#Food warehouse and distribution

[lmwarehousing]

Food warehouse and logistics services offer essential benefits for businesses handling perishable goods. Key advantages include temperature-controlled storage to maintain product freshness, and real-time inventory management to prevent stock issues. Reliable distribution ensures timely delivery to customers and retailers. Facilities comply with food-grade standards to meet safety regulations, while end-to-end logistics support streamlines operations from receiving to final delivery. These services help maintain quality and efficiency across the supply chain.

[foreverknightalways]

Denise tries to convince to let her come along but Nick says NO! #ForeverKnight

[sayruq]

The United Nations said Tuesday it suspended food distribution in the southern Gaza city of Rafah due to lack of supplies and insecurity. It also said no aid trucks entered in the past two days via a floating pier set up by the U.S. for sea deliveries. The U.N. has not specified how many people have stayed in Rafah since the Israeli military began its intensified assault there two weeks ago, but apparently several hundred thousand people remain. The World Food Program said it was also running out of food for central Gaza, where hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fleeing Rafah have sought shelter in a chaotic exodus, setting up new tent camps or crowding into areas already devastated by previous Israeli offensives. Abeer Etefa, a spokesperson for the U.N’s World Food Program, warned that “humanitarian operations in Gaza are near collapse.” If food and other supplies don’t resume entering Gaza “in massive quantities, famine-like conditions will spread,” she said.

The prosecutor at the International Criminal Court cited Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for alleged “use of starvation as a method of warfare,” a charge they and other Israeli officials angrily deny. The prosecutor accused three Hamas leaders of war crimes over killings of civilians in the group’s Oct. 7 attack. The U.N says some 1.1 million people in Gaza – nearly half the population — face catastrophic levels of hunger and that the territory is on the brink of famine. The crisis in humanitarian supplies has spiraled in the two weeks since Israel launched an incursion into Rafah on May 6, vowing to root out Hamas fighters. Troops seized the Rafah crossing into Egypt, which has been closed since. Since May 10, only about three dozen trucks made it into Gaza via the nearby Kerem Shalom crossing from Israel because fighting makes it difficult for aid workers to reach it, the U.N. says. For months, the U.N. has warned that an Israeli assault on Rafah could wreck the effort to get food, medicine and other supplies to Palestinians across Gaza. Throughout the war, Rafah has been filled with scenes of hungry children holding out pots and plastic containers at makeshift soup kitchens, with many families reduced to eating only one meal a day. The city’s population had swelled to some 1.3 million people, most of whom fled fighting elsewhere. Around 810,000 people have streamed out of Rafah, although Israel says it has not launched the full-fledged invasion of the city it had planned. The United States has said Israel did not present a “credible” plan for evacuating the population or keeping it safe. The main agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, announced the suspension of distribution in Rafah in a post on X, without elaborating beyond citing the lack of supplies. U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said the UNRWA distribution center and the WFP’s warehouses in Rafah were “inaccessible due to ongoing military operations.”

An absolute nightmare

[canadian-best-logistic-services]

Your Top-Notch Logistics, Warehousing, and Distribution Company in Richmond, Vancouver!

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[mostlysignssomeportents]

The future of Amazon coders is the present of Amazon warehouse workers

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in BURBANK with WIL WHEATON TONIGHT (Mar 13), and in SAN DIEGO at MYSTERIOUS GALAXY on Mar 24. More tour dates here.

My theory of the "shitty technology adoption curve" holds that you can predict the future impact of abusive technologies on you by observing the way these are deployed against people who have less social power than you:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/11/the-shitty-tech-adoption-curve-has-a-business-model/

When you have a new, abusive technology, you can't just aim it at rich, powerful people, because when they complain, they get results. To successfully deploy that abusive tech, you need to work your way up the privilege gradient, starting with people with no power, like prisoners, refugees, and mental patients. This starts the process of normalization, even as it sands down some of the technology's rough edges against their tender bodies. Once that's done, you can move on to people with more social power – immigrants, blue collar workers, school children. Step by step, you normalize and smooth out the abusive tech, until you can apply it to everyone – even rich and powerful people. Think of the deployment of CCTV, facial recognition, location tracking, and web surveillance.

All this means that blue collar workers are the pioneering early adopters of the bossware that will shortly be tormenting their white-collar colleagues elsewhere in the business. It's as William Gibson prophesied: "The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed" (it's pooled up thick and noxious around the ankles of blue-collar workers, refugees, mental patients, etc).

Nowhere is this rule more salient than in Big Tech firms. Tech companies have thoroughly segregated workforces. Delivery drivers, customer service reps, data-labelers, warehouse workers and other "green badge," low-status workers are the testing ground for their employer's own disciplinary technology, which monitors them down to the keystroke, the eye-movement, and the pee break. Meanwhile, the "blue badge" white-collar coders get stock options, gourmet cafeterias, free massages, day care and complimentary egg-freezing so they can delay fertility. Companies like Google not only use separate entrance for their different classes of workers – they stagger their shifts so that the elite workers don't even see their lower-status counterparts.

Importantly, almost none of these workers – whether low-status or high – are unionized. Tech union density is so thin, it's almost nonexistent. It's easy to see why elite tech workers wouldn't bother with unionizing: with such fantastic wages and so many perks, why endure the tedium of meetings and memos? But then there's the rest of the workers, who are subjected to endless "electronic whipping" by bossware and who take home wages that look like pocket change when compared to the tech division's compensation. These workers have every reason to unionize, living as they do in the dystopian future of labor.

At Amazon warehouses, workers are injured at three times the rate of warehouse workers at competing firms. They are penalized for "time off task" (like taking a piss break). They are made to stand in long, humiliating body-search lines when they go on- and off-shift, hours every week, without compensation. Variations on this theme play out in other blue-collar sectors of the Amazon empire, like Amazon delivery drivers and Whole Food shelf-stockers.

