SDF Chatter

About 3,800 workers at one of the nation’s largest meatpacking plants were set to strike Monday morning in Colorado in what union representatives said would be the first walkout at a U.S. beef slaughterhouse since the 1980s.

The strike at the Swift Beef Co. plant in Greeley was set to begin at 5:30 a.m. MDT, said Kim Cordova, president of United Food and Commercial Workers Local 7, which represents the workers.

It follows accusations from union officials that owner JBS USA retaliated against workers and committed other unfair labor practices amid contract negotiations. A previous contract was due to expire at midnight Sunday.

Hopefully the cross post works

The video’s opening shot shows a man hiding under a bed snipping in a hole in someone’s sock. Seconds later, the same man uses a saw to shorten a table leg so that it wobbles during breakfast. “My job is to make things shitty,” the man explains. “The official title is enshittificator. What I do is I take things that are perfectly fine and I make them worse.”

The video, released recently by the Norwegian Consumer Council, is an absurdist take on a serious issue; it is part of a wider, global campaign aimed at fighting back against the “enshittification”, or gradual deterioration, of digital products and services.

“We wanted to show that you wouldn’t accept this in the analogue world,” said Finn Lützow-Holm Myrstad, the council’s director of digital policy. “But this is happening every day in our digital products and services, and we really think it doesn’t need to be that way.”

Coined by author Cory Doctorow, the term enshittification refers to the deliberate degradation of a service or product, particularly in the digital sphere. Examples abound, from social media feeds that have gradually become littered with adverts and scams to software updates that leave phones lagging and chatbots that supplant customer service agents.

A former Colorado funeral home owner who helped her ex-husband hide nearly 200 decomposing bodies in a building is asking for leniency when she is sentenced Monday, saying she was a “scared and desperate mother” who was manipulated to keep the family business operating.

Carie Hallford, 48, faces up to 20 years in prison for taking over $130,000 from families for funeral services, including cremations, and often giving them urns full of concrete mix instead. In two cases, investigators found the wrong body was buried. In August, she pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and admitted that she and her ex-husband Jon Hallford cheated customers and also defrauded the federal government out of nearly $900,000 in pandemic small business aid.

More registered voters view Israel negatively than positively in the latest NBC News poll, driven by change among independents and especially Democrats.

American voters’ feelings on Israel and the Palestinian territories have shifted dramatically in recent years, in a sea change that is transforming the Democratic Party and shaping its primaries.

A new NBC News poll underscores the depths of the shift. More registered voters view Israel negatively than positively, a change from a few years ago. The change has been especially pronounced among independents and Democrats, fueling divided congressional primaries in 2026 and potentially shaping the party’s 2028 presidential contest.

When asked whether their sympathies lie more with Israelis or Palestinians, 40% of registered voters say they side more with the Palestinians, while 39% choose the Israelis. The split stood at 45% for Israelis and 13% for Palestinians when NBC News asked the question more than a decade ago, in November 2013.

But while two-thirds of Republicans side with the Israelis, similar to 2013, two-thirds of Democrats now side with the Palestinians.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/42654180

I plan to draw all solar terms this year, starting with Spring Commences, which is today!

Made this a while ago (4th Feb 2026). Didn't occur to me that I should post it here until I saw someone else posting about vector art today. I've made more since then but I don't know if I should crosspost them all individually as that seems kind of spammy.

This art is open source, btw

For 12 years, via completely secret channels, the German chancellor funneled the equivalent of 20 billion shekels to Israel. The goal: to fund its Dimona nuclear reactor and secure the country's future

Since December 1960, when the existence of a nuclear reactor in the Negev city of Dimona was no longer a secret, countless books and articles have been published regarding this sensitive project – which Israel, with impressive obstinacy, still clouds with ambiguity.

The most important of these works, Avner Cohen's 1998 book, "Israel and the Bomb," laid the groundwork, upon which other important researchers – such as Seymour Hersh, Zaki Shalom and Adam Raz – based their extensive works. In 2024, investigative journalist Shany Haziza created an excellent documentary series, "The Atom and Me," which put a human face on the project.

Kyiv's tools, honed over years of daily Russian drone attacks, could give a critical boost to Middle Eastern countries looking to repel attacks from Iran.

As the conflict in the Middle East escalates, Ukraine could prove to be an invaluable trove of battle-tested expertise from its own bitter and costly fight against Russia.

After months of pressure and hardened rhetoric from Washington aimed at ending the war in Ukraine, Kyiv is now also fielding requests for help as Iran’s Gulf neighbors grapple with the modern reality of drone warfare.

Hotels, airports and residential buildings have been hit in cities across the Gulf, wreaking havoc as Iran targets the U.S. military bases hosted by its neighbors. It’s a picture all too familiar in Ukraine, whose skies are swarmed by hundreds of Russian drones on a nightly basis, many of them of the Shahed type designed in Iran.

In a polluted future Venice researchers are working on a way to improve living conditions. One day, unknown forces start killing them off. A team of soldiers and civilians is sent to investigate. Soon, they encounter strange murderous creatures.

TRAILER

IMDb.com || letterboxd.com

Defence analyst says torpedo strike is a ‘humiliation’ for Modi’s government that disregarded a US defence partner

The attack on the warship left senior military figures and analysts in the region stunned, provoking fears that Donald Trump’s Middle East war will have wider ramifications for the geopolitically sensitive Indian Ocean region.

Iran called the attack an “atrocity” but the Trump administration was insistent that Dena was a fair target. In a press conference, the US defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, did not disguise his glee as he said Dena had thought it was safe until it died a “quiet death”. That same week, Trump boasted of the strategy by the US military to strike, rather than capture, about 50 Iranian ships in the conflict. “They like sinking them better,” said the US president, chuckling.

India’s former chief of naval staff, Adm Arun Prakash, said the attack on Dena was legal as it took place in international water but was nonetheless “shocking” on multiple fronts.

“The US navy could have sunk this ship anywhere on the way back to the Persian Gulf,” said Prakash. “We are supposed to be friends and partners of the USA. To bring the war to right to our doorstep was a perverse act.”

Social media giants made decisions which allowed more harmful content on people's feeds, after internal research into their algorithms showed how outrage fuelled engagement, whistleblowers told the BBC.

More than a dozen whistleblowers and insiders have laid bare how the companies took risks with safety on issues including violence, sexual blackmail and terrorism as they battled for users' attention.

An engineer at Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, described how he had been told by senior management to allow more "borderline" harmful content - which includes misogyny and conspiracy theories - in user's feeds to compete with TikTok.

"They sort of told us that it's because the stock price is down," the engineer said.

A TikTok employee gave the BBC rare access to the company's internal dashboards of user complaints - as well as other evidence of how staff had been instructed to prioritise several cases involving politicians over a series of reports of harmful posts featuring children.

Decisions were being made to "maintain a strong relationship" with political figures to avoid threats of regulation or bans, not because of the risks to users, the TikTok staffer said.

From Mark Workman

ARE YOU LOOKING AT ME.

That is one sassy little Boreal Owl! 🤣

A generation ago, Poland rationed sugar and flour while its citizens were paid one-tenth what West Germans earned. Today its economy has edged past Switzerland to become the world’s 20th largest with over $1 trillion in annual output.

It’s a historic leap from the post-Communist ruins of 1989-90 to today’s European growth champion that economists say has lessons on how to bring prosperity to ordinary people — and that the Trump administration says should be recognized by Poland’s presence at a summit of the Group of 20 leading economies later this year.

From Derek Yeo

Long-Eared Owl (Asio otus)

"Wing Wrap Mousie Meal"

China