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A Federal Judge Visited Israel on a Junket Designed to Sway Public Opinion. Now He’s Hearing a Gaza Case.
Wed, 05 Jun 2024 18:24:04 +0000
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.
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.
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.
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.
It is revealing how casually the prime minister has abandoned any attempt at integrity under the pressure of an election
The function of televised election debates is an airing of rival policies by competing candidates, allowing an audience to judge which has more merit. In practice it has become a game in which the object is to project scripted attacks into the public arena – an opportunity to frame the terms of combat for the rest of the campaign. That is not debating in the traditional sense, but it is a legitimate use of a broadcast platform. The whole exercise is corrupted, however, if the power of message amplification is used to spread falsehood.
This is what Rishi Sunak did in the first televised debate of the election campaign when he claimed that “independent Treasury officials” had costed Labour plans and calculated an increased household tax burden of £2,000. That number is a fiscal fiction drawn up by the Conservative campaign. The permanent secretary at the Treasury has made it clear that the civil service does not recognise Mr Sunak’s analysis and that it should not be presented as having official endorsement.
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.
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...Party will have to pick coalition partners and then try to reform itself in response to declining support
South Africa’s ruling African National Congress party has lost its three-decade electoral majority in devastating fashion. As the former liberation movement faces the task of building a coalition government, it remains to be seen how it will respond to the message sent to it by voters.
The ANC’s vote share collapsed from 57.5% in 2019 to 40.2% in last week’s elections, amid chronic unemployment, degraded public services and high rates of violent crime.
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.
The megadonor’s plan for a $25 million research center at Cornell fell apart. So he took his money to Texas A&M.
The post Leonard Leo Built the Conservative Court. Now He’s Funneling Dark Money Into Law Schools. 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.
Spacecraft to collect samples from rarely explored area after landing heralded as ‘enormous technical achievement’
China has landed its uncrewed Chang’e-6 lunar probe on the far side of the moon, marking an important step in the country’s 53-day mission to retrieve rock and soil samples from the “dark” lunar hemisphere, in what would be a world first.
The landing elevates China’s space power status in a global rush to the moon, where countries including the US are hoping to exploit lunar minerals to sustain long-term astronaut missions and moon bases within the next decade.
Continue reading...Voting in the EU elections begins Thursday and ends on Sunday
Turnout in the Netherlands stood at 7% at 10:30am, according to Ipsos, NOS reported.
This is in line with turnout during the time in the previous election.
I made a concept called Europe first, instead of made in China. This was trying to focus on industrial production in Europe and to ramp it up and to become more independent … So we need more investment in our future, meaning also in industry and in production, in green projects, saying we need solar panels on our roofs, but not imported from China, but to produce them in Europe and to put it on our European roofs.
Secondly, social Europe: defending what we achieved, for minimum age, platform workers, pay transparency, working time limitations for truck drivers, but also asking for abolishing unpaid internships, and also having something like Erasmus for the elderly, and fair taxation.
Continue reading...Brighton have held talks with Graham Potter about a potential return to the club but are determined not to rush into appointing a successor to Roberto De Zerbi after missing out on Ipswich’s Kieran McKenna.
Potter, who left Brighton to join Chelsea in September 2022, is a surprise contender to replace De Zerbi after the Italian’s departure by mutual consent. Tony Bloom, the Brighton owner, had made McKenna his No 1 target before the Northern Irishman committed his future to Ipswich by signing a new four-year contract amid interest also from Chelsea and Manchester United.
Continue reading...This mind-boggling documentary about a man who was imprisoned for a crime he didn’t commit will prompt rage, tears – and a sense of wild injustice
Right from the start, the events that led to Andrew Malkinson’s imprisonment for rape were absurd. It was summer 2003 when police pulled over the motorbike on which the then-37-year-old was riding pillion – the exchange, according to local reporter Neal Keeling, was “quite amicable”. Weeks later, those same officers receive a description of an attacker from a woman who has been raped. For some strange reason, they recall their brief encounter with Malkinson and decide he fits the bill. Malkinson is put into a police lineup, then a courtroom, then prison – for 17 years. Truly, though, he was transported into what he calls a “parallel nightmare world”, where he remained until last year, when his conviction was finally overturned.
In The Wrong Man: 17 Years Behind Bars, Malkinson eloquently guides us through his descent into this bizarre hellscape. He willingly attends the police lineup he believes will clear his name, only to be positively identified by the victim. Oddly, two members of the public also claim to have seen Malkinson near the scene of the crime, which took place on a motorway embankment in Salford in the early hours. He is found guilty by a jury, and given a life sentence. He spends his jail time “hypervigilant” against violent attacks – yet he is always hopeful that something will come to light that proves his innocence.
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July’s general election is likely to be most expensive since regulation of party spending began in 2000
The UK’s most expensive general election is widely believed to have been in 1880, when at least £170m in today’s terms was spent by candidates, with the increased cost of campaigning to an expanded electorate and a peak in corruption that led to the first regulatory controls on political spending.
After more than 140 years, and scandals ranging from cash for honours to foreign money and dodgy donors, parties and candidates are now subject to rules on expenditure and donations. An increase in spending limits, announced last year, means this general election is likely to be the most expensive since regulation of party spending began in 2000.
Continue reading...A large team of tech nostalgia enthusiasts have made a PiDP-10, a replica of the PDP-10 mainframe computer first launched by the Digital Equipment Corporation in 1966
On my desk right now, sitting beside my ultra-modern gaming PC, there is a strange device resembling the spaceship control panel from a 1970s sci-fi movie. It has no keyboard, no monitor, just several neat lines of coloured switches below a cascade of flashing lights. If you thought the recent spate of retro video game consoles such as the Mini SNES and the Mega Drive Mini was a surprising development in tech nostalgia, meet the PiDP-10, a 2:3 scale replica of the PDP-10 mainframe computer first launched by the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in 1966. Designed and built by an international group of computer enthusiasts known as Obsolescence Guaranteed, it is a thing of beauty.
The origins of the project go back to 2015. Oscar Vermeulen, a Dutch economist and lifelong computer collector, wanted to build a single replica of a PDP-8 mainframe, a machine he had been obsessed with since childhood. “I had a Commodore 64 and proudly showed it to a friend of my father’s,” he says. “He just sniffed and said the Commodore was a toy. A real computer was a PDP, specifically a PDP-8. So I started looking for discarded PDP-8 computers, but never found one. They are collectors’ items now, extremely expensive and almost always broken. So I decided to make a replica for myself.”
Continue reading...Voces8 Foundation Choir and Orchestra/Liebeck/Smith
(Voces8 Records)
Partly set to medieval poetry, with eight singers and an orchestra boasting top soloists, these works pull heavily on the heartstrings
The eight singers of Voces8, violinist Jack Liebeck and a studio full of colleagues come together for a recording heavy on the kind of choral music that lunges for the heartstrings. Conducted by Barnaby Smith, it takes its title from a new work by Taylor Scott Davis, described as a Concerto for Violin, Choir and Orchestra. This sets one medieval poem and two newly written responses, with sweetly glowing passages for choir and violin finally conquering the darker orchestra.
Otherwise we hear arrangements, mostly new, of existing music. Vaughan Williams’s violin concerto The Lark Ascending is performed in a mashup of two versions, with both orchestra and choir – mostly wordless, though there’s a jolt when the basses start singing the poetry that inspired the composer, briefly drawing focus from Liebeck’s beautifully coloured violin. There’s Rebecca Dale’s The Cloths of Heaven, shoehorning WB Yeats’s poem into a foursquare, sentimental tune, and Eric Whitacre’s evocative Sleep. Britten’s anthem Rejoice in the Lamb gets a refreshingly unchurchy performance in Imogen Holst’s orchestral arrangement. As this orchestra has some leading soloists among its ranks we get the luxury of Julian Bliss on clarinet, vividly portraying the poet’s twisting, sunbathing cat.
Continue reading...Douglas Ross says he will ‘lead from the front’ after David Duguid not selected in Aberdeenshire North and Moray East
The Scottish Conservative leader, Douglas Ross, has announced he plans to stand again for Westminster in a key Scottish National party target seat, after the party blocked the anticipated candidate who is recovering from a serious illness.
Reversing repeated commitments to focus on his duties at Holyrood, Ross said he had decided to “to lead from the front” after the former Scotland office minister David Duguid, who had been expected to stand for the new seat of Aberdeenshire North and Moray East, developed “serious health issues”.
Continue reading...The movie that launched a million memes has lost none of its conspiratorial power, and its action sequences still dazzle – but was it actually trying to tell us something we’ve all missed?
To paraphrase Apu in The Simpsons, this was the year filmgoers were partying like it was on sale for $19.99; it offered the vintage of American Beauty, Fight Club, The Sixth Sense and more. But The Matrix seemed to me then – and seems to me now – more exciting than any of them, first among equals in the previous century’s final graduating class. Rereleased for its 25th anniversary, this barnstorming sci-fi paranoia thriller, produced by action veteran Joel Silver and written and directed by the Wachowskis, holds up tremendously well. The martial arts sequences choreographed by Yuen Woo-ping are gripping and nothing about the bullet-time effects or production design feels dated. Even the ringing payphone – an unexceptional detail in 1999 – now looks like an inspired steampunk touch.
Keanu Reeves, inscrutable, adorable and eccentric in his utterly individual way, plays Thomas Anderson, a talented young software programmer by day, and by night a mysterious online figure on global networks with the handle “Neo”. He has attracted the disapproval of shadowy government forces, led by Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving) who are worried by Neo’s anti-establishment posts and technical savvy, and his intuition that the government is keeping secrets, or just one big secret, from the people. But Neo is also being pursued by rebel activists, including Trinity (played with icy severity and style by Carrie-Anne Moss) and led by the charismatic Morpheus (a suavely assured Laurence Fishburne) who, despite his name, wants the whole world to wake up. Morpheus confronts Neo and offers him a fundamental choice in a now legendary scene: a blue pill which will return him to his current state of befuddled but basically placid ignorant acceptance, or the red pill which will irreversibly reveal to him just what is going on: the reality behind the illusion.
Continue reading...Action against five accused, including Jeremy Corbyn’s former chief of staff, estimated to have cost £1.5m
Labour has withdrawn a costly lawsuit against five former staffers accused of leaking an internal report on antisemitism and “conspiring” against Keir Starmer.
The legal action is expected to have cost the Labour party more than £1.5m and it was estimated the party could have spent almost £900,000 more, according to documents shown in open court last year.
Continue reading...Adam Bandt hits back, saying he will not be lectured about peace by someone who backs invasion
Tensions in parliament over a rise in antisemitism and Islamophobia sparked by the war in Gaza have spilled over into a second day with the opposition leader, Peter Dutton, calling the Greens “evil” and accusing it of playing a “central” role in protests on university campuses.
Parliament’s question time erupted on Wednesday after Anthony Albanese accused the Greens of spreading misinformation and Dutton alleged the Greens were condoning acts of violence instead of condemning them.
Continue reading...This blog is now closed
Going fully electric would save households more than $600 a year for next four decades, report says
Households would save an average of $608 a year for the next 40 years if new residential buildings in New South Wales were required to be fully electric, according to a report commissioned by climate organisation 350 Australia.
It cuts energy bills for local residents and small businesses during a cost of living crisis and reduces climate pollution, at almost no cost to councils. It will be low-income people and renters who will benefit most from council-led electrification.
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People may be told their condition is a gift. But that’s little comfort when looking back at a trail of destruction
Discovering in my 40s that I have ADHD was a bit like how, I imagine, Tarzan felt when he found out he was a human and not a chimpanzee. For years he must have wondered why he was so different to the other chimps. Why did he have to use rope instead of his arms to swing from the trees? Why did he prefer to eat berries rather than termites and why, no matter how much another chimp shook its arse at him, he didn’t get the horn.
I know how it feels for people around you to think you are not doing things their way just to be annoying. “If only you applied the same focus to swinging from branches as you do to making things with your hands, you wouldn’t be so behind,” his chimp teachers must have said, as he whittled wood to make a cutlery set.
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The journal’s board of directors took the entire website down after the "Nakba" article published.
The post Columbia Law Review Remains Offline After Students Reject Disclaimer Undermining Palestine Article appeared first on The Intercept.
Once upon a time, it was only hardcore bodybuilders who pumped themselves up with testosterone. Today it is no longer niche. But how dangerous is it?
Dave is an ordinary office worker in the north of England. He is about average height for a British man – 5ft 10in – and to catch a glimpse of him between 9am and 5pm, the only hint that his leisure time is spent shattering the natural limits of human growth might be his slightly ill-fitting XXL shirt, or the fact that he sometimes wears women’s trousers, to better accommodate the steep slope between his trim waist and bulging thighs.
But in the videos and photos Dave posts online, to approving comments from other weightlifters (“huge progress ”), he is a total beast. His chest looks herculean, and the skin on his legs is pulled so tight that it has ceased to conceal the striated landscape of muscles underneath. Looking at him brings to mind the peeled-back diagrams of an undergraduate anatomy textbook. You can imagine attentive medical students poring over him, admiring the clarity – there the brachioradialis, there the palmaris longus. He looks impossibly strong, and he is. His record deadlift is 250kg, about the weight of three average men.
Continue reading...Exclusive: as Reform courts Tory vote, chancellor insists election campaigns are won from the centre ground
At the first three doors that Jeremy Hunt knocked on during his canvassing session in leafy Godalming earlier this week were voters who said they would back the Conservatives.
The chancellor, looking a bit embarrassed, admitted that they were not representative of what his team have been seeing across this Surrey constituency, where his 8,800 majority is under threat from the resurgent Liberal Democrats.
But at the fourth door, Tory voters Stephen and Caroline told him they felt it was time for change. “The Conservatives have had a good crack at the whip,” said Stephen. “Unfortunately I think they’ve lost their way.”
Many in Westminster were surprised when Hunt announced that he would be running again, with former colleagues like Theresa May and Michael Gove having decided it was time to stand down after 14 years running the country.
After almost 20 years in parliament and a string of senior cabinet jobs, including foreign secretary and chancellor, and with the Tories on course to lose the next election and with it swathes of constituencies – including his own of Godalming and Ash – some expected Hunt to retire from parliament.
Yet he had no such plans. “I think I can hold it,” he said in an interview with the Guardian in the Inn on the Lake pub in the town. “But it’s going to be a very big fight, the biggest I’ve ever had.”
Like many fellow Conservative candidates, Hunt is getting squeezed from both the left – with the Lib Dems on course to take the seat – and the right, from what he describes as “Boris Conservatives” who will presumably now drift to Reform.
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Ukraine rations power as generation falls far short of needs; US to reportedly release $225m more in weapons, France to sign €650m deal. What we know on day 834
A Ukrainian drone attack set fire to the Novoshakhtinsk oil refinery in Rostov-on-Don, southern Russia, forcing it to halt operations, the regional governor said early on Thursday. The plant is considered one of the most important oil refineries in southern Russia. Located around 10km (six miles) east of the border, it has been targeted by Ukrainian attacks several times. “Work was suspended due to a repeated attack, and personnel were withdrawn to a safe distance,” said Vasily Golubev, the governor.
Another drone strike in Russia overnight destroyed an oil tank at a depot in Stary Oskol, north of the Ukrainian border, said the Belgorod regional governor, Vyacheslav Gladkov. Ukraine suffers regular attacks on its energy systems and hits back at sites in Russia, both in retaliation and to hinder the Russian war effort.
Ukraine’s power grid operator, Ukrenergo, ordered cuts in 12 regions on Wednesday evening due to critical shortages. Ukrainians have been warned to limit consumption after Russian airstrikes in recent weeks inflicted serious damage on generating capacity. “In view of repairs to units and the latest destruction, we are catastrophically short of electricity for our needs,” said Serhii Kovalenko, head of Yasno, the largest private power company in Ukraine. Russia has either destroyed or captured 50% of Ukraine’s power generation, according to a report in the Financial Times.
The United States is expected to announce a new $225m weapons package for Ukraine this week, sources have told Reuters. The US president, Joe Biden, was due to meet with Volodymyr Zelenskiy, Ukraine’s president, on Thursday in Normandy at the 80th anniversary commemoration of the D-day invasion.
France is to provide Ukraine with €650m in loans and grants to support local authorities and critical infrastructure, particularly energy facilities, targeted by Russia. The French president, Emmanuel Macron, will attend the Swiss conference on Russia’s war against Ukraine on 15-16 June, his office said on Wednesday. Macron and the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, are due to sign the loans and grants deal in Paris on Friday.
A Moscow court has sentenced Russian blogger Anna Bazhutova to five and a half years in jail for livestreaming witness testimony about alleged Russian atrocities during the occupation of the Kyiv suburb of Bucha. “It’s disgusting and vile. It’s messed up,” the 30-year-old defendant said from the dock said in reaction to the ruling. Her lawyer promised an appeal. In April 2022, Bazhutova did a live broadcast including witnesses directly accusing the Russian military of carrying out killings. Vladimir Putin’s regime has made criticism of the military illegal.
Vladimir Putin has said Russia could supply arms to other countries to attack western targets, Pjotr Sauer writes. His comments came after a US senator and a western official confirmed that Ukraine has recently used US weapons to strike inside Russia. The weapons were used under recently approved guidance from Joe Biden allowing American arms to be used to strike inside Russia for the defence of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city.
The Republican senator Mike Rounds of South Dakota, a member of the Senate armed services committee, confirmed strikes with US weapons inside Russia but did not say how he was briefed. According to a 3 June report from the Institute for the Study of War, Ukrainian forces struck a Russian S-300/400 air defence battery in Russia’s Belgorod region, probably with a high mobility artillery rocket system, or Himars, on 1 or 2 June.
French prosecutors launched an terrorism investigation after a Ukrainian-Russian man detonated explosive materials in a hotel room north of Paris. The suspected was reportedly from the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, part of which has been occupied by pro-Russian and Russian forces since 2014. A source at the French anti-terrorism prosecutors office (PNAT) said that on Monday night the 26-year-old man received “significant burns after an explosion” in a hotel in the Val-d’Oise, north of Paris. A search uncovered “products and materials intended for the manufacture of explosive devices”.
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New York City police department to revoke Trump’s license after suspending permit to carry a concealed weapon in April 2023
Donald Trump’s license to carry a gun is expected to be revoked by the New York City police department now that he has been convicted of a felony, according to reports on Wednesday evening.
The former president once boasted that he was so popular with the electorate, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters.” He made the claim in January 2016 during the Iowa caucuses campaign.
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The draconian restrictions on asylum-seekers owe a lot to Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, but the path was paved by Democrats.
The post Joe Biden’s Cruel Border Shutdown Follows in Clinton and Obama’s Footsteps Too appeared first on The Intercept.
