Mali’s economy near standstill amid JNIM fuel attacks
An ongoing fuel blockade initiated by the JNIM jihadist group in Mali has brought the landlocked Sahel nation’s economy to a near standstill. In an effort to isolate the capital, Bamako, and exert pressure on the ruling junta, the militants have intensified their attacks on fuel tankers, prompting Western governments to urge their citizens to leave the country.Since back-to-back coups in 2020 and 2021, Mali has been ruled by a military junta that is struggling to counter various armed groups, particularly the Al-Qaeda-linked Group for the Support of Islam and Muslims (JNIM), which is carrying out the blockade.
Since September, the JNIM has targeted fuel tankers, particularly those coming from Senegal and Côte d'Ivoire, through which the majority of Mali's imported goods transit.
JNIM is retaliating against the authorities' ban on the sale of fuel at locations other than service stations in rural areas, a move meant to dry up the jihadists' fuel supply lines, according to Malian authorities.
Mali's fuel shortage is exacerbating severe and recurrent power outages that have crippled the economy for the past five years.
The junta announced late Sunday that class was cancelled at schools and universities for two weeks due to the shortages.
In the middle of harvest season, some agricultural machinery has been rendered inoperable without fuel, with the shortages having struck daily life outside the capital several weeks earlier.
Tankers have been set on fire daily for the past two months, while drivers and soldiers have been killed or kidnapped in jihadist ambushes.
Talks between Malian intermediaries and the jihadists have so far failed to alleviate the problem.
Last Thursday, several embassies in Mali urged citizens to depart the country immediately while the United States and United Kingdom withdrew non-essential staff, amid fears of growing insecurity.Citing the "unpredictability of Bamako's security situation" and "ongoing armed conflict" around the capital, the US embassy later urged all citizens to "depart immediately" on commercial aircraft.
Italy, Germany, Canada and a handful of other countries have also told their nationals to depart Mali as swiftly as possible.
The various embassies' recent actions "reveal a critical and rapid deterioration of security, even around Bamako, which until now had been relatively spared", says Bakary Sambe, director of the Timbuktu Institute, a Dakar-based think tank.
He told RFI that the jihadists do not appear to be preparing a military assault against the Malian capital, but rather working towards economic exhaustion intended to weaken the transitional regime in place.
"Several aspects lead me to be cautious about the imminence of a frontal assault on Bamako, which is neither in their doctrine nor within the current capabilities of JNIM. It is not their objective," he explains.
"The group has had to learn from past experiences [notably the occupation and administration of the northern regions of Mali for ten months in 2012, editor's note] and has made the strategic choice of gradual suffocation: a war of economic and political attrition, which delegitimises the regime without ever exposing itself to a conventional battle that would be lost in advance."
Since July, Mali has seen an increase in attacks targeting industrial and mining sites, particularly in the Kayes region, which accounts for 80 percent of Mali's gold production, its main source of wealth.
Examples include the Diamond Cement Factory in Kayes – where three Indian engineers were kidnapped – and several mines in the Kayes region, where about ten Chinese employees were abducted.
The Bougouni lithium mine, operated by the British company Kodal Minerals, has also been subjected to several raids.
According to information confirmed by RFI and France 24 on Monday, JNIM released three hostages in exchange for a large ransom.
Two Emiratis and an Iranian, who were captured outside Bamako on 23 September were released on 29 October under the auspices of the Malian intelligence services for a sum between 50 and 70 million euros.
Several tons of military equipment – vehicles and weapons – were also delivered to the jihadist group. According to several sources, a prisoner exchange also took place.
For Sambe, these fall into a range of tactics used by JNIM to "project an image of resounding failure".
From falling export revenues, to scaring off direct investment and fomenting popular discontent, especially since the regime had promised security and sovereignty with support from Moscow.
"It's a war of suffocation, but also a strategy of discrediting the regime, demonstrating daily its inability to ensure the safety of the population."
In a statement released Monday, the Malian army claimed to have targeted "a major terrorist base" near Sirakoro, in the Bougouni region of central Mali.
According to the army headquarters, the site was used "to plan attacks against fuel tanker convoys."
The Malian army claims to have neutralised "more than a dozen terrorists" and destroyed or recovered equipment.
Two new maps on A.E.S.!
Two new maps available on our server "A.E.S."!📦 Neden 2 - a Block League map as a tribute to the map with the same name from S4 League
🌻 Flowers - a Colour Jump map made by fnetX
Come try them out! 👇
aes.land/
Colorado Passes Measures to Feed All Public School Kids by Taxing the Wealthy
Colorado Passes Measures to Feed All Public School Kids by Taxing the Wealthy
Excess funds from the school meals program would be redirected toward the state-managed SNAP program.Chris Walker (Truthout)
copymyjalopy likes this.
