Google has released the first beta of Android Q. It won’t give the software its official moment in the spotlight until the Google I/O conference in May, of course, but we already know some important information about its direction.
Normally, Google showing up to the Game Developers Conference isn't a huge deal. The company does this pretty much every year—Android smartphones and Google Play are a pretty big gaming platform, after all—and it shows up with livestreams and blog posts and all the usual festivities. This year, though, is different. Google has been sending out vague teasers since last month for a GDC event, but as the date approaches, the company has been dropping more and more hints of exactly what it is announcing: Google is launching video game hardware for the Project Stream platform.
Google Chrome may soon have native support for both the Nintendo Switch Pro controller and its Joy-Cons, according to an article from 9to5Google.
A new commit in Chromium’s Gerrit source code, titled “Improve support for Nintendo Switch gamepads”, was discovered by both 9to5Google and Owen Williams.
I also have a slight inkling on what new devices we might see announced but I’m still researching and checking with some sources, so it’s premature to share anything just yet. Stay tuned though.
I’m a Google fan, but there has always been one product that I’ve been hesitant to try: Chrome OS, Google’s desktop operating system that powers all Chromebooks on the market. If you’ve ever heard anything about Chromebooks, chances are that you’ve heard the stereotype that it’s just a “glorified web browser.” I’ve been following Chrome OS for years and I know that there is so much more to it now—Android apps, Linux support, etc. But I never actually ditched Windows and exclusively used a Chromebook as my only laptop—until now.
The architects of open source *service* mesh technology Istio and Envoy have broken off to set up an enterprise-grade solution aimed at large-scale customers.
San Francisco startup Tetrate, which develops an app management platform for hybrid and multicloud environments, today emerged from stealth with $12.5 million in a funding round led by Dell Technologies Capital, with participation from 8VC, Intel Capital, Rain Capital, and Samsung Next. The startup also attracted individual investments from a number of industry executives, including former Cisco chief development officer Pankaj Patel, Yubico chief product officer Guido Appenzeller, and WeWork’s Shiva Rajaraman.
Tetrate this week emerged from stealth to launch what it describes as an enterprise-class implementation of a service mesh based on the open source Istio project.
Fresh off raising $12.5 million in funding, Tetrate’s goal is to deliver a service mesh based on Istio that will span both modern containerized applications running on Kubernetes and legacy applications running on virtual machines and bare-metal servers, says CEO Varun Talwar.
Is IBM's $34 billion merger with Red Hat in trouble? Is it facing delays?
Sheng Liang, CEO and co-founder of Rancher Labs, explained that Submariner creates the necessary tunnels and routes between Kubernetes clusters that allow for direct connections regardless of their location. It can be deployed into existing Kubernetes clusters with the addition of Layer-3 network connectivity between pods in different clusters.
The project also secures those connection paths using IPSec tunnels, though Rancher Labs does plan to add different interconnectivity plugins. Liang said this includes additional remote connectivity plugins for WAN-optimized or SD-WAN technologies.
The popular but troubled Jenkins CI/CD system is being reworked to support cloud-native applications on the Kubernetes container-orchestration platform. The Jenkins X project is a response to user concerns that Jenkins had lost its luster and had developed configuration and stability issues.
Jenkins X is intended for Kubernetes users who want to adopt CI/CD or who want CI/CD and are moving to the cloud, without necessarily knowing anything about Kubernetes. Jenkins X builds on Jenkins with open source tools, promoting a Git branching and a repository model. A Jenkins distribution is used as the core CI/CD engine.
Weekly Briefing March 15, 2019: Nvidia buys Mellanox, Facebook snatches up Sonics, Linus Foundation holds its first Open Source Leaders’ Summit, Geneva auto show
With broader availability expected soon for Intel Optane NVDIMMs backed by 3DXPoint memory, which offers a new means of speedy persistent memory, patches have landed in Linux 5.1 to optionally treat this persistent memory just like system RAM.
With Intel set to release their next-gen Comet Lake processors, a leaked Linux support list has indicated that the forthcoming desktop processors might feature up to 10 cores.
Intel will still rely on the 14nm manufacturing process, and the Comet Lake-S is speculated to be based on the Skylake micro-architecture. It will succeed the currently popular Intel Core i9-9900K processor which has 8 cores and 16 threads.
Paolo Bonzini submitted the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) changes for the Linux 5.1 kernel on Friday, much later in the cycle than normal. This isn't due to some big ticket features landing but rather "some ugly factors" in the form of tracking down some bugs and ended up dropping some premature optimizations.
So for Linux 5.1 the KVM virtualization work isn't the most exciting but there are some clean-ups for the ARM code, similar work on the S390 front, bug fixes and improvements to the POWER code, and "many, many cleanups" on the x86 front. Along with the many x86/x86_64 cleanups to the KVM code, a number of unnecessary MMU code optimizations were removed.
This program is available to encourage participation by mentees from traditionally underrepresented or marginalized groups in technology and open source communities, including, but not limited to, persons identifying as LGBTQ, women, persons of color, and/or persons with disabilities.
CloudBees, Google, Netflix all donate open source CI/CD platforms to the new foundation
The world’s leading tech companies have teamed up to launch a new foundation aimed at improving industry standardisation and oversight in continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) – an automated software testing and development practice.
The Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF), a project initiated by CloudBees, will be staffed and operated by the Linux Foundation. Its 22 founding members include CapitalOne, CloudBees, GitLab, Google, Microsoft, Netflix, and Red Hat.
As the first open source project based on IBM's z/OS, Zowe provides the framework and capabilities to accelerate mainframe application development via modern DevOps tools, while introducing new levels of automation and infrastructure management.
The formation of CDF was announced at the Linux Foundation Open Source Leadership Summit on Tuesday. CDF will act as a “vendor-neutral home” for some of the most important open source projects for continuous delivery and specifications to speed up the release pipeline process.
Big news coming over from the CloudBees team that announces the launch of the Continuous Delivery Foundation (CD Foundation or CDF), a foundation that will operate under the umbrella of the Linux Foundation. CloudBees was the leading voice in this launch initiative, but the CDF was realized in collaboration with the Jenkins Community, Google and the Linux Foundation itself.
To learn more about this announcement and what it has in store for the developer community, we invited Kohsuke Kawaguchi, the creator of Jenkins, to give us some insight into the goals of CDF, the details around project donations and more!
An industry group made up of 22 members is launching a Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF) to develop, nurture and promote open source projects, best practices and industry specifications related to continuous delivery.
Founding members of the CDF include the Linux Foundation, Google, Microsoft, Netflix, Red Hat, CloudBees and the Jenkins Community
At the Open Source Leadership Summit (OSLS), the Linux Foundation introduced, with a host of partners, the Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF). Its goal? The not-so-modest one of bringing sense to continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD).
The Linux Foundation today unveiled several major collaborative partnerships as it looks to cement the development of various open source projects that power much of the web.
First off, the Node.js Foundation and the JS Foundation, which the Linux Foundation launched in 2016, are merging to form the OpenJS Foundation. The merger between the two chief organizations that focus on JavaScript comes six months after they publicly began to explore such a possibility with their communities.
The Linux Foundation on Monday announced its new CHIPS (Common Hardware for Interfaces, Processors and Systems) Alliance with member companies Google, Western Digital, Esperanto Technologies, and SiFive. On the same day tech heavyweights Intel, Alibaba, Cisco, Dell EMC, Facebook, Google, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Huawei, and Microsoft formed a consortium to develop open interconnect technology called Compute Express Link (CXL).
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Fellow chipmaker Nvidia, which this week outbid Intel to buy Mellanox Technologies for $6.9 billion, is notably not a member of the CXL Consortium.
The first development milestone release of Phoronix Test Suite 8.8-Hvaler is now available for your open-source, automated benchmarking needs on Linux, BSD, Windows, and macOS operating systems.
Phoronix Test Suite 8.8 Milestone 1 features a smattering of different improvements compared to Phoronix Test Suite 8.6 that shipped last month as the Q1'2019 feature update.
In developed countries, healthcare workers represent a significant proportion of the working population. For example, in the United Kingdom, more than 1 million people work for the National Health Service, a publicly funded healthcare system. Medical software therefore has a huge market to tap. Whatever stage of a country’s economic development, health care is one of the most important elements in society.
This article focuses on software that provides Electronic Medical Records (EMR) functionality. This type of record is used in a hospital and doctor’s surgery to capture medical information, reducing the amount of physical records, and the costs associated in storing them. EMR software can make an appreciable difference to improve a medical organisation’s efficiency and raise quality standards. For example, it reduces storage costs, minimises medical errors, provides statistical reporting, and assists clinical studies.
Open source EMR software has an important role to play. In a resource poor country, commercial healthcare computer software may simply not be affordable. Alternatively, developed countries can make significant savings in IT costs by using an open source EMR system without compromising on patient care.
To provide in insight into the quality of software that is available, we have compiled a list of 6 high quality open source EMR software. Here’s our rating for each program.
As a newbie-friendly distro, elementary OS complies the aforementioned features. At the current age, leisure has always been linked to computing, as many projects have started for reasons related to entertainment. Nowadays, entertainment is extremely linked to computers, especially music, People are more apt to listen to music on computers. That?s why CDs are nothing more than relics of the ancient world. Let?s check out the best media players on elementary OS. With them, you will be able to listen to your favorite music, download them from any site and even copy them from your CD/DVD!
Re-based off Friday's release of Wine 4.4, Wine-Staging 4.4 is now available though the delta compared to upstream is now many patches lighter thanks to some of the work being upstreamed.
Wine-Staging 4.4 is only about 770 patches on top of the "vanilla" Wine, compared to not too far back when the patch delta was well over 800 patches. Over the past two weeks many patches were upstreamed including the addition of the new MSIDB tool for manipulating MSI databases representing a bulk of the mainlined code. There was also code merged around improving the D3D8 validate pixel shader function, WMCreateSyncReader, MSVIDC32, and other bits.
The first day at a new school is always a challenge. It's even more challenging when you keep reliving the same day over and over, Bill Murray style, as you will in indie developer Moloch Media's newly released Mars Underground.
In this unusual "apocalyptic adventure," the titular Mars finds himself waking up to the same school day each morning, only for the world to end once again every night to start all over again. Except it's not entirely the same, as "with each cycle new items can be picked up and topics unlocked." Players will need to "solve brain damaging mysteries" while exploring the many opportunities the time loop presents. You can choose to "take experimental prescription drugs. Talk to a toilet. Get hit by a car. Humiliate yourself repeatedly. All in the name of figuring out what on earth is going on" as you progress through branching story paths.
