The idea of spinning openSUSE out into a foundation is not new; it has come up multiple times along the way. The most recent push started back in April at two separate board meetings where it was discussed. It picked up steam during a board meeting at the openSUSE Conference 2019 in late May. While waiting for the outcome from that meeting (though there was a panel session with the board [YouTube] at the conference where some of the thinking was discussed), the community discussed ideas for a name for the foundation (and, possibly, the project itself). Now, board member Simon Lees has posted a draft of the foundation proposal for review.
The proposal outlines the current thinking of the board. It notes that the move to a foundation is not meant to pull away from SUSE, "but to add more capabilities to the openSUSE Project". In particular, having a separate entity will allow the project to "receive and provide sponsorships (in terms of money, hardware, or contracted services)". Currently, any kind of agreement between the project and some other organization has to be done via SUSE, which can complicate those efforts. The new foundation would be able to partner with others, receive donations, spend money, and sign contracts with venues, service providers, and the like, all on behalf of the openSUSE project.
SUSE would clearly have a role in the new foundation; the board is requesting some funding to set up the organization as well as one or two people to help with the administrative side. The new foundation's board would take the place of the existing project board, with the same election rules as there are today (which results in a board of six, five elected from the members of the project and the chair appointed by SUSE).
The board is looking at setting up a German stiftung foundation as the legal entity for the new organization, though that was not clearly specified in the draft proposal. An eingetragener Verein (e. V.) was considered, but the structure of that type of entity is inflexible; in addition, the purpose of an e. V. can be changed if there was a "hostile takeover" at some point. Umbrella organizations (e.g. the Linux Foundation) and simply keeping things the same were also looked at, but were deemed unworkable for various reasons.
There is also a handful of open questions, including logistical issues such as whether SUSE or the new foundation would own the IT infrastructure, trademarks, and so on. Also, who would be responsible (in a GDPR sense) for the project's data collection and storage. The biggest open issue is to create a charter for the foundation, which requires legal advice. The Document Foundation (TDF) is something of a model for what openSUSE is trying to achieve; it is also a stiftung and shares some of the attributes with the proposed structure.
Linux Mint team is working with Compulab to bring MintBox 3 soon, which is based on Airtop 3, after successor of Mintbox 2. It was release back in 2014.
It’s pre-installed with the latest Linux Mint with Linux Mint branding.
Linux Mint is continuing its long-standing partnership with Compulab and their relationship is going well, there is no doubt about it.
It is bringing high performance computer powered by an 8-core Intel? Core? i9-9900K Processor and Nvidia Quadro RTX 4000, both passively cooled using Compulab’s Natural Airflow technology.
Recently, we published several blog posts, aimed at helping developers enjoy a smoother, faster, more streamlined experience creating snaps. We discussed the tools and tricks you can employ in snapcraft to accelerate the speed at which you iterate on your builds.
We want to continue the work presented in the Make your snap development faster tutorial, by giving you some fresh pointers and practical tips that will make the journey even brisker and snappier than before.
But the negative effects of the war against Linux has left scars on Microsoft that are visible today.
It’s definitely nice to see Microsoft play ball with open source software, which can be especially useful as innovations such as AI, IoT, and 5G gradually become mainstream. What do you think about the growth of Linux, especially on Microsoft’s own Azure?
Yesterday, Youhana Naseim the Group Engineering Manager at Azure Pipelines provided a post-mortem of the bug, due to which a sqlite3 module in the Ubuntu 16.04 image for Python went missing from May 14th.
The Azure DevOps team identified the bug on May 31st and fixed it on June 26th. Naseim apologized to all the affected customers for the delay in detecting and fixing the issue.
It looks like CentOS 8 as the "community" version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0 is still a few weeks away, but good progress is being made.
In their July newsletter for CentOS, they still anticipate the release coming within "the next month or two."
We are thrilled to announce an updated release of the data streaming component of our messaging suite, Red Hat AMQ streams 1.2, which is part of Red Hat integration.
Red Hat AMQ streams, based on the Apache Kafka project, offers a distributed backbone that allows microservices and other applications to share data with extremely high throughput and extremely low latency. AMQ streams makes running and managing Apache Kafka a Kubernetes-native experience, by additionally delivering Red Hat OpenShift Operators, a simplified and automated way to deploy, manage, upgrade and configure a Kafka ecosystem installation on Kubernetes.
This episode is a story about packaging, and flit, tox, pytest, and coverage. And an alternate solution to "using the src".
Python makes it easy to build simple tools for all kinds of tasks. And it's great to be able to share small projects with others on your team, in your company, or with the world.
When you want to take a script from "just a script" to maintainable package, there are a few steps, but none of it's hard.
Also, the structure of the code layout changes to help with the growth and support.
Website protection with OPNsense, FreeBSD Support Pull Request for ZFS-on-Linux, How much has Unix changed, Porting Wine to amd64 on NetBSD, FreeBSD Enterprise 1 PB Storage, the death watch for X11 has started, and more.
This week we’ve been giving talks and spending 8 and a half years becoming a Doctor of Philosophy. We discuss 32-bit Intel packages in Ubuntu, the Eoan Ermine wallpaper competition, Mir still not being dead, the new Snap Store, some jobs you might want to apply for, UbuCon Europe, Oggcamp, the new Raspberry Pi 4 and round up some headlines from the tech world.
As of this writing, just over 13,600 non-merge changesets have been pulled into the mainline repository for the 5.2 development cycle. The time has come, once again, for a look at where that work came from and who supported it. There are some unique aspects to 5.2 that have thrown off some of the usual numbers. 1,716 developers contributed changes for the 5.2 kernel, 245 of whom made their first contribution during this cycle. Those 1,716 developers removed nearly 490,000 lines of code, which is a lot, but the addition of 596,000 new lines of code means that the kernel still grew by 106,000 lines.
Technologies like UEFI secure boot are intended to guarantee that a locked-down system is running the software intended by its owner (for a definition of "owner" as "whoever holds the signing key recognized by the firmware"). That guarantee is hard to uphold, though, if a program run on the system in question is able to modify the running kernel somehow. Thus, proponents of secure-boot technologies have been trying for years to provide the ability to lock down many types of kernel functionality on secure systems. The latest attempt posted by Matthew Garrett, at an eyebrow-raising version 34, tries to address previous concerns by putting lockdown under the control of a Linux security module (LSM). The lockdown patches have a long and controversial history; LWN first wrote about them in 2012. Opposition has come at all kinds of levels; some developers see lockdown as a way of taking control of systems away from their owners, while others see it as ultimately useless security theater. There does appear to be some value, though, in making a system as resistant to compromise as possible, so these patches have persisted and are often shipped by distributors. Disagreement over more recent versions of the lockdown patch set were focused on details like whether lockdown should be tied to the presence of secure boot or integration with the integrity-measurement infrastructure.
