cabbage

Norway asks the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to clarify whether Israel is violating international law. On Monday, Israel adopted new laws that effectively ban the UN aid organization for Palestinian refugees.

Norway, the UN, the USA and several countries have reacted strongly to the fact that the majority in the Knesset passed two new laws on Monday evening which will ban the UN aid organization for Palestinian refugees, UNWRA.

One law prohibits UNWRA from operating in Israel and the Israeli-occupied territories from next year.

The second law stipulates that Israel labels the UN aid organization as a terrorist group and breaks diplomatic ties with the organization.

This means that the Israeli authorities are prohibited from having any contact whatsoever with the UN organisation.

Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide (Ap) said in a press release yesterday that Norway strongly distanced itself from the decision.

Now the Norwegian government is going one step further.

Eide wants the UN's highest court to assess whether Israel is violating international law when they want to ban UNRWA's work.

- No one is above the law and no one is above international law. The occupying power Israel has a duty to facilitate support for the people living in Palestine under occupation. Therefore, we believe this decision is simply illegal, says Eide to NRK.

According to the government, a number of countries have expressed support for the initiative, in addition to the United Nations Organization for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA).

Doesn't think anyone can replace UNRWA now

Norway has long been critical of how Israel has operated in Gaza and the West Bank after the Hamas attack in October last year.

Following Israel's decision to ban the UN aid organisation, Norway fears that the consequences could be dramatic for hundreds of thousands of civilians.

The organization has provided aid to millions of displaced Palestinians for over 70 years. They have also continued to work, while the war has raged in Gaza.

Eide believes that the Israeli government is now making it difficult for the Palestinians to get vital help and basic services such as health care and school.

The Israeli authorities say they are working on other solutions that can replace UNRWA, but Barth Eide believes that is not good enough.

- All the important emergency aid organizations are clear that they need the UN's emergency aid organization for Palestinian refugees. They are the ones who have the experience, they are the ones who have the expertise and those who have the entire infrastructure both in Gaza and the West Bank, says Eide to NRK.

He does not believe that anyone can replace the UN organization in the current situation.

- I do not believe that there is an alternative plan for this that can be put in place in time. The need and the crisis are now, not in the future. So this must be reversed, says Eide.

- Undermines the work on a two-state solution

Eide also believes that Israel's decision could undermine the work for a viable Palestinian state and a two-state solution.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, on the other hand, is well satisfied with Monday's decision.

- UNRWA staff involved in terrorist activities against Israel must be held accountable, he wrote on X after the new laws were passed.

Israel has claimed that 450 UNRWA staff worked for militant groups in Gaza and that several participated in the terrorist attack on Israel on 7 October last year.

Several countries put payments to UNRWA on hold. Norway was not among them.

An independent commission of inquiry later determined that Israel lacked evidence. UNRWA also fired around 20 staff for having a role in the 7 October attack.

Via NRK, the Norwegian public broadcaster.

I am currently using GNOME Backups (aka Déjà Dup Backups) to backup all my files to a "backups" folder in my Dropbox. This is not a good solution - first because I want to stop paying for dropbox, second because I don't want to keep everything in the cloud, third because everything is stored twice on my laptop and storage is precious.

I therefore want to manage back-ups locally instead. I would like to keep using Déjà Dup, as it has worked really well and effortlessly.

My initial idea is very bare bones. I could keep an old laptop running 24/7, connect a hard drive, and use SSH file transfer in Deja Dup in order to store everything on that machine. That said, I have a few concerns as well.

1. Is this a good way of doing things? Should I be doing something else instead?
2. I'm not always at home - will it be a problem if the Backup software cannot find the folder because it's not on the correct network, or will it have the sense to wait until it's connected to the correct wifi?
3. Will the old laptop use a lot of power, or is it regrettable for any other reason? Is it possible to make it automatically hibernate for example during the nigthtime? Or to have it spend very little power unless anything is connected via SSH?
4. Would it be better to get a dedicated device, like a Rasberry Pi or something? I don't have all too much faith in my old laptop not making noise with the fan running at random times.

