Atlanta police have been carrying out around-the-clock surveillance in several neighborhoods for months, on people and houses linked to opposition against the police training center colloquially known as “Cop City”.

The surveillance in Georgia has included following people in cars, blasting sirens outside bedroom windows and shining headlights into houses at night, the Guardian has learned.

While no arrests have been made, residents said they’re at a loss as to what legal protections of privacy and freedom from harassment are available to them. Chata Spikes, the Atlanta police spokesperson, did not respond to requests for comment.

Although it was not the only factor in the race, the Israel-Hamas war undoubtedly hovered over the contest.

Democratic Rep. Summer Lee, the first member of the progressive “Squad” to face a primary challenger this cycle, successfully fended off her opponent in her Pittsburgh-based district on Tuesday.

Although it was not the only factor in the race, the Israel-Hamas war undoubtedly hovered over the contest. Lee has been an outspoken critic of Israel’s actions in its war with Hamas and was among the first lawmakers to call for a cease-fire. She was seen as potentially vulnerable to a primary challenge when pro-Israel groups began to threaten heavy outside spending.

Three men accused by the Crown of helping lead and coordinate the COVID-19 protest blockade at Coutts, Alta., in 2022 have been found guilty of mischief.

Jurors deliberated for three hours Tuesday night before finding Alex Van Herk, Marco Van Huigenbos, and Gerhard (George) Janzen guilty of one count each of mischief over $5,000.

Gasps of surprise were heard in a courtroom packed with supporters of the trio when the verdict was announced.

This is a noteworthy article. Here follow a few select paragraphs:

A group of students at McGill University have spent more than three weeks on hunger strike in an effort to force the Canadian college to divest from “companies supporting the Israeli military”.

The move follows months of protests and sit-ins at McGill and at universities around the world, as students and faculty members have protested against Israel’s military offensive in Gaza.

Then there's this paragraph that might beg the question why an academic institution would invest in the military industrial-complex:

Documents on McGill’s website show that it held investments in companies including Lockheed Martin, a defense contractor which has sold fighter jets to Israel, and Safran, a French air and defense company.

It would appear McGill University initially agreed to a public forum - and the reneged on that agreement:

Amine said the McGill administration had acknowledged the strike, and agreed to a public forum on the issue, before cancelling the meeting. The school proposed a private meeting in early March, the students said, which was turned down.

A few initial paragraphs follow:

The accusation by the UN and other humanitarians that Israel may be committing a war crime by deliberately starving Gaza’s population is likely to significantly increase the prospect of legal culpability for the country, including at the international court of justice.

Amid reports that the Israel Defense Forces are hiring dozens of lawyers to defend against anticipated cases and legal challenges, the charge that Israel has triggered a “man-made famine” by deliberately obstructing the entry of aid into Gaza is backed by an increasing body of evidence.

Already facing a complaint of genocide from South Africa at the ICJ, the UN’s top court – including an allegation that senior Israeli political officials have incited genocide in public statements – Israel is also the subject of a provisional emergency ruling by the court ordering it to admit life-saving aid to Gaza.

On Wednesday, the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, underlined the growing sense of crisis as he warned that all of Gaza’s 2 million people were experiencing “severe levels of acute food insecurity” – the first time an entire population of Gaza has been so classified.

Unlike other issues related to Israel’s conduct in its war against Hamas in Gaza, which has claimed more than 30,000 lives and displaced more than 85% of the population amid widespread destruction, the human-made famine occurring in the Palestinian territory appears more straightforward.

From the top of the article, we come to discover that the MyPillow person is asking us all to foot his legal bill:

MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell doesn’t seem to be so confident in his election conspiracies these days.

The floundering businessman took to Steve Bannon’s podcast on Monday to push his latest theory that the U.S. needs to outlaw electronic voting machines. The current suit, led by failed Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, is being underwritten by the pillow salesman. After admitting the effort is a total longshot and his evidence did not “shock the world,” as he had promised, Lindell decided to ask supporters if they could foot his legal bill.

The article closes with these further challenges that this MyPillow individual has had to face:

The former millionaire spent months using every platform at his disposal to seed conspiracy theories following the 2020 presidential election, including against Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic, claiming the electronic voting companies were complicit in a scheme to keep Donald Trump from retaking the White House. That, however, cost Lindell $5 million, and put him on the line in a $1.3 billion defamation suit brought by Dominion, in which he’s being sued not just for spreading the lies but also attempting to profit off of it. Lindell, of course, has a plan for that—he’s going to use the Supreme Court to defend himself with his new crowdfunded legal fund.

“But Steve, all this evidence, this new evidence is gonna be used far and wide,” he told the far-right host. “There’s cases out there, as you know, Mike Lindell and MyPillow getting sued for billions of dollars.”

A 25-year-old Missouri man says he mistook his mother for an intruder before shooting her to death at their home’s back door.

