Mr. Mamdani’s victory upended city politics and reverberated nationally. He relied on a memorable message, charisma and a strong ground game.

By Nicholas Fandos, Benjamin Oreskes, Emma G. Fitzsimmons and Jeffery C. Mays
July 1, 2025 Updated 3:58 p.m. ET

"Where Mr. Cuomo lectured from a distance, Mr. Mamdani took his campaign to the streets and asked questions. When other #progressives traded 10-point plans, Mr. Mamdani offered simple, concrete ideas for a city buckling under spiraling costs: free buses, child care and a rent freeze. He may have been outspent on TV and dismissed by newspaper editorial boards, but he turned his candidacy into something closer to a movement that jumped from social media to an army of volunteers."

archive.ph/vIw7u

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/01/nyregion/how-mamdani-won-campaign-mayor.html

cross-posted from: lemmy.ml/post/32570135

cross-posted from: lemmy.ml/post/32570131

Mr. Mamdani’s victory upended city politics and reverberated nationally. He relied on a memorable message, charisma and a strong ground game.

By Nicholas Fandos, Benjamin Oreskes, Emma G. Fitzsimmons and Jeffery C. Mays
July 1, 2025 Updated 3:58 p.m. ET

"Where Mr. Cuomo lectured from a distance, Mr. Mamdani took his campaign to the streets and asked questions. When other #progressives traded 10-point plans, Mr. Mamdani offered simple, concrete ideas for a city buckling under spiraling costs: free buses, child care and a rent freeze. He may have been outspent on TV and dismissed by newspaper editorial boards, but he turned his candidacy into something closer to a movement that jumped from social media to an army of volunteers."

archive.ph/vIw7u

Peter Link

2025-07-02 04:18:44

How Zohran Mamdani Stunned New York and Won the Primary for Mayor

Mr. Mamdani’s victory upended city politics and reverberated nationally. He relied on a memorable message, charisma and a strong ground game.

By Nicholas Fandos, Benjamin Oreskes, Emma G. Fitzsimmons and Jeffery C. Mays
July 1, 2025 Updated 3:58 p.m. ET

"Where Mr. Cuomo lectured from a distance, Mr. Mamdani took his campaign to the streets and asked questions. When other #progressives traded 10-point plans, Mr. Mamdani offered simple, concrete ideas for a city buckling under spiraling costs: free buses, child care and a rent freeze. He may have been outspent on TV and dismissed by newspaper editorial boards, but he turned his candidacy into something closer to a movement that jumped from social media to an army of volunteers."

archive.ph/vIw7u

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/01/nyregion/how-mamdani-won-campaign-mayor.html

Well-known AI chatbots can be configured to routinely answer health queries with false information that appears authoritative, complete with fake citations from real medical journals, Australian researchers have found.

Without better internal safeguards, widely used AI tools can be easily deployed to churn out dangerous health misinformation at high volumes, they warned in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

“If a technology is vulnerable to misuse, malicious actors will inevitably attempt to exploit it - whether for financial gain or to cause harm,” said senior study author Ashley Hopkins of Flinders University College of Medicine and Public Health in Adelaide.

https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/its-too-easy-make-ai-chatbots-lie-about-health-information-study-finds-2025-07-01/

https://www.techspot.com/news/108525-windows-11-catches-up-windows-10-months-before.html

"Anyone could be prioritized," a spokesperson for the ACLU told Common Dreams. "It's really chilling."

'All Are Now Vulnerable': Legal Scholars Alarmed as DOJ Begins Push to Denaturalize Citizens

"Anyone could be prioritized," a spokesperson for the ACLU told Common Dreams. "It's really chilling."

^{stephen-prager (Common Dreams)}

"People are fed up with billionaires' greed eroding the environment and communities we depend on," said one supporter of the new initiative. "It's time for world leaders to listen and act."

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.

Anti-Poverty Campaigners Cheer Spain-Brazil-South Africa Plan to Tax the Grotesquely Rich

"People are fed up with billionaires' greed eroding the environment and communities we depend on," said one supporter of the new initiative. "It's time for world leaders to listen and act."

^{brad-reed (Common Dreams)}

Over 165 NGOs are calling for an end to the U.S. and Israel's deadly humanitarian aid distribution scheme in Gaza.

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.

US- and Israel-Backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation Must Be Shut Down, Say 165+ Charities

Distribution points run by the group, warns the NGO coalition, "have become sites of repeated massacres in blatant disregard for international humanitarian law."

^{jessica-corbett (Common Dreams)}

"This isn't political. This is personal," said one veteran. "For many of us, these are people that we served with."