Linux game porter Ethan Lee has taken a break from his FNA-XNA/FAudio/Wine hacking to add support to the SDL2 library for the GameCube controller adapter intended for Nintendo's Wii U / Switch devices.
Nintendo's adapter allows for old GameCube controllers to be used with the Wii U and Switch platforms, since the old GameCube Controllers do not offer a USB connection. Or now thanks to this support within SDL2, the GameCube Controllers can be enjoyed for some Linux gaming in SDL2-using titles.
Week 62 for KDE’s Usability & Productivity initiative is here, and we didn’t let up! We’ve got new features, bugfixes, more icons… we’ve got everything!
Similar to Microsoft Windows, KDE Plasma 5.16 is picking up an option on the shutdown screen for letting users reboot into their UEFI setup screen where supported.
Rather than trying to hit the right key on the initial system start-up for entering the UEFI/BIOS setup screen, Plasma 5.16 is adding the option to its shutdown screen. This functionality is achieved in cooperation with Logind for setting the proper bit to allow this to happen. It's a simple but very useful option especially for enthusiasts.
We are getting excited as Plasma 5.15 has been released (since 12 February 2019) and we soon want to test it. I have tested it on Neon and it is lightweight and very impressive. This list is for you wanting to test Plasma as quick as possible by downloading GNU/Linux distros with built-in Plasma 5.15. They are Neon 5.15, Kubuntu 19.04, Chakra, KaOS, and openSUSE Tumbleweed. You can download the ISO images from links I mentioned below and quickly run a LiveCD session of them. Additionally, I also mentioned Kubuntu 18.10 and Fedora 30 on the separate section below as they don't bundle it but make it available through repositories. Anyway, go ahead and happy testing!
The enterprise open source company Suse said that growth investor EQT has completed Suse acquisition from Micro Focus.
Fedora has always been shipping Mono 4.8, the open source development platform for building cross-platform applications, with each Fedora release. Even after shipping Mono 5.0 in May 2017, the company still continued with Mono 4.8. But it seems the idea will be changing now with the release of Fedora 31. With Fedora 31, the team at Fedora is finally planning to switch to Mono 5.20 which is expected to release later this year.
Five candidates now are running to be Debian's project leader for the coming year.
When it rains, it tends to pour. This seems true in the case of the Debian GNU/Linux project elections, with five developers putting their hands up to contest for the post of leader, after nobody was in the running three days out from the initial date for the closing of nominations. On Friday, as iTWire reported, just one developer, Joerg Jaspert, had said he would be contesting the post.
Another four developers have now joined the ranks: Jonathan Carter, Sam Hartman, Martin Michlmayr and Simon Richter.
Michlmayr has been leader twice before, in 2003 and 2004. A quiet, introspective type, he is the most experienced of the five candidates.
There are many Linux distributions in the wild nowadays, but none are more beautiful than deepin. Even though I don't use the operating system regularly (I prefer Fedora and GNOME), I recognize deepin's beauty as second to none. Some people refuse to use the distro because its developers are in China, but in reality, it should be fine to use. Just like concerns about Huawei hardware, it is largely due to xenophobia.
While deepin has always seemed rock solid to me, its base of Debian unstable apparently made it less reliable than the developers liked. As a result, beginning with the new 15.9.2 beta, deepin is switching to Debian stable. In other words, the developers are not only focused on the superficial.
But Raspberry Pi isn’t the only single board computer out there; there is a myriad range of pocket-sized PCs aimed at toppling Pi’s domination. They’re able to perform an immense array of tasks, from complex robotics to supporting gaming platforms or media centres. Some of these offer more than the Raspberry Pi 3 B+, with increased memory, quicker processors and more features.
THIS MESSAGE IS mainly for the leaders and enthusiasts of the broad-based movement toward decentralizing content, but especially social media. I’m not trying to start a new project or organization—after all, decentralization is what I am encouraging. I’m partly trying to start a conversation among individuals, to get them thinking and talking—but on a massive scale. But I’m also trying to inspire people to action, to come together and go the last mile to achieving robust and extremely widespread decentralization.
Close your Twitter account, delete your old Tweets, pack your bags, and head over to Mastodon's wild world of federated microblogging.
For many organisations, undergoing IT transformation means re-investigating and overhauling existing information technology to support various new technological aspects of the organisation such as digital transformation and changes in IT infrastructure. Today, open source technologies are providing viable, cost efficient and leading-edge solutions, with more organisations and businesses adopting open source to support their IT transformation goals.
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Research by SUSE found that 95 percent of IT leaders believe SDI is the future for the data centre. Businesses that are focused on the future of their organisations and transformation strategies will need to address a multifaceted IT world which encompasses traditional data centres, SDI and cloud environments.
Why should technology be open source? Why is open source important?
DP: Open source technology is developed by a community of developers, and benefits from collaborations among highly-skilled talents and professionals to facilitate more, and better ideas. More importantly, open source isn't a company or a product. It's a methodology that ensures greater innovation and collaboration.
Today, open source is the preferred choice for organizations that want to become more agile and flexible. It offers a wide range of benefits, from improved security to freedom from vendor lock-in. Industries across the spectrum in the region – even those traditionally regarded as being very private and guarded such as the public sector and financial services – are now embracing open source approaches to realize innovation and drive transformation. Beyond its positive impacts on business, open source innovation has also led to greater citizen participation and contribution in government initiatives around the world. Open source methodologies have the potential to fundamentally transform how countries are run, and at the same, enrich the lives of citizens in so many ways, technologically and culturally.
For those who cut their teeth on computers like the Apple II and Commodore 64, GEOS brought a Mac-like GUI to comparatively lower-powered, 8-bit home computers. The team behind GEOS developed GeoWorks for PC in 1990. GeoWorks was also the basis of America Online for DOS. Substantial amounts of GeoWorks were written in fine-tuned x86 Assembly, making it decently more performant on Intel 386-based computers than Windows 3.0, which was released the same year. This high performance in constrained environments gave GeoWorks a protracted lifespan.
Popular Ethereum wallet service MyEtherWallet (MEW) has launched an open-source blockchain explorer named EthVM (virtual machine) on the Ropsten testnet. EthVM will compete directly with leading Ethereum block explorer Etherscan.io.
According to a press release published on Monday, March 11th, MEW seeks to offer a comprehensive solution to Ethereum developers while at the same time designed to provide a seamless and simple interface for blockchain users (especially beginners).
Over the course of 2019, the big battleground in the software market is going to be around open source and specifically around how it’s used.
“You’re starting to see the battle lines drawn up between the Mongos, the AWSs and Redis,” confirms Jim Rose, CEO at CircleCI.
At the moment, you have these open source communities/companies that have built very valuable software that is “being taken off the shelf “and implemented for money by all of the cloud vendors.
Mobile operators are seeking to transform their networks to keep up with the demands of Industry 4.0 – as wireless connectivity requirements evolve from connected devices to connected everything – people, places, and things. Navigating the open source landscape can be a challenge as there are a number of open ecosystems that have emerged to help define how next-generation networks will be built to support 50+ billion connected devices and new 5G services and applications.
C
CBTS is putting elements of the Open Networking Foundation's SEBA reference design into play with a new reference architecture called COI.
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"One of the things is that R-CORD has been tough for the carriers to do themselves," said Lee Doyle, principal analyst of Doyle Research, in an interview with FierceTelecom. "They're (CBTS) trying to jump on a new market opportunity and we'll see if there's a substantial market for that or not.
"The market is extremely nascent right now. There are a lot of people who are trialing R-CORD, but we've all seen that before with NFV. Just because you're trialing it doesn't mean you're using it."
The 20th Open Infrastructure Summit—formerly known as the OpenStack Summit—is headed to the Shanghai Expo Center the week of November 4, 2019. China is the one of the largest markets for OpenStack based on the number and scale of users—including China Mobile, China UnionPay, China Railway, the State Grid Corporation of China—and developers who contribute to the open source software project. Contributors and users from 30 open infrastructure projects will attend and speak at the event.
However, it has yet to win over the spot as my default browser. For that, I rely on Firefox. But why? I decided to use both browsers side-by-side for a few weeks to find out what it is about Vivaldi that prevents me from making the switch on a permanent basis. The end results, surprisingly, had me even more confused as to which I should be running (I'll confess what tipped the scales in a moment.).
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At this point, Vivaldi does a good job of mimicking the efficiency of Firefox. There's little more customization to be done. And yet, Firefox is still my default. Why? What is it about Firefox that makes me select it over Vivaldi? Unfortunately, the answer lies in one particular aspect that is not likely to change.
You see, as an advocate of open source software, with all things being equal I will always go with the open source option. Now, if Vivaldi had the upper hand over Firefox with a particular feature or usability that I couldn't get with the open source equivalent, I'd happily set Vivaldi as my default (as I'm not a purist). But until said time, the open-source browser remains as my default.
What does that say? Simple. With a few quick tweaks, Vivaldi is as efficient and solid a browser as Firefox. Outside of being open source, there is nothing Firefox can do that Vivaldi cannot mimic. Truth be told, if we're looking at a feature-for-feature comparison, Vivaldi easily comes out on top.
Now, if Vivaldi were to shift to an open source license, I'd kick Firefox off that "Default" curb and go about my day, humming Spring's melody. Until then, Vivaldi will only come out to play for testing, or when Firefox Nightly (which is the version I use at the moment) has problems with a particular site.
TenFourFox Feature Parity Release 13 final is now available for testing (downloads, hashes, release notes). I added Olga's minimp3 patch for correctness; otherwise, there are no additional changes except for several security updates and to refresh the certificate and TLD stores. As usual it will go live Monday evening Pacific time assuming no difficulties.
I have three main updates in mind for TenFourFox FPR14: expanding FPR13's new AppleScript support to allow injecting JavaScript into pages (so that you can drive a web page by manipulating the DOM elements within it instead of having to rely on screen coordinates and sending UI events), adding Olga's ffmpeg framework to enable H.264 video support with a sidecar library (see the previous post for details on the scheme), and a possible solution to allow JavaScript async functions which actually might fix quite a number of presently non-working sites.
WordPress powers an astonishing one-third of all websites these days.
