Poland’s Far-Right Advances on Anti-Ukraine Sentiment

By Nathan Alan-Lee

April 13, 2023

Support for the governing right-wing party is stalling as radical populists attack Ukraine and the cost of living.

Since the beginning of Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine, Poland has emerged as a bedrock of support for Ukraine and a key partner on NATO’s Eastern Flank and — as the analyst Chels Michta has noted — enjoys increasing strategic influence. Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party (PiS) has received much of the credit for its response, both at home and in the international community.

Yet over the past six months, support for Poland’s radical right-wing Konfederacja party has nearly doubled to around 10%, with the party now polling third for the first time since it was founded in 2019. Although the right has long been the dominant political force in Poland, the rise of Konfederacja marks a sharp departure from the norm.

It is questioning of bedrock policies like the country’s “unconditional support” for Ukraine, and even Poland’s transatlantic ties remain firmly a fringe position and conflict with the beliefs held by Polish society as a whole. But its support profile gives the lie to the notion that only the old support such parties — 20% of under-30s voted for Konfederacja in 2019.

Despite the largely successful government-led response to Russia, multiple crises are taking a toll on Poland, and putting pressure on its leadership. PiS is currently polling around 34%, well below what is required to form a majority government. Meanwhile, a soaring cost of living driven by high inflation, the influx of Ukrainian refugees, and fear that the war will escalate, are all being exploited by Konfederacja. Notable too, are widespread protests from farmers — one of PiS’ main sources of support — about competition for cheap Ukrainian grain. Poland’s agriculture minister resigned on April 5 after the European Union (EU) extended the tariff relaxation to 2024.

In its electoral manifesto, “On Poland’s Side,” geared toward this year’s October parliamentary elections, Konfederacja lays out a novel approach to Ukraine. In contrast to PiS policy, the program stipulates the need for Ukraine to “guarantee Polish companies participate in the reconstruction of Ukraine on preferential terms,” in exchange for aid. Likewise, they criticize the ruling party as “servants of the Ukrainian people” for accepting and caring for refugees at the expense of Polish society (around 1.6 million Ukrainian refugees have registered in Poland and costs in 2022 were around $9bn, although the EU refunded some of that.) At best, this may seem tone-deaf cynicism, but given Konfederacja’s history, this rhetoric betrays a more fundamental conflict with Ukraine and Western solidarity.

The party has long expressed anti-Ukrainian views, drawing largely on historical grievances, and these remain an integral part of its platform. MP Janusz Korwin-Mikke, 80, a central figure in Konfederacja and a Putin apologist, was recently reprimanded for “suggesting to the public that Ukrainian citizens, not Russian soldiers, may have been responsible for the massacre of the Bucha residents,” after he tweeted his own take on the mass killings by Russian troops. In a similar vein, Mikke implied that the US was at fault for the all-out invasion stating that “arming Ukraine provoked the Russian Federation.” He has previously referred to the inferiority of women and suggested rabbis may have provoked pogroms to improve Jewish genetic stock.

Predictably perhaps, the party also questions Poland’s transatlantic ties, which party representatives have cast in terms of “American imperialism.” Konfederacja MP Robert Winnicki, speaking to far-right media, accused the ruling Law and Justice party of “liquidating Poland’s sovereignty” through “vassalization to Washington.” Similarly, Konfederacja MP Grzegorz Braun described the US-Poland Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement of 2020, as “colonization-plus or maybe even occupation-plus” at a parliamentary press conference.

Since the all-out war, Konfederacja has taken steps to tone down its rhetoric, shifting attention to younger and less controversial party leaders such as its 2019 Presidential candidate Krzysztof Bosak, and chairman Sławomir Mentzen. (This may reflect a recognition of popular support for Ukraine against Russia, the old enemy — 77.5% support sending weaponry, though few back financial aid.) Yet Konfederacja’s surface-level rebranding does little to change the party’s underlying principles. 

The radical right’s surge in the polls has more to do with PiS’s electoral shortcomings, and its need to bolster support than it does with Konfederacja itself. It is possible that Konfederacja will find itself in the position of kingmaker if PiS is unable to open a significant lead against the centrist Civic Coalition (KO), which currently polls around 25%. It would once have been unthinkable to imagine a coalition, formal or otherwise, between PiS and Konfederacja, but some on both sides have floated the idea. It might give the governing party a significant electoral boost in the Sejm but would pull Polish politics further to the right.

Debate has already shifted to discussing what compromises would be necessary for this possible coalition. While there are leading voices in each party that still flatly reject the possibility of cooperation, there are signs of change. MP Janusz Korwin-Mikke, for all his controversial bravado, suggested that “we can rule even with PiS,” in an interview in March.

