The Netherlands has officially handed back 119 ancient sculptures stolen from the former Nigerian kingdom of Benin more than 120 years ago during the colonial era.

Olugbile Holloway, director-general of Nigeria’s National Commission for Museums and Monuments, said on Saturday that the artefacts were the “embodiments of the spirit and identity of the people from which they were taken from”.

The Netherlands returns 119 stolen sculptures to Nigeria

The Benin Bronzes were artefacts stolen during the UK’s imperial plunder of Benin, modern-day southern Nigeria.

^{Al Jazeera}

The former politician explained that the situations in Ukraine and Israel cannot be compared because Kyiv did not threaten Russia’s existence.

“I don’t quite agree that Israel does not adhere to international law. When a country’s existence is threatened by Iran or Hamas, it’s not so easy to respond strictly according to international law. If some are allowed to declare they want to destroy the state of Israel, then Israel must have the ability to defend itself,” Merkel said.

At the same time, she emphasized that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine violates international law.

Israel’s strikes on Iran follow international law, Russia’s war on Ukraine does not - Merkel

Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel stated that Israeli strikes on Iran cannot be equated with the war in Ukraine, as Russia violated the world order with its full-scale invasion

^{Espreso TV (Espreso)}

cross-posted from: lemmy.ml/post/32055974

time to switch to ArcaneChat/DeltaChat 😁

James Maxton (1885 - 1946)

Mon Jun 22, 1885

James Maxton, born on this day in 1885, was a socialist Scottish politician, pacifist, and leader of the Independent Labour Party, a dissident working class party to the left of the Labour Party of its day. He was also a prominent supporter of Home Rule for Scotland.

Maxton was born in the burgh of Pollokshaws (modern day Glasgow), the son of two schoolteachers. He would later become a teacher himself, joining the socialist movement after witnessing firsthand the poverty of the schoolchildren he taught.

Maxton was also a pacifist who opposed both World Wars. During World War I, he was a conscientious objector who refused conscription, and was instead given work on the barges. While there, he became involved in organizing strikes in the shipyards as part of the Clyde Workers' Committee. In 1916, Maxton was convicted of sedition and served a year in prison.

Initially serving as an MP with the Labour Party, he broke with the party under its leadership of Ramsay MacDonald, joining the Independent Labour Party (ILP) instead, later becoming its leader.

One of the best known members of the ILP, Maxton remained a prominent dissident in Parliament for the rest of his life, the only person out of 465 members of the House of Commons to vote against a Motion of Confidence in Winston Churchill's wartime government. Maxton died in 1946, still serving as MP for Bridgeton.

"In the interests of economy they condemned hundreds of children to death and I call it murder."

- James Maxton

• Date: 1885-06-22
• Learn More: en.wikipedia.org, spartacus-educational.com.
• Tags: #Socialism, #Labor, #Birthdays.
• Source: www.apeoplescalendar.org

cross-posted from: feddit.it/post/18887776

Doesn't sound like much, but waiting for a bus on a bench can make a huge difference.

Guerrilla urbanism is awesome!

lgsp@feddit.it

2025-06-21 21:24:32

Bay Area guerrilla ‘bench collective’ installs seating at 8 Mission bus stops

Doesn't sound like much, but waiting for a bus on a bench can make a huge difference.

Guerrilla urbanism is awesome!

Bay Area guerrilla ‘bench collective’ installs seating at 8 Mission bus stops

A group of transit activists have dropped eight benches of their own making into the Mission, where residents are (mostly) grateful.

^{Jordan Montero (Mission Local)}

I'm trying to digitize some VHS tapes (presumably recorded as NTSC), but I have some questions that I've yet to find answers for. My current process/setup is as follows:
- VHS tapes are played in a PV-D4745S-K VCR
- The VCR's composite output is captured using a generic EasyCap capture card.
- The captured output is fed into OBS Studio with the following settings:
- A source with it's device set to the capture card, the video format is set to YUYV 4:2:2, the resolution is set to 720x480, the frame rate is currently set to Leave Unchanged (more on this later).
- Under Settings>Video I have set Common FPS Values with 29.97.
- I also have set my encoding options under Settings>Output, as well as audio settings under Settings>Audio, but the details of that aren't relevant in this context.
- I also have deinterlacing disabled by right clicking on the scene and selecting Deinterlacing>Disable.

