I'm announcing the release of the 5.14.10 kernel.
All users of the 5.14 kernel series must upgrade.
The updated 5.14.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-5.14.y and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser: https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-s...
thanks,
greg k-h
If you work for a large company or corporation, dealing with contracts and agreements often requires the use of digital signatures. Such signatures ensure that both parties are protected under their own sets of laws, enabling them to conduct business efficiently. However, choosing an electronic signature service can be difficult.
Here’s a list of things to look out for when trying to choose the best electronic signature for Linux...
We've recently deployed multi-factor authentication for SSH access to some especially sensitive machines, which has caused me to become much more familiar with how OpenSSH's sshd and MFA interact with each other and the limits on that. Unfortunately these limits mean that some combinations of authentication methods are not really available (or not available at all). For example, in many situations you can't require people to use their Unix password and then either a public key or MFA authentication.
It might seem like an obvious point but if you want to blog, blog. Don’t work on the technology that powers your blog. Work on the content of your blog. A blog is content first, technology only incidentally.
Built from the ground up but designed to be backward-compatible with its classic quarry, Haiku follows BeOS' lead in its entirely modular design, allowing different components of the OS to be developed concurrently. It’s been a while since the OS had a stable release. In fact, even the second beta release of its under-development branch was released almost two years after the previous one.
Ubuntu Frame aims to power graphical applications for embedded devices like interactive kiosks, smart retail solutions, and so on.
Ubuntu Frame supports Flutter, Qt, GTK, Electron, and SDL2, as well as HTML5 and Java apps. Its main goal is to provide all components developers need in an embedded graphical application, including secure communication, touch screen support in addition to mouse and keyboard, and so on, to allow them to focus uniquely on the display content. Security is enforced by running the client and server apps in separate containers that can only communicate with Ubuntu Frame using a secure socket.
We discuss Guido’s new work on making CPython faster (PEP 659), Tiers of Python Interpreter Execution, and high impact, low hanging fruit performance improvements.
Before you could slip the world in your pocket and conjure its sleek apparitions with a thumb on glass, David Cronenberg’s 1983 film Videodrome envisioned the body’s encounter with technology as a grotesque collision: cassette tapes plunged into a yonic gash where the stomach should be; a firearm made literal as mottled flesh grows over a gun, claiming its contours like moss would a stone. Such fears of technological corruption well predate Videodrome, but the film’s ragged suturing of human and machine centers a long-standing anxiety about the body and its boundaries: where it begins, where it ends, and how much of its wants and needs are really its own. These are also the stakes of Julia Ducournau’s Palme d’Or–winning Titane, a film teeming with the kind of carnal metamorphoses that Cronenberg once called “the flesh undergoing revolution.” Bodies leak, tear, and erupt, but in Titane, the flesh’s revolt begins long before the bursting viscera. In the very first scene, an accident inflicts a wound so indelible that the rest of the film leaves us to wonder if there can be a life—or a self—forged apart from its deepest traumas.
Madera County has been a stronghold for the Republican Party in California’s San Joaquin Valley for decades. Billboards this fall lined rural highways, urging the recall of Governor Gavin Newsom, pasted over peeling Trump/Pence posters. If Newsom’s fate had rested on Madera County, he would no longer be governor—60 percent of county voters went against him. Fifty-six percent went for Trump in 2020, slightly more than 2016. In fact, the last Democratic presidential candidate to win the county (barely) was Jimmy Carter in 1976.
“Can I give you a cane?” he asked.
This was in the alley two blocks from my house. I was pushing myself along — I love to walk in alleys for some reason, maybe because I never know what I’ll come upon — and I passed an older guy (around my age, that is) whose garage door was open. He was working at his bandsaw. As I walked past him, he turned and called out his cane offer to me.
Another day, another massive privacy breach nobody will do much about. This time it's Neiman Marcus, which issued a statement indicating that the personal data of roughly 4.6 million U.S. consumers was exposed thanks to a previously undisclosed data breach that occurred last year. According to the company, the data exposed included login in information, credit card payment information, virtual gift card numbers, names, addresses, and the security questions attached to Neiman Marcus accounts. The company is, as they always are in the wake of such breaches, very, very sorry:
On Wednesday, the poster published a link to a torrent of 135 GB, calling it "an extremely poggers leak" which allegedly includes source code for all Twitch clients for different operating systems, an unreleased Steam competitor, and internal tools that Twitch's security team uses.
This prize for Professor Parisi, split with trail-blazing meteorologists Professor Manabe and Professor Hasselmann, is an amazing recognition of an entire research area – perhaps a little less glamorous than the likes of general relativity or string theory – that attempts to understand and model what we in physics call “complex systems”.
These include things like climate ecosystems, financial systems, and biological phenomena, to name a few. The sheer variety of complex systems – represented in fluctuating markets and flocking starlings – makes it very hard to derive any sort of universal rules for them. Parisi’s work has allowed us to derive unprecedented conclusions about such systems that, on the surface, look random, unpredictable and impossible to model theoretically.
