cannot withstand such devastating litigation. The United States currently may be the global leader in AI development, but that could change if litigation stymies investment by imposing excessive damages on AI companies."
Good. Building a business model on theft should not be allowed
AI industry groups are urging an appeals court to block what they say is the largest copyright class action ever certified. They've warned that a single lawsuit raised by three authors over Anthropic's AI training now threatens to "financially ruin" the entire AI industry if up to 7 million claimants end up joining the litigation and forcing a settlement.
Last week, Anthropic petitioned to appeal the class certification, urging the court to weigh questions that the district court judge, William Alsup, seemingly did not. Alsup allegedly failed to conduct a "rigorous analysis" of the potential class and instead based his judgment on his "50 years" of experience, Anthropic said.
If the appeals court denies the petition, Anthropic argued, the emerging company may be doomed. As Anthropic argued, it now "faces hundreds of billions of dollars in potential damages liability at trial in four months" based on a class certification rushed at "warp speed" that involves "up to seven million potential claimants, whose works span a century of publishing history," each possibly triggering a $150,000 fine.
On Thursday, the Trump administration issued an executive order asserting political control over grant funding, including all federally supported research. The order requires that any announcement of funding opportunities be reviewed by the head of the agency or someone they designate, which means a political appointee will have the ultimate say over what areas of science the US funds. Individual grants will also require clearance from a political appointee and "must, where applicable, demonstrably advance the President’s policy priorities."
The order also instructs agencies to formalize the ability to cancel previously awarded grants at any time if they're considered to "no longer advance agency priorities." Until a system is in place to enforce the new rules, agencies are forbidden from starting new funding programs.
In short, the new rules would mean that all federal science research would need to be approved by a political appointee who may have no expertise in the relevant areas, and the research can be canceled at any time if the political winds change. It would mark the end of a system that has enabled US scientific leadership for roughly 70 years.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Two years ago, researchers in the Netherlands discovered an intentional backdoor in an encryption algorithm baked into radios used by critical infrastructure -- as well as police, intelligence agencies, and military forces around the world -- that made any communication secured with the algorithm vulnerable to eavesdropping. When the researchers publicly disclosed the issue in 2023, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), which developed the algorithm, advised anyone using it for sensitive communication to deploy an end-to-end encryption solution on top of the flawed algorithm to bolster the security of their communications. But now the same researchers have found that at least one implementation of the end-to-end encryption solution endorsed by ETSI has a similar issue that makes it equally vulnerable to eavesdropping. The encryption algorithm used for the device they examined starts with a 128-bit key, but this gets compressed to 56 bits before it encrypts traffic, making it easier to crack. It's not clear who is using this implementation of the end-to-end encryption algorithm, nor if anyone using devices with the end-to-end encryption is aware of the security vulnerability in them. Wired notes that the end-to-end encryption the researchers examined is most commonly used by law enforcement and national security teams. "But ETSI's endorsement of the algorithm two years ago to mitigate flaws found in its lower-level encryption algorithm suggests it may be used more widely now than at the time."
If anyone needed a reminder that US health secretary and fervent anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has no background in science or medicine, look no further than the video he posted on social media Tuesday evening.
In the two-and-a-half-minute clip, Kennedy announced that he is cancelling nearly $500 million in funding for the development of mRNA-based vaccines against diseases that pose pandemic threats. The funding will be clawed back from 22 now-defunct contracts awarded through the federal agency tasked with developing medical countermeasures to public health threats. The agency is the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA).
Kennedy is generally opposed to vaccines, but he is particularly hostile to mRNA-based vaccines. Since the remarkably successful debut of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines during the COVID-19 pandemic—which were developed and mass-produced with unprecedented speed—Kennedy has continually disparaged and spread misinformation about them.
Israel’s use of starvation as a weapon of war has been well-documented by human rights organizations since 2023. | Abdelhakim Abu Riash/Anadolu via Getty Images
“We are imposing a complete siege on [Gaza]. No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel — everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we must act accordingly.”
That was Yoav Gallant, then the Israeli defense minister, two days after Hamas’s attack on October 7, 2023, killed some 1,200 Israelis and took 250 more hostage. The following week, Israel’s national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, echoed a similar sentiment: “So long as Hamas does not release the hostages,” he posted on X, “the only thing that should enter Gaza is hundreds of tons of air force explosives — not an ounce of humanitarian aid.”