With this, I seem to be able to capture VHS tapes with decent quality, but I have some nagging questions:
1. How do I verify if OBS has indeed captured interlaced? I'm trying to capture both fields, but I'm unsure if that's actually happening, and I'm not sure how to go about verifying it.
2. Should I capture at 29.97 FPS or 59.94 FPS? My thinking is that, given that I'm capturing interlaced, I would think I would multiply the number of captured frames by 2 as, if I understand correctly, each captured frame contains 2 fields, and each would be captured sequentially, so if I want to capture at 29.97 FPS interlaced, I would need to capture at 59.94 FPS. I'm not sure if I'm right about that though.
3. I mentioned above that the framerate under the source properties is set to Leave Unchanged. The reason for why I chose that option is because the only other options that it offers for framerates are 30.00, 20.00, 10.00, and 5.00 — ie there is no option for 29.97, nor 59.94 — so I'm using Leave Unchanged in the hopes that it's autodetecting the proper frame rate, but that's mostly an assumption on my part. The closest to NTSC's 29.97 would be 30.00, but I'm not sure if this is an issue. And what's confusing me more is that I have 29.97 FPS set under Settings>Video with Common FPS Values and 29.97 set. If I set to source framerate to 30 with OBS at 29.97, will that lead to syncing issues? Is there a way to force the source to use 29.97 to match OBS? What's confusing me further about this is that if I list the formats for the capture device with
v4l2-ctl --device=/dev/video2 --list-formats-ext
I get the following output (I have truncated it to only list what's relevant, as the full output is long and contains unnecessary information):
[…] size: Discrete 720x480 […] Interval: Discrete 0.033s (30.000 fps) Interval: Discrete 0.050s (20.000 fps) Interval: Discrete 0.100s (10.000 fps) Interval: Discrete 0.200s (5.000 fps) […]
There is no option for 29.97 FPS, and, as can be seen by the output, it matches what OBS sees. Is this an issue? It seems, to me, that the capture card isn't capable of proper NTSC framerates, and can only capture at 30 FPS as the closest value.

E’ un buon ritorno questo di Paul Simon che, dopo diverse pubblicazioni di non grande valore, ritorna finalmente con un disco sopra la media, anche se lontano dall’ultimo suo capolavoro solista che è Graceland... Leggi e ascolta...

ᗩᐯᗩIᒪᗩᗷᒪᗴ

2025-06-22 08:13:43

Paul Simon – So Beautiful Or So What (2011)

E’ un buon ritorno questo di Paul Simon che, dopo diverse pubblicazioni di non grande valore, ritorna finalmente con un disco sopra la media, anche se lontano dall’ultimo suo capolavoro solista che è Graceland. So Beautiful Or So What è il dodicesimo lavoro in studio del settantenne cantautore americano famoso anche per il duo con Art Garfunkel. Nei testi è la spiritualità l’elemento predominante, ecco infatti cosa dice in una sua intervista: “Spiritualità sì, tanta, anche se in senso non religioso. Credo sia connessa con i tempi, con i problemi economici in America; c'è tanta gente che ha perso e perde il lavoro. Quel che capita nel mondo, e anche nella mia vita, finisce sempre nelle canzoni. Ma direi che sarebbe troppo appioppargli il titolo “Now i sing God”; il soggetto Dio appare in 4 o 5 canzoni, non l'ho fatto intenzionalmente”, un disco quindi, che approfondisce il significato della vita... artesuono.blogspot.com/2014/07…

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Ascolta: album.link/i/1416977100

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

Paul Simon – So Beautiful Or So What (2011)

di Silvano Bottaro E’ un buon ritorno questo di Paul Simon che, dopo diverse pubblicazioni di non grande valore, ritorna finalmente con...