200+ US Veterans Volunteer to Attend Asylum Court With Afghans Targeted by Trump

"This isn't political. This is personal," said one veteran. "For many of us, these are people that we served with."

^{brett-wilkins (Common Dreams)}

Sen. Lisa Murkowski was the deciding vote to pass Republicans' massive social safety net cuts through the Senate. She said she didn't like the bill, but voted for it anyway after getting Alaska exempted from some of its worst harms.

'You Know It's a Terrible Bill': Murkowski Helps GOP Gut Safety Net After 'Bribe' Shields Her State

Sen. Lisa Murkowski was the deciding vote to pass Republicans' massive social safety net cuts through the Senate. She said she didn't like the bill, but voted for it anyway after getting Alaska exempted from some of its worst harms.

^{stephen-prager (Common Dreams)}

Federal judge blocks unlawful mass layoffs at HHS by Trump administration. Court rules actions likely violated the law. Victory for 19 states.

Case file: storage.courtlistener.com/reca…

Judge Slaps Down RFK Jr's Likely 'Unlawful' Mass Layoffs at HHS

"We're not going to let Trump and RFK Jr. dismantle our nation's health systems to promote conspiracy theories and tax breaks for billionaires," said Connecticut Attorney General William Tong.

^{brad-reed (Common Dreams)}

Under this plan, SpaceX’s satellites would play a big role in the Space Force’s kill chain.

Pentagon may put SpaceX at the center of a sensor-to-shooter targeting network

^{Stephen Clark (Ars Technica)}

Democratic NYC mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani was defiant against Trump's threats to arrest him if he makes good on a promise to refuse to cooperate with ICE.

'We Will Not Accept This Intimidation,' Mamdani Says of Trump Threat to Arrest Him

"That Trump included praise for Eric Adams in his authoritarian threats is unsurprising, but highlights the urgency of bringing an end to this mayor's time in City Hall," said the New York City mayoral candidate.

^{jessica-corbett (Common Dreams)}

He didn't cover his tracks very well, the iGiant claims in a court filing

Case file: regmedia.co.uk/2025/07/01/appl…

Apple accuses former engineer of taking Vision Pro secrets to Snap

: He didn't cover his tracks very well, the iGiant claims in a court filing

^{Brandon Vigliarolo (The Register)}

How are student visa applicants supposed to share their social media accounts on platforms that haven’t existed in years, like Google+ and Vine?

Want a Student Visa? The U.S. Government Needs Your Vine Account.

^{Nikita Mazurov (The Intercept)}

Vance handwaved away the Medicaid cuts — expected to lead to thousands of deaths yearly — as “minutiae.”

JD Vance Says Medicaid Cuts for Millions “Immaterial” Compared to Funding ICE

Vance handwaved away the Medicaid cuts — expected to lead to thousands of deaths yearly — as “minutiae.”…

^{Sharon Zhang (Truthout)}

The last round of ranked-choice ballots showed the left-wing candidate winning 56 percent of the votes, to Cuomo’s 44.

Zohran Mamdani Won in a Double-Digit Blowout, NYC Ballot Results Confirm

^{Sharon Zhang (Truthout)}

3.26.0d Hotfix

• The Reanimator Mercenary no longer has Minion Instability while in the Enemy state.
• Fixed a bug where, under very specific circumstances, Ultimatum encounters could unintentionally generate the same encounter.

Patch Notes - 3.26.0d Hotfix - Forum - Path of Exile

Path of Exile is a free online-only action RPG under development by Grinding Gear Games in New Zealand.

^{Path of Exile}

Australian airline Qantas disclosed that it detected a cyberattack on Monday after threat actors gained access to a third-party platform containing customer data.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/qantas-discloses-cyberattack-amid-scattered-spider-aviation-breaches/

Microsoft has released the source code for the GitHub Copilot Chat extension for VS Code under the MIT license.

Repo: github.com/microsoft/vscode-co…

Kelly & Associates Insurance Group (dba Kelly Benefits) is informing more than half a million people of a data breach that compromised their personal information.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/kelly-benefits-says-2024-data-breach-impacts-550-000-customers/

Esse Health, a healthcare provider based in St. Louis, Missouri, is notifying over 263,000 patients that their personal and health information was stolen in an April cyberattack.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/esse-health-says-recent-data-breach-affects-over-263-000-patients/

Building automation giant Johnson Controls is notifying individuals whose data was stolen in a massive ransomware attack that impacted the company's operations worldwide in September 2023.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/johnson-controls-starts-notifying-people-affected-by-2023-breach/

https://www.cisa.gov/resources-tools/resources/iranian-cyber-actors-may-target-vulnerable-us-networks-and-entities-interest

Full PDF Report.

