cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/51167317

Crossposted from https://lemmy.ca/post/69977166

A Trump-appointed judge also said Americans have no “constitutional right to truthful information” during a public health crisis.

On Friday, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the dismissal of a lawsuit against the city of Jackson, Mississippi, which alleged the city knowingly let residents drink lead-contaminated water.

The lawsuit, first filed in 2022, says the contamination violated Jacksonians’ constitutional right to bodily integrity. Donald Trump-appointed judge Kurt Engelhardt disagreed. “The Constitution does not provide redress for every governmental wrongdoing,” Engelhardt said.

“Defendants’ actions allegedly deprived Plaintiffs of clean water and guileless information. These deprivations, while grievous, do not infringe upon any deeply rooted constitutional right.”

Not only was it terrible, it was terrible.

A small update from a few days ago. To save you a click, it turns out that if you apply PVC cement and don't push the pipes together you won't actually make a good joint. Who knew.

I'm honestly impressed it lasted so long without issues. We've lived in this house over 10 years and the PVC run predates our purchase.

As a side note, PVC repair couplers are a massive PITA. I am glad I didn't have to dig a fresh trench, get the old pipe out, and put a new one in, but it was quite the dance getting the coupler on while fighting with 2" OD pipe that's firmly lodged in clay. My nice small hole grew a bit longer to get some wiggle room.

Donald Trump wants the midterm elections to be all about Donald Trump. Republicans think they have little choice but to go along.

Many of those Republicans ― or at least the political operatives working for them ― are fully aware they don’t really want the president to show up in their districts. Trump is deeply unpopular, with voter anger at his decision to launch a costly war in Iran and his failure to lower prices driving his approval rating down into the 30s in most public opinion surveys.

But downballot Republicans, who have seen their majorities in the House and Senate become deeply endangered, are not responding by breaking with Trump. They long ago decided on a midterm strategy of tying themselves to the president in hopes of turning out low-propensity conservative voters, and they are desperate for his political operation to spend the hundreds of millions of dollars he has hoarded so far.

More than 153 million US and Canadian driver’s licenses, as well as other identity documents, have reportedly become available for purchase on the dark web for a limited time. According to cybersecurity journalist Brian Krebs, the service was called Nexus, and although it’s no longer available at the time of writing, it claimed to have possessed 153 million driver’s licenses, 10 million ID cards, 1.9 million travel documents, 1.3 million international driver’s licenses, 579k medical cards, 429k common access cards, 91k residence cards, 77k employment authorization records, and 5 million other documents, allegedly sourced from an ID-authentication service based in Louisiana.

However, Planet13 and Hertz [the companies involved] do not do their own authentication; instead, they contract a service provider for the service. Now, it turns out that both Planet13 and Hertz used the company for identity verification and ID-authentication — IDScan.

wo bekomme ich die her? die sind ja mal ultrageil!

Title. Well these days I've been feeling lonely, and I feel somewhere male friendships I have aren't that strong. I'll be honest, I don't have many female friends either, but I've been particularly felt disappointed by my male peers, especially when it comes to talking emotionally. What are your experiences?

A caver dropped into a hole in the limestone of Comal County, Texas, put his face into the underground stream at the bottom, and found the streambed paved with bones.

John Young photographed what he could see and sent the images to John Moretti, a palaeontologist at the University of Texas at Austin, expecting an identification and possibly a polite thank you. Moretti asked to come and look himself. What followed, written up in a paper published in Quaternary Research, is the first palaeontological study ever made of a Texas water cave.

President Donald Trump is the first sitting president in a century to appear on a U.S. coin, reviving questions about whether the practice is legal.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/51595631

Great Lakes region, USA. September 05, 2026.

Some friends and I went kayaking yesterday and I stumbled upon this green heron. This is a lifer for me and so cool to find in the wild. Ardeidae is one of my favorite families of birds.

I use instant when I can't do espresso. 😂

Sen. John Fetterman is lashing out at former aides who accused him of showing indifference toward his work and of routinely skipping constituent meetings, dismissing them as “disgruntled staffers” pushing “smears” to tarnish his reputation.