"Where have you gone Joe DiMaggio / our nation turns its lonely eyes to you / woo, woo, woo!"—Simon & Garfunkel.
Kurt Thigpen clenched his hands around the edge of the table because if he couldn’t feel the sharp edges digging into his palms, he would have to think about how hard his heart was beating. He was grateful that his mask hid his expression. He hoped that no one could see him sweat.
A woman approached the lectern in the center aisle, a thick American flag scarf looped around her neck.
A federal judge has temporarily blocked Texas’s near-total ban on abortions, granting the Justice Department’s emergency request to halt the law while courts consider its legality. In his ruling, Judge Robert Pitman slammed the Texas ban’s unconstitutionality, writing, “This Court will not sanction one more day of this offensive deprivation of such an important right.” “Judge Robert Pitman ruled and said what advocates in Texas and clinics operators in Texas have been saying all along … a near-total ban on abortion in the state of Texas is flagrantly unconstitutional,” says Amy Littlefield, abortion access correspondent for The Nation. Abortion clinics in the state are already moving quickly to resume abortions.
Decrying inequities in coronavirus vaccine distribution as both "immoral" and "stupid," United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres on Thursday implored rich countries to live up to their vows to deliver lifesaving shots to billions of vulnerable people in poor nations around the world.
"Vaccine equity will accelerate the end of the pandemic."
Buffalo, N.Y.—At 6 am last Friday, more than 2,000 health care workers at Mercy Hospital here—part of the Catholic Health network—took to the picket line in part of a growing wave of labor unrest in Western New York and the nation.
Facebook represents some of the most difficult and complex conflicts of our time. The concerns are not new, but they have taken on new power in recent days, underscored by Tuesday’s congressional hearing and Sunday’s “60 Minutes” segment. As Haugen, a data scientist who has worked at Facebook and other social media giants, told CBS interviewer Scott Pelley: “The thing I saw at Facebook over and over again was there were conflicts of interest between what was good for the public and what was good for Facebook. And Facebook, over and over again, chose to optimize for its own interests, like making more money.”
The conflict between self-interest and public interest is not exclusive to Facebook, of course. But the decision to stay or leave the site is made harder by the fact that attachment to others is a basic human need, and Facebook has offered an opportunity for many of us to meet this need. So do we stay to feed our personal need for connection? Do we leave to make a “statement,” or because we can no longer stomach being part of an organization that, through self-interested manipulation, is contributing to some of society’s worst problems?
Those analyzing the COVID-19 crisis and its effects have mostly focused on how its disruptive nature has led to major shifts and recalibrations throughout society and the economy. Such disruption has also lent itself to a variety of agendas that had required an event of “reset” potential in order to be realized. In the case of the vaccine industry, COVID-19 has led to dramatic changes in how federal agencies manage the approval of medical countermeasures during a declared crisis, how trials for vaccine candidates are conducted, how the public perceives vaccination, and even how the term “vaccine” is defined.
Such shifts, though obvious, have provoked praise from some and sharp criticism from others, with the latter category being largely censored from public discourse on television, in print, and online. However, in objectively analyzing such seismic changes, it’s clear that most of these shifts in vaccine development and vaccine policy dramatically favor speed and the implementation of new and experimental technology at the expense of safety and thorough study. In the case of vaccines, it can be argued that no one benefitted more from these changes than the developers of the COVID-19 vaccines themselves, particularly the pharmaceutical and biotechnology company Moderna.
While most Canadians can get their vehicle fixed wherever they want these days, she worries that independent shops could be left behind by new cars — linked wirelessly to manufacturers — capable of limiting access to data that helps technicians diagnose and fix a problem.
Planned obsolescence is an integral part of their strategy. The policy of designing a consumer product to fail before its natural lifespan. The purpose of this is to compel consumers to buy the newer model within long before they really need to.
For example, your smartphone has a built-in frailty that will force it to fail in approximately 2-3 years. This isn’t because the phone itself will reach the end of its natural life in that time, but rather because it fits the manufacturer’s marketing plans and sales quotas.
Cybersecurity organization Mandiant labeled the group “FIN12” as part of a report detailing the group’s activities, with Mandiant noting that it has been in existence since at least 2018, but was increasingly hitting organizations in North America with annual revenues of more than $300 million with ransomware attacks. Many of these companies made even more, with the average annual revenue of North American groups targeted at just under $6 billion.
Musk said Tesla will continue to operate its electric vehicle factory in Fremont, CA, and that he even plans to try and increase production there by 50 percent. “Just to be clear, though, we will be continuing to expand our activities in California,” he said during the company’s annual shareholder meeting. “So this is not a matter of Tesla leaving California.”
The move means Tesla’s home will no longer be the state where its vehicles are the most popular; instead, Tesla will be headquartered in a state where it can’t legally sell its cars directly to consumers.
Ireland said Thursday it would join an international agreement that sets taxes on profits for multinational corporations at a minimum rate of 15 percent. This is a major shift for the country that is the European headquarters for many large US pharmaceutical companies, as well as tech firms, including Google, Apple, and Facebook.
