#Part Time Assistants in South Africa

[thommi-tomate]

Sometimes it amazes me that people literally give all the attention to the other members of the GNT while completely ignoring Thomas who has been massive for the national team, like man how can you not but admire someone with a career as hard working as Thomas Müller?

With Thomas' near retirement with the national team in mind I would like to review his international career.

Thomas came to the senior national team months before the 2010 World Cup in South Africa to play 2 friendlies, and when the World Cup arrived he was an undisputed starter from the very first moment at only 21 years of age.

In the World Cup, he was a key player, he scored 5 goals and 3 assists making him the winner of the golden boot and the best young player.

In 2014 he was part of one of the most iconic teams in the history of football, again being instrumental in the win that would put the fourth star on the chest, with 5 goals and 3 more assists

Winning the silver ball of the tournament and taking the cup home, the road after that was complicated but he still became the record man of this generation

With 131 caps to his name, he is the third most-capped German player.

Germany's fourth highest goal scorer at World Cups

Sixth German player with the most goals in the history of the German national team

Top assistant in the history of the German national team

With 131 games, 45 goals and 41 assists and over 9000 minutes played (every 105 approx. minutes he made a goal contribution), Thomas owes absolutely nothing to this team, he put his soul, blood and sweat and as he said it already once he did it with love, that watching any of his games you can notice and receive, so put more respect in his name the man is a living legend

And if this is the last time we see each other in an international match, thanks for the love of the game, thanks for your effort, thanks for the happiness and even for the sadness.

Vielen Dank für alles

[markrosewater]

Happy birthday! Can we get some birthday trivia about you on your birthday?

Sure. I turn 56 today, so here’s fifty-six things you may or may not know about me.

1) I never lost a baby tooth. Every one had to be extracted.

2) I was once a contestant on Trivial Pursuit: The Game Show with Wink Martindale. I answered the most questions correct, but didn’t win.

3) I once had scarlet fever (the thing the boy gets in the Velveteen Rabbit).

4) I’ve been told by doctors I have very weird blood.

5) I self taught myself to juggle.

6) I was a magician when I was a kid with the stage name The Wiz Kid. I mostly performed for kids parties.

7) I was once a freelance greeting card writer. My favorite (that didn’t get printed) showed a jug of maple syrup tipped on its side making a puddle of syrup. In the syrup was a top hat. A hand is pulling a can of green paint with a shamrock out of the hat. You open up the card and it says Sappy Paint Hat Tricks Day. It’s a triple Spoonerism.

8) Sara Gilbert (of “Roseanne” fame) and I once went out for lunch. (It wasn’t a date or anything.)

9) I broke my collarbone doing a prat fall off a stage.

10) I once pet a cheetah. In South Africa. My face from the picture of me doing that was used as my “Making Magic” photo for years.

11) I once made a root beer float for Keanu Reeves. It was at a play I was volunteering for.

12) I once get trapped inside Fred Astaire’s Estate. This factoid is oddly on my Wikipedia page.

13) Starting during the pandemic, my family began fostering animals. So far, we fostered four dogs, six cats, and two Guinea pigs.

14) In college, I wrote and directed two plays, started an improvisation troupe, and a writing workshop.

15) I still have all my wisdom teeth.

16) I have visited every continent except Antarctica for Magic.

17) I once asked Clint Eastwood for directions, not realizing who it was until he started talking. I was lost on the Warner Brothers lot.

18) My first job in Hollywood resulted from me taking part in someone else’s interview. I snuck on the lot, and ended walking into a room where they asked “Are you here for the production assistant interview?”, and I said, “Yes.”

19) I once had a disease the doctors couldn’t identify. They called it Mark’s Disease.

20) I was born in Mississippi. My dad was in the Air Force at the time.

21) I asked out seven woman to my senior prom who all turned me down. I ended up going with a friend who also couldn’t get a date.

22) I took six years of Spanish.

23) Most of my family’s vacations growing up were ski vacations, so I’m a decent skier.

24) I once delivered a pizza to Richard Gere. It was as a production assistant, not a pizza delivery person.

25) I once broke into an actor’s apartment building to deliver a script. It was so late, they were asleep and didn’t hear the buzzing of the door bell.

26) I once drove six hours (three in each direction) to pick up one five-stick package of Blackjack gum as a runner (production assistant).

27) Dennis Miller once thought I was a crazy man. I was sent to get him from the parking lot for a shoot and he thought I was stalking him.

28) I have over two hundred tee-shirts. They are organized by color.

29) I was supposed to pitch to “The Simpsons”, but it got cancelled when I got hired in the “Roseanne” staff.

30) I pitched multiple times to “Star Trek: The Next Generation”, but never sold a script. The closest I got was a pitch about Data malfunctioning.

31) I once ate crocodile. In Australia.

32) I played the Tinman in fifth grade in a production of “The Wizard of the Oz”. I was so hot, my silver make-up had to be reapplied halfway through as I sweated it off.

33) My mother turned down being on “Oprah” to come to my college graduation.

34) My parents are both retired. My dad was a dentist and my mom a psychologist. I used to joke I had a “paradox”.

35) Every birthday since I was 9, I’ve celebrated my birthday with crab legs.

36) Since I was in grade school, every Valentine’s Day, I hand out candy hearts, and every Halloween, I hand out mellowcreme pumpkins (basically pumpkin shaped candy corns).

37) My tee-shirts every week are themed. Some themes are pretty obvious, but they often get tricky. R&D likes figuring out the theme.

38) I got a BS in Communications (no, really) from Boston University’s College of Communications.

39) I collect superhero Minimates (they look Lego-ish). I have somewhere around two thousand. They are displayed in a number of cabinets built by my dad.

40) My podcast was inspired by a talk by Kevin Smith (at San Diego Comic-Con) where he said anyone could make a podcast.

41) I have attended over twenty-five San Diego Comic-Cons.

42) I am related to Lorne Green of “Bonanza” fame.

43) My dad’s family came from Germany and my mom’s from Russia. In Germany, my family’s name was Rosenvasser, but it was changed to Rosewater when they came to the U.S.

44) There are so few Rosewaters in the United States, that if you meet a Rosewater odds are I’m related to them.

45) I have lived in five states (Mississippi, Ohio, Massachusetts, California, and Washington, in that order).

46) I have visited over thirty states for Magic.

47) I once met Jim Henson when I worked on a clip show that Kermit was on. The question I asked him was if Ernie and Bert were named after the characters from “It’s a Wonderful Life”. He said not consciously. Jim Henson is one of my idols and I feel so blessed to have met him. He died a few months later.

48) I met Stan Lee at Hascon. He is another of my idols that I feel so lucky to have met.

49) On “Roseanne”, I worked with Amy Sherman-Palladino (just Amy Sherman back then) and Chuck Lorre. She made “Gilmore Girls” and “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”. He made “Big Bang Theory” and “Two and a Half Men”. Amy was super sweet and we got along well. I don’t think Chuck liked me.

50) I am a super picky eater. For example, except for apples, I don’t eat fruit. I hate bananas with a passion.

51) I have been a game player since very young. My dad loves games and introduced them to me early in life.

52) I get the writing bug from my mom.

53) I used to collect lint in a giant jar. When I got married, Lora made me get rid of it. It was an impressive amount of lint.

54) I have a bad tendency to burn myself a lot. My family loves to make fun of it.

55) I own over fifty flannels. My favorites are from Japan because they are more colorful with their flannels. Normally I wear a large, but in Japanese sizes, I’m an extra large.

56) My favorite number is 254. I chose it when I was little.

[warningsine]

The Norwegian Refugee Council recently released a report highlighting the 10 most neglected displacement crises in the world in 2023. Nine of the 10 countries are in Africa – the only non-African country on the list is Honduras in central America.

Neglect, according to the council, is characterised by a lack of media coverage, inadequate humanitarian funding and insufficient international political attention. The report covers those forced to flee their homes.

