Image is of the Cuban flag and the Pride flag on the Havana Health Ministry building.
Inspired by a highly upvoted recommendation by @Commiejones@hexbear.net:
We need to kill the Mega Posting Wars meme. It wasn't very funny to start with and now I get the feeling some people are taking it way too seriously. Clogging up the news thread with bullshit just to try to out post the trans mega is just dumb and annoying.
The News Megathread is now under trans martial law:
-
Loving trans people on this site and elsewhere is strictly mandatory.
-
Posting about the "comment wars" between the trans and news megathreads is now strongly discouraged inside the news megathread. No shame in it - I also recently made jokes about it - but though they were almost always just jokes, it was unrelated to current events and was beginning to feel more like padding the comment count instead of trying to improve the quality of the thread. If you want to boost comments and engagement here, then post articles and analysis!
The COTW (Chemical of the Week) label is designed to spur discussion and debate about a specific chemical every week in order to help the community gain greater understanding of the domestic situation of often-understudied chemicals. If you've wanted to talk about the chemical or share your experiences, but have never found a relevant place to do so, now is your chance! However, don't worry - this is still a general news megathread where you can post about ongoing events from any country.
The Chemicals of the Week are Estrogen and Testosterone! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants.
Please check out the HexAtlas!
The bulletins site is here!
The RSS feed is here.
Last week's thread is here.
Israel-Palestine Conflict
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA daily-ish reports on Israel's destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news (and has automated posting when the person running it goes to sleep).
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.
Various sources that are covering the Ukraine conflict are also covering the one in Palestine, like Rybar.
Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Sources:
Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don't want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it's just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists' side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster's telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a 'propaganda tax', if you don't believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine Telegram Channels:
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
Grand Rapids, Mi mistakenly collected $81K in holiday parking fees. It won’t issue refunds
Article.
GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (WOOD) — Holiday parking on Grand Rapids streets is supposed to be free. But for years, people were paying on holidays because of a mistake on a smartphone app.
It’s a story you probably have never heard before, because city officials kept quiet about it after the problem was discovered in 2022. By then, the app had been mistakenly allowing holiday payments for more than three years, apparently since the MOTU parking app was introduced in Grand Rapids.
Nobody noticed until Shannon Tanis says she parked on a downtown street on a holiday and used the app.
“I had paid and I was like, ‘Wait a minute.’ I realized there was supposed to be free (parking) on holidays,'” she said.
She says the app didn’t warn her off or refuse the payment. She did some research.
Tanis says she keeps a critical eye on local government, so she knew who to call: City Comptroller Max Frantz.
“Shannon reached out to me,” said Frantz, the official city financial watchdog. “She had done some testing herself and some documentation.”
Frantz says he checked some audit reports and found that the MOTU app was indeed collecting money on holidays when city policy dictates free parking. The app was supposed to block payments on holidays, but the comptroller says that message somehow never got to the app contractor.
“For some reason, that transmission didn’t occur or there was an issue with it,” Frantz said.
He says city parking officials fixed the problem. Now, they say they program the app every year to make sure it prevents holiday payments.
All told, according to Frantz, there were more than 36,000 unnecessary parking payments totaling more than $81,000.
Tanis, who discovered the mistake, says the city government should refund the money.
“They just need to do the right thing,” she said.
Tanis contacted Target 8 investigators after she saw our story in June about a city policy that puts a four-year limit on refunds of water and sewer overbilling and a man who says the city overbilled his business thousands of dollars for 10 years and only paid back part of it.
The city decided not to refund the mistaken parking payments, either.
“I had suggested to the director of MobileGR at that time that at minimum he consider evaluating what a refund would look like,” Frantz said.
He says it would have been possible to refund the thousands of parking payments, but it would take a lot of work. He says he’s comfortable with the city decision not to.
“I think there are a lot of things to take into consideration,” he said.
“The remarkable thing about this story,” Frantz said, “is that it really just took one resident to document something and get in touch with someone at city hall willing to take a hard look at this.”
This is on top of the city destorying a block with a massive water main break and not covering any of the damage their neglected infrastructure caused saying they are "immune".
Love how almost every American city is so completely dysfunctional that they outsource even simple transactions such as parking payments to a private third party
It’s a wonder they haven’t started selling cities wholesale to private corporations at this point
They basically did in Chicago, at least if you count the square footage of streets.
$2 for parking? What's the point in charging for it all.
there's about 81k points to it apparently
Yes, an amount that would be unlikely to cover the overhead costs for the local government to developing the app, installing and maintaining signage and so forth.
Maybe it's just a mechanism to get fine revenue? As in they don't really care about the parking fees, there just needs to be some nominal fee to be able to give our parking fines.
it appears to be $2.25/hr. Which isn't nothing when multiplied by many thousands of spots, as long as you're frugal with signage.
But the point is more regulating use of a limited resource than it is making money. If you have 20 parking spots on a block with two apartment buildings and 4 shops/restaurants, and you have no fee system, the people living in the apartments will have basically all of those spots occupied 24/7 and nobody will be able to use them to get to the restaurants/shops. This is all car-brain logic ofc, street parking is mostly just dumb and unnecessary in city centers in functional cities, but it isn't pointless within that logic.
They could also just impose time limits though, and not have to worry about spending money on administering a payment system and everything that comes with that. From what I remember of their their most recent annual report, the county is running a net loss on their parking scheme
I guess. In my experience adherence is really bad on time limit schemes but maybe that's just because of poor enforcement, and that enforcement and signage and stuff still costs money that you can't recoup much of, even compared to metered parking. If it was a bigger city I guess you could jack the meter rate way up to be closer to what a cheap lot/ramp costs