The petition to the House of Commons to remove Pete Hoekstra from his position as U.S. Ambassador to Canada has now received over 100,000 signatures as of Friday, August 18.

According to the CBC, the petition had 56,000 signatures as of Wednesday morning, "almost double the number of signatures 24 hours earlier". The petition will be presented in Parliament in the fall by Elizabeth May, MP for the Green Party. Pete Hoekstra had previous won hearts and minds for his stellar work as ambassador to the Netherlands. /snark

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

date stamped on slide February 1963

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Greg Adams Photography posted a photo:

Back side of Sawn Boats in Boston, MA

BertvB posted a photo:

A captivating low-angle macro portrait of a Mission Golden-eyed Tree Frog (Trachycephalus resinifictrix), captured in the aquarium exhibit at Artis Zoo, Amsterdam.

France's Constitutional Council has struck down a law that would have banned children under 15 from social media, ruling that it disproportionately restricted freedom of expression and lacked adequate privacy safeguards around age verification. President Emmanuel Macron has asked the government to rewrite the measure, with the goal of putting a revised version in place before spring 2027. Reuters reports: "The Council holds that the contested provisions, on the one hand, disproportionately infringe upon the freedom of expression and communication and, on the other, fail to provide the legal safeguards necessary to ensure the right to respect for private life," it said.

French lawmakers had approved the bill in July, becoming the first in Europe to follow Australia, whose world-first ban barred access to platforms including Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube for under-16s in December. Lawmakers there are considering stricter penalties after data showed mixed success.

Countries around the globe, including China, the United Arab Emirates and Turkey, have either instituted measures intended to curtail or bar access to social media for young people, or have said they were planning them. The European Union has said it was planning to seek stronger protections for children from harmful social media features.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: After its cloud storage provider went defunct, a PBS affiliate decided to sue a data center provider to regain access to 50TB of TV shows, videos, and other data dating back 70 years. As reported this week by Current, a trade newspaper covering public broadcasting, St. Louis affiliate Nine PBS filed a lawsuit against Iron Mountain Data Centers on July 28, seeking access to the data. In the litigation filed in Denver District Court, Nine PBS says that its cloud storage provider, Open Source Storage (OSS), used one of Iron Mountain's Denver data centers to store the channel's data. However, OSS is being unresponsive, and Nine PBS says Iron Mountain has refused to release its data.

The data in question includes the station's coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic, East St. Louis' history, The Great Flood of 1993, and over 11,000 files, The Denver Post reported in July. The lawsuit claims that "most" of the data is "unique and irreplaceable," according to the Post. Last month, a judge blocked Iron Mountain from deleting or modifying the data.

In a hearing on Wednesday, a judge ruled that Iron Mountain must hand over any physical devices holding the data, Current reported today. The judge also said that Nine PBS must find a third party, such as a former OSS worker, who can help retrieve the data within 30 days and without sharing or corrupting data belonging to other OSS clients. Nine PBS is already communicating with a former OSS employee "who is willing to help," the report said. If complications arise, such as from the data being encrypted, another hearing will be scheduled. Nine PBS and Iron Mountain must provide updates by September 14. Iron Mountain's spokesperson said the company only provides physical infrastructure, such as the building, network connectivity, power, and environmental controls. "Our customers rent space for their servers and other hardware. These are the client's assets. We don't have access to the data on the hardware/servers because they belong to our customers," the company said.

If it granted "unauthorized access to third-party hardware without a court order," Iron Mountain said the company would violate basic data privacy protocols, breach its contract with OSS, and "potentially [expose] confidential data belonging to other clients of OSS."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ECT

Na haar overstap van de 400 meter horden naar de 800 meter temperde Femke Broeders-Bol de verwachtingen. Maar vrijdagavond liet ze op de EK atletiek zien tot de wereldtop te behoren: ze won brons en evenaarde het Nederlands record. „De dromen die ik had over de 800 meter komen vroeger uit dan ik had verwacht.”