Facebook set up the open source foundation last year for its GraphQL project, hosted under the Linux Foundation with the aim of encouraging widespread adoption of GraphQL and the surrounding ecosystem. The news of the new collaboration means GraphQL is likely to become increasingly dominant in the area of API development.
Google yesterday announced a new program, Seasons of Docs, that aims to make a substantive contribution to open source software development. The eight-month project will assemble a team of technical writers to work on improving documentation development for various open source projects.
Just two days ago, the team at Google announced Season of Docs, a new program which will connect technical writers with open source projects. Season of Docs will help in bringing technical writers and open source projects together in order to work on open source documentation.
As a company, Google contributes to open source by releasing code and tools to the community, as well as supporting various projects. Its latest is called “Season of Docs” and is aimed at bringing together technical writers and open source projects to work on documentation.
When the Mac laptop came out without an ESC key (it was on this gimmicky little one row display at the top of the keyboard that could be reconfigured based on your application), as a long-time VI user (the commands are programmed into my spinal cord, I really have no choice now) I was disgusted. That forced me to recognize that I wasn’t Apple’s target market. They wanted average computer users who didn’t care if they were on the latest and greatest chipset and they were getting more and more closed and “un-upgradeable” every day.
The Call for Talk and presentation proposals for EuroBSDCon 2019 is now open.
EuroBSDcon is the European technical conference for users and developers of BSD-based systems. The conference will take place September 19-22 2019 in Lillehammer, Norway. The tutorials will be held on Thursday and Friday to registered participants and the talks are presented to conference attendees on Saturday and Sunday.
The Call for Talk and Presentation proposals period will close on May 26th, 2019. Prospective speakers will be notified of accepteance or otherwise by June 3rd, 2019.
Orchestra is an open source workflow management system that uses the Robotics Process Automation to support teams and improve how people do analytical and creative work. By having the machines do repetitive parts of a project, developers can spend much more time working on some of the more engaging tasks.
“It’s not about what data can do for diplomacy. It is how diplomacy can possibly remain relevant unless we embrace data.”
So says Graham Nelson, the founder of the UK Foreign Office’s Open Source Unit (OSU). He is fresh from delivering a seminar on data-driven policymaking at Singapore’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
It’s been a long day, but he becomes visibly more animated when talking about his work: helping governments around the world use data to solve their most defining challenges. “I am really excited by the potential for data to do so much good,” says the mathematician-turned-diplomat. He shares how data is an indispensable tool for governments today, and how it can help agencies examine the impact they are really making.
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It certainly helps that governments today “have got much better access to commercial satellite data and meteorological data than we would have had before”. “There are some really easy ways that countries thinking about setting up on this journey of using data can start,” Nelson points out.
GoInvo, a digital health design consultancy headquartered in Arlington, Massachusetts, today announced the release of a repo featuring over 20 open source health visualizations and graphics (https://www.goinvo.com/vision/health-visualizations) available to all for use or modification, under a Creative Commons Attribution v3 license or MIT license.
A new version of the HiFive1 wireless development platform has been rolled out via Crowd Supply this month announcing that the latest HiFive1 Rev B by SiFive is now powered by the FE310-G002 and offers wireless connectivity via the on-board Wi-Fi/Bluetooth module. Priced at just $49 the HiFive1 Rev B development board is now available to preorder and will start shipping during the middle of next month April 2019. The price includes free shipping throughout the United States and worldwide shipping is available for an additional $12.
“The FE310 is the first open source, commercially available RISC-V SoC. SiFive has contributed the FE310 RTL code to the open source community. Now you can see what’s inside the chip. The USB debugger has been upgraded to Segger J-Link, with support for drag & drop code download. In favor of driving GPIO directly from the FE310, the HiFive1 Rev B supports 3.3 V I/O only.”
Debug tools supplier Lauterbach has released its JTAG Switcher VHDL source code into the public domain under the MIT Open Source License...
Whether you are an experienced Java programmer or you are just getting into the game, you will definitely use an Integrated development environment (IDE). A Java IDE is software that houses all the necessary tools, libraries and other resources that are needed for Java programming.
C/C++ has been declared “dead” a million times over the years as Java and Python continue to grow in popularity, but still the language persists. It is one of the most widely used programming languages in most technical fields, powering backend systems that these other languages run on the front end and is also embedded into the programming of just about every machine and electronic device out there. Whether it’s engineering, high-end game programming, or robotics, C/C++ is a must, which is why we compiled 11 free resources for learning C/C++ programming to help you get started.
CIDLib, a general-purpose C++ development environment, is now open source. Note that it does use some third-party code, including a version of the Scintilla engine as the CML language source editor and parts of the standard JPEG libraries to provide JPEG file format support.
CDLib is not based on standard C++/STL libraries but has a far lighter use of templates than what has been commonplace, making it more debuggable, developer Dean Roddey said.
Python is one of the best future-oriented programming languages out there. All thanks to its versatility and large developer community. Python allows you to solve complex problems in fewer lines of code. Either you want to make a career in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning or Data Science, you will always see python developers are being preferred over others.
However, all these things are next to impossible in lack of a good Integrated Development Environment or IDE. If you are from a programming background, you definitely know how important it is to choose the right IDE. It doesn’t only enable you to write code faster but also helps in debugging. Today, I will share some best IDEs for Python developers that you can use to make your job simpler and easier.
Berlin’s population is growing and the economy is doing well. More workers mean that once-quiet streets are getting congested. Rising rents are pushing residents out of the centre, increasing the number of car-commuters and making trains and buses more crowded. More Berliners would no doubt like to get out and feel the breeze in their hair—if they were less worried about being mown down by motorists.
Light pollution has raised increasing alarm in recent years. Research estimates that 99 percent of Americans live within its glare, and that 80 percent of us no longer experience the once-common view of the Milky Way. Health experts point out that excessive exposure to artificial lighting also disrupts the human circadian rhythm, increasing our susceptibility to obesity, depression, dementia, cancer, and other health problems.
On May 5, 1809, Mary Kies became the first woman to receive a patent in the United States. (It was for her technique of weaving straw with silk.)
Of course, women inventors existed before this time, but the property laws in many states made it illegal for women to own property on their own. This led some women to apply for patents in their husbands’ names if they decided to apply at all.
As of last year, only 10 percent of U.S. patent holders were women, although women account for half of doctoral degrees in science and engineering. This disparity is due in part to the the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office being more likely to reject patents with women as sole applicants.
Almost 60 percent of people with employer-sponsored health insurance carry plans with deductibles of more than $1,000. That means more people are exposed to high health care charges for hospital visits. In addition, patients complain frequently of surprise bills they receive after a hospital stay. Those surprise bills often arise when a patient is treated by out-of-network doctors who happen to be working in hospitals that do participate in the patient's insurance network.
Congress is already considering bills to address such surprise billing practices.
Nickels, the representative of the hospital association, says consumers have no need to see the prices insurance companies pay hospitals, just as they don't need to see what a grocery store pays for cases of Coca-Cola.
Finland's healthcare system has helped give it the lowest maternal death rate in the world -- and it's available to everyone for next to nothing.
Finnish gardeners want to tap into this new export opportunity. The executive director at Market Garden Association Jyrki Jalkanen said that the export potential for this growing cannabis industry is worth billions of euros globally. He added that they want to explore whether commercial gardeners can tap into this huge export market.
According to aid agencies, 60 million Nigerians, or 33 percent of the population, do not have access to clean water.
But water and environmental experts like Joseph Ibrahim say that figure may have been underestimated.
The soils, tropical climate, and network of canals and rivers of southern Vietnam have created one of the most diverse tropical jungles and intensely cultivated landscapes of Southeast Asia. This paradise has a long history of numerous wars, foreign occupations, and most recently the Second Indochina War (aka the Vietnam War 1965-1972) which defoliated rain forests and ancient wetland mangroves and left behind contaminated soil and sediment hotspots. During this war, the United States (US) military sprayed 80 million liters of Agent Orange contaminated with the dioxin TCDD in a guerrilla war against communist insurgents.
PIRG tested five wines, 14 beers and one hard cider for the study. The wine brands were Barefoot, Beringer, Frey (organic), Inkarri Estates (organic), and Sutter Home. The beers tested were from Budweiser, Coors, Corona, Guinness, Heineken, Miller, Peak (organic), Sam Adams, Samuel Smith (organic), Sierra Nevada, Stella Artois, Tsingtao and New Belgium. Ace Perry Hard Cider was also tested.
The study determined that popular beers like Coors, Budweiser, and Corona Extra contained an average of roughly 28 parts per billion (ppb). Tsingtao, the outlier, contained a whopping 49.7 ppb.
Though the trenches ranged in location from Japanese to Chilean waters, all of them were within the “hadal zone,” meaning they were at least 6,000 meters under the sea. The study even includes amphipods collected at Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench, which is the lowest known point in the seabed at 10,890 meters below the ocean surface.
Despite such remote habitats, Jamieson’s team found plastic and synthetic fibres such as nylon, polyethylene, and polyvinyl alcohol in the guts of most amphipods they examined. “Of the 90 individual amphipods examined, 65 individuals (approximately 72 percent) contained at least one microfibre or fragment,” the team concluded.
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“Once the microplastics enter the hadal food chain, there is a strong possibility that they will be locked into a perpetual cycle of trophic transfer,” the team cautioned.
It isn’t very often that we find ourselves saddened when a member of the Trump administration decides to resign. But when FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb leaves his position, it could spell disaster for progressives — especially those who support reproductive rights.
Unlike many of the government officials serving President Donald Trump, Gottlieb — while by no means a moderate — wasn’t totally unqualified for his job. And, even more importantly, he didn’t appear to be using his office to push forward the policies most important to zealous religious groups or letting his own personal dogma influence his work.
In a Department of Health and Human Services full of far-right social conservative bigwigs, Gottlieb was surprisingly more interested in public health than pushing Christian dominionist ideology.
Hometown Food Company has recalled certain Pillsbury Unbleached All-Purpose flour products which may be contaminated with salmonella.
The Democratic establishment — deep in the pockets of the health industry — wanted to make sure any blue wave election in 2018 would help sink, rather than support, the growing movement for a single-payer health care system. The recent decline in co-sponsors of the House Medicare for All legislation is, in part, a byproduct of this strategy and a reminder of the great obstacles corporate Democrats have put in front of the single-payer movement.
