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For Decades, Officials Knew a School Sat on a Former Dump — and Did Little to Clean Up the Toxins
Tue, 04 Jun 2024 10:00:00 +0000
In Gainesville, Florida, children are on the front lines of the hazards long ignored by local and state government officials.
The post For Decades, Officials Knew a School Sat on a Former Dump — and Did Little to Clean Up the Toxins appeared first on The Intercept.
Climate advocates say Hochul missed crucial opportunity to follow cities around the world in reducing gas emissions
An eleventh-hour decision to halt a plan to charge a fee for cars entering the heart of New York City has provoked outrage from environmental advocates and Democratic lawmakers, potentially scuppering hopes of congestion pricing taking hold in any US city in the near future.
New York City was, on 30 June, primed to be the first American city to toll drivers in its traffic-clogged centre, with cars entering Manhattan south of 60th Street set to be charged $15 a day in a plan heralded as a landmark moment in tackling air pollution, helping curb carbon emissions and providing a funding boost for New York’s sprawling yet beleaguered public transit system.
Continue reading...Richard Tice made some eye-opening statements on the climate, and the manifesto is packed with even more falsehoods
Despite 40C record heat in 2022 and the wettest 18 months on record this winter, this general election seems set to test the UK’s political consensus on climate change like never before.
Reform UK, the rightwing party that describes itself as offering “commonsense” policies on immigration and energy, has eschewed the consensus in favour of outright climate scepticism. So what exactly does the party have to say about global heating and the UK’s net zero target?
Continue reading...Prosecutors say Manhattan architect Rex Heuermann, 60, now charged with six murder counts, ‘planned out his kills’
The suspected Gilgo Beach serial killer Rex Heuermann has been indicted on new charges in Long Island, New York, of second-degree murder in the killings of two women.
The charges were brought by the Suffolk county district attorney, Ray Tierney, and come in addition to charges Heuermann faces in the killings of four women whose remains were discovered in scrub and marshland on the Long Island coast nearly 14 years ago.
Continue reading...Party has put state-owned power company at centre of its plans for decarbonisation, security and energy bills
Labour is to put a government-owned power company at the heart of the UK’s energy system for the first time since the privatisation of the industry in 1990, in one of Keir Starmer’s boldest pledges so far.
Great British Energy, with £8bn of investment, forms the centrepiece of Labour’s promise to decarbonise the electricity supply by 2030. This would stop well short of any form of renationalisation: GB Energy would be a state-owned investment vehicle and company working alongside and often in partnership with the existing private sector suppliers. The plan is for it to be largely invisible to households, not offering electricity directly to consumers but financing and helping to build low-carbon infrastructure, from windfarms to – potentially – nuclear reactors.
Continue reading...Forests across Europe, the US and Canada have been hard hit by drought, fires and bark beetles. Now scientists fear the northern hemisphere’s greatest carbon sink is nearing a tipping point
The giant sequoia is so enormous that it was once believed to be indestructible. High in California’s southern Sierra Nevada mountains, the oldest trees – known as monarchs – have stood for more than 2,000 years.
Today, however, in Sequoia national park, huge trunks lie sprawled on the forest floor, like blue whale carcasses stranded on a beach. Many of these trees were felled by a combination of drought and fire. But among the factors responsible for the rising toll is a tiny new suspect: the bark beetle.
Continue reading...Scientists say calamities on same scale as disaster that has killed 169 will become more common if emissions not cut
The unusually intense, prolonged and extensive flooding that has devastated southern Brazil was made at least twice as likely by human burning of fossil fuels and trees, a study has shown.
The record disaster has led to 169 deaths, ruined homes and wrecked harvests, and was worsened by deforestation, investment cuts and human incompetence.