One outcome from the most recent discussion was a concern that the lockdown patches were wiring too much policy into the kernel itself. The kernel has long had a mechanism for pushing security-policy decisions out to user space — the security-module mechanism. So it arguably makes sense to move lockdown decision-making into an LSM; that is indeed what the more recent versions of the patch set do.
First, though, there is the problem of initialization. LSMs exist to apply policies to actions taken by user space, so as long as the LSM infrastructure is running by the time user space starts, everything is fine. Lockdown, though, must act earlier: it needs to be able to block the action of certain types of command-line parameters and must be functional even before a security policy can be loaded. So the patch set starts by creating a new type of "early security module" that is initialized toward the beginning of the boot process. At this point, the module can't do much — even basic amenities like kmalloc() are not available — but it's enough to register its hooks and take control.
While there is the open-source OpenGL driver support in RadeonSI now part of Mesa 19.2 for the Radeon RX 5700 series launching on Sunday, for the open-source Vulkan driver support due to timing you might be needing to wait a little bit.
For the popular RADV Vulkan driver within Mesa that is led by Valve/Google/RedHat developers, there aren't any indications AMD provided any card samples or documentation in advance to these "community" developers. We're hopeful though that we'll still see some Navi 10 support for RADV in Mesa 19.2 that is going into feature freeze in early August and then releasing as stable a few weeks after that point. For now it's a waiting game.
Last week I wrote about Navi (10) support pending for the RadeonSI OpenGL driver to complement the AMDGPU Linux kernel driver support for the Radeon RX 5700 series currently queued into DRM-Next for Linux 5.3. That OpenGL driver support has been now been merged into Mesa 19.2 for debuting as stable around the end of August for providing open-source OpenGL on these next-gen AMD GPUs.
The work by Google developer Bas Nieuwenhuizen introduces the concept of RADV shader binaries that can allow for simplifying some elements of their code and creating RTLD shader binaries. Following the various changes, they switch to using the RTLD ELF linker.
Avorion is a fully 3D co-op space sandbox game, where players build a ship and eventually a fleet from single blocks and it's quite engrossing. This latest update enables proper modding support, with integrated Steam Workshop support.
Previously, you were able to download pre-built ships other had made but this goes a massive step further for the game. You can now use Lua to mod all sorts of things in the game, although some things like Materials, Rarities or Blocks cannot yet be modded. What's fun is that dedicated servers, for those that plan online, also support modding. If you connect to a modded server, it grabs the mods for you—handy.
Ready to get engrossed in another Visual Novel? Synergia looks promising, with a futuristic yuri cyberpunk setting. Giving off some Ghost in the Shell vibes, it's actually quite impressive. The intro video especially, not something I was expecting to see with a Visual Novel and sets the mood quite nicely.
I recently got shown Superstarfighter, a 1-4 player local multiplayer (with AI too) fast-paced action game and it's actually pretty fun.
It's a very frantic arcade game, where each player can shoot out homing missiles to take down other players. With multiple game modes available, it's surprisingly good. I'm quite a fan of the Take the Crown mode, where each player fights over a single Crown and whoever wears in the longest wins. There's also a pretty amusing Hive Filling mode, with each player flying over tiles to change the tile into their colour, with opposing colours slowing you down.
The second game developed by Mirko Seithe and made on Linux, Kubifaktorium, a voxel colony management and automation game is now available in Early Access.
As someone who has been slightly obsessed over the Vikings series from the History network, a game based around Norse mythology is exactly what I need right now.
Viking Vengeance from Lowpoly Interactive is due out sometime later this year and it is currently advertising Linux support on Steam. When speaking to the developer about it in this forum post, they said "Hello and thank you for the question. Yes if people using Linux will be interested in the game we will definitely bring it to Linux.", so it might be worth letting them know if you're interested.
In the official announcement, they said the price is going to be increasing from $9.99 to $15.99 so if you were thinking of getting it you may want to think quicker if you wanted to save a little. After release, they said updates will still be coming, just not as often as they do currently. A special edition will also be offered which will include a PDF art book and an expanded soundtrack. They're also considering paid DLC as it "gets asked a lot".
NuTyX Linux, NuTyX Linux 11.1, Linux Distro, Linux Distributions, Distro relese, Distribution release
NuTyX team have announced the release of NuTyX 11.1 on July 01, 2019. This new release contains more than 1000 packages upgrade.
It’s offering a 32 bits version of NuTyX 11.1.
NuTyX is a French Linux distribution (with multi-language support) that built from Linux From Scratch (LFS). It comes with custom package manager called “cards”.
Today we are looking at KaOS 19.07. It comes with KDE Plasma 5.16.2, KDE Apps 19.04.2 and Qt 5.13.0. It uses Linux Kernel 5.1 and it is a rolling independent distro, so not build on off another Linux Distro. It uses about 1.1 GB of ram when idling and with its new default wallpaper and general look, it has truly become a beautiful, clean,, up to date, professional distro. Enjoy!
Donald Stewart has announced the release of Mageia 7 on July 01, 2019. Mageia 7 comes with lots of new features, exciting updates and support latest hardware.
It will be supported with security and bug fix updates for 18 months, up to 2020.
It support both 32-bit and 64-bit architectures, as well as live DVD’s for 64-bit Plasma, GNOME, Xfce, and 32-bit Xfce. Also, you can install other desktops too.
It’s offering variety of desktops and window managers, improved support for Wayland and for hybrid graphics cards. Also added many games collections.
A good progress made on ARM support: aarch64 and ARMv7 but this still being experimental stage.
In case you haven’t heard about it, Pocket Science Lab [1] is a really nifty board developed by the FOSSAsia community which combines a multichannel, megahertz-range oscilloscope, a multimeter, a logic probe, several voltage sources and a current source, several wave generators, UART and I2C interfaces… and all of this in the form factor of an Arduino Mega, i.e. only somewhat larger than that of a credit card. Hook it up over USB to a PC or an Android device running the official (free and open source, of course) app and you are all set.