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England’s top golfer, a newly minted cult hero after being snapped smoking at the US Open, has the whole-mood swagger of John Daly by way of Kate Moss – and the game to back it up
Tobacco has been having a pretty good week. First we had those images of Paul Mescal and Natalie Portman looking like a starry-eyed advertisement for divorce and May-December romance as they took a smoke break outside some bar in Islington. Then along came Charley Hull, the 28-year-old English golfer who set the internet ablaze when she signed autographs for a gaggle of adoring fans at last week’s US Women’s Open in Pennsylvania with a lit cigarette dangling from her lips. There were several admirers awaiting her signature (and one indisputably grown-ass man who slipped her his number), and she didn’t bother to stub out the ciggie as she moved from fan to fan.
It’s easy to fall for Hull’s smooth ponytail and IDGAF swagger, but the viral images only tell part of the story. As she told a gallery of reporters on Sunday after carding a three-under 67 in the final round at Lancaster Country Club, she rarely goes for alcohol (“I don’t need to drink because I can have a fun time without it”), and she has started smoking old-fashioned cigarettes as a way to limit her nicotine consumption. You can vape anywhere, you see, but you can’t light up indoors.
Continue reading...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.
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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.
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The Labour party suddenly and controversially stripped her of the chance to be one of its MPs last week. She talks about why she’s still determined to represent Chingford and Woodford Green
Faiza Shaheen is composed when I meet her at home in Chingford, north-east London, all things considered. It is three days after she had been summoned to an interview with three members of Labour’s national executive committee (NEC) to answer for a series of tweets dating back to 2014, which they said damaged the party’s electoral chances. “They decided my fate, on a 40-minute Zoom meeting, half of which the baby was crying through,” she says. She’s holding her four-and-a-half-month-old son now. He beams at me throughout our interview.
She was deselected as Labour’s candidate for Chingford and Woodford Green on Wednesday 29 May. It’s a move that stunned her supporters locally, and reverberated far beyond her constituency. A recording of that meeting made it on to the Today programme. A week later, Shaheen has announced her decision to stand as an independent. “If you’d told me a week ago that this is where we’d be, I wouldn’t have believed it,” she messaged me. “I’ve had hundreds of messages from people in my community, urging me to run. They are tired of the Tories but now feel they can’t trust Labour.”
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Microsoft recently caught state-backed hackers using its generative AI tools to help with their attacks. In the security community, the immediate questions weren’t about how hackers were using the tools (that was utterly predictable), but about how Microsoft figured it out. The natural conclusion was that Microsoft was spying on its AI users, looking for harmful hackers at work.
Some pushed back at characterizing Microsoft’s actions as “spying.” Of course cloud service providers monitor what users are doing. And because we expect Microsoft to be doing something like this, it’s not fair to call it spying...
A proposed New York training facility shows how establishment politicians only understand governance through policing.
The post New York Spends $225 Million on Its Own “Cop City” — to Make the Whole City Run on Cops appeared first on The Intercept.
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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...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.
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The charge of an illegitimate marriage is all that’s left after a court acquitted Khan over his handling of a classified cypher.
The post Imran Khan Remains Imprisoned Over His Wife’s Menstrual Cycles. State Department Says That’s “Something For the Pakistani Courts to Decide.” appeared first on The Intercept.
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 students who edit the journal sought out the article by a Palestinian scholar who was censored by Harvard Law Review last year.
The post Columbia Law Review Refused to Take Down Article on Palestine, So Its Board of Directors Nuked the Whole Website appeared first on The Intercept.
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...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.
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...
The narrative that took hold ignored inland campuses, like in the Rust Belt and into Appalachia, where students formed their own encampments.
The post Not Just Coastal Elites: Here’s How Three Rust Belt Colleges Protested Israel’s War in Gaza appeared first on The Intercept.
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.
A senior USAID adviser said he was pressured to resign days after the agency censored his presentation.
The post He Made a PowerPoint on Mothers Starving in Gaza. Then He Lost His Government Job. appeared first on The Intercept.
“It’s hard to see this wildly disproportionate response as anything other than an attempt to chill speech on this issue.”
The post Columbia Coincidentally Rewrites Disciplinary Rules Just in Time to Screw Over Student Protesters appeared first on The Intercept.
I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to predict that artificial intelligence will affect every aspect of our society. Not by doing new things. But mostly by doing things that are already being done by humans, perfectly competently.
Replacing humans with AIs isn’t necessarily interesting. But when an AI takes over a human task, the task changes.
In particular, there are potential changes over four dimensions: Speed, scale, scope and sophistication. The problem with AIs trading stocks isn’t that they’re better than humans—it’s that they’re faster. But computers are better at chess and Go because they use more sophisticated strategies than humans. We’re worried about AI-controlled social media accounts because they operate on a superhuman scale...
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.
Lunar I-Hab, the next European habitat in lunar orbit as part of the Gateway, has recently undergone critical tests to explore and improve human living conditions inside the space module.
Biden's plan to cozy up to Arab dictators is right out of Donald Trump's playbook — but even worse.
The post Joe Biden’s Terrible Israel Policy Is Really About Getting in Bed With Saudi Arabia appeared first on The Intercept.
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...
The megadonor’s plan for a $25 million research center at Cornell fell apart. So he took his money to Texas A&M.
The post Leonard Leo Built the Conservative Court. Now He’s Funneling Dark Money Into Law Schools. appeared first on The Intercept.
Is this what the “pro-life” movement wanted?
The post Sterilization, Murders, Suicides: Bans Haven’t Slowed Abortions, and They’re Costing Lives appeared first on The Intercept.
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...British surgeon Dr Omar El-Taji has been in Gaza for more than a week with medical nonprofit Fajr Scientific, working in one of Gaza’s largest remaining hospitals as Israel’s invasion of Rafah deepens. The European hospital, which was founded by Unrwa with a grant from the EU, has limited resources and fewer local staff to deal with high numbers of patients being admitted with devastating injuries. ‘These people have gone through this for six to seven months now, they cannot go through this any more,’ says El-Taji, who is currently living at the hospital after the medical team’s safe house was evacuated. The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has so far rejected US pressure to hold off on a full-scale attack, claiming Rafah is the last stronghold of Hamas and that Israel can only achieve its war aims by killing militants and leaders in the city
Continue reading...Of all the prescient insights to be found in Orwell’s classic novel, perhaps one of the most chilling is the advent of the post-truth era. Can 1984 help us better navigate our own dystopia?
The story famously opens as the clocks strike 13 – conveying an immediate sense of discomfort, or of abnormality. As if time itself has been distorted.
But it isn’t just the clocks. Through the eyes of the protagonist, Winston Smith, and through the technology with which he interacts, 1984 shows us a world built on governmental control – not just over people’s actions, but over their thoughts.
Continue reading...
In the rapidly advancing landscape of AI technology and innovation, LimeWire emerges as a unique platform in the realm of generative AI tools. This platform not only stands out from the multitude of existing AI tools but also brings a fresh approach to content generation. LimeWire not only empowers users to create AI content but also provides creators with creative ways to share and monetize their creations.
As we explore LimeWire, our aim is to uncover its features, benefits for creators, and the exciting possibilities it offers for AI content generation. This platform presents an opportunity for users to harness the power of AI in image creation, all while enjoying the advantages of a free and accessible service.
Let's unravel the distinctive features that set LimeWire apart in the dynamic landscape of AI-powered tools, understanding how creators can leverage its capabilities to craft unique and engaging AI-generated images.
This revamped LimeWire invites users to register and unleash their creativity by crafting original AI content, which can then be shared and showcased on the LimeWire Studio. Notably, even acclaimed artists and musicians, such as Deadmau5, Soulja Boy, and Sean Kingston, have embraced this platform to publish their content in the form of NFT music, videos, and images.
Beyond providing a space for content creation and sharing, LimeWire introduces monetization models to empower users to earn revenue from their creations. This includes avenues such as earning ad revenue and participating in the burgeoning market of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs). As we delve further, we'll explore these monetization strategies in more detail to provide a comprehensive understanding of LimeWire's innovative approach to content creation and distribution.
LimeWire Studio welcomes content creators into its fold, providing a space to craft personalized AI-focused content for sharing with fans and followers. Within this creative hub, every piece of content generated becomes not just a creation but a unique asset—ownable and tradable. Fans have the opportunity to subscribe to creators' pages, immersing themselves in the creative journey and gaining ownership of digital collectibles that hold tradeable value within the LimeWire community. Notably, creators earn a 2.5% royalty each time their content is traded, adding a rewarding element to the creative process.
The platform's flexibility is evident in its content publication options. Creators can choose to share their work freely with the public or opt for a premium subscription model, granting exclusive access to specialized content for subscribers.
As of the present moment, LimeWire focuses on AI Image Generation, offering a spectrum of creative possibilities to its user base. The platform, however, has ambitious plans on the horizon, aiming to broaden its offerings by introducing AI music and video generation tools in the near future. This strategic expansion promises creators even more avenues for expression and engagement with their audience, positioning LimeWire Studio as a dynamic and evolving platform within the realm of AI-powered content creation.
The LimeWire AI image generation tool presents a versatile platform for both the creation and editing of images. Supporting advanced models such as Stable Diffusion 2.1, Stable Diffusion XL, and DALL-E 2, LimeWire offers a sophisticated toolkit for users to delve into the realm of generative AI art.
Much like other tools in the generative AI landscape, LimeWire provides a range of options catering to various levels of complexity in image creation. Users can initiate the creative process with prompts as simple as a few words or opt for more intricate instructions, tailoring the output to their artistic vision.
What sets LimeWire apart is its seamless integration of different AI models and design styles. Users have the flexibility to effortlessly switch between various AI models, exploring diverse design styles such as cinematic, digital art, pixel art, anime, analog film, and more. Each style imparts a distinctive visual identity to the generated AI art, enabling users to explore a broad spectrum of creative possibilities.
The platform also offers additional features, including samplers, allowing users to fine-tune the quality and detail levels of their creations. Customization options and prompt guidance further enhance the user experience, providing a user-friendly interface for both novice and experienced creators.
Excitingly, LimeWire is actively developing its proprietary AI model, signaling ongoing innovation and enhancements to its image generation capabilities. This upcoming addition holds the promise of further expanding the creative horizons for LimeWire users, making it an evolving and dynamic platform within the landscape of AI-driven art and image creation.
Sign Up Now To Get Free Credits
Upon completing your creative endeavor on LimeWire, the platform allows you the option to publish your content. An intriguing feature follows this step: LimeWire automates the process of minting your creation as a Non-Fungible Token (NFT), utilizing either the Polygon or Algorand blockchain. This transformative step imbues your artwork with a unique digital signature, securing its authenticity and ownership in the decentralized realm.
Creators on LimeWire hold the power to decide the accessibility of their NFT creations. By opting for a public release, the content becomes discoverable by anyone, fostering a space for engagement and interaction. Furthermore, this choice opens the avenue for enthusiasts to trade the NFTs, adding a layer of community involvement to the artistic journey.
Alternatively, LimeWire acknowledges the importance of exclusivity. Creators can choose to share their posts exclusively with their premium subscribers. In doing so, the content remains a special offering solely for dedicated fans, creating an intimate and personalized experience within the LimeWire community. This flexibility in sharing options emphasizes LimeWire's commitment to empowering creators with choices in how they connect with their audience and distribute their digital creations.
After creating your content, you can choose to publish the content. It will automatically mint your creation as an NFT on the Polygon or Algorand blockchain. You can also choose whether to make it public or subscriber-only.
If you make it public, anyone can discover your content and even trade the NFTs. If you choose to share the post only with your premium subscribers, it will be exclusive only to your fans.
Additionally, you can earn ad revenue from your content creations as well.
When you publish content on LimeWire, you will receive 70% of all ad revenue from other users who view your images, music, and videos on the platform.
This revenue model will be much more beneficial to designers. You can experiment with the AI image and content generation tools and share your creations while earning a small income on the side.
The revenue you earn from your creations will come in the form of LMWR tokens, LimeWire’s own cryptocurrency.
Your earnings will be paid every month in LMWR, which you can then trade on many popular crypto exchange platforms like Kraken, ByBit, and UniSwap.
You can also use your LMWR tokens to pay for prompts when using LimeWire generative AI tools.
You can sign up to LimeWire to use its AI tools for free. You will receive 10 credits to use and generate up to 20 AI images per day. You will also receive 50% of the ad revenue share. However, you will get more benefits with premium plans.
For $9.99 per month, you will get 1,000 credits per month, up to 2 ,000 image generations, early access to new AI models, and 50% ad revenue share
For $29 per month, you will get 3750 credits per month, up to 7500 image generations, early access to new AI models, and 60% ad revenue share
For $49 per month, you will get 5,000 credits per month, up to 10,000 image generations, early access to new AI models, and 70% ad revenue share
For $99 per month, you will get 11,250 credits per month, up to 2 2,500 image generations, early access to new AI models, and 70% ad revenue share
With all premium plans, you will receive a Pro profile badge, full creation history, faster image generation, and no ads.
Sign Up Now To Get Free Credits
In conclusion, LimeWire emerges as a democratizing force in the creative landscape, providing an inclusive platform where anyone can unleash their artistic potential and effortlessly share their work. With the integration of AI, LimeWire eliminates traditional barriers, empowering designers, musicians, and artists to publish their creations and earn revenue with just a few clicks.
The ongoing commitment of LimeWire to innovation is evident in its plans to enhance generative AI tools with new features and models. The upcoming expansion to include music and video generation tools holds the promise of unlocking even more possibilities for creators. It sparks anticipation about the diverse and innovative ways in which artists will leverage these tools to produce and publish their own unique creations.
For those eager to explore, LimeWire's AI tools are readily accessible for free, providing an opportunity to experiment and delve into the world of generative art. As LimeWire continues to evolve, creators are encouraged to stay tuned for the launch of its forthcoming AI music and video generation tools, promising a future brimming with creative potential and endless artistic exploration
In this article, we explore the top 10 AI tools that are driving innovation and efficiency in various industries. These tools are designed to automate repetitive tasks, improve workflow, and increase productivity. The tools included in our list are some of the most advanced and widely used in the market, and are suitable for a variety of applications. Some of the tools focus on natural language processing, such as ChatGPT and Grammarly, while others focus on image and video generation, such as DALL-E and Lumen5. Other tools such as OpenAI Codex, Tabnine, Canva, Jasper AI,, and Surfer SEO are designed to help with specific tasks such as code understanding content writing and website optimization. This list is a great starting point for anyone looking to explore the possibilities of AI and how it can be applied to their business or project.
So let’s dive into
ChatGPT is a large language model that generates human-like
responses to a variety of prompts. It can be used for tasks such as language
translation, question answering, and text completion. It can
handle a wide range of topics and styles of writing, and generates coherent and
fluent text, but should be used with care as it may generate text that is
biased, offensive, or factually incorrect.
Pros:
Cons:
Overall, ChatGPT is a powerful tool for natural language
processing, but it should be used with care and with an understanding of its
limitations.
DALL-E is a generative model developed by OpenAI that is
capable of generating images from text prompts. It is based on the GPT-3 architecture,
which is a transformer-based neural network language model that has been
trained on a massive dataset of text. DALL-E can generate images that
are similar to a training dataset and it can generate high-resolution
images that are suitable for commercial use.
Pros:
Cons:
Overall, DALL-E is a powerful AI-based tool for generating
images, it can be used for a variety of applications such as creating images
for commercial use, gaming, and other creative projects. It is important to
note that the generated images should be reviewed and used with care, as they
may not be entirely original and could be influenced by the training data.
Lumen5 is a content creation platform that uses AI to help
users create videos, social media posts, and other types of content. It has
several features that make it useful for content creation and marketing,
including:
Pros:
Cons:
Overall, Lumen5 is a useful tool for creating content
quickly and easily, it can help automate the process of creating videos, social
media posts, and other types of content. However, the quality of the generated
content may vary depending on the source material and it is important to review
and edit the content before publishing it.
Grammarly is a writing-enhancement platform that uses AI to
check for grammar, punctuation, and spelling errors in the text. It also provides
suggestions for improving the clarity, concision, and readability of the text. It
has several features that make it useful for improving writing, including:
Pros:
Cons:
OpenAI Codex is a system developed by OpenAI that can
create code from natural language descriptions of software tasks. The system is
based on the GPT-3 model and can generate code in multiple programming
languages.
Pros:
Cons:
Overall, OpenAI Codex is a powerful tool that can help
automate the process of writing code and make it more accessible to
non-technical people. However, the quality of the generated code may vary
depending on the task description and it is important to review and test the
code before using it in a production environment. It is important to use the
tool as an aid, not a replacement for the developer's knowledge.
Tabnine is a code completion tool that uses AI to predict
and suggest code snippets. It is compatible with multiple programming languages
and can be integrated with various code editors.
Pros:
Cons:
Overall, TabNine is a useful tool for developers that can
help improve coding efficiency and reduce the time spent on writing code.
However, it is important to review the suggestions provided by the tool and use
them with caution, as they may not always be accurate or appropriate. It is
important to use the tool as an aid, not a replacement for the developer's
knowledge.
Jasper is a content writing and content generation tool that uses artificial intelligence to identify the best words and sentences for your writing style and medium in the most efficient, quick, and accessible way.
Pros:
Cons:
Surfer SEO is a software tool designed to help website
owners and digital marketers improve their search engine optimization (SEO)
efforts. The tool provides a variety of features that can be used to analyze a
website's on-page SEO, including:
Features:
Pros:
Cons:
Overall, Surfer SEO can be a useful tool for website owners
and digital marketers looking to improve their SEO efforts. However, it is
important to remember that it is just a tool and should be used in conjunction
with other SEO best practices. Additionally, the tool is not a guarantee of
better ranking.
Zapier is a web automation tool that allows users to
automate repetitive tasks by connecting different web applications together. It
does this by creating "Zaps" that automatically move data between
apps, and can also be used to trigger certain actions in one app based on
events in another app.
Features:
Pros:
Cons:
Overall, Zapier is a useful tool that can help users
automate repetitive tasks and improve workflow. It can save time and increase
productivity by connecting different web applications together. However, it may
require some technical skills and some features may require a paid
subscription. It is important to use the tool with caution and not to rely too
much on it, to understand the apps better.
Compose AI is a company that specializes in developing
natural language generation (NLG) software. Their software uses AI to
automatically generate written or spoken text from structured data, such as
spreadsheets, databases, or APIs.
Features:
Pros:
Cons:
Overall, Compose AI's NLG software can be a useful tool for
automating the process of creating written or spoken content from structured
data. However, the quality of the generated content may vary depending on the
data source, and it is essential to review the generated content before using
it in a production environment. It is important to use the tool as an aid, not
a replacement for the understanding of the data.
AI tools are becoming increasingly important in today's
business and technology landscape. They are designed to automate repetitive
tasks, improve workflow, and increase productivity. The top 10 AI tools
included in this article are some of the most advanced and widely used in the
market, and are suitable for various applications. Whether you're looking
to improve your natural language processing, create high-resolution images, or
optimize your website, there is an AI tool that can help. It's important to
research and evaluate the different tools available to determine which one is
the best fit for your specific needs. As AI technology continues to evolve,
these tools will become even more powerful and versatile and will play an even
greater role in shaping the future of business and technology.
