Many organizations are trying to create a culture of automation and struggling with what it will take to achieve it—or at least to begin to make a legitimate attempt at creating and maintaining it. This article is a different take on the topic for anyone interested in automation, including people struggling on a team that focuses on automation, a company that hasn't quite figured it out, or teams that aren't returning the expected ROI.
The Red Hat Academy program is now available at more than 1,140 academic institutions around the world, offering top-quality education programs on Red Hat technologies and helping students learn practical, open source IT skills. Red Hat Academy is an academic training program designed to help institutions differentiate themselves by providing an enterprise-ready Linux and open source curriculum. With more than 90 percent of Fortune 500 companies using Red Hat tools and services, Red Hat Academy provides individuals with opportunities of growth through in-demand content and hands-on labs with flexibility.
In the nearly four years since our landmark announcement, Red Hat and Microsoft have seen immense value delivered to our customers, from co-support of hybrid cloud deployments to waves of upstream innovation for expanded Linux capabilities. We’re pleased to continue this great work in the years ahead and look forward to helping enterprises harness the power of open enterprise technologies across the hybrid cloud.
Rule-based artificial intelligence (AI) is often overlooked, possibly because people think it’s only useful in heavyweight enterprise software products. However, that’s not necessarily true. Simply put, a rule engine is just a piece of software that allows you to separate domain and business-specific constraint from the main application flow. We are part of the team developing and maintaining Drools—the world’s most popular open source rule engine and part of Red Hat—and, in this article, we will describe how we are changing Drools to make it part of the cloud and serverless revolution.
Most managers and agile coaches depend on metrics over feedback from their teams, users, and even customers. In fact, quite a few use feedback and metrics synonymously, where they present feedback from teams or customers as a bunch of numbers or a graphical representation of those numbers. This is not only unfortunate, but it can be misleading as it presents only part of the story and not the entire truth.
Dave McLoughlin started the open source auditing business at OpenLogic and has been working at Flexera in the software composition analysis (SCA) business, formerly Palamida, since February 2018. He was part of the initial SPDX working group and worked on creating some of the first real-world examples around the 1.0 specification.
The recently announced container-confinement breakout for containers started with runc is interesting from a few different perspectives. For one, it affects more than just runc-based containers as privileged LXC-based containers (and likely others) are also affected, though the LXC-based variety are harder to compromise than the runc ones. But it also, once again, shows that privileged containers are difficult—perhaps impossible—to create in a secure manner. Beyond that, it exploits some Linux kernel interfaces in novel ways and the fixes use a perhaps lesser-known system call that was added to Linux less than five years back.
The runc tool implements the container runtime specification of the Open Container Initiative (OCI), so it is used by a number of different containerization solutions and orchestration systems, including Docker, Podman, Kubernetes, CRI-O, and containerd. The flaw, which uses the /proc/self/exe pseudo-file to gain control of the host operating system (thus anything else, including other containers, running on the host), has been assigned CVE-2019-5736. It is a massive hole for containers that run with access to the host root user ID (i.e. UID 0), which, sadly, covers most of the containers being run today.
There are a number of sources of information on the flaw, starting with the announcement from runc maintainer Aleksa Sarai linked above. The discoverers, Adam Iwaniuk and Borys Popà âawski, put out a blog post about how they found the hole, including some false steps along the way. In addition, one of the LXC maintainers who worked with Sarai on the runc fix, Christian Brauner, described the problems with privileged containers and how CVE-2019-5736 applies to LXC containers. There is a proof of concept (PoC) attached to Sarai's announcement, along with another more detailed PoC he posted the following day after the discoverers' blog post.
It should come as no surprise that plugging untrusted devices into a computer system can lead to a wide variety of bad outcomes—though often enough it works just fine. We have reported on a number of these kinds of vulnerabilities (e.g. BadUSB in 2014) along the way. So it will not shock readers to find out that another vulnerability of this type has been discovered, though it may not sit well that, even after years of vulnerable plug-in buses, there are still no solid protections against these rogue devices. This most-recent entrant into this space targets the Thunderbolt interface; the vulnerabilities found have been dubbed "Thunderclap".
There are several different versions of Thunderbolt, either using Mini DisplayPort connectors (Thunderbolt 1 and 2) or USB Type-C (Thunderbolt 3). According to the long list of researchers behind Thunderclap, all of those are vulnerable to the problems they found. Beyond that, PCI Express (PCIe) peripherals are also able to exploit the Thunderclap vulnerabilities, though they are a bit less prone to hotplugging. Thunderclap is the subject of a paper [PDF] and web site. It is more than just a bunch of vulnerabilities, however, as there is a hardware and software research platform that they have developed and released. A high-level summary of the Thunderclap paper was posted to the Light Blue Touchpaper blog by Theo Markettos, one of the researchers, at the end of February.
Kernel developers are used to having to defend their work when posting it to the mailing lists, so when a longtime kernel developer describes their own work as "expensive and nasty", one tends to wonder what is going on. The patch set in question is core scheduling from Peter Zijlstra. It is intended to make simultaneous multithreading (SMT) usable on systems where cache-based side channels are a concern, but even its author is far from convinced that it should actually become part of the kernel. SMT increases performance by turning one physical CPU into two virtual CPUs that share the hardware; while one is waiting for data from memory, the other can be executing. Sharing a processor this closely has led to security issues and concerns for years, and many security-conscious users disable SMT entirely. The disclosure of the L1 terminal fault vulnerability in 2018 did not improve the situation; for many, SMT simply isn't worth the risks it brings with it.
But performance matters too, so there is interest in finding ways to make SMT safe (or safer, at least) to use in environments with users who do not trust each other. The coscheduling patch set posted last September was one attempt to solve this problem, but it did not get far and has not been reposted. One obstacle to this patch set was almost certainly its complexity; it operated at every level of the scheduling domain hierarchy, and thus addressed more than just the SMT problem.
Zijlstra's patch set is focused on scheduling at the core level only, meaning that it is intended to address SMT concerns but not to control higher-level groups of physical processors as a unit. Conceptually, it is simple enough. On kernels where core scheduling is enabled, a core_cookie field is added to the task structure; it is an unsigned long value. These cookies are used to define the trust boundaries; two processes with the same cookie value trust each other and can be allowed to run simultaneously on the same core.
March 1, 2019 For much of its history, the kernel has had little in the way of formal testing infrastructure. It is not entirely an exaggeration to say that testing is what the kernel community kept users around for. Over the years, though, that situation has improved; internal features like kselftest and services like the 0day testing system have increased our test coverage considerably. The story is unlikely to end there, though; the next addition to the kernel's testing arsenal may be a unit-testing framework called KUnit.
The KUnit patches, currently in their fourth revision, have been developed by Brendan Higgins at Google. The intent is to enable the easy and rapid testing of kernel components in isolation — unit testing, in other words. That distinguishes KUnit from kernel's kselftest framework in a couple of significant ways. Kselftest is intended to verify that a given feature works in a running kernel; the tests run in user space and exercise the kernel that the system booted. They thus can be thought of as a sort of end-to-end test, ensuring that specific parts of the entire system are behaving as expected. These tests are important to have, but they do not necessarily test specific kernel subsystems in isolation from all of the others, and they require actually booting the kernel to be tested.
KUnit, instead, is designed to run more focused tests, and they run inside the kernel itself. To make this easy to do in any setting, the framework makes use of user-mode Linux (UML) to actually run the tests. That may come as a surprise to those who think of UML as a dusty relic from before the kernel had proper virtualization support (its home page is hosted on SourceForge and offers a bleeding-edge 2.6.24 kernel for download), but UML has been maintained over the years. It makes a good platform for something like KUnit without rebooting the host system or needing to set up virtualization.
Kernel code must often access data that is stored in user space. Most of the time, this access is uneventful, but it is not without its dangers and cannot be done without exercising due care. A couple of recent discussions have made it clear that this care is not always being taken, and that not all kernel developers fully understand how user-space access should be performed. The good news is that kernel developers are currently working on a set of changes to make user-space access safer in the future.
The first projects to be hosted under the auspices of CDF, which was launched at the Open Source Leadership Summit conference, includes Jenkins, the open source CI/CD system, and Jenkins X, an open source CI/CD solution on Kubernetes. Both were developed by CloudBees. Netflix and Google, meanwhile, are contributing Spinnaker, an open source multi-cloud CD solution, and Google is also adding Tekton, an open source project and specification for creating CI/CD components.
Additional projects are expected to join CDF once a Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) is formally named.
Founding members of the CDF include Alauda, Alibaba, Anchore, Armory, Autodesk, Capital One, CircleCI, CloudBees, DeployHub, GitLab, Google, Huawei, JFrog, Netflix, Puppet, Red Hat, SAP and Snyk.
Chris Aniszczyk, vice president of developer relations for The Linux Foundation, said that while a lot of progress has been made over the years regarding adoption of CI, the challenges associated with mastering CD have proven more vexing. To address that issue, the CDF will evangelize CI/CD and DevOps methodologies, define and document best practices, provide guidelines and create training materials to better enable organizations to implement CI/CD best practices.
The OpenChain Project, which builds trust in open source by making open source license compliance simpler and more consistent, announced today at Linux Foundation’s Open Source Leadership Summit (OSLS), that Fujitsu has joined as a Platinum member.
Fujitsu joins other recent Platinum member additions including Bosch, Microsoft, Uber, Google and Facebook. OpenChain provides a specification as well as overarching processes, policies and training that companies need to be successful in managing open source license compliance so that it becomes more efficient, understandable and predictable for participants of the software supply chain.
As code flows between companies that consume billions of lines of open source software through their supply chains to build new products and services, a key challenge is ensuring the relevant license requirements are met in a timely and effective manner. The OpenChain Project provides a consistent way to address that and other challenges. Conformance with the OpenChain Specification shows that an organization follows the key requirements of a quality open source compliance program, and builds trust between organizations in the supply chain. It makes procurement easier for purchasers and preferred status easier for suppliers.
The open-source Envoy project is part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and was originally developed by ride sharing company Lyft. Envoy is a service mesh reverse proxy technology that is used to help scale microservices data traffic. Multiple vendors, including Google, IBM, AWS, F5 Networks, Avi Networks and VMware, have embraced the Istio and Envoy model and have announced their own services based on the technology.
Alongside Tetrate's official launch, the company also announced that it has raised $12.5 million in funding led by Dell Technologies Capital with participation from 8VC, Intel Capital, Rain Capital and Samsung NEXT.
Programmers love to write code. But what about debugging it, writing test suites, and tracking down security bugs? Not so much. To help address these problems in Linux, Shuah Khan, a noted Linux kernel developer, is becoming -- after Linus Torvalds and Greg Kroah-Hartman -- the Linux Foundation's third Linux Foundation Fellow.
The Linux Foundation and several major RISC-V development firms have launched an LF-hosted CHIPS Alliance with a mission “to host and curate high-quality open source code relevant to the design of silicon devices.” The founding members -- Esperanto Technologies, Google, SiFive, and Western Digital -- are all involved in RISC-V projects.
On the same day that the CHIPS Alliance was announced, Intel and other companies, including Google launched a Compute Express Link (CXL) consortium that will open source and develop Intel’s CXL interconnect. CXL shares many traits and goals of the OmniXtend protocol that Western Digital is contributing to CHIPS (see farther below).
The CHIPS Alliance aims to “foster a collaborative environment that will enable accelerated creation and deployment of more efficient and flexible chip designs for use in mobile, computing, consumer electronics, and Internet of Things (IoT) applications.” This “independent entity” will enable “companies and individuals to collaborate and contribute resources to make open source CPU chip and system-on-a-chip (SoC) design more accessible to the market,” says the project.
The Linux Foundation has announced a new initiative called CommunityBridge; its purpose is to help with funding and support for open-source developers. It includes some security-related services and a means for connecting developers with mentors. The program is in an "early access" mode for now.
Yesterday, the Linux Foundation (LF) launched a new service, called 'Community Bridge' -- an ambitious platform that promises a self-service system to handle finances, address security issues, manage CLAs and license compliance, and also bring mentorship to projects. These tasks are difficult work that typically require human intervention, so we understand the allure of automating them; we and our peer organizations have long welcomed newcomers to this field and have together sought collaborative assistance for these issues. Indeed, Community Bridge's offerings bear some similarity to the work of organizations like Apache Software Foundation, the Free Software Foundation (FSF), the GNOME Foundation (GF), Open Source Initiative (OSI), Software in the Public Interest (SPI) and Conservancy. People have already begun to ask us to compare this initiative to our work and the work of our peer organizations. This blog post hopefully answers those questions and anticipated similar questions.
The first huge difference (and the biggest disappointment for the entire FOSS community) is that LF's Community Bridge is a proprietary software system. Section 4.2 of their Platform Use Agreement requires those who sign up for this platform to agree to a proprietary software license, and LF has remained silent about the proprietary nature of the platform in its explanatory materials. The LF, as an organization dedicated to Open Source, should release the source for Community Bridge. At Conservancy, we've worked since 2012 on a Non-Profit Accounting Software system, including creating a tagging system for transparently documenting ledger transactions, and various support software around that. We and SPI both now use these methods daily. We also funded the creation of a system to manage mentorship programs, which we now runs the Outreachy mentorship program. We believe fundamentally that the infrastructure we provide for FOSS fiscal sponsorship (including accounting, mentorship and license compliance) must itself be FOSS, and developed in public as a FOSS project. LF's own research already shows that transparency is impossible for systems that are not FOSS. More importantly, LF's new software could directly benefit so many organizations in our community, including not only Conservancy but also the many others (listed above) who do some form of fiscal sponsorship. LF shouldn't behave like a proprietary software company like Patreon or Kickstarter, but instead support FOSS development. Generally speaking, all Conservancy's peer organizations (listed above) have been fully dedicated to the idea that any infrastructure developed for fiscal sponsorship should itself be FOSS. LF has deviated here from this community norm by unnecessarily requiring FOSS developers to use proprietary software to receive these services, and also failing to collaborate over a FOSS codebase with the existing community of organizations. LF Executive Director Jim Zemlin has said that ?wants more participation in open source - to advance its sustainability and -- wants organizations to share their code for the benefit of their fellow [hu]mankind?; we ask him to apply these principles to his own organization now.
One month since the release of ROCm 2.1, the Radeon Open Compute stack has now been succeeded by ROCm 2.2.
The ROCm 2.2 release shipping today comes as a bit of a surprise. It's not the most feature-packed update but does have some nice additions while building on the already exciting ROCm 2.0 that shipped at the end of 2018.
ROCm 2.2 brings rocSPARSE optimizations for Vega 20 with cache usage improvements, improved DGEMM performance for reduced matrix sizes, and with Caffe2 there is now support for multi-GPU training.
Hi List,
I'm pleased to announce the general availability of mesa 19.0.0. We've had a slightly long rc process with 7 RCs (there should have been 6, but there was a bug in the script for pulling patches resulting in two back to back RCs). In general this release has shaped up rather nicely, and I look forward to the stable release cycle.
Of note is that autotools support is deprecated in 19.0.0, and you must now add --enable-autotools to autogen.sh and configure. If you haven't already **now** is the time to try meson, if all goes according to plan autotools will be removed before the 19.1 release.
Dylan
shortlog: Brian Paul (1): svga: remove SVGA_RELOC_READ flag in SVGA3D_BindGBSurface()
Danylo Piliaiev (1): anv: Fix destroying descriptor sets when pool gets reset
Dylan Baker (4): cherry-ignore: Update the cherry-ignore file VERSION: bump for 19.0.0 release docs: Add release notes for 19.0.0 docs: Add SHA256 sums for 19.0.0
Eric Anholt (1): st/dri: Set the PIPE_BIND_SHARED flag on create_image_with_modifiers.
Erik Faye-Lund (1): virgl: remove unused variable
Ian Romanick (2): intel/fs: nir_op_extract_i8 extracts a byte, not a word intel/fs: Fix extract_u8 of an odd byte from a 64-bit integer
Jason Ekstrand (5): spirv: Pull offset/stride from the pointer for OpArrayLength anv: Refactor descriptor pushing a bit anv: Take references to push descriptor set layouts nir: Add a pass for lowering IO back to vector when possible intel/nir: Vectorize all IO
Juan A. Suarez Romero (1): anv: destroy descriptor sets when pool gets reset
Samuel Pitoiset (1): radv: fix pointSizeRange limits
Tapani Pälli (3): anv: release memory allocated by glsl types during spirv_to_nir anv: revert "anv: release memory allocated by glsl types during spirv_to_nir" anv: destroy descriptor sets when pool gets destroyed
pal1000 (1): scons: Compatibility with Scons development version string
The team behind the Mesa 3D Graphics Library project announced today the final release and general availability of the long-anticipated Mesa 19.0 graphics stack series for Linux-based operating systems.
Implementing the OpenGL 4.5 API, the Mesa 19.0 graphics stack is finally here after an extended development cycle that took place over the last three months. It brings dozens of new features, new extensions, and countless bug fixes. Highlights of this major new series includes support for AMD Radeon Vega 10, Vega 20, and Vega M GPUs, GNU Hurd support, and LLVM 7 compatibility.
Mesa 19.0 has finally been released! It's more than two weeks late, but it should be worth the wait given all the improvements in this quarterly feature update to this open-source graphics driver stack.
The Mesa 19.0 features are plentiful with Intel's Vulkan driver now having transform feedback and many other additions, soft FP64/INT64 was merged to Mesa, the necessary bits are in place for RadeonSI FreeSync/Adaptive-Sync, AMD Zen thread optimizations, various new OpenGL extensions, Vega RADV primitive binning is enabled by default, and a variety of performance improvements and other OpenGL/Vulkan driver tuning.
Today is the day, for those of you using open source graphics drivers (AMD/Intel and some older NVIDIA GPUs), Mesa 19.0 is now officially out.
It's busy as ever for the open-source Intel Linux graphics driver developers bringing up support for upcoming hardware like the recently published driver patches for Comet Lake, continuing to tweak the maturing Icelake "Gen 11" graphics, and also plotting the necessary re-engineering of the driver needed to bring-up Intel's in-development "Xe" discrete graphics. And Intel developers this evening sent out their initial enablement work for Elkhart Lake.
During the past few months, significant progress has been made on the Open Source Arm Mali GPU driver front, culminating in the Panfrost driver now being available for Mali T and G-series of GPUs.
Since last week the big set of DRM driver changes has been part of the mainline kernel for Linux 5.1 while working its way to mainline now are a couple of early fixes to the AMDGPU driver.
Benchmarking is probably of one the most mind-bending and involved process of computer science and technology. They are supposed to represent what your hardware is capable of doing in real world scenarios and also worst possible scenarios.There are a lot of things you might want to consider while benchmarking. What are you benchmarking? The CPU, the memory, SSD IOPs, or maybe it is your GPU. What workloads are you benchmarking for? This is where the entire system may have to be considered as a single entity rather than just focusing on one component. For example, if you are benchmarking a system’s performance as a database you can’t just measure the SSD’s speeds and be done with it. The CPU can be a bottleneck or so can be the memory. Given how involved the process of benchmarking is, and how important it is when making a decision. We need some standard set of tools that we can use to benchmark our systems, get a simple to understand result and use it to compare different hardware components and configurations effectively.
Here are a few free benchmarking tools that you cover a wide array of hardware and use cases.
Family history (or genealogy) software is computer software used to record, organise and publish genealogical data. With this software, you can help unlock the past, discover secrets and surprises from your past. Genealogy, the study of one’s ancestry, allows people to personalise the past.
There are useful websites devoted to helping would-be genealogists. Further, radio and TV programmes such as the immortal Who Do You Think You Are?, and other shows such as Secrets of the Clink have encouraged a growing band people to trace their roots, sparking new interest. It’s not just celebrities when tracing their ancestry who come up with secrets and surprises from their past.
The newest feature addition for systemd is supporting L2TP, the Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol, as part of its networking code.
Systemd's networkd now has support merged for LT2TP tunnel support. L2TP can be used for extending a local area network (LAN) or also for VPN purposes when paired with the likes of IPsec for providing encryption. L2TP also has a variety of other use-cases with this bare protocol able to offer a layer two link over an L3 network.
The first RC for libinput 1.13 is now available.
Only two notable features in this release but patches are accumulating on master, it's been 6 months since 1.12 and I've decided to postpone the two major features (hi-res scrolling and totem support) to 1.14.
Touch arbitration has improved for tablets, especially on touch screens. A timer set on pen proximity out means we don't get ghost touches anymore when the hand lifts off slower than the pen itself. And location-based touch arbitration means that parts of the screen can be interacted with even while the pen is in proximity. libinput uses the tilt information where available to disable touches in a rectangle around the pen where the hand is likely to be but leaves the rest of the touchscreen available otherwise. Where the UI supports it, this allows for bimanual interaction.
