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The human rights of marginalized groups are more than just “identity politics”

Last month, Senator Bernie Sanders spoke in a notably all-white panel at a Sanders Institute conference, and reiterated a frequent talking point of his, as well as many in his sect of often white, male progressive thinkers who reject what they call “identity politics” and “social issues.” According to Sanders, the experiences of rural Trump […]




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Radio Free Burrito Presents: A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift

A Modest Proposal is brilliant, biting, hilarious satire, that is as horrifyingly relevant in 2020 as it was in 1729. This reads like one of those brilliant editorials from The […]




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Handhsake Protocol

eeeeeewaaaakkksssshhhhh




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Stance Change

Elliot isn't doing himself any favors




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Mightier Than The Sword




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Eat it: Hanoi chef spreads joy with 'Coronaburger'

You've got to eat it, to beat it: That's the philosophy of one Hanoi chef who is attempting to boost morale in the Vietnamese capital by selling green, coronavirus-themed burgers.




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Metapost: As the seasons change (?), the COTWs continue

Comics Curmudgeon readers! Do you love this blog and yearn for a novel written by its creator? Well, good news: Josh Fruhlinger's The Enthusiast is that novel! It's even about newspaper comic strips, partly. Check it out! Hey y’all: it’s your comment … of … the WEEK! “If we do have to accept a more […]




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Pagan Community Notes: PSG 2020 canceled, leadership change within Sacred Well, indigenous shaman and actor Antonio Bolivar crosses Veil, and more!

In this week's Pagan Community Notes, Pagan Spirit Gathering has been canceled, indigenous shaman and actor Antonio Bolivar joins the Ancestors, Sacred Well announces changes in leadership, and more!

Continue reading Pagan Community Notes: PSG 2020 canceled, leadership change within Sacred Well, indigenous shaman and actor Antonio Bolivar crosses Veil, and more! at The Wild Hunt.




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Brazil's President Bolsonaro must 'drastically change course' on Covid-19, says The Lancet

British medical journal’s editorial says the Brazilian president’s disregard for lockdown measures is damaging

The biggest threat to Brazil’s ability to successfully combat the spread of the coronavirus and tackle the unfolding public health crisis is the country’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, according to the British medical journal The Lancet.

In an editorial, The Lancet said his disregard for and flouting of lockdown measures was sowing confusion across Brazil, which reported a record number of Covid-19 deaths on Friday, and is fast emerging as one of the world’s coronavirus hot spots.

Continue reading...




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Coronavirus app has changed the way the Isle of Wight sees itself

Islanders are coming to terms with unexpected publicity from the contact-tracing pilot project


Last Sunday, we woke to the news that the Isle of Wight really had been chosen as the pilot location for the NHS coronavirus contact-tracing app, the idea having been floated by the leader of the council at the start of the previous week.

Thus a manic week began here at News OnTheWight, where we’ve been pumping out stories as usual, taking part in national media briefings, delving into details of the app and exploring privacy issues while dealing with queries from media outlets from around the world. All sorts of organisations started pushing press releases supporting the app – the most unexpected being the Church of England.

When Matt Hancock, the health secretary, announced at last Monday’s press conference, “Where the Isle of Wight goes, Britain follows”, there was a collective spitting out of tea on the island and beyond. Of course there were the predictable jibes – “How do I install the app on my fax machine?” was one of the best we heard, and once again, creativity was ignited with memes and T-shirts.

With such attention, locally it felt like little else but the app was discussed.

How has the app gone down? Lots of people seem to be jumping on board, claiming any perceived privacy downsides as a small price to pay. Others, with earlier smartphones, were excluded. Older residents overheard in the post office said they really wanted to use the app but their steam-powered mobile phones weren’t capable.

Continue reading...




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Young men more likely than women to break lockdown rules – UK survey

Researchers call on government to do more to explain need for physical distancing

Young men are more likely than young women to break lockdown rules, research suggests.

A team of psychologists led by Dr Liat Levita from the University of Sheffield surveyed 2,000 13- to 24-year-olds in the UK to examine the impact of the pandemic on young people.

Continue reading...




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Photos That Say More Than Just a Thousand Words

Ready for your weekly dose of amazing animal photos?

These are sure worth your time.

Here's a link to our previous list, in case you missed it.




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Excited Elephants Run To Greet New Rescued Baby Elephant

This video is from 2017 but it just makes us feel so warm and happy that we had to let it surface once more! 

