All posts by nedhamson

Activist, writer, researcher, addicted to sharing information and facts.

In search of cleaner coal, scientists lace lake with toxic element

Murderers not scientists! Stephanie Graves

Scientists don’t know precisely how selenium affects fish and other animals. So they’re adding the coal-mining byproduct to a boreal lake in northwestern Ontario.

Reddit user data compromised in sophisticated hack

Oops!

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Hackers access usernames, passwords and email addresses in breach of one of world’s biggest websites

Reddit has suffered a data breach compromising usernames, passwords and email addresses of groups of users, the site has confirmed.

While the size of the breach has yet to be clarified, Reddit said two data sets had been accessed by hackers, including one from 2007 containing account details and all public and private posts between 2005 and May 2007.

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Matteo Salvini not welcome in Mallorca over anti-immigrant stance

Viva Espana!

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Spanish island declares Italy’s far-right interior minister persona non grata

The Spanish island of Mallorca has declared Italy’s far-right interior minister, Matteo Salvini, persona non grata as a result of his vitriolic stance against immigrants and the Roma community.

The motion, presented by the leftwing Podemos, the Balearic Islands branch of the Socialist party (PSIB) and the Més Per Mallorca coalition, was approved by authorities on the popular holiday island.

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What the Womad visa fiasco tells us about live music in Brexit Britain

Racist ruling in Tory England!

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This isn’t the first time esteemed overseas artists have been refused entry to the UK for a festival. The Home Office is killing our world music scene – and it’s going to get worse

The UK has long been a leading destination for discovering sounds from far-flung corners of the globe, whether it is Malian songbird Oumou Sangaré’s set at Glastonbury, or the shadowy South African electro of DJ Lag in a sticky-floored club in London. But last weekend, that reputation was thrown into disarray following comments by Womad organiser Chris Smith, who lambasted the UK’s oppressive visa restrictions on world music artists. Three of the acts scheduled for the festival – Sabry Mosbah from Tunisia, Wazimbo from Mozambique and some of the members of Niger’s Tal National – were denied entry to the UK and either had to cancel their festival appearance or perform stripped-down sets. Indian duo Hashmat Sultana passed through border control 24 hours after they were due to go on stage. Smith said that an increasing number of performers were now declining invitations to the event because they deemed the Home Office’s iron-fisted process humiliating.

Questions have been raised about what this means for the future of world music in the UK. The festival’s co-founder, Peter Gabriel, this week released a statement calling the situation “alarming” and asked: “Do we really want a white-breaded, Brexited flatland? A country that is losing the will to welcome the world?” Channel 4 News’s Jon Snow, meanwhile, tweeted: “The ‘hostile environment’ took its toll at Womad … a number of events were seriously affected by visa refusals. By definition, a festival of world music requires visas for many bands. What on Earth is the Home Office doing refusing them? Is music the new enemy?”

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Download 3 million Russian troll tweets

How amazing would it be if this weren’t a thing and Twitter released this data themselves? Or better yet, what if Twitter released their own report based on research conducted by their own data scientists? No one knows how trolls use Twitter better than Twitter.

Of course, that’s not happening any time soon. So until then, download the data here.

Oliver Roeder for FiveThirtyEight:

FiveThirtyEight has obtained nearly 3 million tweets from accounts associated with the Internet Research Agency. To our knowledge, it’s the fullest empirical record to date of Russian trolls’ actions on social media, showing a relentless and systematic onslaught. In concert with the researchers who first pulled the tweets, FiveThirtyEight is uploading them to GitHub so that others can explore the data for themselves.

The data set is the work of two professors at Clemson University: Darren Linvill and Patrick Warren. Using advanced social media tracking software, they pulled the tweets from thousands of accounts that Twitter has acknowledged as being associated with the IRA. The professors shared their data with FiveThirtyEight in the hope that other researchers, and the broader public, will explore it and share what they find. “So far it’s only had two brains looking at it,” Linvill said of their trove of tweets. “More brains might find God-knows-what.”

