05.31.16
Posted in Europe, Patents at 3:48 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Yet another dodgy contract between Battistelli’s EPO and private contractors overseas, this time in an effort to whitewash or cleanse the image of the EPO’s current regime
“The dude behind the OHSRA [Occupational Health Survey],” explains to us a reader, is someone that’s now the subject of gossip and rumours.
“Although the EPO systematically brushed aside all risks’ warnings issued by SUEPO/staff reps for the past years,” this reader continues, “5 suicides later something had to be done ASAP: the EPO is currently organising a white-washing exercise to story-tell the public that it cares for its staff whereas the production pressure has never ever been so high and the level of psychological stress explodes, according to some insider information.
“Whilst on the one hand the EPO shoots big time at messengers (e.g. SUEPO officials alerting staff and reporting that the HR policies implemented by “Mrs-spouse-from-Battistelli’s-right-arm” are known to be dangerous) on the other hand the EPO hired a weird very structure (see below) to perform an Occupational Health Survey office-wide (as you may expect with no genuine involvement of staff representation and after a non-public selection procedure whilst pretending otherwise.
“Here the information about this “serious provider”.
First company:
WELLKOM LIMITED
Check filing history and the first PDFs.
The company is registered in a private house, has two owners (Mr Phillips and his presumed wife, 2nd PDF), had massive assets: GBP 2 (just over 2 euros).
It looks like an empty shell.
Second company:
WELLKOM CORPORATE SERVICES LIMITED
Check the first PDF:
Same postal address as above. In 2014, went from GBP 87,000 assets… to GBP 190,000 debts.
“…the EPO is currently organising a white-washing exercise to story-tell the public that it cares for its staff whereas the production pressure has never ever been so high and the level of psychological stress explodes, according to some insider information.”
–Anonymous“But no worries,” our reader said, “now the EPO is here to help.” This isn’t the only such ongoing ‘study’ or ‘survey’ whose so-called ‘findings’, based on information we have received, were more or less decided in advance. We gave examples of these before. If there’s no open tender or procurement process, then there’s lots of room for folly, e.g. staff getting an old friend (or worse — family) a fat contract. Recall the story about Questel's deal with the EPO and its relation to Jacques Michel, who now receives sensitive data from the EPO, under the umbrella of Europatis [1, 2, 3, 4]. As people here in Britain say, “it’s as dodgy as f%$#.”
As we pointed out several weeks ago, Battistelli made such private contracts virtually invisible to anyone (so much for “transparency”!), unless they get leaked.
We now know that the EPO (not a private entity) is paying a fortune for six bodyguards to march around Battistelli, paying a fortune (almost a million dollars) to a PR company based in the US, and paying for military-connected Control Risks (we don’t know the amount paid, as no leaks relating to this ever reached us). The EPO is so rotten in fact that even the police is now disregarded and the premises are policed by a Croatian thug who faces many criminal charges in his home country. To quote a comment from yesterday:
If there ever was any foul play (something which I mightily doubt) then the President ought to call in the police to conduct a proper investigation at the EPO, and not take matters in his own hands, or trust one of his creatures to spin some conspiracy theory.
IIRC, there are precedents where the national police was allowed to enter the EPO offices for cases of petty theft. But on the other hand, from my own experience, it is nearly impossible to get a German policeman to lift his derrière from his chair for a case of theft or vandalism involving a mere bicycle.
What does the President have to fear, if his allegations are true? He could hardly invoke his personal impunity, sorry, the EPOrg’s immunity, to justify his barricading.
A version of this sordid affair could become in a few years the canvas for an episode of the dreadful “Tatort” series…
How many dodgy dealings does the EPO need to be involved in (never mind many suicides and human rights abuses) before the German authorities send independent investigators on-site? It cannot go on like this. As a reminder, tomorrow in the afternoon this subject will be discussed in the Bavarian Parliament (covering Munich), and not for the first time either. Based on a recent program from Bavarian television, at least some of the suicides at the EPO were the fault of the management (we had to remove copies of this program). Wellkom’s job is apparently to lie about it or make up a false narrative with which Team Battistelli can lobby or alter the record.