From the side of PiS, the decision to join Konfedercja would be more complicated. The government is far from unified and would face resistance from its moderate wing, loosely headed by PM Mateusz Morawiecki. The EU, already at loggerheads with Poland over rule of law and other issues, would no doubt be appalled by the prospect of a more illiberal government, and the US will want continuing support for Ukraine from one of its most determined backers. NATO not only supplies Ukraine through the critically important Rzeszów air base, but Poland’s plans to double defense expenditure will make it one of the alliance’s biggest military powers.

However, the government’s right-wing camp, led by Justice Minister Zbigniew Ziobro, has already indicated a willingness to cooperate with Konfederacja. Deputy Minister Janusz Kowalski stated in March that “there are no enemies on the right,” and further that “Mentzen would be a good experiment as finance minister.”

There is still much to play for with elections five months away, so a lot can change. But these are happy days for Poland’s radical right.

Nathan Alan-Lee is a doctoral researcher at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, and is  a commentator on Polish and regional affairs.  

Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the position or views of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis.

Mini hydro company raises $18M to generate power in canals

By ISABELLA O'MALLEY

Water flows through an irrigation canal with a turbine at Ralston Reservoir in Arvada Colo. on Thursday, April 13, 2023. Emrgy, a business that places small turbines in irrigation canals to generate electricity, has raised $18.4 million to scale up its technology and generate carbon-free hydropower. 

(AP Photo/Brittany Peterson)

A startup business that places small turbines in irrigation canals to generate electricity has raised $18.4 million to scale up its technology for carbon-free hydropower.

Emily Morris, CEO and founder of Emrgy, said her inspiration for making electricity in places that some people might find unlikely was seeing water swiftly flowing through the vast network of U.S. irrigation infrastructure. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation alone operates 1,600 miles of main canals.

In the same way that putting solar on rooftops avoids disturbing the land, making use of existing canals means the hydropower turbines don’t have to disturb the natural environment.

“Our infrastructure represents a new sector of renewable energy real estate,” Morris said in an interview.

Irrigation canals in the U.S. are made of concrete or stone and transport water from main sources to fields. Emrgy units look something like a propeller with blades rotating parallel to the ground. Water in the canals turns them and then flows past; there is no dam. The spinning turbines do change how the water moves through the canals, slowing it, so Emrgy works closely with water operators.

Emrgy’s installations are very small in the commercial sense — between 2 and 10 megawatts. But that’s approximately enough to power a neighborhood or a small campus.

It “can amount to a pretty significant amount of power,” said John Gulliver, an engineering professor emeritus at the University of Minnesota, given the miles of canals.

An installation is made up of modules that each generate 5-25 kilowatts, but Morris said the company would never deploy a single turbine, just as a solar company would not install a single solar panel on a roof.

“We need everything we can get from all of the renewable energy sources,” said Dan Reicher, senior scholar at the Stanford University School of Sustainability. “So I do think this energy generation is meaningful.” It’s also environmentally low impact, he said.

Water flows through an irrigation canal with a turbine at Ralston Reservoir in Arvada Colo. on Thursday, April 13, 2023. (AP Photo/Brittany Peterson)

Daniel Kirschen, an engineering professor at the University of Washington made the same point. “If we can generate a reasonable amount of power from them, it’s very useful,” he said.

Traditional large-scale hydropower projects have faced scrutiny for their environmental impact, including submerging communities, slowing rivers, and blocking fish migration. Some are being demolished. On the other hand, they generate enormous amount of energy, as long as it rains and snows.

The Emrgy systems connect to the grid the same way any distributed wind or solar does. Sometimes electric distribution lines run right along canals. The turbines can be installed quickly without lengthy permitting.

“I’ve watched how solar has risen to dominate the renewable energy mix over recent years,” said Morris. “We know the faster we can generate new power means we will be more impactful and can grow.”

Emrgy’s systems are currently in use at Denver Water, Oakdale Irrigation District in California, a district in Salt Lake City and one in New Zealand. The company has a pilot in South Africa and is expanding.

The $18.4 million will go to hire more people, develop projects, and open a first assembly facility in Aurora, Colorado.

The Inflation Reduction Act signed last fall is helping. It offers incentives for U.S.-based clean energy manufacturing. Emrgy gets a 10% tax credit for sourcing its machinery and components in the U.S. and a 30% federal investment tax credit for renewable energy development.

“This is definitely a renewable resource that needs to be tapped and it’s fantastic they have an economic solution,” said Kirschen.

___

Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Gig Workers Are Being Stabbed, Stoned, and Abused in India


Varsha Bansal
WIRED

Image courtesy of WIRED.