An increase from Ireland’s current 12.5 percent to 15 percent may not seem that large by itself. The so-called Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Inclusive Framework agreement, outlined in July, is actually a two-pillar plan aimed at helping end tax avoidance and making international tax rules fairer and more transparent. The OECD has estimated that a 15 percent tax rate would generate some $150 billion in global tax revenue annually and would help to stabilize the international tax system.
On September 16, EFF held the 30th Annual Pioneer Award Ceremony, a yearly celebration of our digital heroes. The Barlows this year went to a selection of individuals who have worked to protect privacy in unique, impressive, and successful ways, from the streets of Harlem and Boston to Mumbai. If you missed the awards, you can watch it online. You can also read the full transcript.
EFF’s Executive Director, Cindy Cohn, kicked off the event by pointing out that the world may be changing shape--this is our second online Pioneer Award Ceremony, after all--but EFF was built for change, and we’ve had significant successes over the past year: our fight to keep dangerous scanning software off Apple devices; passing one of the largest state investments in public fiber broadband in U.S. history in California; developing guides to help observe visible and invisible surveillance at protests; our pressure on Amazon Ring, which finally added a variety of protections as well as visibility into its partnerships with police; and of course, our win at the Supreme Court, which overturned an overbroad interpretation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.€
It was also a challenging year, as we lost two luminaries who made important and influential impressions on the digital rights landscape. Cindy gave a touching tribute to Sherwin Siy, who passed away in July. Sherwin was “a brilliant advocate and strategist dedicated to protecting and preserving the web as a place for creativity and innovation and sharing.” We also lost Dan Kaminsky, who “showed work and security are linked and it is our responsibility to respect users in the tools we built.” Sherwin and Dan remind us that “we define technology and that we are not helpless. We help each other. Each one of us has the power to grow, nurture and inspire others in our own ways.”€
For more information on government use of face recognition and how to end it in your community, visit EFF’s About Face resource page.
Face detection: Determines whether an image includes a human face. Some government agencies use face detection to aid in obscuring identifiable faces before releasing video footage in response to requests for public records. As a result, many bans on government use of face recognition technology specifically exclude face detection for this purpose, provided that no information about the faces is collected or stored. Generally, this use does not raise significant privacy concerns.
Face recognition: Any collection and processing of faceprints, including both face matching and face analysis (two terms defined below). Face recognition raises significant digital rights concerns.
We disagree. All forms of face recognition are a menace to privacy, free speech, and racial justice. This post explores many of the various kinds of face recognition, and explains why all must be addressed by laws.
At the most basic level, face recognition technology takes images of human faces and tries to extract information about the people in them.
Here’s how it usually works today:
Frances Haugen’s testimony at the Senate hearing today raised serious questions about how Facebook’s algorithms work—and echoes many findings from our previous investigation.
Facebook has experienced years of intense scrutiny over the exact issues that are being discussed in the wake of Haugen’s revelations, and has only succeeded in making its inherent problems worse. During the hearing, Haugen compared fixing Facebook’s issues to mandating that cars come with seatbelts. But maybe Facebook doesn’t need a seatbelt. Maybe it just needs to stop being given more chances.
“The Idle Detection API notifies developers when a user is idle, indicating such things as lack of interaction with the keyboard, mouse, screen, activation of a screensaver, locking of the screen, or moving to a different screen. A developer-defined threshold triggers the notification,” Google said in a blog post. “Applications that facilitate collaboration require more global signals about whether the user is idle than are provided by existing mechanisms that only consider a user's interaction with the application's own tab.”
The misleading first name of the Defense Department doesn’t justify using “defense” as an adjective for its budget. On the contrary, the ubiquitous use of phrases like “defense budget” and “defense spending” — virtually always written with a lower-case “d” — reinforces the false notion that equates the USA’s humongous military operations with defense.
In the real world, the United States€ spends more€ money on its military than the next 10 countries all together. And€ most of those countries€ are military allies.
On the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, I tromped to the National Mall in Washington to make a speech on the evils of the War on Terror. Antiwar demonstrators had organized Camp Democracy, a few blocks in front of the U.S. Capitol on the Mall. The speaking gig was arranged by a lady from the Veterans for Peace who I met at the 2004 National Libertarian Party convention. After she nudged hard for a freebie, I told her, “If there is a good audience, I’m willing to waive my usual speaking fee.”
“Sure – we can do that,” she assured me. She wanted to have at least one libertarian on the program.
Progressive foreign policy experts on Thursday pointed to a new Congressional Budget Office report that concludes it is possible to slash a trillion dollars in military spending over the coming decade without reducing force effectiveness as further proof that the United States can and should prioritize investments in tackling pandemics, inequality, and the climate crisis.
"The U.S. military budget is now higher than it was at the peak of the Vietnam War, the Korean War, or the Cold War," said Lindsay Koshgarian, program director of the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS). "This report shows that there are viable options for immediate, substantial reductions to the Pentagon budget."