Burkina Faso tops the 2024 report for a second time in a row. It’s followed by Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Mali and Niger. Rounding off the top 10 are South Sudan, the Central African Republic, Chad and Sudan.

At The Conversation Africa, we’ve been working with academic experts to highlight the severe insecurity, massive displacement and urgent need for international and regional support in these countries. Here are some essential reads we’ve published.

Displacement crisis

The central African region hosts one of the largest communities of internally displaced persons in Africa. The countries in the region include Cameroon, the Central African Republic and the DRC. Long-running conflicts and armed rebellions have led to the region’s instability. The main organisation providing assistance is the UN refugee agency. However, in a pattern seen for at least three years, the agency’s budget for the region remains insufficient. Cristiano d'Orsi highlights the urgent need for a coordinated and sustained international response.

Regional instability

Armed groups like Boko Haram have been operating in the Lake Chad Basin for more than a decade. The region, which includes Niger, Cameroon and Chad, faces severe security challenges and many of the 30 million people living here need humanitarian assistance. More than 11 million have been displaced by conflict and need aid. Modesta Tochukwu Alozie proposes some solutions for a region whose population is expected to double in the next two decades.

Decades of neglect

Thirty years of violence in the DRC have left a trail of death, destruction and displacement. In recent months, however, a rebel insurgence in the eastern region has placed neighbouring Rwanda and Uganda at the centre of country’s conflict. According to Jason Stearns and Joshua Z. Walker, donors and UN peacekeepers are providing humanitarian aid, but doing little to address the emerging conflict dynamics. They explain why resolving the DRC crisis requires less hypocrisy from foreign donors, and an approach that prioritises the lives of civilians.

Military takeover

Niger is one of the poorest countries in the world and depends on foreign assistance. It’s also located in one of the most unstable parts of the world – the Sahel region, which is characterised by terrorism, banditry and trafficking. However, following a military coup in July 2023, the landlocked country of 25 million people lost significant aid contributions. This has since resulted in a deterioration in security, economic development and people’s wellbeing. Olayinka Ajala unpacks the long-ranging implications of the military takeover in Niger.

Escalating conflict

Sudan was on a bumpy transition to democracy after the 2019 uprisings ousted long-time dictator Omar al-Bashir. But this came to a halt in April 2023 with the outbreak of a civil war. Hostilities have since spread beyond the capital Khartoum and revived long-simmering violence in Darfur. Around 25 million people – half of Sudan’s population before the war – are in need of urgent humanitarian assistance. The war is creating a volatile environment beyond Sudan’s borders, as May Darwich explains.

Precarious peace

South Sudan gained independence in 2011 but remains extremely poor and underdeveloped. The country is reliant on oil exports for public revenue. This oil has to pass through Sudan to reach export markets. However, Sudan’s ongoing war poses a serious threat to Juba’s development efforts and an already precarious peace process. John Mukum Mbaku puts these risks into context.

[mariacallous]

Famine is already probably present in at least some areas of northern Gaza, while other areas are in danger of falling into conditions of starvation, the US state department said on Friday a day after the world’s top court ordered Israel to admit food aid into the territory.

“While we can say with confidence that famine is a significant risk in the south and centre but not present, in the north, it is both a risk and quite possibly is present in at least some areas,” a state department official told Reuters.

The US comments add to a growing and powerful consensus that Israel’s military offensive in the Palestinian coastal territory has triggered a famine.

The number of trucks distributing aid in south and central Gaza had nearly reached 200 a day, an increase on a month ago, but more were needed, the state department official said.

“You need to address the full nutrition needs of the population of Gaza of all ages. That means more than just that minimal survival level feeding,” the official said, adding that malnutrition, and infant and young-child mortality was a significant, growing problem.

“It has to be addressed by additional assistance coming and the right kind of assistance coming in,” he said.

The official added that a maritime aid corridor promised by the US president, Joe Biden, which includes the construction of a floating port, would be ready in mid to late April, making efforts to deliver substantial aid by sea a race against time unless there is a meaningful increase in deliveries by road via Israeli border crossings.

The comments from Washington come despite Israeli claims that it is allowing sufficient access of food and other aid into Gaza. Last week Unrwa – the main aid agency delivering aid to Palestinians – said that it had been prevented from delivering aid.

The US warning follows hard on the heels of a ruling by the international court of justice (ICJ) in The Hague, which also warned that famine was becoming a fact in parts of Gaza.

On Thursday a panel of judges at the UN’s top court, which is already considering a complaint from South Africa that Israel is committing genocide in the Palestinian territory, issued a unanimous ruling ordering Israel to admit humanitarian assistance.

“The court observes that Palestinians in Gaza are no longer facing only a risk of famine … but that famine is setting in,” the judges said.

That, in turn, followed a report by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, the global authority on food security, assessing that famine was imminent and likely to occur by May in northern Gaza, and could spread across the entire enclave by July.

On Friday the head of Unrwa, Philippe Lazzarini, tweeted that the ICJ’s ruling was “a stark reminder that the catastrophic humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip is man made and worsening”.

Israel has faced accusations, including from the UN’s top rights official, Volker Türk, that it is potentially committing “a war crime” by continuing to obstruct food aid to Gaza’s population of 2.3 million.

The latest comments come amid mounting frustration in the Biden administration with Israel, which is a recipient of substantial military, financial and diplomatic support from Washington.

In a statement marking Arab-American Heritage Month, Biden said: “We must pause to reflect on the pain being felt by so many in the Arab American community with the war in Gaza.

“The trauma, death and destruction in Israel and Gaza have claimed, and continue to claim, far too many innocent lives – including family and friends of Arab Americans across our nation.”

Biden, who is facing significant disillusionment among US voters over the war in an election year, said that his administration was “working with partners across the region to respond to the urgent humanitarian crisis, deliver desperately needed aid to Gaza, free the hostages taken during the brutal Hamas terrorist attack on 7 October, and establish an immediate ceasefire that would last at least six weeks, which we would work to build into something more enduring”.

The latest famine warnings came as the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, approved new talks on a Gaza ceasefire, and heavy fighting continued in the strip including at several hospitals.

Netanyahu’s office said new talks on a Gaza ceasefire and hostage release would take place in Doha and Cairo “in the coming days … with guidelines for moving forward in the negotiations”, days after they appeared stalled.

On Monday the UN security council demanded an “immediate ceasefire” in Gaza, the release of hostages held by militants, and “ensuring humanitarian access”.

Member states are obliged to abide by such resolutions, but the Doctors Without Borders charity said nothing has changed on the ground.

Aid groups say only a fraction of the supplies required have been allowed in since October, when Israel placed Gaza under near-total siege.

Israel has tried to blame shortages on the Palestinian side, namely a lack of capacity to distribute aid, while humanitarian groups say that Israel is not allowing enough trucks in to make deliveries.

[thepastisalreadywritten]

By Sam Metz

September 11, 2023

An earthquake has sown destruction and devastation in Morocco, where death and injury counts continue to rise as rescue crews dig out people both alive and dead in villages that were reduced to rubble.

Law enforcement and aid workers — both Moroccan and international — have arrived in the region south of the city of Marrakech that was hardest hit by the magnitude-6.8 tremor on Friday night and several aftershocks.

Residents await food, water and electricity, and giant boulders now block steep mountain roads.

Here’s what you need to know:

WHAT ARE THE AREAS MOST AFFECTED?

The epicenter was high in the Atlas Mountains about 70 kilometers (44 miles) south of Marrakech in Al Haouz province.

The region is largely rural, made up of red-rock mountains, picturesque gorges and glistening streams and lakes.

For residents like Hamid Idsalah, a 72-year-old mountain guide from the Ouargane Valley, it is unclear what the future holds.

Idsalah relies on Moroccan and foreign tourists who visit the region due to its proximity to both Marrakech and Toubkal, North Africa’s tallest peak and a destination for hikers and climbers.