As a side note, over the past 2 years we have received alarming messages about panicky doctors who are extremely concerned about suicidal tendencies among EPO staff, caused directly because of the workplace (expectations, intimidation, workload and so on). We were kindly asked not to quote these directly (as these messages can reveal identities), but such relatively old messages sure help substantiate what was said above. To pretend otherwise is to mislead, or to produce propaganda for personal gain. Is Wellkom that desperate? Given its grim financial situation, it might be. █
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05.30.16
Posted in Europe, Patents at 11:27 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Topićanda style
Summary: EPO promotion disguised as reporting or journalism, as seen in the media partners of the EPO well before these partnerships even begin
THE EPO‘s technical department seems to be infatuated with Microsoft and it’s not going to do the EPO any favours. Has the brain drain taken its toll? Maybe that’s why there’s so much outside help for media, security, investigation etc. Neoliberalism and privatisation using secret contracts.
Meanwhile, looking at the daily nonsense from the EPO over at Twitter, the PR people are ever more desperate to create a distraction from the EPO’s horrible track record. They ask: “Which of this year’s finalists deserves the Popular Prize?”
“Has the brain drain taken its toll?”“You have until tomorrow to decide,” they say, but don’t forget the tactics (like multiple vote castings per person and spammy promotion [1, 2]) employed by them over the past month.
Earlier today the EPO promoted this link to a new puff piece from the French media about this event. The EPO’s “media partner”, Les Echos (which censored itself for Battistelli and his goons), already does puff pieces, even before the propagandistic event took place. What’s next? How much does this whole charade cost? It’s a secret as usual; that’s the Battistelli tradition. █
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Posted in Europe, Patents at 11:15 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
The pattern of Microsoft bed-sharing continues at the EPO
Summary: The EPO just can’t help providing special treatment to Microsoft, not only when it comes to patent applications but also when it comes to rejecting stakeholders/applicants who dare not become Microsoft customers
THE EPO just doesn’t seem capable of shaking off the impression that it is in bed with Microsoft — an impression that led the EPO to repeatedly make threats against me (it was always about Microsoft and the leak which got them upset made it into Italian television earlier this month). We previously gave examples in articles such as:
“Unitary Patent court filing software will be for Microsoft customers only,” noted Benjamin Henrion (FFII) this afternoon, as the “EPO is spreading good old .exe [in] http://www.epo.org/applying/online-services/online-filing/download.html#more”
Is anybody surprised by this? The above 4 examples are some among many. The EPO doesn’t seem to care about people who avoid back doors and choose a brand other than Microsoft. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 10:45 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Be it the smallest Android smartphone or the biggest of servers, Linux has become the very foundation of our digital lives, something Linus Torvalds could have hardly fathomed.
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Desktop
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The best Linux distro is a matter of personal taste and use case. On the following pages, we take you through four potential Linux use cases and select the best for each. We’ll look at the best overall OS for general computing, the best for an old laptop, a lightweight distro for USB drives and a privacy-focused option.
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Kernel Space
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I recently had a quick chat with Linux evangelist Brian Byrne, known by many as Brian Linuxing, who invited me to an upcoming event that I want to tell you about in this short and painless blog entry.
The event is called Linuxing in London, and it is the first of its kind for those who live in London, England, or surrounding areas. It is a Linux event for those who are curious about Linux as an operating system for their personal computers, but also for vendors who want to distribute a free OS with open-source software on their devices.
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The Linux Foundation, a non-profit organization, trying to promote Linux and the open source ecosystem among IT professional, computer manufacturers, and enterprises, announced two important upcoming Linux events.
LinuxCon Japan 2016 and ContainerCon Japan 2016 are two of the most anticipated Linux conference events in Asia, promising to bring together top experts from all over the world, including, but not limited to kernel developers, system administrators, IT industry leaders, community managers, and last but not least users.
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It’s Sunday, and it has been two weeks since the release of the Linux 4.6 kernel, so the time has come for Linus Torvalds to introduce us to the development cycle of the next major kernel branch.