How amazing would it be if this weren’t a thing and Twitter released this data themselves? Or better yet, what if Twitter released their own report based on research conducted by their own data scientists? No one knows how trolls use Twitter better than Twitter.

Of course, that’s not happening any time soon. So until then, download the data here.

Tags: election, trolls, Twitter

Why Pope Francis Just Declared the Death Penalty ‘Inadmissible’

Pope Francis has approved a change to the official teachings of the Catholic Church, calling for the worldwide abolition of the death penalty. The pope has frequently spoken out against the death penalty; in a speech in Rome last year, for example, Francis called the punishment “inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person.” The new change to the Catechism, which is the official body of the Church’s teachings, formalizes that opposition based on “an increasing awareness that the dignity of the person is not lost, even after the commission of very serious crimes.”

In approving this change, Francis has sent a signal about his priorities—and his posture toward change. The Church has underscored its opposition to the destruction of any kind of life, even when that means defying the state. And Francis is willing to alter Church teaching to make that clear.

The Church has not always been a clear opponent of the death penalty. As Francis pointed out in his 2017 address, past popes presided over executions when they governed the Papal States, the territory in present-day Italy that was controlled by the Church until the late-19th century. Some of these killings were particularly gruesome: When Pope Clement VIII declared Giordano Bruno a heretic in 1600, the philosopher was tied to a stake, burned alive, and dumped in the Tiber.

Francis rebuked his predecessors: “Let us take responsibility for the past and recognize that the imposition of the death penalty was dictated by a mentality more legalistic than Christian.”

In recent years, however, the Church has been steadily moving toward a rejection of the practice. In 1995, Pope John Paul II welcomed efforts to oppose the death penalty in his encyclical Evangelium Vitae, affirming that “modern society in fact has the means of effectively suppressing crime … without definitively denying [criminals] the chance to reform.” Some local groups of bishops have prioritized this issue: The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, for example, has frequently urged legislatures and governors to reject the procedure and put this issue at the center of its advocacy efforts.

But the Church never quite declared its full opposition to the death penalty. John Paul II wrote that cases in which the death penalty is an “absolute necessity” are “very rare, if not practically non-existent,” but allowed for those exceptions. Until this week, the Catechism had taught that “traditional teaching of the Church does not exclude recourse to the death penalty” if it’s the only way to protect human lives.  

Now Francis has moved to make the Church’s position on the death penalty absolute. “The death penalty is an inhumane measure that, regardless of how it is carried out, abases human dignity,” he said last fall. He called for an official change to the Catechism, which was formalized this week.

A Cassandra cry against Pope Francis

For all of Francis’s moral resolution, changing Church teachings is a big step, and can be controversial. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican body that oversees Church teachings, justified the update based on “new” context: “increasing awareness” of the dignity of human beings, a “new understanding” of the consequences of state punishment, and the development of “more effective systems of detention” that still allow for the “possibility of redemption.” Because of this, the Church has concluded that the death penalty is “inadmissible.” The Church’s new position doesn’t actually contradict past teachings, they claimed; the context is what has changed.

In general, this posture toward change has been one of Francis’s legacies: He believes Church teachings should be updated to reflect contemporary moral understandings. As he said in his 2017 address on the death penalty, “The word of God cannot be mothballed like some old blanket in an attempt to keep insects at bay!”

This is a controversial position within an institution that has often declared itself a bulwark against the moral relativism of modern times. Even when Francis has clearly desired to change Church teachings on various subjects, he has framed these changes as continuous with past teachings, and has had to navigate dramatic internal Church politics along the way.

The new Catholic teaching on the death penalty underscores the Church’s commitment to the preservation of life. But it’s also a case study in how the Church can choose to change to meet the moral demands of modern times.