The test suite is installed on demand (meson -Dinstall-tests=true). Where run from the installed location it will use the normal library lookups and the quirks directory as defined by the prefix. This makes it useful for distribution-level testing, i.e. run this on a test machine after updating the package to make sure everything is as expected. Where available, you can invoke it with the "libinput test-suite" command.
Other than that, a load of fixes, quirks added, cleanups, tidy-ups and so on an so forth.
As usual, the git shortlog is below. Many thanks to all the contributors.
Libinput is fairly mature at this stage for offering a unified input handling library for use on both X.Org and Wayland Linux desktops. Libinput has largely reached a feature plateau with new releases no longer coming out so often and no glaring gaps in support. With it already being a half-year since the last major release, libinput 1.13 is now being buttoned up for release and available today is the first release candidate.
Libinput 1.13 isn't that exciting of a release particularly since maintainer Peter Hutterer of Red Hat decided to delay the high resolution scrolling support. The Linux 5.0 kernel brought the much anticipated high resolution scrolling support for various Logitech/Microsoft mice to improve the scroll-wheel experience. Besides the kernel support, there is also the user-space support that needs updating. Peter decided to delay this functionality now until Libinput 1.14 to give it more time to bake.
The SPEC Graphics Performance Characterization Group (SPECgpc) has released a Linux Edition of its SPECviewperf 13 benchmark. SPECgpc members include AMD, Dell, Fujitsu, HP, Intel, Lenovo and Nvidia.
You may want to know who logged on your system and from where. You should also see bad login attempts on your system. Learn how to see login history in Linux.
This is the latest in our series of articles highlighting essential system tools. These are small, indispensable utilities, useful for system administrators as well as regular users of Linux based systems. The series examines both graphical and text based open source utilities. For details of all tools in this series, please check the table at the summary page of this article.
For this article, we’ll look at Firejail, a SUID sandbox program that reduces the risk of security breaches by restricting the running environment of untrusted applications using Linux namespaces, Linux capabilities and seccomp-bpf.
What are namespaces? They are a method of detaching processes from a specific layer of the kernel and assigning them to a new layer. The processes see a different file system root with no access to the original file system. This concept is extended to the other operating system layers. A specific process therefore resides in a virtual operating system.
Some fresh news about a wonderful open source game engine this morning, as OpenRCT2 for RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 has a new release out.
This release v0.2.2 code-named "Dirty Hungarian Phrasebook" brings in an almost completely new Hungarian translation, a replay system, a sprite sorting benchmark, a shortcut to advance one tick, allow for steep slopes on the side-friction roller coaster, they added Powered Launch mode to Inverted RC (for RCT1 parity), an optional chat button to top toolbar in multiplayer games, the handy feature to download missing objects when loading a park and new object types: station, terrain surface, and terrain edge.
MewnBase, a space-cat base-building survival game currently in development just recently had a new update, which includes some fun new buildings.
Added in are Wind Turbines allowing you a new means of generating power, a Lightning Rod/Collector to protect your base from strikes, a Large Battery for more storage and Powered Rain Collectors to automatically transfer rain water into your Water Supply modules.
There's also new tooltips, some UI updates, Engines now have their own tech-tree level, improvements to the map view to include pan and zoom along with some bug fixes.
Baba Is You from developer Hempuli Oy is a very interesting looking puzzler and it's out now with Linux support.
Don't let the simplistic visuals fool you, the whole idea is honestly brilliant. To complete each level, you need to change the rules. These rules are blocks in each level you move around and combine to overcome challenges.
Heroes of Hammerwatch, the great looking rogue-lite action-adventure just expanded with the Pyramid of Prophecy DLC.
The release also comes with a big free patch to the base-game for all owners, even without the DLC so that's awesome too. The free update adds in a sixth tier to the Town Hall including new levels, new voices, new items, a new Luck stat to tip the RNG in your favour and more.
This is you sort-of mid-week look at some epic Linux gaming deals going on right now, a look across various stores to find you some deals ready for the weekend ahead.
First up, Fanatical are doing a big Spring Sale (Linux games here) and if you use the discount code "FANATICAL10" up until March 31st you get an extra 10% off. They have a pretty amazing deal going on Skullgirls + 2nd Encore DLC with 91% off. They also have Two Point Hospital at the lowest price so far with 25% off.
Hypnospace Outlaw is both ridiculous and brilliant, a game that simulates the '90s internet in a rather disturbing way and it's out now with Linux support.
For those who love their building and management sims, one I spotted recently was School Owner and it's coming to Linux in May.
First thing, it's not a fully completed game. It's going to be in Early Access, although the developer did say it's already in a "playable state" (I would hope so…) but they have plans to add in a lot more during the development of it like roads, updated graphics, more sound effects and background music and so on.
After a bit more than one year of work, the Godot developers and contributors are delighted to get their new release out the door, Godot 3.1! It brings much-requested improvements to usability and many important features.
Godot 3.0 was a massive release, which required large rewrites of the engine codebase and breaking backwards compatibility significantly. This new version builds upon it by improving it and finishing the pending work.
As a result, Godot 3.1 feels more mature and easy to use, and it does away with many hurdles introduced in the previous versions.
Download Godot 3.1 now and keep on reading about the great features added in this version.
After going through 11 beta builds and 3 release candidates, Godot 3.1 is officially out with tons of new features.
This open source game engine continues to impress and this latest release might be quite enticing to game developers. Godot 3.1 comes in little over a year after Godot 3.0 and to say it's a big release would be a huge understatement. When looking over what they've done, I'm shocked at just how many features have been put in.
It's been over one year since Godot 3.0 debuted and today it's finally been succeeded by the release of Godot 3.1, the latest feature update for this leading cross-platform, open-source game engine.
Godot 3.1 delivers on OpenGL ES 2.0 rendering support, continued enablement around virtual reality (VR), 3D soft-body physics capabilities and a new 3D rag-doll system, constructive solid geometry, BPTC texture compression, 2D improvements, and a lot more to make this game engine more on par with the proprietary competition and upping the visual capabilities for both desktops and mobile platforms.
With Valve and Easy Anti-Cheat in talks to get EAC supported within Steam Play, many readers asked about BattlEye as it's another anti-cheat solution blocking games actually working with Steam Play on Linux. I now have an answer on that.
In a future not too far away, one Artificial Intelligence proved better than the rest, better than governments and now everyone is connected in VirtuaVerse.
Announced yesterday from developer Theta Division and publisher Blood Music, it has a seriously good style to it.
After failing to get funding on Kickstarter, the fast-paced dungeon crawler 'Doomgeon' has gone to itch.io to continue development.
With a meagre goal of €£3,000 the developer, OkaeriStudio, only managed to get €£341 since February 11th. That doesn't mean it's a bad game though to be clear, a lot of good games completely fail to get any kind of traction across crowdfunding and various stores.
For those who prefer different stores to keep their options open, the Early Access tactical RPG FLAMBERGE is now available on itch.io.
For the Linux version, the developer has made it clear that while Linux versions are being made, it's not "strictly supported" as they've had some trouble with it in the past. However, they did mention to email them if you find bugs and some issues might not be fixed "until the end of the development".
Axis & Allies Online, the digital adaption of the classic that Beamdog announced last month is coming to Linux and we can now actually see what it looks like.
As a reminder, Axis & Allies Online is based on Axis & Allies 1942 Second Edition along with plenty of upgrades you would expect to see in digital form. It's going to start off in Early Access and they're not giving a date on when that will be just yet.
This Tuesday, March 12, Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev ordered National Resources and Environment Minister Dmitry Kobylkin to verify that the construction of a bottling facility in the Lake Baikal area complies with “the strictest environmental standards.”
Construction on the plant began this January, supported by 1.5 billion rubles ($22.9 million) in investment from the company “Aquasib.” The facility was expected to begin operating by the end of the year, before construction is completely finished in 2021. Roughly 80 percent of the plant’s production is earmarked for export, mainly to China, South Korea, and Mongolia.
We’re deep in bug fixing mode now, because in May we want to release the next major version of Krita: Krita 4.2.0. While there will be a host of new features, a plethora of bug fixes and performance improvements, one thing is unique: support for painting in HDR mode. Krita is the very first application, open source or proprietary, that offers this!
So, today we release a preview version of Krita 4.2.0 with HDR support baked in, so you can give the new functionality a try!
Of course, at this moment, only Windows 10 supports HDR monitors, and only with some very specific hardware. Your CPU and GPU need to be new enough, and you need to have a monitor that supports HDR. We know that the brave folks at Intel are working on HDR support for Linux, though!
Also, while not part of the core GNOME, a new Desktop Icons extension was released, which restores traditional desktop icons for users wanting this functionality. The extension has multi-monitor support, and it offers everything you'd need, from thumbnails, and symlinks, to keyboard shortcuts for selection, renaming, and so on. What's more, this extension supports Wayland too, as opposed to Files (Nautilus) which only worked with X11.
The GNOME 3.32 changes presented in this article are only the most prominent in this release, but there are many more smaller improvements and fixes.
The GNOME 3.32 desktop should be made available soon after its release in rolling Linux distributions like Arch Linux. It will also be available with the next Ubuntu and Fedora releases (Ubuntu 19.04 / Fedora 30), and other Linux distributions shipping with the GNOME desktop.
Barring any last minute delays, GNOME 3.32 is expected to ship today as the latest six-month update to this popular open-source desktop environment. GNOME 3.32 personally has me quite excited more so for the improvements -- and bug fixes -- over "new" features, but here is a look at some of what there is to get excited about with this latest update to the GNOME 3 desktop.
The GNOME Project, through Andre Klapper, announced that the release schedule of the upcoming GNOME 3.34 desktop environment was finalized and it's now available for general public.
With the final release of the GNOME 3.32 desktop environment knocking on our doors, the time has come to take a look at the release schedule of the next major release of the open-source graphical desktop environment used by numerous Linux-based operating systems, including Ubuntu.
According to the release schedule, the development cycle of the GNOME 3.34 desktop environment series will kick off soon after GNOME 3.32 release hits the streets tomorrow, March 13th, and it'll take place under the GNOME 3.33.x umbrella. The first development snapshot, GNOME 3.33.1, will be released to the public on April 24th.
Cast to TV, a GNOME extension to cast videos, music and pictures to Chromecast or other devices over the local network, has been updated to v8, with some important additions.
Cast to TV v8 brings support for multiple Chromecast devices. To select the Chromecast device that is used for casting local media, open the extension settings, click the refresh icon next to the "Chromecast selection" item, and the drop-down next to it will be populated with a list of Chromecast devices available on the local network.
Another important addition is automatic subtitles encoding. Previously, the Cast to TV settings had an option which allowed users to manually select the subtitles encoding - since this is done automatically now, the character encoding option has been removed from its settings.
The latest version of GNOME 3 has been released today. Version 3.32 contains six months of work by the GNOME community and includes many improvements, performance improvements and new features.
This release features a refreshed visual style ranging from an entirely new set of app icons to improvements to the user interface style. Many of the base style colors have been saturated, giving them a more vivid, vibrant appearance. Buttons are more rounded and have a softer “shadow” border. Switches no longer use the explicit ON and OFF text, instead using color to indicate state.
GNOME 3.32, which is codenamed "Taipei" given the location of GNOME.Asia Summit 2018, has been officially released on time.
The GNOME folks have officially announced 3.32 as the latest version of the GNOME 3 stack.
From this morning you can see our favorite changes and new features of GNOME 3.32... The biggest highlights are fractional scaling support, performance improvements, and a lot of bug fixing.
Six months in development, the GNOME 3.32 desktop environment is finally here to upgrade your GNOME experience to the next level by adding lots of new features, fixing bugs from previous versions, improving existing components and apps, as well as polishing the look and feel of the user interface.
With the GNOME 3.32 release, the GNOME desktop becomes flatter, lighter, and more modern. After upgrading, users will notice that the App Menus are no longer available and their content was moved to other places, there are changes to the buttons, header bars, and switches, as well as more consistent colors and new app icons.
GNOME 3.32, out today, brings a crop of new features and enhancements to the Linux desktop.
The update includes a new icon set and theme refresh, rolls in a bunch of (much needed) performance patches, and includes new versions of core apps, like the Nautilus file manager.
In all, it’s a major upgrade. And, as this is the world’s most popular free, open-source desktop environment, a major upgrade of the GNOME desktop is major news to its millions of users.
There’s plenty more to learn about, so join us as we take a look at the best new features of GNOME 3.32.
Whether or not a desktop environment is "best" is subjective. In other words, not all people prefer the same DE. Some folks like GNOME, others are KDE Plasma fans, and some Linux users choose something else. With that said, GNOME is the best. It is not debatable -- please accept this fact. GNOME simply offers the most sensical user interface while also being beautiful. Look, when Canonical killed the much-maligned Unity, what DE was chosen as the new default DE for Ubuntu? Exactly -- GNOME. Hell, GNOME bests both macOS and Windows 10 too.
Today, the best gets even better as GNOME 3.32 "Taipei" is finally here! The DE finally gets one of the most desired features -- fractional scaling. While technically just experimental for now, it will allow users to better scale their desktops when using a HiDPI monitor. Speaking of appearances, GNOME finally gets refreshed icons, and yes, that matters. They look amazing and modern. Also cool? The on-screen keyboard has an emoji picker! User images are now all circular too, lending to a more cohesive and consistent feel. The excellent GNOME Software is getting an update too, with more transparent details about app permissions.
With IoT devices, we have a tendency to think of them as simple when they’re really anything but. Even the simplest IoT devices run software to keep them going, and the vast majority of these are running some form of Linux.
If you’re not familiar with Linux distributions, they take the same core operating system, Linux, and build tools around it for specific needs. Because IoT devices have limited hardware resources compared to PCs, there are a few distros aimed at this use case. Whether you’re building a DIY project or you’re just curious, we’ve compiled a list of some of the best-known Linux distros used in IoT devices.
Let’s start with the best Linux distros for the beginner or let’s say easy to use Linux distros in 2019. In this categories, We thought to put Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Manjaro Linux and Zorin OS.
Once you have understood the pros and cons while shifting from Windows to Linux and decided in favor of the latter, the tougher part would be adjusting with the new environment. Thankfully, there are a few distributions of Linux which have an interface similar to that of Windows. While no Linux distribution can be like Windows 10, many of them do follow teh Windows 7 model.
This is the official release announcement for IPFire 2.21 - Core Update 128; another maintenance update with a brand new kernel, introducing TLS 1.3 throughout the whole system and of course a whole package of bug fixes and other improvements.
Thanks to everyone who has contributed to this Core Update with either sending in patches, testing, reporting bugs and many many other things. I am quite happy to see the team grow! Thank you very much as well to all of you who have supported our Donations Challenge so far. We have received a lot of nice words and support from you, but we are not there, yet
New live/install iso images of SparkyLinux 5.7 “Nibiru” special editions: GameOver, Multimedia & Rescue are available to download. Sparky 5 follows rolling release model and is based on Debian testing “Buster”.
The latest iso images follow changes implemented at the Sparky 5.7, and offer additional small changes, such as: – system updated from Debian testing repos as of March 11, 2019 – a password strength in Calamares installer changed from 8 to 6 signs (minimum) – torrent files use the DistroWatch tracker as default now (thank’s a lot), but can be found at LinuxTracker service too, as before
The Fedora infrastructure is working on replacing our current message bus fedmsg by a new library fedora-messaging based on AMQP. This is an update on the work currently in progress.
After deploying a RabbitMQ cluster and bridges to duplicate messages from fedmsg to the fedora-messaging and from fedora-messaging to fedmsg. We are now starting the migration of application to fedora-messaging.
Over the last 5 days, Troy Dawson, Jeroen van Meeuwen, Carl W George, and several helpers have gotten nearly all of the python34 packages moves over to python36 in EPEL-7. They are being included in 6 Bodhi pushes because of a limitation in Bodhi for the text size of packages in an include.
The current day for these package groups to move into EPEL regular is April 2nd. We would like to have all tests we find in the next week or so also added so that the updates can occur in a large group without too much breakage.
The project originated from the will to have a free, as in freedom, service alternative to Gravatar, giving the users the possibility to use a hosted service or to run their own instance of the service and have full control of their data.
In April 2018 the Libravatar project announced that the service will be shutting down. The service is/was being used by many communities like Fedora, Mozilla and the Linux Kernel to name a few. The announcement triggered a big response from the community, of people interested and willing to help to keep it running.
The Fedora Project is now sponsoring Libravatar, the "free and open source service that anyone can use to host and share an avatar (profile picture) to other websites". The Libravatar blog describes the project as "part of a movement working to give control back to people, away from centralized services and the organizations running them. It addresses a simple problem: putting a face on an email address." The Libravatar project had announced it was shutting down about a year ago, but the Fedora Project worked with the community to keep it alive.
The Flatpak 1.3 unstable series has kicked off starting the latest round of feature work to this leading Linux sandboxing / app distribution technology.
Flatpak 1.3.0 is available for testing as the first unstable/development release for what will eventually become Flatpak 1.4. The Flatpak 1.3 release now supports multiple NVIDIA GPUs, support for systems where /var/run is a symlink (e.g. Gentoo), initial support for sandboxed DConf support, and generating the AppStream branch is now much faster on large repositories, among other improvements. There's also the usual assortment of bug fixing and some translation updates in this release.
Flatpak developer and maintainer Alexander Larsson released a new unstable release of the Linux application sandboxing and distribution framework, targeting the upcoming Flatpak 1.4 stable series.
Flatpak 1.3 is here as the first milestone is a series of unstable releases towards the next major and stable new version of the Linux application sandboxing and distribution framework, Flatpak 1.4, adding several new features and improvements like support for systems with multiple Nvidia devices.
Furthermore, the Flatpak 1.3 release adds initial support for sandboxed dconf, introduces two new options to the build-update-repo command, namely --no-update-[summary,appstream] and --static-delta-ignore-ref=PATTERN, and improves support for large repositories by making regeneration the appstream branch faster.
One of the traditional rites of the (northern hemisphere) spring is the election for the Debian project leader. Over a six-week period, interested candidates put their names forward, describe their vision for the project as a whole, answer questions from Debian developers, then wait and watch while the votes come in. But what would happen if Debian were to hold an election and no candidates stepped forward? The Debian project has just found itself in that situation and is trying to figure out what will happen next.
The Debian constitution describes the process for electing the leader. Six weeks prior to the end of the current leader's term, a call for candidates goes out. Only those recognized as Debian developers are eligible to run; they get one week to declare their intentions. There follows a three-week campaigning period, then two weeks for developers to cast their votes. This being Debian, there is always a "none of the above" option on the ballot; should this option win, the whole process restarts from the beginning.
This year, the call for nominations was duly sent out by project secretary Kurt Roeckx on March 3. But, as of March 10, no eligible candidates had put their names forward. Lamb has been conspicuous in his absence from the discussion, with the obvious implication that he does not wish to run for a third term. So, it would seem, the nomination period has come to a close and the campaigning period has begun, but there is nobody there to do any campaigning.
This being Debian, the constitution naturally describes what is to happen in this situation: the nomination period is extended for another week. Any Debian developers who procrastinated past the deadline now have another seven days in which to get their nominations in; the new deadline is March 17. Should this deadline also pass without candidates, it will be extended for another week; this loop will repeat indefinitely until somebody gives in and submits their name.
While the controversy over the integrity of elections in free software communities is significant, a far more serious issue for all communities right now is the spectre of secret punishments and other practices that involve shaming people. Debian has recently experimented with these practices and it would be wise to ensure they are not repeated or replicated in any other community.
Secret punishments exploit shame to maintain secrecy and avoid controversy. For example, many pedophiles know they can keep offending because shame will keep their victims from talking.
This reveals an interesting feature of shame: people feel shame whether they did something wrong or not. An innocent 13-year-old victim of a pedophile feels shame. A rogue trader who knows he is guilty feels shame too. It is much the same emotion.
Not everybody responds the same way however. Consider the recent prosecution of Cardinal Pell in my home town, Melbourne, Australia. I went to Catholic schools and a number of relatives worked in Catholic education, in the administration down the road from St Patrick's Cathedral, where Pell would wander in from time to time for meetings. I used to row past St Kevin's almost every day. I met many people from St Kevin's during university too. It is unusual for me to see Cardinal Pell in this situation and I can't help contemplating people on both sides of the case. Consider one key fact from the trial: of the two boys who were allegedly abused, one has died from a drug overdose and there was no evidence that he ever told anybody about Pell's offenses at any point in his life. Shame prevented him from talking. Yet some victims of this abuse do choose to come forward.