The first-term Pennsylvania Democrat broke his silence this weekend after The Wall Street Journal published text messages and cited former staffers who contended Fetterman has grown more keen on ingratiating himself with conservative media than on the critical work expected of a United States senator.

Now, former Fetterman staffers have created an anonymous account on X and are threatening to share further unflattering details about the senator, who is facing sagging approval ratings within his own party amid battles with the left over Israel, Iran and immigration — all as he stares at a potential run for reelection in 2028. The senator bluntly warned in July that he would leave the Democratic Party if it adopts an anti-Israel policy — one of his most direct threats yet.

Archived link

The Canadian intern charged with espionage at NATO headquarters in Belgium was found in April near the office of the alliance’s supreme commander after a fire alarm was pulled by a suspected accomplice, a Belgian source familiar with the case told The Globe and Mail.

The intern’s unexpected appearance there triggered an investigation into her activities by the counterintelligence service of NATO’s Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe, known as SHAPE.

It reported its concerns to Belgian military intelligence. In July, she was arrested by Belgian police and faces espionage charges on suspicion of spying for a third country.

...

Biwei Zhang (also known as Claire Zhang) is a former Canadian federal public servant who took an internship at SHAPE in Mons, Belgium, last year.

...

On April 21 this year, the intern, an IT specialist, was found near the building of U.S. General Alexus Grynkewich, the Supreme Allied Commander Europe, as an evacuation of SHAPE’s personnel took place after the triggering of a fire alarm.

Ms. Zhang, a naturalized Canadian of Chinese origin, had already come to the attention of SHAPE’s counterintelligence service after asking colleagues questions about the consequences of security protocol breaches.

The Belgian source told The Globe on Friday that the investigation into Ms. Zhang, who is in pretrial detention in Belgium, is probing whether she was aided by accomplices both inside and outside the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

...

The fire alarm is believed by investigators to have been triggered by someone other than Ms. Zhang, but they have not been identified, the source said. And on the day that it was triggered, according to the source, there was some suspicious activity in the access-control system of the building where the supreme NATO commander works.

...

[The source, who spoke under the condition of anonymity] said that after she was arrested and incarcerated, a number of passwords to her social-media accounts were remotely changed. Her apartment in Mons was also broken into while she was behind bars, the source said, sparking questions about whether material that could relate to her case was being searched for.

...

A Belgian judge on Monday denied her appeal for release from prison. The Chamber of Indictments decided to extend her pretrial detention by a month.

...

The Canadian Security Intelligence Service is working with Belgian authorities on the case.

In a statement, CSIS spokesperson Eric Balsam said, “as the Prime Minister has shared, we are directly supporting our Belgian counterparts in support of the ongoing legal process in Brussels.”

Some of those involved in the investigation were surprised, according to the source, that Ms. Zhang was given security clearance by the Canadian government before starting her internship at NATO headquarters in Mons, near the French border. They said her background would likely have raised a number of red flags with security experts in Belgium.

...

In Canada’s Parliament last month, the Commons public safety and national security committee launched an inquiry into vetting of public officials, after MPs expressed concern about how Ms. Zhang was cleared by Ottawa to work at NATO headquarters.

...

She had previously held a number of federal jobs including at Statistics Canada and the Canadian Space Agency.

But in 2023, Ms. Zhang was found to have committed fraud within the federal civil service when she wrote the same job exam twice for a single posting at the Canada Border Services Agency, applying under slightly different names and separate e-mail addresses.

The public-service watchdog, which investigated her conduct, ruled that if she joined the federal public service within a year, she would have to complete an ethics course.

Margaret McCuaig-Johnston, a senior fellow at the University of Ottawa and advisory-board member of the China Strategic Risks Institute, said it is possible that Ms. Zhang, who had “been in numerous and increasingly responsible positions already, did not get the screening depth that she might otherwise have had.”

...

Since Mark Carney took office, she added in an e-mail, Canada’s security agencies “have been spread thin with budget cuts and many demands to screen new employees into sensitive positions in the PM’s and ministers’ offices as well as staff of newly created agencies.”