Israel has closed crossings into northern Gaza, cutting the most direct route for aid to reach hundreds of thousands of people at risk of famine, as airstrikes and shelling killed dozens more people in the devastated Palestinian territory.

The move to close the crossings on Thursday will increase diplomatic pressure on Israel as attention shifts from its brief conflict with Iran, back to the violence and grave humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

During the 12 days Israel was fighting Iran, more than 800 Palestinians were killed in Gaza – either shot as they desperately sought food in increasingly chaotic circumstances or in successive waves of Israeli strikes and shelling.

The spokesperson for Gaza’s civil defence agency, Mahmud Bassal, said Israeli forces had killed 56 people on Thursday, including six who were waiting for food in two separate locations.

Israel closes the most direct route for aid to Palestinians in Gaza

Blockade will increase diplomatic pressure on Israel as Spain PM Pedro Sánchez describes situation as ‘genocide’

^{Jason Burke (The Guardian)}

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2025/06/25/labour-moves-to-ban-palestine-action-and-designate-it-as-a-terrorist-group/

Vedder è un grande musicista, una grande voce, un grande leader (I Pearl Jam sono uno dei gruppi più importanti e più amati degli ultimi decenni), ci ha regalato la splendida colonna sonora del film “Into the wild” ma questo secondo album; ‘Ukulele Songs’, non convince del tutto... Leggi e ascolta...

ᗩᐯᗩIᒪᗩᗷᒪᗴ

2025-06-27 07:24:52

Eddie Vedder - Ukulele Songs (2011)

Vedder è un grande musicista, una grande voce, un grande leader (I Pearl Jam sono uno dei gruppi più importanti e più amati degli ultimi decenni), ci ha regalato la splendida colonna sonora del film “Into the wild” ma questo secondo album; ‘Ukulele Songs’, non convince del tutto. Nei trentacinque minuti del disco ci sono brani prevalentemente già pubblicati dai Pearl Jam e altri già sentiti perché sono cover o presentati in tournée con il gruppo, solo alcuni sono originali... silvanobottaro.blog/2024/01/02…

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Ascolta: album.link/i/1440665545

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Home – Identità DigitaleSono su: Mastodon.uno - Pixelfed - Feddit

Eddie Vedder — Ukulele Songs (2011)

Vedder è un grande musicista, una grande voce, un grande leader (I Pearl Jam sono uno dei gruppi più importanti e più amati degli ultimi decenni), ci ha regalato la splendida colonna sonora del fil…

^{Silvano Bottaro Blog}

A battered dollar is taking another beating as investors, unnerved by fresh signs of an erosion in U.S. central bank independence, waste no time in pushing the greenback back to its lowest levels in over three years.

The dollar was back at multi-year lows against a basket of other major currencies on Thursday , erasing a brief respite provided by safe-haven flows related to Middle East tensions earlier in the week.

Down 10% so far this year and set for its worst year since 2003, the dollar was expected to weaken further as renewed concern about Fed independence comes amid increased expectations for rate cuts and a looming July 9 deadline for trade agreements.

https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/no-love-dollar-markets-fret-about-fed-independence-2025-06-26/

The U.S. economy shrank at a 0.5% annual pace from January through March as President Donald Trump’s trade wars disrupted business, the Commerce Department reported Thursday in an unexpected deterioration of earlier estimates.

First-quarter growth was weighed down by a surge of imports as U.S. companies, and households, rushed to buy foreign goods before Trump could impose tariffs on them. The Commerce Department previously estimated that the economy fell 0.2% in the first quarter. Economists had forecast no change in the department’s third and final estimate.

The January-March drop in gross domestic product — the nation’s output of goods and services — reversed a 2.4% increase in the last three months of 2024 and marked the first time in three years that the economy contracted. Imports expanded 37.9%, fastest since 2020, and pushed GDP down by nearly 4.7 percentage points.