In 2018, there were 124 cosponsors for the Medicare for All bill in the House (then H.R. 676), representing 66 percent of the Democratic Caucus. This was celebrated widely as a high-water mark for the legislation. So was the release of Bernie Sanders’s Medicare for All bill in the Senate, which also got a record 16 co-sponsors, including prominent Democrats who are running for president.
Given that the Democrats gained 35 seats in the 2018 midterm and Medicare for All has been polling extremely high among Democratic voters — a survey by Reuters from August 2018 showed around 85 percent of Democrats supported the policy — many were hopeful that the number of cosponsors would rise even higher in the current Congress.
Despite this hope, when Rep. Pramila Jayapal introduced the new flagship Medicare for All bill (H.R. 1384), the amount of co-sponsors decreased considerably to 106, down to 47 percent of the caucus. So why, if Democratic voters are moving left on health care, is this not reflected in Congress? Where did all the co-sponsors go?
Small South Carolina water systems struggle to decrease the amount of lead in locally piped tap water. More than 40 small water systems have exceeded the lead standard since 2011.
So, it is quite surprising that the Lead and Copper Rule is being challenged in court by Michigan water providers. Think about that: our lead in drinking water protections are being challenged by water system leaders who have seen the horrors of poisoned water in Flint and who know of ongoing lead releases in water systems throughout the state. Oakland County Water Resources Commissioner Jim Nash, Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan through the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department, Mayor Dennis Wright through the City of Livonia, and the southeast Michigan regional body known as the Great Lakes Water Authority have banded together to try to overturn the new rule in court.
Although NRDC didn’t secure everything we were looking for in the updated Lead and Copper Rule, we strongly supported the new rule. That is why we filed a friend of the court brief challenging key points being put forth in the lawsuit. The full brief is available here but the main takeaways are:
Hispanics breathe in 63 percent more than the pollution than they make, according to a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. For African-Americans the figure is 56 percent. White Americans are exposed to 17 percent less air pollution than they make.
Deaths caused by air pollution appear to have overtaken those caused by smoking, according to a study published in the European Heart Journal. In 2015, air pollution was thought to be responsible for 8.79 million deaths, compared with the 7.2 million caused by tobacco smoking, the study—which focused on Europe—found.
An additional 790,000 deaths in Europe were likely caused by air pollution, with between 40 to 80 percent of those associated with cardiovascular disease, according to the study. Fine particulate matter could be shaving 2.2 years off the life of the average European, likely due to a combination of densely populated areas and poor air quality, the authors of the study warned.
The system will be fully open source and designed with newly developed secure hardware to make the system not only impervious to certain kinds of [intrusion], but also allow voters to verify that their votes were recorded accurately.
Group-IB has dubbed the JavaScript sniffer GMO after the gmo[.]il domain it uses to send pilfered data from infected sites, all of which run the Magento e-commerce Web platform. The researchers said the domain was registered last May and that the malware has been active since then. To conceal itself, GMO compresses the skimmer into a tiny space that’s highly obfuscated and remains dormant when it detects the Firebug or Google Developer Tools running on a visitor’s computer. GMO was manually injected into all seven sites, an indication that it is still relatively fledgling.
Nasty code-execution bug in WinRAR threatened millions of users for 14 years The flaw, disclosed last month by Check Point Research, garnered instant mass attention because it made it possible for attackers to surreptitiously install persistent malicious applications when a target opened a compressed ZIP file using any version of WinRAR released over the past 19 years. The absolute path traversal made it possible for archive files to extract to the Windows startup folder (or any other folder of the archive creator’s choosing) without generating a warning. From there, malicious payloads would automatically be run the next time the computer rebooted.
The attacks can be carried out by anyone who is within range of an affected keyboard set and takes the time to build the hardware that exploits the replay and injection flaws. Normally, that distance is about 30 feet, but the use of special antennas could extend that range. That leaves open the possibility of attacks from hackers in nearby offices or homes.
Friday’s SySS advisory said that there is currently no known fix for the vulnerabilities. It said company researchers privately reported the vulnerability to Fujitsu. The disclosure timeline is: [...]
Using software-defined radios, researchers from Trend Micro were able to reverse-engineer the commands used to control massive industrial machines, including cranes, excavators and scrapers; most of these commands were unencrypted, but even the encrypted systems were vulnerable to "replay attacks" that allowed the researchers to bypass the encryption.
In our research and vulnerability discoveries, we found that weaknesses in the controllers can be (easily) taken advantage of to move full-sized machines such as cranes used in construction sites and factories. In the different attack classes that we’ve outlined, we were able to perform the attacks quickly and even switch on the controlled machine despite an operator’s having issued an emergency stop (e-stop).
The core of the problem lies in how, instead of depending on wireless, standard technologies, these industrial remote controllers rely on proprietary RF protocols, which are decades old and are primarily focused on safety at the expense of security. It wasn’t until the arrival of Industry 4.0, as well as the continuing adoption of the industrial internet of things (IIoT), that industries began to acknowledge the pressing need for security.
More than 1.2 million ethereum applications have used a little-known security tool to help them avoid the costly errors arising from self-executing lines of code known as smart contracts.
Launched by ethereum technology startup Amberdata back in October, the free tool is available for anyone in the general public to interpret the security of active applications on the ethereum blockchain. Smart contracts with bugs that have been exploited have led to huge losses, even to the tune of hundreds of millions.
The automated service scans for common vulnerabilities found in smart contract code and generates a letter grade rating (e.g. A, B, or C) for the security of a decentralized application (dapp).
The feature is one of the many tools encouraging best practice and increased transparency between dapp developers and end-users in the ethereum ecosystem.
Currently, there are a variety of open source and OpenVPN capable routers to choose from, but the most popular models are the Linksys AC3200 and the Netgear Nighthawk AC1900.
A decentralized, open-source crypto platform based on the Ethereum protocol named Callisto Network offers users free-of-charge smart contract security audits. The company wants to support them in the battle against cyber criminals and help developers solve security issues in Ethereum codes.
Android adware found its way into as many as 150 million devices – after it was stashed inside a large number of those bizarre viral mundane job simulation games, we're told.
The so-called Simbad malware was built into mobile gaming titles such as Real Tractor Farming Simulator, Heavy Mountain Bus Simulator 2018, and Snow Heavy Excavator Simulator, according to infosec research biz Check Point today.
The adware campaign made use of malware dubbed SimBad, which sits within a malicious software development kit called 'RXDrioder' and can perform actions after an infected Android device is booted. SimBad then connects back to a control and command server where it receives instructions from the malicious actors controlling it.
For almost two months now, Venezuela has been caught in a tense stand-off between the incumbent government of Nicolás Maduro and the US-backed right-wing opposition leader Juan Guaidó, who proclaimed himself president in January and who has since been trying to force Maduro from office with the active support of the Trump administration and various right-wing regional leaders. Over the next weeks, ROAR will be publishing a series of interviews with Venezuelan activists and intellectuals to help share local perspectives on the origins of the current crisis, the risks of an escalation in the conflict, and possible ways out for radical-democratic forces.
The first interview, published below, is with the Venezuelan sociologist and left-wing intellectual Edgardo Lander, who is a Professor Emeritus at the Central University of Venezuela and a Fellow at the Transnational Institute (TNI). Lander was a critically constructive supporter of former president Hugo Chávez, and served as a consultant to the Venezuelan commission negotiating the Free Trade Area of the Americas. He was one of the organizers of the 2006 World Social Forum, and is currently involved in TNI’s New Politics program. In this interview, he calls on the international left to recognize the complexity of the situation, and not to conflate the need for firm opposition to the ongoing US intervention with unconditional support for the Maduro government.
As the perceptive reader will notice, Lander’s position differs in several important respects from the reading offered by the Venezuelan sociologist and former government minister Reinaldo Iturriza in our second interview, published here. We offer these different perspectives on the assumption that the critical and intelligent reader will be able to make up their own mind as to which reading they find most persuasive, and which position they are most comfortable to align themselves with. We are currently preparing two more interviews with Venezuelan activists that we hope to publish over the next weeks. We consider these grassroots perspectives particularly important in the present context, given the international media’s systematic inattention to (and active marginalization of) the voices of ordinary Venezuelans.
Denouncing the "strangling" of the Venezuelan economy via sanctions and demanding the Trump administration allow the South American country to determine its own fate, pro-democracy protesters marched through Washington, D.C. on Saturday to demand, "Hands Off Venezuela!"
The demonstration came seven weeks after the Trump administration recognized opposition leader Juan Guaido as interim president, rebuking President Nicolas Maduro, who won re-election last May.
U.S. sanctions on Venezuela's state-owned oil company followed, on top of the $30 million per day earlier U.S. sanctions have cost the country.
Code Pink's Medea Benjamin was among the prominent anti-war advocates who spoke at a rally on Capitol Hill before hundreds of protesters from all over the country began their march through the streets.
A U.S. Navy veteran from California has been sentenced to 10 years in prison in Iran, his lawyer said Saturday, becoming the first American known to be imprisoned there since President Donald Trump took office.
Though the case against Michael R. White remains unclear, it comes as Trump has taken a hard-line approach to Iran by pulling the U.S. out of Tehran’s nuclear deal with world powers.
Iran, which in the past has used its detention of Westerners and dual nationals as leverage in negotiations, has yet to report on White’s sentence in state-controlled media. Its mission to the United Nations did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
On March 16, 1968, about 300 Vietnamese villagers died at the hands of U.S. troops in what came to be known as the My Lai massacre.
Listeners will likely know by now, that the late February story, complete with vivid video footage, about the forces of elected Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro burning trucks that were trying to bring the besieged country food and medicine was false. Weeks later, the New York Times (3/10/19) reported that the humanitarian trucks were not set on fire by Maduro’s forces, but instead by anti-Maduro protestors who threw a Molotov cocktail. The Times outlined how the fake story took root, passing from US officials to media that simply reported their claims as fact with no investigation—and does any of this sound familiar?
Folks like CNN‘s Marshall Cohen noted the Times debunking as if it were just an interesting development—a “classic example of how misinformation spreads,” Cohen said in a tweet. Except, as The Intercept‘s Glenn Greenwald pointed out (3/10/19), it was Cohen’s own network, CNN, that led the way in spreading the lie around the world.