Project
India's Gig Workers and Algorithms

An Uber driver was mugged. An Ola driver was beaten and left in a coma. Platform workers say tech companies are doing little to protect them.

One night at around 2 am this past January, Uber driver Priyanka Devi was on her way to pick up a passenger in the Kashmiri Gate area in Delhi. While she waited for the passenger, a brick came through her car window. Two men attacked her, trying to grab her phone and demanding she hand over her keys. When she resisted, one of them slashed her neck with a broken beer bottle. The men fled when a passerby approached, taking with them her day’s earnings and leaving Devi, 31, bleeding by the roadside. Devi said she tried calling Uber and used an SOS button in her car. “I called them [Uber] so many times,” she says. “They responded to me a few days later, only after this incident made it to local news.”

(Uber India spokesperson Ruchica Tomar says that they reached out to Devi as soon as they were made aware of the incident. The Uber app has an “in-app emergency button through which the driver can directly call the local police,” Tomar says, adding that Uber’s records show Devi didn’t use it after her attack.)

One week after Devi was attacked, Mohammed Rizwan, a 23-year-old in Hyderabad, was attacked by a customer’s pet dog while delivering a food order for delivery platform Swiggy. To save himself, Rizwan jumped from a third floor balcony. He was taken to the hospital, but died a few days later. In the same city, Y. Venkatesh, a driver for the Ola ride-hailing service, has been in a coma since last year, after being beaten by the friends of a passenger who refused to pay his fare.

Just this month, platform drivers complained about being harassed—and even assaulted—by security staff at Mumbai airport, in the western part of India. Drivers in the east Indian city of Guwahati filed complaints of being robbed by fraudsters posing as customers. And in a gruesome incident down south, a customer allegedly killed a delivery agent when he couldn’t pay for the iPhone he ordered online. Reports say he kept the corpse with him for at least three days before disposing of it.

Gig work in India is dangerous. A review of local news reports across the country shows at least a dozen such attacks over the past few months. WIRED spoke to 50 people working for ride-hailing and food delivery services; roughly half of them said they have been attacked on the job—some because customers refused to pay; others because of their caste or religion. The numbers reflect a rising trend of violence against platform workers in India. The Center for Internet and Society, a think tank, surveyed 1,500 gig workers last year, and found that one in three said they fear theft or physical assault at work.

“For one in three people while going to work fearing that they might be robbed today or face physical assault is alarmingly high,” Aayush Rathi, research lead at CIS, says

While instances of rogue customer behavior and carjacking are common in the US and other countries, the power imbalances in Indian society due to class and caste divides create a potentially toxic environment for platform workers.

The gig workforce in India has expanded rapidly in recent years. NITI Aayog, the Indian government’s public policy think tank, estimates that there may be more than 23 million gig workers in the country by 2030, more than three times the number at the start of the decade. The growth of this cohort, who lack stable jobs, social protections, and access to collective bargaining, intersects with India’s other social fractures, exacerbating their precarity and disempowerment.

This has often been manifested in overt religious discrimination. Late last year, Syed Lateefuddin, a Muslim Uber driver in Hyderabad, was attacked by six men, who forced him to chant a Hindu expression and pelted his car with stones. According to the Telangana Gig and Platform Workers Union (TGPWU), which represents gig and platform workers in the region, Lateefuddin called Uber’s emergency services multiple times, but did not receive a response.

Even when they don’t face physical violence, Muslim gig workers often face hostility. “There are many instances when the customer’s behavior changes [once they know it’s a Muslim driver],” said Shaik Salauddin, an Uber driver from Hyderabad and the founder of TGPWU. “Sometimes they directly say they don’t want a Muslim delivery boy—openly saying they don’t want someone from this community.”

Last year, the Telangana Gig and Platform Workers Union recorded several instances of customers requesting that their packages not be delivered by Muslims.

Syed, who works for food delivery platform Swiggy in Bengaluru, says that he’s faced routine discrimination due to his faith. He asked to be identified using only his first name, to avoid a backlash from the platform. “Most customers are warm and welcoming, but the ones who are angry that I am a Muslim, I can just see in their behavior—they don’t even want to collect the food from me and ask me to leave it at the door,” he says, adding he’s faced many instances where customers refused to pay after receiving their food.

Syed and several other gig workers who spoke to WIRED say that they believe thieves target them because it’s known they’re often paid in cash. Carrying money is risky, but many gig workers prefer to be paid directly rather than through the apps.

Last year, Syed had a close run during a late-night delivery. He saw a group of men walking toward him. “The minute I saw them, I knew they were going to attack me,” he recalls. “I dropped the food, swerved my bike, and just rode for my life. Had I not done that, I don’t even know if I would still be around.” Since then he has cut down his time with Swiggy and diversified his income sources by working at a hospital part-time. He also doesn’t deliver after 10 pm anymore. Many gig workers, after listening to such anecdotes from their peers, say they have started to avoid neighborhoods they think might be dangerous.

