
Billboard advertising company Lamar has come under fire after rejecting two billboards designed by Jay-Z’s Team ROC that featured the names of three people killed by the same police officer.

Billboard advertising company Lamar has come under fire after rejecting two billboards designed by Jay-Z’s Team ROC that featured the names of three people killed by the same police officer.
In a joint statement, Germany’s Chancellor, Angela Merkel, and Foreign Minister, Heiko Maas, have called on the Russian authorities to conduct an open investigation into the poisoning of Russian opposition leader, Alexey Navalny.
“It’s way too little, way too late,” Samantha Follows said. “This administration has just proven to me that they’re not really trustworthy.”
Follows and about two dozen others protested outside their local post office — Griffith Station in Atwater Village — one of hundreds of demonstrations across the country Saturday against DeJoy and the Trump administration. 
Brigid LaBonge, the daughter of a mail carrier, helped to organize Saturday’s protest outside the post office in Atwater Village. (Josie Huang/LAist)
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Facing an intense backlash over his cost-cutting measures at the Postal Service, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy has said he will suspend further reductions until after the November election, and he insists ensuring the timely delivery of mail-in ballots is his “sacred duty.”
But that was cold comfort to Samantha Follows of Silver Lake, who stood in 96 degree heat this morning to call for DeJoy’s resignation.
“It’s way too little, way too late,” Samantha Follows said. “This administration has just proven to me that they’re not really trustworthy.”
Follows and about two dozen others protested outside their local post office — Griffith Station in Atwater Village — one of hundreds of demonstrations across the country Saturday against DeJoy and the Trump administration.

Samantha Follows of Silver Lake said she was protesting on behalf of her daughter, who depends on the mail for her cystic fibrosis medication and will be casting her first-ever vote by mail. (Josie Huang/LAist)
Hundreds of mail-sorters and public collection boxes have been removed as part of DeJoy’s trims, and in Congressional testimony Friday he said they won’t be returned to use, insisting, “they’re not needed.”
Critics fear those moves will slow the processing of mail-in ballots for an election only 73 days away.
Follows said she was protesting for her 20-year-old daughter, who she feels stands to be among the people potentially affected by DeJoy’s policies. Her daughter depends on the mail to get medications for cystic fibrosis, and because of her chronic illness, she will also need a mail-in ballot to take part in her first election.
“This kind of thing to be taken away from everyday citizens is truly sad,” Follows said.
The protests were organized by MoveOn, the NAACP, SEIU, and other groups.
The protest in Atwater Village was led in part by Brigid LaBonge of Silver Lake, the wife of former City Councilman Tom LaBonge.
LaBonge, who said she’s the daughter of a 25-year mail carrier, called the postal service “an institution.” Steeped in politics for decades because of her husband’s career, LaBonge said the cutbacks to the postal service are unlike anything she’s ever witnessed.
“I’ve never been more passionate about what’s right for our country and this is wrong, this is absolutely wrong,” she said.
LaBonge said she has already noticed delays in service. A poster she ordered from Kentucky took five weeks to arrive, and “our mail came at 8:15 last night, the latest our mail’s ever come,” she said.

Protester Chloe Hoffman. (Josie Huang/LAist)
Another protester Chloe Hoffman, 17, said she was too young to vote.
“But what I also can’t do is stand by and watch the president of our country, who is supposed to protect our democracy, dismantle a way [to vote] for people who wouldn’t otherwise be able to vote,” she said.
Throughout Southern California, protesters tweeted photos from outside their post offices.
In Irvine:
%23SaveThePostOffice #SaveThePostOffice Back from my driveby protest. A BIG thank you to all the “protectors” at the post office at UC Irvine! I’d be there if I wasn’t compromised pic.twitter.com/kUlUL76py4
— MOPmom (@MOPendleton) August 22, 2020
In Santa Ana:
Great turnout for #SaveThePostOfficeSaturday in Santa Ana today! #SaveThePostOffice @MoveOn pic.twitter.com/A8aUYrCRNH
— Harrison Zierer (@HarrisonZierer) August 22, 2020
And San Pedro:
.#SaveThePostOffice you don’t mess with our mail. Proud of everyone in San Pedro who stands up for what’s right. pic.twitter.com/tBTQJ4kT6j
— Vianne Frances (@viannekelly97) August 22, 2020

