PhilipTheBucket

In 1998, Tania Cepero Lopez surrendered herself at Miami International Airport as a Cuban refugee. She was a 19-year-old with a dream to become an educator. In the U.S. she believed she could freely teach ideas — even if they triggered debate or discomfort — without fear of repression from the government. For some time, Cepero Lopez lived out that dream as a professor at Florida International…

The next four-person team to live and work aboard the International Space Station departed from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Friday, taking aim at the massive orbiting research complex for a planned stay of six to eight months.

Spacecraft commander Zena Cardman leads the mission, designated Crew-11, that lifted off from Florida's Space Coast at 11:43 am EDT (15:43 UTC) on Friday. Sitting to her right inside SpaceX's Crew Dragon Endeavourcapsule was veteran NASA astronaut Mike Fincke, serving as the vehicle pilot. Flanking the commander and pilot were two mission specialists: Kimiya Yui of Japan and Oleg Platonov of Russia.

Cardman and her crewmates rode a Falcon 9 rocket off the launch pad and headed northeast over the Atlantic Ocean, lining up with the space station's orbit to set the stage for an automated docking at the complex early Saturday.

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Although NASA and its counterpart in Russia, Roscosmos, continue to work together on a daily basis, the leaders of the two organizations have not held face-to-face meetings since the middle of the first Trump administration, back in October 2018.

A lot has changed in the nearly eight years since then, including the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the rocky departure of Roscosmos leader Dmitry Rogozin in 2022 who was subsequently dispatched to the front lines of the war, several changes in NASA leadership, and more.

This drought in high-level meetings was finally broken this week when the relatively new leader of Roscosmos, Roscosmos Director General Dmitry Bakanov, visited the United States to view the launch of the Crew-11 mission from Florida, which included cosmonaut Oleg Platonov. Bakanov has also met with some of NASA's human spaceflight leaders at Johnson Space Center in Houston.

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Wander into Kirsty Elson’s Cornwall studio, and you’ll likely greet a menagerie of creatures alongside scraps of driftwood and rusted bits of metal. Scouring local beaches and embankments, the artist (previously) has an impeccable ability to envision a piglet’s ear or a dog’s snout from a weathered hunk of timber. Once in her studio, quirky characters emerge from scratched and worn materials, their lively personalities shining through the signs of age.

Elson sells some of her sculptures on her website, and you can follow her work on Instagram.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Kirsty Elson’s Spirited Creatures Breathe New Life into Weathered Driftwood appeared first on Colossal.

Microsoft-owned LinkedIn has quietly joined the parade of tech giants rolling back basic protections for transgender users, removing explicit prohibitions against deadnaming and misgendering from its hate speech policies this week. The change, first spotted by the nonprofit Open Terms Archive, eliminates language that previously listed “misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals” as examples of prohibited hateful content.

LinkedIn removed transgender-related protections from its policy on hateful and derogatory content. The platform no longer lists “misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals” as examples of prohibited conduct*. While “content that attacks, denigrates, intimidates, dehumanizes, incites or threatens hatred, violence, prejudicial or discriminatory action” is still considered hateful, addressing a person by a gender and name they ask not be designated by is not anymore.*

Similarly, the platform removed “race or gender identity” from its examples of inherent traits for which negative comments are considered harassment. That qualification of harassment is now kept only for behaviour that is actively “disparaging another member’s […] perceived gender”, not mentioning race or gender identity anymore.

The move is particularly cowardly because LinkedIn made the change with zero public announcement or explanation. When pressed by a reporter at The Advocate, the company offered the classic corporate non-answer: “We regularly update our policies” and insisted that “personal attacks or intimidation toward anyone based on their identity, including misgendering, violates our harassment policy.”

But here’s the thing: if your policies haven’t actually changed, why remove the explicit protections? Why make it harder for users and moderators to understand what’s prohibited? The answer is as obvious as it is pathetic: LinkedIn is preemptively capitulating to political pressure in this era of MAGA culture war.

