#christchurch massacre

[bandcampsnoop]

12/8/23.

After a long break, Ian Henderson (Dunedin, Fishrider Records) is posting again. His "Pop Lib" has been a go-to site for albums from Australia and New Zealand. His label has been a go-to label for years. And his brother, George Henderson (The Puddle) has been a go-to musician for years.

He posted about Senica the other day. Senica is a band that checks a lot of boxes for me. Christchurch, New Zealand - check. Melted Ice Cream (label), check. The aforementioned Pop Lib stamp of approval - check. The sweet guitar sounds that recall The Jean-Paul Sarte Experience - check.

This is a short EP on cassette made by friends who have been playing together since high school. The music certainly sounds more mature than their years might otherwise suggest. The band itself cite references like Straitjacket Fits, Wilco, Brian Jonestown Massacre and Radiohead.

[onedingo]

BIG INFO POST ABOUT BRENTON TARRANT AND CHRISTCHURCH ATTACKS + FILES UPLOADED TO DRIVE BY ME WITH PICTURES AND INFO

This folder was made by me. I gathered all the visual information about Brenton Tarrant that I have so far. Most of it I found on reddit, and I would like to give credit to a specific user, who is u/uncanealguinzaglio

Brenton Tarrant was born on October 27, 1990, in Grafton, New South Wales, Australia. In his manifesto, he described himself as an ordinary white man who had a normal childhood. In his own words:

"Just an ordinary White man, 28 years old. Born in Australia to a working-class, low-income family. My parents are of Scottish, Irish, and English stock. I had a regular childhood, without any great issues. I had little interest in education during my schooling, barely achieving a passing grade. I did not attend university as I had no great interest in anything offered in the universities to study. I worked for a short time before making some money investing in Bitconnect, then used the money from the investment to travel. More recently, I have been working part-time as a kebab removalist. I am just a regular White man, from a regular family. Who decided to take a stand to ensure a future for my people."

Despite this, there are some relevant details about Brenton's childhood and past before the attack, such as:

His parents' divorce when he was still a child. After the divorce, Tarrant and his sister, Lauren, lived with their mother and her new partner, who became violent, leading them to move in with their father, Rodney Tarrant. Other significant events include a fire that destroyed their family home and the death of his grandfather.

Between the ages of 12 and 15, Brenton gained weight, became overweight, and was bullied at school, where he also had few friends. He showed little interest in classes, although he managed to get good grades. The only subject that engaged him was history, where he demonstrated great interest in topics such as World War II.

After graduating from Grafton High School, he did not attend university, as he claimed there was nothing interesting to study. Instead, he pursued a career as a personal trainer at Big River Gym in Grafton, obtaining certification in 2009. He left the job in 2012 after an injury and decided to use an inheritance he received after his father’s death to travel.

Tarrant frequently traveled to countries such as France, Portugal, Spain, Serbia, Croatia, Montenegro, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Turkey, North Korea, and Pakistan. He had a keen interest in photography and travel.

Personality and Internet Activity

Brenton exhibited racist behavior from a young age. He spent a lot of time online and was exposed to far-right ideas through internet forums. He was an active user of 4chan from the age of 14 and developed strong anti-immigration views during his teenage years. He was also reported to have made racist remarks about one of his mother's boyfriends, who had Aboriginal heritage.

He spent years purchasing firearms and related equipment, yet authorities never intervened, allowing him to continue acquiring weapons, including semi-automatic rifles and shotguns.

Attack Planning

Tarrant began officially planning his attack in 2017. According to the Counter Extremism Project:

"By his own account, Tarrant was radicalized over a month-long period during his travels in Europe in the spring of 2017. On April 7 of that year, an Uzbek asylum seeker drove a truck into a crowd in Stockholm, Sweden, killing five people. On May 7, anti-immigration French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen was defeated by moderate Emmanuel Macron. In Tarrant's own words, he found his 'emotions oscillating between seething rage and suffocating despair at the indignity of France’s invasion,' referring to the immigrants he saw there."

There is also a connection between two terrorism-related crimes. In 2017, Alexandre Bissonnette carried out the Quebec mosque massacre in Canada, killing six people and injuring 19. Although never explicitly mentioned by Tarrant, Bissonnette was a major inspiration for him, and his name was inscribed on one of Tarrant’s rifle cartridges.

Tarrant spent a great deal of time online, using platforms such as Facebook, Twitter (now X), 4chan, and 8chan. He frequently shared memes and "shitposts" satirizing immigrants, Black people, Muslims, and communists. Some of these memes were created by him, while others were reposted.

Additionally, it was confirmed that Tarrant financially supported far-right organizations, including the French and Austrian branches of the Identitarian Movement, which promotes the "Great Replacement" theory, a white supremacist conspiracy claiming that white populations are being replaced by non-white immigrants.

Attack Execution

Tarrant carefully selected the Al Noor Mosque and spent considerable time researching it. He studied its layout using online tools, flew a drone over the mosque to map the area, and visited in person multiple times. Some survivors believed they had seen Tarrant attending Friday prayers before the attack, pretending to pray and asking about the mosque's schedule. He also engaged with Muslims to learn about Islam, intending to use this knowledge against them.

He customized his weapons, engraving them with names and symbols associated with white supremacy and historical Christian-Muslim conflicts. Some of these inscriptions included:

Vienna 1683: Reference to the Battle of Vienna, where the Holy Roman Empire fought the Ottoman Empire.

Luca Traini: Italian who shot six immigrants from his car, sentenced to 12 years in prison.

Gaston IV: Viscount of Béarn, known as "The Crusader" for his role in the First Crusade.

Charles Martel: French ruler who defeated Muslim armies at the Battle of Tours in 732.

Alexandre Bissonnette: Responsible for a mosque shooting in Quebec, sentenced to 40 years in prison.

Marco Antonio Bragadin: Venetian resistance leader in Cyprus during the Ottoman conquest in 1570.

14: Reference to the "Fourteen Words," a white supremacist slogan.

Before the attack, Tarrant posted his manifesto, The Great Replacement, on 8chan along with a message:

"Well lads, it's time to stop shitposting and time to make a real-life effort post. I will carry out an attack against the invaders and will even livestream the attack via Facebook."

He also uploaded 150 photographs to his Facebook profile. These photographs were mostly memes and shitposts with prejudiced content and highlighting his ideologies. In these posts, Brenton makes clear his admiration for Dylann Roof, Anders Breivik and Timothy McVeigh.

At 1:32 PM, he began live streaming on Facebook while driving to Al Noor Mosque. He played two songs: Serbia Strong (a Serbian nationalist and anti-Islamic song) and The British Grenadiers (a traditional British military march).

At 1:39 PM, Tarrant parked near Al Noor Mosque, armed himself with a Mossberg 930 shotgun and a Windham Weaponry AR-15 rifle, and approached the entrance. He was greeted by a man who said, "Hello, brother," before Tarrant shot and killed him along with four others. Inside the mosque, he continued firing indiscriminately.

He used a strobe light on his weapons to disorient victims. After exiting the mosque, he retrieved another rifle from his car and shot two more people in the parking lot. He then re-entered the mosque and shot injured individuals before leaving again, killing a woman outside. He then ran over her body as he drove away. In total, 49 people were killed at Al Noor Mosque.

While driving to the Linwood Islamic Centre, he continued streaming, singing Fire by Arthur Brown. However, the livestream was cut due to a connection failure.

At the Linwood Islamic Centre, he killed two more people, but his attack was less effective as some of his weapons malfunctioned and he became disoriented inside the mosque. He then drove away, intending to attack a third mosque.

At 1:57 PM, two police officers rammed his car off the road. Tarrant was arrested without resistance at 1:59 PM, 18 minutes after the first emergency call.

Trial and Imprisonment

Tarrant was convicted of 89 crimes and sentenced to life in prison without parole. His behavior in court was inconsistent—sometimes smiling and laughing, other times appearing emotionless. During one hearing, he subtly made a "white power" hand gesture.

While in custody, he claimed to have been subjected to "inhumane or degrading treatment" that prevented a fair trial. In 2022, he appealed his conviction, but no hearing was immediately scheduled. In 2023, he requested a judicial review of his prison conditions.

Tarrant is currently held in Auckland Prison’s Extreme Risk Prisoner Unit.

For more information about the victims, I highly recommend this article:

[mariacallous]

Last weekend, former President Donald Trump posted another anti-immigrant screed to Truth Social. It would have been unremarkable ― at least, graded on the Trumpian curve of extreme xenophobia ― except for one word.

“[We will] return Kamala’s illegal migrants to their home countries (also known as remigration),” he wrote. “I will save our cities and towns in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and all across America.”

Many people might have glossed over his use of “remigration.” White nationalists did not.

“#Remigration has had a massive conceptual career,” Martin Sellner — leader of the Austrian chapter of Generation Identity, a pan-European white supremacist network — tweeted in his native German. “Born in France, popularized in German-speaking countries and now the term of the hour from Sweden to the USA!”

It was a succinct and accurate history from Sellner, a 35-year-old who typically trafficks in vicious lies and conspiracy theories, particularly about Black and brown people. He has been at the vanguard of pushing “remigration” — a euphemism for ethnically cleansing non-white people from Western countries — into the popular political lexicon in Europe.