^{Silvano Bottaro (Blogger)}

https://www.rte.ie/news/business/2025/0622/1519521-how-secure-is-your-banking-app/

https://www.rte.ie/news/analysis-and-comment/2025/0621/1519609-connelly-analysis-eu/

According to a post online, Thunderbird email client makes connections to sites that have nothing to do with sending and receiving email, for "telemetry" and other questionable reasons

Is this something we should be concerned about? Is there a good alternative to Thunderbird given that it seems to have telemetry implemented inside it?

I use Thunderbird heavily and I'm really worried about this problem. Can someone clarify whether if thunderbird is trustworthy?

Below is the post support.mozilla.org/en-US/ques…

In case it gets taken down, a user asked this:

I would like to know why, when Thunderbird first starts up or shortly thereafter, it attempts to connect to the following sites:

detectportal.firefox.com

status.geotrust.com

thunderbird-settings.thunderbird.net

It does not need to connect to any of these to send or receive email, so I would like to know why it's attempting to connect to those addresses. Little Snitch is blocking them for now but if one of them is important I can remove that block.

Also, at some point every day, Thunderbird complains that it can't get the latest version, and every day I have to dismiss that popup. I bring this up because it may be related to me blocking the connections but until I know what they are for I'd like to know if it is possible to make Thunderbird stop checking for updates.

They all concern me but the one that really concerns me is thunderbird-settings.thunderbird.net, first because it is listed as a bad address on one of the malware sites, and second because I don't want my settings being sent off my computer. Really the only reason I want Thunderbird to connect to the Internet is to send and receive mail, and maybe to check for updates if it can do ONLY that, and not send any other data from my computer back to the mothership.

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And this was the response, from a "Top 10 Contributor"/"Moderator" (emphasis added):

Firefox.com is owned by Mozilla corporation.

Thunderbird.net is owned by the Thunderbird project / Mzla technologies

GeoTrust is an Audited encryption certificate purveyor with a huge web presence that is a subsidiary of DigiCert, a larger certificate and PKI company.

If you have software identifying either an malware sites or some other imagined bad sites then I suggest you get rid of it. This is course unless you suspect Thunderbird or Mozilla of nefarious intentions in which case you probably want to remove their products and use another mail client and browser.

Why does Thunderbird try and connect to the web? Because significant part off it are web pages. That is why there are so many external preferences loaded in the defaults.

Another response on this site states **support.mozilla.org/en-US/ques… detectportal.firefox.com is used to detect captive portals on public wifi networks to be able to redirect you to their logon screen, so you don't just get page loading errors in firefox (set network.captive-portal-service.enabled to false in about:config in order to disable that feature). Thunderbird ises the Fireofx code base and will be doing the same of web pages.

I would guess without trying that status.geostruct.com is an attempt to verify the legitimacy of a geotrust SSL/TLS certificate issued by probably your mail server as Thunderbird.net uses lets encrypt and Firefox uses Amazon. I assume your connections are encrypted. Probably prompted by the setting Query OSCP responder servers to confirm the current validity of certificates.

I clicked the link you posted to thunderbird-settings.thunderbird.net which gave me a link to docs.kinto-storage.org/en/stab… where I read

At Mozilla, Kinto is used in Firefox for global synchronization of frequently changed settings like blocklists, experimentation, A/B testing, list of search engines, or delivering extra assets like fonts or hyphenation dictionaries.

Given Thunderbird is built on the Mozilla platform, I think we have an answer.

All I can say is in this day and age, software calls home extensively to report telemetry, load web pages and download settings appropriate for certain actions like configuring an account. TRying to prevent that is really limiting the software ability to function as a fairly basic level.

You have listed three of perhaps twice that number of sites Thunderbird will regularly connect to.

