Louisiana judge orders return of devices to ex-priest caught having sex on church altar
A judge in Louisiana has ordered the return of electronics belonging to an ex-Roman Catholic priest who pleaded guilty to obscenity for being caught having sex with two dominatrices atop a church altar while still belonging to the clergy in 2020.
However, the judge also told authorities to erase all data from the devices and storage media as a precaution against videos taken of the tryst from becoming public.
The ruling from state court judge Ellen Creel came in the case centering on Travis Clark as well as dominatrices whose professional names are Lady Vi (also known as Satanatrix) and Empress Ming. The videos in question have been under indefinite court seal ever since the trio’s encounter made international news headlines in 2020.
Louisiana judge orders return of devices to ex-priest caught having sex on church altar
Former Roman Catholic priest and two dominatrices were evidently recording sexual videos in the church in 2020Ramon Antonio Vargas (The Guardian)
Exposing Indonesia’s largest Muslim organisation, Nahdlatul Ulama, and its troubling ties to Israel
Recently in Indonesia, Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), the country’s largest Muslim organization, has found itself at the center of a moral and political controversy that demands scrutiny. In August 2025, Peter Berkowitz, a pro-Israel academic affiliated with the Hoover Institution, was invited to lecture at NU’s National Leadership Academy in Jakarta.
The Berkowitz invitation in 2025 intensifies concern. His writings, including Israel and the Struggle over the International Laws of War (2012), explicitly defend Israel’s attacks, including critiques of UN investigations like the Goldstone Report. Hosting him at NU’s premier leadership academy, in the midst of ongoing atrocities, signals tacit endorsement. NU’s language of pluralism and tolerance rings hollow when it amplifies voices justifying mass violence.
Defenders argue that these engagements are intellectual exercises or dialogue. Pro-Israel activist Monique Rijkers, founder of Indonesia’s Hadassah Foundation, praised the 2024 trip as a way to understand Israel’s perspective. NU scholars have framed these encounters as opportunities for interfaith learning. But context matters. When interlocutors defend killings of civilians, dialogue becomes a moral hazard. It is no longer academic curiosity—it is ethical compromise.
NU’s repeated apologies are not just inadequate—they are morally hollow. For decades, this organization has prided itself on defending the oppressed and upholding ethical leadership. Yet time and again, it has granted legitimacy to those who defend mass murder. This is not dialogue. This is betrayal. Engagement with perpetrators of atrocities is not pluralism—it is complicity, and history will remember it as such.
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The Terminal Crisis of European Neoliberalism
The Terminal Crisis of European Neoliberalism
The European project stands at the precipice of collapse, with its fundamental contradictions exposed by accelerating economic deterioration across core member states.Dialectical Dispatches
☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆ doesn't like this.
Switching to the Fediverse for Daily Social Media Use
Switching to the Fediverse for Daily Social Media Use
I’ve come to realize that being endlessly absorbed by AI slop and brainrot, especially Instagram reels constantly shared between friends,...Circle With A Dot
the mental toll was the second biggest reason why i started using lemmy & the fediverse full-time instead of reddit or facebook like i did in the past.
there's still a lot of redditors & facebookers on lemmy, but they've thankfully quarantined themselves either on .world or used the extensive block lists that they curate/share w each other; effectively keeping the tribalism & toxicity they carried w them at bay and atleast for now.
the biggest reason was because of the content suppression and it's been a real eye opening experience for me to watch those self-quarantined sections of feddiverse heavily leverage that toxicity & tribalism to keep the content that they don't like at bay for themselves.
Software Freedom Day 2025 - New Jersey
cross-posted from: lemmy.sdf.org/post/41246302
We're having an event for Software Freedom Day. It is a world-wide event, and we are having one right here at Montclair State University in New Jersey.September 20th, 2025 from 11am-4pm
We'll have talks about what free software is, and why it's important for everyone. What kind of software is available for your existing computer, and how you can use Free Software to use your computer past the date that the manufacturer wants to keep updating it. There will be a talk on self hosting, so that you can run services that reduce or replace your reliance on outside big tech companies, and keep better control of your data. Talks about Wikipedia and Open Source are proposed. There will also be a talk on Social Networking with free software called "Mastodon and the Fediverse" that will show how you can network with people without giving your data to big tech, and without the algorithms that don't work in your best interest.
Here a link for more information:
softwarefreedom.neocities.org/
We'll be happy to discuss any details.