Now Sellner was seeing his favorite little word all grown up, moving overseas in service of the 45th president of the United States, who has promised to implement the largest mass deportation of immigrants in U.S. history if elected back to the White House in six weeks’ time.

Trump’s use of “remigration” is the latest instance of the GOP’s intensifying anti-immigrant rhetoric in the run-up to November’s election, underscoring the degree to which one of America’s two major political parties is sourcing many of its talking points and policy ideas directly from neo-fascists.

“Trump’s rhetoric about ‘remigration’ has its origins in the international far-right,” Jakob Guhl, a senior manager of policy and research at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, explained to HuffPost in an email. “The term remigration was popularized by groups adhering to Identitarianism, a pan-European ethno-nationalist movement, as their policy to reverse the so-called ‘great replacement.’”

“The great replacement theory is a conspiracy theory which claims that ‘native’ Europeans are being deliberately replaced through non-European migration while suppressing European birth-rates,” he continued. “This theory has inspired numerous terrorist attacks, including the Christchurch massacre, where 51 people were killed, as well as attacks in Poway, El Paso, Halle, Buffalo, and Bratislava.”

Pat Buchanan, the onetime presidential hopeful and former aide to President Richard Nixon, used the term “remigration” to whitewash his own call for ethnic cleansing as early as 2006, in his racist tract “State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America.” But the term’s journey into the Trump campaign’s vernacular more likely got its start in November 2014, when 500 far-right activists gathered in Paris.

The inaugural Assises de la Remigration, or Annual Meeting on Remigration, was organized by Generation Identity. Its featured speaker was Renaud Camus, the travel writer-turned-philosopher who coined the term “great replacement” in his 2012 book by the same name. Camus’ book built off the work of another French author, Jean Raspail, who wrote “The Camp of the Saints,” an extraordinarily racist French novel that depicts a flotilla of feces-eating brown people invading Europe.

“The Great Replacement is the most serious crisis that France has witnessed in 15 centuries,” Camus told the crowd, eliding many bloody episodes in the country’s history, including a pair of world wars that killed nearly 2 million French people. For Camus, “remigration” was the best solution to the imagined crisis of the “great replacement,” the two terms essentially joined at the hip.

Camus and his fellow subscribers to identitarianism “have always been quite clear that the objective of ‘remigration’ is to create greater ‘ethnocultural’ homogeneity,” Ruhl told HuffPost. “For them, culture and ethnicity are inseparable, and they view (white) European identity as being fundamentally threatened by the presence of migrants ― necessitating drastic, far-reaching responses.”

According to a study by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, the term “remigration” was “used over 540,000 times between April 2012 and April 2019” on Twitter, particularly from accounts in France and Germany. Usage of the term skyrocketed after the Annual Meeting on Remigration in Paris. Camus himself was one of the main promoters of the word online.

As “remigration” became an increasingly discussed term, militant far-right groups adapted it as their own. In 2017, police in France arrested 10 far-right activists over a suspected plot to kill politicians and migrants and to attack mosques. Officers found a shotgun and two revolvers in the home of the group’s ringleader, who’d sought to create a militia, according to a post on Facebook, to kill “arabs, blacks dealers, migrants, [and] jihadist scum.” Per French investigators, the group, known as OAS, was formed to “spark remigration.”

The term made an appearance in Canada, too, where a far-right fight club called Falange — named for the fascist group that served under the Spanish general Francisco Franco during the Spanish Civil War — put signs with the word “Remigration” across Quebec City.

And that same year in the U.S., the group Identity Evropa — modeled after Generation Identity in Europe — burst into the public consciousness for its participation in the deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Identity Evropa’s proposed policies included “remigration,” and when its members marched in Charlottesville, they invoked the “great replacement” concept, chanting “You will not replace us.”

Back in Europe, in March 2019, Sellner started a channel on the chat app Telegram called the “European Compact for Remigration,” the beginning of a campaign, he announced, to influence far-right parties across Europe to support “de-Islamisation” and “remigration.”

That same month, a white supremacist in Christchurch, New Zealand, livestreamed himself walking into two mosques and opening fire, killing 51 Muslim worshipers. He’d posted a genocidal screed online before the shooting. Its title was “The Great Replacement.” Nevertheless, one week after the shooting, Sellner’s Generation Identity group in Austria staged a protest against the “great replacement,” again calling for “de-Islamisation” and “remigration.”

A couple of months later, it emerged that the shooter in New Zealand had communicated with Sellner only a year prior, donating over $2,300 to Sellner’s white supremacist group. “Thank you that really gives me energy and motivation,” Sellner wrote to the shooter in an email.

“If you ever come to Vienna,” Sellner added, “we need to go for a café or a beer.”

Despite these revelations, Sellner’s efforts to get far-right political parties to support remigration started to see results in the following years. In 2019, Alternative for Deutschland — which recently became the first far-right party since the Nazis to win a state election in Germany — inserted “remigration” into its list of official policy proposals.

Four years later, an investigation from Correctiv found that AfD members held a secret meeting with neo-Nazis and wealthy businesspeople to discuss the “remigration” of asylum seekers, immigrants with legal status, and “unassimilated citizens” to a “model state” in North Africa. The plan — which bore an unnerving resemblance to the Nazis’ initial idea to mass-deport Jews to Madagascar, before they settled on a wholesale extermination campaign — was Sellner’s brainchild.

That same year, as noted recently by Mother Jones, a jury of linguists in Germany selected “remigration” as the “non-word” of the year. “The seemingly harmless term remigration is used by the ethnic nationalists of the AfD and the Identitarian Movement to conceal their true intentions: the deportation of all people with supposedly the wrong skin color or origin, even if they are German citizens,” one guest juror wrote.

Mother Jones also noted that earlier this year, “an AfD candidate in Stuttgart campaigned with the slogan ‘Rapid remigration creates living space,’ a nod to the concept of Lebensraum used by the Nazis to justify the genocidal expansion into Eastern Europe.”

And finally, this year in Austria, the far-right Freedom Party (FPOe), founded after World War II by former Nazis, and which recently enjoyed success in national elections, called for the creation of a “remigration commissioner” in the country.

Still, very few, if any, U.S. politicians have uttered the word “remigration” in recent years. Trump’s use of the term stateside has coincided with his renewed embrace of dehumanizing language when talking about immigrants.

The former president’s promotion of a false story about Haitian immigrants eating pets in Ohio was classic fascist fare, depicting an entire category of people as savages. And earlier this year, the GOP nominee said immigrants were “poisoning the blood” of the nation. Historians quickly noted that Trump’s language echoed the words of Adolf Hitler. “All great cultures of the past perished only because the originally creative race died out from blood poisoning,” Hitler wrote in “Mein Kampf.”

But who in Trump’s orbit might have introduced him to the term “remigration”? The Trump campaign didn’t immediately respond to HuffPost’s request for comment. One possible culprit, though, might be Stephen Miller, who served in the Trump White House as an adviser and speechwriter. Miller’s ties to white supremacists are legion, and while working as an editor at Breitbart in 2015, according to leaked emails obtained by the Southern Poverty Law Center, he suggested the website publish articles about “The Camp of the Saints,”the racist French novel that inspired Renaud Camus.

Miller, like Sellner, was thrilled with Trump’s use of “remigration” last weekend.

“THE TRUMP PLAN TO END THE INVASION OF SMALL TOWN AMERICA: REMIGRATION!” he tweeted.

[beardedmrbean]

A second Sydney nurse who allegedly appeared in a video that made threats towards Israeli patients has been charged by police.

Ahmad Rashad Nadir, 27, and Sarah Abu Lebdeh, 26, were both suspended from their duties at Bankstown Hospital in February after the video was released online. It was filmed on an anonymous online platform which pairs people randomly for a chat.

Authorities say there is "no evidence" the pair actually harmed patients.

Mr Nadir was charged on Wednesday with using a carriage service to threaten, menace or harass, and with possessing a prohibited drug.

Carriage services refer to modern communication systems such as phones and the internet.

Ms Lebdeh was charged last week with three offences: threatening violence to a group, using a carriage service to threaten to kill, and using a carriage service to harass or cause offence.

Neither person has entered a plea to the charges, but Mr Nadir apologised last month through his lawyer.

In the footage, which appeared to have been filmed inside a hospital and was published by an Israeli content creator, Ms Abu Lebdeh and Mr Nadir allegedly bragged about refusing to treat Israeli patients, killing them, and said they would go to hell.

The video spread widely online and caused public outcry, with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese describing it as "disgusting" and "vile".

Earlier this month Australia passed tougher laws against hate crimes following a wave of unrelated antisemitic attacks. In recent months, there have been a series of arson and graffiti incidents involving homes, cars, and synagogues in Jewish communities across Australia.

There have also been rising incidents of islamophobia. A Western Australian teenager was charged on Wednesday after allegedly threatening to launch a Christchurch massacre-inspired attack on a Sydney mosque.

[airandangels]

Here we go yet again. Please be sure to make a submission and let the government know that we want strong gun control and there is absolutely no legitimate reason for members of the public to have semiautomatic firearms. Anyone who can remember the Christchurch mosque massacres (and see the massacres regularly taking place in USAmerican schools and public places) and still say “Yes, but maybe we should let responsible people have that kind of gun because they really want one” is not to be trusted.