Those workers have every reason to unionize, and they have done their damndest, but Amazon has defeated worker union drives, again and again. How does Amazon win these battles? Simple: they cheat. They illegally fire union organizers:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/31/reality-endorses-sanders/#instacart-wholefoods-amazon

And then they smear unions to the press and to their own workers with lies (that subsequently leak):

https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/03/socially-useless-parasite/#christian-smalls

They spend millions on anti-union tech, spying on workers and creating "heatmaps" that let them direct their anti-union efforts to specific stores and facilities:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/21/all-in-it-together/#guard-labor-v-redistribution

They make workers use an official chat app, and then block any messages containing forbidden words, like "fairness," "grievance" and "diversity":

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/05/doubleplusrelentless/#quackspeak

That's just the tip of the iceberg. A new investigation by Northwestern University's Teke Wiggin draws on worker interviews and FOIA requests to the NLRB to assemble a first-of-its-kind catalog of Amazon's labor-disciplining, union-busting tactics:

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/23780231251318389

Disciplining labor and busting unions go hand in hand. It's a simple equation: the harder it is for your workers to form a union, the worse you can treat them without facing labor reprisals, because individual workers' options are limited to a) quitting or b) sucking it up, while unionized workers can grieve, sue, and strike.

At the core of Amazon's labor discipline technology is "algorithmic management," which is exactly what it sounds like: replacing middle managers with software that counts your keystrokes, watches your eyeballs, or applies a virtual caliper to some other metric to decide whether you're a good worker or a rotten apple:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/26/hawtch-hawtch/#you-treasure-what-you-measure

Automation theory describes two poles of workplace automation: centaurs (in which workers are assisted by technology) and "reverse-centaurs" (in which workers provide assistance to technology):

https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/19/the-shakedown/#weird-flex

Amazon is a reverse-centaurism pioneer. Take the delivery drivers whose every maneuver, eyeball movement, and turn signal is analyzed and inevitably, found wanting, as workers seek to satisfy impossible quotas that can't even be met if you pee in a bottle instead of taking toilet breaks:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/20/release-energy/#the-bitterest-lemon

Then there's the warehouse workers who are also tormented with impossible, pisscall-annihilating quotas. Some of these workers are fitted with haptic wristbands that buzz to tell them they're being too slow at picking up an item and dropping it into a box, pushing them to faster, joint-destroying paces that account for Amazon's enduring position as the most worker-maiming warehouse employer in the nation:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/05/la-bookseller-royalty/#megacycle

In his paper, Wiggin does important work connecting these "electronic whips" to Amazon's arsenal of traditional union-busting weapons, like "captive audience" meetings where workers are forced to sit through hours of anti-union indoctrination. For Wiggin, bossware tools aren't just a stick to beat workers with – they're also a carrot that can be used to diffuse a worker's outrage ahead of a key union vote.

Algorithmic management isn't just software that wrings more work out of workers – it's software that replaces managers. By surveilling workers – both on the job and in social media spaces (like subreddits) where workers gather to talk, Amazon can tune the "electronic whip," reducing quotas and easing the pace of work so that workers view their jobs more favorably and are more receptive to anti-union propaganda.

This is "twiddling" – exploiting the digital flexibility of a system to "twiddle the knobs" governing its business logic, changing everything from prices to wages, search rankings to recommendations, in realtime, for every customer and worker:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/

Twiddling combines surveillance data with flexible business logic to create an unbeatable house advantage. If you're an Amazon shopper, you get twiddled all the time, as Amazon replaces the best matches for your searches with paid results. If you buy that first product result, you'll pay an average of 29% more than the best match for your search:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/06/attention-rents/#consumer-welfare-queens

Worker-side twiddling is even more dystopian. When a nurse is assigned a shift by an "Uber for nurses" app, the app checks whether the worker has overdue credit card bills, which trigger lower wages (on the theory that an indebted worker is a desperate worker):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/18/loose-flapping-ends/#luigi-has-a-point

When it comes to union-busting, Amazon's found a new use for twiddling: lessening the pace of work, which Wiggin calls "algorithmic slack-cutting." The important thing about algorithmic slack-cutting is that it's only temporary. The algorithm that reduces your work-load in the runup to a union vote can then dial the pace of work up afterward, by small, random increments that are below the threshold at which they register on the human sensory apparatus. They're not so much boiling the frog as poaching it.

Meanwhile, Amazon gets to flood the zone with anti-union messages, including mandatory messages on the app that assigns your shifts – a captive audience meeting in every pocket.

Between social media surveillance and on-the-job surveillance, Amazon has built a powerful training set for algorithms designed to crush workplace democracy. That's how things go for Amazon's warehouse workers and delivery drivers, and the shelf-stockers at Whole Foods.

But of course, the picture is very different for Amazon's techies, who enjoy the industry standard of high wages and lavish perks.

For now.

The tech industry is in the midst of three years' worth of mass layoffs: 260K in 2023, 150k in 2024, tens of thousands this year. None of this is due to a shortfall in profits, mind: Google laid off 12,000 workers just weeks after staging a stock buyback that would have funded their salaries for 27 years. Meta just announced a 5% across-the-board headcount cut and that it was doubling its executive bonuses.

In other words, tech is firing workers not because it must, but because it can. When workers depend on scarcity – instead of unions – as a source of power, they dig their own graves. For well-paid, scarcity-based coders, every new computer science graduate is the enemy, eroding the scarcity that your wages depend on.

Amazon coders get to come to work with pink mohawks, facial piercings, and black t-shirts that say things their bosses don't understand. They get to pee whenever they want to. That's not because Jeff Bezos is sentimentally attached to techies and bears personal animus toward warehouse workers. Jeff Bezos wants to pay his workforce as little as he can. He treats his tech workers with respect because he's afraid of them, because if they quit, he can't replace them, and without their work, he can't make money.

Once there's an army of unemployed coders who'll take your job, Jeff Bezos doesn't have to fear you anymore. He can fire you and replace you the next day.