Well, not quite set yet. What you get for your 50-ish EUR is just the board itself. You will quite definitely need a set of probe cables (sadly, I have yet to find even an unofficial adaptor allowing one to equip PSLab with standard industry oscilloscope probes using BNC connectors) but if you expect to lug yours around anywhere you go, you will quite definitely want to invest in a case of some sort. While FOSSAsia does not to my knowledge sell PSLab cases, they provide a design for one [2]. It is meant to be laser-cut but I have successfully managed to 3D-print it as well, and for the more patient among us it shouldn’t be too difficult to hand-cut one with a jigsaw either.
Now being into Q3, we're waiting to see if Purism will be able to deliver the Librem 5 GNU/Linux smartphone this quarter after being pushed back twice from their original January ship date. They haven't released any finished design yet or the finalized specifications (they still haven't finalized on the RAM, battery, cameras, and speaker(s)), but their latest series of blog posts are showing that GNOME/Linux applications can run on their Librem 5 developer kit.
Following their posts showing off the boot time compared to an obsolete Android smartphone and Quake II can run on their Linux smartphone, they have been highlighting other applications that can run on the phone -- well, their developer kit.
Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger has called for “people with serious grievances against social media” to go on strike from social media for two days to “demand that giant, manipulative corporations give us back control over our data, privacy, and user experience”.
On July 4 and 5, Sanger is urging users to log out of social media to urge the global developer community to focus on a new system of decentralised social media, encouraging strikers to use the hashtag #socialmediastrike to publicly declare their grievances with social media giants.
Reitschin does add he is no lawyer, but these claims do raise a number of serious concerns and questions about the ReactOS project. These claims alone will probably ensure no serious commercial entity will ever want to associate itself with ReactOS, and it will be interesting to see if these claims will ever lead to something more serious than mere words.
For those using Samba for better Windows interoperability with SMB/CIFS/AD, the forthcoming Samba 4.11 will be a lot more scalable so it can be used within massive organizations.
Samba has been undergoing work to improve its performance on the large scale for organizations with 100,000+ users and over one hundred thousand computer objects and memberships. Samba 4.11 will be able to scale a hell of a lot better than previous releases due to performance improvements around reindexing, domain joins, LDAP server memory, custom LMBD map size, better batch operation support, better LDB search performance, better sub-tree rename performance, and other tuning to allow Samba to perform at massive scales.
The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 6.2.5, the fifth bug and regression fixing release of the LibreOffice 6.2 family, targeted at tech-savvy individuals: early adopters, technology enthusiasts and power users. Users in production environments can start evaluating LibreOffice 6.2.5.
LibreOffice’s individual users are helped by a global community of volunteers: https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/community-support/. On the website and the wiki there are guides, manuals, tutorials and HowTos. Donations help us to make all of these resources available.
Why OpenBSD? Simply because it is the best tool for the job for me for my new-to-me Lenovo Thinkpad T420. Additionally, I do care about security and non-bloat in my personal operating systems (business needs can have different priorities, to be clear).
I will try to detail what my reasons are for going with OpenBSD (instead of GNU/Linux, NetBSD, or FreeBSD of which I’m comfortable using without issue), challenges and frustrations I’ve encountered, and what my opinions are along the way.
Disclaimer: in this post, I’m speaking about what is my opinion, and I’m not trying to convince you to use OpenBSD or anything else. I don’t truly care, but wanted to share in case it could be useful to you. I do hope you give OpenBSD a shot as your workstation, especially if it has been a while.
The FreeBSD operating system is continuing to make progress, 26 years after it got its name. Among the areas where work is being done is on improved support for RISC-V, FUSE filesystem updates, C runtime changes, and security improvements. FreeBSD Day is celebrated on June 19, in recognition of the date in 1993 when the name FreeBSD was coined for a fork of the 386BSD project. The first official release of FreeBSD did not occur until November 1, 1993, however.
Ahead of FreeBSD Day, the project released its quarterly report for the first quarter of 2019, outlining some of its ongoing efforts. In addition to the quarterly report, the executive director of the FreeBSD Foundation provided LWN with some insights into the state of the project and the foundation that supports it.
More bugs in free software are being found these days, which is good for many reasons, but there are some possible downsides to that as well. In addition, projects like OSS-Fuzz are finding lots of bugs in an automated fashion—many of which may be security relevant. The sheer number of bugs being reported is overwhelming many (most?) free-software projects, which simply do not have enough eyeballs to fix, or even triage, many of the reports they receive. A discussion about that is currently playing out on the oss-security mailing list.
The calling interfaces between programming languages are, by their nature, ripe for misunderstandings; different languages can have subtly different ideas of how data should be passed around. Such misunderstandings often have the effect of making things break right away; these are quickly fixed. Others can persist for years or even decades before jumping out of the shadows and making things fail. A problem of the latter variety recently turned up in how some C programs are passing strings to Fortran subroutines, with unpleasant effects on widely used packages like LAPACK.
The C language famously does not worry much about the length of strings, which simply extend until the null byte at the end. Fortran, though, likes to know the sizes of the strings it is dealing with. When strings are passed as arguments to functions or subroutines, the GCC Fortran argument-passing conventions state that the length of each string is to be appended to the list of arguments.
The Rust team is happy to announce a new version of Rust, 1.36.0. Rust is a programming language that is empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software.
The Rust language team is marking this US Independence Day by rolling out Rust 1.36.
Rust 1.36 brings a stabilized Future trait, the Alloc crate as the core allocation and collections library has been marked stable, a new "--offline" argument for Cargo for offline usage, and various other library changes.
In this article, we will further look at the other methods of the DataFrame object, we will continue to explore the DataFrame object methods in a few more chapters before moving forward to the other Pandas objects.
This is the 13th article in my series of articles on Python for NLP. In the previous article, we saw how to create a simple rule-based chatbot that uses cosine similarity between the TF-IDF vectors of the words in the corpus and the user input, to generate a response. The TF-IDF model was basically used to convert word to numbers.
In this article, we will study another very useful model that converts text to numbers i.e. the Bag of Words (BOW).
Since most of the statistical algorithms, e.g machine learning and deep learning techniques, work with numeric data, therefore we have to convert text into numbers. Several approaches exist in this regard. However, the most famous ones are Bag of Words, TF-IDF, and word2vec. Though several libraries exist, such as Scikit-Learn and NLTK, which can implement these techniques in one line of code, it is important to understand the working principle behind these word embedding techniques. The best way to do so is to implement these techniques from scratch in Python and this is what we are going to do today.