Are you looking for a way to create content that is both effective and efficient? If so, then you should consider using an AI content generator. AI content generators are a great way to create content that is both engaging and relevant to your audience.
There are a number of different AI content generator tools available on the market, and it can be difficult to know which one is right for you. To help you make the best decision, we have compiled a list of the top 10 AI content generator tools that you should use in 2022.
So, without further ado, let’s get started!
Boss Mode: $99/Month
The utility of this service can be used for short-term or format business purposes such as product descriptions, website copy, market copy, and sales reports.
Free Trial – 7 days with 24/7 email support and 100 runs per day.
Pro Plan: $49 and yearly, it will cost you $420 i.e. $35 per month.
Wait! I've got a pretty sweet deal for you. Sign up through the link below, and you'll get (7,000 Free Words Plus 40% OFF) if you upgrade to the paid plan within four days.
Claim Your 7,000 Free Words With This Special Link - No Credit Card Required
Just like Outranking, Frase is an AI that helps you research, create and optimize your content to make it high quality within seconds. Frase works on SEO optimization where the content is made to the liking of search engines by optimizing keywords and keywords.
Solo Plan: $14.99/Month and $12/Month if billed yearly with 4 Document Credits for 1 user seat.
Basic Plan: $44.99/month and $39.99/month if billed yearly with 30 Document Credits for 1 user seat.
Team Plan: $114.99/month and $99.99/month if billed yearly for unlimited document credits for 3 users.
*SEO Add-ons and other premium features for $35/month irrespective of the plan.
Article Forge is another content generator that operates quite differently from the others on this list. Unlike Jasper.ai, which requires you to provide a brief and some information on what you want it to write this tool only asks for a keyword. From there, it’ll generate a complete article for you.
What’s excellent about Article Forge is they provide a 30-day money-back guarantee. You can choose between a monthly or yearly subscription. Unfortunately, they offer a free trial and no free plan:
Basic Plan: $27/Month
This plan allows users to produce up to 25k words each month. This is excellent for smaller blogs or those who are just starting.
Standard Plan: $57/month)
Unlimited Plan: $117/month
It’s important to note that Article Forge guarantees that all content generated through the platform passes Copyscape.
Rytr.me is a free AI content generator perfect for small businesses, bloggers, and students. The software is easy to use and can generate SEO-friendly blog posts, articles, and school papers in minutes.
Cons
Pricing
Rytr offers a free plan that comes with limited features. It covers up to 5,000 characters generated each month and has access to the built-in plagiarism checker. If you want to use all the features of the software, you can purchase one of the following plans:
Saver Plan: $9/month, $90/year
Writesonic is a free, easy-to-use AI content generator. The software is designed to help you create copy for marketing content, websites, and blogs. It's also helpful for small businesses or solopreneurs who need to produce content on a budget.
Writesonic is free with limited features. The free plan is more like a free trial, providing ten credits. After that, you’d need to upgrade to a paid plan. Here are your options:
Short-form: $15/month
Features:
Long-Form: $19/month
CopySmith is an AI content generator that can be used to create personal and professional documents, blogs, and presentations. It offers a wide range of features including the ability to easily create documents and presentations.
CopySmith also has several templates that you can use to get started quickly.
CopySmith offers a free trial with no credit card required. After the free trial, the paid plans are as follows:
Starter Plan: $19/month
Hypotenuse.ai is a free online tool that can help you create AI content. It's great for beginners because it allows you to create videos, articles, and infographics with ease. The software has a simple and easy-to-use interface that makes it perfect for new people looking for AI content generation.
Special Features
Hypotenuse doesn’t offer a free plan. Instead, it offers a free trial period where you can take the software for a run before deciding whether it’s the right choice for you or not. Other than that, here are its paid options:
Starter Plan: $29/month
Growth Plan: $59/month
Enterprise – pricing is custom, so don’t hesitate to contact the company for more information.
Kafkai comes with a free trial to help you understand whether it’s the right choice for you or not. Additionally, you can also take a look at its paid plans:
Writer Plan: $29/month Create 100 articles per month. $0.29/article
Newsroom Plan $49/month – Generate 250 articles a month at $0.20 per article.
Printing Press Plan: $129 /month Create up to 1000 articles a month at roughly $0.13/article.
Industrial Printer Plan: ($199 a month) – Generate 2500 articles each month for $0.08/article.
Peppertype.ai is an online AI content generator that’s easy to use and best for small business owners looking for a powerful copy and content writing tool to help them craft and generate various content for many purposes.
Unfortunately, Peppertype.ai isn’t free. However, it does have a free trial to try out the software before deciding whether it’s the right choice for you. Here are its paid plans:
personal Plan:$35/Month
Team Plan: $199/month
Enterprise – pricing is custom, so please contact the company for more information.
It is no longer a secret that humans are getting overwhelmed with the daily task of creating content. Our lives are busy, and the process of writing blog posts, video scripts, or other types of content is not our day job. In comparison, AI writers are not only cheaper to hire, but also perform tasks at a high level of excellence. This article explores 10 writing tools that used AI to create better content choose the one which meets your requirements and budget but in my opinion Jasper ai is one of the best tools to use to make high-quality content.
If you have any questions ask in the comments section
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The marketing industry is turning to artificial intelligence (AI) as a way to save time and execute smarter, more personalized campaigns. 61% of marketers say AI software is the most important aspect of their data strategy.
If you’re late to the AI party, don’t worry. It’s easier than you think to start leveraging artificial intelligence tools in your marketing strategy. Here are 11 AI marketing tools every marketer should start using today.
Personalize is an AI-powered technology that helps you identify and produce highly targeted sales and marketing campaigns by tracking the products and services your contacts are most interested in at any given time. The platform uses an algorithm to identify each contact’s top three interests, which are updated in real-time based on recent site activity.
Key Features
Seventh Sense provides behavioral analytics that helps you win attention in your customers’ overcrowded email inboxes. Choosing the best day and time to send an email is always a gamble. And while some days of the week generally get higher open rates than others, you’ll never be able to nail down a time that’s best for every customer. Seventh Sense eases your stress of having to figure out the perfect send-time and day for your email campaigns. The AI-based platform figures out the best timing and email frequency for each contact based on when they’re opening emails. The tool is primarily geared toward HubSpot and Marketo customers
Key Features
Phrasee uses artificial intelligence to help you write more effective subject lines. With its AI-based Natural Language Generation system, Phrasee uses data-driven insights to generate millions of natural-sounding copy variants that match your brand voice. The model is end-to-end, meaning when you feed the results back to Phrasee, the prediction model rebuilds so it can continuously learn from your audience.
Key Features
HubSpot Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an integral tool for the Human Content team. It uses machine learning to determine how search engines understand and categorize your content. HubSpot SEO helps you improve your search engine rankings and outrank your competitors. Search engines reward websites that organize their content around core subjects, or topic clusters. HubSpot SEO helps you discover and rank for the topics that matter to your business and customers.
Key Features
When you’re limited to testing two variables against each other at a time, it can take months to get the results you’re looking for. Evolv AI lets you test all your ideas at once. It uses advanced algorithms to identify the top-performing concepts, combine them with each other, and repeat the process to achieve the best site experience.
Key Features
Acrolinx is a content alignment platform that helps brands scale and improves the quality of their content. It’s geared toward enterprises – its major customers include big brands like Google, Adobe, and Amazon - to help them scale their writing efforts. Instead of spending time chasing down and fixing typos in multiple places throughout an article or blog post, you can use Acrolinx to do it all right there in one place. You start by setting your preferences for style, grammar, tone of voice, and company-specific word usage. Then, Acrolinx checks and scores your existing content to find what’s working and suggest areas for improvement. The platform provides real-time guidance and suggestions to make writing better and strengthen weak pages.
Key features
MarketMuse uses an algorithm to help marketers build content strategies. The tool shows you where to target keywords to rank in specific topic categories, and recommends keywords you should go after if you want to own particular topics. It also identifies gaps and opportunities for new content and prioritizes them by their probable impact on your rankings. The algorithm compares your content with thousands of articles related to the same topic to uncover what’s missing from your site.
Key features:
Copilot is a suite of tools that help eCommerce businesses maintain real-time communication with customers around the clock at every stage of the funnel. Promote products, recover shopping carts and send updates or reminders directly through Messenger.
Key features:
Yotpo’s deep learning technology evaluates your customers’ product reviews to help you make better business decisions. It identifies key topics that customers mention related to your products—and their feelings toward them. The AI engine extracts relevant reviews from past buyers and presents them in smart displays to convert new shoppers. Yotpo also saves you time moderating reviews. The AI-powered moderation tool automatically assigns a score to each review and flags reviews with negative sentiment so you can focus on quality control instead of manually reviewing every post.
Key features:
Albert is a self-learning software that automates the creation of marketing campaigns for your brand. It analyzes vast amounts of data to run optimized campaigns autonomously, allowing you to feed in your own creative content and target markets, and then use data from its database to determine key characteristics of a serious buyer. Albert identifies potential customers that match those traits, and runs trial campaigns on a small group of customers—with results refined by Albert himself—before launching it on a larger scale.
Albert plugs into your existing marketing technology stack, so you still have access to your accounts, ads, search, social media, and more. Albert maps tracking and attribution to your source of truth so you can determine which channels are driving your business.
Key features:
There are many tools and companies out there that offer AI tools, but this is a small list of resources that we have found to be helpful. If you have any other suggestions, feel free to share them in the comments below this article. As marketing evolves at such a rapid pace, new marketing strategies will be invented that we haven't even dreamed of yet. But for now, this list should give you a good starting point on your way to implementing AI into your marketing mix.
Note: This article contains affiliate links, meaning we make a small commission if you buy any premium plan from our link.
Imagine a world in which you can do transactions and many other things without having to give your personal information. A world in which you don’t need to rely on banks or governments anymore. Sounds amazing, right? That’s exactly what blockchain technology allows us to do.
It’s like your computer’s hard drive. blockchain is a technology that lets you store data in digital blocks, which are connected together like links in a chain.
Blockchain technology was originally invented in 1991 by two mathematicians, Stuart Haber and W. Scot Stornetta. They first proposed the system to ensure that timestamps could not be tampered with.
A few years later, in 1998, software developer Nick Szabo proposed using a similar kind of technology to secure a digital payments system he called “Bit Gold.” However, this innovation was not adopted until Satoshi Nakamoto claimed to have invented the first Blockchain and Bitcoin.
A blockchain is a distributed database shared between the nodes of a computer network. It saves information in digital format. Many people first heard of blockchain technology when they started to look up information about bitcoin.
Blockchain is used in cryptocurrency systems to ensure secure, decentralized records of transactions.
Blockchain allowed people to guarantee the fidelity and security of a record of data without the need for a third party to ensure accuracy.
To understand how a blockchain works, Consider these basic steps:
Let’s get to know more about the blockchain.
Blockchain records digital information and distributes it across the network without changing it. The information is distributed among many users and stored in an immutable, permanent ledger that can't be changed or destroyed. That's why blockchain is also called "Distributed Ledger Technology" or DLT.
Here’s how it works:
And that’s the beauty of it! The process may seem complicated, but it’s done in minutes with modern technology. And because technology is advancing rapidly, I expect things to move even more quickly than ever.
Even though blockchain is integral to cryptocurrency, it has other applications. For example, blockchain can be used for storing reliable data about transactions. Many people confuse blockchain with cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and ethereum.
Blockchain already being adopted by some big-name companies, such as Walmart, AIG, Siemens, Pfizer, and Unilever. For example, IBM's Food Trust uses blockchain to track food's journey before reaching its final destination.
Although some of you may consider this practice excessive, food suppliers and manufacturers adhere to the policy of tracing their products because bacteria such as E. coli and Salmonella have been found in packaged foods. In addition, there have been isolated cases where dangerous allergens such as peanuts have accidentally been introduced into certain products.
Tracing and identifying the sources of an outbreak is a challenging task that can take months or years. Thanks to the Blockchain, however, companies now know exactly where their food has been—so they can trace its location and prevent future outbreaks.
Blockchain technology allows systems to react much faster in the event of a hazard. It also has many other uses in the modern world.
Blockchain technology is safe, even if it’s public. People can access the technology using an internet connection.
Have you ever been in a situation where you had all your data stored at one place and that one secure place got compromised? Wouldn't it be great if there was a way to prevent your data from leaking out even when the security of your storage systems is compromised?
Blockchain technology provides a way of avoiding this situation by using multiple computers at different locations to store information about transactions. If one computer experiences problems with a transaction, it will not affect the other nodes.
Instead, other nodes will use the correct information to cross-reference your incorrect node. This is called “Decentralization,” meaning all the information is stored in multiple places.
Blockchain guarantees your data's authenticity—not just its accuracy, but also its irreversibility. It can also be used to store data that are difficult to register, like legal contracts, state identifications, or a company's product inventory.
Blockchain has many advantages and disadvantages.
I’ll answer the most frequently asked questions about blockchain in this section.
Blockchain is not a cryptocurrency but a technology that makes cryptocurrencies possible. It's a digital ledger that records every transaction seamlessly.
Yes, blockchain can be theoretically hacked, but it is a complicated task to be achieved. A network of users constantly reviews it, which makes hacking the blockchain difficult.
Coinbase Global is currently the biggest blockchain company in the world. The company runs a commendable infrastructure, services, and technology for the digital currency economy.
Blockchain is a decentralized technology. It’s a chain of distributed ledgers connected with nodes. Each node can be any electronic device. Thus, one owns blockhain.
Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency, which is powered by Blockchain technology while Blockchain is a distributed ledger of cryptocurrency
Generally a database is a collection of data which can be stored and organized using a database management system. The people who have access to the database can view or edit the information stored there. The client-server network architecture is used to implement databases. whereas a blockchain is a growing list of records, called blocks, stored in a distributed system. Each block contains a cryptographic hash of the previous block, timestamp and transaction information. Modification of data is not allowed due to the design of the blockchain. The technology allows decentralized control and eliminates risks of data modification by other parties.
Blockchain has a wide spectrum of applications and, over the next 5-10 years, we will likely see it being integrated into all sorts of industries. From finance to healthcare, blockchain could revolutionize the way we store and share data. Although there is some hesitation to adopt blockchain systems right now, that won't be the case in 2022-2023 (and even less so in 2026). Once people become more comfortable with the technology and understand how it can work for them, owners, CEOs and entrepreneurs alike will be quick to leverage blockchain technology for their own gain. Hope you like this article if you have any question let me know in the comments section
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Grammarly is a tool that checks for grammatical errors, spelling, and punctuation.it gives you comprehensive feedback on your writing. You can use this tool to proofread and edit articles, blog posts, emails, etc.
Grammarly also detects all types of mistakes, including sentence structure issues and misused words. It also gives you suggestions on style changes, punctuation, spelling, and grammar all are in real-time. The free version covers the basics like identifying grammar and spelling mistakes
whereas the Premium version offers a lot more functionality, it detects plagiarism in your content, suggests word choice, or adds fluency to it.
ProWritingAid is a style and grammar checker for content creators and writers. It helps to optimize word choice, punctuation errors, and common grammar mistakes, providing detailed reports to help you improve your writing.
ProWritingAid can be used as an add-on to WordPress, Gmail, and Google Docs. The software also offers helpful articles, videos, quizzes, and explanations to help improve your writing.
Here are some key features of ProWriting Aid:
Grammarly and ProWritingAid are well-known grammar-checking software. However, if you're like most people who can't decide which to use, here are some different points that may be helpful in your decision.
As both writing assistants are great in their own way, you need to choose the one that suits you best.
Both ProWritingAid and Grammarly are awesome writing tools, without a doubt. but as per my experience, Grammarly is a winner here because Grammarly helps you to review and edit your content. Grammarly highlights all the mistakes in your writing within seconds of copying and pasting the content into Grammarly’s editor or using the software’s native feature in other text editors.
Not only does it identify tiny grammatical and spelling errors, it tells you when you overlook punctuations where they are needed. And, beyond its plagiarism-checking capabilities, Grammarly helps you proofread your content. Even better, the software offers a free plan that gives you access to some of its features.
Are you searching for an ecomerce platform to help you build an online store and sell products?
In this Sellfy review, we'll talk about how this eCommerce platform can let you sell digital products while keeping full control of your marketing.
And the best part? Starting your business can be done in just five minutes.
Let us then talk about the Sellfy platform and all the benefits it can bring to your business.
Sellfy is an eCommerce solution that allows digital content creators, including writers, illustrators, designers, musicians, and filmmakers, to sell their products online. Sellfy provides a customizable storefront where users can display their digital products and embed "Buy Now" buttons on their website or blog. Sellfy product pages enable users to showcase their products from different angles with multiple images and previews from Soundcloud, Vimeo, and YouTube. Files of up to 2GB can be uploaded to Sellfy, and the company offers unlimited bandwidth and secure file storage. Users can also embed their entire store or individual project widgets in their site, with the ability to preview how widgets will appear before they are displayed.
Sellfy includes:
Sellfy is a powerful e-commerce platform that helps you personalize your online storefront. You can add your logo, change colors, revise navigation, and edit the layout of your store. Sellfy also allows you to create a full shopping cart so customers can purchase multiple items. And Sellfy gives you the ability to set your language or let customers see a translated version of your store based on their location.
Sellfy gives you the option to host your store directly on its platform, add a custom domain to your store, and use it as an embedded storefront on your website. Sellfy also optimizes its store offerings for mobile devices, allowing for a seamless checkout experience.
Sellfy allows creators to host all their products and sell all of their digital products on one platform. Sellfy also does not place storage limits on your store but recommends that files be no larger than 5GB. Creators can sell both standard and subscription-based products in any file format that is supported by the online marketplace. Customers can purchase products instantly after making a purchase – there is no waiting period.
You can organize your store by creating your product categories, sorting by any characteristic you choose. Your title, description, and the image will be included on each product page. In this way, customers can immediately evaluate all of your products. You can offer different pricing options for all of your products, including "pay what you want," in which the price is entirely up to the customer. This option allows you to give customers control over the cost of individual items (without a minimum price) or to set pricing minimums—a good option if you're in a competitive market or when you have higher-end products. You can also offer set prices per product as well as free products to help build your store's popularity.
Sellfy is ideal for selling digital content, such as ebooks. But it does not allow you to copyrighted material (that you don't have rights to distribute).
Sellfy offers several ways to share your store, enabling you to promote your business on different platforms. Sellfy lets you integrate it with your existing website using "buy now" buttons, embed your entire storefront, or embed certain products so you can reach more people. Sellfy also enables you to connect with your Facebook page and YouTube channel, maximizing your visibility.
Sellfy is a simple online platform that allows customers to buy your products directly through your store. Sellfy has two payment processing options: PayPal and Stripe. You will receive instant payments with both of these processors, and your customer data is protected by Sellfy's secure (PCI-compliant) payment security measures. In addition to payment security, Sellfy provides anti-fraud tools to help protect your products including PDF stamping, unique download links, and limited download attempts.
