Professional sports leagues have 4.8 billion reasons to review how they distribute out-of-market broadcasts after Thursday’s judgement against the NFL in the “Sunday Ticket” case in U.S. District Court.

“It’s going to require other leagues to take a close look at their model and make sure that the means by which they’re providing consumer choice really does ensure true choice,” said Christine Bartholomew, vice dean and professor in the University of Buffalo’s School of Law. “What happened here, at least according to the jury, was that the NFL had really suppressed consumer choice. Not only did they steer the consumers towards using satellite TV, it meant that they had to buy the whole package.”

The jury of five men and three women determined the NFL violated antitrust laws in distributing Sunday afternoon games not aired locally on Fox or CBS on a premium subscription service that only had one distributor. That kept the cost of the package high and limited those who could subscribe so that it would not impact local ratings.

The class-action lawsuit covered 2.4 million residential subscribers and 48,000 businesses in the United States who paid for the package of out-of-market games from the 2011 through 2022 seasons on DirecTV.

Armed with rhetoric about the “deep state”, a conservative-backed group is planning to publicly name and shame career government employees that they consider hostile to Donald Trump.

This “blacklist” of civil servants, which will be published online, is intended to advance Trump’s broader goals, which, if elected, include weeding out government employees and replacing them with loyalists.

The group behind the list is the American Accountability Foundation (AAF), which was founded in 2020 and describes its mission as “working non-stop to expose the left’s secrets and hold Biden accountable”. A 2022 New Yorker profile described AAF as a “conservative dark-money group” and “slime machine”.

Backed with a $100,000 grant from the Heritage Foundation, an influential rightwing thinktank, AAF will compile information, including social media posts, about civil servants they suspect will “obstruct and sabotage a future conservative president”. They plan to publish dossiers on those non-public facing individuals, starting with the Department of Homeland Security, and expose them to scrutiny.

Online retailer Etsy will prohibit sales of most sex toys, content that depicts sex acts and genitalia, and more starting July 29.

The indie seller published its Adult Nudity and Sexual Content policy yesterday, which states that sales of adult toys that are insertable, "applied to the genitalia," or "designed for genitals to be inserted into them" will be prohibited. That pretty much runs the gamut — dildos, vibrators, rings, plugs, and the like will be banned.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/17080384

DURING AN APPEARANCE before a military review board, an attorney for Guantánamo Bay’s “forever prisoner” revealed that negotiations are underway for his possible release after being tortured and detained without charges for 22 years.

Abu Zubaydah (whose real name is Zayn al-Abidin Muhammed Husayn) is perhaps the most egregious victim of the U.S. national security apparatus that ran amok after the September 11 attacks and still grinds on. He appeared in a Guantánamo courtroom Thursday, listening to his attorney Solomon Shinerock tell a board of U.S. officials that a “redacted” country could admit Abu Zubaydah and monitor his activities indefinitely. The detainee will agree to any form of surveillance by the host country, said Shinerock, who did not name the country during the unclassified portion of the hearing.

Unlike Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and three other alleged 9/11 plotters, Abu Zubaydah has never been charged with any crime. The U.S. assessment notes that he never swore allegiance to bin Laden because the Saudi militant leader focused on attacking the United States while Abu Zubaydah “had wanted to attack Israel for its treatment of Palestinians.”

Abu Zubaydah has the funds to support himself upon release, Shinerock told the panel. The detainee was awarded more than $200,000 by the European Court of Human Rights in 2022 as compensation for CIA torture at black sites located in Lithuania and Poland. In 2023, a United Nations human rights panel, U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, urged the United States to immediately release Abu Zubaydah.

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On 21 June 2024, China issued alarming new guiding opinions under the 2005 Anti-Secession Law.

The guidelines threaten to impose a maximum potential death penalty for a range of vaguely defined supporting ‘Taiwan independence’ activities. They allow Chinese courts to conduct trials in absentia and appear to apply to both Taiwanese nationals and foreigners alike, in an unacceptable escalation in Beijing’s assault on the freedom of expression of the people of Taiwan and the international community.