An Isis jihadi fighter returned to his home in Sweden to have wounds to his shoulder treated for free at a state-run hospital, before returning to the front line in Syria, Sweden's Expressen newspaper has reported.
She was sold 17 times. One of her owners, a Swede, would lock her in the home for days without food while he went to fight. Another man, an Albanian, stomped on her hands in his military boots, after she scolded him for buying a 9-year-old slave girl.
A handful of captive Yazidis have also been released from Baghuz but hundreds more may still be inside as human shields.
In recent weeks, and in light of reports that Asia Bibi was to find refuge in Canada, a new phenomenon emerged of calls to violence wherever Asia Bibi is to be found.
Human rights organizations began reporting in November that Saudi interrogators tortured at least four of the women, including with electric shocks and whippings, and had sexually harassed and assaulted them.
“The Saudi prosecution is bringing charges against the women’s rights activists instead of releasing them unconditionally,” said Michael Page, deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “The Saudi authorities have done nothing to investigate serious allegations of torture, and now, it’s the women’s rights activists, not any torturers, who face criminal charges and trials.”
West Papuans beg for UN intervention as 2,650 Indonesian commandos hunt down freedom-fighters and the Jakarta government blocks emergency food water and medical supplies to highland villagers
According to the United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP), an additional 650 Indonesian commandos were deployed along with an extra 2000 troops on March 12 to the Central Highlands of West Papua to fight the West Papua National Liberation Army.
The Indonesian government has been blocking all emergency food, water and medicines supplied by local churches and NGOs to the central highland districts of Nduga, Kenyam, Yigi, Mbua, and Mapunduma for the past three months.
The ULMWP said the 650 additional commandos have been deployed to “hunt and kill West Papuan freedom fighters” and “eliminate the independence movement”.
But even elected Papuan leaders in government pushing for a de-escalation of military operations risk a reprimand or threat of prosecution from Indonesia’s military.
A tool that analyses climate data, developed by a team from the Australian National University School of Art and Design along with their colleagues from the ANU Climate Change Institute has shown that by 2050 winter, as we now know it, will no longer exist.
Farmers will only get more water after federal biologists complete an intricate scientific analysis on how it would affect endangered species. But an investigation by KQED finds that analysis will be done under unprecedented time pressure, with less transparency, less outside scientific scrutiny, and without, say federal scientists, the resources to do it properly.
[...]
The internal emails also show the new environmental rules will receive less outside scientific review than before, which eliminates public involvement. Peer review, in which independent scientists assess other researchers' work, is a core practice of science, and previous biological rules have received that scrutiny.
Thanks to advances in dams, tunnelling, and pipelines, stability in water usage has been maintained since then despite a growing population, the team says, but with reservoir construction peaking in the 1960s, those adaptations won't keep delivering the same way in the future.
Egil Matsen, Deputy Governor said: "This advice is based exclusively on financial arguments and analyses of the government's total oil and gas exposure and does not reflect any particular view of future movements in oil and gas prices or the profitability or sustainability of the oil and gas sector”.
In this part of Banteay Meanchey province, farmers remark on the lack of rain, during the wet season as well as the dry season. Cambodian farmers grow rice in both seasons. Cambodia’s rainy season typically arrives in May and ends in October and dry season runs from November until April.
The fifth in a series of assessments, the report determined that conditions are worsening for Finland's flora and fauna, as 11.9 percent of the species examined can now be determined threatened. This number is an increase from the 10.5 percent that was concluded to be at risk in 2010.
A new assessment of threatened species indicates an increasing loss of biodiversity in Finnish nature. Of the 22 000 species evaluated, 11.9% were classified as threatened, compared to 10.5% in the previous assessment. All species groups include threatened species, and the highest proportion can be found among birds and bryophytes (mosses). The primary cause of threat is the decline and deterioration of natural habitat. Much can be done to stop this development, but urgent action is needed.
The results of the extensive assessment for the Red List of all of Finland’s terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems were published in December 2018. The threat status of ecosystem or habitat types in Finland was now evaluated for the second time, using this time the new assessment methodology called IUCN Red List of Ecosystems Categories and Criteria.
The first thing to recognise is that the 70% figure is largely irrelevant to the debate. The sea it represents is salty, accounting for 97.5% of all the water on Earth. A further 1.75% is frozen, at the poles, in glaciers or in permafrost. So the world has to rely on just 0.75% of the planet’s available water, almost all of which is subterranean groundwater, though it is from the 0.3% on the surface that it draws 59% of its needs (see chart). This report will argue that misuse of water may indeed lead to a series of catastrophes. But the means to dodge them are already known, and new technologies are constantly evolving to help.
The North Atlantic right whale is not only one of the rarest whale species in the world, it is the one most at-risk. While the days of commercial whaling may be over, human activity remains their biggest threat. Once numbering in the tens of thousands, there are fewer than 415 right whales left alive today. Among remaining right whale, fewer than 100 are breeding females. At best, we have only five years to reverse this course before it’s too late. Without committed and immediate action, the species will become functionally extinct in just two decades.
Global warming is gradually increasing the average temperature of the oceans, but the new research is the first systematic global analysis of ocean heat waves, when temperatures reach extremes for five days or more.
The research found heat waves are becoming more frequent, prolonged and severe, with the number of heat wave days tripling in the last couple of years studied. In the longer term, the number of heat wave days jumped by more than 50% in the 30 years to 2016, compared with the period of 1925 to 1954.
The news followed the revelation that over half the world’s oceans are being industrially fished. A 2018 study, published in the journal Science, found that commercial fishing covered a bigger area than global agriculture.
This massive disruption to ocean ecosystems can be caused by such diverse threats as overfishing, agricultural chemical offspill and global warming driving up sea temperatures. While threats to rainforests and other land environments have long been known, public awareness about the precarious state of the ocean are a more recent revelation, thanks in part to cultural phenomena like the BBC’s Blue Planet series.
An energy firm linked to " When the review concluded, Trump shrank the monument by 85%. Some 100 uranium claims that were previously *inside* the monument's protected boundary were suddenly on the outside.
Now, House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Raul M. Grijalva (D-AZ) says Democrats plan hold a hearing on March 13, to look into that shady review.
On March 15, tens of thousands of high-school and middle-school students in more than 30 countries plan to skip school to demand that politicians treat the global climate crisis as the emergency it is. Shakespeare made the Ides of March famous with his soothsayer’s warning in Julius Caesar, but ancient Romans actually saw it as a day for settling debts. What bigger debt is there than the theft of a livable future? At the March 15 School Strike 4 Climate, young people will call in that debt and, in the United States at least, demand real solutions in the form of the Green New Deal championed by Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
About 100 bird species are predicted to go extinct based on current farming and forestry practices, according to a new global analysis.
This number has increased by 7% over the first ten years of this century alone, say scientists.
All this work is leading to March 15, when activists around the world are hoping for a global student strike. Youth Climate Strike U.S., an organization Alexandria is affiliated with, has strikes already planned in dozens of states to support Fridays for Future and School Strike for Climate — some states already have multiple strikes in the works, Alexandria says.
The year 2018 was the second consecutive poor harvest year in Finland. Last year, drought reduced the total yield, particularly in Southwest Finland and surrounding areas. In addition to cereals, the broad bean harvest was much smaller than normal. In 2017, heavy rainfall reduced the total yield.
Now, Villaseñor is one of the leaders of the New York City climate strike—one of more than 1,000 strikes across at least 70 countries that will take place tomorrow. Inspired by Greta Thunberg, a Swedish teenager who began the #FridaysforFuture in front of the Swedish parliament building last year, children and teens like Villaseñor have started to call on adults to cut fossil-fuel emission in half within the next 10 years. While Villaseñor is often the only climate protester in front of the UN, she’s not not alone in her fight. Through social media, Villaseñor has connected with other student activists in Chile, the United Kingdom, Australia, Uganda, and elsewhere. This—as the March 15 strike will make clear—is a global movement.
The strikes signal a shift in green activism, with those who will be particularly affected by climate change taking the lead. The protests take place amid a lawsuit that has been filed by a group of American children against the federal government, arguing that it was violating their constitutional right to life, liberty and property by allowing activities that contribute to climate change. Although some politicians have criticised the school strikes as disruptive, others, including Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor, back them. This could be because children’s fears for the future carry a certain moral weight; last month Dianne Feinstein, a Democratic senator, was roundly criticised after a video of her lecturing a group of young climate activists went viral. For many, Greta Thunberg has become a beacon of hope. But as she told the Davos crowd in January, that was never her plan. “I don’t want you to be hopeful,” she said. “I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act.”
Tribes battling the Dakota Access oil pipeline in court are accusing the Army Corps of Engineers of withholding dozens of documents that could bolster their case that the pipeline could unfairly impact them.
Many of the records that attorneys for the four Sioux tribes allege are missing relate to the pipeline's crossing beneath the Lake Oahe reservoir on the Missouri River in the Dakotas, which the tribes rely on for drinking water, fishing and religious practices. Fears of a spill into the river sparked prolonged protests in 2016 and early 2017 that drew thousands of pipeline opponents from around the world to southern North Dakota.
This year, CARE highlighted the fact that almost all of these crises can be traced in large part to climate change. In Sudan, unpredictable rainfall has meant “frequent droughts,” occasional flooding, and “extreme hunger.” In the island nation of Madagascar, “at the frontline of climate change,” cyclones and drought have put 1.3 million people at risk of hunger and, according to UNICEF, a staggering 49 percent of the country’s children have been left stunted by malnutrition. In the Philippines, 2018’s fiercest storm, “super-typhoon” Mangkhut, fed by the heat of the warming oceans, displaced more than a million people. In Niger, desertification has spurred violence and displacement, just as it has in Chad, where nearly half the population is now chronically malnourished. The major source of fresh water in the region, Lake Chad, has shrunk to one-twentieth the area it once covered. In Haiti it was drought again, plus three devastating hurricanes over two consecutive years, leaving nearly 3 million people in need of immediate aid.
Data collected from 1930 to 2010 has shown that sustainable fish stock declined 4.1 percent on average over that time period. In some regions, including the East China Sea and the North Sea, the drop was as high as 15-35 percent.
Both climate change and overfishing are to blame, the team of researchers says. They did also find that a small number of fish populations actually increased - because previously colder waters became more habitable for them.
Scientists have warned that global warming will put pressure on the world’s food supplies in coming decades. But the new findings — which separate the effects of warming waters from other factors, like overfishing — suggest that climate change is already having a serious impact on seafood.