Swiggy declined to give an attributable comment in response to questions.

A common complaint among the workers that WIRED spoke to is that the platforms do little to help workers in distress.

Jude Matthew, national press secretary of the Indian Federation of App-Based Transport Workers, a gig workers’ organization, says he gets at least one call every two weeks regarding a driver who has faced a problem on the job with no aid from the platforms. Workers and workers’ groups say that the platforms have gotten worse at dealing with complaints and concerns on the ground, which some put down to deep job cuts at tech firms. Uber India laid off 600 employees—a quarter of its workforce—during the Covid-19 pandemic. Around the same time, Ola let go of more than 1,400 employees.

“After Covid, [cab-hailing platforms] don’t have any management. They have fired many employees. There aren’t many staffers to help out [drivers on ground]. Who do we take these issues to?” Matthew says. “At least before, there was a concerned office [to address disputes], now there is no concerned office. Everything is online.”

Ola did not respond to questions sent by WIRED.

Rathi from CIS says that a responsive grievance mechanism for gig workers is “completely absent” and continues to be “one of the top three demands” that workers have. “The firms are able to provide more responsive services to customers,” he says. “The workers are as important if not more [than customers], and they should be able to extend the same kind of mechanisms, practices, and policies to workers.”

Because workers are often in precarious economic situations and have no jobs to fall back on, being mugged or attacked has a huge impact on their ability to earn.

Some of the platforms do offer limited insurance for gig workers, including for accidents. However, these don’t necessarily provide much respite, according to Aditi Surie, a senior consultant at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements, a research organization based in Bangalore, who has studied the schemes. Her research showed that making a claim against the platform-provided insurance is a long and laborious process. “So even if you have grievous bodily harm, there are lots of steps that prevent anyone from making use of any insurance or offering from the platform,” Surie says. “So, if you’re in a road accident, for example, the police have to get involved. Now finding the right police station, contacting your insurance in time, getting the ambulance there—these are all things that platforms say they try and help with but there is nothing there—which again then falls back on the worker.”

Uber spokesperson Tomar says that the company gave Devi financial support to cover her loss of earnings as a result of the incident, and that the company “helped her claim her medical expenses under Uber’s on-trip insurance policy, which covers all drivers on the app.” Devi claims that both the insurance money and Uber’s financial support for her loss of earnings haven’t made it into her bank account.

“Uber is deeply committed to the safety of drivers on the Uber app,” Tomar says. “Uber drivers have many of the same transparency and accountability features that riders do, such as feedback and ratings for every trip, GPS tracking, an emergency button, and shared trip feature.”

In Delhi, Devi has had enough of Uber, which she says isn’t safe or profitable enough to justify the risks. Devi, who previously worked at a hospital for a meager salary, learned to drive just so she could start working for Uber, and began driving for the platform in 2019. A single mother, she had to find work to support her two children. “That time, many women around me told me that Uber is a good option and the earnings are good,” she says. “They did not even deduct high commissions back then.”

The first time she complained to Uber was in 2020, when a customer verbally attacked her. “He was hurling abuses at me. I had complained against the customer then, but Uber didn’t do anything about it,” said Devi. “Uber never does anything when a driver complains. But even a small complaint against a driver means that they will block their account.”

At the time, she remembers spending 500 rupees ($6.08) on fuel each day but taking home 2,000 rupees ($24.39) in earnings. But lately she says the fuel costs have gone up to 700 rupees a day, while her earnings have fallen to less than 1,000 rupees.

Devi is upset that despite the life-threatening incident she experienced, the only calls she’s received from Uber are about when she will resume driving again, because she has been offline since January. She says, fuming, she has blocked those numbers. “I am worried about my children—what if something like this happens again? So I need to think really hard before taking the next steps,” she says. “For now I don’t intend to go back to driving for Uber.”

RELATED CONTE

VICTORY FOR BIDEN

U.S. Supreme Court Won't Halt $6 Billion Student Debt Settlement

By John Kruzel
04/13/23 

The U.S. Supreme Court building is seen in Washington, U.S.

, April 6, 2023. REUTERS

The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday refused to halt a legal settlement that would erase more than $6 billion in debt owed by former students of colleges - many of them for-profit institutions - who have said they were misled by schools about academics and job prospects.

The justices turned away a request from three colleges that are challenging a settlement between the U.S. Education Department and borrowers that linked the colleges to claims of "substantial misconduct," an allegation they dispute.