Continue reading...Technology was once simply a tool—and a small one at that—used to amplify human intent and capacity. That was the story of the industrial revolution: we could control nature and build large, complex human societies, and the more we employed and mastered technology, the better things got. We don’t live in that world anymore. Not only has technology become entangled with the structure of society, but we also can no longer see the world around us without it. The separation is gone, and the control we thought we once had has revealed itself as a mirage. We’re in a transitional period of history right now...
All small business owners need a drive to succeed, but can it go too far? Recent research suggests that hustle culture can have its toxic side – with the potential to hit the bottom line for entrepreneurs and the UK economy
Starting a business can take drive and determination, so it’s not surprising that the so-called “hustle” has become a buzzword among some entrepreneurs. The notion is characterised by hard work and a desire to succeed, with entrepreneurs often required to hustle for business.
But while these are generally constructive traits, there can be a downside to hustle culture if they are taken too far. For example, when an “always on” work mentality leads to chronic overworking, and burning ambition turns into burnout. Those running a small- to medium-size enterprise (SME) – many of whom are pursuing their own passion – can find themselves susceptible to what Barclaycard Payments describes as “toxic hustle culture”.
Continue reading...
SEMrush and Ahrefs are among
the most popular tools in the SEO industry. Both companies have been in
business for years and have thousands of customers per month.
If you're a professional SEO or trying to do digital
marketing on your own, at some point you'll likely consider using a tool to
help with your efforts. Ahrefs and SEMrush are two names that will likely
appear on your shortlist.
In this guide, I'm going to help you learn more about these SEO tools and how to choose the one that's best for your purposes.
What is SEMrush?
SEMrush is a popular SEO tool with a wide range of
features—it's the leading competitor research service for online marketers.
SEMrush's SEO Keyword Magic tool offers over 20 billion Google-approved
keywords, which are constantly updated and it's the largest keyword database.
The program was developed in 2007 as SeoQuake is a
small Firefox extension
Features
Ahrefs is a leading SEO platform that offers a set of
tools to grow your search traffic, research your competitors, and monitor your
niche. The company was founded in 2010, and it has become a popular choice
among SEO tools. Ahrefs has a keyword index of over 10.3 billion keywords and
offers accurate and extensive backlink data updated every 15-30 minutes and it
is the world's most extensive backlink index database.
Features
Direct Comparisons: Ahrefs vs SEMrush
Now that you know a little more about each tool, let's
take a look at how they compare. I'll analyze each tool to see how they differ
in interfaces, keyword research resources, rank tracking, and competitor
analysis.
User Interface
Ahrefs and SEMrush both offer comprehensive information
and quick metrics regarding your website's SEO performance. However, Ahrefs
takes a bit more of a hands-on approach to getting your account fully set up,
whereas SEMrush's simpler dashboard can give you access to the data you need
quickly.
In this section, we provide a brief overview of the elements
found on each dashboard and highlight the ease with which you can complete
tasks.
AHREFS
The Ahrefs dashboard is less cluttered than that of
SEMrush, and its primary menu is at the very top of the page, with a search bar
designed only for entering URLs.
Additional features of the Ahrefs platform include:
SEMRUSH
When you log into the SEMrush Tool, you will find four
main modules. These include information about your domains, organic keyword
analysis, ad keyword, and site traffic.
You'll also find some other options like
Both Ahrefs and SEMrush have user-friendly dashboards,
but Ahrefs is less cluttered and easier to navigate. On the other hand, SEMrush
offers dozens of extra tools, including access to customer support resources.
When deciding on which dashboard to use, consider what
you value in the user interface, and test out both.
If you're looking to track your website's search engine
ranking, rank tracking features can help. You can also use them to monitor your
competitors.
Let's take a look at Ahrefs vs. SEMrush to see which
tool does a better job.
The Ahrefs Rank Tracker is simpler to use. Just type in
the domain name and keywords you want to analyze, and it spits out a report
showing you the search engine results page (SERP) ranking for each keyword you
enter.
Rank Tracker looks at the ranking performance of
keywords and compares them with the top rankings for those keywords. Ahrefs
also offers:
You'll see metrics that help you understand your
visibility, traffic, average position, and keyword difficulty.
