Tootfinder

‘A good day’: Detained U.S. citizen said agents bragged after arresting dozens at Home Depot.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-06-20/border-patrol-agents-brag-in-front-of-detained

Detained citizen says agents bragged after arresting dozens at Home Depot
A U.S. citizen who was tackled and arrested by border agents after filming and yelling at them said his 'blood was boiling' when agents high-fived each other after grabbing dozens at Home Depot on Thursday.

Iran vowed swift retaliation Saturday following the U.S. military’s strikes on the Iranian nuclear program.
“Every American citizen or military personnel in the region is now a target,” a commentator on Iranian state media said.
Al-Asad Air Base, an Iraqi installation 150 miles west of Baghdad that is operated jointly by the Iraqi and U.S. air forces, houses thousands of American troops,
the largest U.S. deployment in the country.
Iran and its proxies have in recent…

U.S. bases that could attack Iran — and become targets
A number of U.S. military sites in the Middle East could face reprisals if Trump strikes Iran.

Citizen science study determines that more than one light per person is still on late at night in Germany #Germany

Citizen science study determines that more than one light per person is still on late at night in Germany
Nighttime satellite images have shown that cities are getting brighter, and light pollution is now recognized as an environmental issue. But how should local governments even begin the work of resolving this if nobody really knows what the sources of all this light are? A large citizen science project led by Dr. Christopher Kyba, at the time geographer at Ruhr University Bochum and the GFZ Helmholtz Center for Geosciences, is now shedding light on the matter.

Citizen science illuminates the nature of city lights: #LightPollution

Ein Bürgerforschungsprojekt hat über 234.000 #Lichtquellen in deutschen Städten erfasst.
Nach Mitternacht bleibt im Schnitt pro Person ein Licht an. #Straßenlaternen sind dabei nur ein kleiner Teil. Besonders häufig leuchten private Fenster,

Citizen science illuminates the nature of city lights - Nature Cities
This study employs a citizen science approach to identify and classify over 230,000 light sources in German city centers, suburbs and villages. The results underscore the pivotal role of citizen science in expanding knowledge of artificial light emissions and bolstering policymaking efforts to mitigate urban light pollution.

'A good day': Detained U.S. citizen said agents bragged after arresting dozens at Home Depot (Los Angeles Times)
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-06-20/border-patrol-agents-brag-in-front-of-detained
http://www.memeorandum.com/250621/p3#a250621p3

Ars Technica author Ashley Belanger presents both consumer rights advocacy group Public Citizen's position against the use of AI in toys, and toy maker Mattel's and Open AI's. Public Citizen's tone is baselessly alarmist, given that "Both companies [have] emphasized that safety, privacy, and age-appropriateness would be front of mind in designing Mattel's AI products."
"Toy-maker Mattel accused of planning 'reckless' AI social experiment on k…

https://www.nbcnewyork.com/long-island/video-long-island-man-driving-to-work-handcuffed-by-ice-despite-being-citizen/6301068/

Video: NY man driving to work is handcuffed by ICE despite being a U.S. citizen
ICE detained a Brentwood electrician who is also a US citizen.

Takeover of British Russia expert’s email accounts used novel phishing tactic https://therecord.media/keir-giles-russia-expert-email-attack-gtig-citizen-lab-reports

Garcia said he’s still recovering from several injuries incurred during the ordeal and said he plans to file a lawsuit over the violent detainment.
https://ktla.com/news/local-news/u-s-citizen-detained-in-hollywood-immigration-raid-s…

"Putin is afraid to admit how many [Russian] people have died. Because if the moment comes when he needs to mobilize, his society will be afraid," Zelensky said.
Ukrainian authorities have confirmed that at least 20 of the bodies Russia returned as Ukrainian were actually Russian soldiers.
"Sometimes these bodies even have Russian passports," Zelensky said.
He also cited the case of a deceased Israeli citizen fighting on Russia's side, whom Moscow had …

Russia 'afraid to admit' scale of losses, trying to hide by dumping soldiers' bodies on Ukraine, Zelensky says
Ukrainian authorities have confirmed that at least 20 of the bodies Russia returned as Ukrainian were actually Russian soldiers, President Volodymyr Zelensky said.

'No Kings' Protests, Citizen-Run ICE Trackers Trigger Intelligence Warnings (Dell Cameron/Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/no-kings-protests-citizen-run-ice-trackers-trigger-intelligence-warnings/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250613/p128#a250613p128

“Noor, who made so many friends on Bluesky since she started an account there in the summer of 2023, had her account suddenly suspended on Friday. Bluesky did not send a reason for the suspension, so while she wrote an appeal, she did not know what actions she was appealing, so as of now it's still suspended. She’s been silenced, and effectively disappeared.”

