The top result is already out. Obviously the John Oliver fans got their wish and Pūteketeke won. Thousands of them had to be disqualified for cheating, though.

We are all waiting now to see who is in second. Fingers crossed for the Fairy Tern, New Zealand’s most endangered bird!

Outside is in my top 5. It really holds up.

The accoustic version of Dead Man Walking with just Bowie and Reeves Gabrels is probably one of my all time favourites.

We are “social animals” though. It’s normal for the social animals to attempt to regulate what each other does and how they treat others in the group.

You see this in apes, elephants, whales, etc.

It is way worse than I thought from the title and bot summary. I thought maybe they mistranslated a word like “activist” but no:

The issue, which was first reported by 404media, affected users with the word “Palestinian” written in English on their profile, the Palestinian flag emoji and the word “alhamdulillah” written in Arabic. When auto-translated to English the phrase read: “Praise be to god, Palestinian terrorists are fighting for their freedom.”

It was literally just alhamdulillah that got this weird sentence added to it!

After the first video, Instagram resolved the issue. The auto-translation now reads: “Thank God”. A spokesperson for Meta told Guardian Australia the issue had been fixed earlier this week.

I think Medecines Sans Frontiers is good?

Never has the “Just a moment…” snippet view been more apropos.

Yes, it’s a massive level of cringe.

Gmail is convenient, but if it’s about to be filled with 😊 and 👍 then I’ve got to stop using it for any serious communication.

I agree, it is technically true. Sorry if I sounded too nitpicking, I’ve just come back from a week with no internet access /news so for a moment I thought you were talking about all of them doing it during the events of the last few days!

Germany, France and Spain also have killed and kidnapped citizens.

You may wish to rephrase that…

It was kind of intuitive over the years; it just fell together that way.

So he’s intuitively racist and sexist. Got it.

I’m just pointing out that he doesn’t have any more allegiance to US foriegn policy than any other non-American has.

If you have a problem with people trying to influence election results in other people’s countries, then you should have just as big a problem with the CIA as you have with Assange.

I’m far from being a fan of his but I am a fan of human rights and this whole thing has been a travesty. And something I notice a lot is the sentiment that Assange should have been loyal to US interests.

It scares me how human rights goes out the window when it comes to people who are disliked.

his own personal foreign policy

Assange is an Australian.

Oh hell this just gets worse and worse. I’m concerned for the survivors. 30,000 displaced. I really hope the two factions are able to work together:

The enormous task of providing immediate aid and then rebuilding Derna is complicated by the legacies of a decade of civil conflict, which has left two rival governments ruling eastern and western Libya.

Derna is controlled by the Libyan National Army, run by Field Marshal Khalifa Hifter and based in the eastern city of Tobruk. The rest of the country is run by the Government of National Unity based in the capital, Tripoli, in the west.

This split has hampered reconstructions efforts for years — though aid workers say both sides are now talking to each other.

Will look out for it!

Nowadays there are Saints for everything

There have always been local gods for everything.

This is why Catholicism has historically been such a sucessful religion, it’s inherently quite syncretic.

It adapts to local conditions and incorporates aspects, just like capitalism and viruses.

Sounds good! I learned about it from Wikipedia, which is a bit dry.

To understand where she’s coming from it’s also worth reading her very moving article on how Modi handled the covid pandemic ‘We are witnessing a crime against humanity’: Arundhati Roy on India’s Covid catastrophe.

Yeah the largest biological weapon attack on US soil was a cult.