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Have you ever seen an #astrophotography image where something looked off, like an oddly large #Moon or the #MilkyWay where it shouldn't be?

I just wrote an article in the ESO #blog explaining some methods and tools you can use to find out if these images have been doctored.

Check it out: eso.org/public/blog/csi-astron

#astrodon #astronomy #photography

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Vancouver may soon see a dramatic addition: Sen̓áḵw, 11 towers holding 6,000 apartments. It’s being built by the Squamish First Nation. Since it's on land they own, they don't have to follow Vancouver’s zoning rules. And they've chosen to build bigger, denser and taller than anywhere else in Canada.

Predictably, this rubs against a widespread belief that the Squamish, are an indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest Coast, are living fossils with a duty to embody a romantic vision of life before Europeans came here:

City councillor Colleen Hardwick said “How do you reconcile Indigenous ways of being with 18-storey high-rises?” And Gordon Price, a Vancouver urban planner and a former city councillor, said “When you’re building 30, 40-storey high rises out of concrete, there’s a big gap between that and an Indigenous way of building.”

Neither of these people are members of the Squamish First Nation. Sen̓áḵw existed as a city of cedar longhouses long before Vancouver was built. Its Squamish residents saw their land carved up for railways until their homes were torched and they were loaded onto a barge and shipped away in 1913. Now they're back.

Much of my text was paraphrased from this article by Michelle Cyca, which has more cool pictures:

macleans.ca/society/sen%cc%93a

"PRESS RELEASE: the indicates additional provisional measures following South Africa’s request of 6 March 2024 in the case v. Israel bit.ly/3IVfOjp"

The court _unanimously_ orders more land crossings opened, and full cooperation with the UN.

Seeing that Bibi is rejecting cooperation with UNRWA, that's not likely to happen, but noteworthy that the ICJ could reach unanimity.

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This WSJ investigation is enormously illuminating. The paper’s findings marry the two conflicting versions I’ve been seeing in the U.S. media and from Team Navalny, ie the deal was far from done vs. Putin killed him just before the deal was signed.

wsj.com/world/russia/russia-u-

According to this WSJ report, Biden met privately at the Oval Office with Scholz to pitch trading for Whelan and Gershkovich. Putin, of course, wants his assassin buddy Vadim Krasikov, but that SOB is locked up in Germany. To “sell” the deal to the German public, how about Russia also coughs up Navalny, who enjoys popularity in Germany.

Biden and Scholz reportedly said, okay, let’s think about this, but “word of the discussions reached the Kremlin via a private intermediary” within a week, before Washington could offer anything formally. (This presumably refers to rumors about Roman Abramovich talking to Putin about the idea of including Navalny in the swap.)

And then, poof, Navalny dies. While this doesn’t conform to Team Navalny’s talk of an “imminent deal,” it does support the main thrust of its claim that Putin ordered Navalny death directly, in relation to his calculations on an exchange deal for Krasikov.

Besides these insights into the Navalny tragedy (including Christo Grozev recruiting Hillary Clinton for the cause, wow), this WSJ article also offers a fascinating look at the partisan politics behind which Americans get swapped and the public opinion and lobbying work that elevates some people over others. (The Griner vs. Krivanek stories are a real indictment.)

Overall, an incredible read.

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Good luck finding a story that’s more characteristic of the Putin regime than this: “How the Russian authorities tried to charge a handless activist with strangling a police officer” meduza.io/en/feature/2024/03/2

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New!! Observations of our Event Horizon Telescope (#EHT) collaboration have uncovered strong & organized magnetic fields spiraling around the edge of the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*). Images in polarized light of the #blackhole in the Milky Way center reveal structures similar to those in M87*, suggesting that strong magnetic fields may be common to all black holes. This also hints toward a hidden jet in Sgr A*!
#astronomy #astrodon #scicomm #physics

ru.nl/en/about-us/news/astrono

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NEW: Facebook snooped on Snapchat users' encrypted network traffic to study how they behaved, unsealed court documents reveal.

This was part of a secret program called "Project Ghostbusters," and even inside the company, it was very controversial.

“I can’t think of a good argument for why this is okay. No security person is ever comfortable with this, no matter what consent we get from the general public. The general public just doesn’t know how this stuff works,” Pedro Canahuati, Facebook's then-head of security engineering, wrote in an email.

techcrunch.com/2024/03/26/face

@BenRossTransit
Is Biden not president right now? Has he declared the cancellation of the citizens right to have their voice heard?

No, the simple truth is that Biden chose Israel over his supporters, and now he's having to fix the damage he brought upon himself.

Demonising the voters whose relatives are being killed by the IDF as Trump puppets only hurts your own credibility.

@kevinrothrock
Is this Volodin? Seems to have called for the reintroduction of the death penalty also in June 2022, possibly more times than that too.

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According to German security services, almost half of Microsoft Exchange Server installations in Germany which have OWA internet facing have critical security vulnerabilities due to lack of patching or end of life software. bsi.bund.de/DE/Service-Navi/Pr

@kevinrothrock
What a weird thing to say, starting with a long rambling "of course Ukraine did it" and then finishing with "we must figure out why they fled towards Ukraine"!

Is this sort of blatant self-contradiction in the same rant something Putin does frequently?

@malteengeler
I mean, I get that most of the "innovation they hype is really just polish, but Apple looks to have been fairly important for the development of Unicode in the first place: unicode.org/history/earlyyears

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Nieuwe #Eurobarometer--cijfers tonen dat een minderheid van de arbeidersklasse en lagere middenklasse in België zich politiek gehoord voelt.

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New BJIR-article shows that stronger workplace unionization in 🇳🇴 leads to increased employee participation in further education, lower employee turnover, and higher salaries during further education (but lower post-training wage premiums): onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10

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The Insider (an investigative outlet that has worked extensively with Bellingcat) reports that the color, print, and cut of the clothes visible in photos published by ISIS showing the alleged Moscow attackers match the clothes of the arrested suspects. theins.ru/news/270191

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Russia’s special forces are still looking for the gunmen who executed at least 40 people at a concert hall outside Moscow today, and no one has yet taken responsibility for the terrorist attack. Updates here. meduza.io/en/live/2024/03/22/t

@kallekn
the_ins_ru har video på Twitter, taget inifrån och visar folk som skjuts på väldigt nära håll, kollade inte på hela klippet

@gwagner
I'm pretty sure you are being sarcastic, but I feel the need to ask anyway: do you think the linked report is good news?

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