Opposition politician and Anti-Corruption Foundation creator Alexey Navalny was hospitalized early on Thursday, August 20, in critical condition. At the time of this writing, he is in a coma and breathing through a ventilator. Doctors have yet to share a diagnosis to explain Navalny’s sudden illness, but signs suggest he was poisoned. Will the Russian authorities open a criminal investigation? If they do and if he was indeed poisoned, will the police find those responsible? Judging by past investigations of similar attacks, the chances are slim.
Hello everyone ! Have a wonderful and safe day 

Dopamine is a neurotransmitter released between neurons in the brain. There is a brain reward pathway known as the mesolimbic dopamine system which gets triggered and releases dopamine when an unexpected reward is anticipated. Once the award or the outcome is achieved, the dopamine eases and comes back to its average level. So, dopamine is a chemical of motivation and desire, which is released in the brain whenever there is the anticipation of reward and pleasure.

Psychologically, our brain is devised as a survival mechanism, since evolution. When we interact with resources we have, we conduct consummatory behaviour of pure feeling of satisfaction like while eating or drinking. When we interact with resources which we do not have but desire to have, we hold appetitive behaviour which are like motivation, drive, passion, hard work. The dopamine chemical is released and peaked when a reward or outcome is expected. Its primary purpose is to maximize future resources.
The rest of the time, the brain is more engaged with other chemicals like serotonin, endorphins and oxytocin, which gives the sense of satisfaction of the present moment of here and now. So, like all chemicals in the body, in the brain, too there is a need for chemical homeostasis. As long as the homeostasis is there, things are in harmony.

But in today’s time, our life is filled with lots of things and means which greatly overstimulate this reward pathway. These stimulants greatly multiply the dopaminergic drive, and the tolerance level develops faster and easier. People chase for money, success, technology gadgets, cars, fame, drugs, sex, alcohol and a lot more. Our society is filled with compelling things all around. We look around for something that would give us dopamine hits in terms of pleasure and reward like chasing for a sugar rush, binging junk food, shopping, smartphones, video gaming, drinking alcohol or doing drugs.

Developing addiction for TV shows, Netflix, video games, social media like facebook, Instagram, WhatsUp, internet surfing and the list goes on and on. Many of us are not even aware of the fact that it’s this dopamine drive of pleasure and reward that keep us chasing for these stimulants.

As a result of this over-exhaustion of dopamine release, we fail to live life in the present moments; we fail to make one to one connections, spend time with family and loved ones and doing meditation, yoga or practising mindfulness. All these steps give us clarity of mind and also satisfaction and contentment. Psychologically, developing social connections, compassions, mindfulness helps the release of chemicals like serotonin, oxytocin and endorphins, which causes to restore the chemical haemostasis in the brain.

Dopamine Detox or Dopamine Fasting has been doing so much around as a strategy to antidote this dopamine overexhaustion. It’s a strategy of completely withdrawing from all the pleasurable activities for a specific period, say a day in the week to reset the brain from this imbalance. But, scientific studies show that it is not possible to reset this dopaminergic pathway completely. There is no total solution in dopamine fasting.

But yes, withdrawing for a while, or controlling and reducing the stimulants routinely can help our brain to balance and restore the chemical haemostasis. The critical solution is maintaining a balance in life.

