The software for GNU/Linux distributions is a surprisingly accessible set of shell scripts that attach themselves to ACPI events surrounding the lid switch. In use it seems a little cumbersome, but we suspect its real value is not in repeatedly slammin the lid to produce Morse text input. Instead with many lid switches being magnetic reed switches an operator could simply wear a ring with a magnet and tap out their text every bit as quickly as they could using a traditional key.
We like the idea, and could see it being popular among radio amateurs. It’s a theme we’ve visited before with a more traditional key, and if you’d love to try but don’t know any Morse then perhaps this may help you learn.
Google has maintained a very simple homescreen for its Chrome OS platform since the beginning, but slowly it’s been improved through small tweaks here or there. Now, in version 85, Chrome OS is preparing a tweaked app drawer that has smoother animations and, overall, is just a needed usability update. Here’s a quick look.
As first spotted by a Reddit user, there’s a small tweak to the app drawer in Chrome OS v85 which makes a big difference in terms of usability. Specifically, this change puts a “ghost” shadow behind an icon you’re moving. Thanks to that, moving icons around on the homescreen feels smoother and more accurate. Previously, it was really easy to accidentally drop an app into a folder instead of moving it to a new location.
A few days ago I mentioned that it looked like the FSGSBASE patches could finally land for Linux 5.9 and indeed this performance-sensitive x86_64 feature is on track for premiering the next kernel cycle. But additional testing is encouraged.
Addressed to Andy Lutomirski confirmed plans for landing FSGSBASE support in Linux 5.9. He is encouraging testing of the FSGSBASE-enabled kernel ahead of time particularly for relevant workloads in ensuring nothing is broken and in good shape.
Two weeks after ROCm 3.5, the AMD Radeon team has now issued a patch update to this Radeon Open Compute stack.
ROCm 3.5.1 comes with updated Kernel Fusion Driver (AMDKFD) code to fix a memory access fault error that was happening since ROCm 3.3 for multi-GPU setups. ROCm 3.5.1 also provides API additions for querying the priority of a stream with HIP, support for NCCL 2.7 with send/receive operations now being supported, and RCCL updates to provide network proxy profiling and support for gather/scatter/all-to-all collective operations.
The Raspberry Pi 1 through Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ and even the Raspberry Pi Zero can now see Vulkan support via a new unofficial "RPi-VK-Driver" that is offering even better performance than the Broadcom OpenGL driver.
While there has been a Vulkan driver in development for the Raspberry Pi 4 and future models with the newer Broadcom VideoCore GPU that officially supports Vulkan, an independent developer has been developing a Vulkan driver for the VideoCore IV GPU found in pre-RPi4 SBCs. VideoCore 4 isn't compliant with Vulkan in full, but with enough effort, a Vulkan driver was brought up.
 
Adobe Photoshop is not available for desktop Linux. GIMP is the best alternative to Adobe Photoshop on Linux.
If you have used Photoshop for sometime, you’ll notice that the GIMP has different settings, different keyboard shortcuts and layout than Photoshop.
And there is absolutely nothing wrong with it. After all, both are two different software, and they don’t have to look the same.
However, people who are used to Photoshop find it difficult to forget their hard learned muscle memory while switching to GIMP. This could frustrate some because using a new interface means learning numerous keyboard shortcuts and spending time on finding which tool is located where.
To help such Photoshop to GIMP switchers, Diolinux has introduced a tool that mimics Adobe Photoshop in GIMP.
Customization is one of the main reasons why I use Linux. There is no end to the kind of customization you can do to your desktop Linux. You can change icons, themes, change fonts, change terminals, add screenlets, indicator applets, extensions and what not.
We have covered numerous desktop customization tips and tricks on It’s FOSS. In this one, I’ll show you how to make Ubuntu look like macOS.
Many people use macOS because of its simplistic and elegant look. You may disagree with it but it remains a popular opinion. Even there are Linux distributions that have macOS like look and feel.
One of the readers requested us to show how to make Ubuntu look like macOS and hence we’ve created this tutorial. In fact, this is a good example to show the customization capability of desktop Linux.
Mentioned in my last tutorial, PeerTube is able to mirror YouTube videos. This means we simply copy the video addresses instead of reupload the files and video is instantly published on PeerTube. It is a cool feature. It is thanks to the tool used behind the scene named youtube-dl. Now it is the time to discuss how to do that more precisely. In this tutorial I explain mirroring several videos from that Google-owned site. I use examples from our Free Libre Open Source Software community. Enjoy!
Wine-Staging has traditionally been around 800~850 patches over upstream while with Wine-Staging 5.11 this experimental/testing flavor of Wine has ticked down to just a 702 patch delta.
Wine-Staging is ticking closer to mainline thanks to more of the patches being deemed viable and ready for upstream. Among the work upstreamed into Wine and making Wine-Staging 5.11 smaller are a number of the NTDLL improvements as well as a number of DirectManipulation patches.
Ghostrunner Demo running through Steam Play on Linux. The demo is available as part of the Steam Game Festival.
Crumble Demo running natively on Linux. The demo is available as part of the Steam Game Festival.
Now that EA have decided to cosy up with Valve once again, their games have been pouring onto Steam and that means certain games like Titanfall 2 are easy to get going on Linux.
Thanks to the Steam Play Proton compatibility layer (more info), tons of big Windows-only titles like this are really easy to get running on pretty much any Linux distribution. Titanfall 2 is an underappreciated gem too. I’m a massive FPS nut, I simply love these tactical feeling shooters and Titanfall 2 especially because it’s ridiculously over the top. We also so very rarely get games like this officially on Linux so thanks to Proton we can play Titanfall 2 and many other EA games easily now.
Want to get started with the excellent Linux gaming overlay MangoHud? There's an app for that. A reminder of the wonderful GOverlay which just had a new release.
MangoHud enables you to do fancy things like check FPS, frame timings, monitor temperatures, RAM and VRAM use and the list goes on. It can take a little tinkering to get it where you want it through a config file or with launch options for games but how about making it a little easier? That's where GOverlay comes in.
GOverlay has been covered here a few times and with good reason, it's a nifty little open source app that talks to MangoHud and lets you configure it by clicking buttons and ticking boxes. I like the simple life okay? It's great. Version 0.3.4 of GOverlay just went up bringing in support for recent additions to MangoHUD 0.4.1.
Currently, the Wine and Proton compatibility layers for Linux don't work with Easy Anti-Cheat and we have something of an update on the status for you.
Easy Anti-Cheat is one of the most widely used systems to reduce cheating in games, it's available in some form for actual Linux builds of games but it's something of a sore spot for Wine and Proton. Some time ago, it was confirmed that Valve and the Easy Anti-Cheat team were planning to work together to get the situation sorted, Epic Games later confirmed Easy Anti-Cheat was still supported on Linux for native builds too after it appeared that was stopping. Since then, we've not really heard anything officially on it.
However, over on Reddit, user Guy1524 who happens to work for CodeWeavers (who work on Wine / Proton) gave a personal update on their own clearly unofficial progress to get Easy Anti-Cheat working.
As usual, KDE developer Nate Graham is keeping us up to date with what’s going on in the Plasma world, and it looks like the KDE Plasma 5.20 desktop environment is already shaping up to be a great release with lots of new additions, as well as countless bug fixes and improvements.
The most prominent new features included so far in Plasma 5.20 include a new icon-only task manager as default Plasma layout that’s more modern and touch-friendly, middle-click paste support on Wayland, re-written System Settings Users page, as well as the ability to unplug screens on Wayland.
KDE developers continue making much progress on enhancing their desktop through this pandemic and the nice summer weather.
KDE's Nate Graham has published his usual weekly report on the development happenings for the trailing week. Here is a look at some of the very latest accomplishments:
- Support for performing private/icognito searches in KRunner with the web shortcuts. KRunner also has an "arch: " shortcut for searching the Arch Linux Wiki.
this is the second post about the progress in my GSoC project and I want to present the new zoom widget feature and some useful tooltip changes.
[...]
In the next post I plan to show another important and somewhat bigger feature which about handling of external graphical packages inside of Cantor.
For completeness, overall acquisitions since the stuff is in the store:
Kate - Advanced Text Editor - 46,824 acquisitions
Okular - More than a reader - 37,212 acquisitions
Filelight - Disk Usage Visualizer - 6,532 acquisitions
Kile - A user-friendly TeX/LaTeX editor - 4,408 acquisitions
KStars - Astronomy Software - 2,496 acquisitions
Elisa - Modern Music Player - 1,450 acquisitions
Lots of effort is going into Tracker at the moment. I was waiting for a convenient time to blog about it all, but there isn’t a convenient moment on a project like this, just lots of interesting tasks all blocked on different things.
With the API changes mostly nailed down, our focus moved to making initial Tracker 3 ports of the libraries and apps that use Tracker. This is a crucial step to prove that the new design works as we expect, and has helped us to find and fix loads of rough edges. We want to work with the maintainers of each app to finish off these ports.
If you want to help, or just follow along with the app porting, the process is being tracked in this GNOME Initiatives issue.
UbuntuDDE is a satisfactory Desktop Environment. Would I say it is the most beautiful? No, not a chance. I think it is fine though. What bothers me most about it is the very limiting feeling I get from it. I don’t feel attached to the desktop. I don’t feel like it is mine and things like not all applications respecting the dark theme just added more to that pile.
Despite my experience with the desktop. I think you should give it a try, in a VM or on actual hardware. After all, your experience may be far different than mine. It could be all roses and puppy dogs or maybe Kawaii cats hiding and appearing. After all, I am a biased openSUSE Plasma user that wants his bacon fried to a certain perfection. My tastes are different than yours so you should explore and find your Desktop Home.
Slackware community is very active nowadays, and that's for a reason. They are waiting for the big update coming to Slackware, which is the new Plasma 5 and XFCE. It has been requested for so long after -current start moving, but Pat hasn't made the change until 2020 when big basic components such as Qt5 went in and many followed up.
There were some distractions along the way, such as PAM taking some time to test (it was initially planned for a day or two in testing/), but at the end it was a smooth migration. I barely notice any changes since all the changes happening under the hood and it works well both in my MATE and Cinnamon project (basically for Cinnamon since i already have PAM installed, but not as part of the core packages. It just sit there as a requirement for Cinnamon-screensaver).
For next Plasma 5 and XFCE, there are some another changes needed for it to go smoothly and that's UPower and elogind. Slackware 14.2 up to -current is still using the old UPower which is already deprecated for some time, but since it's related to many other libraries/applications, Pat kept them until it's time to move on with the rest of the projects and i believe it's time. Newer UPower is needed by Plasma 5, XFCE, mate-power-manager 1.24 (it's still at 1.22 for now due to this constraints) and better battery support in Cinnamon.
  Oracle announced the release of brand new Oracle Linux 8.2 which is an enterprise-class server Linux distribution built from Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).
I can now PXE Boot both RHEL 7.8 and RHEL 8.1 OS images for virtual machines. Here is what works.
Earlier this week, Miroslav Suchý proposed removing removing retired packages as part of Fedora upgrade. As it stands right now, if a package is removed in a subsequent release, it will stick around. For example, I have 34 packages on my work laptop from Fedora 28 (the version I first installed on it) through Fedora 31. The community has been discussing this, with no clear consensus.
I’m writing this post to explore my own thoughts. It represents my opinions as Ben Cotton: Fedora user and contributor, not as Ben Cotton: Fedora Program Manager.
Debian GNU/Linux is one of the oldest Linux-based operating systems known for its rock-solid stability and large community support. The most popular Linux distros like Ubuntu or Tails are based on Debian Linux.
However, you cannot install pure Debian directly on your smartphones or tablets. You need hardware-specific customizations to run it smoothly on different devices.
Surprisingly, Debian exists for smartphones either as PureOS or Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system. Now here comes another Debian-based mobile operating system, Mobian, which aims to bring the full power of Debian to mobile devices.
The Xubuntu team has been announced and released Xubuntu 20.04 LTS On April 23rd, 2020. Xubuntu 20.04 LTS is the Eighth Long Term Support (LTS), It will be supported with security and software updates for 3 years, until April 2023, This release rolls-up various developments, fixes and optimizations that have been released since the 19.10 LTS.
Xubuntu 20.04 LTS ships with the latest Xfce desktop environment 4.14 series by default, a brand-new dark theme, Greybird-dark, has been added, complementing the default Greybird theme; six community wallpapers are bundled from winners of the Community Wallpaper Contest.
  Touch is a popular command in the Linux system that can be used for performing many tasks, rather than just creating an empty file. Using the touch command, you can change the existing file’s timestamp, the time of last modification, and the time of last access. This article will cover how to use the touch command using several examples in Ubuntu 20.04. All the touch commands discussed in this article will be input into the terminal on Ubuntu 20.04. Common uses of the touch command are given below.
This is my first Odroid device. A few years ago, I considered very seriously replacing my Raspberry Pi with an Odroid XU4 SBC, but I ended up purchasing a huge ass rack server instead for the same price.
Following Cow_killer’s review of the OGA, I decided to follow progress of the device very carefully to see when it would be back in stock, since the first run was in very limited numbers.