The Sellfy platform includes marketing and analytics tools to help you manage your online store. You can send email product updates and collect newsletter subscribers through the platform. With Sellfy, you can also offer discount codes and product upsells, as well as create and track Facebook and Twitter ads for your store. The software's analytics dashboard will help you track your best-performing products, generated revenue, traffic channels, top locations, and overall store performance.
To expand functionality and make your e-commerce store run more efficiently, Sellfy offers several integrations. Google Analytics and Webhooks, as well as integrations with Patreon and Facebook Live Chat, are just a few of the options available. Sellfy allows you to connect to Zapier, which gives you access to hundreds of third-party apps, including tools like Mailchimp, Trello, Salesforce, and more.
The free plan comes with:
Starter plan comes with:
The business plan comes with:
The premium plan comes with:
Sellfy has its benefits and downsides, but fortunately, the pros outweigh the cons.
In this article, we have taken a look at some of the biggest benefits associated with using sellfy for eCommerce. Once you compare these benefits to what you get with other platforms such as Shopify, you should find that it is worth your time to consider sellfy for your business. After reading this article all of your questions will be solved but if you have still some questions let me know in the comment section below, I will be happy to answer your questions.
Note: This article contains affiliate links which means we make a small commission if you buy sellfy premium plan from our link.
Are you looking for a new graphic design tool? Would you like to read a detailed review of Canva? As it's one of the tools I love using. I am also writing my first ebook using canva and publish it soon on my site you can download it is free. Let's start the review.
Canva has a web version and also a mobile app
Canva is a free graphic design web application that allows you to create invitations, business cards, flyers, lesson plans, banners, and more using professionally designed templates. You can upload your own photos from your computer or from Google Drive, and add them to Canva's templates using a simple drag-and-drop interface. It's like having a basic version of Photoshop that doesn't require Graphic designing knowledge to use. It’s best for nongraphic designers.
Canva is a great tool for small business owners, online entrepreneurs, and marketers who don’t have the time and want to edit quickly.
To create sophisticated graphics, a tool such as Photoshop can is ideal. To use it, you’ll need to learn its hundreds of features, get familiar with the software, and it’s best to have a good background in design, too.
Also running the latest version of Photoshop you need a high-end computer.
So here Canva takes place, with Canva you can do all that with drag-and-drop feature. It’s also easier to use and free. Also an even-more-affordable paid version is available for $12.95 per month.
The product is available in three plans: Free, Pro ($12.99/month per user or $119.99/year for up to 5 people), and Enterprise ($30 per user per month, minimum 25 people).
To get started on Canva, you will need to create an account by providing your email address, Google, Facebook or Apple credentials. You will then choose your account type between student, teacher, small business, large company, non-profit, or personal. Based on your choice of account type, templates will be recommended to you.
You can sign up for a free trial of Canva Pro, or you can start with the free version to get a sense of whether it’s the right graphic design tool for your needs.
When you sign up for an account, Canva will suggest different post types to choose from. Based on the type of account you set up you'll be able to see templates categorized by the following categories: social media posts, documents, presentations, marketing, events, ads, launch your business, build your online brand, etc.
Start by choosing a template for your post or searching for something more specific. Search by social network name to see a list of post types on each network.
Next, you can choose a template. Choose from hundreds of templates that are ready to go, with customizable photos, text, and other elements.
You can start your design by choosing from a variety of ready-made templates, searching for a template matching your needs, or working with a blank template.
Inside the Canva designer, the Elements tab gives you access to lines and shapes, graphics, photos, videos, audio, charts, photo frames, and photo grids.The search box on the Elements tab lets you search everything on Canva.
To begin with, Canva has a large library of elements to choose from. To find them, be specific in your search query. You may also want to search in the following tabs to see various elements separately:
The Photos tab lets you search for and choose from millions of professional stock photos for your templates.
You can replace the photos in our templates to create a new look. This can also make the template more suited to your industry.
You can find photos on other stock photography sites like pexel, pixabay and many more or simply upload your own photos.
When you choose an image, Canva’s photo editing features let you adjust the photo’s settings (brightness, contrast, saturation, etc.), crop, or animate it.
When you subscribe to Canva Pro, you get access to a number of premium features, including the Background Remover. This feature allows you to remove the background from any stock photo in library or any image you upload.
The Text tab lets you add headings, normal text, and graphical text to your design.
When you click on text, you'll see options to adjust the font, font size, color, format, spacing, and text effects (like shadows).
Canva Pro subscribers can choose from a large library of fonts on the Brand Kit or the Styles tab. Enterprise-level controls ensure that visual content remains on-brand, no matter how many people are working on it.
Create an animated image or video by adding audio to capture user’s attention in social news feeds.
If you want to use audio from another stock site or your own audio tracks, you can upload them in the Uploads tab or from the more option.
Want to create your own videos? Choose from thousands of stock video clips. You’ll find videos that range upto 2 minutes
You can upload your own videos as well as videos from other stock sites in the Uploads tab.
Once you have chosen a video, you can use the editing features in Canva to trim the video, flip it, and adjust its transparency.
On the Background tab, you’ll find free stock photos to serve as backgrounds on your designs. Change out the background on a template to give it a more personal touch.
The Styles tab lets you quickly change the look and feel of your template with just a click. And if you have a Canva Pro subscription, you can upload your brand’s custom colors and fonts to ensure designs stay on brand.
If you have a Canva Pro subscription, you’ll have a Logos tab. Here, you can upload variations of your brand logo to use throughout your designs.
With Canva, you can also create your own logos. Note that you cannot trademark a logo with stock content in it.
With Canva, free users can download and share designs to multiple platforms including Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Slack and Tumblr.
Canva Pro subscribers can create multiple post formats from one design. For example, you can start by designing an Instagram post, and Canva's Magic Resizer can resize it for other networks, Stories, Reels, and other formats.
Canva Pro subscribers can also use Canva’s Content Planner to post content on eight different accounts on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Slack, and Tumblr.
Canva Pro allows you to work with your team on visual content. Designs can be created inside Canva, and then sent to your team members for approval. Everyone can make comments, edits, revisions, and keep track via the version history.
When it comes to printing your designs, Canva has you covered. With an extensive selection of printing options, they can turn your designs into anything from banners and wall art to mugs and t-shirts.
Canva Print is perfect for any business seeking to make a lasting impression. Create inspiring designs people will want to wear, keep, and share. Hand out custom business cards that leave a lasting impression on customers' minds.
The Canva app is available on the Apple App Store and Google Play. The Canva app has earned a 4.9 out of five star rating from over 946.3K Apple users and a 4.5 out of five star rating from over 6,996,708 Google users.
In addition to mobile apps, you can use Canva’s integration with other Internet services to add images and text from sources like Google Maps, Emojis, photos from Google Drive and Dropbox, YouTube videos, Flickr photos, Bitmojis, and other popular visual content elements.
In general, Canva is an excellent tool for those who need simple images for projects. If you are a graphic designer with experience, you will find Canva’s platform lacking in customization and advanced features – particularly vectors. But if you have little design experience, you will find Canva easier to use than advanced graphic design tools like Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator for most projects. If you have any queries let me know in the comments section.
If you are looking for the best wordpress plugins, then you are at the right place. Here is the list of best wordpress plugins that you should use in your blog to boost SEO, strong your security and know every aspects of your blog . Although creating a good content is one factor but there are many wordpress plugins that perform different actions and add on to your success. So let's start
Those users who are serious about SEO, Yoast SEO will do the work for them to reach their goals. All they need to do is select a keyword, and the plugin will then optimize your page according to the specified keyword
Yoast offers many popular SEO WordPress plugin functions. It gives you real-time page analysis to optimize your content, images, meta descriptions, titles, and kewords. Yoast also checks the length of your sentences and paragraphs, whether you’re using enough transition words or subheadings, how often you use passive voice, and so on. Yoast tells Google whether or not to index a page or a set of pages too.
A website running WordPress can put a lot of strain on a server, which increases the chances that the website will crash and harm your business. To avoid such an unfortunate situation and ensure that all your pages load quickly, you need a caching plugin like WP Rocket.
WP Rocket plugin designed to increases your website speed. Instead of waiting for pages to be saved to cache, WP Rocket turns on desired caching settings, like page cache and gzip compression. The plugin also activates other features, such as CDN support and llazy image loadding, to enhance your site speed.
Wordfence Security is a WordPress firewall and security scanner that keeps your site safe from malicious hackers, spam, and other online threats. This Plugin comes with a web application firewall (WAF) called tthread Defence Feed that helps to prevents brute force attacks by ensuring you set stronger passwords and limiting login attempts. It searches for malware and compares code, theme, and plugin files with the records in the WordPress.org repository to verify their integrity and reports changes to you.
Wordfence security scanner provides you with actionable insights into your website's security status and will alert you to any potential threats, keeping it safe and secure. It also includes login security features that let you activate reCAPTCHA and two-factor authentication for your website.
Akismet can help prevent spam from appearing on your site. Every day, it automatically checks every comment against a global database of spam to block malicious content. With Akismet, you also won’t have to worry about innocent comments being caught by the filter or false positives. You can simply tell Akismet about those and it will get better over time. It also checks your contact form submissions against its global spam database and weed out unnecessary fake information.
Contact Form 7 is a plug-in that allows you to create contact forms that make it easy for your users to send messages to your site. The plug-in was developed by Takayuki Miyoshi and lets you create multiple contact forms on the same site; it also integrates Akismet spam filtering and lets you customize the styling and fields that you want to use in the form. The plug-in provides CAPTCHA and Ajax submitting.
When you’re looking for an easy way to manage your Google Analytics-related web tracking services, Monster Insights can help. You can add, customize, and integrate Google Analytics data with ease so you’ll be able to see how every webpage performs, which online campaigns bring in the most traffic, and which content readers engage with the most. It’s same as Google Analytics
It is a powerful tool to keep track of your traffic stats. With it, you can view stats for your active sessions, conversions, and bounce rates. You’ll also be able to see your total revenue, the products you sell, and how your site is performing when it comes to referrals.
MonsterInsights offers a free plan that includes basic Google Analytics integration, data insights, and user activity metrics.
Pretty Links is a powerful WordPress plugin that enables you to easily cloak affiliate links on your websiteIt even allows you to easily redirect visitors based on a specific request, including permanent 301 and temporary 302/307 redirects.
Pretty links also helps you to automatically shorten your url for your post and pages.
You can also enable auto-linking feature to automatically add affiliate links for certain keywords
We hope you’ve found this article useful. We appreciate you reading and welcome your feedback if you have it.
Ginger VS Grammarly: When it comes to grammar checkers, Ginger and Grammarly are two of the most popular choices on the market. This article aims to highlight the specifics of each one so that you can make a more informed decision about the one you'll use.
If you are a writer, you must have heard of Grammarly before. Grammarly has over 10M users across the globe, it's probably the most popular AI writing enhancement tool, without a doubt. That's why there's a high chance that you already know about Grammarly.
But today we are going to do a comparison between Ginger and Grammarly, So let's define Grammarly here. Like Ginger, Grammarly is an AI writing assistant that checks for grammatical errors, spellings, and punctuation. The free version covers the basics like identifying grammar and spelling mistakes
While the Premium version offers a lot more functionality, it detects plagiarism in your content, suggests word choice, or adds fluency to it.
Ginger is a writing enhancement tool that not only catches typos and grammatical mistakes but also suggests content improvements. As you type, it picks up on errors then shows you what’s wrong, and suggests a fix. It also provides you with synonyms and definitions of words and allows you to translate your text into dozens of languages.
In addition, the program provides a text reader, so you can gauge your writing’s conversational tone.
Grammarly and Ginger are two popular grammar checker software brands that help you to become a better writer. But if you’re undecided about which software to use, consider these differences:
Grammarly Score: 7/10
Ginger:4/10
So Grammarly wins here.
For companies with three or more employees, the Business plan costs $12.50/month for each member of your team.
Ginger Wins Here
While both writing assistants are fantastic in their ways, you need to choose the one you want.
For example, go for Grammarly if you want a plagiarism tool included.
Choose Ginger if you want to write in languages other than English. I will to the differences for you in order to make the distinctions clearer.
Which one you like let me know in the comments section also give your opinions in the comments section below.
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are the most popular digital assets today, capturing the attention of cryptocurrency investors, whales and people from around the world. People find it amazing that some users spend thousands or millions of dollars on a single NFT-based image of a monkey or other token, but you can simply take a screenshot for free. So here we share some freuently asked question about NFTs.
NFT stands for non-fungible token, which is a cryptographic token on a blockchain with unique identification codes that distinguish it from other tokens. NFTs are unique and not interchangeable, which means no two NFTs are the same. NFTs can be a unique artwork, GIF, Images, videos, Audio album. in-game items, collectibles etc.
A blockchain is a distributed digital ledger that allows for the secure storage of data. By recording any kind of information—such as bank account transactions, the ownership of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), or Decentralized Finance (DeFi) smart contracts—in one place, and distributing it to many different computers, blockchains ensure that data can’t be manipulated without everyone in the system being aware.
The value of an NFT comes from its ability to be traded freely and securely on the blockchain, which is not possible with other current digital ownership solutionsThe NFT points to its location on the blockchain, but doesn’t necessarily contain the digital property. For example, if you replace one bitcoin with another, you will still have the same thing. If you buy a non-fungible item, such as a movie ticket, it is impossible to replace it with any other movie ticket because each ticket is unique to a specific time and place.
One of the unique characteristics of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) is that they can be tokenised to create a digital certificate of ownership that can be bought, sold and traded on the blockchain.
As with crypto-currency, records of who owns what are stored on a ledger that is maintained by thousands of computers around the world. These records can’t be forged because the whole system operates on an open-source network.
NFTs also contain smart contracts—small computer programs that run on the blockchain—that give the artist, for example, a cut of any future sale of the token.
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) aren't cryptocurrencies, but they do use blockchain technology. Many NFTs are based on Ethereum, where the blockchain serves as a ledger for all the transactions related to said NFT and the properties it represents.5) How to make an NFT?
Anyone can create an NFT. All you need is a digital wallet, some ethereum tokens and a connection to an NFT marketplace where you’ll be able to upload and sell your creations
When you purchase a stock in NFT, that purchase is recorded on the blockchain—the bitcoin ledger of transactions—and that entry acts as your proof of ownership.
The value of an NFT varies a lot based on the digital asset up for grabs. People use NFTs to trade and sell digital art, so when creating an NFT, you should consider the popularity of your digital artwork along with historical statistics.
In the year 2021, a digital artist called Pak created an artwork called The Merge. It was sold on the Nifty Gateway NFT market for $91.8 million.
Non-fungible tokens can be used in investment opportunities. One can purchase an NFT and resell it at a profit. Certain NFT marketplaces let sellers of NFTs keep a percentage of the profits from sales of the assets they create.
Many people want to buy NFTs because it lets them support the arts and own something cool from their favorite musicians, brands, and celebrities. NFTs also give artists an opportunity to program in continual royalties if someone buys their work. Galleries see this as a way to reach new buyers interested in art.
There are many places to buy digital assets, like opensea and their policies vary. On top shot, for instance, you sign up for a waitlist that can be thousands of people long. When a digital asset goes on sale, you are occasionally chosen to purchase it.
To mint an NFT token, you must pay some amount of gas fee to process the transaction on the Etherum blockchain, but you can mint your NFT on a different blockchain called Polygon to avoid paying gas fees. This option is available on OpenSea and this simply denotes that your NFT will only be able to trade using Polygon's blockchain and not Etherum's blockchain. Mintable allows you to mint NFTs for free without paying any gas fees.
The answer is no. Non-Fungible Tokens are minted on the blockchain using cryptocurrencies such as Etherum, Solana, Polygon, and so on. Once a Non-Fungible Token is minted, the transaction is recorded on the blockchain and the contract or license is awarded to whoever has that Non-Fungible Token in their wallet.
You can sell your work and creations by attaching a license to it on the blockchain, where its ownership can be transferred. This lets you get exposure without losing full ownership of your work. Some of the most successful projects include Cryptopunks, Bored Ape Yatch Club NFTs, SandBox, World of Women and so on. These NFT projects have gained popularity globally and are owned by celebrities and other successful entrepreneurs. Owning one of these NFTs gives you an automatic ticket to exclusive business meetings and life-changing connections.
That’s a wrap. Hope you guys found this article enlightening. I just answer some question with my limited knowledge about NFTs. If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to drop them in the comment section below. Also I have a question for you, Is bitcoin an NFTs? let me know in The comment section below
Are you a great Chrome user? That’s nice to hear. But first, consider whether or not there are any essential Chrome extensions you are currently missing from your browsing life, so here we're going to share with you 10 Best Chrome Extensions That Are Perfect for Everyone. So Let's Start.
When you have too several passwords to remember, LastPass remembers them for you.
This chrome extension is an easy way to save you time and increase security. It’s a single password manager that will log you into all of your accounts. you simply ought to bear in mind one word: your LastPass password to log in to all or any your accounts.
Features
MozBar is an SEO toolbar extension that makes it easy for you to analyze your web pages' SEO while you surf. You can customize your search so that you see data for a particular region or for all regions. You get data such as website and domain authority and link profile. The status column tells you whether there are any no-followed links to the page.You can also compare link metrics. There is a pro version of MozBar, too.
Grammarly is a real-time grammar checking and spelling tool for online writing. It checks spelling, grammar, and punctuation as you type, and has a dictionary feature that suggests related words. if you use mobile phones for writing than Grammerly also have a mobile keyboard app.
VidIQ is a SaaS product and Chrome Extension that makes it easier to manage and optimize your YouTube channels. It keeps you informed about your channel's performance with real-time analytics and powerful insights.
Features
ColorZilla is a browser extension that allows you to find out the exact color of any object in your web browser. This is especially useful when you want to match elements on your page to the color of an image.
Features
Honey is a chrome extension with which you save each product from the website and notify it when it is available at low price it's one among the highest extensions for Chrome that finds coupon codes whenever you look online.
Features
GMass (or Gmail Mass) permits users to compose and send mass emails using Gmail. it is a great tool as a result of you'll use it as a replacement for a third-party email sending platform. you will love GMass to spice up your emailing functionality on the platform.
It's a Chrome extension for geeks that enables you to highlight and save what you see on the web.
It's been designed by Notion, that could be a Google space different that helps groups craft higher ideas and collaborate effectively.
Features
If you are someone who works online, you need to surf the internet to get your business done. And often there is no time to read or analyze something. But it's important that you do it. Notion Web Clipper will help you with that.
WhatFont is a Chrome extension that allows web designers to easily identify and compare different fonts on a page. The first time you use it on any page, WhatFont will copy the selected page.It Uses this page to find out what fonts are present and generate an image that shows all those fonts in different sizes. Besides the apparent websites like Google or Amazon, you'll conjointly use it on sites wherever embedded fonts ar used.