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The morning release is partly because I don’t have anything I know of pending (and if there was somebody who was planning on sending their last-minute changes five minutes before the usual afternoon release, I really can’t be bothered to care). And partly because I think it’s been a fine merge window, and we have plenty of new code to close it with.
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The first test release of Linux 4.7 is now available. This new kernel version comes with plenty of new features and functionality.
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Over the past two weeks of the merge window for the Linux 4.7 kernel, around 200,000 lines of code was added.
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After a very exciting past two weeks, the merge window for Linux 4.7 is expected to close today. This was an action-packed merge window with a ton of new code being introduced. While I’ve already written dozens of posts on Phoronix about the changes that got me excited, here’s my usual kernel feature overview. Here’s a look at what’s coming for Linux 4.7.
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Graphics Stack
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What happens when a game engine meets a display server meets a multimedia framework? Oh yeah and whereby the behavior is controlled with Lua. No, it’s not a joke, just the latest creation in the open-source world. Say hello to Arcan as a new Linux display server.
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With Linux 4.7 there are four new DRM drivers! But that flow of new DRM/KMS drivers, largely for display hardware on ARM SoCs, is not over.
Among several patches floating around for new DRM hardware enablement is another DRM driver for Hisilicon. In Linux 4.7 there’s the Hisilicon Kirin DRM driver while being worked on for a future kernel release is now a Hisilicon Hibmc DRM driver.
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Applications
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A console application is computer software which can be used with a text-only computer interface, the command line interface, or a text-based interface included within a graphical user interface operating system, such as a terminal emulator (such as GNOME Terminal or the aforementioned Terminator). Whereas a graphical user interface application generally involves using the mouse and keyboard (or touch control), with a console application the primary (and often only) input method is the keyboard. Many console applications are command line tools, but there is a wealth of software that has a text-based user interface making use of ncurses, a library which allow programmers to write text-based user interfaces.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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AMD has been working on a new Linux graphics driver stack, and it’s finally becoming usable. You can install the gaming-optimized AMDGPU-PRO driver on Ubuntu 16.04 today, and Valve just added it to the latest beta version of SteamOS.
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To re-iterate something I’ve said every time: SteamOS was never, ever going to be an overnight success. New platforms generally take quite some time to make a difference, but SteamOS has already made a massive difference to Linux gaming.
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Today, May 30, 2016, we would like to introduce our Linux readers to an upcoming edition of the Arch Linux-based Manjaro Linux operating system designed for gamers.
Meet Manjaro Linux Gaming, a special flavor of the popular Manjaro Linux distribution built on top of the latest Arch Linux technologies, using a highly customized Xfce desktop environment with a dark setup to make it easy on your eyes, and preloaded with some of the best open-source software for gamers.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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Chris Michael of Samsung has been working on a new DRM library for the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries (EFL) with a number of improvements.
The initial implementation of this new library, Ecore_Drm2, has been added to EFL Git.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Andrius Štikonas announced the release of the KDE Partition Manager 2.2.0 open-source partition editor software designed specifically for the KDE Plasma 5 desktop environment, as well as the KPMcore 2.2.0 utility.
KDE Partition Manager and KPMcore 2.2.0 are two major release, finally bringing proper LUKS (Linux Unified Key Setup) support, in the way that the software is now capable of creating LUKS volumes on disk drivers, as well as to format the inner file system, besides detecting the LUKS container.
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The KDE Partition Manager, the promising disk partitioning application that’s become a viable alternative to GParted, is up to version 2.2.
KDE Partition Manager 2.2 was released this week by Andrius Štikonas and its big feature is proper LUKS support. The KDE Partition Manager can now properly handle LUKS encrypted volumes with support for creating them and formatting the inner file-system, opening/closing LUKS volumes, resizing support, and more.
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Every day, a sizable number of people posts problems on the KDE Community Forums and the ever-helpful staff does their best to solve whatever issues they’re facing. But what exactly does one do when this happens? This post provides more insights on the process.
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Reviews
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We decided to take the Arch Linux based distribution Antergos out for a test drive. Here’s how it handled, out in traffic and on the track.