"The hope is to have a fresh 'Star Trek' movie, though [Paramount] has moved on from the idea of bringing back Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto and the rest of the ensemble from the J.J. Abrams reboot."
David Ellison’s Hollywood Takeover: First Paramount. Is Warner Bros Next?
David Ellison is the ultimate Hollywood disruptor. This week's Variety cover story goes deep on the Paramount-Skydance boss' industry takeover.Tatiana Siegel (Variety)
Pro-Israel Billionaire Who Led Mamdani Scaremongering Now Offers to Help NYC's Next Mayor | Common Dreams
Pro-Israel Billionaire Who Led Mamdani Scaremongering Now Offers to Help NYC's Next Mayor
One social media user wrote that the hedge fund executive Bill Ackman "went from acting like Mamdani was going to import ISIS to extending a friendly handshake… in like six hours."stephen-prager (Common Dreams)
adhocfungus likes this.
The Company Quietly Funneling Paywalled Articles to AI Developers
The Common Crawl Foundation is little known outside of Silicon Valley. For more than a decade, the nonprofit has been scraping billions of webpages to build a massive archive of the internet. This database—large enough to be measured in petabytes—is made freely available for research. In recent years, however, this archive has been put to a controversial purpose: AI companies including OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Nvidia, Meta, and Amazon have used it to train large language models. In the process, my reporting has found, Common Crawl has opened a back door for AI companies to train their models with paywalled articles from major news websites. And the foundation appears to be lying to publishers about this—as well as masking the actual contents of its archives.Common Crawl has not said much publicly about its support of LLM development. Since the early 2010s, researchers have used Common Crawl’s collections for a variety of purposes: to build machine-translation systems, to track unconventional uses of medicines by analyzing discussions in online forums, and to study book banning in various countries, among other things. In a 2012 interview, Gil Elbaz, the founder of Common Crawl, said of its archive that “we just have to make sure that people use it in the right way. Fair use says you can do certain things with the world’s data, and as long as people honor that and respect the copyright of this data, then everything’s great.”
Common Crawl’s website states that it scrapes the internet for “freely available content” without “going behind any ‘paywalls.’” Yet the organization has taken articles from major news websites that people normally have to pay for—allowing AI companies to train their LLMs on high-quality journalism for free. Meanwhile, Common Crawl’s executive director, Rich Skrenta, has publicly made the case that AI models should be able to access anything on the internet. “The robots are people too,” he told me, and should therefore be allowed to “read the books” for free. Multiple news publishers have requested that Common Crawl remove their articles to prevent exactly this use. Common Crawl says it complies with these requests. But my research shows that it does not.
The Nonprofit Feeding the Entire Internet to AI Companies
Common Crawl claims to provide a public benefit, but it lies to publishers about its activities.Alex Reisner (The Atlantic)
The Age of Anti-Social Media Is Here
Since its founding, Facebook has described itself as a kind of public service that fosters relationships. In 2005, not long after the site’s launch, its co-founder Mark Zuckerberg described the network as an “icebreaker” that would help you make friends. Facebook has since become Meta, with more grandiose ambitions, but its current mission statement is broadly similar: “Build the future of human connection and the technology that makes it possible.”More than 3 billion people use Meta products such as Facebook and Instagram every day, and more still use rival platforms that likewise promise connection and community. But a new era of deeper, better human fellowship has yet to arrive. Just ask Zuckerberg himself. “There’s a stat that I always think is crazy,” he said in April, during an interview with the podcaster Dwarkesh Patel. “The average American, I think, has fewer than three friends. And the average person has demand for meaningfully more; I think it’s like 15 friends or something, right?”
Zuckerberg was wrong about the details—the majority of American adults say they have at least three close friends, according to recent surveys—but he was getting at something real. There’s no question that we are becoming less and less social. People have sunk into their phones, enticed into endless, mindless “engagement” on social media. Over the past 15 years, face-to-face socialization has declined precipitously. The 921 friends I’ve accumulated on Facebook, I’ve always known, are not really friends at all; now the man who put this little scorecard in my life was essentially agreeing.
Zuckerberg, however, was not admitting a failure. He was pointing toward a new opportunity. In Marc Andreessen’s influential 2023 treatise, “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” the venture capitalist wrote, “We believe that there is no material problem—whether created by nature or by technology—that cannot be solved with more technology.” In this same spirit, Zuckerberg began to suggest the idea that AI chatbots could fill in some of the socialization that people are missing.