The Supreme Court on Wednesday waded into the case of Abu Zubaydah, a terrorism suspect whose request that the U.S. release him from Guantanamo Bay or charge him with a crime has languished without action for more than 13 years.
The court was hearing a case on another issue: Whether the U.S. government could cite “state secrets” to prevent Zubaydah’s lawyers from taking depositions from the CIA contractors who subjected Zubaydah to waterboarding and other methods of torture.
The Supreme Court heard oral arguments Wednesday in a case brought by Abu Zubaydah, the Guantánamo prisoner who was the first subject of the CIA’s torture program. Zubaydah’s legal team has spent years trying to obtain testimony from two psychologists who helped the CIA design and implement his torture, and the Biden administration is continuing the Trump’s administration strategy to keep key information about Zubaydah’s torture in Poland classified despite the fact that the two psychologists are willing to testify. Several justices contradicted the Biden administration, suggesting Zubaydah, the only witness besides the psychologists to the torture in Poland, testify himself, and expressing frustration that Zubaydah is still being held incommunicado at Guantánamo. We speak with Abu Zubaydah’s attorney, Joe Margulies, and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Raymond Bonner, who has long followed the case. “The legal justification for continuing to hold [Guantánamo detainees] has disappeared,” says Margulies.
The anniversary of the 9/11 attacks was marked by days of remembrances — for the courageous rescue workers of that moment, for the thousands murdered as the Twin Towers collapsed, for those who died in the Pentagon, or in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, fighting off the hijackers of the commercial jet they were in, as well as for those who fought in the forever wars that were America’s response to those al-Qaeda attacks.
Soldiers from four NATO countries have exercised with the Israeli Air Force in the use of ââ¬Å¾live-fire munitions“ with drones. A German squadron took over the reconnaissance. All drones ordered by the Bundeswehr in Israel are to be delivered this month. The new Bundestag will decide on their armament.
Earlier this summer, Rahmon mobilized 20,000 troops to the border, and held military exercises and discussions with Russia and other members of the Collective Security Treaty Organization. Meanwhile, the spokesperson for the Afghan government—Zabihullah Mujahid—tweeted pictures of Afghan troops deployed to Takhar province on the border of the two countries. The escalation of harsh language continues. Prospects of war between these two countries should not be discounted, but—given the role Russia plays in Tajikistan—it is unlikely.
Panjshir Exiles
The Finnish Coast Guard has launched seven criminal investigations after migrants who crossed the Belarusian border were found in Finland. Some had arrived on ferries from Estonia.
It is thought likely the women will face terror charges that will result in prison sentences of three to five years if they are convicted.
All three travelled to Syria in 2014 to join up with their husbands and the IS movement. Nine of their 14 children were born in Denmark, and the other five were born in Syria.
As I have argued before, such reactions are shortsighted and ill-advised — another example among many of the way America's political class, news media and the public at large still does not understand the nature of the threat they face from the Republican-fascist movement and the larger white right.
Experts on domestic terrorism have repeatedly warned that in the aftermath of Jan. 6 many militant Trumpists and other neofascists are operating more covertly, perhaps by breaking up into small cells that are difficult for law enforcement to track and apprehend. Right-wing militants and terrorists are more likely to attack "soft targets" as opposed to widely publicized events and locations where law enforcement is sure to be present.
As seen in Michigan and elsewhere, right-wing militants are likely to focus their attention at the state and local level where law enforcement assets are more porous and likely targets are, in general, more vulnerable to attack.
Not only is the government using "reverse warrants" to rummage around in your Google stuff, it's also using "keyword warrants" to cast about blindly for potential suspects.
But where are the US politicians? Where are the Wall Streeters? Where are the Big Four, the masterminds of global tax avoidance PwC, EY, KPMG and Deloitte?
Conspicuously absent, that’s where. Again.
Google announced a new policy Thursday prohibiting the monetization of content that contradicts the scientific consensus on climate change.
That means that Google advertisers and publishers and YouTube creators will not be able to make ad revenue off of climate denialism.
Google will no longer allow advertisers, publishers, and YouTube creators to monetize content that denies the existence of climate change. The company detailed the changes in a support document on Thursday.
It was supposed to be the greatest transition of modern times.
Practically overnight, a dirty, inefficient, and unjust system that encompassed 11 time zones was to undergo an extreme makeover. Billions of dollars were available to speed the process. A new crew of transition experts came up with the blueprint and the public was overwhelmingly on board. Best of all, this great leap forward would serve as a model for all countries desperate to exit a failed status quo.
That’s not what happened.
Digital rights advocates on Thursday welcomed a report that Google and its YouTube video platform are prohibiting the monetization of climate misinformation.
Google advertisers and publishers and YouTube creators will be banned from receiving advertising revenue that contradicts "well-established scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change," company officials said in a statement reported by Axios.
Building on a "bombshell" release from earlier this year, the International Energy Agency on Thursday published a report on pathways to cut planet-heating methane emissions from fossil fuels 75% by 2030, which the IEA calls "essential" to combating the climate emergency.