[brookston]

Holidays 4.13

Holidays

Aerosmith Day (Massachusetts)

American Elephant Day

American Sikh Day

Arugula o Rocket Day (French Republic)

Auslan Day (Australia)

Beauty Peace Day

Celebrate Teen Literature Day

Day of Patrons and Philanthropists (Russia)

Day of the Dead (Elder Scrolls)

Environmental Protection Day

Feast of Rotten Endings

413 Day (Arkansas)

Functional Neurological Disorder (FND) International Awareness Day

Homestuck Day

Huguenot Day (France)

Ides of April (Ancient Rome)

International Campus & Community Day

International Creativity & Innovation Day

International Day of the Kiss

International Functional Neurological Disorder Awareness Day

International Imposter Syndrome Awareness Day

International Jaat Day (India)

International Plant Appreciation Day

International Rock & Roll Day

International Special Librarian’s Day

International Turban Day

John Hanson Day (Maryland)

Katyn Memorial Day (Poland)

Military-Industrial Complex Employee Day (Ukraine)

National Boot Day

National Borinqueneers Day

National Hippy Day

National Hockey Card Day

National Japanese Spitz Day

National Kiss Your Homies Day

National Pathology Day (India)

National PhiliShui Day

National Silly Earring Day

National Sticker Day

National Theresa Day

Neil Banging Out the Tunes Day

Religious Freedom Day (England; France)

Scrabble Day

Silent Spring Day

Sinhala & Tamil New Year’s Eve (Sri Lanka)

Sterile Packaging Day

Swiftie Day

Teacher’s Day (Ecuador)

Thomas Jefferson Day

Unfairly Prosecuted Persons Day (Slovakia)

Western Mass Day (Massachusetts)

World Microscope Day

World Sarcoidosis Day

World’s Day of Remembrance for Victims of Katyn Massacre

Food & Drink Celebrations

Day to Give Thanks for Fish and Seafood

Hopocalypse Day (Drake’s Brewing)

National Make Lunch Count Day

National Peach Cobbler Day

2nd Saturday in April

Baby Massage Day [2nd Saturday]

Global Day to End Child Sexual Abuse [2nd Saturday]

National Catch & Release Day [2nd Saturday]

Slow Art Day [2nd Saturday]

World Circus Day [2nd Saturday]

Weekly Holidays beginning April 13 (2nd Week)

California Native Plant Week [thru 4.20]

Independence & Related Days

Adammia (Declared; 2013) [unrecognized]

Mensa Ann (Declared; 2019) [unrecognized]

Sicily (from Naples; 1848)

Varnland (Declared; 1991) [unrecognized]

Winterspell (Declared; 2017) [unrecognized]

New Year’s Days

Songkran (Thailand) (a.k.a. …

Bangla New Year

Bisket Jatra (Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Laos, Myanmar, Nepal, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Thailand)

Chiang Mai Songkran

Tamil New Year

Thai New Year

Festivals Beginning April 13, 2024

Armageddon Expo Christchurch, New Zealand) [thru 4.14]

Baldwin County Strawberry Festival (Loxley, Alabama) [thru 4.14]

Bar K Beer Fest (St. Louis, Missouri)

Cherry Blossom Festival of Greater Philadelphia (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) [thru 4.14]

CNY Maple Festival (Marathon, New York) [thru 4.14]

Crawfish & Zydeco Festival (Kemah, Texas) [thru 4.14]

Dairy State Cheese & Beer Festival (Kenosha, Wisconsin)

Dessert Wars (Baltimore, Maryland)

Georgia Renaissance Festival (Fairburn, Georgia) [thru 6.2]

Hall Cabernet Cookout (St. Helena, California)

Hudson Mac & Cheese Fest (Washingtonville, New York)

International Orange Blossom Carnival (Adana, Turkey) [thru 4.21]

Lost Colony Wine & Culinary Festival (Manteo, North Carolina)

Mobile Chocolate Festival (Mobile, Alabama)

National Grits Festival (Warwick, Georgia)

Northern California Cherry Blossom Festival (San Francisco, California) [thru 4.14 & 4.20-21]

Polish Festival (Phoenix, Arizona) [thru 4.14]

Spring Cheese and Chocolate Weekend (Stillwater, Minnesota) [thru 4.14]

Supernova Pop Culture Expo Gold Coast, Australia) [thru 4.14]

Taste of Hillcrest (San Diego, California)

Feast Days

Alfarbot: Alfheim Day (Pagan)

Believe in Fairies Day (Pastafarian)

Bill Hicks Day (Church of the SubGenius; Saint)

Caradoc (Christian; Saint)

Carpus, Papyrus, and Agathonic (Christian; Martyrs)

Elizablecccch Arden (Muppetism)

Eudora Welty (Writerism)

Festival of Jupiter Victor (Ancient Rome)

Festival of Libertas (Ancient Roman personification of freedom and political liberty)

Grounding Meditation Day (Starza Pagan Book of Days)

Guinoch of Scotland (Christian; Saint)

Hermenegild (Christian; Martyr)

Ida of Louvain (Christian; Saint)

James Ensor (Artology)

Libertas (Old Roman Goddess of Liberty)

Martin I, Pope (Christian; Saint)

Martius (a.k.a. Mars; Christian; Saint)

Poshui Jie begins (Water Splashing Festival; China)

Ptolemy (Positivist; Saint)

Purification Festival (Thailand; Everyday Wicca)

Samuel Beckett (Writerism)

Seamus Heaney (Writerism)

Squashing of Moonhopper Day (Shamanism)

Thomas Lawrence (Artology)

Vaisakhi (Sikh spring grain harvest festival)

Vishnu (Pondicherry, India; Hindu)

Yayoi Matsuri (Nikko, Japan; 5-Day Spring Festival)

Islamic Moveable Calendar Holidays

Eid al-Fitr celebrations continue (Islam)

Lucky & Unlucky Days

Prime Number Day: 103 [27 of 72]

Sensho (先勝 Japan) [Good luck in the morning, bad luck in the afternoon.]

Premieres

Aladdin Sane, by David Bowie (Album; 1973)

An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures, by Clarice Lispector (Novel; 1969)

Bedeviled Rabbit (WB Cartoon; 1957)

The Big Bad Wolf (Disney Cartoon; 1934)

Black Rose, by Thin Lizzy (Album; 1979)

Bridget Jones’s Diary (Film; 2001)

Brown Sugar, by The Rolling Stones (Song; 1971)

Bulldog Drummond (Radio Series; 1941)

By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, by Elizabeth Smart (Novel; 1945)

Casino Royale, by Ian Fleming (Novel; 1953) [James Bond #1]

Catch a Fire, by Bob Marley (Album; 1973)

Critic’s Choice (Film; 1963)

Dane, by Heinrich Schütz Opera; 1627)

Daltrey, by Roger Daltrey (Album; 1973)

Echo, by Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers (Album; 1999)

El Capitan, by John Philip Soul (Operetta; 1896)

Good Little Monkeys (Happy Harmonies; 1935)

The Greyhound and the Rabbit (Color Rhapsody Cartoon; 1940)

Hold the Lion Please (Noveltoons Cartoon; 1951)

The Kilkenny Cats (Mighty Mouse Cartoon; 1945)

Lolly, Lolly, Lolly, Get Your Adverbs Here Grammar Rock Cartoon; Schoolhouse Rock; 1974)

Messiah, by George Frederic Handel (Oratorio; 1742)

Mickey’s Kangaroo (Disney Cartoon; 1935)

Mouse Into Space (Tom & Jerry Cartoon; 1962)

The One Minute Manager, by Kennth Blanchard and Spencer Johnson (Book; 1983)

Rampage (Film; 2018)

Rising Sun, by Michael Crichton (Novel; 1992)

Safe at Home! (Film; 1962)

Swing Shift (Film; 1984)

Tango in the Night, by Fleetwood Mac (Album; 1987)

Tintin and the Picaros, by Hergé (Graphic Novel; 1976) [Tintin #23]

12 Angry Men (Film; 1957)

Unbroken, by Laura Hillenbrand (Historic Novel; 2012)

Today’s Name Days

Hermenegild, Ida, Martin (Austria)

Ida, Martin (Croatia)

Aleš (Czech Republic)

Justinus (Denmark)

Tarvi, Tarvo (Estonia)

Tellervo (Finland)

Ida (France)

Hermenegil, Ida, Gilda, Martin (Germany)

Gerontios (Greece)

Ida (Hungary)

Ermenegildo, Martino (Italy)

Egils, Jagailis, Justins, Justs, Nauris (Latvia)

Algaudė, Ida, Mingaudas (Lithuania)

Asta, Astrid (Norway)

Hermenegild, Hermenegilda, Ida, Jan, Justyn, Małgorzata, Przemysł, Przemysław (Poland)

Artemon (Romania)

Aleš (Slovakia)

Hermenegildo, Martín (Spain)

Artur, Douglas (Sweden)

Slavka, Yaroslava (Ukraine)

Thom, Thomas, Thomasina, Thompson, Tom, Tomas, Tommie, Tommy, Twain (USA)

Today is Also…

Day of Year: Day 104 of 2024; 262 days remaining in the year

ISO: Day 6 of week 15 of 2024

Celtic Tree Calendar: Fearn (Alder) [Day 28 of 28]

Chinese: Month 3 (Wu-Chen), Day 5 (Ding-Wei)

Chinese Year of the: Dragon 4722 (until January 29, 2025) [Wu-Chen]

Hebrew: 5 Nisan 5784

Islamic: 34 Shawwal 1445

J Cal: 14 Cyan; Sevenday [14 of 30]

Julian: 31 March 2024

Moon: 28%: Waxing Crescent

Positivist: 20 Archimedes (4th Month) [Albategnius]

Runic Half Month: Man (Human Being) [Day 4 of 15]

Season: Spring (Day 26 of 92)

Week: 2nd Week of April

Zodiac: Aries (Day 24 of 31)

[hasellia]

9/11 reminds me of when the Christchurch massacre happened in Aotearoa. The next day, my family was at a neighbourhood backyard party. My dad and I talked to an old man who had moved from Serbia to Australia when the subject of the attack came. His eye lit up in fear, and he started talking about "there will be a retaliation! It will happen for sure! It's only a matter of time!" Somehow, despite knowing my dad for roughly a month now, he completely missed that he's muslim and that both me and him carry Islamic names. My dad went to a mosque that very morning praying with the immam and other followers for peace for the families as well as the victims. Even though I'm pale as dog shit my dad is visably a POC, we didn't say say anything back to him other than a soft "no I don't think that'll happen, it'll be alright." I think about the fear in his eyes and how scared that old man was every now and then but especially on this day.