The video is only a bit over a minute but filled with a lot of emotions, excitement, and love, that you can just feel. 

Elephants are truly remarkable animals, so intelligent and gentle, you can just tell they have a big heart. 




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Brutally Honest Handmade Graphs About Animals

The talented Instagrammer, Chaz Hutton has found a creative way to describe the perils of life with a series of brutally honest graphs to make you chuckle.

We have gathered the funniest ones he created about animals. 




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Uzaki-chan Wants to Hang Out! Anime's 2nd Promo Video Reveals New Cast

Yousuke Akimoto joins cast for series premiering in July




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Industries that are Shadier than They Seem

It seems like when you get down to the nitty gritty of just about any industry, there are some shady parts of it that no one wants to talk about. Even the most fun and simple seeming industries like avocados or tropical fish have seriously dark sides. When it comes to how a company treats it's employees, there are some definitered flags when it comes to looking for a job.




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Impatient Choosing Beggar Pesters Artist, Artist Handles It

As long as the choosing beggars continue to present themselves, it's up to the rest of the world to serve them up reality checks, free of charge. This particular impatient choosing beggar experienced a nice wakeup moment, after pestering an artist to rush a free drawing, after they already received one free drawing. The artist absolutely delivered. 




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Man Runs Sad Math On Chances Of Finding Soulmate

Man, when anyone posts a wholesome meme they put themselves in the situation where other, potentially more mean spirited folks online will do as they do to make everyone else feel just a bit worse about themselves. Thus could be the case for this situation where a dude runs the sad numbers on the chances of anyone finding a soulmate. He says he has a better chance at winning the Mega Millions. Ouch. 




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Earth Day at 50: How an idea changed the world and still inspires now

Coronavirus will overshadow Earth Day's golden anniversary, but the movement's successes are worth celebrating, says Gary Paul Nabhan




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What would a game-changing treatment for coronavirus look like?

Even if we find drugs that are effective against the coronavirus, that doesn't necessarily mean they will change the wider situation and help end lockdowns




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Fracking wells in the US are leaking loads of planet-warming methane

Satellites have revealed the fracking heartland of the US is leaking methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, at a record-breaking rate.




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Brain implant lets man with paralysis move and feel with his hand

A brain-computer interface has helped a man with a severe spinal cord injury move and feel using a hand again, letting him carefully lift light objects such as a paper cup




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Drinking coffee appears to cause epigenetic changes to your DNA

Coffee has been linked to changes on our DNA that affect how active certain genes are. The finding may help explain some of coffee's touted health benefits




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Men are worse than women at estimating their height and weight

We tend to overestimate our height and underestimate our weight to fit society’s ideals, or because we think we're still the same as our younger selves




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Climate change has already made parts of the world too hot for humans

Global warming has already made parts of the world – including cities in Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates – hotter than the human body can withstand




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Michelle Malkin still has a fanbase? And it’s enhanced by including Milo?

Milo Yawannapissoff and Michelle Malkin have been collaborating, and the results are even more awful than you can probably imagine. They decided to work together to create an “America First” reading list for their followers. Just from their choice of subject you can tell it’s going to be a collection of racists’ greatest hits. Milo […]




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'Amazingly good news': New York healthcare workers not testing positive for coronavirus at higher rate than general public

New York has released more details into who has tested positive for the coronavirus in the state, and Governor Andrew Cuomo said the per cent of healthcare workers with Covid-19 is not higher than the general public.“That is amazingly good news,” Mr Cuomo said during his press briefing on Thursday.





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Meghan McCain Goes Off on Kayleigh McEnany for ‘Spinning Propaganda’

