News gathered 2024-10-07
(date: 2024-10-07 07:37:26)
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-10-07, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Manton Reece on Automattic, WP Engine, and 37signals.
https://www.manton.org/2024/10/04/automattic-wp-engine.html
SAP offers different way to move SQL Server-based software to the cloud
date: 2024-10-07, updated: 2024-10-07, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Just don’t call it an alternative to RISE with SAP
SAP has developed an alternative way of shifting customers’ legacy systems running on Microsoft’s SQL Server database to the cloud, a method that is outside of its preferred RISE with SAP program.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/07/sap_sql_server_shift/
New York’s Disaster Drones Are Here to Save You
date: 2024-10-07, from: Heatmap News
Last week, I took a train and two buses to an abandoned tuberculosis sanatorium on Staten Island, where I watched first responders pretend another Hurricane Sandy had just struck New York City.
For the sake of the drill, organizers kept many of the details of the fictional scenario the same as they’d been then: Emergency Management officials were told to respond as if a supercharged storm was causing devastating floods and stranding people in life-threatening situations. But the dry run also featured a major difference from the disaster that hit 12 years ago this month and left more than 43 New Yorkers dead.
This time, the city has drones.
It has drones with cameras that can read the logo on your jacket from 400 feet in the air and drones with sophisticated mapping software that can estimate how deep a flooded intersection is. It has drones that come on little leashes tethered to NYPD cruisers for continuous power and drones that are so small they can fly under beds and into closets and sound like dentist drills when they’re operating. It has drones that can transmit messages in 80 languages, drones with thermal sensors, and drones that can drop flotation devices into the ocean. It even has a drone that can break a window — the highlight of the morning for the members of the local press and the top brass of the New York Police Department, Fire Department, and NYCEM (New York City Emergency Management, pronounced “Nee-chim,” newly rebranded from the more generic Office of Emergency Management) who’d gathered to observe the exercise, which was touted as the largest-known municipal unmanned aerial system drill in history.
“Breach drones,” as I’ve since learned, look a little like crudely drawn mosquitos. Held aloft by four rotary wings, the $87,750 contraptions are affixed with rods on their fronts that resemble an insect’s proboscis but function essentially like a battering ram. Given the drone’s unsteady, bobbing flight and the way it repeatedly banged itself against the window to chip a hole in the pane big enough to fly through, I found the whole demonstration to be surprisingly entomological for what New York City’s first responders claim is the bleeding edge of its extreme weather response.
“We’re really just scraping the first layer” of what is possible, Louis Font, a citywide interagency coordinator, told me during the drill. As he put it, drones are “the Swiss army knife of the public safety world.”
There is a small problem, though: New Yorkers really, really hate drones. Actually, they hate all autonomous gadgets that give off a whiff of Big Brother. A security robot deployed in the Times Square subway station over the winter had to be guarded by two human officers around the clock to prevent it from being vandalized, and the cheeky New York City news blog Hell Gate proposed that bots like the NYPD’s crime-fighting “Digidog” are “the city’s most expensive punching bags” and teased, “we’re excited to watch as the situation unfolds.” Even the local wildlife seems willing to take matters into its own talons, with birds attacking drones deployed to Rockaway Beach over the summer.
The city acquired its first set of drones in 2018 and is now one of about 900 U.S. municipalities that have begun using unmanned aerial systems in its crime- and emergency-related responses. But with a police budget bigger than many nations’ entire military outlay and a techno-optimist mayor, New York quickly became one of the premier drone-wielding cities in the world.
It hasn’t been an entirely smooth journey, though. Plans to use drones to monitor private backyard Labor Day parties last year spurred privacy concerns rooted in a history of the NYPD abusing surveillance technologies and prompted pushback from local civil liberties groups. “We’ve got so many discredited examples of this mayor searching for high-tech gimmicks to solve real-world problems and leaving New Yorkers out to dry,” Albert Fox Cahn, the executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, a.k.a. STOP, told me. “We end up spending a huge amount of money on largely unvetted vendors to buy products that simply just don’t fit the needs of our city.”
The question I wanted to answer on Staten Island was whether drones might be able to meet the needs of a city after a storm like Hurricane Helene or Hurricane Sandy. The overwhelming impression I left with, though, was of agencies that are in the awkward stage of a growth spurt — eager to use technology that will one day be indispensable but, for the time being, presents the risk of overcomplicating situations that would otherwise benefit from a more old-fashioned, boots-on-the-ground approach, with potentially both comic and tragic results.
Much of this is simply because of the physical limitations of drones. For one thing, they can’t fly in winds of more than about 20 to 30 miles per hour, making them pretty much useless during an actual storm (or in a Manhattan wind tunnel, for that matter). That narrows their use to two main categories: before a storm, as early warning systems, and after, in search-and-rescue operations.
It’s easy to understand the appeal of the former use. Scientists expect New York will get about 25% more annual rainfall by 2100 due to climate change, and the city has over 500 miles of coastline vulnerable to storm surge, with over half of its environmental justice communities living within its 100-year floodplains. During Hurricane Ida in 2021, 11 people drowned in flooded basement apartments, which are illegal under the city housing code and often used as housing by low-income immigrant families. Making matters worse, New York’s emergency alert system requires a voluntary opt-in and currently has just 1,281,938 subscribers — roughly 15% of a city of 8.3 million. Last year, the city comptroller further claimed that the notification list for people living in basement apartments reached less than 1% of its target population. (A spokesperson for NYCEM told me there has been a 35% increase in their basement subscriber numbers since the comptroller’s comments.)
The drones come in handy, then, because “not every New Yorker is on Twitter, not every New Yorker is on Instagram or Facebook, not every New Yorker reads The New York Times, the Post, or the Daily News, not all of them are tuned into our press conferences,” NYCEM Commissioner Zachary Iscol told me. “And so especially for vulnerable populations and immigrant communities, you’ve got to reach them where they are.”
This summer, NYCEM piloted a program using drones to broadcast bilingual flood warnings in low-lying neighborhoods ahead of storms — an idea Mayor Eric Adams had after seeing hurricane sirens on telephone poles during a visit to Puerto Rico, Iscol told me. The drones’ machine-generated Spanish translations, however, were slammed as “incomprehensible” by native speakers. (Font, the interagency coordinator, admitted the translations are still crude since “they’re robots” and told me the agencies are working to improve the messages.)
Carolina Salguero, the founder and executive director of PortSide NewYork, which works with the waterfront community in Red Hook, told me she fears drone-delivered storm warnings could potentially alienate their intended audiences. “Why would you believe the government if it’s dissed the community for this long?” she said, recalling how some Red Hook residents unwisely ignored warnings ahead of Sandy. (One can only imagine the added element of distrust that would come from a drone shouting those same warnings at you.). Cahn, of STOP, was also skeptical of the message’s delivery system: “The idea that you’re going to warn people with a fleet of drones is ludicrous. It’d take hundreds of thousands of drones operating throughout the day to reach the number of people that [NYCEM] can reach through a single text message,” he told me.
That problem of scale is also true after a storm. While I was impressed by the drones’ heat-seeking capabilities — operators could quickly find human actors and mannequins heated to lifelike temperatures during the Staten Island drill — the NYPD only had 85 drones in its arsenal as of this spring. Because connectivity issues are common after major weather disasters, drones cannot travel terribly far from human-toted hotspots, meaning the actual ground drones can cover to look for stranded, trapped, hurt, or drowning New Yorkers is relatively small. Drones also have a limited battery life of about half an hour and must repeatedly return to handlers to have their batteries swapped out as they conduct searches.
Sometimes it seems almost as if the city government is creating problems for drones to solve. A scenario where a window-breaching drone would be more beneficial than having a firefighter simply walk into a building feels like an edge case, and while a drone can inform someone in Mandarin that help is on the way, that “help” still ultimately takes the form of human paramedics, police, or firefighters. Font told me that drones helped supplement the rescue of “multiple drowning victims” in the Rockaways this summer by providing an extra vantage, but the systems were only deployed in the first place because of an unresolved lifeguard shortage. (Though there was excited chatter at the Staten Island drill about drones one day being able to tow distressed swimmers to shore, currently they can only bonk you with a hotdog-sized floatation device that inflates to three feet long to buy first responders some extra time — and that’s if you manage to grab ahold of it while flailing about in rough waters.)
Perhaps the biggest problem the drone exercise appeared poised to address was concerns about whether the city government could continue to function adequately under Adams’ leadership. Though the drill had reportedly been in the works for six months, mounting scandals and resignations in the administration made the large-scale demonstration of interagency cooperation conveniently timed. When I asked Iscol — who has publicly admitted to having had conversations about leaving the administration due to the ongoing turmoil — if he was confident that there could be smooth operations between City Hall and its agencies in the event of a near-term disaster, he said firmly that he was. “There are 300,000 people that work for the city of New York, and they’re showing up every day,” he told me. “It’s our job to show up and make sure they have the resources and support and the guidance and direction they need to be successful to deliver for New Yorkers.” He emphasized that “it’s business as usual for the agencies,” despite how things look in the headlines.