This follows the now-familiar playbook we’ve seen from Meta, YouTube, and others. Meta rewrote its policies in January to allow content calling LGBTQ+ people “mentally ill” and portraying trans identities as “abnormal.” YouTube quietly scrubbed “gender identity” from its hate speech policies, then had the audacity to call it “regular copy edits.” Now LinkedIn is doing the same cowardly dance.

What makes this particularly infuriating is the timing. These companies aren’t even waiting for actual government threats. They’re just assuming that sucking up to the Trump administration’s anti-trans agenda will somehow protect them from regulatory scrutiny. It’s the corporate equivalent of rolling over and showing your belly before anyone even raises their voice.

And it won’t help. The Trump administration will still target them and demand more and more, knowing that these companies will just roll over again.

And let’s be clear about what deadnaming and misgendering actually are: they’re deliberate acts of dehumanization designed to erase transgender people’s identities and make them feel unwelcome in public spaces. When platforms explicitly protect against these behaviors, it sends a message that trans people belong in these spaces. When they quietly remove those protections, they’re sending the opposite message. They’re saying “we don’t care about your humanity, and we will let people attack you for your identity.”

LinkedIn’s decision is especially disappointing because professional networking platforms should be spaces where people can present their authentic selves without fear of purely hateful harassment. Trans professionals already face discrimination in hiring and workplace environments. The last thing they need is for LinkedIn to signal that it’s open season for harassment on its platform.

The company is trying to argue that it still prohibits harassment and hate speech generally. But vague, general policies are much harder to enforce consistently than specific examples. When you remove explicit guidance about what constitutes anti-trans harassment, you make it easier for bad actors to push boundaries and harder for moderators to draw clear lines.

This is exactly the wrong moment for tech companies to be weakening protections for vulnerable communities. Anti-trans rhetoric and legislation have reached fever pitch, with the Trump administration making attacks on transgender rights a central part of its agenda. This is when platforms should be strengthening their commitment to protecting people from harassment, not quietly rolling back safeguards.

Sure, standing up for what’s right when there’s political pressure to do otherwise is hard. But that’s exactly when it matters most. These companies have billions in revenue and armies of lawyers. If anyone can afford to take a principled stand, it’s them.

Instead, we’re watching them fold like cheap suits at the first sign of political headwinds. They’re prioritizing their relationships with authoritarian politicians over the safety of their users. And they’re doing it in the most cowardly way possible: quietly, without explanation, hoping no one will notice.

The message this sends to transgender users is clear: you’re expendable. Your safety and dignity are less important than our political calculations. And that message isn’t just coming from fringe platforms or obvious bad actors—it’s coming from mainstream services owned by some of the world’s largest companies.

This isn’t just bad for transgender users. It’s bad for everyone who believes that online spaces should be governed by consistent principles rather than political opportunism. When platforms start making policy decisions based on which way the political winds are blowing, they undermine their own credibility and the trust users place in them.

Hell, for years, all we heard from the MAGA world was how supposedly awful it is when platforms make moderation decisions based on political pressure.

Where are all of those people now?

The irony is that these companies are probably making themselves less safe, not more. By signaling that they’ll cave to political pressure, they’re inviting more of it. Authoritarians don’t respect weakness—they exploit it.

LinkedIn, Meta, YouTube, and the rest need to understand: there’s no appeasing the anti-trans mob. No matter how many protections you strip away, it will never be enough. Stick to your principles and protect your users regardless of political pressure.

But instead of showing backbone, these companies are racing to see who can capitulate fastest. It’s a disgraceful display of corporate cowardice at exactly the moment when courage is most needed.

We all deserve better than watching supposedly values-driven companies abandon their principles the moment it becomes politically inconvenient to maintain them.

The US just launched its biggest effort yet to compensate victims of human trafficking, setting up a process to dole out $200 million from seizures related to shutting down the notorious online escorts ad service Backpage.com.

In an announcement on Thursday, the Department of Justice confirmed that "this marks the largest remission process to date to compensate victims of human trafficking."

Acting Assistant Attorney General Matthew Galeotti said the effort to redistribute millions of ill-gotten gains "underscores the Department’s unwavering commitment to use forfeiture to take the profit out of crime and to compensate victims." It comes after Backpage's "owners and key executives and businesses related to the platform" were found guilty of facilitating crimes including money laundering and "unlawful commercial sex using a facility in interstate or foreign commerce," the DOJ said.