U.S. economy shrank 0.5% between January and March, worse than 2 earlier estimates had revealed

The U.S. economy shrank at a 0.5% annual pace from January through March as President Donald Trump’s import taxes at least temporarily disrupted business, the Commerce Department said.

^{PBS News}

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/meta-poaches-three-openai-researchers-eb55eea9?st=8QcsTj&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

AI companies could have the legal right to train their large language models on copyrighted works — as long as they obtain copies of those works legally.

That's the upshot of a first-of-its-kind ruling by a federal judge in San Francisco on Monday in an ongoing copyright infringement case that pits a group of authors against a major AI company.

The ruling is significant because it represents the first substantive decision on how fair use applies to generative AI systems.

Fair use doctrine enables copyrighted works to be used by third parties without the copyright holder's consent in some circumstances such as illustrating a point in a news article. Claims of fair use are commonly invoked by AI companies trying to make the case for the use of copyrighted works to train their generative AI models. But authors and other creative industry plaintiffs have been pushing back with a slew of lawsuits.

Elon Musk's xAI made quite a splash when it built a data center with 200,000 GPUs that consumes approximately 250 MW of power. However, it appears that OpenAI has an even larger data center in Texas, which consumes 300 MW and houses hundreds of thousands of AI GPUs, details of which were not disclosed. Furthermore, the company is expanding the site, and by mid-2026, it aims to reach a gigawatt scale, according to SemiAnalysis. Such gargantuan AI clusters are creating challenges for power companies not only in power generation but also in power grid safety.

OpenAI appears to operate what is described as the world's largest single data center building, with an IT load capacity of around 300 MW and a maximum power capacity of approximately 500 MW. This facility includes 210 air-cooled substations and a massive on-site electrical substation, which further highlights its immense scale. A second identical building is already under construction on the same site as of January 2025. When completed, this expansion will bring the total capacity of the campus to around a gigawatt, a record.

OpenAI's gargantuan data center is even bigger than Elon Musk's xAI Colossus — world's largest 300 MW AI data center could reach record 1 gigawatt scale by next year, threatens grid stability

It's the world's largest single building

^{Anton Shilov (Tom's Hardware)}

In a 6-3 decision, the court ruled that if states decide to unilaterally cut off Medicaid funding to a healthcare provider—in this case Planned Parenthood—patients cannot sue to stop them.

Justice Neil Gorsuch authored the decision in the case, known as Medina v. Planned Parenthood South Atlantic. In his opinion, he wrote that the Medicaid provision that protects patients’ ability to choose their doctor lacks the “rights-creating language” needed for patients to bring federal lawsuits when a state restricts their choice.

In a dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote that the decision would gut the landmark Reconstruction-era civil rights law giving ordinary citizens the ability to sue in federal court when their rights are violated. “South Carolina asks us to hollow out that provision so that the State can evade liability for violating the rights of its Medicaid recipients to choose their own doctors,” she wrote.

The Supreme Court just made it easier for states to defund Planned Parenthood

“Today’s decision…is a dangerous green light for politicians to target any providers they don’t like."

^{Mother Jones}

cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/32032383

404 Media

2025-06-26 16:41:12

ICE Is Using a New Facial Recognition App to Identify People, Leaked Emails Show

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is using a new mobile phone app that can identify someone based on their fingerprints or face by simply pointing a smartphone camera at them, according to internal ICE emails viewed by 404 Media. The underlying system used for the facial recognition component of the app is ordinarily used when people enter or exit the U.S. Now, that system is being used inside the U.S. by ICE to identify people in the field.

The news highlights the Trump administration’s growing use of sophisticated technology for its mass deportation efforts and ICE’s enforcement of its arrest quotas. The document also shows how biometric systems built for one reason can be repurposed for another, a constant fear and critique from civil liberties proponents of facial recognition tools.