As for the drones, the commissioner seemed clear-eyed in assessing their usefulness. “As you do things that are new and for the first time, it’s an evolution — you’re always improving,” he told me. Drone advancements are “iterative, kind of like an iPhone,” and he’s aware they’re not all the way there yet. But “it’s not like we’re only using drones,” he stressed. “We’re still taking a multi-channel approach.”
Concerned onlookers will often approach Font, the interagency coordinator, to ask if he’s spying on them when they notice him flying a drone. He told me that he is always eager to show regular New Yorkers how the city is using the technology: “We’re a bunch of tech guys, so we really love getting into the nuts and bolts of it,” he said.
He expects, though, that eventually the questions and suspicious looks will start to taper off. The NYPD and FDNY already use drones in their everyday operations throughout the city; companies like Amazon have also started exploring the use of drones to deliver packages. Drones will become increasingly commonplace as the years wear on. Boring, even! So of course they’ll be used during extreme weather events, too.
“This is the world we live in now,” he said.
https://heatmap.news/technology/new-york-disaster-drones
The Corporate Corruption Behind Hurricane Helene
date: 2024-10-07, from: The Lever News
In the South, residents are suffering from the fallout of two disasters — recent Lever reporting shows how corporate meddling and regulatory failures made both of them worse.
https://www.levernews.com/the-corporate-corruption-behind-hurricane-helene/
Windows 11 migration? Upgrade engine revs up, enterprises have no choice
date: 2024-10-07, updated: 2024-10-07, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Support expiry clock ticks for Windows 10 - PC makers won’t be happy with latest stats
Windows 11 migration projects, long hoped for by Microsoft and PC chums, are picking up. But a report from asset management biz Lansweeper indicates the rush is on with “millions” of devices still running Windows 10.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/07/enterprise_windows_11_upgrade/
Migrants waiting in Mexico cultivate vegetable gardens
date: 2024-10-07, from: VOA News USA
On Mexico’s northern border, migrants awaiting entry to the United States have found an unexpected source of solace: cultivating their own food. In this report, narrated by Veronica Villafañe, César Contreras shows how a community garden in Ciudad Juárez is sowing seeds of hope.
https://www.voanews.com/a/migrants-waiting-in-mexico-cultivate-vegetable-gardens/7813136.html
Investors are recalibrating their interest rate expectations
date: 2024-10-07, from: Marketplace Morning Report
Third quarter earnings season kicks off this week, when we’ll get a view of the economy through the lens of the companies on the front lines. We had a banner jobs report last week. Are banner earnings next? And what would all that mean for future rate cuts? Also on the show, we’ll examine why labor force participation has hovered at around 63% for a few years now.
AI-Generated Pro-North Korean TikToks Are Also Bizarre Ads for Supplements
date: 2024-10-07, from: 404 Media Group
These AI-generated people are big fans of North Korea and of Reus Research’s Nicotinamide Riboside.
https://www.404media.co/ai-generated-pro-north-korean-tiktoks-are-also-bizarre-ads-for-supplements/
Aruba to Receive 2024 Internet Archive Hero Award for Groundbreaking Digital Heritage Initiatives
date: 2024-10-07, from: Internet Archive Blog
In a world where digital access to knowledge is increasingly vital, the island nation of Aruba has taken bold steps to ensure its cultural heritage is preserved and accessible for […]
What is “Derivative Work” in the Digital Age?
date: 2024-10-07, from: Authors Union blogs
Ideas and concepts, including “derivative works,” are only important to the extent they elucidate our understanding of the world. When the use of “derivative works” leads to more confusion than clarity, we should be cautious in adopting the new meaning being superimposed on “derivative works.”
https://www.authorsalliance.org/2024/10/07/what-is-derivative-work-in-the-digital-age/
Atos stumbles again as French government says ‘non’ to rescue deal
date: 2024-10-07, updated: 2024-10-07, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Ailing IT services giant still in hot pursuit of agreement on Big Data & Security unit
Struggling IT services giant Atos says it is continuing discussions with the French state after failing to reach an agreement for the government to buy key assets from its Big Data & Security (BDS) division.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/07/atos_french_deal_fails/
Mark Sonoda: Leading NASA’s Path to the Commercialization of Space
date: 2024-10-07, from: NASA breaking news
With over 34 years of experience in human spaceflight, Mark Sonoda has witnessed some of NASA’s most pivotal moments, from the startup of the International Space Station to the retirement of the space shuttle. As the acting associate program manager for the Commercial Low Earth Orbit Development Program (CLDP), he is set to help guide […]
Rival browsers cry foul after Microsoft Edge slips through EU gatekeeper cracks
date: 2024-10-07, updated: 2024-10-07, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Vivaldi and others line up behind Opera to request a rethink
The European Commission’s decision not to designate Microsoft Edge as a core platform service has rival browser makers and engineers up in arms.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/07/microsoft_edge_eu_gatekeeper/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-10-07, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Trump Reiterates He Wants to Be a ‘Dictator’ for 'One Day' at Rally.
‘Critical’ CUPS vulnerability chain easy to use for massive DDoS attacks
date: 2024-10-07, updated: 2024-10-07, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Also, rooting for Russian cybercriminals, a new DDoS record, sneaky Linux server malware and more
Infosec In Brief The critical vulnerability in the Common Unix Printing System (CUPS) reported last week might have required some very particular circumstances to exploit, but Akamai researchers are warning the same vulnerabilities can easily be exploited for mass DDoS attacks. …
Doing the numbers on campaign promises
date: 2024-10-07, from: Marketplace Morning Report
The nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget released a new study this morning, looking at how the Harris and Trump campaigns’ spending plans would affect the national debt. Both estimates are pretty dire. We’ll hear the latest. Plus, the global private equity market was worth $579 billion in 2000; today, it’s worth over $8 trillion. But is there trouble ahead for private equity?
https://www.marketplace.org/shows/marketplace-morning-report/doing-the-numbers-on-campaign-promises
Florida braces for Hurricane Milton
date: 2024-10-07, from: VOA News USA
Hurricane Milton Takes Aim at Florida
date: 2024-10-07, from: Heatmap News
Current conditions: Rescue teams have arrived in Bosnia after intense rain triggered flooding and landslides that killed at least 18 people • Phoenix marked its 13th straight day of record heat Sunday • There are three storms churning in the Atlantic simultaneously, which has never happened before this far into hurricane season.
THE TOP FIVE
- Hurricane-battered Florida braces for another dangerous storm
Hurricane Milton is intensifying rapidly in the Atlantic and is expected to become a major hurricane later today. Forecasters believe it will make landfall near Tampa Bay in Florida by Wednesday, less than two weeks after Hurricane Helene tore through the area. It could bring a foot of rain, possible more, and 10-15 feet of storm surge. “We expect the storm surge to be worse than what many people experienced during Helene,” said AccuWeather’s lead hurricane expert Alex DaSilva. “This storm has the potential to create a catastrophic storm surge that no one in Tampa has seen in their lifetime.”
AccuWeather
More than 15 million people across southern and central Florida are under flood watches, and a state of emergency has been declared in 51 of the state’s counties. Kevin Guthrie, executive director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management said the state was preparing for “the largest evacuation that we have seen, most likely since 2017, Hurricane Irma.” In a bleak warning, Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody said those who choose not to evacuate should “write your name in permanent marker on your arm, so that people know who you are when they get to you afterwards.”
- Oil giants reportedly want Trump to keep the IRA
Some large fossil fuel companies have urged Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump not to gut the Inflation Reduction Act if he comes into power again in November, The Wall Street Journal reported. The IRA, President Biden’s landmark climate law, provides tax credits for renewable energy and carbon capture projects, including many that these oil giants have heavily invested in. According to the Journal, executives from Exxon Mobil, Phillips 66, and Occidental Petroleum have been in discussions with the Trump campaign and congressional allies to make the case for the law, which Trump has called the “Green New Scam” and vowed to roll back. Political strategists told the Journal that Trump may try to “rebrand” the IRA given its popularity among Republican states. A recent report found that nearly 60% of the projects supported by the IRA are based in Republican congressional districts.
- Meanwhile, at BP…
BP has dropped its ambitious 2030 plan to reduce its oil and gas production by 40% and shift to renewables, three sources told Reuters. The company made the commitment in 2020, and had already watered it down last year. Now it has reportedly abandoned the plan entirely and will focus on new investments to increase oil and gas output. Other oil giants including Shell have also walked back their energy transition goals.