Bezos is obviously incredibly horny for this. Like most tech bosses, he dreams of a world in which entitled hackers can't call their bosses dumbshits and decline to frog when they shout "jump!" That's why Amazon PR puts so much energy into trumpeting the business's use of AI to replace coders:

https://www.hrgrapevine.com/us/content/article/2024-08-22-amazon-cloud-ceo-warns-software-engineers-ai-could-replace-your-coding-work-within-2-years

It's not just that they're excited about firing coders and saving money – they're even more excited about transforming the job of "Amazon coder," from someone who solves complex technical problems to someone who performs tedious code review on automatically generated code barfed up by a chatbot:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/01/human-in-the-loop/#monkey-in-the-middle

"Code reviewer" is a much less fulfilling job than "programmer." Code reviewers are also easier to replace than programmers. A code reviewer is a reverse-centaur, a servant to the machine. Every time you hear "AI-assisted programmer," you should substitute "programmer-assisted AI."

Programming is even more bossware-ready than working in a warehouse. The machines coders use are much easier to fit with surveillance technology that monitors their performance – and spies on their communications, looking for dissenting chatter – than a warehouse floor. The only thing that stopped Jeff Bezos from treating his programmers like his warehouse workers is their scarcity. That scarcity is now going away.

That's bad news for Amazon customers, too. Tech workers often feel a sense of duty to their users, a "vocational awe" that drives them to put in long hours to make things their users will enjoy. The labor power of tech workers has long served as a check on the impulse to enshittify those products:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/25/moral-injury/#enshittification

As tech workers' power wanes, they don't just lose the ability to protect themselves from their bosses' greediest, most sadistic urges – they also lose the power to defend all of us. Smart tech workers know this. That's why Amazon tech workers walked out in support of Amazon warehouse workers:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/19/deastroturfing/#real-power

Which led to their prompt dismissal:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/14/abolish-silicon-valley/#hang-together-hang-separately

Tech worker/gig worker solidarity is the only way workers can win against tech bosses and defeat the shitty technology adoption curve:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/13/solidarity-forever/#tech-unions

Wiggin's report isn't just a snapshot of Amazon warehouse workers' dystopian present – it's a promise of Amazon tech workers' future. The future is here, in Amazon warehouses, and every day, it's getting closer to Amazon's technical offices.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/13/electronic-whipping/#youre-next

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[unsolicited-opinions]

Can someone help me understand this?

The Israelis have repeatedly insisted not only that Hamas was stealing aid for both profit and control over Gazans, but that the UN agencies involved were complicit in this. The Israelis had noted how much food went in Gaza during the ceasefire and said that if food wasn't reaching civilians, it was being hoarded, almost certainly by Hamas.

Both Hamas and the the UN, including the World Food Programme, denied this, saying that there was just no food in Gaza.

Right?

Then Gazans broke into a WFP warehouse in Gaza. Hamas and WFP agree on this.

Ihab Hasan yesterday, 5/28/25:

BREAKING: People in Gaza stormed Al-Ghafari warehouse in Gaza and found it stocked with food and flour. Hamas opened fire-reportedly killing 5.

Hamas proudly confirmed killing these five Gazans on Telegram.

5 لصوص تم إعدامهم على مدخل المغازي ونطلب المزيد بضرب بيد من حديد لكل عميل

Translation:

Five thieves were executed at the entrance to Maghazi. We demand more, with an iron fist, against every collaborator.

Hamas killed hungry people for trying to get the food Hamas was refusing to distribute.

Says the World Food Programme:

Hordes of hungry people broke into WFP's Al-Ghafari warehouse in Deir Al-Balah, Central Gaza, in search of food supplies that were pre-positioned for distribution. Initial reports indicate two people died and several were injured in the tragic incident. WFP is still confirming details.

Gazan Hamza Howidy:

Breaking: reports from Gaza, that Hamas just shot at least five more Palestinians in the knees-the same day they executed five others-for the crime of being hungry and desperate enough to search for food. This is what Hamas calls "order." Kneecaps for the poor, bullets for the starving, executions for the desperate. They steal the aid, then shoot anyone who touches it without paying them first.

So...the UN's World Food Programme...which claimed there was no food in Gaza...was refusing to distribute a warehouse full of food to people they themselves say were desperately hungry?

Or was it Hamas doing this with the WFP warehouse...without the knowledge of the WFP?

Was it Hamas, the WFP, or both which refused to distribute food to people who both claimed were starving?

Does this not prove that at least one of these two organzations was lying?

Does this not prove that either the WFP was lying or the WFP is choosing to cover for Hamas' lies after the fact?

Is this not proof that Israel was right and that the UN agencies involved are not just lying but actively supporting Hamas instead of the people of Gaza?

Make it make sense?

The WFP also yesterday (5/28/25) said that "Sudan is the only country in the world where famine has been confirmed."

Meanwhile, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation distributed 1.3 million meals directly to Gazans in about 36 hours. Here's video of Gazans at a GHF distribution center saying "thank you, America."

@Imshin:

Following the success of the GHF aid distribution centers in South Gaza Strip, another center opened today on Netzarim Corridor, between Central Gaza Strip and North Gaza. Large numbers of Gazans have been seen flocking there.

Video source:

[workersolidarity]

[ 📹 Injured children are pulled from the rubble and wreckage that remains of the Quran studies school inside the Fatima Al-Zahraa Mosque, in the Al-Daraj neighborhood of Gaza City, following an Israeli occupation airstrike that killed 10 civilians, mostly children, and wounded many others. ]

🇮🇱⚔️🇵🇸 🚀🏘️💥🚑 🚨

230 DAYS OF GENOCIDE IN GAZA: RAFAH AND KARM ABU SALEM BORDER CROSSINGS REMAIN CLOSED, ONE HOSPITAL RAIDED BY IOF, SECOND HOSPITAL CLOSES, MASS MURDER CAMPAIGN CONTINUES AS OVER 115'000 CASUALTIES ARE RECORDED

On 230th day of the Israeli occupation's ongoing special genocide operation in the Gaza Strip, the Israeli occupation forces (IOF) committed a total of 9 new massacres of Palestinian families, resulting in the deaths of no less than 91 Palestinian civilians, mostly women and children, while another 21 others were wounded over the previous 24-hours.