"It is inexcusable that massive amounts of methane continue to be allowed to just seep into the air from fossil fuel operations."
For roughly six decades, Formosa Plastics Group has prioritized profits and flouted labor, environmental, and public health regulations in multiple places around the globe, from the Gulf Coast to Vietnam to Illinois—leaving in its wake a trail of deadly accidents and pollutants that exemplifies the entire petrochemical industry's worldwide threats to human rights and the biosphere.
"The scale of Formosa Plastics' abuse is staggering."
"Climate inaction is not an option, the climate emergency is here and we are living it… We cannot miss this once-in-a-generation opportunity to act for a cleaner, healthier future."
"Biden cannot go to COP 26 to negotiate global cooperation on climate, when he cannot even cut a good deal for climate and pass his own Build Back Better agenda here at home, with his own party."
With an open letter expressing "the utmost alarm about the state of our climate system," over 330 scientists on Thursday urged President Joe Biden to declare a climate emergency and swiftly put an end to a fossil fuel-based energy system.
"When scientists across the U.S. are imploring the president to get the country off fossil fuels," said Dr. Shaye Wolf, climate science director at the Center for Biological Diversity, "it's time to listen."
George Osborne’s work for an investment bank that counts BP among its major clients presents a “glaring conflict of interest” with his new role as chair of the British Museum, campaigners have said.
The former UK chancellor is currently employed as a full-time partner at “boutique” investment bank Robey Warshaw, which has worked with the oil giant in recent years, including on its €£7.7 billion purchase of US shale assets from BHP Group in 2018.
"Not a single drop of oil is going to come out of the Amazon until the government takes care of us," said AIDCBY.
"Now we'll see the real face of the executive who campaigned about supporting Indigenous peoples."
It started with a mysterious humming noise that sounded like a wave “but 100 times more annoying,” according to local reports. Then residents of an estate in Alberta, Canada did some investigating and found out that the weird racket was actually a Bitcoin mining power plant—one that was running without anybody’s knowledge.
The power plant had been set up by Vancouver-based data center and power firm Link Global to mint new tokens of the world’s biggest cryptocurrency. The problem: they built the thing without obtaining planning permission.
Addendum: I am not personally a fan of aggressive street lighting. It tends to create a substantial light pollution problem that is thought to contribute to health problems in humans and environmental disturbances. Further, it's been the common wisdom for some time now that street lighting is likely not actually effective in reducing crime. That said, a recent 2019 study conducted in New York City is the first randomized controlled trial of the impact of additional street lighting on crime, and it actually did find a reduction in crime, and not a small one. That stands in opposition to a history of studies that have not found any crime reduction, but none of those studies were as rigorously designed. Hopefully more research will be conducted on this question.
The Soldier-Butler Project, located about 30 miles northwest of Missoula, Montana,€ called for logging and/or burning on 9,975 acres, including 114 acres of clear-cuts, The logging plans called for building at least 7 miles of new roads and adding and reconstructing over 37 miles of “undetermined roads” to the National Forest road system.
This was another enormous “landscape-scale” logging and road-building project that encompassed more than 70 square miles and added well over 44 miles of new roads to this already highly-roaded landscape. And let’s be clear here. What the Forest Service calls “undetermined roads” are often illegal, user-created roads that the agency is now legitimizing by including these roads in its official road system. This only incentivizes yet more illegal and unplanned user-created roads, which are highly detrimental to grizzly bears and elk habitat security. This is exactly the opposite of what the Forest Service should be doing to protect our public lands and national forests.
"Wildlife and coastal economies cannot continue to be jeopardized by dangerous offshore drilling. It's past time to permanently protect our coast."
Just ahead of a major United Nations summits on biodiversity and the climate—and amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic—a global consortium has launched a planetary health declaration in which they "raise an alarm that the ongoing degradation of our planet's natural systems is a clear and present danger to the health of all people everywhere" that must be countered with a fundamental paradigm shift transforming nearly every aspect of society.
"The planetary health science is clear," the São Paulo Declaration on Planetary Health, published Tuesday at The Lancet, states. "We can no longer safeguard human health unless we change course."
For 100 years in California, anyone could dig a well on their land and pump as much as they wanted. Farmers got most of it. They pumped so much water that the underground water table fell by more than 100 feet in some places. The ground itself subsided as water was pumped out from underneath it.
All that's supposed to end. The Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA), passed in 2014 but just now going into effect, treats the aquifer like a bank account that has to stay in balance. There can be withdrawals of water, but they cannot exceed the rate at which the aquifer is replenished.
Shelter is a basic survival need, along with food, clothing and health care. But it’s even more than that. It’s also a psychic and spiritual need. As the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard wrote: “A home shelters daydreaming, a home protects the dreamer, a home allows us to dream in peace.”
To see evolution in a bee’s flight And biodiversity in a leaf of grass. To know Gaia from the passing of day to night And complexity from the biomass.
