https://archive.ph/e0Nta

Mulonda "Maven" Rashidi, the new leader of the Peace & Justice Party's youth wing, considers North Korea to be one of the world's freest and most democratic countries.

Rashidi has shared political videos on TikTok. He expands on his views on North Korea to Klassekampen:

—"My personal support for North Korea is a matter of anti-imperialism. Korea was divided by the USA," Rashidi says.

The Peace & Justice Party's youth wing is called Young Anti-Imperialism.

See also: "On its own planet: The Peace & Justice Party for all who have smoked their socks" (Gunnar Stavrum) [opinion piece basically calling the party stupid]

When confronted with claims of North Korea being an oppressive dictatorship without any democracy or freedom of expression, Mulonda Rashidi replies,

—"What you're talking about, I think, is the liberal values that the USA is trying to push onto other countries. North Korea has different values. It is out of touch with reality to say that they are not democratic. North Korea's constitution is very democratic. Everyone has the right to work, healthcare, and education."

See also: "Oftebro will not leave the party: —'Anette is not happy'" [about a famous actor who's got some slack after it became known that he's a member of the Peace & Justice Party]

Rashidi understands that his views are provocative for many people in Norway.

—"Westerners do not want to call North Korea a democracy, but you have to understand it as a country with a completely different history and culture than the West," he says.

See also: "Going viral: —'Norway is pretty racist'" [about a Norwegian standup comedian who's gone viral on TikTok for talking about how Norway is racist and increasingly xenophobic]

cross-posted from: https://rss.ponder.cat/post/194204

From BBC News via this RSS feed

France bans smoking in most outdoor areas, starting July 1; violators face a €135 fine.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/30849754

Jeremy Scahill, Sharif Abdel Kouddous, and Jawa Ahmad May 29, 2025

"A new proposal for a Gaza ceasefire spearheaded by Donald Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, includes a 60-day initial truce, a “redeployment” of some Israeli occupation forces, and an exchange of captives, including ten living Israelis held in Gaza. It would also require the “immediate” delivery of humanitarian aid, including by the United Nations and the Red Crescent. Drop Site obtained a copy of the document, labelled a “term sheet” by Witkoff."

cross-posted from: https://rss.ponder.cat/post/194081

That summation greatly oversimplifies things, but if all you’re going to read is a headline, it will have to do.

We’ll dig in deeper into the Fifth Circuit’s second attempt to handle content moderation vis-a-vis public libraries, but first, we’ll take a look back to what happened last year.

In middle of book ban bills hitting multiple state legislatures — several of which created new civil avenues for private citizens to demand book removals and/or sue public libraries/librarians directly for being offended by books they found on library shelves, the Fifth Circuit handled a challenge brought by the ACLU after a few local right wingers tried to get a bunch of books removed from a Llano County public library.

These were the books that were removed by the library, working from a list provided by allegedly aggrieved county resident Bonnie Wallace and seconded by state rep Matt Krause and his own list of “objectionable material,” which included several more titles referred to by Krause as “pornographic filth.”

Seven “butt and fart” books, with titles like I Broke My Butt! and Larry the Farting Leprechaun;

Four young adult books touching on sexuality and homosexuality, such as Gabi, a Girl in Pieces;

Being Jazz: My Life as a (Transgender) Teen and Freakboy, both centering on gender identity and dysphoria;

Caste and They Called Themselves the K.K.K., two books about the history of racism in the United States;

Well-known picture book, In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak, which contains cartoon drawings of a naked child; and

It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex and Sexual Health.

Pretty much everyone acting to get these books removed worked for some branch of the local government, ranging from two county judges, to the state rep, to the library board the local government handpicked to replace the less-than-obsequious board it disbanded after it refused to let Bonnie Wallace run the library.

