Futurology Today

By the 17th century, it wasn’t just God who could create a vacuum. Physicists Evangelista Torricelli and Blaise Pascal had also managed it using a mercury barometer. But had they really created nothing?

Archived link of the article

Niamey (Niger) (AFP) – Niger's junta said Tuesday it had freed around 50 people, including ministers from the government it toppled in July 2023, in line with recommendations of a "national conference" in February.

Those freed include former ministers, a diplomat, a journalist and soldiers accused of a coup bid in 2010. However ousted former president Mohamed Bazoum is still in detention despite international calls for his release.

"These individuals are being released in accordance with the recommendations of the National Forum for Reconstruction," the government's general secretariat said in a statement read on public television.

Those released include former oil minister Mahamane Sani Issoufou, the son of ex-president Mahamadou Issoufou who was in power for a decade from 2011, ex-defence minister Kalla Moutari, former finance minister Ahmat Jidoud, and former energy minister Ibrahim Yacoubou.

The president of the PNDS former ruling party, Foumakoye Gado, and journalist Ousmane Toudou are also among those freed along with Alat Mogaskia, former ambassador to Nigeria.

They were arrested after the coup that brought to power General Abdourahamane Tiani, former head of the presidential guard, and were being held in various prisons, notably for "conspiracy to undermine the security and authority of the state".

Similar charges are pending against former president Bazoum, whose immunity was lifted without a trial date being set.

Soldiers previously convicted of coup bids or "endangering state security" were also released, including general Salou Souleymane, former chief of staff, and three other officers sentenced in 2018 to up to 15 years in prison for trying to overthrow president Issoufou in 2015.

Each I is a finger, V is the thumb and index. X is crossing your index and middle finger.

Gaza’s bakeries will run out of flour for bread within a week, the U.N. says. Agencies have cut food distributions to families in half. Markets are empty of most vegetables. Many aid workers cannot move around because of Israeli bombardment.

“We depend entirely on this aid box,” said Shorouq Shamlakh, a mother of three collecting her family’s monthly box of food from a U.N. distribution center in Jabaliya in northern Gaza. She and her children reduce their meals to make it last a month, she said. “If this closes, who else will provide us with food?”

The World Food Program said Thursday that its flour for bakeries is only enough to keep producing bread for 800,000 people a day until Tuesday and that its overall food supplies will last a maximum of two weeks. As a “last resort” once all other food is exhausted, it has emergency stocks of fortified nutritional biscuits for 415,000 people.

Fuel and medicine will last weeks longer before hitting zero. Hospitals are rationing antibiotics and painkillers. Aid groups are shifting limited fuel supplies between multiple needs, all indispensable — trucks to move aid, bakeries to make bread, wells and desalination plants to produce water, hospitals to keep machines running.

Now, thousands of protesters have been detained and government-owned media appears to be running a blackout on any coverage of the protests. A number of journalists have been arrested and a BBC reporter has even been deported after his reporting of demonstrations.

Hundreds of thousands of protesters have gathered across Turkey in what was initially to express opposition to Imamoglu’s arrest, but have quickly bloomed into wider anti-government gatherings. However, Turkish state media has been accused of censoring any coverage of the protests. The Guardian reported that government owned channels broadcast interviews with ministers unrelated to the protests and that:

Substantive coverage of the protests has instead been the preserve of the small slice of newspapers and cable channels that exist outside the well funded and slick pro-government broadcasting networks.

Paywall? https://archive.is/cBXlo

I realized that I haven't spent time on Pixelfed in a while, and that it would be great to find more content to add to my feed! So I logged in to my instance (social.photo) and then... hit a wall.

With Lemmy and Mastadon, it is super easy to peek at what is going on at other instances and find communities to subscribe to, but it looks like Pixelfed does not make this easy. The biggest issue I have run into is that many of the largest servers do not seem to let you explore what is on them unless you first create an account, and the main Pixelfed Server Directory at https://pixelfed.org/servers does not indicate which servers can be explored or not, so you have to click a few times (since the link takes you to the registration page) to even find this out for a given server. It also does not help that navigating to an instance does not show you the content for that instance, like it does for Lemmy or Mastadon, but for a login page that may or may not have an "Explore" tab at the top.

Am I missing something here? I just logged into Tumblr for the first time in years and my immediate next thought was, "Gee, I should be using Pixelfed instead!" But if in practice it is simply not possible to find content I am interested in without a great deal of hassle then it is not a realistic replacement. In particular, it seems like the way Pixelfed is set up requires me to register on particular instances to get a better view of what content is available (not just locally, but pulled in from other instances). This seems contrary to me to one of the biggest advantages of the Fediverse, which is that you are able and encouraged to pick an instance that best suits you rather than the one where all of the content lives; in particular I could not imagine self-hosting a Pixelfed instance without being left out of most of the content available.

And just to be clear, I am willing to put up with some degree of hassle resulting from the inherently decentralized model of the Fediverse, since I switched completely over to Lemmy from Reddit about a year and a half ago after the API fiasco (and the only reason why I do not use Mastadon more is because I was never that into Twitter-style content to begin with). But having to go out of my way to get through artificially constructed walls to even find content to subscribe is a bit much.

However, again, maybe I am missing here. If someone is willing to point me to a resource that solves this problem problem and makes this entire rant sound completely ignorant then that would be great! 😀

Edit: Fixed silly typo.

What does someone have to do that means no amount of remorse or effort to fix things will get you to forgive them? I don't mean forgive and forget to the point where they can hurt you again. If someone repeatedly steals from you, forgiveness doesn't mean putting them in a position where they can steal again.

I'm asking this purely out of curiosity. I'm just wondering what the attitude in my corner of the internet is.

• One third of Canada’s emissions lose CO2 pollution pricing
• $20 billion cheaper to buy climate-polluting fuels
• 15 to 20 million more tonnes of CO2 projected by 2030
• Climate solutions undercut

Walid Ahmad was a healthy high schooler before his arrest in September for allegedly throwing stones at soldiers, his family said. Rights groups have documented widespread abuse in Israeli detention facilities holding thousands of Palestinians who were rounded up after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack ignited the war in the Gaza Strip.

Prison authorities deny any systematic abuse and say they investigate accusations of wrongdoing by prison staff. But the Israeli ministry overseeing prisons acknowledges conditions inside detention facilities have been reduced to the minimum level allowed under Israeli law.

Israel’s prison service did not respond to questions about the cause of death. It said only that a 17-year-old from the West Bank had died in Megiddo Prison, a facility that has previously been accused of abusing Palestinian inmates, “with his medical condition being kept confidential.” It said it investigates all deaths in detention.

A faith-based Indiana group and heating contractors in Maine are among hundreds of businesses and organizations stymied by EPA’s attempt to claw back $20 billion of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund.

This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/pcmasterrace by /u/ArupDnath on 2025-04-02 06:48:21+00:00.

#Firefox 138 PromisesNew Contrast Control Settings for Sites, New Features for #Android Users, and Other Changes https://9to5linux.com/firefox-138-is-out-for-public-beta-testing-with-new-contrast-control-settings

#FreeSoftware #OpenSource #Linux