Fish make up 17 percent of the global population’s intake of animal protein, and as much as 70 percent for people living in some coastal and island countries, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
Somewhere in the order of 150,000 students went absent from classes in Australia on Friday afternoon for the global “School Strike 4 Climate” marches.
In what might be seen as an afternoon practical lesson in democracy, free speech, and civic engagement, students from cities and towns across the country and the world marched, chanted, and held placards aloft.
One of the biggest marches in Australia saw 25,000 students on the streets of Sydney, the home of the Rupert Murdoch-owned The Daily Telegraph.
But one student in particular caught eye of The Daily Telegraph — a 17-year-old, Year 12 pupil called Joanne Tran, who wrote an article for the newspaper explaining why she would not be marching.
“Kingsmill Bond” certainly sounds like a proper name for a City of London financial analyst. He looks the part, too: gray hair expertly trimmed, well-cut suit. He’s lived in Moscow and Hong Kong and worked for Deutsche Bank, the Russian financial firm Troika Dialog, and Citibank. He’s currently “new energy strategist” for a small British think tank called Carbon Tracker, and last fall he published a short paper called “2020 Vision: Why You Should See the Fossil Fuel Peak Coming.” It asks an interesting question: At what point does a new technology cause an existing industry to start losing significant value?
This may turn out to be the most important economic and political question of the first half of this century, and the answer might tell us much about our chances of getting through the climate crisis without completely destroying the planet. Based on earlier technological transitions—horses to cars, sails to steam, land lines to cell phones—it seems possible that the fossil fuel industry may begin to weaken much sooner than you’d think. The British-Venezuelan scholar Carlota Perez has observed that over a period of twenty years, trains made redundant a four-thousand-mile network of canals and dredged rivers across the UK: “The canal builders…fought hard and even finished a couple of major canals in the 1830s, but defeat was inevitable,” as it later was for American railroads (and horses) when they were replaced by trucks and cars.
Major technological transitions often take a while. The Czech-Canadian academic Vaclav Smil has pointed out that although James Watt developed the coal-powered steam engine in 1776, coal supplied less than 5 percent of the planet’s energy until 1840, and it didn’t reach 50 percent until 1900. But the economic effect of those transitions can happen much earlier, Bond writes, as soon as it becomes clear to investors that a new technology is accounting for all the growth in a particular sector.
Over the last decade, there has been a staggering fall in the price of solar and wind power, and of the lithium-ion batteries used to store energy. This has led to rapid expansion of these technologies, even though they are still used much less than fossil fuels: in 2017, for instance, sun and wind produced just 6 percent of the world’s electric supply, but they made up 45 percent of the growth in supply, and the cost of sun and wind power continues to fall by about 20 percent with each doubling of capacity. Bond’s analysis suggests that in the next few years, they will represent all the growth. We will then reach peak use of fossil fuels, not because we’re running out of them but because renewables will have become so cheap that anyone needing a new energy supply will likely turn to solar or wind power.
Kawika Ke Koa Pegram has lived his entire life in island communities and is all too familiar with what sea level rise looks like firsthand. Pegram, a 17-year-old junior in high school, recently moved back to Hawai‘i—where he was born—from the Philippines. Two years later, Hurricane Walaka hit the state.
“It was one of the worst storms the island has seen in modern history,” he remembers. “It had floods that went up to your knees and legs.” Pegram says he had seen that degree of flooding before, but this storm was different: It actually sunk an entire Hawaiian island.
Pegram is one of more than 60 student leaders who have stepped up to lead climate strikes in cities and towns across the country on March 15 as part of a global school strike for climate action modeled after the example of Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg. An estimated 50 percent of U.S. student leaders are students of color. This representative leadership is making the strike relatable and accessible to more students.
Pegram first began environmental organizing just a few weeks ago. After seeing on Twitter that the global climate strike movement was coming to the United States, he tracked down the U.S. Youth Climate Strike website and emailed its leaders. “They got back within an hour. And within a few hours, I was in it,” he says. Pegram is now heading the state of Hawai‘i in staging school strikes and storming the Capitol in Honolulu on Friday.
The certified organic label has helped save many generational farms and enabled people like me, who do not come from agricultural backgrounds, to become successful farmers. Organic farming has brought environmental benefits — healthier soils, freedom from toxic pesticides and herbicides — to 6.5 million acres in the U.S.
Organic shoppers are willing to pay a little extra for food that is free from chemical residues. But the organic label is in trouble after reports of fraudulently labeled food made national news. On top of that, agribusiness pressures and National Organic Program (NOP) actions have weakened standards. Yet at a time when farms are in distress, family-scale farmers need a label with integrity. They need a label that provides public support from people who understand that small-scale farmers are an endangered species.
In the 1980s, I was one of the organic farmers who helped launch organic certification. Farming and non-farming members of the Northeast Organic Farming Association worked together to write standards for a label that identified the real organic food that non-farmers wanted to buy — for which they were willing to pay enough to keep the small farms in business.
In retrospect, it has become clear that we were very naïve. It did not occur to us to consider the many ways our clear, simple statements could be twisted by people who were willing to cut corners to increase their bottom line and steal markets by underselling the farmers who observed the standards faithfully.
Industries and organizations that stand to gain from the budget spend millions of dollars lobbying the U.S. government each year.
From cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Education, to a 5 percent increase in the military budget, the Fiscal Year 2020 budget will delight economic conservatives wanting cuts to social spending and dismay liberals aiming to preserve environmental regulation and welfare programs.
While the budget will likely gain no traction on Capitol Hill, the document unambiguously presents the priorities of the administration. It calls for a 31 percent cut in the EPA, an 11 percent cut at the Department of Energy, and a 12 percent cut at the Department of Education.
At the Department of Energy, a 70 percent decrease in funds for the department’s office of renewable energy coincides with increased investment in nuclear energy, coal and fossil fuels. The budget for the Office of Fossil Energy Research and Development will increase by $60 million, and the Office of Nuclear Energy’s budget will surge by $67 million.
The proposed cuts have received condemnation from liberal environmental groups such as the League of Conservation Voters, which spent tens of millions to elect Democrats in 2018
“This isn’t a budget for a better America, it’s a budget for a sicker, dirtier America,” said Carol M. Browner, board chair of the League of Conservation Voters and a former EPA administrator.
Union contract negotiations include mandatory and permissive subjects of bargaining. Employers are required by law to negotiate over mandatory subjects—wages, benefits and working conditions. Permissive subjects, such as decisions about which public services will be provided and how, have historically been the purview of management. We only negotiate over how managerial decisions affect members’ jobs. Employers may voluntarily agree to negotiate permissive subjects, but unions can’t legally strike over them.
In recent years, some unions have embraced “bargaining for the common good,” which use the union campaign to win broad, righteous public benefits. The best current example of this is the Los Angeles teachers’ strike, which opposed the underfunding, privatization and overcrowding of schools—all of which hurt students. Common good goals often bump against the constraints of what is legally bargainable. For instance, does a demand from teachers’ unions that school districts use district-owned property to fund and build affordable housing for teachers affect working conditions? While shortages of affordable housing affect teachers very directly, how school districts use their land and invest their money is normally considered a managerial prerogative.
But last fall’s report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is a game-changer. It concludes that humanity has 12 years to cut greenhouse gas emissions enough to hold global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius—and avoid civilization-threatening consequences of climate change. There is a lot of space between projected best- and worst-case future scenarios. It’s the difference between bad and apocalyptic. That space represents hundreds of millions of people dying. Avoiding worst-case scenarios, in strictly scientific terms, requires everyone to do everything, immediately.
“After Amada’s passing, the peyote distribution system lost heart and seemed to be about monetary compensation,” said Iron Rope, former chairman of the Native American Church of North America (NACNA) and today chairman of the NAC of South Dakota. He is concerned that the remaining three or four peyote dealers in Texas — all non-Native — don’t give “the medicine” the reverence they should.
“They don’t make prayerful offerings when they harvest,” Iron Rope said. “We’ve heard reports about intoxicated harvesters. Sometimes, the medicine that comes to us was mushy or small, and the harvesting technique was not one that would allow regrowth.”
Careless and sometimes illegal harvesting, along with increased land and resource development in Texas, has led to a decline in peyote’s quality and availability. Prices have gone up, and church members worry the cactus, now listed as a vulnerable species, could become endangered.
The Food and Drug Administration announced Friday that it is lifting an import alert that stopped genetically engineered salmon from entering the US.
Bread in Zimbabwe now costs $2 a loaf, or higher, making it beyond the reach of many in the poverty-stricken country.
About 21% of working Americans said they aren't saving any money at all, Bankrate found in a survey. Among those who are saving, a majority are putting away less than 10% of their income.
Over the past several decades, household savings in the US have been trending downward. By the Bureau of Labor Statistics' measure, Americans were saving 7.6% of disposable income in December. Before the 1980s, that rate had mostly been in the double digits.
There is also an entirely legal way to corrupt the elite admissions system, which for some reason generates less outrage. Mr Singer grasped this dynamic: There is a front door “which means you get in on your own” and a “back door” secured by multimillion-dollar donations to universities, he explained in a recorded call to a client. What Mr Singer did—for 761 buyers, he claimed—is create a “side door” by bribing university officials and faking test scores that would achieve the same result at one-tenth of the cost. In effect, his scheme granted mere multimillionaires access to the billionaires’ entrance.
Finally, there is the odd experience of meeting supposed colleagues who are in fact complete strangers, meaning foreigners employed by Chinese state media, or by obscure Western news outlets that channel Chinese propaganda. Some ask planted questions at press conferences. Others pop up in the state media lauding China’s political system. Xinhua, China’s official news agency, this year put out a video entitled “Chinese democracy in the eyes of an American”. A fresh-faced young man from Chicago, Colin Linneweber, strolls around Tiananmen Square while opining that “it’s widely acknowledged that a key to China’s success is its system of democracy”, and praising the country’s “stability”. He then presents mini-profiles of delegates with such day jobs as farmer, migrant worker and postman, whose proposals for making China better became law. It is tempting to be quite cross with such Westerners. Ordinary Chinese who start praising democracy on the square, a ghost-haunted, massively policed spot, would be instantly arrested. Stability comes at a price, what is more. China’s one-party rule involves more than the absence of messy things like real elections or a free press. It requires active, unsleeping maintenance by state-security agents tasked with tracking, threatening or jailing any who challenge the Communist monopoly on power.
