A dark money group paid $80,000 to Noem’s personal company when she was governor of South Dakota. She did not include this income on her federal disclosure forms, a likely violation of ethics requirements, experts say.

Kristi Noem Secretly Took Personal Cut of Political Donations

^ProPublica

The bill would cut Medicaid by over $1 trillion and strip health insurance from nearly 12 million over the next decade.

Sanders: GOP Budget Bill Is “Most Dangerous” Legislation in Modern US History

^{Jake Johnson (Truthout)}

A source within the government tells journalist Erin Reed they believe the noncompliance is intentional.

Trump Admin Appears to Defy Court Order Allowing Gender-Affirming Passports

^{Erin Reed (Truthout)}

Mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani has proposed raising taxes on corporations and the wealthy in New York City.

Mamdani Says Billionaires Shouldn’t Exist: “What We Need More of Is Equality”

^{Sharon Zhang (Truthout)}

The deadly aid site protocol is called “Operation Salted Fish,” the Israeli name for the children’s game.

Archived version: archive.is/newest/truthout.org…

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.

Israeli Forces Liken Gaza Aid Site Shootings to Game of “Red Light, Green Light”

^{Sharon Zhang (Truthout)}

New taxes on wind and solar are "truly bizarre, a self-defeating measure."

Senate version of "beautiful" bill will "kill" America's clean energy sector, experts say

^{Mother Jones}

The bill is targeted at harming the poor, and is projected to cause 50,000 excess deaths yearly.

Fetterman Moans He’s Missing Beach Trip to Vote on Bill Projected to Kill 50k

^{Sharon Zhang (Truthout)}

The government in Switzerland is informing that sensitive information from various federal offices has been impacted by a ransomware attack at the third-party organization Radix.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/switzerland-says-government-data-stolen-in-ransomware-attack/

We are ecstatic to announce that we have released the third experimental version of Pidgin 3.0!!! This is a pre alpha release with an official version number of 2.92.1. We will continue releasing in this fashion until we are ready for 3.0.0 which will be the release we consider ready for end users.

The release can be found on SourceForge and should show up on Flathub Beta shortly.

If you don't want to use the Flathub Beta method, there are build instructions in the README for building a flatpak locally or installing into a meson devenv. Both methods avoid installing directly to your OS installation which is preferred as there is no easy way to uninstall.

About

Just like Experimental 1 and 2, this is a milestone release. It is something we think other tinkerers and developers may want to start playing with, but it is not meant for end users.

Most things are not implemented, the user interface has not been polished at all, and there are so many bugs. As such we are asking that packagers please do not package this for your users yet as the potential support requests will be too much for us to handle at this time.

This release isn’t quite what we wanted as things just didn't align well this cycle, but there’s still a lot of good progress.

Looking forward, Experimental 4 is scheduled for 2025-09-30 and will have a version number of 2.93.0.

We have a bunch of tickets entered for Experimental 4, and you can keep an eye on the Burndown Chart for Experimental 4 to stay informed. As always, priorities and possibilities can and will change, so even if something is listed for this release that doesn't mean it will be in the release until it's actually completed.

Highlights

The main highlights for this release are preferences! We've finally added some much need new sections named Appearance, Privacy, and Development. There's not a whole lot in these three yet, but there's a bunch we want to drop in here in the future.

Appearance Preferences

Right now the appearance preference just lets you toggle formatting of message which affects all messages and can be easily restored. We have a number of things to add here in the future, but if there's something you'd like to see, let us know in the comments below!

Privacy Preferences

Just like appearance the privacy preferences page is meant to help you keep your personal information personal. In the future we'll be adding options for how Pidgin should identify itself when queried and a few other things.

Development Preferences

The development preferences are meant to make the development of Pidgin and plugins easier. Developer mode itself does a number of things right now including showing the Bonjour and XMPP protocols which are not yet functional. This way developers can work on them easily and end users won't get confused by something that's not implemented.

ChangeLog

In the past we've tried to filter the ChangeLog to just the bits that might be interesting, but going forward we're just going to include everything that was done for the release.

General

• Add a native file for macos on arm (RR 3956) (Gary Kramlich)
• Run scour over all of the svgs (RR 3990) (Gary Kramlich)
• Add discrete options for protocol plugins (RR 3994) (Gary Kramlich)
• Fix a typo in POTFILES.in for the privacy preferences (RR 3998) (Gary Kramlich)
• Add an in-development tag to all protocols that are still early in development (RR 4007) (Gary Kramlich)
• Update the flatpak to gnome 48 and to the matching birb version (RR 4038) (Gary Kramlich)

libpurple:

• Add GListModel versions of purple_account_manager_get_{disabled,enabled (PIDGIN-18067) (RR 3952) (Elliott Sales de Andrade)
• Remove GList versions of purple_account_manager_get_{disabled,enabled} (RR 3955) (Elliott Sales de Andrade)
• Update the convey plans (RR 3975) (Gary Kramlich)
• Add Purple.ContactInfo:external for tracking external contacts (PIDGIN-18090) (RR 3973) (Gary Kramlich)
• Add Purple.Conversation:url (PIDGIN-18091) (RR 3974) (Gary Kramlich)
• Make Purple.ProtocolConversation.join_channel_finish return a conversation (RR 3982) (Gary Kramlich)
• Move the connection-state implementation to Purple.Account (PIDGIN-17988) (RR 3964) (Gary Kramlich)
• Add a Purple.Account::connection-state-changed signal (PIDGIN-18087) (RR 3965) (Gary Kramlich)
• Add Purple.Presence.primitive-changed signal (PIDGIN-18025) (RR 3966) (Gary Kramlich)
• Add Purple.Contact.is_own_account (RR 3985) (Gary Kramlich)
• Create purple_core_new_settings (RR 4000) (Gary Kramlich)
• Add Purple.Protocol:tags and add unit tests for protocol properties (RR 4006) (Gary Kramlich)
• Update to birb 0.4 and use the testing helpers in libpurple (RR 4014) (Gary Kramlich)
• Remove some unused markup functions (RR 4029) (Gary Kramlich)

Pidgin

• Port PidginApplication to purple_account_manager_get_enabled_model (PIDGIN-18067) (RR 3952) (Elliott Sales de Andrade)
• Convert PidginAccountsDisabledMenu to the list model (PIDGIN-18067) (RR 3952) (Elliott Sales de Andrade)
• Convert PidginAccountsEnabledMenu to the list model (PIDGIN-18066) (RR 3954) (Elliott Sales de Andrade)
• Remove a dead assignment in Pidgin.ConversationMember (RR 3962) (Gary Kramlich)
• Fix Pidgin.Application.get_active_window to only return Pidgin.DisplayWindows (RR 3972) (Gary Kramlich)
• Add keybinding support to the channel join dialog (RR 3971) (Gary Kramlich)
• Add a preference for toggling whether or not to show formatting (PIDGIN-18081) (RR 3970) (Gary Kramlich)
• Start of the appearance preferences (PIDGIN-18082) (RR 3996) (Gary Kramlich)
• Remove the conversation preferences (RR 3995) (Gary Kramlich)
• Create a Privacy preference page with the send typing notification preference (PIDGIN-17450) (RR 3999) (Gary Kramlich)
• Add a Pidgin.PresenceIcon to Pidgin.ConversationMember (RR 4004) (Gary Kramlich)
• Add a Developer Settings preference pane (RR 4005) (Gary Kramlich)
• Update Pidgin.ProtocolChooser to hide in-development protocols (RR 4008) (Gary Kramlich)
• Add the operating system to the runtime information (PIDGIN-18005) (RR 4015) (Gary Kramlich)

Demo

• Use EionRobb's typical handle (RR 3967) (Gary Kramlich)
• Fix EionRobb's avatar (RR 3976) (Gary Kramlich)
• Fix some unbalanced G_BEGIN_DECLS (RR 3989) (Gary Kramlich)

IRCv3

• Fix privmsg going to the status window before registration is complete (RR 3963) (Gary Kramlich)
• Set the presence to offline when we receive a quit message (PIDGIN-18089) (RR 3969) (Gary Kramlich)
• Add support for away-notify (PIDGIN-18088) (RR 3968) (Gary Kramlich)
• Do a who after joining a channel (PIDGIN-17936) (RR 3981) (Gary Kramlich)
• Handle the WHOTOPIC and CHANNEL_URL messages (RR 3983) (Gary Kramlich)
• Check if a member is in a conversation before adding them (RR 3987) (Gary Kramlich)
• Handle formatting in server messages (RR 3991) (Gary Kramlich)
• Handle RPL_NOWAWAY and RPL_UNAWAY messages (RR 4003) (Gary Kramlich)
• Remove versioned API (RR 4030) (Gary Kramlich)

SIP

• A stubbed out SIP protocol plugin (RR 3988) (Gary Kramlich)
• Disable SIP by default and update the protocol summaries to reflect what will be built (RR 4028) (Gary Kramlich)

Thank You!

Thank you everyone for your continued support of Pidgin, it means a lot to us!

If you’re interested in contributing, you can check out our Contributing Guide to get started.

Also be sure to check out our merch store as well as our sticker store!

And if you’re feeling generous, you can learn how to donate to the project on our Donation Page.

Discuss this on our forum.

Session is pretty neat considering that it doesn’t require a cell phone number, unlike Signal messenger, which beats the purpose of anonymity.

I just purchased $20 in tokens. Perhaps one day in the future more people will start using it and nodes will start springing up all over, making the service much faster.

Has anyone else used or still uses Session? What are your thoughts? I think it has potential if more people have it a go.

https://www.jacoporanieri.com/blog/?p=42614

Can't we just ship Cruz off to Cancun permanently at this point?

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has a plan for spectrum auctions that could take frequencies away from Wi-Fi and reallocate them for the exclusive use of wireless carriers. The plan would benefit AT&T, which is based in Cruz's home state, along with Verizon and T-Mobile.