While some of the Fifth Circuit judges recognized that declaring library content curation “government speech” meant prematurely terminating legitimate First Amendment challenges, the court ultimately decided libraries should be allowed to handle their own content moderation. After all, to do otherwise would mean being forced to carry racist tomes and bigoted creative works. If that meant citizens could cleanse libraries of content they personally don’t like, it was just acceptable collateral damage for refusing to protect the First Amendment right to access content, even if others think you shouldn’t have access to it.

Roughly a month later, the Fifth Circuit said it would take another look at this case, having apparently realized it had enabled censorship while claiming to be protecting librarians’ rights to curate content of the libraries they oversee.

It shouldn’t have bothered. Its first decision was a mess, but at least it held back from actively blessing proxy censorship of protected First Amendment expression by authors and content creators. This review goes further, giving the government free rein to censor content it doesn’t like under the guise of “curation.”

The latest ruling [PDF], which sets precedent for the entire Fifth Circuit and its grouping of overwhelmingly right wing states, says there’s simply no way to solve this problem in a way that makes everyone — including fans of civil liberties — happy. So, if anyone is going to suffer, it’s going to be the citizens, rather than the government.

[P]laintiffs cannot invoke a right to receive information to challenge a library’s removal of books. Yes, Supreme Court precedent sometimes protects one’s right to receive someone else’s speech. But plaintiffs would transform that precedent into a brave new right to receive information from the government in the form of taxpayer-funded library books. The First Amendment acknowledges no such right.

That is a relief, because trying to apply it would be a nightmare. How would judges decide when removing a book is forbidden? No one in this case—not plaintiffs, nor the district court, nor the panel—can agree on a standard. May a library remove a book because it dislikes its ideas? Because it finds the book vulgar? Sexist? Inaccurate? Outdated? Poorly written? Heaven knows. The panel majority itself disagreed over whether half of the 17 books could be removed. For their part, plaintiffs took the baffling view that libraries cannot even remove books that espouse racism.

There’s no room for nuance here, apparently. Either librarians can remove anything they want to or they can’t remove anything. But this isn’t a win for librarians. Librarians tend to actually care about expanding knowledge and minds. Library boards — those run by local governments — are more interested in pushing their own viewpoints at the expense of library patrons. But library boards get the win here because… well, who could possibly want the government to be forced to pay for books that espouse racism?

Only racists really want that. But they can’t actually get that, so they do the next best thing. They disband library boards and re-stock them with sympathizers and then set about removing books that detail the United States’ long history of racism (along with some harmless books containing fart jokes).

Not a problem, says the Fifth Circuit, even if it’s obviously a problem. But what the Fifth Circuit can’t logically (or lawfully) argue away, it chooses to belittle. This is some truly shameful writing from a court that can’t even attempt to hide its disdain for the plaintiffs challenging the quasi-book ban urged on by a state rep that definitely wants to engage in censorship on behalf of a single complainant who wants to remove any content she personally doesn’t like.

Finally, we note with amusement (and some dismay) the unusually over-caffeinated arguments made in this case. Judging from the rhetoric in the briefs, one would think Llano County had planned to stage a book burning in front of the library. Plaintiffs and amici warn of “book bans,” “pyres of burned books,” “totalitarian regimes,” and the “Index librorum prohibitorum.” One amicus intones: “Where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people.”

Take a deep breath, everyone. No one is banning (or burning) books. If a disappointed patron can’t find a book in the library, he can order it online, buy it from a bookstore, or borrow it from a friend. All Llano County has done here is what libraries have been doing for two centuries: decide which books they want in their collections. That is what it means to be a library—to make judgments about which books are worth reading and which are not, which ideas belong on the shelves and which do not.

If you doubt that, next time you visit the library ask the librarian to direct you to the Holocaust Denial Section.

Well, why have a library at all then? Maybe taxpayers would be better off just buying or borrowing (from friends) anything they want to read? Why burden, say, Bonnie Wallace, with the extremely minor tax burden of paying for the occasional book of fart jokes or a treatise on racism in America? In fact, why not just shut down newspapers, radio stations, and news broadcasters? If people want to know what’s happening, surely they can just ask their neighbors or call up relatives living elsewhere in the nation? Who needs public records requests? Surely, anyone interested in the inner workings of their government can just politely ask government employees to answer their questions in person?