The Russian propaganda operation targeted at media organisations and fact-checkers is still going strong. Operation Overload, which we first documented in June 2024 is now leveraging AI generated content, impersonation techniques and is expanding to more platforms such as TikTok and BlueSky. Telegram and direct emails to newsrooms remain a daily dissemination technique used to attempt to create a sense of urgency amongst their targets. Since we last published an update about the operation last September, some legitimate outlets regularly fall in the trap.

Operation Overload: An AI fuelled escalation of the Kremlin-linked propaganda effort - CheckFirst

^{Guillaume K. (Check First)}

Each month, we create a post to keep you abreast of news and happenings regarding the server, discuss recent events, and to act as town square for the community.

This July, we'll be talking about the SLRPNK Outage, the upcoming 50501 Protest, and fun projects to do with others to build community.

🌟 Community Highlights 🌟

• !Foraging@slrpnk.net - A new foraging community, where we come together to explore the bountiful wonders of the natural world and share our knowledge of gathering wild goods!
• !TacticalUrbanism@slrpnk.net - A community about implementing urbanist improvements Via direct action
• !Signs@slrpnk.net - A community celebrating clever and inspiring anti-fascist art at demonstrations.

🔌 The Great SLRPNK Outage of 2025 🪫

Last month, SLRPNK went offline on the 4th of June, and lasted a total of 7 days; the longest downtime since its creation.

The length of that downtime was due to multiple unexpected and unfortunate circumstances, all intersecting at once. For one, our main Sysadmin, poVoq, had taken on obligations that took him outside of the country for an extended period of time (3 months). In addition, the other sysadmins that had physical access to the server coincidentally also had taken on responsibilities or had gone on vacation, which prevented them from being able to access the server as well.

As the server seemed to be working perfectly fine for a long period of time, it didn't seem like it would be much of a risk to leave it unattended for that duration. Unfortunately, things chose to go wrong after everyone who could attend to it, now couldn't..

The primacy cause of the outage was a recent change in IP assignment by our ISP, in addition to what looks like an very recent bug in our firewall software (IPfire).

Previously, our ISP would assign new IP's to us slowly, 3 times a year. But recently they have been assigning them more frequently. IPfire normally catches this, automatically changing the Dynamic DNS to the new IP, and all was dandy. However, before the trip, IPfire was updated, which introduced a new and yet unknown bug, which ultimately prevented it from automatically updating the DNS when a new IP was assigned. All other fail-safes previously put in place by poVoq to notify him of this problem also failed, which lead us to assume there was a hardware failure in the Firewall, preventing us from being able to access the server remotely.

However, a few days later, poVoq received signs of life in the form of an automated e-mail sent from the server, indicating that the it was still running, meaning something else was preventing access. They would have to find out what the new assigned IP was manually to access it.

With the help of a friend, they were able to help track down the new IP by performing a port-scan on over five hundred thousand IP's in a subnet that was known to contain our server, narrowing it down to 20 possible IP addresses by looking for open ports that are used by XMPP servers (as we also host an XMPP chat messaging service). After trying each one, they finally hit pay dirt, and were able to log in for the first time since the outage! By the 11th of June, we were back up and running.

We'll be taking many lessons from this event to bolster the reliability and accessibility of the server to hopefully prevent an outage of this scale from happening again, such as:

• Switching to a new and hopefully more reliable Firewall/Dynamic DNS software & adding additional out of band notifications on IP change
• Installing a KVM on the main firewall that is connected to a separate IP to make it possible to connect to it directly, giving us the ability to reboot and troubleshoot remotely even if the main connection is lost.
• Experiment with a Wireguard tunnel on a rented VPS, which could allow for a more stable connection, and could be used to host essential services like our XMPP, which would help it remain accessible even if the main server went down.

As unfortunate as this outage was, due to the efforts of poVoq and his friend, it was thankfully far, far shorter than it could've been, and we're extremely grateful to have such a dedicated admin hosting our little corner of the web. Three cheers to poVoq and his friend! 😁

📢 Good Trouble ✊🏿

Last month on June 14, millions took to the street in strategic non-violent protest. News about the results of past protests, and announcements of new direct actions are welcome in all of the localized communities at 50501.chat.

While protests are good for demonstrating unrest with the regime, they are also extremely potent milieus for sharing information with like-minded individuals. It is typical to find political and labor organizations distributing information from xeroxed flyers to printed newspapers. If you feel inclined, we encourage you to invite people you meet in the streets to join the Fediverse. If you come up with flyers or zines to help do this, we'd love it if you shared it in this month's meta to help others do the same.