A few months back, a fellow tech writer mentioned in an email exchange that I might try using the Arch Linux based Antergos distro as a way to grab the latest and greatest versions of popular software titles for review. Mainly because of Arch’s community repositories, in which users suggest and vote on packages to be included, many popular software titles are available within days after a new release. And since Antergos is a simple install compared to Arch, it would be easy to quickly throw up an installation on a test machine just to look at the latest and greatest from LibreOffice, GIMP and the like.
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Screenshots/Screencasts
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Gentoo Family
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Today, May 29, 2016, Sabayon ARM developer Ettore Di Giacinto announced the release of Sabayon ARM 16.06 Media Center Edition for Raspberry Pi 3 and Raspberry Pi 2 SBCs.
We were expecting to see today the release of Sabayon 16.06 for computers, which is the monthly update to the Gentoo-based GNU/Linux operating system for July 2016, because the Sabayon people are always announcing a new monthly release on the 29th of each month, but this time, things were a bit different.
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OpenSUSE/SUSE
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Embedded below is the blog of Google Summer of Code student Martin Garcia Monterde. Martin detailed his first week coding with openSUSE and the Google Summer of Code.
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Red Hat Family
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Open is at the core of ProudCity, a web platform that “lets municipalities easily launch and manage government digital services all in one place.”
As government service providers, it is our duty to ensure cities get the most sustainable, flexible technology available, so that they can best serve their residents, businesses, and visitors. We will do this by following the ethos of what Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst calls the “open organization.”
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Finance
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Fedora
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Will you be attending the annual Python Conference in Portland, Oregon this year? Then you should totally come and find us at the Development Sprints! Check out our PyCon 2016 Wiki page for details.
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I gave a talk about “Forget mod_php”. It is about this PHP installation method, the most documented, the simplest, but which have given a bad image about Apache HTTPD Server, and encourage user, needing performance, to migrate to nginx and its threaded mode and so with FPM. But, it is also possible to use Apache in thread mode, using the worker or event MPM, also with FPM.
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Pravin Satpute started using Linux in 2004 when he was working with Dr. Nagarjuna Gadiraju of the Free Software Foundation of India. He was working on a project to develop libre fonts for Indian languages. At that time, he was using Knoppix with the KDE desktop. In 2006, he became interested in Fedora and starting using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) in 2007 when he was given a laptop with RHEL 5. Quickly after receiving the laptop, he switched to Fedora 8. His childhood heroes were Steve Jobs, Ratan Tata and Sachin Tendulkar. His favorite movies are Inception and The Mummy.
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Debian Family
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I have updated the openpht repository with builds of OpenPHT 1.5.2 for Debian/sid for both amd64 and i386 architecture. For those who have forgotten it, OpenPHT is the open source fork of Plex Home Theater that is used on RasPlex, see my last post concerning OpenPHT for details.
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About a week ago, I extended vcswatch to also look at tags in git repositories.
Previously, it was solely paying attention to the version number in the top paragraph in debian/changelog, and would alert if that version didn’t match the package version in Debian unstable or experimental. The idea is that “UNRELEASED” versions will keep nagging the maintainer (via DDPO) not to forget that some day this package needs an upload. This works for git, svn, bzr, hg, cvs, mtn, and darcs repositories (in decreasing order of actual usage numbers in Debian. I had actually tried to add arch support as well, but that VCS is so weird that it wasn’t worth the trouble).
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Derivatives
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A lot of good things are happening lately for the Debian-based Parsix GNU/Linux operating system, and the distribution’s maintainers announced a few hours ago, May 29, 2016, the availability of new security fixes for supported releases.
Both the stable Parsix GNU/Linux 8.5 “Atticus” and the upcoming Parsix GNU/Linux 8.10 “Erik” operating system have received important security fixes for various core components, including expat, libgd2, libndp, ImageMagick, libidn, jansson, IceDove, libarchive, QEMU, Wireshark, librsvg, WebSVN, libxstream-java, xerces-c, swift-plugin-s3, and atheme-services.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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The Internet Of Things movement has attracted a lot of attention in recent years. Not just enthusiasts, but also major firms in the technology sector are working on developing new IoT initiatives. A Partnership between QNAP and Canonical will help optimize Ubuntu on NAS systems for Internet of Things applications.
