Quartz: In his TED talk, Pope Francis had some choice words for the world’s egotistical leaders

In the era of Brexit, the European refugee crisis and the Trump administration’s “America First” policies, the Pope preached solidarity, especially with the world’s 244 million immigrants displaced by war, calamity or poverty. “I myself was born in a family of migrants,” he said. “My father, my grandparents, like many other Italians, left for Argentina and met the fate of those who are left with nothing. I could have very well ended up among today’s ‘discarded’ people.” [...]

The pontiff also addressed TED’s tech-obsessed attendees, including SpaceX founder Elon Musk, who is scheduled to speak at the conference later this week. “If the growth of scientific and technological innovation would coincide with more equality and social inclusion,” the Pope Said. “How wonderful would it be if, while we discover far away planets, we could also rediscover the needs of the brother, or the sister, orbiting around us.” [...]

TED’s international curator, Bruno Giussani, explains that it took several tries to convince the popular pontiff to speak at the conference. “When I first approached the Vatican, it’s fair to say that not many there knew of TED,” Giussani said. “So there was a lot of explaining to do.”

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Land of Maps: GDP per Capita for Europe by subdivision

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The Huffington Post: Someone Chained A Cross To Gay Street In NY. What Happened Next Was Beautiful.

On Good Friday, a mysterious giant wooden cross appeared on Gay Street in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City, chained and locked to an apartment gate.

Over the next nine days, the cross’ owner would return and chain the cross to different parts of the street making it impossible for others to move it.

“To be honest, I’m a Christian, and the cross means, love, peace and hope. And it was clear the owner of this cross did not share those values,” Gay St. resident Micah Latter, whose gate the cross was first chained to, told HuffPost. “Whatever [this person’s] point, [it] was lost in translation. Their actions were pointless and annoying.” [...]

On Sunday, Latter and ten neighbors and friends gathered to paint the cross the colors of the LGBTQ rainbow flag. They drank champagne and changed the locks so the original owner can no longer move it ― they’re now calling it “The Love Cross.”

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The Washington Post: The free press is in really bad shape around the world. A new report says populism is to blame.

This year, the experts say, things are worse than ever. In the past year, the outlook for journalists and the media has gotten worse in nearly two-thirds of the 180 countries surveyed. In the past five years, the level of media freedom constraints and violations has risen 14 percent worldwide. “Violations of the freedom to inform are less and less the prerogative of authoritarian regimes and dictatorships,” the report's authors write. “Once taken for granted, media freedom is proving to be increasingly fragile in democracies as well.”

A key explanation for this is the rise of populism around the world, the report's authors say. They write, “discrediting the media is the preferred weapon of those who are 'anti-system.' " So outsider candidates such as President Trump call the media “among the most dishonest human beings on earth” and accuse them of spreading “fake news.” (In part because the report says Trump has set off a “witch-hunt against journalists,” the United States dropped two spots in 2016.) Nigel Farage, of the anti-immigration U.K. Independence Party, frequently disparaged the media during his Brexit campaign. Beppe Grillo, the comedian who heads Italy's xenophobic Five Star Movement, prefers blogging to answering questions from the journalistic “caste.”

The report also raises alarm bells about another scary trend — spying on sources. Germany, for example, passed a law extending mass surveillance powers of the country's intelligence agency without an exception for journalists. This year, the United Kingdom passed a similar measure.

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The Telegraph: Hackers flood Isis social media accounts with gay porn

The hacker, who goes by the name WachulaGhost, started targeting the Isis accounts after being deeply affected by the notorious shooting at the Orlando Pulse nightclub in Florida in 2016, in which 49 people were killed and 53 wounded. [...]

WachulaGhost claims to have gained access to more than 250 social media accounts affiliated with Isis supporters and sympathisers - and has received threatening messages as a result of his efforts, which generally entail filling the accounts with rainbow flags, pro-LGBT+ messages, images of gay pornography and links to porn sites.

Speaking to CNN last year, he said. “I get beheading images… death threats. ‘We’re going to kill you’ and that’s good because if they are focusing on me they are not doing anything else." 

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