It gives you an idea of whether a keyword would be
profitable to target or not.
SEMRush offers a tool called Position Tracking. This
tool is a project tool—you must set it up as a new project. Below are a few of
the most popular features of the SEMrush Position Tracking tool:
All subscribers are given regular data updates and
mobile search rankings upon subscribing
The platform provides opportunities to track several
SERP features, including Local tracking.
Intuitive reports allow you to track statistics for the
pages on your website, as well as the keywords used in those pages.
Identify pages that may be competing with each other
using the Cannibalization report.
Ahrefs is a more user-friendly option. It takes seconds
to enter a domain name and keywords. From there, you can quickly decide whether
to proceed with that keyword or figure out how to rank better for other
keywords.
SEMrush allows you to check your mobile rankings and
ranking updates daily, which is something Ahrefs does not offer. SEMrush also
offers social media rankings, a tool you won't find within the Ahrefs platform.
Both are good which one do you like let me know in the comment.
Keyword research is closely related to rank tracking,
but it's used for deciding which keywords you plan on using for future content
rather than those you use now.
When it comes to SEO, keyword research is the most
important thing to consider when comparing the two platforms.
The Ahrefs Keyword Explorer provides you with thousands
of keyword ideas and filters search results based on the chosen search engine.
Ahrefs supports several features, including:
SEMrush's Keyword Magic Tool has over 20 billion
keywords for Google. You can type in any keyword you want, and a list of
suggested keywords will appear.
The Keyword Magic Tool also lets you to:
Both of these tools offer keyword research features and
allow users to break down complicated tasks into something that can be
understood by beginners and advanced users alike.
If you're interested in keyword suggestions, SEMrush
appears to have more keyword suggestions than Ahrefs does. It also continues to
add new features, like the Keyword Gap tool and SERP Questions recommendations.
Both platforms offer competitor analysis tools,
eliminating the need to come up with keywords off the top of your head. Each
tool is useful for finding keywords that will be useful for your competition so
you know they will be valuable to you.
Ahrefs' domain comparison tool lets you compare up to five websites (your website and four competitors) side-by-side.it also shows you how your site is ranked against others with metrics such as backlinks, domain ratings, and more.
Use the Competing Domains section to see a list of your
most direct competitors, and explore how many keywords matches your competitors
have.
To find more information about your competitor, you can
look at the Site Explorer and Content Explorer tools and type in their URL
instead of yours.
SEMrush provides a variety of insights into your
competitors' marketing tactics. The platform enables you to research your
competitors effectively. It also offers several resources for competitor
analysis including:
Traffic Analytics helps you identify where your
audience comes from, how they engage with your site, what devices visitors use
to view your site, and how your audiences overlap with other websites.
SEMrush's Organic Research examines your website's
major competitors and shows their organic search rankings, keywords they are
ranking for, and even if they are ranking for any (SERP) features and more.
The Market Explorer search field allows you to type in
a domain and lists websites or articles similar to what you entered. Market
Explorer also allows users to perform in-depth data analytics on These
companies and markets.
SEMrush wins here because it has more tools dedicated to
competitor analysis than Ahrefs. However, Ahrefs offers a lot of functionality
in this area, too. It takes a combination of both tools to gain an advantage
over your competition.
When it comes to keyword data research, you will become
confused about which one to choose.
Consider choosing Ahrefs if you
Consider SEMrush if you:
Both tools are great. Choose the one which meets your
requirements and if you have any experience using either Ahrefs or SEMrush let
me know in the comment section which works well for you.
Activists suing the Biden administration over Gaza policy are demanding the judge recuse himself over the sponsored trip.
The post A Federal Judge Visited Israel on a Junket Designed to Sway Public Opinion. Now He’s Hearing a Gaza Case. appeared first on The Intercept.