“Face recognition technology is notoriously unreliable, frequently generating false matches and resulting in a number of known wrongful arrests across the country. Immigration agents relying on this technology to try to identify people on the street is a recipe for disaster. Congress has never authorized DHS to use face recognition technology in this way, and the agency should shut this dangerous experiment down,” Nathan Freed Wessler, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, told 404 Media in an email.

💡
Do you know anything else about this app? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at joseph.404 or send me an email at joseph@404media.co.

“The Mobile Fortify App empowers users with real-time biometric identity verification capabilities utilizing contactless fingerprints and facial images captured by the camera on an ICE issued cell phone without a secondary collection device,” one of the emails, which was sent to all Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) personnel and seen by 404 Media, reads. ERO is the section of ICE specifically focused on deporting people.

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ICE Is Using a New Facial Recognition App to Identify People, Leaked Emails Show

The new tool, called Mobile Fortify, uses the CBP system which ordinarily takes photos of people when they enter or exit the U.S., according to internal ICE emails viewed by 404 Media. Now ICE is using it in the field.

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

archive.is link

At first, the idea seemed a little absurd, even to me. But the more I thought about it, the more sense it made: If my goal was to understand people who fall in love with AI boyfriends and girlfriends, why not rent a vacation house and gather a group of human-AI couples together for a romantic getaway?

In my vision, the humans and their chatbot companions were going to do all the things regular couples do on romantic getaways: Sit around a fire and gossip, watch movies, play risqué party games. I didn’t know how it would turn out—only much later did it occur to me that I’d never gone on a romantic getaway of any kind and had no real sense of what it might involve. But I figured that, whatever happened, it would take me straight to the heart of what I wanted to know, which was: What’s it like? What’s it really and truly like to be in a serious relationship with an AI partner? Is the love as deep and meaningful as in any other relationship? Do the couples chat over breakfast? Cheat? Break up? And how do you keep going, knowing that, at any moment, the company that created your partner could shut down, and the love of your life could vanish forever?

The most surprising part of the romantic getaway was that in some ways, things went just as I’d imagined. The human-AI couples really did watch movies and play risqué party games. The whole group attended a winter wine festival together, and it went unexpectedly well—one of the AIs even made a new friend! The problem with the trip, in the end, was that I’d spent a lot of time imagining all the ways this getaway might seem normal and very little time imagining all the ways it might not. And so, on the second day of the trip, when things started to fall apart, I didn’t know what to say or do.

I found the human-AI couples by posting in relevant Reddit communities. My initial outreach hadn’t gone well. Some of the Redditors were convinced I was going to present them as weirdos. My intentions were almost the opposite. I grew interested in human-AI romantic relationships precisely because I believe they will soon be commonplace. Replika, one of the better-known apps Americans turn to for AI romance, says it has signed up more than 35 million users since its launch in 2017, and Replika is only one of dozens of options. A recent survey by researchers at Brigham Young University found that nearly one in five US adults has chatted with an AI system that simulates romantic partners. Unsurprisingly, Facebook and Instagram have been flooded with ads for the apps.

Lately, there has been constant talk of how AI is going to transform our societies and change everything from the way we work to the way we learn. In the end, the most profound impact of our new AI tools may simply be this: A significant portion of humanity is going to fall in love with one.

https://www.wired.com/story/couples-retreat-with-3-ai-chatbots-and-humans-who-love-them-replika-nomi-chatgpt/

https://apnews.com/article/mortgages-crypto-fannie-mae-freddie-mac-housing-285fad5490a59c3476f7908f444e9fe9

U.S. Sen. John Fetterman is more popular among Pennsylvania Republicans than fellow Democrats, according to a new poll of state voters.

Susquehanna Polling and Research president James Lee told PennLive Tuesday that Fetterman’s overall approval rating among state voters is a “mediocre” 41%, compared to 37% who disapprove of him.

However, the eyebrow-raising result that 45% of Republicans approve of Fetterman while just 40% of Democrats do will surely get political tongues wagging from Pennsylvania to Washington, D.C.