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In part one of our rather lengthy review, we took a look at the bq Aquaris M10 Ubuntu tablet’s hardware. Suffice it to say, it perfectly played the role of a mid-range tablet. While the device had a few ups, like its lightweight design, bright display, and substantial battery, it would have been easily passed for a mediocre slab if not for the software running on it. In this round, we take a deeper look into what makes this tablet truly one of a kind, and almost literally too. This time, we take a dive into the alien world of Ubuntu Touch.
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IT’S NOT EVERY DAY that a smartphone crosses our desk running Canonical’s open source Ubuntu operating system.
The Linux-based OS already commands millions of installations across desktops and tablets the world over, and makes a welcome change from the endless run of Android-based devices. Anticipation levels were therefore high and, on first impressions, we believed we were in the presence of a truly desirable smartphone.
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The long-anticipated OTA-11 update for Ubuntu Phone and Ubuntu Tablet devices is just around the corner, and today we’ll have a quick look at what’s coming in the Web Browser app.
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I finally settled on the CanaKit Raspberry Pi 3 Complete Starter Kit (32 GB edition) which has everything needed to get started except for the display and a keyboard and mouse. It includes the Pi, case, power supply, HDMI video cable, and even heat sinks for the chips.
I looked at several keyboard and mouse options, even a really cool foldable keyboard. I ultimately chose an iPazzPort wireless combination keyboard and touchpad that is small and perfect for kids. It is designed for things like the Raspberry Pi, Android devices, and the Google smart TV. It has a rechargeable battery and a USB cable for that purpose. It is also less expensive than separate keyboard and mouse combinations.
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Phones
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Developers can find UniK on Github.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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As an operating system, Firefox OS has undergone a massive transformation in the past 24 months – it’s far more than just a web browser nowadays. But now Mozilla is looking to take Firefox to the next level by using it as a hub for a plethora of Internet of Things projects.
Mozilla is currently working on four IoT projects behind the scenes: Project Smart Home, Project Link, Project Sensor Web and Vaani. Each of the projects will deal with IoT technology in different ways, but all are aimed at making the end consumer’s home and devices smarter. In a blog post, Mozilla’s SVP of Connected Devices, Ari Jaaksi, posted: “Everything is connected around us. This revolution has already started and it will be bigger than previous technology revolutions, including the mobile smartphone revolution. Internet of Things, as many call it today, will fundamentally affect all of us.”
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Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)
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BSD
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Bhyve, the hypervisor developed by FreeBSD that supports running BSD/Linux/Windows guests, has initial graphics support.
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Openness/Sharing/Collaboration
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Are you interested in keeping track of what is happening in the open source cloud? Opensource.com is your source for news in OpenStack, the open source cloud infrastructure project.
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Open Hardware/Modding
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A recent message on Twitter about an open source 3D printed violin sent me in search of more information about Hovalin. Much of the 3D printed universe is about robots and drones, so seeing a violin in the mix caused me to pause and wonder more about this unique project. I reached out to husband and wife team, Kaitlyn and Matt Hova.
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Programming/Development
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The reason I’m sharing this is because over the last ten to fifteen years I’ve noticed a quiet crisis unfolding in software development leading to low quality applications, unhappy employees and unhappy users. Silver bullet solutions keep creeping into our awareness (Scrum, anyone?) and predictably keep letting us down.
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Travellers at Stockholm’s Arlanda airport were beset again with delays on Saturday afternoon after technical problems with flightplan management software.
“The flightplan management system is not working as it should,” Per Fröberg of Swedish air traffic control told Swedish newspaper, Aftonbladet.
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Microsoft’s Surface line, reported as one of its better earners in its most recent quarterly results, suffers from a bug which has come to be referred to as Sleep of Death.
When the Surface Pro 4 or the Surface tablet are put into sleep mode for a few hours or more, they are unlikely to wake up.
The devices have to be powered back on and this means there is a risk of data corruption.