Andrew Bailey’s office has a losing record of fighting against exonerations recommended by local prosecutors — but it’s not giving up.
The post Missouri’s Attorney General Is Waging War to Keep the Wrongly Convicted Locked Up appeared first on The Intercept.
Trump fans say his conviction is an overreach. But a close look at another recent fraud trial shows his case was run-of-the-mill.
The post To Understand the Trump Verdict, Look at the Case Against Shukhratjon Mirsaidov appeared first on The Intercept.
All over the country, architecture firms make the case for bigger jails — then get hired to design them.
The post The Little-Known Reason Counties Keep Building Bigger Jails: Architecture Firms appeared first on The Intercept.
Far-right strategist and Donald Trump ally was convicted for ignoring a summons from House committee that investigated the January 6 insurrection
In response to Donald Trump’s insistence that he could “go after” Joe Biden and other political adversaries if re-elected, the Democratic president’s campaign said it indicated that the former president was “visibly rattled” by his felony conviction last week.
“Tonight in prime time, America saw Donald Trump consumed by rage and visibly rattled following his felony conviction; a man who has clearly snapped and whose candidacy is becoming more dangerous by the day,” said Michael Tyler, the Biden campaign’s communications director.
Donald Trump is so consumed with personal grievance that he does not care who he hurts so long as Donald Trump benefits. That’s why he sicced a violent mob on the Capitol in an attempt to overturn the 2020 election he lost; that’s why he’s pledging to rule as a dictator and calling for a bloodbath; that’s why he thinks the extreme state level abortion bans he made possible are ‘a beautiful thing to watch’. It’s why the American people voted for Joe Biden over Donald Trump to begin with and why Trump can never step foot back in the Oval Office ever again.
Continue reading...Democracy campaigners welcome move by Lord Sumption and Lord Collins, who cited political situation in statement
Two of the last remaining British judges to sit on Hong Kong’s top court have resigned, with one citing the political situation in the former colony.
Lawrence Collins and Jonathan Sumption, former UK supreme court justices, announced their resignations on Thursday. “I have resigned from the court of final appeal because of the political situation in Hong Kong, but I continue to have the fullest confidence in the court and the total independence of its members,” Lord Collins said.
Continue reading...American says she is ‘sad but determined’ after Italian court upholds her conviction
Amanda Knox has said an Italian court’s decision to uphold her slander conviction for wrongly accusing a bar owner of murdering the British student Meredith Kercher was “unfair and incorrect” and vowed to continue her fight against “this injustice”.
Knox, 36, left through a back exit of a Florence appeals court on Wednesday and cancelled a planned press conference after judges rejected her appeal to have the conviction dropped.
Continue reading...My day consists of staring at different sized glowing rectangles – sometimes multiple at a time. This is called living life to its fullest
The primary task of all parents is to worry. You are given a thousand things to worry about across the course of the day, ranging all the way from “What’s that in their mouth?” to “How am I going to get this cleaning done?” across to “How will we get through the rest of the year?” and all the way back to “OK, they’ve got something else in their mouth now. What is it?”
Once we are done with the immediate worries, we have the joy of worrying in the abstract, about things entirely out of our control. This again moves on a spectrum all the way from whether they will be a good person to whether they will have a breathable atmosphere. Of all of these, one of the most talked about, stressed about, and judged by other parents about topics is screen time. It’s something that constantly plays on my mind. Every moment my child so much as glances at an electronic billboard I can feel a countdown timer click over in my head. I try to calm myself by remembering how I was raised on television and turned out fine. Then I realise that I currently work in television, believe television to be very important, and have absolutely not “turned out fine”.
Continue reading...Researchers tested for bias in Facebook’s algorithm by purchasing ads promoting for-profit colleges and studying who saw them.
The post One Facebook Ad Promotes a For-Profit College; Another a State School. Which Ad Do Black Users See? appeared first on The Intercept.
Government employees are using their official badges to demonstrate against U.S. support for Israel’s war on Gaza.