Nonetheless, VW’s operating system will be flexible, with VW “joining the Linux community,” according to Senger, suggesting the use of that open-source operating system as the backbone. Brands will be given some “leeway” and to deploy certain functions such as using Android in some markets. Here’s a low-resolution (sorry) screenshot from the presentation.
  The Raspberry Pi 4 with 8GB RAM launched a couple of weeks ago together with the beta version of Raspberry Pi OS 64-bit. Note that you should currently use the 32-bit version of Raspberry Pi OS (previously known as Raspbian) as the 64-bit still has bugs and missing features, but I want to find out the current progress, so I installed raspios_arm64-2020-05-28/2020-05-27-raspios-buster-arm64.zip and had no problem to boot the board.
It looks like the Raspberry Pi engineers have been hard at work because the newer firmware releases have significantly reduced the overall power consumption and thus the thermal load. In my testing so far it only seems “a little” hotter than the 3b+.
The ISC has had a Pi honeypot(1) for the last couple of years, but I haven't had much time to try it on the Pi zero. Recently, I've had a chance to try it out, and it works great.
It is no longer news that Google is working on a file-sharing feature for Android similar to Apple’s AirDrop. The feature which is now called Nearby Share (formerly known as Nearby Sharing) has been in development for a while, and now more details have surfaced.
New info has revealed that Nearby Share will not be limited to sharing between Android devices but also other operating systems with the help of the Chrome browser.
Last year's Stylo 5 was a decent choice if you really wanted a budget Android phone with a stylus, but the Stylo 6 is much tougher to recommend. The stylus is neat, and it does have a massive screen if you're into that, but the Helio P35 processor in this phone (and perhaps LG's lack of software optimization) makes the Stylo 6 frustrating to use. There are plenty of other phones in the $200 price range that will run much better, like the Moto G Fast.
LG also has competition for budget stylus phones in 2020. The Moto G Stylus was just released in the United States, will probably get Android 11 someday (unlike the Stylo 6), and is much faster and more responsive. While it is substantially more expensive at $300, it's such a massively better phone that you'd be silly to choose the Stylo 6 just to save $80. The Moto G Stylus is also available right now as an unlocked device that works on all major U.S. carriers, while the Stylo 6 is currently only sold at certain prepaid carriers (though an unlocked model will probably arrive in a few months).
In the end, I don't really see any compelling reasons for most people to buy the LG Stylo 6. Perhaps if you can get an exceptionally good deal on one (like, free), this phone will hold you over until you can afford something better. But the performance issues are extremely unlikely to be resolved by software updates, and we just don't think MediaTek's budget Helio chips make any sense to choose when Qualcomm alternatives are readily available at the same price point (albeit without a stylus). LG goofed on the Stylo in 2020—hopefully they'll see the error of their ways and correct course on the next iteration.
The Opensource.com community is full of people with varied interests; all brought together by their love of open source. The 2020 Opensource.com summer reading list reflects those diverse interests by covering books about a wide range of subjects and for different age groups. Books about mathematics, cryptography, Unix, and "coding" a sandcastle are just a few of the selections that comprise this year's list.
This year's summer reading list also provides a great representation of the ever-growing and changing nature of Opensource.com. Contributors range from people who have worked on this site for many years to some of the newest correspondents. Over the years, old friends have moved on to different experiences and new faces have joined the community, but the commitment to open source has remained a constant bond of camaraderie.
My own journey with Opensource.com began with a contribution to the 2013 summer reading list and has now grown to 100 articles. I have learned a lot from all of my Opensource.com colleagues during that time, and I hope you will also learn a lot from the wisdom some of them have shared in their book reviews.
Our last choice of WordPress alternatives is Drupal. Though this content system requires more back-end work and a more advanced level of employment, Drupal is a developer’s fairytale come true and a perfect fit for a budding business. And, you can refer to more such guides using techyhost.com. Because you take care of the particular customization, you can have command over the amount of built-in flex. After you get it set up, Drupal, compared to WordPress, is pretty standard and effortless to use. The task of creating and editing pages is clean and precise, with an editor similar to a CMS like WordPress, as is managing things like commenting and media libraries. You can also add or delete customizable fields to forms and pages. We hope you have found this article helpful. Let us know your questions or feedback if any through the comment section in below. You can subscribe to our newsletter and get notified when we publish new articles. Moreover, you can explore here other interesting articles.
The GH control center (gnuhealth-control) version 3.6.4 is out, fixing some minor security issues found by the openSUSE security team[1] You just need to to the following: 1) Login as GNU Health 2) cdutil 3) ./gnuhealth-control update That is all. The new gnuhealth-control center is now installed.
We are GNU Chinese Translators Team (GNU CTT). Our goal is to translate the http://www.gnu.org webpages into Chinese. According to https://www.gnu.org/help/help.html
Before we obtain the map data we have to solve another problem first: which area do we actually want to display? In typical map applications the area that is presented is usually not constraint, you can scroll in any direction as long as you want. That’s not what we need here though, we are only interested in a single (large) building.
Constraining the map display to that area has a number of advantages, such as having a well-defined memory bounds. Even a big station mapped in great detailed fits in a few hundred kB in OSM’s o5m binary format. That avoids the need of any kind of tile or level of detail management you’d usually need on global scope.
It also means working with “raw” OSM data is feasible (which we need to enable all the features we want), we don’t need to reduce the level of detail of the data when sufficiently constraining the area.
For now we have a reasonably well working heuristic that takes care of this.
Go is a statically-typed programming language with strong support for concurrency. It is backed by Google and is meant for general-purpose projects like systems application development or web apps. Golang is becoming more and more popular due to its robust feature set and support for the latest programming practices. A large number of companies are looking for active Go developers due to its growing usage in modern applications. Developers can use a number of go commands to increase their programming productivity or workflow management. In this guide, we will discuss some of these commands for aspiring Go devs.
The Pascal programming language is 50 years old this year. The Free Pascal Compiler for Pascal / Object Pascal is out with version 3.2 to celebrate, five years since FPC's previous 3.0 stable series. Somewhat amusing. this FPC 3.2 compiler update adds a Windows 16-bit target support for building Pascal code for Windows 3.0+.
User namespaces were designed from the start to meet a requirement that unprivileged users be able to make use of them. Eric accomplished this by introducing subuid and subgid delegations through shadow. These are defined by the /etc/subuid and /etc/subgid files, which only root can write to. The setuid-root programs newuidmap and newgidmap, which ship with shadow, respect the subids delegated in those two files.
Until recently, programs which wanted to query available mappings, like lxc-usernsexec, have each parsed these two files. Now, shadow ships a new library, libsubid, to facilitate more programatic querying of subids.
I just went through a debugging exercise that was so ridiculous, I just had to write it up. Some of this probably should go into a bug report instead of a rant, but I'm tired. And clearly I don't care anymore.
OK, so I'm doing computer vision work. OpenCV has been providing basic functions in this area, so I have been using them for a while. Just for really, really basic stuff, like projection. The C API was kinda weird, and their error handling is a bit ridiculous (if you give it arguments it doesn't like, it asserts!), but it has been working fine for a while.
At some point (around OpenCV 3.0) somebody over there decided that they didn't like their C API, and that this was now a C++ library. Except the docs still documented the C API, and the website said it supported C, and the code wasn't actually removed. They just kinda stopped testing it and thinking about it. So it would mostly continue to work, except some poor saps would see weird failures; like this and this, for instance. OpenCV 3.2 was the last version where it was mostly possible to keep using the old C code, even when compiling without optimizations. So I was doing that for years.
SCP? It’s that handy file-transfer feature of SSH, right?
Well, not quite. It’s more of a hack. Or an undocumented, unstandardized mashup of two protocols. Let’s look at the exciting (and scary) details.
Welcome to “What’s new on CPAN”, a curated look at last month’s new CPAN uploads for your reading and programming pleasure. Enjoy!
This weekly blog is coming a week later than normal. Why? Last week I tried Live Coding for the first time. It was scary but enjoyable experience. It took more time than the blog. Having said that I didn’t want to stop blogging about my solutions. So here you go, I am sharing my solutions with you. Just for record, please find below links to the Live Coding videos.
In this tutorial, we'll look at how to prevent a Celery task dependent on a Django database transaction from executing before the database commits the transaction. This is a fairly common issue.
Python’s pickle module is a very convenient way to serialize and de-serialize objects. It needs no schema, and can handle arbitrary Python objects. But it has problems. This post briefly explains the problems.
[...]
Pickles can be hand-crafted that will have malicious effects when you unpickle them. As a result, you should never unpickle data that you do not trust.
The insecurity is not because pickles contain code, but because they create objects by calling constructors named in the pickle. Any callable can be used in place of your class name to construct objects. Malicious pickles will use other Python callables as the “constructors.” For example, instead of executing “models.MyObject(17)”, a dangerous pickle might execute “os.system(‘rm -rf /’)”. The unpickler can’t tell the difference between “models.MyObject” and “os.system”. Both are names it can resolve, producing something it can call. The unpickler executes either of them as directed by the pickle.
MongoDB is a cross-platform, document-oriented NoSql database server. In this tutorial, you will find a shell script to backup MongoDB database. The script also remove backups from server older than specified days.
When I look at some of the trends on the web today, I wonder if we’re at that point yet. I wonder if we’re ready to revisit some of the ideas of the early web again.
Probably not in design - I’m afraid dancing-baby.gif is gone for good. But some of the broader ideas from back then are picking up a second wind lately, and I like it.
In many ways, the problem isn’t just the touching. It’s the perception that what was once safe is now no longer.
And then there’s the amenities question. There’s a widespread belief that COVID-19 changes could raise ticket prices higher as people stay away from the airport and some airlines block off entire seats that were once closely connected.
Given that, what would you want to see airlines invest in? Certainly, in-fight entertainment falls near the bottom of the list when not having it could potentially knock a not-insignificant price off your ticket, and you have a smartphone anyway.
Nonetheless, it’s fascinating to look back at the innovations of in-flight entertainment, which, over the span of 70 years or so, worked out so successfully that they may have innovated their way out of existence.
But seat-back Game Boys were still pretty cool when we had them.
Our not-so-distant forebears balked at the thought that civilised humans hadn’t abandoned their animal past, that they belong to nature every bit as much as other primates. No wonder it’s hard to imagine that something as human as the confounded [I]nternet is co-extensive with nature and not at war with it. Richard Rorty, a philosopher and my mentor at university, taught that what distinguishes the experience of some animals from that of others is that some, like humans, use language. Language always precedes us, Rorty believed, and we use it to invent the world, to “construct” it, he used to say (though that moved his students close to the practice of deconstruction, which some of us, good foes of continental hocus-pocus, resisted).
While Lynn Ritchie’s inquiries confirmed that Dennis Ritchie never did submit the bound copy of his dissertation, and did not then leave Harvard with his PhD, his brother John feels that there was something else going on with Dennis Ritchie’s actions beyond a fit of pique about fees: He already had a coveted job as a researcher at Bell Labs, and “never really loved taking care of the details of living.” We will never really know the reason, and perhaps it was never entirely clear to Ritchie himself. But what we can know with certainty is that Dennis Ritchie’s dissertation was lost for a half-century, until now.
Within the Dennis Ritchie collection, recently donated by Ritchie’s siblings to CHM, lay several historical gems that we have identified to date. One is a collection of the earliest Unix source code dating from 1970–71. Another is a fading and stained photocopy of Ritchie’s doctoral dissertation, Program Structure and Computational Complexity. CHM is delighted to now make a digital copy of Ritchie’s own dissertation manuscript (as well as a more legible digital scan of a copy of the manuscript owned by Albert Meyer) available publicly for the first time.
The time of maximum eclipse, when that "ring of fire" event happens, will be at 2:40 a.m. ET on Sunday when the moon crosses into the center of the sphere of the sun from Earth's perspective. The eclipse starts at 11:45 p.m. ET on June 20 and ends at 5:34 a.m. ET, according to NASA.
The HP Chromebook x360 12b is an affordable Chromebook made for grown-ups. It takes you a cut above the rock-bottom basic Chromebooks that hover around $250 (and continue to sell well). Get one of those for your kids—who cares if they destroy it? But you, the adult in the room, deserve the Chromebook x360 12b, with its surprisingly good design and great battery life.
For users who want more than Chrome OS, there is the option to install Linux natively. This allows for a more complete OS that gets rid of most of the limitations of Chrome OS. This method removes Chrome OS from your Chromebook and turns it solely into a Linux machine.
Right before President Donald Trump unveiled punitive measures against China on May 29, he inserted a surprise into his prepared text.
“We will be today terminating our relationship with the World Health Organization,” he announced during a press conference in the Rose Garden.
Global public health experts are looking on in “alarm and disbelief” as the U.S. economy reopens even as Covid-19 case numbers continue to rise in a number of states, with President Donald Trump signaling he has no intention of calling for more economic shutdowns regardless of the outcome.
President Trump and his Republican advisers appear to be laying the groundwork for presidential election chaos on November 3.
The news comes just hours before the president holds a campaign event in the city.
"I can't imagine what it must be like having to go to work knowing it"s unsafe," said one expert in New Zealand. "It's hard to see how this ends."
"More than 150,000 new cases of Covid-19 were reported to WHO yesterday—the most in a single day so far."