AI Is Not Your Friend
The social-media era is over. What’s coming will be much worse.Damon Beres (The Atlantic)
Starmer's Labour slammed for abandoning the term 'Islamophobia'
Labour are set to abandon the term 'Islamophobia' in favour of 'anti-Muslim hate' - a disgraceful watering down of horrific racism
Trump Administration Signals It May Not Pay Furloughed Workers After Shutdown Ends
A 2019 statute signed into law by Trump himself requires furloughed workers to be compensated when shutdowns end.
Backed by Platner Campaign, Maine Voters Reject GOP-Led Attack on Absentee Voting
Maine voters rejected a GOP voter suppression bill, protecting absentee voting rights—a development cheered by Democratic US Senate candidate Graham Platner, who campaigned against it.
Backed by Platner Campaign, Maine Voters Reject GOP-Led Attack on Absentee Voting
"This victory belongs to the thousands of volunteers, many of them with our campaign, who left it all on the field to save absentee voting in Maine," said the US Senate candidate.jessica-corbett (Common Dreams)
ICE: America’s favourite death cult with a badge
ICE thugs have killed, kidnapped, and terrorised — Now even the FBI admits the America’s fascist stormtroopers are out of control
NC GOP Threatens ProPublica: Drop This Story Or We’ll Call Trump To Punish You
The faux “party of free speech” strikes again. For years, the MAGA GOP has insisted that it is the true “party of free” speech even as all evidence suggests this administration is the most censorial and the most dismissive of the First Amendment in modern history. Over and over and over and over and over and over and over again we see the Trump administration engaging in blatant and obvious speech suppression.
NC GOP Threatens ProPublica: Drop This Story Or We’ll Call Trump To Punish You
The faux “party of free speech” strikes again. For years, the MAGA GOP has insisted that it is the true “party of free” speech even as all evidence suggests this administration is the most censoria…Techdirt
US federal judge vacates immigration condition for federal transportation funding
Chief Judge John McConnell for the US District Court of Rhode Island ruled Tuesday that the Department of Transportation (DOT) cannot require states to cooperate with federal immigration authorities in order to receive federal transportation funding. The case was brought by twenty Democratic state attorneys general against the DOT in May, claiming that the DOT and other federal agencies were unlawfully withholding billions of dollars in funding.
Case file: storage.courtlistener.com/reca…
US federal judge vacates immigration condition for federal transportation funding
Chief Judge John McConnell for the US District Court of Rhode Island ruled Tuesday that the Department of Transportation (DOT) cannot require states to cooperate with federal immigration authorities i...Paul Leech | Georgetown U. Law Center, US (- JURIST - News)
for interest in swedish climate emissions & political shifts
i don't usually, but i did just now cough up a lengthier comment with a nugget of inside perspective.
i rarely see nordic perspectives written out in english speaking spaces (only american, english, sometimes australian) so i thought to make this post pointing to it. i would look forward to any motivation that others wanting to know more brings to my writing and compiling nordic sources - alot of misrepresentation of our politics abroad
blorpblorp.xyz/inbox/c/showert…
please don't be inflammatory with me, idc for drama and fingerpointing.
Blorp – A Threadiverse client for Lemmy and PieFed
Blorp – A Threadiverse client for Lemmy and PieFed. Web, iOS & macOS, and more!Blorp
Colorado Passes Measures to Feed All Public School Kids by Taxing the Wealthy
Excess funds from the school meals program would be redirected toward the state-managed SNAP program.
Pro-Israel Billionaire Who Led Mamdani Scaremongering Now Offers to Help NYC's Next Mayor
Billionaire hedge fund CEO Bill Ackman dumped nearly $2 million into stopping Zohran Mamdani from becoming NYC's next mayor, portraying him as a "dangerous" supporter of "terrorism." Hours after Mamdani's win, Ackman offered his congratulations and help.
Pro-Israel Billionaire Who Led Mamdani Scaremongering Now Offers to Help NYC's Next Mayor
One social media user wrote that the hedge fund executive Bill Ackman "went from acting like Mamdani was going to import ISIS to extending a friendly handshake… in like six hours."stephen-prager (Common Dreams)
Frey Defeats Democratic Socialist Fateh to Win Third Term as Minneapolis Mayor
“They may have won this race, but we have changed the narrative about what kind of city Minneapolis can be,” Omar Fateh said.
Manchester transport strikes escalate as TfGM workers reject pay insult
Unite members across the Manchester transport strike for fair wages and safety. TfGM’s 3.2% offer is a pay cut, not a rise
US | Lawsuit Charges That California Law Illegally Muzzles Students and Teachers on Palestine
The new law conflates criticism of Zionism with antisemitism and punishes educators for teaching truthful information.
Case file: drive.google.com/file/d/1gkbQN…
Under the hood: How Firefox suggests tab groups with local AI | The Mozilla Blog
Background Mozilla launched Tab Grouping in early 2025, allowing tabs to be arranged and grouped with persistent labels. It was the most requested feature in the history of Mozilla Connect.