Just over half of all directors at 30 of the world’s largest insurance companies have affiliations to polluting companies and organisations, reveals an investigation by DeSmog, including several individuals holding senior roles at some of the world’s largest energy companies.
The findings raise concerns over a potential pervasive conflict of interest on the boards at a time when the international insurance sector is under pressure to halt its support for the fossil fuel industry.
American families have struggled for decades to make ends meet with stagnant wages and a decimated social safety net. The U.S. now spends less on children than nearly any other wealthy nation.
This year there was a small glimmer of hope that such a trend might be halted and even reversed. Democrats, using their razor-thin control of the Senate and marginal control of the House,€ passed an expanded child tax credit€ (CTC) in March 2021 as part of the American Rescue Plan that not only increased the tax refund received by families with young children but also began sending them€ a monthly advance€ instead of making them wait until they filed their annual tax return.
By any measure, the amounts are embarrassingly modest and only offer an increase of $1,000 to $1,600 over the entire year. Families whose incomes are low enough to qualify and have children aged 6 through 17 are now receiving $3,000 a year instead of $2,000, while those with children younger than 6 are getting checks that add up to $3,600 a year.
Everything that moved me about goodness in the world and in the idea of communion, and provided me with a sense of exaltation and the sancta simplicitus of the Golden Rule and becoming, introjecting Christ through transubstantiation — was all due to these brothers who were there for me. They weren’t bookish monks, but happy, smart, and activists (I felt like I had my own squad of Berrigan Brothers assigned to save my soul). I’ve heard many tales growing up of priests bringing evil to childhood and desecrating the Vibe, but my Catholicism, though now long lapsed, was a joyous intersection that saved my life.
My life as a Catholic boy, while not as fraught as that described by Jim Carroll on his album by the same name, was still full of sin and worry (including the time some LaSalette brothers got me shitfaced at a steakhouse when I was 12); but it was also an introduction to Latin, rituals, Bach and Handel, homilies and the sympathetic empowerment of the priesthood, and of the curious practice of money in little brown enveloped being coughed up when the basket came around. (I was once with an adult at Mass who put a button in the basket; presumably he’s now Satan’s seamstress in Hell.) All such memories, vague as they are now, proved a useful and rather interesting filter through which to read Ben Schreckinger’s new book, The Bidens: Inside the First Family’s Fifty-Year Rise to Power. Biden is only the second Catholic elected president (JFK was the first) and Schreckinger imbues the narrative with references to his faith that enrich his political life.
The Biden administration has a plan that is estimated to cut child poverty in half. And it's already in place.
The Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday released an exhaustive report that describes in new detail how then-President Donald Trump and his allies repeatedly pressured the U.S Department of Justice to overturn his 2020 election defeat and reveals the extent to which high-ranking government officials responded to the coup attempt by threatening to resign.
Based on an ongoing investigation that includes interviews with former top DOJ officials, the 394-page interim report—entitled Subverting Justice—contains findings that Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), chair of the committee, called "damning."
It’s hard to remember a time when anyone beyond the borders of New York state cared about how the state’s congressional districts were redrawn. Bleeding population and House seats every decade, New York had long been something of an afterthought, ignored in heated debates over how states like Texas, Florida, and Ohio carve out their maps.
Twenty years ago today, the U.S. invaded Afghanistan under the guise of€ "saving Afghan women" from the Taliban. The U.S. ignored warnings from pro-peace feminists that military action would further endanger Afghan women and set back women's rights, leading to more deaths, violence and€ destruction. After two decades of a failed militarized foreign policy, the U.S. must uphold its responsibility to offer care and repair to the Afghan people, including women in whose names it went to war.
Two items dominated the pre-conference headlines: (1) how would Jeremy Corbyn, still a party member, but having to sit as an independent MP thanks to the whim of the Labour leader Keir Starmer, conduct himself? Corbyn is deeply popular with the party’s grassroots’ membership, and the party leadership was concerned about the protests against Starmer that were likely to take place; and (2) Starmer has been embarking on a Blairite restoration throughout his 18 months as party leader, and there was a strong chance that open hostility towards this could erupt at the conference.
The cornerstone of the Blairite restoration has been to wrest power from the ordinary membership and put it in the hands of the parliamentary party and its big donors, with key-decision-making confined to a small “kitchen” cabinet or coterie of trusties (as Blair himself did when he became party leader, which led to accusations that he was conducting himself like a US president).
Media coverage of the fight over a pair of infrastructure bills—one physical, one social—has become so chaotic that the truth is getting lost amid a cacophony of arguments over price tags and party factions.
Tucker Carlson continues to lose it. I’ve watched him losing it for a while. His white nationalism is on display nightly. But he ratchets it up when he pushes his “Great Replacement theory,” which holds that white Americans are being “replaced” by nonwhite immigrants, and Democrats are pushing open immigration policies to accelerate the process—because they expect these nonwhites to vote for them, giving them an eternal lock on political power.
A share of the opprobrium heaped on Facebook is incoherent. Politicians are angry but so far seem incapable of co-ordinating reform to rein it in. And investors have kept buying the stock, regardless of the bad headlines. Yet the company should take no comfort from this. The blind fury unleashed shows that its reputational problems have got out of hand.