Russian Authorities Order the Destruction of a Digital Artwork

via aleksey godin Rodina, "9 Stages in the Decomposition of the Leader" (2015), a print of nine time-lapse images showing an official portrait of the president over a seed box (image courtesy of Rodina)Rodina, “9 Stages in the Decomposition of the Leader” (2015), a print of nine time-lapse images showing an official portrait of the president over a seed box (image courtesy of Rodina)

MOSCOW — In what may be the first recent case of Russian authorities ordering the destruction of a specific work of art, a St. Peterburg court is in the midst of hearing an appeal into the case of a work that shows the disintegration of a photo of President Vladimir Putin — it was seized as part of a demonstration last spring. Artists and activists involved in the case are unlikely to succeed in the courts, but they say it is a priceless opportunity to discuss censorship in Russia today.

The condemned work, entitled “9 Stages in the Decomposition of the Leader,” is a print of nine time-lapse digital images showing an official portrait of the Russian president over a seed box, with each image documenting the disintegration of Putin’s portrait as grass grows through. A framed print was carried by artist and activist Varya Mikhailova when she and a group of opposition and LGBTQ activists joined a trade union march last May Day on Nevsky Prospekt in St. Petersburg.

May Day march, May 1 on Nevsky Prospekt in St. Petersburg shortly before Varya Mikhailova was detained (photo courtesy of Elena Lukjanova)May Day march, May 1 on Nevsky Prospekt in St. Petersburg shortly before Varya Mikhailova was detained (photo courtesy of Elena Lukjanova)

After a half hour with the march, the artists were approached by an organizer who demanded to know if the image was “approved.” Shortly after, police arrived, and she and others were detained. They were released after a few hours, but the framed print was not returned.

In a court hearing on June 8 in Kuibyshev District Court, Mikhailova was ruled to have participated “not in accordance with the declared purpose of the march,” and was fined 160,000 rubles (~$2,500). The print was ordered destroyed. She and her lawyers have appealed, citing European Convention of Human Rights protections for freedom of peaceful assembly and the protection of personal property.

“The funny thing with the court’s decision to ‘destroy’ our artwork is that it is digital, so physical destruction means nothing,” said Max Evstropov, a member of the art collective Rodina, which created the work. “The huge police state is rather awkward.”

November 2016 march in St. Petersburg (image courtesy of Vadim Lurie)Translation of the signs, left to right: “Our only hope is death,” “Alas,” “War Unemployment November,” “Let’s Endure This,” “Pain Emptiness Patriotism,” “Nothing,” November 2016 march in St. Petersburg (image courtesy of Vadim Lurie).

Activists quickly swung into gear, printing the offending image on posters, t-shirts, and tote bags, and selling them online. So far they say they’ve made enough to cover Mikhailova’s fine.

The actual image was created in 2015. Evstropov said it was conceived as an allusion to 19th century Japanese artist Kobayashi Eitaku’s print “Body of a Courtesan in Nine Stages,” about the inevitable victory of nature and decay over human assignments of beauty and value.

November 2016 march in St. Petersburg (image courtesy of Vadim Lurie)“No,” November 2016 march in St. Petersburg (image courtesy of Vadim Lurie)

The work created by Rodina sees a similar case in the political evolution of Russia. “This action is an expression of hope for a slow but inevitable change in the situation from below — through a multitude of ‘small deeds,’” Evstropov wrote in an email to Hyperallergic. “It reflects the low spirits and sickness unto death so characteristic of Russian society of the last few years: there’s no revolution to wait for, and hope for change is no longer associated with human acts.”

The particular print now in custody was sold at an auction in 2017 to support an activist co-working space in St. Petersburg. The first owner put it in a frame, and then sold it again for the same cause a few months later, which is how Mikhailova bought it.

November 2016 march in St. Petersburg (image courtesy of Vadim Lurie)“Born Suffered and Died,” November 2016 march in St. Petersburg (image courtesy of Vadim Lurie)

The subversive nature of the work, and the universe of irony it stumbled into as a result of the subsequent case, is a reflection of how young artists and activists are responding to the current political climate. Angelina Lucento, an assistant professor of art and cultural history at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, said the work is driven not so much by hopelessness or despair, but rather by a sense of desperation as other avenues of political action have been cut off.

