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<h4 class="article-title"> <a href="https://mutualaidspace.org/mutual-aid-request-roundup-26-aug-2026/">Mutual Aid Request Roundup 26 Aug 2026</a> </h4> <figure class="article-cover"> <img src="https://mutualaidspace.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/nikolas-gannon-wlAzDbfVSIg-unsplash-1-1024x768.jpg" alt="" loading="lazy"> </figure> <div class="article-body"> 2,305 words10–15 minutes<a href="https://mutualaidspace.org/mutual-aid-request-roundup-26-aug-2026/#respond" rel="nofollow">No comments on Mutual Aid Request Roundup 26 Aug 2026</a><p>Flores Displacement Tops 180,327 as Kalimantan Burns</p><p>The death toll from the magnitude-7.7 earthquake that struck East Nusa Tenggara before dawn on August 15 <a href="https://en.antaranews.com/news/428395/east-nusa-tenggara-quake-death-toll-rises-to-100" rel="nofollow">reached 100 by August 24</a>, national disaster agency chief Suhartoyo confirmed, up from 48 in the first two days alone. Displacement climbed even faster than the death count: 92,735 people forced from their homes as of August 21 had become <a href="https://en.tempo.co/read/2118067/ntt-earthquake-death-toll-rises-to-83-displaces-110785" rel="nofollow">110,785 by the same day</a>, then 180,327 by August 24, with 1,603 people still reported injured. The agency has logged 6,409 aftershocks across eight days and expects seismic activity to continue for up to four more weeks. That trajectory, nearly quadrupling in ten days, is what happens after the first week of international coverage moves on and the counting keeps going without an audience.</p><p>The same week, hotspots were burning across all five Indonesian provinces on Borneo and four on Sumatra: 38,310 hectares in West Kalimantan, 8,620 in South Kalimantan, 7,634 in Central Kalimantan, more than 2,700 hot spots detected in West Kalimantan alone and nearly 2,500 in Central Kalimantan. This was not weather. <a href="https://www.thejakartapost.com/indonesia/2026/08/24/police-crack-down-on-land-burning-in-kalimantan" rel="nofollow">On August 23, national police arrested 72 people across those nine provinces</a> (35 in Riau alone, 17 in South Sumatra, 11 in Central Kalimantan) in connection with 89 separate forest and land fire cases. Investigators seized matches and oil palm seedlings as evidence. Brigadier General Mohammad Irhamni, the police’s special crimes director, said plainly that “most of the suspects were accused of deliberately burning land to clear areas for plantations at lower cost,” and that <a href="https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/indonesian-police-arrest-72-people-suspected-of-starting-forest-fires" rel="nofollow">at least four companies in West Kalimantan are now under investigation for financing or ordering the burns</a>, facing possible permit revocation if it’s proven. “We will not stop at the perpetrators on the ground,” Irhamni said. “We will determine who benefited from these activities and who was ultimately behind them.” Underneath the arrests sits a second, quieter policy failure that The Jakarta Post documented separately: <a href="https://www.thejakartapost.com/indonesia/2026/08/22/kalimantan-fires-rage-as-response-lags" rel="nofollow">central government austerity measures have cut local firefighting budgets so deeply that districts can’t afford basic equipment like water pumps</a>, in the same province where a water shortage was already hampering the response. A fire lit on purpose for palm oil profit, met by a firefighting budget cut on purpose. Neither half of that sentence is an accident, and neither is a natural disaster.</p><p>Meanwhile the government’s own free nutritious meal program kept making people sick. <a href="https://www.thejakartapost.com/indonesia/2026/08/18/negligence-blamed-for-free-meal-poisoning-that-sickened-350-students" rel="nofollow">In North Sumatra, more than 350 students fell ill after a school kitchen left 200 to 300 kilograms of fish at room temperature for roughly twelve hours instead of refrigerating it</a>. It was negligence the head of the National Nutrition Agency himself called reckless: “such negligence can have life-and-death consequences.” That single incident sits inside a much larger pattern: 40,759 students, teachers, pregnant women, and toddlers have fallen ill from the program since it launched. One kitchen was suspended. The program itself was not.