John Lewis was a civil rights leader who eventually transitioned to become a United States politician. He is famous for saying, "Speak up, speak out, get in the way. Get in good trouble, necessary trouble, and help redeem the soul of America." This July 17th, organizations across the world are mobilizing for a sequel to the wildly successful "No Kings" protest, called "Good Trouble Lives On" in honor of the five-year anniversary of John Lewis' death of cancer at 80 years old.

While this protest movement is nominally for the United States, the trend towards authoritarianism as the climate crisis worsens is a world problem. Mobilizations have already been announced in Florence and Dublin. This is not a 'US' problem, it's an 'us' problem. If we hope to push back authoritarianism, we must do it together through solidarity. The signs in the streets remind us that we are part of a world-wide resistance movement - from Ukraine's resistance to Russia's imperialism, Palestine's struggle to be free from the tyranny of the IDF, to the barricades that just went up recently in Belgrade, Serbia. We are all connected.

🛠 Fun Projects to Build Community 👩🏾‍🏭

Meeting your neighbors, fostering goodwill, and having a real sense of community is a powerful thing. It's the main building block that all other actions we have in our arsenal rely upon. Without it, we're far less able to build the vision we all share of a more hopeful future, and less capable to resist the darker visions others have for us.

With summer here and hopefully some good weather gracing a good amount of us, now's the time to bust out some tools (maybe from your local library if they have a tool section!), gather some friends, heed the primal call, and do some solarpunk style community building with direct action!

In the clickable drop-down below are a few ideas to get started. I'm hoping more of you chime in with your own in the comments as well! 😁

::: spoiler 🔽 Community Projects🔽
* First off, seek out a local group already engaging in mutual aid in your area. That could take the form of a Food Not Bombs chapter, a local Anarchist group, or even a progressive church if you're in a more rural area and that's all that's around. This is possibly the best method to meet like-minded folk who you can befriend, and who will already be open to the idea of fostering and building community with you, and might even join in on some of these other projects!
* If know of an area near you where food security is an issue, building a community garden is a great way to alleviate that while also fostering a sense of community.
* If you have a front yard, that could be a great place to create a small community garden that your friends and neighbors could partake in with you! But If you live in an HOA which doesn't allow that, it might be worth considering reaching out to receptive neighbors and collectively joining the HOA board to change the rules. Alternatively, if you can manage to find a larger piece of land to, that would be ripe for a . Garden's like these are incredibly powerful community building tools, and could also be a main source of food to stock your community fridge with!
* Little Free Libraries are a great way to spread goodwill with your neighbors, and encourage kids in your neighborhood to read. It's also a good place stock with cool zines! (Check out our zines community at !zines@slrpnk.net for info on how to make them and other ideas)
* Engage in some Guerilla Gardening! It's not only fun to do with friends, but (over time) can create green spaces with lots of shade, or even become , which can be a gathering place for your community to hang out and connect (and that shade will be critical to making climate change a little more bearable too). Just be sure to use native species in your area! They're already adapted to your local climate, and won't out compete with other native plants. Do your research!
:::

🗣️ Open Discussion 🗪

Now it’s your turn to share whatever you’d like down below; your thoughts, ideas, concerns, hopes, or anything related to the server. If you have a new community you’d like to shine a spotlight, shine away! If you’re a new user wanting to say hi, feel free to post an introduction 😀

SLRPNK Community Resources:

Community Wiki - Moderators: you can create your own Wiki here for your communities!

Movim Chat - Open to all members (use your SLRPNK login credentials)

Etherpad - Collaborative document editor

This question was asked by mike@flipboard.social on Dot Social's latest episode about the blogosphere on Fedi.

johnonolan@mastodon.xyz: "we wanted to connect Ghost blogs to each other, but then we discovered ActivityPub"

pfefferle@mastodon.social: "we wanted to connect WordPress blogs to each other, and ActivityPub has been the most successful attempt"

[paraphrased for brevity]

Did you catch the subtext? Both those answers, and my own answer with NodeBB contain the same seed idea... that we originally wanted to connect our software with itself only. We went through years of building a company and vying for profitability that it never occurred to us to work towards cross compatibility with anyone besides out own software.

Then ActivityPub came along and quite literally expanded the potential for the entire endeavour a hundred-fold, because not only are you connecting your own software to each other, but every other ActivityPub enabled software in existence. Blogs, microblogs, forums, image boards, etc. all with a built-in user base ready from the get-go.

It's no wonder that after discovering AP, it becomes the protocol to utilise.