Over the past week evidence keeps growing that the US has entered a second wave of the Coronavirus pandemic. More than 117,000 Americans thus far have died in just the past three months and more than 2.1 million have been infected. That compares to roughly 460,000 and 7.6 million worldwide. With roughly 5% of the world’s population, the US has about 25% of the world’s virus cases—a testimony to the abject failure of the US thus far to manage the virus.
Frontline healthcare, transit, and grocery clerk workers are too busy risking their lives helping and saving people exposed to the deadly Covid-19 pandemic to see themselves emerging as the force that can overcome decades of commercial obstruction to full Medicare for All.
"Just a reminder that Trump and the people around him are still tested constantly to keep him safe while he repeats this utter bullshit to the public."
Life in Russia’s southern city of Krasnodar is returning to normal despite the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. Meanwhile, local medical workers are continuing to work shifts in uncomfortable protective suits. They’ve learned to recognize each other by only their eyes, which are visible through the thin strip of their protective goggles. In a special photo report for Meduza, photographer Maxim Babenko shares his experience spending several days in the “red zone” of Krasnodar’s Regional Clinical Hospital No. 2.
One thing that the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed is the affinity between the antivaccine movement and conspiracy theorists who deny the severity of COVID-19 and the necessity of the public health measures instituted to slow the spread of SARS-CoV-2 (the coronavirus that causes COVID-19). This affinity and alliance between antivaxxers and anti-lockdown protesters and COVID-19 conspiracy theorists who, for example, blame the 5G rollout for COVID-19 came as a surprise to many, but not to those of us who’ve been following the antivaccine movement for a long time. The reason, of course, that the antivaccine movement is based on a conspiracy theory, what I like to refer to as the central conspiracy theory of the antivaccine movement, and groups of conspiracy theorists tend to be attracted to each other, and COVID-19 has been a magnet for medical conspiracy theories. So it comes as no surprise that yet another not-so-dynamic duo of antivaccine propagandists, Amy Becker and Mark Blaxill, have decided to lie with statistics about excess death statistics during the COVID-19 pandemic in order to blame vaccines for killing babies. No, wait. That’s not exactly right. What they’ve done is to note that there has been a decrease in infant deaths during the lockdowns instituted as a response to the pandemic and claim that that indicates that vaccines were killing babies before the pandemic, because, to antivaxxers, whatever happens, be it good or bad, is always an indication that vaccines are bad. Always. It’s their default. These living examples of the Dunning-Kruger effect lay out their “case” (such as it is) in an article posted to Health Choice, Blaxill’s antivaccine group, entitled Why are so many fewer children dying?
"It's easy to understand why Trump's Covid response has been such a disaster."
Governments around the world are attempting to prop up a failing capitalist system by — surprise! — throwing money at wealthy individuals and corporations, especially in the financial industry. In other words, in this time of unprecedented crisis and economic difficulty, it’s business as usual.
"One of the problems we face in the United States is that unfortunately, there is a combination of an anti-science bias that people are—for reasons that sometimes are, you know, inconceivable and not understandable—they just don't believe science and they don't believe authority," Fauci said.
"So, when they see someone up in the White House, which has an air of authority to it, who's talking about science, that there are some people who just don't believe that," he added. "And that's unfortunate because, you know, science is truth."
Fauci described science as "the attempt, in good faith, to get to the facts," while noting that the scientific process is "self-correcting." He likened people who deny evidence-based health advice during the pandemic to those who speak against vaccination despite decades of research proving safety and efficacy.
The head of the World Health Organization said the coronavirus pandemic is “accelerating” and that more than 150,000 cases were reported yesterday - the”highest single-day number so far.
In a media briefing on Friday, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said nearly half of the newly reported cases were from the Americas, with significant numbers from South Asia and the Middle East.
Former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) on Thursday lauded new California measures requiring residents to wear masks outside of their homes, saying that “anyone making it a political issue is an absolute moron who can’t read.”
The measures were released by the state health department Thursday as the state gradually reopens businesses amid the coronavirus pandemic. It calls for residents to wear face coverings when they are inside or in line to enter a public space, in addition to other settings.
“The golden age of globalisation, in 1990-2010, was something to behold,” wrote The Economist in a January, 2019 article. “Commerce soared as the cost of shifting goods in ships and planes fell, phone calls got cheaper, tariffs were cut and the financial system liberalised.”
Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat became an international best-seller in 2005 by nicely explaining what this new golden age of globalization was all about, including the key forces that contributed to flattening the world, - from the explosive growth of the Internet, open source software and related technologies; to the rise of outsourcing, offshoring and global supply chains.
In 2011 I attended a conference where Friedman was one of the speakers. He said that we’ve transitioned from a connected to an increasingly hyperconnected global economy since he wrote The World is Flat in 2004. Many of the companies and technologies that were part of every day conversations in 2011, - Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, smartphones, cloud computing, big data, broadband wireless Internet, - weren’t mentioned in his book because they had not yet been born or were still in their infancy.
The very nature of the global firm was transformed during these same decades. In The Globally Integrated Enterprise, a 2006 Foreign Affairs article, then IBM CEO Sam Palmisano argued that the modern industrial corporation was now in its third stage of evolution in the way it conducted business around the world.
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Most everyone expects that the pandemic will accelerate the rate and pace of digitization, AI adoption and automation. Consequently, over the next few years companies may well choose to automate an increasing number of their service jobs rather than continuing to offshore them to lower cost countries. Re-shoring such jobs may not help national economies if they’re destined to be automated out of existence altogether. But, it’s also quite possible that if companies get used to supervising employees remotely, they will also get used to doing so overseas, driven less by costs than by the availability of precious skills and talent.
Longer term, what’s the likely impact of Covid-19 on globalization?
“As defenders of the status quo try to explain that strength lies in openness, and critics crow about globalisation going too far, the reality is that both will probably get their way,” writes The Economist in conclusion. “The medical and pharmaceutical sectors should expect pressure to localise more of their production in those countries that have enough clout to apply it. Those Chinese companies hoping to take advantage of the global market in ideas will find it harder to access. Foreign acquisitions will be treated with suspicion. American scrutiny of their suppliers will make international commerce harder. But once companies can start investing again many will continue to set up their supply chains in such a way as to chase the next source of growth - mindful, of course, of governments prone to placing obstacles between them and their favoured suppliers.”
“Don’t be fooled that a trading system with an unstable web of national controls will be more humane or safer,” it further warns. “Poorer countries will find it harder to catch up and, in the rich world, life will be more expensive and less free. The way to make supply chains more resilient is not to domesticate them, which concentrates risk and forfeits economies of scale, but to diversify them. Moreover, a fractured world will make solving global problems harder, including finding a vaccine and securing an economic recovery.”
Puerto Rico’s government announced water rationing measures on Friday as 26% of the U.S. territory faces a severe drought amid the pandemic.
The island’s utilities company said water will be shut off for eight hours a day starting Saturday in several neighborhoods in the northern municipalities of Canovanas and Loiza.
[...]
Other parts of the Caribbean are experiencing similar problems, with short-term severe drought reported in certain areas of the U.S. Virgin Islands. Meanwhile, officials in the French Caribbean island of Guadeloupe have extended water rationing measures that began in April until late July.
Crozer-Keystone owns four hospitals and four outpatient centers in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, according to its website. It was not immediately clear how, if at all, the cybersecurity incident impacted those facilities. Leonowitz declined to answer questions on the matter.
Samsung did not immediately respond to a request for comment Saturday. Customer service representatives replying to the message board posters are telling people the company is investigating.
If Apple is behaving so unreasonably by rejecting apps for ridiculous anti-consumer reasons, why are we–both developers, who prop up their behavior by feeding their ecosystem with new apps; and consumers, who prop up their behavior by continuing to buy their overpriced hardware–continuing to support them?
Volkswagen is seeking to retain control of the entire vehicle architecture, including the electronics, as a way to ensure long-term competitiveness in the connected and autonomous car space. In addition, the data generated from the connected vehicles of the future is one way automakers can generate additional revenue streams. Volkswagen is seeking to control a majority of it, so the company can have better control over revenue-generating digital services that Volkswagen plans to offer to its customers.
In January, Volkswagen launched Car.Software, an independent unit responsible for developing lines of code, with around 3,000 digital experts and a budget of more than 7 billion euros ($7.8 billion). By 2025 it wants to have more than 10,000 software experts.
By 2025, VW wants to increase its own share of software development on its cars to 60%, from 10% at present, and to design the electronics and vehicle architecture as well. Volkswagen board member Thomas Ulbrich said in March that U.S. electric car manufacturer Tesla has a 10-year start on rivals when it comes to building electric cars and software.
Volkswagen will define the core operating system but may seek an open-source approach to enhance elements of it. "The operating system is not something that we will control on our own. We will define its core and then quickly include open-source components, to create standards. This will create opportunities for partnerships," Senger said.
What does it mean to see privacy as a civil rights struggle? The collapse of our privacy is exposing each of us to palpable risks: the erosion of the right to pray, to study, to congregate, or to participate in our democracy. In a digital world, privacy is the barrier between civil society and racial, political, or religious profiling writ large.
The rise of surveillance capitalism — the buying and selling of our identities and our data — may herald the death knell of privacy. Social media and targeted online advertising are designed to allure us; in the process, we are losing our rights to anonymity and accelerating the erosion of our civil rights. Proposed individual "solutions" — such as configuring our social media privacy settings or using the anonymous Tor web browser — are at best half-measures. A personal example best illustrates why.
The Air Force inspector general is investigating whether the military improperly used a little-known reconnaissance plane to monitor protests in Washington and Minneapolis this month, the Air Force said on Thursday.
The inquiry was apparently prompted by lawmakers who expressed concerns to Pentagon officials that the use of military surveillance airplanes may have violated the civil liberties of the mostly peaceful protesters demonstrating against the police killings of African-Americans.
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According to one military official familiar with the situation, senior National Guard leaders in Washington could watch the footage recorded from the aircraft on their cellphones in real time.
Technology can't shoulder all the blame for our loneliness. Temperament, mental health and isolating events like cross-country moves, job changes, divorces and deaths of loved ones also play a huge role. Plus, there's the question of causation versus correlation: It's hard to tell whether we're more lonely because of all the time we spend online or we're spending so much time online because we're more lonely.
But experts say our interactions with technology shape the experience of being lonely in an undeniable way. It's not just that tech creates an illusion of connection. Endless possibilities for interactions lower our tolerance for solitude while raising expectations about the number, speed and frequency of our connections.
PIF’s investment will translate into a 2.32 per cent equity stake in Jio Platforms on a fully diluted basis. With this investment, Jio Platforms has raised Rs 1.16 lakh crore from leading global investors including Facebook, Silver Lake, Vista Equity Partners, General Atlantic, KKR, Mubadala, ADIA, TPG, L Catterton, and PIF, since April 2020. In return for this, RIL has given away a 22.7 per cent stake in Jio Platforms to these investors.
One lawsuit was filed in Spain against MGP25 Cyberint Services, which provided automated software to distribute fake likes and comments, Facebook said Thursday in a press release. Facebook also filed suit in San Francisco federal court against Mohammad Zaghar, who operated a service that asked users for login credentials to scrape their data from the Facebook platform, the company said.
Late last year, Palantir also launched a 50-50 joint venture with Sompo called Palantir Technologies Japan K.K. to service the Japanese government as well as commercial clients. And earlier this month another Japanese tech company, Fujitsu Limited, invested $50 million into Palantir in the United States. Both Sompo and Fujitsu are also customers of Palantir.
To create real security, we must slash the Pentagon budget and invest in meeting everyone’s basic human needs.
Sources said that despite earlier talks in which it was decided that the two sides would move back by a kilometre and create a temporary ‘no man’s land’ in the valley, the Chinese side has brought in additional troops and continues to remain deployed inside Indian territory near Patrol Point 14.
All this comes at an awkward time for Zambia as it dives into intense discussions between the government and its creditors, of which China is the most significant player, about debt relief. China has been the source of billions of loans which Zambia has used to finance infrastructure projects including an upgrade to its main airport and a motorway.
Zambia’s external debt is estimated to be $11.2 billion. However, there are concerns that the true extent of the debt may be higher. The World Bank and local civil society organizations across Africa have expressed concern about opaque deals between the Chinese government and entities and African governments.
American military planes would undoubtedly ignore China’s rules, as they do in the East China Sea. So why bother? The answer is that even a partially successful ADIZ might benefit China. Although an ADIZ does not imply sovereignty over the airspace it covers, it can be used to show authority. In 2010, for instance, Japan extended its ADIZ to cover a Japanese-held island claimed by Taiwan, which Taiwan had included in its own ADIZ. There is no evidence that China has used its existing ADIZ to disrupt civilian air-traffic, but it may see it as a tool for doing so in a crisis. And China may see an ADIZ in the South China Sea as a way of justifying more air patrols there.
When the superseding indictment was returned by a federal grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia against Julian Assange on May 23, 2019, there was one glaring omission.€ It was an achievement, it might even be said the achievement, that gave the WikiLeaks publisher and the organisation justified notoriety.€ Collateral Murder, as the leaked video came to be called, featured the murderous exploits by the crew of Crazy Horse 1-8, an Apache helicopter that slew 11 people on July 12, 2007 in east Baghdad.€ Among the dead were Reuters photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen and a driver and fixer, Saeed Chmagh.