</p><p>Two days before this roundup goes out, on August 27, <a href="https://kolektiva.social/@wrzky/117157396448200607" rel="nofollow">the United Pati Community Alliance plans to march on Indonesia’s House of Representatives to demand asset seizure and the death penalty for convicted corruption offenders</a>. <a href="https://eastasiaforum.org/2025/10/20/protest-wave-challenges-indonesias-authoritarian-drift/" rel="nofollow">The alliance exists because of last year’s crackdown in Pati, Central Java, where a 250 percent property tax hike following Prabowo-administration budget cuts triggered protests, police killed motorcycle taxi driver Affan Kurniawan with a tactical vehicle, and the state’s response left 11 people dead and hundreds injured</a>. Lokataru director Delpedro Marhaen was detained on what rights groups called vague charges in the same crackdown, and Indonesia was subsequently placed in V-Dem’s “grey zone,” no longer meeting minimum standards for electoral democracy. Days before this year’s planned march, <a href="https://www.thejakartapost.com/indonesia/2026/08/24/mandiri-freezing-of-protesters-account-raises-alarm-over-civic-freedom" rel="nofollow">Bank Mandiri froze the account of the coalition’s coordinator, Supriyono: roughly Rp 80.9 million in personal savings and public donations meant to cover protesters’ food, transport, and lodging</a>. The bank says it acted on an unnamed law enforcement request and has not identified the agency or the legal basis. Rights groups including CELIOS, YLBHI, and Amnesty International Indonesia say the freeze likely violates Article 140 of the Criminal Procedure Code, which requires a court order for exactly this kind of coercive measure, and have called it what it is: an attempt to cripple a protest through economic pressure rather than argument.</p><p>The tool Bank Mandiri used against Supriyono is not unique to Indonesia. <a href="https://www.amnesty.org.uk/latest/tortured-disappeared-executed-how-iran-is-using-war-as-a-shield-for-systematic-repression/" rel="nofollow">Since the war with the US and Israel began on February 28, Amnesty International has documented at least 750 asset seizures inside Iran through a digital system called Saham, alongside more than 6,000 arbitrary arrests, an 88-day internet shutdown, and 39 political executions, sweeping up protesters, journalists, labour organisers, students, and Ahwazi Arab, Baluch, Baha’i, and Kurdish minorities</a>. <a href="https://iranwire.com/en/news/150854-iran-moves-to-seize-assets-of-100-citizens-abroad-freeze-bank-accounts/" rel="nofollow">Tehran’s public prosecutor used a version of the same mechanism in April against a much narrower target: more than 100 Iranians connected to the London-based broadcasters Iran International and Manoto, accused of “supporting the enemy abroad”</a>. That specific case carries a complication worth naming plainly. Iran International is funded through a Saudi businessman’s holding company and has been described by Bloomberg as “explicitly monarchist” and “pro-israel”; Manoto’s finances are opaque but widely suspected of similar Gulf backing; both networks have spent years promoting exiled would-be monarch Reza Pahlavi, who addressed CPAC in March and met Netanyahu in 2023. A Saudi- and Gulf-funded broadcasting operation gets frozen for a very different reason than a Central Java protest fund does, and conflating the two would blur a distinction worth keeping sharp. What holds across both cases regardless is the mechanism itself: seize first, let a court hear the appeal later if it hears one at all. That mechanism is what connects the 750 Iranians caught up in Saham, whatever their politics, to Supriyono’s frozen donation account in Pati.</p><p>An earthquake response that can’t outrun its own displacement count, a fire season lit on purpose and met by a budget cut on purpose, a feeding program that keeps hospitalising the children it’s meant to feed, and a bank account frozen with the same seize-first mechanism Tehran has used against 750 of its own people this year: five angles on one state’s priorities, all visible in a single week. That does not make Flores and Kalimantan more urgent than whoever ends up listed below this piece. Austerity in East Nusa Tenggara and precarity in Manchester or Milwaukee happen on different continents, in different currencies, under different flags, and they still trace back to the same governing decision: a state, or a bloc of states, choosing in advance which lives get insured against catastrophe and which get a line item cut before the catastrophe even arrives. Most of the requests in this roundup come from disabled, unemployed, and otherwise structurally abandoned people across the globe: the same machine, running on different soil, in a currency that makes the neglect easier to miss. The Palestinians in this roundup’s spotlight section are living the sharpest edge of that same architecture from a different angle again, the same Washington weighing debt terms against an NTT earthquake is the Washington funding the siege this roundup covers elsewhere. Mutual aid runs on a different premise entirely: that a border does not get to decide who is owed solidarity and who gets a week of headlines instead. Give what you’re able to move directly, wherever on that list it lands. Where you can’t, carry the request further than your own feed reaches. Two funds are moving directly toward this week’s disasters: <a href="https://kitabisa.com/campaign/setarapedulintt" rel="nofollow">Setara Peduli NTT for earthquake relief across Flores and Lombok</a>, and <a href="https://kitabisa.com/campaign/urgentkarhutla" rel="nofollow">Urgent Karhutla for wildfire response across Sumatra, Kalimantan, and Papua</a>. And if the August 27 mobilisation inside Indonesia is reachable for you, showing up or helping fund those who are is the same re-distributive instinct this roundup runs on every week.