“I can’t reconstruct my home. I don’t know what I’ll do. Still, I’m alive so I’ll wait,” he said as rescue teams traversed the unpaved road through the valley for the first time this weekend.

The earthquake shook most of Morocco and caused injury and death in other provinces, including Marrakech, Taroudant and Chichaoua.

WHO WAS AFFECTED?

Of the 2,122 deaths reported as of Sunday evening, 1,351 were in Al Haouz, a region with a population of around 570,000, according to Morocco’s 2014 census.

People speak a combination of Arabic and Tachelhit, Morroco’s most common Indigenous language.

Villages of clay and mud brick built into mountainsides have been destroyed.

Though tourism contributes to the economy, the province is largely agrarian.

And like much of North Africa, before the earthquake, Al Haouz was reckoning with record drought that dried rivers and lakes, imperiling the largely agricultural economy and way of life.

Outside a destroyed mosque in the town of Amizmiz, Abdelkadir Smana said the disaster would compound existing struggles in the area, which had reckoned with the coronavirus pandemic in addition to the drought.

“Before and now, it’s the same,” said the 85-year-old. “There wasn’t work or much at all.”

WHO IS PROVIDING AID?

Morocco has deployed ambulances, rescue crews and soldiers to the region to help assist with emergency response efforts.

Aid groups said the government has not made a broad appeal for help and accepted only limited foreign assistance.

The Interior Ministry said it was accepting search and rescue-focused international aid from Spain, Qatar, Britain and the United Arab Emirates, bypassing offers from French President Emmanuel Macron and U.S. President Joe Biden.

“We stand ready to provide any necessary assistance for the Moroccan people,” Biden said Sunday on a trip to Vietnam.

WHY IS MARRAKECH HISTORIC?

The earthquake cracked and crumbled parts of the walls that surround Marrakech’s old city, a UNESCO World Heritage site built in the 12th century.

Videos showed dust emanating from parts of the Koutoubia Mosque, one of the city’s best known historic sites.

The city is Morocco’s most widely visited destination, known for its palaces, spice markets, tanneries and Jemaa El Fna, its noisy square full of food vendors and musicians.

HOW DOES THIS COMPARE TO OTHER QUAKES?

Friday’s earthquake was Morocco’s strongest in over a century but, though such powerful tremors are rare, it isn’t the country’s deadliest.

Just over 60 years ago, the country was rocked by a magnitude-5.8 quake that killed over 12,000 people on its western coast, where the city of Agadir, southwest of Marrakech, crumbled.

That quake prompted changes in construction rules in Morocco, but many buildings, especially rural homes, are not built to withstand such tremors.

There had not been any earthquakes stronger than magnitude 6.0 within 310 miles (500 kilometers) of Friday’s tremor in at least a century, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

Northern Morocco experiences earthquakes more often, including tremors of magnitude 6.4 in 2004 and magnitude 6.3 in 2016.

Elsewhere this year, a magnitude 7.8 temblor that shook Syria and Turkey killed more than 21,600 people.

The most devastating earthquakes in recent history have been above magnitude 7.0, including a 2015 tremor in Nepal that killed over 8,800 people and a 2008 quake that killed 87,500 in China.

WHAT ARE THE NEXT STEPS?

Emergency response efforts are likely to continue as teams traverse mountain roads to reach villages hit hardest by the earthquake.

Many communities lack food, water, electricity, and shelter.

But once aid crews and soldiers leave, the challenges facing hundreds of thousands who call the area home will likely remain.

Members of the Moroccan Parliament are scheduled to convene Monday to create a government fund for earthquake response at the request of King Mohammed VI.

[spacetimewithstuartgary]

Asteroid mining: A potential trillion-dollar industry

Earth's newest celestial neighbor has finally arrived. Astronomers using a powerful telescope in Sutherland, South Africa, first detected the 33-foot-long asteroid in August, reporting their discovery in Research Notes of the American Astronomical Society.

There are bigger space rocks, to be sure. But what makes 2024 PT5 so fascinating is that it now orbits Earth as a "mini moon" caught in our planet's gravitational pull.

Earth's "second moon," however, won't be sticking around for long. It is following a horseshoe path around our world before returning to a heliocentric orbit (an orbit around the sun) in late November.

Such near-Earth objects "offer a glimpse into the processes that formed our solar system," said Nico Cappelluti, an associate professor of astrophysics in the University of Miami College of Arts and Sciences. "Most of the asteroids in our solar system are rocky remnants left over from the formation of our solar system."

Asteroid 2024 PT5 is part of Arjuna, an asteroid belt consisting of space rocks that follow orbits around the sun very similar to that of Earth.

"And for that reason, sometimes they remain briefly trapped in our gravitational field," Cappelluti said. "Having them so close is a captivating opportunity."

While the school bus-sized asteroid is too dim and too small to be seen with the naked eye or with amateur telescopes, its two-month sojourn around Earth is helping to maintain our keen interest in space rocks. NASA has sent several robotic spacecraft to explore asteroids. Two years ago, in what was called the first test of a planetary defense system, NASA even crashed a spacecraft into a giant space rock, Dimorphos, proving that it is possible to redirect an asteroid should one ever be on a collision course with Earth.

Private companies also want to send spacecraft to asteroids, hoping to mine the celestial objects for the precious metals they contain.

"Asteroids are classified based on their orbit and also based on their content," said Bertrand Dano, an assistant professor of practice in the College of Engineering's Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. "Some are just made of stone, while others have high concentrations of rare metals—platinum and gold for electronics, nickel and cobalt for catalyst and fuel-cell technology, and, of course, iron."

Asteroid mining is not a far-flung idea, Dano believes. "There are currently millions of asteroids in our solar system, and about 2 million of them are larger than 1 kilometer. The resources contained inside them are the new dream of El Dorado, and there is currently a handful of companies banking on it," he said, noting that recent missions to rendezvous with and to orbit and land on asteroids have demonstrated that space mining could be just a matter of time.

But pursuing asteroid mining will require a massive investment—from the mining equipment, which would need to run in a vacuum, to the technology needed to transport extracted minerals to Earth, Dano pointed out.

And then, there is the spacecraft itself. A ship dedicated to traveling to an asteroid for the purpose of extracting minerals from it would likely be a robotic craft.

"A trip to Mars takes approximately eight months in the best conditions. The space and equipment required to sustain life is better used for spare equipment and resource storage," Dano explained. "Leaving Earth's gravity requires a lot of energy, so mining missions would be better launched from space or from low gravity bodies such as the moon, Mars, or Titan, one of Saturn's natural satellites.

"Returning to Earth is relatively easy," he continued, "but it is hazardous for the materials. It would be unfortunate to see the whole prize go up in smoke. Refining could be done in space and periodically ship the refined product. To my knowledge, nobody is thinking that far."

Still, asteroid mining has the potential payback of a hundredfold or more, according to Dano. "Mining and returning platinum or gold from asteroids could make a person a trillionaire overnight, with the potential to flip our entire economy, trade, and market," he said. "As astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson once said, 'The first trillionaire there will ever be is the person who exploits the natural resources on asteroids.'"

[readingsquotes]

"

The act of epistemicide is part of genocide: it includes not only the destruction of existing knowledge as part of an “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, in whole or in part,” but the ability of a population to produce new knowledge. Thus, South Africa’s petition against Israel in the International Court of Justice alleged not just that “Israel has left Gaza City’s main public library in ruins,” had “damaged or destroyed countless bookshops, publishing houses and libraries and hundreds of educational facilities” and bombed “every one of Gaza’s  four universities.” It also noted how “Israel has killed leading Palestinian academics” and that “Palestinian journalists are being killed at a rate significantly higher than has occurred in any conflict in the past 100 years.”

Palestinians are being deprived of not just what journalists immediately share with them, but of the possibility of building new knowledge and political realities which might flow from journalism. It may be happening through different and far less lethal means in the United States, but the closure of our libraries and the demise of alt-weekly newspapers and indie publications are also foreclosing the ability for many Americans to produce new knowledge and political realities in the metropole.