A Future for Noor and Her Children
Hello! I'm Meave, a U.S. citizen sponsoring this fundraiser on behalf of my dear friend Noor Hassan and her children. Noor and her son Abdul Rahman are kind, generous people; though their original fundraiser succeeded last summer, supporting themselves and their extended family cost them everything. This fundraiser will allow them to support themselves and save up to buy passage to Egypt and pursue a better future.

I thought that police recruits had to take a basic training course that included the very basics principles of law. Like:
"Every person (not just every US citizen, not just every white US citizen, not just every rich white US citizen, not just every billionaire white US citizen) is to be presumed innocent by the government until proved guilty of a crime." 🧵‍>

Apple fixes an iPhone zero-day used in Paragon spyware hacks after a Citizen Lab report found two European journalists had their iPhones hacked with the spyware (Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/12/appl

Apple fixes new iPhone zero-day bug used in Paragon spyware hacks | TechCrunch
The iPhone maker quietly updated a February security advisory to publicize a flaw that was used to hack at least two journalists in Europe.

ChatbotManip: A Dataset to Facilitate Evaluation and Oversight of Manipulative Chatbot Behaviour
Jack Contro, Simrat Deol, Yulan He, Martim Brand\~ao
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.12090

ChatbotManip: A Dataset to Facilitate Evaluation and Oversight of Manipulative Chatbot Behaviour
This paper introduces ChatbotManip, a novel dataset for studying manipulation in Chatbots. It contains simulated generated conversations between a chatbot and a (simulated) user, where the chatbot is explicitly asked to showcase manipulation tactics, persuade the user towards some goal, or simply be helpful. We consider a diverse set of chatbot manipulation contexts, from consumer and personal advice to citizen advice and controversial proposition argumentation. Each conversation is annotated b…

Researchers find evidence that a second fanpage.it journalist, along with an anonymous European journalist, were targeted using Graphite spyware (The Guardian)
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2025/jun/12/…

“Under a 287(g) task force model, such as the agreement being pursued by the University of Florida, participating officers would have the authority to interrogate “any alien or person believed to be an alien” about their right to remain in the country, as well as the power to make arrests without a warrant in some cases.”
https://www.wuft.org/public-safety/2025-04-14/uf-other-florida-universities-to-deputize-campus-police-for-immigration-enforcement
Imagine being asked to learn while you can be stopped and interrogated just walking between classes because a campus police officer believes you might not be a US citizen.

I'm not saying any new shit:
"I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection."
- Letter from a Birmingham Jail, MLK

If the media continues to refer to people as "undocumented" when they have valid work/student visas, green cards, and judicial orders allowing them to be here.. Then they will also refer to a US citizen as "undocumented" when ICE takes them (you).

#Blakes7 Series C, Episode 12 - Death-Watch
DEETA: So, you have an answer for the Summons to Justification. Like what? Surely not a Blood Feud? [rises to face her] I can't have killed someone who's close kin to both of you. Particularly not as your friend here is a citizen of the Vandor Confederacy. As I assume you are. [drops a metal ID card at her feet]
KARLA: [Picks it …

Paragon spyware activity found on more journalists’ devices https://therecord.media/paragon-graphite-spyware-journalists-apple-devices-citizen-lab

Gerade laufen die Nebula-Award-Ceremonies. Aktuell spricht die diesjährige SFWA Grandmaster Nicola Griffith: https://nebulas.sfwa.org/grand-masters/nicola-griffith/

Feds: Just change your State's whole way of doing things and make your ID's "Real ID". That way we can be sure they aren't fake.
Also Feds: This "Real ID" looks fake, we're deporting you!
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/us-ci…

U.S. citizen with REAL ID handcuffed in Alabama immigration raid and held before release
A U.S.-born citizen who was wrestled into the dirt, handcuffed and detained in a vehicle as part of an immigration raid had a REAL ID on him that was dismissed as fake, the man's cousin said Friday.

'Forever chemicals' detected in 65% of sampled private wells in Pennsylvania https://phys.org/news/2025-06-chemicals-sampled-private-wells-pennsylvania.html
PFAS Found in 65% of Private Wells Sampled in Pennsylvania

'Forever chemicals' detected in 65% of sampled private wells in Pennsylvania
In Pennsylvania, 3.5 million people are served by private well systems, according to Penn State Extension. To better understand potential contamination of the groundwater feeding these systems, a team of researchers from Penn State conducted a novel three-year citizen science study of per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances (PFAS)—often referred to as forever chemicals—in 167 private wells across Pennsylvania.