</p><p>A note before the list: <a href="https://kolektiva.social/@wrzky/117148446427277853" rel="nofollow">mutualaidspace.org’s submission form is live</a>. Submitting a request there gets it federated as <span class="h-card"><a href="https://mutualaidspace.org/author/comrade/" class="u-url mention" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">@<span>comrade</span></a></span>, automatically tagged for wider reach, and listed publicly under <a href="https://mutualaidspace.org/comrades-community" rel="nofollow">Comrades &amp; Community</a> or <a href="https://mutualaidspace.org/victims-of-empire" rel="nofollow">Victims of Empire</a>, whether or not the person asking has a Fediverse account of their own. No verification process, no proof of suffering required. More on the project itself: <a href="https://mutualaidspace.org/about/" rel="nofollow">mutualaidspace.org/about</a></p><p>✨Mutual Aid Roundup✨</p><p><span class="h-card"><a href="https://toot.garden/@monaant" class="u-url mention" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">@<span>monaant</span></a></span> <span class="h-card"><a href="https://mastodon.redgarterclub.com/@AnthonyJK" class="u-url mention" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">@<span>AnthonyJK</span></a></span> <span class="h-card"><a href="https://cyberpunk.lol/@tiredpinklover" class="u-url mention" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">@<span>tiredpinklover</span></a></span> <span class="h-card"><a href="https://mastodon.social/@OshunThaGreat" class="u-url mention" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">@<span>OshunThaGreat</span></a></span> <span class="h-card"><a href="https://kolektiva.social/@harrietteann" class="u-url mention" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">@<span>harrietteann</span></a></span> <span class="h-card"><a href="https://kolektiva.social/@psychoalpastor" class="u-url mention" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">@<span>psychoalpastor</span></a></span> <span class="h-card"><a href="https://made.asterism.gay/@tea" class="u-url mention" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">@<span>tea</span></a></span> <span class="h-card"><a href="https://lgbtqia.space/@aceofcosmicspace" class="u-url mention" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">@<span>aceofcosmicspace</span></a></span> <span class="h-card"><a href="https://mastodon.social/@sparkshocker" class="u-url mention" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">@<span>sparkshocker</span></a></span> <span class="h-card"><a href="https://turtleisland.social/@francesdanger" class="u-url mention" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">@<span>francesdanger</span></a></span></p><p>✨Palestinian Campaign Spotlight✨</p><p>Help us save my family in Gaza from hunger and killing.</p><p>Baraa is watching her son Ibrahim fight severe infections in a Gaza clinic after already losing her daughters. The family’s campaign covers his treatment and their survival from hunger and violence; open it, give directly. <a href="https://mastodon.social/@baraa1998/117157886786862253" rel="nofollow">[View original post]</a></p><p><span class="h-card"><a href="https://mastodon.social/@baraa1998" class="u-url mention" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">@<span>baraa1998</span></a></span></p><a href="https://chuffed.org/project/161145-abdo" rel="nofollow">REDISTRIBUTE</a><p>Help Lina’s family survive and secure medical treatment for her injured husband and her whole family</p><p>Lina is struggling every day to provide for her children while caring for her injured husband and her mother-in-law who has cancer. Only £3,857 of the £10,000 goal is raised so far. <a href="https://mastodon.social/@sham00/117149613532290423" rel="nofollow">[View original post]</a></p><p><span class="h-card"><a href="https://mastodon.social/@sham00" class="u-url mention" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">@<span>sham00</span></a></span></p><a href="https://chuffed.org/project/omsham" rel="nofollow">REDISTRIBUTE</a> Gaza Verified Archive Verified Palestinian campaigns under $200 These are verified Palestinian accounts whose campaigns received less than $200 in the past 7 days. Nine of many. The archive holds the rest. <span class="h-card"><a href="https://mastodon.social/@Raghadaln18" class="u-url mention" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">@<span>Raghadaln18</span></a></span> <span class="h-card"><a href="https://mastodon.social/@mazuza" class="u-url mention" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">@<span>mazuza</span></a></span> <span class="h-card"><a href="https://metroholografix.ca/@Saveeleen" class="u-url mention" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">@<span>Saveeleen</span></a></span> <span class="h-card"><a href="https://mastodon.social/@tareqradi" class="u-url mention" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">@<span>tareqradi</span></a></span> <span class="h-card"><a href="https://mastodon.social/@Raghadfamily" class="u-url mention" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">@<span>Raghadfamily</span></a></span> <span