For reasons unknown, Apple is looking to hire Linux kernel developers in both Texas and California.
Apple has placed some job ads in March looking for experienced Linux kernel engineers. After a reader tipped us off, I was thinking maybe it was just a botched job ad by an ignorant recruiter, some April Fool's related prank, etc, but sure enough it pans out and there are multiple job listings for Apple looking out for Linux kernel developers.
The Kerala Blockchain Academy (KBA) of the state-run Indian Institute of Information Technology and Management-Kerala (IIITM-K) has become the first Indian institution to be granted membership by Hyperledger project hosted by Linux Foundation.
With this, the city-based KBA has become an associate member along with Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance, of the University of Cambridge, in the Hyperledger ecosystem, which was launched in 2016 with a technical and organizational governance structure and 30 founding corporate members.
The VK9 project began more than one year ago as an attempt to implement the Direct3D 9 API atop the modern Vulkan API. The project continues progressing and has this weekend hit its 25th milestone.
Some time ago I started writing some articles about how easy it is to write a shell based on MirAL. With subsequent events that work has been neglected. But with the recent release of MirAL 2.0 in Mir 0.31 I decided to update the code that accompanied these articles.
We've known that Mir developers have been trying to get a Mir example desktop session going in time for Ubuntu 18.04. More details on that are now coming to light as we meet the EGMDE desktop environment.
Canonical's Alan Griffiths has been working on EGMDE to demonstrate the ease of being able to write a desktop shell based on MirAL, Mir's abstraction layer. EGMDE is the renewed effort based on Mir 0.31 and MirAL 2.0. EGMDE is short for the Example Mir Desktop Environment.
With Vulkan 1.1 it should be possible to write a pure Vulkan Wayland compositor while a Phoronix reader has tipped us off to a developer starting work on a proof-of-concept Vulkan window compositor.
The simply named VulkanCompositor is working on implementing a window compositor simply using Vulkan and GLFW, though at least for now isn't yet implementing Wayland. The project has just begun but is seeing work on GitHub by developer Ilya Glushchenko.
NVIDIA on Friday released an updated Vulkan driver for Windows and Linux with their latest feature work.
The NVIDIA 387.42.06 driver for Linux and 389.20 driver for Windows are now the company's latest developer drivers for those wanting to make use of the latest Vulkan functionality on Quadro/GeForce/Titan graphics hardware.
Eric Anholt of Broadcom is looking at making use of the AMDGPU DRM scheduler within the VC5 direct rendering manager driver.
In Linux 4.16, the AMDGPU scheduler code was punted off into a common area of the DRM subsystem due to interest stemming from the Etnaviv team in making use of this "marvelous" scheduler in their own driver. With Linux 4.17, Etnaviv is indeed making use of the AMDGPU scheduler that also is now known as just "drm/scheduler" after being generalized for use by other DRM drivers.
After writing yesterday about the Broadcom VC5 DRM driver potentially re-using the AMDGPU scheduler code, a Phoronix reader pointed out that the out-of-tree Linux-Lima driver has begun using this scheduler too.
Now that the AMDGPU scheduler has been punted to the DRM subsystem's common area as DRM_SCHED, we're seeing the smaller Direct Rendering Manager drivers look at using it or alrea
Given all the interest in ray-tracing and related announcements for Windows from last month's Game Developers Conference, I decided to spend some time on this holiday weekend looking at some of the Vulkan ray-tracing projects.
Kevin Brace is the sole developer left working on the OpenChrome DRM driver for supporting integrated graphics from the days of VIA x86 hardware. He's hoping to mainline the driver in the Linux kernel but it still is lacking proper 2D acceleration and more.
In recapping his development activities for March, he notes that he was finally able to fix a long-standing bug where the X.Org Server would crash when changing the screen resolution at runtime. That bug has been fixed as well as some hardware cursor issues.
So now my confession: The Perl graphics in the DeLorean dashboard I described in My DeLorean runs Perl share a history with my OpenGL for Bash project. In a fun and ironic twist, I originally started the project 13 years ago after witnessing Frozen Bubble and having my technical sensibilities offended that someone had written a real-time video game in Perl. Back then, my primary language was C++, and I was studying OpenGL for video game purposes. I declared to my friends that the only thing worse would be if it had been 3D and written in Bash. Having said the idea out loud, it kept prodding me, and I eventually decided to give it a try to one-up the "awfulness" of using Perl for real-time graphics.
The major Mesa 18 open-source graphics stack for Linux-based operating system has been released earlier this week to further advance the Linux graphics drivers and it already started appearing in the main repos of various distros.
Mesa 18 is a massive update that promises to enhance the overall gaming experience for Intel and AMD Radeon GPU users. Finally switched to the Meson build system, the latest Mesa release introduces numerous improvements for existing OpenGL and Vulkan graphics drivers, as well as various new features.
Among the new features, we can mention support for Intel's recently released Cannon Lake microarchitecture, the successor of Ice Lake, on both the Intel i965 OpenGL and Intel ANV Vulkan drivers, and OpenGL 4.3 and OpenGL ES (GLES) 3.1 support on the r600/evergreen driver with hw FP64 (Double Point Precision Computing) support.
With the first quarter of 2018 now in the books, I ran GitStats on the current Mesa code-base as of this morning to see how things are looking for the year to date.
As of this morning there is a total of 2,385,813 lines of code and other text to the Mesa source tree spread across 101,298 commits from over 800 different
Last week I posted an article looking at the Relative Spectre/Meltdown Mitigation Costs On Windows vs. Linux. Today from a different system and using Windows Server 2016 rather than Windows 10 are some fresh benchmarks doing a similar comparison with different hardware and also looking at the Spectre and Meltdown mitigation performance impact again on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and Clear Linux.
Following Friday's debut of Wine 3.5, a new Wine-Staging release is now available that continues to carry close to one thousand patches on top of the upstream Wine code.
Wine-Staging 3.5 was able to drop some of the patches now that the BCrypt patches have been upstreamed, but they still are dealing with around 950 experimental/testing patches for code not yet in Wine trunk.
In going through the GDC 2018 videos and slides now available, one of the most interesting sessions is Alen Ladavac of Croteam talking about frame stuttering and in particular how his company is working to overcome it thanks in part to Vulkan's VK_GOOGLE_display_timing extension.
Croteam has been experimenting with Vulkan's VK_GOOGLE_display_timing extension in Talos Principle and Serious Sam Fusion for being able to obtain accurate timing information and to be able to schedule future frames appropriately. VK_GOOGLE_display_timing has been around since Vulkan 1.0.43 and allows for obtaining information on the presentation engine's display with timing information, etc.
A few days back we wrote about Valve to open-source their Steam networking sockets library and now that source code release has occurred.
The "GameNetworkingSockets" project is a network transport layer for games with a TCP-inspired but messages-based protocol designed for reliability, supports bandwidth estimation and encryption, and other features for use by modern games. This library has already been in use for some games like Dota 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive while now Valve has made it open-source under a BSD license and has also made it not dependent upon Steam so that it can be used independently and is cross-platform.
Welcome to week 12 in Usability & Productivity! Despite all the awesome improvements I’m about to share, there are EVEN MORE that I wasn’t able to announce this week because they’re not quite done yet! But In the coming weeks, some very nice fixes and improvements are going to land.
On a side note, this was my first week at Endless. The onboarding experience is great and I am very excited about Endless in general. Special thanks to Cosimo Cecchi who guided me all through the process. Delighted to start my career at a great FLOSS-oriented company!
Manjaro 17.1.6 Hakoila Xfce edition is a decent distro. But it's different from the Plasma version, and that's not good. These two systems have a radically different user experience, hardware support, and overall quality, and there's little overlap among them. Almost as if they were developed in isolation. Xfce does media and smartphone support well, but it has sucky network support by default.
It's stable, robust overall, very fast, but the visual side of things is tricky, especially the fonts. You will need to invest time taming the distro, and I'm not talking just about pure subjective aesthetics. Most of the problems that I encountered are solvable, so why not just fix them from the start? If you're looking for a good, friendly Linux desktop, Hakoila is a reasonable choice, partly because it gives you Microsoft Office Online in a way no other distro does. Which makes the Samba and printing issues confusing. The Xfce version has some brilliant moments, marred by incomplete execution and various visual bugs. Overall, 7.0/10, I'd say, and it could easily be much much more with some attention to detail.