It looks like my partner will be getting a new laptop running Linux soon enough as she has to hand in her work computer, so it would be good timing to get a proper solution into place.

Thank you in advance!

I picked up a Ducky One Mini at a flea market yesterday, and after cleaning it extensively it seems to be working pretty well for the most part. I'm using it for writing and coding, so not having dedicated arrow keys will take some getting used to, but other than that it seems neat enough for the price I paid.

However, the alternative graphic button (on the right side of the space bar) is completely unresponsive. Pressing it just makes no difference at all. I used a tool that maps keyboard presses in Linux (xev), and it showed nothing when Alt Gr was pressed (just like the Fn button), so it seems no signal is being sent from the keyboard to the computer.

It could be that this is due to some setting made by the previous owner, or maybe there's something else going on. Maybe I need to update the firmware. Maybe it's broken. I have no idea.

The back-light behind some of the numerical keys is also disabled or broken, but it doesn't bother me much as I'm not a big fan of back-light anyway.

But if anyone has any suggestions what to try for the alternative graphic key it would be much appreciated! For now I have re-routed right super (Windows button) to be read as Alt Gr, but it's not very convenient when writing Latex and using a lot of curly brackets. :)

Labour has decided to start their campaign with a bang, pruning women of colour and left wingers from the ballot due to reasons such as liking tweets sharing Jon Stewart videos. At the end of the day it boils down to support for Palestine.

Looks like Labour is doing what they can to make sure UK politics remains completely fucked even after the end of the Tory rule.

I noticed responding to posts in communities hosted at lemmy.ml gives the following warning:

This post is hosted on lemmy.ml which will ban you for saying anything negative about China, Russia or Putin. Tread carefully.

While I see where this is coming from and I agree with the general sentiment, I'm not sure it's a great idea to include such a message. I basically read it as an invitation to be off-topic and to derail conversations in order to annoy the admins. While it comes from a point of good intentions, it can be disheartening for the people running communities on Lemmy.ml to receive comments about Russia from users basically trying to get banned, in communities that has nothing to do with this issue.

It's unfortunate, but a lot of valuable older communities are still hosted on lemmy.ml, and I think PieFed users should be encouraged to be constructive and on-topic users there as they should be everywhere else.

An alternative suggestion: Maybe it could be useful to remind people which community they are posting in? Like, "This community is dedicated to renewable energy. Please keep this in mind when contributing to the discussion". Then again, that would be a mess to implement in a good way.

Hi,

The CSAM scandal the other day got me thinking about the (often lacking) capability of the Threadiverse to deal with quickly with content moderation, and since PieFed has already been a bit experimental in this regard, I figured maybe this is a place where I could ask if an idea is feasible. Sorry if it's a bad match!

The idea is to identify trusted users, in the same way that PieFed currently identifies potentially problematic users. Long term users with significantly more upvotes than downvotes. These trusted users could get an additional option to report a post, beyond "Report to moderator": Something like "Mark as abuse".

The user would be informed that this is meant for content that clearly goes against the rules of the server, that any other type of issue should be reported to moderators, and that abuse of the function leads to revoke of privilege to use it and, if intentional, potentially a ban.

If the user accepts this and marks a post as abuse, every post by the OP of the marked post would be temporarily hidden on the instance and marked for review by a moderator. The moderator can then choose to either 1) ban the user posting abusive material, or 2) make the posts visible again, and remove the "trusted" flag of the reporting user and hence avoiding similar false positives in the future.

A problem I keep seeing on the threadiverse is that bad content tends to remain available too long, as many smaller instances means that the moderating team might simply all be asleep. So this seems like one possible way of mitigating that. Maybe it's not technically feasible, and maybe it's just not a particularly good idea; it might also not be a particularly original idea, I don't know. But I figured it might be worth discussing.

Congratulations on having made such a great tool, even in its early phase! It seems very solid.

I'm curious about the long-term plans for the project: Is the idea to work strictly with the Threadiverse (similar to Lemmy), or are there plans to integrate more with the microblog platforms (similar to Kbin)? Any particular difference in approach to Fediverse integration vis-a-vis the two main platforms?