RPM of PHP version 7.3.7 are available in remi repository for Fedora 30 and in remi-php73 repository for Fedora 27-29 and Enterprise Linux ââ°Â¥ 6 (RHEL, CentOS).
RPM of PHP version 7.2.20 are available in remi repository for Fedora 28-29 and in remi-php72 repository for Fedora 26-27 and Enterprise Linux ââ°Â¥ 6 (RHEL, CentOS).
CD brings fundamental changes to organizations because old scheduling and development cycles disappear. As you move to CD, you need to bring your entire organization—not just your development and operations teams—along in order to reap every advantage.
AMD graphics cards are getting some Linux love from what might seem like an unlikely source: Valve. Source. Valve. C’mon… Whatever. A team of software engineers in Valve has been working on a new shader compiler for AMD GPUs running on Linux operating systems, and it promises dramatically shorter time to compile metrics as well as a few cases where it’s making a positive difference to gaming frame rates on Linux too.
“Several global companies engaged in large-scale manufacturing, especially in China, are seriously considering an alternative location, owing to political, economic and strategic reasons. The ongoing US-China trade war has further accelerated the pace of efforts at relocation or towards finding a diverse location,” stated the letter, which calls for setting up an inter-ministerial panel to look at ways to harness India’s potential to become a low-cost manufacturing hub for high-end IT products.
Processor manufacturer Broadcom appears set to buy security firm Symantec in what looks to be a bid to increase the range of its business.
A deal would expand Broadcom's push into software a year after its $18.9 billion deal to buy U.S. business software company CA Inc. It also follows Broadcom's failed bid reut.rs/2xn5gVE to buy Qualcomm Inc.
Memphis University Hospital is a tax-exempt nonprofit whose CEO, Dr. Michael Ugwueke, took home $1.6m last year; the hospital itself makes an operating surplus of $80m/year -- and it also sues the shit out of its patients, running its own in-house collection agency and filing more garnishment claims than any other hospital in the state.
The SKS keyserver network has been a victim of certificate poisoning attack lately. The OpenPGP verification used for repository syncing is protected against the attack. However, our users can be affected when using GnuPG directly. In this post, we would like to shortly summarize what the attack is, what we did to protect Gentoo against it and what can you do to protect your system.
The certificate poisoning attack abuses three facts: that OpenPGP keys can contain unlimited number of signatures, that anyone can append signatures to any key and that there is no way to distinguish a legitimate signature from garbage. The attackers are appending a large number of garbage signatures to keys stored on SKS keyservers, causing them to become very large and cause severe performance issues in GnuPG clients that fetch them.
The attackers have poisoned the keys of a few high ranking OpenPGP people on the SKS keyservers, including one Gentoo developer. Furthermore, the current expectation is that the problem won’t be fixed any time soon, so it seems plausible that more keys may be affected in the future. We recommend users not to fetch or refresh keys from SKS keyserver network (this includes aliases such as keys.gnupg.net) for the time being. GnuPG upstream is already working on client-side countermeasures and they can be expected to enter Gentoo as soon as they are released.
Google's video-sharing site YouTube has started to ban videos that show users how to get past software restrictions and provide instructions on information security.
Youtube banning security disclosures doesn't make products more secure, nor will it prevent attackers from exploiting defects -- but it will mean that users will be the last to know that they've been trusting the wrong companies, and that developers will keep on making the same stupid mistakes...forever.
During the interrogation, one of the accused –a car mechanic- said he bought a Bluetooth-enabled tablet online used by car showroom staff to access the vehicles.
This cooperation strengthens the existing relationship between the two organizations, ensuring information and technology sharing can support INTERPOL in cybercrime-related investigations. Within the new agreement, Kaspersky will share information about its cyberthreat research and provide the necessary tools to assist with full digital forensics, aimed at strengthening efforts on the prevention of cyberattacks.
The malware downloads a tourist’s text messages, calendar entries, and phone logs, as well as scans the device for over 70,000 different files.
Border guards reportedly took tourists' phones and secretly installed an app on them which could extract emails, texts and contacts, along with information about the handset; basically a mother-load of privacy-sapping stuff.
There are reports that in some cases Android phones are returned to those entering the region with an app called Fēng cÃŽi installed. Apple's iPhones don't appear to come back with the app, but they could have been scanned by border control guards in a separate area after travellers were forced to hand them over.
The app gathers personal data from phones, including text messages and contacts. It also checks whether devices are carrying pictures, videos, documents and audio files that match any of more than 73,000 items included on a list stored within the app’s code.
Security updates have been issued by CentOS (libssh2 and qemu-kvm), Debian (lemonldap-ng), Fedora (tomcat), Oracle (kernel), and SUSE (elfutils, kernel, and php5).
As the number of users on the platform has increased over the years, so has YouTube’s list of ‘banned content.’ Adding further to the list, YouTube has banned ‘instructional hacking and phishing’ videos.
The latest bans have led to the deletion of several educational videos on ethical hacking as they now violate YouTube’s Terms of Service. The list also includes ‘extremely dangerous challenges,’ ‘eating disorders’ and ‘violent events’ as banned categories.
Creators behind malicious malware are evolving and coming up with new techniques to make it almost impossible for a normal user to spot them. A new banking trojan named BianLian, which was previously used as a dropper for spreading notorious banking malware like Anubis is affecting Android users all over the world.
A new form of malware has been spotted in the wild by cybersecurity companies which say the code's main focus is the fraudulent mining of the Monero (XMR) cryptocurrency.
Between 1940 and 1945, some 2.7 million tons of bombs were dropped on Europe by US and British forces, half of which landed in Germany. Of the roughly quarter million bombs that did not explode, thousands are still hidden underground all over the country.
Horst Lenz has been defusing bombs since 1984. The 63-year-old director of the Explosive Ordnance Clearance Service in Rhineland-Palatinate and his team of 15 is called in when bombs are found around the state. Last year they found around 35 tons of munitions and munition parts, including 63 unexploded bombs, 319 incendiary devices, 11 anti-tank mines, 444 grenades and 5,045 kilos of bullets.
Intelligence and foreign-policy officials have long been warning that ongoing United States-led power-sharing negotiations with the Taliban could end up again turning Afghanistan into a hub for global Islamist terror groups.