Three of the schools identified in the settlement - for-profit Lincoln Educational Services Corp <LINC.OO and American National University Inc as well as nonprofit Everglades College Inc - challenged the agreement after it was approved by a federal judge in California last November. Around 3,500 borrowers entitled to automatic loan discharge under the settlement attended one of the three schools.

The decision was separate from a case pending before the high court over the legality of President Joe Biden's plan to cancel $430 billion in student debt for about 40 million borrowers. A ruling in that case is expected by the end of June.

The latest dispute stemmed from a class-action settlement under which the Education Department would automatically cancel the debt of nearly 200,000 borrowers who attended 151 schools.

The schools have been accused of boosting enrollment through aggressive sales tactics as well as misrepresentations about the quality of their academic offerings, graduates' career prospects and networking opportunities, according to Eileen Connor, director of litigation at the Project on Predatory Student Lending, a group that represents borrowers involved in the settlement.

The three schools argued in court filings they had suffered reputational harm, comparing their inclusion on the settlement's list of schools to being "branded with [a] scarlet letter." They also argued the Biden administration lacked the legal authority to cancel the debt.

Rishi Sunak’s wife Akshata Murty lands £6.7 million Infosys payout

Murty has collected over £20 million in dividends over the past twelve months

By Simon Hunt

Rishi Sunak’s wife Akshata Murty is set to pocket another £6.7 million in dividends from her billion-dollar family tech company as she cements her position as the wealthiest-ever resident of Downing Street.

Murty, who has a stake in Bangalore-based Infosys worth just over half a billion pounds, is set to receive the cash after the firm today announced a 17.5 rupee (17p) dividend to shareholders following a year of rapid growth.

She has received over £40 million in dividends since the start of 2020, according to an Evening Standard analysis, making her one of the highest earners in the country.

The payout comes amid a 96-hour walkout by thousands of junior doctors after the government rejected their demand for a pay rise.

Junior doctors have seen a 26% real-terms pay cut since 2008-09, according to figures by the British Medical Association, who claim that many now face lower hourly wages than coffee shop baristas despite years of costly education and training.

Rishi Sunak has said he is keen to reach a pay settlement with doctors to avert further strike action.

On Wednesday in a pooled broadcast interview he said: “We are keen to find accommodation, we are happy to talk about pay settlements that are reasonable, that are fair, that are affordable for the taxpayer and allow us to continue delivering on our promise to halve inflation.”

Murty’s extreme wealth has come under the spotlight since her husband Rishi Sunak first ran to be leader of the Conservative Party in July last year, and was earlier this week the subject of an attack ad run by the labour party.

The advert, which concentrates on her non-dom tax status, asks: “Do you think it’s right to raise taxes for working people when your family benefited from a tax loophole? Rishi Sunak does.”

Murty last year renounced her non-dom status, which gave her preferential tax treatment on income earned outside the UK, after it appeared to jeopardise Sunak’s chances at becoming party leader. The abolition of non-dom tax breaks would raise more than £3 billion in additional government revenues per year, according to a study by the London School of Economics.

Nursing union to reveal pay ballot result as junior doctors remain on strike

At a leadership hustings event in Darlington, Sunak said: “I think in our country, we judge people not by their bank account, we judge them by their character and their actions. And yes, I’m really fortunate to be in the situation I’m in now, but I wasn’t born like this.”

Akshata’s father Narayana Murty founded Infosys, which provides IT outsourcing services, in 1981. It has since grown to have a market cap of £58 billion, giving him a wealth of $4.4 billion (£3.9 billion) according to Forbes.

Infosys today said it delivered $18.2 billion in revenues in the year to end March 2023, up 15.4% on the previous year, with operating margins of 21.0%.

Murty and Sunak, who married in 2009, own a string of luxury properties worth an estimated £15 million, from a Pacific Ocean facing penthouse apartment in celebrity enclave Santa Monica, to a rambling Georgian manor house in North Yorkshire.

In London, they own two properties including a five-bedroom mews house in Kensington and pied-à-terre apartment in South Kensington’s Old Brompton Road.

Elon Musk Is Waging War on Freedom of Speech on Twitter

BYLUKE SAVAGE
JACOBIN

04.13.2023

It was supposed to be a new day for free speech on Elon Musk’s Twitter. Instead, the petulant billionaire has actually clamped down on speech.

In the months surrounding Elon Musk’s $44 billion purchase of Twitter, a consensus seemed to hold among supporters and critics alike that he embraced a kind of free speech absolutism. To some, this was a virtue; to others, a concern. But most disagreement had to do with whether or not you were optimistic about what a less moderated and more permissive Twitter would bring.