Cruz's proposal revives a years-old controversy over whether the entire 6 GHz band should be devoted to Wi-Fi, which can use the large spectrum band for faster speeds than networks that rely solely on the 2.4 and 5 GHz bands. Congress is on the verge of passing legislation that would require spectrum to be auctioned off for full-power, commercially licensed use, and the question is where that spectrum will come from.

When the House of Representatives passed its so-called "One Big Beautiful Bill," it excluded all of the frequencies between 5.925 and 7.125 gigahertz from the planned spectrum auctions. But Cruz's version of the budget reconciliation bill, which is moving quickly toward a final vote, removed the 6 GHz band's protection from spectrum auctions. The Cruz bill is also controversial because it would penalize states that regulate artificial intelligence.

Instead of excluding the 6 GHz band from auctions, Cruz's bill would instead exclude the 7.4–8.4 GHz band used by the military. Under conditions set by the bill, it could be hard for the Commerce Department and Federal Communications Commission to fulfill the Congressional mandate without taking some spectrum away from Wi-Fi.

Senate GOP budget bill has little-noticed provision that could hurt your Wi-Fi

Cruz bill could take 6 GHz spectrum away from Wi-Fi, give it to mobile carriers.

^{Jon Brodkin (Ars Technica)}

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2025/06/30/the-north-atlantic-treaty-organizations-hallucinations/

Easy to moderate
7 mi out and back or short walk to falls only
1,496 ft elevation gain
Hiked 6/1/25

Located in the Thompson Falls recreation area not too far from Golden BC this is a great waterfall with an ok trail that could be shortened to maybe half a mile or so of a mild slope. Falls were way overfull at time of hike, but appear to be a worthwhile stop, perhaps while camping in the area.

Another view of Thompson falls from a little further away, which better shows the shelf under the rushing river.

The uppermost section of falls along the trail, looks like it would have been a small cascade on the far side with a rapid on the near. Currently very blown out, the downed trees on the farside are stuck.

A jumble of fallen trees suspended in the forest. (Marge voice: I just think they're neat!)

Bluesky link to post with Videos of the falls

https://www.top.org.nz/citizens-voice

https://neuters.de/sustainability/boards-policy-regulation/apple-loses-bid-dismiss-us-smartphone-monopoly-case-2025-06-30/

https://neuters.de/sustainability/boards-policy-regulation/apple-loses-bid-dismiss-us-smartphone-monopoly-case-2025-06-30/

Israel's Knesset House Committee voted to advance the impeachment of prominent lawmaker Ayman Odeh, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, on Monday, over comments he made earlier this year, which were perceived as being pro-Palestinian and against the war in Gaza.

Lawmakers from both the ruling coalition and opposition Yesh Atid and National Unity parties voted 14-2 in favour of impeachment, while two Knesset members from the Palestinian Ra'am and Ta'al parties opposed the move.

Odeh had earned the scorn of several Israeli lawmakers earlier this year when he welcomed a long-awaited ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas.

"I am happy about the release of the hostages and prisoners. From here, both peoples must be freed from the yoke of the occupation. We were all born free," Odeh wrote on 19 January after Hamas released three Israeli women after 471 days in captivity.

Israel's Knesset votes to impeach Palestinian lawmaker Ayman Odeh

^{Middle East Eye}

Israel's Knesset House Committee voted to advance the impeachment of prominent lawmaker Ayman Odeh, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, on Monday, over comments he made earlier this year, which were perceived as being pro-Palestinian and against the war in Gaza.

Lawmakers from both the ruling coalition and opposition Yesh Atid and National Unity parties voted 14-2 in favour of impeachment, while two Knesset members from the Palestinian Ra'am and Ta'al parties opposed the move.

Odeh had earned the scorn of several Israeli lawmakers earlier this year when he welcomed a long-awaited ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas.

"I am happy about the release of the hostages and prisoners. From here, both peoples must be freed from the yoke of the occupation. We were all born free," Odeh wrote on 19 January after Hamas released three Israeli women after 471 days in captivity.

Israel's Knesset votes to impeach Palestinian lawmaker Ayman Odeh

^{Middle East Eye}

Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó announced that the United States has lifted sanctions that previously restricted the construction of the Russian-built Paks II nuclear power plant in Hungary.

According to Szijjártó, the sanctions were originally introduced under the administration of former US President Joe Biden and had complicated Hungary’s long-term energy plans.

In a statement published on June 29, Szijjártó credited current US President Donald Trump for reversing the measures, calling the decision a step toward ensuring Hungary’s future energy security.

“In light of the fact that there is now a president in Washington who considers Hungary a friend, the American government has lifted sanctions related to investments in the Paks nuclear power plant,” Szijjártó said.

US Lifts Sanctions, Clearing Path for Russia’s Nuclear Expansion in Hungary

The US has lifted sanctions affecting Hungary's Paks II nuclear power plant, enhancing the nation’s energy security, says Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó.

^{Ivan Khomenko (UNITED24 Media)}

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/5371548-hog-dnc-young-progressives-democrats-future/

https://apnews.com/article/patriotism-america-national-pride-decline-poll-gallup-0411dd2f28329a6b640d404db8626d3f