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There’s $42.5 billion in broadband grants are headed to the states thanks to the 2021 infrastructure bill most Republicans voted against (yet routinely try to take credit for among their constituents).

But Republicans, despite a supposed feud between Trump and Elon Musk, have been rewriting the grant program’s guidance to eliminate provisions ensuring the resulting broadband is affordable to poor people, and to ensure that Elon Musk gets billions in new broadband subsidies for his expensive and increasingly congested satellite broadband company, Starlink.

The rewrites delayed the underlying grant program, forcing many states to revamp their plans for the already earmarked funds. That includes a new bidding process. Unsurprisingly, in states like Tennessee and Colorado, Jeff Bezos’ Project Kuiper and Elon Musk’s Starlink are now poised to dominate the bidding process, resulting in a lot of taxpayer funds likely going toward satellite services… instead of fiber:

“SpaceX’s Starlink and Amazon’s Project Kuiper flooded the Tennessee office with applications, submitting more than twice as many broadband grant applications as fiber builders, while requesting on average about 10 times less in funding – at least according the application areas.”

Republicans revamped the program to make billionaires happy. Though they claim they revamped the program because they were looking to cut costs. But we’ve noted repeatedly how these Low-Earth orbit satellite broadband efforts have massive problems that make them ill-suited to tackling America’s digital divide at any serious scale.

Starlink has been criticized for harming astronomical research and the ozone layer. Starlink customer service is largely nonexistent. It’s too expensive for the folks most in need of reliable broadband access. The nature of satellite physics and capacity means slowdowns and annoying restrictions are inevitable, and making it scale to permanently meet real-world demand is expensive and not guaranteed.

One recent study found that Starlink struggles to deliver the FCC’s already flimsy definition of broadband – 100 megabits per second (Mbps) down, 20 Mbps up – in any areas where Starlink subscribership exceeds 6 households per square mile. In many areas, these capacity constraints are causing Starlink to issue “congestion” charges as high as $750.

So yes, it’s technically cheaper for taxpayers to fund expensive, congested satellite broadband service, but it results in slower, more expensive service that can’t actually deliver on the promises it’s going to be making. Republicans don’t really care about that, and later on, after the subsidies have been doled out and public is frustrated by the substandard result, they’ll just ignore the problem they caused.

The other problem is money directed to Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk is money directed away from a lot of locally owned municipal and cooperative broadband providers that have been recently using taxpayer money to deploy “future proof”, symmetrical gigabit fiber for prices as low as $60 a month.

Many states had only just started funding these promising emerging competitors, but the Trump revamp of this BEAD (Broadband, Equity, Access and Deployment) program means that if the Trump administration doesn’t like your proposal (it doesn’t reward Musk, it tries to help the poor, or it funds community broadband access) your state could lose millions or billions in funds, permanently.

Another problem: the Trump administration’s lower standards means that companies like Comcast that had originally been encouraged to deploy fiber, are now deploying slower (but still as expensive for consumers) cable broadband service. From Tennessee:

“In the initial round of funding, Comcast applied for funding for 27 project areas. In the Benefit of the Bargain round, Comcast applied to serve 39 project areas. The key difference is that, in the initial round, Comcast proposed to serve these areas with fiber broadband and is now proposing to serve them with cable broadband at a lower cost.”

Fiber providers may have higher up front construction costs, but they’re fixing the problem permanently and properly. As opposed to throwing the lion’s share of taxpayer money at a technology that literally and technically can’t accomplish what’s being asked of it. And, in at least one case, into the lap of a company owned and run by an overt white supremacist with a head full of conspiracy theories.

Ideally, you want taxpayer money going primarily to fiber. After that, to stuff like fixed wireless and 5G wireless. After that, you fill in the gaps with LEO satellite service. LEO satellite service shouldn’t be the primary choice. But because the U.S. is too corrupt to function, that logic’s flying right out the window, and most of the funding is now poised to get dumped into the laps of Trump’s favorite billionaires.\