It’s essential to get motivated and thrive for success, money, fame, pleasure. Still, at the same time, it’s also crucial sometimes to slow down a while, relax, spend time with loved ones, meditate and be mindful to remain contentment.
Thanks for reading.
Blessings and much love to all 
The post Dopamine release 😇 appeared first on The 3H:health,happiness,healing.
On the 17th of August, Microsoft decided to kill off its Internet Explorer browser. The browser lives on as Edge which first appeared with an engine also called Edge, but finally, the original Internet Explorer has been put to rest.
It is unfortunate that we now have one less browser engine on the Internet. Competition is good and fewer browser engines means less innovation in browser engines. It is quite simple really.
But that being said, the loss of Internet Explorer is not really a loss. The loss of the Presto browser engine was a much bigger loss. In fact, I would say that the Web is better off without Internet Explorer, something even Microsoft has understood.
The first Internet Explorer was based off the original Mosaic code, licensed from Spyglass. Microsoft was late to the Web game. Their original goal was to build their own Internet, but like other proprietary attempts at building Internet, such as AOL and Compuserve, they failed.
Having seen the growth of Netscape, Microsoft understood that they needed to act and they did. After getting the license from Spyglass, they started on their road of the infamous Embrace, extend, extinguish tactic.
The principle there was to embrace web standards and get the standards community on board. After “cutting off the air supply” from Netscape, by bundling IE with Windows and stopping any ability to get browsers bundled on Windows computers, they quickly took the lead in the browser market.
They then started to expand on the web standards, with total disregard for the standards community. During this time they introduced technology such as ActiveX and Silverlight, making it impossible to use competing browsers when accessing services that used those technologies.
They also added various proprietary tags in their HTML/CSS/JS code, which made life difficult for web developers. In reality, many web developers made sites optimized for IE, instead of for web standards, making it really hard for competing browsers.
At the time, I was leading the Opera browser which I had co-founded with Geir Ivarsøy.
As a competitor of Microsoft, we noticed a lot of the things they did to kill off competition.
Getting distribution with any Windows-based computer was impossible. Projects we were involved with, such as with Compaq and Intel, got canceled due to threats from Microsoft. We had to deal with compatibility issues across the board. Some examples include:
But there were a lot more websites with issues. Given that Microsoft deviated from the standards and they had the most used browser, so many sites demanded that you use Internet Explorer to access their content.
Microsoft was really close to taking over the Web fully.
Jon von Tetzchner on stage.
Microsoft killed Netscape and although Netscape was replaced by Mozilla, Mozilla did not have a lot of clout in the early days.
Luckily Microsoft’s tactic backfired.
They stopped developing Internet Explorer after Internet Explorer 6, presumably because they wanted to move people over to Silverlight instead.
At the same time, Opera, Mozilla, and Apple, alongside the World Wide Web consortium, decided to work together on improving Web standards. Together we wrote HTML 4, which took the Web to another level.
Gradually our combined user base started to grow and Microsoft was forced to restart the development of Internet Explorer, but from this point onwards they were lagging behind. They still lead the market share, but they had lost momentum, and given that both the US government and the EU were watching Microsoft’s anti-competitive behavior, they were somewhat limited in their response.
Microsoft was pretty close to being split up over how they had used their domination in the browser market to kill off Netscape. With the government watching, they had to compete more on the merits and there they lost. Suddenly their incompatibility had moved from being an asset to being a liability.
Instead of sites coding for Internet Explorer first, more and more sites began coding for the standards first and then for Internet Explorer.
Microsoft was now dealing with the problem they had created. It became hard for them to both support the standards and their own deviations from those standards. Finally, they decided to drop their old code and embrace the standards. As doing that from scratch is hard and as there still is a lot of code there looking for their name in identification strings, they decided to use Chromium instead.
* * *
Microsoft can not be written off. Given that the focus of governments is now more on Google and Facebook, you can see how Microsoft is gradually trying to use their position to steal users in Windows, during updates and by making it hard for competing browsers to fully default.
At the same time, it is good to see that Internet Explorer is gone. As much as I want there to be choice on the Internet, Internet Explorer is not a choice we ever needed.
Photo by Aron Visuals on Unsplash.
In May 1968, just a month after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, around 3,000 protesters converged in Washington, D.C., to stage a campaign that the civil rights leader had been planning. Known as the Poor People’s Campaign, or PPC, it represented new directions in both King’s thought and strategy. The PPC was conceived in the belief that racial equality is inextricable from economic equality, that civil rights are insufficient without the security to enjoy them. And in practice, as he put it in a 1967 speech, King hoped that the protests would embody a “middle ground between riots on the one hand and timid supplications for justice on the other … ”
On May 13, the day after Coretta Scott King led protesters into the capital, thousands of the demonstrators set up tents and shacks on the National Mall, making it plain that they were not simply marching in and then out of town. They dubbed it “Resurrection City,” and called it home for more than 40 days. They made themselves impossible to ignore—so much so that, after Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in early June 1968, his casket and funeral procession passed through Resurrection City.
Jill Freedman, a young, white, amateur photographer from New York, quit her job as a copywriter to live with the protesters in Resurrection City and document their time there. Though Freedman was not sent to the protests on assignment, her photos later circulated widely, appearing first in LIFE magazine and then in the book Old News: Resurrection City. In August 2020, Bonhams auction house will open bidding on a selection of Freedman’s protest photos, with estimates ranging as high as $7,000. The online auction, which will also include photos by Bruce Davidson, who documented the civil rights movement as well, will close in early September.