The default background wallpaper of Ubuntu 19.04 is revealed. One in colour, one in black and white.
Ubuntu 19.04, codename ‘Disco Dingo’, will be released on April 18, 2019. It will ship with Linux Kernel 5.0 and Gnome 3.32 (due in spring).
Now the default background wallpaper for Gnome desktop is available.
In seeking to improve the out-of-the-box experience when running the Ubuntu desktop as a guest virtual machine within VMware's products, Ubuntu is planning on having the open-vm-tools-desktop package be automatically installed for providing a better initial experience.
A few folks from our writer community weighed in to share their favorite Raspberry Pi projects to help us celebrate Raspberry Pi Day this year.
Steve Reaver's projects are built by him at home. First up, a PlayStation One case for your Raspberry Pi.
Today is Pi Day, a day in which we celebrate the date ticking up to the 3.14 approximation of ̉ (at least for those of us who use American-style dates). We also take today to celebrate a tiny device, not much bigger than a credit card, that shares its name with this useful, irrational number. We're talking about, of course, the Raspberry Pi.
Every year on March 14th, we geeks celebrate Pi Day. In the way we abbreviate dates—MMDD—March 14 is written 03/14, which numerically reminds us of 3.14, or the first three numbers of pi. What many Americans don't realize is that virtually no other country in the world uses this date format, so Pi Day pretty much only works in the US, though it is celebrated globally.
Wherever you are in the world, let's celebrate the Raspberry Pi and wrap up this series by reviewing the topics we've covered in the past two weeks...
With the Raspberry Pi Foundation recently having begun rolling out a Linux 4.19-based kernel to Raspberry Pi boards, here are some benchmarks looking at the performance of two Raspberry Pi systems with the new Linux 4.19 kernel compared to its previous 4.14 kernel.
The upgrade from Linux 4.14 to 4.19 is quite a significant jump and users can switch over to this new kernel release by firing off raspi-upgrade. On a Raspberry Pi 2 Model B and Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+, I ran benchmarks before/after the kernel upgrade for seeing how this new kernel changes the performance.
Things are starting to wind down in this series, and as much fun as I've had writing it, mostly I hope it has helped someone out there use start using a Raspberry Pi for education or entertainment. Maybe the articles convinced you to buy your first Raspberry Pi or perhaps helped you rediscover the device that was collecting dust in a drawer.
Daylight Linux is the only official distribution for the Raspberry Pi to work with the Fluxbox interface. With Fluxbox, Daylight Linux is one of the lightest and fastest distributions for all Raspberry Pi models.
Many programs, games and system tools were developed during a long year of work in Python 3 to create version 3.
Andes unveiled new A25MP and AX25MP versions of its Linux-friendly A25 CPU cores claimed to be the first RISC-V cores with a “comprehensive” DSP. The 1GHz-plus cores provide cache coherency and support for SMP and up to quad-core designs.
At the RISC-V Workshop Taiwan, Andes Technology announced a second generation of its Linux-friendly, RISC-V ISA compatible A25 (32-bit) and AX25 (64-bit) CPU cores. The 32-bit, 28nm fabricated A25MP and 64-bit AX25MP are the first commercial RISC-V cores with comprehensive DSP instruction extensions, says Andes. Unlike the earlier A25 generation (see farther below), they are also the first to offer cache coherency for supporting multi-core and multi-processor support. The initial products, however, will be single-core designs.
If you are planning on attending, stop by our booth to get a firsthand look at our platform building expertise and see how we use continuous integration and automated testing to increase productivity and quality control. We will also be discussing Apertis, the GNU/Linux-based platform built to deliver a white label, app-centric, end-to-end automotive IVI solution.
TQ Systems unveiled three compute modules: an 8th Gen Whiskey Lake-U based COM Express Compact, a COM based on a 64-bit NXP LS1028A, and a module with a PowerPC-based T1022.
The latest updates to Intel's Linux DRM kernel driver and coreboot (previously known as LinuxBIOS) reveal some pretty interesting information about Intel's upcoming Comet Lake (CML) processors.
Comet Lake is pegged as the successor to Intel's Coffee Lake and Whiskey Lake processor architectures. The description in the update to the Linux DRM kernel driver claims "Comet Lake comes off of Coffee Lake". Hence, it's safe to assume that Comet Lake is yet another refresh in Intel's practice of rewarming the Skylake architecture and that Intel will fab Comet Lake chips on the already saturated 14nm manufacturing process. The driver update also says Comet Lake parts will continue to use the existing Gen9 (Generation 9) graphics processor, which debuted with Skylake. There are mentions of both GT1 and GT2 (GT standing for Graphics Technology) configurations.
In 2019, mobile innovation is stronger than ever, with new technologies from 5G to edge to edge displays and even foldable screens. Android is right at the center of this innovation cycle, and thanks to the broad ecosystem of partners across billions of devices, Android's helping push the boundaries of hardware and software bringing new experiences and capabilities to users.
Google today rolled out their first public beta/development release of the upcoming Android Q that will be formally released in the second half of 2019.
Android Q is introducing new privacy protections, new foldable screen support given the recent wave of foldable devices, the ability to share shortcuts, improved peer-to-peer/internet connectivity, new WiFi performance and low latency modes, support for the AV1 video codec, support for audio encoding using Opus, a native MIDI API, and other enhancements.
After a series of rumors and leaks, Google has finally released the first Android Q Beta and shared its factory images and OTA files. “Today we’re releasing Beta 1 of Android Q for early adopters and a preview SDK for developers,” Google said in its official announcement.
It should be noted that the first beta is aimed at developers and Android enthusiasts who love to go the extra mile to get the latest features as soon as possible. The final and stable Android Q release is expected to arrive in early August.
Control over how technology works forms the foundation of digital colonialism. Software is often proprietary, which means that users cannot read, modify, or share the source code. This prevents them from understanding and controlling how their computers work.
The public cannot hold Big Tech corporations accountable if they cannot take direct action to change how their software works.
It is for this reason that American software programmer Richard Stallman started advocating for Free and Open Source Software in the early 1980s. "A nonfree program is a yoke, an instrument of unjust power," Stallman reasoned.
People should be given the freedom to control their computers, which requires them having access to software source code - the set of instructions that tells your computer what to do.
Free Software licenses are written to invert the authoritarian power of proprietary software: They secure the user's freedom to use, study, modify, and share the software. They keep software free and open for everyone and enable accountability.
For example, Microsoft configures its Windows operating system to spy on its users. If it were not under the proprietary control of Microsoft, computer hacktivists would surely strip out its spying services and release a modified, "spy-free" version of Windows for the public.
However, Free Software alone is not enough to protect the public interest because in recent years, surveillance capitalism has given rise to centralised Internet services outside of user control. Platforms like Facebook function as "information intermediaries" which stand between end users. Want to send a picture to a friend? You send it to Facebook first, and then your friend downloads it from Facebook.
With the shift to centralised services run by corporate giants, the surveillance of users sky-rocketed. Cloud computing plays a key role. While Free Software creates accountability for software running inside your own device, it cannot produce accountability for cloud services run by corporations. This is because the software is running on someone else's computer (Facebook, Google, etc). Corporate clouds dispossess the people of the ability to control their computers.
Cloud services provide petabytes of information to corporations, who use the data to train their artificial intelligence systems. AI uses Big Data to "learn" - it requires millions of pictures to "understand" how to recognise, say, the letter "A" in its different fonts and forms. In this sense, "data is the new oil".
When applied to humans, the sensitive details of people's personal lives become an incredibly valuable resource that tech giants are incessantly trying to extract.
Who doesn't want to secure software? After all, every day, there's another major security violation bubbles up from the swamp of bad programs. To help deal with this, at the Open Source Leadership Summit, the Linux Foundation announced the Red Team Project.
Red Teams, for those who don't live in the security-world, are a way of testing the effectiveness of a company or group's security program. It does this by emulating how attackers so after your systems in the real world.
Corporations that get their feet wet in the sea of free software often find out that not only do they now have obligations to provide source code, but that people will actually try to access it and complain loudly if they can't get it. At the first Copyleft Conference, Alexios Zavras from Intel spoke alongside Stefano Zacchiroli from Software Heritage about how the two organizations are working together. Software Heritage's mission makes it ideally suited to host Intel's many source-code releases in a way that provides stable long-term repositories that Intel can then reference.
This year's FOSDEM was its 19th edition, and it's now a regular and much-loved part of the European free-software year. But for the first time, the Software Freedom Conservancy organized a one-day Copyleft Conference immediately following FOSDEM in Brussels; it is intended to allow a more in-depth exploration of copyleft issues than the Legal and Policy Issues devroom at FOSDEM can accommodate.
Open-source search software company Elastic saw its stock fall as much as 5 percent on Tuesday after Amazon Web Services announced the launch of a separate library of open-source code for Elasticsearch, a set of technologies that can be use to build search engines for web sites, and an important part of Elastic's business.
Tââ¬â¹he Cloud Native Computing Foundation, which sustains and integrates open source technologies like Kubernetes€® and Prometheus, today announced the session line-up for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe on May 20-23, 2019, in Barcelona. The event features real-world case studies using Kubernetes and other cloud native technologies from experts at ADMIRALTY, Booking.com, British Telecom, Carnegie Mellon, eBay, Engel & Völkers Technology, ING, LinkedIn, LSST & French National Institute of Nuclear and Particle Physics (IN2P3), Mediakind, McKesson, VTT, and more.
After the largest ever KubeCon last December in Seattle with more than 8,000 attendees, KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe will bring together more than 10,000 technologists from thriving open source communities across the world to further collaboration around cloud native computing. Maintainers and end users of CNCF’s hosted projects – including Kubernetes, Prometheus, Envoy, CoreDNS, containerd, OpenTracing, Fluentd, gRPC, rkt, CNI, Jaeger, Notary, TUF, Vitess, NATS, Rook, Harbor, etcd, Linkerd, and Helm – and other cloud native technologies will gather for four days to share insights and encourage participation in this fast growing ecosystem. Register for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe by March 20 to save up to $300.
We are pleased to announce the Call for Microconferences for the 2019 edition of the Linux Plumbers Conference, which will be held in Lisbon, Portugal on September 9-11 in conjunction with the Linux Kernel Maintainer Summit.
We are pleased to announce the Call for Refereed-Track talk proposals for the 2019 edition of the Linux Plumbers Conference, which will be held in Lisbon, Portugal on September 9-11 in conjunction with the Linux Kernel Maintainer Summit.
Refereed track presentations are 50 minutes in length (which includes time for questions and discussion) and should focus on a specific aspect of the “plumbing” in the Linux system. Examples of Linux plumbing include core kernel subsystems, toolchains, container runtimes, core libraries, windowing systems, management tools, device support, media creation/playback, and so on. The best presentations are not about finished work, but rather problems, proposals, or proof-of-concept solutions that require face-to-face discussions and debate.
Mozilla Firefox has announced the stable release of its free and encrypted file sharing service Firefox Send. Learn more about it.
Imagine you went to a social gathering your friends, family or colleagues. You took a bunch of photos and now everyone is asking you to share those photos. What are your options?
You can share photos via WhatsApp but they will be compressed. Sharing the photos as document (to preserve quality) might confuse people.
You can copy everything to a USB key and give the USB to others. This is so ‘early 21st century’ and with a risk of not getting your USB key back.
Over the past year, the Fission MemShrink project has been working tirelessly to reduce the memory overhead of Firefox. The goal is to allow us to start spinning up more processes while still maintaining a reasonable memory footprint. I’m happy to announce that we’ve seen the fruits of this labor: as of version 66 we’re doubling the default number of content processes from 4 to 8.
Doubling the number of content processes is the logical extension of the e10s-multi project. Back when that project wrapped up we chose to limit the default number of processes to 4 in order to balance the benefits of multiple content processes — fewer crashes, better site isolation, improved performance when loading multiple pages — with the impact on memory usage for our users.
Our telemetry has looked really good: if we compare beta 59 (roughly when this project started) with beta 66, where we decided to let the increase be shipped to our regular users, we see a virtually unchanged total memory usage for our 25th, median, and 75th percentile and a modest 9% increase for the 95th percentile on Windows 64-bit.
We access the web on all sorts of devices from our laptop to our phone to our tablets. And we need our passwords everywhere to log into an account. This is why we made Firefox Lockbox, a way to securely track your Firefox passwords and access them anywhere.
After getting a soft launch last year, Mozilla has officially launched the Firefox Lite Android version at an event in India.
Additionally, Mozilla has collaborated with various companies such as Times Internet, DB Digital and MoMagic to enhance its presence in India.
[...]
For those who don’t know, Firefox Lite is now available in 15 markets in Asia including Bangladesh, Brunei, Cambodia, China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Singapore, Thailand, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Vietnam.
Lite-er versions of apps have been quite prevalent in developing countries such as India, where such apps prove apt for low-end smartphones catering to tier 2 and tier 3 segments, which could also prove beneficial for Mozilla.
In the early 1990s, a young man named Marc Andreessen was working on his bachelor’s degree in computer science at the University of Illinois. While there, he started working for the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. During that time Sir Tim Berners-Lee released an early form of the web standards that we know today. Marc was introduced to a very primitive web browser named ViolaWWW. Seeing that the technology had potential, Marc and Eric Bina created an easy to install browser for Unix named NCSA Mosaic). The first alpha was released in June 1993. By September, there were ports to Windows and Macintosh. Mosaic became very popular because it was easier to use than other browsing software.
In 1994, Marc graduated and moved to California. He was approached by Jim Clark, who had made his money selling computer hardware and software. Clark had used Mosaic and saw the financial possibilities of the internet. Clark recruited Marc and Eric to start an internet software company. The company was originally named Mosaic Communications Corporation, however, the University of Illinois did not like their use of the name Mosaic. As a result, the company name was changed to Netscape Communications Corporation.
The company’s first project was an online gaming network for the Nintendo 64, but that fell through. The first product they released was a web browser named Mosaic Netscape 0.9, subsequently renamed Netscape Navigator. Internally, the browser project was codenamed mozilla, which stood for “Mosaic killer”. An employee created a cartoon of a Godzilla like creature. They wanted to take out the competition.
We have covered several file sharing applications over time with apps like Wormhole, EasyJoin, and Android File Transfer For Linux. Today, we introduce you to Firefox’s recently released file sharing service, Firefox Send.
Firefox Send is a free, encrypted file sharing service that enables you to privately share files up to 1GB (and files up to 2GB using a Firefox account) with privileged parties. How does it work? Upload the files that you want to share and send the link to the recipients who just have to click the download button.
Send uses end-to-end encryption coupled with an extra layer of security that you can advantage of by password-protecting the links. That way, people who are able to access the download link will not be able to use.
Key quote: "We continue to believe that the SSPL complies with the Open Source Definition and the four essential software freedoms. However, based on its reception by the members of this list and the greater open source community, the community consensus required to support OSI approval does not currently appear to exist regarding the copyleft provision of SSPL. Thus, in order to be respectful of the time and efforts of the OSI board and this list’s members, we are hereby withdrawing the SSPL from OSI consideration."
Open source hardware is hardware that is, well, open source. The Open Source Hardware Association maintains a formal definition of open source hardware, but fundamentally, open source hardware is about two types of freedom. The first is freedom of information: Does a user have the information required to understand, replicate, and build upon the hardware? The second is freedom from legal barriers: Will legal barriers (such as intellectual property rights) prevent a user who is trying to understand, replicate, and build upon the hardware from doing so? True open source hardware is open to everyone to do with as they see fit.
Intel and RISC-V backers announced rival alliances to nurture competing ecosystems around tomorrow’s processors.
In the previous article, we started our discussion about how to do natural language processing with Python. We saw how to read and write text and PDF files. In this article, we will start working with the spaCy library to perform a few more basic NLP tasks such as tokenization, stemming and lemmatization.
Yes, it’s that time again! You can improve your C++ skills with the help of LibreOffice developers: we’re running regular workshops which focus on a specific topic, and are accompanied by a real-time IRC meeting. For the next one, the topics are Classes and Arrays. Start by watching this presentation:
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Always wanted to contribute to open-source projects but didn't know where to start? Every week we highlight some tasks from the Rust community for you to pick and get started!
In this chapter we will continue to develop our Forex and Stock application. We have created a method to retrieve and plot the stock value vs time interval on a graph in the previous chapter and in this chapter we will create a combo box and populate it with the stock symbols so a user can select any stock he wishes to plot before calling the plot stock exchange method again.
In this chapter we will edit the main file of the pygame project so when we click on the ?x? button on the top right of the game window during the game stage or we click on the exit button on the main menu page, the current game level will be saved and the game will exit. The position of the exit button on the start scene class remains unchanged so the only file we need to edit is the main file where we will create an exit button rectangle which will be used to determine whether the exit button has been clicked or not, if so then the game will exit. Or else if the ?x? button has been clicked then the game will exit as well.
When you’re writing robust code, tests are essential for verifying that your application logic is correct, reliable, and efficient. However, the value of your tests depends on how well they demonstrate these criteria. Obstacles such as complex logic and unpredictable dependencies make writing valuable tests difficult. The Python mock object library, unittest.mock, can help you overcome these obstacles.
The Python Software Foundation (PSF) and PSF Packaging Working Group are excited to announce that the first round of slated improvements to PyPI for 2019 are underway. This Open Technology Fund funded project will bring improvements to the accessibility and security of the service. You can read more about the scope of this project in our request for proposals document.
What's it like to be a beginner in software development? How about learning Python for the first time? This episode is a special panel episode and is the first of a two-part series we are doing on the podcast called Beginners and Experts.
Comparing things in Python. That sounds like something that almost doesn’t even need to be taught. But I’ve found that Python’s comparison operators are often misunderstood and under-appreciated by newer Pythonistas.
Let’s review how Python’s comparison operators work on different types of objects and then take a look at how we can use this to improve the readability of our code.
When I was first starting out as a sysadmin and I wanted to know what it took to get promoted, one of the things that I was told was that I needed to know the BASH utilities such as AWK. I am not sure that AWK is actually a utility, it was originally intended to be a data-driven programming language when Alfred Aho, Peter Weinberger and Brian Kernighan wrote it at Bell Labs. The name comes from the initials of their last names in fact, but the program that we use in BASH on Linux is (G)AWK or Gnu AWK and there are many derivatives.
Up until now, in this C programming tutorial series, we have discussed about basic things like functions, arrays, variables, and more. Continuing with the flow, in this tutorial, we will discuss another such basic concept: operators.
In simple terms, System Administration refers to the management of hardware and software systems. Some of the major tasks performed by a system administrator include adding and removing hardware, installing operating systems, creating, managing and removing users and groups, installing, upgrading and removing software, performing backups and monitoring the system.
A system administrator is also responsible for troubleshooting, documentation and, importantly securing a system. On the other hand, programming is concerned with writing scripts, programs to developing user applications or software.
Does a Linux system administrator need programming skills? In this article, we will elaborate on answer to this question. We will explain why learning programming concepts are significant for Linux system administration.
This article is specifically prepared for Linux users aspiring to become professional sysadmins (from now on referring to system administrators).
It first hit me many years ago, when I was building an app (in Objective-C) that imported a list of people from an user’s address book and social media graph, and filtered out duplicates. In certain situations, I would see the same person added twice because the names wouldn’t compare as equal strings.
In fact, while the two strings above look identical on screen, the way they’re represented on disk, the bytes saved in the file, are different. In the first “Zoë”, the ë character (e with umlaut) was represented a single Unicode code point, while in the second case it was in the decomposed form. If you’re dealing with Unicode strings in your application, you need to take into account that characters could be represented in multiple ways.
In recognition of Women’s History Month, we’re honoring a few notable women with careers tied to ocean science. While this list is by no means comprehensive, it pays homage to some of the women who defied social convention and paved the way for scientists, regardless of their gender, to protect, study, and explore the ocean and ocean life.
Thirty-six beagles are in danger of being euthanized at the end of a pesticide test by Dow AgroSciences, the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) revealed Tuesday.
The beagles' potential fate was only one of several shocking revelations uncovered by an almost 100-day HSUS investigation into the testing of beagles and hounds at Charles River Laboratories in Michigan.
There are more than 60,000 dogs used annually in experiments at hundreds of labs across the country
Today, the Trump Administration unveiled their 4.75 Trillion dollar budget proposal, and it’s chock full of that signature brand of waste, fraud, and abuse Trump pledged to eliminate on the campaign trail.