Meghan McCain, The View’s resident conservative host, tore into Kayleigh McEnany for “spinning propaganda” on Thursday morning after the new White House press secretary dismissed the need for increased coronavirus testing as the economy reopens.During her press briefing on Wednesday, McEnany said it was “nonsensical” to think that every American should be able to get tested for coronavirus, even though President Donald Trump said two months earlier that “anybody that wants a test can get a test.” The hosts of The View took the press secretary to task over those remarks.Co-host Sunny Hostin said she found it “shocking” that the White House spokesperson would say that considering recent news that one of the president’s personal valets just tested positive for the virus.“So it’s obviously important enough for everyone in the White House and surrounding the president to be tested for the coronavirus, but it’s not important to the press secretary and to the administration for Americans to be tested for the coronavirus,” she declared. “And so that tells me that she is just spinning lies to the American people rather than being honest with the American people.”After first saying there has been “mixed messaging” coming not just from the White House but from medical experts since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, McCain went on to blast McEnany as a propagandist.“I think in regards to Kayleigh McEnany, she was hired for this job because she’s good at spinning propaganda, and she was good spinning propaganda before she got hired,” she exclaimed. “And you can make the argument that’s the role of any press secretaries but it’s probably a little more egregious with this particular president.”The conservative co-host then worried aloud that we were reaching a tipping point on saving the economy, criticizing the Trump administration for not taking the necessary steps to safely reopen the country.“If we don’t start getting a plan to get testing, to somehow pull ourselves out of this and get America back to work,” she proclaimed. “This is going to be far more egregious than any crisis any of us have seen in all of our lifetimes.” “If the tests aren’t important, why is the White House, and everybody else getting tested before they go before the president?” McCain concluded. “I would like to go back to work. I know you would, and I would be comfortable doing that if we all had the capacity to get tested.”Read more at The Daily Beast.Got a tip? Send it to The Daily Beast hereGet our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.





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Was the coronavirus made in a Wuhan lab? Here's what the genetic evidence shows

Despite President Trump's statements that the coronavirus was released from a laboratory in Wuhan, scientist say the evidence points to a natural origin.





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Report says cellphone data suggests October shutdown at Wuhan lab, but experts are skeptical

U.S. and U.K. intel agencies are reviewing the private report, but intel analysts examined and couldn't confirm a similar theory previously.





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How will coronavirus change the way we live?

Will life return to how it was once lockdown restrictions are eased, or will some things change for ever?




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Matt Hancock asks Julian Lewis about lockdown haircut

There was laughter in the Commons as minister asks MP about his "extraordinary" haircut.




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Coronavirus: UK warned to avoid climate change crisis

UK government advisors say post-pandemic recovery funds should go to firms reducing carbon emissions.




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Why are Welsh Assembly Members changing their name?

As of 6 May, the name of Assembly Members will change to Members of the Senedd.




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Coronavirus: 'Modest' lockdown changes announced in Wales

People will be allowed to exercise outside more than once a day, First Minister Mark Drakeford says.




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Coronavirus lockdown: UK 'should not expect big changes'

The PM will set out a "cautious" road map for the UK in his speech on Sunday, a cabinet minister says.




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Climate change: Could the coronavirus crisis spur a green recovery?

Some governments want to channel their economic recovery plans into low-carbon industries.




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Extra substitutes among temporary law changes when leagues resume

Teams will be allowed to use five substitutes when the season resumes after a Fifa proposal to help with fixture congestion was approved.




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Coronavirus: Ghana's dancing pallbearers become Covid-19 meme

Social media users have adopted the troupe as a dark-humoured symbol of death in the time of Covid-19.




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Coronavirus: Thanking healthcare workers worldwide

Some of the ways that people have expressed thanks to workers on the frontline against Covid-19.




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Coronavirus: I got a life-changing opportunity in lockdown

Ana Carmona chronicled her month in quarantine with her family in NYC, including when she got some big news.




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Coronavirus and climate change a ‘double crisis’

Many activists have had to stop their usual work due to the pandemic. Here's how they're responding.




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Let’s hang (Spotify)

Love music? Follow your own tastes? Let’s share. Connect on Spotify.Connect on Last.fm. As a bonus, if we connect on Spotify, you not only get access to An Event Apart’s playlists from the past decade, you also get a preview of the 2020 playlist in progress.

The post Let’s hang (Spotify) appeared first on Zeldman on Web & Interaction Design.




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Stimulus Reflex, and sending thanks to Matz

#498 — April 23, 2020

Read on the Web

Ruby Weekly

Credit: Divina Epiphania / Shutterstock.com

Mining for Malicious Ruby Gems: 700+ Gems Affected — Breathe easy as this was all resolved a month ago (and was too obscure to pay off for the hackers anyway) but a security research team recently found over 700 malicious Ruby gems that were subtle typos/adjustments of more popular gems (e.g. atlas-client vs atlas_client – could you tell which one is real?)

Tomislav Maljic

You Can Now Sponsor Matz on GitHub — I appreciate these are challenging times, but if you’ve ever wanted to give a big thank you to Matz, the creator of Ruby, here’s one way to do it. We’re sponsoring Matz now as without him, this newsletter wouldn’t exist! ???? Alternatively, if you have little to spare, maybe send him a thanks on Twitter?