It should be noted that as a result of the constant Israeli bombardment of Gaza's healthcare system, infrastructure, residential and commercial buildings, local paramedic and civil defense crews are unable to recover countless hundreds, even thousands of victims who remain trapped under the rubble, or who's bodies remain strewn across the streets of Gaza.

For the 17th consecutive day, the Israeli occupation forces closed the Rafah and Karm Abu Salem border crossings, south of the city of Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip, blocking thousands of humanitarian aid trucks from entering Gaza, and preventing hundreds of critically wounded and severely sick Palestinians from leaving the enclave for treatment abroad.

Commenting on the closure, the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) warned on Wednesday that "thousands of families still in Rafah need aid."

"WFP distributed food until it ran out. With little aid coming in from southern crossings and our warehouses still inaccessible, remaining food stocks have only supported 50'000 hot meals a day," the WFP said in a post to the social media platform X.

"We need safe and sustained access," the WFP added.

Due to the continued closure of Gaza's largest border crossings, not only are food, medicine and medical supplies in short supply, but also fuel for generators.

As a result of the fuel shortage, Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah, in the central Gaza Strip, said it would cease providing healthcare services "within two hours" due to running out of fuel.

Appeals were made by the hospital calling for more fuel to continue its operations, but to no avail.

Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital is one of the last remaining hospitals still functioning in the Gaza Strip, serving an inordinately large percentage of the Palestinian population in central Gaza, as the Israeli occupation's ongoing bombing and shelling, along with the raid of several hospitals and the closure of Gaza's border crossings, have put the vast majority of the enclave's hospitals and healthcare centers out of service.

Previously, the Israeli occupation army destroyed a multitude of healthcare facilities in Gaza, demolishing and bombing several medical centers, including the Al-Shifa medical complex in Gaza City, one of the largest hospitals in Gaza at the start of the genocide.

The occupation army also destroyed several other hospitals, leaving piles of rubble in place of the medical institutions that once operated in Gaza.

Local medical sources say Al-Awda and Kamal Adwan Hospitals remain the last two hospitals in operation in the northern Gaza Strip, which are barely functioning at the time of publishing, following 8 months of raids, blockade, siege and bombardment.

However, in an example of the Israeli occupation's ongoing assault on what remains of Gaza's healthcare system, on Wednesday, the occupation army stormed Al-Awda Hospital in Jabalia.

According to reporting in the local media, occupation forces stormed Al-Awda Hospital, forcing medical personnel and patients to leave the hospital towards the west of Gaza City following the arrest of at least one member of the hospital's staff.

“There remain 14 employees in the hospital, accompanied by 11 injured people and companions. They refused to evacuate unless ambulances were present to evacuate the wounded," a local medical source told the Palestinian media.

Beginning on Sunday, May 19th, the Israeli occupation forces began a massive assault on the city of Jabalia and the Refugee Camp of the same name, demanding local residents evacuate their homes and shelters and forcing them towards Gaza City.

Al-Awda Hospital is considered to be the only hospital to provide orthopedic, gynecological, and obstetrics services in the northern Gaza Strip, while also providing services for general surgery, emergency and trauma care, specialized clinics, radiology and also had a functioning lab.

At least 148 people were trapped in Al-Awda Hospital during the time of the siege, while their fates remain unknown since the time of the raid, though some medical staff were seen evacuating on foot.

Meanwhile, the Israeli occupation forces (IOF) continued massacreing entire families in the Gaza Strip, killing and wounding dozens of civilians, mostly children, over the last day, with massive bombing and shelling targeting residential areas of the Palestinian enclave.

In Gaza's north, in the latest occupation atrocity, Israeli reconnaissance aircraft bombed a gathering of civilians near a gas station in the Al-Zaytoun neighborhood, southeast of Gaza City, killing at least 10 civilians, including several children, and wounding more than 20 others.

Similarly, Zionist air forces bombed Palestinians as they evacuated a shelter for displaced civilians in the Jabalia Refugee Camp, in the northern Gaza Strip, martyring four citizens and wounding several others.

In yet another genocidal mass murder event, Israeli occupation forces bombed a residential home in the Al-Daraj neighborhood in central Gaza City, leading to the deaths of 16 civilians, including at least 10 children, while a number of others were wounded in the attack.

Another 10 civilians were killed, and many others wounded, mostly children, after IOF fighter jets bombed a Quran studies school inside the Fatima Al-Zahraa Mosque, in the Al-Daraj neighborhood of central Gaza City.

In yet another airstrike, occupation forces bombed the Shabat family home on Al-Ma'amel Street, also in the Al-Daraj neighborhood of Gaza City, resulting in the deaths of 5 Palestinian civilians, while a further bombing targeted a residential apartment in the Tal al-Hawa neighborhood, south of Gaza City, killing one civilian and wounding several others.

The Israeli occupation army also pummeled the city of Jabalia, targeting several neighborhoods, including air assaults on Blocks 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, along with Riad Al-Saliheen Square, also the Al-Qasaib neighborhood up to the Aisha Mosque, Ezbet Mallin, Al-Ajarma Street, Tal al-Zaatar, and the northern neighborhoods up to the Sheikh Zayed Towers, the Ezbet Abd Rabbo and Hay Al-Salem neighborhoods.

Bombings further targeted a gathering of civilians in front of the Abu Hussein School, leading to the deaths of four Palestinians, while five more civilians were killed when the IOF bombed a house belonging to the Alloun family in the Al-Jarn area of the Jabalia Camp.

The occupation army also burned down entire residential squares in the area of the Jabalia Camp's police station, along with neighborhoods in the eastern and northern areas of the Camp.

The mass bombing in Jabalia didn't end there, occupation forces also destroyed a five-story residential building belonging to the Al-Ajrami family, in the Al-Faluga neighborhood of the Jabalia Camp, while in nearby Beit Hanoun, occupation forces advanced towards the entrance of the town while laying siege to local schools operating as shelters for displaced Palestinian families.

The slaughter continued in central Gaza when IOF warplanes bombed a residential home behind the Al-Orouba School, north of the Nuseirat Refugee Camp, murdering 7 civilians and wounding a number of others.