It’s easy to get distracted by the President’s more outlandish scandals and statements, but his budget proposal is actually far more insidious.
This budget would be the U.S government’s largest ever, which wouldn’t be a problem if it weren’t also such a morally bankrupt document.
It contains a 5% increase in defense spending the Pentagon has not requested and 8.6 billion for a border wall. Oh, and don’t forget he has to account for massive corporate tax cuts that made it possible for health insurance giants to avoid paying any federal taxes in 2018.
You can guess what he cut to offset those costs: a jaw-dropping $1.1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid and Medicare over the next decade.
If that proposal is approved, citrus growers could spray more than 650,000 pounds of the antibiotic streptomycin on citrus fields every year to treat the bacteria that causes citrus greening disease. Streptomycin belongs to a class of antibiotics considered critically important to human health by the World Health Organization. By contrast, people in America only use 14,000 pounds of that antibiotic class each year.
"The more you use antibiotics, the greater the risk that bacteria resistant to the drugs will flourish and spread. The bottom line is that the potential problems created by spraying massive amounts of streptomycin on citrus fields could outweigh the original problem the EPA wants to solve," said Matt Wellington, U.S. PIRG's Stop the Overuse of Antibiotics campaign director.
Senate Republicans recently voted to confirm former coal lobbyist Andrew Wheeler as the permanent administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Though tasked with protecting Americans’ health and environment, Wheeler is instead attempting to force through a deadly plan to weaken lifesaving protections from mercury pollution.
Mercury is poison, and Wheeler’s scheme is a poison plan.
Mercury is a potent neurotoxin that can cause permanent brain damage to infants and children exposed to mercury in the womb, including long-term impacts on their memory, cognitive functioning, language and fine motor skills. Wheeler’s proposal would undermine lifesaving safeguards that are effectively limiting the amount of mercury pollution from power plants. By pursuing this deadly agenda, he is jeopardizing the health and well-being of millions of Americans.
As a mother, I am grateful that I brought two healthy sons into the world. While I was expecting, I made sure to follow my doctor’s instructions — eating balanced meals, drinking plenty of water, getting enough rest, avoiding alcohol and even over-the-counter medications. I wanted to be sure to give these little ones the best chance to thrive both before and after they were born.
On our mailing list this week Holger Levsen explained why Debian Buster will only be 54% reproducible (in short: due to Debian bugs #894441 and #900837). There was some follow-up discussion on Reddit and Hacker News.
Ghidra is a reverse engineering tool, written in Java, that was recently open-sourced by the National Security Agency (NSA). You can find the Github page here and the download link here. Once downloaded you will need to depackage (dpkg) the Debian file. We have installed it on our Kali Linux box to complement the tools
It seems to me that there is a fairly easy solution to verify the author of an email: sign it with a digital signature. Either S/MIME or PGP will do. I don’t even care about encryption here, just signing to prevent phishing.
One of the lessons from our recent visit to Iran as a Peace Delegation is that Iran is a mature country. It is 2,500 years old, ten times as old as the United States and one of the world’s oldest continuous major civilizations with settlements dating back to 7,000 BC. It was an empire that controlled almost half the Earth for over 1,000 years. It is hard not to see the US-Iran relationship as one between an adolescent bully and a mature nation.
The root cause of the problems between the United States and Iran is not because Iran has oil, an Islamic government, nuclear weapons or Iran’s role in the Middle East — it is because in 1979, Iran ended 26 years of US domination. Foreign Minister Zarif explained to our Peace Delegation:
“…the U.S. difficulty with Iran is not because of the region, not because of human rights, not because of weapons, not because of the nuclear issue – it’s just because we decided to be independent – that’s it – that’s our biggest crime.”
Since the 1979 Revolution, the US has sought to dominate Iran using sanctions and threats of military aggression. Iran has responded by seeking negotiation with the US. The Iran Nuclear Agreement (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, JCPOA), which took over ten years to finalize, was viewed by Dr. Zarif as a first step toward more agreements.
Indian nationalists are quick to claim their intractable hold on Kashmiris; Pakistani nationalists are just as quick to claim to speak for Kashmiris. Kashmir, despite having a real internal history and a place in the world, is suppressed by its positioning in the Indo-Pak conflict.
[...]
In one of my favorite novels, Shadow Lines, the author, Amitav Ghosh, shows that the nation is rendered all the more threatening when the war that leads to its construction is internecine and does not bind Muslim to Hindu or Bengali to Kashmiri but rather sunders Bengali from Bengali, Kashmiri from Kashmiri. Such an irregular was polarizes ethnic groups into Hindus and Muslims who are required to disaffirm their cultural, linguistic, and social unities.
As one of the characters in Ghosh’s novel wonders, “And then I think to myself why can’t they draw thousands of little lines through the whole subcontinent and give every little place a new name? What would it change? It’s a mirage; the whole thing is a mirage. How can anyone deny a memory?” (247).
The Partition is a vivid manifestation of the claim that postcolonial nations are founded in a bloody severance of the umbilical cord, one that fortifies borders between nation-states with irrational and remorseless violence. The discourse of ultra-right wing nationalism, however, affects to make sense of the absurd loss of lives.
America’s full-spectrum campaign against Chinese tech leader Huawei is coming spectacularly undone. Curtains are imminent for Washington’s tawdriest global offensive in recent memory – featuring open extortion, kidnapping, demonization and intimidation of both friends and foes.
The signs were apparent as early as two months ago, when many governments worldwide lukewarmly greeted US calls for a boycott of Huawei’s products and services. But explicit refusals in the past week by staunch American allies Germany, Britain and New Zealand, as well as NATO member Turkey, have all but sealed the deal. After all, hardly any country outside the US-dominated Empire is signing on.
Even 61% of CNN viewers thought the crackdown was motivated by politics, against 24% who believe Washington’s line on “protecting national security.” All that apparently persuaded POTUS Trump to tweet about winning the tech race with China “through competition, not by blocking out currently more advanced technologies.”
Washington’s stunning defeat stems from US leaders’ hidebound hubris, their utter inability to conceive of a world in which their country was no longer No. 1 in everything significant. Such navel-gazing put them to sleep, oblivious that history has marched past them in the form of China’s Huawei Technologies. The simple fact is – as Huawei boss Ren Zhengfei has been saying – the Chinese firm is far ahead of everyone else in the development of 5G. Any nation that doesn’t want to be left behind rolling out the game-changing, next-generation communications technology has little choice but to do business with Huawei. Moreover, without fanfare the company has taken a leading role in shaping the very rules of 5G, on a global basis. Like China itself, Huawei simply cannot be contained.
On October 29, 2018, a Boeing 737 Max 8 belonging to Lion Air in Indonesia crashed into the Java Sea 12 minutes after take-off. All 189 passengers and crew members were killed instantly. It is extremely unusual for planes to suffer such accidents in clear weather after having reached their cruising altitude. Flight experts concluded that the pilots were not adequately trained in the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS), a robotics technology that lowers the nose of a plane to prevent a stall. Although there is no definitive judgement on exactly what happened, it appears to be a combination of inadequate training for the pilots and a malfunctioning MCAS.
On Sunday, another 737 Max 8 owned by Ethiopian Airlines had the same kind of accident resulting in the death of 157 passengers and crew members. In the aftermath of the tragedy, this has led to Australia, China, Germany, France, Indonesia, Ireland, Malaysia, Singapore, and the United Kingdom grounding the planes.
Looking at these two horrible tragedies that will make me think twice about getting on a plane again, I keep thinking of the title of Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s classic “Chronicle of a Death Foretold”. In essence, the use of MCAS is akin to an experimental, driverless car owned by Uber killing a pedestrian who was jaywalking on a dark road in Tempe, Arizona on May 18, 2018. The back-up driver, who was supposed to keep a sharp eye on the road to prevent such an accident, was watching reruns of the reality TV show “The Voice” at the time.
The tragic Ethiopian Airline plane crash recalls another passenger plane crash some 30 years ago. The latter, however, was not due to a mechanical malfunction but to U.S. missiles. And while very few Americans remember this incident, it still weighs heavy on the hearts of many Iranians--as we discovered on our recent trip there.
The tragic downing of the commercial passenger airline, Iran Air Flight 655, happened on July 3, 1988. A U.S. Navy ship called the Vincennes was stationed in the Persian Gulf to protect oil trade routes. The plane had just taken off from nearby Bandar Abbas International Airport in southern Iran when U.S. personnel on the warship fired two surface-to-air missiles. The flight was still in Iranian airspace, climbing on its regularly scheduled flight to Dubai, when it was hit. The plane disintegrated immediately and crashed into the water, killing all 290 onboard--274 passengers and 16 crew members.
According to the U.S. government, this was an accident: the crew thought the Iranian Airbus A300 was an attacking F-14 Tomcat fighter jet.
I called Boeing’s office in Washington, D.C. about the new Boeing 737 MAX 8 crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia, with over 300 fatalities, to give them some advice.
Consumer advocate Ralph Nader believes Boeing should ground its fleet of 737 Max 8 airplanes.
The message comes as the world struggles to understand what happened to Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, which crashed Sunday, March 10, killing 157. The accident came just four months after the crash of Indonesian Lion Air Flight 610 in October—also a 737 Max 8.
Nader's grand-niece, Samya Stumo, died in the crash. The Sheffield, Mass., native was an employee of education publisher ThinkWell and was ultimately headed to Uganda for work.
In an open letter to Boeing executives published Wednesday, Nader said that the airplane manufacturer was behaving as a company "used to having its way" and not in the interests of American lives.
"Stop digging in your heels," Nader wrote. "Tell the airlines to stop digging in their heels."
In response to the Ethiopian Airlines disaster, most countries across the world grounded the planes. The European Union shut down flights by the plane, taking down a fleet that makes up two thirds of the total number of planes in use. The U.S. stands almost alone in its continued use of the 737 Max 8.
Calls are growing for the United States to ground all Boeing 737 MAX 8 planes in the wake of a devastating plane crash in Ethiopia Sunday that left 157 people dead. It is the aircraft model’s second fatal crash in the past five months. An Indonesian flight of the same plane type crashed last October, killing 189 people. In response, two-thirds of the 737 MAX 8s have been pulled from service. At least 41 countries across the globe, from China to Turkey to India, have grounded their fleets of the aircraft until a thorough safety review is conducted. Despite international outcry, the United States and Canada are continuing business as usual. We speak with Ralph Nader, longtime consumer advocate, corporate critic and former presidential candidate. His great-niece, Samya Stumo, died on Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302. Nader wrote an open letter to Boeing titled “Passengers First, Ground the 737 MAX 8 Now!” And we speak with William McGee, aviation journalist for Consumer Reports. He is the author of “Attention All Passengers: The Airlines’ Dangerous Descent.”
Pilots repeatedly voiced safety concerns about the Boeing 737 Max 8 to federal authorities, with one captain calling the flight manual "inadequate and almost criminally insufficient" several months before Sunday's Ethiopian Air crash that killed 157 people, an investigation by The Dallas Morning News found. The News found five complaints about the Boeing model in a federal database where pilots can voluntarily report about aviation incidents without fear of repercussions. The complaints are about the safety mechanism cited in preliminary reports about an October Boeing 737 Max 8 crash in Indonesia that killed 189.
You don’t seem to see the writing on the Wall. Your Boeing 737 MAX 8 is being grounded by more and more countries and foreign airlines. Airline passengers in the U.S. are switching away their reservations on this plane and there are signs of an organized boycott of this aircraft which is used by the major U.S. airlines.
It is only a matter of time before the bereaved families organize, before members of Congress start forcefully speaking out, as Senators Ed Markey and Richard Blumenthal just did. Both Senators are on the Senate’s Aviation Subcommittee.
Soon the technical dissenters in the reported “heated discussions” with FAA, the airline industry, the pilot unions and your company will see some internal e-mails, memos, and whistleblowers go public. Technical dissent cannot be repressed indefinitely.
Your own lawyers should be counselling you that Boeing is on public notice and that, heaven forbid, a Boeing 737 MAX 8 crash in this country, the arrogance of your algorithms overpowering the pilots, can move law enforcement to investigate potential personal criminal negligence.
Clearly, you run a company used to having its way. Used to having a patsy FAA, with its “tombstone mentality,” used to delaying airworthiness directives that should be put out immediately, and not diluted and delayed, used to getting free government R&D and used to avoiding state and federal taxes.
Stop digging in your heels. Tell the airlines to stop digging in their heels. Public trust in your Boeing 737 MAX 8 is eroding fast. Get ahead of the curve that is surely heading your way.
You see the Boeing 737 MAX 8 as being a large part of your passenger aircraft business. You’ve delivered over 300 planes and reportedly have over 3000 orders. Over the years, your engineers have solved many technical problems brilliantly. The domestic safety record of the major airlines, using your equipment, has been very commendable for more than a decade. A lot of the credit goes to Boeing as well as to the airline pilots, flight attendants, traffic controllers, and mechanics.
Representative Tulsi Gabbard has made reforming United States foreign policy, particularly ending what she calls “regime change wars” and the “new Cold War and nuclear arms race,” central to her 2020 presidential campaign. She is virtually the only presidential candidate warning of the specter of nuclear war.
At a CNN town hall at South By Southwest on March 10, Gabbard contended, “We are in a situation today where we, here in the United States and the world, are at a greater risk of nuclear catastrophe than ever before in history.”
“My commitment in fighting to end these counterproductive regime change wars is based on these experiences and my understanding [of] the cost of war and who pays the price,” Gabbard added. “Yes, it is our service members. It is our troops. It is our military families. It is the people in these countries, where these wars are waged, whose suffering ends up far worse after we launch these regime change wars.”
Yet, the establishment news media is largely uninterested in listening to Gabbard attempt to persuade voters that the U.S. should quit waging wars to overthrow governments. They hear Gabbard’s statements and think if the U.S. pursued an anti-interventionist foreign policy then dictators would be free to commit crimes against humanity and repress their people without any consequences.
Gabbard, an Iraq War veteran, could be an effective messenger for anti-interventionist policies. She was deployed in a war based on lies. So, to obstruct her from gaining supporters, the pundit class obsesses over a meeting Gabbard had with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in January 2017.
Give Chagos back to the Chagossians! That’s a slogan I first heard in 2000. It was a demonstration in London, outside a courthouse, a small group of people with handmade signs appealing to the British legal system to return their islands to them. Few people paid them any attention. The courts sided with the islanders (whose case is unimpeachable) and then did nothing to enforce their verdict.
The Chagos Archipelago is a group of 60 islands in the Indian Ocean. These islands are claimed by Mauritius, a country that won its independence from the United Kingdom in 1968. Three years before the independence of Mauritius, the British separated the Chagos Archipelago and converted it into the British Indian Ocean Territory. To cement its control over the islands, the British expelled over 2,000 Chagossians. Some of these Chagossians stood in London, fighting for their lost islands.
At the end of February, the UN’s International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that the UK must give the islands back to Mauritius. In 2017, the UN General Assembly had heard the case of the islanders and referred it to the ICJ. Now, the ICJ—with a 13 to 1 ruling (the U.S. voting against)—has sided with the Chagossians. But this is not a binding ruling, and the British government has said it would ignore the International Court of Justice.
Blindly backing Israel has become an article of faith, a civic religion even, for mainstream American politicians. Rarely do any dare publicly question the costs and benefits of this decades-old relationship. Such hesitancy is understandable. After all, to criticize Israeli policy, however mildly, is to risk near certain rebuke and reflexive charges of anti-semitism. Denouncing Israel’s current right-wing government or its ongoing, half-century-long occupation of Palestinian Territories is all risk and no reward – it’s a potential career-ender or, at least, a ticket to the margins of polite political discourse. Israel/Palestine is, as I’ve long said, the veritable "third-rail" of U.S. foreign policy debate.
Nonetheless, regarding the U.S.-Israel nexus, the time is now for reassessment and realignment. For far too long, Washington’s bipartisan, reflexive backing of Israel has damaged America’s good name on the Arab (or Muslim) "street," and inflicted substantial strategic costs in the Greater Middle East. As President Trump, ostensibly, gears up to withdraw the US military from a series of regional quagmires, he should simultaneously address one root of America’s long-term "beef" with average Muslims – Washington’s no-strings-attached support for Israel.
He won’t, naturally. Though Trump sometimes displays admirable instincts to ditch military liabilities in the Mideast, he has only ratcheted up America’s iron-alliance with Israel. In a staggering, and internationally isolated, move, he even moved the US embassy to Israel into the heart of Jerusalem – recognizing the contested city as the singular capital of the Jewish state. Look, Israel – like our other nefarious frenemy, Saudi Arabia – buys tons of American weapons, and Trump-the-businessman absolutely loves that. Besides, Trump and (recently indicted) Prime Minister Netanyahu are political peas in a pod – both face potential corruption charges and rely on fear-mongering to whip up support from their right wing bases.
In an executive order last week, President Trump ended a requirement for the government to tell the public its official count of civilians killed by U.S. military and CIA lethal strikes in countries where we are not at war. The effect is that our government will continue killing people abroad with less oversight and no accountability.
The reporting requirement, put in place by President Barack Obama, had many shortcomings, but it was still valuable. We know, for example, that the government says 64 to 116 civilians were killed by strikes in noncombat zones between 2011 and 2015, though credible media and human rights groups say the actual number is likely much higher. Trump has now also ended the government’s commitment to explaining these discrepancies.
The Trump administration justified its decision to end such reporting by arguing that transparency reports are duplicative because the military is required to issue similar reports. But that’s not completely true, as military figures won’t include civilian deaths from CIA strikes.
Some in Congress reacted with alarm to Trump’s order, and Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) announced that he will seek to reimpose the transparency requirement with legislation. This is a necessary step but only an initial one, because this country desperately needs to reckon with and seek an end to the president’s claimed unilateral authority to kill terrorism suspects in parts of the world where we are not at war.
Proponents argue that these airstrikes reduce risk to U.S. forces and keep the United States from being drawn into actual or worsening wars. But without public accountability about the costs and consequences of the program, we can’t take that at face value. Nor can we accept an equation that minimizes the deaths of civilians or ignores perspectives from people in affected countries.
"The start of this looming purge represents an unprecedented step backward in the social and civil progress of our country and our military," Harper Jean Tobin, director of policy for the National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE), said in a statement.
President Donald Trump initially announced a ban on trans troops with a series of tweets in 2017—signaling his intention to reverse a policy implemented under former President Barack Obama in 2016 that was praised by much of the LGBTQ community.
Trump's attempts to expel trans people from service and block them from enlisting sparked legal challenges, but in January, the U.S. Supreme Court's right-wing majority gave the green light for the administration to pursue its "bigoted" and "cruel" effort while fights in court continue.
"The Trump administration is built on demonizing minority groups; reversing the civil rights gains of immigrants, people of color, women, and the LGBTQ movement will forever remain the hallmarks of their time in office," Tobin said, calling on Congress to block the policy.
Aaron Belkin is the director of the Palm Center, a think tank that has conducted research on trans people serving in the military. With these rules, he said, "the Trump administration has chosen prejudice and politics over the truth of open service as revealed by the testimonies of dozens of medical and military leaders and the service and sacrifice of 14,700 transgender service members."
Despite ongoing litigation, the second-in-command at the Defense Department signed off on a memo (pdf) detailing the administration's official rules. As of April 12, transgender service members and new applicants only can serve under their "biological sex," effectively forcing them to conceal their gender identity or leave the military.
Two individuals involved in a violent attack on the North Korean embassy in Madrid have reportedly been linked by Spanish authorities to the CIA.
According to the Spanish newspaper El País, which first reported the findings of Madrid investigators, "two of the 10 assailants who broke into the embassy and interrogated diplomatic staff have been identified and have connections to the U.S. intelligence agency."
"Sources believe that the goal of the attack on the North Korean embassy was to get information on Kim Hyok Chol, the former North Korean ambassador to Spain," El País reported on Wednesday.
The CIA has denied involvement in the attack. But, Spanish government sources told El País that the agency's story was "unconvincing."
The attack on the North Korean embassy occurred on Feb. 22, just days before U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un met for a summit in Hanoi.
According to reporting from the BBC, ten masked men broke into the embassy in the middle of the afternoon and took at least eight staffers hostage. One woman was eventually able to climb out of a second-story window and contact Spanish police.
None of the individuals believed to have been involved in the attack have been apprehended.
“What is terrorism, and who is a terrorist?” the New York Times (3/7/19) asked in a recent report on the hindering of peace negotiations between the United States government and the Taliban in Afghanistan—without suggesting any possible answers to these questions. When the headline of a story literally includes the phrase “Big Question: What Is Terrorism?” you might think it would offer at least one plausible definition proposed by any party or individual involved in these discussions. But not a single definition is suggested by anyone in the report, written by Mujib Mashal.
