Raphael

Republicans in the United States House of Representatives have passed an annual defence funding bill that highlights the party’s conservative priorities – and sticking points – in advance of the 2024 election season.

Democrats have decried the bill approved on Friday, which included anti-LGBTQ, anti-diversity and anti-abortion rights provisions. It passed by a 219 to 210 largely party-line vote in the majority Republican chamber. Four Democrats voted in support of the bill.

There’s nothing like a good kerfuffle between tech giants, especially when it’s about something as near and dear to developers’ hearts as open source software development.

Which is probably why the ongoing controversy around Red Hat‘s decision to limit the availability of the source code to its flagship Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) distro. In short: Before, that source code would be available to anybody and everybody, leading to the proliferation of RHEL-compatible alternative Linux distros like Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux. Under Red Hat’s proposed new licensing terms — announced almost exactly four years after IBM’s $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat closed — RHEL’s source code will only be available to paying customers.

For an exact timeline, Tom Krazit offers a play-by-play recap over at the Runtime newsletter. Suffice it to say, however, that Red Hat’s decision was met with hostility from many in the open source community. Specifically, critics argue that taking what had been widely-available code and putting it behind what’s functionally a paywall is antithetical to the open source principles that Red Hat was founded in 1993 to support. The core tenet of open source, after all, is to share and share alike.

Red Hat, for its part, has defended the changes as a way to protect its business and pay its employees: “We have to pay the people to do that work — those passionate contributors grinding through those long hours and nights who believe in open source values,” Red Hat Vice President of Core Systems Mike McGrath wrote in a June blog post. Importantly, McGrath also reiterated that Red Hat will continue to use the CentOS Stream project as a place to share what’s essentially a preview of what’s to come in RHEL, though not the code for the current stable version.

The Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies Subcommittee, chaired by U.S. Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho), on Thursday marked up a GOP appropriations bill for fiscal year 2024. A Republican fact sheet celebrates proposed "cuts to wasteful spending" and "claw-backs of prior appropriations," highlighting that it "reins in" the Environmental Protection Agency, "limits abuse of the Endangered Species Act," and provides protections for the fossil fuel industry.

The GOP proposal would slash appropriations for the Clean Water State Revolving Fund (CWSRF) and Drinking Water State Revolving Fund (DWSRF). The former provides low-interest loans for infrastructure projects like wastewater facilities while the latter provides assistance for initiatives like improving drinking water treatment and fixing old pipes.

Country endured 28 mass killings – a total of 140 victims – amid uptick in gun violence and calls by some for stricter laws. Police officers walking down street,

The United States saw a record of 28 mass killings in the first half of 2023, The Associated Press has reported, as policymakers struggle to curb gun violence across the country.

The AP analysis, published on Friday, said 140 victims were killed during that period. All but one of the mass killings – incidents in which four or more people are slain not including the perpetrator – involved firearms.

“What a ghastly milestone,” Brent Leatherwood, whose three children were in class at a private Christian school in Nashville in March when a former student fatally shot six people, told the AP. “You never think your family would be a part of a statistic like that.”

To Palestinians, Gaza is a symbol of resistance. To Israel, Gaza is a template to pummel and isolate that resistance.

On June 19, Israeli combat helicopters fired missiles into the camp, ostensibly as part of an arrest operation that ended up killing five Palestinians, including a 15-year-old girl named Sadeel Naghniyeh.

Then in early July, in the worst attack on the West Bank since 2002, the Israeli armed forces terrorised the inhabitants of Jenin for two days and killed at least 12 people, including children. The massive aerial and ground assault involved helicopter gunships, missiles, drones, armoured vehicles, bulldozers and more than 1,000 Israeli soldiers.

That is what happens, it seems, when Palestinians keep rebuilding – and keep existing. Indeed, Al Jazeera quoted 56-year-old camp resident Ahmed Abu Hweileh on the takeaway from the bloody escapade: “The message to the world and the occupation is that this camp will keep on going. They tried to destroy it and it came back up.”

Israel’s recent comportment in Jenin – and particularly the sudden use of air strikes in the West Bank for the first time in years – has invited comparisons to the Israeli modus operandi in the Gaza Strip, another location that has come to symbolise Palestinian resistance.

Washington, DC – Authorities in the United States have closed the investigation into the source of cocaine found at the White House without identifying a suspect “due to a lack of physical evidence”, the Secret Service has said.

The announcement on Thursday could further fuel conspiracy theories by Republicans, including former President Donald Trump, linking the drug without evidence to President Joe Biden, a Democrat, and his son, Hunter.