The TESS Ten Thousand Catalog: 10,001 uniformly-vetted and -validated Eclipsing Binary Stars detected in Full-Frame Image data by machine learning and analyzed by citizen scientists
Veselin B. Kostov, Brian P. Powell, Aline U. Fornear, Marco Z. Di Fraia, Robert Gagliano, Thomas L. Jacobs, Julien S. de Lambilly, Hugo A. Durantini Luca, Steven R. Majewski, Mark Omohundro, Jerome Orosz, Saul A. Rappaport, Ryan Salik, Donald Short, William Welsh, Svetoslav Alexandrov, Cledison Marcos da Si…

The TESS Ten Thousand Catalog: 10,001 uniformly-vetted and -validated Eclipsing Binary Stars detected in Full-Frame Image data by machine learning and analyzed by citizen scientists
The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has surveyed nearly the entire sky in Full-Frame Image mode with a time resolution of 200 seconds to 30 minutes and a temporal baseline of at least 27 days. In addition to the primary goal of discovering new exoplanets, TESS is exceptionally capable at detecting variable stars, and in particular short-period eclipsing binaries which are relatively common, making up a few percent of all stars, and represent powerful astrophysical laboratories for …

[OT] Saturday June 14: No Kings protests https://www.nokings.org Could be US citizen's last chance to save US democracy from oligarchy and a police state

No Kings
On June 14—Flag Day—Donald Trump wants tanks in the street and a made-for-TV display of dominance for his birthday. A spectacle meant to look like strength. But real power isn’t staged in Washington. It rises up everywhere else.

The only jury I've ever been on faced a question about resisting arrest. The defendant was tackled by an officer and initially fought back (or so the officer claimed). The officer was wearing a police uniform, but we acquitted on the charge, because the defendant was tackled from behind and there was reasonable doubt as to whether the officer actually identified themselves verbally in a way that made it clear to the defendant they weren't being tackled by some random dude.
This ain't legal advice, but in situations where a kidnapper refuses to identify themselves, show a warrant, or even a badge number, I suspect a sufficiently white bystander might not be convicted on interference charges if they did something like a citizen's arrest of a suspicious out-of-town paramilitary type who was in the process of an extrajudicial kidnapping. If there are multiple kidnappers, to be effective you might need multiple people willing to face jail time for such interventions to be successful...
#resist #ICE #kidnapping
Just thinking about this in light of the recent kidnapping in the next town over where some fools called the city police thinking they might actually protect the community from an unlawful assault. Can't blame the fools too much because of how deep positive portrayals of cops are embedded in our media diet though...

According to @…'s newsletter this morning, the Citizen's Advice Bureau is now requiring #Trans employees (? and clients?) to use toilets according to their gender assigned at birth, which, if true, is not a good look at all. Journalist is Steph Paton, who I sli…

Scots charity in trans rights row after announcing change to bathroom access
A Scottish charity may be discriminating against transgender staff after announcing a change to bathroom access following the recent UK Supreme Court ruling on the Equality Act, say legal experts.

Just sent a truly epic email to the Freedom of Information office at the BC Ministry requesting that they release a bunch of information that they refused/redacted in my 2000 page Island Railway related information disclosure.
It was 1160 words with 11 attachments. 😂
Feeling my citizen-power rn
Though i don't envy the FOI analyst opening that up just before lunch on a Friday in June. 😇
(blog post about the FOI request: (#BCPoli #BCGov #IslandRail #FOIPPA #FOI

Signals as a First-Class Citizen When Querying Knowledge Graphs
Tobias Schwarzinger, Gernot Steindl, Thomas Fr\"uhwirth, Thomas Preindl, Konrad Diwold, Katrin Ehrenm\"uller, Fajar J. Ekaputra
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.03826

Signals as a First-Class Citizen When Querying Knowledge Graphs
Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) tightly integrate computation with physical entities, often generating vast amounts of time series data from thousands of sensors. Although knowledge graphs offer a powerful means to contextualize these data, existing approaches to integrating knowledge graphs with time series data lack a concept to model the continuous temporal values inherent in CPSs. This gap can make expressing computations on the sensor data cumbersome. In this work, we propose the integration…

https://apnews.com/article/swatting-plot-thomasz-szabo-60de50b8bf1dd35b3ea403072a58f1cd
Romanian man pleads guilty to ‘swatting’ plot that targeted an ex-US president and lawmakers

Romanian man pleads guilty to 'swatting' plot that targeted US lawmakers
A Romanian citizen has pleaded guilty to engaging in a plot to use “swatting” calls to intimidate and threaten dozens of people with bogus police emergencies, including a former U.S. president and several members of Congress. Thomas Szabo, 26, is scheduled to be sentenced on Oct. 23 by U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson in Washington. Szabo pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy and one count of making bomb threats. He was extradited from Romania in November 2024 after he was indicte…