The post “Not the Career in Public Service I Signed Up For”: Federal Workers Protest War appeared first on The Intercept.
Party says it has reached out to opposition leaders after election result as it looks to form coalition
An influential committee in the African National Congress (ANC) has recommended the party form a government of national unity, as the group tries to build a coalition after losing its parliamentary majority in South Africa for the first time since it swept to power at the end of apartheid.
The second largest party, the pro-business Democratic Alliance (DA), has ruled out working with the fourth-largest, Marxist-inspired Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF). However, some analysts said that the lure of power may end up bringing most of the largest parties together.
Continue reading...In an exclusive interview with the Guardian, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, revealed the tactics and traits that help him face the daily frustrations of leading a country at war for more than two years.
Within a ceremonial room inside Kyiv’s presidential compound, Zelenskiy spoke for nearly an hour with a Guardian team, including the editor-in-chief, Katharine Viner. The interview took place during perhaps the toughest time for Ukraine since the early days of the war. Russia is on the offensive in Kharkiv, an advance that follows months of delay in the US Congress over the passing of a major support package, limiting Ukraine’s battlefield capabilities
Continue reading...In Gainesville, Florida, children are on the front lines of the hazards long ignored by local and state government officials.
The post For Decades, Officials Knew a School Sat on a Former Dump — and Did Little to Clean Up the Toxins appeared first on The Intercept.
The leader of the Morena party could pass legislation and budgets unopposed through congress
Claudia Sheinbaum seems poised to cement her historic victory as Mexico’s first female president with a supermajority in congress that would let her party pass legislation and budgets unopposed – and perhaps even change the constitution without need for compromise.
Sheinbaum, a 61-year-old climate scientist and former mayor of Mexico City, won the presidency with 59.5% of the vote, according to a rapid sample count by Mexico’s electoral authority.
Continue reading...Government prosecutors claimed they didn’t know a former detainee recanted his testimony in interviews with the government.
The post Guantánamo Prosecutors Accused of “Outrageous” Misconduct for Trying to Use Torture Testimony appeared first on The Intercept.
Found guilty on 34 counts by a New York jury, Trump might find himself campaigning behind bars.
The post These Convictions Thwart Trump’s Plan to Pardon Himself appeared first on The Intercept.
Richard Holden shows his mettle with a shock appearance on the Basildon and Billericay ballot, a Tory safe seat
Just for one day the election campaign took a back seat as the country’s eyes turned towards northern France where the commemorations for the D-day landings and the Normandy campaign were taking place. A time to remember both those who came back and those who didn’t.
No one came out of the war unscarred. My dad could never speak of the horrors he had witnessed, nor the gallantry that won him a Distinguished Service Cross. Here were the last survivors of the war generation: most of them 100 years old or more who had fought for our freedoms. A freedom that many now take for granted.
Continue reading...Tech firm earlier committed to storing less data about individuals in response to privacy concerns
Google will delete everything it knows about users’ previously visited locations, the company has said, a year after it committed to reducing the amount of personal data it stores about users.
The company’s “timeline” feature – previously known as Location History – will still work for those who choose to use it, letting them scroll back through potentially decades of travel history to check where they were at a specific time.
Continue reading...The second world war is not fodder for the culture wars. We owe it to those who fought to keep it that way
Nigel Farage launched his campaign to become Clacton’s MP by citing a recent survey that revealed more than half of 18- to 34-year-olds couldn’t correctly identify what happened on D-day. Praising a local veteran travelling to Normandy for the 80th anniversary commemorations, the Reform party boss described the poll as representing “a complete failure of the education system … as if we’re telling our youngsters to be ashamed of our past”. It formed a key part of a speech full of supposedly patriotic, anti-immigrant, anti-trans rhetoric.
