4 months old but new to me and pretty funny.

~

https://invidious.privacyredirect.com/watch?v=epvLrK6Mhd4

https://newsie.social/@Geewhizpat/113028457198325540

#ALTtext: Parody video of video footage of various 1-on-1 interviews with Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin combined with closed captioning of lyrics related to a Trump scandal(s) and to the tune of Shaggy's hit (2000) "It wasn't me." There's a music backing track as well. There are Trump-like and Putin-like voices singing their respective parts. Trump lists things he's done like "dabbling in election fraud" to his confidant, Putin, who elaborates on his general advice, to say "it wasn't me."

Palestinians calling home to Gaza on Skype have had their digital lives destroyed, after Microsoft closed their email accounts without warning.

BBC News has spoken to 20 Palestinians living abroad who say Microsoft, which owns the voice and video chat app, kicked them out of their accounts. The total number affected is thought to be much higher.

In some cases, these email accounts are more than 15 years old and the users have no way to retrieve emails, contacts or memories.

Microsoft says they violated its terms of service - but will not say how - and the decision is final.

The Gazans say they have no links to Hamas - designated as a terrorist organisation by some Western countries, including the US, where Microsoft is headquartered - and accuse the technology giant, the most valuable company in the world, of persecuting them unfairly.

Armed conflicts have indirect health implications beyond the direct harm from violence. Even if the conflict ends immediately, there will continue to be many indirect deaths in the coming months and years from causes such as reproductive, communicable, and non-communicable diseases. The total death toll is expected to be large given the intensity of this conflict; destroyed health-care infrastructure; severe shortages of food, water, and shelter; the population's inability to flee to safe places; and the loss of funding to UNRWA, one of the very few humanitarian organisations still active in the Gaza Strip.^8^

In recent conflicts, such indirect deaths range from three to 15 times the number of direct deaths. Applying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death^9^ to the 37 396 deaths reported, it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186 000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza. Using the 2022 Gaza Strip population estimate of 2 375 259, this would translate to 7·9% of the total population in the Gaza Strip.

Despite its name, the infrastructure used by the “cloud” accounts for more global greenhouse emissions than commercial flights. In 2018, for instance, the 5bn YouTube hits for the viral song Despacito used the same amount of energy it would take to heat 40,000 US homes annually.

Large language models such as ChatGPT are some of the most energy-guzzling technologies of all. Research suggests, for instance, that about 700,000 litres of water could have been used to cool the machines that trained ChatGPT-3 at Microsoft’s data facilities.

Additionally, as these companies aim to reduce their reliance on fossil fuels, they may opt to base their datacentres in regions with cheaper electricity, such as the southern US, potentially exacerbating water consumption issues in drier parts of the world.

Furthermore, while minerals such as lithium and cobalt are most commonly associated with batteries in the motor sector, they are also crucial for the batteries used in datacentres. The extraction process often involves significant water usage and can lead to pollution, undermining water security. The extraction of these minerals are also often linked to human rights violations and poor labour standards. Trying to achieve one climate goal of limiting our dependence on fossil fuels can compromise another goal, of ensuring everyone has a safe and accessible water supply.

Moreover, when significant energy resources are allocated to tech-related endeavours, it can lead to energy shortages for essential needs such as residential power supply. Recent data from the UK shows that the country’s outdated electricity network is holding back affordable housing projects.

In other words, policy needs to be designed not to pick sectors or technologies as “winners”, but to pick the willing by providing support that is conditional on companies moving in the right direction. Making disclosure of environmental practices and impacts a condition for government support could ensure greater transparency and accountability.

1:21 video shows the scale of the protest.

Shulamit Ron, Demonstrator: "We hope the world hears us: the people of Israel are not the government of Israel. We don't agree with the policy; we don't agree with the way they behave; and we want to have a different future."

Roi Tzohar, Demonstrator: "The Israeli people are hostages to their right-wing government. The people of Gaza are hostages to Hamas. And, basically, there has to be a way to overcome that and to stop the fighting and the killing. This [demonstration?] is to give everybody hope."

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/15001340

"Such an invasion could lead to horrific massacres and raise scenarios of a second Nakba," the Gaza-based Palestinian Center for Human Rights said recently. "After 200 days of horrific genocidal acts in Gaza, the real objectives of the attack are the continuation of the 76-year-long ongoing Nakba and the erasure and genocidal destruction of the Palestinian people in Gaza. Israel is laying the groundwork to fulfill its settler-colonial plan of colonizing Gaza."