This is an extremely specious response to a serious concern, one that has only become more serious in recent years as hundreds of legislators and an entire political party has decided to get into the censorship business.

Only the dissent contains anything worth taking to heart. Written by Judge Stephen Higginson, it calls out the majority’s bullshit take on the First Amendment and the right to information it contains:

Public libraries have long kept the people well informed by giving them access to works expressing a broad range of information and ideas. But this case concerns the politically motivated removal of books from the Llano County public library system by government officials in order to deny public access to disfavored ideas. In an effort to ratify this official abridgment of free speech, the majority overturns decades of settled First Amendment law, disparaging its free speech protections as a “nightmare” to apply.

There it is: not only does the majority decide to give the government an on-ramp for censorship via libraries, it wraps up its refusal to honestly wrestle with this difficult issue by belittling the people who raised it. Everyone in the Fifth Circuit is worse off for it. And this abysmal take on free speech is only going to encourage more of what happened in this case. It gives would-be censors all the permission they need to start ridding public libraries of content they don’t like and the quasi-legal cover for their definitively anti-American actions.

From Techdirt via this RSS feed

Two members of the NYPD, including a detective in Mayor Eric Adams' security detail, have been placed on modified duty this week after links surfaced to two crypto businessmen charged with kidnapping an Italian tourist earlier this month, sources closes to the case tell News 4.

Sources familiar with the case say NYPD brass learned the detective assigned to protect Adams had provided security at the Prince Street townhouse in Nolita where crypto businessmen John Woeltz and William Duplessie allegedly tortured and held captive an Italian tourist for 17 days. Sources believe the detective - working off duty for the two crypto businessmen - also picked up the Italian tourist from the airport earlier this month.

The HHS report, released May 1, says it is “not a clinical practice guideline,” but Kennedy’s letter warns providers against relying on science-based professional guidelines and urges them to use the government document to inform their practice instead. The letter also said that HHS is committed to protecting whistleblowers and may soon create new policies and oversight actions to “hold providers that harm children accountable.”

Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz said CMS “will not turn a blind eye to procedures that lack a solid foundation of evidence and may result in lifelong harm.”

“These and other guidelines based on the so-called ‘gender-affirming’ model of care should not be relied upon to harm children any further,” the letter says.

cross-posted from: https://rss.ponder.cat/post/193608

Schools, parents, police, and existing laws are not prepared to deal with the growing problem of students and minors using generative AI tools to create child sexual abuse material of other their peers, according to a new report from researchers at Stanford Cyber Policy Center.

The report, which is based on public records and interviews with NGOs, internet platforms staff, law enforcement, government employees, legislators, victims, parents, and groups that offer online training to schools, found that despite the harm that nonconsensual causes, the practice has been normalized by mainstream online platforms and certain online communities.

“Respondents told us there is a sense of normalization or legitimacy among those who create and share AI CSAM,” the report said. “This perception is fueled by open discussions in clear web forums, a sense of community through the sharing of tips, the accessibility of nudify apps, and the presence of community members in countries where AI CSAM is legal.”

The report says that while children may recognize that AI-generating nonconsensual content is wrong they can assume “it’s legal, believing that if it were truly illegal, there wouldn’t be an app for it.” The report, which cites several 404 Media stories about this issue, notes that this normalization is in part a result of many “nudify” apps being available on the Google and Apple app stores, and that their ability to AI-generate nonconsensual nudity is openly advertised to students on Google and social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok. One NGO employee told the authors of the report that “there are hundreds of nudify apps” that lack basic built-in safety features to prevent the creation of CSAM, and that even as an expert in the field he regularly encounters AI tools he’s never heard of, but that on certain social media platforms “everyone is talking about them.”