It’s sporadically very funny, but the tone of this blackly comic murder-mystery is all over the place. It wants to tackle big issues, but seems afraid of its own politics

‘But I can’t get an F,” wails Elise (Lydia West) in the first episode of the Australian campus comedy He Had It Coming, shoulders slumping like soufflés as her tutor peers pityingly at her terrible paintings. “I’m here on a scholarship? I’m here to be an artist?!” Alas, poor Elise. No amount of wounded upspeak can disguise the fact that she is an aspiring artist in much the same way a bag of flour is an aspiring pastry. Her “work”, bless it, consists of daubing clothes on to impressionist nudes – a “protest”, apparently, against the patriarchy and its preoccupation with “ancient bush”. Unctuous Professor Phoenix (Harry Greenwood) is unimpressed. “Hmm,” he sighs, pouting affectedly at Elise’s “feminist reimagining” of Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe; the picnic’s enigmatic nude now sporting a pair of jeans and oversized novelty spectacles. Mon Dieu! The problem, explains Phoenix, slowly, is a lack of ambition. Feminist art isn’t for amateurs. “Be radical,” he smirks, as Elise quietly broils with rage. “Don’t settle for mediocrity.”

The nerve! “These men are holding us back,” she roars later at new pal Barbara (Natasha Liu Bordizzo), a prickly fashion influencer who is being slut-shamed by the campus jocks for having tipsily humped a stranger’s thigh at a party. “Yes,” agrees Barbara. “Let’s go vandalise something!” And so to the quadrant, where, in the dead of night, a mallet is applied to the genitals of the statue of the university’s hopelessly male namesake.

He Had It Coming aired on BBC Three and is available on iPlayer

Continue reading...

President said nine months at sea ‘not nearly long enough’ even as families call for attention to mental health crisis

Donald Trump has downplayed concerns about US sailors enduring a record-setting deployment of nearly nine months onboard the USS Abraham Lincoln on Friday, saying the deployment was “not nearly long enough” as concerns mount over mental health and supply issues onboard the aircraft carrier.

The US president made the comments during a brief exchange with reporters before flying to New York for an event highlighting falling violent crime rates across the US.

Continue reading...

Seriousness of remark made in New York on Friday, and whether it signaled new policy ​position, not clear

Donald Trump has threatened to declare the strait of Hormuz as “a territory of the United States” as his administration struggles to conclude the war with Iran.

During a speech at a police academy on Long Island, New York, on Friday, the US president said he would “pretty soon” designate the waterway – a crucial chokepoint for global trade, through which about a fifth of the world’s seaborne oil supplies typically pass – a US territory.

Continue reading...

• Manager’s deal expires at end of the new season

• ‘They don’t have to worry … I want to be here’

Mikel Arteta has said he is relaxed about his Arsenal contract expiring at the end of the new season and believes his side will need to be better than last year to defend their title successfully.

The Premier League champions will face Enzo Maresca’s Manchester City in the Community Shield in Cardiff on Sunday and are heavy favourites to win back-to-back league titles for the first time since the 1930s. The departure of Pep Guardiola from their traditional rivals City means Arteta is now the Premier League’s longest-serving manager, with the Spaniard having joined in December 2019.

Continue reading...

Raúl Jiménez marked his return to Wolves with the stoppage-time equaliser that saved them from an embarrassing start to their return to the Championship.

The Mexico striker, who scored against England during the World Cup finals, retained his composure to convert a penalty given for handball by Rayan Alebiosu that would have had VAR questioning whether the defender was in the area when Jackson Tchatchoua’s cross struck his arm. Thankfully for Wolves, the video assistant referee is no longer their problem. Jiménez, who had bought scarves for all supporters in the South Bank in gratitude for their response to welcoming him home, tucked away his first goal in this second spell for the club he graced during their recent heyday.

Continue reading...

No longer and not yet, Carl Corey [substack]