cross-posted from: https://midwest.social/post/6117560

Two months after a prominent conservative activist and fundraiser was caught hosting white supremacist Nick Fuentes, leaders of the Republican Party of Texas have voted against barring the party from associating with known Nazi sympathizers and Holocaust deniers.

In a 32-29 vote on Saturday, members of the Texas GOP’s executive committee stripped a pro-Israel resolution of a clause that would have included the ban. In a separate move that stunned some members, roughly half of the board also tried to prevent a record of their vote from being kept.

In rejecting the proposed ban, the executive committee's majority delivered a serious blow to a faction of members that has called for the party to confront its ties to groups that have recently employed or associated with outspoken white supremacists and extremists.

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Two months after a prominent conservative activist and fundraiser was caught hosting white supremacist Nick Fuentes, leaders of the Republican Party of Texas have voted against barring the party from associating with known Nazi sympathizers and Holocaust deniers.

In a 32-29 vote on Saturday, members of the Texas GOP’s executive committee stripped a pro-Israel resolution of a clause that would have included the ban. In a separate move that stunned some members, roughly half of the board also tried to prevent a record of their vote from being kept.

In rejecting the proposed ban, the executive committee's majority delivered a serious blow to a faction of members that has called for the party to confront its ties to groups that have recently employed or associated with outspoken white supremacists and extremists.

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Last weekend, Ally was kicked out of a family Shabbat dinner. Ally is 21 years old and from New York.

"My dad is a staunch Zionist. He said, 'You better not f*ing have gone to that protest.' "

Ally has gone to many protests.

"He was like, 'I don't want to have you in my house right now. You are not welcome at this dinner table,' " Ally said.

Ally, who requested anonymity due to ongoing harassment, has family in Israel. Some are currently in the Israel Defense Forces.

Since the Israel-Hamas war began, there have been protests demanding a cease-fire. Many Jewish Americans have joined in. Some say they've been met with hostility from within their own communities. Ally is a student at Columbia University, and is part of Jewish Voice For Peace, which is vocally demanding a cease-fire in Gaza.

What Ally wants, beyond a cease-fire, is to address the human rights violations Palestinians have endured over the years.

"My position as a Jew is that it [has] always been our responsibility, according to our religion, to stand up for all those who are targeted, all those who are oppressed, all those who are facing violence. Because as a people, we've been persecuted for so long."

Rabbi Ari-Lev Fornari, also with Jewish Voice for Peace, says lately, he's been hearing about a lot of arguments like the one at Ally's Shabbat dinner table.

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Researchers have devised an attack that forces Apple’s Safari browser to divulge passwords, Gmail message content, and other secrets by exploiting a side channel vulnerability in the A- and M-series CPUs running modern iOS and macOS devices.

iLeakage, as the academic researchers have named the attack, is practical and requires minimal resources to carry out. It does, however, require extensive reverse-engineering of Apple hardware and significant expertise in exploiting a class of vulnerability known as a side channel, which leaks secrets based on clues left in electromagnetic emanations, data caches, or other manifestations of a targeted system. The side channel in this case is speculative execution, a performance enhancement feature found in modern CPUs that has formed the basis of a wide corpus of attacks in recent years. The nearly endless stream of exploit variants has left chip makers—primarily Intel and, to a lesser extent, AMD—scrambling to devise mitigations.

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A team of scientists has used multiple space- and ground-based telescopes, including the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope, to observe an exceptionally bright gamma-ray burst, GRB 230307A, and identify the neutron star merger that generated the explosion that created the burst. Webb also helped scientists detect the chemical element tellurium in the aftermath of the explosion.

Other elements near tellurium on the periodic table – like iodine, which is needed for much of life on Earth – are also likely to be present among the kilonova’s ejected material. A kilonova is an explosion produced by a neutron star merging with either a black hole or with another neutron star.

