GENEVA – UN experts today called for safe passage for the Freedom Flotilla Coalition’s ship carrying essential medical aid, food, and baby supplies to Gaza which departed from Italy on 1 June 2025.

“Aid is desperately needed for the people of Gaza to forestall annihilation, and this initiative is a symbolic and powerful effort to deliver it. Israel should remember that the world is watching closely and refrain from any act of hostility against the Freedom Flotilla Coalition and its passengers,” the experts said.

“The people of Gaza have the right to receive aid through their own territorial waters even under occupation, and the Coalition ship has the right to free passage in international waters to reach the people of Gaza,” they said. “Israel must not interfere with its freedom of navigation, long recognised under international law.”

Embrace the JDA instead: https://jerusalemdeclaration.org/

The latest news out of Boston is that people are starting to really push back against ICE, trying to protect their neighbours at personal cost. ICE agents also keep operating without identifying themselves, without warrants, and they have started detaining and even deporting US citizens. In the US, where there are more guns than there are people. This is a powderkeg, waiting to blow.

And I have no confidence that their government is going to try to deescalate things. If we allow ourselves to dabble into conspiracy thinking and ascribe to malice what can just as well be ascribed to stupidity, we can just as well say there is a deliberate strategy by the US government to provoke violence. Trump signed that Executive Order to allow the use of military and national security assets to be used for policing. The Project 2025 guy has famously said that «the revolution will be bloodless “if the left allows it to be.”». And with Trump fucking up their economy, he will need to refocus to some internal enemy, to also clamp down on the inevitable economic discontent.

Aaaand to top it all up, historically, things heat up as temperatures heat up. It's coming, folks. Am I paranoid here? I don't think I am.

How is this going to impact us? Are we going to have a surge of political asylum claimants and/or refugees from the States? The first ones have already started trickling in.

And what the hell are we doing to prepare for this? In the short term, this is going to put stress on social services, housing, employment, healthcare, etc. In the medium term, we could be seeing anti-refugee backlash (e.g., an influx of a bunch of angloamericans in QC might re-ignite language tensions) and political tension with the US demanding deportations of asylum claimant dissidents (some of whom might have violent charges against them, e.g., for fighting back against ICE).

I feel like the guy from the meme a bit. But, guys! Guys! WTF.

I'm trying to find a replacement for NaturalReader in Linux but I'm not finding anything as good.

I have played around with different engines, such as Espeak (too robotic), Mozilla TTS and Coqui, and Piper. But I'm looking for an application, not just an engine, something that would allow me to open up a PDF, pick a spot and read from there, then be able to move back and forth on the document. Ideally, I would like to also be able to tell the application how to pronounce certain words.

I haven't figured out how to make Okular use The best I have found is ReadAloud, but it's just a browser addon. Okular doesn't seem to be able to use something like Piper EDIT: but Pied exists: https://github.com/Elleo/pied which makes it work.

Any ideas?

(I use Debian btw :P )

“When I got that threat, I was floored,” he said. “When I started thinking about what it meant for me and my family, that I was the target of a real threat to my life, I had the chills.”

At the time his wife, Gurkiran Kaur Sidhu, was pregnant with their second daughter. His older daughter was then almost two years old.

“For the first number of days, I just stayed in the basement because they advised me to stay away from windows,” he said. “It was a pretty serious thing.”

Singh said he had some very “tough talks” with his wife about whether or not to remain at the party helm, noting the reason for the threats was his position as “a prominent elected official.”

The NDP leader said he ultimately decided to stay on because he had more he wanted to do, including finalizing the national dental care program the party pushed the Liberals to implement.

Singh said the RCMP did not say where the threats to his life came from but the “implication” was they originated from a foreign government.

It's silly to use the geographical map of Canada to show election results. Land doesn't vote, people do.

Image source: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/04/28/world/canada/results-canada-federal-election.html

Given the rapidly evolving political landscape in the United States and reports of individuals encountering difficulties crossing the border, [the Canadian Association of University Teachers] strongly recommends that academic staff travel to the U.S. only if essential and necessary.