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China is building the world’s largest national parks system
China is building the world’s largest national parks system
Within the next decade, China hopes to become a global leader in protected nature reserves, creating a network of wilderness that would be three times the size of the U.S. system.Ronan O’Connell (Travel)
Former Ukraine parliament speaker shot dead in Lviv
Former Ukraine parliament speaker shot dead in Lviv
A murder investigation has been launched, Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s Office said.Camille Gijs (POLITICO)
WIPO: Shenzhen-Hong Kong-Guangzhou cluster ranks 1st in Global Innovation Index
WIPO: Shenzhen-Hong Kong-Guangzhou cluster ranks 1st in Global Innovation Index
China's Shenzhen-Hong Kong-Guangzhou innovation cluster has been ranked first globally in the Global Innovation Index (GII) 2025 top 100 innovation clusters released by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) on Monday.CGTN
I give up 🏳️
I give up.... Privacy is a fool's game and it's a losing one at that. We are slowly entering a world where more and more requirements are made on people to own a regular non-hipster cell phone. There are places you can't even buy parking or look at a restaurant menu without having a proper cell phone.
Maybe the answer is not to flash some obscure on life support operating system on your Google pixel but rather.. maybe the answer is to work within the system and simply adjust privacy controls as allotted?
that's because you are trying an individual solution to a collective problem.
going for the roots of it involves going for the corporations and oligarchs taking control of our electronics, not simply installing a private rom.
Both ends need working on. I think creating and supporting new movements require change, it starts with individuals fighting for more rights on a microscopic level. Shifting to GrapheneOS will accelerate Google to make changes for the good of all of us.
Be wise and patient. I think our older politicians don't accept these concepts, but as our young grow into old then we've got a platform to fight for.
‘It’s super impressive’: tourists flock to China as ‘cyberpunk’ cities go viral
From drones to robots: tourists flock to China to glimpse a ‘cyberpunk’ future
Social media hype about China’s ‘futuristic’ technology and urban infrastructure is attracting a growing wave of foreign tourists.Mia Nulimaimaiti (South China Morning Post)
compose
support is pretty much on par and rootless practically always works.
When they fix that, then i will switch as i no longer have any container that requires root.
System76’s COSMIC Desktop Hits Initial Setup Completion
System76’s COSMIC Desktop Hits Initial Setup Completion
COSMIC desktop reaches the completion of its initial setup, moving one step closer to the final stable release.Bobby Borisov (Linuxiac)
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A great thing to do would be to start delegating community cleaning to students in schools. I believe they do this in Japan. If we start teaching kids to work collectively and take care of common spaces together, we can make a society that does the same.
Like you said, we already all do it in our own homes.
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Jewish Artists for Palestine disrupt BBC Proms at Royal Albert Hall
Pro-Palestine activists disrupted a BBC Proms concert at the Royal Albert Hall, accusing the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra (MSO) of silencing artists critical of Israel’s war on Gaza.
Members of Jewish Artists for Palestine interrupted the performance for more than 10 minutes on Friday night. Some shouted from the upper stalls that the orchestra had “silenced artists” and “silenced protest.”
Videos on social media showed banners reading “Jewish Artists for Palestine” and “complicit in genocide.” One protester shouted: “The MSO has blood on its hands. You silenced Jayson Gillham.”
Gillham, a leading pianist, is suing the MSO after it cancelled a Melbourne concert he was scheduled to perform in August 2024. He says the cancellation was aimed at suppressing his outspoken criticism of Israel’s assault on Gaza.
The group said in a statement: “We reject Zionist funding, censorship and complicity in our cultural institutions.”
BREAKING: 4 Israeli soldiers missing, others killed in resistance ambush in Zeitoun neighbourhood east of Gaza: Israel media
Israeli media reported that 4 soldiers were missing, and others were killed and wounded in Gaza, as part of a large ambush to capture Israeli soldiers carried out by the Qassam Brigades in the Zeitoun neighbourhood east of Gaza City.
Sources reported that the operation began with a large ambush in the Zeitoun neighbourhood, which resulted in the deaths of several Israeli soldiers, while other reports confirmed injuries described as critical.