Tangentially related: Fossil fuel company Equinor announced this morning it had acquired a 9.8% stake in wind energy giant Orsted. That makes Equinor the firm’s second largest shareholder, behind the Danish government.
- Mexico’s Sheinbaum reiterates focus on ramping up renewables in 1st
speech
In case you missed it: Mexico’s new president, Claudia Sheinbaum, pledged last week to “boost renewable energies” to a 45% share of the country’s total energy mix by 2030. Sheinbaum, who was inaugurated on Tuesday, is a climate scientist, and her ascension has raised hopes among environmentalists that Mexico could ramp up climate action. Sheinbaum made many promises during her campaign but analysts have been skeptical of their staying power because she also promised to carry on the legacy of her predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who doubled down on fossil fuels. But the strong words during Sheinbaum’s first speech as president “marks a sharp departure” from López Obrador, noted The Associated Press. “The terms ‘sustainability’ or ‘renewable energy’ really never appeared” in his policies, one expert commented. “He didn’t use the term in any speech, in any document. And she has been using it all the time.” Sheinbaum promised to soon unveil her energy transition program focused on “the reduction of greenhouse gases that cause climate change.” Mexico is the only G20 nation that does not have a net zero target.
- WMO water report shows a hydrological cycle in chaos
The World Meteorological Organization published its 2023 State of Global Water Resources report today. It found that more than half of the world’s “river catchments” – watersheds or drainage basins – saw unusual levels of water flow last year. Mostly, there was less water than normal, with “large territories” of North, Central, and South America especially dry and many river flows falling to all-time lows. But in some places, like the Horn of Africa, the Philippines, and the United Kingdom, there was much more water than normal. These extremes – drought in some places and extreme flooding in others – were reflected in the regional soil moisture and terrestrial water levels. Glaciers lost more than 600 gigatons of water last year, the largest loss registered in the last 50 years. “Water is the canary in the coalmine of climate change,” WMO secretary general, Celeste Saulo, told The Guardian. “As a result of rising temperatures, the hydrological cycle has accelerated. It has also become more erratic and unpredictable, and we are facing growing problems of either too much or too little water. A warmer atmosphere holds more moisture which is conducive to heavy rainfall. More rapid evaporation and drying of soils worsen drought conditions.”
THE KICKER
“In the U.S., there is a decision being made now – and I’m not a part of it – as to whether to stop making pure ICE for the U.S. market. Just the fact that we’re thinking of that means that, OK, it must be close.” –Gill Pratt, Toyota’s chief scientist, speaking to Bloomberg about the future of the internal combustion engine.
https://heatmap.news/climate/hurricane-milton-florida-tampa
Russian court sentences 72-year-old American to nearly 7 years in prison for fighting in Ukraine
date: 2024-10-07, from: VOA News USA
MOSCOW — A Russian court on Monday sentenced a 72-year-old American in a closed trial to nearly seven years in prison for allegedly fighting as a mercenary in Ukraine.
Prosecutors said Stephen Hubbard signed a contract with the Ukrainian military after Russia sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022 and he fought alongside them until being captured two months later.
He was sentenced to six years and 10 months in a general-security prison. Prosecutors had called for a sentence of seven years in a maximum-security prison.
Hubbard, from the state of Michigan, is the first American known to have been convicted on charges of fighting as a mercenary in the Ukrainian conflict.
The charges carried a potential sentence of 15 years, but prosecutors asked that his age be taken into account along with his admission of guilt, Russian news reports said.
Arrests of Americans have become increasingly common in Russia in recent years. Concern has risen that Russia could be targeting U.S. nationals for arrest to use later as bargaining chips in talks to bring back Russians convicted of crimes in the U.S. and Europe.
Also on Monday, a court in the city of Voronezh sentenced American Robert Gilman to seven years and 1 month for allegedly assaulting law enforcement officers while serving a sentence for another assault.
According to Russian news reports, Gilman was arrested in 2022 for causing a disturbance while intoxicated on a passenger train and then assaulted a police officer while in custody. He is serving a 3 1/2-year sentence on that charge.
Last year, he assaulted a prison inspector during a cell check, then hit an official of the Investigative Committee, resulting in the new sentence, state news agency RIA-Novosti said.
The U.S. and Russia in August completed their largest prisoner swap in post-Soviet history, a deal involving 24 people, many months of negotiations and concessions from other European countries, which released Russians in their custody as part of the exchange. Several U.S. citizens remain behind bars in Russia following the swap.
US Supreme Court taking the bench with ghost guns, a capital case and transgender rights on the docket
date: 2024-10-07, from: VOA News USA
Washington — The U.S Supreme Court is taking the bench again on Monday, ready to hear cases on ghost guns, a death sentence and transgender rights.
The docket doesn’t have quite as many blockbuster cases as it did last term, when its rulings included an opinion granting broad immunity to former President Donald Trump.
Still, it’s possible that the conservative-majority court could yet be asked to intervene in election disputes after the ballots are cast in November.
The justices also stayed relatively busy during their summer break. The orders they issued on emergency appeals included a refusal to restore President Joe Biden’s student loan plan and a partial approval of an Arizona law requiring proof of citizenship to vote.
The new term also opens against the backdrop of low public trust in the Supreme Court, and continued debate about whether their newly adopted code of ethics should have an enforcement mechanism.
Here’s a look at some of the cases coming up:
Ghost gun regulations
The justices will hear a case Tuesday on regulations for ghost guns, privately made weapons that are hard for police to track because they don’t have a serial number.
The number of the firearms found at crime scenes has soared in recent years, from fewer than 4,000 in 2018 to nearly 20,000 recovered by law enforcement in 2021, according to Justice Department data.
The numbers have been declining in multiple cities since the Biden administration began requiring background checks and age verification for ghost gun kits that can be bought online.
But manufacturers and gun rights groups argue that the administration overstepped and the rule should be overturned.
Doubts about a death sentence
In the decades since Richard Glossip was sentenced to die over a 1997 murder-for-hire scheme, the case has become a rare one where prosecutors are conceding mistakes.
Oklahoma’s Republican attorney general has joined with Glossip in seeking to overturn his murder conviction and death sentence.
Despite those doubts, an Oklahoma appeals court has upheld Glossip’s conviction, and the state’s pardon and parole board deadlocked in a vote to grant him clemency.
The court will hear arguments in his case on Wednesday.
Transgender rights
Perhaps the court’s most closely watched case so far this year is a fight over transgender rights.
The case over state bans on gender-affirming care comes as Republican-led states enact a variety of restrictions, including school sports participation, bathroom usage and drag shows.
The administration and Democratic-led states have extended protections for transgender people, though Supreme Court has separately prohibited the administration from enforcing a new federal regulation that seeks to protect transgender students.
The justices will weigh a Tennessee law that restrict puberty blockers and hormone therapy for transgender minors. The case does not yet have a hearing date, but will likely be argued in December.
Oil prices rise over Middle East tensions
date: 2024-10-07, from: Marketplace Morning Report
From the BBC World Service: The biggest rise in oil prices for nearly two years was recorded on Friday, as the world watches mounting tensions in the Middle East and how Israel will respond to attacks by Iran. Then, an aging population is straining future growth prospects for Malaysia’s economy. And a British woman who spent nearly half a century wondering why a dream job application went unanswered has finally found out why.
R.I.P. Kris Kristofferson
date: 2024-10-07, updated: 2024-10-07, from: One Foot Tsunami
https://onefoottsunami.com/2024/10/07/r-i-p-kris-kristofferson/
Three and Vodafone: We need to merge because our networks are rubbish
date: 2024-10-07, updated: 2024-10-07, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Voda users have to fall back to 2G in some places after 3G switchoff, docs claim
Vodafone and Three UK are desperately trying to convince Britain’s competition regulator to approve their merger, going so far as to denigrate their own network services - at least in some regions - as outdated.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/07/three_and_vodafone_we_need/
Nobel Prize in medicine honors American duo for their discovery of microRNA
date: 2024-10-07, from: VOA News USA
STOCKHOLM — The Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine was awarded Monday to Americans Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun for their discovery of microRNA, tiny pieces of genetic material that alter how genes work at the cellular level and could lead to new ways of treating cancer.
The Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute, which awarded the prize, said the duo’s discovery is “proving to be fundamentally important” in understanding how organisms develop and function.
MicroRNA have opened up scientists’ approaches to treating diseases like cancer by helping to regulate how genes work at the cellular level, according to Dr. Claire Fletcher, a lecturer in molecular oncology at Imperial College London.
Fletcher said microRNA provide genetic instructions to tell cells to make new proteins and that there were two main areas where microRNA could be helpful: in developing drugs to treat diseases and in serving as biomarkers.