The images on sale portray the diversity of the protests’ participants and capture the events on scales both epic and intimate. One particularly striking photo shows the Washington Monument in the distance behind a row of tents, juxtaposing the nation’s stated ideals with its lived realities. Another shows children rafting through floodwaters around the tents, documenting the weather and volatile conditions the protesters endured during their stay. Throughout the photos there are close-ups and group shots, young children and older people, and Americana ranging from flags to passing Greyhound busses. There are also police: One photo captures an officer from behind, tightly clasping his baton, as a priest leads a group of protesters just a few feet across the way.
Picking a standout image from the collection is like trying “to pick my favorite scene from a novel,” says John Edwin Mason, a historian of Africa and photography at the University of Virginia, and the author of an essay in a 2017 edition of Freedman’s Resurrection City photos. (Freedman passed away in 2019.) In other words, Freedman’s work strikes him primarily as a whole. “What I remember is the rawness,” he says, “her refusal to prettify Resurrection City.”

In Mason’s view, Freedman’s position as a white photographer does not make the images feel insincere or voyeuristic. (The protests were multiracial, though the demonstrators were predominantly Black.) “She walked the walk,” he says. “She had quit her job, she was virtually penniless, [and] she was not getting paid for the photos” as she took them. He adds that her respect for the subjects also comes through clearly: They’re not “cardboard heroes” with limitless strength. Instead, we see the protesters tired and frustrated. Because she lived in Resurrection City, says Mason, the protesters knew who she was. “She’s not taking photographs of people unawares,” he explains. “They’re very aware of her presence, and they accept her.”
When King laid out his vision for the PPC, which was first suggested to him by the NAACP’s Marion Wright, he hoped the campaign would yield jobs, a higher minimum wage, and more equitable access to education. Ultimately, according to Stanford University’s King Institute, the results were more modest—such as programs supplying surplus food to 200 counties and some limited hiring pledges. King and his successor Ralph Abernathy, who led the campaign, had hoped for more—and indeed, their work is not done. In recent years, the Poor People’s Campaign has relaunched with an agenda revised for the 21st century. It is currently being revised further, as the COVID-19 pandemic poses unique threats to the economically vulnerable.