Similar Web is an SEO add on for both Chrome and Firefox.It allows you to check web site traffic and key metrics for any web site, as well as engagement rate, traffic ranking, keyword ranking, and traffic source. this is often a good tool if you are looking to seek out new and effective SEO ways similarly as analyze trends across the web.
Features
I know everyone knows how to install extension in pc but most of people don't know how to install it in android phone so i will show you how to install it in android
1. Download Kiwi browser from Play Store and then Open it.
2. Tap the three dots at the top right corner and select Extension.
3. Click on (+From Store) to access chrome web store or simple search chrome web store and access it.
4. Once you found an extension click on add to chrome a message will pop-up asking if you wish to confirm your choice. Hit OK to install the extension in the Kiwi browser.
5. To manage extensions on the browser, tap the three dots in the upper right corner. Then select Extensions to access a catalog of installed extensions that you can disable, update or remove with just a few clicks.
Your Chrome extensions should install on Android, but there’s no guarantee all of them will work. Because Google Chrome Extensions are not optimized for Android devices.
We hope this list of 10 best chrome extensions that is perfect for everyone will help you in picking the right Chrome Extensions. We have selected the extensions after matching their features to the needs of different categories of people. Also which extension you like the most let me know in the comment section
Quantum computers are probably coming, though we don’t know when—and when they arrive, they will, most likely, be able to break our standard public-key cryptography algorithms. In anticipation of this possibility, cryptographers have been working on quantum-resistant public-key algorithms. The National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) has been hosting a competition since 2017, and there already are several proposed standards. Most of these are based on lattice problems.
The mathematics of lattice cryptography revolve around combining sets of vectors—that’s the lattice—in a multi-dimensional space. These lattices are filled with multi-dimensional periodicities. The ...
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.
A lively chat saw different views on gas-guzzling cars and whether we are able to halt the climate emergency, but could they at least agree on air pollution?
Bob, 76, Portishead
Occupation Retired, former IT director
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...Reconstructing buildings destroyed in first four months of Israeli assault will generate nearly 60m tonnes of CO2 equivalent – study
The carbon cost of rebuilding Gaza will be greater than the annual greenhouse gas emissions generated individually by 135 countries, exacerbating the global climate emergency on top of the unprecedented death toll, new research reveals.
Reconstructing the estimated 200,000 apartment buildings, schools, universities, hospitals, mosques, bakeries, water and sewage plants damaged and destroyed by Israel in the first four months of the war on Gaza will generate as much as 60m tonnes of CO2 equivalent (tCO2e), according to new analysis by researchers in the UK and US. This is on a par with the total 2022 emissions generated by countries such as Portugal and Sweden – and more than twice the annual emissions of Afghanistan.
The planet-warming emissions generated by aerial and ground attacks during the first 120 days of the war on Gaza were greater than the annual carbon footprint of 26 of the world’s most climate-vulnerable nations including Vanuatu and Greenland, according to the research, which is yet to be peer-reviewed.
More than 99% of the estimated 652,552 metric tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2 equivalent/CO2e) estimated to have been generated in the first four months after the Hamas attack on 7 October are linked to Israel’s aerial bombardment and ground invasion of Gaza.
Almost 30% of the total CO2e emissions were generated by the 244 American cargo planes known to have flown bombs, munitions and other military supplies to Israel in the first 120 days.
According to the calculation, which is almost certainly a significant underestimate due to missing military emissions data, the carbon cost of the first 120 days of Israel’s assault on Gaza was equivalent to the combined annual energy use of 77,200 American households.
Hamas rockets fired into Israel between October 2023 and February 2024 generated an estimated 1,140 tCO2e. Another 2,700 tCO2e were attributed to the fuel stored by the group prior to 7 October. Combined, the Hamas carbon footprint over the first 120 days was equivalent to the annual energy use of 454 American homes.
Continue reading...Low-carbon electricity investment driven by solar projects but oil and gas spending still too high to meet climate goals
Global investment in low-carbon electricity will rise to 10 times as much as fossil fuel power this year due to an increase in spending on solar projects, according to the International Energy Agency.
The global energy watchdog has predicted that investment in clean energy including renewables and nuclear power as well as electric vehicles, power grids, energy storage, low-emissions fuels, efficiency improvements and heat pumps will reach $2tn this year.
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.
Once upon a time, it was only hardcore bodybuilders who pumped themselves up with testosterone. Today it is no longer niche. But how dangerous is it?
Dave is an ordinary office worker in the north of England. He is about average height for a British man – 5ft 10in – and to catch a glimpse of him between 9am and 5pm, the only hint that his leisure time is spent shattering the natural limits of human growth might be his slightly ill-fitting XXL shirt, or the fact that he sometimes wears women’s trousers, to better accommodate the steep slope between his trim waist and bulging thighs.
But in the videos and photos Dave posts online, to approving comments from other weightlifters (“huge progress ”), he is a total beast. His chest looks herculean, and the skin on his legs is pulled so tight that it has ceased to conceal the striated landscape of muscles underneath. Looking at him brings to mind the peeled-back diagrams of an undergraduate anatomy textbook. You can imagine attentive medical students poring over him, admiring the clarity – there the brachioradialis, there the palmaris longus. He looks impossibly strong, and he is. His record deadlift is 250kg, about the weight of three average men.
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...
With 50 days to go before the Paris Olympics start, the Ukrainian high jumper on preparation amid the turmoil of Russia’s invasion
Yuliya Levchenko arrives full of apologies, although they are not at all necessary. She has crossed Kyiv after watching her younger sister Polina, a fellow high jumper, compete at a local event and the reason for her half-hour delay was wearyingly familiar. An air raid warning disrupted proceedings midway through and, as usual, the athletes had to shelter until the skies were deemed sufficiently safe. She beams when recounting that Polina, who has accompanied her to this quiet cafe on the city’s left bank, still recorded a personal best.
It is an everyday snapshot of the challenges Ukraine’s athletes must surmount, and so often do with astonishing results, in trying to make a career. Gorgeous late-spring days such as this one contain an undercurrent of horror. “You know, it looks like we’ve adapted to this situation,” Levchenko says. “It’s horrible, because it’s nonsense really, but now we adapt to it. Here in Kyiv it’s safer now than in Dnipro or Kharkiv. It’s safety, but it’s not safety.”
Continue reading...Voting in the EU elections begins Thursday and ends on Sunday
Turnout in the Netherlands stood at 7% at 10:30am, according to Ipsos, NOS reported.
This is in line with turnout during the time in the previous election.
I made a concept called Europe first, instead of made in China. This was trying to focus on industrial production in Europe and to ramp it up and to become more independent … So we need more investment in our future, meaning also in industry and in production, in green projects, saying we need solar panels on our roofs, but not imported from China, but to produce them in Europe and to put it on our European roofs.
Secondly, social Europe: defending what we achieved, for minimum age, platform workers, pay transparency, working time limitations for truck drivers, but also asking for abolishing unpaid internships, and also having something like Erasmus for the elderly, and fair taxation.
Continue reading...Clash between Iran and west over nuclear programme looms as US drops objections and joins European states condemning Tehran
A fresh confrontation between Tehran and the west is looming over Iran’s nuclear programme after the board of the UN nuclear watchdog voted heavily to censure the country for its repeated failure to cooperate with UN nuclear inspectors.
The vote by the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) members was passed with 20 represented countries in favour, two against, and 12 abstentions. The two countries to vote against were Russia and China.
Continue reading... submitted by /u/machinade89 [link] [comments] |
Microsoft recently caught state-backed hackers using its generative AI tools to help with their attacks. In the security community, the immediate questions weren’t about how hackers were using the tools (that was utterly predictable), but about how Microsoft figured it out. The natural conclusion was that Microsoft was spying on its AI users, looking for harmful hackers at work.
Some pushed back at characterizing Microsoft’s actions as “spying.” Of course cloud service providers monitor what users are doing. And because we expect Microsoft to be doing something like this, it’s not fair to call it spying...
Sanmu Chen appeared to write the date of massacre in the air as anniversary becomes increasingly sensitive in Hong Kong
Hong Kong police detained an artist on Monday night after he appeared to write “8964” in the air with his hand, a reference to the date of the Tiananmen Square massacre, hours before Tuesday’s 35th anniversary.
Public acknowledgment of the events of 4 June 1989, when Chinese soldiers shut down a weeks-long peaceful protest with violence, killing anything from several hundred to several thousand people – is banned in mainland China and increasingly sensitive in Hong Kong.
Continue reading...Uncrewed Chang’e-6 lander is carrying rock and soil samples in ‘very important achievement’ after lunar liftoff
China’s uncrewed Chang’e-6 probe is on its way back to Earth carrying the first samples from the far side of the moon, in a major achievement for Beijing’s space programme.
The probe landed on the lunar surface on Sunday, within one of the oldest craters on the moon – the South Pole-Aitken (SPA) basin – then spent two days gathering rock and soil samples using its drill and robotic arm.
Continue reading...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.
In today’s newsletter: After pollsters and pundits predicted a sweeping victory that never came, is India’s prime minister entering his final act in politics?
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Good morning.
For months, the consensus was that India’s Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) was going to win a thumping majority in the general election. A few days ago, exit polls indicated the BJP was going to secure a sweeping victory, and could even gain seats to win a two-thirds majority in parliament. The party’s confidence came through most clearly in its highly publicised goal of winning 400 seats.
Israel-Gaza war | At least 30 Palestinians including five children have been killed in an Israeli airstrike on a UN school housing displaced people in al-Nuseirat, in the central Gaza Strip, medical officials have said, with dozens more wounded. The Israeli military confirmed it had targeted a UN school in al-Nuseirat, saying it had been housing Hamas terrorists from the 7 October attack on Israel who were planning further attacks.
Wales | The Welsh first minister, Vaughan Gething, has lost a no-confidence vote less than 12 weeks after taking office, following a series of scandals that have called into question his judgment and transparency.
General election 2024 | The UK Statistics Authority has opened an investigation into remarks made by Rishi Sunak about the economy “going gangbusters” amid concerns that politicians could misuse economic data in the run-up to the election. The watchdog’s intervention came soon after the chair of the organisation began a review of Sunak’s claim that the Treasury calculated that Labour would raise taxes by £2,000 for everyone if it won the election.
Climate crisis | Fossil fuel companies are the “godfathers of climate chaos” and should be banned in every country from advertising akin to restrictions on big tobacco, the secretary general of the United Nations has said while delivering dire new scientific warnings of global heating.
NHS | A cyber-attack thought to have been carried out by a Russian group has forced London NHS hospitals to resurrect long-discarded paper records systems in which porters hand-deliver blood test results because IT networks are disrupted.
Continue reading...Strongman-style leader set for historic third term but with authority diminished after loss of majority
Narendra Modi has secured the backing of his political allies in order to form a government and is expected to be sworn in over the weekend, after a dramatic election in which his party failed to secure an outright majority.
At a meeting in Delhi after Tuesday’s shock results, parties in the National Democratic Alliance, which is led by Modi’s Bharatiya Janata party (BJP), pledged their support to Modi and backed his return as prime minister for a historic third term. “We, the leaders of the NDA, unanimously elect Narendra Modi as our leader,” the party leaders said in a resolution.
Continue reading...INDIA alliance prevents Modi’s BJP from forming majority, but analysts say keeping it united will be difficult
In the months building up to India’s election, many pundits had already written obituaries for the country’s beleaguered political opposition.
Over his decade in power, the prime minister, Narendra Modi, and his Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) government have been accused of using the full might of the state against political opponents, with agencies harassing and jailing opposition leaders or intimidating them into switching sides.
Continue reading...The prime minister assumed he would sweep back to power in a landslide. Voters have wisely chosen otherwise
Nemesis has followed swift on the heels of Narendra Modi’s hubris. He is set to be the first Indian prime minister to serve a third term since its first, Jawaharlal Nehru. Yet rarely has an election victory looked more like defeat.
He boasted that he would win a third full majority in the world’s largest democracy – suggesting his party would win as many as 400 seats – and said he had been sent by God. Instead of a coronation, he got a rebuke. Far from winning a landslide, his Bharatiya Janata party’s seats fell from 303 to 240, leaving him reliant on political allies. The BJP had made a major push in the south and managed to take a seat in Kerala. But Mr Modi’s vote slumped in his own constituency of Varanasi, in the north. Indian electors have humbled the strongman.
Continue reading...Anger at rampant unemployment, stagnant wages and inflation led to surprise losses in Uttar Pradesh
It was less than six months ago that Narendra Modi walked solemnly through the ornate surroundings of the Ram Temple in Ayodhya, in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state and one of its most politically crucial. His appearance in the holy city to inaugurate the newly constructed Hindu temple, built on the ruins of a mosque demolished two decades earlier, was cast as the pinnacle of the prime minister’s decade in power – the crowning glory of his Hindu nationalist agenda and his ticket to a third term in office. The ceremony was deemed to mark the unofficial launch of his election campaign.
But on Tuesday evening Modi was faced with a rude awakening. His Bharatiya Janata party (BJP), which has ruled India with an iron grip for a decade, has lost its majority as a single party and will have to rely on coalition partners to return to government. The losses were particularly heavy in Uttar Pradesh, long considered to be the BJP’s bastion – and nowhere more so than in Ayodhya.
Continue reading...Latest results reveal unexpected blow to PM, forcing negotiation with coalition partners to regain power
Narendra Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata party has lost its parliamentary majority, dealing an unexpected blow to the prime minister and forcing him to negotiate with coalition partners in order to return to power.
With all votes counted early on Wednesday morning, it was clear that the landslide for the BJP predicted in polls had not materialised and instead there had been a pushback against the strongman prime minister and his Hindu nationalist politics in swathes of the country.
Continue reading...Narendra Modi says India has placed its faith in the ruling coalition ‘for a third consecutive time’, as figures show his BJP party unlikely to secure an overall majority
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led alliance, the NDA bloc, is enjoying an early lead as votes are counted, pulling ahead in 154 seats of the total 543 in the lower house of parliament.
Early trends show the opposition INDIA alliance leading in 120 seats.
The first votes counted are postal ballots, which are paper ballots, mostly cast by troops serving outside their home constituencies or officials away from home on election duty.
This year, postal votes were also offered to voters over 85 years of age and people with disabilities to allow them to vote from home.
According to some exit polls, Modi and the BJP could be headed for a two-thirds majority in parliament, giving them an even stronger victory than in the 2019 elections.
Continue reading...Exit polls had projected overwhelming victory for the BJP and an even stronger mandate for India’s strongman
India’s elections may return Narendra Modi to power for a third term but Tuesday’s results did not have the flavour of victory for the strongman prime minister.
Indeed, as the early counts of the votes began to roll in, it was clear this was going to be one of the most humbling moments for Modi and his Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) in over a decade.
Continue reading...Events marking 35 years since troops ended peaceful protest with deadly violence are banned in China and Hong Kong
Chinese and Hong Kong authorities have arrested or put under surveillance several dissidents before the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre this week, according to human rights groups.
On 4 June it will be 35 years since Chinese soldiers shut down a weeks-long peaceful protest with violence, killing anything from several hundred to several thousand people.
Continue reading...Spacecraft to collect samples from rarely explored area after landing heralded as ‘enormous technical achievement’
China has landed its uncrewed Chang’e-6 lunar probe on the far side of the moon, marking an important step in the country’s 53-day mission to retrieve rock and soil samples from the “dark” lunar hemisphere, in what would be a world first.
The landing elevates China’s space power status in a global rush to the moon, where countries including the US are hoping to exploit lunar minerals to sustain long-term astronaut missions and moon bases within the next decade.
Continue reading...Balloons filled with US dollars, K-pop and leaflets critical of Kim Jong-un have been sent over the border by a group of a North Korean defectors
The “balloon wars” between the two Koreas have intensified after activists in the South said they had sent balloons carrying anti-North Korean propaganda over the countries’ heavily armed border.
A group of North Korean defectors called the Free North Korea Movement on Thursday said it had sent 10 large balloons filled with 200,000 leaflets critical of the regime of North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, as well as US dollar bills and flash drives loaded with K-pop, according to South Korean media.
Continue reading...I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to predict that artificial intelligence will affect every aspect of our society. Not by doing new things. But mostly by doing things that are already being done by humans, perfectly competently.
Replacing humans with AIs isn’t necessarily interesting. But when an AI takes over a human task, the task changes.
In particular, there are potential changes over four dimensions: Speed, scale, scope and sophistication. The problem with AIs trading stocks isn’t that they’re better than humans—it’s that they’re faster. But computers are better at chess and Go because they use more sophisticated strategies than humans. We’re worried about AI-controlled social media accounts because they operate on a superhuman scale...
“It’s hard to see this wildly disproportionate response as anything other than an attempt to chill speech on this issue.”
The post Columbia Coincidentally Rewrites Disciplinary Rules Just in Time to Screw Over Student Protesters 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.
The queen of all sandwiches, featuring protein, pickled vegetables, fresh herbs and mayo all packed into a baguette to thrill your tastebuds
There are sandwiches, and then there are sandwiches. The old-school sandwich is eaten at lunch and has a single-minded filling, bar a small leeway for a garnish: think egg and cress. The new school, however, is a multi-textured, multi-cultured, multi-flavoured wonderland that can be eaten at any time of the day and, among them, bánh mì is queen. In Vietnam, there is no single recipe for bánh mì, because it’s fully customisable, but in general you can expect the main ingredient – traditionally pork, but here miso- and peanut-coated tofu – a spread and a wildly colourful array of pickled vegetables and herbs, all packed into a crusty baguette.
Discover Meera’s recipes and many more from your favourite cooks in the new Guardian Feast app, with smart features to make everyday cooking easier and more fun
Continue reading...A court in the Philippines has banned the commercial growth of golden rice, a genetically modified rice which was created to help tackle vitamin A deficiency in developing countries. It’s just the latest twist in a long and controversial journey for this rice. Ian Sample hears from the Observer science and environment editor, Robin McKie, and from Glenn Stone, a research professor of environmental science at Sweet Briar College in Virginia who is also an anthropologist who has studied golden rice, about why it has taken so long for this potentially life-saving technology to reach the fields, if it is the silver bullet so many had hoped for, and whether this ban is really the end of the story
Continue reading...Residents living near the volcano have been ordered to evacuate as authorities warn of further eruptions
Authorities in the Philippines have ordered residents living near Kanlaon volcano in the country’s west to evacuate, after an eruption sent a 5km (three mile) plume of ash into the sky.
The six-minute explosive eruption on Monday caused a “strong earthquake” and prompted the suspension of work and schools in nearby Canlaon City, while three airlines cancelled 32 flights on Tuesday.
Continue reading...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.
Biden's plan to cozy up to Arab dictators is right out of Donald Trump's playbook — but even worse.
The post Joe Biden’s Terrible Israel Policy Is Really About Getting in Bed With Saudi Arabia appeared first on The Intercept.