This isn’t the first time in the Times’ propagandistic coverage of the War on Terror that the paper has raised the question without attempting to answer it; a 2005 piece (8/14/05) whose headline included the big question, “What Is Terrorism?,” also didn’t propose any definitions either.
In its recent story, the Times reported that the current snag in negotiations has to do with US negotiators insisting that the Taliban promise not to allow Afghanistan to be used by terrorist groups (implying that the Taliban should promise to abolish itself, since the Times also mentions that US leaders like Secretary of State Mike Pompeo consider the Taliban to be a terrorist group). The Taliban is reportedly balking, “saying there was no universal definition of terrorism,” but would promise not to allow Afghanistan to be used as a launching pad for international attacks.
"This is historic. For the first time in 45 years, Congress is one step closer to withdrawing U.S. forces from an unauthorized war," Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), the lead sponsor of the resolution, declared following the vote. "We must end the war in Yemen."
Kate Gould, legislative director for Middle East policy at the Friends Committee on National Legislation, applauded the grassroots activists who have been working tirelessly to end America's disastrous role in Yemen.
"The Senate has now taken a decisive step in ending the American facilitation of the Yemen war and the world’s largest humanitarian crises," Gould said. "Millions of grassroots activists, who helped make this vote a reality, want their lawmakers to end this unconscionable war."
Passage of the resolution comes as the Saudis continue to launch deadly airstrikes in Yemen with U.S. backing, worsening a crisis that has already resulted in mass suffering and tens of thousands of deaths. Earlier this week, dozens of civilians—including women and young children—were killed by Saudi airstrikes in Yemen's Kushar district.
According to the United Nations, 14 million Yemenis could soon be on the brink of starvation if the bombing continues. Save the Children, a London-based human rights organization, estimated in a report last November that 85,000 Yemenis under the age of five have starved to death since the Saudi-led coalition began bombing the country.
As the Senate headed toward a crucial vote to end U.S. support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen Wednesday, peace action groups called on Americans to keep up pressure on their representatives, demanding they vote to approve the War Powers Resolution and end the nation's complicity in the slaughter.
On Tuesday, Win Without War was among the groups pushing for passage of Senate Joint Resolution 7 (S.J. Res. 7) Wednesday, calling the vote a "a historic chance to take a stand" against U.S. support for a war which has, according to some estimates, killed as many as 80,000 civilians.
At least two of the 10 assailants who broke into the embassy and interrogated diplomatic staff have been identified and have connections to the US intelligence agency. The CIA has denied any involvement but government sources say their response was “unconvincing.”
If it is proven that the CIA was behind the attack, it could lead to a diplomatic spat between Madrid and Washington. Government sources say that it would be “unacceptable” for an ally to take such action. Not only would it mean that the US agency had operated on Spanish soil without asking for authorization or informing the authorities, it would also be a violation of the international conventions that protect diplomatic delegations.
What’s more, unlike other intelligence activities – such as cyberattacks, which are characterized by their discretion, the attack on the North Korean embassy was especially violent. On February 22 at 3pm, 10 masked men carrying alleged imitation weapons broke into the embassy, located north of the capital in the residential area of Aravaca. They tied up the eight people inside and put bags on their heads. The victims were beaten and interrogated. A woman managed to escape from a window on the second floor and her screams for help were heard by a neighbor, who contacted the police.
The United States is pushing for an overthrow of the government of Venezuela. The Trump administration has denounced Nicolas Maduro as a “dictator,” dismissing the 2018 election, which the opposition boycotted. Instead of a good neighbor policy or a policy of non-intervention, the Trump administration has set out intentionally to overthrow the regime.
Long before Trump, the United States was a bitter opponent of the Hugo Chavez regime. The fact that Chavez was wildly popular and freely elected made no difference. He represented a revolution that embraced Fidel Castro’s Cuba and implemented plans to redistribute wealth and empower the poor. In 2002, when the Venezuelan military moved to overthrow Chavez, an official in the Bush administration reportedly met with the coup leaders. The coup attempt was frustrated, however, when Venezuelans rose up in mass against the plotters.
Now with Chavez gone, the current president Nicolas Maduro unpopular, the economy a mess — in significant degree because the price of oil is near record lows — the Trump administration is apparently orchestrating another attempt.
It has continued to ratchet up pressure. It has imposed brutal sanctions on Venezuela, making a bad situation far worse, all the while blaming the government for the misery. Trump has openly threatened a “military option” for Venezuela. His bellicose national security adviser, John Bolton, boasted that “The troika of tyranny in this hemisphere — Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua — has finally met its match.”
“I will not comply with this, or any other grand jury.” So explained Chelsea Manning in justifying her refusal to answer questions and comply with a grand jury subpoena compelling her to testify on her knowledge of WikiLeaks. “Imprisoning me for my refusal to answer questions only subjects me to additional punishment for my repeatedly stated ethical obligations to the grand jury system.”
Manning, whose 35-year sentence was commuted by the Obama administration in an act of seeming leniency, is indivisibly linked to the WikiLeaks legacy of disclosure. She was the source, and the bridge, indispensable for giving Julian Assange and his publishing outfit the gold dust that made names and despoiled others.
The sense of dredging and re-dredging in efforts to ensnare Manning is palpable. She insists that she had shared all that she knew at her court-martial, a point made clear by the extensive if convoluted nature of the prosecution’s effort to build a case. “The grand jury’s questions pertained to disclosures from nine years ago, and took place six years after an in-depth computer forensics case, in which I tesified [sic] for almost a full day about these events. I stand by my previous testimony.” Before Friday’s hearing, she also reiterated that she had invoked the First, Fourth and Sixth Amendment protections.
Grand juries have gone musty. Conceived in 12thcentury England as a feudalistic guardian against unfair prosecution, they became bodies of self-regulating and policing freemen (often barons with a gripe) charged with investigating alleged wrongdoing. Doing so provided a preliminary step in recommending whether the accused needed to go court. The US Constitution retains this element with the Fifth Amendment: that no “person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury.”
A trio of free-speech groups urged a U.S. judge to dismiss a lawsuit filed against WikiLeaks by the Democratic National Committee over the disclosure of private DNC information, arguing that published material -- even if acquired illegally -- is protected by the First Amendment.
The suit, filed by the DNC last April, accuses Russian intelligence of hacking into computers, penetrating its telephone systems, gaining access to tens of thousands of documents and emails and releasing them through WikiLeaks and other methods. The DNC also alleged that President Donald Trump’s campaign organization conspired with WikiLeaks, a claim Trump has denied.
[...]
The groups said the Supreme Court has protected publications of "truthful information of public concern" in a series of cases over the last 50 years, including information that was published even after it was illegally acquired -- as long as the publisher wasn’t involved in the unlawful collection of the material.
"The press has relied on this protection to report on major stories -- ranging from the Pentagon Papers to the Panama Papers -- that inform the public and hold the powerful to account," the groups said in their filing. "A ruling that narrowed this protection could jeopardize the well-established legal framework that has made much more important investigative and national-security journalism possible."
The First Amendment protects Wikileaks from being sued over the release of the DNC’s hacked emails. In the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election, the Democratic National Committee was hacked, and thousands of its emails and other private documents were stolen. Those documents were eventually released to the public through a website run by “Guccifer 2.0” (an online persona allegedly maintained by the Russian government) and through WikiLeaks. Early last year, the DNC sued those it believes are responsible for the hack, including the Trump campaign and Russian officials.
The DNC also sued WikiLeaks and Julian Assange. In its complaint, the DNC alleges that WikiLeaks released the hacked documents and that WikiLeaks communicated with Guccifer 2.0 after the hack to obtain the documents and coordinate their release.
These allegations raise an important First Amendment question with weighty implications for freedom of the press.
On Wednesday, the ACLU, the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press filed a friend-of-the-court brief addressing that question — namely, whether an act of publication that would otherwise be protected by the First Amendment loses that protection simply because a source acquired the published information unlawfully.
The Southland is experiencing a rare sighting this week: About 1 billion butterflies swarming the skies during their migration from Mexico to the Pacific Northwest.
The Painted Ladies have been spotted from San Diego to Pasadena. Californians took to social media to share pictures of the orange, black and white insects.
“Everyone was posting about the butterflies all over Instagram,” one woman said. “I saw so many, it was kinda like a swarm of them. It was pretty insane.”
Scientists say the migration isn’t new, but they haven’t seen numbers like this in almost 15 years. The reason, scientists say, is because of the unusual amount of rain in Southern California recently. The butterflies now have plenty of flowers and leaves to feed on.
Last year, scientists feared a butterfly catastrophe as numbers of the magical insect took a nosedive. Researchers counted only 25,000 migrating Painted Ladies. This year, they estimated more than one billion.
“I think it’s really neat just because everyone can really see the effects of how much rain we’ve been getting,” another woman said.
A private contractor employed by the state of Massachusetts to conduct a statewide safety review of its gas distribution companies hired gas industry executives for the project, documents obtained by DeSmog show. They include two former executives of National Grid — one of the companies under review — and Enbridge, a main supplier of gas in the state.
One of the former National Grid executives was removed from the review once the state learned a family member of his currently works for the company.
News of the hires has activists, who have been pushing the state to address its aging and leaking gas system, on edge. “We're concerned that this assessment is led by a consultant that not only depends on the gas industry for its business, but also included two former National Grid executives and a former Enbridge executive,” said Debbie New of the group Mothers Out Front.
Voters in Exeter, New Hampshire, fearing the impact on their community from a planned pipeline project, declared Tuesday that their town's right to a safe and healthy climate trumps corporate profits.
"Our right to a healthy climate is an unalienable right," said Maura Fay, co-founder of the community group Citizen Action for Exeter's Environment (CAEE), in a statement. "Any new energy infrastructure in our town must align with that right. We live here, and what we envision for our community comes before what any project developer and state government envision if it threatens our rights."
Voters passed Article 30, the Right to a Healthy Climate Ordinance, by a vote of 1,176 to 1,007
When President Trump nominated long-time Koch network insider and renewable energy antagonist Daniel Simmons to lead the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), the administration's priorities for federal energy programs were made abundantly clear. Simmons had, after all, been serving at the time of his nomination as Vice President for Policy at a Koch-funded think tank that had, in 2015, called for the outright elimination of the very office he was tapped to lead.
The Trump administration budget proposal released this week, for fiscal year 2020, goes a long way toward delivering this wish to the Koch network, calling for a 70 percent reduction in funding for the EERE and scrapping entirely the Department of Energy’s loan programs. The EERE ultimately received $2.4 billion in the current 2019 budget, and the current Trump proposal would fund it at $696 million.
Beginning last August, a Swedish schoolgirl named Greta Thunberg went on strike from her classes, choosing instead to spend the days on the steps of the Parliament building in Stockholm. Her reasoning: If her government couldn’t be bothered to safeguard her future by taking action against climate change, it was a bit rich to demand that she spend her time preparing for a future that might not exist. Her protest soon spread across Scandinavia, Europe, Britain and Australia.
Hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren have now participated worldwide, and the protest has drawn some prominent support: German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on March 2, “I very much welcome that young people, school students, demonstrate and tell us to do something fast about climate change." But of course others have been less understanding. During climate demonstrations in Australia, the Prime Minister Scott Morrison said, “We do not support our schools being turned into parliaments. … What we want is more learning in schools and less activism in schools.”
"Without undercover investigations, there are no effective watchdogs protecting animals from egregious cruelty," Mercy For Animals president Leah Garcés told Common Dreams. "Consumers have a right to know how their food is produced and how animals at factory farms are mistreated."
The legislation would create a new crime called "agricultural production facility trespass," enabling state law enforcement to charge someone with a misdemeanor if they use "deception" to gain access to a facility "with the intent to cause physical or economic harm or other injury to the agricultural production facility's operations, agricultural animals, crop, owner, personnel, equipment, building, premises, business interest, or customer."
I hope one day to meet lion conservationist Shivani Bhalla, a sister in spirit who lives half a world away, in northern Kenya. We are featured in BBC’s global radio program “The Conversation,” where each episode features two women from different countries, who work in similar fields. The show airs as naturalist and filmmaker David Attenborough’s new series “Dynasties” debuts in America. This time the inimitable Attenborough brings the lives of lions, chimpanzees, tigers, painted wolves and emperor penguins into our living rooms and our hearts. Living among certain families or clans over a number of years, the crew was able to capture on film dramatic turning points in the lives of these animals of the sort that most of us will never see.
Dr. Shivani Bhalla is featured in the episode on African lions, a species that she has devoted her career to saving. I had not heard of her work or the new Attenborough series before receiving a call from the London-based BBC World Service radio producer exploring the possibility of bringing Shivani and me together by phone to share our experiences in large carnivore conservation. I don’t know much about lions and less about Kenya’s Samburu culture. Producing a podcast too has made me intimately familiar with the challenges of such an undertaking, and here I was vaulted to the top of the league. Both nervous and groggy at the ungodly early recording hour, I doubted my mind would connect to my mouth.
But as soon as we started to chat, my brain kicked in and the continents between Shivani, host Kim Chakanetsa and me vanished. For the next hour, I felt like I was having coffee with colleagues. The flow was interrupted only once when Kim chided Shivani for clapping – while my reaction was one of delight.
The challenges we face are uncannily similar: protected areas too small for the wide-ranging carnivores that depend on them, mounting human encroachment, and a warming climate. With extremely low birth rates, grizzlies and lions are at the mercy of humans like never before.
Sometimes the best solutions to energy problems – and to the fight against climate change – are the simple ones, like cocoa fuel.
Ghana is one of the world’s leading producers of cocoa – the vital ingredient in the multi-billion dollar international chocolate industry.
Cocoa beans are extracted from inside the pod husks of the cocoa tree. Husks are usually discarded during the production process.
Now, in a project led by specialists at the University of Nottingham in the UK, the plan is to use the husks as feedstock in bio-fuel energy installations.
“Ghana is the second highest producer of cocoa in the world and every ton of cocoa beans harvested generates 10 tons of cocoa pod husks”, says Jo Darkwa, professor of energy storage technologies at Nottingham and one of the people behind the Ghanaian project.
House Democrats, indigenous tribal leaders, and public land protection advocates all rebuked the Trump administration's downsizing of two national monuments Wednesday, arguing that President Donald Trump and former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke acted illegally by conducting what at least one critic called a "sham" review process.
The administration acted in the interest of pro-fossil fuel lawmakers, the oil and gas industry, and other monument opponents when they conducted a hasty review of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments in 2017, critics argued.
The United Nations Environment Programme's Sixth Global Environmental Outlook (GEO-6), described as the most rigorous climate assessment released by the international body in the last five years, warned that continued inaction from policy-makers could result in millions of premature deaths from air pollution and other factors throughout Asia, the Middle East, and Africa by mid-century.
The report also highlighted rapidly increasing rates of species extinction.
"At present," the authors note, "42 percent of terrestrial invertebrates, 34 percent of freshwater invertebrates, and 25 percent of marine invertebrates are considered at risk of extinction."
Without "urgent action at an unprecedented scale," the report said, the "ecological foundations of society" are at risk of collapse.
Joyeeta Gupta and Paul Ekins, co-chairs of the GEO-6 process, said in a statement that all the technology, policy ideas, and money needed to bring about ambitious global changes already exist.
"What is currently lacking is the political will to implement policies and technologies at a sufficient speed and scale," they said.
By the close of the century, parts of the Southern Ocean could become impoverished as more acidic seas displace abundant marine food resources. Tiny sea snails that form the basis of the food supply for one of the world’s richest ecosystems could disappear because the depth at which they can form their shells will have shifted.
Right now, in Antarctic waters, creatures known as pteropods can exploit the calcium carbonate dissolved in the oceans down to a depth of 1000 metres to grow their shells.
But as atmospheric carbon dioxide levels soar, as a consequence of profligate use of fossil fuels by humankind, the chemistry of the oceans will shift towards the acidic.
The ratios of two kinds of carbonate – calcite and aragonite – will alter. And by 2100, there won’t be enough aragonite.
I suppose we all owe UCLA economist and Hoover Institution senior fellow Lee Ohanian a debt of gratitude for telling us how it is. The “free market” propagandist recently took to the pages of The Hill, a Washington, D.C., journal for political insiders, to explain that the holy laws of economics dictate that humanity must consent to its own extermination. In a piece titled “The Green New Deal is a Pipe Dream,” Ohanian drowned climate activists’ overheated dreams of ecological salvation in the icy waters of bourgeois reality, arguing that the proposed legislation’s advocates are, in fact, nefarious, big-government “command-and-control” zealots—eco-Stalinists—who want “to impose their social and economic preferences on others at an extravagantly high economic cost.”
Ohanian described the Green New Deal’s goal of net-zero U.S. carbon emissions in 10 years as an “infeasible” aim that demonstrates a failure “to understand basic cost-benefit analysis.” If that weren’t enough, the Hoover fellow noted that “the GND would be extremely expensive” and that America lacks “the technological know-how” to reach zero carbon emissions. Ohanian further pleased the Hoover Institution’s big-business sponsors by adding his judgment that the Green New Deal’s promise of a living wage will make workers lazy and unproductive. No such promise can be fulfilled today, “when jobs can be easily offshored, outsourced, and automated,” he pronounced.
Now that we understand these economic realities, we can prepare—without rebellion, with calm acceptance and within the limits of our stagnant incomes—for our coming extinction. Onward with the coming macroeconomic ecocide.
Except, wait. Hold on. Maybe Ohanian is full of petroligarchic crap. Maybe there’s still hope for the species after all.
He is, and there is.
It’s simply not true that we lack the technological expertise to achieve zero carbon emissions. Writing for Scientific American, Stanford engineering professor Mark Jacobson and University of California at Davis research scientist Mark Delucchi have shown repeatedly over the last decade that humanity could convert to a completely renewable energy-based system by 2030 if nations employ technologies vetted by scientists rather than those championed by private industry.
Volkswagen plans to go carbon neutral by 2050, the word's current largest vehicle maker announced at a news conference Tuesday where CEO Herbert Diess acknowledged that the company's cars caused one percent of global carbon dioxide emissions, The New York Times reported.
The recent military clash between India and Pakistan underscores the need for the major nuclear powers — the U.S., Russia, China, Britain, and France — finally to move toward fulfilling their obligations under the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
The Treaty’s purpose was not simply to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons, but to serve as a temporary measure until Article VI could take effect: the “cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a Treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.”
The 191 countries that signed the NPT — the most widely subscribed nuclear treaty on the planet — did so with the understanding that the major powers would de-nuclearize. But in the 50 years since the Treaty was negotiated, the nuclear powers have yet to seriously address eliminating weapons of mass destruction.
While over the years the Americans and the Russians have reduced the number of warheads in their arsenals, they — along with China — are currently in the midst of a major modernization of their weapon systems. Instead of a world without nuclear weapons, it is a world of nuclear apartheid, with the great powers making no move to downsize their conventional forces.
For non-nuclear armed countries, this is the worst of all worlds.
Ever since our first ancestor lit a fire, humans have been pumping CO2 into the atmosphere. Add to that the first herder because ruminants are another large emitter of greenhouse gas (GHG).
Some people want to declare a national emergency and ban fossil fuels within ten years. How? I am for it and all ready to go. But please tell me how. Think of the quarter billion vehicles in the U.S. and the infrastructure supporting them; the myriad gas stations and repair shops and the people employed in them; the thousands of miles of domestic gas pipelines to homes using gas stoves and gas heating. Think of the restructuring, the replacement, the energy required, the megatons of metal and other materials used and their production which all require one thing — energy. And what about air travel and the shipping industry?
What of the millions of jobs lost? Think of the jobholders and their families. Most of these workers cannot switch skills overnight. These are not just the million and a half employed in the industry directly, but include gas company employees, your gas furnace repair and maintenance man, the people building furnaces, gas stoves, the auto repair infrastructure — electric motors of course are darned reliable and need attention only to brakes, tire rotation and battery coolant checks for the most part — and so on.
In the U.S., we consume more than 15 billion pounds of tissue each year—more than 50 pounds per person. It's taking a major toll on forests like the Canadian boreal.
The way to stop climate change might be buried in 300 square feet of earth in the Venice neighborhood of Los €Angeles, amid kale and potatoes. A half-dozen city youth are digging through the raised bed on a quiet side street, planting tomato seedlings between peach and lime trees. Nineteen-year-old €Calvin sweats as he works the rake. There’s a lot at stake here. The formerly homeless youngsters are tentatively exploring farming through a community outreach program started by a California nonprofit called Kiss the Ground. More importantly, they are tending to the future of our planet.
“Soil just might save us,” filmmaker Josh Tickell says, “but we are going to have to save it first.” He wrote that in his 2017 book, also called Kiss the Ground, after becoming deeply invested in the potential of soil to reverse climate change. (The nonprofit supports the book and Tickell’s upcoming documentary about it, though he has no role with the organization.) He has experienced both soil and climate change intimately. He started to work on farms more than two decades ago for World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms, and in 2017 he and his family had to leave their home in Ojai, fleeing devastating wildfires.
Even as most of the world works to reduce emissions, new studies confirm that it will be impossible to stop climate change without changing agriculture. Soil degradation is slowly turning a third of the world into desert. At this rate, fertile soil will be depleted in 60 years.
What exactly does soil have to do with climate change? In the atmosphere, too much carbon overheats the climate. But in the ground, carbon is useful.
Loss of topsoil releases carbon into the air. Modern petroleum-fueled agriculture, beginning around 1930, has released 50 to 70 percent of soil’s carbon into the atmosphere. In a report last year, the U.N. warned that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increased at record speed to hit a level not seen for more than 3 million years.
In 92 countries and counting, hundreds of thousands of students are planning to skip school on March 15 as part of the "School Strike 4 Climate" — a growing movement of young people demanding that policymakers worldwide take urgent and radical steps to battle the climate crisis.
For the past several months, students around the world have joined the #FridaysForFuture school strike launched last year by Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg, whose solitary protests outside her country's parliament — inspired by the Parkland students advocating for stricter gun laws in the U.S. — generated headlines that helped spur the global youth climate movement.
Almost no one was surprised that the annual budget released by the White House on Monday once again proposed slashing billions of dollars in federal spending on environmental protection and renewable energy research. The budget is considered an agenda-setting document for the Trump administration, and President Trump is apparently the fossil fuel industry’s best friend.
“And the oil and gas industry, I want to promise you, has no greater friend than President Donald Trump,” Vice President Mike Pence said in a Friday address to the Ohio Oil and Gas Association, an industry and lobbying group that has grown powerful with the shale fracking boom.
With an audience of fossil fuel industry insiders gathered in Columbus, Ohio, Pence listed off clean air and water protections the Trump administration has rolled back as the U.S. becomes the largest producer of oil and gas on the planet. Pence claimed that New York’s decision to ban fracking hurt the state’s economy, repeating a recent industry claim that was quickly debunked by analysts. He only alluded to climate change once, while boasting about Trump’s decision to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris climate agreement.
Meanwhile, in Iowa, presidential hopeful Sen. Bernie Sanders was sending a much different message, telling a crowd of supporters at a campaign rally on Friday that a “political revolution” would transform the country and take energy production in an entirely different direction. This movement would tell Trump and his friends in the fossil fuel industry that climate change is not a “hoax,” but an “existential threat” to the nation and the planet.
On February 28, 2019 the last financial wire transactions between the small socialist country of Eritrea and all the western countries were stopped with no further wire transfers in USD$ or Euros to or from Eritrea being allowed .
Unjust and illegal UN sanctions against Eritrea were lifted recently but the damage being done continues. During the 9 year-long UN sanctions period the US shut down all Eritrean government bank accounts and cut off all access to USD$ international transfers. The USA and its European lackeys even tried to prevent Eritreans in the diaspora from paying their national 2% income tax (something all US citizens outside the country must do), critical to the creation and survival of the country.
After being kicked out of the dollar market Eritrea’s next turn was to the EU to no avail. The EU would not allow Eritrea access to international euro transfers so Eritrea was forced to fall back on her only international friend, Russia, as a conduit for international banking transactions in euros.
Calls for competition regulation are coming from both sides of the aisle. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) has also made it his mission to question the power of Big Tech. Congressional committees with antitrust jurisdiction have begun to hold hearings to discuss changes that could be made to the current interpretation of antitrust laws, and it’s clear that the debate won’t end anytime soon.
At SXSW, she was preaching to the converted. “Can we get a show of hands if you believe that these tech giants have become too powerful and need regulation?” CNN Digital editor-in-chief Meredith Artley asked an audience waiting to hear Vestager speak in a packed hotel ballroom. Almost every hand went up. Now, she has to get the EU’s voters to be true believers, too.
The scope of the scandal, and the fact that it's snared well known figures, made it front page news. But for a number of politicians, journalists, and commentators, the scheme exposed a deeper, uglier truth about the lack of meritocracy in America and how power works.
"I hope it's a wake-up call for people who have bought into the system that people become wealthy because they have worked hard," Ivory Toldson, professor of counseling psychology at Howard University, told Democracy Now! in an interview Wednesday. "It's a deception that's pervasive in our society."
As a leftie I’m biased of course, but I always thought the old witch Margaret Thatcher was more or less off her trolley (as we Brits say) — she had that mad glint in her eyes, and the recent release of a batch of Thatcher’s private papers, made public after the 30-year embargo was lifted, serves somewhat to confirm this impression.
Some of the papers in this set of releases show Thatcher to have been a sucker for what quacks were quick to offer her.
Thatcher’s biggest supplier of quack remedies was Dame Barbara Cartland (1901-2000), the author of 723 novels (mostly trashy bodice-rippers) that sold over 750 million copies and were translated into 38 languages. Cartland, incidentally, was Princess Diana’s step-grandmother, and it is reported that Cartland’s novels were the only books read by the untutored Diana.
Thatcher, known to be a workaholic, received “nutrimental capsules” from the ever-solicitous Dame Barbara “in case you ever feel tired”.
Some of these capsules were made from “crushed sheep’s brain plus heart”.
Did it ever occur to the good dame that some may view capsules made from the crushed brains and hearts of donkeys to possess as much “nutrimental” value as her sheep-derived capsules?
"Socialism," snarled Donald Trump at a recent pep rally of far-right Republicans. And the obedient crowd of faithful Trumpistas snarled back in unison: "So-shull-izz-ummm!"
And there you have the entire intellectual content of the GOP's 2020 re-election strategy under Generalissimo Trump — slap Democrats silly with a scurrilous campaign branding them as Lenin-Trotsky-Stalin reincarnate. It's not just Trump hissing out the socialist label in a frantic McCarthyesque attempt to make it stick by mindless repetition, but also Mike Pence, cabinet officials, Republican lawmakers, right-wing pundits and, of course, the extremist choreographers of Fox News.
Their incessant babbling has already turned clownish, with many babblers bumbling over their own ignorance and making ridiculous attempts to overplay their weak hands. Texas Sen. John Cornyn, for example, compared Democrats who support ideas such as "Medicare for All" to Mussolini. Apparently, Cornyn is unaware that the brutish Italian dictator was no socialist, but a fascist! Mussolini's ideology of ultranationalism, promotion of masculine authoritarianism, domination of society by big business and the wealthy and suppression of democratic rights is the opposite of the Democratic agenda. Indeed, it describes the policies of — guess who — Trump and his acolytes, including Cornyn!
On March 6, Russia’s State Duma approved a new law that consists primarily of a single sentence: “A residential space in a building with multiple apartments may not be used to provide hotel services.” As of March 13, the Federal Council had requested that the final draft of the law be modified to go into effect on January 1, 2020 rather than taking effect immediately. However, the Council’s members indicated support for the law, and there is no doubt that it will sooner or later become active.
The U.S. for-profit prison industry, already facing organized opposition from human rights and justice reform advocates, got some bad news recently from its bankers.
JPMorgan Chase & Co., the biggest U.S. bank measured by assets, last week announced its intention to stop financing private operators of prisons and immigrant detention centers after an evaluation of costs and benefits. The move follows banking giant Wells Fargo’s recent decision to scale back its involvement with the private prison industry as part of its risk management efforts. The decisions are a blow to an industry with a business model that relies on debt financing in the form of credit, loans, and bonds for day-to-day operations as well as for buying smaller companies.
The banks’ announcements come amid a years-long campaign by advocacy groups that targeted the industry’s bankers. For example, JPMorgan and Wells Fargo were among the six Wall Street firms identified in a 2016 report by California-based privatization watchdog In the Public Interest (ITPI) as financing the debt of the two biggest U.S. for-profit prison companies: Nashville, Tennessee-based CoreCivic (formerly Corrections Corporation of America), which at the time had total debt of about $1.5 billion, and The GEO Group of Boca Raton, Florida, with debt of about $1.9 billion.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Ocasio (D-NY) proved once again her verbal interrogation skills on Tuesday as she grilled Wells Fargo CEO Timothy Sloan over the financial giant’s dubious investments and won applause for holding his feet to the fire.
The freshman congresswoman questioned bank CEO Timothy Sloan about two issues for which corporations are rarely directly held accountable—the bank’s financing of human rights abuses as well as environmental disasters.
On the issue of Wells Fargo’s relationship with the private prison industry and the Trump administration’s child detention policy, Ocasio-Cortez asked sharply: “Mr. Sloan, why was the bank involved in the caging of children?”
Operation Varsity Blues. That’s the name of a sweeping federal probe into what the Justice Department calls the biggest college admissions scam the agency has ever uncovered. On Tuesday, 50 people, including 13 college coaches, were arrested for taking part in a scheme where wealthy parents paid exorbitant bribes to secure spots for their unqualified children in elite schools, including Yale, Stanford, Georgetown, UCLA, USC and Wake Forest. Prosecutors have charged 33 parents, including Hollywood stars Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin; Loughlin’s husband, the fashion designer Mossimo Giannulli; and Bill McGlashan, a founder of TPG Capital, one of the largest private equity investment firms in the world. We speak with Ivory Toldson, professor of counseling psychology at Howard University and president of Quality Education for Minorities. His new book is titled “No BS (Bad Stats): Black People Need People Who Believe in Black People Enough Not to Believe Every Bad Thing They Hear About Black People.”
The New Mexico legislature just dealt a huge blow to the racist, sexist exclusion of domestic and home care workers from basic workplace rights, one that advocates hope will spark change throughout the country. With a 52 to 14 vote, lawmakers in the state House passed a bill on Tuesday evening providing these workers with basic protections like minimum wage and overtime pay in state law for the first time. With prior passage in the Senate, it now heads to the governor’s desk.
In 2013, the U.S. Department of Labor announced a rule change that brought home care workers under the protections of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), ending a longstanding “companionship exemption” that had excluded them from basic workplace rights like making a minimum wage or being owed overtime pay for extra hours. It followed a change in 1974 that expanded the FLSA to cover domestic workers.
But according to advocates, 17 states still don’t fully include home care and domestic workers in their labor laws. New Mexico has been one of those holdouts, whose state law explicitly excludes domestic workers from the basics of a minimum wage and other job protections offered to nearly all other workers. That means state law doesn’t require that they be paid the minimum wage or overtime for extra hours, nor protect them from retaliation or discrimination.
While federal law may offer those protections, “the real issue is enforcement,” said Stephanie Welch, supervising attorney of workers’ rights at the New Mexico Center on Law and Poverty. Home care and domestic workers in New Mexico could make a complaint to the Department of Labor if their rights are denied, but those complaints too often go uninvestigated and unenforced. “If they were covered under state law, they would have a state agency that enforces state workers’ rights,” Welch explained. The state agency “has a duty under state law to investigate state wage claims … and to recover wages that are owed.”
In one of the listening sessions held to make the case for legislative change, a home care supervisor named Alfreda recalled the stories of fellow caregivers who live in rural parts of the state who aren’t reimbursed for their gas mileage driving to and from clients’ homes. The FLSA doesn’t require that employees be reimbursed for business expenses, but companies can violate the FLSA if failure to do so makes their earnings dip below the minimum wage. Because their employers don’t abide by this rule, though, some home caregivers have to drive up to 50 miles just to serve disabled veterans or elderly people, paying out of pocket for gas. Because they’re making only about $9.50 an hour, it’s often not financially worth it for them to do that kind of work.
Other workers said they had been misclassified as independent contractors, which meant they had to pay their own employment taxes, further lowering their meager incomes and depriving them of other basic rights. Others still simply aren’t paid for all of the hours they work. Once the law goes into effect, “they’ll have that money and they’ll have higher incomes,” Welch pointed out.
Currently, average pay for the 61,000 people in the state employed in this work is just $9.51 an hour. More than half earn so little that they fall below 200 percent of the federal poverty line, and about half qualify for public assistance. Yet it’s the fastest-growing occupation in the state, and one that will become even more critical as the population ages. The state is projected to rank fourth in the country for the share of its population age 65 and over by 2030, and the need for care workers is projected to grow by 40 percent by 2024.
Without stronger protections, though, people are fleeing the industry. Workers have told stories of people leaving care work to work at McDonald’s or other fast food jobs because it’s less demanding and they can expect a stable wage. The hope is that the new law will reduce turnover and even attract people to a high-demand job.
The legislation’s origins trace back to the state senate voting in 2017 to create a task force on the possibility of changing state law to mirror federal law for home care and domestic workers. That task force became a two-year effort that produced two different reports.
Seventeen states still don’t fully include home care and domestic workers in their labor laws.
The European Commission is warning Britain’s Parliament that voting against Brexit happening without a withdrawal deal in place isn’t enough and lawmakers must approve the deal, too.
An official from the EU’s executive branch noted Wednesday that the bloc already reached a divorce deal with Prime Minister Theresa May and the House of Commons rejected it – twice.
The official asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the unresolved situation.
Parliament voted Wednesday night to reject leaving the EU as scheduled on March 29 if it hasn’t approved an agreement.
Anytime a politician proposes a wildly popular idea that helps ordinary people, a few grumpy conservatives will call them “socialists.” Propose to reduce college debt, help sick families, or ensure the super-rich pay their fair share of taxes — suddenly you’re a walking red nightmare.
Utah Republican Rep. Chris Stewart is so alarmed he’s convened an “Anti-Socialism Caucus” to ward off “the primitive appeal of socialism” that will “infect our institutions.” Democrats’ talk of restoring higher income tax rates on the wealthiest or helping families with childcare was enough to trigger Treasury Secretary Steve Munchin to quip, “We’re not going back to socialism.”
These same politicians consistently vote for tax cuts for the rich and to gut taxes and regulations on corporations so they can exercise their full freedom and liberty — to mistreat workers, pollute the environment, and rip off their customers.
The “shrink government” fear-mongers want you to believe there are only two flavors of economic ice cream. Choose strawberry and you get liberty-choking gulag communism. From this vantage, any proposal to rein in the unchecked power of global corporations and the rule-rigging rich is creeping socialism.
Choice number two, blueberry, is plutocracy, a society where the super-rich lord over the rest of us. It’s an economically polarized dystopia with stagnant wages and a declining standard of living for the majority.
Conservative demagogues aim to scare you into embracing their pro-plutocrat agenda as the only tolerable choice.
The good news is there many flavors to choose from. A number of presidential candidates have proposed or endorsed policies such as low cost or free college, a higher minimum wage, taxing the super-rich, and investing in infrastructure to reduce carbon emissions.
One of the many amusing things one hears on the American right is the charge that MSNBC is a “far” and radical “leftist” network.
Right, and the North American Meat Institute is a vegan advocacy group.
I’ve watched more of MSNBC than any actual leftist should in recent months. If there’s anything good to result from this bad habit it is that I am thoroughly inoculated against the notion that the network is anywhere close to my side of things.
One day last week while making dinner, I had MSNBC on in the background. The network’s egomaniacal Ted Baxter-like anchor Chris Matthews had just finished discussing the late breaking news that Donald Trump is a liar. After a long break for drug commercials and some reflections on Ivanka Trump’s security clearance, the Kennedy family super-fan Matthews (who regularly uses his cable news perch to hawk his silly books on the unmatched eminence of the Kennedys) turned to the greatness of capitalism, or “the market.”
Periodically the American punditocracy convenes on cable TV for a “conversation about race.” But, whether sparked by a celebrity chef’s use of a racial slur, or a Black president’s comment about the shooting of a Black teen, or a white president’s remarks about “fine people on both sides” of a racist march, the conversations about race seem to fade out of the national consciousness as quickly as spring showers, with the phrase “both sides” lingering after them like a bit of precipitation on a pundit’s lip.
Still, dead conversations about race return, first as tragi-comedy, then as farce.
The latest case in point is the national blackface conversation that erupted in February, after Virginia Democratic governor Ralph Northam’s medical school yearbook page (complete with a photograph of someone in blackface next to someone in Klan garb), was publicized.
There followed the triple tragi-comedy of Northam’s refusal to resign, of Justin Fairfax, his Democratic lieutenant governor, in turn refusing to step down after two women separately accused him of sexual assault, and, finally, of Mark Herring, the Democratic attorney general and the next in line for the governorship, preemptively announcing that he himself had worn blackface in his youth. All of this and even some of the conversation it sparked would fit in a remake of the old Ingrid Bergman movie where someone asks, apropos of an old crime, “Who remembers what happened or did not happen? Who remembers the truth?”
Who remembers indeed? Amnesia may be the reason why tragi-comedies do not last in real life but tip one way or the other, into full-on farce or full-on tragedy: into Trump riding into the White House promising to fix an illusory border crisis with money from Mexico, or into refugee children suffering and in a few cases dying in the name of that same crisis.
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Both the pseudoscience and the thirst for blackface entertainment were injected into American life during the period when slavery stood in need of defense and celebration.
One of those who led the conversation on race in those days was a New York actor named Thomas D. Rice. He popularized blackface in the 1830s by creating Jim Crow, a character whose behavior, according to one Louisiana editorialist, proved that emancipation of the slaves should not be considered for even a moment. After Reconstruction, “Jim Crow” unsurprisingly became the nickname for the system that enshrined Black inferiority in the southern law.
If Rice was the Mr. Hyde of American race relations, the Dr. Jekyll was Josiah Nott, an esteemed slave-owning physician who became a passionate racial anthropologist. Together with an “American school” of naturalists, Nott helped spread racist ideas that continue to plague the national unconscious to this day.
My long article on the Chagos Islands sat unfinished yesterday, despite my passion for the subject, as I was horribly fascinated by the Gothic twists and turns of the Brexit debates in the House of Commons. I seldom write on the subject, but some observations seem now called for.
The Westminster system of handling business is designed purely to handle binary questions disputed between two major parties. Where those parties are both themselves hopelessly riven by internal conflict, and the issues not simply reduced to a manageable number of binary choices, Erskine May just cannot cope.
Parliament thus ended up yesterday with a vote in which the majority of MPs who voted against May’s Withdrawal Agreement view its Irish Backstop provision as almost the only decent thing in it – an opinion with which I tend to concur. They however were egging on the antediluvian DUP/ERG faction to join them, on the basis of an argument that the Irish Backstop is terrible and could be permanent, neither of which anyone sensible really believes.
It says something about the insanity of UK politics that the debate quite seriously hinged around discussions of what happens if the EU acts in bad faith and used the “backstop” deliberately to trap the UK permanently in the Customs Union. The notion that the EU is acting in “bad faith” is frankly ludicrous. No trading partner has ever accused the EU, which has the most transparent negotiating process on trade deals of any country or trading bloc, of acting in bad faith. In its own interest, yes. In bad faith – ie lying and tricking – no.
The notion that the EU is like SPECTRE, and its leaders sit round a table headed by Blofeld Junker conjuring up evil plots to trap the UK in a customs union, is stark raving mad. It is an absolutely crazed conspiracy theory. Yet pro-EU MPs were pretending to share this conspiracy theory in order to encourage the ERG/DUP nutters to vote down May’s deal. That is madness.
Now that the 2016 Democratic Primary cycle is (mostly) over — will it ever be entirely? — it has become fashionable once again to forward name recognition as a reasonably large factor in what distinguishes one or more candidates from the others in early polling of the field at large and amongst specific demographic sub-groupings. As The Intercept’s Ryan Grim has noted in an article on Bernie Sanders having double the support among African American likely Democratic Primary voters as Kamala Harris, the name recognition argument was “casually dismissed when made by Sanders supporters” in 2016.
“Casually” puts it somewhat mildly. Rudely and perfunctorily would do better. Meanwhile, the same crowd is enthusiastically chalking up almost all of Joe Biden and Sanders’ poll strength over their preferred candidates to the name recognition shibboleth.
Put most simply, the ‘name recognition’ argument suggests that even large gaps in polling support might best be explained by how well candidates are known by voters at this stage in the race rather than by the likelihood that those differences may hold when voting begins a year or so from now.
In 2016 there were 17 major candidates for the Republican presidential nomination, so many they had to have two sets of debates—and the guy who won was the first of all. Seven pundit-viable candidates have declared for 2020 on the Democratic side, more probably on the way, yet many Democrats say they’re not excited by any of them.
