Most nations have resumed funding to UNRWA which is the main channel of humanitarian support to Palestinians in Gaza as well as Palestinian refugees across the region. But with no evidence the US Congress permanently banned funding to UNRWA agency.
The US and Israel: Genocide, war crimes, apartheid.
Alt headline: Israel expects the US to indefinitely and unconditionally support its war crimes, genocide, land theft and apartheid state.
Israel presses the U.S. to reconsider sanctions against IDF battalion
The Israeli government called on the Biden administration on Sunday in public and in private to reconsider its expected decision to sanction the Israel Defense Forces' “Netzah Yehuda” battalion for human rights violations in the occupied West Bank.
2024-04-21 07_22
I never noticed that when magnified some of the Calyptra (oval ends of sporophytes) look a little bit like long sharp teeth!
A new-to-me moss, Plagiomnium cuspidatum. Very pretty with smooth, thin leaves.
I posted earlier today that I’d seen a drop off in reporting on the famine in Gaza. The April 9 article from Human Rights Watch that I linked was reporting famine stats from April 2. I’ve not seen any more recent stats. We’re now at April 20 and articles like the following from the Guardian today continue to describe the famine as looming with little to no new information. Is this just the result of journalists being restricted from the area?
Famine looms, made worse by acute shortages of shelter, medicine and clean water. Almost everyone in the enclave now depends on donated food, after more than six months of war has destroyed homes and decimated Gaza’s economy.
Daily aid shipments are still not even half the minimum levels the UN says are needed to keep more than two million people alive.
Israeli authorities, the US and humanitarian organisations have all said that deliveries should return to prewar levels of about 500 truckloads of aid a day. On Friday, only 250 trucks entered the enclave, UN figures showed, and that was the highest in April.
After more looking I’m still finding little in the way of recent updates. Suddenly intentional famine as a weapon doesn’t matter? Or is everyone in Gaza getting food?
Gaza: Israel’s Imposed Starvation Deadly for Children | Human Rights Watch
Gaza’s Health Ministry reported as of April 1, that 32 people, including 28 children, had died of malnutrition and dehydration at hospitals in northern Gaza. Save the Children confirmed on April 2 the deaths from starvation and disease of 27 children.
Media reports of famine in Gaza have dropped to near zero in the past 5 days. So is the food suddenly flowing in or is it just the attention span of the media shifting to the Iran story? I did find this:
Germany and Israel argued heatedly over images from Gaza during their meeting in Jerusalem earlier this week, with Germany’s Foreign Minister contending the images fail to show the reality of famine in the enclave, Israeli media reports said Friday.
Earth’s record hot streak might be a sign of a new climate era - The Washington Post
The heat fell upon Mali’s capital like a thick, smothering blanket — chasing people from the streets, stifling them inside their homes. For nearly a week at the beginning of April, the temperature in Bamako hovered above 110 degrees Fahrenheit. The cost of ice spiked to ten times its normal price, an overtaxed electrical grid sputtered and shut down.
With much of the majority-Muslim country fasting for the holy month of Ramadan, dehydration and heat stroke became epidemic. As their body temperatures climbed, people’s blood pressure lowered. Their vision went fuzzy, their kidneys and livers malfunctioned, their brains began to swell. At the city’s main hospital, doctors recorded a month’s worth of deaths in just four days. Local cemeteries were overwhelmed.
We need to support social justice in tech. Solidarity. An excellent post by Ben Werdmuller: No tech for apartheid is within its rights to protest | Werd.io
There is nothing honorable about supporting your employer as it commits or facilitates human rights violations. Protesting is the ethical thing to do…
Human rights should always trump business.
The US is isolated in its support of Israel, a state actively engaged in land theft, war crimes and genocide. Shameful.
The vote in the 15-member security council was 12 in favor, the US opposed and two abstentions, the UK and Switzerland.
Before the vote, diplomats said the US mission had been trying to convince one or two other council members to abstain, to mitigate Washington’s isolation on the issue…
Columbia University is colluding with the far-right in its attack on students | The Guardian
In her willingness to unleash state violence against student protestors, Minouche Shafik proved herself to be a willing ally to extremists…
To that end, she made only tepid defenses of academic freedom, instead favoring wholehearted condemnations of the protestors, assents to bad-faith mischaracterizations of the students as antisemitic and genocidal, and public, apparently on-the-spot, personnel decisions that removed some pro-Palestinian faculty and staff from their positions.
We could do with far more worker activism like this. Genocide in Gaza and also the climate emergency, both are crises that need more activism. Not easy to put one’s livelihood on the line in a protest.
Organized by the group No Tech for Apartheid, the protesters are demanding Google withdraw from Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion contract to provide cloud computing services to the Israeli military.
Arctic permafrost is now a net source of major greenhouse gases | New Scientist
Areas of permanently frozen ground in northern regions are now emitting more carbon into the atmosphere than they absorb, causing the planet to heat even further, according to the first Arctic-wide estimate of all three major greenhouse gases.
Frozen ground, or permafrost, which underlies 15 per cent of the northern hemisphere and contains twice as much carbon as the atmosphere, has shrunk in area by an estimated 7 per cent in 50 years as it thaws.
Democrats Question U.S. Claims That Israel Isn’t Violating International Law Using American Weapons
More than two dozen House Democrats sent a letter to the Biden administration on Tuesday questioning its assertions that the Israeli government is using American weapons in full compliance with U.S. and international law, as required by a memo President Joe Biden issued in February.