President Donald Trump made an ambiguous but direct threat to anyone planning to protest his first campaign event in months, set to take place this Saturday in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
"The president expresses his intention to violate the Constitution by denying Americans' First Amendment right to peacefully assemble."
Dozens of youth protesters descended on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s home Louisville Friday morning armed with bullhorns and banners to disrupt the Kentucky Republican’s sleep in order to call for justice for Breonna Taylor and for new leadership.
Unless one defines defense as attacking others with overwhelming force, the Israeli Defense Forces have never been a defensive force. As scholar and author Haim Beshreeth-Zabner makes clear in his just published history An Army Like No Other, the IDF was designed to be an offensive armed force intended to take and keep territory. In the years after the 1973 war-the one war in Israel’s modern history in which it was attacked—the role of the IDF was expanded into that of an occupying force as it worked to keep the Palestinian people under control. Indeed, except for the occasional illegal air raid on Syria or attack on Lebanon, the repression of the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza is the primary task performed by the IDF.
[...]
An Army Like No Other describes each major war Israel has fought, providing a brief discussion of the military strategy and its effectiveness. Underlying these descriptions is an ongoing discourse regarding the internal and international politics motivating the decision to go to war and the goals of each military operation. One thing that is quite apparent in Bresheeth-Zabner’s telling is that the belief in the Zionist myth of a nation-state for Jews was and is greater than any political differences inside Israel. This was the case in the days before 1948 and is the case now, even as the Israeli left diminished in influence and numbers, making the current right-wing nature of Israeli politics a fait accompli. Indeed, it is hard to believe that there was a time when Israel was populated by socialists in the kibbutzim and in the government, especially when one considers today’s political spectrum which goes from the extreme right to fascist.
If the Trump administration follows through on its threat to re-start nuclear tests, it will complete the unraveling of more than 50 years of arms control agreements, taking the world back to the days when school children practiced “duck and cover,” and people built backyard bomb shelters.€
A mortar bomb blast inside a religious school in northern Afghanistan Thursday killed at least nine students, police said.
"As per initial investigation, the explosion was caused by a mortar that had somehow been carried inside the madrassa," police spokesman Khalil Asir told AFP, adding many of the dead were aged under 18.
Armies of all stripes are trying to regain control, sometimes brutally. Soldiers from Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger have murdered hundreds of civilians this year. Meanwhile, the UN has 15,000 peacekeepers in Mali. France has 5,100 troops in the Sahel to fight jihadists. America has 1,200, mainly for intelligence and logistics—though Donald Trump is considering withdrawing some of them. That would be a boon for jihadists, who on June 3rd lost Abdelmalek Droukdel, the head of al-Qaeda’s network in the region, to a French raid helped by American intelligence.
These various troop deployments are not large enough to police the area, which is as large as India. To dislodge the jihadists, governments will have to govern. Besides security, locals crave jobs and health care. However, given the West’s fatigue after its failures in Afghanistan and elsewhere, countries in the Sahel can expect only modest help from abroad for their own nation-building efforts.
The clip edits footage of two children playing into a bizarre warning against race-baiting by the media, presented as a false CNN broadcast with the chyron “terrified todler [sic] runs from racist baby.” Since the presented footage was never actually aired by CNN, the false appearance of a broadcast may have provided the basis for the manipulated media tag.
Even states seen as “climate progressives” are far from meeting their global commitments to avert dangerous climate change.
"The Vatican's call for divestment is a breath of hope in times when faith is more needed than ever," said 350.org co-founder Bill McKibben. "It is a powerful statement that attempting to profit off the destruction of the planet is plainly and simply immoral and unethical."
"After nine years of promises without proper action and decades of pollution, the people of Ogoniland are not only sick of dirty drinking water, oil-contaminated fish and toxic fumes. They are sick of waiting for justice, they are dying by the day."
On June 9th and 12th, I interviewed Lupine, a tree-sitter who is currently participating in a Redwood Forest Defense campaign to stop logging at a site in Humboldt County, California. We spoke on the phone, and though we were disconnected several times by a weak signal, we were able to have a great conversation. Tree-sitters have always been heroes to me, and I really appreciated the chance to connect with someone from the newest generation to be out there fighting the good fight.
The 1964 Wilderness Act requires federal agencies to protect and manage designated wilderness areas “to preserve its natural conditions.” Given that all domestic livestock are exotic alien animals and hardly contribute to “natural conditions,” one might assume that livestock production would be prohibited in designated wilderness.
"President Bolsonaro is now overseeing the destruction both of a once-thriving people, and the rainforests they managed and looked after for millennia. Brazilian and international solidarity to resist this genocide is desperately needed."
"No member of the party of FDR should support cutting the American people's earned Social Security benefits."
Before regulators signed off on T-Mobile's $26 billion merger with Sprint, executives like former CEO John Legere told anybody who'd listen that the merger would create oodles of new jobs from "day one." With the ink barely dry on the deal, it's abundantly clear that's not happening.
Organized labor led no mass opposition to Trump’s presidency or the December 2017 tax cut or the failed U.S. preparation for and management of COVID-19. Nor do we yet see a labor-led national protest against the worst mass firing since the 1930s Great Depression. All of these events, but especially the unemployment, mark an employers’ class war against employees. The U.S. government directs it, but the employers as a class inspire and benefit the most from it.
Taxpayers’ money is being used to make the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans. Thus, the public has every right to know the names of the recipients of those loans. Despite originally promising transparency, U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin is now stonewalling Congress on releasing a list of the recipients.
The European Central Bank has handed out 1.31 trillion euros ($1.46 trillion) in long-term, ultra-cheap credit to hundreds of banks as part of its emergency support aimed at cushioning the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on businesses and workers.
The three-year loans are aimed at making sure banks can keep lending to companies so they don't run out of money and go out of business during the crisis. That would cause a cascading loss of jobs and income and hurt the long-term recovery from the severe interruptions to business due to the measures aimed at limiting the spread of the virus.
The ECB said Thursday that 742 banks across the 19 countries that use the euro currency took up the credit offer, which can carry a negative interest rate of as low as minus 1.0% so long as banks keep up their lending to businesses. That means banks are getting paid by the ECB to borrow the money, an offer that many found hard to refuse. The ECB cut the rate on the offer from minus 0.5% at its April 30 meeting as the virus lockdowns slammed the European economy.
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The ECB is the central bank for the countries that use the shared euro currency.
In this latest episode of ourVoices, Laura Basu speaks with a range of expert academics and public figures – including Jayati Ghosh, Yanis Varoufakis, Walden Bello and Ashish Kothari – to consider how the rules of today’s global economy are skewed in favour of large corporations and financial institutions.
Spitting in the face of science, Donald Trump and Mike Pence have spent the week explaining how the COVID-19 pandemic is supposedly behind us.
"This late Friday night dismissal reeks of potential corruption of the legal process," said Sen. Chuck Schumer.
"Make no mistake," said Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) in reaction to the news, "Bill Barr will go down in history as having aided and abetted the most corrupt president this country has ever seen."
Science has laws, and we can’t change them by glaring at them or shouting at them or wearing a partisan campaign button.
Along The Line is a non-profit, education-based podcast that provides listeners with context and analysis about various critical and contemporary issues and topics. Hosted by Dr. Nolan Higdon, Dr. Dreadlocks (Nicholas Baham III), and Janice Domingo. ATL’s Creative Director is Dylan Lazaga. Mickey Huff is ATL’s producer. ATL’s engineer is Janice Domingo. Adam Armstrong is ATL’s webmaster. Along the Line is brought to you by The Media Freedom Foundation. Listen to our previous content at https://www.projectcensored.org/atl/ Along the Line is a proud member of the Demcast Network. https://demcastusa.com/ Listen to Along the Line on these platforms: Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3E5JGKCDVVePzxQxFY7jJg?si=jd65roYdQwWYA00TC9K6tg Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/along-the-line/id1447780425?mt=2 Follow us on Twitter: ATL Official Twitter – https://twitter.com/alongtheline2 Dr. Nolan Higdon – https://twitter.com/Nolan_higdon Dr. Nicholas Baham III – https://twitter.com/doctordredlocks Janice Domingo – https://twitter.com/j_nice44 Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/alongthelineshow/ RSS feed: https://www.projectcensored.org/feed/podcast/along-the-line Send us an email: [email€ protected] Check out these books: The Anatomy of Fake News by Nolan Higdon – https://www.projectcensored.org/product/the-anatomy-of-fake-news-a-critical-news-literacy-education-pre-order-singed-copy/ United States of Distraction by Nolan Higdon and Mickey Huff – https://www.citylights.com/book/?GCOI=87286100388060 Support Along the Line and Project Censored: https://www.projectcensored.org/support/
Earlier this week you may have heard about the so-called "Wednesday night massacre", in which the newly Trump-appointed head of the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM), Michael Pack, got rid of the heads of the various divisions he now runs:
As you've probably heard by now, earlier this week, the Justice Department went to court to sue former National Security Advisor John Bolton regarding his book (which is highly critical of the President), entitled The Room Where It Happened. Lots of people have lots of opinions regarding Bolton, Trump, and the book, but I'm going to focus specifically on the legal dispute here, which in some ways is reminiscent of the lawsuit filed over Ed Snowden's book, which meant that the government can take all the proceeds of that book.
Donald Trump should resign as president in light of a profile of disgrace about him by his onetime national security adviser, John Bolton.
“Movement” politics is how the people flex their power, while electoral politics under the corporate duopoly is the domain of the moneyed classes.
If you’ve been watching mainstream TV news programs lately, you’ve probably noticed that a number of corporate journalists – prodded by the marvelous protests against police violence – seem to have learned a new phrase, which they invoke regularly: “systemic racism.”
The inept response of our leaders in Washington, D.C., to nationwide protests following the police murder of George Floyd can best be depicted with two images. First, there was the image from June 1 of U.S. Park Police officers in riot gear using tear gas and flash grenades to clear peaceful protesters out of Lafayette Square, so that President Trump could have his picture taken holding up a bible in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church.
The president is not only betraying our country and the values that underpin a democratic republic, but he is also selling out the hopes and dreams of the American working people.
"Donors don't want their money going into a slush fund for McGrath’s future campaigns or to bonuses for losing consultants. They want to defeat one of the worst senators in history, Mitch McConnell."
Charles Booker has electrified Kentucky politics with a US Senate campaign that upsets expectations, rejects conventional wisdom, and articulates a way to do what no Democrat has ever done: defeat Mitch McConnell in a November election. That’s why the progressive legislator from Louisville, who promises to campaign “from the hood to the holler” for economic, social, and racial justice, now has a real chance of beating the pick of DC insiders for the party’s nomination in one of the highest-profile Senate contests of 2020.
In late May, before the surge of Covid-19 cases in 22 states, Trump threatened to withhold aid to Michigan and Nevada over their plans to permit voting by mail. Such withholding is illegal. Trump alleged that vote by mail leads to voter fraud. This is hogwash. Trump’s fabrication about voter fraud is an attempt to distract from what he and some Republicans are up to, namely, voter suppression. But even Trump had to back down from his threat.
The most noteworthy aspect of the series of popular demonstrations in response to the “police lynchings” of African-Americans that have occured over the last few years may well be how few riots have taken place.
US President Donald Trump threatened on June 1 to send active duty troops to crush the anti-racist rebellion sweeping the country in the wake of George Floyd’s police murder. The announcement was followed by a photo op in front of St. John’s Church in DC’s Lafayette Square, which was brutally cleared of demonstrators by military police.
As police violence against Black people and those who would rise in their defense forces a national engagement—of a sort—with the reality of white supremacy in our institutions, the widening recognition that the batons and tear gas are just one part of it, that there is more than one way to choke the life out of a people, meant that it was just a matter of time before news media would need to acknowledge the call coming from inside the house.
What we expect comes to pass far more often than what we do not, though it can sometimes seem otherwise because an improbable turn of events is remarkable in ways that an expected outcome is not.
Culturally informed by Roman Catholicism’s expectation that regret must prompt an apology as well as penance, Western European tradition calls for a rhetorical journey by politicians who claim to have changed course. A chastened leader should explain why and how he came to his previous belief, explain the circumstances that changed his mind and make the case for his new, different policy. He must expend political capital in order to get changes enacted.
Noam Chomsky believes that it is so imperative that Trump be defeated that he will vote for Biden, while Glenn Greenwald challenges the political strategy of the lesser-of-two-evils dictum. It is difficult to imagine anyone more intellectually commanding than Chomsky, but Greenwald is no inferior. Chomsky and Greenwald are unbroken, rational warriors who apply contrasting chessboard logic to this issue. In my day job as a psychologist, I’ve learned how people in abusive relationships can so focus on certain types of reasoning that they lose their integrity and become too broken to liberate themselves.
President Donald Trump says he doesn’t trust masks or facial coverings, believing they’re possibly exacerbating, not limiting, the spread of coronavirus across the United States.
"This is the level of engagement and respect he gives small business owners trying to tell him about their problems during the outbreak."
The Postal Service Is Steadily Getting Worse — Can It Handle a National Mail-In Election?