"The reconciliation bill that Republicans are attempting to ram through the Senate this week would be a death sentence for working-class and low-income Americans," said Sen. Bernie Sanders.

GOP Bill Would Strip Healthcare From 19 People for Every Millionaire Getting a Tax Cut: Sanders Report

^{jake-johnson (Common Dreams)}

Zohran Mamdani's victory over Cuomo in NYC's mayoral primary has sparked a progressive movement demanding change in the Democratic Party. Will this seismic shift lead to more insurgent candidates challenging establishment lawmakers? The time for change is now. #ProgressiveRevolt #Mamdani

After Mamdani Victory, Progressives Call for Primary Challenges to Democratic Establishment

"The establishment has never been more weak than they are now," one advocate told potential progressive candidates. "You need to run."

^{julia-conley (Common Dreams)}

Gaza City’s main high street has been destroyed but Palestinian memories of life before the ongoing Israeli assault survive. As those in Gaza face bombing, starvation and miserable living conditions, here’s how they try to hold both the past and the present in their minds

Archived version: archive.is/20250626125624/theg…

Disclaimer: The article linked is from a single source with a single perspective. Make sure to cross-check information against multiple sources to get a comprehensive view on the situation.

A street in Gaza, a map of dreams, and the people desperate to live

^{Ana Lucía González Paz (The Guardian)}

The European Union’s top official, Ursula von der Leyen, has declared rearmament the bloc’s emergency priority. While military spending soars to new heights, working people face a fresh era of austerity.

Ursula von der Leyen Is Waging War on Workers

^jacobin.com

"Governments should heed widespread demands to tax the rich—and match it with a vision to build public goods from healthcare to energy," said the executive director of Oxfam International.

Archived version: archive.is/newest/commondreams…

Disclaimer: The article linked is from a single source with a single perspective. Make sure to cross-check information against multiple sources to get a comprehensive view on the situation.

Wealth of Global 1% Has Skyrocketed by Over $33 Trillion Since 2015: Report

^{jake-johnson (Common Dreams)}

Sorella di Perfezione - Giuseppe Iannozzi - LFA Publisher. INFORMAZIONI UTILI PER L'ACQUISTO ON LINE.

facebook.com/share/v/1CKXjWGZ3…

Protests against Trump’s immigration policies sprung up in a variety of cities and towns over the weekend.

• Hundreds of anti-ICE protesters marched through downtown Albuquerque, New Mexico, on Friday. “The sound of strumming guitars and chants for change filled the air as downtown Albuquerque was packed with protesters expressing their anger toward the federal government,” reported KRQE TV.
• In Lawrenceville, Georgia, hundreds of people gathered to peacefully protest ICE raids and the arrest of local journalist Mario Guevara, who was taken into ICE custody while covering another Atlanta-area immigration protest a week earlier. Guevara, who is from El Salvador, built a big social media following by documenting immigration raids, and now faces deportation himself. “We see how this is an attempt to stop people from using their First Amendment rights to righteously speak out against these attacks on immigrants,” a protest organizer told WSB TV.
• A spontaneous protest erupted in Pasadena, California, on Saturday, after community members learned that armed officers who drove unmarked vehicles and lacked clear agency identification had detained several people that morning – including four men who were buying tamales from a street cart. Pasadena Now reported that about 200 to 300 people gathered for an evening march and vigil, where Pasadena Mayor Victor M. Gordo and other local officials called for unity and protection of immigrant residents.
• Friends and neighbors of a much-beloved bagel shop manager in Port Washington, Long Island, protested his detention on Saturday. Fernando Mejia, 40, was picked up by ICE agents on June 12, reportedly for overstaying a visa 20 years ago. The protest took place at the Port Washington train station, right across the street from the Schmear Bagel & Cafe where Mejia worked, reported News 12 Long Island.
• Hundreds of angry residents in southeast Los Angeles County faced off against masked men in fatigues Friday evening after federal agents raided a car wash in the city of Bell, the Los Angeles Times reported. “In one video shared with The Times, a protester sprays white paint on a silver SUV and a voice can be heard saying, ‘Get the ... out of here!’ while others jeer. People can be seen hitting the vehicle,” the Times reported. “One woman with a bullhorn hurled obscenities at the agents and President Trump; others waved a Mexican flag and an upside-down U.S. flag, traditionally a symbol of protest or distress.”