Thus, in the weeks following Musk’s initial purchase of the platform, conservatives and self-identified free speech warriors celebrated the restoration of banned and suspended accounts and the rolling back of existing moderation policies. Critics, meanwhile, warned that Twitter’s new ethos of free speech absolutism was making the site a haven for hate speech and reactionary extremism.

The moderation of an expansive and complicated social media platform like Twitter is bound to be a contentious issue on which reasonable people can disagree. Nonetheless, in the just over five months since Musk’s takeover, it’s become clear that both his supporters and critics were incorrect about what it would actually mean. Whatever else he may be, Elon Musk is certainly no “free speech absolutist,” nor someone particularly committed to freedom of speech at all. His brief tenure as Twitter CEO has in fact broken new ground in free speech suppression and seen him turn the platform into the very thing he pledged to destroy: namely, a place where the free expression of opinion is routinely constrained by heavy-handed and arbitrary fiat.

Left-wing accounts were among the first targeted last fall, with many of the bans following obtuse public exchanges between Musk and odious characters on the Right. Soon after, Musk banned an account posting publicly available information about the whereabouts of his personal private jet. In due course, prominent journalists from Vox, CNN, the Washington Post, and the New York Times all had their accounts taken away, either because they had reported on or criticized various Musk bans (those accounts were later restored following one of Musk’s now semi-regular Twitter polls asking users whether he should bring them back). Elsewhere, links related to Twitter competitor Mastodon have been targeted while various keywords — among them “bisexual,” “gay,” “lesbian,” “queer,” and “transgender” — have been subjected to soft censorship by Twitter’s algorithm. Despite Musk’s claims to the contrary, Twitter is now waging a similar campaign against publishing platform Substack as well.

Among the most sinister developments of the past few months has been Musk’s apparent willingness to do the bidding of India’s far-right government. In January, the Intercept revealed that Twitter censored a BBC documentary critical of Indian prime minister Narendra Modi in direct coordination with Indian state officials. More recently, amid a police crackdown in the northern state of Punjab, the company suspended more than a hundred accounts belonging to politicians, activists, and journalists, also blocking the official account of BBC News Punjabi. In an apparent first, some of Twitter’s bans in India seem to apply worldwide.

Whatever you might call all of this, it’s certainly not free speech absolutism — let alone anything even approaching a coherent moderation policy. Like so much else about Musk’s rule at Twitter, what is or isn’t allowed on the site at any given time ultimately seems to come down to some combination of the billionaire’s mood, his chaotic temperament, and his personal interests — commercial and otherwise.

The upshot is an environment where virtually anything can be suppressed or stifled at whim if one unfathomably wealthy man believes it should be. If Twitter is a “digital town square,” as Musk called it late last year, then it’s one now governed by a tyrannical and impulsive mayor.

If the past few months are any indication, Musk’s ownership of Twitter will probably be remembered most for the general aura of anarchy that has accompanied it — one characterized by mass layoffs, frequent breakdowns in the site’s basic operations, and the steady exodus of advertisers. In the final estimation, however, the billionaire’s most significant legacy may end up being the repressive approach he has brought to moderating a platform he pledged to make freer, more open, and more inclusive of diverse views. It should be a wake-up call to anyone who believes that moderation of a vital public platform like Twitter can be left to the whims of the market — let alone those of a fifty-one-year-old cringeposter with an inflated reputation and a fragile ego.

Luke Savage is a staff writer at Jacobin. He is the author of The Dead Center: Reflections on Liberalism and Democracy After the End of History.

First-ever close-up of a supermassive black hole sharpened to 'full resolution' by AI, and the results are stunning

Astronomers have used machine learning to sharpen the 2019 Event Horizon Telescope image of the black hole M87*, the first direct image of a black hole ever taken.

 

A sharpened up image of the black hole M87*, now captured at the fullest resolution of the Event Horizon Telescope. (Image credit: Medeiros et al. 2023)

By Ben Turner

The first-ever photo of a supermassive black hole has gotten a "maximum resolution" makeover, thanks to artificial intelligence (AI).

The iconic 2019 image of M87*, a solar system-size black hole in the center of the Virgo galaxy cluster, was made by pooling radio light that had traveled to us across 53 million light-years of space.

Now, a new effort has used machine learning to clean the image, sharpening it to achieve the fullest resolution possible and exposing a larger and darker central region surrounded by glowing gas that astronomers have described as a "skinny donut." The researchers published the updated image April 13 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters

"With our new machine learning technique, PRIMO, we were able to achieve the maximum resolution of the current [telescope] array," lead author Lia Medeiros(opens in new tab), an astronomer at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, said in a statement. "Since we cannot study black holes up-close, the detail of an image plays a critical role in our ability to understand its behavior. The width of the ring in the image is now smaller by about a factor of two, which will be a powerful constraint for our theoretical models and tests of gravity."