There must be a better way.
Presidential campaigns could be improved—streamlined, made more relevant to more voters and their worries, and likelier to result in better outcomes—and it wouldn’t require revolutionary change, just common-sense reforms.
In a representative democracy the goal ought not to be engagement for its own sake. You want voters to vote because they’re vested in the outcome; you want candidates who, after they’re elected, work hard to fix the biggest problems. The ideal politician is responsive and accountable to the citizenry. Otherwise people look at politics and think “what a load of crap, it makes no difference to me.”
First, take a step back: get rid of jungle primaries and open primaries. Both of these newfangled experiments were marketed as ways to increase voter turnout and encourage moderation. They don’t.
In a jungle or open-participation primary like in California the top two vote-getters, regardless of party, advance to a second final round. Trouble is, both might be from the same party, disenfranchising the other party’s voters during the general election. If one party’s candidates split the vote, the minority party can win. Either scenario depresses voter interest and participation. In an open primary voters can cross party lines to vote in the other party’s primary. Studies show that open primaries do not result in victories by more moderate candidates (assuming that’s desirable); Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign shows what happens when a party whose electorate has moved way left is asked to turn out for a centrist.
Asked Wednesday on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" if she believes U.S. Vice President Mike Pence is "an honorable man," Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts shot back without hesitation her one-word answer: "No."
Asked by show host Mika Brzezinski if she wanted to expand, Warren said: "Sure. Anyone who engages in the kind of homophobia and attacks on people who are different from himself is not an honorable person. That's not what honorable people do."
U.S. special counsel Robert Mueller has yet to release his report about Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, but the Kremlin has been rehearsing its response for months.
The narrative, shared by President Vladimir Putin, his top lieutenants and state television, is strikingly similar to U.S. President Donald Trump’s description of the investigation as a “witch hunt:” They say the whole process is about the Democrats’ stubborn refusal to admit that they lost the election.
“They don’t want to acknowledge his victory and do everything to delegitimize the president,” Putin said at his annual news conference in December.
Mueller has been looking into whether the Trump campaign coordinated with Russia and whether the president obstructed the investigation.
The Federation Council of the Russian Federation gave its approval to two new bills despite opposition from another federal agency. The bills would penalize Internet users and online media for publishing “unreliable” information of social significance or spreading “obscene” criticisms of the Russian government, its symbols, or some of its members.
A coalition of activist groups is protesting in front of Fox News Headquarters in New York City today to bring attention to the network's recent controversies—as the cable channel tries to woo companies in the wake of a number of high profile advertising defections.
"The message to companies and their media buyers is clear," said Angelo Carusone, the president of watchdog group Media Matters for America, one of the organizers of the action, in a statement. "No matter what time of day you advertise on Fox News, you support the network's extremism and bigotry."
Progressives often applaud the idea of “speaking truth to power.” But this concept is hazardous. If taken literally and deployed as a single-minded strategy, it can divert attention from the crucial need to take power away from those who abuse it. Political movements don’t get very far if they depend on appealing to the moral scruples of the powerful.
While noting that “power without love is reckless and abusive,” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. pointed out that “love without power is sentimental and anemic.” All too often, progressive activists don’t realize their own potential power when they rely on ethical arguments to persuade authorities. Appealing to the hearts of people who run a heartless system is rarely effective.
Humane principles are low priorities in the profit-driven scheme of things, as the devastating impacts of economic inequality and militarism attest. By and large, rapacious power already knows what it’s doing — from Wall Street and the boardrooms of mega-corporations to the Pentagon and the top echelons of the “national security” state.
Speaking truth to power is fine, but it’s far more important — and potentially transformational — to focus on public education efforts, agitation and organizing that speaks truth about power while challenging it. Only by mobilizing to take power can we realistically hope to overcome and dismantle the dominant power structures.
Following Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s announcement that she would seek to break up Facebook, Amazon and Google if elected president, Facebook removed an advertisement run by Warren’s page that was critical of big tech. The ad was restored Tuesday, but it essentially supported her argument and put further pressure on potential Democratic hopefuls to revisit their relationships with Silicon Valley.
“Thanks for restoring my posts,” Warren tweeted in regard to the story, “But I want a social media marketplace that isn’t dominated by a single censor.” A spokesperson for Facebook said the ad was removed because it violated policy by using Facebook’s logo.
Last week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a new “privacy-focused” direction for the company that, while sounding great in theory, also set off several alarm bells—including concerns about competition as the company moves to make its messaging properties indistinguishable from one another. As usual for Zuckerberg, it’s all frying pans and fires: just a few days later, it seemed the company had accidentally-on-purpose picked a fight with one leading competition critic — Senator and Presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren — by deleting Facebook ads, placed by her campaign, that advocated breaking up the platform.
Facebook has since restored the ads, and clarified that they were removed solely because they violated policies against the use of the company’s trademarks in advertising on the platform. The company’s advertising platform policy prohibits advertisers from “represent[ing] the Facebook brand in a way that makes it the most distinctive or prominent feature” of the ad, and use of the logo itself is forbidden.
This policy goes well beyond what the law requires. Trademarks are intended to protect consumers by helping ensure that a person can identify a product’s source. If you prefer Coke over Pepsi, a logo helps you know which to buy. But advertisers, whether commercial or political, can normally use a trademark as part of speech criticizing conduct or to comment upon corporations and products, as long as the use doesn’t suggest endorsement. If an advertiser, especially a political campaign, is using Facebook’s trademark to identify the company in a critical comment, it’s unlikely people would think Facebook endorsed it.
There have always been two groups of people on the platform: those with the power to contest censorship and those without.
Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort was sentenced to a total of seven and a half years in prison Wednesday after a federal judge rejected his appeal for no additional time and rebuked him for his crimes and years of lies.
Within minutes of the sentencing, prosecutors in New York brought state charges against Manafort — a move that appeared at least partly designed to guard against the possibility that President Donald Trump could pardon him. The president can pardon federal crimes, but not state offenses.
U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson sentenced Manafort to nearly three-and-a-half years in prison on charges that he misled the U.S. government about his foreign lobbying work and encouraged witnesses to lie on his behalf. That punishment is on top of a roughly four-year sentence he received last week in a separate case in Virginia. He is expected to get credit for the nine months of jail time he’s done already.
A big bad day for the especially egregious members of Grifters Inc. as Paul Manafort was hit with 16 shiny new charges of fraud and slime brought by New York prosecutors just moments after his sentencing in federal court. The indictment, unveiled by Manhattan D.A. Cy Vance, charges Manafort with 16 counts related to mortgage fraud, conspiracy and much falsifying of business records involving millions in fraudulent loans, including three conspiracy counts incriminating his daughter ("Individual 3") and former son-in-law ("Individual 2"), terms starting to sound pretty familiar these days. "No one is beyond the law in New York," intoned Vance on the charges, which pose potential prison terms - and conditions - far harsher than the slap-on-the-wrist-white-boy variety Manafort now faces, and most importantly which, as state charges, are pardon-proof.
The New York charges came minutes after DC Judge Amy Berman Jackson had dropped her gavel on Manafort's federal crimes, giving him 43 more months of prison time in addition to the low-ball 47 months he'd earlier gotten thanks to his fictional "blameless life." Wednesday's sentence brings his total time behind bars to a still-modest 7€½ years. Emerging to address the waiting crowd, Manafort attorney Kevin Downing crowed that "Judge Jackson conceded that there was absolutely no evidence of any Russian collusion in this case.” As predictably as mud season, Downing's claim was duly, eagerly parroted by the pathological-liar-in- chief - current status: 4,583 lies, almost six a day - who babbled to reporters that the day's events proved "no collusion. There was no collusion...it was all a big hoax...Today, again, 'no collusion.'"
What newcomer to the US House of Representatives, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Mn) may not have fully realized is that her critique of Israel influence on American politics would open a door that has previously been hermetically sealed as the third rail of American politics.
With its influence carefully concealed behind decades of deceptions, lies and ruthless intimidation and representing a mere 2.1% of the population spread across nine states, AIPAC and its supporters are like any schoolyard bully when confronted with a higher ethical authority. They throw down the race card, an archaic accusation of anti-semitism intended to play on a misguided empathy that is no longer effective when confronted with words that speak truth to power.
Rep. Omar first came to our attention during a House Foreign Affairs Committee meeting with an elegant takedown of convicted felon and neo-con purveyor of brutal atrocities Elliot Abrams who sorely deserved to be humiliated. Abrams is currently President Trump’s point man on plotting future military action in Venezuela.
Despite the top three elected Virginia State Democrats generating national headlines for being accused of past racist or even criminal behavior, a movement to reform their democratic process continues to grow. These efforts can use three tools for making structural changes in government: the initiative process, court rulings and electing new public officials.
Virginia does not have the first option. Citizens can only vote on a specific institutional change when their General Assembly (their Senate and House chambers) brings a state constitutional amendment to a vote of the people. Virginia, like a number of other states, has a constitution that is very prescriptive. Consequently, what may be handled as a legislative solution becomes a constitutional amendment, which is a three-step process: it must be passed by two sessions of the General Assembly, followed by a vote of the populace. Despite an arduous journey, constitutional amendments are voted on regularly, most of which are non-controversial.
Their General Assembly completed its annual session in February. On the last day they overwhelmingly approved a a ground-breaking amendment to establish a bi-partisan Redistricting Commission to draw legislative and congressional maps. Next year’s General Assembly must vote on it again before it is placed on the ballot as a referendum during the November 2020 election.
D.C.’s longest-serving councilman is in trouble. With the U.S. Attorney’s Office and a federal grand jury investigating his suspect dealings, Jack Evans’ days as a top DC powerbroker are over. That conclusion seems inescapable now that Evans’ strongest ally, the Washington Post, is no longer shielding him.
For years the Post willfully ignored Evans’ repeated crossing of bright ethical lines. As chairman of D.C.’s powerful finance and revenue committee, a position he has held for two decades but may soon lose, Evans has played a central role in crafting deals involving several billion taxpayer dollars, including deals in which he had undisclosed conflicts of interest.
Despite $140,000 salaries, among the nation’s highest for city councils, D.C. councilmembers are allowed to earn outside income. Evans has earned a lot of it over the years, primarily at powerhouse lobby firms. These side hustles haven’t always been isolated from his elected position. His dual hats – as legislator and hired hand – have led to conflicts of interest which are reminiscent of misconduct that led to jail time for others.
Yet over the years Evans had little to fear, as the Post averted the gaze of readers and prosecutors alike. D.C.’s paper of record even appeared to sanction Evans’ conduct, while it pursued black officials over less serious allegations.
However the outlet spoke with US officials who suggested a different narrative, according to which Aro was effectively disinvited because of her sharp criticism of US President Donald Trump on Twitter.
Jessikka Aro, a Finnish investigative journalist, has faced down death threats and harassment over her work exposing Russia’s propaganda machine long before the 2016 U.S. presidential elections. In January, the U.S. State Department took notice, telling Aro she would be honored with the prestigious International Women of Courage Award, to be presented in Washington by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
Weeks later, the State Department rescinded the award offer. A State Department spokesperson said it was due to a “regrettable error,” but Aro and U.S. officials familiar with the internal deliberations tell a different story. They say the department revoked her award after U.S. officials went through Aro’s social media posts and found she had also frequently criticized President Donald Trump.
The Federal Security Service (FSB) has filed a defamation lawsuit against the independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta and correspondent Ivan Zhilin, demanding the retraction of two articles published in January about the alleged torture of a man detained in Magnitogorsk after an explosion killed 39 people last December.
The lawsuit claims that Novaya Gazeta’s reporting “is untrue” and “damages the FSB’s professional reputation.” In January, following the apartment building blast, the authorities detained a Kyrgyz citizen named Khudnidin Zainabidinov. His wife and multiple human rights advocates told Zhilin that he was tortured in FSB custody. A few days after Novaya Gazeta’s first report, however, Chelyabinsk state attorney Vitaly Lopin claimed that Zainabidinov and his wife had recanted these allegations.
Another day, another SLAPP suit. Back in 2015, NY Times reporter Eric Lipton wrote an interesting article detailing the close ties of the food industry with various academics in ways that some might find questionable. Most of the discussion focused on companies on both sides of the debate around whether or not there should be mandated labels on genetically modified foods (so called GMOs). And while it was one side of the debate that encouraged Lipton to look into this, he used Freedom of Information laws to get emails from a bunch of academic scientists working at state universities. This practice is a bit more controversial than other types of Freedom of Information laws -- which are normally used to access government records from those in actual government agencies. However, in the more recent past, FOIA laws have been used to access academic emails, noting (correctly) that since state universities are technically government entities, those emails are considered public records.
Senator Tom Lee's bill is a gift to the government at large, even if law enforcement agencies and schools will be the most direct recipients of this largesse. If this "privacy protection" had been in place a few years ago, the public would have had no idea how badly the Broward County Sheriff's Department botched its response to the school shooting. Not only would that have kept the BCSD relatively free of criticism, it would have shielded its oversight -- state legislators -- from being asked what they were doing to prevent school shootings and/or ensure better response from those expected to serve and protect the public.
Supporters of bills like these claim it's all about protecting the privacy of crime victims and their families. But as the excellent Sun Sentinel op-ed points out, most requests to block release of recordings originates with governments and businesses rather than the victims and their loved ones. These requests have prevented the public from accessing key details in everything from Dale Earnhardt's Daytona crash to an inmate's death at the hands of jailers.
The recently revealed audio recordings of Fox News host Tucker Carlson spewing racist and misogynist rhetoric on a radio show years ago offers new evidence of the media outlet’s tilt toward hate. In clips originating from 2006 to 2011 available here and here, obtained by the watchdog group Media Matters for America, Carlson is heard ranting against women, Iraqis, blacks, immigrants and others, using the same language heard from white supremacists, male chauvinists, homophobes and old-fashioned racists.
For example, during a discussion of the U.S. war in Iraq, Carlson is heard saying, “Iraq is a crappy place filled with a bunch of, you know, semiliterate primitive monkeys.” When asked how the war could be salvaged, his answer was, “It’s beyond our control. I mean if, somehow, the Iraqis decided to behave like human beings or something.” He also envisioned a president who would say, “It’s these lunatic Muslims who are behaving like animals, and I’m going to kill as many of them as I can if you elect me.” Those are only three instances of many, each one as appalling as the next.
So far, the Fox News host has refused to apologize. Instead he has characterized his words on Twitter as “naughty” and dug in his heels. Fox News has refused to take action, simply re-releasing a statement from several months ago, saying, “We cannot and will not allow voices like Tucker Carlson to be censored by agenda-driven intimidation efforts.” The White House has ignored the recordings altogether. Staying with the examples cited above, if one were to replace the words “Iraqis” and “Muslims” with “Israelis” and “Jews,” the double standard becomes imminently clear.
As a nation, we rightfully no longer tolerate anti-Semitism. Even Trump, the Republicans and Fox News executives would have immediately distanced themselves from a person spewing hatred against Jews. But when it comes to Muslims in particular, why is there is no howl of protest at the use of dehumanizing language by a public figure? Carlson’s corresponding misogyny, anti-black racism and homophobia are also apparently not deal-breakers for his employers.
"ProtonMail is not blocked in the normal way, it's actually a bit more subtle," Yen explained. "They are blocking access to ProtonMail mail servers. So Mail.ru — and most other Russian mail servers — for example, is no longer able to deliver email to ProtonMail, but a Russian user has no problem getting to their inbox."
The ProtonMail servers that got blocked were back-end mail delivery servers, which would explain the conundrum Yen highlighted.
The push is on to implement biometric screening at major US airports. The DHS has been pushing this for awhile, telling concerned travelers all they need to do to opt out is not travel. The pilot programs don't seem to have produced anything in the way of actionable results, but the administration's insistence that the US is surrounded by terrorists has dropped a lead foot on the DHS's gas pedal, resulting in an accelerated process that ignores both concerns about biometric scanning tech and the concerns of the traveling public that will be subjected to it.
The question in the title is one that I actually think is worth discussing, because seeing the reactions to both Mark Zuckerberg's announced plans for greater privacy in Facebook's messaging tools, and to Elizabeth Warren's not very well thought out plan to break up Facebook, it seems quite clear that some people just want the company dead at any cost. Indeed, I've seen a lot of people pointing to this AP article, derisively, about how Facebook's plans for more privacy are all a misleading game because the the company might profit from it.
As if that's a bad thing.
For years, we kept getting told that the reason big companies like Facebook and Google didn't treat user privacy very carefully was because there was profit in scooping up all our data, and that there were no profits in privacy. This was seen as a problem. Yet, now that Facebook is exploring ways to provide more privacy and snoop less, some are still complaining that it might profit from it? Shouldn't we want to see business models that align with protecting user privacy? Shouldn't we want companies to realize that protecting user privacy both can and should be profitable as well? Won't that encourage companies to move away from data surveillance business models into ones that are more respectful to end users?
That's why I highlighted the positive concepts in Zuckerberg's post. Because I think it's good to encourage companies to go in the right direction.
Records obtained in an ACLU lawsuit show how ICE is accessing billions of location data points from license plate scanners in over a dozen states.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is using mass location surveillance to target immigrants. And local governments like Merced and Union City, California, are helping — feeding their residents’ personal information to ICE, even when it violates local privacy laws or sanctuary policies. Today, the ACLU is urging an immediate end to this information sharing.
Records obtained by the ACLU of Northern California in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit detail ICE’s sweeping use of a vast automated license plate reader (ALPR) database run by a company called Vigilant Solutions. Over 9,000 ICE officers have gained access to the Vigilant system under a $6.1 million contract that the public first learned of last year. ICE has access to over 5 billion data points of location information collected by private businesses, like insurance companies and parking lots, and can gain access to an additional 1.5 billion records collected by law enforcement agencies.
Over 80 local law enforcement agencies, from over a dozen states, have agreed to share license plate location information with ICE. Emails show local police handing driver information over to ICE informally, violating local law and ICE policies.
o say that Google knows more about you than you know about yourself would not be an exaggeration. In a fresh attack on Google, Oracle has submitted a 17-page attachment titled “Google’s Shadow Profile” to Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s digital platform inquiry.
Oracle has accused Google of building profiles of Australian users by logging their data. This profile consists of their “secret interests,” “intimate lifestyle details” and their office and home address.
Currently, disability examiners do not typically look at recipients social media accounts. If a case is flagged for potential fraud, investigators can use social media to corroborate information from other sources in conjunction with state and local law enforcement.
The Trump administration has been quietly working on a proposal to use social media like Facebook and Twitter to help identify people who claim Social Security disability benefits without actually being disabled. If, for example, a person claimed benefits because of a back injury but was shown playing golf in a photograph posted on Facebook, that could be used as evidence that the injury was not disabling.
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Moreover, people are more likely to post pictures of themselves when they are happy and healthy than when they are in a wheelchair or a hospital bed.
I have read Jackson’s book. Before I get to the actual contents, let’s get this out of the way: What happened to Jackson is frightening. Purity tests are the tools of fanatics, and the quest for purity ultimately becomes indistinguishable from the quest for power. In the Twitterverse, ideologues have far more power than moderates. They have more followers; their tweets get more traction (studies have shown that emotional tweets pretty much always have more traction); they set the terms of their neighborhood’s culture and tone.
From 2008 to 2018, few professors at the University of New Mexico—whether tenured, or tenure-track, or adjunct—received wage increases greater than the cost of living. In most of those years, wages remained stagnant, while out-of-pocket costs for health insurance and retirement contributions increased. As a result, some professors, particularly those faculty who teach on semester-to-semester or short-term contracts, make less today than they did ten years ago. Median salaries for UNM faculty, already low at all ranks and dramatically low in comparison to similar universities, continue to shrink.
Last week, after years of on-campus organizing, UNM faculty—United Academics of the University of New Mexico—filed with the local labor board to form a faculty union. Nearly 1,000 faculty signed union authorization cards. If we win the election, the more than 1,700 faculty at UNM collectively bargain with UNM over wages and working conditions.
As any educator working in higher education knows, faculty working conditions are student learning conditions. The worse that things have gotten for faculty at UNM, the worse they’ve gotten for students. A decade of steep cuts to the academic mission at UNM has created a crisis in UNM’s ability to hire and retain faculty, educate students, conduct research, and serve the state of New Mexico as the flagship institution of higher learning. These cuts have convinced many faculty that UNM leadership isn’t serious about its mission. Endless austerity has shrunk the university. Year after year, UNM balances its books on the backs of faculty, staff and students. According to UNM’s interim provost in a February 13 email to all faculty, declining state support and an even sharper decline in enrollments over the past five years have cratered UNM’s budget. Revenue at UNM’s main campus “is now about $24 million less than it was in 2009.”