On today’s show, host Kevin Rothrock speaks to online-disinformation investigation pioneer Ben Nimmo about his latest research into a sweeping Russian disinformation campaign called “Secondary Infektion.” Mr. Nimmo is the founder of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab and last year he became the head of investigations for the social-media monitoring company “Graphika.”
The department’s dispatching of unmanned aircraft over protests in Minneapolis last month sparked a congressional inquiry and widespread accusations that the federal agency had infringed on the privacy rights of demonstrators.
But that was just one piece of a nationwide operation that deployed resources usually used to patrol the U.S. border for smugglers and illegal crossings. Aircraft filmed demonstrations in Dayton, Ohio; New York City; Buffalo and Philadelphia, among other cities, sending video footage in real time to control centers managed by Air and Marine Operations, a branch of Customs and Border Protection.
The footage was then fed into a digital network managed by the Homeland Security Department, called “Big Pipe,” which can be accessed by other federal agencies and local police departments for use in future investigations, according to senior officials with Air and Marine Operations.
The flagship provision in France’s new law, which was supported by President Emmanuel Macron’s government and sponsored by his party, created an obligation for online platforms to take down hateful content flagged by users within 24 hours. If the platforms failed to do so, they risked fines of up to 1.25 million euros, or about $1.4 million.
But the Constitutional Council, a French court that reviews legislation to ensure it complies with the French constitution, noted in its ruling on Thursday that the measure put the onus for analyzing content solely on tech platforms without the involvement of a judge, within a very short time frame, and with the threat of hefty penalties.
“For clarification, the arrestee had passed through the metal detector area to the most secure area of the event accessible only to ticket holders. Whether she had a ticket or not for the event is not a contributing factor for the Tulsa Police in making the arrest. Officers at the location, particularly in the ‘Sterile’ area, will remove individuals only at the direction of Campaign Staff,” the statement continued.
When President Bush travels around the United States, the Secret Service visits the location ahead of time and orders local police to set up "free speech zones" or "protest zones," where people opposed to Bush policies (and sometimes sign-carrying supporters) are quarantined. These zones routinely succeed in keeping protesters out of presidential sight and outside the view of media covering the event.
As path-breaking activists in the antiwar, labor, women’s rights and civil rights movements witnessed, proponents of social change have the strongest stake protecting speech that is unpopular, or even deemed dangerous.
The “Limiting Section 230 Immunity to Good Samaritan’s Act” has been introduced to the US Senate and would do away with legislation that has become a cornerstone of internet freedom and the success of American internet companies. That key piece of legislation is the Communications Decency Act of 1996 – specifically Section 230. The proposed legislation was brought forth by Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO), Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL), Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR), Senator Mike Braun (R-IN), and Senator Kelly Loeffler (R-GA). As the name of the bill suggests, the bill would limit the immunity granted by Section 230 only to “Good Samaritans.” The thing is, it’d be up to the government to decide what qualifies as a “Good Samaritan,” and once that door is opened – it can’t be shut.
Lawyer Daniel Horowitz has a wonderful write-up for NYU's Journal of Legislation & Public Policy on why we need a federal anti-SLAPP law. It's a quick, but thoughtful overview (and, full disclosure, I gave him a couple of small points while he was researching the article), that details not just the need for more SLAPP laws in general, but specifically a federal anti-SLAPP law. As he makes clear in the piece, there are just way too many ways to get around state anti-SLAPP laws (if a state even has one, which many don't):
After his statements on Tuesday that the Koran is more dangerous than the Corona virus, the head of the Freedom Party (FPÃâ), Norbert Hofer, says he is confronted with countless insults and death threats in social media. This shows that his words “may not have been completely without foundation”, the party leader sees his criticism confirmed. [...]
On May 13, the French Senate adopted in final reading the Law aimed at combating illegal speech on the internet, also known as Avia law after its original proponent, Laetitia Avia.
At the heart of the Law lie two notice-and-take down mechanisms: the first requires operators of online platforms to remove terrorist content and child pornography within 1 hour from receiving a notification from the competent administrative authority; the second mandates upon operators of online platforms to remove various types of hatred speech within 24 hours from receiving a notice from a user.
The Law was adopted despite Marc Zuckerberg’s best lobbying and an opinion from the European Commission, warning France that its provisions might be in breach of Arts. 3, 14 and 15 of the Electronic Commerce Directive.
This week, the French Constitutional Court partly quashed the Avia law, stating that the notice-and-take down measures envisaged therein jeopardise freedom of expression and of communication in a manner, which is not adequate, necessary or proportionate to the aim pursued.
"A free society cannot abide the government silencing certain perspectives before they are even uttered; such censorship runs contrary to the very notion of what our First Amendment was written to guard against."
A small claims court in Moscow has fined the radio station Ekho Moskvy and online editor Vitaly Ruvinsky 200,000 rubles ($2,900) and 60,000 rubles ($865), respectively, for publishing remarks about political analyst Valery Solovey. In a Telegram post, Ekho Moskvy editor-in-chief Alexey Venediktov confirmed the fine and vowed to file an appeal, but did not clarify specifically what comments resulted in the penalty.€
Anti-extremism police in Moscow have summoned Dozhd correspondent Anton Baev for questioning in connection with a story he authored earlier this week about local scammers using SIM cards and personal data stolen from senior citizens to create fake online voting accounts to falsify results in Russia’s upcoming plebiscite on constitutional amendments.
When Julian Assange was spectacularly extracted from the Ecuadorian embassy last year, the world watched on in shock as he was dragged from the building where he had sought out political asylum for more than seven years.
But what very few people knew was that with his arrest and eviction, Julian Assange was leaving behind his two young children and loving fiancée.
This Sunday on 60 Minutes, the controversial Australian's secret family is revealed.
A former speechwriter for former Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis said Wednesday that President Donald Trump expressed the belief that journalists should be killed, backing up a claim made in a new book from John Bolton.
Thirteen years ago in Iraq, US soldiers in an attack helicopter killed 11 people in what the US described at the time as a firefight — nine were insurgents and two were employees of the Reuters news agency — a photojournalist and a fixer.
A cockpit video captured the killings and was later leaked to Wikileaks.
The release of that footage, called "Collateral Damage", showed the US military targeting the journalists and made WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange a household name.
He's now detained in a British prison, facing extradition to the US on espionage charges.
St. James Parish, Louisiana — Death Alley activists gathered near the hamlet of Welcome on Friday to celebrate Juneteenth, which observes the date when news of the end of slavery reached enslaved Black people in Texas. About 40 people danced, prayed and sang gospel songs at a cemetery of unmarked graves on the grounds of a former plantation where nearby residents firmly believe their Black ancestors were buried after working the land as slaves. The celebration paid homage to those who founded their rural community along the Mississippi River and lived through one of the nation’s darkest periods.
Two windows, each the size of a brick, show her sunrise and sunset. When the meal cart rolls to a stop outside her vault-like cell door, Ricki Dahlin knows it’s noon.
This is how you tell time in the hole at Hiland Mountain Correctional Center. Hidden among the acres of skeletal birch and Christmas tree evergreens outside Anchorage, the prison houses 322 women convicts from across Alaska. Dahlin, a 28-year-old recovering addict, is a regular.
This is the new normal. Let’s keep it up.
Racist redlining practices still exacerbate inequality across the United States, costing homeowners in affected areas hundreds of thousands in home equity, according to a study by the real estate firm Redfin.
Jefferson County has a population of roughly 767,000 and will have just one polling location.
The lack of ownership is crucial to understanding the crippling economic disparity that has hollowed out the black middle class and continues to plague black America.
As states reopen for business, the coronavirus is exploding among America’s 2.5 million farmworkers, imperiling efforts to contain the spread of the disease and keep food on the shelves just as peak harvest gets underway.
With a culture of silence fostered by the fear of career derailment, women who speak up run the risk of becoming an “unwilling face of sexual harassment in the tech ecosystem,” Eweniyi says. It’s a sentiment echoed by ‘Lade Tawak, a 23 year old Lagos-based user experience researcher. “There is fear of retaliation, especially if you still want to work in the industry. You’re going to be seen as a “troublemaker” that nobody wants to hire.”
Marks for cunning, I suppose. Using “female” instead of “woman” is clearly an attempt to avoid circularity. The problem is that “female” is not something you can identify as. It’s a word with an objective definition that holds right across all of biology, and hardly any of the things it refers to are capable of identifying as anything. It means: “of or denoting the sex class that produces large gametes,” and so it refers to peahens (not peacocks), fish eggs (not fish sperm), kangaroo pouches (only the females carry joeys), the pistil of a flower (not its stamens), and so on.
"A start, but not good enough. We cannot rest until all the officers involved in Breonna Taylor's murder are charged."
It's not often you see a sitting judge condemn years of case law, especially when some of it is case law he likely helped convert into circuit precedent. But with everyone's eyes currently on brutal cops and the system that has encouraged lawless behavior by law enforcement, very few people are sitting on the sidelines of the ongoing discussion. The killing of George Floyd by a police officer has resulted in demonstrations around the country, giving very few politicians, judges, and police representatives an opportunity to remain silent.
In a nation that says it "cannot breathe," we much reach deep down for fundamental change.
In New York City, the government's surveillance tools are being turned against it. This is wonderful news for all citizens who still have the power to inject accountability and transparency into a system that wholeheartedly resists it. To keep tabs on misbehaving cops, activists are using the city's cameras to watch their watchers. Lorenzo Franceshi-Bicchieari has the details for Motherboard.
We are at a reckoning point in history, where we must decide how we will continue as a nation and how we will continue as inhabitants on this planet that supports all of our lives.
We can’t reform police until we reckon with their history of enforcing white supremacy.
"She was a top cop at an extremely brutal police department. She was a vocal supporter of brutal actions by police."
The uprisings sparked by a wave of police killings that took the lives of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, Modesto “Desto” Reyes, Rayshard Brooks and so many others have sent mayors and lawmakers scrambling for reforms, as activists lift up longstanding demands to reimagine public safety and end policing into the mainstream. While the slogans “defund” and “abolish the police” may be new to the dominant news cycle, the ideas behind them are rooted in the longstanding movement to abolish prisons developed and led by Black and Brown feminists — including sex workers.
The use of lethal force by police, National Guard, and other security forces has come under increasing scrutiny in the wake of the George Floyd killing and resulting uprisings. Congressional Democrats have begun speaking out against police-perpetrated killings as well as the use of excessive force against protesters and journalists across the country, such as the notorious incident in Lafayette Park across from the White House late last month.
Congress is currently debating whether the next pandemic rescue package should include substantial aid for state and local governments. These governments are experiencing massive budget shortfalls as revenues have plummeted due to the pandemic at the same time as demand for pandemic-related services rises.
The Stockholm€ International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI)€ just issued its€ 2020 Yearbook, reporting on developments in armaments, disarmament, and international security. In light of the drumbeat of frightening news about growing hostility between the dominant nuclear-armed states vying for power, SIPRI describes a bleak outlook for arms control. It notes ongoing nuclear weapons modernization and new weapons development, space weaponization moving forward, without check or controls, and a disturbing increase in geopolitical tensions together with a rapid deterioration in practices and possibilities for cooperation and monitoring between the great powers.
Palestinians’ sustained struggle for freedom and independence offers many lessons
Juneteenth is a day that celebrates the announcement of emancipation from slavery while providing us an important warning. Changes for the better can be followed by reconfigurations of past violence. Though some enslaved people celebrated freedom on this day, many continued to be kept in bondage and others were reenslaved. Meanwhile, those who wanted slavery to remain intact found new ways to reform the abolished system long past its official end. We can see their efforts to this day in prisons, courts and policing. Now that wide swaths of the country are hearing the call to abolish the police, those who are issuing these calls are being asked, “How?” Abolitionists are tasked with building what, for many, is unimaginable.
On June 7, the Minneapolis City Council announced its plan to disband the police force, setting off a wave of national coverage and support, with some cities, like Seattle, launching efforts to do the same, while others began taking steps to redirect money set aside for police into community resources.
This article is based on a talk I gave at a recently held conference on how higher education unions are responding to the pandemic and proposed cuts. It was held by Higher Educators United, a Northern California group of faculty from many different colleges seeking to work together to address shared issues and concerns, something badly needed.
The resurgent Black Lives Matter movement plus its allies is the most beautiful, inspiring movement since the Sixties. It is unprecedentedly diverse. It is angry, determined, grimly serious when not festive, generally peaceful but sometimes violent, bold enough to risk the plague to voice its outrage.
In a time when Americans are inundated by messages of “support the troops,” and “honor our veterans,” and simultaneously veterans continue to commit suicide at alarming rates, go homeless and hungry, face battles with addiction, and isolate themselves, it certainly feels as if more effort can be made to think of and offer innovative programs and therapies that may better address veterans’ needs. While this researcher would not claim that therapeutic horticulture is a panacea to all the problems that plague the veteran population, nor would she argue that every veteran would be interested in and/or benefit from this modality, as this research shows, some veterans are reaping significant benefit by engaging in this practice.
Recent protests, catalyzed by the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, call for an end to racist police violence. With their actions, the protesters have also moved beyond many of the stale policing debates of the recent past. Defund, disband, abolish—people who would never have even heard these words in discussions about the police are now seriously considering them.
Corrections officials are confining people to their cells in prisons, jails, and detention centers at alarming rates in response to COVID-19, but advocates say the practice risks wider transmission of the disease, and are calling instead for large-scale decarceration.