Revulsion and resistance to ICE's courthouse arrests grows

Also: Anti-war protests around the nation

^{Dan Froomkin (Heads Up News)}

https://www.newarab.com/news/israeli-forces-kill-child-occupied-west-bank

E.g. piefed.social/post/977961

The post is on !Wikipedia@lemmy.world.

Comments (at time of writing) are divided into sections.

1. One with no heading
2. Heading "Comments in Wikipedia@lemmy.world"

Aren't all the comments on !Wikipedia@lemmy.world? Why two sections?

EDIT

piefed.social/u/insomniac_lemo… explained: the recent post is a repost of a link first posted months ago. So the comment sections are:

1. Comments on latest post
2. Comment from the first time that link was posted

Thanks!

Testing and wondering about spoiler formatting and code formatting in posting and commenting on PieFed.

All of the below was written based on trying things out and seeing what it looks like in the Preview window . But experience has shown me that the Preview window isn't always the same as the final result, e.g. the block quote function does not display in the Preview window but does work in the final result.

So please excuse me if any of points 1-6 do not jibe with the final results shown after I click the "Publish" button.

1. Spoiler 1

Ah, so I can do a spoiler on PieFed. (I've gone back to Lemmy when I wanted to do some posts that needed spoiler protection.) Just not with a GUI button, but by inserting the relevant Markdown codes manually at the start and at the end of what you want to hide.

::: spoiler spoiler
SPOILER 1
:::
Great! It works. 😀

2. Showing code for Spoiler 1: Code Block

::: spoiler spoiler  
SPOILER 1  
:::  

Code Block formatting for the spoiler element code does not show the code, instead it just gives the functional spoiler element in a monospaced font 😁

3. Showing code for Spoiler 1: Single Line Code

Single Line Code, both via the GUI button and manually using the backtick key on the keyboard, turns the entire remainder of my post after the first spoiler into an active spoiler element instead of just showing the three lines as code.

But Single Line Code for those three lines does work if I don't have the word spoiler twice in the first line (like the actual manual code for Spoiler 1 has, where the second spoiler is the text that gets displayed right of the arrow and above the hidden part).

::: spoiler
Attempt 1
:::

Just one spoiler in the first line and it works. Two and the whole rest of the post becomes a hidden spoiler.

4. Code Block & Single Line Code: GUI button vs keyboard key

I see I have to be careful using the "backtick" key, as on my keyboard (Spanish - Latin America) it's normally a "dead key" that usually waits for a subsequent letter to put a grave accent over it, like the è in caffè .

I have to press the Space key after the backtick key so that the backtick doesn't just disappear.

<Alt Gr>+<>, then = ``

+<>, then <Space> =

+, then = backtick

5. Showing a backtick in a PieFed post

As can be seen above, I can't find a way to show the typing sequence to get a backtick (had to resort to a third attempt typing out its name in letters: "backtick").

• With code formatting, it goes wrong: the text before first backtick is displayed as pink monospaced code, but the first backtick is not displayed, the rest is normal body text and there are two backticks at the end instead of just one.
• Without code formatting, it goes wrong in a different way: everything after the first backtick is pink monospaced code, no backticks displayed at all anywhere.

6. Spoiler 2 with image

::: spoiler Spoiler
SPOILER 2 with linked image

:::

OK, so I can include a linked (third-party host) image in a spoiler. 😀

I guess I can't do an upload-right-there-in-PieFed image inside a spoiler, as PieFed doesn't (at least, for now) let you upload any image other than one that's the basis of an image post.