Despite the multitude of stories popping up in our newsfeed that show white people facing consequences after their racism was caught on camera, a lot of white people still appear to be comfortable showing off the extent of their bigotry even after they realize they’re being recorded.
The Poland-based Telegram channel Nexta has become a key source of information
An example of a recent post on Nexta Live, showing protesters in the city of Homel reading aloud their demands to the authorities. This post was viewed over half a million times. Screenshot from Nexta Live / Telegram.
It seems that everybody in Belarus follows Nexta Live. During the first days after the country’s presidential election, when the entire country went nearly completely offline, this channel on the Telegram messenger service was one of the only sources of information about an escalating political crisis.
That crisis was triggered by President Alexander Lukashenka’s bid to secure a sixth term in office in elections on August 9. According to official results, Lukashenka received 80 percent of the vote compared to just 10 percent for his challenger Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya. Belarusians and international observers alike suspected mass electoral fraud, leading thousands of voters to take to the streets in protest and workers across the country to declare strikes. Riot police responded with extreme violence, detaining over 6,000 protesters.
But protesters have kept up the pressure. On August 16, tens of thousands of Belarusians gathered in the capital Minsk in what may well have been the largest demonstrations since the country gained independence in 1991. They now demand nothing less than Lukashenka’s resignation. But the president says he’s going nowhere; the next day, before a jeering crowd of factory workers, Lukashenka vowed not to hold a re-run of the election “unless you kill me.”
Belarus’ opposition activists and independent journalists have good cause to fear those words. Since becoming president in 1994, Lukashenka has ruthlessly cracked down on all resistance to his rule and on media freedoms. Domestic and international journalists alike have been beaten and detained during recent protests.
With so many obstacles to newsgathering on the ground, Nexta becomes an even sharper thorn in the authorities’ side. The channel has circulated footage of police attacks on peaceful protesters, striking workers’ political demands, and photographs of what it alleges are “real” voting tallies from polling stations across the country.
That content has got Nexta noticed. If at the start of August the channel had more than 300,000 subscribers, it now has over two million — not a trivial number in a country of around ten million.
In fact, that makes Nexta one of the most popular Telegram channels in the world. And the Belarusian authorities have noticed; that’s why on August 14, the country’s police opened a criminal case against Nexta’s founder Stepan Putsilo, who lives in Poland, on charges of “organising mass riots” and calling for the overthrow of the Belarusian government.
“It was just a hobby. I made funny videos for my family. Then I decided to gather all the trash from Lukashenka’s Belarus,” explained the 22-year-old Putsilo in an interview with Charter97, a Belarusian human rights website. Thus Nexta, whose name comes from the Belarusian for “somebody,” was born in 2015. Initially it was a YouTube channel, where Putsilo and his friends would share reflections on social issues in Belarus alongside their satirical songs with an anti-Lukashenka message.
The lyrics of one such song from 2015 would not be out of place at a protest rally in Minsk today:
Все двадцать лет
Выбора нет: Только усатые портреты.
Нужно искать
Способ сбежать, Но всё дороже здесь билеты…
Все двадцать лет
Выбора нет…
All these 20 years
There’s been no choice. Just moustachioed portraits.
I need to find
A way to get out, but the tickets are so expensive
All these 20 years
There’s been no choice…— NEXTA, Выбора нет (cover Сплин), YouTube, October 4, 2015
Putilo did eventually find a way out of Belarus — with a one-way ticket. In his Charter97 interview, Putilo recounted that he returned once in 2018 to visit his family. However, upon learning that his apartment had been searched by the security services, he has not been back since. Nevertheless, Putilo is one of several opposition-minded Belarusians based in their country’s neighbour to the West. The Polish capital also hosts Belsat, a Belarusian-language news channel which is critical of the Lukashenka government (The Nexta founder is the son Alexander Putilo, a Belsat journalists, and writes articles for Belsat himself under the name Stepan Svetlov.)
Nexta’s prominence only grew despite, or perhaps due to, its founder’s exile. In February 2018, the Belarusian authorities opened a case against Nexta for “insulting the president” in critical YouTube videos. That autumn, Nexta moved onto the Telegram messaging service, and most of its YouTube audience followed.
The channel’s output also became increasingly professional. In April 2019, Nexta was the first source to report on the murder of a traffic policeman from the Belarusian city of Mogilev; the information it provided later formed the basis of journalistic investigations. Then in October 2019, Nexta released its first professional documentary — “Lukashenka: Criminal Materials”, which told the story of how the current Belarusian president rose to power. The film attracted nearly three million views on YouTube; the Belarusian authorities denounced it as “extremist.”
