Interesting
Laurence Dollimore, writing in the Olive Press »
The left-wing PSOE leader made the announcement at an event marking the 46th anniversary of the Spanish Magna Carta – when the country left behind the Franco dictatorship and installed a parliamentary democracy.
“We believe that these are rights that we must protect in the Constitution so that no one can touch them in the future,” Sanchez said in a statement in parliament on Friday.
Kat Tenbarg, writing in NBC News »
On Sunday, Musk confirmed the platform has deprioritized posts including links, which was how journalists and other creators historically shared their work. But four journalists told NBC News that after millions of users migrated to Bluesky, an alternative that resembles a pared-back version of X, after the election, they are rebuilding their audiences there, too.
“My average post that isn’t a hot-button issue or isn’t trending might not perform as well on X as it does on Bluesky,” said Phil Lewis, a senior front page editor at HuffPost who has over 400,000 followers on X and close to 300,000 on Bluesky. “Judging by retweets, likes and comments, it’s a world of difference.”
Platform and audience editors at The Guardian and The Boston Globe have publicly noted higher traffic to their news websites from Bluesky than from competitors including Threads, Meta’s X alternative. Rose Wang, Bluesky’s chief operating officer, quoted the Guardian’s stats, writing: “We want Bluesky to be a great home for journalists, publishers, and creators. Unlike other platforms, we don’t de-promote your links. Post all the links you want — Bluesky is a lobby to the open web.”
The National Literacy Institute »
Illiteracy has become such a serious problem in our country that 130 million adults are now unable to read a simple story to their children
- 21% of adults in the US are illiterate in 2022
- 54% of adults have a literacy below 6th grade level
- 45 million are functionally illiterate and read below a 5th grade level
- 44% of the American adults do not read a book in a year
- The Top 3 states for highest child literacy rates were Massachusetts, Maryland, and New Hampshire, in that order (highest to lowest).
- The Bottom 3 states for child literacy rates were Louisiana, Mississippi, and New Mexico, (highest to lowest).
Jane Mayer, writing in The New Yorker »
After the recent revelation that Pete Hegseth had secretly paid a financial settlement to a woman who had accused him of raping her in 2017, President-elect Donald Trump stood by his choice of Hegseth to become the next Secretary of Defense. Trump’s communications director, Steven Cheung, issued a statement noting that Hegseth, who has denied wrongdoing, has not been charged with any crime. “President Trump is nominating high-caliber and extremely qualified candidates to serve in his administration,” Cheung maintained.
But Hegseth’s record before becoming a full-time Fox News TV host, in 2017, raises additional questions about his suitability to run the world’s largest and most lethal military force. A trail of documents, corroborated by the accounts of former colleagues, indicates that Hegseth was forced to step down by both of the two nonprofit advocacy groups that he ran—Veterans for Freedom and Concerned Veterans for America—in the face of serious allegations of financial mismanagement, sexual impropriety, and personal misconduct.
Read the whole article at The New Yorker »
Article also archived here »
The EFJ is the largest organization of journalists in Europe. They represents some 295,000 journalists in 74 journalists’ organizations across 44 countries.
European Federation of Journalists blog post (2024.11.26) »
The European Federation of Journalists (EFJ) has decided it will no longer post content on Elon Musk’s social media platform, X, from 20 January 2025, when Donald J. Trump will officially become the 47th President of the United States.
Like many European media outlets (The Guardian, Dagens Nyheter, La Vanguardia, Ouest-France, Sud-Ouest, etc.) and journalists’ organisations, such as the German Journalists’ Association (DJV), the EFJ considers that it can no longer ethically participate in a social network that its owner has transformed into a machine of disinformation and propaganda.
Continue reading
Karen Middleton, at the The Guardian »
Journalists will no longer face criminal prosecution for merely receiving some secret government information even without making it public, under changes the federal attorney general has announced to national secrecy laws.
Mark Dreyfus has also agreed to repeal parts of the law that make it a criminal offence to publish any information stamped “protected”, “secret” or “top secret” – meaning actual or likely harm is determined by the content of a document, not just the label on it.
80 years ago today, 160,000 troops from Britain, Canada, USA, —along with a dozen other nations— stormed five sandy beaches along the Normandy Coast, intending to liberate France and mainland Europe from Adolf Hitler’s tyranny.
The Canadian Encyclopedia says »
Juno Beach was the Allied code name for a 10 km stretch of French coastline assaulted by Canadian soldiers on D-Day, 6 June 1944, during the Second World War. The Canadian Army’s 3rd Infantry Division and 2nd Armoured Brigade seized the beach and its seaside villages while under intense fire from German defenders — an extraordinary example of military skill, reinforced by countless acts of personal courage. The 3rd Infantry Division took heavy casualties in its first wave of attack but took control of the beach by the end of the day. More than 14,000 Canadian soldiers landed or parachuted into France on D-Day. The Royal Canadian Navy contributed 110 warships and 10,000 sailors and the RCAF contributed 15 fighter and fighter-bomber squadrons to the assault. There were 1,074 Canadian casualties, including 359 killed.
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