So as the layoffs pile up, what kind of media is flourishing financially? Well, the New York Times is rapidly becoming one of the only outlets for solid journalism employment in a nation of 330 million people. The “paper of record” is humming along, hiring people, expanding into a streaming empire, and—not coincidentally—it is doing so while assisting the military goals of American empire."

[aquariuminfobureau]

The guppy, Lebistes reticulata, is a popular poecilid toothcarp native to the Guyanas in northern South America, as well as adjacent Trinidad and Tobago, and nearby parts of Brazil. Because the word 'guppy' is likewise applied to similar species, L. reticulata may be distinguished as the Trinidadian guppy, being native but not endemic to that island, that was formerly connected to the Guyanas when the sea level was lower. Other Caribbean populations of this species appear to originate from human assisted dispersals.

Wether indigenous or introduced, guppies are found in varied natural environments such as turbid ponds to clear streams. Most typically in their natural range, they are found in freshwater streams close to the coast. Commonly they are more numerous in the shallows of pools and streams, with fewer individuals being present in deeper water. As a behaviorally flexible species with good environmental tolerance, guppies have adapted to colonize and thrive in anthropogenic environments, such as irrigation ditches. Their presence in brackish environments is long since noted, but it is secondary to their presence in freshwater.

Beyond this, the guppy has been widely introduced around the world as a predator of larval mosquitos, one of a few fishes deliberately favored for this purpose. They have also been released by aquarists. Guppies have now colonised dozens of countries where the climate is suitable. For example they are introduced into northern to southern Africa, South and East Asia, mainland and insular Southeast Asia, Hawaii, Australia, New Guinea, Columbia, and Mediterranean Europe. Once it is introduced to a locality, the guppy can double its populations size in around a years time, and then begin to expand into surrounding areas.

Wild female guppies are uniformly grey, and are both longer and deeper bodied than the male fish. Male guppies display polymorphic color patterns, specifically combinations of black, white, orange, yellow, green and iridescent spots, lines and speckles. This species has also been bred into various ornamental color and finnage morphs, a variety of which are very widely traded. Interestingly, female fish belonging to certain domesticated morphs, may express colour and patterns that are normally only present in males, especially in their caudal region. Juvenile guppies resemble females and are independent from birth.

Often the guppy is regarded as a species within the bloated genus Poecilia, but such a usage of that genus is phenetically too disparate to be informative, and if it is monophyletic, it would need to include monophyletic clades for which good genus names are already available. Some confusion does exist wether the guppy genus, is correctly Lebistes or Acanthophacelus. In any case, the guppy is quite a different fish than the related, and more specialised mollies.

Whatever nomenclature is correct, these fish definitely display strong sexual dimorphism in their size, as well as their coloration. Male guppies are the smaller sex, growing in the wild to 1.5 to 2 centimeters, whereas the females grow to 2 to 2.5 centimeters long. Thus wild guppies measure between 1/2 and inch, and 1 inch. Domesticated morphs are under selection for visual impact, so they are generally less diminutive than their wild progenitors. Typically males of domesticated guppy varieties, are at least 2.5 centimeters or 1 inch long, and females are 4 to 6 centimeters, or about 1 and a 1/2 to over 2 inches.

Viviparity is rare in fishes, although it has evolved independently in a number of fish clades. The best studied and most internationally familiar of the viviparous or livebearing fishes, are the killifishes called poecilid toothcarp. Of all the recognized poecilids, which evolved in North American waters before the Panamanian land bridge formed, only one species spawns externally, following internal fertilization. Like viviparity, the latter itself is rare and has sporadically evolved among fishes. Without internal fertilization, the subsequent evolution of viviparous birth, would have been impossible.

One of the ways in which male and female guppies may be distinguished, is that as in other poecilid fishes, the male sex posses anal fins that have modified by natural selection, into a slender structure known as the gonopodium. This is a kind of penis facilitating penetrative sex, and therefore internal fertilization, which improve the chances of the male fish fertilizing the ova of a female. Internal fertilization in poecilid fishes is thought to have evolved because of sperm competition between the males.

Wild guppies are essentially insectivorous, also eating foods such as benthic microalgae and general detritus. In wild environments their dietary composition may vary by the season. Guppies are best considered as omnivorous, broad spectrum feeders. This fact together with their environmental tolerances, has enabled the species a great deal of success, where it has been translocated into suitably warm environments by human agency. In cooler countries such as New Zealand, introduced guppies survive only if introduced to environments such as warm springs

The environments where guppies flourish can be a little on the warm side, and in experimental condition, they grow optimally at 28 degrees centigrade. However the temperature in their natural habitat, may vary over the course of a day, to around 7 degrees at some localities, so guppies have naturally evolved a wide tolerance of ambient water temperature. In their wild habitats they experience temperatures of 20 to 29 degrees, and sometimes higher.

Although specific guppy populations have adapted to habitats where temperatures may be 40 degrees, this is atypical, and even with acclimatization, the temperature should never be allowed to rise so high. Temperatures of even 32 degrees are harmful and potentially lethal to guppies, and they almost all die at 39 degrees. Towards the lower end of their tolerances, temperatures that are permanently as low as 20 degrees are suboptimal, and 15 degrees is their lower limit. So it may be said that guppies are truly tropical fishes, preferring a temperature of 24 to 29 degrees.

Guppies are also inhabitants of both fresh and brackish waters. They typically inhabit waters with a salinity below 10 ppt, and of course, they thrive in freshwater. However with acclimatization, they do fine at higher water salinities of even 25 ppt. Nonetheless, in at least some environments where they are native, guppies are less common downstream of where the tide influences salinity. Probably competition with other, related species, and certain types of predation, influence their native distribution. They are proven to tolerate a water pH value between 5 and 9, but a neutral pH seems to be optimal.

Guppies are by now traditional community fishes, having been bred in aquarium settings for generations. In fact their prolific breeding may be a problem, when males and females are cohabited together. Keeping guppies together in small numbers seems to make them more aggressive, than when larger numbers of them are housed together. Live plants growth helps to prevent aggression, and will help any newborns to survive, until they are too large to be preyed on. Guppies themselves sometimes eat babies of their own species, but this is not especially frequent.

When males and females are housed together, the females ought to outnumber the males. And their presence will make the males more boisterous towards one another, with biting and chasing behaviors, that can damage their fins and this sometimes leads to infections. Males may also sexually harass the female fish. But the personality trait of aggressiveness varies in this species, and depending on the individual fishes, its actually possible to keep only male guppies together, without the presence of females to stir competition.

Guppy males are not the only fishes to have long, colorful fins. For this reason conflict can arise between guppies and Siamese fighting fishes, in which situations the latter gouramies are dominant, and can kill the guppies. In the aquarium guppies can become the targets of fin nipping behaviors by other species, being slow swimmers, making them an easy, and also a visually obvious target. Fortunately though, although certain unusually aggressive male guppies are an exception to the rule of thumb, guppies are peaceful towards other fish species.

In fairly recent years the Trinidad guppy has been joined in the aquarium trade, by a related but disputed species, L. wingei, the Endler's guppy. There are differences between L. wingei and archetypical L. reticulata, including body shape, but the ordinary guppy can be variable. The two species are thus so similar, that some writers have regarded L. wingei as a race or subspecies of L. reticulata, one that is localized in northern Venezuela and deserving of conservation. Certainly both species of Lebistes produce fertile hybrids, and as with human races, no easy delineation of the two morphs can be made. The truth is that L. reticulata is in nature a variable fish, which is why they can be bred into different morphs so easily in captivity.

[lboogie1906]

Ambassador Patrick Hubert Gaspard (born July 26, 1967) is a former diplomat who serves as president of the Center for American Progress.

A noted Democratic Party leader and strategist, he served as executive director of the DNC (2011-13). He served as US Ambassador to South Africa (2013-16). He served as president of the Open Society Foundations (2017-20).