Manning appeared virtually today in front of the Immigration and Refugee Board for an admissibility hearing. The administrative tribunal makes decisions about who can enter and stay in Canada.
"QAnon John" whipped other followers of the conspiracy theory into a frenzy this week, when he shared a photo of the virtual White House set used by President Joe Biden on the social media app Telegram.
It remains perplexing to me that so many people -- especially among the Trumpist world -- seem to believe that removing Section 230 will somehow make websites more likely to host their incendiary speech. We've explained before why the opposite is true -- adding more liability for user speech means a lot fewer sites will allow user speech. But now we have a real world example to show this.
But cellaring, hiding, suppressing unsavoury viewpoints are the very things social media platforms are getting more enthusiastic about, much of it pushed on the censorious lobby that claims to have a monopoly on veracity and good behaviour.€ In the name of misinformation, offence and incitement, users will be either suspended, barred or subjected to digital excommunication in the name of safety.
Which brings us to the fascinating nature of Trump’s latest legal action against Twitter.€ In January, the former US president was banned from the platform following the January 6th riot at the Capitol building inspired by supporters riled by claims that the election had been stolen.€ It began as a temporary ban of 12 hours for “repeated and severe violations of our Civic Integrity policy”.€ Two days later, the ban was made permanent.€ “In the context of the horrific events this week, we made it clear on Wednesday that additional violations of the Twitter Rules would permanently result in this very course of action,” Twitter claimed in its January 8 statement.€ “The company’s “public interest framework” existed to permit “the public to hear from elected officials and world leaders directly.”€ But this role did not exist “above our rules entirely” and could not be used “to incite violence, among other things.”
There were a bunch of headlines this weekend claiming that Donald Trump had just "sued" Twitter to get his account reinstated. This is untrue. There were also some articles suggesting that he was using Florida's new social media law as the basis of this lawsuit. This is also false (what the hell is wrong with reporters these days?).
Judge Loretta Preska, an advisor to the conservative Federalist Society, to which Chevron is a major donor, sentenced human rights attorney and Chevron nemesis Steven Donziger to six months in prison Friday for misdemeanor contempt of court after he had already spent 787 days under house arrest in New York.
Earlier this year we were excited to see the Filecoin Foundation give the Internet Archive its largest donation ever, to help make sure that the Internet Archive is both more sustainable as an organization, and that the works it makes available will be more permanently available on a more distributed, decentralized system. The Internet Archive is a perfect example of the type of organization that can benefit from a more distributed internet.
Politkovskaya was shot to death in an elevator of her Moscow apartment building on Oct. 7, 2006. The 48-year-old investigative reporter for Russian independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta had been an outspoken critic of Russia's longtime president, Vladimir Putin.
She gained prominence for her coverage of human rights violations committed during Russia's war with separatists in its constituent republic of Chechnya in the 2000s.
Her killing coincided with an intensification of a Kremlin crackdown on freedoms of speech and the press in Russia, recalled Jeffrey Trimble, an Ohio State University political science lecturer who had been a senior manager at VOA sister network Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty at the time.
Shops along Main Street and on adjoining streets are reminiscent of a time past and resemble the so-called head shops and avant-garde clothes shops of decades ago. With a nearby cannabis retail outlet, the quaintness of a head shop is like something out of ancient history.
Marches and rallies defending women’s rights and defending against the decades-long attack against women’s reproductive rights are anything but quintessential! Like the mostly defunct peace movement, the defense of women’s reproductive rights has been one of primarily rear-guard actions and responses to horrific assaults on women’s health clinics during past decades.
The CPB continues to increase the number of electronic devices (at least temporarily) seized and searched at border crossings and international airports. Basic searches -- ones that don't involve any additional tech or software -- can be performed for almost any reason. For deeper searches, the CBP needs only a little bit more: articulable suspicion.
Many of the same corporations trumpeting their support for Black lives are duplicitously bankrolling police violence via little-known but powerful police foundations in cities across the United States, a new report released Thursday revealed.
"Many police foundations' top corporate sponsors made public statements in support of Black Lives Matter while providing a corporate slush fund for police."
As the U.S. Supreme Court embarks on a new term, Justice Samuel Alito is feeling angry and hurt. The hallowed institution on which he has served since 2006 is experiencing a crisis of legitimacy not seen since the early 1930s.€
Amid the mounting humanitarian crisis in Ethiopia, the Ethiopian government has been using the commercial airline Ethiopia Airlines to shuttle weapons and military vehicles from neighboring country Eritrea since the beginning of their civil war, according to a new CNN investigation. This comes as the United Nations estimates more than 5 million people in the country’s Tigray region are now in need of humanitarian assistance in order to survive, but U.N. officials say Ethiopia’s government is blocking the movement of medicine, food and fuel into Tigray. In response, Ethiopian officials expelled seven senior U.N. officials from Ethiopia last week, giving them just 72 hours to leave the country. We look at the latest developments with Nima Elbagir, award-winning senior international correspondent for CNN, and also air her full report documenting ethnic cleansing.