This means that anyone who has left the system with files on which they are working open, has to shift through auto-saved versions, hoping against hope that one of those will mean that work is not lost.
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Microsoft stepped on the gas in its quest to drive Windows 7 and 8 users to Windows 10 over the past couple of weeks, rolling the upgrade out as a Recommended update. Watch out! The only behavior that could deny the Windows 10 upgrade before—closing the pop-up by pressing the X in the upper-right corner—now counts as consent for the upgrade, and worse, the upgrade installation can automatically begin even if you take no action whatsoever.
It’s nasty business, and it’s tricking legions of happy Windows 7 and 8 users into Windows 10. Over the past week, I’ve received more contact from readers about this issue than I have about everything else I’ve written over the rest of my career combined. But beyond merely burning bridges with consumers, these forced, non-consensual upgrades could have more insidious consequences.
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Science
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Persuading politicians and officials to ingest the fruits of new research and then to regurgitate them in the form of sensible policy is a frustrating process at the best of times. Policymaking is intangible, diffuse and shapeshifting. One result is that too little research with lessons for policymakers hits the target.
The government has recently performed a U‑turn on a policy that could have banned publicly funded academic researchers from campaigning for changes to the law. So this is a good moment to consider how to manage academics’ expectations while ensuring that their research has the biggest possible impact. Bearing in mind these 10 commandments – based on my own experience of policymaking – will help.
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Health/Nutrition
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What can we do about the powerful transnational agribusiness companies that have captured or at the very least heavily influence regulatory bodies, research institutes, trade agreements and governments? How can we assess the safety and efficacy of GMOs or their other technologies and products when narratives and decision-making processes have become distorted by these companies?
Through the ‘green revolution’ chemical-intensive model of agriculture these corporations and their powerful backers promoted and instituted, they have been able to determine what seeds are to be used by farmers, what is to be grown and what inputs are to be applied. This, in turn, has adversely affected the nutritional content of food, led to the over-exploitation of water and diminished drought resistance, degraded soil, undermined biodiversity, polluted the environment, destroyed farmers’ livelihoods and so much more: with 60 years’ farming experience behind him, Bhaskar Save outlined many of these impacts in his open letter to Indian officials some years back.
These powerful corporations increasingly hold sway over a globalised system of food and agriculture from seed to plate. And with major mergers within the agribusiness sector in the pipeline, power will be further consolidated and the situation is likely to worsen. While scientific innovation has a role to play in improving agriculture, the narrative about farming has been shaped to benefit the interests of this handful of wealthy, politically influential corporations whereby commercial interest trumps any notion of the public good.
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It’s impossible to talk about GMO ethics without considering how corporations like Monsanto use GMOs as means of control.
[...]
But safety issues are just the tip of the iceberg. Consumer rights, state rights and the overuse of “probably carcinogenic” pesticides like Roundup are all crucial aspects in this debate. They go hand in hand with the massive consolidation within the food industry and a lack of choice at the grocery store.
When biotech companies like Monsanto, Dow, Dupont and Syngenta create GMO seeds, they’re also creating entire systems of food production. By creating a suite of products designed to work together – seeds for crops engineered to withstand Roundup, a probably human carcinogen, for example – they’re able to control the entire farming cycle and block out competition. Not only that, but the explosion of herbicide-resistant seeds has given way to herbicide-resistant weeds, fueling the growth of “superweeds” and ensuring that farmers must continue to buy increasingly harsh chemicals, often from the same company, to compensate.
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The National Health Action Party issued warnings in 2013 about the potentially dangerous consequences of selling the NHS’ state owned blood plasma supplier, Plasma Resources UK (PRUK) to US private equity firm Bain Capital. Now we are issuing a warning again as it has been sold on.
PRUK was specifically brought into public ownership in 1975, by Dr David Owen, because of the risks associated with contaminated blood under for-profit conditions.
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Portland, Oregon is the latest place in the country gripped by unsafe levels of lead exposure. On Friday, Portland officials announced that the school district will shut off all drinking water for the rest of the school year following reports of high levels of lead in water samples from two schools.