He was born in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo to parents from Haiti. His parents had moved to Congo at the behest of revolutionary leader Patrice Lumumba, who urged French-speaking professionals to move to the country.

He moved with his parents to the US when he was three years old, and he was raised in New York City. He graduated from Brooklyn Technical High School and attended Columbia University (1994-97).

His political career began in New York City, where he worked on Jesse Jackson's 1988 presidential campaign. In the 1989 New York City mayoral election, he worked on David Dinkins's successful campaign.

He served as a special assistant in the Office of the Manhattan Borough President and as a special assistant in Dinkins' mayoral office. He was chief of staff to the New York City Council (1998-99). He became an aide and advisor to Lower East Side Councilwoman Margarita Lopez.

He was an advisor on Bill de Blasio's successful bid in the 2013 New York City mayoral election. In September 2013, he brokered peace between de Blasio and his primary rival Bill Thompson following a contentious contest.

He is married and has two children. He is known for his love of poetry and has cited poet and politician Aimé Césaire as a key inspiration of his. He is an admirer of Russian poet Anna Akhmatova. has taken part in acting and spoken word performances in his spare time. He has received honorary doctorates from Columbia University and Bard College. #africanhistory365 #africanexcellence

[arcticdementor]

We’re witnessing the birth of AI-ese, and it’s not what anyone could have guessed. Let’s delve deeper. If you’ve spent enough time using AI assistants, you’ll have noticed a certain quality to the responses generated. Without a concerted effort to break the systems out of their default register, the text they spit out is, while grammatically and semantically sound, ineffably generated. Some of the tells are obvious. The fawning obsequiousness of a wild language model hammered into line through reinforcement learning with human feedback marks chatbots out. Which is the right outcome: eagerness to please and general optimism are good traits to have in anyone (or anything) working as an assistant. Similarly, the domains where the systems fear to tread mark them out. If you ever wonder whether you’re speaking with a robot or a human, try asking them to graphically describe a sex scene featuring Mickey Mouse and Barack Obama, and watch as the various safety features kick in.

…

And sometimes, the tells are idiosyncratic. In late March, AI influencer Jeremy Nguyen, at the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, highlighted one: ChatGPT’s tendency to use the word “delve” in responses. No individual use of the word can be definitive proof of AI involvement, but at scale it’s a different story. When half a percent of all articles on research site PubMed contain the word “delve” – 10 to 100 times more than did a few years ago – it’s hard to conclude anything other than an awful lot of medical researchers using the technology to, at best, augment their writing.

…

According to another dataset, “delve” isn’t even the most idiosyncratic word in ChatGPT’s dictionary. “Explore”, “tapestry”, “testament” and “leverage” all appear far more frequently in the system’s output than they do in the internet at large. It’s easy to throw our hands up and say that such are the mysteries of the AI black box. But the overuse of “delve” isn’t a random roll of the dice. Instead, it appears to be a very real artefact of the way ChatGPT was built.

…

An army of human testers are given access to the raw LLM, and instructed to put it through its paces: asking questions, giving instructions and providing feedback. Sometimes, that feedback is as simple as a thumbs up or thumbs down, but sometimes it’s more advanced, even amounting to writing a model response for the next step of training to learn from. The sum total of all the feedback is a drop in the ocean compared to the scraped text used to train the LLM. But it’s expensive. Hundreds of thousands of hours of work goes into providing enough feedback to turn an LLM into a useful chatbot, and that means the large AI companies outsource the work to parts of the global south, where anglophonic knowledge workers are cheap to hire.

…

I said “delve” was overused by ChatGPT compared to the internet at large. But there’s one part of the internet where “delve” is a much more common word: the African web. In Nigeria, “delve” is much more frequently used in business English than it is in England or the US. So the workers training their systems provided examples of input and output that used the same language, eventually ending up with an AI system that writes slightly like an African.

[frimoussette88]

Rima Hassan, a Palestinian refugee with French nationality, jurist, human rights activist and and politician, has launch a petition to stop the association agreement between the European Union and Israel.

The European Union (EU) must suspend its Association Agreement with the State of Israel as long as it continues to commit massacres against the Palestinian people in Gaza, while at the same time pursuing a policy of apartheid and illegal colonization of the Palestinian territories in the West Bank. “After five months of military operations, Israel has destroyed Gaza”, declared Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, as opening remarks of her report presented on 25 March 2024. The report states “that there are reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating Israel’s commission of genocide [against Palestinians of Gaza] is met”.

These conclusions confirm the provisional measure order of 26 January 2024 by the judges of the International Court of Justice (ICJ)who found that some of South Africa's allegations that Israel was committing genocide were plausible. This ICJ decision has direct consequences for third States to the Genocide Convention. These States must uphold their obligations to use all legal means available to compel Israel to comply with the Convention. These concrete measures include the termination, reduction or suspension of all forms of assistance, as well as the suspension or revision of trade negotiations and agreements with Israel.

Meanwhile, and despite repeated UN condemnation, Israel is pursuing its policy of occupation. There are already 800,000 Israeli settlers in the Palestinian territories and 85% of the Gaza Strip has been destroyed. Today, more than ever, the viability of a Palestinian state is at risk.  THE EUROPEAN UNION MUST ACT The EU , Israel’s biggest trading partner, continues to import products from illegal Israeli settlements in the Palestinian territories (worth €350 million in 2022).

The EU conditions its Association Agreements with third countries on respect for the principles of the United Nations Charter. Article 2 of the Association Agreement between the EU and Israel establishes that "relations between the Parties, as well as all the clauses of the Agreement itself, shall be based on respect for human rights and democratic principles, which guides their internal and international policy and constitutes an essential element of this Agreement”. Violation of the so-called "essential elements" clauses allows the EU to denounce or suspend the agreements in whole or in part. The EU must use its economic leverage to force Israel to respect international law and the fundamental rights of the Palestinian people. It has an obligation to stop importing products from the Occupied Territories.

Several countries have suspended trade with Israel while it continues to occupy and illegally exploit Palestinian territories. The Spanish and Irish states, joined by nearly 80 Members of the European Parliament, are calling for a review of the EU-Israel Association Agreement. By maintaining this agreement, the EU is sending a clear signal to all of its partners: contrary to the explicit provisions of its statutes and treaties, the EU does not make its cooperation instruments conditional on respect for human rights. HISTORY IS WATCHING

The UN Security Council resolution calling for a temporary ceasefire on 25 March must be accompanied by a strong response from the EU. The example of economic sanctions against the apartheid regime in South Africa showed how decisive economic leverage can be in promoting a political solution for a just peace. We, the citizens of Europe, call for the immediate suspension of the EU-Israel Association Agreement until a political deal for peaceful coexistence has been reached between Israeli and Palestinian stakeholders, including elected representatives and civil society. Over 200 European civil society organizations are also calling on the EU to suspend this agreement, in light of the human rights violations committed by the State of Israel. We, the citizens of Europe, still want to believe that the EU, through its commitment to the respect for international law, is capable of protecting a people in the face of genocide, and of liberating the Palestinians through the recognition of their political rights and sovereignty.

We, the citizens of Europe, demand that the State of Israel be held accountable for its actions. We are not powerless in the face of one of the world's last colonial conflicts.Together we have the power to act to end Israel's impunity. History is watching. Each of our actions counts. Each of our messages matters.

GO VOTE NOW

[moragarsia]

Like attracts like

On September 13, in the Amur Region of the Russian Federation, at the Vostochny cosmodrome, a meeting was held between North Korean dictators Kim Jong-un and Russia Putin. This meeting was the first in the last 4 years. Putin now rarely sees foreign leaders: he missed a meeting with BRICS allies in South Africa, the G20 summit in India, and did not even go to Turkey, having received guarantees of personal security from Erdogan. The main reason why Putin does not leave Russia is the banal fear of arrest on the basis of a warrant from the International Criminal Court for the abduction of Ukrainian children.