Following that, the Israeli occupation army bombed a residential house belonging to the Shihab family in the Nuseirat Camp, resulting in the deaths of 8 Palestinians, the majority of which being children and women, while several others were wounded in the assault. The number of deaths is expected to rise due to the critical nature of the injuries sustained by the wounded.

Yet another bombing by the Zionist occupation army targeted a house belonging to the Al-Shami family, in neighborhoods west of the Nuseirat Camp, resulting in the martyredom of 8 civilians and injuring many others.

Yet another occupation airstrike targeted a house belonging to the Al-Shaer family near Lafat Badr, northwest of the city of Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip, resulting in the death of a civilian.

Occupation Merkava tanks also entered Block 0 south of Rafah along the Egyptian border, west of the Salah al-Din Gate, razing the entire area and advancing further west, while Zionist artillery shelling targeted the Al-Awda roundabout.

As a result of the Israeli occupation's ongoing special genocide operation in the Gaza Strip, the current death toll now exceeds 35'800 Palestinians killed, including over 15'000 children and 10'000 women, while another 80'011 others were wounded since the start of the current round of Zionist aggression, beginning with the events of October 7th, 2023.

May 23rd, 2024.

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@WorkerSolidarityNews

[nourasbasha]

Urgent - Ma'an News Agency | The World Food Programme: We will resume distributing flour and aid directly to families in the Gaza Strip in the near future.

World Food Programme

Since May 19, the Israeli authorities have refused to allow the World Food Programme to deliver wheat flour and other food supplies directly to families. We have worked tirelessly to obtain permission to resume direct distribution to families, as we believe this is the right and safest way to support families in Gaza.

As a result of these efforts and after receiving approval, flour distribution to families is scheduled to resume soon, including in the northern governorates.

We call on the community to unite and work together to support the calm and orderly delivery and distribution of food to all Palestinian families across Gaza.

We recognize how difficult this period is for you and how much families need urgent food. WFP will not change its commitment to Palestinian families, but to distribute these vital supplies, you must be able to reach all people safely and unhindered.

Recent attacks on aid trucks, warehouses, and humanitarian service providers have placed humanitarian operations and, most importantly, the community at extreme risk

Theft, chaos, and violence toward humanitarian aid convoys will deprive widows, children, people with disabilities, and the elderly of the food they desperately need. They will also make aid deliveries and distributions more difficult.

The World Food Programme has done everything possible to bring in food assistance and resume direct support to families. Without strong community cooperation, WFP will not be able to carry out distributions in a safe and dignified manner. WFP is counting on you

[goodstuffhappenedtoday]

Millions of U.S. apples were almost left to rot. Now, they'll go to hungry families

NOVEMBER 27, 2023 By Alan Jinich

It's getting late in the harvest season in Berkeley County, West Virginia and Carla Kitchen's team is in the process of hand-picking nearly half a million pounds of apples. In a normal year, Kitchen would sell to processors like Andros that make applesauce, concentrate, and other products. But this year they turned her away. ... Across the country, growers were left without a market. Due to an oversupply carried over from last year's harvest, growers were faced with a game-time economic decision: Should they pay the labor to harvest, crossing their fingers for a buyer to come along, or simply leave the apples to rot?

Bumper crops, export declines and the weather have contributed to the apple crisis

... While many growers in neighboring states like Maryland and Virginia left their apples to drop. Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia was able to convince the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) to pay for the apples produced by growers in his state, which only makes up 1% of the national market.

A relief program in West Virginia donated its surplus apples to hunger-fighting charities

This apple relief program, covered under Section 32 of the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1935, purchased $10 million worth of apples from a dozen West Virginia growers. Those apples were then donated to hunger-fighting charities across the country from South Carolina and Michigan all the way out to The Navajo Nation.

Mike Meyer, head of advocacy at The Farmlink Project, says it's the largest food rescue they've ever done and they hope it can serve as a model for their future missions. "There's over 100 billion pounds of produce waste in this country every year; we only need seven billion to drive food insecurity to zero," Meyer says. "We're very happy to have this opportunity. We get to support farmers, we get to fight hunger with an apple. It's one of the most nutritional items we can get into the hands of the food insecure."

At Timber Ridge Fruit Farm in Virginia, owners Cordell and Kim Watt watch a truck from The Farmlink Project load up on their apples before driving out to a food pantry in Bethesda, Md. Despite being headquartered in Virginia, Timber Ridge was able to participate in the apple rescue since they own orchards in West Virginia as well. Cordell is a third-generation grower here and he says they've never had to deal with a surplus this large.

At the So What Else food pantry in Bethesda, Md., apple pallets from Timber Ridge fill the warehouse up to the ceiling. Emanuel Ibanez and other volunteers are picking through the crates, bagging fresh apples into family-sized loads. "I'm just bewildered," Ibanez says. "We have a warehouse full of apples and I can barely walk through it." "People in need got nutritious food out of this program. And that's the most important thing" Executive director Megan Joe says this is the largest shipment of produce they've ever distributed – 10 truckloads over the span of three weeks. The food pantry typically serves 6,000 families, but this shipment has reached a much wider circle. "My coworkers are like, 'Megan, do we really need this many?' And I'm like, yes!" Joe says. "The growing prices in the grocery stores are really tough for a lot of families. And it's honestly gotten worse since COVID."

"It's the first time we've done this type of program, but we believe it can set the stage for the region," Kent Leonhardt, West Virginia's commissioner of agriculture says. "People in need got nutritious food out of this program. And that's the most important thing." Following West Virginia's rescue program, the USDA announced an additional $100 million purchase to relieve the apple surplus in other states around the country. This is the largest government buy of apples and apple products to date. But with the harvest window coming to an end, many growers have already left their apples to drop and rot.

[eretzyisrael]

In world affairs, the strategy of “just pretend it isn’t happening” has an extremely poor track record. Nor is it true that, as the chief of medicine on Scrubs once put it, “if you don’t look for a mistake, you can’t find one.”