Last week's report, produced by the United Nations' Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring Team's report, says the Taliban "cooperate and retain strong links with al Qaeda, al Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent, the Haqqani Network, the Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, the East Turkistan Islamic Movement, as well as nearly 20 other regionally and globally-focussed groups."
If you don’t get relief, extreme heat reaches a dangerous point as your body temperature rises to 103 or above. Heat stroke, or hyperthermia, comes on suddenly in the form of a throbbing headache, rapid pulse, and red, hot, and dry skin. (You’re no longer sweating.) Your body can’t cool itself down anymore, and your body temperature can rise to 106 or higher within 10 or 15 minutes.
“We do need a world-war type mobilization and that means putting in place incentives to move our economy as quickly as we can away from fossil fuels to renewable energy,” Mann, a scientist at Pennsylvania State University who is known for taking on climate skeptics, told Hill.TV in an interview that aired Wednesday.
[...] The free lifeline water scheme of providing 700 litres of water per household, for example, brought multi-fold benefits to the DJB (Delhi Jal Board) and its consumers.
On the one hand, it ensures ‘right to water’ to everyone. On the other hand, it promotes conservation of water resources by those households who would consciously cut their consumption to reduce their water bills. Most importantly, it facilitates the provisioning of piped water to those areas that are currently water stressed or have no piped water supply network by generating demand.
Karnataka, the minister said, will not get into a confrontation with Tamil Nadu over the Mekedatu project.
Glyphosate was originally developed by chemical giant Monsanto, a US company that became a subsidiary of Germany's Bayer last year. The herbicide first appeared on the market under the name of Roundup in 1974. The patent for it has since expired and various companies now produce glyphosate-based weedkillers under different names.
There’s no escaping climate teaching. Gone are the days when the core curriculum at most schools used to consist of reading, writing and ’rithmetic, and not an awful lot more. It’s increasingly rare today to find any that don’t include the facts of life in this warming world.
But, as global youth concern over the deepening crisis manifests itself in the protests of Fridays for Future, which has earned the backing of leading climate scientists, how do teachers fulfil our obligation to encourage pupils to treat the climate as responsibly as it deserves?
What are we teaching, and how are we teaching it? What are we trying to achieve?
The past twenty years in primary and tertiary education have taught me that the answer is, and always has been, quite simple; we must keep the content real and we must teach honestly.
That means doing away with tokenistic “eco weeks” or days, and embedding climate change teaching in the day-to-day reality of core subjects.
Share a meal in a local household. Eatwith.com and Mealsharing.com connect travelers with people in host countries who love to entertain. Prices vary. Eight other guests and I recently paid $49 each, staying past midnight sharing food, wine, and conversation in the home of a French journalist covering the yellow vest protests in Paris. Saigon Hotpot sets up meals in university students’ homes as well as city and street food tours in Ho Chi Minh City.
[...]
Lodge locally. Sleep where your dollars make a difference by staying in independently owned hotels, small inns, and homestays rather than internationally owned chain hotels. Look for hotels that partner with nonprofit organizations to train and employ disadvantaged youth. The Responsible Travel Guide Cambodia led me to Robam Inn in Siem Reap, whose owners returned to start the business after taking refuge in Canada during the Khmer Rouge regime.
[...]
DeTour exists to change the image of Hawai‘i as a tourist playground, a perception that ignores its occupation and oppression by the U.S. military and its treatment of Native Hawaiians. DeTours’ decolonizing tourist experience encourages visitors to support Hawaiians’ wish for sovereignty. Stops include areas polluted by the military and sites important to Polynesian and ancient Hawaiian history—all to show a side of Hawai‘i out of the shadows of U.S. imperialism.
Veterans for Peace was formed in 1985 by U.S. veterans to increase public awareness of the causes and costs of war and to oppose militarism and arms proliferation. The nonprofit has hundreds of chapters worldwide, including one in Vietnam composed of former servicemen who live there and organize annual tours across the country. The tours are designed to show damage left by the war in Vietnam and to raise funds for ongoing work, such as ordnance removal and support for victims of Agent Orange. -Zeb Larson
In 2010, scientists warned we’d already built enough carbon-dioxide-spewing infrastructure to push global temperatures up 1.3 ÃÅ¡C, and stressed that the fossil-fuel system would only continue to expand unless “extraordinary efforts are undertaken to develop alternatives.”
Spoiler: They weren’t.
In a sequel to that paper published in Nature today, researchers found we’re now likely to sail well past 1.5 ÃÅ¡C of warming, [...]
Another pipeline could soon up its capacity to carry more Bakken oil out of North Dakota, marking the third announcement of a major pipeline project in the state over the past month.
In the case of DAPL, scores of local governments passed resolutions supporting the people and communities of Standing Rock — but how did the State government of North Dakota respond? The oil boom peaked in 2012. Oil production and the corresponding man camps housing thousands of oil workers tripled crime by 121 percent from 2005 to 2011 , with Native women being heavily impacted. According to one report, sexual assaults on women on the Fort Berthold reservation have increased by 75.5%. In response to this escalating violence, the Governor of North Dakota allocated $150,000 over 5 years — $30,000 a year — for women’s shelters and violence prevention programs. In response to the potential equipment damage, ETP faced from the DAPL protest North Dakota’s Governor spent over $38 million over a 5 months period to protect the company’s equipment. They made it crystal clear whose side they have been on.
The position of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe is that the Dakota Access Pipeline violates Article II of the Fort Laramie Treaty, which guarantees the "undisturbed use and occupation" of reservation lands surrounding the proposed location of the pipeline. In 2015 the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, operating as a sovereign nation , passed a resolution regarding the pipeline stating that "the Dakota Access Pipeline poses a serious risk to the very survival of our Tribe and ... would destroy valuable cultural resources."
“The public must have a say on any move by Energy Transfer that could further endanger the environment in Lakota Country,” he said. “The company's track record of respect for the land, water and people potentially affected is obviously less than stellar.”
Greenpeace on Tuesday accused Energy Transfer Partners of repackaging racketeering claims that were thrown out of federal court earlier this year.
The Finnish Forest Association says landowners have been known to cut down trees that provide the perfect habitat for flying squirrels, to stop them making themselves at home in the first place.
In short, the populations of Africa and Asia are expected to rise by over 2.5 billion, while the population of Europe is expected to decline. Most of the rise will come in countries which are relatively poor compared to Western Europe.