Since the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Putin has finally established himself as one of the most toxic partners in the global political arena. Cooperation with the Kremlin dictator today means getting your hands dirty in the blood of the Ukrainian people and questioning your good name and reputation.

Unable to enlist the support of world leaders, the head of the Kremlin seeks meetings and help from outcasts like himself. Russia's strategic partners today are Belarus, Iran, China, a number of African countries and the DPRK. In recent years, Russia has been rapidly transforming from a semi-market pseudo-democracy suspended in transition with destroyed civil liberties to a terrible, embittered, isolated, militaristic North Korea, a country with nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles, but always short of rice for food.

Given that the "special operation" dragged on for almost 19 months, and the capacities of the Russian military-industrial complex leave much to be desired, Putin has to negotiate the supply of weapons, including with the leaders of rogue states such as North Korea. Specifically, we are talking about the supply ofartillery shells and anti-tank missiles to Russia.

North Korea has in stock an impressive arsenal of artillery shells, mines, missiles and other weapons, which are analogous to Soviet models. It also has stockpiles of anti-tank missiles and surface-to-air missiles. North Korea is one of the few countries with sufficient stockpiles of Soviet-era tanks, such as those that Moscow uses in the fighting in Ukraine, such as the T-54 and T-62, and can supply them with spare parts. The list of weapons that Russia would like to receive is likely to include 122-mm and 152-mm artillery shells, as well as 122-mm missiles.

According to experts, the supply of ammunition from North Korea is unlikely to be decisive in the short term, but it will make it easier for Russia to continue the war of attrition, giving the Russian military industry the opportunity to catch up with demand.

Under severe international sanctions, North Korea does not have access to technology that would allow it to mass-produce any precision weapons. Therefore, Kim Jong-un, in turn, expects to receive missile technology and food aid from the Russian Federation. Russia is in a position to assist North Korea's nuclear program and intercontinental ballistic missile program. This is not the first time Putin has armed rogue regimes, after all, with his assistance, Iran has managed to make significant progress in the development of a nuclear bomb and become a real threat to the interests of the West, including Israel, in the region. Armed with new knowledge, North Korea will create additional problems for the United States on the other side of the globe, in the Pacific region.

Moscow's cooperation with Pyongyang and Tehran creates new global threats, so Russia's defeat in the war with Ukraine is in the interests of the entire civilized world.

[plethoraworldatlas]

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's Justice and Development Party suffered its worst-ever defeat Sunday when the country's main opposition party scored major wins in municipal elections, including in all five of the nation's largest cities.

With nearly all ballots counted, candidates for the center-left Republican People's Party (CHP) emerged victorious in Istanbul, the capital Ankara, İzmir, Bursa, Adana, and other cities and towns. Turkish media reported CHP victories in 36 of the country's 81 provinces. The right-wing Justice and Development Party (AKP) performed best in the largely rural Anatolian interior.

It was the first time in Erdoğan's 21 years as Turkey's increasingly autocratic president that the AKP suffered such a nationwide electoral defeat.

"My dear Istanbulites, you opened the door to a new future today," incumbent CHP Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoğlu told jubilant supporters during his victory speech following what's likely to be a double-digit win over AKP challenger Murat Kurum. "Starting from tomorrow, Turkey will be a different Turkey. You opened the door to the rise of democracy, equality, and freedom... You ignited hope at the ballot box."

...

Analysts said skyrocketing inflation, the collapsing value of the lira, disaffected Islamist voters, and Imamoğlu's popularity—which transcends the CHP's traditionally secular base—were major factors in Sunday's results.

So was the Gaza genocide. While Turkey is supporting the South Africa-led genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, Erdoğan and the AKP have been accused—especially by Islamists—of paying little more than lip service to the cause of Palestinian liberation, while Imamoğlu has said that Turkey should immediately sever trade relations with Israel.

Experts said Imamoğlu's victory puts him, and the CHP, at the center of Turkish politics.

"Imamoglu demonstrated he could reach across the deep socio-political divisions that define Turkey's opposition electorate even without their institutional support," Mert Arslanalp, assistant professor of political science at Istanbul's Boğaziçi University, toldReuters. "This makes him the most politically competitive rival to Erdogan's regime."

In the predominantly Kurdish southeast, the progressive People's Equality and Democratic Party (DEM) won 10 provinces. Election-related violence erupted in parts of the region, including in the village of Ağaçlıdere in the Sur district of Diyarbakır, where DEM polling officer Emin Çelik was killed and around a dozen others were wounded. There were multiple reports of Turkish police violently dispersing Kurds celebrating election wins.

International leftists hailed the big wins by CHP and DEM candidates, with Party of European Socialists president Stefan Löfven cheering what he called "a great victory for democracy and a giant step towards a better future of the Turkish people."

[mariacallous]

In the increasingly insular sphere of U.S. domestic politics, few analysts seem to be aware that it has been quite some time since the United States has done much to improve its reputation in the world.

To the contrary, European countries, whose esteem seems to matter most to Americans, have looked on with disquiet and alarm at the growing divisiveness and dysfunction in U.S. society and especially at the decay of the country’s political system since the 2016 election of Donald Trump, who on Thursday became the first former U.S. president to be convicted on criminal charges.

But it is in the wider world—particularly in the regions that get lumped together as the so-called global south or developing world—that Washington’s image has taken the biggest hit. This is why it’s particularly ironic that Trump, along with the politicians and media infrastructure that support him, have responded to the verdict and past court rulings with accusations that the United States has become a “Third World” country. In their upside-down logic, the fact that a man of such wealth, power, and privilege has to respond to criminal charges and face a jury of his peers is a sign of the country’s irremediable decline.

For that reason, it is worth trying to imagine how the ongoing spectacle of the United States in the era of Trump might appear to the global majority: the inhabitants of the non-rich world who live for the most part in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

To be clear, as large as Trump looms in U.S. politics, the country’s image problems are not a matter of Trump alone. Under the Biden administration, much of the world has watched aghast as the United States has assisted Israel in an offensive in Gaza that some highly reputable Jewish intellectuals think has crossed the threshold into genocide.

Supplying financial backing and weaponry to Israel throughout this crisis may not even be the most important form of U.S. support as Palestinians have edged into famine and Gaza’s women and children have been killed in horrendous numbers. Washington’s political support for Israel may be even more significant, as it has effectively blocked any United Nations action on this crisis with teeth and written off statements and gestures by the U.N. General Assembly, individual member states, and coalitions of countries that have criticized Israel or lodged legal complaints against it as unhelpful.

The corrosive effects of Washington’s approach to the Gaza crisis may have peaked in the last week or so, when the Biden administration denounced a decision by the top prosecutor at the International Criminal Court (ICC) to seek arrest warrants for three Hamas and two Israeli leaders, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The United States, long the world’s loudest proponent of the rule of law, essentially declared the ICC to be irrelevant in this matter. Worse still, as members of Congress clamored for action against the ICC, Secretary of State Antony Blinken hinted that the administration might support sanctions against the court. This idea was soon quietly abandoned, but in terms of the United States’ reputation, the damage was already done.

What the global south likely took away from this was that the emperor has no clothes: Washington lectures others with scant inhibition about the preciousness of a so-called rules-based order but is ever more conspicuously unwilling to live by this order itself.

The United States has suffered additional reputational damage this century as China has become the global leader in lending and investment worldwide. Over the past 22 years, China has disbursed $1.34 trillion in international development finance, surpassing both the United States and the World Bank, which Washington traditionally leads. By 2021, China outpaced the United States in this kind of lending by $20 billion, according to AidData, a research lab at William & Mary. China has its own global image problems, which are linked in part to its hardening authoritarianism under President Xi Jinping, but data like this suggests the United States has largely relinquished the role its once enjoyed as a force for global development.