White Skin Privilege
Over the past several weeks, hundreds of thousands of Americans have taken to the streets in the wake of George Floyd’s hideous murder. Police stations have been commandeered and torched, corporate stores destroyed and set ablaze. In Seattle, people have constructed the ‘Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone,’ otherwise known as CHAZ, which encompasses several city blocks, a police station, apartments, and storefronts. Protests and actions ranging from nonviolent marches to small-scale rebellions and uprisings have taken place in over 2,000 cities across the United States.
As calls to defund the police gain traction, bloated police budgets are coming under scrutiny for siphoning public resources away from Black and Brown communities. While police budgets are typically public documents that must be approved by elected officials, there are other institutions in place with the sole purpose of funneling even more resources toward law enforcement.
Judge Jed Rakoff of the Southern District of New York isn't one to suffer the federal government's many fools. Five years ago, Rakoff resigned from the DOJ's rigged forensics committee -- one supposedly formed to tell the DOJ what it was doing wrong when analyzing and testifying about forensic evidence. Rakoff received a personal call from the DOJ's Deputy Attorney General who told him the Commission would not be examining the handling of pre-trial evidence. In other words, the Commission could not make any recommendations about disclosures about means and methodology used by forensic investigators to defendants prior to trial. Rakoff resigned, calling out the government for its "trial by ambush" practices.
In a 5-4 decision led by Chief Justice John Roberts, the Supreme Court on Thursday blocked President Trump’s attempt to end Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA. The federal program created by President Obama in 2012 protects from deportation about 700,000 immigrants who arrived in the U.S. as children. Luis Cortes, one of the lawyers who defended DACA at the Supreme Court, says the key to the victory was being able to share the stories of DACA recipients. “What moved Chief Justice Roberts in our case was the stories,” says Cortes, who is a DACA recipient himself. We also speak with Erika Andiola, advocacy chief at RAICES, the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services, and host of the podcast “Homeland Insecurity.”
As protests and uprisings sweep across the nation and world, America’s profane aesthetics face extinction — desecrations of Christopher Columbus, Robert E Lee and Frank Rizzo, all symbols of whiteness and white supremacy, force imperialism, racism, and capitalism to see further days of reckoning and perhaps one day, “The End of Policing.”
The history of the American labor movement is rich and diverse—diverse, exhilarating, depressing, inspirational and heartbreaking. Ever since passage of the landmark National Labor Relations Act (the Wagner Act), in 1935, unions have been recognized as the legal, government-sanctioned entities dedicated to improving the wages, benefits and working conditions of employees.
“I can’t breathe,” pled George Floyd in Minneapolis and Erik Garner in New York City and Javier Ambler in Austin, Texas, before police killed them.
"Every single problem in our country, Mitch McConnell stands in the way of solving."
We need business to leverage their power to change a bad law and help end the cycle of state-sponsored killing of unarmed black people.
"Today we honor Black excellence. Black innovation. Black history. Black futures. Black joy. Black brilliance."
Eight Solutions to Ensure Economic Recovery Reduces the Racial Wealth Gap.
Arrogance by police often mirrors the stance of individuals above the cops.
A protest rally opposing the arrests of politicians and activists during the lead up to the Belarusian presidential elections (set for August 9) took place in Minsk on the evening of June 18. More than 2,000 people took part in the protest. The demonstrators formed a “solidarity chain” along Independence Avenue, the main street in downtown Minsk. The “chain” stretched for several kilometers.
Over the past couple of months, I have been bingeing on Netflix like most house-bound CounterPunchers. In case you haven’t seen them yet, I highly recommend two series that originated on Iceland television: The Valhalla Murders and Trapped. Both are close relatives to the Swedish Marxist detective stories that I reviewed on CounterPunch in 2014. They succeed both as social commentary and art.
One reason we continue to repeat the sins of our past is that we haven’t fully acknowledged them.
"A movement requires sacrifice, and that's what we're doing as longshoremen."
Let me rant for a moment. I don’t do it often, maybe ever. I’m not Donald Trump. Though I’m only two years older than him, I don’t even know how to tweet and that tells you everything you really need to know about Tom Engelhardt in a world clearly passing me by. Still, after years in which America’s streets were essentially empty, they’ve suddenly filled, day after day, with youthful protesters, bringing back a version of a moment I remember from my youth and that’s a hopeful (if also, given Covid-19, scary) thing, even if I’m an old man in isolation in this never-ending pandemic moment of ours.
Moor Mother (Camae Ayewa) is a poet in Irreversible Entanglements, which describes itself as a liberation-oriented free jazz collective. They formed at a Musicians Against Police Brutality event after the New York Police Department murdered Akai Gurley, and on March 20, 2020, the ensemble released the album “Who Sent You?” featuring “The Code Noir/Amina.”
Over an uptempo rhythm and foreboding horns, the ensemble reckons with past demons. Moor Mother pays homage to Black ancestors who withstood, endured, and survived centuries of exploitation. Then her poetry turns to agitation for action from humanity. “At what point do we stand up? At the breaking point? At the point of no return? At what point? At what point do we pull each other up, up out of the void, up out of a hell? At what point? At what point? At what point do we give a shit? Do we stand up and say something?”
When Minneapolis erupted in flames following the modern-day lynching of George Floyd, both local officials and protesters were quick to blame outside agitators and infiltrators for looting and destruction of property. Determined to lift the cry for racial justice above scenes of a city on fire, millions of people mobilized to march and hold peaceful vigils in cities and small towns around the world. But now that the flames have subsided, we should consider again their source. The fires that were blamed on a few bad actors can be traced to decades of b
Too many young people working out your government is complete shite? Then hike up university fees for courses which teach students to think critically about life, the universe and Australian politicians. Louise Miolin weighs in.
Late this morning, Lavigne and a couple dozen supporters held the memorial at what they say is a former burial ground for enslaved people that sits on the future site of a $9.4 billion plastics plant complex. But even as widespread protests against anti-Black racism have prompted a national reckoning, the ceremony at the former grave site was met with opposition. FG LA LLC, a local member of the Formosa Plastics Group, owns the property on a former sugar plantation and denied Lavigne’s request to have a Juneteenth ceremony there. It took a last-minute judge’s ruling to force the petrochemical corporation to make the ceremony legal; Lavigne had planned to hold the ceremony there, with or without€ permission.
Amidst a national reckoning with anti-Black racism and white supremacy throughout the United States, legacy media outlets have published highly problematic and dangerous articles on recent protests against police brutality. Recent local coverage of protests in Detroit, which included a nonviolent march up Gratiot Ave. on the city’s East Side on Tuesday June 2nd, illustrates this national trend and plays directly into the hands of those who would prefer to see these protests squashed rather than succeed.
A long smoldering and now massive popular response to injustice has been catalyzed by the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25th. Even Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson concedes, “this was without precedent in the modern era.”
The Dutch Supreme Court has accepted Russia’s cassation appeal challenging a ruling by the Hague Court of Appeal ordering Moscow to pay $50 billion to the former shareholders of the oil company Yukos, Russia’s Justice Ministry announced on June 19.€
On June 19, Belarus saw protests break out in Minsk and other cities in support of activists and politicians arrested during the presidential election campaign, reports RFE/RL’s Belarusian service, Radio Svoboda, and the news site Tut.by.€
On May 25, 2020, George Floyd, a Black man, was murdered by Derek Chauvin, a white Policeman in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Captured on camera and viewed by millions, Floyd’s brutalization inspired an uprising in multiple cities across the United States and the world.
Instead of spending $100 million on a 'center on racial equity,' the mega-corporation should give the money to its underpaid African American workforce.
"We will not return to business as usual after the events we have experienced this year," says Rev. James Forbes.
The attitude of the media and the American people towards Donald Trump’s personality has been the longest emperor-has-no-clothes tale ever told. A man who has been called a “fucking moron” by one of his own appointees, has been routinely praised for his wiliness and his political acumen, his intuitive knowledge of the American people. An intuitive knowledge that in his own mind extends to medicine—he tells us that doctors are amazed at his knowledge of complex medical issues which he somehow acquired without any study of medicine. He just knows it. On the basis of his knowledge of medicine he has offered advice on possible cures of the covid-19 infections such as the injection of Lysol. And it’s true. Doctors are amazed.
“Bob Dylan Has a Lot on His Mind,” the New York Times reported on June 12.€ That’s for sure. In late March, as the COVID-19 pandemic shut down America, the 79 year old singer-songwriter released “Murder Most Foul,” an epic, 17-minute song-poem about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
President Trump’s first campaign rally since the start of the pandemic takes place Saturday in Tulsa, Oklahoma, despite a spike of COVID-19 cases there. Trump rescheduled the rally to Saturday after facing backlash for saying it would happen on Juneteenth — a celebration of African Americans’ liberation from slavery — amid a nationwide uprising against racism and police brutality. Tulsa is also the site of one of the deadliest massacres in U.S. history, when a white mob in 1921 killed as many as 300 people in a thriving African American business district known as “Black Wall Street.” For more on this history and the pervasive racism that remains, we speak with civil rights lawyer Damario Solomon-Simmons, who represents the last known survivor of the Greenwood massacre living in Tulsa. He’s also the attorney for the family of Terence Crutcher, a Black man who was shot and killed by a white police officer in Tulsa in 2016. Terence Crutcher’s sister, Dr. Tiffany Crutcher, also joins us from Tulsa.
In a 5-4 decision led by Chief Justice John Roberts, the Supreme Court on Thursday blocked President Trump’s attempt to end Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA. The federal program created by President Obama in 2012 protects from deportation about 700,000 immigrants who arrived in the U.S. as children. Luis Cortes, one of the lawyers who defended DACA at the Supreme Court, says the key to the victory was being able to share the stories of DACA recipients. “What moved Chief Justice Roberts in our case was the stories,” says Cortes, who is a DACA recipient himself. We also speak with Erika Andiola, advocacy chief at RAICES, the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services, and host of the podcast “Homeland Insecurity.”
June 19 is Juneteenth, celebrating the day in 1865 when the last enslaved Black people in the United States learned they had been freed from bondage. As momentum grows to enshrine it as a national holiday, we speak with author and historian Gerald Horne, who says that while the story of Juneteenth is “much more complicated and much more complex than is traditionally presented,” increased recognition of the day “provides an opportunity to have a thorough remembrance of this horrific system that was slavery.”
"The United Nations needs to do its job—not get bullied out of doing it," said the ACLU in response.
Introduction to Why Killer Cops Go Free
"Those whose backs are against the wall are pushing this whole nation towards justice."
As protests over police violence continue around the nation, cause and effect are being defined through the political goals of those with official voices. Protesters were calm until the choice to be calm was no longer an option. For decades rising corporate and state repression have merged with declining economic circumstances to produce a claustrophobia of the soul for the ‘lesser’ ninety or so percent of us. The so-called land-of-the-free has the largest police-prison industrial complex in the world to assure that those who tire of quiet desperation remain docile and compliant no matter the provocation.
Illinois schools are not required to teach a class in the state’s history. Perhaps as a result, you may be surprised to learn that Illinois at one time allowed slavery. But Darrel Dexter, a historian and high school social studies teacher in Tamms, has been researching, writing about and teaching the history of slavery in Illinois for years. His book about the topic, “Bondage in Egypt, Slavery in Southern Illinois,” was published by Southeast Missouri State University in 2011, and described by one academic reviewer as “the most comprehensive account to date of racial slavery in Illinois.” I first met Dexter at the public library in Anna, Illinois, while reporting on its history as a sundown town. Since then, he’s helped me better understand the parts of our state’s history often left out of classroom curricula and, as a result, the public’s understanding of Illinois history.
I recently spoke with Dexter just ahead of the Juneteenth holiday, which commemorates the ending of slavery. Here is an edited version of our conversation.
Ajit Pai's FCC majority is almost never skeptical about the claims made by giant broadband providers. Yet the FCC is expressing doubt that Elon Musk's looming, well-hyped satellite broadband service Starlink will deliver on its promises.
Beijing’s frequent use of invalidation proceedings against patents by foreign companies allow Chinese firms to use patented foreign technologies “without paying adequate royalties,” the report says. The Financial Times commented that the "worst offenders continue to drain European businesses of jobs as well as billions of euros in revenues."
As for trademarks in China, the report found the main problem to be the registration of bad faith applications. While China’s trademark law has recently been strengthened, many loopholes remain.
Filling a gap in the market, this is the first book dedicated to providing a detailed overview of the law and practice in relation to intellectual property rights enforcement in all 54 African countries. For the first time, a comprehensive manual on the conditions and procedures under which the civil and criminal courts, the police and customs take action with regard to counterfeit and pirated goods is publicly available.
Last year the Stonewall Riots’ 50th anniversary was celebrated. Those demonstrations marked the beginning of the fight for the recognition of the rights of coloured transgenders, homosexuals and various other outcasted minorities. Fifty-one years later, the process for social acceptance of same-sex relationships is still ongoing. During this time, the LGBT community has adopted a unique representative symbol, which has acquired worldwide recognition: the rainbow flag.