class="h-card"><a href="https://mastodon.social/@aseelfromgz" class="u-url mention" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">@<span>aseelfromgz</span></a></span> <span class="h-card"><a href="https://mastodon.social/@serajnjar20" class="u-url mention" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">@<span>serajnjar20</span></a></span> <span class="h-card"><a href="https://mastodon.social/@Ibrahim_fayez" class="u-url mention" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">@<span>Ibrahim_fayez</span></a></span> <span class="h-card"><a href="https://mastodon.social/@tahreersoph" class="u-url mention" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">@<span>tahreersoph</span></a></span> Open the archive, find the campaign link on each account, give directly where possible, and share the campaign links that need movement. <a href="https://gaza.onl/campaigns/accounts?currency=USD&amp;start_time=2026-08-19T00:00:00&amp;end_time=2026-08-26T00:00:00&amp;sort=amount:asc&amp;sort=last_activity_time:desc&amp;sort=last_donation_time:desc" rel="nofollow">View underfunded campaign list</a> <a href="https://gaza.onl" rel="nofollow">About Gaza Verified Campaigns</a> <p>🗣️Support Corner🗣️</p><p>📱Share this article far and wide. <a href="https://wrzky.com/newsletter" rel="nofollow">Subscribe</a> to get this update in your inbox!</p><p>This space is held together by a<a href="https://wrzky.com/about" rel="nofollow">disabled Indonesian Muslim woman.</a> Monthly support keeps me fed, medicated, and connected, and helps me keep resisting corporate funding and the humanitarian-industrial complex through my <a href="https://wrzky.com/RATM" rel="nofollow">writing</a> and <a href="https://mutualaidspace.org/about/" rel="nofollow">mutual aid projects</a>.</p><p>If you find this voluntary work worth supporting, please do so by pledging as little as $1 monthly via Liberapay or other tiers available across Liberapay, ko-fi, and Patreon. One-off support helps too. 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<div class="article-body"> <p>We’ve rolled out an update that makes sharing content to the fediverse via ActivityPub even better—especially when it comes to images in comments. Now, when you include an HTML &lt;img&gt; tag that points to a file in your WordPress media library, that image is bundled as a proper attachment in the ActivityStreams payload. This means your followers on other platforms will see both your comment and its image, making conversations more vivid and engaging.</p><p>To protect your privacy and security, only images hosted in your own WordPress media library are supported. Images from external sources are intentionally skipped.</p><p>Smoother Following, Better Interactions</p><p>If you’ve turned on the “Following User Interface” feature in the advanced settings, you’ll see a few nice improvements. The followers list now shows whether you’re already following someone—and if not, you can follow them back with just one click.</p><p>We’ve also made it easier to follow people from other sites. When you click “Follow” on someone else’s blog, you’ll now be taken to your own site to complete it. It keeps things simple and familiar, even when you start following someone from another site.</p><p>Better Support for Multibyte Text</p><p>Finally, we’ve improved how multibyte characters (like those in Greek and other non-Latin scripts) are handled when generating post summaries for the fediverse. We’ve replaced byte-based string functions with multibyte-safe alternatives and reordered text processing steps to avoid errors.</p><p>Full Changelog</p><p>Added</p><p>Add image attachment support to federated comments – HTML images in comment content now include proper ActivityStreams attachment fields.<br>Link to the following internal dialog for remote interactions, if the feature is enabled.<br>The followers list now shows follow status and allows quick follow-back actions.<br>Trigger Actor updates on (un)setting a post as sticky.<br>You can now use OrderedCollections as starter packs — just drop in the output from a Follower or Following endpoint.</p><p>Changed</p><p>Ensure that tests run in production-like conditions, avoiding interference from local development tools.<br>Moved HTTP request signing to a filter instead of calling it directly.</p><p>Fixed</p><p>Allow non-administrator users to use Follow Me and Followers blocks.<br>Correct linking from followers to the following list.<br>Fix avatar rendering for followers with missing icon property.<br>Fix multibyte character corruption in post summaries, preventing Greek and other non-ASCII text from being garbled during text processing.<br>Informational Fediverse blocks are no longer rendered when posts get added to the Outbox.</p><p>Downloads</p><p>WordPress.org: <a href="https://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/activitypub.7.2.0.zip" rel="nofollow">activitypub.7.2.0.zip</a><br>GitHub: <a href="https://github.com/Automattic/wordpress-activitypub/releases/tag/7.2.0" rel="nofollow">tag/7.2.0</a></p><p>Thank you!</p><p>Huge thanks to everyone who shared code, gave feedback, tested, or simply cheered us on! Together, we’re building a more connected fediverse, one release at a time. ❤️</p><p>We’ve just released version 7.2.0, give it a spin and let us know what you think!</p> </div>