Scientists May Have Identified a Culprit Behind Declining Amazon Rains | Deforestation is playing a greater role than researchers expected, according to a new study
How climate change and deforestation interact in the transformation of the Amazon rainforest - Nature Communications
In this study, the distinct impacts of deforestation and global climate change on the Brazilian Amazon are quantified for the period 1985-2020. Deforestation amplifies the temperature increase and dominates the decrease in rainfall in the dry season.Nature
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Considering the Amazon rainforest is largely man-made, we'll just make it again
Read: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_r…
The BBC’s Unnatural Histories presented evidence that the Amazon rainforest, rather than being a pristine wilderness, has been shaped by man for at least 11,000 years through practices such as forest gardening and terra preta.[20] Terra preta is found over large areas in the Amazon forest; and is now widely accepted as a product of indigenous soil management. The development of this fertile soil allowed agriculture and silviculture in the previously hostile environment; meaning that large portions of the Amazon rainforest are probably the result of centuries of human management, rather than naturally occurring as has previously been supposed.
Deutsche Justiz knöpft sich Social-Media-Plattform X vor
Deutsche Justiz knöpft sich Social-Media-Plattform X vor
Elon Musk spricht von «Meinungsfreiheit», will mit X aber nicht nach den in Europa geltenden Regeln spielen und blockt Anfragen von Strafverfolgungsbehörden ab. Nun wird gegen die Manager seiner Social-Media-Plattform ermittelt.Daniel Schurter (watson)
Announcement of LibreOffice 25.8.1
Announcement of LibreOffice 25.8.1 - The Document Foundation Blog
Berlin, 29 August 2025 – LibreOffice 25.8.1, the first minor release of the free, volunteer-supported office suite for personal productivity in office environments, is now available at https://www.libreoffice.Italo Vignoli (The Document Foundation)
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Introducing loftly.social – Post Across the Fediverse & More in One Go 🚀
I wanted an easier way to post across Mastodon, Pixelfed, Lemmy, and Bluesky, but couldn’t find a tool that did it all. So I built one: loftly.social
It lets you share posts everywhere in one go, saving time and keeping your networks in sync.
I’d love feedback from the community—what features would you like to see next, or any improvements you’d suggest?
What I allways felt we needed was a federated identity system. Then all posts on a platform could just be followed on any other platform.
Now, joe@one.site has to create a separate account on other.site, but joe@other.site is already taken, so he has to go with doe@other.site and resort to solutions like this one to post to several locations at once.
What I whould suggest is to just create some kind of federated identity provider so that Joe can just be joe@joe.site and post on one.site, other.site or whatever.site he wants and have his posts federate magicaly throughout the fediverse.
Of course, moderation would have to be based more on user accounts than on nodes, I gess...
Wasn't there something already close to this? "OpenId"?...
Wasn’t there something already close to this? “OpenId”?...
Just stumbled upon this: wedistribute.org/2025/08/socia…
Let's just hope...
Couldn't IpenId fulfill this need? Do we really need to reinvent the wheel?
How can I disable the GNOME alt tab popup?
Thanks and farewell to Steven Deobald
Steven Deobald has been in the post of GNOME Foundation Executive Director for the past four months, during which time he has made major contributions to both the Foundation and the wider GNOME project. Sadly, Steven will be leaving the Foundation this week. The Foundation Board is extremely grateful to Steven and wish him the very best for his future endeavors.
The Executive Director role is extremely diverse and it is hard to list all of Steven’s contributions since he has been in post. However, particular highlights include:
- energetic engagement with the GNOME community, including weekly updates focused on the Foundation’s support of GNOME development, and attention to topics of importance to our contributors, such as Pride Month and Disability Pride
- the creation of a new donations platform, which included both a new website, detailed evaluation of payment processors, and a strategy for distributing donations to GNOME development
- a focus on partner outreach, including attending UN Open Source Week, adding postmarketOS to our Advisory board, and the creation of a new Advisory Board Matrix channel, alongside many conversations with partner organisations
- internal policy and documentation work, particularly around spending and finances
- the addition of new tooling to augment policies and documentation, such as an internal Foundation Handbook and vault.gnome.org
- assistance with the board, including recruiting a new treasurer and vice-treasurer
We are extremely grateful to Steven for all this and more. Despite these many positive achievements, Steven and the board have come to the conclusion that Steven is not the right fit for the Executive Director role at this time. We are therefore bidding Steven a fond farewell.
I know that some members of the GNOME community will be disappointed by this decision. I can assure everyone that it wasn’t one that we took lightly, and had to consider from different perspectives.
The good news is that Steven has left the Foundation with a strong platform on which to build, and we have an energetic and engaged board which is already working to fill in the gaps left by his departure. I’m confident that the Foundation can continue on the positive trajectory started by Steven, with a strong community-based executive taking the reins.
