‘The couple had been told the church was likely to be under water on their wedding day. But they were from an area of the Philippines prone to flooding – and stuck to their plan’
I’ve been working as a photographer for the Associated Press bureau in Metro Manila for nearly 30 years, and in that time floods in the Philippines have become increasingly common. One day last July, I returned to the office after a morning spent in my waders, photographing the after-effects of a monsoon that had flooded much of Manila and the surrounding areas.
While I was having lunch and drying out, I got a message from a photographer friend on assignment in Bulacan, the next province. She’d been shooting at Barásoain Church, a historic building that was flooded, and as she’d made to leave, someone had said: “Don’t you want to wait for the wedding?” It was hard to believe people were getting married in those conditions, but she told me the ceremony was due to start at three, which gave me an hour to get there. Even in ideal conditions it would have taken at least 40 minutes, but I jumped in a car with the AP driver and we made it to within a kilometre or two of the church, by which point the water was too deep to continue.
Choreography of back-to-back visits appeared deliberately mirrored but China made sure the differences were noticed
Days after Donald Trump was greeted in Beijing with a military band, an honour guard and dozens of youths waving American and Chinese flags, Vladimir Putin arrived in China to an almost identical spectacle.
The choreography of the two welcomes appeared deliberately mirrored, designed to showcase Beijing’s ability to host leaders from Washington and Moscow with equal grandeur.
Lithuania’s president and prime minister were rushed to underground bunkers and residents of the capital, Vilnius, urged to take shelter during a warning issued after a drone violated the country’s airspace.
Air and train traffic in and around the city was suspended after the mobile phone “take shelter” alert, the first issued in an EU and Nato country since the start of Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
When drum’n’bass grew stale in the 90s, it got a samba-splicing Brazilian twist. As that style returns, the scene’s legends and newcomers celebrate a cross-cultural triumph
Wagner Ribeiro de Souza wasn’t carrying much in his backpack. A local compilation of techno, house and jungle hits, a couple of news clippings and a VHS tape with footage from the club where he played weekly: small fragments of a music scene that he, under the moniker DJ Patife, and some friends were building in São Paulo, Brazil.
It was 1998. He had travelled to London to talk his way into the office of Movement, one of Britain’s most important drum’n’bass nights, with a single goal: pitching an edition of the party in Brazil. “I played that tape recorded at the club,” Patife remembers. “And when Bryan Gee saw like 2,000 people singing, he said: ‘Let’s go to Brazil right now!’”
After months of discussion and outrage from residents, the city council of the tiny town of Bandera, Texas voted 3-2 to immediately end its contract with the surveillance company Flock. In the aftermath of the vote, one of the dissenting council members crashed out and said he would be introducing measures to ban cell phones, the internet, cameras, and nearly all technology in the town of roughly 900 people.
Bandera had a state grant to install eight Flock Safety AI license plate reader cameras in the tiny town. The technology proved to be incredibly controversial, with residents repeatedly turning out to city council meetings to say that they did not want government surveillance in the town; the poles that the cameras were installed on were repeatedly destroyed by vandals in protest, leading the town to have to replace them at their own expense. Last week, the town formally decided to abandon its contract with Flock entirely.
After the vote, Councilmember Jeff Flowers, a staunch Flock supporter, said that if people in the town wanted privacy then the city council should basically ban all technology, essentially calling people who did not want government surveillance hypocrites. Flowers said he would propose a series of new regulations at an upcoming city council meeting, which he is calling the “Bandera Declaration of Digital Independence.” In a letter posted by the local newspaper, the Bandera Bulletin, Flowers said that in the name of preserving privacy he would suggest the city go back to the days of 1880 .
“For months, I have listened to the outcry regarding License Plate Recognition (LPR) technology. I have seen the eyerolls, and I’ve even been met with ‘Nazi rhetoric,’ the dangerous claim that believing in accountability and community safety is somehow equivalent to totalitarianism,” Flowers wrote. “Comparing a neighbor’s desire for a safe street to a dark chapter of history is a classic case of comparing apples to oranges; it is a distraction used to avoid the reality of the threats our town faces today.”