Janine Jackson interviewed Alec Karakatsanis about the “crime surge” for the October 1, 2021, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Images of Border Patrol officers on horseback whipping Black migrants shocked many Americans. President Biden called them "outrageous" and "wrong" and promised an investigation. Many members of Congress also spoke out.
A federal judge late Wednesday temporarily blocked enforcement of Texas' near-total abortion ban, issuing a scathing order that condemns the recently enacted law as an "unprecedented and aggressive scheme" to strip state residents of their reproductive rights.
"We already know the politicians behind this law will stop at nothing until they've banned abortion entirely."
When the First Amendment meets a law enforcement officer's ability to be offended on the behalf of the general public, the First Amendment tends to lose.
Moreover, researchers discovered that more than half of fatal encounters with police in the United States went unreported at the same time. The study estimated 55 percent of deaths from police violence were not reported or were misclassified in official government databases between 1980 and 2018. These unreported killings represent more than 17,000 deaths at the hands of US police that were kept from public view over a period covering almost 40 years. However, this troubling statistic is still likely an underestimation of the real impact of police brutality.
The new study provides a clearer picture of the issue of police violence in the United States. However, it does not fully account for the real social toll. What’s missing from this report is the untold number of victims that are brutalized by police but survive the physical and emotional scars bore by the victims and their families and the immeasurable suffering inflicted on families and communities that lose a loved one at the hands of police.
From 2022, Belgian cross-border workers will be entitled to 34 days working from home. Now, 19 elected officials from France's Grand Est region are pushing to add a further 18 days for employees working from home.
As written by OpenKRITIS, the RCE “is the resilience baseline for EU operators”. EU nations have parameters to determine whether or not an organisation can be classified as ‘critical infrastructure’. Examples are energy suppliers, transport services, water and waste water, financial institutions, the health sector, public administration, and more. Such organisations will be subjected to a scan to see if its digital resilience and risk management is up to par. If it isn’t, or is lacking in certain areas, it can face a fine.
Now, before any IT team might hastily start checking their assets, it’s important to note that the regulation is not yet in effect. OpenKRITIS: “RCE is EU legislation that still needs to be enacted by the EU. It will then be transposed into national law by EU member states.” That might not happen for a little while. It’s likely that EU member states start actively regulating the critical infrastructure as of 2022+, depending on internal processes. Still, both the NIS2 and RCE need to be transposed into national law within 18 months.
Moderna's pledge Thursday to build a coronavirus vaccine factory in a yet-to-be-determined location in Africa at some unspecified point in the future was met with immediate skepticism from public health campaigners and analysts, who warned that the U.S.-based company's new announcement may be nothing more than a "PR gimmick."
"The U.S. government has the power to order Moderna to share this essential technology with WHO and the world."
A report published by the Nikkei Asia website quoted JFTC secretary-general Shuichi Sugahisa as informing the media on Wednesday that views would be sought from operators, app developers and smartphone users.
John MacGregor’s four “views” of Mont Blanc, printed in color by George Baxter, reveal a different side of the mountain when compared to well-known Romantic depictions.
Cloudflare has defeated a lawsuit from two wedding dress manufacturers that accused the company of failing to terminate the accounts of repeat copyright infringers. According to a California federal court, neither Cloudflare's CDN service nor its IP-address obfuscation system materially contribute to the alleged copyright infringements of its customers.
After Triller sued the popular H3 Podcast for $50m claiming that the people behind it had pirated the Jake Paul vs. Ben Askren fight on YouTube, the defendants sought to dismiss the "fatally flawed" complaint. Now Triller is shifting its approach, claiming that it's not suing over a commentary video but the underlying 'stolen' fight hosted on YouTube. As such, fair use defenses fail.
Readers here will know that we've followed the trademark and copyright lawsuit filed by the estate of Dr. Seuss against ComicMix LLC, creators of the mashup book Oh, the Places You'll Boldly Go! The entire thing has been a multi-year rollercoaster designed to be serpentine, with ComicMix arguing that the mashup book was transformative and covered by fair use, and winning on that front, only to have the copyright portion of the argument overturned on appeal. Go and read Cathy Gellis' writeup on the appeal; it's incredibly detailed and informative.
You may remember that, a couple years ago, our line of Copying Is Not Theft t-shirts and other gear was suddenly taken down by Teespring (now just called Spring) — first based on the completely false assertion that it contained third-party content that we didn't have the rights to use, then (after a very unhelpful discussion with their IP Escalations department) because it apparently violated some other policy that they refused to specify. That prompted us to open a new Techdirt Gear store on Threadless, where we've launched many of our old designs and all our new ones since the takedown. But we also kept the Spring store active for people who preferred it and for some old designs that we hadn't yet moved — and a few weeks ago the site's takedown regime struck again, wiping out our line of Copymouse gear that had lived there for nearly five years. So, once again, we've relaunched the design over on Threadless:
