#Israel / The state has informed the Supreme Court that it will continue to ban foreign and Israeli journalists from entering Gaza to report freely on the situation

This ban has been in place since October 2023, with multiple legal challenges filed by the Foreign Press Association (#FPA). While some limited access with military escort has been granted, Israel maintains that free movement for journalists poses unacceptable security risks.

The FPA has stated journalists will bear responsibility for any harm they face in Gaza, but Israel disputes this, fearing potential legal challenges and risks to operational security.

A court hearing on the FPA's petition is now scheduled for October 23rd, over a year after the initial request.

[...] The FPA's petition, filed approximately ten months ago, was originally scheduled for a hearing last April. However, the hearing was postponed due to "court calendar constraints." Subsequent hearings planned for May and June were also canceled, in part due to Israel's attack on #Iran.

https://www.the7eye.org.il/556850

@palestine
@israel
#GazaGenocide #PressFreedom

WandererFan is retiring
WandererFan, AKA Chris has recently announced his retirement from two roles at FreeCAD: Maintainer of the TechDraw workbench and member of the FreeCAD Project Association (FPA) board, responsible for all accounting and budgeting work. 

Chris is a retired IT engineer in the transportation industry. He joined FreeCAD in 2013 to submit various Unicode-related fixes and add some new tools to Draft (
https://blog.freecad.org/2025/07/03/wandererfan-is-retiring/
#FPA

Q2 2025 grant program deadline
This year, we are running the grant program in four waves. The deadline for submissions in the second wave is quickly approaching. We will wrap up on June 1, so if you are considering participation and you have a great project in mind, please submit your application before that. Otherwise, it will be reviewed in the third wave.

For program rules and guidelines, please see t
https://blog.freecad.org/2025/05/09/q2-2025-grant-program-deadline/
#FPA #Grants

New grant: fixes and improvements in TechDraw and PartDesign
The FreeCAD Project Association has awarded a grant of EURO 5,000 to the CAD Working Group (CWG) for allocation towards bounty projects.

Most of the deliverables are TechDraw improvements, such as adding support for labeling symbols from ISO 129-1:2022 and workpiece edge symbols from ISO 13715, adding broken-out se
https://blog.freecad.org/2025/04/29/new-grant-fixes-and-improvements-in-techdraw-and-partdesign/
#FPA #Grants

Canadian Journal of Rural Medicine https://journals.lww.com/cjrm/fulltext/2025/01000/ten_year_retrospective_study_on_medico_legal_risk.7.aspx https://journals.lww.com/cjrm/fulltext/2025/01000/ten_year_retrospective_study_on_medico_legal_risk.7.aspx?lid=xep974rf7gzd&utm_source=25Apr17en-G-78-79&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=Ebulletin “Ten-year retrospective study on medico-legal risk of family physicians providing anaesthesia care in Canada, 2013–2022”
#FPA #RuralHealth #CJRM

Q1 2025 grants announced
The FPA General Assembly has finalized the list of approved grant applications for the first quarter of 2025.

Ajinkya Dahale (AjinkyaDahale) will develop two new types of curves in Sketcher: restricted and offset curves. Restricted curves are useful when we only need a portion of an external curve that can change. Offset curves are dependent on a parent curve to allow offset for a larg
https://blog.freecad.org/2025/04/07/q1-2025-grants-announced/
#FPA #Grants

FreeCAD Telemetry addon is now available
Chris Hennes developed an opt-in Telemetry addon to help the development team make good decisions and help answer questions like:

How many people are affected by a given bug?

How many people are running an addon that may be affected by an API change?

Which platforms are the most popular and should receive the most development support?

https://blog.freecad.org/2025/03/30/freecad-telemetry-addon-is-now-available/
#DevelopmentUpdates #FPA

New contracts at FPA
The FreeCAD project association has filled three previously announced developer-support roles:

Pieter Hijma will take the role of OpenCASCADE Liaison. He will coordinate bug reports and patches with the upstream development team.

Sofia Fabiancic-Zühr will be the Translatable Text Reviewer. She will improve the consistence of terminology use throughout FreeCAD and improve grammar, spelling, and syn
https://blog.freecad.org/2025/03/02/new-contracts-at-fpa/
#FPA

FPA’s 2024 Annual Report
The FreeCAD Project Association (FPA) has just published the 2024 annual report.

Here are some of the report's highlights:

FreeCAD 1.0 release as the major milestone for the entire community.