The racket was busted after a woman in Bengaluru made a distress call to police in the district alleging that she had been duped out of Rs 4 lakh, out of which Rs 40,000 was deposited in a bank account in Bhind.
The case was then probed by Madhya Pradesh police's cyber cell which uncovered over 23 accounts in six-seven public sector banks which were opened by these unemployed young men, allegedly with the purpose of making money via cyber fraud.
Freelancers, the self employed and workers in the so-called gig economy may like the flexibility but they would prefer a steady job, according to new research from the Centre for Economic Performance (CEP). The rise of non-traditional work arrangements is not due to workers wanting or demanding these jobs, but rather because they have no other choice the report concludes. What’s more, workers would agree to earn less in order to increase their employment security. The results come from analysis of data from over 4,000 UK and US workers, who were surveyed on their current work arrangements and the job attributes they most want.
I find that on average, workers are willing to give up approximately 50 per cent of their hourly wage for a permanent contract over a one-month one. There are important institutional differences between the UK and US when it comes to permanent contracts. In the UK, permanent contracts offer a host of additional benefits such as unfair dismissal protection, mandatory redundancy pay and notice periods, and there is no similar legislation in the US. Despite this fact, the valuations of a permanent contract are very similar between the two countries (55.4 per cent of an hourly wage in the UK, and 44.1 per cent in the US).
Recreation fees are collected by national parks through admission fees. The funds typically go toward park maintenance as well as seasonal hiring, such as for additional fire fighters. The NPS system is facing a nearly $12 billion maintenance backlog and the Trump administration has routinely suggested cutting the agency’s budget.
Some Democrats have raised concerns that the park fees are being used to bolster the spectacle surrounding Trump’s Thursday evening speech from the Lincoln Memorial, which they fear will serve as a campaign-style rally, with VIP seating for top campaign donors, and politicize a national holiday that has otherwise been apolitical.
After days of fraught negotiations, European Union leaders reached agreement Tuesday on the five key positions to head the EU, with German Defence Minister Ursula von der Leyden poised to take over the European Commission presidency.
Most Americans are familiar with its first three words – "We the People." Yet they "don't understand" the venerable document, says Kimberly Wehle, a professor of law at the University of Baltimore.
To get readers interested in the charter, Wehle recently published "How to Read the Constitution -- and Why," a back-to-the-basics, accessible primer on the U.S. charter of government written for a time when many on the left and some on the right think the Constitution is under assault.
The book’s launch coincides with the end of a consequential term for the Supreme Court, during which President Donald Trump’s second court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, joined the bench following a contentious confirmation hearing. It also coincides with the nation's 243rd observance of Independence Day, July 4.
VOA spoke with Wehle about the Supreme Court and how and why to read the Constitution. The following excerpts have been edited for clarity and length.
Interior Secretary Eduardo Ano, who oversees the national police, said, however, that authorities have obtained information indicating the other suicide attacker may also be a Filipino militant from Sulu. Remains of both bombers will be subjected to DNA tests to ascertain their identities, he added.
As of August 2018, the Islamic State had as many as 30,000 fighters in Iraq and Syria—far more than the 700-1,000 fighters its predecessor, al Qaeda in Iraq, had in 2011, when the United States withdrew, according to a new report by the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) that warns of the risk for an Islamic State resurgence. During the gradual fall of the caliphate, the group quietly dispersed across both countries and is now waging a capable insurgency, boosted by a global financial network and sufficient supplies, including weapons, hidden in tunnel systems.
"In a Facebook post-Tuesday night, the accused used abusive words against the chief minister and also mentioned Jawaharlal Nehru while talking about power cuts," Sablok said.
In March, the Washington Department of Corrections issued a new policy banning nonprofit organizations from donating used books to prisoners. After public outcry, the department reversed the ban and scheduled a meeting with Books to Prisoners, a Seattle nonprofit. The outcome has not been made public.
Federal courts have repeatedly affirmed that prisoners have a First Amendment right to read, and publishers and others have a right to send them reading materials. While those rights can be restricted in the interest of security, blocking the free flow of ideas serves no penological purpose. Proponents of stricter controls on the books available to incarcerated readers argue that some information is inherently dangerous, but the First Amendment is designed to prohibit the suppression of information.
Nearly three weeks after removing three pieces of artwork critical of the Chinese government, the town of Cary has offered to reinstall the paintings and extend the exhibit through the end of the month.
In an e-mail obtained by ABC11, Cary Cultural Arts Manager Lyman Collins made the offer to Durham-based artist Bing Weng on Wednesday morning.
At the very least, it shows that German authorities appear to harbor extremely selective views of what constitutes hate speech, based, it seems, on nothing more than the identity of the group that voices it.
If you have hangups about Amazon and privacy on its smart assistant, Alexa, you're not alone. Even after Amazon sent answers to a US senator who had questions about how the tech giant retains voice data and transcripts, the lawmaker remains concerned about Alexa's privacy practices.
Sen. Chris Coons, a Democrat from Delaware, sent a letter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos in May, demanding answers on Alexa and how long it kept voice recordings and transcripts, as well as what the data gets used for. The letter came after CNET's report that Amazon kept transcripts of interactions with Alexa, even after people deleted the voice recordings.
The deadline for answers was June 30, and Amazon's vice president of public policy, Brian Huseman, sent a response on June 28. In the letter, Huseman tells Coons that Amazon keeps transcripts and voice recordings indefinitely, and only removes them if they're manually deleted by users.
Huseman also noted that Amazon had an "ongoing effort to ensure those transcripts do not remain in any of Alexa's other storage systems." But there are still records from some conversations with Alexa that Amazon won't delete, even if people remove the audio, the letter revealed.
Apart from Facebook keeping hold of our personal data, Amazon, too, performs the same deed as its virtual assistant — Alexa — has been caught keeping users’ voice recordings. Even though Amazon introduced the delete history feature, it seems like the voice assistant still keeps the user data.
As per a letter by Amazon to US Senator Chris Coons, it is suggested that Alexa stores users’ transcripts and voice recordings indefinitely. But when the user deletes the voice recording, the company deletes the associated transcripts.
The same image tags are showing up on Instagram, and as well as detailing general scene and object descriptions, they also suggest who is in a photo based on Facebook’s facial recognition. (The company has been doing this for photos you’re not tagged in since 2017.)