The Messier 87 black hole, which is as wide as our solar system and 6.5 billion times the mass of the sun, was imaged by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), an array of eight globally synchronized radio telescopes. Black holes have such a powerful gravitational pull that nothing (not even light) can escape their maws, but this doesn't mean they can't be seen. This is because active black holes are surrounded by accretion disks — vast rings of material stripped from gas clouds and stars orbiting the black holes' event horizons — that get heated to red-hot temperatures by friction, producing a faint-yet-detectable glow.

A side by side comparison of the M87* black hole image before (left) and after (right) being sharpened by the PRIMO algorithm. (Image credit: Medeiros et al. 2023)

It is from these faint radio glimmers that astronomers were able to reconstruct the distant singularity as a doughnut hole surrounded by a halo of light. But gaps in the data, arising from missing jigsaw pieces of light where no radio telescope was there to receive it, left the image fuzzy and ill-defined.

To sharpen the picture, the researchers turned to a new AI technique called principal-component interferometric modeling (PRIMO), which analyzed more than 30,000 high-fidelity simulated images of black hole gas accretions to find common patterns. These patterns were then sorted by how commonly they occurred before being blended together and applied to the original image to produce a sharper estimate.

By checking the newly rendered image with EHT data and the theory on what the black hole should look like, the researchers confirmed that their image was a very close approximation of the real thing. This obviously required the big assumption that the black hole will look like we expect it to, but the researchers said the 2019 image already confirmed theoretical predictions of its broad details. This new image will enable even closer study of the extreme effects produced by the cosmic sinkholes, where our theories of gravity and quantum mechanics break down and merge, the team added.

"The 2019 image was just the beginning," Medeiros said. "If a picture is worth a thousand words, the data underlying that image have many more stories to tell. PRIMO will continue to be a critical tool in extracting such insights."

James Webb Space Telescope discovers oldest black hole in the universe — a cosmic monster 10 million times heavier than the sun

By Ben Turner

The James Webb Space Telescope detected what may be the oldest known black hole in the universe by deconstructing faint glimmers of light from close to the dawn of time.

An artist's illustration of a black hole.  (Image credit: Shutterstock)

The James Webb Space Telescope has spotted the earliest known black hole in the universe, and astronomers think even earlier ones could have swarmed the young cosmos.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), whose powerful cameras allow it to peer back in time to the earliest stages of the universe, discovered the supermassive black hole, which has a mass of 10 million times that of the sun, at the center of a baby galaxy 570 million years after the universe began.

The cosmic monster could be just one of countless black holes that gorged themselves to ever-larger sizes during the cosmic dawn — the period starting about 100 million years after the Big Bang when the young universe glowed for a billion years. Astronomers aren't sure why there were so many of these black holes or how they got so big. The researchers who found the latest black hole published their findings March 15 on the preprint server arXiv(opens in new tab), but the research has not been peer-reviewed yet.

"This is the first one that we're finding at this redshift [point in time after the Big Bang], but there should be many of them," lead study author Rebecca Larson(opens in new tab), an astrophysicist at the University of Texas at Austin, told Live Science. "We do expect that this black hole didn't just form [recently], so there should be more that are younger and existed earlier on in the universe. We're just starting to be able to study this time in cosmic history this way with the JWST, and I'm excited for us to find more of them."

Black holes are born from the collapse of giant stars and grow by ceaselessly gorging on gas, dust, stars and other black holes. For some of the gluttonous space-time ruptures, friction causes the material spiraling into their maws to heat up, and they emit light that can be detected by telescopes — turning them into so-called active galactic nuclei (AGN). The most extreme AGN are quasars, supermassive black holes that are billions of times heavier than the sun and shed their gaseous cocoons with light blasts trillions of times more luminous than the brightest stars.

Because light travels at a fixed speed through the vacuum of space, the deeper that scientists look into the universe, the more remote light they intercept and the further back in time they see. To spot the black hole, the astronomers scanned the sky with two infrared cameras — the JWST's Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) and Near Infrared Camera — and used the cameras' built-in spectrographs to break down the light into its component frequencies. 

By deconstructing these faint glimmers sent from the universe's earliest years, they found an unexpected spike among the frequencies contained within the light — a key sign that the hot material around a black hole was beaming out faint traces of radiation across the universe.

How black holes formed so suddenly across our young comos remains a mystery. Astronomers are still on the hunt for even younger, hypothesized "primordial" black holes,  which came into being very soon after — or, according to some theories, even before — the Big Bang. But so far, they remain elusive. 

There are two leading theories for how so many black holes grew so quickly after the Big Bang: that they are the remains of giant stars that formed far faster than the ones we know today, or that billowing clouds of incredibly dense gas collapsed suddenly to form the all-consuming singularities in space-time.