Michael Caster, Asia Digital Program Manager at ARTICLE 19, commented:

“In these new guidelines, Beijing is seeking to wield the maximum threat of in absentia death sentences to instill fear and gag independent expression on all things Taiwan. Make no mistake, this has nothing to do with preserving cross-straits peace, as Beijing would have it. This development serves to further bully the international community into isolating Taiwan. The only acceptable response is to redouble solidarity and accelerate coordination and cooperation with Taiwan.

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Addition for clarification: The "South China Morning Post"(SCMP) is a state-controlled Chinese media outlet. In this article, however, it criticizes the Chinese health care system and even cites ordinary citizens' posts which don't appear to be censored, a rare move in China. This is why the article is linked here. In general, however, one should be very careful using this source.

A hospital in China has stoked controversy by charging a patient for the use of a chair they were sitting on while receiving an intravenous infusion.

On mainland social media at the end of June, a person released a billing statement by the public-funded Ningxia Children’s Hospital, which showed that five yuan (70 US cents) had been charged for a seat, Zonglan Video reported.

It is not clear how old the patient was, or what they were being treated for, but the bill showed the medication contained antibiotics.

An official at the hospital in Yinchuan in Ningxia Hui autonomous region, northwestern China, said the fee was for two days’ use of a chair by the patient who was sitting on it while receiving an infusion. [...] The controversial chair fee has become the subject of heated discussions on mainland social media, after being viewed 5 million times on Douyin alone.

“Hospitals are so commercial. I feel speechless about this fee,” one online observer said.

“It’s the first time I’ve heard of this kind of cost in a hospital. Is there anything left that they do not charge fees for?” said another person.

“Are ordinary people now expected to bring their own chair to see doctors from now on,” a third said.

Donald Trump's overarching narrative for the debate was that Joe Biden has diminished U.S. power by opening the border and allowing millions of "Illegal immigrants" released "From prisons, jails and mental institutions" to come into the country to "Take our jobs," overwhelm our health care and Social Security systems, and rape and kill us.

Rather than pointing out Trump's utter lack of concern for people's well-being, Biden's rebuttal fell into the trap of trying to respond to Trump's tirades, allowing the former president to control the agenda and tone of the debate.

Trump used this as an opportunity to point out how little progress has been made under Biden and that Biden helped drive these disparities through his embrace of the "Superpredator" myth in the 1990s.

While many in the Biden administration and its key constituencies favor dialing back criminalization, they feel that it is politically impossible to state that clearly and openly, leaving the president to quietly support some good programs, while publicly leaning into a police-centered crime control strategy that will never be able to compete with Trump's undiluted authoritarianism.

Biden's weak policies and incoherent responses during the debate may give us another four years of Trump and his drive to turn the U.S. into a despotic kleptocracy.

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Addition for clarification: The "South China Morning Post"(SCMP) is a state-controlled Chinese media outlet. Sometimes they appear to publish articles like this one that are, at least to some degree, critical of the CCP, although the article increasingly reiterates the CCP's stance as you read along. The post provides a rare glimpse into the Chinese propaganda machinery, however, which is why I posted it here. In general, however, one should be very careful using this source.

• “Narrative construction and discourse building are essential if we are to effectively defend our rights and interests in the South China Sea – both in the present and in future,” Wu Shicun, founder of the National Institute for South China Sea Studies, told a seminar held in Hainan province last week.

• Without naming any country, Wu said China faced “an increasingly arduous battle over public perception and opinion”, adding that “rival claimants” were “stepping up cooperation with extraterritorial forces in the study of historical and legal issues” concerning the South China Sea.

• Beijing lays claim to much of the South China Sea, citing historic activities and records in support.

• Its claims were rejected by the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague in 2016 in a case filed by the Philippines.

• Beijing has dismissed the Hague ruling as “null and void” and continued to build up its infrastructure and troop presence in the South China Sea. But the Philippines and other claimants – which include Vietnam, Malaysia and Brunei – along with the United States and its allies have repeatedly urged China to abide by international law.

• Yi Xianliang, a former ambassador to Norway who previously served as deputy director of the foreign ministry’s boundary and ocean affairs department, also spoke at Tuesday’s seminar and dismissed the 2016 ruling as a “bad joke”.

• But Yi warned “we have to ask why the ruling is flawed” and ask if it “will happen again and how we can prevent it from happening again”.

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WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange is free after a 14-year battle against extradition to the United States. In a final effort to secure his freedom, an anonymous Bitcoiner donated over 8 Bitcoin, worth around $500,000, to help Assange’s family pay off the debt incurred by his travel and settlement expenses. [...] The donation link was posted by Stella Assange on June 25, and within 10 hours, an anonymous Bitcoiner paid over 8 Bitcoin (BTC) to the fund, almost clearing the goal of $520,000. He has also received over 300,000 British pounds ($380,000) in fiat donations so far.

The single Bitcoin donation was the largest donation to the fund, more than all other donations in all currencies combined. As a result, Assange will arrive in Australia debt free.

A ballot question to enshrine Nevada's abortion rights in the state constitution has met all of the requirements to appear in front of voters in November, the Nevada Secretary of State's office announced Friday, and Democrats across the nation hope similar measures mobilize supporters on Election Day.

NEW YORK (AP) — The Associated Press says it is setting up a sister organization that will seek to raise money in support of state and local news reporting, as the crisis in that sector shows little sign of abating.

...

AP in particular can play an important role in bolstering coverage of government and political news in the states, said Tim Franklin, who leads the local news initiative at Northwestern’s Medill journalism school. The Pew Research Center has detailed that there are fewer full-time reporters working in statehouses than there were a decade ago.

...

Besides philanthropy, the AP has been more aggressively marketing its own news website and asking for reader donations. “We believe there is a gap in the U.S. market, in the consumer arena, for people who want independent, fact-based, non-partisan news, and that’s the role that the AP plays in the ecosystem,” Veerasingham said.

A prime mover behind the Shirion Collective, a conspiracy-minded, pro-Israel disinformation network seeking to shape public opinion about the Gaza conflict in the US, Australia and the UK, is a tech entrepreneur named Daniel Linden living in Florida who co-wrote a guidebook for OnlyFans users, the Guardian can reveal.

Shirion has harassed pro-Palestinian activists, including many Jews, offered bounties for the identity of pro-Palestinian protesters, spread conspiracy narratives centered on figures like George Soros, and boasted of an AI-surveillance platform but offered few concrete details of how the technology functions.

The Guardian investigation used public records and open source materials to corroborate information originally provided by the White Rose Society, an Australian anti-fascist research collective.

Moreover, according to a senior Democratic official, the party leadership would have much more control over choosing a replacement if Biden were to drop out after receiving the nomination than if he did so beforehand. Once a candidate is officially nominated, there is a process for the Democratic National Committee members to choose a successor. Biden is the dominant force at the DNC, and his preference for a successor would surely carry sway.

If Biden were to exit before that, his delegates might do what he asked of them — but they wouldn’t be bound in the same way they are now. In that scenario, the delegates could nominate anyone, and there could be a political brawl at the convention.

A sense of concern is growing inside the top ranks of the Democratic Party that leaders of Joe Biden’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee are not taking seriously enough the impact of the president’s troubling debate performance earlier in the week.

DNC Chairman Jaime Harrison and Biden campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez held a Saturday afternoon call with dozens of committee members across the country, a group of some of the most influential members of the party. They largely ignored Biden’s weak showing Thursday night or the avalanche of criticism that followed.

Multiple committee members on the call, most granted anonymity to talk about the private discussion, described feeling like they were being gaslighted — that they were being asked to ignore the dire nature of the party’s predicament. The call, they said, may have worsened a widespread sense of panic among elected officials, donors and other stakeholders.

Instead, the people said, Harrison offered what they described as a rosy assessment of Biden’s path forward. The chat function was disabled and there were no questions allowed.

An officer in upstate New York shot and killed a teen fleeing while pointing a replica gun, police said Saturday.

Migrant apprehensions at the border continue to drop after President Biden's execution order on asylum.