Interesting Shares

The once-beloved children’s author is working herself up over Scotland’s new bias law.

U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has jumped to defend J.K. Rowling, who is once again using her one wild and precious life to post obsessively about transgender women instead of doing literally anything else with her hundreds of millions of dollars.

The Harry Potter author took to X, formerly Twitter, on April 1 to share her thoughts on Scotland’s new Hate Crime Act, which went into effect the same day. The law criminalizes “stirring up hatred” related to age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, trans identity, or being intersex, as the BBC reported. “Stirring up hatred” is further defined as communicating or behaving in a way “that a reasonable person would consider to be threatening or abusive” against a protected group. The offense is punishable by imprisonment of up to seven years, a fine, or both.

In response to the legislation, Rowling posted a long thread naming several prominent trans women in the U.K., including Mridul Wadhwa, the CEO of the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre, and activist Munroe Bergdorf. Since it was April Fool’s day, Rowling decided to commemorate it by sarcastically affirming the womanhood of all the people she named in her thread. In the same breath that she said that a convicted child predator was “rightly sent to a women’s prison,” she also called out a number of trans women making anodyne comments about inclusion, seemingly implying that trans identity is inherently predatory.

read more: https://www.them.us/story/jk-rowling-rishi-sunak-social-media-trans

Climate change and poverty threaten to wash away the coastal community founded by fugitive slaves.

Oaxaca, Mexico – Outside Mama Cointa’s home where she has lived for almost all her life, guests have gathered to celebrate her 101st birthday. Her friend Victor steadies her quivering hand with his own while she tilts a ribbon-wrapped bouquet of wilting flowers to her nose. Her son Don Amado ushers visitors inside their family home.

“Our home is the last of its kind here,” Amado said, ducking underneath a sheet of thatched palm leaves hanging over the entranceway to a windowless, one-room house, where he was raised by his mother, Mama “Cointa” Chavez Velazco, in the village of Tecoyame, Oaxaca.

read more: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/4/2/four-hundred-years-on-mexicos-oldest-black-community-struggles-to-survive

The failure of South African universities to call out Israel’s genocide challenges the assumption that South Africans have a deep appreciation of injustice in Palestine given their similar experiences under apartheid.

On December 29, 2023, South Africa initiated a case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) against Israel for atrocities in occupied Palestine, which were argued to rise to the threshold of genocide. This ICJ case has been widely interpreted as a key milestone for South African society, marking a “moment of self-assertion and patriotism” that confirmed South Africa’s “place on the world stage in solidarity with Palestinians.”

South African solidarity with Palestine is undoubtedly important, both locally and internationally, but not everyone is on the same page. Several major universities in South Africa have rejected calls by academics and students to take an institutional position calling for an immediate and unconditional ceasefire in Gaza. Our position is that South Africans should be in solidarity with Palestine, but we also suspect that the case for actually existing solidarity may have been overstated. We have no doubt that a minority of the population has been deeply inspired by and invested in the ICJ case and the longstanding plight of the Palestinians, but there are also a large number of South Africans who remain indifferent or uncommitted.

In this piece we draw on recent experiences at one university to suggest that public sentiment on Palestine is far from uniform and unified. At a recent high-level university debate, efforts to express solidarity with Palestine were derailed by a strong opposition that—rather than showing explicit support for Israel—resisted the idea of taking any position on the issue.

read more: https://africasacountry.com/2024/04/the-limits-of-international-solidarity/

Despite today's date, this is not an April Fool's prank. At a press conference in Tokyo last weekend, professor Hiroshi Yoshida from the Tohoku University Research Center for Aged Economy and Society, sounded the alarm bell for a looming crisis. By the year 2531, e

The strangest hardware problem I've ever had to debug.

MyRGB is a tiny, web-based, color guessing game. The game is available as a single HTML page that runs in a web browser. It presents a page with a randomly chosen background color. Your job is to guess the three RGB hexademical digits that make the given background color.

Researchers have found fresh evidence that may connect the mysterious Denisovans to the early human species Homo longi

Daily dosis of shit experienced on Microsoft Azure.

Exclusive: fingers of willow gloves, found in only two woodlands, will be rushed to Cumbria and tied to new trees

Man says he ended up in ‘a crazy situation’ after he began taking in cats abandoned during Covid pandemic

The competition for waiters and waitresses began in 1914, but has not been held since 2011 due to lack of sponsors.

Article: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/mar/24/not-waiting-around-paris-service-staff-battle-it-out-in-revived-course-des-cafes

Major landmarks, businesses and households in cities around the world turned their lights off for one hour at 8.30pm local time on Saturday 23 March to raise awareness of the climate crisis and show support for renewable energy

Has LEGO prices gone up or down? Let's find out.

A team of neurologists, stem cell specialists and molecular biologists affiliated with several institutions in the U.S. and led by a group at Stanford University School of Medicine has found evidence that the root cause of Alzheimer's disease may be fat buildup in brain cells. The study is published in the journal Nature.

The mystery of “infantile amnesia” suggests memory works differently in the developing brain

Countless fans took to social media to share ways they're enjoying brie before the cheese is gone for good

Authorities say owner in Erie county neither had a proper permit for the animal nor properly secured the 30-year-old animal

Digital platforms are struggling, meanwhile a 136-year-old book retailer is growing again. But why?

Behind-the-scenes build log for my Linux-powered business card

Researchers at Nottingham Trent University hope device used at home will improve tracking of tumours

After its Chinese backers pulled out, Oceanwide Plaza stands abandoned – could it be turned over to those who need it most?

Mini missions are being launched amid the spires – a haven for dust particles that may contain clues about the cosmos and the early Earth

DNA My Dog received human genetic sample and identified it as a malamute, shar-pei and labrador, according to news station