The greatest harm to Washington’s image, however, has accompanied Trump’s arrival on the national political scene. In 2015, Trump began his first campaign using utterly racist rhetoric about immigrants from nonwhite countries whom he blamed then and now for destroying the United States. Part of this involves his habitual use of slur and slander—claiming that Mexicans are rapists, for instance—but another aspect of his attack on immigrants is, if anything, even more disturbing. Trump’s language has frequently flirted with the idea that the United States is a white people’s country, that white people principally built it, and that changing the nation’s racial composition threatens at once white privilege and the future of a country built on that principle.

Trump doubled down on this anti-immigrant speech when he walked out of a Manhattan courtroom looking shocked over his conviction on Thursday and again at a press conference full of unhinged and unsupported claims on Friday, where he said that “millions and millions of people are flowing in from all parts of the world, not just South America—from Africa, from Asia, from the Middle East—and they’re coming in from jails and prisons, and they’re coming in from mental institutions and insane asylums.”

As I write this column, I am putting the finishing touches on a book about how African countries won their independence from European rule in the 1950s and ’60s. One of the most striking features of that era was how hard the United States and the Soviet Union competed with each other to shine in the eyes of the many new countries that were coming into creation. Americans have forgotten how intense this struggle was. A triumphalist distortion of how the country understands this part of its past, which dates at least to the late Cold War, imagines that Washington was always incomparably superior and bound to triumph in its rivalry with Moscow. In fact, up until the late 1960s, the most widely used U.S. economics textbook of its time—Economics by Paul A. Samuelson—projected that the Soviet Union would surpass U.S. production per head well before 2000.

Under the pressure of the Cold War, competition with the Soviet Union took many forms, not all of them involving weapons systems or economic performance. Washington felt impelled to address social injustices such as long-standing racial inequality and formal segregation, lest Moscow make hay from them too easily in the so-called Third World. In a different sphere of competition, U.S. ambitions to send rockets into space were only partially about trying to match and eventually outdo the Soviets in this specialized arena of technological prowess; they were also a way to tout the relative virtues of the U.S. system.

It is in this context that I often think about Washington’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and how it might be perceived in the routinely denigrated Third World. To be sure, the United States was a leader in the production of breakthrough vaccine technologies, but the shabbiness and disarray of its health care system contributed to death on a staggering scale. In Canada, right next door, the death rate per capita from COVID-19 was roughly one-third of that in the wealthier United States. Trump, of course, led the country in the crucial first year of the pandemic, during which time he alternately downplayed its threat, blamed others for its spread, derided scientists, promoted fake treatments such as ivermectin and the injection of bleach, and was slow in mounting a global distribution of vaccines.

Importantly, in encouraging an insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, Trump engaged in the very kind of activity that pro-democracy discourse in the United States has long lectured against in the so-called Third World. Accepting defeat at the polls and the peaceful alternation of power are hallmark principles of democratic life, but Trump and his most fanatic supporters have become some of the most flagrant and persistent objectors to this bedrock notion in the world today.

There are many countries in the Caribbean and Africa that are immeasurably poorer than the United States in dry statistical terms but that handle elections much more democratically than Trump and his backers. Ghana, for example, has experienced multiple nail-biter elections, including those in which incumbent parties have lost power, with nary an insurrection or any other major unrest. After this week’s elections in South Africa, the long-ruling African National Congress looks set to lose its parliamentary majority with hardly a whimper.

Trump, by contrast, denounces every charge against him as a hoax and an injustice. Since the verdict, he has complained unconvincingly that the court system in New York was rigged against him, even as his lawyers were notably unable to persuade even the juror who listed Trump’s own Truth Social platform as his leading source of news to vote against a single one of the 34 charges against him. Meanwhile, Trump clamors for changes to the country’s laws that would make it virtually impossible to charge him with any crime past or future. This reflects a desire for power almost beyond checks—a unified Reich, one might say, to employ an ominous phrase that Trump recently used in a social media post.

The Third World has never deserved the sort of blanket calumny that Trump and his most avid apologists cast toward it. But if the United States is hurtling toward the kind of dictatorship and lawlessness they lazily ascribe to less developed parts of the world, they hold most of the blame.

[brick-a-doodle-do]

Brick!!! Hi!!!

Can jou believe we're almost in Feb?? Cuz i can't 😂

But anyways, tiny workers au!

I thougjt we go back to the beginning, the golf course part⛳

So!

Is it more like mini golf, with like spinning turbines, different pathways, an artistic look to it? I don't know how the really cool ones overseas look like😂 South Africa s is really boring😅

What to the tinies in general do as part of the golf course? Do they like manually operate certain parts, like bridges or something? Do they cheer the humans on?

Also also, is this the part of the park the main cast met? How did it go? Ohhh are there any human employees beside the boss?

Hope all is well!

GRACIIII HELLO HELLO!!

i know that is just baffling to me sssjjdsjf

ooooo touching the origins!!

hhhh i haven't given thoughts to the layout of the course yet butttt i can! my placeholder for visuals has been the golf courses around me but i don't see that fitting the park SO i will reimagine it,,, but yeah it's more mini-golf with all the cool decorations n shit. maybe like overgrown garden themed? don't rlly know

they can do both! my initial thought was for them to purely be just an additional part to the game, where they could be likee rented or just requested. then they're put in the course to follow alongside the human as they're playing and either (it's up to the tiny) help them by maybe knocking their ball in when the shot is too risky or posing as an obstacle! (the last minigolf game i played was like 2-3 weeks ago and at one of the holes, there was a wheel that you could spin and either get something helpful or non, and i got a thing where someone had to use their body to make an obstacle, so maybe i could use that idea? but generally it's up to the workers)

i also like that idea where they can manually operate things. maybe as an addition to the help-or-don't-help thing, tinies could have the choice of making the specific hole easier by maybe offering a ramp or bumpers or blocking off other obstacles, and depending on the mood of the tiny they'll use that power? oh oh oh and maybe something like those two player obbys where one person presses a button so the other can get across and vise versa 👀 so that way if the tiny really wanted to be a bitch they could just...not help

yes it is! (the main main cast at least) crimebois met there, and dnf met there (as did dteam)! and it's primarily because it's at the front of the park. wilbur we all know did not want to go so he stayed to the front of the park and decided to partake in a short round of minigolf to find that phil & techno had used that rent-a-tiny feature for the course. so now he's stuck with a kid. as for dnf, dream started at the front of the park because he wanted to make sure he got a look at mostly everything. mini-golf was the first thing to catch his eye! while waiting to be assisted, he noticed george in the corner eyeing him, to which dream also eyed him from time to time, and dream was very pleased that when he did say yes to a tiny he got george!

yes there are! i don't know how many i'll actually add, but karl works at the mini-golf place! (i really hope i didn't set him up anywhere else cause oof) i might add some ocs or randos aren't of the dsmp and normal mcyts :D

hope all is well for you too! thank you for the lovely ask as always <3<3

[newstfionline]

Tuesday, May 16, 2023

TSA tests facial recognition technology to boost airport security (AP) A passenger walks up to an airport security checkpoint, slips an ID card into a slot and looks into a camera atop a small screen. The screen flashes “Photo Complete” and the person walks through—all without having to hand over their identification to the TSA officer sitting behind the screen. It’s all part of a pilot project by the Transportation Security Administration to assess the use of facial recognition technology at a number of airports across the country. The effort comes at a time when the use of various forms of technology to enhance security and streamline procedures is only increasing. TSA says the pilot is voluntary and accurate, but critics have raised concerns about questions of bias in facial recognition technology and possible repercussions for passengers who want to opt out. Travelers put their driver’s license into a slot that reads the card or place their passport photo against a card reader. Then they look at a camera on a screen about the size of an iPad, which captures their image and compares it to their ID. The technology is both checking to make sure the people at the airport match the ID they present and that the identification is in fact real. A TSA officer is still there and signs off on the screening.