Israel, in other words, did not engineer a famine in Gaza overnight. From the war’s outset, Israel has been blocking humanitarian aid from entering the Gaza Strip, to varying degrees, resulting in the spread of preventable diseases, including malnutrition, across the territory. In fact, since late 2023, international organizations have been warning that Gaza has been on the brink of famine. In April of last year, Save the Children confirmed that children had been dying from starvation. And now, the UN-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) — the world’s leading authority on hunger crises — has officially determined that there is a famine in Gaza City and its surrounding areas, adding a warning that famine will rapidly spread to other parts of the Gaza Strip without immediate intervention.
So why is it that it took this long for the world to turn its attention to this humanitarian disaster?
Part of the answer is that in recent weeks, the situation really has gotten much more dire, after Israel ended its 42-day ceasefire with Hamas in March and stopped allowing any aid into Gaza for two months, as my colleague Joshua Keating recently wrote.
But there’s another factor: The images coming out of Gaza have been absolutely heart-wrenching. Photos and videos have gone viral — on news sites and on social media — clearly showing malnourished babies starving to death, as well as those showing children and adults with their skin clinging to their bones with barely anything in between. “It is tragic that it takes those types of really graphic, really horrible images to break through,” said Alex de Waal, an expert on famine who serves as the executive director of the World Peace Foundation at Tufts University. “And that is such a terrible commentary on just a gargantuan failure.”
This, of course, is nowhere near the first time horrific images from Gaza have surfaced and sparked outrage around the world. But there’s something about the visibility of a human-made famine that, for many people — including some of Israel’s most ardent supporters — crosses a moral threshold.
Starving an entire population cannot be spun as collateral damage or merely the cost of war — a messaging tactic that Israel has turned to to justify its killing of innocent people despite plenty of evidence that it has routinely targeted civilians. “You can’t starve anyone by accident. It has to be deliberate and sustained,” de Waal said. “It is beyond dispute that you have to starve people systematically because it takes so long.”
Israel’s mass starvation of Gaza is, by definition, a form of collective punishment — imposing potentially fatal consequences on every Palestinian living in the enclave, whether they are a combatant or an innocent civilian. That’s why using starvation as a weapon of war is illegal under international law.
But that wasn’t always the case. What Israel is doing is part of a long history of weaponizing food and basic resources. Still, while there are many examples of countries intentionally creating or exacerbating famine conditions on populations, there are also aspects of Israel’s current policies in Gaza that are unique.
How countries have used starvation as a weapon of war
Using starvation as a weapon of war wasn’t always explicitly illegal under international law. The siege of Leningrad by the Nazis and their allies, which lasted from 1941 to 1944, was one of the deadliest sieges in history, killing more than 1 million people.
Many of these deaths were attributed to starvation. An American-run tribunal, however, determined that the forced starvation was compatible with international law. After all, it was a tactic that the Allies themselves had used as well, notably in their blockades of German-occupied territories and in Japan.
There are many examples throughout history of famines that were either entirely engineered or deliberately made worse through reckless colonial and war policies. In 1943, as the British empire’s colonial rule of the Indian subcontinent was nearing its end, the Bengal famine killed up to 3 million people.
Since then, studies have uncovered scientific evidence that the famine was not a result of climate conditions like serious drought. Instead, British policies, under Prime Minister Winston Churchill — which included confiscating rice and boats from the coastal parts of Bengal and exporting rice from India to other parts of the empire — seriously exacerbated famine conditions. Churchill denied this, saying that the reason there was a famine was because Indians were “breeding like rabbits” and suggesting that if the situation was indeed as dire as people claimed, then Mahatma Gandhi would be dead.
Another example is the Holodomor, the famine that killed millions of Ukrainians under the Soviet Union in the early 1930s. Joseph Stalin pursued a range of policies that engineered famine conditions — including restricting the movement of people, seizing grain even when there wasn’t enough to feed the local population, and exporting grain even as Ukrainians starved — in part, historians argue, to tamp down Ukrainian nationalist movements. Several countries and scholars have since recognized the famine as an act of genocide.
The US also used blockades as a means to advance its war interests. One of its military campaigns against Japan during World War II was named “Operation Starvation” — which aimed to destroy Japan’s economy by limiting the distribution of food and other imports. The military assault deprived Japan of essential raw materials and led to food shortages. That, along with naval blockades and America’s destruction of agricultural infrastructure contributed to widespread malnutrition and starvation.
It was only after World War II that the Geneva Conventions of 1949 established some rules about the responsibility to allow food and other essentials into enemy territory for vulnerable populations. But even then, by and large, starvation tactics were still permissible.