TOP5 achievements: major progress with toponaming, integrated Assembly workbench, UX/UI improvements, new materials system, better documentation.

Rapid activity growth in the grant program.

https://blog.freecad.org/2025/02/27/fpas-2024-annual-report/
#FPA

FPA Grant Program 2025
The FreeCAD Project Association collects corporate and personal donations and distributes the funds to contributors who improve FreeCAD and its ecosystem.

In 2025, we are switching to quarterly waves of grant application reviews. Here are the submission deadlines:

Q1: March 1

Q2: June 1

Q3: Sept 1

Q4: Nov 15

If you want to apply for a grant for the next round of reviews, p
https://blog.freecad.org/2025/02/20/fpa-grant-program-2025/
#FPA #Grants

2024 grant program recap
Since its inception in late 2021, the FreeCAD Project Association (FPA) has been collecting the community’s donations with the intention of spending them on improving FreeCAD and its ecosystem. In 2024, the FPA launched its first annual grant program. Here is a recap of how this went.
https://blog.freecad.org/2025/02/13/2024-grant-program-recap/
#FPA #Grants

Einen neue Folge des Schulpodcasts der FFS Schweinfurt ist hier erschienen:

https://kugellager.fosbos-sw.de/2025/02/10/ffsk11-fachpraktische-ausbildung-und-tag-der-offenen-tuer/

Es geht in dieser Folge um die fachpraktische Ausbildung (FPA) an der Friedrich-Fischer-Schule in Schweinfurt. Viel Spaß. #schule #fpa #ausbildung #praktika #podcast #linux

New grant: Refactoring Sketcher, part 2
The FPA General Assembly approved another grant application.

Ajinkya Dahale will continue refactoring Sketcher. The main deliverables are the same as the last time: more methods simplification, testing, and documentation.

On top of that, Ajinkya plans to spend more time merging his previous changes into the main development branch (he was holding those of
https://blog.freecad.org/2025/01/31/new-grant-refactoring-sketcher-part-2/
#FPA #Grants

Job openings at the FPA
The FreeCAD Project Association now has three open positions, each with a 1-year long contract and a compensation of up to $500 a month:

OpenCASCADE Liaison. You will coordinate bug reports and patches with the OpenCASCADE development team.

Addon Ecosystem Coordinator. The job is to test addons and work with 3rd-party developers to ensure addons compatibility with the current stable version
https://blog.freecad.org/2025/01/24/job-openings-at-the-fpa/
#FPA

High organofluorine concentrations in municipal #wastewater affect downstream #drinkingwater supplies for millions of Americans. Fluorinated #Pharmaceuticals Account #FPA for the Majority of EOF. We further identified 12 fluorinated pharmaceuticals/metabolites that accounted 4 a mean of 75% of EOF in wastewater influent, 62% of EOF in effluent - celecoxib, flecainide, maraviroc, hydroxyphenylmaraviroc, sitagliptin made up majority of quantified EOF in POTW influent #PFAS https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2417156122

New grants: transparent preview in Part Design, interactive Sketcher tutorials
The FPA General Assembly approved two new grant applications.

Kacper Donat aka kadet will work on a new feature preview system that can be used in Part and Part Design. Whenever you need to apply Pad or Loft or any other command, you will get a transparent preview of what you are g
https://blog.freecad.org/2024/12/02/new-grants-transparent-preview-in-part-design-interactive-sketcher-tutorials/
#FPA #Grants

[thread] anti-trans hate groups

Frontline Policy Action
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clint_Dixon#Alliances

* Family Policy Council of the Christian nationalist group Family Policy Alliance
* unrepentant in disrespect of transgender community
* claims their actions "protect children"

The annual grant program is live
The FPA is launching an annual grant program following last year’s research. The goal is to foster rapid development of FreeCAD. To do that, the FPA will use the community’s donations to pay developers and non-programming contributors. We encourage work on items from the general roadmap, but are also interested in grant applications exploring other possibilities.

The pr
https://blog.freecad.org/2024/03/01/the-annual-grant-program-is-live/
#FPA #Grants

New grants: electromagnetic system simulations and bug triage
The FreeCAD Project Association issued two more grants.

Mario Passaglia is now working on bugfixing and electromagnetic system simulations using CalculiX in the FEM workbench. Expected new features will provide the resolution of:

Electrostatics problems through an analogy with the heat equation to derive the e
https://blog.freecad.org/2024/02/27/new-grants-electromagnetic-system-simulations-and-bug-triage/
#FPA #Grants