Human rights defenders have warned that Israel may ultimately seek to ethnically cleanse as many Palestinians as possible from Gaza.

The devaluing of Palestinian life is not a supposition, it is a statistical fact. According to a new study of coverage in major US newspapers, for every Israeli death Israelis are mentioned eight times – or at a rate 16 times more per death than that of Palestinians. An analysis of BBC coverage by data specialists Dana Najjar and Jan Lietava found a similarly devastating disparity, and that humanising terms such as “mother” or “husband” were used far less often to describe Palestinians, while emotive terms such as “massacre” or “slaughter’” were almost only ever applied to the Israeli victims of Hamas’ atrocities.

Irish lawyer Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh, while laying out South Africa’s case against Israel in the international court of justice, described this as “the first genocide in history where its victims are broadcasting their own destruction in real time in the desperate, so far vain hope that the world might do something.” For younger generations exposed to numerous video clips of screaming mothers clutching the lifeless corpses of their newborns, this whole episode has proven instructive.

What do these young people then make of media coverage, or the statements of politicians, that don’t seem to treat Palestinian life as having any worth at all? What conclusions are being drawn about the growing minority populations of western countries whose media and political elites are making so little effort to disguise their contempt for Palestinian life as it is extinguished on such a biblical scale?

St. Louis, Missouri, US

It took far longer than he expected, but on January 12, in a 12-0 vote, the St. Louis Board of Aldermen voted overwhelmingly to adopt the committee substitute that had emerged from the Legislation and Rules Committee earlier in the week, calling for a bilateral ceasefire in Gaza. With its passage, St. Louis became the 16th municipality in the country to call for a ceasefire — reminding itself to prize its humanity above all else, to “give it a front seat” as Congresswoman Bush might say.

This was my first time making fajitas/tacos. I got inspired seeing some authentic tortillas in a health food store, and this meal/post is the result :) I didn't have much experience with fajitas/tacos before making this.

I found there were two great aspects. It's an unusually fun-to-eat meal. The assembly, once the ingredients are prepared, allows for some creativity and different ideas. (I think it'd be a fun at-home date idea.) There's the finger-food aspect. I stuffed back like 4 or 5 of these for supper. As someone who eats a fair amount of wheat (and rice), it's neat to get a really filling meal without either wheat or rice. The second great aspect is that between the black beans and avocado (and maybe fried onions and tortilla as well) it was legitimately rich in a creamy sort of way. I was not at all missing dairy cheese with these!

The only downside is that they aren't too conducive batch cooking (e.g., preparing food for several dinners in a row).

My crude recipe (makes 4-5 fajitas):

• 1 medium onion, sliced
• 1 sweet pepper, sliced
• 1/2 can of black beans
• A few cloves of garlic, chopped for veg/beans mix; 1 small clove grated for guacamole
• 100% corn tortillas
• 1 avocado
• 1 jalapeño, diced
• cilantro
• 1 lime, squeezed (1/2 in guacamole, 1/2 to spritz on top at the end)
• olive oil
• salt
• Southwestern chipotle seasoning (I found an inexpensive one that isn't predominantly salt, and I was very happy with it)

The recipe is pretty forgiving and also easy to vary. Ideas for furthering my fajita/taco game welcome :D

Snippets:

In the early days of the Israeli war on Gaza, the campaign to suppress any pro-Palestine view, in fact, any anti-war view, was most intense.

Some countries in Europe, which pride themselves on supposed freedom of speech, either banned or considered banning the Palestinian flag, or even specific chants.

In some countries, especially France, the campaign turned even more extreme where artists, sportsmen and even ordinary citizens were attacked, and in some cases tried, for social media statements expressing solidarity with the Palestinians.

This period shall be remembered as the war on freedom of speech in many European societies.

Snippets:

“We demand an immediate end to this unjust war against Palestinians and implementation of the two-state solution,” the Chairman of the African Union Commission, Moussa Faki Mahmat, reportedly told the meeting of heads of state in Uganda’s capital, Kampala.

The summit, which began on January 15, runs until January 20.

Cuba’s vice president, Salvador Valdes Mesa, said that “Since October 7, we have witnessed one of the cruelest genocidal acts ever to be recorded by history.”

“How can the Western countries, who claim to be so civilized, justify the murder of women and children in Gaza, the indiscriminate bombings of hospitals and schools and deprivation of access to safe water and food?” he reportedly questioned, in his speech on Friday.

According to Gaza’s Ministry of Health, 24,927 Palestinians have been killed, and 62,388 wounded in Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza starting on October 7.