GitHub Sponsors

Ruby Performance Tips — Here’s a collection of practical tips for improving Ruby performance for better user experiences, brought to you by Raygun. Read the tips here.

Raygun sponsor

Full Text Search in Milliseconds with Rails and Postgres — If you’ve never played with full text search with Postgres and Rails, this is a fine place to start. It covers LIKE/ILIKE, trigrams, and ‘proper’ full text searching. We also get to see how Leigh took a query from taking 130ms down to 7ms.

Leigh Halliday

▶  Introduction to Stimulus Reflex — Stimiulus Reflex makes SPA-type interactions very simple by using ActionCable to render pages and then diffing them on the client.

GoRails

Rails Performance: When is Caching the Right Choice? — Before you say “always”, understand that caching is not free and, if done incorrectly, can even make things worse.

Jonathan Miles

???? Jobs

Find a Job Through Vettery — Vettery specializes in tech roles and is completely free for job seekers. Create a profile to get started.

Vettery

Ruby Backend Developer (Austria) — We’re seeking mid-level and senior devs to join us and build top-class backend infrastructure for our adidas apps, used by millions. Our stack includes: jRuby, Sinatra, Sidekiq, MySQL, & MongoDB.

Runtastic

ℹ️ Interested in running a job listing in Ruby Weekly? There's more info here.

???? Articles & Tutorials

How to Customize Webpack in Rails Apps — How to go about configuring webpack when tweaking webpacker.yml just isn’t enough.

Ross Kaffenberger

RSpec Given/When/Then with Symbols — An interesting, alternative way to structure a BDD feature in RSpec. I think I prefer the underscores but YMMV.

Caius Durling

Looking Inside a Ruby Gem — Piotr decomposes a .gem file which turns out to just be a collection of gzipped and tarred files, only some of which are the code.

Piotr Murach

eBook: The Most Important Events to Monitor in Your Postgres Logs — In this eBook, you will learn about the Top 6 Postgres log events for monitoring query performance and preventing downtime.

pganalyze sponsor

Passing Rails Controller Params to SidekiqActionController::Parameters can give Sidekiq issues.

Prathamesh Sonpatki

Catchup Subscriptions with Rails Event Store

Miroslaw Praglowski

Logic-less Ruby Templates with Mustache

David Santangelo

▶  Discussing Ruby for Good with Sean Marcia — Sean talks about founding Ruby For Good (an event about philanthropic Ruby development) and some of the projects it has been responsible for creating.

Ruby Rogues podcast

???? Code and Tools

Impressionist 2.0: A Plugin to Log Impressions in Rails Apps — Impressionist tracks page views and impressions. v2.0 has just dropped but they’re also are looking for new maintainers, so contact them if you want to get involved.

Charlotte Ruby Group

acli 0.3: A Command Line Client for Action Cable — Interesting on two fronts.. first, because it’s an mruby app, and we don’t see many of those, and second, because it lets you play with Action Cable channels in any easier way.

Vladimir Dementyev

Undercover: A Tool to Stop You Shipping Untested Code — It’s like RuboCop but for code coverage rather than code style.

Jan Grodowski

How to Monitor Your Host Metrics Automatically

AppSignal sponsor

Bridgetown: A Modern Ruby (JAMstack) Web Framework — Bridgetown is a new Ruby-based static-site generator based on a fork of Jekyll. It supports plugins and Webpack, so you can use your front-end framework of choice.

Bridgetown

net-ssh 6.0: A Pure Ruby Implementation of the SSH2 Client Protocol — Yes, you can write programs that invoke and interact with processes on remote servers, via SSH2, all in Ruby.

Buck, Fazekas, et al.




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npm's CTO: So Long, and Thanks for All The Packages

#334 — April 16, 2020

Read on the Web

Node Weekly

npm Has Now (Actually) Joined GitHub — We announced GitHub’s acquisition of npm a month ago but now the process is complete. Not much real news here but the plan is to now focus on community engagement and improving registry infrastructure.

Jeremy Epling (GitHub)

Node v13.13.0 (Current) Releasedfs.readv is a new function to sequentially read from an array of ArrayBufferViews, util.inspect now lets you specify a maximum length for printed strings, the default maximum HTTP header size has been increased to 16KB, there are three new collaborators, and more.

Michaël Zasso

Get Better Insight into Redis with RedisGreen — Modern hosting and monitoring services include memory usage maps, seamless scaling, key size tracking, and more.

