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US intel revealed Israeli officials discussing use of human shields in Gaza, sources say (Reuters, 2025-11-13)

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-intel-revealed-israeli-officials-discussing-use-human-shields-gaza-sources-2025-11-12/
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>> The U.S. gathered intelligence last year of Israeli officials discussing how their soldiers had sent Palestinians into #Gaza tunnels the Israelis believed were potentially lined with explosives, according to two former U.S. officials familiar with the matter.

>> The information was shared with the White House and analyzed by the intelligence community in the final weeks of former President Joe Biden's administration, …

>> Washington's collection of its own evidence on the subject has not been previously reported.

>> Reuters could not determine whether the Biden administration discussed the intelligence with the Israeli government.

>> Former Biden White House officials did not respond to requests for comment. The CIA did not respond to a request for comment.

#BidenAdministration #USPol #HumanShield #palestine @palestine@fedibird.com

OQB @actionjbone@sh.itjust.works

https://archive.ph/2KJDu

Katie Wilson, who narrowly defeated the incumbent, Bruce Harrell, emerged from the city’s left-wing activist class and brings with her little experience in governing.

In a state without an income tax, the mayor-elect has promised to pursue what she calls “progressive” new sources of revenue to pay for housing and other basic services, including potential local taxes on capital gains, digital advertising and buildings purposely left vacant. She has pledged to push a $1 billion bond to build more homes and new protections for renters, who make up 56 percent of the city.

“There was a time when we saw Seattle as kind of a laboratory for progressive policy,” Ms. Wilson said in an interview this fall. “And that time’s not now anymore. But why can’t it be?”

The EU countries have no fundamental problem with US law enforcement agencies accessing their national databases to search for threats.

The EROFS read-only file-system started by Huawei and now maintained by a growing number of contributors continues attracting even more interest. EROFS has exhibited much potential for mobile devices as well as container use-cases while proving itself to be quite robust since its mainlining back in 2019.

Merged today as part of the EROFS fixes for Linux 6.18 kernel ahead of this weekend's Linux 6.18-rc6 is adding another EROFS code reviewer.

I got fed up with spending weekends redoing themes, fixing package breakage, and hunting lost dotfiles whenever I swapped laptops. If you care about uptime and reproducibility more than distro-faith, stop treating your desktop like an altar and treat it like infrastructure: encrypt the disk, snapshot the root, manage dotfiles as code, and back up everything that matters. Do that and a dead SSD or a new laptop becomes a 30-minute restore, not a week-long grief spiral.

Do this in order: 1) Install with LUKS full-disk encryption and Btrfs subvolumes for @ and @home so snaps are atomic. 2) Enable automatic snapshots with Timeshift or snapper. 3) Export your package lists: Debian/Ubuntu: dpkg --get-selections > packages.txt; Arch: pacman -Qqe > pkglist.txt; also flatpak list --app > flatpaks.txt. 4) Put your dotfiles under version control and manage them with chezmoi or GNU Stow. 5) Use Flatpak for GUI apps, containerized toolchains (podman) for dev environments, and keep only system-critical packages in the distro manager. 6) Back up with Borg: borg init --encryption=repokey /path/to/repo ; borg create repo::$(date +%F) /home /etc --stats ; borg prune --keep-daily=7 --keep-weekly=4 --keep-monthly=6. 7) Keep a small, bootable USB with the exact kernel/tools you use so you can unlock LUKS and mount Btrfs snapshots. 8) Test restores quarterly: restore a snapshot to a spare partition and boot it. Do that for a year and tell me reinstalling is fun again.

Yes, it takes a few hours up front, but imagine swapping a motherboard or recovering from ransomware and having a known-good snapshot plus a package list and borg repo waiting. Stops the doomscrolling and gets you back to actually using Linux.

OC by @Bagel@lemmings.world

I was sick of reinstalling after every experiment, so I built a desktop that survives distro hopping, dumb package upgrades and the occasional X11/Wayland meltdown. The trick is simple: encrypted LUKS root, Btrfs subvolumes with aggressive zstd compression and snapshotting, plus borg backups mirrored offsite with rclone. I can break everything and be back to a working system in 10 minutes.

Quick recipe you can follow (NVMe primary, small EFI, LUKS encrypted root):

• Partition: EFI 512M, root as LUKS. Cryptsetup and create Btrfs inside the LUKS container: cryptsetup luksFormat /dev/nvme0n1p2; cryptsetup open /dev/nvme0n1p2 cryptroot; mkfs.btrfs -f /dev/mapper/cryptroot
• Create subvolumes: mount /dev/mapper/cryptroot /mnt; btrfs subvolume create /mnt/@; btrfs subvolume create /mnt/@home; umount /mnt
• Mount for install: mount -o subvol=@,noatime,compress=zstd:15,space_cache=v2,ssd /dev/mapper/cryptroot /mnt; mkdir -p /mnt/home; mount -o subvol=@home,compress=zstd:15 /dev/mapper/cryptroot /mnt/home
• Install your distro onto /mnt normally, put /boot or EFI on the unencrypted partition if your distro needs it.

Make snapshots and backups part of the routine:

• Local snapshots: use Timeshift (GUI) or snapper for automatic pre/post package snapshots. Snapper is great for root snapshots on Btrfs.
• Offsite backups: borg init --encryption=repokey-blake2 /path/to/repo; borg create --stats /path/to/repo::'{now:%Y-%m-%d_%H:%M}' /home /etc; borg prune --keep-daily=7 --keep-weekly=4 --keep-monthly=6. Mirror the borg repo to cloud with rclone or an inexpensive S3/backblaze bucket.

How to recover when you inevitably mess up:

1. Boot a live USB, open the LUKS container with cryptsetup open /dev/nvme0n1p2 cryptroot.
2. Mount the Btrfs and list snapshots: btrfs subvolume list -s /mnt.
3. Make the snapshot the default root with btrfs subvolume set-default /mnt and reboot.

Hardware notes: buy a second NVMe or a small external SSD for local borg archives and cold snapshots. Avoid weird consumer RAID features on laptops and get a wifi card known to have mainline driver support. This setup saved my butt more than once when a kernel update nuked my X11 config or when I wanted to try a new distro without grief.

If you want, I can post a ready-to-run install script for Ubuntu/Arch with these exact commands and a sample snapper config. Stop treating your root filesystem like a fragile snowflake and start building resilience.

OC by @Bagel@lemmings.world

OQB @FreshParsnip@lemmy.ca