Prosecutors have charged Jaylen Johnson with manslaughter and armed criminal action in connection with the shooting death on Thursday of his mother, Monica McNichols-Johnson.

McNichols-Johnson’s shooting death came less than a year after another shooting in Missouri saw Ralph Yarl, then 16, get shot on 13 April by 84-year-old Andrew Lester after ringing the wrong doorbell while picking up his siblings.

Aaron Bushnell, who died last month, ‘sacrificed everything’ for Palestinians, says mayor of Jericho

A few of the initial paragraphs for context follow - but the article is worth reading fully:

The Palestinian town of Jericho has named a street after Aaron Bushnell, the US air force member who set himself on fire outside the Israeli embassy in Washington to protest against the war in Gaza.

The 25-year-old, who died on 25 February, “sacrificed everything” for Palestinians, said the mayor of Jericho, Abdul Karim Sidr, as the street sign was unveiled on Sunday.

“We didn’t know him, and he didn’t know us. There were no social, economic or political ties between us. What we share is a love for freedom and a desire to stand against these attacks [on Gaza],” the mayor told a small crowd gathered on the new Aaron Bushnell Road.

Bushnell livestreamed his self-immolation on the social media platform Twitch, declaring he would “no longer be complicit in genocide” and shouting “free Palestine” as he started the fire. Law enforcement officials put out the flames, but he died in hospital several hours later.

Israel’s offensive in Gaza has killed more than 31,000 people, the majority of them women and children, according to the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory. The war was triggered by the cross border attack on 7 October when Hamas killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and kidnapped 250 people.

Even as governments in Europe and the US have largely continued to back Israel’s campaign in Gaza as part of the country’s right to self-defence, Palestinians have taken heart from popular protests held from Michigan to Madrid.

Christian evangelical institution punished victims ‘for violating the student code of conduct’ as ‘assailants were left unpunished’

Some of the initial content - the article is well written:

Liberty University fined $14m over ‘culture of silence’ around sexual assault

Liberty University has been hit with a $14m Department of Education federal fine for creating “a culture of silence” around sexual assault, failing to support victims of violence and then failing to properly report them correctly under the law.

Announcing the fine on Tuesday, the department said in a statement that the Christian evangelical institution had punished sexual assault victims “for violating the student code of conduct”, while “their assailants were left unpunished” – a violation of federal law.

Liberty was founded in 1971 by the television preacher Jerry Falwell Sr, the Baptist minister who, eight years later, created the Moral Majority movement that mobilized the Christian right to the cause of the Republican party. The university was notified two years ago by the department that it would be conducting a review of the institution under the Clery Act, which requires the disclosure of campus security information.

Students of the university, which is located near Lynchburg, Virginia, are required to follow The Liberty Way, a student honor code that prohibits sexual relations outside of “a biblically-ordained marriage between a natural-born man and a natural-born woman”.

But signs that aspects of the code – and law – were failing came in 2021 when Liberty spokesperson Scott Lamb was fired for standing up for 22 female students represented in a lawsuit that claimed the university “enabled on-campus rapes” and suppressed complaints of sexual assault and rape, a violation of federal Title IX statutes, in what it said was “the weaponization of the ‘Liberty Way’”.

Linus Torvalds just issued Linux 6.8-rc7 as we close in on the Linux 6.8 stable release in the next week or two.

With prior weekly release candidates there were concerns raised by Torvalds that this might be a cycle needing to go with an extra "-rc8" candidate before declaring the stable kernel. But this week Linux 6.8-rc7 did tick on the smaller side and in turn Linus expressed the possibility of not needing 6.8-rc8, in which case the Linux 6.8 stable release would happen next Sunday on 10 March. But if things don't go smoothly, Linux 6.8-rc8 would come then and then v6.8 the following Sunday.

Statcounter, a website that tracks the market share of web browsers, operating systems, and search engines, is reporting that Linux on the desktop has over 4% market share for the very first time (Statcounter records ChromeOS as a separate operating system despite being based on Linux). Statcounter doesn’t provide any explanation about why the market share has increased but we can speculate what’s going on.

Linux’s march to its 4.03% market share has been a steady process ever since the final months of 2020 when Linux held just 1.53% of desktop market share. One of the biggest contributors to the growth of Linux is likely the stringent hardware requirements of Windows 11.

Overall, the analysis, released as a pre-print, found that RTO mandates did not improve a firm's financial metrics, but they did decrease employee satisfaction.

Drilling down, the data indicated that RTO mandates were linked to firms with male CEOs who had greater power in the company. Here, power is measured as the CEO’s total compensation divided by the average total compensation paid to the four highest-paid executives in the firm.

This is an interesting metric. And the research outcome makes a lot of sense.

Also, RTO policies are garbage - but I'm stating the obvious.