“Just over 150 years since Dmitri Mendeleev wrote down the periodic table of elements, we are now finally in a position to start filling in those last blanks of understanding where everything was made, thanks to Webb,” said Andrew Levan of Radboud University in the Netherlands and the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom, lead author of the study.

While neutron star mergers have long been theorised as being the ideal 'pressure cookers' to create some of the rarer elements substantially heavier than iron, astronomers have previously encountered a few obstacles to obtaining solid evidence.

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ghostarchive link

The biggest names in late night have turned their private group chat into a Spotify podcast, Strike Force Five. All the proceeds will go to support their staff during the writers' strike.

Who are they?

• The hosts of the shows arguably most immediately affected by the strikes: Jimmy Kimmel, John Oliver, Seth Meyers, Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Fallon.

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If you were to fly over any city in the world that's blazing under triple-digit temperatures right now, you wouldn't see anything that would look like a disaster.

Yet, extreme heat killed more people in the U.S. last year than hurricanes, floods, lightning or tornadoes, according to the National Weather Service. Kathy Baughman McLeod says it doesn't have to be this way.

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[ Emphasis mine]

Fascism is still on the rise:

Members of the far-right populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) gathered in the eastern German city of Magdeburg Friday to begin their annual party conference, which will last until Sunday.

The party is currently polling well nationally, between 18% and 22%, as establishment parties struggle with voter resentment. The party's numbers are roughly twice what they were during 2021 federal elections. In Magdeburg, leadership implored members not to let up.

Party Co-Chair Tino Chrupalla said the numbers reflect a new "harmony" among leadership. "We will carry this harmony into the next election," he said, as he greeted some 600 delegates in attendance.

Chrupalla referenced upcoming state elections in Bavaria and Hesse, and voiced confidence about the broader prospect of growing political popularity, saying, "Next year we can win Saxony, Thuringia and Brandenburg" — all states in the east of the country where AfD has tended to perform best.

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What is the "triumvirate of British films" that "the genre started with"? Are urban legends counted as separate from folk tales?

O’FALLON, Mo. (AP) — In the national reckoning that followed the police killing of George Floyd three years ago, about 2,000 protesters took to the streets in a St. Louis suburb and urged the mostly white Francis Howell School District to address racial discrimination. The school board responded with a resolution promising to do better.

Now the board, led by new conservative board members elected since last year, has revoked that anti-racism resolution and copies of it will be removed from school buildings.

The resolution passed in August 2020 “pledges to our learning community that we will speak firmly against any racism, discrimination, and senseless violence against people regardless of race, ethnicity, nationality, immigration status, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, or ability.

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The limits of human adaptability

Scientists and other observers have become alarmed about the increasing frequency of extreme heat paired with high humidity.

In the Middle East, Asaluyeh, Iran, recorded an extremely dangerous maximum wet-bulb temperature of 92.7 F (33.7 C) on July 16, 2023 – above our measured upper limit of human adaptability to humid heat. India and Pakistan have both come close, as well.

People often point to a study published in 2010 that theorized that a wet-bulb temperature of 95 F (35 C) – equal to a temperature of 95 F at 100% humidity, or 115 F at 50% humidity – would be the upper limit of safety, beyond which the human body can no longer cool itself by evaporating sweat from the surface of the body to maintain a stable body core temperature.

It was not until recently that this limit was tested on humans in laboratory settings. The results of these tests show an even greater cause for concern.

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.studio/post/283413

My wife works in a restaurant, and the power-tripping manager has instituted a new policy where all shift changes must be approved by management. I think that is reasonable enough, but they're also asking the originally-scheduled employee why they are switching shifts, then approving or denying based on the answer.

For example, her coworker (Tom) wanted Monday afternoon off, and Harry agreed to cover the shift. The manager asked Tom why he wanted Harry to work for him, and Tom said, "I have a softball game." Manager denied the shift change because it was "unnecessary".

Is this legal? I feel like if you're able to find someone to cover your shift, you don't owe management any explanation why you need the time off. How should my wife approach this situation? Colorado, USA BTW.