To this end, the board held its regular annual meeting this week, and appointed new directors to key positions. I’ve taken over the president’s role from Rob McQueen, who has now joined Arun Raghavan as one of two Vice-Presidents. The Executive Committee has been expanded with the inclusion of Arun and Maria Majadas (who is our new Chair). We have also bolstered the Finance Committee, and are looking to create new groups for fundraising and communications.
Steven has been very helpful in working on a smooth transition, and our staff are continuing to work as normal, so Foundation operations won’t be affected by these management changes. In the near future we’ll be pushing forward with the fundraising plans that Steven has set out, and are hopeful about being able to provide more financial support for the GNOME project as a result. If you want to help us with that, please get in touch.
Should you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to reach out to president@gnome.org.
On behalf of the GNOME Foundation Board of Directors,
– Allan
Executive Committee
Current members: Allan Day (President, ex officio), Robert McQueen (Vice President, ex officio), Arun Raghavan (Vice President, ex officio), Maria Majadas (Chair, ex officio), Julian Sparber. Commi...GNOME Project Handbook
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Syncthing setup that is suitable for a battery powered Linux device
GitHub - Bill-Stewart/SyncthingWindowsSetup: Syncthing Windows Setup
Syncthing Windows Setup. Contribute to Bill-Stewart/SyncthingWindowsSetup development by creating an account on GitHub.GitHub
This Week in Plasma: Saved clipboard items and tablet touch rings
Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!
This week saw huge improvements to the Plasma clipboard, KRunner, and drawing tablet support — not to mention a bunch of UI improvements in Discover, and plenty more, too! So without further ado…
Notable New Features
Plasma’s clipboard now lets you mark entries as favorites, and they’ll be permanently saved so you can always access them easily! This is very useful when you find yourself pasting the same common text snippets all the time. The feature request was 22 years old; this may be a new record for oldest request ever implemented in KDE! (Kendrick Ha, link)
Plasma now lets you configure touch rings on your drawing tablet! (Joshua Goins, link)
Discover now lets you install hardware drivers that are offered in your operating system’s package repos! (Evan Maddock, link)
KRunner and KRunner-powered searches can now find global shortcuts! (Fushan Wen, link)
Notable UI Improvements
Plasma 6.5.0
KRunner and KRunner-powered searches now use fuzzy matching for applications. (Harald Sitter, link)
Improved the way Discover presents error messages to be a bit more user-friendly and compliant with KDE’s Human Interface Guidelines. (Oliver Beard and Nate Graham, link 1 and link 2)
Discover now lets you write a review for apps that don’t have any reviews yet. (Nate Graham, link)
On operating systems using RPM-OSTree (like Fedora Kinoite), there’s no longer an awkward red icon used in the sidebar and other places you’d expect black or white icons. (Justin Zobel, link)
KDE Gear 25.12.0
Opening a disk in KDE Partition Manager from its entry in Plasma’s Disks & Devices widget no longer mounts the disk, which is annoying since you’ll then have to unmount it in the app before you can do anything with it. (Joshua Goins, link 1 and link 2)
Notable Bug Fixes
Plasma 6.4.5
Fixed a critical issue that could cause the text of a sticky note on a panel to be permanently lost if that panel was cloned and then later deleted. This work also changes handling for deleted notes’ underlying data files: now they’re moved to the trash, rather than being deleted immediately. Should be a lot safer now! (Niccolò Venerandi, link 1 and link 2)
Fixed a very common KWin crash when changing display settings that was accidentally introduced recently. (David Edmundson, link)
Made a few strings in job progress notifications translatable. (Victor Ryzhykh, link)
Fixed an issue that could allow buttons with long text to overflow from System Monitor’s process killer dialog when the window was very very small. (Nate Graham, Link)
Fixed an issue in the time zone chooser map that would cause it to not zoom to the right location when changing the time zone using one of the comboboxes. (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)
The warnings shown by System Settings’ Fonts page in response to various conditions will now be shown when you adjust all the fonts at once, not only when you adjust one at a time. (Nate Graham, link)
Plasma 6.5.0
Fixed a case where Plasma could crash while you were configuring the weather widget. (Bogdan Onofriichuk, link)