<div class="article-body"> <p>Ever wonder how your site proves it’s really you talking to the rest of the Fediverse? It’s not magic—it’s HTTP signatures, the digital equivalent of a secret handshake. With our next release, we’re making that handshake a lot more universal (and a little less awkward).</p><p>Why HTTP Signatures Matter</p><p>When you interact with the Fediverse, you want to know that the messages you send and receive are genuine. <a href="https://swicg.github.io/activitypub-http-signature/" rel="nofollow">HTTP signatures</a> are the technology that makes this possible. Every time your site sends a message, it includes a digital signature—like sealing an envelope with your personal stamp. This signature proves that your content really came from your account and that no one has tampered with it along the way. As a result, you can trust that your interactions across the network are authentic.</p><p>A Bit of Background: draft-cavage and RFC 9421</p><p>If you’ve heard about HTTP signatures, you might have come across terms like “draft-cavage” and “RFC 9421.” These are just different versions of the rules for how those digital signatures are created and checked.</p><p>For a long time, most of the Fediverse has used what’s called <a href="https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-cavage-http-signatures-12" rel="nofollow">the draft-cavage-12 specification</a>. Think of this as a set of instructions that people agreed to try out, but that hadn’t been officially finalized. It worked well enough to let sites talk to each other securely, but because it was just a draft, there were sometimes small differences in how different software used it.</p><p>Recently, the community agreed on a final, official version of these rules, called <a href="https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9421.html" rel="nofollow">RFC 9421</a>. This is now the standard way to create and verify HTTP signatures. This makes it easier for sites and servers to understand each other and work together, since everyone is following the same process.</p><p>Incoming Support for the New Standard, Out of the Box</p><p>With this update, the plugin will support incoming HTTP signatures that use the new standard right away. There’s nothing extra you need to do. This means that when other servers use the new, official approach for signatures, your site will recognize and accept them. By making support for the new standard easy and automatic, the plugin helps move the Fediverse forward, encouraging more sites to adopt this approach and making connections across the network more reliable.</p><p>Outgoing Requests and the Double Knock Approach</p><p>There’s a new setting for outgoing requests, but for most people, there’s no need to touch it. This option is really for the folks who like to be on the cutting edge and want to start using the new standard for outgoing messages right away. If that sounds like you, here’s how to find it: head to the ActivityPub settings in your dashboard, open “Screen Options” at the top right, and enable “Advanced Settings.” Then, click on the Advanced Settings tab and turn on “Use modern signature format for Fediverse communications.”</p><p>But don’t feel any pressure—leaving this setting off is perfectly fine. The plugin already handles incoming messages with the new standard out of the box, and we’ll automatically enable outgoing support for everyone once the wider Fediverse is ready. For now, this is just an option for early adopters.</p><p>If you do turn it on, the plugin uses what we call the “double knock” approach. It’ll try the new standard first, and if the other server isn’t ready for it, it’ll automatically fall back to the older method. So, you can experiment without worrying about breaking communication with anyone.</p><p>Improved Verification for Existing Signatures</p><p>The plugin also brings improvements to how it handles signatures that use the older method, especially those using the hs2019 algorithm. Now, when a signed message arrives, the plugin fetches the sender’s public key and uses it to determine the correct way to verify the signature, following the specification more closely. This means more reliable verification and fewer errors, making your experience smoother and more predictable.</p><p>Looking Forward</p><p>With this update, the plugin helps move the Fediverse toward a shared standard for signing and verifying messages. By supporting both the new standard and the older method, you’re making it easier for everyone to communicate using the same agreed-upon approach. There’s no change in security, but you’re part of making the network more consistent and helping the community take the next step forward.</p><p>We hope this explanation helps clarify these technical changes. If you have any questions about HTTP signatures or how our plugin interacts with the Fediverse, please don’t hesitate to reach out in the comments below.</p> </div>