Deterrence policy against asylum seeker boats is under strain, with three vessels arriving in a week in May
The number of asylum seekers on Nauru appears to have topped 100, with a further two groups of 37 people sent to the Pacific Island.
The people, classified as “unauthorised maritime arrivals”, include 33 Bangladeshis who were found on Christmas Island on 9 May, one of who is a woman. Their boat was destroyed by bad weather.
Continue reading...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.
Kuo Chiu, known as KC to his friends, teaches urban design at Tunghai University in Taiwan. He’s also one of many of the country's citizens who practises rifle skills in his spare time, in case of a Chinese invasion.
The population of Taiwan has long grown familiar with Beijing’s pledge to one day ‘unify’ what it claims is a breakaway province. But recently, there has been a significant increase in aggressive and intimidatory acts.
Taiwan’s 160,000 active military personnel are vastly outnumbered by China’s 2 million-member armed forces, leading many civilians to turn to voluntary medical and combat training to protect themselves.
The Guardian's video team spent time with KC to see how he is preparing
Continue reading...Tinned chickpeas are flying off the shelves at Tesco. Vegan influencer Christina Soteriou and child nutritionist Charlotte Stirling-Reed explain why – and share their tips for recipes and moreish snacks
“Chickpeas are flying off the shelves, so our priority is making sure they’re always available when customers want them,” says Ashley Wainaina, Tesco’s canned pulses buyer. “We’ve even changed our stocking system to make it more efficient, so we can keep up with demand.”
As the UK’s largest food retailer, Tesco is helping customers make better choices when they shop by highlighting better foods, such as snacks containing under 100 calories or foods that are high in fibre or low in sugar, through its Better Baskets campaign. Chickpeas are loaded with protein and fibre, they’re filling, a third of a tin counts as one of your five a day, and they can be cooked in a plethora of different ways. They’ve been eaten for millennia across the Middle East, India and the Mediterranean, and their popularity has soared here recently, too.
Continue reading...We know turbulence is a common part of flying – but are some routes more prone? And where is it the worst? Turbulence is the leading cause of in-flight injuries to crew and passengers and after the fatal Singapore Airlines incident and injuries to passengers above Turkey on a Qatar Airways flight, you might be wondering if flights are about to get bumpier. Incidents of severe turbulence are on the rise – increasing by 55% between 1979 and 2020 – and the climate crisis is thought to be a responsible factor
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Continue reading...Ban Khun Samut Chin, a coastal village in Samut Prakan province, Thailand, has been slowly swallowed by the sea over the past few decades. This has led to the relocation of the school and many homes, resulting in a dwindling population. Currently, there are only four students attending the school, often leaving just one in each classroom. The village has experienced severe coastal erosion, causing 1.1-2km (0.5-1.2 miles) of shoreline to disappear since the mid-1950s
Continue reading...The Guardian’s John Harris is on the road, visiting Jeremy Hunt’s seat in Godalming and Ash and Michael Gove’s Surrey Heath constituency to find out why lifelong Conservative voters are abandoning the party
Godalming and Ash constituency candidates:
Jeremy Hunt – Conservative and Unionist Party
Paul Follows – Liberal Democrats
James Walsh – Labour Party
Steve Williams – Green Party
Graham Drage – Reform UK
Surrey Heath constituency candidates:
Ed McGuinness – Conservative and Unionist Party
Alasdair Pinkerton – Liberal Democrats
Jess Hammersley-Rich – Labour Party
Jonathan Campbell – Green Party
Sam Goggin – Reform UK
The draconian restrictions on asylum-seekers owe a lot to Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, but the path was paved by Democrats.
The post Joe Biden’s Cruel Border Shutdown Follows in Clinton and Obama’s Footsteps Too appeared first on The Intercept.
Hester apologised for being rude about Abbott but did not accept that what he said about her was racist
Anneliese Dodds, the Labour party chair, has said the revelation that the Tories are still taking money from Frank Hester shows Rishi Sunak has “no integrity”. In a statement she said:
Rishi Sunak has proven he is a man with no integrity.
He is too weak to return the money donated by a man who has made violent, misogynist, and racist remarks which belong nowhere near our politics.
Continue reading...Douglas Ross says he will ‘lead from the front’ after David Duguid not selected in Aberdeenshire North and Moray East
The Scottish Conservative leader, Douglas Ross, has announced he plans to stand again for Westminster in a key Scottish National party target seat, after the party blocked the anticipated candidate who is recovering from a serious illness.
Reversing repeated commitments to focus on his duties at Holyrood, Ross said he had decided to “to lead from the front” after the former Scotland office minister David Duguid, who had been expected to stand for the new seat of Aberdeenshire North and Moray East, developed “serious health issues”.
Continue reading...Our panel on why they’re politically at sea, the policy that could win their vote – and that paddleboarding video
As many as 15% of British voters are still undecided about who to vote for. How they make up their minds will have seismic consequences for the UK’s political future – so the Guardian has spoken to a range of undecided voters from across the country. In the first of this series, we hear how they are grappling with their decision, and how they’re responding to the campaign so far.
As told to Lucy Pasha-Robinson
Continue reading...Action against five accused, including Jeremy Corbyn’s former chief of staff, estimated to have cost £1.5m
Labour has withdrawn a costly lawsuit against five former staffers accused of leaking an internal report on antisemitism and “conspiring” against Keir Starmer.
The legal action is expected to have cost the Labour party more than £1.5m and it was estimated the party could have spent almost £900,000 more, according to documents shown in open court last year.
Continue reading...Exclusive: as Reform courts Tory vote, chancellor insists election campaigns are won from the centre ground
At the first three doors that Jeremy Hunt knocked on during his canvassing session in leafy Godalming earlier this week were voters who said they would back the Conservatives.
The chancellor, looking a bit embarrassed, admitted that they were not representative of what his team have been seeing across this Surrey constituency, where his 8,800 majority is under threat from the resurgent Liberal Democrats.
But at the fourth door, Tory voters Stephen and Caroline told him they felt it was time for change. “The Conservatives have had a good crack at the whip,” said Stephen. “Unfortunately I think they’ve lost their way.”
Many in Westminster were surprised when Hunt announced that he would be running again, with former colleagues like Theresa May and Michael Gove having decided it was time to stand down after 14 years running the country.
After almost 20 years in parliament and a string of senior cabinet jobs, including foreign secretary and chancellor, and with the Tories on course to lose the next election and with it swathes of constituencies – including his own of Godalming and Ash – some expected Hunt to retire from parliament.
Yet he had no such plans. “I think I can hold it,” he said in an interview with the Guardian in the Inn on the Lake pub in the town. “But it’s going to be a very big fight, the biggest I’ve ever had.”
Like many fellow Conservative candidates, Hunt is getting squeezed from both the left – with the Lib Dems on course to take the seat – and the right, from what he describes as “Boris Conservatives” who will presumably now drift to Reform.
Continue reading...The Guardian’s Pippa Crerar and Kiran Stacey discuss the first TV head to head between Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak
Continue reading...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.
Local members voice anger in Basildon and Billericay, where Richard Holden was put forward as only candidate at last minute
The Conservative chair, Richard Holden, has been selected at the last minute for a safe seat 300 miles from his former constituency, triggering anger among members.
Holden was chosen to stand in Basildon and Billericay in Essex on Wednesday night after being the only candidate on the list.
Continue reading...It is revealing how casually the prime minister has abandoned any attempt at integrity under the pressure of an election
The function of televised election debates is an airing of rival policies by competing candidates, allowing an audience to judge which has more merit. In practice it has become a game in which the object is to project scripted attacks into the public arena – an opportunity to frame the terms of combat for the rest of the campaign. That is not debating in the traditional sense, but it is a legitimate use of a broadcast platform. The whole exercise is corrupted, however, if the power of message amplification is used to spread falsehood.
This is what Rishi Sunak did in the first televised debate of the election campaign when he claimed that “independent Treasury officials” had costed Labour plans and calculated an increased household tax burden of £2,000. That number is a fiscal fiction drawn up by the Conservative campaign. The permanent secretary at the Treasury has made it clear that the civil service does not recognise Mr Sunak’s analysis and that it should not be presented as having official endorsement.
Continue reading...Readers respond to Tuesday night’s TV debate between Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer, and a new book in the Mr Men series
This is the big red bus all over again. The row over the Tories’ £2,000 Labour tax claim is straight out of the Dominic Cummings/Boris Johnson playbook (Reeves accuses Sunak of lying after Treasury’s warning on ‘£2,000 tax rise’ claim, 5 June). In the 2016 EU referendum, the leave campaign invented an eye-watering figure for our EU contributions and painted it on to their campaign bus. Remainers came out in force to expose the lie, publishing their reasoning far and wide; but in doing so they unwittingly propagated and disseminated the lie itself, paradoxically enhancing its impact in a society more interested in headlines than arithmetic.
I fear that we are about to make the same mistake with the Tories’ latest lie. I’d suggest that we drop the “£2,000” from future news reports and opinion pieces, focusing instead on the Tories’ well-established woeful relationship with the truth.
Neil Farquhar
Edinburgh
Nigel Farage has announced that he will stand in Clacton for the Reform UK party in the general election, his eighth attempt to become an MP after seven previous failures as a Ukip candidate. Farage, who recently said he would not stand in the election, told a press conference that he had a ‘terrible sense of guilt’ for not putting himself forward after speaking to people during the campaign, saying he felt he was ‘letting them down’
Continue reading...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.
Find out who’s up and who’s down in the latest polls – and how many seats each party is likely to win in the 2024 general election
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has called the next UK general election for 4 July 2024.
After 14 years of Conservative rule, Keir Starmer’s Labour has been consistently ahead in the polls since the start of 2022.
Continue reading...July’s general election is likely to be most expensive since regulation of party spending began in 2000
The UK’s most expensive general election is widely believed to have been in 1880, when at least £170m in today’s terms was spent by candidates, with the increased cost of campaigning to an expanded electorate and a peak in corruption that led to the first regulatory controls on political spending.
After more than 140 years, and scandals ranging from cash for honours to foreign money and dodgy donors, parties and candidates are now subject to rules on expenditure and donations. An increase in spending limits, announced last year, means this general election is likely to be the most expensive since regulation of party spending began in 2000.
Continue reading...Exclusive: After ruling out rises in VAT, income tax or NICs, shadow chancellor said to be weighing other options to raise cash in an autumn budget
Rachel Reeves is under pressure from Labour shadow ministers to raise capital gains tax as part of an autumn budget at which the shadow chancellor is considering up to a dozen new revenue-raising measures.
Members of the shadow cabinet want Reeves to increase rates of capital gains tax (CGT) as a way to raise billions more to pay for public services, as the shadow chancellor has already ruled out raising income tax, national insurance and VAT.
Continue reading...The first minister’s supporters insist that he can survive a no-confidence vote, but his position is surely untenable
The way in which Vaughan Gething secured his victory in the race to become Labour’s leader in Wales – and the nation’s first minister – was bound to store up problems for him and his party. Bad enough was the crude way in which the largest trade unions placed their collective thumb on the scale in his favour. More damaging still was Gething’s decision to fund his leadership campaign through a £200,000 donation from a company controlled by a businessman found guilty of environmental crimes. As a result, the legitimacy of his wafer-thin victory over his rival, Jeremy Miles, was always going to be open to question.
What was in doubt was the extent to which Gething would be able to rebuild the bridges that his leadership campaign had burned, so that he might at least lead his party into the next devolved election due in May 2026. Wednesday’s events in the Senedd suggest that is now unlikely. While Gething and his remaining allies persist in trying to make the frankly absurd case that it matters not if the first minister loses a confidence vote in the Welsh legislature, wiser heads are recognising that his position is becoming untenable.
Richard Wyn Jones is professor of Welsh politics and director of Cardiff University’s Wales Governance Centre
Continue reading...Our system is designed for the powerful to retain control. Participatory democracy and a lottery vote are just two ways to gain real representation
Everything hangs on them but little changes. For weeks or months, elections dominate national life. Media reports and public conversations are monopolised by furious jostling and frantic speculation. All else – policymaking, problem-solving, reason itself – grinds to a halt. Unsurprisingly, when the frenzy is over, we discover we have solved almost none of our problems.
An election is a device for maximising conflict and minimising democracy. Parties gain ground by sowing division and anger, often around trivial issues that play to their advantage. At the same time, as the big players seek to appease commercial lobbies and the billionaire press, they converge disastrously on far more important issues, such as austerity, privatised public services, massive inequality of wealth and the unfolding genocide in Gaza. Many of those who seek election manipulate, distract and lie.
George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist
Continue reading...Centrists and pragmatic rightwing parties could at least compromise on the most urgent global threats
Few issues divide reliable centrist dads from rightwing and leftwing outliers as much as the European Union. Traditionally, the idea of European integration was favoured by the sensible majority. The proud nation state, on the other hand, was brandished by troublemakers with a penchant for collective self-harm. But could this all be about to change?
Europeans have reaped the dividends of the US security umbrella and of a western-led world economic order for decades. Our tanks rusted and our factories exported. The centrist dads unimaginatively administered the placid world of yesterday; the troublemakers protested against fictitious EU rules on the curvature of bananas.
Lorenzo Marsili is a philosopher, activist, author and director of the Berggruen Institute Europe
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...Strongman-style leader set for historic third term but with authority diminished after loss of majority
Narendra Modi has secured the backing of his political allies in order to form a government and is expected to be sworn in over the weekend, after a dramatic election in which his party failed to secure an outright majority.
At a meeting in Delhi after Tuesday’s shock results, parties in the National Democratic Alliance, which is led by Modi’s Bharatiya Janata party (BJP), pledged their support to Modi and backed his return as prime minister for a historic third term. “We, the leaders of the NDA, unanimously elect Narendra Modi as our leader,” the party leaders said in a resolution.
Continue reading...Rishi Sunak’s assertion that people would pay £2,000 more in tax under Labour was called a lie by the shadow chancellor today. Archie Bland reports
Continue reading...The Labour party suddenly and controversially stripped her of the chance to be one of its MPs last week. She talks about why she’s still determined to represent Chingford and Woodford Green
Faiza Shaheen is composed when I meet her at home in Chingford, north-east London, all things considered. It is three days after she had been summoned to an interview with three members of Labour’s national executive committee (NEC) to answer for a series of tweets dating back to 2014, which they said damaged the party’s electoral chances. “They decided my fate, on a 40-minute Zoom meeting, half of which the baby was crying through,” she says. She’s holding her four-and-a-half-month-old son now. He beams at me throughout our interview.
She was deselected as Labour’s candidate for Chingford and Woodford Green on Wednesday 29 May. It’s a move that stunned her supporters locally, and reverberated far beyond her constituency. A recording of that meeting made it on to the Today programme. A week later, Shaheen has announced her decision to stand as an independent. “If you’d told me a week ago that this is where we’d be, I wouldn’t have believed it,” she messaged me. “I’ve had hundreds of messages from people in my community, urging me to run. They are tired of the Tories but now feel they can’t trust Labour.”
Continue reading...The Guardian is reporting from the constituency of Clacton to find out what issues people there care about most – and we want your help
The Guardian will be reporting from Clacton ahead of the general election, where Nigel Farage said he would stand as an MP and take over as leader of Reform UK, after changing his mind while spending time on the campaign trail.
This will be part of a series of pieces from across the country focused on finding out what matters most to the people who live there.
Continue reading...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...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...I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to predict that artificial intelligence will affect every aspect of our society. Not by doing new things. But mostly by doing things that are already being done by humans, perfectly competently.
Replacing humans with AIs isn’t necessarily interesting. But when an AI takes over a human task, the task changes.
In particular, there are potential changes over four dimensions: Speed, scale, scope and sophistication. The problem with AIs trading stocks isn’t that they’re better than humans—it’s that they’re faster. But computers are better at chess and Go because they use more sophisticated strategies than humans. We’re worried about AI-controlled social media accounts because they operate on a superhuman scale...
In today’s newsletter: After pollsters and pundits predicted a sweeping victory that never came, is India’s prime minister entering his final act in politics?
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Good morning.
For months, the consensus was that India’s Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) was going to win a thumping majority in the general election. A few days ago, exit polls indicated the BJP was going to secure a sweeping victory, and could even gain seats to win a two-thirds majority in parliament. The party’s confidence came through most clearly in its highly publicised goal of winning 400 seats.
Israel-Gaza war | At least 30 Palestinians including five children have been killed in an Israeli airstrike on a UN school housing displaced people in al-Nuseirat, in the central Gaza Strip, medical officials have said, with dozens more wounded. The Israeli military confirmed it had targeted a UN school in al-Nuseirat, saying it had been housing Hamas terrorists from the 7 October attack on Israel who were planning further attacks.
Wales | The Welsh first minister, Vaughan Gething, has lost a no-confidence vote less than 12 weeks after taking office, following a series of scandals that have called into question his judgment and transparency.
General election 2024 | The UK Statistics Authority has opened an investigation into remarks made by Rishi Sunak about the economy “going gangbusters” amid concerns that politicians could misuse economic data in the run-up to the election. The watchdog’s intervention came soon after the chair of the organisation began a review of Sunak’s claim that the Treasury calculated that Labour would raise taxes by £2,000 for everyone if it won the election.
Climate crisis | Fossil fuel companies are the “godfathers of climate chaos” and should be banned in every country from advertising akin to restrictions on big tobacco, the secretary general of the United Nations has said while delivering dire new scientific warnings of global heating.
NHS | A cyber-attack thought to have been carried out by a Russian group has forced London NHS hospitals to resurrect long-discarded paper records systems in which porters hand-deliver blood test results because IT networks are disrupted.
Continue reading...Sir Robert Chote to see if PM repeated ONS analyst’s comments taken out of context to exaggerate Tory economic record
The UK’s statistics watchdog has opened an investigation into remarks made by Rishi Sunak about the economy “going gangbusters” amid concerns that politicians could misuse economic data in the run-up to the election.
Sir Robert Chote, chair of the UK Statistics Authority, will examine whether the prime minister repeated comments that were “taken out of context” and exaggerated the Conservative party’s economic record.
Continue reading...A proposed New York training facility shows how establishment politicians only understand governance through policing.
The post New York Spends $225 Million on Its Own “Cop City” — to Make the Whole City Run on Cops appeared first on The Intercept.
Latest results reveal unexpected blow to PM, forcing negotiation with coalition partners to regain power
Narendra Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata party has lost its parliamentary majority, dealing an unexpected blow to the prime minister and forcing him to negotiate with coalition partners in order to return to power.
With all votes counted early on Wednesday morning, it was clear that the landslide for the BJP predicted in polls had not materialised and instead there had been a pushback against the strongman prime minister and his Hindu nationalist politics in swathes of the country.
Continue reading...Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer went head to head in the first TV debate before the general election on 4 July. The debate was dominated by a row on taxes after the prime minister repeatedly told the audience Keir Starmer would raise families' taxes by £2,000. Starmer responded by calling this nonsense. The two party leaders went on to debate immigration, the Rwanda scheme, funding the NHS and what their plans are to help the younger generation
Reality check: how do the leaders’ claims in TV debate stack up?