On startup it will load a web page from

live.thunderbird.net/

Opening the addon page will load Thunderbird.net pages as will viewing the release notes, or any of the entries on the help menu except about. Some open in a browser window, others open internally to Thunderbird. I have no idea what exact connections are made and I am not aware of any list or page that monitors them.

Checking for updates is not optional, The team do not want folk using old versions of the software as it exposes them to increased security risks as each version contains security enhancements. Updates can be managed in corporate situation using group policies. Otherwise stand alone users are limited in their options options to automatic install or not.

I won't post the user's reply to that (it is a bit lengthy) but he's not happy with the response. He just wants an email client that will connect to Google' email service using oAuth. As he says, he already has several web browsers and doesn't need another. He just wants his email program to do email and that's all, apparently.

I think maybe the Thunderbird developers have some explaining to do, particularly with regard to why they are forcing telemetry on users and giving them no way to opt out.

cross-posted from: lemmy.sdf.org/post/37177364

cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/31771868

La Susina Purin-a di Pavarolo, chiamata anche “Prugna di San Giovanni” (“Brigna” in piemontese), è una drupa color vinoso di piccola pezzatura, dolce, molto gustosa e apprezzata dai consumatori, al punto che da anni l’amministrazione comunale le dedica una Sagra giunta alla 28ª edizione. Il nome Purin-a è un richiamo alla parola “pura” che sta ad indicare la rusticità della pianta, che necessita di pochissimi trattamenti e non richiede innesto. La varietà matura attorno al 24 giugno, appena dopo la Susina di San Luigi, da cui si differenzia per il sapore più intenso e per la colorazione.

La varietà Purin-aè coltivata a Pavarolo in particolare nella frazione San Defendente. “Il successo del prodotto deriva sia dalla precocità di maturazione che dal sapore, caratteristiche che hanno permesso alla Susina Purin-a di essere presente in tutte le cascine fino ad oggi” spiega la Sindaca di Pavarolo, Laura Martini.

L’appuntamento con la Sagra della Brigna Purin-a, patrocinata dalla Città metropolitana di Torino, quest’anno è fissato per mercoledì 25 giugno nella piazzetta del mercato in via Maestra. Saranno presenti agricoltori, artigiani e artisti ed è in programma una passeggiata guidata tra i frutteti, in collaborazione con l'associazione Camminare Lentamente, che proporrà un itinerario di circa 5 km su strade bianche. Alle 18 è in programma una dimostrazione con prova pratica di callistenia, disciplina sportiva che utilizza il peso del corpo come resistenza per sviluppare l'armonia e la forza.

L’evento in programma la sera del 25 giugno a partire dalle 19si intitola“Viola come la brigna! Cibo, musica ed una prugna che non ti aspetti”ed è organizzato dalla Pro Loco di Pavarolo.

Mercoledì 25 giugno a Pavarolo (To) la sgra della Susina Purin-a - ViaggieMiraggi

MERCOLEDÌ 25 GIUGNO 2025 A PAVAROLO LA SAGRA DELLA SUSINA PURIN-A La Susina Purin-a di Pavarolo, chiamata anche “Prugna di San Giovanni” (“Brigna” in piemontese), è una drupa color vinoso di piccola pezzatura, dolce, molto gustosa e apprezzata dai co…

^{Redazione (ViaggieMiraggi)}

Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller is so involved in every aspect of the Trump administration’s efforts to radically reconfigure American democracy that congressional aides have reportedly begun complaining about his incessant phone calls.

Ignoring the fact that his “outreach wasn’t always welcome,” Miller would call congressional aides for lengthy, aimless conversations about illegal immigration that contained no specific requests, according to a damning new Wall Street Journal report.

One aide likened Miller to a “grandmother who wouldn’t stop talking,” and compared his phone calls to podcasts. Other aides said that Miller would call to scold them about how they had worded something in a press release or framed an issue in a social media post.