This growing following eventually gave Nexta a funding model in the form of paid advertisements, which disappear from its feed after 24 hours. Its editors recently told the Russian version of Esquire Magazine that Nexta has not received grants from any organisations or governments, and survives exclusively from this advertising revenue and donations from its readers.
By the time Belarus held its 2020 presidential election, Nexta had become an essential source of information for any serious observer of Belarus. The project’s decentralised structure, featuring profiles on multiple social media platforms but no website, was ideal in building up this following — but led to an immense volume of submissions. Hundreds of anonymous users were sending information, photos, and videos to Nexta’s channels. There was so much that Putsilo was compelled to hire three colleagues to sift through the submissions from his home country.
They would soon be working overtime.
Nexta maintains three Telegram channels: Nexta, Nexta Live, and Luxta (which mostly shares satirical posts). During the height of the protests in the days following the presidential election, Nexta Live was publishing hundreds of messages every day, many of them including content provided by anonymous users with only the most cursory contextual information. Each post now has a million reads on average.
But in recent days, Nexta has also circulated texts of protesters’ demands, updates about arrests, locations of arrests by riot police, and contacts for lawyers and human rights defenders. It is clear that the channel does not merely report on the protests, but has played a substantial role in organising them:
There are two groups behind Belarus uprising:
1) Tsikhanouskaya, incl. her team, team of jailed V. Babaryka, traditional party activists. They create a transitional council
2) Telegram’ers (led by NEXTA), including multiple channels and influencers. They organize protests mainly.— Franak Viačorka (@franakviacorka) August 16, 2020
Despite criticism from some quarters, Nexta’s editor-in-chief Roman Protasevich does not see a contradiction between this overt political agenda and conventional journalistic ethics. The 25-year-old journalist recently joined Putsilo’s team, and has now received political asylum in Poland. Speaking on August 12 with the prominent Ukrainian journalist Dmitry Gordon, who had interviewed Lukashenka a few days before, Protasevich denied that Nexta could be described as the main coordinator of the protests, though acknowledged that he and his colleagues had been forced into the spotlight as key opposition figures:
Это в принципе невозможно координировать, в стране отключена от интернета, а вчера даже мобильный интернет отсутствовал вообще польностью. Невозможно пытаться как-то управлять толпы. Это раз. А во-вторых, да мы осознаем та ответственность которую на нас лежит. Мы понимаем это, но обладая таким резурсом и такой вообще узнаваемостью и доверием к себе среди сотен тысяч белорусов, мы понимали, что на какой-то момент действительно нужно будет отойти от каких-либо парадигмов невмешательства хотя бы по простой причине что все мы тоже белорусы, и все мы люди которые живут при диктатуре уже много лет. Многие, особенно молодежь, живут при Лукаженке с самого рождения. С этим нужно что-то делать. Да, я понимаю что в последные дни мы практически полностью нарушили какую-то журналистическую этику, отказались от каких-то этических правил в плане журналистики, но важно понимать, что мы не только журналисты, мы люди. И мы действительно хотим перемен к лучшему. Мы хотим сами вернуться домой […] Мы такие же беларусы как и все и мы просто стараемся сделать все, для того чтобы в Беларуси была сменяемость власти, чтобы в Беларуси соблюдалась элементарная права человека, для того, чтобы там существовала свобода слова.
In principle, this isn’t something which can be coordinated, particularly not in a country which is cut off from the internet, where yesterday there wasn’t even mobile internet. It’s impossible to somehow direct the crowds. That’s one point. Furthermore, we fully comprehend the responsibility which lies on our shoulders. We have an incredible resource, we’re widely recognised, and hundreds of thousands of Belarusians have put their trust in us. We understood that at some point, we had to move beyond concepts of non-interference if only for the simple reason that we are also Belarusians, and we are all people who have lived under a dictatorship for many years. Many, particularly young people, have lived under Lukashenka since the day they were born. Something has to be done about that. Yes, I understand that over the last few days we have entirely violated some journalistic ethics, some ethical rules of the field, but it’s important to understand that we are not just journalists, we are human beings. And we really do want change for the better. We’d like to return home ourselves some day […] We are Belarusians, just like everybody else, and we are trying to do all in our power to ensure that Belarus has rotations of power and that elementary human rights were respected in the country, so that there is some freedom of speech in Belarus.
Protasevich did not respond to GlobalVoices’ request for comment. However, his words above make his view clear: when journalists face pressure from the authorities, they are ethically obliged to push for freedom of expression — even if that means abandoning the pretence of impartiality.