Flowers said that at the next city council meeting he will propose “a total ban on all cellular and GPS-capable devices for all operations within city limits. If we are to be truly ‘private,’ we must leave our smartphones at the city line.” He will also propose “a total ban on outward facing cameras,” and “a total termination of all internet services and electronic record-keeping. We are going back to 1880, paper ledgers and cash only.”
Like in many other communities around the country, the use of Flock’s AI cameras has become a major topic of discussion in Bandera. In February, Bandera held a town hall meeting exclusively about Flock that Flowers moderated. Kerry McCormack, a former Cleveland city council member who is now on the public affairs team for Flock, came to that meeting to discuss the technology, demonstrating that the company is sending representatives even to tiny towns in order to promote its use. Bandera paid for its Flock cameras using a public safety grant from the state of Texas; in his letter, Flowers said that the city “didn’t just throw away a state grant (free money), they spent $15,000 of your local tax dollars out of pocket to back out of the deal.”
In an earlier February city council meeting, Flowers said, “I believe personally that guilty people act defensively. If you don’t have anything to hide, then it shouldn’t be a problem. I also believe when you are in a public space, your privacy kind of goes out the window because you are in essence in a public place.”
Bandera had eight Flock cameras installed. At the meeting last week where the town voted to end the Flock contract, residents noted that Bandera has one of the lowest crime rates in the state. Other residents noted that people in the town kept cutting down the poles the Flock cameras are installed on, leading the town to continually spend money and time to replace them. Residents said they felt like they made it clear that they do not want the cameras in the town, but that the town had dragged its feet on actually ending the contract.
“This is the fifth meeting [about Flock]. How many more meetings are we going to have to have before we get to the idea that we don’t need the Flock system?” one resident said in the meeting last week. “How many more meetings is it going to take before we understand the community didn’t vote for this? They don’t want it. How many more times are the cameras going to have to get cut down before somebody realizes it’s not worth the money? It’s coming to a point where we’re going to have to have meetings until we’re all dead […] By putting the cameras back up [after they’ve been cut down], you’re basically baiting someone else to come cut them down or shoot them down, you’re basically causing an issue because we didn’t vote for it.”
Another resident said Flock “doesn’t pass the vibe check. Bandera is the cowboy capital of the world. We don’t need to implement mass government surveillance in our town.”
At the meeting last week, city council members discussed how it was clear residents didn’t want Flock cameras, and that the town had stopped installing new ones, but that it never formally ended the contract. “Call for a vote please,” one council member eventually said. “It’s a waste of time,” to keep discussing a technology that residents didn’t want, they added. At that point, the council proposed to “deactivate and remove any Flock cameras that are city owned,” and voted to end the contract.
The discussion that happened in Bandera is essentially the same one that has played out throughout the country in small towns and large cities across the political spectrum. Time and time again, local politicians advocate for more surveillance even when it is clear their constituents don’t want it. In Troy, New York, the city council voted to end its Flock contract, for example, but the mayor declared a state of emergency to continue using the cameras, The Washington Post reported. In Dunwoody, Georgia, residents have been fighting against Flock after they learned the company was using cameras in the city in sales demos. The city council there elected to slightly tweak its contract with Flock but not end it entirely. Later this week, Flock is throwing a training for police officers about “how to speak with city councils: meeting the moment with confidence.”
In his letter to residents, Flowers said that they should stop being hypocrites by using technology.
“Let’s take Bandera back to 1880 properly. No double standards, no hypocrisy,” Flowers wrote. “If LPRs are ‘unconstitutional’ and invade our right to ‘public’ privacy, we need to be courageous enough to go all the way. I look forward to the ‘Privacy First’ crowd showing up to support these bans [...] just remember to leave your phones at home.”
Earlier this year, after the February town hall meeting, Flowers told the Bandera Bulletin that he believed town residents’ privacy concerns “deserve to be addressed directly and respectfully.” Flowers did not respond to multiple requests for comment from 404 Media.
The Formula 1 driver market is potentially just one domino away from exploding into a frenzy, so what exactly does an F1 driver need to do to get themselves into the best seat on the grid?
Tuapse has been under a state of emergency since late April, when successive waves of drone strikes sparked major fires at the Rosneft-operated oil refinery.