Now that the world has been forced to admit that there is no famine in Gaza, it has been made clear that Israel is letting plenty of food aid into the strip. Which means it’s time to admit something is happening to that food, and it isn’t Israel’s fault. From the Wall Street Journal:

Officials from the United Nations, the largest distributor of aid in Gaza, say that people are looting trucks when they reach Gaza, making it unsafe for their employees to deliver aid. By midafternoon on Monday, no U.N. trucks arrived to pick up aid from the Kerem Shalom crossing, where on Sunday Israel began a daily pause to fighting from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. along a key north-south road used to deliver aid throughout much of Gaza. The Israeli military said 21 other trucks picked up supplies on Sunday. “We need to keep people safe,” said Scott Anderson, the Gaza-based director of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, a key group tasked with managing aid distribution in the Strip. An official with the World Food Program, another U.N. agency that delivers aid to Gaza, also cited looting en route to WFP warehouses as hindering deliveries.

So UN trucks are allowed into Gaza, it’s just that the UN drivers don’t want to go because they fear Palestinian violence.

Read more: Here

[stiltsthegm]

Steam NextFest Impressions - June 2025

Having recently finished Clair Obscure and completing the first major task of Blue Prince, I was floundering a bit on what to play on my PC when my hands finally get tired of holding the Switch (perhaps the least ergonomic console of all time) during Fantasy Life i sessions. NextFest's overwhelming bounty of demos provided me an opportunity to satiate my restlessness without needing to get too invested in anything. So I figured, hey, it's been quite a while since I've written something on my blog, why not get all these demo opinions off my chest? Maybe it'll even be helpful to someone.

Pompeii: The Legacy

Here's a fact about me that I feel like doesn't come up that often: I'm a sucker for city builders. Thankfully for me, it seems like we've been in a bit of a renaissance for these styles of games for the past few years, with both big developers and indies taking stabs at the genre from all sorts of aesthetic directions. I admit to having a bit of a bias towards historical ones, though, so I had to give Pompeii a shot. Given the very limited scope of the demo, it's a little hard for me to tell whether this one has the sauce or not (the true nature of a city builder doesn't tend to reveal itself until you've at least reached the specific complexities of the mid-game), but I did enjoy what I saw. The opening portions have a similar vibe to an Anno without being quite as logistically or mathematically demanding. It's also got story events that pop up from time to time to give you very light roleplaying (or min-maxing) opportunities, which seems to be something a lot of 4X and city/colony builders are doing these days. I know some enthusiasts don't particularly like them (looking at you, every popular Civ 7 Youtuber); but I'm a filthy casual, so I find them a nice change of pace even if the implementation is pretty basic.

It seems like disaster management will be a pretty important consideration in the full game, but none of that reared its head in the demo. Definitely one to keep an eye on to see how it shakes out once it's actually released.

Town To City

Might as well get the other city builder out of the way. This one actually gives you a pretty solid chunk of time; and even once you reach the "end," you can still keep playing and building. You just can't progress further up the development tiers. I adored this game. Unlike most city builders I've encountered, TTC puts a much larger emphasis on spatial puzzle solving rather than strict management of production chains. Fulfilling citizen desires with specific building types to increase happiness does still exist here, but in a much more simplified form. To satisfy food needs, just plop down a fruit stall and fish stall. No need to also put down a farm and harbor and then optimize the output of each one. Instead, you need to manage your use of space: distribute your shops and warehouses so that your entire populace has easy access to things they want, build housing dense enough to provide sufficient labor for those shops and services, but don't build so dense that you don't leave yourself any space for other needs.

Aesthetic considerations are very important in this game. It has no grid, and you're encouraged to plop buildings down in more organic, freeform arrangements. The road building tool is literally a paintbrush, which I think communicates this game's priorities perfectly. My favorite part, though, is how decorations work. Much like in real life, your populace is happier when their workplace, housing, and commute have features that are pretty to look at. It's vital to fill in the spaces between your houses, shops, and walkways with all sorts of little decorations: streetlights, flower pots, wells, arches, bushes, trees, etc. There are a lot of options, and many of them have different colors and varieties you can either manually select or have the game randomize for you on placement. You can even place some of these decorations directly on your existing structures: streetlights turn into wall-mounted lamps or lanterns floating in a fountain, and flower pots and bushes turn into windowsill planters. This gridless, modular system makes it so much easier and more fun to customize and beautify your little town. The game even comes with a photo mode to let you capture your town from any angle you want (I used one of my own photos for the screenshot before this writeup). It really is a delightful, relaxing, and only moderately-puzzly game. The most no-brainer wishlist addition for me.

Date Everything

Oof.

So despite this game appearing like your typical farcical dating sim, I wanted to give it a fair shot. On my first playthrough, I left with mixed feelings but still felt tentatively optimistic. Sure, some of the humor did not land all that well and was trying way too hard, but there were at least a couple characters I enjoyed (Betty the Bed and Mac the Computer) and one I thought was fine but had promise (the piano whose name I can't recall off the top of my head).

It turns out I just got very lucky with my choices.

When I replayed the game on a date with Fabby and let her make nearly all of the decisions, we both left feeling largely negative and wary. Fabby being Fabby, she spent most of the second day (the first day where you can choose to talk with anything in the house) in the bathroom. The writing for these characters was pretty dire. The toilet character's gimmick (a white rapper with an extremely overdone French accent) was so surprising and weird that it kinda wrapped back around to being a little charming, but the shower, mirror and towel just did not have anything interesting going on. You'd think these characters would provide at least some fun interplay and/or kink given how closely they're linked to intimate, seemingly private activities, but their introductory scenes did not have any interest at all in exploring any of that. The shower was especially egregious, as he spent most of his scene complaining about being stuck in the bathroom and finding his job extremely dull (while shifting inexplicably between an Elvis and Johnny Cash impersonation). Betty the Bed does engage in intimacy and kink, so this seemed to just be a result of specific writing choices made for those characters rather than any game-wide content restrictions. Fabby's comments summed up my disappointment with the writing quite well: "This shower should be happy to see me naked every day." The whole situation wasn't improved by a noticeable lack of gender variety in the bathroom characters (everybody we found used he/him pronouns) and misgendering language used by at least two of them (to the point where I would have wondered if I had accidentally chosen the wrong pronouns at the start if it weren't for the opening sequence clearly referring to our avatar with she/her pronouns). We also noticed a trend of non-white characters sometimes being put in stereotyped roles and outfits. It happened just frequently enough to give both of us some weird vibes.