“The reason it was permitted was because the Americans and the British rather liked using it,” de Waal said. “It really wasn’t until the British and the Americans had abandoned their colonial wars — the American one being Vietnam in the ’70s — that they thought, ‘Okay, now we’re not going to fight these kinds of wars, and we can get around to banning it.’”
The Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions, which were agreed to in 1977, finally prohibited the “starvation of civilians as a method of warfare [or combat].” And just over 20 years later, in 1998, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court officially codified weaponizing starvation as a war crime.
“Here, what we see is all the ingredients coming together in a deliberate way. We see the [Israeli leaders’] statements; we see the total bombing of all the food production,” said Neve Gordon, a professor of human rights law at Queen Mary University of London. “I don’t think there’s [another] case in history, because other cases had to do with other stuff going on that were not human-made. Here, the whole starvation — from beginning to end — is human-made.”
But since the ceasefire ended in March, Israel has placed unprecedented constraints on those organizations. Instead, since May, Israel has been coordinating with the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a newly formed US- and Israel-backed private entity that operates militarized distribution sites in central and southern Gaza.
Israeli troops have also shot at aid-seekers at GHF’s distribution sites, and, according to the UN, some 1,000 Palestinians have been killed trying to get aid from GHF. Gordon calls GHF “a famine profiteering company,” adding that it “does not actually provide the necessary food, while producing these hunger games that everyone was watching, [showing] starving people are going to get food and getting shot at.”
While Egypt has been complicit in enforcing the blockade through its border with Gaza, the reality is that even aid going into Gaza through the Egyptian border has to go through Israeli inspection. The result is that Israel has effectively vacuum-sealed Gaza, with full control of what aid gets in.
Israel could have chosen to prevent a famine at any point. Instead, it has repeatedly hampered or entirely rejected efforts to deliver life-saving aid to Palestinians — all in contravention of international law. “Israel is not unique at all in using hunger as a weapon of war,” de Waal said. “What is unique about the Israeli one is just how rigorous and how sustained it is, and how it is in defiance of an international humanitarian capacity that can respond just like that. So if Netanyahu wanted every [child in Gaza] to have breakfast tomorrow, it can be organized.”
One example of Israel’s (and the world’s) capacity to stop the worst from happening is the polio vaccination campaign that happened last year. When polio — which had been eradicated from Gaza for 25 years — resurfaced as a result of the humanitarian and sanitation crisis imposed by Israel’s war, governments around the world pressured Israel to agree to a humanitarian pause in combat, in order to vaccinate children across the Gaza Strip. In the middle of the war, the vaccination campaigns were successful, reaching 95 percent of the target population. An effort to stop malnutrition can be similarly efficient.
The faster Israel relents and allows unimpeded aid delivery, the more lives can be saved. But unfortunately, it’s already too late for far too many Palestinians in Gaza. “Even if there was divine intervention — and we had a ceasefire and the best doctors and the right kind of food — I think we’d still have hundreds [or] thousands of deaths,” Gordon said. “But we’re not going to have that divine intervention.”
Update, August 22, 10:10 am ET: This article was originally published on August 7, 2025, and has been updated to include news of the IPC’s classification of famine in Gaza.
Dems had better wake up: The GOP doesn't respect the rules, so Dems have to stop with the unilateral disarmament
As New York Governor Kathy Hochul denounced the GOP’s aggressive attempt to gerrymander Democrats into political oblivion this week, she lamented her party’s built-in disadvantage. “I’m tired of fighting this fight with my hand tied behind my back,” she told reporters.
As political metaphors go, it’s not a bad one. Hochul omitted a key detail, however: Democrats provided the rope themselves. For more than a decade, they’ve tried to be the party of good government on redistricting. But Democrats’ support for letting independent commissions draw legislative maps has cost them seats in key blue states, and their push to ban gerrymandering nationwide flopped in the courts and in Congress.
Now that Republicans, at the behest of President Donald Trump, are moving quickly to redraw district lines in Texas and elsewhere in a bid to lock in their tenuous House majority, Democrats want to match them seat for seat in the states that they control. But the knots they’ve tied are hard to undo.
To boost the GOP’s chances of winning an additional five House seats in Texas next year, all Governor Greg Abbott had to do was call the state’s deeply conservative legislature back to Austin for an emergency session to enact new congressional maps. The proposed changes carve up Democratic seats in Texas’s blue urban centers of Dallas, Houston, and Austin, as well as two seats along the U.S.-Mexico border, where Republicans are betting they can retain support among Latino voters who have moved right during the Trump era. Democratic lawmakers are trying to block the move by leaving the state and denying Republicans a required quorum in the legislature.