Fixed an issue that could cause System Settings to crash while quitting when certain pages were open. (David Redondo, link)
Plasma is now better at remembering if you wanted Bluetooth on or off on login. (Nicolas Fella, link)
Panels in Auto-Hide, Dodge Windows, and Windows Go Below modes will now respect the opacity setting. (Niccolò Venerandi, link)
Frameworks 6.18
Fixed an issue that caused Plasma to crash when dragging files from Dolphin to the desktop or vice versa when the system was set up with certain types of mounts. (David Edmundson, link)
Other bug information of note:
- 4 very high priority Plasma bugs (down from 5 last week). Current list of bugs
- 26 15-minute Plasma bugs (down from 27 last week). Current list of bugs
Notable in Performance & Technical
Plasma 6.5.0
Implemented support for “overlay planes” on single-output setups, which have the potential to significantly reduce GPU and power usage for compatible apps displaying full-screen content. Note that NVIDIA GPUs are currently opted out because of unresolved driver issues. (Xaver Hugl, link)
Implemented support for drag-and-drop to and from popups created by Firefox extensions, and presumably other popups implemented with the same xdg_popup
system, too. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)
Fixed an issue that would cause V-Sync to be inappropriately disabled in certain games using the SDL library. (Xaver Hugl, link)
Undetermined release date
The annotating feature in Spectacle has been extracted into a re-usable library so that it can also be used in other apps in the future! Such integration is still in progress (as is working out a release schedule for the git repo that the library lives in now), but you’ll hear about it once it’s ready! (Noah Davis and Carl Schwan, link)
How You Can Help
KDE has become important in the world, and your time and contributions have helped us get there. As we grow, we need your support to keep KDE sustainable.
You can help KDE by becoming an active community member and getting involved somehow. Each contributor makes a huge difference in KDE — you are not a number or a cog in a machine! You don’t have to be a programmer, either; many other opportunities exist, too.
You can also help us by making a donation! A monetary contribution of any size will help us cover operational costs, salaries, travel expenses for contributors, and in general just keep KDE bringing Free Software to the world.
To get a new Plasma feature or a bugfix mentioned here, feel free to push a commit to the relevant merge request on invent.kde.org.
Add support for installing hardware drivers (!1048) · Merge requests · Plasma / Discover · GitLab
This is a patch that we created for Solus to enable users to use Discover to install hardware drivers when using the PackageKit backend. By having this in...GitLab
- Plasma now lets you configure touch rings on your drawing tablet! (Joshua Goins, link) -> screenshot
I am not a graphics designer, but i have a graphics tablet with such a touch ring. Wanted to use it for some photo editing and this really bugged me in the past. Finally its solved and hopefully the ring can be used to change brush size or zoom in and out in example.
Forgotten Toronto: Inside the great ‘clown riots’ of 1855 — and the coverup that changed the city’s policing forever
Forgotten Toronto: Inside the great ‘clown riots’ of 1855 — and the coverup that changed the city’s policing forever
How a normal circus visit turned into a vicious battle between clowns, firefighters and the powers that ran Toronto.The Toronto Star
The ever expanding great scientist Exodus list
- Li Hanfeng
- Hu Yijuan
- Yi Shouliang
- Xie Yimin
- Shang Rui
- Wang Zhonglin
- Guo-Jun Qi
- Ma Donghan and Ma Dongxin
- Xie Xiaoliang
- Sun Huanbo
- Charles Lieber
- Chen Jing
- Li Yongxi
- She Yiyuan
- Pan Linfeng
- Andrew Yao
- Terence Tao
- Joshua Zahl
- Zhong Xiao
- Chen Min and shen jie
- huaxin lin
- wang xujia
- ma xiaonan
- kenji fukaya
- Sun song
- Sun xin
- Vladimir Markovic
- Guo zaiping
- Dang yang and mu ming poo
- Sun Nan
- Duan luming
- Chen Zhoufeng
- Nieng Yan
- Sun shao cong
- Quan Guocong
- Yuriy Semenov
- Zhang chengqi
- Lu wei
- Yau Shing-Tung
- Zhang Yaqin
- Ronald eils and Irina Lehmann
- Giorgio Parisi
- Liu chang
- Chen Hudong
- Julian cheng
- Wang jing
- Niu Fenglin
- Wang Xujia
- Zhang Yonghao
- Chen deliang
- Gérard Mourou
- Feng Gensheng
- Zhou Ming
- Zhang Yitang
- Shan Liang
- Cao Ting
- Mohd Rizal Arshad
- Luo Weiwei
- Dong Sijia
Rising academic star who left US for China’s ‘unprecedented’ opportunities dies aged 33
News of marine scientist Dong Sijia’s death emerged in a journal and there has been no official word from her university.Dannie Peng (South China Morning Post)
DeathsEmbrace
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