[mariacallous]

In the first 48 hours of President Donald Trump’s second term in office, he has taken action on virtually every single culture war topic that has excited his base for the last 12 months, including the signing of dozens of executive orders targeting immigrants, gender expression, the environment, and DEI policies.

Trump has also pardoned or commuted the sentence of every single person that took part in the violent insurrection at the Capitol in 2021. Meanwhile, his close ally Elon Musk has invigorated an even more extreme wing of Trump’s supporters, by making a Nazi-like salute onstage—twice—in front of thousands of people in DC and millions watching on TV.

Trump’s actions have generated a lot of excitement among the far-right in the US. They’ve also been hailed as a blueprint by an adoring fan base of far-right lawmakers, extremist influencers, and white supremacist groups across the globe. And those people and organizations now believe that Trump’s actions should not only be copied, but taken to the next level.

“It is more than just a political success,” Martin Sellner, the far-right activist and leader of the Identitarian Movement of Austria, wrote on his Telegram channel. “It is a metapolitical victory: the end of wokeness and trans ideology, stopping illegal immigration and many other ideas have been normalized in society.”

“These extremists think that this is the way to go, that their countries need to take a lesson from what Trump is proposing, and they need to not get weak about it, and not let woke activists get in their way, because everybody knows that the right thing to do is get rid of the immigrants,” Wendy Via, the CEO of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, tells WIRED.

Sellner, who once communicated with the Christchurch massacre shooter, is best known for popularizing the white nationalist concept of “remigration,” the idea to ethnically cleanse western nations of all nonwhite citizens. That extremist ideology has gained traction among other far-right groups in Europe, including Alternative for Germany (AfD) and the Freedom Party of Austria. Trump even promoted “remigration” in September.

Now, Sellner believes that Trump’s return to the Oval Office signals a moment to take his agenda mainstream.

“By pushing further into the realm of the ‘unspeakable’ we move out of the defensive and truly shift the Overton Window to the right for the first time,” Sellner wrote. “Even if you think Trumpism goes far enough, you should support the radical flank.”

Sellner is not alone in Europe. Across the continent, far-right figures praised Trump’s actions on migration and gender, and called for leaders in their own countries to follow suit.

In France, the Generation Identity group, the youth wing of the far-right Identitarian movement, wrote on Telegram: “Remigration in full swing. Identitarianism has won ideologically, it will only take time for this victory to be reflected in the material world.”

In Ireland, Keith Woods, the far-right influencer and ally of US white supremacist Nick Fuentes, shared a clip of Musk’s Nazi-like salute with the caption: “Ok maybe woke really is dead.” Irish UFC fighter Conor McGregor, who has aligned himself with Ireland’s far-right community in recent years, was in the Capitol for the inauguration and met with House speaker Mike Johnson. McGregor praised Trump’s immigration policies and wrote on Instagram, “Ireland and its human trafficking racket needs absolute dismantling! It is a breach of our security and our sovereignty. For me it is A NATIONAL EMERGENCY.” (McGregor has recently said that he is considering running for president in Ireland, which is a symbolic role without any real power.)

In the UK, Tommy Robinson, whose legal bills are now being footed by Elon Musk, wrote that Trump’s inauguration signaled that “freedom is back” and hailed the “return of the king.” Robinson, who is currently in jail for making repeated false allegations against a Syrian refugee, which led to death threats against their family, is a well-known Islamophobic activist and former member of the fascist British National Party. Robinson’s compatriot Mark Collet, who heads up the white supremacist Patriotic Alternative group, praised the pardoning of the January 6 prisoners, writing on Telegram: “What a first day, this is a massive redemption arc.”

In Brazil, far-right lawmaker Jair Bolsonaro, who was invited to the inauguration but could not travel because of his alleged role in a Brazilian coup attempt in 2023, wrote a lengthy message to Trump, saying that “under Trump’s leadership, the West is being reborn.” He added that Trump’s return “reaffirms the pillars of our civilization: God, nation, family, and freedom.”

In Germany, Sebastian Schmidtke, the leader of the neo-Nazi Die Heimat party, wrote, “Greetings back from Germany @elonmusk” above a clip on X of Musk’s Nazi-like salute. The country’s far-right publication COMPACT also praised Trump’s decision to withdraw from the World Health Organization, citing the organization’s “evil nature during the Corona period.”

“There is huge support for Trump in the German far-right, and they see themselves emboldened by it,” Miro Dittrich, a researcher who focuses on German extremist groups, tells WIRED.

Dittrich analyzed the links shared in thousands of German-speaking far-right and conspiracy-driven Telegram channels, and found that they had a strong focus on Trump, Musk, and the US inauguration as compared to the upcoming German elections.

In Australia, neo-Nazi Thomas Sewell shared a picture of himself making a similar salute to Musk’s, writing on X: “Donald Trump, White Power, Patriots are in control.”

“This is the vision they have for the world, and Trump is their hero at the moment,” says Via.

[politixpulse]

Federal Prosecutors Charge White Supremacist Leaders with Plotting Attacks

Federal prosecutors announced charges on Monday against two alleged leaders of a white supremacist group, accusing them of using the messaging app Telegram to incite violence and carry out attacks against marginalized communities.

The group, identified as "The Terrorgram Collective," allegedly used Telegram to glorify global white supremacist violence and solicit further racially motivated crimes. The indictment charges Dallas Humber, 34, from Elk Grove, California, and Matthew Allison, 37, from Boise, Idaho, with 15 counts, including conspiracy, soliciting hate crimes, threatening federal officials, and distributing bomb-making instructions. If convicted, each faces up to 220 years in prison.

The Terrorgram Collective is said to promote a radical white supremacist ideology, advocating for violence and terrorism to trigger a race war and establish a white ethnostate. This group was designated as a terrorist organization by the UK government in April.

“Today’s indictment charges the defendants with leading a transnational terrorist group dedicated to attacking America’s critical infrastructure, targeting public officials, and committing deadly hate crimes,” stated Attorney General Merrick B. Garland.

According to the indictment, Humber and Allison, who joined the group in 2019 and became leaders in 2022, were instrumental in developing a document that justified their extremist views and included detailed plans for terror attacks and bomb construction. They allegedly created a "hit list" targeting a U.S. senator and a federal judge as part of their campaign.

“The defendants solicited murders and hate crimes based on race, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, and gender identity,” said U.S. Attorney Phillip A. Talbert. “They also doxxed federal officials and conspired to support terrorism.”

Prosecutors revealed that Humber and Allison encouraged followers to commit attacks and remain silent to amplify unrest. They reportedly celebrated various incidents of white supremacist violence, including the 2019 Christchurch massacre.

The indictment also alleges that the men promoted a doctrine where members could attain "Sainthood" by committing acts of violence to advance their racist ideology. They managed a network of Telegram channels and group chats to facilitate and support these activities.

Lisa Monaco, Deputy Attorney General, emphasized the gravity of the charges, stating that the defendants used Telegram to promote their extremist agenda, solicit hate crimes, and provide instructions for terrorist acts.

The charges against Humber and Allison follow a broader Justice Department initiative targeting individuals and groups seeking to incite civil unrest through violence. In July, federal authorities charged Michail Chkhikvishvili, a Georgian national known as "Commander Butcher," for plotting to poison Jewish children in New York City. Chkhikvishvili, 20, was arrested in Moldova under an Interpol order.

[almanach-international]

11 juillet : la mémoire de Srebrenica

Cérémonie à la mémoire des 8372 hommes et adolescents musulmans de Bosnie massacrés à Srebrenica par les forces serbes en juillet 1995. Chaque année, le 11 juillet, pour la Commémoration de Srebrenica (Komemoracija u Srebrenici) des dizaines de milliers de personnes se retrouvent au mémorial de Potočari, créé en mémoire des victimes et inauguré en 2003 par Bill Clinton. Dans les années 2010 encore, l'identification et la ré-inhumation des corps se poursuivaient.

