Interesting Shares

I ignored the IRS for an entire decade and got away with it. I think.

Disclaimer: please don't take this as advice.

The title of this piece is very clickbaity but the article is quite interesting.

The two disappearances of Tom Phillips and his children.

The painful and debilitating condition can spring up out of nowhere and can leave sufferers struggling to even walk the dog

A carefully constructed crime leads to California arrests.

Millions of years ago, animals adapted to become warm-blooded amid huge climactic changes. Now scientists hope these clues from the past could help us understand what lies ahead

As his new film looks at society’s relationship with the camera, the double Palme d’Or winner talks about the power of the screen – big and small – and why the next generation will be Marxist

I flew down the corridor screaming at everyone: ‘Do you have my baby?’

Internet Archive broadens its digital preservation efforts.

Staff member put work on display at Munich’s Pinakothek der Moderne ‘in hope of achieving his breakthrough’

Writing negative reactions on paper and shredding it or scrunching and throwing in the bin eliminates angry feelings, study finds

Viewers association has called for Amica Chips to suspend the campaign over a lack of respect towards practising Catholics

Ransomware gangs are increasingly calling up victim organizations to extort and intimidate rank-and-file employees.

Content warning: details of assault.

The long read: Going public after I was attacked was hard, but it helped me overcome the shame that so many victims feel

Chris Black, who spent more than a month documenting the situation in Gaza for the World Health Organization, talks about the trauma and destruction he witnessed

Patric Gagne has spent most of her life fighting terrible urges. She is also a loving sister, daughter, mother and wife. She talks about her remarkable journey

Project gives new views of atmospheric monastic ruins in Cumbria visited by likes of JMW Turner and Wordsworth

The allegation that the revered Kenyan author used to beat his wife should start a new conversation on tradition, patriarchy and women’s rights on the continent.

On March 12, Mukoma wa Ngugi, the Kenyan American poet and author, who is the son of Ngugi wa Thiong’o, the famed writer widely seen as a giant of African literature, took to X, formerly Twitter, to allege that his father was an abusive husband.

“My father Ngugi wa Thiong’o physically abused my late mother. He would beat her up. Some of my earliest memories are of me going to visit her at my grandmother’s where she would seek refuge.”

read more: https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2024/4/4/ngugi-wa-thiongo-literary-giant-revolutionary-hero-domestic-abuser

On September 21, 1970, the New York Times ran its first “op-ed” page. Short for “opposite the editorial,” this new feature provided space for writers with no relationship to the newspaper’s editorial board to express their views. Before long, other newspapers followed suit. More than fifty years later, in order to compete with electronic media news, traditional newspapers have come to utilize opinion pages as a means to attract and keep readers.

Newspaper editors understood the power of opinion pieces as early as 1921 when editor Herbert Bayard Swope of the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York World said: “Nothing is more interesting than opinion when opinion is interesting, so I devised a method of cleaning off the page opposite the editorial… and thereon I decided to print opinions, ignoring facts.”

The pioneering opinion pieces Swope published were written by newspaper staff; and, while he may have ignored some facts in the opinions he published, contemporary newspapers claim to aspire to journalistic integrity. In its op-ed guidelines, the Washington Post, for example, notes that all op-eds are fact-checked. Post guidelines explain that authors with “important titles,” like “senators, business leaders, heads of state,” are held “to a particularly high standard when considering whether to publish them in The Post.”

As competition for the public’s attention stiffens in a social media and online communications-saturated environment, it’s perhaps not surprising that conflicts of interest arise in the op-ed pages. In 2011, more than 50 journalists and academics urged greater transparency about conflicts of interest among New York Times op-ed page contributors. In an October 6, 2011, letter to Arthur Brisbane, the Times’s public editor, they criticized the practice of “special interests surreptitiously funding ‘experts’ to push industry talking points in the nation’s major media outlets,” absent reporting of those writers’ vested interests.

In their letter to the Times, the signatories called out the unreported bias of Manhattan Institute senior fellow Robert Bryce. The Institute received millions of dollars in funding from the fossil fuel industry. Bryce’s promotion of fossil fuels rather than renewable energy, they wrote, flew in the face of his “masquerading as an unbiased expert.”

Corporate media consolidation has strategically limited the diversity of perspectives and the quality of journalism and unduly influenced audience opinion. With a handful of large corporations controlling a majority of media outlets, content homogenization and profit prioritization often replace journalistic integrity. For instance, the acquisition of hundreds of weekly and daily newspapers by conglomerates like Gannett has led to a reduction in independent voices, an increase in editorial uniformity, biased editorials and op-eds, and news deserts.

read more: https://www.projectcensored.org/op-ed-abuse/

One afternoon in 1957 in Johannesburg, Benjamin Pogrund walked into a classroom at the University of the Witwatersrand to meet his fiancée Astrid. He found her in conversation with her teacher, Robert Sobukwe, a lecturer in isiZulu (his official title at the university was “language assistant”). Astrid had spoken warmly of Sobukwe before and Pogrund took an easy liking to him, even though, as he later wrote, in the early days of their friendship he was not particularly impressed by Sobukwe as an intellectual (finding him “too academic and too timid”). No record of Sobukwe’s early impressions of Pogrund is available in the archives. They began to meet at Sobukwe’s office at Wits and later at Pogrund’s home in the whites-only suburbs of Johannesburg; Pogrund would “abuse” his journalistic privileges to visit Sobukwe at his home in Mofolo, a suburb of the Soweto township, sometimes socializing there with other men from the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) such as P.K. Leballo, Zephaniah Mothopeng, and Peter Raboroko.