“What you see among this new generation of contemporary artists is more a disillusion with mass protest as a kind of political resistance,” she said. “There’s a sense that it is not the most effective means to take, and you see a real creative drive to explore and implement other forms of resistance.”

November 2016 march in St. Petersburg (image courtesy of Vadim Lurie)“Alas,” November 2016 march in St. Petersburg (image courtesy of Vadim Lurie)

While the Russian art market and gallery system has grown since the end of the Soviet Union, closer to the ground the tradition of conceptual performance-based art remains vibrant. That has included high profile actions by groups like Pussy Riot — famous for their action in a cathedral and the heavy-handed response, and, just this month, disrupting the World Cup final — as well as artists like Petr Pavlensky, famous for nailing himself to the cobblestones of Red Square and setting the front door of the Russian secret police headquarters on fire.

Groups like Rodina (“Motherland” in Russian) are part of that effort to find other means of protest. The group emerged in the fall of 2013 after the last wave of mass opposition appeared to fade. There were demonstrations in late 2011 after parliamentary elections, and in 2012 when Putin cynically returned to the presidency after swapping with seat-warmer Dmitry Medvedev. That moment culminated in a mass demonstration at Bolotnaya Square in Moscow during the days of Putin’s inauguration, but faded afterwards.

November 2016 march in St. Petersburg (image courtesy of Vadim Lurie)“Everything will go poorly and will never end,” November 2016 march in St. Petersburg (image courtesy of Vadim Lurie).

Evstropov, a philosopher by training, founded the group with Darya Apahonchich, a philologist, and Leonid Tsoi, a psychotherapist, to engage ideas about Russia’s hyper-patriotism through “performative social art, field and experimental studies of patriotism, language, and institutions of power.”

“The mass protests had already shrunk, but we still felt the necessity to act on those things that happened,” Evstropov said. “There is a certain amount of black humor in our activities. We [offer] no hope, but our work is therapeutic somehow.”

Among their actions was a march in the fall of 2016 that subverted the rhetoric of national celebration and optimism that once characterized May Day in the Soviet Union, when people would march on bright spring days with flowers and placards with hopeful words like “Peace — Labor — May!” In the détourned version by Rodina, they gathered on a gloomy autumn day with much less upbeat signs: “War — Unemployment — November!” “Alas!” “Let’s Endure!” “Born. Suffered. Died.”

November 2016 march in St. Petersburg (image courtesy of Vadim Lurie)“Everybody is dead but some are deader,” November 2016 march in St. Petersburg (image courtesy of Vadim Lurie)

In 2017, the group launched a side project to criticize the ramped up politicization of war dead, specifically a national project called the “Immortal Regiment,” in which people march carrying photos of family members who served or died in the Second World War, as an assertion of national pride and power. The “Party of the Dead” imagines the deceased as a majority social group excluded from political power, but now given a voice for their vague but irresistible demands. “The dead are the ultimate proletariat, and our party aims to empower them,” Evstropov said.

They dress in black and paint their faces white, deploy a lot of “Day of the Dead” style imagery, and chant slogans like, “Your future is us!” “A people united — in death!” and “Whoever is not with us, is not yet with us!” Mikhailova was marching with other “Party of the Dead” members on the May Day parade, and brought the “9 Stages” print from home because she thought it was appropriate for the theme.

Most of the group’s actions and work are spread through social media — usually Facebook and the Russian alternative, VKontakte. And while they’ve had some bumps with the authorities, Evstropov said this court case is the most attention they’ve gotten from the state. He told Hyperallergic that pressure often comes not from the authorities but from sympathetic institutions that want to avoid trouble.

“Fear and censorship are things that politically engaged art in Russia faces very often,” he said. “The other dangerous thing artists and activists face is exhaustion and the loss of the will to do anything.”

The post Russian Authorities Order the Destruction of a Digital Artwork appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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