The report notes that while 38 U.S. states now have laws about AI CSAM and the newly signed federal Take It Down Act will further penalize AI CSAM, states “failed to anticipate that student-on-student cases would be a common fact pattern. As a result, that wave of legislation did not account for child offenders. Only now are legislators beginning to respond, with measures such as bills defining student-on-student use of nudify apps as a form of cyberbullying.”

One law enforcement officer told the researchers how accessible these apps are. “You can download an app in one minute, take a picture in 30 seconds, and that child will be impacted for the rest of their life,” they said.

One student victim interviewed for the report said that she struggled to believe that someone actually AI-generated nude images of her when she first learned about them. She knew other students used AI for writing papers, but was not aware people could use AI to create nude images. “People will start rumors about anything for no reason,” she said. “It took a few days to believe that this actually happened.”

Another victim and her mother interviewed for the report described the shock of seeing the images for the first time. “Remember Photoshop?” the mother asked, “I thought it would be like that. But it’s not. It looks just like her. You could see that someone might believe that was really her naked.”

One victim, whose original photo was taken from a non-social media site, said that someone took it and “ruined it by making it creepy [...] he turned it into a curvy boob monster, you feel so out of control.”

In an email from a victim to school staff, one victim said “I was unable to concentrate or feel safe at school. I felt very vulnerable and deeply troubled. The investigation, media coverage, meetings with administrators, no-contact order [against the perpetrator], and the gossip swirl distracted me from school and class work. This is a terrible way to start high school.”

One mother of a victim the researchers interviewed for the report feared that the images could crop up in the future, potentially affecting her daughter’s college applications, job opportunities, or relationships. “She also expressed a loss of trust in teachers, worrying that they might be unwilling to write a positive college recommendation letter for her daughter due to how events unfolded after the images were revealed,” the report said.

💡Has AI-generated content been a problem in your school? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at ‪emanuel.404‬. Otherwise, send me an email at [email protected].

In 2024, Jason and I wrote a story about how one school in Washington state struggled to deal with its students using a nudify app on other students. The story showed how teachers and school administration weren’t familiar with the technology, and initially failed to report the incident to the police even though it legally qualified as “sexual abuse” and school administrators are “mandatory reporters.”

According to the Stanford report, many teachers lack training on how to respond to a nudify incident at their school. A Center for Democracy and Technology report found that 62% of teachers say their school has not provided guidance on policies for handling incidents

involving authentic or AI nonconsensual intimate imagery. A 2024 survey of teachers and principals found that 56 percent did not get any training on “AI deepfakes.” One provider told the authors of the report that while many schools have crisis management plans for “active shooter situations, they had never heard of a school having a crisis management plan for a nudify incident, or even for a real nude image of a student being circulated.”

The report makes several recommendations to schools, like providing victims with third-party counseling services and academic accommodations, drafting language to communicate with the school community when an incident occurs, ensuring that students are not discouraged or punished for reporting incidents, and contacting the school’s legal counsel to assess the school’s legal obligations, including its responsibility as a “mandatory reporter.”

The authors also emphasized the importance of anonymous tip lines that allow students to report incidents safely. It cites two incidents that were initially discovered this way, one in Pennsylvania where a students used the state’s Safe2Say Something tipline to report that students were AI-generating nude images of their peers, and another school in Washington that first learned about a nudify incident through a submission to the school’s harassment, intimidation, and bullying online tipline.

One provider of training to schools emphasized the importance of such reporting tools, saying, “Anonymous reporting tools are one of the most important things we can have in our school systems,” because many students lack a trusted adult they can turn to.

Notably, the report does not take a position on whether schools should educate students about nudify apps because “there are legitimate concerns that this instruction could inadvertently educate students about the existence of these apps.”

From 404 Media via this RSS feed

I fear Ukraine have let the cat out the bag

someone dig up Captain Tom

he's got one more war left in him

https://peertube.mesnumeriques.fr/w/wUD7qYU7YvWv9GQvQZXqhX

Fucking hilarious