Activist groups are calling on governments to step in to regulate the sale of spyware after data was leaked to major news outlets showing hundreds of journalists, activists, dissidents and lawyers around the world likely had their phones targeted by invasive surveillance software was leaked to major news outlets. “The industry has shown that it is incapable of policing itself, while governments—including democratic states—are hiding behind national security to whitewash these surveillance abuses,” said the digital rights group Access Now in a statement. “We need regulation, transparency, and accountability now.”
This issue is both public and personal for the six openly gay Olympians who will be competing at Sochi. They'll join 6,000 athletes from 85 countries. Gay rights have taken center stage at Sochi, thanks to Russia's own targeting of the LGBT community. In June 2013, the Russian government banned dissemination of pro-gay "propaganda" that could be accessible to children. The law's vagueness, activists note, could prohibit almost any pro-gay expression, such as public statements, rallies, rainbow flags, rainbow nesting dolls, or same-sex hand-holding. Violators can be fined or jailed up to 14 days. Foreigners can be expelled.
Volunteers are helping forgotten Dutch diarists of WWII to speak at last. Their voices, filled with anxiety, isolation and uncertainty, resonate powerfully today. Anne Frank listened in an Amsterdam attic on March 28, 1944, as the voice of the Dutch minister of education came crackling over the radio from London. “Preserve your diaries and letters,” he said. Frank was not the only one listening. Thousands of Dutch people had been recording their experiences under German occupation since the Nazi invasion four years earlier. So the words of the minister, part of a government trying to operate from exile in England, resonated.
Archaeologists may finally know the age and true identity of the “Rude Man,” also known as the Cerne Abbas Giant, one of dozens of geoglyphs etched into the British countryside. In March 2020, archaeologists traveled to a hilltop in Dorset, England, to bag a giant. They sliced into his elbows and feet, then took bits of him back to their labs in bags and metal tubes. No actual behemoth was harmed in the process, because the Cerne Abbas Giant is a geoglyph—a large artwork emblazoned into the landscape. The 180-foot-tall figure was created by scouring away grass to reveal the white chalk beneath, then packing the trenches with more chalk quarried nearby. Thanks largely to his 35-foot phallus, the giant has become a beloved fertility icon. According to folklore, couples who couple on his crotch will successfully conceive.