Elevated levels of lead were found in six of the 56 drinking fountains and other water sources at the Creston School and eight of the 36 fountains and sinks at the Rose City Park campus, according to a local NBC news affiliate.
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Piecemeal, and at long last, chemical manufacturers have begun removing the endocrine-disrupting plastic bisphenol-A (BPA) from products they sell.
Sunoco no longer sells BPA for products that might be used by children under three. France has a national ban on BPA food packaging. The EU has banned BPA from baby bottles.
These bans and associated product withdrawals are the result of epic scientific research and some intensive environmental campaigning. But in truth these restrictions are not victories for human health. Nor are they even losses for the chemical industry.
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Security
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A few days ago, Parrot Security OS developer Frozenbox Network teased users on Twitter with the upcoming release of the long anticipated Parrot Security OS 3.0 “Lithium” distribution.
Based on the latest Debian GNU/Linux technologies and borrowing many of the packages from the Debian 8 “Jessie” stable repositories, Parrot Security OS 3.0 just received new Release Candidate (RC) ISO builds that users can now download and install on their personal computer if they want to get an early taste of what’s coming.
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The Release Candidate of Parrot Security OS 3.0 ‘Lithium’ is now available for download. The much-anticipated final release will come in six different editions with the addition of Libre, LXDE, and Studio editions. The version 3.0 of this Kali Linux alternative is based on Debian Jessie and powered by custom hardened Linux 4.5 kernel.
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Every time I start a discussion about how we can solve some of our security problems it seems like the topics of professional organizations and regulation are where things end up. I think regulations and professional organizations can fix a lot of problems in an industry, I’m not sure they work for security. First let’s talk about why regulation usually works, then, why it won’t work for security.
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Defence/Aggression
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The United States and the European Union poured millions into democracy promotion in Ukraine, which fed what Sakwa calls a monist (ethnically purist and pro-Western) conception of the Ukrainian nation, and this directly threatened the Russian geo-political position. As evidence., he quotes Putin’s remarks on May 24 2014 when he said that: “some of the events in Ukraine directly threaten our interests, first of all with regard to security. I”m talking about Ukraine’s potential accession to NATO. As I said earlier, such an accession could be followed by the deployment of a missile strike system in Ukraine, including Crimea. Should this happen it would have serious geopolitical consequences for our country. In fact, Russia would be forced out of the Black Sea territory, a region for legitimate presence in which Russia has fought for centuries.”
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Pellegrino’s book is a moving and grueling close-up look at the horrors experienced by the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki both on the day of the bombing and in the days and years afterward. I have the heart of a dried-up raisin but even I got a little teary in places.
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In the aftermath of NATO’s destruction of Libya, official rhetoric fluctuated between transition and reports of violence which were swiftly brushed aside as mere consequences of a country struggling to embrace a democratic framework.
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Although it is true that Obama has been the least successful president in some time in reducing nuclear stockpiles, there is one area where he has had success in reducing world tensions, and that is with regard to Iran. Moreover, the Iran breakthrough has implications for both nonproliferation and for conventional warfare. A war on Iran was one of the central objectives of the Cheney/ Neoconservative faction in the George W. Bush White House, and had their war of aggression on Iraq not gone sour, the would have likely gone on to Tehran.
The standing War Party in Washington has figured out how to pursue conventional wars of aggression in the face of public skittishness: They simply hype a country they want to plunder as an unconventional threat– i.e. as a country that could have nuclear weapons or even chemical and biological weapons.
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There are over 60,000 U.S. veterans who served in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan who are now sick and dying. But the Pentagon denies there is such a health crisis, and the Department of Veterans Affairs is denying these suffering men and women the benefits they desperately need and deserve.
These veterans are not the victims of enemy fire. They are suffering from medical ailments associated with the open-air burn pits that were constructed on over 230 military bases across Iraq and Afghanistan. These fiery pits, which were hastily dug in violation of the military’s own health and environmental regulations, were used to dispose of the mountains of trash created by war. Every type of refuse imaginable was thrown into these burn pits, including such toxic materials as plastics, metals, medical waste, batteries, tires, old ordnance and even human body parts.