"The direct collapse method would have to start with a larger amount of matter in the galaxy directly collapsing into a black hole," Larson said. "It's less likely but it would take less time, and there hasn't been that much time at the point we observed it."

More likely, it is a so-called Population III Star — a category of hypothesized stars that were the first to ever exist in the universe and were made of just hydrogen and helium — that exploded and left behind a black hole around 200 million years after the Big Bang and "then accreted a lot of material pretty quickly and occasionally at a faster-than-stable rate," to swell up to the size that researchers observed, Larson explained.

The researchers will now begin working alongside the team that built MIRI to scan for an even stronger signature of the light from the distant galaxy. Those emissions could contain further clues about how the mysterious black hole formed at the galaxy's center.

Originally published on LiveScience.com.

Russian Court Fines Wikipedia for Article About Ukraine War

April 13, 2023 
Associated Press


A Moscow court on Thursday again fined Wikipedia for a Russian-language article it refused to remove about Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the latest in a series of government moves to silence objective reporting or criticism of the war and restrict the Russian public's access to information.

The court fined Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that runs the free, publicly edited online encyclopedia, 2 million rubles ($24,464) for not removing a Wikipedia article titled "Russian occupation of the Zaporizhzhia region," a reference to one of four Ukrainian provinces that Russia annexed last September. Most countries have condemned the annexation, as well as that by Russia in 2014 of Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula, as illegal.

The state Tass news agency said the Wikimedia Foundation had failed to heed the demands of Russia's state communications watchdog Roskomnadzor to remove articles containing "false information." Tass said a Wikipedia representative asked the court to reject the removal demand as vague.

President Vladimir Putin in recent years has increased his crackdown on criticism and factual reporting that doesn't correspond to his government's views or versions of events. The crackdown has widened since his troops invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, focusing especially on information and dissent against what he calls Russia's "special military operation" in the neighboring country.

Through Roskomnadzor, his government has also tried, with mixed success, to technically limit Western news reports that can be seen in Russia. The BBC and some Voice of America sites are among those that it has blocked but that Russians can access using virtual private networks.

This is not the first time Wikipedia has been fined for refusing to delete "false" information about the war in Ukraine.

Last week, the same Moscow court issued a fine of 800,000 rubles ($9,785) to the Wikimedia Foundation for not removing materials linked to a song by a Russian rock band called Psychea, which Russian authorities consider to be extremist.

In November 2022, the organization was fined 2 million rubles for refusing to delete "false" information in seven Wikipedia articles about the "special military operation," including information about atrocities in Bucha and the destruction of Mariupol's theater.

Wikipedia didn't respond immediately to a request for comment but says in its online encyclopedia about censorship: "Since the early 2010s, Russian Wikipedia and its editors have experienced numerous and increasing threats of nationwide blocks and countrywide enforcement of blacklisting by the Russian government, as well as several attempts to censor pages, spread propaganda and disinform."

Tass said Roskomnadzor would label Wikimedia in search engines as a violator of Russian law, and that more action against specific articles was planned.

 More than 18,000 cattle killed in US dairy farm explosion

Sarah Bahari Apr 14 2023

CASTRO COUNTY SHERIFF'S OFFICE/TNS/SUPPLIED

An explosion at Southfork Dairy Farm in Dimmitt, Texas killed more 

than 18,000 cattle and critically injured one worker.

A fiery explosion in the Texas Panhandle killed more than 18,000 cattle and critically injured one worker in what is being described as the deadliest barn fire for cattle on record.

Fire tore through the holding pens of Southfork Dairy Farm in Dimmitt on Monday night (local time), as the cattle were waiting to be milked, authorities told local news outlets.

A dairy farm worker rescued from the building was taken to a hospital and was in critical but stable condition.

Investigators have not determined the cause of the fire, but Castro County Sheriff Sal Rivera told KCBD-TV that overheating electrical equipment used to suck waste from the holding pens may have ignited methane.

Photos and videos of the fire posted to social media show a massive plume of thick black smoke swelling from the fire.

“It’s mind-boggling,” Dimmitt mayor Roger Malone told USA Today. “I don’t think it’s ever happened before around here. It’s a real tragedy.”

It was the biggest single-incident death of cattle in the US since the Animal Welfare Institute, an animal advocacy group, began tracking barn and farm fires in 2013

Texas ranks fourth nationally in milk production and is home to an estimated 625,000 cows producing almost 16.5 billion pounds of milk a year, according to the Texas Association of Dairymen. Castro County is the second-highest-producing county in Texas, with 15 dairies producing roughly 11% of the state’s milk.

- The Dallas Morning News