Experts like Boston say digital plates can produce more revenue for governments than the traditional versions. While most of the additional price goes to the plate manufacturer, Boston said he expects governments will increase their revenues through some of the charges associated with using the new technology.
The plates also can advertise corporate messages when the vehicle is parked, which offers drivers a potential revenue stream.
MDOT MVA will outfit 20 vehicles in its fleet and two belonging to the Maryland Transportation Authority, including cars, SUVs and trucks. Reviver is providing the 22 Rplate Pro models at no cost to the state and each features LTE connection, a front-lit, high-definition display, plate customization, personalized messages, and advanced telematics. The Rplate Pro retails for $499, according to Reviver’s website.
But crucially, Jassy and Smith seem to argue, it’s also inevitable. In calling for regulation, Microsoft and Amazon have pulled a neat trick: Instead of making the debate about whether facial recognition should be widely adopted, they’ve made it about how such adoption would work.
By September, 2018, Intel announced that Nokia and Ericsson would partner to deploy 5G globally describing that, according to an Ericsson spokesman “for 5G we’ve been collaborating since four years back.”
Privacy advocate Allie Funk was surprised to learn that her Delta flight out of Detroit airport would use facial recognition scans for boarding; Funk knew that these systems were supposed to be "opt in" but no one announced that you could choose not to use them while boarding, so Funk set out to learn how she could choose not to have her face ingested into a leaky, creepy, public-private biometric database.
To figure out how to do so, I had to leave the boarding line, speak with a Delta representative at their information desk, get back in line, then request a passport scan when it was my turn to board. Federal agencies and airlines claim that facial recognition is an opt-out system, but my recent experience suggests they are incentivizing travelers to have their faces scanned—and disincentivizing them to sidestep the tech—by not clearly communicating alternative options. Last year, a Delta customer service representative reported that only 2 percent of customers opt out of facial-recognition. It's easy to see why.
South Korea’s two smartphone manufacturers, Samsung and LG, would also love to have an independent operating system but success is unlikely. Samsung tried with Tizen, which was supported by the Linux Foundation. The Samsung Z series was launched in India and didn’t do well enough but Tizen is used in Samsung Gear smartwatches. LG could have a go with Palm’s Linux-based webOS, which it acquired from HP in 2013. WebOS first appeared on Palm Pre smartphones in 2009 but LG has mainly used it in smart TV sets.
Sailfish started with another failed Linux project, Nokia and Intel’s MeeGo. The latest version uses a graphical shell from Jolla, the Finnish company that appears to be its major backer. Sailfish can be ported to more alternative smartphones than Ubuntu Touch but I can’t see any current phones with Sailfish pre-installed. The same is true for both /e/ (formerly Eelo), which is a sort of de-Googled Android, and LineageOS, which is a reborn CyanogenMod.
But de Adder disputes BNI's reasoning and said he was told by the company that they would not run cartoons about Trump.
"It got to the point where I didn't submit any Donald Trump cartoons for fear that I might be fired," he said on Twitter, adding that in the past two weeks he drew three viral Trump cartoons.
"And a day later I was let go. And not only let go, the cartoons they already had in the can were not used. Overnight it was like I never worked for the paper. Make your own conclusions."
On Twitter, de Adder also said that every Trump cartoon he submitted for the past year was axed.
A rioter knocked a friend of mine, the journalist Philip Wegmann, to the ground, causing him to briefly lose consciousness—even though, Wegmann told me, he was wearing credentials that clearly identified him as a member of the press. Wegmann is a writer for conservative news outlets such as Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal, however. And one of the main principles of the new activist left is that unfriendly media organizations should not have the right to cover their activities, even on public property.
But it isn’t just conservative media outlets that bear the “unfriendly” designation; many activists are equally dismissive of mainstream news sources. One activist told me that she hates CNN just as much as Trump supporters do. Only explicitly leftist media organizations are permitted to cover the antics of the #Resistance.
While some conservative Indonesian culture warriors are concerned about the increasing “westernization” of Indonesian culture and social norms, those on the other end of the political spectrum often object to what they call the “Arabization” of Indonesia, particularly the implementation of government regulations based on strict interpretations of Islamic sharia law, similar to what might be found in Saudi Arabia.
A gender-segregated “sharia beach” in the Banyuwangi regency of East Java recently became the focus of such accusations after a Facebook post titled “In the Hindu Land of Banyuwangi, Arabization is forced to grow” went viral.
In contrast, the 2020 presidential contender Kamala Harris questioned in a Wednesday Twitter post "how can anybody look at these photos and think this isn't a human rights abuse?" while referring to photos highlighting extreme overcrowding and poor conditions in a Texas facility.
Charges against the alleged shooter had already been dismissed following a failed indictment.
President Donald Trump brushed off reports of overcrowding and squalid conditions in migrant detention centres on Wednesday (July 3) by saying the migrants can opt "not to come" to the United States.
"If Illegal Immigrants are unhappy with the conditions in the quickly built or refitted detentions centres, just tell them not to come. All problems solved!" Trump tweeted.
More than a year later, Orange County defense attorneys are still trying to piece together the scope and potential impact of the jailhouse recordings. Prisoners’ phone calls with their attorneys are understood to be protected by attorney-client privilege, and, in California, it is a felony to listen to or record an incarcerated person’s calls with an attorney. Just this month, assistant public defenders Scott Sanders and Sara Ross filed motions in separate cases with hopes of compelling the courts to help illuminate the breadth of the misconduct.
Since August 2018, police have shot dead, apparently unlawfully, at least 21 men and boys whom they alleged were criminals in Nairobi’s Dandora and Mathare neighborhoods alone, Human Rights Watch found. Rights activists in those neighborhoods believe that, based on the cases they know about and those reported in the media, police have unlawfully killed many more in the past year. Under Kenyan and international law, the police should only intentionally use lethal force when it is strictly unavoidable to protect life.
If her estranged husband demands her return then this poses a diplomatic headache for Britain, which has close ties to the UAE.
But curiously these policies do not seem to have had the desired result. Turks do not appear to be any more devout than they were a decade ago, scores of Islamic schools remain empty, and the brotherhoods seem increasingly out of step with a rapidly changing society.
According to a study by KONDA, a local polling company, between 2008 and 2018 the share of Turks who define themselves as religious dipped from 55% to 51%. The number of women who wear the Islamic headscarf barely budged, from 52% a decade ago to 53%, and the share of those who fast regularly decreased from 77% to 65%. Meanwhile, the number of atheists has risen from 1% to 3%.