Au début de l'été 1995, 25 000 habitants de la périphérie de Srebrenica cherchent à rejoindre le camp de réfugiés installé par les forces des Nations unies. Seuls 5 000 femmes, enfants et personnes âgées peuvent être accueillis par le bataillon hollandais. Le 11 juillet 1995, le général serbe Ratko Mladic et ses troupes entrent dans la zone de Srebrenica pour prendre le contrôle de la ville. "Nous sommes aujourd'hui, 11 juillet 1995, dans la ville serbe de Srebrenica. La veille d'un grand jour pour la nation", annonce-t-il à l'époque devant les caméras de télévision. "Nous allons rendre la ville à la nation serbe. Le temps est venu de prendre notre revanche sur les musulmans", précise-t-il. À l'annonce de cette offensive, des milliers d'hommes et d'enfants se précipitent pour fuir la ville pour rejoindre Tuzla en traversant la montagnes et rejoindre Tuzla, à quelques dizaines de kilomètres au nord-ouest de Srebrenica. L'armée serbe déploie alors ses hommes dans les bois alentour. C'est le début d'une opération génocidaire à l'origine de la mort de milliers de Bosniaques : la plupart sont exécutés d’une balle dans la nuque après avoir été pris par les forces serbes. Lesquelles font appel à des bulldozers pour creuses des fosses où faire disparaitre les cadavres.

Le 11 juillet 1995, plus de 8000 Musulmans bosniaques étaient ainsi massacrés par l'armée serbe à Srebrenica. La Cour internationale de Justice (CIJ) et le Tribunal pénal international pour l'ex-Yougoslavie (TPIY) ont reconnu le caractère génocidaire du massacre (le pire en Europe depuis la Seconde guerre mondiale). En 2015, La Russie mettait son veto à la reconnaissance par l'ONU du caractère génocidaire de ce massacre.

Finalement, l’ordonnateur de ce massacre, le chef des Serbes de Bosnie Radovan Karadzic, a été condamné par le Tribunal pénal international pour l’ex-Yougoslavie le 20 mars 2019. Il a malheureusement inspiré des tueurs comme celui de Christchurch. À ce jour, 47 personnes ont été condamnées à plus de 700 ans de prison pour ces crimes.

Jusqu'à présent, 6 671 victimes du génocide commis en juillet 1995 ont été enterrées au Centre commémoratif de Potocari-Srebrenica, tandis que quelques centaines autres victimes ont été enterrées dans d'autres lieux, selon les souhaits des familles des victimes. Environ 1 000 personnes sont toujours portées disparues.

En juillet 2021, le Haut représentant international en Bosnie-Herzégovine, Valentin Inzko, décide d’utiliser son pouvoir discrétionnaire pour modifier le code pénal et interdire le déni du génocide Srebrenica et des crimes de guerre qui l'accompagnent. Cette décision entraine la protestation des nationalistes serbes, lesquels demeurent dans le dénis des massacres, et le blocage des principales institutions de la Bosnie-Herzégovine. Cette page sombre de l’histoire sombre est également occulté de l’enseignement de l’histoire en Serbie.

La guerre en Ukraine ravivent aujourd’hui le souvenir de ces massacres que la communauté internationale a été incapable d’éviter.

Un article de l'Almanach international des éditions BiblioMonde, 10 juillet 2022

[casuallyodd]

I know it's easy to doomscroll and we are drawn to negative stories, but it feels like there is no good news right now.

This story starts out with how this affects lefty Americans, but it does move on to actually discuss the situation without that framing.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/07/02/new-zealand-america-moving-trump/

New Zealand, once a utopia for Trump-weary exiles, turns to the right

Rachel Pannett

WELLINGTON, New Zealand — After the debate between President Biden and Donald Trump turned disastrous for the incumbent Thursday, comedian Jon Stewart quipped on “The Daily Show” that he needed to “call a real estate agent in New Zealand.”

Stewart was riffing on some American liberals’ fantasy when Trump was last in power. Many talked of moving to New Zealand, a faraway place they viewed as utopian, with a progressive leader in Jacinda Ardern and natural beauty that was second to none. A significant number actually did: Data from the 2018 Census shows a jump in American-born residents in New Zealand of nearly 30 percent, or more than 6,000 people, compared with five years earlier.

Americans, like Stewart, looking for an escape hatch will find New Zealand a very different place this time around. Ardern is gone, and so too are her policies. This country is now led by a coalition of center-right, libertarian and populist lawmakers who have formed its most conservative government in decades.

“This is the sharpest political swing in a generation, the coalition is the most conservative I have seen in 30-odd years,” said Janet Wilson, a political commentator who previously worked for the mainstream conservative National Party, which leads the coalition government, and is now sharply critical of it.

The sudden shift has caught out some American expats. Jamie Pomeroy and her husband, both in their mid-30s, moved to Queenstown from Boulder, Colo., in September, the month before the election.

They were motivated in part by Ardern’s move to ban semiautomatic weapons following the 2019 Christchurch mosque massacre. A 2021 shooting at a Boulder supermarket with a similar weapon left 10 people dead.

“New Zealand actually did something about it,” Pomeroy said.

The country appeared to be “trending the right way” on the things they cared about, she said, including the environment and gun laws.

Less than a year later, they’re returning to North America — maybe to Canada this time. “Since the election, it seems like all the values we admired New Zealand for are going the other way,” Pomeroy said. “It doesn’t feel like the forever home we hoped it would be.”

The Ardern era is well and truly over. The National-led coalition that took office in November has set about undoing many of her government’s initiatives. It is following a playbook not unlike “Project 25,” the second-term “battle plan” promoted by pro-Trump think tanks designed to concentrate power in the executive branch and unravel efforts to slow global warming.

It is reversing a ban on oil and gas drilling, and is proposing a “fast-track” for big projects, including mines, that bypasses environmental checks. It has cut climate programs and jobs, scrapped electric vehicle subsidies, abandoned plans for one of the world’s largest marine sanctuaries and set aside a world-leading cow “burp” tax as it questions the science on methane, a potent greenhouse gas.

For years, mainstream politicians on both sides of the aisle have attempted to preserve New Zealand’s unusual fauna. The marine sanctuary was a vision of a former conservative government, which also funded climate studies and vowed to eradicate nonnative pests by 2050.

When she was prime minister, Ardern argued that her policies would help New Zealand preserve its green image globally. The new resources minister dismisses that as “green unicorn thinking.”

New Zealand’s pivot to the right was driven by the political fallout from the Ardern government’s coronavirus pandemic response. Although hailed internationally for saving lives, the lockdowns and vaccine mandates led to protests about freedoms being trampled.

The leaders of the two junior partners in the coalition government capitalized on that sentiment. They are David Seymour, the 41-year-old leader of the libertarian ACT party, and Winston Peters, who has been in Parliament since before Seymour was born and leads the populist New Zealand First party.

The two of them are pressuring Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and his National Party to veer sharp right, Wilson said, pushing through changes that were never part of National’s campaign plan, like reversing a world-leading plan to ban smoking for future generations.

“Luxon hasn’t put his imprimatur on the coalition, so you’ve got three leaders of a country trying to battle it out to see who really is the alpha dog,” she said.

ACT has boasted that it “punches above its weight” in the coalition, saying that even though it has only 11 lawmakers in the 123-seat Parliament, it is responsible for half of the government’s actions. But Seymour wants more. Asked if ACT has an outsize influence over the government, he said: “We have some but not as many as I would like of our policies being advanced.”

During coalition talks, Seymour won concessions for American-style charter schools; a “three strikes” law extending prison terms for repeat offenders; and a deal to rewrite the country’s Arms Act, revisiting a ban on military-style rifles after a 2019 mass shooting. He is pushing for a referendum on New Zealand’s founding document with Indigenous Maori that opponents warn will be divisive.

Some researchers also attribute Seymour’s rise and the recent political shift to aggressive campaigning by right-leaning interest groups with ties to the United States, where think tanks backed by conservative donors have been a brain trust for GOP administrations since the Reagan era.

They point to one neoliberal nonprofit in particular: the Atlas Network.

The Atlas Network has nearly 600 global partners — including the Heritage Foundation, which leads Project 25, and climate deniers. Its stated goal is helping “freedom-oriented idea entrepreneurs” lobby for lower taxes, smaller government and less regulation. Behind the scenes, neoliberalism scholars say Atlas Network alumni campaign against climate policies around the globe from Argentina to Australia.

“It’s like a permanent soft coup. They’re ready to go at any moment in any country as soon as the opportunity arises,” said Jeremy Walker, a political historian at the University of Technology in Sydney who studied the links between neoliberal lobbyists and fossil fuel companies in Australia. Others have charted the activities of Atlas Network partners in South America and Europe.

Atlas Network’s chairperson, Debbi Gibbs, is a New Zealander whose wealthy businessman father helped found ACT. Her mother is one of ACT’s biggest donors. Gibbs says Atlas Network is nonpolitical, and “the idea that there could be a centrally-controlled cabal” overseeing hundreds of groups in 120 countries “is just mind-blowing.”

The most prominent Atlas affiliate in New Zealand is Seymour, who will become deputy prime minister next year.

His relationship with Atlas dates back nearly two decades. He was awarded a two-week “Atlas MBA” in 2008. At the time, he worked for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy, an Atlas Network partner in Canada that has disparaged climate science.