So yeah! I left that second playthrough feeling pretty disappointed with the game. It leans way too heavily on comedy for how unfunny most of the writing is, and it seems weirdly averse to being kinky and horny. I think I would have liked it if it was either more sincere or more perverse. Ideally both.

Dispatch

I was genuinely floored by this demo. It's a superhero workplace comedy made by former Telltale folks that blends a simple management simulator with the now-ubiquitous timed dialogue choices. The animated sequences look gorgeous, the writing is snappy and clever, and the actual dispatching portion of the game is surprisingly engaging. I love how you're given a brief description of what traits might be important for a mission and have to spend a brief moment agonizing over which of your Z-listers might pull it off. And how sometimes the one you know would knock it out of the park is already busy doing some other mission. When you succeed you feel like a genius, and when you fail you can't help but laugh. It rules! One of the few games I'm absolutely going to buy the moment it releases.

Azaran: Islands of the Jinn

Hey, you know how Nintendo hasn't made a "traditional" 3D Zelda game in 14 years? Benji decided to just make their own, and God bless them for it. I don't have much to say about it, since the demo is just a small slice of what I assume is the very first dungeon, but it does a great job of nailing the aesthetic and dungeon design. As someone who tends to replay Ocarina of Time and Twilight Princess at least once a year, I'm very happy this exists.

Crescent County

You are a delivery witch who rides a broom (that's basically a motorcycle with glide capabilities) through a pastoral, pastel island. The primary mood the demo seemed to be trying to hit was "chill." Even the races were chill. The delivery portions didn't have time limits; and while "optimal" routes exist, you can pretty much drive wherever. It was fun enough, but I'm not sure how well what seems to be the core loop will hold up in the full game.

Eriksholm: The Stolen Dream

I feel like it's been ages since I've seen an isometric stealth game, and I'm so goddamn happy I found this one. I do love me some first-person stealth (Thief, Dishonored) and third-person stealth (Splinter Cell, Hitman), but there's something really special about the birds-eye, isometric implementation. I love how blatantly puzzle-y it is. You're given essentially perfect knowledge of enemy placement and routes. Then the game stares out you and demands you take it all in and figure it out. It's not trying to trick you. That would be gauche. It just wants to see those gears turn in your brain.

Eriksholm's demo gives you longer to play than I figured it would, and I loved every second of it. Just barely threading the needle between two guards feels so fucking good.

Undusted: Letters from the Past

A woman restores mementos from her childhood as she remembers her complicated relationship with her parents. It's the kind of game I'm a sucker for, and it itches the same part of my brain that Powerwash Simulator did. Just in smaller, bite-size portions. Of course the story is clearly going to be much more important for this game than it was for Powerwash, and the writing seems pretty solid so far, though it's not something that can truly be evaluated from just the short snippet the demo offers. I'm intrigued, though!

AEROMACHINA

I really wanted to like this game more than I did. It's got a killer art design and a compelling premise (you're a cyborg furry who's part fighter jet and you do 3D platforming), but the implementation was just a bit too frustrating and awkward for me. The nadir of the demo was very early on where it tries to teach you how to do a long-jump into a glide and does and absolutely piss-poor job of it. If it weren't for a Steam discussion thread where multiple people expressed their own frustrations and one kind soul perfectly communicated the specific button-press timing the game is looking for, I truly don't think I would have made it past that room. Even when I finally knew what to do and could do the long-jump glides consistently, it still felt kinda bad and awkward. Psuedoregalia this is not.

I feel the real test of how much you care about a game will reveal itself in how willing you are to redo lost progress as a result of an unfortunate save situation (whether it be the game's fault or your own). In my case, I got into a boss fight without realizing just how difficult it was going to be, died, and then went back to the last time I passed a save point. Because this game doesn't have checkpoints or auto-saves. I realized I'd have to redo, like, 15 minutes of progress and decided I just didn't care that much about seeing the end of the demo.

I had seen enough.

[missunderstood-with-ideas]

Mission impossible 3 was Ethan’s feral cat biting era. (I’m serious he bit like 4 people in the span of 2hrs Julia please vaccinate your husband. Luther come get ur boy)

Which is funny cuz Julia straight up domesticated Ethan. The cat distribution system worked to well and Julia got a husband with a cat personality instead of a plain and normal cat.

Ethan probably wandered over and Julia just picked him up and took him home. She literally got hobo!Ethan who canonically sleeps in barns/abandoned warehouses/hotel rooms/garages/streets and is legitimately a squatter to sleep in her bed and live with her (it has to be her house, Ethan credit is probably like a 6, the insurance company’s hates and loves him at the same time. If he does have a good credit score it’s 98% faked/hacked by Luther who looks at his peasant friend and feels bad) which btw has the same energy as a human seeing a feral cat on the side of the road and just picking them up and taking them home *your my friend now! And then casually catnaps them*

Ethan also give off the outdoor farmcat attitude of stopping by and living in the house for some days then disappearing back to its colony or back to work. Liked a shared custody case. The other spies be like bro wtf have you been??? And Ethan will be like I got myself a wife, food, and a roof over my head by just giving her all my affection wby? How’s living in that barn rn?

In conclusion Ethan hunt is a feral cat who was pretty enough to get adopted by a single but gorgeous women.

Discuss if u must

[snapmite1998]

Darth Maul's ambitious plan to leverage the chaos from the aftermath of the Clone Wars has led to suffering of refugees and the forgotten inhabitants in the Galactic Underworld is a calculated strategy to build power and influence from the shadows of Coruscant. Here’s how he could orchestrate the operation with Dryden Vos and Crimson Dawn:

Step 1: Establishing the Humanitarian Front

1.1. Employing the service of Dryden Vos:

Maul has Dryden Vos, a cunning and ruthless leader of Crimson Dawn, to manage the operation. Vos’s experience with the criminal underworld allows him to navigate the complex networks of power and resources.