Under the hood: How Firefox suggests tab groups with local AI
Mozilla’s tab grouping feature uses AI to automatically organize and label browser tabs, making it easier to manage and find open pages.Vasish Baungally (The Mozilla Blog)
The limits of zero-knowledge for age-verification | Brave
ZKPs are often advanced as a technical remedy, promising privacy-preserving attestations of age or eligibility. Yet their deployment in practice exposes both conceptual and practical limits.
University of Pennsylvania confirms data stolen in cyberattack
The University of Pennsylvania has confirmed that a hacker breached numerous internal systems related to the university's development and alumni activities and stole data in a cyberattack.
[Announcement] Breach Encounters and Monsters in Maps
Over the past few days, we’ve seen a number of reports about Breaches preventing monsters from spawning.
We’ve been actively testing this issue, as this behaviour isn’t what we would expect. Our investigation has identified a problem with two specific methods of adding monsters to maps, Shrines and the Essence Scarab of Calcification.
For Shrines, packs of monsters were not spawning if the Shrine was located within a Breach Hive.
For Essence Scarab of Calcification we found that there were 30% less essences found in maps with Breach Hives than those with Unstable Breaches or on Standard.
We’re currently working on fixes for both of these cases.
Our testing with Divination Scarab of The Cloister and Ambush Scarab of Containment shows a consistent number of the monsters/strongboxes added by these scarabs whether a Hive spawns in a map affected by them or not.
It’s worth noting that monsters which would normally be placed within the area of a Hive encounter are not removed entirely. Instead, they’re compensated for by placing monsters elsewhere in the map. We’ll continue to monitor this situation closely and share updates if we discover anything further.
Announcements - Breach Encounters and Monsters in Maps - 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
Influencers have fractured reality in Portland
Influencers have fractured reality in Portland
As the Oregon National Guard lawsuit goes through the Ninth Circuit, it’s become clear that right-wing content creators are shaping policy and law.Sarah Jeong (The Verge)
Influencers have fractured reality in Portland
Influencers have fractured reality in Portland
As the Oregon National Guard lawsuit goes through the Ninth Circuit, it’s become clear that right-wing content creators are shaping policy and law.Sarah Jeong (The Verge)
Gaza and the death of morality
Gaza and the death of morality
The genocide in Gaza has stripped the global order of its last illusion: exposing a civilization that feels nothing and justifies everything.Tala Alayli (Gaza and the death of morality)
like this
New quantum hardware puts the mechanics in quantum mechanics
New quantum hardware puts the mechanics in quantum mechanics
As a test case, the machine was used to test a model of superconductivity.John Timmer (Ars Technica)
WTH, XOM? ExxonMobil Again Sues to Dodge Accountability
WTH, XOM? ExxonMobil Again Sues to Dodge Accountability
Large fossil fuel and cement companies are responsible for the vast majority of the emissions that science shows are driving changes in the earth’s climate.The Equation
Democrats celebrate while Republicans stew over Mamdani’s historic win and others
Obama said ‘the future looks a little bit brighter’ while the House speaker lied about New York mayor-elect’s policies
Left-leaning Americans awoke to a rare recent moment of political celebration with Democratic victories in several elections across the country, led by the election of Zohran Mamdani as the next mayor of New York, while Republicans breathlessly predicted the end of the country.
“The future looks a little bit brighter,” Barack Obama wrote on X about Democratic victories on Tuesday. “It’s a reminder that when we come together around strong, forward-looking leaders who care about the issues that matter, we can win.”
COP30: What the ‘Baku to Belém roadmap’ means for climate finance
COP30: What does the ‘Baku to Belém roadmap’ mean for climate finance? - Carbon Brief
Carbon Brief details what the Baku to Belém roadmap is, why it was launched and what the key points within it are.Carbon Brief Staff (Carbon Brief)
NDIS participants can no longer access sex worker services through funding. Advocates say it's a 'deep betrayal'
ABC News
ABC News provides the latest news and headlines in Australia and around the world.Isabella Ross (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)
In Chicago immigration crackdown, agents raid daycare, senior living center
A Spanish-language immersion daycare in a leafy residential neighborhood on the North Side of Chicago was raided by federal immigration agents on Wednesday and a teacher was taken away, panicking school administrators and parents of infants, toddlers and pre-kindergarten children at the center, a staff worker at the daycare told Reuters.
Footage obtained by local WGN-TV showed two men, one in a balaclava, dragging a woman out of the colorfully decorated front doors of Rayito de Sol daycare center as she screamed. The men wore vests that said "Police" but no other agency markings were visible.
etherphon
in reply to James R Kirk • • •