Lastly, I deeply worry about the inconsistencies between the Plasma and the Xfce versions. Neither was Hakoila perfect in any form, and worse yet, Gellivara was actually better. Lots of homework required, but then, Manjaro is at the forefront of innovation, a rare thing in Linux nowadays. Despite what we saw today, I'm quite optimistic about this distro. Let's see how it evolves.
At the time it seemed not a big task to change names from ArchMerge to ArcoLinux but in retrospect we had quite a big drain in resources because of it. It involves everything till the social media channels, websites etc. But luckily not a financial drain thanks to our partner https://how2.be.
We are happy with the new name as it shows we do more then just merge 3 desktops in one iso.
The Red Hat Linux distribution is turning 25 years old this week. What started as one of the earliest Linux distributions is now the most successful open-source company, and its success was a catalyst for others to follow its model. Today’s open-source world is very different from those heady days in the mid-1990s when Linux looked to be challenging Microsoft’s dominance on the desktop, but Red Hat is still going strong.
To put all of this into perspective, I sat down with the company’s current CEO (and former Delta Air Lines COO) Jim Whitehurst to talk about the past, present and future of the company, and open-source software in general. Whitehurst took the Red Hat CEO position 10 years ago, so while he wasn’t there in the earliest days, he definitely witnessed the evolution of open source in the enterprise, which is now more widespread than every.
Stefano Zacchiroli and I released ledger2beancount, a script to convert ledger files to beancount. Ledger is a bookkeeping system based on text files. Beancount is another tool which follows a similar approach but which from my point of view is the way forward.
Ladies and gentlemen, it is the same time of the year again. It is end of March, and it means that the release of the next generation of your favourite operating system will be released less than in a month's time! And this will be a Long-term support (LTS) version this time!
Yes, Ubuntu 18.04 is less than a month away. Many of you already looking for downloading of your own ISO image of the system. Yes, that's the next version, codenamed Bionic Beaver.
But many of you are not so lucky, and will need to wait longer, because you can not or do not want to create their own DVDs with operating system images. We can help!
The Raspberry Pi has been very popular among hobbyists and educators ever since its launch in 2011. It’s a credit-card-sized single-board computer with a Broadcom BCM 2835 SoC, 256MB to 512MB of RAM, USB ports, GPIO pins, Ethernet, HDMI out, camera header and an SD card slot. The most attractive aspects of the Raspberry Pi are its low cost of $35 and large user community following.
There are no April Fool's Day surprises on Phoronix, but considering the occasion and the otherwise slow Easter weekend, I figured it would be fun to discuss some of the grandest open-source/Linux letdowns or failures from over the years... Here's a trip back down memory lane for some once promising projects and goals.
Below is the list I came up with this morning. Feel free to chime in via the forums or on Twitter with your thoughts and other letdowns in the Linux/open-source space over the years. No hard feelings, just figured it would be fun to discuss and look back at some of these projects especially for newer Linux users that may have never heard of them. The list is in no particular order.
Who said Thunderbird is dying? Mozilla plans to release the 60th version of its open-source and cross-platform email, calendar, and news client, which will introduce a plethora of new features and improvements.
Mozilla Thunderbird 60 entered beta testing earlier this week to allow public testers to take a glimpse at the new features, which include the ability to view locations for calendar events in both the Day and Week views, along with support for deleting, cutting, or copying selected occurrences or entire series for recurring events.
The Calendar component of Thunderbird will also provide users with the ability to send meeting notifications directly instead of displaying a pop-up. On the other hand, Thunderbird 60 will remove the app's capability to send email invitations that are compatible with Microsoft Outlook 2002 and earlier versions.
As most of you know, I probably won’t be around to see much more of it, but (this will seem trite if it’s not to seem big-headed!) Mozilla is much more than one or even a few people. There will always be a Mozilla as long as there is an Internet and people who care about people on it. In that vein, let me also say that I’m absolutely delighted with the final outcome of the worldview project. The four items in the addendum to the Manifesto are admirable goals to aim for, and ones I endorse wholeheartedly.
It’s the morning of March 31, 1998, and the Netscape campus is chock-full of engineers, hours earlier than on a normal day. It’s a Tuesday and it’s known universally in the Netscape browser world as “three thirty-one” and written as 3/31. It’s the day the Mozilla code is open-sourced to the world, and the day the Mozilla Project is formally launched.
Three thirty-one was the result of a massive amount of work in two short months. The intent to make open source the code for “Netscape Navigator” had been announced on January 22. On that date the code was not ready, we didn’t know which free software / open source license we would use, and we didn’t have a structure for running an open source project. That was pure Netscape style.
Ziggy is a long time Mozillian that is involved in organizing our presence at FOSDEM or managing the volunteers at the Mozilla Festival. Together with Anthony he started working on both finding speakers for the DevRoom but also to be sure we have a good presence at the booth too. This work was spread around 3 months so we are definitely grateful for their effort.
According to Wikipedia, “Project management is the process of initiating, planning, executing, controlling and closing the work of a team to achieve specific goals and meet specific success criteria at the specified time.”
The only solution to managing projects smoothly is to get project management software. They are online systems for working and collaborating on projects. The best project management apps help teams to handle common problems like slipped deadlines, automatically rescheduling tasks and generating relevant reports. That’s why, today, we will be exploring top 5 web-based project management software.
When I started this blog back in 2009, I chose to publish it on Wordpress because it was easy to use and maintain. I hosted it using wordpress.com’s free tier, and it has worked well enough for me since then, but when it came time to move the blog off of wordpress.com and onto something self-hosted, I wasn’t convinced that Wordpress was still the best solution for me.
As a system administrator, my biggest concern regarding Wordpress is its security. When our school’s website switched from some 90’s era framework to Wordpress a couple of years ago, it wasn’t long before our site was compromised. We switched from a web host to a DigitalOcean instance running the latest version of Fedora and a system copy of Wordpress (both kept up-to-date), which has (at least for now) kept our site from being compromised again, but that is one more service that we have to keep our eyes on.
TrueOS, the free and open-source FreeBSD derivative, has been updated on Friday to version 18.03, a release that finally includes patches for the Meltdown and Spectre security vulnerabilities publicly disclosed in January 2018. TrueOS 18.03 comes three months after version 17.12 and includes mitigations for the Meltdown and Spectre security vulnerabilities that put billions of devices at risk of attacks. It ports all the fixes from FreeBSD to fix Meltdown for systems using Intel-based processors when running virtual machines.
In addition, this release ports all available mitigations from FreeBSD HEAD, including the retpoline mitigation strategy, for the second variant of the Spectre security vulnerability. On top of this, TrueOS developers recommend all users to install the latest microcode update from Intel to fully mitigate Spectre.
If San Francisco wants an open-source voting system that supporters say would be more reliable and transparent than current proprietary machines, it could cost between $11.5 million and $27.8 million, according to a new consultant’s report.
The report comes as supporters of an open-source system, which includes the Elections Commission, are calling on Mayor Mark Farrell to help fund the effort.
An open-source voting system means the software used to tabulate the ballots is open to public view. Anyone with computer knowledge can examine the software code and look for vulnerabilities or bugs.
Software engineer Yan-Yin Choy has created “Heart of the Valley,” an open source, online map that shows the locations of murals and other pieces of public art, along with a short description that often includes the name of the artist and a photo.
McElmurry has testified he could not point to a specific instance in which Lyon attempted to prevent him from carrying out his research, but said "our contract was deliberately slowed" in an effort to prevent any connection between river water and outbreaks of Legionnaires'.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday gave the green light to two class-action lawsuits filed by residents of Flint, Michigan who are pursing civil rights claims against local and state officials over lead contamination in the city’s water supply.
The report reveals that the majority of bottled water is municipal tap water, a common resource captured in plastic bottles and re-sold at an astonishing markup — as much as 2,000 times the price of tap, and even four times the price of gasoline. Besides being a rip-off, there is plenty more to loathe about the corporate water scam: The environmental impacts from pumping groundwater (especially in drought-prone areas), the plastic junk fouling up our waterways and oceans, and the air pollution created as petrochemical plants manufacture the materials necessary for making those plastic bottles filled with overpriced tap water.