The company is already under investigation in the US for allegedly storing data from under-13s. It has no been confirmed that the UK Data Commissioner's Office is launching its own probe of how TikTok conducts itself, and protects its users.
One of the major players in cop tech is bowing out of the facial recognition race. As Hayley Tsukayama reports for the EFF, Axon (formerly Taser) has decided there are far too many ethical and practical concerns to move forward with adding facial recognition tech to its popular bodycams.
Axon actually has an ethics board -- something that certainly would have been welcome back in its Taser sales days. Perhaps having a few ethical discussions would have prevented dead Americans from being awarded postmortem declarations of "excited delirium," thus keeping law enforcement officers from being held accountable for killing people when they were only supposed to be arresting them.
The Third Circuit Court of Appeals, in Philadelphia, overturned a judge’s decision that Amazon was shielded under the Communications Decency Act, which protects online businesses from lawsuits over the postings of their users.
It’s the first federal appeals court to hold that Amazon is a product “seller” that can be held liable under state law for sales on its marketplace.
In a 7-5 decision, the Federal Circuit has denied Athena’s petition for en banc rehearing on the question of eligibility of diagnostic patents. As discussed below, the en banc denial includes eight (8) separate opinions — all of which call for Supreme Court or Congressional intervention.
[...]
In its original decision, the Federal Circuit found the claim directed to an ineligible preexisting law of nature: “the correlation between the presence of naturally-occurring MuSK autoantibodies in bodily fluid and MuSK-related neurological diseases.” The court found the additional concrete steps in the claim were all “standard techniques in the art” and thus did not rise to a patentable inventive concept.
[...]
Of some interest – the judges were almost uniformly all careful to focus their attention on medical diagnosis inventions — suggesting a targeted solution that would not extend to business methods and other information-based inventions.
Like in that Bruce Springsteen song, "Just say goodbye it's Independence Day." Goodbye to the Northern District, I mean. Now there's nothing left to do in San Jose, and on to the Ninth Circuit.
The only thing that surprised me in this context was when someone told me on Twitter Qualcomm's stock was down 3% after hours on this news. At least the investors who talk to me, individually or on group calls, perfectly knew that this was the most likely outcome, especially since Qualcomm for the most part would have required Judge Koh to contradict her own ruling (a true opus magnum), at least implicitly. It wasn't 100% unthinkable that maybe some irreparable-harm argument might have gotten some traction, but I couldn't really find a totally pressing reason for a stay, for the reasons I explained in previous posts.
What's going to be different now before the Ninth Circuit is that there will be a panel of new judges. Judge Koh is still sitting on the district court, but only because Donald Trump's 2016 victory derailed her already fairly advanced nomination process. Frankly, it might even have been good for her in the short term because she then got this historic FTC case just a couple of months later. On the Ninth Circuit, she most likely wouldn't have had a similar opportunity, and she doesn't seem to care about titles or salaries as much as about doing high-quality meaningful work. But I really do wish her the best for being promoted as soon as possible at this stage. With so much partisan divide it may be difficult, and I totally agree with those Republicans who would like to bring more political balance to the Ninth Circuit (which has already happened under this President to some extent), but Judge Koh is so obviously a perfect choice for the next Ninth Circuit nomination and certainly not the kind of ideological judge because of whom Rush Limbaugh calls the Ninth Circuit the "Ninth Circus." She would be a great consensus candidate, and that would be a politically smart move for Republicans (not with a view to California, which they obviously won't carry anytime soon, but from a broader perspective). But that's a separate story, though it is related to this process at this procedural juncture.
The U.S. Supreme Court's June 24 decision in Iancu v. Brunetti provides a green light for immoral or scandalous marks to receive federal trademark protection.
Marks such as FUCT, KO KANE, and BONG HITS 4 JESUS will now appear on the Trademark Register alongside esteemed household brand names.
While this may be welcome news for some brand owners, freedom of speech may come at a cost. Justice Stephen G. Breyer warned that registration of "immoral and scandalous" marks may increase these marks' use.
In turn, this "may lead to the creation of public spaces that many will find repellent, perhaps on occasion creating the risk of verbal altercations or even physical confrontations." Time will tell whether these potential ripple effects come to fruition.
In-house lawyers at Reckitt Benckiser, pharma company Gedeon Richter and a multinational share tales of protecting their trademarks at the EUIPO and beyond, discussing surprising early-stage decisions, the threat of “trademark trolls” and whether proving use in oppositions is too easy
In-house counsel in industries including consumer goods and pharma have suggested that a tweaking of the EUIPO rules regarding genuine use could help better protect their brands.
Following orders from local authorities, Kaspersky's VPN has begun blocking sites on Russia's national blacklist, which includes many 'pirate' sites. The news follows reports that the country's telecoms watchdog, Roscomnadzor, will not attempt to block VPNs for non-compliance, but will seek to fine them instead.
Pirate site blocking is seen as an an effective enforcement tool for rightsholders. However, network experts and Internet providers warn that new threats are on the horizon. Encrypted DNS and SNI can potentially make it much more complicated to prevent people from visiting certain websites.
Parsing the statements from both Swift and her attorney Donald Passman, it is clear that she was not offered the opportunity to acquire the rights to her music without signing a new deal with Big Machine, under terms she herself said were not acceptable. Her Tumblr post from Sunday begins: “For years I asked, pleaded for a chance to own my work. Instead I was given an opportunity to sign back up to Big Machine Records and ‘earn’ one album back at a time, one for every new one I turned in.” It is worth noting that nowhere in her statement does she say she was not offered any opportunity to buy her masters, as many have reported.
In April, WGA members voted overwhelmingly to require agencies to sign a code of conduct. Agencies that declined were fired by the writers they represent (including me) on April 14. Recently the big three agencies—UTA, CAA, and WME—sued the Writer’s Guild, claiming that “The WGA has organized a group boycott and unlawful restraint of trade targeting CAA and other talent agencies.” Corporations suing a union would typically rile up Democratic candidates, especially when issues of gender and racial equality are at stake. The WGA also requested agencies provide access to writer contracts. Agencies balked, citing privacy; however, many women and minority writers believe that agencies, known for lacking diversity, may actually fear that sharing writer contracts would expose racial and gender disparities in negotiations. Yet somehow this labor dispute doesn’t appear to be on the Democrats’ radar.
