literature.cafe

Senior officials unsure who to believe after aides fired and chief of staff quits amid look into Panama canal media leak

Defense secretary Pete Hegseth’s orbit has become consumed by a contentious leak investigation that those inside the Pentagon believe is behind the firing of three senior aides last week, according to five people involved in the situation.

The secretary’s office has been marked for weeks by ugly internal politics between chief of staff Joe Kasper, who left the department on Thursday, and the three ousted aides, including senior adviser Dan Caldwell, deputy chief Darin Selnick and chief to the deputy defense secretary Colin Carroll.

The fraught nature of the investigation into the mishandling of classified information also threatens to reopen scrutiny of Hegseth’s ability to manage the Pentagon at a time when he himself shared plans for US strikes against the Houthis in Yemen in a second Signal group chat that included his wife.

The views expressed below are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights or Harvard Kennedy School. These perspectives have been presented to encourage debate on important public policy challenges.  On April 16, 2025, the United Kingdom's Supreme Court issued a unanimous ruling interpreting the terms "woman" and "sex" under the Equality Act 2010 to refer strictly to biological sex assigned at birth.

Shitposting Automation with Linux

I put some effort into my shitpostblog and automated everything. Now collecting memes became my calling. I found my purpose in life. It's memes.
Here's the status report.

Data indicates the Cosmos 2553 – which US officials claim is aiding Moscow’s development of nuclear anti-satellite weapon – may no longer be functional

A secretive Russian satellite in space that US officials believe is connected to a nuclear anti-satellite weapons program has appeared to be spinning uncontrollably, suggesting it may no longer be functioning in what could be a setback for Moscow’s space weapons efforts, according to US analysts.

The Cosmos 2553 satellite, launched by Russia weeks before invading Ukraine in 2022, has had various bouts of what appears to be errant spinning over the past year, according to Doppler radar data from space-tracking firm LeoLabs and optical data from Slingshot Aerospace, shared with Reuters.

Believed to be a radar satellite for Russian intelligence as well as a radiation testing platform, the satellite last year became the centre of US allegations that Russia for years has been developing a nuclear weapon capable of destroying entire satellite networks, such as SpaceX’s vast Starlink internet system that Ukrainian troops have been using.

Archived (Wayback Machine):

• earth.com article
• full study in Nature as webpage and PDF

More than 100,000 Syrian lives remain on hold after the UK and several European countries paused asylum claims following the fall of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.

Many of the countries, including Germany which has the largest Syrian population outside of the Middle East, froze applications days after the rebel takeover of Damascus in December 2024.

The situation is also turbulent. Israel has repeatedly targeted Syria with hundreds of air strikes and seized parts of the Golan Heights. Sectarian violence has erupted in recent weeks which has not been fully contained.

International sanctions against Syria too are still largely in place, although on Thursday the UK lifted sanctions on Syria's defence and interior ministries and a range of its intelligence agencies.

The plans, hatched by Sweden’s rightwing government with support of its far-right backers, made waves around the world. Politicians said they were working to strip citizenship from dual nationals who had been convicted of some crimes.

The concept also made a cameo in Germany’s February election after Friedrich Merz – whose centre-right CDU/CSU bloc emerged victorious in the ballot – told the newspaper Welt it should be possible to revoke German citizenship in the case of dual nationals who commit criminal offences.

The proposal was swiftly criticised, with one political commentator pointing out that it would result in some being “Germans on probation” for their entire lives. “They can never truly be German. One mistake, one crime – and their Germanness is gone,” the journalist and political commentator Gilda Sahebi wrote on social media. “It doesn’t matter if they were born here or if their family has lived in Germany for generations.”

Merz’s idea, she added, had laid bare the normalisation of “racist discrimination” in that, “in other words,” he was calling for remigration – the concept long-peddled by far-right, anti-immigrant parties and which, in Germany, calls for the mass deportation of migrants, including those with German citizenship.

I remember watching s1 for the first time and all the theorizing.

Who is who but also who knows what?

We began to realize that Regina still had her memories when she squashed Graham's heart.

(Poor, poor Graham.)

But Mr Gold was always so enigmatic.

He never acted like anything other than a creepy land owner.

But then Regina confronted him in "Skin Deep" while he was in a cell.

For the first time we heard her verbally reference the truth and the Enchanted Forest, when she asked him his true name.

"I am Mr Gold. Every day I've spent on the earth that's been my name."

"What about the time you spent... elsewhere!"

And then his mask drops with a sly little smile and he gnarls breathlessly:

"Rumplestiltskin!"

Boom! Chills!

Man, Robert Carlyle is such a fantastic actor!

tl;dr: toronto sun and national post lying and hate-mongering

April Revolution Succeeds (1960)

Tue Apr 26, 1960

Image: Lee Cheol-seung, who participated in the protest against fraudulent elections [Wikimedia]

On this day in 1960, illegitimate South Korean President Syngman Rhee was forced to resign and flee the country after weeks of sustained nationwide protests against his regime known as the April Revolution, or April 19th Movement.

Protests opposing Rhee were started by student and labor groups in the southeastern port city of Masan on April 11th after the discovery of the body of a local high school student who had been killed by police during demonstrations against President Rhee's rigged elections that March.

On April 18th, the protests spread to the capital, Seoul, where students from Korea University demanded new elections at a non-violent protest at the National Assembly against police violence and demanding new elections.

On April 19th (called "Bloody Tuesday"), more than 100,000 protesters, many of which were students, gathered at Blue House, the official residence for the South Korean head of state. When they arrived and demanded Rhee's resignation, police opened fire on protesters killing approximately 180 and wounding thousands. A week later, professors joined students and citizens in large-scale protests in which police refused to attack the protesters.

The next day, Rhee resigned and fled the country and found asylum in Hawaii. On May 16th, 1961, following months of political instability, General Park Chung-hee launched a coup d'état overthrowing the short-lived Second Republic of South Korea and replacing it with a military junta and later the autocratic Third Republic of South Korea.

• Date: 1960-04-26
• Learn More: en.wikipedia.org, www.jstor.org.
• Tags: #Protests.
• Source: www.apeoplescalendar.org

Jason Baldes drove down a dusty, sagebrush highway earlier this month, pulling 11 young buffalo in a trailer up from Colorado to the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming. His blue truck has painted on the side a drawing of buffalo and a calf. As the executive director of the Wind River Buffalo Initiative and Eastern Shoshone tribal member, he’s helped grow the number of buffalo on the reservation for the last decade. The latest count: the Northern Arapaho tribe have 97 and the Eastern Shoshone have 118.

“Tribes have an important role in restoring buffalo for food sovereignty, culture and nutrition, but also for overall bison recovery,” he said.

The Eastern Shoshone this month voted to classify buffalo as wildlife instead of livestock as a way to treat them more like elk or deer rather than like cattle. Because the two tribes share the same land base, the Northern Arapaho are expected to vote on the distinction as well. The vote indicates a growing interest to both restore buffalo on the landscape and challenge the relationship between animal and product.