“Every part of society, every citizen of this country has a role to play,” #warmonger #Starmer
Well Keith, I'm fucking not going to play any part in your plans for mass destruction, and I assure you, nor will any of my family.
‘If government cared about security, it would end child pove…

Ukrainian abducted in Russian-occupied Crimea; Ukraine's ombudsman appeals to Moscow: https://benborges.xyz/2025/05/29/ukrainian-abducted-in-russianoccupied-crimea.html

The USA is doing so much wrong lately. It is very frustrating to care about human beings and see what our society is doing to harm them.
In this video John Green explains how $20 a year (from you and every other USA citizen) has helped save 91,000,000 human lives since 2000.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJ…

Can anyone here help explain the "status of a #Slovak living abroad"?
It is available to a) citizens and b) descendants of citizens. I understand the purpose of the status for the second group. But why would a Slovak citizen need the status document?

Fears of racial profiling rise as Border Patrol conducts ‘roving patrols,’ and detain U.S. citizens
video: “These guys, literally based off of skin color! My homie was born here!” The friend said Gavidia was being questioned “just because of the way he looks.”
U.S. Border Patrol Sector Chief Greg Bovino,
who oversaw raids that included picking people up at Home Depot
and stopping them on the highway,
has emerged as a key figure in L.A.
He stood alongside…

Fears of racial profiling rise as Border Patrol conducts 'roving patrols,' detains U.S. citizens
Border Patrol agents on 'roving patrol' arrest U.S. citizen on assault charges. Fear of widespread racial profiling gains momentum as Home Depots and car washes raided.

What every citizen of BC should know about the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act is that at the end, it has a section that essentially argues that *any* and *all* government information *must* be disclosed if it is in the public interest.
“Division 4 -- Public Interest Paramount”
It has just one Section:
*Information must be disclosed if in the public interest*
25 (1)Whether or not a request for access is made, the head of a public body must, without delay, disclose to the public, to an affected group of people or to an applicant, information
(a)about a risk of significant harm to the environment or to the health or safety of the public or a group of people, or
(b)the disclosure of which is, for any other reason, clearly in the public interest.
(2)Subsection (1) applies despite any other provision of this Act.
———
#BCPoli #BCGov #IslandRail #FOIPPA #FOI

Detention, pressure, threats — US pastor in Ukraine tells the Kyiv Independent about his encounter with Russians: https://benborges.xyz/2025/05/29/detention-pressure-threats-us-pastor.html

The iNaturalist Sounds Dataset
Mustafa Chasmai, Alexander Shepard, Subhransu Maji, Grant Van Horn
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.00343 https://

The iNaturalist Sounds Dataset
We present the iNaturalist Sounds Dataset (iNatSounds), a collection of 230,000 audio files capturing sounds from over 5,500 species, contributed by more than 27,000 recordists worldwide. The dataset encompasses sounds from birds, mammals, insects, reptiles, and amphibians, with audio and species labels derived from observations submitted to iNaturalist, a global citizen science platform. Each recording in the dataset varies in length and includes a single species annotation. We benchmark multi…

Here's the latest. -- The suspect is an Egyptian citizen who stayed in the United States ... (New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/06/02/us/boulder-colorado-attack-suspect
http://www.memeorandum.com/250602/p104#a250602p104

Elizabeth May is up soon after, presenting a petition on Elector Reform and urging a Citizen's Assembly.
#CanPoli #CdnPoli

Good Morning #Canada
#HappyBirthday to Robert Norman Munsch, born June 11, 1945, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, but thankfully, he became a Canadian citizen in 1983. He has published more than 60 books in 30 languages and is a Member of the Order of Canada and Canada’s Walk of Fame. Health issues have ended his writing and public appearances, and in 2021, he was diagnosed with dementia. But his stories continue to speak to children.
#CanadaIsAwesome #CanadianHeroes
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/thenextchapter/full-episode-oct-2-2021-1.6193424/the-stories-will-be-the-last-thing-to-go-robert-munsch-on-his-legacy-as-one-of-canada-s-great-storytellers-1.6193428

Across the country, Republican lawmakers have been working to undermine or altogether undo the will of the voters -- by making it harder to pass amendments and laws through citizen-led initiatives.
In #Missouri, the 2025 legislative session was dominated by Republican lawmakers trying to reverse two major measures that voters had put on the ballot and approved just months before;
one made

Red State Voters Approved Progressive Measures. GOP Lawmakers Are Trying to Undermine Them.
In the wake of ballot measures that increased abortion access and improved sick leave for workers, a coordinated effort is unfolding across the country to restrict direct democracy — and shift power to partisan legislatures.