There can be no doubt that Nexta and a handful of other Telegram channels have played a crucial role in informing the world about the turmoil in Belarus after the election. However, some observers voice discomfort at depending too much on these sources. The information they share is fragmentary, anonymous, contextless, and despite the best efforts of its editors, some of it appears to be unverified. For example, in the early hours of August 10, Nexta reported that the 35-year-old Yevgeny Zaichkin had died during clashes with police in Minsk. As it happened, Zaichkin was wounded but survived.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, these concerns are shared by editors of older Belarusian publications whose readerships now pale in comparison with Nexta. Anna Kaltygina, an editor for one of the largest Belarusian news websites Tut.By, told the Russian radio station Ekho Moskvy on August 12 that she doubted whether it was possible to seriously fact check events on the ground in Belarus from faraway Warsaw. However, one can also ask whether it is possible to report seriously from the ground in Belarus given the authorities’ harassment of journalists in recent weeks and generally poor record on press freedom.
In this context, a media source which relies on anonymous content has practical merit. Kaciaryna Šmacina, a Research Fellow at the Belarusian Institute for Strategic Studies, told GlobalVoices that Nexta and other Telegram channels rose in prominence at just the right moment:
Right now the Belarusian protests are leaderless, and for the moment this is probably for the good. We have no leader in Belarus who would take charge and channel those protest moods, because if he or she were there, they would have at the very least been thrown out of the country like Tsikhanouskaya or put in jail. And in such a repressive context, these Telegram channels are something very new, allowing people to coordinate themselves and organise protests. They are an important tool and source of information, but at the same time I think it’s very legitimate to ask who are the coordinators of these channels, particularly if they call on people to resist the police.
Telegram confounds autocratic rulers in the post-Soviet space, where its use is particularly widespread. This year, the Russian authorities abandoned an attempt to ban the messaging platform; the internet outages in Belarus also failed to silence Nexta and other popular channels. As Deutsche Welle noted this May, Lukashenka has denounced Telegram with ever greater frequency this year. He has continued to do so during the protests; It is not implausible that he had Nexta in mind.
It’s now possible that other sources of information will be available for those watching developments in Belarus. On August 17, state television employees went on strike, no longer content to tow the government’s line against the protesters.
#BREAKING! In #Minsk, #Belarus, workers of the state TV reportedly joined the nationwide strike in #protest against rigged election results & police brutality.
This is what this morning’s state TV show looked like:pic.twitter.com/IonISHw8bh
— Alex Kokcharov (@AlexKokcharov) August 17, 2020
Furthermore, some Belarusian television channels have now started to broadcast footage of mass protests.
These developments are extraordinary, but Šmacina cautions against a false sense of security where freedom of expression is concerned. “Everybody who speaks up against the regime or criticises the regime is still in danger, and this danger hasn’t gone anywhere. Lukashenka is not close to relinquishing power, and my main concern is that we will see even more ugly scenes.”
Until and unless something cardinally changes in Belarus, it is likely that ordinary Belarusians will continue to opt for anonymity when they speak out — and seek out Nexta when they do so.
Written by Maxim Edwards · comments (0)
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Blog de viajes y lugares
The official blog of Ed Mooney Photography. Dad of 3, Photographer, Blogger, Powerlifter. Exploring the historical sites of Ireland.
It has new aidias,news, about education , motivation, social, historical, culture, marketing creation new aidias education of language science culture and history
L'unico modo sensato di vivere è senza regole
by Anuran (A) & Sayoni (S)
Fun for the Brain
An exemplary learning community.
Loves, lamentation, and life through prose, stories, passions, and essays.
public tantrums by a non-two-year-old
Public, street and urban art worldwide
all the rules of free form
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Lapsed Painter, Occasional Photographer, Compulsive Writer
Health Blogs
Exploring the hidden architectural heritage of Budapest
Yaşamdan
The third incarnation...
More than a thought less than a question
"بوصلة الحياة: مدونة متعددة المجالات، من السياسة إلى الرومانسية، ومن تطوير الذات إلى الأدب وأكثر!" بقلم مشاعر بنت عبدالرحمن
The view from here ... Or here!
Bringer and seeker of joy
The One Where She Stumbled Through Her 40's and Faced Her Demons
Baw wit da baw. Just sayin'.
Website storys
Welcome to the Anglo Swiss World
Querbeet und ohne Gewähr
KINDNESS IS FREE, sprinkle it all over the world, and 😁 smile
Nuestra ética de todos los días...
Fiction Writer in Poet's Clothing
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