Linkage

In 2014, the Religious Right’s morale reached its lowest point. Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was repealed in 2011. Same-sex marriage looked inevitable as court after court struck down ban after ban behind a wave of rising public support. Time magazine had declared a “transgender tipping point.” It was here that the Right made a decision to shift their culture-war focus to transgender people. Simultaneously, they began funding ostensibly feminist anti-trans groups like the Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF), which took $15,000 in seed money from the Alliance Defending Freedom, a Religious Right legal group dedicated to basing U.S. law on the Bible.

At the 2017 Values Voters Summit hosted by the Family Research Council, Meg Kilgannon outlined the religious right’s plan to co-opt anti-trans feminist groups, and use their feminist-sounding language to seem more secular while hiding the true motivation behind their animus. Ultimately, they would loop back around to finish off LGB people once the trans community had been dealt with.

“For all of its recent success, the LGBT alliance is actually fragile, and the trans activists need the gay rights movement to help legitimize them. Gender identity on its own is just a bridge too far. If you separate the T from the alphabet soup, we’ll have more success.”

US senators have defeated a measure, introduced by Bernie Sanders, that would have made military aid to Israel conditional on whether the Israeli government is violating human rights and international accords in its devastating war in Gaza.

A majority of senators struck down the proposal on Tuesday evening, with 72 voting to kill the measure, and 11 supporting it. Although Sanders’ effort was easily defeated, it was a notable test that reflected growing unease among Democrats over US support for Israel.

The measure was a first-of-its-kind tapping into a decades-old law that would require the US state department to, within 30 days, produce a report on whether the Israeli war effort in Gaza is violating human rights and international accords. If the administration failed to do so, US military aid to Israel, long assured without question, could be quickly halted.

“I thought it would be really funny if a stranger came over asking to do a poo,” explained Will. They never did, and about a year ago Will moved out.

Recently, Will had a look to see if Big Dumpers was still marked on Google Maps. It was. He was getting monthly emails about the performance of his business with information on how many people had viewed it or clicked to see its phone number.

But looking at the app’s listing for the “business”, Will spotted something that he didn’t find as funny. Like many other businesses, Google Maps showed a “Popular times” graph depicting how popular the location is using information provided by Google users who’ve agreed to let the app access their geolocation data. 9AM on Thursday was a busy time for Big Dumpers, according to Google Maps, but completely empty later in the day. 

What clicked in Will’s mind is that he had inadvertently created a public tracker of when people were in his share house — almost certainly without their knowledge. Will quickly voluntarily “closed” his business on Google but the listing remained up afterwards.

After being informed of the exploit by Crikey, founder of Australian information security company DVULN Jamieson O’Reilly said that his review of Google’s technical material corroborated Will’s understanding of the situation.

“My gut tells me you could list any place as a business then if the residents had opted in to location services you could totally use it to measure someone’s patterns,” he said.

In May, the Los Angeles Department of Transportation and LA Metro launched the biggest Universal Basic Mobility experiment ever attempted in the U.S., giving 1,000 South Los Angeles residents a “mobility wallet” — a debit card with $150 per month to spend on transportation.

The catch? Funds can be used to take the bus, ride the train, rent a shared e-scooter, take micro-transit, rent a car-share, take an Uber or Lyft, or even purchase an e-bike — but they can’t be spent on the cost of owning or operating a car.

The year-long pilot, ending in April, has the dual goals of increasing mobility for low-income residents and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

It’s a radical experiment based on a simple idea: People know what they need. Give them the money to go where they want to go, and they will improve the quality of their lives.

It’s the biggest experiment in Universal Basic Mobility in the U.S., but it is not the first. 

“I’m scared to death” about the level of voter distrust heading into 2024, said Mark Earley, the supervisor of elections in Leon County, Florida, which includes the capital of Tallahassee.

Earley’s comments were echoed by dozens of others among a crowd of nearly 100 local election workers who gathered in Crystal City, Virginia, last week for an annual confab hosted by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.

[…]

The two-day event was supposed to be a forum for local officials to review and rehearse often mundane election administration practices, like handling mail safely or responding to severe weather events.

But concerns about voter distrust and conspiracies cropped up repeatedly even though they claimed no formal place on the agenda. During group breakout sessions, hallway conversations and coffee breaks, attendees expressed both alarm and exasperation about how difficult it was to convince some Americans that the vote could be trusted.

“It doesn’t matter what you do, what we say or how much we educate the skeptics,” Kellie Harris Hopkins, the director of elections in Beaufort County, North Carolina, said during a roundtable. Roughly a dozen other officials nodded their heads, snapped their fingers or murmured in agreement.

While federal officials and state leaders often act as the face of election integrity at the national level, it is local election workers who actually run U.S. elections, doing everything from processing ballots to checking in voters.

That also means they’re the ones who most directly confront election conspiracy theories — and the violence and intimidation they increasingly fuel.

One in six election workers have experienced threats because of their job, and 77 percent said those threats had increased in recent years, according to a March 2022 study from NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice, capturing the impact of false election fraud claims by Donald Trump and his allies since 2020.

The Japanese parking model essentially prohibits all on-street parking with some exceptions for daytime and evening parking, where permitted. There is also a rule that forbids overnight street parking after 3am in the whole country. The larger and more important part of the law requires everyone to demonstrate that they have a legal off-street parking spot before they can purchase a car, those spots can be owned or rented, but they will not register your vehicle without this proof. This requirement means that if you don’t have access to an off-street parking spot for your car, you cannot get a car.

South Africa is determined not only to be on the right side of history, but to change the course of it — and if the International Court of Justice was true to its name, it would give due consideration to South Africa’s case. It would find that the bombardment is wrong, the bombardment is illegal, and the bombardment represents the collective punishment of the Palestinian people. And it would rule that acts of genocide have been committed by the Israeli government.

In the meantime, the South African case asked for interim relief, which would require a rapid call for an immediate cease-fire. It is a call that should be made by any political representative anywhere in the world committed to the protection of civilian life. It is to the great shame of the British and American political systems that relatively few elected representatives in either country have supported this call for an end to the loss of human life.

There is no way forward other than a cease-fire observed by all sides, which would present the opportunity then to map out a just and peaceful future. This is a decision to be made by the Palestinian people, not by those of us who support them. Acts of solidarity cannot entail telling others what to do.

Australia has supported the US and UK militaries as they launched more than a dozen airstrikes against sites used by Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen.

The US president, Joe Biden, confirmed the strikes, which are the most significant military response to the Houthis’ campaign of drone and missile attacks on commercial shipping in the Red Sea.

The Australian defence minister, Richard Marles, said the decision to launch the strikes “was not taken lightly”.

[…]

Asked if the US-led attacks risked escalating tensions in the region, Marles said defending freedom of navigation and global trade routes was “utterly central to Australia’s national interest”.

Tory Brown’s debut game, published by Fort Circle Games, catapulted both designer and publisher into the board gaming limelight following its release in 2022, picking up widespread praise from reviewers including Polygon’s Charlie Hall, who named it one of the year’s best board games, and game design luminaries including Undaunted series co-designer David Thompson.

[…] 

But Fort Circle founder Kevin Bertram told BoardGameWire the Facebook ads for the campaign he has been submitting since the start of the New Year are all being rejected after a very short amount of time on the site.

The automated response Bertram is receiving from Facebook says the ads are being rejected because they either mention a politician or are about “sensitive social issues”, which “could influence how people vote and may impact the outcome of an election or pending legislation”.

His requests for review have also all been rejected.