Recent events have shown how the issue of social discrimination is still rooted within modern society and is yet fiercely combated by various movements that adopted different marks to identify themselves, such as the #MeToo or the #BlacklivesMatter supporters. Similarly, the LGBT community and its affiliates have adopted and used, for more than half a century, the rainbow flag and its colourful pattern to stand in defence of the LGBT community’s rights.
The article tackles the type and level of protection that intellectual property law offers to such well-known LGBT Pride symbol under the EU and US legal framework. The flag was designed to be freely used. On the one hand, this allowed a global diffusion and identification of the LGBT community under one emblem. On the other hand, such free use also allowed various misuses of the rainbow design in social and economic settings. Furthermore, the Pride symbol’s lack of protection endangers the distinctive meaning the flag has acquired (for example, in Italy the “peace” flag features an inverted rainbow pattern), considering also that new variations of the rainbow flag have been introduced to include different minorities (for example, the flag designed by Daniel Quasar in 2018).
When it comes to decorative patterns, registration as a trade mark may, in some instances, serve as an ideal form of IP protection - free from the originality conditions of copyright as well as the novelty and individual character requirements of design protection. Nonetheless, trade mark protection poses evidentiary challenges of its own, as many patterns which are ab initio devoid of distinctive character across the EU as a whole will inevitably face the difficult challenge of demonstrating acquired distinctiveness.
Long-time readers may remember back in 2015 - when Louis Vuitton found itself battling invalidity proceedings in relation to their brown and beige, and light and dark grey chequerboard pattern marks respectively (T-359/12 and T-360/12, see IPKat here) - the General Court (GC) found in both cases that not enough evidence had been produced to demonstrate that the marks had acquired distinctive character in all of the EU Member States.
However, the same outcome was not reached last week in relation to another of Louis Vuitton’s beige and blue chequerboard patterns (’Damier Azur’), when the GC annulled the decision of the Second Board of Appeal (R-274/2017-2) which had found the mark to be invalid. The Court reached its conclusion on the basis that the Board of Appeal had not carried out an overall assessment of the mark when considering distinctive character acquired through use in the EU.
A German court has concluded that each of JinkoSolar GmbH, REC Solar EMEA GmbH and LONGi Solar Technologie GmbH have infringed the intellectual property (IP) rights of Hanwha Q Cells GmbH.
The Regional Court of Dusseldorf has ruled on June 6 that the trio has distributed in the local market certain solar modules that feature cells utilising a patented Q Cells technology, without having a licensing agreement for it. The announcement by Q Cells notes that opposition proceedings challenging the patent’s validity are still pending before the European Patent Office (EPO).
The court’s decision grants Q Cells a right to provisionally place restrictions on import and sales of the infringing products. The accused companies are legally obliged to recall said products distributed since January 30, 2019 from the distribution channels. Also, the court has granted a claim for destruction of patent-infringing products in possession of the three firms.
The decisions can be appealed to the Higher Regional Court of Dusseldorf.
JinkoSolar Holding Co., Ltd. ("JinkoSolar") (NYSE: JKS), one of the largest and most innovative solar module manufacturers in the world, today responded to the Regional Court of Düsseldorf's recent determination concluding that third-party cell technology contained in certain JinkoSolar modules, no longer in production, infringes a patent held by Hanwha Q CELLS. JinkoSolar believes the Düsseldorf court came to an erroneous conclusion and will appeal the decision. JinkoSolar is also challenging the Hanwha patent's validity at the European Patent Office ("EPO").
Importantly, the scope and impact of the Düsseldorf court's decision is limited to Germany. Additionally, the decision relates to third-party cells included in older versions of JinkoSolar-branded modules which are no longer in production. As such, the decision has no impact on current JinkoSolar customers, and JinkoSolar may continue to import and sell modules that use its own cell technology to customers in Germany.
The Regional Court of Düsseldorf, Germany has confirmed Hanwha Q CELLS patent ‘689’ infringement case against two major ‘Solar Module Super League’ (SMSL’s) members, JinkoSolar and LONGi Solar, as well as PV module manufacturer REC Group.
Hanwha Q CELLS' ‘689’ patent is very similar to the ‘215’ patent that the US ITC recently rejected after its investigation into that patent’s claimed infringement. However, Q CELLS has also confirmed it would appeal the US ITC ruling.
As it stands, legal proceedings that challenge the validity of the ‘215’ and ‘689’ patents are pending before the European Patent Office (EPO), while the Düsseldorf Court judgment can be appealed to the Higher Regional Court of Düsseldorf. A separate Australian infringement case remains outstanding.
Dr. Daniel Jeong, CTO of Q CELLS, said: “We are pleased that the Regional Court of Düsseldorf has confirmed what we knew to be true all along. As we eagerly stressed when we filed the lawsuit in 2019, intellectual property laws exist to incentivize innovation and protect those innovations from being unfairly used. The protection of intellectual property rights is of foremost importance for our fast-evolving solar industry to ensure continued development of breakthrough technological innovations.”
Although the U.S. courts thought differently, the Regional Court of Düsseldorf in Germany has upheld Hanwha Q CELLS’ patent infringement complaint filed on March 4, 2019, finding that JinkoSolar, REC, and LONGi Solar unlawfully incorporated Q CELLS’ patented technology into specific solar products of the respective brands. The lawsuit charged that the three companies have infringed the German part of European Patent EP 2 220 689 (‘689 patent), which protects a unique passivation technology also used in Q.ANTUM – a technology for increasing the efficiency of solar cells.
On June 16, the German Court concluded that JinkoSolar, REC and LONGi Solar have distributed certain solar modules in Germany that contain solar cells which use technology covered by the ‘689 patent, without a prior license agreement with Q CELLS.
The German government has revived legislation for the UPC, but questions on the relocation of the London court create uncertainty for the life sciences industry
The concept of a simplified patent system across Europe and the UK has been in the making for more than 40 years. The first step was to set up a pan-European patent, which would provide protection of ideas across all its signatories — a simpler, cheaper and more comprehensive alternative to the system of national patents, experts say.
The reforms also require a court where multi-state patents can be defended. Progress towards this harmonisation of national patents has been by fits and starts — culminating in the creation of the unitary patent in 2012. Currently all EU member states except Spain, Poland and Croatia have signed up for the unitary patent regulation, but states will only participate once the UPC agreement to create the new court is ratified.
A central court where innovation can be defended in one place is key to the operation of a unified patent, says Carol Plunkett, a commercial litigator at William Fry in Dublin. Presently, even though inventors can apply for a patent at the central European Patent Office, the body does not provide a single European patent as such. Instead, applicants essentially receive a bundle of independent national European patents which are enforceable in national courts — each with their own national laws, procedures and levels of competence in intellectual property law.
“The concept of a single European patent and a unitary court is a good one,” says Ms Plunkett. “It could be particularly useful for small businesses that want to patent their invention and just make one patent application rather than applying in multiple countries and then, if there’s a conflict, defending in one court, rather than defending around Europe in different jurisdictions with different procedures. It can be incredibly costly and a logistical challenge.”
While the UK’s vote to leave the EU in 2016 complicated matters, the UK government voiced its intention to be part of the UPC by ratifying the agreement that would have triggered the court’s creation in 2018.
Orgalim calls for a swift ratification of the Unified Patent Court Agreement
The European Union and the participating EU Member States reached an agreement years ago on the unitary patent package, which consists of two EU Regulations1 on the Unitary Patent and an international Agreement on the Unified Patent Court (UPC)2. Orgalim calls on the remaining participating EU Member States to ratify the UPC Agreement as soon as possible, so that the unitary patent system can become fully operational.
As reported here, the German Constitutional Court ruled in March 2020 that the Bundestag did not effectively pass the Act of Approval of the Unified Patent Court Agreement (UPCA) rendering the Act of Approval void.
The UP/UPC system is an EU initiative to establish a Unitary Patent (UP) having unitary effect throughout the EU member states, and to establish the Unified Patent Court (UPC) to hear disputes relating to the Unitary Patent, and also relating to European patents having effect in the EU member states.
The German Ministry of Justice and Consumer Protection has now issued a new draft UPCA approval proposal for consultation with a three week deadline for comments. Notes accompanying the proposal suggest that UPCA approval can be successfully completed if a two-thirds majority of all eligible voters is achieved in both chambers of the German parliament. This means formal German ratification of the UPCA by the German President, the final ratification required for the UP/UPC provisional application phase (PAP) to commence, could be completed this year. This could allow the UPCA to enter into force in 2021 and for the UP/UPC to become operational.
The Enlarged Board of Appeal of the European Patent Office has decided that the exclusion from patentability of essentially biological processes for the production of plants or animals now also extends to plant or animal products that are exclusively obtained by means of an essentially biological process for European patents or pending European patent applications that were granted or filed from July 1, 2017, on.
Plants and animals exclusively obtained by essentially biological processes are excluded from patentability, according to the Enlarged Board of Appeal ("EBA") of the European Patent Office ("EPO"). This reversal of the EBA's previous rulings was issued late last week in the eagerly anticipated opinion in referral G 3/19 ("Pepper").
To recap, after the Broccoli-II and Tomato-II decisions (G 2/12 and G 2/13) affirmed the patentability of products derived from essentially biological processes, the European Commission issued a Notice indicating that the Biotech Directive should have been interpreted to exclude such products from patentability (see our June 2015 Commentary, "Clarifying or Confirming the Extent of Process Exclusion under Art. 53(b) EPC?" and our December 2016 Alert, "Clarifying or Confusing? The European Commission Chews on Tomatoes and Broccoli"). In order to comply with the Notice, the EPO Administrative Council introduced Rule 28(2) EPC in July 2017 (see our July 2017 Commentary, "Clarifying or Conforming? The EPO Bows to the European Commission").
In a recent Patents Court interim hearing concerning pharmaceutical products, Mr Justice Marcus Smith refused an application for an interim injunction. The judgment marks an exception to the “rule of thumb” that a generic entrant can expect to be enjoined if it fails to “clear the way”.
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Neurim also owns a second medical use patent which protects its products (the “Patent”). The Patent was filed on 12 August 2002 and claims priority from 14 August 2001. If not revoked sooner, the Patent will expire on 12 August 2022, i.e. some two years and three months' time from the date of the interim judgment. The Patent was granted by the EPO in May 2017. Mylan opposed the patent post-grant and the EPO Opposition Division revoked it in November 2019. That decision has been appealed at the EPO, and the Technical Board of Appeal may not provide a decision until after the Patent has expired.
Circadin's label indicates use for the short-term treatment of primary insomnia in patients aged 55 or over. However, Circadin is also frequently used “off-label” for insomnia in patients under the age of 55. It is also sometimes used in relation to non-insomnia symptoms.
The Patent for the second medical use protects use in the treatment of insomnia in general terms. The Patent is therefore broader than the label, containing no limitations on age. It covers the off-label and on-label use of Circadin in the treatment of insomnia.
Global patent and trademark offices (IPOs) have adapted procedures and timeframes, including for oral hearings and certification of documents, in light of COVID-19 and social distancing. You can find a summary of the latest news from a selection of these IPOs below. As the situation is changing all the time, please be sure to refer to the official website for further details, or speak to your Novagraaf attorney to ensure you receive up-to-the minute advice.
On Monday, the press office of the Landgericht Düsseldorf (Dusseldorf Regional Court) issued a press release on six Conversant v. Huawei and ZTE cases scheduled to go to trial tomorrow (Thursday, June 18, 2020). Of note, the court that adjudicates more patent infringement cases than any other European court (though most smartphone cases, including cases over cellular connectivity in cars, go to the rocket dockets in Mannheim and Munich) reiterates its position on the availability ofcinjunctions over standard-essential patents...
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The legal test is extremely important, but let's not forget that a lot depends on how a test is applied. If the analysis begins with the SEP holder's offer, but even the most egregious of royalty demands are deemed to be FRAND-compliant, it won't really help. Conversely, if a court approaches a case like the Mannheim Regional Court's Second Civil Chamber in Nokia v. Daimler, but doesn't set the bar unreasonably high for the implementer of the standard, then the outcome may still be pro-competitive. That's why next week's Mannheim ruling will be a particularly interesting one to analyze.
Despite dire warnings by the US Chamber of Commerce, the impact of the EU’s SPC waiver won’t be known for years, says Paul Williams of Lewis Silkin.
The US Chamber of Commerce has published its International IP Index 2020, a map of the IP ecosystems of 53 economies, representing over 90% of global gross domestic product (GDP). The index aims to provide a snapshot of each economy’s overall IP ecosystem by evaluating its IP framework across 50 indicators, selected to represent the most effective IP systems.
Is an anticounterfeiting service regulation drafted by an IP lawyer protected by copyright?
This, in a nutshell, is the question at the heart of the dispute initially brought by said IP lawyer against the organizers of a trade fair in the Venice area, who had allegedly copied the regulation that he had drafted.
Last month, the Italian Supreme Court ruled (decision 10300/2020, Casucci v Unipol Assicurazioni S.p.A. and Others, also commented in Italian here) that, in principle, a technical work like that one at hand could be eligible for copyright protection, subject to it being original.
The Federal Circuit Bar Association (FCBA) will be offering a remote program entitled "A Discussion With the Federal Circuit's Clerk's Office" on June 23, 2020 from 1:00 pm until 2:00 pm (EST). Andrew Trask of Williams & Connolly LLP will moderate a panel consisting of Peter Marksteiner, Circuit Executive and Clerk of Court, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit; and Jarrett Perlow, Chief Deputy Clerk, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. The panel will offer information and perspective about a significant set of proposed amendments to the Federal Circuit's Rules of Practice, which were announced on April 24, 2020.