By comparison, Democrats face a much longer and more arduous process to do the same in California and New York. Voters in both states would have to approve constitutional amendments to repeal or circumvent the nonpartisan redistricting commissions that Democrats helped enact. In California, Democrats hope to pass legislation this month that would put the question to voters this November. If the amendment is approved, the legislature could implement the new districts for the 2026 election. In New York, the legislature must pass the change in two separate sessions, meaning that a newly gerrymandered congressional map could not take effect until 2028 at the earliest.
By then, some Democrats fear it may be too late. Republicans want to gain seats through mid-decade redistricting not only in Texas but in GOP-controlled states such as Florida, Missouri, Ohio, and Indiana. The GOP goal is to secure enough seats to withstand an electoral backlash to Trump’s presidency in next year’s midterms.
That imbalance has caused Democrats to reassess—and in some cases abandon altogether—their support for rules they long championed as essential to maintaining a fair playing field on which both parties could compete. “What is at stake here is nothing less than the potential for permanent one-party control of the House of Representatives, and the threat of that to our democracy absolutely dwarfs any unfortunately quaint notions about the value of independent redistricting,” Micah Lasher, a New York State assembly member who represents Manhattan’s Upper West Side, told me. It’s a reversal for Lasher, a former Hochul aide who won office last year while endorsing independent redistricting.
Lasher is the author of legislation that would allow New York to redraw its congressional maps in the middle of a decade if another state does so first. Lawmakers there could consider the bill when they return to Albany in January. The proposal is limited in scope: It does not throw out the state’s decennial post-Census redistricting process but merely creates an exception allowing New York to respond to other states’ moves. This is partly due to worries that voters might reject a more aggressive plan; in 2021, New York Democrats and election reformers failed to win approval of a series of statewide referenda aimed at expanding access to voting. (Republicans don’t face the same concerns, because voters in red states won’t have a direct say in the maps they draw.)
Proposals like Lasher’s have won the support of Democrats who previously led the fight to ban gerrymandering. On Monday, the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee became the first party organization to formally call for Democrats to redraw congressional maps in states where they have the power to do so. “We’re looking at a country where everything has changed, quite frankly, and the things that you thought could not happen happen,” Andrea Stewart-Cousins, the majority leader of the New York State Senate and the chair of DLCC’s board, told me.
Even as they pursued a national ban on gerrymandering, Democrats never forswore the practice entirely. Indeed, their ability to respond to Republicans now is constrained in part by the fact that district lines in blue states such as Illinois and Maryland are already skewed heavily in their favor. (Democrats control the legislatures and governorships of far fewer states than do Republicans, which further limits their power to match the GOP in gerrymandering.)
Yet Republicans’ recent moves, aided by a Supreme Court ruling that sidelined federal courts from striking down purely partisan (as opposed to racial) gerrymanders, represent an escalation that has stunned Democrats. I asked Stewart-Cousins whether the party’s push to take politics out of redistricting, which has succeeded in protecting one out of five congressional seats from the threat of gerrymandering, was misguided. “It wasn’t a mistake,” she insisted, casting the party’s new posture more as a temporary shift than a permanent reorientation.
Lasher, however, wasn’t so sure. “It is fair to say that Democrats in New York and around the country vastly underestimated the willingness of the Republican Party to cross every line, break every norm, and do so with enormous speed,” he said. “We’re in a period of adjustment. We better adjust really damn quickly.”
alternative_right writes: I use RSS to cover all of my news-reading needs because I like a variety of sources spanning several fields -- politics, philosophy, science, and heavy metal. However, it seems Google wanted to kill off RSS a few years back, and it has since fallen out of favor. Some of us are holding on, but how many? And what software do you use (or did you write your own XML parsers)?
Without providing specifics, President Trump said on Wednesday that he will impose a 100% tariff on imports of semiconductors and chips, but not for companies that are "building in the United States." CNBC reports: "We're going to be putting a very large tariff on chips and semiconductors," Trump said in the Oval Office on Wednesday afternoon. "But the good news for companies like Apple is if you're building in the United States or have committed to build, without question, committed to build in the United States, there will be no charge," he said. "So in other words, we'll be putting a tariff on of approximately 100% on chips and semiconductors. But if you're building in the United States of America, there's no charge." The remarks follow a recently announced commitment by Apple to invest another $100 billion in the U.S. over the next four years to boost manufacturing in the U.S.