Industry marketing from corporations like Nestlè means that more people are buying bottled water than ever — even though about 64 percent of the bottled water comes from municipal water systems. That means that people buying bottled water are paying much, much more than they would for that same water from the tap. Bottled water is literally more expensive than gasoline -- and about 2,000 times more expensive than tap water.ââ¬â°
[...]
Industry marketing strategies designed to promote the safety of bottled water to people who historically lack access to safe tap water (especially recent immigrants) prey upon those who may mistrust tap water and communities concerned about obesity and sugary beverages. In 2014, Nestlé spent over $5 million advertising Pure Life — the most advertised U.S. bottled water brand — and three quarters ($3.8 million) went to Spanish-language television advertising.
Ultimately, we believe right to try is poised to give the Trump administration a political win on a popular public policy but will do little to change the status quo for terminally ill patients. Some opponents say, if anything, it could give terminally ill patients false hope for new access to drugs they already can obtain through existing FDA policy.
The sprawling patch of detritus – spanning 1.6m sq km, (617,763 sq miles) more than twice the size of France – contains at least 79,000 tons of plastic, new research published in Nature has found. This mass of waste is up to 16 times larger than previous estimates and provides a sobering challenge to a team that will start an ambitious attempt to clean up the vast swath of the Pacific this summer.
“Population growth, along with over-consumption per capita, is driving civilisation over the edge: billions of people are now hungry or micronutrient malnourished, and climate disruption is killing people.”
[...]
“It is a near certainty in the next few decades, and the risk is increasing continually as long as perpetual growth of the human enterprise remains the goal of economic and political systems,” he says. “As I’ve said many times, ‘perpetual growth is the creed of the cancer cell’.”
In a brief hearing before a federal magistrate judge in San Francisco, Yevgeniy Nikulin pleaded not guilty to illegally accessing computers belonging to those companies in 2012.
Nikulin was arrested on October 5, 2016, but he was only very recently extradited from the Czech Republic to the United States. In the Czech Republic, Nikulin's attorneys and the Russian government attempted to get him sent back home to face significantly lesser criminal charges dating back to 2009.
SB315 creates a new crime of "unauthorized access" to computers, which will allow companies to seek criminal retribution against security researchers who conduct good faith research into vulnerabilities in systems that Georgians -- and the world -- relies on.
After it's been pulled from Ubuntu's repositories in late January at Intel's request due to serious hardware issues reported by numerous users, Inte's microcode update to mitigate the Spectre security vulnerability makes a comeback.
On January 22, 2018, Canonical replaced the Intel microcode firmware versioned 20180108 with the older 20170707 release at Intel's request, thus no longer protecting users' computers against the Spectre security vulnerability that could allow a local attacker to expose sensitive information from kernel memory.
"Jann Horn discovered that microprocessors utilizing speculative execution and branch prediction may allow unauthorized memory reads via side-channel attacks. This flaw is known as Spectre. A local attacker could use this to expose sensitive information, including kernel memory (CVE-2017-5715)," reads the security advisory.
The government says 106 children - 104 schoolgirls, a girl who did not go to the school, and a boy - were freed. It denied claims that a ransom was exchanged to secure the girls' release.
News of the girls' return led to celebration in the town, although five girls are reported to have died. The only Christian girl of the group is still in captivity. Parents told AFP that Boko Haram would release her if she converted to Islam, which she refuses to do.
*Sharibu:* All of them were released. They said some were dead there and my daughter is alive but they said she is a Christian and that is why they cannot release her. They said if she wants to be released until she converts and become a Muslim and she said she will never become a Muslim.
"Today, there is an open gang war. My brother was murdered. I have 18 or maybe even 19 mates who were murdered. Today's Sweden is a different reality — today in Sweden, a completely different world," Ken Ring told NRK.
The State Department approved nearly $1 billion in new arms sales for Saudi Arabia as the kingdom's crown prince continued his American tour.
Congress was notified Thursday of the deal, which includes a $670 million sale of more than 6,600 TOW anti-tank missiles and a $300 million sale of spare vehicle parts for the Royal Saudi Land Forces Ordnance Corps.
Mattis now admits the US is “doing the planning” in Yemen strikes, and has shown the Saudis how the concept of a no-strike zone is supposed to work, and engaged in a maturing process of “battlefield management” intended to see Saudi strikes killing fewer civilians.
Rampant sexual and gender-based violence is used by Syria’s warring parties to instill fear in the civilian population and to humiliate and shame their victims into silence, according to the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Syria.
[...]
A report released March 15, said U.N. investigators found sexual and gender-based violence was pervasive throughout Syrian society.
Both India and Pakistan have between 120 and 140 nuclear warheads, according to estimates provided by the Arms Control Association. However a report produced in 2015 by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Stimson Center asserts that Pakistan may be outpacing India in terms of its nuclear stockpile, and may possess 350 nuclear warheads in the next five to ten years. A 2016 SIPRI report confirmed the assessment that Pakistan has more nuclear warheads than India.
The major difference between the two countries’ nuclear doctrines is that while India has renounced first use of nuclear weapons, Pakistan has refused to do so by reserving its right to use nuclear weapons in the face of India’s conventional superiority.
A $4 billion Saudi contribution would go a long way toward U.S. goals in Syria that the Saudis say they share, particularly that of limiting Assad’s power and rolling back Iran’s influence. By comparison, the United States last month announced a $200 million donation to the stabilization effort.
Yesterday, while many Europeans are still pilloried for viewing mass migration from Muslim-majority countries as a threat to Western culture -- and are still accused of "xenophobia," "Islamophobia" and "fear-mongering" -- the city of Afrin, in the Kurdish area of Syria, fell to Turkey.
When Turkey’s armed forces finally seized control last Sunday of the Kurdish enclave of Afrin in northern Syria, after a two-month campaign, it was presented as a victory by “Islam’s last army” in a holy war, or “jihad.”
Turkey has mounted frequent cross-border operations into Iraq over the years to target militants of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). And “Operation Olive Branch” – as Turkey named the Afrin offensive – is the second major operation into Syria since 2016, aimed at preventing Syrian Kurds affiliated with the PKK from building their own mini-state on Turkey’s southern border.
i“It appears the majority of the population of the city ... evacuated under threat of attack from Turkish military forces and Turkish-backed opposition forces. This adds to the already concerning humanitarian situation in the area, with United Nations agencies reporting a displaced population in or from Afrin district in the hundreds of thousands, who now require immediate shelter and other assistance to meet basic needs,” the statement said.
While drifting away from its NATO partners, Ankara has forged closer relations, including both trade and military ties, with Russia and Iran, two main targets of US imperialism. On March 12, the Russian news agency TASS reported that Moscow would accelerate the delivery of the S-400 air defense systems to Turkey. Turkish-Russian economic and trade ties also continue to grow rapidly. Ankara and Tehran are developing close ties in different areas, including commerce and tourism, as well military relations, with almost daily reciprocal visits by government officials and business representatives. The main issue of cooperation between the two countries, however, remains that of “fighting terrorism,” which for Turkey is focused on Kurdish separatism.
John Bolton has spent years imploring the U.S. to go on the attack in cyberspace — a stance that some digital warfare experts caution could set the nation up for a conflict it would be better off avoiding.
President Donald Trump’s incoming national security adviser has made this point in a series of op-eds, speeches and appearances on panels and television, arguing that America should deploy its “muscular cyber capabilities” to strike back against digital adversaries like China, Russia, Iran and North Korea. The point, he said, would be to impose costs “so high that they will simply consign all their cyber warfare plans to their computer memories to gather electronic dust.”
President Donald Trump's choice of John Bolton as his new national security adviser and his ongoing escalation of trade hostilities and reshuffling of his legal team have been interpreted as evidence that Trump is finally governing and conducting himself as he wanted to all along. He's tired of advisers who are steering him away from his true agenda and persona, goes this narrative; instead, he's getting back to the basics that make Trump who he really is.