Upon his return to New Zealand, he went into politics, entering Parliament in 2014 as ACT’s sole representative. But it wasn’t until 2020 that he gained prominence, successfully campaigning for assisted dying laws. Gibbs, who has been on the Atlas Network board for a decade, got to know Seymour during this end of life campaign. She said she wasn’t officially involved, but shared research and ideas from her American advocacy with Seymour.

Then when New Zealanders bristled at pandemic-era restrictions, Seymour seized upon the mood and accused Ardern of using the coronavirus to “justify more state control.”

In a speech in February 2021, Seymour cited an Atlas survey to bolster his claim that “our commitment to freedom is being lost.”

Asked about his links with Atlas, Seymour dismissed as “conspiracy” the idea that “somehow the world is organized by the Atlas Network,” saying he has been subject to a lot of theories about secretive influence efforts.

But even commentators on the right are alarmed. “Now he’s got power. We are absolutely seeing the whites of his eyes,” Wilson said. “We’re now seeing the radicalism of some of his policies.”

[brookstonalmanac]

Holidays 4.13

Holidays

Aerosmith Day (Massachusetts)

American Elephant Day

American Sikh Day

Arugula o Rocket Day (French Republic)

Auslan Day (Australia)

Beauty Peace Day

Celebrate Teen Literature Day

Day of Patrons and Philanthropists (Russia)

Day of the Dead (Elder Scrolls)

Environmental Protection Day

Feast of Rotten Endings

413 Day (Arkansas)

Functional Neurological Disorder (FND) International Awareness Day

Homestuck Day

Huguenot Day (France)

Ides of April (Ancient Rome)

International Campus & Community Day

International Creativity & Innovation Day

International Day of the Kiss

International Functional Neurological Disorder Awareness Day

International Imposter Syndrome Awareness Day

International Jaat Day (India)

International Plant Appreciation Day

International Rock & Roll Day

International Special Librarian’s Day

International Turban Day

John Hanson Day (Maryland)

Katyn Memorial Day (Poland)

Military-Industrial Complex Employee Day (Ukraine)

National Boot Day

National Borinqueneers Day

National Hippy Day

National Hockey Card Day

National Japanese Spitz Day

National Kiss Your Homies Day

National Pathology Day (India)

National PhiliShui Day

National Silly Earring Day

National Sticker Day

National Theresa Day

Neil Banging Out the Tunes Day

Religious Freedom Day (England; France)

Scrabble Day

Silent Spring Day

Sinhala & Tamil New Year’s Eve (Sri Lanka)

Sterile Packaging Day

Swiftie Day

Teacher’s Day (Ecuador)

Thomas Jefferson Day

Unfairly Prosecuted Persons Day (Slovakia)

Western Mass Day (Massachusetts)

World Microscope Day

World Sarcoidosis Day

World’s Day of Remembrance for Victims of Katyn Massacre

Food & Drink Celebrations

Day to Give Thanks for Fish and Seafood

Hopocalypse Day (Drake’s Brewing)

National Make Lunch Count Day

National Peach Cobbler Day

2nd Saturday in April

Baby Massage Day [2nd Saturday]

Global Day to End Child Sexual Abuse [2nd Saturday]

National Catch & Release Day [2nd Saturday]

Slow Art Day [2nd Saturday]

World Circus Day [2nd Saturday]

Weekly Holidays beginning April 13 (2nd Week)

California Native Plant Week [thru 4.20]

Independence & Related Days

Adammia (Declared; 2013) [unrecognized]

Mensa Ann (Declared; 2019) [unrecognized]

Sicily (from Naples; 1848)

Varnland (Declared; 1991) [unrecognized]

Winterspell (Declared; 2017) [unrecognized]

New Year’s Days

Songkran (Thailand) (a.k.a. …

Bangla New Year

Bisket Jatra (Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Laos, Myanmar, Nepal, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Thailand)

Chiang Mai Songkran

Tamil New Year

Thai New Year

Festivals Beginning April 13, 2024

Armageddon Expo Christchurch, New Zealand) [thru 4.14]

Baldwin County Strawberry Festival (Loxley, Alabama) [thru 4.14]

Bar K Beer Fest (St. Louis, Missouri)

Cherry Blossom Festival of Greater Philadelphia (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) [thru 4.14]

CNY Maple Festival (Marathon, New York) [thru 4.14]

Crawfish & Zydeco Festival (Kemah, Texas) [thru 4.14]

Dairy State Cheese & Beer Festival (Kenosha, Wisconsin)

Dessert Wars (Baltimore, Maryland)

Georgia Renaissance Festival (Fairburn, Georgia) [thru 6.2]

Hall Cabernet Cookout (St. Helena, California)

Hudson Mac & Cheese Fest (Washingtonville, New York)

International Orange Blossom Carnival (Adana, Turkey) [thru 4.21]

Lost Colony Wine & Culinary Festival (Manteo, North Carolina)

Mobile Chocolate Festival (Mobile, Alabama)

National Grits Festival (Warwick, Georgia)

Northern California Cherry Blossom Festival (San Francisco, California) [thru 4.14 & 4.20-21]

Polish Festival (Phoenix, Arizona) [thru 4.14]

Spring Cheese and Chocolate Weekend (Stillwater, Minnesota) [thru 4.14]

Supernova Pop Culture Expo Gold Coast, Australia) [thru 4.14]

Taste of Hillcrest (San Diego, California)

Feast Days

Alfarbot: Alfheim Day (Pagan)

Believe in Fairies Day (Pastafarian)

Bill Hicks Day (Church of the SubGenius; Saint)

Caradoc (Christian; Saint)

Carpus, Papyrus, and Agathonic (Christian; Martyrs)

Elizablecccch Arden (Muppetism)

Eudora Welty (Writerism)

Festival of Jupiter Victor (Ancient Rome)

Festival of Libertas (Ancient Roman personification of freedom and political liberty)

Grounding Meditation Day (Starza Pagan Book of Days)

Guinoch of Scotland (Christian; Saint)

Hermenegild (Christian; Martyr)

Ida of Louvain (Christian; Saint)

James Ensor (Artology)

Libertas (Old Roman Goddess of Liberty)

Martin I, Pope (Christian; Saint)

Martius (a.k.a. Mars; Christian; Saint)

Poshui Jie begins (Water Splashing Festival; China)

Ptolemy (Positivist; Saint)

Purification Festival (Thailand; Everyday Wicca)

Samuel Beckett (Writerism)

Seamus Heaney (Writerism)

Squashing of Moonhopper Day (Shamanism)

Thomas Lawrence (Artology)

Vaisakhi (Sikh spring grain harvest festival)

Vishnu (Pondicherry, India; Hindu)

Yayoi Matsuri (Nikko, Japan; 5-Day Spring Festival)

Islamic Moveable Calendar Holidays

Eid al-Fitr celebrations continue (Islam)

Lucky & Unlucky Days

Prime Number Day: 103 [27 of 72]

Sensho (先勝 Japan) [Good luck in the morning, bad luck in the afternoon.]

Premieres

Aladdin Sane, by David Bowie (Album; 1973)

An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures, by Clarice Lispector (Novel; 1969)

Bedeviled Rabbit (WB Cartoon; 1957)

The Big Bad Wolf (Disney Cartoon; 1934)

Black Rose, by Thin Lizzy (Album; 1979)

Bridget Jones’s Diary (Film; 2001)

Brown Sugar, by The Rolling Stones (Song; 1971)

Bulldog Drummond (Radio Series; 1941)

By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, by Elizabeth Smart (Novel; 1945)

Casino Royale, by Ian Fleming (Novel; 1953) [James Bond #1]

Catch a Fire, by Bob Marley (Album; 1973)

Critic’s Choice (Film; 1963)

Dane, by Heinrich Schütz Opera; 1627)

Daltrey, by Roger Daltrey (Album; 1973)

Echo, by Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers (Album; 1999)

El Capitan, by John Philip Soul (Operetta; 1896)

Good Little Monkeys (Happy Harmonies; 1935)

The Greyhound and the Rabbit (Color Rhapsody Cartoon; 1940)

Hold the Lion Please (Noveltoons Cartoon; 1951)

The Kilkenny Cats (Mighty Mouse Cartoon; 1945)

Lolly, Lolly, Lolly, Get Your Adverbs Here Grammar Rock Cartoon; Schoolhouse Rock; 1974)

Messiah, by George Frederic Handel (Oratorio; 1742)

Mickey’s Kangaroo (Disney Cartoon; 1935)

Mouse Into Space (Tom & Jerry Cartoon; 1962)

The One Minute Manager, by Kennth Blanchard and Spencer Johnson (Book; 1983)

Rampage (Film; 2018)

Rising Sun, by Michael Crichton (Novel; 1992)

Safe at Home! (Film; 1962)

Swing Shift (Film; 1984)

Tango in the Night, by Fleetwood Mac (Album; 1987)

Tintin and the Picaros, by Hergé (Graphic Novel; 1976) [Tintin #23]

12 Angry Men (Film; 1957)

Unbroken, by Laura Hillenbrand (Historic Novel; 2012)

Today’s Name Days

Hermenegild, Ida, Martin (Austria)

Ida, Martin (Croatia)

Aleš (Czech Republic)

Justinus (Denmark)

Tarvi, Tarvo (Estonia)

Tellervo (Finland)

Ida (France)

Hermenegil, Ida, Gilda, Martin (Germany)

Gerontios (Greece)

Ida (Hungary)

Ermenegildo, Martino (Italy)