Texas Democratic Reps. Veronica Escobar and Joaquin Castro led the congressional letter to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines. The 26 Democrats note that for months, “elected representatives, intergovernmental bodies, international courts, Israeli and global human rights observers — along with government officials themselves — have persistently expressed grave concerns regarding the actions of the Netanyahu government.”
Documenting Six Months of Israeli War Crimes in Gaza
Over the last six months, Israel has repeatedly massacred Palestinians in Gaza, resulting in the deaths of well over thirty thousand Palestinians, some 70 percent of whom are women and children. Tens of thousands more have been injured. These numbers are probably an undercount considering Israel’s deliberate destruction of Gaza’s health care system, which is the sole independent source of these numbers (which are also used by Israel, including its prime minister and the military)
Is text editing on the iPad a problem?
Posting on Mastodon Scott Jenson suggested that text editing on the iPad is “tedious”. My initial reaction was, no, it’s not. I read through the thread and I think it speaks more to his lack of experience with the iPad. From his various posts it would seem he decided to jump into one of those “can the iPad be my computer stunts” and bumped into a variety of bugs and differences he didn’t like. Now, I can’t speak to the bugs as I’ve found the iPad with keyboard/trackpad to be rock solid for years.
I hopped over to his very in depth blog post. He makes some great points there in regards to touch-based editing of text but it seems to be oriented towards phone-based editing.
I’ve been coding and writing with a variety hardware keyboards and text editors on the iPad for years, have I just adapted to a poor experience? Is text editing that much better an a Mac? I don’t think so but I’ll get back to that comparison in a bit.
Breaking it down by the numbers. Damning but not surprising.
“One of the reasons I am hosting this new weekly show for Zeteo, is that I am fed up with media organizations failing to challenge the racism and bigotry of our leaders, and I am also fed up with media organizations themselves pushing racist, bigoted, dehumanizing coverage of minorities across the board - but especially, especially, of the Palestinians. I think the world deserves better.”
UN Report Describes Abuse and Dire Conditions in Israeli Detention - The New York Times
Gazans released from Israeli detention described graphic scenes of physical abuse in testimonies gathered by United Nations workers, according to a report released on Tuesday by UNRWA, the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees.
Palestinian detainees described being made to sit on their knees for hours on end with their hands tied while blindfolded, being deprived of food and water and being urinated on, among other humiliations, the report said. Others described being badly beaten with metal bars…
A quick follow-up to my post earlier this morning about blogging from my OBTF. One issue I mentioned as a possible friction point was posts containing images. I solved it easily with a Shortcut that I’ll use for every post regardless of whether they contain images. It’s a simple Shortcut that shares the text as an individual file in Obsidian. This allows for the same, easy posting from iA Writer when I’ve got images in a post. I’ll go ahead and do this for every post as it will continue adding those individual files to the blog posts folder in Obsidian. If I decide in the future not to blog from OBTF all of my posts are still intact as individual files. I’ve also set the Shortcut to copy the post text and open a new post on the Micro.blog website. If you’re an Apple user and you’re not using Shortcuts you’re missing out!
It was 85°F here yesterday (mid-Missouri). Forecast to be 83° today and 82° tomorrow. According to the Apple weather app this is 13° above average. Summer is going to be fun. 🥵
Nerd Note! In early February I decided to experiment with using OBTF (One Big Text File) instead of individual files for daily notes and thus far I really prefer it. I decided tonight to add to this experiment. Instead of individual blog posts residing in their own text files in a folder as I've been doing for a very long time I'm curious if they can be added to the OBTF? Would such a file be too cumbersome to edit or navigate? What about finding posts? Why even try Such a thing? What's the problem of individual files for blog posts?
It takes a certain amount of effort to deal with individual files and I often publish several posts a day usually as link blog style short posts. I use a shortcut to send markdown of highlighted text and the url from Safari to Obsidian. Then I add any comment I want to add and publish straight from Obsidian using the micro.blog publish plugin. It works very well.
Each post/file has YAML meta data to aid in searching via tags in Obsidan or I can search by keyword. Either way I get a list of files. I don't necessarily need to search often but when I do it's clunky. The search results don't indicate much beyond the file name and tags searched. Clicking through search results file-by-file is a bit cumbersome. It works, but it takes awhile.
For the next few weeks I'll try adding blog posts below each day's interstitial journal entries. Any new post, be it a quick link blog or a longer post like this one will get added to the top. And so, at the end of each day that day's blog posts are grouped for easy viewing, newest at the top. I'll tag posts as published with other keyword tags as they get posted. Any post that isn't published will get tagged as draft and will be moved up to the next day until published or abandoned and left behind should I decide not to publish it. I've started this post just before bed so it will get tagged draft and moved up in the morning before I finish it off.
From what I've read even very large text files remain very fast to navigate and search. Using an app like Textastic also provides a section navigation tool. Searching and/or navigating through a single file via this tool in Textastic seems far faster than searching multiple files in a folder in Obsidian.
One potential downside of this method is that I won't be able to use plugin to publish from Obsidian but I'm not sure this will be a significant problem. Publishing will still be very fast. Select the post, copy then use Command-Space to call up a Shortcut via Spotlight that jumps me straight to a new post in Safari where I simply paste. It may actually be easier to post as I usually have to confirm character count which is best done on the micro.blog post composer on the web. By going straight there with a post I'm skipping a step.
Reasons for experiment:
- It may be easier to surface posts when searching
- It may prove easier, simpler for writing and more conducive to posting longer form posts.
Potential problems:
- I have a pretty nice process for posting images in individual posts via the iA Writer app but this relies on each post existing as it's own file.