Stephen Miller Is Driving Congressional Aides Crazy With Non-Stop Calls

A new report details just how far Miller’s reach is in the Trump administration.

^{Catherine Bouris (The Daily Beast)}

Should I Disable WebSocket Connection on My Web Browser (in terms of privacy)?

Considering disabling WebSocket connections for security reasons. Any experience or thoughts? Have you disabled WebSockets? Any notable issues or performance changes?

The People’s Forum and Code Pink may be obligated to register as foreign agents due to Chinese Government funding and influence

BUTLER COUNTY, IOWA – Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) is urging the Department of Justice (DOJ) to assess whether The People’s Forum and Code Pink are obligated to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), due to the group’s reported Chinese Communist Party ties.

“Evidence suggests that The People’s Forum and Code Pink have been funded and influenced by Mr. [Neville Roy] Singham and the communist Chinese government, both of which are foreign principals. The evidence also suggests that The People’s Forum and Code Pink have engaged in covered political activities that directly advance the communist Chinese government’s political and policy interests,” Grassley wrote.

“Secretive foreign lobbying and public relations campaigns by China and other adversaries undermines the political will and interests of the American people. The People’s Forum and Code Pink’s reported role in advancing policies in favor of the communist Chinese government is more than alarming and their potential obligation to register as foreign agents for purposes of FARA ought to be investigated,” Grassley continued.

Read Grassley’s letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director Kash Patel HERE.

Background:

Neville Roy Singham is a social activist and billionaire who reportedly “works closely with the Chinese government media machine and is financing its propaganda worldwide.” Singham has reportedly attended Communist Party workshops focused on “promoting the party internationally,” shares office space and staff with the Shanghai Maku Cultural Communication Company and co-produces a YouTube show that’s partially financed by China’s propaganda department.

The People’s Forum, self-described as a “political and cultural hub,” is also funded in large part by Singham – who reportedly donated over $20.4 million through a series of shell organizations and donor advisory groups. The People’s Forum offers courses titled, “Lenin and the Path to Revolution” and “China75 – When the People Stand Up.” The group joined Code Pink in hosting a conference moderated by the Qiao Collective, known as “a diaspora Chinese media collective.” Further, the Executive Director of the People’s Forum openly pedaled Chinese propaganda when appearing on CGTN, a Chinese state-owned media group. DOJ directed CGTN to register under FARA in 2019.

Code Pink, self-described as a “grassroots organization working to end U.S. warfare and imperialism,” was founded by Singham’s wife, Jodie Evans, and has reportedly received roughly a quarter of its donations from organizations with ties to Singham. Since marrying Singham in 2017, Evans and Code Pink have “stridently support[ed] China,” with Evans publicly describing the Uyghurs, an ethnically Muslim minority group, as “terrorists” and defending their mass detention. Further, Code Pink activists have met with the House Select Committee on China to directly advocate for Chinese interests, including denying evidence of forced labor in the Uyghurs’ native region of Xinjiang.

Grassley Takes Aim at Radical Activist Groups’ Foreign Ties | United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary

BUTLER COUNTY, IOWA – Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) is urging the...

^{www.judiciary.senate.gov}

https://www.science.org/content/article/culture-literally-changes-how-we-see-world

The Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) issued a statement denouncing what it described as brutal and illegal attacks on the country's nuclear sites in Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan on Sunday at dawn.

The statement referred to the aggression as a violation of international law, particularly the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT).

According to the statement, the United States has openly acknowledged its role in the attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities, both through cyberspace operations and public remarks by its president. The targeted sites, it emphasized, are under constant surveillance by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) under the Safeguards Agreement and the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

AEOI condemns US attack on nuclear sites, accuses IAEA of complicity

The Atomic Energy Organization of Iran denounced recent attacks on Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan, accusing the US of violating the NPT and criticizing the IAEA’s silence.

^{Al Mayadeen English (AEOI condemns US attack on nuclear sites, accuses IAEA of complicity)}