RedisGreen sponsor

▶  Watch the Live Coding of a New Feature for Node.js — This is not something for novices, but if the idea of watching ‘over the shoulder’ of a Node.js collaborator implementing a new feature directly into Node itself interests you.. this could be a valuable hour spent.

Vladimir de Turckheim

node-libcurl 2.1: libcurl Bindings for Nodelibcurl is a very powerful and well established way to fetch data from URLs across numerous protocols. node-libcurl 2.1.0 brings support for the latest version of libcurl (7.69.1) to us in the Node world.

Jonathan Cardoso Machado

npm's CTO: 'So Long, and Thanks for All The Packages!' — Ahmad Nassri was npm’s CTO but has now left. Here, he reflects on the past ten years of npm, the repo, the company, and the achievements of both.

Ahmad Nassri

???? Jobs

Find a Job Through Vettery — Vettery specializes in tech roles and is completely free for job seekers. Create a profile to get started.

Vettery

Node.js Developer at X-Team (Remote) — Join X-Team and work on projects for companies like Riot Games, FOX, Coinbase, and more. Work from anywhere.

X-Team

▶️ Get ready for your next role: Pluralsight is free for the entire month of April. Stay Home. Skill Up. #FreeApril — SPONSORED

???? Tutorials

Working With AWS Route 53 from Node — Route 53 is Amazon Web Services’ suite of DNS-related services. Like every AWS service, you can control it via an API, and here’s how to manipulate hosted zones from Node.

Valeri Karpov

Best Practices Learnt Running Express.js in Production for 4 Years — There’s a lot of stuff packed in here focused around middleware, testing, logging, and general concerns around scaling and keeping apps running in production.

Adnan Rahić

The Node.js Security Handbook — Improve the security of your Node.js app with the Node.js security handbook made for developers.

Sqreen sponsor

How To Set Up an Express API Backend Project with PostgreSQL — A pretty extensive walkthrough of creating an HTTP API using Express with Node.js and Postgres on the backend, then deploying it all on Heroku.

Chidi Orji

Porting to TypeScript Solved Our API Woes — From the guy behind the (in)famous Wat video comes a tale of porting a backend from Ruby to TypeScript.

Gary Bernhardt

How to Mass Rename Files in Node

Flavio Copes

▶  Let's Build a Digital Circuit Simulator In JavaScript — A special episode of the Low Level JavaScript series takes us on a brief journey into the world of digital logic.

Low Level JavaScript

The Story of How I Created a Way to Port Windows Apps to Linux — We mentioned ElectronCGI recently as a way to let .NET and Node.js code depend upon each other, but here its creator explains more about the how and why.

Rui Figueiredo

How to Create an Alexa Skill with Node — Implementing a custom ‘skill’ for Amazon Alexa by using Node and AWS Lambda.

Xavier Portilla Edo

???? Tools, Resources and Libraries

Node v10.20.1 (LTS) Released — If you’re still using Node 10, don’t use v10.20.0, use this, due to a bug in the .0 release.

Bethany Nicolle Griggs

emoji-regex: A Regular Expression to Match All Emoji-Only Symbols

Mathias Bynens

ip-num: A Library to Work with ASN, IPv4, and IPv6 Numbers — Happy in both Node and the browser.

dadepo

Optimize Node.js Performance with Distributed Tracing in Datadog

Datadog APM sponsor

verify-json: Verify JSON Using a Lightweight Schema — A lighter weight alternative to something like JSON Schema.

Yusuf Bhabhrawala

middle-manager: A Lightweight 'No BS' Presentation Tool — A bit of humor, really. It turns Markdown into basic presentations but then the magic is it detects your ‘BS’ business language so you can remove it ????

Anders




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Coronavirus: The month everything changed

In the space of a month, the United Kingdom has transformed beyond recognition.




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Birth in a pandemic: 'You are stronger than you think'

Coronavirus is throwing many birth plans up in the air and leading some health trusts to increase home births.




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Coronavirus: Where has all the hand sanitiser gone?

Shelves all over the world are empty - it turns out more alcohol is needed, to ramp up production.




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Coronavirus: ‘Buying a round’ to thank NHS workers

Social enterprise Brewgooder is helping people buy beers for those on the coronavirus front line.




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Coronavirus: UK chancellor on new microloan scheme for small businesses

Firms will be able to borrow up to £50,000, which will be interest free for the first year.