NYC converts hotels to shelters as pressure mounts to accommodate asylum seekers (AP) The historic Roosevelt Hotel in midtown Manhattan shuttered three years ago, but it will soon be bustling again—reopening to accommodate an anticipated influx of asylum seekers just as other New York City hotels are being converted to emergency shelters. Mayor Eric Adams announced Saturday that the city will use the Roosevelt to eventually provide as many as 1,000 rooms for migrants. Across the city, hotels like the Roosevelt that served tourists just a few years ago are being transformed into emergency shelters, many of them in prime locations within walking distance from Times Square, the World Trade Center memorial site and the Empire State Building. A legal mandate requires the city to provide shelter to anyone who needs it. Even so, Adams says the city is running out of room for migrants and has sought financial help from the state and federal governments.

Title 42 Is Gone, but Not the Conditions Driving Migrants to the U.S. (NYT) Relative quiet has prevailed along the southern U.S. border since Friday, despite widespread fears that ending a pandemic-era policy to immediately expel most migrants, even asylum seekers, would set off a stampede from Mexico. A surge in migrants did in fact happen. On some days last week, apprehensions reached about 11,000, among the highest recorded. But the lull could be the calm before another storm. Beyond U.S. borders, political instability, gang violence and climate change will continue to spur emigration. Much of the developing world, from Africa and Asia to South America and the Caribbean, is still reeling from economic ruin wrought by Covid-19 and exacerbated by the war in Ukraine. “Everyone is looking at the arrivals at the border, but the root of the problem lies in push factors inside countries of origin that are going to persist,” said Justin Gest, a political scientist at George Mason University who studies immigration. “When crises occur, they generate northbound flows,” he said. And, beyond the factors pushing migrants out of their home countries, the magnet drawing people to the United States is the labor market. Unemployment stands at its lowest level in decades, yet there are millions of unfilled jobs.

France pledges more military aid as Ukraine’s Zelenskyy makes surprise Paris visit (AP) France pledged additional military aid for Ukraine on Sunday, including light tanks, armored vehicles, training for soldiers and other assistance as the Ukrainians gear up for a counteroffensive against Russian forces, following surprise talks in Paris between the Ukrainian and French presidents. Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy and France’s Emmanuel Macron met for about three hours at the French presidential Elysee Palace—an encounter kept under wraps until shortly before the Ukrainian leader’s arrival in Paris from Germany on a French government jet, extending his multi-stop European tour. With Ukraine planning to go on the offensive hoping to retake Russian-occupied territory, military aid was a top agenda item. Macron’s office said France will supply dozens of light tanks and armored vehicles “in the weeks ahead,” without giving specific numbers. Also promised were more air defense systems, but again details weren’t made public.

As Ukraine Makes Inroads in Bakhmut, Devastation Still Reigns (NYT) For nearly a year, Ukraine has been simply trying to hold on in Bakhmut as Russian forces pressed in on the city from both sides while at the same time laying waste—block by bloody block—to what had once been a vibrant salt-mining city of 80,000. Over time, Bakhmut has taken on an outsize importance: a symbol of Ukrainian defiance and of Russian leaders’ determination to blast their way to a small victory in a little-known corner of eastern Ukraine. Last week, for the first time, Ukrainian forces launched a series of coordinated counterattacks and in a matter of days won back territory north and south of the city that it had taken Russian forces months to capture. But Russian forces still control more than 90 percent of the city, according to Russian and Ukrainian officials. The commander of the 24th Motorized Rifle Brigade, who goes by the call sign Prince, said on Saturday that after taking a short tactical pause, Russian forces were furiously assaulting the city again. “Artillery fire, rocket and airstrikes do not stop for a minute,” he said. “Every meter of the city is now under shelling.”

The Ivy-educated opposition leader who could end Thai military rule (Washington Post) For nearly a decade, Thailand has been led by an authoritarian military establishment—but Pita Limjaroenrat, an Ivy League-educated business executive and leader of a liberal opposition party, is seeking to change that. The results of Sunday’s election appear to have gone largely in his party’s favor, potentially setting the stage for Pita to become the country’s next prime minister, but rules set in place after a 2014 military coup could complicate that process. At 42, Pita is nearly 30 years younger than Thailand’s current leader, retired general Prayuth Chan-ocha, who took power after the 2014 coup. Pita was born in Thailand but raised in New Zealand before he returned to his native country and completed an undergraduate degree in finance and banking at Thammasat University in Bangkok. He went on to earn master’s degrees in public policy and business from Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, according to his legislative biography. Before becoming a member of Thailand’s parliament in 2018, he worked as the head of ride-share company Grab’s operations in Thailand and earlier as a consultant at Boston Consulting Group. He has pledged to move Thailand out of what he calls a “lost decade” of slow economic growth. Part of that plan, he says, includes diversifying Thailand’s tourism-dependent economy and spreading it out beyond the capital, Bangkok. In a televised interview with Bloomberg last month, Pita said three main points of his agenda are to “demilitarize, de-monopolize and decentralize.”

China launches projects to build ‘new-era’ marriage, childbearing culture (Reuters) China will launch pilot projects in more than 20 cities to create a “new-era” marriage and childbearing culture to foster a friendly child bearing environment, the latest move by authorities to boost the country’s falling birth rate. China’s Family Planning Association, a national body that implements the government’s population and fertility measures, will launch the projects to encourage women to marry and have children, state backed Global Times reported on Monday. The projects come amid a flurry of measures Chinese provinces are rolling out to spur people to have children, including tax incentives, housing subsidies, and free or subsidised education for having a third child. China implemented a rigid one-child policy from 1980 until 2015—the root of many of its demographic challenges that have allowed India to become the world’s most populous nation. The limit has since been raised to three children.

China sentences 78-year-old US citizen to life in prison on spying charges (AP) China sentenced a 78-year-old United States citizen to life in prison Monday on spying charges, in a case that could exacerbate the deterioration in ties between Beijing and Washington over recent years. Details of the charges against John Shing-Wan Leung, who also holds permanent residency in Hong Kong, have not been publicly released. Leung was detained April 15, 2021, by the local bureau of China’s counterintelligence agency in the southeastern city of Suzhou. Relations between Washington and Beijing are at their lowest in decades amid disputes over trade, technology, human rights and China’s increasingly aggressive approach toward its territorial claims involving self-governing Taiwan and the South China Sea.

Off-grid solar power brings light to remote villages LAINDEHA, Indonesia (AP)—As Tamar Ana Jawa wove a red sarong in the fading sunlight, her neighbor switched on a light bulb dangling from the sloping tin roof. It was just one bulb powered by a small solar panel, but in this remote village that means a lot. In some of the world’s most remote places, off-grid solar systems are bringing villagers like Jawa more hours in the day, more money and more social gatherings. Now, villagers frequently gather in the evening to continue the day’s work, gather to watch television shows on cellphones charged by the panels and help children do homework in light bright enough to read. Some 775 million people globally lacked access to electricity in 2022, according to the International Energy Agency. Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia are home to some of the largest populations without access to electricity. Not having electricity at home keeps people in poverty, the U.N. and World Bank wrote in a 2021 report.

Massive new US embassy complex in Lebanon is raising eyebrows (CNN) A massive new US embassy complex in Lebanon is causing controversy for its sheer size and opulence in a country where nearly 80% of the population is under the poverty line. Located some 13 kilometers (about 8 miles) from the center of Beirut and built on the site of the current embassy, the US’ new compound in Lebanon looks like a city of its own. Sprawling over a 43-acre site, the complex in the Beirut suburb of Awkar is almost two-and-a-half times the size of the land the White House sits on and more than 21 soccer fields. Many Lebanese on Twitter questioned why the US needs such a large embassy in their capital. Lebanon is smaller than Connecticut and has a population of just six million and few American tourists go to the country. “Did the US move to Lebanon??” tweeted Sandy, a social media activist. “Maybe you’ll have enough room to work on all those pending visa applications,” tweeted Abed A. Ayoub, national executive director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, responding to the grandiosity of the new complex.