Dred Scott. The following year, the US Patent Office with support of the US Attorney General took action to enforce the law in a memorandum entitled “Invention of a Slave.” The memo begins with its clear statement: “A new and useful machine invented by a slave cannot be patented.” Under Dred Scott, a non-enslaved people of color also lacked the requisite citizenship. Two recent articles walk through these events: Brian L. Frye, Invention of a Slave, 68 Syracuse L. Rev. 181, 194 (2018) (historical analysis); Kara W. Swanson, Race and Selective Legal Memory: Reflections on Invention of a Slave, 120 Columbia Law Review 1077 (2020) (reflection on historical and ongoing impact, inter alia). The decision actually frustrated slave owners and during the civil war, the patent laws of the Confederate States did allow for patenting of inventions by enslaved peoples – although all ownership rights would flow to their owners.
It is not just for purposes of getting a vaccine and treatments quickly that we should want fully open research.
Avanci isn't the first patent pool to employ a great deal of spin-doctoring, but its homepage is particularly "rich." Take the "Enabling the IoT" headline (that's one of the pages in its "Marketplace" section): baseband chipset makers undoubtedly enable the IoT, as do makers of connectivity modules that contain such chips and additional components, but Avanci refuses to grant them exhaustive patent licenses--which is an impediment (rather than conducive) to the further development and widespread adoption of IoT technologies
No less absurd is the claim that Avanci's pricing (leaving the question of component-level licensing aside for a moment) is fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory (FRAND). Those of us following the Nokia v. Daimler litigation series know that Nokia makes a clearly supra-FRAND royalty demand (several times what Nokia gets per smartphone) and argues that it gets a similar amount as its share of Avanci's royalty income.
By far the most insane claim on Avanci's website is, however, the part where they talk about the "goal of bringing [...] transparency and predictability to the [licensing] process." Give me a break. On that whole damn website there's no such thing as a list of the patents you can license through Avanci. Nor do they publish their licensing terms. By contrast, there are patent pools such as this one (MPEG LA's AVC/H.264 pool) that do both: they publish their license agreements (including the fees), and they provide a patent list. The length of such a list is no excuse: they could upload a PDF that contains them all and/or provide access via a database query interface. Avanci's claim to be transparent is, sadly, an insult to human intelligence. That website is the epitome of intransparency. It couldn't realistically be any less informative.
At the dawn of the smartphone era, sharing a photo involved unlocking the phone, accessing the camera, taking a photo, returning to the home screen, accessing images, and sharing via email, social media, or messaging. The user interfaces of phones have evolved since then to the extent that this can all now be done straight from the lock screen with minimal user input. User interface (UI) innovation has without doubt made our lives easier when it comes to carrying out day to day tasks. Nowadays, even a voice assistant can tend to most of our smartphone needs. Investment in UI is undoubtedly worthwhile for the user experience alone, but can businesses protect their UI innovation with patents?
In Europe, graphical and voice UIs run the risk of falling foul of the exclusions to patentability which pertain to presentations of information, computer programs, mental acts and even business methods under Article 52(2) EPC. Thus, protecting UI innovation at the EPO can be challenging. An EPO examiner has to be convinced that the invention goes beyond these exclusions as such and solves a technical problem in a non-obvious way.
Dallas Invents is a weekly look at U.S. patents granted with a connection to the Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington metro area. Listings include patents granted to local assignees and/or those with a North Texas inventor. Patent activity can be an indicator of future economic growth, as well as the development of emerging markets and talent attraction. By tracking both inventors and assignees in the region, we aim to provide a broader view of the region’s inventive activity. Listings are organized by Cooperative Patent Classification (CPC).
As the DABUS team continues to push for AI inventorship, Managing IP tours Canada, New Zealand and Australia to see how they feel about robots and patents
This development has led to speculatation over whether other traditionally controversial brands such as the Washington Redskins – which aren’t necessarily connected to the African American community but have been strongly criticised for their offensive nature – might now voluntarily drop their names.
The US and EU courts blocked several legal efforts in 2020 and 2019 to invalidate trademarks on the basis that said marks were rude or immoral.
Only a few months ago, the phrase “social distancing” was not part of daily conversations. Yet, in the context of the current COVID-19 crisis, it is a commonly-cited phrase as one of the most well-known measures introduced to limit the spread of the coronavirus. In true branding form, no shortage of companies have responded to global mandates for social distancing in their own ways; beyond closing brick-and-mortar outlets and focusing primarily on e-commerce, many brands have looked to stay relevant in these strange times, and this has included temporarily adapting or modifying their trademarks and logos to reinforce the importance of complying with the health guidelines.
McDonald's, Coca-Cola, Audi and Volkswagen are just a few of the corporate conglomerates that are interpreting "social distancing" with logo redesigns. The term has become popular recently because of the spread of the novel coronavirus. Social distancing means standing 6 feet apart from others in an effort to lower the risk of contracting the illness. The messages and logos created to promote social distancing have pros and cons, according to two experts in the design field. "Our current global situation is no joke. It's a serious matter," Douglas Sellers, executive creative director for firm Siegel+Gale told CNN Business.
On 28 May 2020 the General Court rendered its most recent ruling regarding enhanced protection of trade marks with a reputation (T-677/18; available in French and Spanish). Two issues are of particular interest in this judgment. First, how to prove reputation, as well as distinctiveness, of a mark consisting of the shape of the product which is always used (in this case also registered) in combination with a word sign (that furthermore is reputed itself). Second, when it is useful to rely on enhanced protection of reputed marks in cases of identical conflicting goods.
Blind SA instituted legal proceedings in the Constitutional Court against President Ramaphosa in May 2020 to compel him to perform his duties in terms of Section 79 of the Constitution of South Africa vis-à-vis the Copyright Amendment Bill (CAB). The CAB had been with the President since March 28th 2019. Earlier today Blind SA was informed by the State Attorney that the President had now decided to refer the CAB to Parliament on the grounds of certain specific constitutional reasons.
Professor of Intellectual [sic] Property [sic] Law at the University of Cape Town, Caroline Ncube, explains the significance of the Marrakesh Treaty: “A decision has been made to sign on to the Marrakesh Treaty but only after the enactment of the Copyright Amendment Bill (CAB). Therefore, as long as the CAB has not received presidential assent, the Marrakesh Treaty lies in limbo for South Africans. This is a travesty, particularly during a national disaster, in which the blind and visually impaired continue to have limited access to materials that provide important health information, which in this context may literally be life-saving. It is essential that these materials be made available in accessible formats, which would be enabled and supported by the provisions in the CAB.”
Jukin Media has also filed a copyright claim complaint to Twitter, according to a statement posted on the company’s account. While Twitter labeled the video as “manipulated media,” it was still active on the President’s account until Friday evening. It appeared to be the first time one of Donktum’s edits has received the “manipulated media” tag, which is usually found on deepfakes. The video has been viewed nearly 20 million times at the time of this writing. It’s still unclear whether Donktum or the president’s team will argue the meme is transformative enough that it’s allowed to exist under fair use.
On 15 May, the Netherlands became the first EU member state to submit a complete DSM copyright directive transposition bill to parliament.[1] Both the timing and the content of the legislative proposal show an acute desire to avoid the risk of late or incorrect transposition.[2] In the operative provisions (auto-translate) and explanatory memorandum (auto-translate), the government has sought neither to mitigate the directive’s limitations nor to offer original interpretations of its impossible compromises. This deliberate lack of imagination is arguably a quality and, while not without its own risks and drawbacks, is based on a pragmatic assessment of national legislators’ room for transpositional manoeuvre. As such, it represents an interesting precedent for other member states considering their own transposition options in the twelve months remaining until the deadline of 7 June 2021. Moreover, despite its best intentions, the Dutch transposition proposal still manages to contain a number of notable choices, and court a number of notable controversies – some of which will probably require amendment in the course of the legislative process.
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The transposition proposal is difficult to read. Rather than transposing the directive into a separate law, or a separate chapter, the proposal amends existing legislation. Thus, Chapter I of the proposal contains amendments to the Copyright Act, Chapter II contains amendments to the Neighbouring Rights Act, and Chapter III contains amendments to the Database Act. Some amendments add entire provisions, while others add individual words or references to existing provisions.
The consequences of this approach are somewhat comical. Article 15 is transposed as a new neighbouring right, and requires the addition of, or changes to, some 15 provisions in the Neighbouring Rights Act.[3] Moreover, since a number of directive provisions affect both copyright and (some but not all) neighbouring rights, there are considerable duplications and cross-references. Thus, Chapter I adds new Articles 29c, 29d, and 29e to the Copyright Act to transpose Article 17; Chapter II adds an Article 19b to the Neighbouring Right Act, which transposes Article 17(1) for performances, phonograms, films, etc. and then declares that most (but not all) of the new Copyright Act provisions apply mutatis mutandis.
There are also potential advantages to transposing the directive through amendments to existing laws. Most importantly, integrating the directive into the existing conceptual framework ensures a level of coherence. While creating an entirely separate framework for e.g. press publications and OCSSPs would make for a superficially ‘cleaner’ law, its meaning would not be any clearer, and questions would quickly arise as to whether common concepts, such as ‘communication to the public’ and ‘citation’, mean the same thing as they do in existing laws (remember the longstanding question, ultimately answered in the negative by the CJEU in Reha Training, of whether the ‘communication to the public’ concept has different meanings in copyright and neighbouring rights). The integrated approach hopefully ensures that common concepts have a uniform meaning (at least until the CJEU tells us otherwise).
The first part of this post provided an introduction to the DSM copyright directive transposition bill submitted to the Dutch parliament on 15 May (operative provisions Dutch / auto-translate, explanatory memorandum Dutch / auto-translate), and a discussion of the provisions transposing Article 15 (the press publishers’ right). This Part 2 continues with an analysis of the first half of Article 17 (OCSSPs). Part 3 will finish up with the second half of Article 17 and some concluding remarks.
The first part of this series provided an introduction to the Dutch DSM copyright directive transposition bill submitted to the Dutch parliament on 15 May (operative provisions Dutch / auto-translate, explanatory memorandum Dutch / auto-translate), and a discussion of the provisions transposing Article 15 (the press publishers’ right). Part 2 continued with an analysis of the first half of Article 17 (OCSSPs). This Part 3 finishes up with the second half of Article 17 and some concluding remarks.
We’re happy to bring you a guest post by our Fellowship applicant, Vedangini Bisht, arguing for expansion of the copyright exhaustion doctrine to the digital medium in India. Vedangini is a 3rd year law student at National Law University, Delhi. Her first submission for the Fellowship can be viewed here.
Is an anticounterfeiting service regulation drafted by an IP lawyer protected by copyright?
This, in a nutshell, is the question at the heart of the dispute initially brought by said IP lawyer against the organizers of a trade fair in the Venice area, who had allegedly copied the regulation that he had drafted.
Last month, the Italian Supreme Court ruled (decision 10300/2020, Casucci v Unipol Assicurazioni S.p.A. and Others, also commented in Italian here) that, in principle, a technical work like that one at hand could be eligible for copyright protection, subject to it being original.
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In the present case, the Court of Appeal had not excluded tout court that a technical work could be protected by copyright. Instead, that court had ruled out that that particular regulation would be protected because of the way in which the legal concepts, sector-specific rules, the drafter’s own experiences had been contextualized, organized, and arranged.
In sum: the regulation did not display any peculiar and creative elaboration of such elements on the side of its author. To use the language of the CJEU, the work at issue did not show ‘any free and creative choices’ by its author, so that the work did not carry his ‘personal touch’.
Although the Italian Supreme Court could not refer to last week’s Brompton Bicycle CJEU judgment [Katpost here] for obvious reasons, it did substantially adopt the same perspective. The present case is one in which the relevant subject matter, whilst dictated by ‘technical considerations’, failed to display that “qualcosa in più” (‘something more’, in the words of the Supreme Court) that goes beyond such considerations and reflects the ‘personality’ of its author.
Napster co-founder Sean Parker became a billionaire by being at the right place at the right time and making smart business decisions. A few years ago, he co-founded a new company, Screening Room, which hoped to revolutionize the movie industry. While the plan has yet to come to fruition, the company did obtain a new anti-piracy patent this week.
Following a complaint by football league Serie A, an Italian court has ordered 'preventative measures' that require the country's ISPs to block 56 servers connected to pirate IPTV services. According to the government's Guardia di Finanza, seven IPTV 'structures' have been rendered "unusuable".
ISP Charter Communications is accusing several major record labels of having violated the Colorado Consumer Privacy Act. The music companies allegedly sent copyright infringement notices for tracks they didn't own the rights to, resulting in false accusations against subscribers. While the record labels don't deny that mistakes were made, they argue that Charter's claims don't hold up in court.
Companies connected to the Robert Redford movie The Company You Keep are writing to customers of Sky demanding that they pay a sizeable settlement or face being taken to court. Bizarrely, the alleged infringements took place seven years ago in 2013, well beyond the six-year limit usually available to copyright holders.