In appointing John Bolton as his national security adviser, President Donald Trump is sending strong signals to his country and the world. First, in choosing a notorious hawk, he has lain to rest all expectation and hope that power will tame him.
Second, he has no interest in securing independent let alone contrary advice so essential to making a sound decision, all the more so in the realm of foreign policy where decision-makers have to act on imperfect evidence, conflicting instincts and even conjectures out of sheer necessity.
If there’s one thing to be gleaned from the current atmosphere of anti-Russian hysteria in the West, it’s that the US-led sustained propaganda campaign is starting to pay dividends. It’s not only the hopeless political classes and media miscreants who believe that Russia is hacking, meddling and poisoning our progressive democratic utopia – with many pinning their political careers to this by now that’s it’s too late for them to turn back.
Donald Trump and Theresa May during a NATO summit in Brussels. Photo Reuters
As it was with Iraq in 2003, these dubious public figures require a degree of public support for their policies, and unfortunately many people do believe in the grand Russian conspiracy, having been sufficiently brow-beaten into submission by around-the-clock fear mongering and official fake news disseminated by government and the mainstream media.
What makes this latest carnival of warmongering more frightening is that it proves that the political and media classes never actually learned or internalized the basic lessons of Iraq, namely that the cessation of diplomacy and the declarations of sanctions (a prelude to war) against another sovereign state should not be based on half-baked intelligence and mainstream fake news. But that’s exactly what is happening with this latest Russian ‘Novichok’ plot.
Trump bullies people on a nearly daily basis, directing his ire at immigrants, Muslims, women, LBGTQ people, the poor and the environment. He hurls Twitter attacks at those who disagree with him.
The president has encouraged police brutality, suggesting in a Long Island speech that law enforcement officers bang suspects’ heads against police car doors. “Please don’t be too nice” when arresting people, Trump advised. “Like when you guys put somebody in the car, and you’re protecting their head, you know, the way you put your hand over” their head, “I said, ‘You can take the hand away, OK?’”
After being told someone might throw tomatoes at him at a campaign rally, Trump urged his supporters to “knock the crap out of them … I promise you, I will pay for the legal fees.” He stated on Fox News that a Black Lives Matter activist who was attacked at a Trump rally “should have been roughed up.”
Trump’s fellow bully Bolton also engages in abusive behavior. Melody Townsel, working on a USAID project in Kyrgyzstan, became the object of Bolton’s wrath in 1994. Townsel had complained about incompetence, poor contract performance and inadequate funding of the project by a contractor Bolton represented.
The leaders of the United States of America are sick people. They are ignorant. They lack judgement. They choose to fight rather than to cooperate. Especially the Republican party. And especially our current President, Donald Trump. However, the American public remains a sorry lot also. We kill each other at an alarming rate. We are a violent, angry, and bloodthirsty group from top to bottom.
There is no doubt about it: Stormy Daniels is a formidable woman. Karen McDougal is no slouch either, though she is hard to admire after that riff, in her Anderson Cooper interview, about how religious and Republican she is; she even said that she used to love the Donald. Stormy Daniels is better than that.
How wonderfully appropriate it would be if she were to become the proverbial straw that breaks the camel’s back.
Even in a world as topsy-turvy as ours has become, there has to be a final straw.
To be sure, evidence of Trump’s vileness, incompetence, and mental instability is accumulating at breakneck speed, and there are polls now that show support for him holding fast or even slightly rising. Trump’s hardcore “base” seems more determined than ever to stand by their man.
I myself tried to write something for the 15 year “commemoration” of the US war against Iraq, but wasn’t able to complete it. It was too much for me. A couple of months ago I was invited to go to the Northwest to speak about “Fifteen Years After the War.” It was too much for me emotionally, and somewhat shamefully I had to decline.
As I write, I have the phone next to me. I am texting a young Iraqi boy who is alone in Turkey. About ten months ago he was kidnapped in Iraq. Through a chain of events, he ended up in Syria. About two months ago his father was contacted and was able to get his son smuggled across the border into Turkey. Last month his son turned 18 years of age and was eligible to register as a refugee with UNHCR. But he will not get an interview for many months to come. Traumatized, missing family and without friends, he tells his family he wants to come home. But it is much too dangerous for him to return. Trying to draw him out of his boredom, I ask him to tell me how his day was. What did he eat? Did he get outside? What is the weather like? I ask him what words he has learned in Turkish. I tell him what I ate, about the soup I cooked or the rainy weather. By the length of time between our messages, I suspect that he is looking up some of the English words. Sometimes we speak by phone and get to see each other.
On 7 December 2010, Tunisian despot Zine El Abidine Ben Ali’s regime blocked Internet access to the Beirut daily Al-Akhbar for publishing a US embassy cable which painted the dictator, his wife and her family in a deeply unflattering light. In the July 2009 cable, US ambassador Robert Godec had accused Ben Ali’s regime of having ‘lost touch with the Tunisian people…[tolerating] no advice or criticism whether domestic or international’, and of increasingly relying ‘on the police for control and focus on preserving power’. The cable mentioned the growing ‘corruption in the inner circle’, particularly around first lady Leila Trabelsi and her family, whom it said the Tunisians ‘intensely dislike, even hate’. It finally concluded that ‘anger is growing at Tunisia’s high unemployment and regional inequities. As a consequence, the risks to the regime’s long-term stability are increasing’.
The draconian measures taken by the government of Ecuador to cut off all access to the outside world by Julian Assange represent a reactionary attack on basic democratic rights that must be vigorously opposed by workers and youth in every country. Ecuadorian authorities have blocked the WikiLeaks founder’s access to the Internet as well as all other means of communication from Quito’s embassy in London, where Assange has been confined for nearly six years. In addition, it is barring visitors from seeing him, leaving him with fewer rights than a prisoner behind bars. Assange continues to face coordinated conspiracies by the British and US governments to have him arrested and extradited to face US charges of treason and espionage, which carry potential death penalties. The attack on Assange is part of a global assault on democratic rights that increasingly recalls the darkest days of the 1930s, in the midst of the rise of fascism and the drive to world war. It is significant that he was subjected to his enforced isolation in part for making a telling comparison on Twitter between the German government’s recent arrest of Catalonian leader Carles Puigdemont at the behest of Spain and the 1940 arrest of the president of Catalonia, Lluís Companys, who was extradited by the Nazis to Franco’s fascist dictatorship, which tortured and executed him. The placing of Assange under what amounts to incommunicado detention coincides with a drive by governments all over the world to impose censorship on the Internet. Assange has been in the forefront of the resistance to this antidemocratic campaign.
The president of Ecuador is being urged to reverse the internet and visitor bans imposed on WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange at its London embassy.
Among those signing a letter to Lenin Moreno are actress Pamela Anderson, musician Brian Eno, fashion designer Vivienne Westwood and former Greek minister Yanis Varoufakis.
The appeal has been co-ordinated by campaign group the Courage Foundation.
The Ecuadorian Government decided earlier this week to stop Mr Assange using the internet or social media from its embassy in London.
He has been living there for almost six years, believing he will be extradited to the United States for questioning over the activities of WikiLeaks if he leaves.
It is with great concern that we heard that Julian Assange has lost access to the internet and the right to receive visitors at the Ecuadorian London Embassy. Only extraordinary pressure from the US and the Spanish governments can explain why Ecuador’s authorities should have taken such appalling steps in isolating Julian.
Only recently the government of Ecuador granted Julian citizenship and a diplomatic passport, in a bid to allow him safe passage from London. The UK government, under heavy pressure from the US government, refused to exploit this opportunity to end Julian’s detention – even after the Swedish authorities announced that no charges were, or would be, laid against him.
Now, it seems that the Ecuadorian government has been ‘leaned’ on mercilessly not only to stop attempting to provide Julian with a diplomatic route to safety but to drive him out of their London Embassy as well. In addition to US pressure, the Spanish government is also using its leverage over Ecuador to silence Julian’s criticisms of Madrid’s imprisonment of Catalan politicians and, in particular, of the arrest of Catalonia’s former premier in Germany.
If it was ever clear that the case of Julian Assange was never just a legal case, but a struggle for the protection of basic human rights, it is now.
Citing his critical tweets about the recent detention of Catalan President Carles Puigdemont in Germany, and following pressure from the U.S., Spanish and U.K. governments, the Ecuadorean government has installed an electronic jammer to stop Assange from communicating with the outside world via the internet and phone. As if ensuring his total isolation, the Ecuadorean government is also refusing to allow him to receive visitors. Despite two U.N. rulings describing his detention as unlawful and mandating his immediate release, Assange has been effectively imprisoned since he was first placed in isolation in Wandsworth prison in London in December 2010. He has never been charged with a crime. The Swedish case against him collapsed and was withdrawn, while the United States has stepped up efforts to prosecute him. His only “crime” is that of a true journalist—telling the world the truths that people have a right to know.
A group of eminent people, including activists, journalists, film stars and academics, have issued a joint letter calling for an end to the campaign against Australian Julian Assange.
As if ensuring his total isolation, the Ecuadorian government is also refusing to allow him to receive visitors. Despite two UN rulings describing his detention as unlawful and mandating his immediate release, Assange has been effectively imprisoned since he was first placed in isolation in Wandsworth prison in London in December 2010. He has never been charged with a crime. The Swedish case against him collapsed and was withdrawn, while the United States has stepped up efforts to prosecute him. His only “crime” is that of a true journalist — telling the world the truths that people have a right to know.
Brooks says in the past ten years, more than a thousand rangers have been killed in clashes with poachers in conservancies and parks across Africa. She filmed deadly encounters at Kenya’s Garamba National Park.
This year, Earth Hour was marked on March 24 with millions of people around the globe turning off non-essential electric lights for an hour as a sign of commitment to rejuvenate the planet. Organised by the World Wide Fund for Nature, what started as a one-off event in Sydney, Australia, has by now drawn in thousands of towns and cities across 187 countries and territories (according to the WWF).
The winter calving season for critically endangered right whales has nearly ended with zero newborns spotted in the past four months _ a reproductive drought that scientists who study the fragile species haven't seen in three decades.
People have their own minds made up about that issue. We’re saying if the pollution is so bad in the sea that the animals are that toxic, then all of these groups should be uniting over this bigger threat.”
In Karachi, shark meat is largely consumed as finger fish while fins are illegally exported as “salted dry fish”.
The suit, filed Thursday in a San Francisco federal court, alleges that Trump's National Marine Fisheries Service failed to designate critical habitat for humpback whale populations after they were again listed as an endangered and threatened species in 2016, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
Schemes to cool reefs in this way have, however, been criticised as hopeless at best and possibly even harmful. Colder water can absorb more carbon dioxide, and is therefore likely to be more acidic. That would damage reefs. A growing number of scientists therefore reckon that an entirely different approach to saving coral is needed. If oceans are changing faster than coral can adapt via the normal processes of evolution, why not, these researchers argue, work out ways to speed up such evolution?
The most revealing thing about the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) might be the location Virginia Governor Ralph Northam chose to hold the final hearing on whether his state would join the regional carbon trading program: The Bank of America building in Richmond. It was a telling move. After all, big financial interests are lining up to capitalize on carbon trading, and Bank of America itself has invested billions in oil and gas development.
Though it is cheered by Northeast politicians and many environmental groups as an effective tool to fight climate change, RGGI does not reduce carbon emissions – no carbon trading system will – and it actually protects and entrenches fossil fuel development, instead of fighting it.
With a sharp rebuke, a federal judge on Thursday rejected Exxon's attempt to shut down two state investigations into whether the oil giant misled investors for years about the risks of climate change.
U.S. District Court Judge Valerie Caproni dismissed Exxon's complaint with prejudice, meaning the company can't refile it.
In the first line of her ruling, the judge describe Exxon's actions as "running roughshod over the adage that the best defense is a good offense."
"The relief requested by Exxon in this case is extraordinary: Exxon has asked two federal courts—first in Texas, now in New York—to stop state officials from conducting duly-authorized investigations into potential fraud," she wrote. "It has done so on the basis of extremely thin allegations and speculative inferences."
As the case plays out, the defendants’ differing version of climate science’s certainty over time will play a role. The lawyers for San Francisco and Oakland, on the other hand, will likely try to counter that internal documents show these companies weren’t befuddled by scientific uncertainty, rather they were consciously combatting scientific certainty.
In the majority of the country, teachers are working in classrooms that are not being adequately funded, even after state budgets have gotten healthier as the recession has faded from view. As of 2015, state money allocated for schools was still lower than it was before the recession in 29 states. Oklahoma is the leader of that pack, having reduced it by more than a quarter over the last decade, but West Virginia has cut back by more than 11 percent. During this same period, many states also cut taxes, further starving themselves of resources that could go to schools.
Jared Kushner’s father met with Qatar’s finance minister three months after President Trump’s inauguration, a New York City session at which funding for a financially troubled real estate project was discussed, the company acknowledged Sunday.
[...]
The Kushners had earlier sought money from Qatar, working from 2014 until at least 2016 to obtain funding from a private investment fund run by Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani, a wealthy former prime minister.
To name a few damaging policy initiatives: a proposal to punish immigrants for participating in programs like Head Start; closing a Department of Justice office that was created to make legal aid more accessible; repealing guidance to judges that suggested they consider an individual’s ability to pay a fine before allowing her to languish in jail; imposing work requirements and time limits on people who need assistance with health care, housing, or food.
Polygamy nearly always means rich men taking multiple wives. And if the top 10% of men marry four women each, then the bottom 30% cannot marry at all. This often leaves them not only sexually frustrated but also socially marginalised. In many traditional societies, a man is not considered an adult until he has found a wife and sired children.
Roughly six months after Hurricane Maria slammed into Puerto Rico, the island's governor signed into law "education reform" legislation that he says "puts our students first" but that critics say stinks of a privatization plan that will do nothing to help students.
The plan will consolidate schools and allow for charter schools and vouchers—ideas that are not endorsed by the Puerto Rico Teachers Association (Asociación de Maestros de Puerto Rico).
Another teacher's union, the Federación de Maestros de Puerto Rico, vowed that it, alongside teachers, parents, and students, would "defeat the false reform with the struggle on the street and in schools."
The latest round of revelations from former CIA analyst and whistle-blower Edward Snowden appear to confirm what many observers had long suspected.
The creator of Bitcoin, known under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, was a high-ranking NSA in-house researcher who is thought to have left the intelligence agency sometime in early March 2009, barely a few weeks after the release of Bitcoin itself.
In its first analysis of how the GOP tax plan will affect Americans' personal income taxes alone, the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center (TPC) this week underscored what experts and most of the public already knew: that the Republican tax law will pour tens of thousands of extra dollars into pockets of the wealthy few while providing mere crumbs for the poor.
Specifically, according to TPC's new report, the top one percent of earners will receive an average annual tax cut of around $33,000 just from individual tax changes under the GOP law. The poorest Americans, by contrast, will see an average break of about $40 per year.
"While most of the corporate tax cuts flow to the top of the income distribution, what this shows is that even in the direct changes to the individual-side of the tax code, most of those changes are still being allocated to the top," Kim Rueben, a senior fellow at TPC, told the Washington Post.
Yes, the Leave campaign probably cheated. And yes, Remain played unfair advantages. But where did the Brexit dark money actually come from? And how is it still shaping our democracy?
In April 2016, Aggregate IQ was a tiny digital services firm working out of a cramped office in British Columbia, Canada. The company had no web presence and no obvious track record. Yet over the final two months of the Brexit campaign, several pro-Leave campaign groups (Vote Leave, the DUP, Veterans for Britain – and bizarrely, a 23 year old fashion student named Darren Grimes) would spend over €£3.5m with Aggregate IQ.
Why?
Speaking in parliament today, Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Chris Wylie said that all these Leave groups were working together – and breaking the law. “This must be co-ordination,” he told MPs. Under British law, there are strict campaign spending limits, and groups that ‘work together’ have to pool their spending under one combined cap.
But the various Leave groups all declared their spending with AIQ separately, and claim that the firm treated them as separate clients, without co-ordinating their campaigns. This allowed them to throw dramatically more cash than would othewise have been possible into winning the knife-edge Brexit referendum.
We now know that AggregateIQ and Cambridge Analytica – the firm behind Trump’s campaign which has been accused of a massive Facebook data breach – are closely intertwined. AggregateIQ developed the very election software that Cambridge Analytica sold for millions of dollars during the 2016 US presidential election. This raises the possibility that AIQ – the company that Vote Leave spent some 40% of their cash with – was using data illegally harvested from Facebook.
Jeff Silvester chief operating officer at AIQ said: “AggregateIQ works in full compliance within all legal and regulatory requirements in all jurisdictions where we operate. AggregateIQ has never managed, nor did we ever have access to, any Facebook data or database allegedly obtained improperly by Cambridge Analytica.”
If you want to understand how British policy makers think; don’t go to Chatham House, go to Lewis Carroll instead. The current government’s Brexit strategies are straight from the White Queen: Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. A list of Brexit ideas emanating from Theresa May’s cabinet number far more than six impossible things – such as Boris Johnson’s ludicrous suggestion that the success of the London congestion charge showed how easy it would be to replace customs checks on a post-Brexit Irish border.
We have, however, been here before. Crashing Through the Looking-Glass seems to be a recurring pathology of British leaders. We saw it with Anthony Eden over Suez and with Margaret Thatcher in the run up to the Falklands conflict. But what distinguished Thatcher from Eden was good luck and skilful manipulation of jingoism.
Labour’s ingenious proposal to negotiate a new custom union with the EU could be a sensible solution, both for Northern Ireland and to limit friction on trade. However, there is simply no way it can be negotiated in the six months that would follow a vote against whatever Brexit deal May might strike. Disentangling the custom union from the single market is an extremely complex task which requires careful reflection on both sides, and patience doesn’t run high in Brussels, after what appears to be a never-ending indecisiveness from the British side. Besides, Labour could only come to negotiate a deal after getting into government through a general election, which would steal a few more months from the total. There simply isn’t enough time to change May’s Brexit course.
I wish this were just an April Fool's Day post, but sadly it's true that politicians in the EU are making ever more radical proposals concerning U.S. Internet giants. While I don't expect anything extreme to actually happen in the near term, calls for or speculation about breakups of large corporations contribute to a climate in which it becomes increasingly hard to find reasonable solutions, and to focus on actual wrongdoing by abusers of dominant market positions. It's a climate of thoughtlessness.
About a week ago, EU competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager, more descriptively named Activistager, told the Telegraph that a breakup of Google into multiple smaller entities would have to remain on the table as an option for competition enforcement. No one seriously believes this would be the outcome, but just mentioning the possibility is a kind of saber-rattling that appears totally disproportionate. One may or-as the U.S. Federal Trade Commission concluded in 2013--may not consider any of Google's business practices anticompetitive. But even if one agreed with the EU Commission's charges, one can't seriously think about a breakup. Maybe some minor remedies and limited fines, but that's the maximum extent of it.
Walker and Republican leaders in the legislature are still looking for ways to avoid following the existing law. On Tuesday, they announced a plan to rewrite state statutes so that governors would no longer be required to call special elections to fill legislative vacancies “as promptly as possible.” Under the Republican rewrite of the statutes that was unveiled Tuesday, legislative vacancies occurring after early December of odd-numbered years could be left unfilled until the regular November election of the following year.
So why do 41 percent of Republicans buy it?
[...]
Margaret Hartmann wrote for New York magazine that, “while there’s little evidence that Cohen was kept on the payroll for his sharp legal mind, he’d demonstrated again and again that he possesses the unshakable loyalty that Trump values so highly,” and yet Cohen claims that he didn’t even tell his boss about this magnanimous gesture, and never planned to do so. He says that he negotiated the agreement and made Trump a party to it without uttering a word about it, and certainly didn’t ask to be reimbursed for it. Paying a porn star $130,000 to keep quiet about an affair that never happened was just a personal transaction by a guy who refers to himself as a “pit bull” on behalf of a guy with much deeper pockets than he has. (The White House has consistently dodged the question of whether Trump knew of the payoff.)
Cohen further insists that it had nothing to do with the Trump Organization, despite the fact that he used his company e-mail address to set up the wire transfer to Daniels and, according to CNN, “Jill Martin, a top lawyer at the Trump Organization,” is listed in a court filing as the attorney representing the LLC that Cohen established specifically to pay off Daniels. Martin, whose title is vice president and assistant general counsel for the Trump Organization, also issued a statement claiming that she worked on the matter only “in a personal capacity,” despite the fact that the address she listed on the filing is that of the Trump National Golf Club in Los Angeles.
All of this, according to the White House and Cohen, also had nothing to do with the presidential campaign—never mind that this all went down just weeks before Election Day, at a time when it appears the campaign was working furiously to kill off stories about the affair that were set to run in at least three outlets. If it had been related to the campaign, Cohen would be liable for an illegal $130,000 campaign contribution, but he insists that it wasn’t.
[...]
It’s become common these days to lament “media polarization,” as if it’s a generic problem that afflicts both sides of the partisan divide. But it’s important to note that there’s a stark difference in how the left and the right views the mainstream media, and its flaws. Partisan outlets on both sides of the ideological divide see themselves, at least in part, to be watchdogs for the traditional media. But progressives tend to focus on subconscious biases or questionable norms, like the tendency to present both sides’ arguments as if there are no objective facts, reporters’ hesitation to risk their access to the powerful or their eagerness to conform to the conventional wisdom. When conservatives talk about “media bias,” they’re often not talking about bias—as a subconscious process—at all.
If you think that professional reporters regularly invent stories out of whole cloth, it may seem defensible to do so yourself in the name of fighting fire with fire. So when a conservative operative tried to pose as a victim of former Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore in order to dupe The Washington Post into reporting a false charge against him, her cover was blown when reporters uncovered a post she had written in which she gleefully announced that she’d “accepted a job to work in the conservative media movement to combat the lies and deceipt [sic] of the liberal MSM.”
The revival began with The Post's acquisition two years ago by the Alibaba Group, the Chinese technology and retail giant. But if Alibaba is breathing new life into the paper, it has also given it a new mission: improving China’s image overseas and combating what it sees as anti-Chinese bias in the foreign media.
In effect, Alibaba has taken Hong Kong’s English-language paper of record since the days of British rule and put it on the leading edge of China’s efforts to project soft power abroad. Every day, The Post churns out dozens of articles about China, many of which seek to present a more positive view of the country. As it does, critics say it is moving away from independent journalism and pioneering a new form of propaganda.
The most recent controversy with regard to this issue stems from Corbyn’s opposition, via a Facebook post, to the removal in 2012 of an antisemitic mural in the East End of London, on the grounds that this was censorship of an artist. Corbyn has since apologized for not taking into consideration the content of the mural, and said he would have supported its removal given what he found out subsequently.
A White House plan to combat the opioid crisis calls for the death penalty to be imposed on certain drug dealers, according to a new report.
As if on cue, Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R) is providing a compelling demonstration of just how bad earmarks can be. She also demonstrated how earmarks persist despite efforts to eliminate them: the riders she is seeking to include in the pending omnibus appropriations bill nominally change policy rather than setting aside funding. Yet they fit the earmark profile to a tee: wasteful, unfair, and undemocratic.
SADC and the AU, African regional groups of which Zimbabwe is a member have since condemned Zimbabwe’s 2008 elections because the process was not free and fair and thus put to shame the denial that Zanu PF had failed to hold free and fair elections. SADC leaders forced Zanu PF to join hands with the two MDC factions to form a Government of Nation (GNU) which was then tasked to implement a raft of democratic reforms designed to stop Zanu PF rigging future elections.
This deal stinks like the swamp Scott Pruitt is mired in. Pruitt's wanton corruption doesn't just ignore the rule of law and clear ethical boundaries, it threatens the health of our families," said Sierra Club executive director Michael Brune. "He must be fired immediately."
"Pruitt the Polluter"—who earned his nickname by attempting to roll back numerous anti-pollution regulations—paid a nightly rental fee of $50 for a bedroom in a condo co-owned by healthcare lobbyist Vicki Hart, the wife of energy lobbyist Steven Hart, whose firm reported a $16 million federal lobbying income last year and who worked temporarily on the Trump transition team.
Pruitt stayed at the townhouse "while transitioning to Washington," according to an EPA spokesperson who verified the terms of the lease to The Hill. By the time Pruitt moved out at the end of July 2017—more than four months after he was confirmed as head of the EPA—he had racked up $6,100 in rent charges.
Zello rose to fame in August 2017 when the 'walkie-talkie' app was used by relief effort volunteers and those stranded in the wake of Hurricane Harvey. The Russian government, however, wants to take the app down and this week it was revealed that the country's telecoms regulator told ISPs to prepare to block 15 million IP addresses, most belonging to Amazon, in order to do so.
He has been branded as "racist" and "bigoted." Entire groups from all over Britain attend his rallies to try and shut him down because of his anti-Islam stance. The former English Defence League (EDL) leader refuses to accept accusations he is spreading hate, because in his words, it is his "right" to say what he wants about any religion he chooses.
In the UK, free speech is not set out in law – but it is assumed through the nation's association with the European Convention of Human Rights, and various case law.
For one of the country’s largest media conglomerates, the sale must have felt like a coup de grâce. Dogan outlets, including two of the country’s four biggest newspapers, Hurriyet and Posta; a leading television channel, CNN Turk; and a news agency, among many others, have been squirming under government pressure for years. The group’s ageing owner, Aydin Dogan, one of the symbols of Turkey’s deposed secular order, has been hounded by tax inspectors and prosecutors. People close to his group say Mr Dogan conducted the sale without consulting any associates. Some believe the mogul faced arrest unless he sold his empire to one of the president’s men. Had that happened to the 81-year-old, he would have joined over a hundred other Turkish journalists already in prison, most of them jailed since the failed [sic] coup of 2016.
A recently introduced Turkish law to regulate the broadcasting of content on the internet is a liberal measure intended to protect families, Turkey’s broadcasting regulator RTÃÅK claimed.
“This law, in spite of what others have said, is a liberal law, it is never a ‘censorship law’. It does not cover the entire internet,” RTÃÅK head ðlhan Yerlikaya said.
“There is no inspection of YouTube, Twitter or Facebook at all. We will only inspect broadcasters which are felt not to be broadcasters due to broadcasting only over the internet, such as Netflix, Blu TV, and Puhu TV.”
The measure was necessary, he said, to protect children from bad role models.
The cutting of veteran talk show host Sakina Kamwendo's radio show was nothing short of media censorshipââ¬Å¡ the SA National Editors Forum says.
Taking to their Twitter account on Saturdayââ¬Å¡ the group said: "Sanef has noted that it is certainly the prerogative of SABC management to make decisions about programming. Howeverââ¬Å¡ we believe this incident with Kamwendo was extremely poorly handled and smacks of censorship!"
"Kamwendo should have been given the space to explain to her listeners what had transpired with her show & with the termination of her time as the shows host."
Sanef intended to consult with the SABC to address the matter.
It’s going to be a long uphill battle to win back the liberties that were slowly won by our ancestors over about six generations, and which have been all but abolished in a decade.
It’s not rocket science that our children should have at least the same set of civil liberties in their digital environment, as our parents had in their analog environment. And yet, this is not happening.
Our children are right to demand Analog Equivalent Privacy Rights — the civil liberties our parents not just enjoyed, but took for granted.
The FBI’s Remote Operations Unit (ROU), tasked with [cracking] into computers and phones, is one of the Bureau’s most elusive departments. But a recent report from the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) for the Department of Justice has now publicly acknowledged the unit’s existence seemingly for the first time. The report also revealed that the ROU has used classified [cracking] tools—techniques typically reserved for intelligence purposes—in ordinary criminal investigations, possibly denying defendants the chance to scrutinize evidence, as well as destabilizing prosecutors’ cases against suspects.
Every single time one of your information-hygiene-moron “friends” are taking yet another test, there’s yet another leak of your information.
And that’s the bigger picture we should be talking about [...]
This is one of the craziest things about the modern age. We would never let the government or a corporation put cameras/microphones in our homes or location trackers on us. But we just went ahead and did it ourselves because – to hell with it! – I want to watch cute dog videos.
The extraordinary messages obtained by tech website the Verge provide a rare window into Facebook’s internal culture: while there was dissent from employees, many appeared focused on flushing out whistleblowers.
Want to visit the United States in a non-immigrant capacity? Should the State Department get its way, your application to enter the country may soon hinge on coughing up five years of your online history.
The Trump administration's proposal, published at the Federal Register on Friday, would expand this request, which is currently required to apply for an immigrant visa. Friday's proposal could be enacted after a 60-day public-comment period pending passage by the Office of Management and Budget. Alternatively, the State Department could modify the proposal and start another comment period. But should this current iteration go into effect, an estimated 14 million non-immigrant visa applicants per year would be asked to list any "identifiers" used on a variety of popular social media sites. Those applicants will additionally be required to disclose identifiers they have used during that timespan on sites that aren't on the State Department's default list.
The proposal covers 20 social media platforms. Most of them are based in the United States: Facebook, Flickr, Google+, Instagram, LinkedIn, Myspace, Pinterest, Reddit, Tumblr, Twitter, Vine and YouTube. But several are based overseas: the Chinese sites Douban, QQ, Sina Weibo, Tencent Weibo and Youku; the Russian social network VK; Twoo, which was created in Belgium; and Ask.fm, a question-and-answer platform based in Latvia.
Once the planned rule change is filed to the Federal Register on Friday, the public will have 60 days to comment on it.
According to notices submitted by the State Department on Thursday, set for formal publication on Friday, the government plans to require nearly all visa applicants to the US to submit five years of social media handles for specific platforms identified by the government -- and with an option to list handles for other platforms not explicitly required.
A 2016 memo from a Facebook Inc. executive made the case for the company’s grow-at-all-costs culture, explaining that the negative consequences of the social network -- even deaths and terrorist attacks -- weren’t reason to abandon its purpose of connecting people to one another.
Sen. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) on Friday hammered Facebook over a leaked memo in which an executive argued the company's growth is justified even it comes at the loss of human lives.
“Death from bullying cannot be the cost of doing business. Terrorist attacks cannot be the cost of doing business,” Markey tweeted, referring to scenarios mentioned in the memo.
The two countries have used the UN budget panel, known as the fifth committee, to cut funding for human rights monitors and for a senior post in the secretary general’s office which is supposed to ensure that human rights – one of three pillars of the UN’s function – are not forgotten in its day-to-day work.
Questions about police conduct in Ayomi’s case don’t end there. Ismawanto confirmed that police waited 23 hours after they detained Ayomi to take him to a hospital, attributing the delay to slow official approval. He said police noted Ayomi’s failure to regain consciousness while in detention as “strange,” but that a doctor at the hospital certified that he was “healthy.”
Identity politics is becoming more depraved by the day. Now it seems even light-skinned black people must atone for their privilege. Amandla Stenberg, a 19-year-old black actress, recently revealed that she stopped pursuing a role in the recent Black Panther film because she felt it deserved a more ‘dark-skinned’ cast.p>
Authorities said that each officer fired 10 times. Any one of the eight bullets that struck Clark could have proved fatal, Dr Omalu said.
Clark’s elderly, disabled grandparents heard the shots, called the police to notify them of the gunplay, and then sat in their living room talking to the responding officers at length about what they had heard. At no point did the officers tell them that the Sacramento police had shot someone in their backyard. Only after they had left, when the grandmother pulled back the blinds and looked out the window, did they realize that there was a body in their garden, and that that body was their grandson. There is, even by the cruel standards of this era, a peculiar grotesquerie to this macabre sequence of events.
The family of Stephon Clark, a 22-year-old unarmed black man fatally shot by police in his grandparents' back yard, on Monday urged the Sacramento, Calif., district attorney's office to bring criminal charges against the two officers who killed him.
“The public doesn’t know the complete picture as to the number of these cases because some judges for whatever reason choose not to publish these decisions,” said Barry Kamins, a former judge and the author of the standard legal book on police search and seizure law in New York State.
This could easily change. All it would take is for judges to make a point of publicly disseminating written decisions whenever they find an officer was not credible. That would give the public a better understanding of the prevalence of dubious police testimony. And it would allow the criminal justice system — from judges down to defendants — to better evaluate the credibility of individual officers.
Landry said Sterling then "quickly sits up and rolls to his left away from officer Salamoni," which Landry said creates an angle for the officers where Sterling's right side appears to be concealed. As Sterling tries to get up, Salamoni fires three more shots into Sterling's back. The autopsy shows that Sterling had six gunshot wounds.
An Islamic association named Raza Academy has filed a complaint against a TV show named ‘Ishq Subhan Allah’ which sought to highlight the Triple Talaq issue in a mature manner. The TV show has also taken into account the recent Supreme Court judgement on the matter.
During the hour of prayer they not only gave instructions regarding the jihad but also on how to treat women. “It was said that women are entrusted to the custody of men, be it husband or brother, and that as such men had the right beat them if they disobeyed”.
Sweden's board of Health and Welfare, in cooperation with the Migration Authority, released a pamphlet titled Information for one who is Married to a Child, intended to help guide men who marry underage girls through the Swedish welfare system.
[...]
"We have chosen to legalize marriages between adults and children and thereby abandon the most vulnerable - young immigrant girls who are being robbed of their future under the watchful eye of the Swedish state," Hernroth-Rothstein wrote.
Perhaps they should ponder the reasons why so many women in the Islamic world have tired of such contradictions and have rejected the hijab outright.
Nigeria has the largest number of child brides in Africa, according to the U.N. Children’s Fund. The practice is most prevalent in the predominantly Muslim north where conservative Islamic groups staunchly resist efforts to criminalize child marriage. Most girls accept whether they want to or not, but times are changing.
According to a young humanitarian identified as Fateemah Habeeb, a 14-year-old girl was defiled by an Imam who is over 50 years old. She explained that the Imam in question had bragged about defiling the girl with courage that nothing was going to happen to him.
Abortion is illegal in Paraguay for pregnancies that resulted from rape or incest. It is illegal when the pregnancy poses a serious – but not life-threatening – health risk, and when a fetus has no hope of surviving outside the womb.
Two Islamic teachers identified as Kamaledeen Alade and Hammed Adebayo were on Wednesday arraigned before a Surulere Chief Magistrate Court in Lagos for allegedly raping two girls between the age of 14 and 16.
The 22-year-old black man fatally shot by Sacramento police in his own backyard Sunday night was carrying a cellphone, not a "tool bar," when confronted by officers, the department clarified late Monday.
During a cabinet meeting on Wednesday, legislators in France were expected to introduce a new bill, conceived months ago, that would take harsher action against sexual harassment and assault, according to The Guardian. The bill, which will reportedly go to parliament in the next few months, allows police officers to give people sexually harassing others in public on-the-spot fines ranging from €90 to €750 (about $111 to $925).
When Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan visited Washington DC last year, he brought along his gang of goons who beat protesters so brutally that nine were hospitalized. US prosecutors dropped charges against against 11 of the 15 men accused of the bloody assault. In the video above you can see the suited thugs kicking people on the ground as police officers try to stop them.
I agree. These are the same people who shuffle compliantly through TSA lines, getting their bodies and rights violated by repurposed mall food court workers dressed up to look like cops.
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iAnd even if you don't have a dog, what kind of human being are you if you don't stand up?
Mr Olad was told he would leave college and be turned over the next day to the care of Muslim clerics who would restore his faith. “I was aware of the horrors of these camps,” Mr Olad says. “They operate them in the middle of nowhere, where you cannot escape. They subject you to beatings, starvation and trampling.” He tried to contact the American embassy, but it could not send help because of recent terrorist attacks nearby. Luckily, he also managed to reach a Kenyan atheist group. In the dead of night he sneaked into his mother’s room, stole his passport and was whisked away by taxi to the embassy, which eventually returned him safely to America. He has not spoken to his family since.
Yes, these future lawyers believe that free speech is acceptable only when it doesn’t offend them. Which is to say, they don’t believe in it at all.
Furthermore, 27 percent of Copenhagen's non-Western population responded that religious laws and traditions must be followed at all costs, even though they may violate Danish law. Again, this was an increase from 2016, when the corresponding figure was 24 percent.
A woman described as a “Mexican Muslim” was arrested in west El Paso, suspected of kidnapping a woman who she said brought shame to the Muslim community, according to court documents.
Mr Justice Baker decided the Islamic marriage was "arranged entirely" by the man and the woman's father.
He said the marriage took place at Northampton Islamic Centre when the woman was vulnerable to influence and ruled it was invalid under English law.
Altantawi worried his children — particularly the two daughters — were becoming “too Americanized,” the Detroit News reports.
A man in Badin surrendered himself to police on Wednesday after killing his 38-year-old wife for 'honour' by repeatedly hitting her with an axe.
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In a separate incident, a man killed his 25-year-old wife and a mother of one, along with another man for the sake of "honour" in the Dilawar Marfani village of Shikarpur.
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Scores of women in Pakistan are still being murdered by relatives for bringing shame on their family, a year since new laws came into force aimed at stemming the flow of 'honour killings'.
The ensuing clashes left dozens of people injured and at least three police officers and one Basij member dead. One arrested protester died in custody in unexplained circumstances. The Iranian authorities should immediately release those held or charge them with a recognizable crime. The authorities should also allow for an independent investigation into possible use of excessive force during the clashes.
The administration's plan to implement Qisas (retributive justice) through beheading has been met with a chorus of criticism from human rights activists who have long campaigned for the abolishment of the death penalty in the country.
“It’s about that FOIA request you made about the building plans for the mosque,” he told her.
It did not immediately dawn on her that she was actually not the one whose name was on the Freedom of Information Act request.
According to reports, a village panchayat of the Bulandshahr district had ordered the beating of the woman on March 10 because she was suspected of having an affair. Her crime and punishment were decided by the panchayat - one of the countless kangaroo courts that populate India's countryside.
McCartney, 75, was joined by his wife Nancy Shevell on Saturday during the March for Our Lives on Manhattan’s Upper West Side when he spoke off-camera to CNN’s Jason Carroll.
As regional gerrymandering challenges draw an increasingly national focus, impeachment threats inspired by one such case drew condemnation from experts in constitutional law and judicial ethics.
“In Putin’s Russia, this is completely normal,” Harvard Law professor Lawrence Lessig said in a phone interview.
Vielle and Falcon were reluctant to share too many details about the ceremonies, which are sacred to their culture.
“Non-Natives are really exploiting our way of life and our ceremonies, grabbing them and selling them,” said Falcon, recalling the 2009 deaths of three people at an Arizona sweat ceremony conducted by non-Native, New Age guru James Arthur Ray.
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“I tell them, ‘I can’t stop you if you want to go and build one. But it won’t be done in the right way,’'' Falcon said. "And once I tell them that, they are very respectful and say, ‘I’ll build a sauna instead.’”
Rodriguez’s case is the 10th related to retired Chicago police Detective Reynaldo Guevara that has been tossed out since mid-2016 following allegations that Guevara beat suspects and improperly coerced witnesses.
Lifeline is essential for low-income Americans "who rely on subsidized internet access to find jobs, schedule doctor's appointments, complete their school assignments, interface with the government, and remain connected in a digital economy," Democrats wrote in the letter to Pai.
This affects ALL small businesses, from hardware stores to massage therapists. The Senate is expected to vote in a matter of weeks. Please spread the word to small business owners you know!
US Patent and Trademark Office has published an application for a ‘Bitcoin Mining Hardware Accelerator with optimized message digest and Message scheduler datapath’. Intel had originally submitted the application in 2016.
The white paper also states it will endeavour to reach a point of voluntary agreement by the end of this year, where the involved parties can decide on which copyright and intellectual property [sic] protection measures work best.
A Florida federal court has denied Cloudflare's request to vacate a recent order which opened the door to widespread site blocking efforts. The order, obtained by the RIAA, applies to the defunct website MP3Skull but could have broader consequences.
Two men behind defunct pirate streaming site Swefilmer have had their sentences increased by the Court of Appeal in Sweden. The main operator was originally sentenced to three years in prison but is now required to serve a four-year sentence and pay additional damages. The second man has had his conditional sentence augmented with a fine.