“MicroRNA alters how genes in the cell work,” said Fletcher, who is an outside expert not associated with the Nobel prize.
“If we take the example of cancer, we’ll have a particular gene working overtime, it might be mutated and working in overdrive,” she said. “We can take a microRNA that we know alters the activity of that gene and we can deliver that particular microRNA to cancer cells to stop that mutated gene from having its effect.”
Ambros performed the research that led to his prize at Harvard University. He is currently a professor of natural science at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. Ruvkun’s research was performed at Massachusetts General Hospital and the Harvard Medical School, where he’s a professor of genetics, said Thomas Perlmann, Secretary-General of the Nobel Committee.
Perlmann said he spoke to Ruvkun by phone shortly before the announcement.
“It took a long time before he came to the phone and sounded very tired, but he quite rapidly was quite excited and happy, when he understood what it was all about,” Perlmann said.
Last year, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine went to Hungarian-American Katalin Karikó and American Drew Weissman for discoveries that enabled the creation of mRNA vaccines against COVID-19 that were critical in slowing the pandemic.
The prize carries a cash award of ($1 million from a bequest left by the prize’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel.
The announcement launched this year’s Nobel prizes award season.
Nobel announcements continue with the physics prize on Tuesday, chemistry on Wednesday and literature on Thursday. The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced Friday and the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences on Oct. 14.
The laureates are invited to receive their awards at ceremonies on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Nobel’s death.
Fletcher said there are clinical trials ongoing to see how microRNA approaches might help treat skin cancer, but that there aren’t yet any drug treatments approved by drug regulators. She expected that might happen in the next five to 10 years.
She said microRNA represent another way of being able to control the behavior of genes to treat and track various diseases.
“The majority of therapies we have at the moment are targeting proteins in cells,” she said. “If we can intervene at the microRNA level, it opens up a whole new way of us developing medicines and us controlling the activity of genes whose levels might be altered in diseases.”
Xfce 4.20 creeps toward Wayland support while Mint 22.1 polishes desktop routine
date: 2024-10-07, updated: 2024-10-07, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
A couple of FOSS goodies that should be ready for the festive season
The next version of Xfce, the oldest FOSS Unix desktop environment around, is nearly ready – and should have preliminary, “minimally usable” Wayland support.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/07/xfce_420_and_mint_221/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-10-07, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Scripting News: Making the social web really work.
http://scripting.com/2024/09/28/132152.html?title=makingTheSocialWebWork
macOS 15.0 now UNIX 03-certified
date: 2024-10-07, from: OS News
You have to wonder how meaningful this news is in 2024, but macOS 15.0 Sequoia running on either Apple Silicon or Intel processors is now UNIX 03-certified. The UNIX 03 Product Standard is the mark for systems conforming to Version 3 of the Single UNIX Specification. It is a significantly enhanced version of the UNIX 98 Product Standard. The mandatory enhancements include alignment with ISO/IEC 9989:1999 C Programming Language, IEEE Std 1003.1-2001 and ISO/IEC 9945:2002. This Product Standard includes the following mandatory Product Standards: Internationalized System Calls and Libraries Extended V3,Commands and Utilities V4, C Language V2, and Internationalized Terminal Interfaces. ↫ UNIX 03 page The questionable usefulness of this news stems from a variety of factors. The UNIX 03 specification hails from the before time of 2002, when UNIX-proper still had some footholds in the market and being a UNIX meant something to the industry. These days, Linux has pretty much taken over the traditional UNIX market, and UNIX certification seems to have all but lost its value. Only one operating system can boast to conform to the latest UNIX specification – AIX is UNIX V7 and 03-certified – while macOS and HP-UX are only UNIX 03-certified. OpenWare, UnixWare, and z/OS only conform to even older standards. On top of all this, it seems being UNIX-certified by The Open Group feels a lot like a pay-to-play scheme, making it unlikely that community efforts like, say, FreeBSD, Debian, or similarly popular server operating systems could ever achieve UNIX-certification even if they wanted to. This makes the whole UNIX-certification world feel more like the dying vestiges of a job security program than something meaningful for an operating system to aspire to. In any even, you can now write a program that compiles and runs on all two UNIX 03-certified operating systems, as long as it only uses POSIX APIs.
https://www.osnews.com/story/140868/macos-15-0-now-unix-03-certified/
Embattled users worn down by privacy options? Let them eat code
date: 2024-10-07, updated: 2024-10-07, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Struggle ye not with cookies, lest ye become a cookie monster
Opinion The people are defeated. Worn out, deflated, and apathetic about the barrage of banners and pop-ups about cookies and permissions.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/07/cookie_opinion/
“Lost” 1983 programming language bought on eBay
date: 2024-10-07, from: OS News
A YouTube channel has resurrected a programming language that hadn’t been seen since the 1980s — in a testament to both the enduring power of our technology, and of the communities that care about it. But best of all, Simpson uploaded the language to the Internet Archive, along with all his support materials, inviting his viewers to write their own programs (and saying he hoped his upstairs neighbor would’ve approved). And in our email interview, Simpson said since then it’s already been downloaded over 1,000 times — “which is pretty amazing for something so old.” ↫ David Cassel It’s great that this lost programming language, MicroText for the Commodore 64, was rediscovered, but I’m a bit confused as to how “lost” this language really was. I mean, it was “discovered” in a properly listed eBay listing, which feels like cheating to me. When I think of stories of discoveries of long-lost software, games, or media, it usually involves things like finding it in a shed after years of searching, or someone at a company going through that box of old hard drives discovering the game they worked on 32 years ago. I don’t know, something about this whole story feels off to me, and it’s ringing some alarm bells I can’t quite place. Regardless, it’s cool to have MicroText readily available on the web now, so that people can rediscover it and create awesome new things with it. Perhaps there’s old ideas to be relearned here.
https://www.osnews.com/story/140866/lost-1983-programming-language-bought-on-ebay/
After we fix that, how about we also accidentally break something important?
date: 2024-10-07, updated: 2024-10-07, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
You had one job – doing extra is nice, but dangerous
Who, Me? On Monday, The Register readers have two jobs: survive the day, and read the fresh instalment of Who, Me? – the column based on your less-marvellous moments.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/07/who_me/
Raspberry Pi SD Cards and the Raspberry Pi Bumper: your new favourite accessories
date: 2024-10-07, from: Raspberry Pi News (.com)
Two accessories we wonder how we managed without: Class A2 Raspberry Pi SD Cards, and the snap-on Raspberry Pi Bumper.
The post Raspberry Pi SD Cards and the Raspberry Pi Bumper: your new favourite accessories appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/sd-cards-and-bumper/
If Dell’s Qualcomm-powered Copilot+ PC is typical of the genre, other PCs are toast
date: 2024-10-07, updated: 2024-10-07, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Despite amazing battery life and lovely speed, this one has flaws that may annoy
Desktop Tourism Across the 30 years I’ve used laptop PCs, they’ve always made me anxious about battery life. Dell’s XPS 13 9345 Copilot+ PC powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Elite X is the first Windows PC to relieve me of that worry and let me confidently leave my desk for a full working day without carrying any charging apparatus whatsoever – but it still has unwelcome baggage.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/07/dell_qualcomm_powered_copilot_pc/
Domains For The Masses
date: 2024-10-07, from: Tedium site
The tale of the founder of GoDaddy, a Vietnam vet who figured out the formula for getting regular people to buy domain names.
https://feed.tedium.co/link/15204/16835496/bob-parsons-godaddy-founder-interview
Episode 141 - Computer Ruins Grocer
date: 2024-10-06, from: Advent of Computing
In 1962 Food Center Wholesale Grocers Inc installed a new IBM 305 RAMAC. That’s when things started to go wrong. The faulty machine seemed to have a mind of it’s own, and would spread chaos to grocery stores all around Boston.
Selected Sources:
https://archive.org/details/computerinsecuri0000norm - Computer Insecurity
https://bitsavers.computerhistory.org/magazines/Computers_And_Automation/196805.pdf - Computers and Automation article
https://archive.org/embed/sim_computerworld_january-01-08-1969_3_1 - Computerworld
https://adventofcomputing.libsyn.com/episode-141-computer-ruins-grocer
This foldable keyboard is also a full-fledged mini PC with a Ryzen 7 8840U processor (crowdfunding)
date: 2024-10-06, from: Liliputing
PC makers have been stuffing the guts of computers inside cases with built-in keyboards for decades. The Commodore 64 and Sinclair ZX Spectrum were both released in 1982, and the trend has continued into recent years: the Raspberry Pi 400 PC-in-a-keyboard launched in 2020 and it looks like there may be a successor on the […]
The post This foldable keyboard is also a full-fledged mini PC with a Ryzen 7 8840U processor (crowdfunding) appeared first on Liliputing.
More Black, Latina women in US lead unions, transform how they work
date: 2024-10-06, from: VOA News USA
Surviving the search engine meltdown
date: 2024-10-06, from: Status-Q blog
Today, I got yet more evidence that the web is sinking in a world of AI-generated slime. Our otherwise-fine Dualit toaster has, after many years, started to have occasional hiccups with its timer… I think the clockwork has become a little dodgy. So I did a quick search to see if others had Continue Reading
https://statusq.org/archives/2024/10/06/12182/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-10-06, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Subornation of perjury is a crime for lawyers, shouldn’t it at least be unethical for journalists and news orgs?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subornation_of_perjury
Trump holds rally at site of 1st assassination attempt; Harris readies for media appearances
date: 2024-10-06, from: VOA News USA
With less than a month to go until the U.S. presidential election, the Democratic and Republican presidential nominees have a busy week ahead. Former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris are both scheduled to continue rallying supporters in key states, amid warnings that the rhetoric is becoming more inflammatory. VOA’s Veronica Balderas Iglesias reports.
US aviation authority OKs SpaceX Falcon 9 vehicle for Monday flight
date: 2024-10-06, from: VOA News USA
Washington — SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9 rocket can return to flight for a mission planned for Monday to launch the European Space Agency’s Hera spacecraft from Florida, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration said Sunday.
Elon Musk’s company, which has engaged in a public quarrel with the FAA in recent weeks, said Sunday it is planning the liftoff for 10:52 a.m. ET (1452 GMT) from Cape Canaveral.
“The SpaceX Falcon 9 vehicle is authorized to return to flight only for the planned Hera mission scheduled to launch on Oct. 7 from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida,” the FAA said Sunday.
The agency said it has “determined that the absence of a second stage reentry for this mission adequately mitigates the primary risk to the public in the event of a recurrence of the mishap experienced with the Crew-9 mission.”
The FAA on Sept. 30 said SpaceX must investigate why the second stage of its Falcon 9 malfunctioned after a NASA astronaut mission, grounding the launch vehicle for the third time in three months. The malfunction caused the booster to fall into a region of the Pacific Ocean outside of the designated safety zone that the FAA approved for the mission.
Hera is set to study the effects of the 2022 impact that NASA’s DART spacecraft had with the asteroid Dimorphos in a test of a planetary defense system — the first time a spacecraft managed to alter the motion of any celestial body. Dimorphos is a moonlet of Didymos, which is defined as a near-Earth asteroid.
The Hera mission is expected to provide data for future asteroid deflection missions with an eye toward redirecting objects that could pose a future collision threat for Earth.
Falcon 9 launched DART in 2021.
The FAA on Sept. 17 proposed fining SpaceX $633,000 for violating agency rules ahead of two 2023 Falcon 9 launches.
“They’ve been around 20 years, and I think they need to operate at the highest level of safety,” FAA Administrator Mike Whitaker said on Sept. 24.
SpaceX took issue with Whitaker’s comments, saying the company is the “safest, most reliable launch provider in the world, and is absolutely committed to safety in all operations.”
Whitaker defended the FAA’s decision to delay a planned September Starship 5 launch, noting that SpaceX failed to complete a timely sonic boom analysis as required. The FAA has said it does not expect a license determination before late November for that launch.
Musk has criticized FAA leaders over the agency’s proposed fine and called for Whitaker’s resignation.
In February 2023, the FAA proposed a $175,000 penalty against SpaceX for failing to submit some safety data to the agency prior to an August 2022 launch of Starlink satellites. The company paid that penalty.
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-10-06, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
FEMA chief calls false claims about government’s Helene response ‘truly dangerous.’
Minnesota man arrested after allegedly threatening to ‘shoot up’ synagogue
date: 2024-10-06, from: VOA News USA
Minneapolis, Minnesota — A Minnesota man was arrested after allegedly threatening to “shoot up” a Minneapolis synagogue, officials announced Saturday.
Staff at Temple Israel reported to the Minneapolis Police Department on Sept. 11 that they had received several phone calls from a person threatening to “shoot up” the synagogue. Then Thursday, a special police detail assigned to provide extra patrols around Temple Israel ahead of the Jewish new year and the one-year anniversary of the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel were notified of a man outside with a firearm. He fled the area, but officers arrested a 21-year-old man the next day.
“Everyone in Minneapolis has the right to feel safe in their communities, and we will ensure our Jewish neighbors are protected as they celebrate the holy days,” Minneapolis Police Chief Brian Chief O’Hara said at a news conference. “We take all threats made against our religious institutions seriously and will continue to hold the individuals accountable who threaten any of our city’s houses of worship.”
O’Hara said officers learned the man had used a phone app to mask his voice as he made repeated threats against the synagogue.
Officers did not recover a gun.
The man was arrested for making “terroristic threats” and charges will be referred to the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office. O’Hara said officers had not found evidence the threat was motivated by antisemitism, but he said the timing of the threats was concerning.
“Since the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks, the worst terrorist attack on our Jewish community since the Holocaust, our police officers have been present where a whole lot of hateful rhetoric has been said against our residents, against members of our community, simply because they are Jewish,” O’Hara said.
Philadelphia Chinatown activists rally to stop development of 76ers arena
date: 2024-10-06, from: VOA News USA
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania — Vivian Chang works on a narrow Philadelphia street that would have been consumed by a Phillies stadium had Chinatown activists not rallied to defeat the plan in the early 2000s. Instead of 40,000 cheering fans, the squeals of young children now fill the playground at Folk Arts-Cultural Treasures Charter School, which opened in 2007.
“We’re standing right where the baseball stadium would have been,” Chang said in late September. “And now it’s 480 students — a lot of immigrants, a lot of students of color from across the city.”
Chang, 33, leads Asian Americans United, which flexed its political muscle during the stadium fight and is now experiencing déjà vu as it tries to stop a planned $1.3 billion basketball arena for the Philadelphia 76ers at the other edge of Chinatown.
Mayor Cherelle Parker hopes a glitzy, 18,500-seat arena can be the catalyst to revive a distressed retail corridor called Market East, which runs for eight blocks, from City Hall to the Liberty Bell. The plan now moves to city council for debate this fall. Team owners say they need the council’s approval for 76 Place by year’s end so they can move into their new home by 2031.
“I wholeheartedly believe this is the right deal for the people of Philadelphia,” Parker said in announcing her support in September, while pledging to protect what she called “the best Chinatown in the United States.”
Few would deny that Market East needs a savior. But some are less sure it should be the Sixers. Critics fear gridlock on game days and a dark arena at other times, along with gentrification, homogenization and rising rents. Chinatown sits just above Market East and the LGBTQ+ friendly “Gayborhood” a few blocks below it.
“The arena is a uniquely bad use for that land,” said local activist Jackson Morgan, who fears the Gayborhood could lose its identity. “It would make Center City virtually unlivable for hours at a time.”
Victor Matheson, an economics professor at the College of the Holy Cross who studies stadium issues, said arenas can bring an economic bounce to downtown business districts, but only a limited one.
“They don’t have much of an effect once you get beyond a couple of blocks,” he said.
Market East, a once-bustling stretch of historic Market Street, has withered over the last half-century amid a series of cultural shifts: the growth of suburban shopping malls in the 1960s and ’70s, the financial crises that crippled U.S. cities in the 1980s, and, more recently, the twin blows of online shopping and the pandemic.
And while much of Philadelphia is thriving as more young people settle downtown, Market East has resisted renewal efforts. All but one of its fabled department stores are long gone.
Enter the 76ers, owned by Harris Blitzer Sports & Entertainment, who want to shed their Wells Fargo Center lease with Comcast Spectacor and move from the city’s South Philadelphia sports complex to their own facility.
The partners, who also own the NHL’s New Jersey Devils and have a controlling interest in the NFL’s Washington Commanders, say the project will be privately financed and bring thousands of jobs and more than $2 billion in economic growth to downtown. They also hope to build an adjacent $250 million apartment tower.
“I think the arena is a good thing,” said Dante Sisofo, 28, who lives nearby. “I could see a lot of families gathering and getting a nice bowl of Vietnamese pho — my favorite dish — and then heading to the game.”
Parker shares his optimism and has tried to address concerns by noting the $50 million in local benefits the team has promised, a sum that includes a $3 million loan fund for Chinatown businesses.
But others wonder if sports fans would really patronize mom and pop stores. Arenas, they say, are designed to keep fans inside, spending their money on increasingly upscale dining and entertainment.
“The Sixers’ owners, they don’t make money by people going to the quaint little sports bar across the street. They make money by having people buy those $14 beers inside the stadium,” Matheson said.
The owners have pledged not to ask the city for any construction funding, although they are free to seek state and federal funds. Instead of property taxes, they would pay about $6 million in annual Payments in Lieu of Taxes. Over the 30-year agreement, the potential savings to the team — and loss to the city and its cash-strapped schools — could be tens of millions of dollars or more, by some economists’ measure.
“Historically, city officials have been extremely poor poker players when it comes to staring down and bluffing billionaire sports owners,” Matheson said.
“And of course, that’s the exact reason why you have them playing footsie with Camden,” he said, referring to a last-minute flirtation from New Jersey to have the Sixers move across the Delaware River, where the team already has a practice facility, for $400 million in tax breaks.
Still, Parker called the deal the best ever struck with a city sports team, given that the three venues in South Philadelphia — the Wells Fargo Center, Citizens Bank Park and Lincoln Financial Field — were all built with huge public subsidies.
Why Cisco reportedly wants in on CoreWeave’s rent-a-GPU racket
date: 2024-10-06, updated: 2024-10-06, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
This may help Switchzilla hit $1B AI sales goal by FY25
Analysis Cisco reportedly plans to throw its weight behind CoreWeave in a deal that would boost its valuation to $23 billion and potentially cement the network giant’s place in the rent-a-GPU outfit’s cloud.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/06/cisco_ai_coreweave/
Rescue, recovery continue after Hurricane Helene rips southeastern US
date: 2024-10-06, from: VOA News USA
Rescue and recovery efforts continue in the southeastern United States following the recent landfall of Hurricane Helene. Now, a new storm, less than two weeks later, swirls in the Gulf of Mexico, threatening even more damage to the battered region. VOA’s Arash Arabasadi has the story.
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-10-06, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
The Art of Evangelism by Guy Kawasaki.
https://hbr.org/2015/05/the-art-of-evangelism
The Curious About Everything Newsletter #43
date: 2024-10-06, from: Curious about everything blog
The many interesting things I read in September 2024
https://jodiettenberg.substack.com/p/forty-three
Meta gives Llama 3 vision, now if only it had a brain
date: 2024-10-06, updated: 2024-10-06, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
El Reg gets its claws in multimodal models - and shows you how to use them and what they can do
Hands on Meta has been influential in driving the development of open language models with its Llama family, but up until now, the only way to interact with them has been through text.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/06/meta_llama_vision_brain/
Chinese hackers breached US court wiretap systems, WSJ reports
date: 2024-10-06, from: VOA News USA
Reuters — Chinese hackers accessed the networks of U.S. broadband providers and obtained information from systems the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, The Wall Street Journal reported Saturday.
Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies are among the telecoms companies whose networks were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter.
The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized U.S. requests for communications data, the Journal said. It added that the hackers had also accessed other tranches of internet traffic.
China’s foreign ministry responded Sunday that it was not aware of the attack described in the report but said the United States had “concocted a false narrative” to “frame” China in the past.
“At a time when cybersecurity has become a common challenge for all countries around the world, this erroneous approach will only hinder the efforts of the international community to jointly address the challenge through dialog and cooperation,” the ministry said in a statement to Reuters.
Beijing has previously denied claims by the U.S. government and others that it has used hackers to break into foreign computer systems.
Lumen Technologies declined to comment, while Verizon and AT&T did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The Journal said the attack was carried out by a Chinese hacking group with the aim of collecting intelligence. U.S. investigators have dubbed it “Salt Typhoon.”
Earlier this year, U.S. law enforcement disrupted a major Chinese hacking group nicknamed “Flax Typhoon,” months after confronting Beijing about sweeping cyber espionage under a campaign named “Volt Typhoon.”
China’s foreign ministry said in its statement that Beijing’s cybersecurity agencies had found and published evidence to show Volt Typhoon was staged by “an international ransomware organization.”
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-10-06, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
The focus in WordPress-land should, imho, be on writers. There's so much more it can do. Keep it simple and streamlined, stay out of their way, and offer lots of choice. It has all the features "social web" need but don't have. And it's deployed, scaled, debugged, and ready to serve as a strong foundation.
http://scripting.com/2024/10/05/142118.html?title=wordpressDestiny
As affordable housing disappears, states scramble to shore up losses
date: 2024-10-06, from: VOA News USA
Los Angeles — For more than two decades, the low rent on Marina Maalouf’s apartment in a blocky affordable housing development in Los Angeles’ Chinatown was a saving grace for her family, including a granddaughter who has autism.
But that grace had an expiration date. For Maalouf and her family it arrived in 2020.
The landlord, no longer legally obligated to keep the building affordable, hiked rent from $1,100 to $2,660 in 2021 — out of reach for Maalouf and her family. Maalouf’s nights are haunted by fears her yearslong eviction battle will end in sleeping bags on a friend’s floor or worse.
While Americans continue to struggle under unrelentingly high rents, as many as 223,0000 affordable housing units like Maalouf’s across the U.S. could be yanked out from under them in the next five years alone.
It leaves low-income tenants caught facing protracted eviction battles, scrambling to pay a two-fold rent increase or more, or shunted back into a housing market where costs can easily eat half a paycheck.
Those affordable housing units were built with the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, or LIHTC, a federal program established in 1986 that provides tax credits to developers in exchange for keeping rents low. It has pumped out 3.6 million units since then and boasts over half of all federally supported low-income housing nationwide.
“It’s the lifeblood of affordable housing development,” said Brian Rossbert, who runs Housing Colorado, an organization advocating for affordable homes.
That lifeblood isn’t strictly red or blue. By combining social benefits with tax breaks and private ownership, LIHTC has enjoyed bipartisan support. Its expansion is now central to Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris’ housing plan to build 3 million new homes.
The catch? The buildings typically only need to be kept affordable for a minimum of 30 years. For the wave of LIHTC construction in the 1990s, those deadlines are arriving now, threatening to hemorrhage affordable housing supply when Americans need it most.
“If we are losing the homes that are currently affordable and available to households, then we’re losing ground on the crisis,” said Sarah Saadian, vice president of public policy at the National Low Income Housing Coalition.
“It’s sort of like having a boat with a hole at the bottom,” she said.
Not all units that expire out of LIHTC become market rate. Some are kept affordable by other government subsidies, by merciful landlords or by states, including California, Colorado and New York, that have worked to keep them low-cost by relying on several levers.
Local governments and nonprofits can purchase expiring apartments, new tax credits can be applied that extend the affordability, or, as in Maalouf’s case, tenants can organize to try to force action from landlords and city officials.
Those options face challenges. While new tax credits can reup a lapsing LIHTC property, they are limited, doled out to states by the Internal Revenue Service based on population. It’s also a tall order for local governments and nonprofits to shell out enough money to purchase and keep expiring developments affordable. And there is little aggregated data on exactly when LIHTC units will lose their affordability, making it difficult for policymakers and activists to fully prepare.
There also is less of a political incentive to preserve the units.
“Politically, you’re rewarded for an announcement, a groundbreaking, a ribbon-cutting,” said Vicki Been, a New York University professor who previously was New York City’s deputy mayor for housing and economic development.
“You’re not rewarded for being a good manager of your assets and keeping track of everything and making sure that you’re not losing a single affordable housing unit,” she said.
Maalouf stood in her apartment courtyard on a recent warm day, chit-chatting and waving to neighbors, a bracelet with a photo of Che Guevarra dangling from her arm.
“Friendly,” is how Maalouf described her previous self, but not assertive. That is until the rent hikes pushed her in front of the Los Angeles City Council for the first time, sweat beading as she fought for her home.
Now an organizer with the LA Tenants’ Union, Maalouf isn’t afraid to speak up, but the angst over her home still keeps her up at night. Mornings she repeats a mantra: “We still here. We still here.” But fighting day after day to make it true is exhausting.
Maalouf’s apartment was built before California made LIHTC contracts last 55 years instead of 30 in 1996. About 5,700 LIHTC units built around the time of Maalouf’s are expiring in the next decade. In Texas, it’s 21,000 units.
When California Treasurer Fiona Ma assumed office in 2019, she steered the program toward developers committed to affordable housing and not what she called “churn and burn,” buying up LIHTC properties and flipping them onto the market as soon as possible.
In California, landlords must notify state and local governments and tenants before their building expires. Housing organizations, nonprofits, and state or local governments then have first shot at buying the property to keep it affordable. Expiring developments also are prioritized for new tax credits, and the state essentially requires that all LIHTC applicants have experience owning and managing affordable housing.
“It kind of weeded out people who weren’t interested in affordable housing long term,” said Marina Wiant, executive director of California’s tax credit allocation committee.
But unlike California, some states haven’t extended LIHTC agreements beyond 30 years, let alone taken other measures to keep expiring housing affordable.
Colorado, which has some 80,000 LIHTC units, passed a law this year giving local governments the right of first refusal in hopes of preserving 4,400 units set to lose affordability protections in the next six years. The law also requires landlords to give local and state governments a two-year heads-up before expiration.
Still, local governments or nonprofits scraping together the funds to buy sizeable apartment buildings is far from a guarantee.
Stories like Maalouf’s will keep playing out as LIHTC units turn over, threatening to send families with meager means back into the housing market. The median income of Americans living in these units was just $18,600 in 2021, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
“This is like a math problem,” said Rossbert of Housing Colorado. “As soon as one of these units expires and converts to market rate and a household is displaced, they become a part of the need that’s driving the need for new construction.”
“It’s hard to get out of that cycle,” he said.
Colorado’s housing agency works with groups across the state on preservation and has a fund to help. Still, it’s unclear how many LIHTC units can be saved, in Colorado or across the country.
It’s even hard to know how many units nationwide are expiring. An accurate accounting would require sorting through the constellation of municipal, state and federal subsidies, each with their own affordability requirements and end dates.
That can throw a wrench into policymakers’ and advocates’ ability to fully understand where and when many units will lose affordability, and then funnel resources to the right places, said Kelly McElwain, who manages and oversees the National Housing Preservation Database. It’s the most comprehensive aggregation of LIHTC data nationally, but with all the gaps, it remains a rough estimate.
There also are fears that if states publicize their expiring LIHTC units, for-profit buyers without an interest in keeping them affordable would pounce.
“It’s sort of this Catch-22 of trying to both understand the problem and not put out a big for-sale sign in front of a property right before its expiration,” Rossbert said.
Meanwhile, Maalouf’s tenant activism has helped move the needle in Los Angeles. The city has offered the landlord $15 million to keep her building affordable through 2034, but that deal wouldn’t get rid of over 30 eviction cases still proceeding, including Maalouf’s, or the $25,000 in back rent she owes.
In her courtyard, Maalouf’s granddaughter, Rubie Caceres, shuffled up with a glass of water. She is 5 years old, but with special needs, her speech is more disconnected words than sentences.
“That’s why I’ve been hoping everything becomes normal again, and she can be safe,” said Maalouf, her voice shaking with emotion. She has urged her son to start saving money for the worst.
“We’ll keep fighting,” she said, “but day by day it’s hard.”
So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish
date: 2024-10-06, from: The Lever News
A fish story, a perfect storm, a toxic loophole, and more from The Lever this week.
https://www.levernews.com/so-long-and-thanks-for-all-the-fish/
Russia’s envoy to US ends term at time of turmoil
date: 2024-10-06, from: VOA News USA
https://www.voanews.com/a/russia-s-envoy-to-us-ends-term-at-time-of-turmoil/7812088.html
Grammys’ revamped voting body is more diverse, with 66% new members
date: 2024-10-06, from: VOA News USA
NEW YORK — For years, the Grammy Awards have been criticized over a lack of diversity — artists of color and women left out of top prizes; rap and contemporary R&B stars ignored — a reflection of the Recording Academy’s electorate. An evolving voting body, 66% of whom have joined in the last five years, is working to remedy that.
At last year’s awards, women dominated the major categories; every televised competitive Grammy went to at least one woman. It stems from a commitment the Recording Academy made five years ago: In 2019, the Academy announced it would add 2,500 women to its voting body by 2025. Under the Grammys’ new membership model, the Recording Academy has surpassed that figure ahead of the deadline: More than 3,000 female voting members have been added, it announced Thursday.
“It’s definitely something that we’re all very proud of,” Harvey Mason jr., academy president and CEO, told The Associated Press. “It tells me that we were severely underrepresented in that area.”
Reform at the Record Academy dates back to the creation of a task force focused on inclusion and diversity after a previous CEO, Neil Portnow, made comments belittling women at the height of the #MeToo movement.
Since 2019, approximately 8,700 new members have been added to the voting body. In total, there are now more than 16,000 members and more than 13,000 of them are voting members, up from about 14,000 in 2023 (11,000 of which were voting members). In that time, the academy has increased its number of members who identify as people of color by 63%.
“It’s not an all-new voting body,” Mason assures. “We’re very specific and intentional in who we asked to be a part of our academy by listening and learning from different genres and different groups that felt like they were being overlooked, or they weren’t being heard.”
Mason says that in the last five years, the Recording Academy has “requalified 100% of our members, which is a huge step.” There are voters who have let their membership lapse — and those who no longer qualify to be a voting member have been removed.
There have been renewal review processes in the past, but under the current model, becoming a voting member requires proof of a primary career in music, two recommendations from industry peers and 12 credits in a single creative profession, at least five of which must be from the last five years.
Comparisons might be made to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which announced in 2016 that it would restrict Oscars voting privileges to active members — ineligible parties included those who haven’t worked in three decades since joining the Academy, unless they themselves are nominated — as a response to #OscarsSoWhite criticisms of its lack of diversity. As a result, some members protested that the new measures unjustly scapegoated older academy members. The film academy has also grown its membership, adding more women and people from underrepresented racial and ethnic communities.
The Recording Academy sought to increase its voting body by reaching out to different, underrepresented communities, says Mason. “Let’s take the time to understand why those people aren’t engaging with us, figure out how we can fix that,” he said. “And once we fixed it, then let’s invite them or ask them if they would like to be a part of our organization. So, it was a multi-step process.”
Since 2019, the Recording Academy has also seen growth in voters across different racial backgrounds: 100% growth in AAPI voters, 90% growth in Black voters and 43% growth in Latino voters.
Still, Mason sees room to grow. Of the current voting membership, 66% are men, 49% are white and 66% are over the age of 40.
“Going forward, we’re going to continue the work. We’re going to continue to grow,” he says.
That might not look like a public commitment to a specific figure, but Mason promises “that our goals will be to be the most relevant, the most reflective, the most accurately representative of the music community that is humanly possible.”
Trump points to new numbers on migrants with criminal pasts. Here’s what they show
date: 2024-10-06, from: VOA News USA
WASHINGTON — Republicans are pointing to newly released immigration enforcement data to bolster their argument that the Biden administration is letting migrants who have committed serious crimes go free in the U.S. But the numbers have been misconstrued without key context.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement released data to Republican Rep. Tony Gonzales in response to a request he made for information about people under ICE supervision either convicted of crimes or facing criminal charges. Gonzales’ Texas district includes an 800-mile stretch bordering Mexico.
Gonzales posted the numbers online and they immediately became a flashpoint in the presidential campaign between former President Donald Trump, who has vowed to carry out mass deportations, and Vice President Kamala Harris. Immigration — and the Biden administration’s record on border security — has become a key issue in the election.
Here’s a look at the data and what it does or doesn’t show:
What are the numbers? As of July 21, ICE said 662,556 people under its supervision were either convicted of crimes or face criminal charges. Nearly 15,000 were in its custody, but the vast majority — 647,572 — were not.
Included in the figures of people not detained by ICE were people found guilty of very serious crimes: 13,099 for homicide, 15,811 for sexual assault, 13,423 for weapons offenses and 2,663 for stolen vehicles. The single biggest category was for traffic-related offenses at 77,074, followed by assault at 62,231 and dangerous drugs at 56,533.
The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, later clarified that the numbers span decades — including the Trump administration and other presidencies — and that those not in its custody may be detained by a state or local agency. It’s a distinction ICE didn’t make in its report to Gonzales.
“When we speak of somebody who is not detained, we mean not detained in ICE custody. The individual could be in Folsom State Prison, for example,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said Monday.
Millions of people are on ICE’s “non-detained docket,” or people under the agency’s supervision who aren’t in its custody. Many are awaiting outcomes of their cases in immigration court, including some wearing monitoring devices. Others have been released after completing their prison sentences because their countries won’t take them back.
What do both sides say about the numbers? Republicans pointed to the data as proof that the Biden administration is letting immigrants with criminal records into the country and isn’t doing enough to kick out those who commit crimes while they’re here.
“The truth is clear — illegal immigrants with a criminal record are coming into our country. The data released by ICE is beyond disturbing, and it should be a wake-up call for the Biden-Harris administration and cities across the country that hide behind sanctuary policies,” Gonzales said in a news release, referring to pledges by local officials to limit their cooperation with federal immigration authorities.
Trump, who has repeatedly portrayed immigrants as bringing lawlessness and crime to America, tweeted multiple screenshots of the data with the words: “13,000 CROSSED THE BORDER WITH MURDER CONVICTIONS.”
He also asserted that the numbers correspond to Biden and Harris’ time in office.
The data was being misinterpreted, Homeland Security said in a statement Sunday.
“The data goes back decades; it includes individuals who entered the country over the past 40 years or more, the vast majority of whose custody determination was made long before this Administration,” the agency said. “It also includes many who are under the jurisdiction or currently incarcerated by federal, state or local law enforcement partners.”
Mayorkas said it was “unfortunate” the information didn’t come with proper explanation, saying that “lends itself to misinterpretation, either deliberate or otherwise.”
The department also stressed what it has done to deport those without the right to stay in America, saying it had removed or returned more than 700,000 people in the past year, which it said was the highest number since 2010. Homeland Security said it had removed 180,000 people with criminal convictions since President Joe Biden took office.
What’s behind the figures? The data isn’t only listing people who entered the country during the Biden administration but includes people going back decades who came during previous administrations, said Doris Meissner, former commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which was the predecessor to ICE.
They’re accused or convicted of committing crimes in America as opposed to committing crimes in other countries and then entering the U.S., said Meissner, who is now director of the U.S. Immigration Policy Program at the Migration Policy Institute.
“This is not something that is a function of what the Biden administration did,” she said. “Certainly, this includes the Biden years, but this is an accumulation of many years, and certainly going back to at least 2010, 2011, 2012.”
A 2017 report by Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General says that as of August 2016, ICE had about 368,574 people on its non-detained docket who were convicted criminals. By June 2021, shortly after Trump left office, that number was up to 405,786.
Can’t ICE just deport criminals? ICE has limited resources. The number of people it supervises has skyrocketed, while its staffing has not. As the agency noted in a 2023 end-of-year report, it often has to send staff to help at the border, taking them away from their normal duties.
The number of people ICE supervises but who aren’t in its custody has grown from 3.3 million a little before Biden took office to a little over 7 million last spring.
“The simple answer is that as a system, we haven’t devoted enough resources to the parts of the government that deal with monitoring and ultimately removing people who are deportable,” Meissner said.
ICE also has logistical and legal limits on who they can hold. Its budget allows the agency to hold 41,500 people at a time. John Sandweg, who was acting ICE director from 2013 to 2014 under then-President Barack Obama, said holding people accused or convicted of the most serious crimes is always the top priority.
But once someone has a final order of removal — meaning a court has found that they don’t have the right to stay in the country — they cannot be held in detention forever while ICE works out how to get them home. A 2001 Supreme Court ruling essentially prevented ICE from holding those people for more than six months if there is no reasonable chance to expect they can be sent back.
Not every country is willing to take back their citizens, Sandweg said.
He said he suspects that a large number of those convicted of homicide but not held by ICE are people who were ordered deported but the agency can’t remove them because their home country won’t take them back.
“It’s a very common scenario. Even amongst the countries that take people back, they can be very selective about who they take back,” he said.
The U.S. also could run into problems deporting people to countries with which it has tepid relations.
Homeland Security did not respond to questions about how many countries won’t take back their citizens. The 2017 watchdog report put the number at 23 countries, plus an additional 62 that were cooperative but where there were delays getting things like passports or travel documents.
Trump returns to site of first assassination attempt for campaign rally
date: 2024-10-06, from: VOA News USA
BUTLER, Pennsylvania — Donald Trump returned on Saturday to the Pennsylvania fairgrounds where he was nearly assassinated in July, holding a sprawling rally before a massive crowd in a critical swing state Trump hopes to return to his column in November’s election.
The former president and Republican nominee picked up where he left off in July when a gunman tried to assassinate him and struck his ear. He began his speech with, “As I was saying,” and gestured toward an immigration chart he was looking at when the gunfire began.
The Trump campaign worked to maximize the event’s headline-grabbing potential with just 30 days to go and voting already underway in some states in his race against his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris. Musician Lee Greenwood appeared on stage and serenaded him with God Bless the USA, frequently played at his rallies, and billionaire Elon Musk spoke for the first time at a Trump rally.
“We fought together. We have endured together. We have pushed onward together,” Trump said. “And right here in Pennsylvania, we have bled together. We’ve bled.”
‘This is a must-win’
Trump needs to drive up voter turnout in conservative strongholds like Butler County, an overwhelmingly white, rural-suburban community, if he wants to win Pennsylvania in November. Harris, too, has targeted her campaign efforts at Pennsylvania, rallying there repeatedly as part of her aggressive outreach in critical swing states.
At the beginning of the rally, Trump asked for a moment of silence to honor firefighter Corey Comperatore, who died as he shielded family members from gunfire. Opera singer Christopher Macchio sang Ave Maria after a bell rung at the same time that gunfire began on July 13.
Standing behind protective glass that now encases the stage at his outdoor rallies, Trump called the would-be assassin “a vicious monster” and said he did not succeed “by the hand of providence and the grace of God.” There was a very visible heightened security presence, with armed law enforcers in camouflage uniforms on roofs.
One of the most anticipated guests of the evening was Musk, who climbed onto the stage on Saturday jumping and pumping his fists in the air after Trump introduced him as a “great gentleman” and said he “saved free speech.”
“President Trump must win to preserve the Constitution. He must win to preserve democracy in America,” said Musk, who endorsed Trump after the assassination attempt. “This is a must-win situation.”
Musk, who bought Twitter and rebranded it as X and has embraced conservative politics, met with Trump and Vance backstage, donning a black “Make America Great Again” hat. A billboard on the way into the rally said, “IN MUSK WE TRUST,” and showed his photo.
Earlier on Saturday, Trump’s running mate, Ohio Senator JD Vance, got on stage and reflected on the events that day while criticizing Democrats for calling Trump “a threat to democracy,” saying that kind of language is “inflammatory.”
“You heard the shots. You saw the blood. We all feared the worst. But you knew everything would be OK when President Trump raised his fist high in the air and shouted, ‘Fight, fight!’” said Vance. “Now I believe it as sure as I’m standing here today that what happened was a true miracle.”
Crowds pack stands
Crowds were lined up as the sun rose Saturday. The crowd packed bleachers, folding chairs and the field stretching to the venue’s edges. Area hotels, motels and inns were said to be full and some rallygoers arrived Friday.
Much of the crowd waited several hours for Trump. About half an hour into his speech, Trump paused his speech for more than five minutes after an attendee had a medical issue and needed a medic.
Trump used the event to remember Comperatore, the volunteer firefighter struck and killed at the July 13 rally, and to recognize the two other rallygoers injured, David Dutch and James Copenhaver. They and Trump were struck when 20-year-old shooter Thomas Matthew Crooks of Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, opened fire from an unsecured rooftop nearby before he was fatally shot by sharpshooters.
The building from which Crooks fired was completely obscured by tractor-trailers, a large grassy perimeter and a fence. Most bleachers were now at the sides, rather than behind Trump.
How Crooks managed to outmaneuver law enforcement that day and scramble on top of a building within easy shooting distance of the ex-president is among many questions that remain unanswered about the worst Secret Service security failure in decades. Another is his motive.
Butler County District Attorney Rich Goldinger told WPXI-TV this week that “everyone is doubling down on their efforts to make sure this is done safely and correctly.”
Mike Slupe, the county sheriff, told the station he estimates the Secret Service, was deploying “quadruple the assets” it did in July. The agency has undergone a painful reckoning over its handling of two attempts on Trump’s life.
‘I believe God’s got Trump’
Butler County, on the western edge of a coveted presidential swing state, is a Trump stronghold. He won the county with about 66% of the vote in both 2016 and 2020. About 57% of the county’s 139,000 registered voters are Republicans, compared with about 29% who are Democrats and 14% something else.
Chris Harpster, 30, of Tyrone, Pennsylvania, was accompanied by his girlfriend on Saturday as he returned to the scene. Of July 13, he said, “I was afraid” — as were his parents, watching at home, who texted him immediately after the shots rang out.
Heightened security measures were making him feel better now, as well as the presence of his girlfriend, a first-time rallygoer. Harpster said he will be a third-time Trump voter in November, based on the Republican nominee’s stances on immigration, guns, abortion and energy. Harpster said he hopes Pennsylvania will go Republican, particularly out of concern over gas and oil industry jobs.
Other townspeople were divided over the value of Trump’s return. Heidi Priest, a Butler resident who started a Facebook group supporting Harris, said Trump’s last visit fanned political tensions in the city.
“Whenever you see people supporting him and getting excited about him being here, it scares the people who don’t want to see him reelected,” she said.
Terri Palmquist came from Bakersfield, California, and said her 18-year-old daughter tried to dissuade her. “I just figure we need to not let fear control us. That’s what the other side wants is fear. If fear controls us, we lose,” she said.
She said she was not worried about her own safety.
“Honesty, I believe God’s got Trump, for some reason. I do. So we’re rooting for him.”
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-10-06, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
New York Mets rally in Game 1, top Philadelphia Phillies.
https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/41629971/new-york-mets-rally-game-1-top-philadelphia-phillies