However, before the deal can go into effect from the U.S. side, it must be approved by Congress. Some representatives have voiced their objections to the international treaty, making its approval less than certain.
The European Union is likely to announce a third fine on Google this week, this one for alleged abuse of its AdSense advertising service, a fine that had been expected as far back as November 2017.
The European Commission in 2016 opened a third case against the world’s most popular internet search engine by accusing Google of preventing third parties using its AdSense product from displaying search advertisements from Google’s competitors.
It said that Google, which at that time had held 80 percent of the European market for search advertising intermediation over the previous ten years, had kept its anti-competitive practices for a decade.
Manchester council paid doomed construction firm Dawnus almost half a million pounds just days before they went bust, the Manchester Evening News can reveal.
The Welsh company went into administration on Friday owing creditors tens of millions of pounds.
Dawnus has been the lead contract on the Regent Road project to improve junctions near the city centre and ease congestion.
French yellow vest protesters set life-threatening fires, smashed up luxury stores and clashed with police Saturday in the 18th straight weekend of demonstrations against President Emmanuel Macron. Large plumes of smoke rose above the rioting on Paris’ landmark Champs-Elysees avenue, and a mother and her child were just barely saved from a building blaze.
The resurgent violence came as protesters are seeking to breathe new life into a movement that seemed to be fizzling, and get attention from French leaders and media whom they see as underplaying their economic justice cause and favoring the elite.
Paris police appeared to be caught off guard by the speed and severity of the unrest. French police tried to contain the demonstrators with repeated volleys of tear gas and water cannon, with limited success.
Anti-Amazon protesters in Arlington County, Virginia were outraged Saturday after the county board dismissed outright their concerns over the corporate giant's decision to build a headquarters in Crystal City—voting unanimously to approve $23 million in tax incentives for the company.
The 5-0 vote followed hours of testimony by Amazon representatives, supporters, and opponents of the plan, with critics arguing that the trillion-dollar company has no need for financial incentives and that its presence in Crystal City will negatively impact lower-income residents and public services.
One resident, Chelsea Yu, called attention to Amazon's actions in its current hometown of Seattle, where in addition to contributing to skyrocketing housing prices, it has actively fought against a corporate tax that would have funded affordable housing.
"You claim Arlington is a place for all, for immigrants, for equality, [and] clamor for the attention of a company that does the opposite," said Yu. "Never have I seen a company so reviled by the city it occupies."
Beto O'Rourke, the former Texas congressman and Senate candidate and recently declared Democratic candidate for president in 2020, has been outed as a former member of what has been described as America's oldest hacking group—the Cult of the Dead Cow (CDC). O'Rourke admitted to his membership in an interview for an upcoming book, as Reuters reported in an exclusive based on the book.
O'Rourke's role in the group, starting in the late 1980s, was more focused on writing screeds for the CDC's text-file essays than hacking. O'Rourke, like other teens of the time, did find ways to avoid paying for long-distance dial-up phone service time to connect to bulletin board systems (BBSs) of the day across the country with his family's Apple IIe computer and 300 baud modem, which he often used to search of pirated games.
The Texas Democrat was a member of the Cult of the Dead Cow, called the CDC, one of the oldest groups of hackers in the United States, according to a Reuters investigation. The CDC is known for coining the phrase "hacktivism," and releasing tools that allow less tech-savvy users to hack Windows computers.
O'Rourke, 46, was a member of the group in the 1980s. He's been involved in tech since: he co-founded the Stanton Street Technology Group, a web design company in El Paso.
What does a megalomaniacal president of the United States do when he’s cornered? We’ll soon find out.
“Wear green on St. Patrick’s Day or get pinched.” That pretty much sums up the Irish-American “curriculum” that I learned when I was in school. Yes, I recall a nod to the so-called Potato Famine, but it was mentioned only in passing.
Sadly, today’s high school textbooks continue to largely ignore the famine, despite the fact that it was responsible for unimaginable suffering and the deaths of more than a million Irish peasants, and that it triggered the greatest wave of Irish immigration in U.S. history. Nor do textbooks make any attempt to help students link famines past and present.
President Trump actually almost got something right the other day. Americans should be worried about a return of “McCarthyism,” the kind of list-waving, name-calling, career-destroying mass hysteria that was pioneered in the 1950s by then-Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy, over his invented claims that the U.S. government was overrun with “card-carrying Communists.” But needless to say, the 45th president is looking for his “witch hunt” in all the wrong places.
No, the place where I’m getting the “Are you now, or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?” crazed vibe of the old House Un-American Affairs Committee is not from the Bob Mueller probe but by watching our elite (and elitist) Beltway pundits on cable TV or in the editorial pages, determined to rid the 2020 presidential campaign of any scourge of alleged “socialism” that might ruin the utopia that is modern American capitalism.
It all came to a head recently when one of the 347 announced Democratic presidential candidates — a guy named John Hickenlooper, a former governor of Colorado — turned up for an interview on the Electronic Daily Diary of the American Dream, MSNBC’s Morning Joe. Hickenlooper is beyond a long shot for the White House, but the 10-minute slot on national TV was a great chance to ask him where he stands, or why he was such a fossil-fuel zealot that he once drank fracking fluid.
But America got none of this. Instead, there was a kind of Spanish Inquisition to ruthlessly pressure Hickenlooper (who got in start in life as a brew-pub owner, with beer striking most people as something very good about capitalism) to look into the camera and declare, “I am a capitalist.”
Traffic to Tumblr fell from 521 million views in December 2018 to 437 million in January, according to figures from Similarweb.
If that sounds too good to be true, it’s because it is. Despite the word “privacy” being used 33 times in the piece, what Zuckerberg lays out is not unalloyed good news for privacy or, indeed, for much else – except Facebook itself, which stands to benefit in important ways. The key idea is the following:
[...]
That is, an increased emphasis on private messaging among small groups of people, rather than posting to Facebook for hundreds of people to see. WhatsApp is central to this strategy, but in his essay Zuckerberg also promises to make private messaging work between all of Facebook’s services. He calls that “interoperability”, but in truth it is more like an integration. Bringing together the different parts of Facebook offers some advantages for users, but it gives the company something much more important. It makes any future efforts to break it up – an idea that is steadily gaining ground – much harder, because there will be no separate pieces, just different ways of communicating with Facebook’s common database of users.
Facebook says it will use end-to-end encryption for its private messaging – certainly good news for people living in countries with repressive governments that spy on their citizens. Encryption might seem a problem for Facebook’s business model, since it will be unable to track what people are writing and sharing.
This week, certain corners of the gaming Internet have been abuzz with a bit of self-described "amateur analysis" suggesting some "pretty sketchy," spyware-like activity on the part of the Epic Game Store and its launcher software. Epic has now stepped in to defend itself from those accusations, while also admitting to an "outdated implementation" that can make unauthorized access to local Steam information.
Russia's Ministry of Culture has tabled new amendments to copyright law that will allow rightsholders to order web hosts to block pirate sites without trial, if they are unresponsive to takedown demands. Site owners will also be forced to publish their names and addresses on their platforms but it's not yet clear how this can be enforced.
Of course, Tinder is also Match Group’s greatest moneymaker, so it gives users the option to fully skip over any of these algorithm rankings with an in-app purchase. That can be in the form of a Super Like, which automatically moves a card toward the top of a person’s profile stack (and visually indicates to him or her that they’ve been Super Liked), or a profile boost, which Tinder says brings a profile closer to the top of many other users’ profile stacks for 30 minutes.
The company has announced that from now on, free accounts will be limited to just three devices - if you go beyond that, you'll need to deauthorise a different one.
In light of Facebook’s long list of wrongdoings, a temporary service outage might not seem like a big deal. It’s even good material for jokes about Facebook. But what if we took Facebook seriously? What if, as an experiment, we charitably assumed all of the things Facebook says about itself are true? Here’s a brief list of some of Facebook’s beliefs about itself: [...]
The investigation was triggered by it coming to light, via another NYT report, that partnerships with the social network allowed some services to access the personal data of Facebook users; for example, the Bing search engine could see the names of Facebook users' friends without their consent, and Spotify and Netflix could read a Facebook user's private messages.
At the time, Facebook said the partnerships with other companies only allowed access to information users had consented to give it.
But this response didn't seem to placate federal investigators, and now Facebook is facing a criminal probe.
For the past 15 years, Mark Zuckerberg has pushed Facebook to be the most innovative, influential, fast-growing, and profitable company in the world—to move fast and break things. It worked great, as we all know. It also broke a lot of things Facebook didn't anticipate. And the cleanup bills are piling up.
The new investigation, by federal prosecutors in the Eastern District of New York, is related to deals with more than 150 partners, including many big tech companies. Those deals allowed the partners to see Facebook user data, sometimes without user consent. The New York Times, which broke the news on Wednesday night, reported on these partnerships in December. While Facebook phased out almost all the deals more than two years ago, it accidentally left some of the data connections open into early 2018, the paper said then.
According to the New York Times report, a grand jury in New York has already subpoenaed information on these types of deals from at least two smartphone and other device manufacturers involved.
Australian Government data stored by American companies who have been certified as Protected cloud providers is not subject to the US CLOUD Act, which allows Washington to obtain data stored overseas by American companies in the event that it is deemed to be needed by law enforcement authorities.
Just last spring, Chris Cox, the chief product officer of Facebook, was promoted to also oversee WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram. It seemed at the time almost like succession planning. If Mark Zuckerberg were to ever leave the company, Cox, his longtime confidante and a represen€tative of the engineering and product side, would be set up to run it.
But Cox announced today that, after 13 years at the company, he’s leaving. “For over a decade, I've been sharing the same message that Mark and I have always believed: Social media's history is not yet written, and its effects are not neutral. It is tied up in the richness and complexity of social life. As its builders, we must endeavor to understand its impact—all the good, and all the bad—and take up the daily work of bending it towards the positive, and towards the good. This is our greatest responsibility,” he wrote.
The departures follow the resignations of Instagram founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger and WhatsApp’s co-founder Jan Koum last year.
However, the latest exits are potentially more troubling, as Mr Cox and Mr Daniels were members of Mr Zuckerberg’s tight-knit group of allies.
