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from Belly of the Beast

President Donald Trump met with major U.S. oil companies to discuss Venezuela’s oil future. But during the meeting, one executive acknowledged that his company didn’tleave Venezuela because of the Venezuelan government, but due to U.S. sanctions imposed by Trump himself six years ago.

Halliburton Company’s CEO confirmed their operations in Venezuela ended in 2019 after sanctions made it legally impossible to stay, despite decades working in the country and hundreds of Venezuelan workers employed by the company.

The contradiction is not unique to Venezuela. The same dynamic has played out in Cuba: the U.S. imposes “maximum pressure” sanctions that drive out U.S. companies, destroy the economy, and immiserate the population. Then the U.S. points to the resulting collapse as proof of failure and the reason why the doors need to be opened to U.S. companies — except the U.S. was the one that closed them in the first place.

from Belly of the Beast

President Donald Trump met with major U.S. oil companies to discuss Venezuela’s oil future. But during the meeting, one executive acknowledged that his company didn’tleave Venezuela because of the Venezuelan government, but due to U.S. sanctions imposed by Trump himself six years ago.

Halliburton Company’s CEO confirmed their operations in Venezuela ended in 2019 after sanctions made it legally impossible to stay, despite decades working in the country and hundreds of Venezuelan workers employed by the company.

The contradiction is not unique to Venezuela. The same dynamic has played out in Cuba: the U.S. imposes “maximum pressure” sanctions that drive out U.S. companies, destroy the economy, and immiserate the population. Then the U.S. points to the resulting collapse as proof of failure and the reason why the doors need to be opened to U.S. companies — except the U.S. was the one that closed them in the first place.

Mozilla has released Thunderbird version 147 of its widely adopted free and open-source desktop email client, now available for download.

One of the most visible additions is a new “Show Full Path” option for the folder pane when using compact view modes. This makes it easier to navigate complex mail setups by displaying the full folder hierarchy instead of truncated names.

Alongside this, Thunderbird 147.0 introduces a new preference, mail.useLocalizedFolderNames, allowing users to control whether special folder names are localized. In addition, special folders are now localized using a restricted and more predictable set of names.

A few months ago, Linux Mint 22.2 "Zara" was introduced with many useful changes, like Linux kernel 6.14, support for accent colors on XDG Desktop Portal XApp, blur effects on the login screen, and an improved Software Manager.

The next release in line, Linux Mint 22.3 "Zena", has now arrived as a point release, with interesting refinements to the Cinnamon desktop alongside new tools for system management.

Nginx Proxy Manager, a popular web-based and user-friendly reverse proxy management interface for Nginx, has just released version 2.13.6. Although this is only a patch release to a minor version, it actually delivers some fairly significant improvements.

The most notable change is the addition of TOTP-based two-factor authentication, allowing administrators to protect access to the web interface with time-based one-time passwords, bringing a long-requested security feature to Nginx Proxy Manager.

Certificate management has also been expanded. When creating new certificates, users can now explicitly choose between RSA and ECDSA key types, offering greater flexibility depending on compatibility or performance requirements.

With Linux gaming clearly showing it's becoming more popular, and with GOG under new ownership, there's hope yet that GOG will improve their Linux support.

GOG does currently support Linux — well, kind of. They publish Native Linux packages for various games, which depends on the developer (just like Steam does without Proton) but they have a very limited support of distributions, which can cause problems installing Linux games from GOG due to dependency mess. That, and GOG Galaxy does not support Linux.

There's easier ways to install games from GOG on Linux / SteamOS though, which you can check out in our GamingOnLinux Guide. You can even do it directly in Steam if you want to.

Along with an entirely new set of awards you can give out across Steam the changes should stop all the clown farming on reviews, guides, forum posts and more.

You've probably seen guides and forum posts that are just pure silly bait on Steam, as it has become a bit of a problem since people expected to get a bunch of clown awards — and they did, it was everywhere. This should hopefully now be a thing of the past. In the Steam announcement Valve mentioned that Steam Awards no longer transfer points over, and they've retired the old awards in favour of a completely new set.

Now it's purely about showing appreciation, with all the awards costing the same amount of Steam Points too.

Rumors of mass killings by security forces in Tanzania spread fast, but as the internet went dark and bodies disappeared from the streets, the true scale of the violence slipped out of reach.

Months later, there is still no official death toll.

President Samia Suluhu Hassan has meanwhile firmly rejected allegations of state-led violence and insists that security forces were responding to looting and an attempted coup.

"When we are accused of using excessive force to quell the post-election violence, the question is: what level of force would have been considered minimal?" Suluhu Hassan said.

A DW investigation into two major incidents in Mwanza region found evidence of atrocities. Eyewitness and survivor accounts, leaked police files, ballistics reports and geolocation data indicate the use of lethal force.

Survivors and eyewitnesses told DW that unarmed civilians were gunned down and soldiers later removed the bodies.