Egils, Jagailis, Justins, Justs, Nauris (Latvia)

Algaudė, Ida, Mingaudas (Lithuania)

Asta, Astrid (Norway)

Hermenegild, Hermenegilda, Ida, Jan, Justyn, Małgorzata, Przemysł, Przemysław (Poland)

Artemon (Romania)

Aleš (Slovakia)

Hermenegildo, Martín (Spain)

Artur, Douglas (Sweden)

Slavka, Yaroslava (Ukraine)

Thom, Thomas, Thomasina, Thompson, Tom, Tomas, Tommie, Tommy, Twain (USA)

Today is Also…

Day of Year: Day 104 of 2024; 262 days remaining in the year

ISO: Day 6 of week 15 of 2024

Celtic Tree Calendar: Fearn (Alder) [Day 28 of 28]

Chinese: Month 3 (Wu-Chen), Day 5 (Ding-Wei)

Chinese Year of the: Dragon 4722 (until January 29, 2025) [Wu-Chen]

Hebrew: 5 Nisan 5784

Islamic: 34 Shawwal 1445

J Cal: 14 Cyan; Sevenday [14 of 30]

Julian: 31 March 2024

Moon: 28%: Waxing Crescent

Positivist: 20 Archimedes (4th Month) [Albategnius]

Runic Half Month: Man (Human Being) [Day 4 of 15]

Season: Spring (Day 26 of 92)

Week: 2nd Week of April

Zodiac: Aries (Day 24 of 31)

[beyondicelebrities]

Compassionate Leadership WEEK 3

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern became a Prime Minister at a considerable young age. During her almost 6 years as a prime minister she showed how empathy and respect are the answer to many challenges we face on a daily basis and around the world.

Ardern faced challenges in personal and political aspects such as sexist questions made by journalists, being a mother, and having a important position in government but also the horrific massacre of 50 Muslims at two Christchurch mosques and the COVID pandemic. Despite the challenge, she showed how strong and confident she was, translating confidence and comfort for all. The Prime Minister also defended herself in a very light and respectful reaction to journalist nonsense questions, showing how we shouldn’t give ears to that. And besides all of that, she also showed empathy for all the people, especially after the mosque shooting. She supported all of the families who lost their loved ones, made sure to honor their lives, and addressed change regarding gun violence not only in New Zealand but around the world. She made us think and emphasize the topic, always bringing it to a personal level of taking care of people.

To finish, she knew when was the time to step out of the Prime Minister's post, and in my opinion, this is also a huge sign of a compassionate leader. She had no greed for power, she gave her best and once she recognized it was time for a new person in charge, she let go of something that was very important for her, but saw a bigger purpose than she could offer at the moment.

How would you define compassionate leadership? Can power and empathy coexist?

Compassion “Compassion and empathy both refer to a caring response to someone else’s distress. While empathy refers to an active sharing in the emotional experience of the other person, compassion adds to that emotional experience a desire to alleviate the person’s distress” - following this definition which I agree, compassion is an act of care, which someone times implies putting other before you, and go out of your way to relieve the physical, mental, or emotional pains of others. Leadership on the other hand has an important aspect of power over others or with others.

With that in mind, I think compassionate leadership requires understanding the audience, listening to them, and knowing that you wouldn’t be able to solve all their problems, but you will try accommodating the majority of them. Being a compassionate leader also requires working together with people instead of demanding them to perform as the leader wishs. Besides all of that, a compassionate leader in my opinion always aims for peace.

On the other hand, it can be delicate and a challenge for some leaders once they see themselves with the power of making decisions. Thinking about everyone is not an easy task, and there will always be someone not satisfied with the choices made by the leader. In other words, I believe that it is possible to have power and still be empathic with your surroundings, but I think it is impossible to achieve a 100% rate of satisfaction.

Does the world need more female leaders? How could this change the world?

I think so, it is very good to see women in important spots in politician and companies, women tend to have a more compassionate way of developing ideas and topics, as Jacinda Ardern mentions “as a mother” they are thinking about the next generation, and trying to take care of others.

However, we can not generalize the topic saying that men can not be as compassionate as women when leading. We had great examples in history, some mentioned in discussion this week, that dedicated their lives to justice and social changes.

Greta Thunberg

born in the Swedish capital Stockholm in 2003, Greta Thunberg is only 1 and a half older than me. During her journey in this life, she paid serious attention to the biggest problem we have in the world: climate change. She started studying the topic more deeply and as a representation of our generation, she started questioning important leaders about their actions and impacts on climate change nowadays. She used her power of speech to enhance a movement for change, moving thousands ( maybe millions) of people around the world to make nowadays leaders take more actions to save our mother earth from burning down. I chose her not only because the environmental cause is an enormous topic to be discussed, but also because she reminds me that even at a young age we can create change and be listened to. Maybe I won’t lead a worldly movement, but something in my neighborhood that can create a difference in people’s lives. She is an example for our generation, for future generations, and past generations.

“Once we start to act, hope is everywhere. So instead of looking for hope, look for action. Then, and only then, hope will come.”

[ashadowofburnedoutstardust]

Tell me you've never accessed public healthcare....

Oh and a giant fuck you to the anti-vaxxer assholes in the USA who decided that hacking NZs Healthcare databases and sending the personal details of our vaccination nurses - one of whom is my stepmother who as a victim was able to tell me this was what happened - and send all of those details to some mystery location in the USA for god knows what reason

Word gets around in a small nation of 5 million so you're not exactly helping yourselves after you NRA wankers decided to harass our MPS not to ban assault weapons after the Christchurch massacre

[mariacallous]

Vice presidents from Meta, YouTube, Twitter, and Microsoft gathered over Zoom in March 2023 to discuss whether to allow TikTok, one of their companies’ most fearsome competitors, into their exclusive club.

The four executives comprised the board of the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT)—where companies share tips intended to prevent their platforms from becoming hotbeds for terrorists—and they knew that TikTok needed help keeping extremist propaganda off its platform. TikTok had passed a training program they required and had addressed their questions about its ties to China. But people briefed on the discussions say the board still worried about the possibility of TikTok abusing its membership in some way that benefited the Chinese government and undermined free expression. On top of that, at the time US lawmakers were considering a ban of the app, and more content moderation mishaps for TikTok likely would add to the heat. The board ultimately didn’t approve TikTok.

A WIRED investigation into GIFCT reveals that TikTok’s bid to join the consortium failed because two of the four executives on the board abstained from voting on its application. A week later, on the fourth anniversary of a deadly terrorist attack in Christchurch, New Zealand, researchers blasted TikTok for hosting footage celebrating the rampage. These were the very videos that would have been easily flagged and removed had TikTok’s rivals granted it access to their group’s threat-spotting technology.

Around the same time, the board members declined to admit the parent company of PornHub, citing concerns over whether its content policies met the bar for membership. By comparison, the board last year quickly approved the unproblematic French social app Yubo. GIFCT’s bespoke advice enabled the startup to identify 50 suspicious accounts that it reported to law enforcement, according to Marc-Antoine Durand, Yubo’s chief operating officer.

More recently, despite having the authority to do so, Meta, Microsoft, and YouTube declined to expel Twitter (now X) from the board even as the platform’s relaxed content moderation practices under Elon Musk threatened reputational harm to the GIFCT and other member companies more broadly. This month, X quietly left the board voluntarily.

These secretive membership decisions, revealed for the first time by WIRED, show how Microsoft, Meta, YouTube, and X are gatekeeping access to anti-terrorism guidance and influencing the content users encounter across the web. Our investigation also uncovers contentious fundraising choices by the four companies and the consequences of a lack of quality control checks in their heralded system for flagging violent extremism.

To understand the consortium’s inner workings, WIRED reviewed records of GIFCT’s internal deliberations and spoke with 26 people directly connected to the organization, including leadership, staff, advisers, and partners. Several of the people believe Meta, Microsoft, YouTube, and X have steered the consortium in a way that has undermined its potential. “The result is almost certainly more users are being radicalized,” claims one of the sources, who has been in consistent contact with GIFCT since its inception. Many of the people sought anonymity because their employers or GIFCT hadn’t authorized speaking with WIRED.

The four tech giants have presided over the consortium since they announced it in 2016, when Western governments were berating them for allowing Islamic State to post gruesome videos of journalists and humanitarians being beheaded. Now with a staff of eight, GIFCT—which the board organized as a US nonprofit in 2019 after the Christchurch massacre—is one of the groups through which tech competitors are meant to work together to address discrete online harms, including child abuse and the illicit trade of intimate images.

The efforts have helped bring down some unwelcome content, and pointing to the work can help companies stave off onerous regulations. But the politics involved in managing the consortia generally stay secret.

Just eight of GIFCT’s 25 member companies answered WIRED’s requests for comment. The respondents, which included Meta, Microsoft, and YouTube, all say they are proud to be part of what they view as a valuable group. The consortium’s executive director, Naureen Chowdhury Fink, didn’t dispute WIRED’s reporting. She says TikTok remains in the process to attain membership.

GIFCT has relied on voluntary contributions from its members to fund the roughly $4 million it spends annually, which covers salaries, research, and travel. From 2020 through 2022, Microsoft, Google, and Meta each donated a sum of at least $4 million and Twitter $600,000, according to the available public filings. Some other companies contributed tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars, but most paid nothing.