Teens told me they use Google Docs to chat just about any time they need to put their phone away but know their friends will be on computers. Sometimes they’ll use the service’s live-chat function, which doesn’t open by default, and which many teachers don’t even know exists. Or they’ll take advantage of the fact that Google allows users to highlight certain phrases or words, then comment on them via a pop-up box on the right side: They’ll clone a teacher’s shared Google document, then chat in the comments, so it appears to the casual viewer that they’re just making notes on the lesson plan. If a teacher approaches to take a closer look, they can click the Resolve button, and the entire thread will disappear.
She said that despite requesting twice that the item be X-rayed instead of handled by officers, the supervisor told her to open the pouch or she would be escorted out of the airport.
It was late February, and around 30 Afro-Colombian human rights defenders from around the country had gathered in the western Colombian city of Cali for a conference. They were taking stock of their efforts toward meaningful peace and security, and toward racial and gender justice in a country still experiencing violence despite being in a post-peace accord context.
The conference was organized by the Black Communities’ Process (PCN), a national network that has advocated for protections and rights for Afro-descendant Colombians for more than 20 years, and my organization, MADRE, an international women’s rights organization.
At the conference, the human rights defenders strategized how to move forward under the right-wing administration of Iván Duque Márquez, which rose to power last year on promises of undoing key provisions of the government’s 2016 peace deal with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Afro-descendant regions of Colombia, heavily impacted by conflict, overwhelmingly supported the peace deal. Advocates, including women leaders from those communities, helped secure inclusion of a chapter protecting and promoting Afro-descendant and Indigenous rights, including gender rights.
There are more U.S. Catholics questioning whether to remain in the church than there were 17 years ago amid a stream of sexual abuse allegations against priests, a new Gallup poll indicates.
Some 37 percent of Catholics polled said they have personally questioned whether they should remain with the church compared to 22 percent in 2002. The survey, published Wednesday, said 62 percent said they have not questioned changing faith, compared to 76 percent in 2002.
A Pennsylvania judge was sentenced to 28 years in prison in connection to a bribery scandal that roiled the state's juvenile justice system. Former Luzerne County Judge Mark Ciavarella Jr. was convicted of taking $1 million in bribes from developers of juvenile detention centers. The judge then presided over cases that would send juveniles to those same centers. The case came to be known as "kids-for-cash."
On March 18, 2018, 22-year-old Stephon Clark was in his backyard when two police officers responding to a report of someone breaking car windows near his home fired 20 shots at him, killing him. The officers claimed they thought Clark’s cell phone was a gun, but he was unarmed.
Nearly a year later, on Saturday, March 2, Sacramento County district attorney Anne Marie Schubert announced that the officers who shot and killed Stephon Clark last year will not be charged.
They were seeking to draw attention to women's issues in Turkey, which ranks 77th out of 138 countries on a United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) index of gender equality. The government frequently faces criticism for its handling of women's issues, including the failure to stem high rates of violence and low female participation in the workforce.
[...]
Plainclothes police began shoving members of the group, and many women fled the square when riot police fired rubber bullets into the crowd.
Several thousand women had gathered in central Istanbul on Friday evening for a march to celebrate International Women’s Day but police fired tear gas to disperse them.
A new law proposal from the government and Dansk Folkeparti would make it illegal for foreign governments and authorities to give money to religious bodies in Denmark.
The law would come into play if it is decided that the purpose of the donation is to undermine the fundamental rights of freedom and democracy in Denmark, reports Kristeligt Dagblad.
Asia Bibi, the mother of five who spent almost a decade on death row for a crime she did not commit, is reported to be in dire physical condition as she continues to be held in a safe house in the Pakistani city of Karachi. Bibi, 53, was acquitted of blasphemy last October after the Supreme Court ruled that the accusations had no evidential basis. Since then, Bibi has been granted asylum in Canada, but as yet has not been released from her home country.
Despite the total acquittal having been granted to the Christian woman, now aged 53, and the across-the-board rejection of all appeals issued by Muslim hardliners, the family fears that the risk of her being attacked right in the street is hardly on the wane.
The United States shares blame for the violence against women in El Salvador. It was the U.S.-supported civil war in the late 1970s and ’80s, in which rape was weaponized as a war tactic by militaries, that has left a legacy of violence against women. What began as the Salvadoran civil war expanded into a proxy war between the United States and Russia, in which Washington was fueling government-led militias and death squads with up to $2 million a day in aid and weapons.
Ms Sotoudeh is known for representing women who have protested having to wear the headscarf.
I have been traveling in the Middle East for the last few weeks and slightly regret returning to the maelstrom of ancient animosities and unbridgeable sectarianism that is modern Britain. But in my absence I see that one of the worst tropes of our time has been stalking unhindered across the land. That is, of course, the latest push to make an equivalence between anti-Semitism and the crock term ‘Islamophobia’.
It is not just in the UK that this play has been made. In America over recent days people have been able to follow the progress of the new Muslim Congresswoman Ilhan Omar who has decided to deflect attention from her weekly expressions of anti-Semitism by claiming ‘Islamophobia’. Where this would once have been a fringe play, this time it has been adopted by the Democratic party itself. So we are no longer talking about a harmless misunderstanding here. This is an equivalence that has developed legs.
According to Koopmans' data, around 65 percent of the Turkish and Moroccan Muslims in six European countries consider religious rules to be more important than the secular law of the country in which they live. Muslims consider themselves separate from other non-Muslim groups, and refrain from broader interaction with those outside their religion. For instance, almost 60 percent of the Muslims surveyed rejected the idea of maintaining friendships with homosexuals, and 45 percent said the same thing about Jews.
ICC notes that abductions and forced conversions to Islam are common for religious minorities in Pakistan, as an estimated 1,000 women from Pakistan’s Christian and Hindu communities are abducted, raped, and forcefully converted to Islam each year. Pakistan ranks as the fifth worst nation in the world when it comes to Christian persecution, according to Open Doors USA's World Watch List.
Four received seven lashes after being simply being found in a room with a member of the opposite sex who was not a relative.
“This is someone who has come to Australia to build a better life and spends most of his days taking high-profile Australians to human rights commission for offending Islam,” said Yemini.
“He’s found a way to manipulate the Australian judicial system to enforce Islamic blasphemy laws.”
In a post, uploaded to the BTP London account last night, the force wrote: "Yesterday one of my officers was accused of not being a 'proper' Muslim because she wears the uniform.
According to Hanafisah, despite the fact that insulting Prophet Muhammad and tarnishing the sanctity of Islam were offences under the law and the legal action and punishment had been imposed on those who committed them, the irresponsible act still occurred, as if the legal punishment bore no effect on the group.
The Green Youth members reminded the public that there had been a total of 100 shootings in Stockholm in 2018 alone, a record high. Of them, 11 ended with fatalities. From this, the duo drew the conclusion that the problem rests with the Swedes themselves.
A man in his 20s was shot and killed at Stockholm’s Ãâlvsjö commuter train station on Saturday evening.
What's unusual is that the joint venture between Vie Management of Miami and the foreign asset manager is structured to comply with Islamic laws governing finance, which prohibits payment of traditional interest. That's a growing but still lesser-known area of specialty in the United States that has become increasingly important as Muslim investors become more active around the world.
He revealed that the accused strangled the victims to death over ‘honour’.
The women, aged 18 and 20, say they do not want to return home because they fear punishment or even death on their return.
Speaking to the BBC's Chinese service, the sisters said they had hatched a plot to flee because they had "no dignity" in their lives in Saudi Arabia.
O.K., this was world-class lack of self-awareness: It doesn’t get much better than being lectured on self-reliance by an heiress whose business strategy involves trading on her father’s name. But let’s go beyond the personal here. We know a lot about upward mobility in different countries, and the facts are not what Republicans want to hear.
The key observation, based on a growing body of research, is that when it comes to upward social mobility, the U.S. is truly exceptional — that is, it performs exceptionally badly. Americans whose parents have low incomes are more likely to have low incomes themselves, and less likely to make it into the middle or upper class, than their counterparts in other advanced countries. And those who are born affluent are, correspondingly, more likely to keep their status.
During Tuesday hearings on the proposal in the House Communications Subcommittee, some Democrats, like Florida Rep. Darren Soto, stated the bill was simply an “opening offer” and that Democrats would be open to amendments for the bill. Others, like Oregon Rep. Kurt Schrader, insisted that additional “compromise” would be needed to ensure passage.
Normally, compromise is a healthy part of the legislative process. But activists at consumer groups like Fight For the Future told Motherboard that at this juncture in the net neutrality fight, they’re only likely to weaken the popular proposal.
Tim Berners-Lee said on the eve of the 30th anniversary of the World Wide Web that the internet is a "mirror of humanity"
In just 30 years, this flagship application of the internet has forever changed our lives, our habits, our way of thinking and seeing the world. Yet, this anniversary leaves a bittersweet taste in our mouth: the initial decentralized and open version of the Web, which was meant to allow users to connect with each other, has gradually evolved to a very different version, centralized in the hands of giants who capture our data and impose their standards.
As an advocate, organizer, and campaigner for preschool access, tax fairness, plastic pollution and other causes for the last 14 years, I’ve heard this saying many times. You tell it to your volunteers when it looks like your movement has hit a wall or when it looks like your opposition has the upper hand, and you want to show your teammates that many people have faced obstacles before, and overcome them.
At its center, the dispute is over patents around the use of smart scales for weighing ingredients that communicate with apps for guided cooking. Perfect Company products include: Perfect Drink app-controlled bartending system, Perfect Bake app-controlled baking system and Perfect Kitchen PRO app-controlled smart kitchen system. The company also licenses out its technology for products include the Vitamix Perfect Blend and the NutriBullet Balance.
In 2016, Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom filed an eight-point statement of claim for judicial review in an effort to attack the underpinnings of the extradition process. A year later, the High Court struck out the first seven and a subsequent appeal by Dotcom failed. In a judgment handed down today, Dotcom was denied permission to appeal to the Supreme Court.
Scammers are using fake copyright notices to obtain login credentials from Instagram users, cybersecurity firm Kaspersky reveals. The recipients are told that their account will be suspended for copyright infringement within 24 hours. They can, however, "verify" their account if they believe it's a mistake.
If history is any guide, Spotify's complaint could lead to a similarly large fine against the iPhone maker. It might also lead to restrictions that could hamper Apple's services business, which the electronics giant has been touting as its future. And the complaint could spur a parallel antitrust investigation here in the US.