Sunak and Starmer scrap over tax and immigration in heated first TV debate
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...Party will have to pick coalition partners and then try to reform itself in response to declining support
South Africa’s ruling African National Congress party has lost its three-decade electoral majority in devastating fashion. As the former liberation movement faces the task of building a coalition government, it remains to be seen how it will respond to the message sent to it by voters.
The ANC’s vote share collapsed from 57.5% in 2019 to 40.2% in last week’s elections, amid chronic unemployment, degraded public services and high rates of violent crime.
Continue reading...Data also shows party accepted £150,000 from Hester days after comments about Diane Abbott were revealed
Frank Hester, the businessman at the centre of a row about comments condemned as racist and misogynistic, gave the Conservative party a further £5m in January, figures released by the Electoral Commission show.
The donation, made by his company, the Phoenix Partnership (TPP), cements his status as the Tories’ single biggest donor, with a total of £15m now given by Hester either personally or through his company.
Continue reading...How does it feel to report on the refugee crisis when it’s also the story of your own family? Aamna Mohdin explains
Aamna Mohdin was a young rookie reporter when she got her first foreign assignment. She was being sent to Calais to write about “the Jungle”, an informal refugee camp that had sprung up, made up of people hoping to cross the Channel for a better life in the UK. She was nervous about doing a good job but as she walked around the chaotic maze of tents with people cooking on open fires she began to feel strange and uneasy.
It wasn’t just the sadness of the stories she was hearing but something more like deja vu. When she told her mother about her trip, her mother asked a question that astonished Aamna: why would she want to go to a refugee camp when they had risked everything to flee one themselves? The question sent Aamna spiralling as she realised she had repressed her own memories of living in a camp in Kenya as a child, and how they had fled to the UK.
Continue reading...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.
Voting in the EU elections begins Thursday and ends on Sunday
Turnout in the Netherlands stood at 7% at 10:30am, according to Ipsos, NOS reported.
This is in line with turnout during the time in the previous election.
I made a concept called Europe first, instead of made in China. This was trying to focus on industrial production in Europe and to ramp it up and to become more independent … So we need more investment in our future, meaning also in industry and in production, in green projects, saying we need solar panels on our roofs, but not imported from China, but to produce them in Europe and to put it on our European roofs.
Secondly, social Europe: defending what we achieved, for minimum age, platform workers, pay transparency, working time limitations for truck drivers, but also asking for abolishing unpaid internships, and also having something like Erasmus for the elderly, and fair taxation.
Continue reading...27-member bloc will have to adjust to new reality as rightwing groups expected to have real influence for first time
When the results of the European parliamentary elections start to emerge on Sunday night, polls suggest they will show that the world’s only directly elected transnational assembly will have tilted, unambiguously, to the right.
Yet, for all the talk of a significant surge in support for the forces of Europe’s hard right, their gains should prove broadly in line with a steady progression over the past couple of decades or more. The difference will be in the response.
Continue reading...Result of ballot, which will return 720 MEPs to next parliament, could have major impact on bloc’s political direction
Elections to the world’s only transnational assembly get under way in earnest on Thursday as Dutch voters go to the polls in a four-day, 27-country ballot that will return 720 MEPs to the next European parliament.
The results of the elections, which will shape the makeup of the next European Commission and could have a major impact on the bloc’s political direction in key areas including immigration and climate action, are expected on Sunday evening.
Continue reading...Recovering PM posts video in which he calls would-be assassin ‘messenger of evil’ but offers forgiveness
The Slovak prime minister, Robert Fico, has blamed the country’s opposition for fostering the “hatred” that led to his assassination attempt in his first appearance since he was seriously wounded in a shooting three weeks ago.
In a pre-recorded speech posted on Facebook on Wednesday, in the run-up to the European elections, Fico described the shooter as an “activist of the Slovak opposition … a messenger of evil and political hatred that the politically unsuccessful and frustrated opposition has fanned to unmanageable proportions”.
Continue reading...INDIA alliance prevents Modi’s BJP from forming majority, but analysts say keeping it united will be difficult
In the months building up to India’s election, many pundits had already written obituaries for the country’s beleaguered political opposition.
Over his decade in power, the prime minister, Narendra Modi, and his Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) government have been accused of using the full might of the state against political opponents, with agencies harassing and jailing opposition leaders or intimidating them into switching sides.
Continue reading...Anger at rampant unemployment, stagnant wages and inflation led to surprise losses in Uttar Pradesh
It was less than six months ago that Narendra Modi walked solemnly through the ornate surroundings of the Ram Temple in Ayodhya, in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state and one of its most politically crucial. His appearance in the holy city to inaugurate the newly constructed Hindu temple, built on the ruins of a mosque demolished two decades earlier, was cast as the pinnacle of the prime minister’s decade in power – the crowning glory of his Hindu nationalist agenda and his ticket to a third term in office. The ceremony was deemed to mark the unofficial launch of his election campaign.
But on Tuesday evening Modi was faced with a rude awakening. His Bharatiya Janata party (BJP), which has ruled India with an iron grip for a decade, has lost its majority as a single party and will have to rely on coalition partners to return to government. The losses were particularly heavy in Uttar Pradesh, long considered to be the BJP’s bastion – and nowhere more so than in Ayodhya.
Continue reading...Narendra Modi says India has placed its faith in the ruling coalition ‘for a third consecutive time’, as figures show his BJP party unlikely to secure an overall majority
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led alliance, the NDA bloc, is enjoying an early lead as votes are counted, pulling ahead in 154 seats of the total 543 in the lower house of parliament.
Early trends show the opposition INDIA alliance leading in 120 seats.
The first votes counted are postal ballots, which are paper ballots, mostly cast by troops serving outside their home constituencies or officials away from home on election duty.
This year, postal votes were also offered to voters over 85 years of age and people with disabilities to allow them to vote from home.
According to some exit polls, Modi and the BJP could be headed for a two-thirds majority in parliament, giving them an even stronger victory than in the 2019 elections.
Continue reading...Exit polls had projected overwhelming victory for the BJP and an even stronger mandate for India’s strongman
India’s elections may return Narendra Modi to power for a third term but Tuesday’s results did not have the flavour of victory for the strongman prime minister.
Indeed, as the early counts of the votes began to roll in, it was clear this was going to be one of the most humbling moments for Modi and his Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) in over a decade.
Continue reading...The charge of an illegitimate marriage is all that’s left after a court acquitted Khan over his handling of a classified cypher.
The post Imran Khan Remains Imprisoned Over His Wife’s Menstrual Cycles. State Department Says That’s “Something For the Pakistani Courts to Decide.” appeared first on The Intercept.
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...
Twelve jurors in New York have presented their fellow Americans with a simple question: are you willing to elect a convicted criminal to the White House?
On Thursday, Donald Trump was found guilty of all 34 counts of falsifying business records in a criminal hush-money scheme to influence the outcome of the 2016 election. The verdict makes him the first president, current or former, to be found guilty of felony crimes in the US's near 250-year history. Regardless, the conviction does not disqualify Trump as a presidential candidate or bar him from again sitting in the Oval Office.
Trump, who opted not to take the stand during the trial, has denied wrongdoing, railed against the proceedings and ahead of the verdict compared himself to a saint: “Mother Teresa could not beat these charges. The charges are rigged,” he said on Wednesday. Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, is expected to appeal the verdict.
The Guardian’s Sam Levine has been in court over the last several weeks covering all the developments – here are three testimonies he found most memorable.
Could Trump go to prison? Here’s what happens next after the guilty verdict
Biden's plan to cozy up to Arab dictators is right out of Donald Trump's playbook — but even worse.
The post Joe Biden’s Terrible Israel Policy Is Really About Getting in Bed With Saudi Arabia appeared first on The Intercept.
A lively chat saw different views on gas-guzzling cars and whether we are able to halt the climate emergency, but could they at least agree on air pollution?
Bob, 76, Portishead
Occupation Retired, former IT director
Continue reading...Hesen Jabr’s story is a chilling reminder that employers in the US have far too much power over workers’ speech
Hesen Jabr, a labor and delivery nurse, was recently honored by her employer, NYU Langone Health in New York, for her work with grieving mothers who had lost babies during pregnancy and childbirth. A supervisor read from a note that said Jabr “not only provides stellar patient care, but also provides support for the rest of the nursing staff so that we can all live up to her example”. Jabr, who is Palestinian American, graciously accepted the award and took the opportunity to devote a small portion of her remarks to draw a connection with grieving mothers in Gaza.
When she reported to her first shift back at work, however, she was sent to meet with senior leadership at the hospital. Her bosses, she has said, told her she had “put others at risk”, “ruined the ceremony” and “offended people” with her remarks. She was sent back to work but several hours later was read a termination letter and escorted out by a police officer. NYU Langone told the New York Times that Jabr was fired for bringing “her views on this divisive and charged issue into the workplace”.
Bhaskar Sunkara is the president of the Nation, founding editor of Jacobin, and author of The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequalities
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 industry is rapidly strangling our planet,’ says Andrew Wilkie, who joins Allegra Spender, Sophie Scamps, Zali Steggall and Monique Ryan in call for ban
At least nine independent MPs and the Greens have backed the UN secretary general’s call for the Australian government to ban fossil fuel advertising and for media companies to stop accepting money to promote coal, oil and gas companies.
Many described fossil fuel advertising as greenwashing that damaged the climate, the environment and people’s health, and compared its use to steps taken by “big tobacco” before cigarette advertising was banned in 1992.
Continue reading...Scathing report finds Department of Communities and Justice not providing the care needed to protect children’s safety and welfare
New South Wales is failing tens of thousands of vulnerable children due to an “ineffective” and “unsustainable” child protection system, a damning audit has found.
The state’s auditor general, Bola Oyetunji, released the scathing report on the child protection system on Thursday, finding that the Department of Communities and Justice (DCJ) was not meeting its legislative requirements to provide the care needed to protect children’s safety and welfare, nor providing the appropriate assistance for parents.
Continue reading...Adam Bandt hits back, saying he will not be lectured about peace by someone who backs invasion
Tensions in parliament over a rise in antisemitism and Islamophobia sparked by the war in Gaza have spilled over into a second day with the opposition leader, Peter Dutton, calling the Greens “evil” and accusing it of playing a “central” role in protests on university campuses.
Parliament’s question time erupted on Wednesday after Anthony Albanese accused the Greens of spreading misinformation and Dutton alleged the Greens were condoning acts of violence instead of condemning them.
Continue reading...This blog is now closed
Going fully electric would save households more than $600 a year for next four decades, report says
Households would save an average of $608 a year for the next 40 years if new residential buildings in New South Wales were required to be fully electric, according to a report commissioned by climate organisation 350 Australia.
It cuts energy bills for local residents and small businesses during a cost of living crisis and reduces climate pollution, at almost no cost to councils. It will be low-income people and renters who will benefit most from council-led electrification.
Continue reading... submitted by /u/EmptySpaceForAHeart [link] [comments] |
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Ukraine rations power as generation falls far short of needs; US to reportedly release $225m more in weapons, France to sign €650m deal. What we know on day 834
A Ukrainian drone attack set fire to the Novoshakhtinsk oil refinery in Rostov-on-Don, southern Russia, forcing it to halt operations, the regional governor said early on Thursday. The plant is considered one of the most important oil refineries in southern Russia. Located around 10km (six miles) east of the border, it has been targeted by Ukrainian attacks several times. “Work was suspended due to a repeated attack, and personnel were withdrawn to a safe distance,” said Vasily Golubev, the governor.
Another drone strike in Russia overnight destroyed an oil tank at a depot in Stary Oskol, north of the Ukrainian border, said the Belgorod regional governor, Vyacheslav Gladkov. Ukraine suffers regular attacks on its energy systems and hits back at sites in Russia, both in retaliation and to hinder the Russian war effort.
Ukraine’s power grid operator, Ukrenergo, ordered cuts in 12 regions on Wednesday evening due to critical shortages. Ukrainians have been warned to limit consumption after Russian airstrikes in recent weeks inflicted serious damage on generating capacity. “In view of repairs to units and the latest destruction, we are catastrophically short of electricity for our needs,” said Serhii Kovalenko, head of Yasno, the largest private power company in Ukraine. Russia has either destroyed or captured 50% of Ukraine’s power generation, according to a report in the Financial Times.
The United States is expected to announce a new $225m weapons package for Ukraine this week, sources have told Reuters. The US president, Joe Biden, was due to meet with Volodymyr Zelenskiy, Ukraine’s president, on Thursday in Normandy at the 80th anniversary commemoration of the D-day invasion.
France is to provide Ukraine with €650m in loans and grants to support local authorities and critical infrastructure, particularly energy facilities, targeted by Russia. The French president, Emmanuel Macron, will attend the Swiss conference on Russia’s war against Ukraine on 15-16 June, his office said on Wednesday. Macron and the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, are due to sign the loans and grants deal in Paris on Friday.
A Moscow court has sentenced Russian blogger Anna Bazhutova to five and a half years in jail for livestreaming witness testimony about alleged Russian atrocities during the occupation of the Kyiv suburb of Bucha. “It’s disgusting and vile. It’s messed up,” the 30-year-old defendant said from the dock said in reaction to the ruling. Her lawyer promised an appeal. In April 2022, Bazhutova did a live broadcast including witnesses directly accusing the Russian military of carrying out killings. Vladimir Putin’s regime has made criticism of the military illegal.
Vladimir Putin has said Russia could supply arms to other countries to attack western targets, Pjotr Sauer writes. His comments came after a US senator and a western official confirmed that Ukraine has recently used US weapons to strike inside Russia. The weapons were used under recently approved guidance from Joe Biden allowing American arms to be used to strike inside Russia for the defence of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city.
The Republican senator Mike Rounds of South Dakota, a member of the Senate armed services committee, confirmed strikes with US weapons inside Russia but did not say how he was briefed. According to a 3 June report from the Institute for the Study of War, Ukrainian forces struck a Russian S-300/400 air defence battery in Russia’s Belgorod region, probably with a high mobility artillery rocket system, or Himars, on 1 or 2 June.
French prosecutors launched an terrorism investigation after a Ukrainian-Russian man detonated explosive materials in a hotel room north of Paris. The suspected was reportedly from the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, part of which has been occupied by pro-Russian and Russian forces since 2014. A source at the French anti-terrorism prosecutors office (PNAT) said that on Monday night the 26-year-old man received “significant burns after an explosion” in a hotel in the Val-d’Oise, north of Paris. A search uncovered “products and materials intended for the manufacture of explosive devices”.
Continue reading...New York City police department to revoke Trump’s license after suspending permit to carry a concealed weapon in April 2023
Donald Trump’s license to carry a gun is expected to be revoked by the New York City police department now that he has been convicted of a felony, according to reports on Wednesday evening.
The former president once boasted that he was so popular with the electorate, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters.” He made the claim in January 2016 during the Iowa caucuses campaign.
Continue reading...As club’s powerful owners rail against ‘the elites’ in legal battle with Premier League, there is a looming danger to the game
Here we are then, at last. The chrysalis has finally hatched. The thing that was always going to be the thing has now become the thing. Welcome to a very Premier League kind of coup.
As news emerged of Manchester City’s potentially devastating legal case against English football’s top tier it was tempting to see a kind of parable. Here we have a league founded out of greed, for the future benefit of greed, which now finds itself threatened with internal detonation by – yes – greed. Invite a tiger in for tea and the tiger might be fun. But it’s also still a tiger. And in the end it’s going to eat you too.
Continue reading...Yvonne Williams on adult education that is now virtually nonexistent, and Geoff Reid on the non-financial value of a degree
Gaby Hinsliff presents a compelling case for the 50% of young people eligible for higher education courses (It’s the Tories who broke Britain, but now they want teenagers to pay for it, 31 May), but why is no one, politician or journalist, making any kind of case for the young people who will pay an even higher price for government failure?
What about young people who can only find low-paid work in hospitality, agriculture or caring professions? They work just as hard and are more likely to be on minimum-wage, zero-hours contracts. Their chances of bettering their prospects are minimal, as they are locked into a just-about-coping lifestyle. What is an even greater scandal than student debt and collapsing apprenticeships is that adult education, which used to give people a second chance to gain GCSEs and A-levels or vocational qualifications suited to their aspirations, is now virtually nonexistent.
Continue reading...Academic tortured in UAE tells families of Britons arrested in controversial circumstances abroad to go public promptly
Families of Britons arrested in controversial circumstances abroad should raise concerns promptly in public because Foreign Office “quiet diplomacy” is not effective, an expert has warned after the arrest of a former British Royal Marine in Dubai.
Matthew Hedges, a British academic who was detained and tortured in the United Arab Emirates in 2018, said the case of Matt Croucher, a military veteran held in the country for seven months, also showed how far the “international influence of the UK had disappeared” in the Gulf region.
Continue reading...Microsoft recently caught state-backed hackers using its generative AI tools to help with their attacks. In the security community, the immediate questions weren’t about how hackers were using the tools (that was utterly predictable), but about how Microsoft figured it out. The natural conclusion was that Microsoft was spying on its AI users, looking for harmful hackers at work.
Some pushed back at characterizing Microsoft’s actions as “spying.” Of course cloud service providers monitor what users are doing. And because we expect Microsoft to be doing something like this, it’s not fair to call it spying...
Deterrence policy against asylum seeker boats is under strain, with three vessels arriving in a week in May
The number of asylum seekers on Nauru appears to have topped 100, with a further two groups of 37 people sent to the Pacific Island.
The people, classified as “unauthorised maritime arrivals”, include 33 Bangladeshis who were found on Christmas Island on 9 May, one of who is a woman. Their boat was destroyed by bad weather.
Continue reading...The Guardian is reporting from the constituency of Midlothian to find out what issues people there care about most – and we want your help
The Guardian will be reporting from Midlothian ahead of the general election. This will be part of a series of pieces from across the country focused on finding out what matters most to the people who live there.
If you live in the constituency of Midlothian, can you tell us what will decide your vote? We’d like to understand the big issues facing you and your family and which policies matter to you. How happy are you with the state of housing, work, public transport, local facilities for young people, policing and health services? What local issues should we be looking at?
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.
Coastguard and lifeboats responded after boat got into difficulty – as analysis shows nearly 1,000 crossings since election called
About 80 people, including at least three children, are understood to have been rescued after a boat got into difficulty while crossing the Channel.
Some of the group are thought to have been pulled from the water, with coastguard and lifeboat crews called to help Border Force off the Kent coast on Thursday morning.
Continue reading...Israel claimed the targeted school contained a militant compound, an allegation rejected by Hamas. Plus, UN urges global ban on fossil fuel ads
Good morning.
At least 30 people, including five children, were killed by an Israeli strike on a UN school on Thursday in the central Gaza Strip, according to health officials in the territory.