A narrow, nostalgic view of the second world war that connects the conflict with culture war issues and a sense of contemporary British decline is frequently exploited by reactionaries such as Farage, both as a political tool and a stick with which to beat supposedly ignorant young people. Jibes that millennials and Gen Z are “too woke” to fight might in fact be familiar to anyone who has read letters between British commanders of the second world war. General Montgomery, one of the architects of the D-day invasion, wrote in 1942 that “the trouble with our British lads is that they are not killers by nature”. A 1943 army report, meanwhile, blamed books, cinema, plays and education for making soldiers weak under fire.
Luke Turner is a writer, editor and the author of two books, Men at War and the Wainwright prize-shortlisted Out of the Woods
Continue reading...The photographer Andrew Esiebo travelled around the city capturing how car tyres otherwise destined for the dump are finding second lives as seats, fences and swings
The work of a vulcaniser is not unlike that of a surgeon, says the Nigerian photographer Andrew Esiebo. Armed with precision tools, vulcanisers across Nigeria extend the lives of tyres otherwise destined for the scrap heap.
“Vulcanisers are like doctors for tyres because the way they work is like surgery,” says Esiebo, who has chronicled how used tyres are being repurposed in Lagos in a photography series exhibited as part of the British Academy-funded Pneuma-City project.
Vulcanisers see their role as keeping the city moving
Continue reading...Artist duo Lola Paprocka and Pani Paul travelled the world photographing teenagers they connected with – along with their broken phones, braces and acne scars
Continue reading...Exclusive: Rivals from two forces fighting to control Darfur region would be subject to asset freezes and travel bans
The EU intends to impose sanctions on six Sudanese military figures who are fuelling the conflict that has led to one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises, European diplomats have said.
EU foreign ministers meeting later this month are expected to approve sanctions against six individuals from the rival forces who have been fighting for control of Darfur, the vast, largely arid region of western and south-western Sudan.
Continue reading...Interesting story of breaking the security of the RoboForm password manager in order to recover a cryptocurrency wallet password.
Grand and Bruno spent months reverse engineering the version of the RoboForm program that they thought Michael had used in 2013 and found that the pseudo-random number generator used to generate passwords in that version—and subsequent versions until 2015—did indeed have a significant flaw that made the random number generator not so random. The RoboForm program unwisely tied the random passwords it generated to the date and time on the user’s computer—it determined the computer’s date and time, and then generated passwords that were predictable. If you knew the date and time and other parameters, you could compute any password that would have been generated on a certain date and time in the past...
Trump fans say his conviction is an overreach. But a close look at another recent fraud trial shows his case was run-of-the-mill.
The post To Understand the Trump Verdict, Look at the Case Against Shukhratjon Mirsaidov appeared first on The Intercept.
Ahead of the election in India, the Guardian’s video team travelled through the country to explore how fake news and censorship might shape the outcome.
Almost one billion people are registered to vote. The country's prime minister, Narendra Modi, has been in power for more than 10 years, and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) is seeking a third term.
But critics of Modi and the BJP say his government has become increasingly authoritarian, fracturing the country along religious lines and threatening India’s secular democracy. At the same time, the space for freedom of speech has been shrinking while disinformation and hate speech has exploded on social media.
Brian Krebs reports on research into geolocating routers:
Apple and the satellite-based broadband service Starlink each recently took steps to address new research into the potential security and privacy implications of how their services geolocate devices. Researchers from the University of Maryland say they relied on publicly available data from Apple to track the location of billions of devices globally—including non-Apple devices like Starlink systems—and found they could use this data to monitor the destruction of Gaza, as well as the movements and in many cases identities of Russian and Ukrainian troops...
From biking adventures to city breaks, get inspiration for your next break – whether in the UK or further afield – with twice-weekly emails from the Guardian’s travel editors. You’ll also receive handpicked offers from Guardian Holidays.
From biking adventures to city breaks, get inspiration for your next break – whether in the UK or further afield – with twice-weekly emails from the Guardian’s travel editors.
You’ll also receive handpicked offers from Guardian Holidays.
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