1.2. Creating a Cover Story:

To gain the trust of the public and the underworld, Vos crafts a narrative that Crimson Dawn is a humanitarian organization aimed at alleviating the suffering caused by the Clone Wars. This includes distributing food, medicine, and financial aid to refugees in the Undercity.

Step 2: Mobilizing Resources

2.1. Gathering Supplies:

Crimson Dawn uses its vast resources to acquire supplies through both legal and illegal means. This could involve negotiating with sympathetic suppliers, stealing from warehouses, or even using bounty hunters to procure goods.

2.2. Distributing Aid:

Vos sets up distribution points throughout the Undercity, staffed by Crimson Dawn operatives disguised as charity workers. This provides a façade of legitimacy and allows for the gathering of intelligence on local populations and potential recruits.

Step 3: Building a Network of Support

3.1. Community Engagement:

Crimson Dawn engages with local leaders and influential figures in the Undercity, providing aid in exchange for loyalty and support. By positioning themselves as benefactors, they begin to build a network of allies among the downtrodden.

3.2. Recruitment of Disenfranchised Individuals:

As the humanitarian efforts continue, Crimson Dawn identifies individuals with skills, such as former soldiers, mechanics, and navigators, who are desperate for work and a sense of purpose. These individuals are offered roles within Crimson Dawn, often with promises of wealth and protection.

Step 4: Covert Military Training

4.1. Training Recruits:

Under the guise of providing vocational training, Crimson Dawn begins to train these recruits in combat and guerrilla tactics. This training is conducted in secret, ensuring that the recruits remain loyal to Maul’s larger goals.

4.2. Establishing Cells:

The recruits are organized into small cells that can operate independently within the Undercity. This decentralized structure allows for flexibility and deniability, making it harder for the Republic or Jedi to trace these activities back to Maul.

Step 5: Strategic Operations

5.1. Sabotage and Disruption:

As the network of recruits grows, Maul directs them to conduct sabotage operations against Republic supply lines and infrastructure, further destabilizing the situation on Coruscant and inciting unrest among the populace.

5.2. Building Public Sentiment:

Crimson Dawn uses propaganda to portray the Jedi and the Republic as oppressors, framing their actions as a necessary rebellion against a corrupt system. This narrative can draw more individuals to their cause.

Step 6: The Endgame

6.1. Coordinating a Large-Scale Uprising:

With a significant force built from the ranks of the disenfranchised, Maul plans a coordinated uprising within the Undercity. This would catch the Republic off guard, leading to chaos that could spread to the surface levels of Coruscant.

6.2. Sacking Coruscant:

The ultimate goal is to create enough unrest and chaos to launch a full-scale attack on key locations within Coruscant, allowing Crimson Dawn to seize control and establish a new order under Maul’s leadership.

Conclusion

Through this multi-faceted strategy, Maul aims to exploit the vulnerabilities exposed by the Clone Wars, using humanitarian efforts as a cover for building a loyal army. By manipulating the suffering of the populace and positioning Crimson Dawn as their savior, Maul seeks not only to gain power but to position himself as a formidable force in the galaxy, ready to strike against the Jedi and the Republic at the opportune moment.

[rjzimmerman]

In addition to the story about the waste caused by the layoffs, The Guardian reports that nearly $500 million of food aid is at risk of spoilage after trump shut down USAID. Brilliant, right? From The Guardian:

Nearly half a billion dollars of food aid is at risk of spoilage following the decision of Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s “Doge” agency to make cuts to USAid, according to an inspector general (IG) report released on Monday.

Following staff reductions and funding freezes, the US agency responsible for providing humanitarian assistance across the world – including food, water, shelter and emergency healthcare – is struggling to function.

“Recent widespread staffing reductions across the agency … coupled with uncertainty about the scope of foreign assistance waivers and permissible communications with implementers, has degraded USAid’s ability to distribute and safeguard taxpayer-funded humanitarian assistance,” the report said.

According to USAid staff, this uncertainty put more than $489m of food assistance at ports, in transit, and in warehouses at risk of spoilage, unanticipated storage needs, and diversion.

Excerpt from the Mother Jones story about the USDA:

The widespread layoff of Department of Agriculture (USDA) scientists has thrown vital research into disarray, according to former and current employees of the agency. Scientists hit by the layoffs were working on projects to improve crops, defend against pests and disease, and understand the climate impact of farming practices. The layoffs also threaten to undermine billions of taxpayer dollars paid to farmers to support conservation practices, experts warn.

The USDA layoffs are part of the Trump administration’s mass firing of federal employees, mainly targeting people who are in their probationary periods ahead of gaining full-time status, which for USDA scientists can be up to three years. The agency has not released exact firing figures, but they are estimated to include many hundreds of staff at critical scientific subagencies and a reported 3,400 employees in the Forest Service.

The IRA provided the USDA with $300 million to help with the quantification of carbon sequestration and greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture. This money was intended to support the $8.5 billion in farmer subsidies authorized in the IRA to be spent on the Environmental Quality Incentives Program—a plan to encourage farmers to take up practices with potential environmental benefits, such as cover cropping and better waste storage. At least one contracted farming project funded by EQIP has been paused by the Trump administration, Reuters reports.

The $300 million was supposed to be used to establish an agricultural greenhouse gas network that could monitor the effectiveness of the kinds of conservation practices funded by EQIP and other multibillion-dollar conservation programs, says Emily Bass, associate director of federal policy, food, and agriculture at the environmental research center the Breakthrough Institute. This work was being carried out in part by the National Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) and the Agricultural Research Service (ARS), two of the scientific sub-agencies hit heavily by the federal layoffs.

“That’s a ton of taxpayer dollars, and the quantification work of ARS and NRCS is an essential part of measuring those programs’ actual impacts on emissions reductions,” says Bass. “Stopping or hamstringing efforts midway is a huge waste of resources that have already been spent.”