Here’s the latest with the impending famine in Gaza: Two UN organizations said more than 1 million people were “expected to face death and starvation” by mid-July.
And the latest from Jerusalem: Violent clashes broke out during the annual Jerusalem Flag Day march, which commemorates the anniversary of Israel taking control and occupying East Jerusalem in 1967.
Which case is this one again? Trump was charged alongside more than a dozen associates last year with racketeering over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election result in the state, after Georgia voted for Joe Biden to become US president. The charges stem in part from the phone call Trump made to Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, asking him to “find 11,780 votes”.
Continue reading...Questions on general knowledge and topical trivia, plus a few jokes, every Thursday. How will you fare?
An unearthed rare letter written by Franz Kafka to his publisher recently showed how much he struggled with writer’s block. He should have tried having a 15-question quiz to write to deadline every week without fail in the middle of a UK general election. Anyway, no prizes, but here are 15 questions on topical news, general knowledge and Björn Borg and Katy Perry for some reason. Let us know how you get on in the comments.
The Thursday quiz, No 163
Continue reading...The journal’s board of directors took the entire website down after the "Nakba" article published.
The post Columbia Law Review Remains Offline After Students Reject Disclaimer Undermining Palestine Article appeared first on The Intercept.
The prime minister assumed he would sweep back to power in a landslide. Voters have wisely chosen otherwise
Nemesis has followed swift on the heels of Narendra Modi’s hubris. He is set to be the first Indian prime minister to serve a third term since its first, Jawaharlal Nehru. Yet rarely has an election victory looked more like defeat.
He boasted that he would win a third full majority in the world’s largest democracy – suggesting his party would win as many as 400 seats – and said he had been sent by God. Instead of a coronation, he got a rebuke. Far from winning a landslide, his Bharatiya Janata party’s seats fell from 303 to 240, leaving him reliant on political allies. The BJP had made a major push in the south and managed to take a seat in Kerala. But Mr Modi’s vote slumped in his own constituency of Varanasi, in the north. Indian electors have humbled the strongman.
Continue reading...With high levels of people seeking asylum, and after failed attempts to pass reforms, Biden has presented his most aggressive restrictions yet
Joe Biden on Tuesday signed an aggressive new immigration order suspending asylum rights, signalling that “securing the border” was a central tenet of his re-election bid.
At the southern US border, the policy is set to cause chaos and hardship for those seeking the protection of the United States.
Continue reading...A selection of winning images from this year’s Pink Lady food photographer of the year awards. The overall winner was the Chinese photographer Zhonghua Yang for an image of a woman making new year dim sum. The judging panel was chaired by the food photographer David Loftus and included Fiona Shields, the Guardian’s head of photography
The megadonor’s plan for a $25 million research center at Cornell fell apart. So he took his money to Texas A&M.
The post Leonard Leo Built the Conservative Court. Now He’s Funneling Dark Money Into Law Schools. appeared first on The Intercept.
A senior USAID adviser said he was pressured to resign days after the agency censored his presentation.
The post He Made a PowerPoint on Mothers Starving in Gaza. Then He Lost His Government Job. appeared first on The Intercept.
As Swift’s economy-shifting Eras tour comes to the UK, Chanté speaks to journalist and fan (but not ‘Swiftie’) Elle Hunt about the singer’s journey from country star to billionaire and asks whether her world domination is good for the music industry
Archive: Vogue, Today, MTV, Firstpost, BBC, Billboard, Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour, ITV
Continue reading...A court in the Philippines has banned the commercial growth of golden rice, a genetically modified rice which was created to help tackle vitamin A deficiency in developing countries. It’s just the latest twist in a long and controversial journey for this rice. Ian Sample hears from the Observer science and environment editor, Robin McKie, and from Glenn Stone, a research professor of environmental science at Sweet Briar College in Virginia who is also an anthropologist who has studied golden rice, about why it has taken so long for this potentially life-saving technology to reach the fields, if it is the silver bullet so many had hoped for, and whether this ban is really the end of the story
Continue reading...We are raiding the Guardian Long Read archives to bring you some classic pieces from years past, with new introductions from the authors.
This week, from 2021: They used to look like quagmires, ice rinks or dustbowls, depending on the time of year. But as big money entered football, pristine pitches became crucial to the sport’s image – and groundskeepers became stars. By William Ralston
Continue reading...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.
Is this what the “pro-life” movement wanted?
The post Sterilization, Murders, Suicides: Bans Haven’t Slowed Abortions, and They’re Costing Lives appeared first on The Intercept.
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 Guardian is reporting from the constituency of Burnley to find out what issues people there care about most – and we want your help
The Guardian will be reporting from Burnley ahead of the general election. This will be part of a series of pieces from across the country focused on finding out what matters most to the people who live there.
In 2019, the Lancashire town elected its first Conservative MP in more than a century. If you live in the constituency of Burnley, can you tell us what will decide your vote? We’d like to understand the big issues facing you and your family and which policies matter to you. How happy are you with the state of housing, work, community relations, policing and health services? What local issues should we be looking at?
Continue reading...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.
Michelle Roach bought a used ice-cream van in order to bring cheap, affordable food to Liverpool's struggling communities. She wanted a vehicle with freezers built in for frozen food, and also something cheerful that was able to break down stigmas around food poverty. Using a '10 items for £5' model, Michelle sources discount food from supermarket surplus and donations.
The Guardian's Christopher Cherry follows Michelle and the van on its rounds, with the service struggling to meet overwhelming demand as the cost of living crisis deepens, and the UK's general election fast approaches.
Continue reading...We want to hear from UK voters across the political spectrum about the issues and factors that will influence their vote
After prime minister Rishi Sunak announced that a general election will be held on 4 July, we want to hear from UK voters about what will decide their vote.
Will you vote in the general election, and do you know who you will vote for?
Continue reading...Keir Starmer appeared in Dover and Deal alongside the Labour party’s newest MP, the former Tory Natalie Elphicke, to announce the scrapping of the Rwanda deportation scheme if Labour is elected. The Guardian spoke to people in Dover to get their reaction
Continue reading...
In the rapidly advancing landscape of AI technology and innovation, LimeWire emerges as a unique platform in the realm of generative AI tools. This platform not only stands out from the multitude of existing AI tools but also brings a fresh approach to content generation. LimeWire not only empowers users to create AI content but also provides creators with creative ways to share and monetize their creations.
As we explore LimeWire, our aim is to uncover its features, benefits for creators, and the exciting possibilities it offers for AI content generation. This platform presents an opportunity for users to harness the power of AI in image creation, all while enjoying the advantages of a free and accessible service.
Let's unravel the distinctive features that set LimeWire apart in the dynamic landscape of AI-powered tools, understanding how creators can leverage its capabilities to craft unique and engaging AI-generated images.
This revamped LimeWire invites users to register and unleash their creativity by crafting original AI content, which can then be shared and showcased on the LimeWire Studio. Notably, even acclaimed artists and musicians, such as Deadmau5, Soulja Boy, and Sean Kingston, have embraced this platform to publish their content in the form of NFT music, videos, and images.
Beyond providing a space for content creation and sharing, LimeWire introduces monetization models to empower users to earn revenue from their creations. This includes avenues such as earning ad revenue and participating in the burgeoning market of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs). As we delve further, we'll explore these monetization strategies in more detail to provide a comprehensive understanding of LimeWire's innovative approach to content creation and distribution.
LimeWire Studio welcomes content creators into its fold, providing a space to craft personalized AI-focused content for sharing with fans and followers. Within this creative hub, every piece of content generated becomes not just a creation but a unique asset—ownable and tradable. Fans have the opportunity to subscribe to creators' pages, immersing themselves in the creative journey and gaining ownership of digital collectibles that hold tradeable value within the LimeWire community. Notably, creators earn a 2.5% royalty each time their content is traded, adding a rewarding element to the creative process.
The platform's flexibility is evident in its content publication options. Creators can choose to share their work freely with the public or opt for a premium subscription model, granting exclusive access to specialized content for subscribers.
As of the present moment, LimeWire focuses on AI Image Generation, offering a spectrum of creative possibilities to its user base. The platform, however, has ambitious plans on the horizon, aiming to broaden its offerings by introducing AI music and video generation tools in the near future. This strategic expansion promises creators even more avenues for expression and engagement with their audience, positioning LimeWire Studio as a dynamic and evolving platform within the realm of AI-powered content creation.
The LimeWire AI image generation tool presents a versatile platform for both the creation and editing of images. Supporting advanced models such as Stable Diffusion 2.1, Stable Diffusion XL, and DALL-E 2, LimeWire offers a sophisticated toolkit for users to delve into the realm of generative AI art.
Much like other tools in the generative AI landscape, LimeWire provides a range of options catering to various levels of complexity in image creation. Users can initiate the creative process with prompts as simple as a few words or opt for more intricate instructions, tailoring the output to their artistic vision.
What sets LimeWire apart is its seamless integration of different AI models and design styles. Users have the flexibility to effortlessly switch between various AI models, exploring diverse design styles such as cinematic, digital art, pixel art, anime, analog film, and more. Each style imparts a distinctive visual identity to the generated AI art, enabling users to explore a broad spectrum of creative possibilities.
The platform also offers additional features, including samplers, allowing users to fine-tune the quality and detail levels of their creations. Customization options and prompt guidance further enhance the user experience, providing a user-friendly interface for both novice and experienced creators.
Excitingly, LimeWire is actively developing its proprietary AI model, signaling ongoing innovation and enhancements to its image generation capabilities. This upcoming addition holds the promise of further expanding the creative horizons for LimeWire users, making it an evolving and dynamic platform within the landscape of AI-driven art and image creation.
Sign Up Now To Get Free Credits
Upon completing your creative endeavor on LimeWire, the platform allows you the option to publish your content. An intriguing feature follows this step: LimeWire automates the process of minting your creation as a Non-Fungible Token (NFT), utilizing either the Polygon or Algorand blockchain. This transformative step imbues your artwork with a unique digital signature, securing its authenticity and ownership in the decentralized realm.
Creators on LimeWire hold the power to decide the accessibility of their NFT creations. By opting for a public release, the content becomes discoverable by anyone, fostering a space for engagement and interaction. Furthermore, this choice opens the avenue for enthusiasts to trade the NFTs, adding a layer of community involvement to the artistic journey.
Alternatively, LimeWire acknowledges the importance of exclusivity. Creators can choose to share their posts exclusively with their premium subscribers. In doing so, the content remains a special offering solely for dedicated fans, creating an intimate and personalized experience within the LimeWire community. This flexibility in sharing options emphasizes LimeWire's commitment to empowering creators with choices in how they connect with their audience and distribute their digital creations.
After creating your content, you can choose to publish the content. It will automatically mint your creation as an NFT on the Polygon or Algorand blockchain. You can also choose whether to make it public or subscriber-only.
If you make it public, anyone can discover your content and even trade the NFTs. If you choose to share the post only with your premium subscribers, it will be exclusive only to your fans.
Additionally, you can earn ad revenue from your content creations as well.
When you publish content on LimeWire, you will receive 70% of all ad revenue from other users who view your images, music, and videos on the platform.
This revenue model will be much more beneficial to designers. You can experiment with the AI image and content generation tools and share your creations while earning a small income on the side.
The revenue you earn from your creations will come in the form of LMWR tokens, LimeWire’s own cryptocurrency.
Your earnings will be paid every month in LMWR, which you can then trade on many popular crypto exchange platforms like Kraken, ByBit, and UniSwap.
You can also use your LMWR tokens to pay for prompts when using LimeWire generative AI tools.
You can sign up to LimeWire to use its AI tools for free. You will receive 10 credits to use and generate up to 20 AI images per day. You will also receive 50% of the ad revenue share. However, you will get more benefits with premium plans.
For $9.99 per month, you will get 1,000 credits per month, up to 2 ,000 image generations, early access to new AI models, and 50% ad revenue share
For $29 per month, you will get 3750 credits per month, up to 7500 image generations, early access to new AI models, and 60% ad revenue share
For $49 per month, you will get 5,000 credits per month, up to 10,000 image generations, early access to new AI models, and 70% ad revenue share
For $99 per month, you will get 11,250 credits per month, up to 2 2,500 image generations, early access to new AI models, and 70% ad revenue share
With all premium plans, you will receive a Pro profile badge, full creation history, faster image generation, and no ads.
Sign Up Now To Get Free Credits
In conclusion, LimeWire emerges as a democratizing force in the creative landscape, providing an inclusive platform where anyone can unleash their artistic potential and effortlessly share their work. With the integration of AI, LimeWire eliminates traditional barriers, empowering designers, musicians, and artists to publish their creations and earn revenue with just a few clicks.
The ongoing commitment of LimeWire to innovation is evident in its plans to enhance generative AI tools with new features and models. The upcoming expansion to include music and video generation tools holds the promise of unlocking even more possibilities for creators. It sparks anticipation about the diverse and innovative ways in which artists will leverage these tools to produce and publish their own unique creations.
For those eager to explore, LimeWire's AI tools are readily accessible for free, providing an opportunity to experiment and delve into the world of generative art. As LimeWire continues to evolve, creators are encouraged to stay tuned for the launch of its forthcoming AI music and video generation tools, promising a future brimming with creative potential and endless artistic exploration
Are you looking for a new graphic design tool? Would you like to read a detailed review of Canva? As it's one of the tools I love using. I am also writing my first ebook using canva and publish it soon on my site you can download it is free. Let's start the review.
Canva has a web version and also a mobile app
Canva is a free graphic design web application that allows you to create invitations, business cards, flyers, lesson plans, banners, and more using professionally designed templates. You can upload your own photos from your computer or from Google Drive, and add them to Canva's templates using a simple drag-and-drop interface. It's like having a basic version of Photoshop that doesn't require Graphic designing knowledge to use. It’s best for nongraphic designers.
Canva is a great tool for small business owners, online entrepreneurs, and marketers who don’t have the time and want to edit quickly.
To create sophisticated graphics, a tool such as Photoshop can is ideal. To use it, you’ll need to learn its hundreds of features, get familiar with the software, and it’s best to have a good background in design, too.
Also running the latest version of Photoshop you need a high-end computer.
So here Canva takes place, with Canva you can do all that with drag-and-drop feature. It’s also easier to use and free. Also an even-more-affordable paid version is available for $12.95 per month.
The product is available in three plans: Free, Pro ($12.99/month per user or $119.99/year for up to 5 people), and Enterprise ($30 per user per month, minimum 25 people).
To get started on Canva, you will need to create an account by providing your email address, Google, Facebook or Apple credentials. You will then choose your account type between student, teacher, small business, large company, non-profit, or personal. Based on your choice of account type, templates will be recommended to you.
You can sign up for a free trial of Canva Pro, or you can start with the free version to get a sense of whether it’s the right graphic design tool for your needs.
When you sign up for an account, Canva will suggest different post types to choose from. Based on the type of account you set up you'll be able to see templates categorized by the following categories: social media posts, documents, presentations, marketing, events, ads, launch your business, build your online brand, etc.
Start by choosing a template for your post or searching for something more specific. Search by social network name to see a list of post types on each network.
Next, you can choose a template. Choose from hundreds of templates that are ready to go, with customizable photos, text, and other elements.
You can start your design by choosing from a variety of ready-made templates, searching for a template matching your needs, or working with a blank template.
Inside the Canva designer, the Elements tab gives you access to lines and shapes, graphics, photos, videos, audio, charts, photo frames, and photo grids.The search box on the Elements tab lets you search everything on Canva.
To begin with, Canva has a large library of elements to choose from. To find them, be specific in your search query. You may also want to search in the following tabs to see various elements separately:
The Photos tab lets you search for and choose from millions of professional stock photos for your templates.
You can replace the photos in our templates to create a new look. This can also make the template more suited to your industry.
You can find photos on other stock photography sites like pexel, pixabay and many more or simply upload your own photos.
When you choose an image, Canva’s photo editing features let you adjust the photo’s settings (brightness, contrast, saturation, etc.), crop, or animate it.
When you subscribe to Canva Pro, you get access to a number of premium features, including the Background Remover. This feature allows you to remove the background from any stock photo in library or any image you upload.
The Text tab lets you add headings, normal text, and graphical text to your design.
When you click on text, you'll see options to adjust the font, font size, color, format, spacing, and text effects (like shadows).
Canva Pro subscribers can choose from a large library of fonts on the Brand Kit or the Styles tab. Enterprise-level controls ensure that visual content remains on-brand, no matter how many people are working on it.
Create an animated image or video by adding audio to capture user’s attention in social news feeds.
If you want to use audio from another stock site or your own audio tracks, you can upload them in the Uploads tab or from the more option.
Want to create your own videos? Choose from thousands of stock video clips. You’ll find videos that range upto 2 minutes
You can upload your own videos as well as videos from other stock sites in the Uploads tab.
Once you have chosen a video, you can use the editing features in Canva to trim the video, flip it, and adjust its transparency.
On the Background tab, you’ll find free stock photos to serve as backgrounds on your designs. Change out the background on a template to give it a more personal touch.
The Styles tab lets you quickly change the look and feel of your template with just a click. And if you have a Canva Pro subscription, you can upload your brand’s custom colors and fonts to ensure designs stay on brand.
If you have a Canva Pro subscription, you’ll have a Logos tab. Here, you can upload variations of your brand logo to use throughout your designs.
With Canva, you can also create your own logos. Note that you cannot trademark a logo with stock content in it.
With Canva, free users can download and share designs to multiple platforms including Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Slack and Tumblr.
Canva Pro subscribers can create multiple post formats from one design. For example, you can start by designing an Instagram post, and Canva's Magic Resizer can resize it for other networks, Stories, Reels, and other formats.
Canva Pro subscribers can also use Canva’s Content Planner to post content on eight different accounts on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Slack, and Tumblr.
Canva Pro allows you to work with your team on visual content. Designs can be created inside Canva, and then sent to your team members for approval. Everyone can make comments, edits, revisions, and keep track via the version history.
When it comes to printing your designs, Canva has you covered. With an extensive selection of printing options, they can turn your designs into anything from banners and wall art to mugs and t-shirts.
Canva Print is perfect for any business seeking to make a lasting impression. Create inspiring designs people will want to wear, keep, and share. Hand out custom business cards that leave a lasting impression on customers' minds.
The Canva app is available on the Apple App Store and Google Play. The Canva app has earned a 4.9 out of five star rating from over 946.3K Apple users and a 4.5 out of five star rating from over 6,996,708 Google users.
In addition to mobile apps, you can use Canva’s integration with other Internet services to add images and text from sources like Google Maps, Emojis, photos from Google Drive and Dropbox, YouTube videos, Flickr photos, Bitmojis, and other popular visual content elements.
In general, Canva is an excellent tool for those who need simple images for projects. If you are a graphic designer with experience, you will find Canva’s platform lacking in customization and advanced features – particularly vectors. But if you have little design experience, you will find Canva easier to use than advanced graphic design tools like Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator for most projects. If you have any queries let me know in the comments section.
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