By last year, at least two board members were enraged at companies they perceived as freeloaders, and fears spread among the nonprofit’s staff over whether their jobs were in jeopardy. It didn’t help that as Musk turned Twitter into X about a year ago, he kept slashing costs, including suspending the company’s optional checks to GIFCT, according to two people with direct knowledge.

To diversify funding, the board has signed off on soliciting foundations and even exploring government grants for non-core projects. “We'd really have to carefully consider if it makes sense,” Chowdhury Fink says. “But sometimes working with multiple stakeholders is helpful.”

Rights activists the group privately consulted questioned whether this would count as subsidies for tech giants, which could siphon resources from potentially more potent anti-extremism projects. But records show staff were considering seeking a grant of more than tens of thousands of dollars from the pro-Israel philanthropy Newton and Rochelle Becker Charitable Trust. Chowdhury Fink says GIFCT didn’t end up applying.

This year, Meta, YouTube, Microsoft, and X amended GIFCT’s bylaws to require minimum annual contributions from every member starting in 2025, though Chowdhury Fink says exemptions are possible.

Paying members will be able to vote for two board seats, she says. Eligibility for the board is contingent on making a more sizable donation. X had signaled it wouldn’t pay up and would therefore forfeit its seat, two sources say—a development that ended up happening this month. It had been scheduled to hold tiebreaking power among the four-company board in 2025. (Under the bylaws, Meta, YouTube, and Microsoft could have ejected Twitter from the board as soon as Musk acquired the company. But they chose not to exercise the power.)

Many of the people close to GIFCT who spoke with WIRED contend that Meta, YouTube, and Microsoft must banish X altogether because it has allegedly been allowing extremists to openly engage in illicit behavior on its platform, such as reportedly selling weapons. The Times last month reported on calls to oust X.

The public copy of GIFCT’s “tech solutions” code of conduct is largely redacted for “operational security,” but it does state that a company can be banned for “sustained inappropriate behavior.” By the consortium’s own telling, “membership should be recognized and appreciated as a strong indication of good stewardship for the internet and its users.” X reported this month that it suspended over 57,000 accounts in the first half of this year for violating its violent and hateful entities policy. It didn’t respond to requests for comment.

The four companies in charge of GIFCT also have had a crucial and little-examined role in crisis response, one of the organization’s most visible functions. The group uses technology—computer scripts that convert image, video, and text files into short, distinct codes—to upload these hashes of problematic content they spot to a database operated by GIFCT staff and hosted on Meta servers. Members can then compare the millions of hashes in the database against hashes of content on their services and can reasonably believe that matches may reflect posts they should remove.

After a gunman streaming live on Twitch shot to death 10 people at a Buffalo, New York, supermarket in early 2022, a worker at a member company alerted a Slack community that GIFCT hosts for sharing tips. Once GIFCT staff saw the message, they began reaching out to YouTube, Meta, Twitter, and Microsoft. At least three of the board companies had to sign off on issuing the group’s most serious threat alarm, which they eventually did for the third time about two hours post-shooting.

In the nearly 26 hours after the board sounded the alarm for Buffalo, members uploaded hashes of about 870 problematic videos and images of the shooting. Later, GIFCT hired a freelance researcher, who provided thousands of hashes covering parts of the shooter’s manifesto that people were likely to glowingly repost.

Companies contend hash sharing has brought efficiency to the complex field of moderation. They avoid the expense and potential user privacy violations of exchanging giant media files, while the collaboration arguably slows the spread of content before it becomes too impossible to contain.

But under the leadership of YouTube, Meta, Twitter, and Microsoft, GIFCT has imposed little transparency and introduced few safeguards to avoid companies erroneously erasing nonviolent content. None of its 25 members discloses the amount of content removed as a result of hash matches, let alone how many of those takedowns are appealed by their users. Only YouTube has reported its contributions to the database—about 45,000 hashes last year. The group declined to say how many are added by its own staff or as a result of tips from researchers or governments, and to what extent it spot-checks hashes from outsiders.

Even which companies currently use the database isn’t public; as of last year, just 13 members had access. The group doesn’t know how many of them manually review content—as opposed to relying on automation—before sharing hashes or acting on matches. “That's the kind of thing that I'm trying to explore a little bit more,” says Skip Gilmour, GIFCT’s recently hired director of technology policy and solutions.

The tech consortium insists that innocuous content rarely ends up in the database. But the board hasn’t allowed outside auditing or ordered comprehensive internal reviews despite confirmed lapses.

In 2022, one social media company noticed that two hashes from the database matched thousands of copies of a music video on its service. The song in question? WIRED learned it was “Never Gonna Give You Up,” the Rick Astley pop tune turned prank meme about love and affection. GIFCT previously disclosed the gaffe without naming the song. It hasn’t shared why another company submitted the song in the first place. Erin Saltman, GIFCT’s membership and programs director, says “testing” and “sample hashes” are sometimes to blame.

A small audit by several members in 2022 also flagged invalid submissions, the number of which the tech consortium never disclosed. But removing them, even as new material was being added, cut the database to 2.1 million hashes that October from 2.3 million about 18 months earlier.

This year, Australia’s eSafety Commissioner—whose counterparts in the Home Affairs Department are formal advisers to GIFCT—demanded Google, Meta, and X turn over details about their counterterrorism work. The findings are expected to be published eventually. “We do not know the answer to a number of fundamental questions about the systems, processes, and resources that these tech behemoths have in place,” the eSafety office wrote.

Some critics of how Meta, YouTube, Microsoft, and X have run the counterterrorism forum say the companies already have a playbook in front of them to protect legitimate speech and better curb violence-inciting hate. GIFCT commissioned a human rights impact assessment from the consulting firm BSR that was published in 2021 and recommended 47 changes—many of which the board has yet to carry out.

Without naming TikTok or anyone specifically, the assessors suggested approving the membership of high-risk, non-US companies “with appropriate measures” to minimize human rights harms, because it would leave the GIFCT “better positioned” to fight extremism. They recommended banning members from contributing hashes without human review. And they described a board with just the four founding members as “not a sustainable model,” proposing that activists and academics take half the seats.

GIFCT also has an independent advisory committee that formed in 2020, but Meta, YouTube, Microsoft, and X haven’t always enacted its suggestions. GIFCT’s executive director at the time billed the advisers as the consortium’s conscience. But some of the nearly two dozen professors, rights activists, and governments that compose the panel have felt ignored, with a couple “quiet quitting” this year. “We have no real power,” says Courtney Radsch, a freedom of expression advocate on the advisory panel. “[GIFCT] is yet another example of how tech self-regulation is ineffective and insufficient. To address the real abuse happening on these platforms, we need to have a more meaningful governance structure with accountability and transparency.”

Current executive director Chowdhury Fink says she appreciates the advisers’ constructive criticism. Privately, GIFCT staff have logged discussions between advisers and Meta, YouTube, Microsoft, and X as “tense,” records show. (The rights assessment recommended that GIFCT publish minutes of board and advisory panel meetings. That hasn’t happened.)

A key contention has been whether GIFCT is falling short of the “global” in its name. Staff have helped companies respond to terror attacks in about 60 countries. But some advisers want it to recruit more companies with influence outside the US. They have urged greater emphasis on tools to suppress white supremacy and far-right gangs; increased attention on studying violence in Africa (where the sub-Saharan region is regarded as the new “epicenter” of terrorism) and in Asia; and a reset from what they view as a disproportionate focus on stemming Islamist extremism.

“Less Euro-North American–centric and really more worldwide-centric,” Ghayda Hassan, a clinical psychologist at University of Quebec in Montreal who chairs the advisory panel, said on stage at the consortium’s annual summit in Singapore this year.

Hassan tells WIRED the advisors recently wrote to the board with concerns about their leadership. She expects the addition of new board members to be vital. “The board has to be more diverse and inclusive, just like GIFCT overall needs to diversify.”

Some GIFCT advisers and staff have protested the board allowing the consortium to facilitate what it called “timely and effective action to remove terrorist and violent extremist content” tied to Israel’s ongoing war with Hamas. The group has avoided becoming a conduit for content takedowns during other wars, and several employees considered the involvement in the Gaza crisis as siding with Israel, two people with direct knowledge of the concerns say. The UN, whose definitions prevail inside GIFCT, lists neither Hamas nor Israel as a terrorist group. GIFCT director Saltman says she’s been gathering advice on handling “protracted war.”

Nearly everyone WIRED spoke to, including critics of GIFCT, believe the world would be worse off without some sort of coordination. The alternative would be individual companies struggling to close interconnected gaps and governments imposing stricter censorship. “Global chaos,” says Farzaneh Badiei, who runs internet governance consultancy Digital Medusa and coauthored GIFCT research.

Services cast off by the GIFCT board, including TikTok and PornHub, have found help from Tech Against Terrorism, an initiative funded by governments such as Canada, UK, and France as well as tech companies. It automatically alerts 135 companies to extremist content on their services and will soon launch a certification program and its own database for sharing hashes of images.

GIFCT had been paying Tech Against Terrorism hundreds of thousands of dollars annually to evaluate and train potential GIFCT members. But increasing clashes between the two organizations about their overlapping goals and identities frayed the relationship. Microsoft, YouTube, Meta, and X decided to cease the contract with Tech Against Terrorism and consolidate control over the process: GIFCT staff will handle the training starting next year.