Sobukwe and Pogrund were both very similar and very different men. Similar in that they shared the social and intellectual formation of those educated in the intellectual tradition of the Enlightenment. Pogrund was less critical of this formation than Sobukwe, whose influences were more diverse. Sobukwe would later describe his taste in reading as “Catholic,” which is an apt way to describe who he was as an intellectual and a person. He had, for instance, the prodigious facility for and interest in language that is natural to anyone whose life has not been narrowed by a fascistic political context but particularly commendable in one whose life was interfered with in just such a way. Although the structure of settler society meant that settlers could get by as monolinguals, while natives were in general multilingual, Sobukwe’s openness to and interest in other languages and their cultures was probably unusual. He spoke the Afrikaans of both town and location fluently, as well as isiXhosa, seSotho, isiZulu, and English (the neat divisions between some of these languages, and indeed the idea that there are clear points at which one part of the spectrum of language can be marked off from another, was itself the product of colonial linguistics and anthropology). As an adult he became interested in Arabic, wishing to study it while in prison.

Both Pogrund and Sobukwe became active opponents of apartheid for which each man paid his price. Pogrund was serially harassed by the state (and periodically thrown into jail), while the newspaper he worked for was taken to court on account of his journalism. Sobukwe spent nine years in prison—six in solitary confinement on Robben Island—for his role in the Pan Africanist Congress’s anti-pass campaign and was then banished to the administrative district of Galeshewe in Kimberley in what was then the Cape province.

read more: https://africasacountry.com/2024/04/speaking-as-one-african-to-another/

Every year, millions of donated food boxes, known as “Ramadan cartons,” are distributed across Egypt throughout the month, circulated from individuals to small charitable organizations to large entities, including government bodies.

Ramadan boxes represent the informal social version of in-kind support, after government-provided in-kind support was replaced by cash transfers in 2014 in line with the adoption of austerity policies.

However, in the same way that official in-kind food assistance disappeared, this informal version may face a similar fate amid exceptional inflation rates.

The surge in food inflation rates, particularly in recent months, has deeply impacted the provision of Ramadan food boxes. Egypt now has one of the highest food inflation rates in the world, which has caused changes in the quality and quantity of food items included in the boxes over the years, while some items have been eliminated altogether.

Speaking to Mada Masr, individuals involved in the distribution of Ramadan boxes have reported a decline in donations and an increase in the number of those in need.

read more: https://www.madamasr.com/en/2024/04/03/feature/economy/generosity-knocked-out-of-the-box-how-economic-crisis-has-shrunk-ramadan-food-donations/

Giorgia Meloni’s government has imposed such blatant domination over Italian public broadcaster RAI that its programming has been nicknamed “Tele-Meloni.” The changes have drawn considerable backlash — and are driving ever more Italians to change channels.

I | talian public broadcaster RAI (Radiotelevisione italiana) has long been a prize in the hands of the latest election winner. Yet if the ruling parties routinely distribute top jobs on national networks, few governments have dared to make RAI a tool of propaganda quite so blatantly as Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. Critics today commonly label its programming “Tele-Meloni.” However, her push to bring RAI to the right is also proving a commercial disaster — turning the broadcaster into a hotbed of continual embarrassments.

In less than a year, RAI executives have replaced, cast out, or forced the resignations of their top hosts and journalists while threatening disciplinary sanctions for those refusing to abide by de facto censorship. The changes include near-mandatory positive coverage of the government — and, in these last six months of war, a ban on explicit criticism of Israel from guests, journalists, and hosts.

read more: https://jacobin.com/2024/04/giorgia-meloni-rai-tv-censorship/

South Africa’s Cape south coast offers many hints about how our human ancestors lived some 35,000 to 400,000 years ago during the Pleistocene epoch. These clues are captured in the dunes they once traversed, today cemented and preserved in a rock type known as aeolianite.

Our research team has been studying this area since 2008. We’ve described the fossilised tracks of large Pleistocene animals such as lion, rhinoceros, elephant, giant buffalo and crocodiles, as well as footprints left by hominins.

Then, in 2018, one of our “citizen scientist” supporters, Emily Brink, spotted an intriguing rock east of Still Bay, about 330km east of Cape Town. The rock was unusually symmetrical and was shaped uncannily like a stingray, minus the tail.

After careful study of the rock, we have published an academic article in the journal Rock Art Research in which we posit that it represents a sand-sculpture of a blue stingray (Dasyatis chrysonata). We believe that the sculpture might have begun with tracing a specimen in the sand.

read more: https://theconversation.com/stingray-sand-sculpture-on-south-africas-coast-may-be-oldest-example-of-humans-creating-an-image-of-another-creature-225909