She advocates for children's rights through her organization "Babies Behind Bars' which earned her a spot in the Mandela Washington Fellowship initiated by President Barack Obama, a Community Leader Award from Elizabeth Arden, and recognition by Independent Newspapers as one of 100 Young Leaders. In addition, she is an Ubuntu Award recipient and a Paul Harris Fellowship Award winner from the Rotary of South Africa.
Eight months after its shelters for immigrant children came under public scrutiny over allegations of abuse and lax supervision, Heartland Human Care Services says it will close four shelters in suburban Chicago and add staff, training and other resources at its remaining five facilities.
The decision, announced to employees in a memo Friday, comes as another agency, Maryville Academy, plans to open two additional shelters, including one as early as next month.
Heartland officials told ProPublica Illinois they plan to move children out of its four shelters in Des Plaines between now and the end of May. Altogether, the Des Plaines shelters can house as many as 116 children and teens; the change will cut Heartland’s total capacity under state rules a little more than 20 percent, from 512 to 396.
According to the memo, obtained by ProPublica Illinois, Heartland officials decided to shutter the Des Plaines facilities after an internal review and listening sessions with staff in the chaotic aftermath of the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance immigration crackdown. The practice separated more than 2,700 children from parents and sent them to shelters across the U.S., including 99 to Heartland shelters in Illinois.
Cops survey a scene of conflict in California’s capital, a struggle between fascists and antifascists. Blood is on the ground, and webcam recordings show images of members of the Ku Klux Klan and related groups, not only armed with knives but actually showing some men stabbing downward at writhing bodies beneath. One side has knives. One side has signs. Guess which side received charges of violating the law? Guess which side had been surveilled by state and federal agents long before the events of the day? I’ll give you a hint: it wasn’t the Ku Klux Klan. According to published reports in The Guardian (London), police accounts concentrated on two major groups: Antifascists and members of Black Lives Matter.
In June 2016, antifascists assembled at a neo-Nazi rally in Sacramento. As expected, this rally was the site of intense emotions. Violence erupted between the two sides, with at least 8 antifascists stabbed, beaten–or both. How did it happen that none of the neo-Nazis were charged with anything; while antifascists were charged with everything? The answer is Donovan Ayres, a California Highway patrolman who was ordered to investigate the melee. He wrote hundreds of pages of notes, advocating charges against the antifascists. As for the neo-Nazis, nothing.
They have every right to protest, but what of those who oppose them? They, it seems, are simply troublemakers. Ayres did extensive research on the antifascists, including email, Facebook and even metadata. His research included Native Americans and Chicano antifascists. At the end of a hearing where Ayres testified, the DA was thanked by one courtroom observer for protecting white supremacists. One wonders, how does such a thing as this happen? How does something so outrageous occur? History provides an excellent answer, for police and fascists have ever been brothers beneath their respective uniforms.
About 15 years ago, Darrita Davis was selling clothes out of her trunk in Dayton, Ohio. She had just gotten back from New York City, where she bought her inventory wholesale. She had designer belts and glasses, velour jogging suits, and pants and shirts covered with the logos of NBA teams, which were popular back then.
Davis usually followed a rule to not sell at night, but she ran into a friend who pleaded with her, knowing she would sell out of the good stuff before he saw her next. After the sale, as she packed up, she saw someone approach out of the corner of her eye. She didn’t think twice about it because she recognized him from her son’s football league.
“He walked straight up to me and said, ‘You have some fly ass shit,'” Davis said. “And he pulled out the gun. I didn’t see it, I just felt it in my back. I kind of immediately turned and looked at him and slammed the trunk down, and was like, ‘You would have to kill me tonight. This is how I’m supporting myself.'”
The man backed off, claiming he was just messing with her. Davis didn’t believe him. She was also shaking with fear. But she didn’t call the police. It never occurred to her.
“Nothing good comes out of calling the police,” she said. “Never, ever.”
Anti-death penalty activists applauded California Gov. Gavin Newsom's planned executive order announcing a moratorium on capital punishment in the state on Wednesday.
The order will grant reprieve to 737 death row inmates, a quarter of all prisoners awaiting execution in the United States. California's prison system has the largest death row population in the Western Hemisphere.
Newsom, in his prepared remarks, called the death penalty "inconsistent with our bedrock values" and noted that 164 inmates—including five in California—have been released from death row over the past 45 years after being exonerated of their convictions.
The governor is expected to outline the long history of discrimination within the criminal justice system, making mentally ill, black, brown, and poor convicts more likely to face the death penalty.
"Our death penalty system has been—by any measure—a failure," the remarks state. "The intentional killing of another person is wrong. And as governor, I will not oversee the execution of any individual."
The state of Oregon needs to overhaul the way it handles people found guilty except for insanity and better track what happens to them once they are released from state jurisdiction, the head of the agency that supervises such defendants said.
In an interview, Alison Bort, executive director of the Oregon Psychiatric Security Review Board, acknowledged gaps in the system for treating and discharging people found criminally insane and said the state Legislature should consider appointing a state task force to weigh reforms.
“I don’t think anyone disagrees we can do better,” Bort said.
The review board has been under scrutiny for the past two years after a person it released was accused of killing two others within a month of being set free. In addition, a series of stories by ProPublica and the Malheur Enterprise documented that the state does not track those it releases.
Bort’s agency is responsible for 575 people charged with crimes who subsequently were determined to be insane. Of those, 205 are committed to the Oregon State Hospital and 364 have been released with conditions into community settings. Six others are in prison or have absconded.
President Donald Trump's State Department was remarkably candid in its annual human rights report.
"The policy of this administration is to engage with other governments, regardless of their record, if doing so will further U.S. interests," Secretary of State Mike Pompeo writes in the preface to the report. The document, formally called the Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2018, was released on Wednesday.
The admission caught the eyes of Amnesty International USA, which called it "astonishing to see this memorialized in black and white in the official human rights report issued by the U.S. government, a report that has long been viewed by world leaders as a weighty credible assessment on the records of countries around the world."
"This statement signals to world leaders including Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman and Egypt's President Sisi that the U.S. doesn't care about human rights and will forgive or forget even the most atrocious human rights abuses," the organization said in a statement.
President Donald Trump has long positioned himself as "tough on crime"—but, as a new Public Citizen report revealed Wednesday, that stance doesn't extend to "lawbreaking corporations."
Over the first two years of Trump's presidency, enforcement activity at the nation's top three consumer protection agencies that resulted in fines of at least $5,000 plummeted 37 percent from the last two years under former President Barack Obama, according to Consumer Carnage (pdf), the watchdog group's new report.
"Trump, who once asserted that he was 'not going to let Wall Street get away with murder,' now is allowing industry after industry to get away with just about anything," said Alan Zibel, the report's lead author and research director for Public Citizen's Corporate Presidency Project.
"Trump's appointees' apparent belief that enforcement of consumer protection laws should be a last resort," Zibel noted, "represents a dramatic about-face from Trump's claim of populism during his campaign."
Gov. Newsom’s moratorium on the use of the fatally flawed death penalty is the latest victory for the repeal movement. Gov. Gavin Newsom dealt a major blow to the nation’s already anemic death penalty on Wednesday when he announced a moratorium on the practice in California. With 737 death row prisoners, the state has by far the nation’s largest death row, dwarfing the next largest states, Florida with 353 and Texas with 232. The death penalty is a barbaric penalty that is riddled with error and bias, and other states should follow California’s lead in halting its use immediately.
The impact of Gov. Newsom’s decision cannot be understated. By suspending the death penalty in California, Newsom reduced the number of death row prisoners in the United States under threat of execution by over 25 percent.
The death penalty in California, and everywhere it is practiced in America, is inseparable from the taint of racial discrimination. In fact, racial bias does not come at one stage of this process — it permeates the entire process. Prosecutors discriminate against jurors of color in jury selection, and the death penalty is used overwhelmingly in favor of white victims rather than victims of color.
The death penalty in California also suffers from an innocence problem. Five former death row prisoners have been exonerated in California, and there are almost certainly other innocent prisoners who remain on the row while their appeals languish under California’s broken system.
When I was in working on my PhD in philosophy at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, I paid for part of my education by teaching in prison. For me it was an incredibly rewarding experience. It was great working these students who had time to read and think, and wonder in the deep ways that philosophy encourages. On the first day of my first political philosophy class, as we sat down to read Plato's Republic, I started by saying that the book was about the nature of justice. Within seconds we were off to a serious philosophical conversation with a student asking “What makes you think that justice exists?” So began a deeply engaging, philosophically rich, and intellectually challenging teaching experience.
That program allowed inmates to receive a bachelor's degree in Liberal Arts from the University of Massachusetts. The degree did not say anything about prison on it. Administrators for the program claimed that there was a 2% recidivism rate for its graduates. The program was funded in large part by Pell Grants. Pell Grants began in 1965 and they continue to this day to be the core sources of money for college for millions of low-income students. I finished my undergraduate education at UC Berkeley as a self-funded older student, and it was Pell Grants that allowed me to do so.
In spite of its incredible success, UMass' prison education program was ended a few years after I left in 1990.
An Alabama prisoner, who has faced retaliation for organizing incarcerated workers for years, began a hunger strike on March 7 after he was transferred to another prison and thrown in solitary confinement in the middle of the night.
As of March 13, Robert Earl Council (aka Kinetik Justice Amun) had refused food and liquids for one week. He said he will remain on hunger strike until the Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC) releases him back into general population and the “ADOC is held accountable.”
“ADOC’s actions amount to a violation of our due process rights and the Eighth Amendment’s ‘Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause,’” he argued.
On the afternoon of March 12, after days of phone calls to ADOC by supporters in Council’s defense, officials transferred him again to the infirmary at Kilby Correctional Facility.
Council’s hunger strike started when a squad of officers from the Corrections Emergency Response Team (CERT) and local police SWAT team members entered his cell before dawn at the St. Clair Correctional Facility in Springville, Alabama on March 7. He was placed in zip ties and transferred to Holman Correctional Facility, where he was placed in solitary confinement.
His visit struck a sour note. The Australian prime minister Scott Morrison was making an effort to show he cared: about those intangible things called borders, secure firm and shut to the unwanted human matter coming by sea. The distant Australian territory of Christmas Island was selected to assist in coping with arrivals from Manus and Nauru Island needing medical treatment. Having lost the vote in parliament on preventing the move, the Morrison government has does its best to ensure that a cruel element remains.
During the visit, Morrison rationalised the re-opening as the fault of the opposition. “As Prime Minister, I closed the Christmas Island detention centre and got all the children off Nauru.” The Labor Party had “voted to weaken our borders and we have acted on official advice to reopen Christmas Island.” The facilities provided “a deterrent to people smugglers and to anyone who thinks they can game the system to get to Australia.” The mythology persists.
There are parallels with atrocity and jail tourism (fancy seeing concentration camps?) in a man being filmed going through such facilities, though this time, they are intended for full use rather than being a site for instructive purposes or moral outrage. Should Australians ever wake up to the full implications of what their government does in their name, such camps might become appropriate measures of a gulag mentality that paralysed any sensible discourse on refugees for a generation.
Being a man obsessed by the moving image (once and adman always an adman), Morrison ensured that cameras never left their focus; the prime minister was keen to push the credentials of the North West Point Detention Centre. He made a pit stop at a library. (Cue necessary movement of arms to bookshelves; expansive hand movements). He even found himself gazing at a lavatory. “It was short,” recalled a disgusted resident, John Richardson. Small businessman Troy Watson was also a touch bitter. “It’s got be some sort of publicity stunt.”
Despite endless government initiatives and countless promises from the telecom sector, our national robocall hell continues. Robocalls from telemarketers continue to be the subject the FCC receives the most complaints about (200,000 complaints annually, making up 60% of all FCC complaints), and recent data from the Robocall Index indicates that the problem is only getting worse. Consumers continue to be hammered by mortgage interest rate scams, credit card scams, student loan scams, business loan scams, and IRS scams. 4.9 billion such calls were placed in February alone..
[...]
But as Oliver notes, there's a lot more Pai's FCC could do, like demanding big carriers offer their customers free robocall protection services, actually punishing those lagging behind at adopting anti-spoofing authentication tech, and narrowing the definition of robocalls to include debt collection and other purportedly "legit" but overwhelming callers. But that would require Pai actually standing up to major industries, something he's yet to do at any meaningful point during his appointment as FCC boss.
As it stands, predictions are that by next year, half of all calls made will be robocalls. And while companies like AT&T spent a few years trying to blame everybody else for its own failure to police the problem, it's one of several carriers finally on the cusp of deploying SHAKEN/STIR authentication technology that should dramatically put a damper on caller ID spoofing later this year. But given the fact this is yet another cat and mouse game where scammers will quickly adapt, some carriers will lag on adoption, and fixing theses problems require a tough FCC steward willing to actually pressure the industry to do more.
The internet dates back to the 1960s ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) and a military project to protect intelligence data from being lost should foreign agents manage to destroy one cache. That project, with a boost from MIT grad students Larry Roberts and Leonard Kelinrock, became the ARPANET.
ARPANET was the first working computer network and formed the basis for the modern internet. A few years later two ARPANET architects, Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf, created the modern internet protocols for information sharing between computers that are still in use today.
So that is the internet proper — the giant network of computers united by the ability to communicate and exchange data via that network. To access the internet in a comprehensible way, however, you need the World Wide Web. If the internet is the information superhighway, the web is the car that allows you to drive on it without being rolled over by torrents of data.
And that innovation came down the pike sometime later than the original innovations that made up the internet — via a plan by physicist and self-taught computer scientist Sir Tim Berners-Lee, first developed when he was working at the CERN particle accelerator in 1989.
Today's web wasn't what Tim Berners-Lee envisioned 30 years ago when he pitched the idea of a "distributed hypertext system" to the European Organization for Nuclear Research, better known as CERN. In his proposal, Berners-Lee described an application he created in 1980 called Enquire to keep track of his software projects. Enquire, he explained, let him create different types of "sheets" that contained information like software documentation. Some sheets could simply be links to other sheets. Wikipedia comes to mind today, but at the time Berners-Lee likened Enquire to the classic text-based game Colossal Cave Adventure (better known as Adventure) and to Apple's Hypercard system.
The technology had come a long way since 1993, when CERN put the web software in the public domain. The first website published at CERN is still available to see.
Back then, social media and streaming services did not exist. It was envisioned as a way of sharing information between scientists, academics and institutes. The tech is not to be confused with the [Internet] itself, which is the global computer network that dates back to the 1960s.
Today, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office's Patent Trial and Appeal Board announced that it had updated its Motion to Amend Study to include all trials under the post-grant review proceedings enacted in the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act (AIA) through the end of Fiscal Year 2017 (which ended on September 30, 2018). The original study included data through April 30, 2016. At that time, only two motions to amend had been granted outright, with another four granted-in-part. This study was updated last year with data through May 31, 2017. At that time, two additional motions to amend had been granted outright, with an additional four granted-in-part. The last study included no new motions to amend granted outright, but there were two more that have been granted-in-part. At the date of the last study release (January 12, 2018), a total of fourteen motions to amend had been granted at least in part as of September 30, 2017 (out of a total of 275 completed trials in which a motion to amend was filed). The Office has also released tabulated data on all 326 completed trials.
Can “SO…?” and “S.O.” be regarded as confusingly similar, even if the said marks are envisaged for different classes of the Nice Classification? IF SO, do they bear the same meaning within the EU?
The EUIPO Fourth Board of Appeal recently answered this in the affirmative in a decision handed down a few days ago.
I'm beginning to think that Axel Voss, the Member of the European Parliament in charge of ramming through the EU Copyright Directive, doesn't have much of a clue about how either copyright or the internet works. Last week, we pointed out that he was making provably false statements about Article 13, and wondered why he'd be doing that. But the more he talks, the more I'm wondering if he simply doesn't understand the basics of either copyright law or the internet. The latest comes in some quotes he gave in a great article by DW.com, which correctly highlights how Article 13 is going to lead to widespread censorship.
Techdirt has just written about an important intervention by the UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of expression in the debate about Article 13 of the proposed EU Copyright Directive. David Kaye said that most Internet sites "would face legal pressure to install and maintain expensive content filtering infrastructure to comply with the proposed Directive." Despite the evident expertise of Kaye in this area, some may try to dismiss this clear condemnation of Article 13 as the UN interfering in a legislative process that really only concerns the Member States of the EU, and no one else.
Yesterday, NBC News published a story about IBM’s work on improving diversity in facial recognition technology and the dataset that they gathered to further this work. The dataset includes links to one million photos from Flickr, many or all of which were apparently shared under a Creative Commons license. Some Flickr users were dismayed to learn that IBM had used their photos to train the AI, and had questions about the ethics, privacy implications, and fair use of such a dataset being used for algorithmic training. We are reaching out to IBM to understand their use of the images, and to share the concerns of our community.
CC is dedicated to facilitating greater openness for the common good. In general, we believe that the use of publicly available data on the Internet has led to greater innovation, collaboration, and creativity. But there are also real concerns that data can be used for negative activities or negative outcomes.
While we do not have all the facts regarding the IBM dataset, we are aware that fair use allows all types of content to be used freely, and that all types of content are collected and used every day to train and develop AI. CC licenses were designed to address a specific constraint, which they do very well: unlocking restrictive copyright. But copyright is not a good tool to protect individual privacy, to address research ethics in AI development, or to regulate the use of surveillance tools employed online. Those issues rightly belong in the public policy space, and good solutions will consider both the law and the community norms of CC licenses and content shared online in general.
I hope we will use this moment to build on the important principles and values of sharing, and engage in discussion with those using our content in objectionable ways, and to speak out on and help shape positive outcomes on the important issues of privacy, surveillance, and AI that impact the sharing of works on the web.
The European Parliament will hold its plenary debate on the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market on March 26, suggesting a plenary vote later that day or the next day. Further headway has meanwhile been made against Article 13, though probably still not enough. For an example, it's now likely that the number of mostly (but not exclusively) young people taking to the streets on March 23 will be in the six figures. The Berlin demonstration alone (which will be the main one) is now expected to have at least 20,000 participants, with more optimistic projections being in the range from 40,000 to 50,000. By the way I'm too busy to go to Berlin, but I will participate in the Munich demonstration that same day. Recently, additional MEPs have declared their intent to vote against Article 13, including the small-in-numbers but well-respected and influential Luxembourgish delegation to the center-right European People's Party (EPP) group in the EU Parliament.
Proponents of Article 13 might still succeed, but they'd pay dearly for it in the EU elections in May--and way beyond those elections. We're talking about generations of voters who have a pretty good idea of what's going on and are not going to take it lightly. There's quite some awareness now among teens, twens, and people in their thirties and fourties for the issue--and there'll be a lot more awareness among those age groups soon. No political grouping would bring up more voters against itself than the EPP, and it's the only political group that is still largely (apart from some pockets of resistance) in favor of that crazy Article 13.
What might happen is that the EPP will later remember its support of Article 13 as the biggest mistake in the history of that Europe-wide group of conservative (partly in name only) parties that for some time has been the most powerful political group in the EU.
If the EPP's national campaign managers in countries with a strong, vocal and growing anti-Article 13 movement aren't either totally incompetent or sleepwalking through this year's elections, they will already have realized that this is the number one problem they face, even eclipsing the issue of migration because of the power of the Internet.
It's the last point above that's most important. Even as some content creators are supporting Article 13, the real impact on them will be incredibly damaging. As tons of YouTube creators have learned over the past few years, automated filters frequently create more headaches than they're worth. Legitimate content is regularly taken down, and it's extra difficult for independent creators to make themselves heard. And this will become much worse in a post-Article 13 world, where you have less competition, since only a few internet giants can deal with the requirements of the law.
Piracy is a major problem for India's movie industry but according to a local new report, the enemy is within. Rival production companies reportedly pirate each other's movies to hurt box office revenues. At the same time, other insiders such as movie theater owners and even the censor board, are also implicated.
A coalition of 243 organizations representing a wide range of creative industries is calling on the European Parliament to quickly adopt the proposed Copyright Directive. The planned changes, including Article 11 and Article 13, will help to create a fair and sustainable Internet, they say.
David Kaye, the UN's Special Rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression, has raised the alarm over the EU's proposals for Article 13 and its de facto filtering requirements. "Such sweeping pressure for pre-publication filtering is neither a necessary nor proportionate response to copyright infringement online," Kaye warns.