Port Sudan (Sudan) (AFP) – An attack on a funeral in the strategic city of El-Obeid in Sudan's central Kordofan region killed 40 people, the UN said Wednesday, as paramilitaries looked poised to launch an offensive there.

The United Nations' humanitarian office did not specify when the attack took place or who was behind it, but said that the situation in Kordofan was worsening.

The war in Sudan has killed tens of thousands of people and displaced millions more, with the fighting spreading to new areas in recent days, sparking fears of an even greater humanitarian catastrophe.

The paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), at war with the military since 2023, appears to have shifted its focus to Kordofan after capturing El-Fasher, the last army stronghold in the vast western Darfur region.

"Local sources report that at least 40 civilians were killed and dozens injured yesterday in an attack on a funeral gathering in El Obeid, the capital of North Kordofan State," the UN humanitarian agency OCHA said.

"Once again, OCHA calls for an immediate cessation of hostilities and for all parties to protect civilians and respect international humanitarian law."

El-Obeid is a logistics and command hub that links Darfur to the Sudanese capital Khartoum.

The RSF claimed control of Bara, a city north of El-Obeid, last week.

People forced to flee El-Fasher have described horrific abuse, including rape, at the hands of the RSF.

"The rapes were gang rapes. Mass rape in public, rape in front of everyone and no one could stop it," mother of four Amira said from a makeshift shelter in Tawila, some 70 kilometres (43 miles) west of El-Fasher.

"You'd be asleep and they'd come and rape you," she said, using a pseudonym while speaking during a webinar organised by campaign group Avaaz.

"I saw with my own eyes people who couldn't afford to pay (for safe passage) and the fighters took their daughters instead."

Yale University's Humanitarian Research Lab released close-up satellite images showing evidence of atrocities committed during the RSF's takeover of El-Fasher.

The lab's executive director, Nathaniel Raymond, told AFP in an interview that the images were "a spark plug for public outrage".

Both sides in the war have been accused of committing atrocities.

The fall of El-Fasher gave paramilitaries control over all five state capitals in Darfur, raising fears that Sudan would effectively be partitioned along an east-west axis.

The RSF now dominates Darfur and parts of the south, while the army holds the north, east and central regions along the Nile and Red Sea.

The UAE is accused by the UN of supplying arms to the RSF -- allegations it has repeatedly denied.

Abu Dhabi on Wednesday voiced its support for a ceasefire and its "deep denunciation of the ongoing human rights violations and horrific crimes being committed against civilians in various parts of Sudan", including El-Fasher.

The Sudanese army, meanwhile, has received support from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Iran, according to observers.

Sudan's army-backed defence minister on Tuesday said the military would press on with its fight against the RSF after an internal meeting to discuss a US proposal for a ceasefire.

"We thank the Trump administration for its efforts and proposals to achieve peace," Hassan Kabroun said in a speech broadcast on state television, but added that "preparations for the Sudanese people's battle are ongoing".

No details of the US truce proposal have been made public.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters on Tuesday that Washington wanted "to see this conflict come to a peaceful end", but added "it's a very complicated situation on the ground right now".

She said the United States was "actively engaged" in seeking a peace deal alongside Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

The army-aligned authorities had rejected an earlier truce proposal from the four countries -- referred to as the Quad -- under which both the army and the RSF would be excluded from a transitional political process.

Speaking at a forum in Qatar on Tuesday, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called on the warring parties to "come to the negotiating table, bring an end to this nightmare of violence -- now".

Attack on funeral in Sudan's Kordofan region kills 40: UN

^RFI

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.

Mali’s economy near standstill amid JNIM fuel attacks

^RFI

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/

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-bans-foreign-ai-chips-state-funded-data-centres-sources-say-2025-11-05/

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)}

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)}

Labour are set to abandon the term 'Islamophobia' in favour of 'anti-Muslim hate' - a disgraceful watering down of horrific racism

Starmer further entrenches Islamophobia in Labour

^{Joe Glenton (The Canary)}

A 2019 statute signed into law by Trump himself requires furloughed workers to be compensated when shutdowns end.

Trump Admin Signals It May Not Pay Furloughed Workers After Shutdown Ends

^{Chris Walker (Truthout)}

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 thugs have killed, kidnapped, and terrorised — Now even the FBI admits the America’s fascist stormtroopers are out of control

ICE: America’s favourite death cult with a badge

^{Joe Glenton (The Canary)}

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

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)}

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.

Excess funds from the school meals program would be redirected toward the state-managed SNAP program.

Colorado Passes Measures to Feed All Public School Kids by Taxing the Wealthy

^{Chris Walker (Truthout)}

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)}

“They may have won this race, but we have changed the narrative about what kind of city Minneapolis can be,” Omar Fateh said.

Frey Defeats Democratic Socialist Fateh to Win Third Term as Minneapolis Mayor

^{brett-wilkins (Common Dreams)}

Unite members across the Manchester transport strike for fair wages and safety. TfGM’s 3.2% offer is a pay cut, not a rise

Manchester transport strike — TfGM workers reject pay insult

^{Alex/Rose Cocker (The Canary)}

The new law conflates criticism of Zionism with antisemitism and punishes educators for teaching truthful information.

Case file: drive.google.com/file/d/1gkbQN…

Lawsuit Charges That California Law Illegally Muzzles Students and Teachers on Palestine | Truthout

^{britney (Truthout)}

The tragedy occurred yesterday.

How You Can Help: KY Governor Declares State Of Emergency Following UPS MD-11 Crash

^{Alexander Mitchell (Simple Flying)}

How a 34-year-old became the next mayor of New York City

Mamdani's Magic

^{Ken Klippenstein}

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)}

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.

The limits of zero-knowledge for age-verification | Brave

^Brave

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.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/university-of-pennsylvania-confirms-data-stolen-in-cyberattack/

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}

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.”

Democrats celebrate while Republicans stew over Mamdani’s historic win and others

^{George Chidi (The Guardian)}

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.

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/chicago-immigration-crackdown-agents-raid-daycare-senior-living-center-2025-11-05/