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“Our defense contractors await your business.” That was the message behind Obama and Carter’s visits to Asia.
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President Obama went to Hiroshima, did not apologize, did not state the facts of the matter (that there was no justification for the bombings there and in Nagasaki), and did not announce any steps to reverse his pro-nuke policies (building more nukes, putting more nukes in Europe, defying the nonproliferation treaty, opposing a ban treaty, upholding a first-strike policy, spreading nuclear energy far and wide, demonizing Iran and North Korea, antagonizing Russia, etc.).
Where Obama is usually credited — and the reason he’s usually given a pass on his actual actions — is in the area of rhetoric. But in Hiroshima, as in Prague, his rhetoric did more harm than good. He claimed to want to eliminate nukes, but he declared that such a thing could not happen for decades (probably not in his lifetime) and he announced that humanity has always waged war (before later quietly claiming that this need not continue).
“Artifacts tell us that violent conflict appeared with the very first man. Our early ancestors having learned to make blades from flint and spears from wood used these tools not just for hunting but against their own kind,” said Obama.
“We may not be able to eliminate man’s capacity to do evil, so nations and the alliances that we form must possess the means to defend ourselves,” he added, leaping from a false claim about the past to a necessity to continue dumping our resources into the weapons that produce rather than avoid more wars.
After much in this higly damaging vein, Obama added: “But among those nations like my own that hold nuclear stockpiles, we must have the courage to escape the logic of fear and pursue a world without them. We may not realize this goal in my lifetime, but persistent effort can roll back the possibility of catastrophe.” He even said: “We’re not bound by genetic code to repeat the mistakes of the past. We can learn. We can choose. We can tell our children a different story. …” That’s right, but the U.S. President had already told a really bad one.
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America has a Donald Trump problem — one that its diversity will probably defeat, at least in the short term. But underlying that Donald Trump problem is a desperate insistence on clinging to the myth of American exceptionalism, with its more offensive parts even embraced in the mainstream. For the sake of the white men who’ve relied on those myths for their sense of dignity, but also to prevent future Trumps, it is time to start replacing that exceptionalist myth with something else.
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Memorial Day is exploited by politicians glorifying war and armed services recruiting new soldiers, but it should be a time to reflect on the ugly reality of warfare and the tragic valor of the combatants, says war correspondent Don North.
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Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair has hinted that he would refuse to accept the verdict of the highly anticipated Chilcot Inquiry into the 2003 invasion of Iraq if it concludes that he privately signed the country up for war while publicly claiming a final decision had not yet been made.
In an interview on the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show on Sunday, Blair rejected the idea that the growth of the so-called Islamic State (ISIS) was fueled by the Iraq War, stating, “I understand all the issues and we’ll debate them when we get to Chilcot, but this idea that all of this comes from the decision to remove Saddam [Hussein], you’ve got to go back into this and look at the roots of it.”
Marr then asked, “The big problem that people still think is that you planned and thought you were going to war, but didn’t tell us…. Will you accept Chilcot’s verdict on this as a fair assessment after all this time, all this evidence?”
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Samantha Power built her journalistic and academic career around human rights, criticizing powerful nations for their complicity in abuses and failure to stop acts of genocide.
Then she joined the Obama administration, where she currently serves as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
Early next month, Power will be receiving an award named for a man used to criticize quite harshly: former secretary of state Henry Kissinger, who has been implicated in a significant number of war crimes across the globe.
And she’ll be getting it from Kissinger himself.
The American Academy of Berlin’s Henry A. Kissinger Prize is awarded annually to a European or American diplomat.
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In Brazil the country’s largest newspaper has published a transcript of a secret recording leaked to the newspaper. The words recorded are the plot by the rich Brazilian elite, involving both the US-corrupted Brazilian military and Supreme Court, to remove the democratically elected president of Brazil under false charges in order to stop the investigations of the corrupt elites who inhabit Brazil’s senate and bring to an end Brazil’s membership in BRICS. The Russian-Chinese attempt to organize an economic bloc independent of Washington has now lost 20% of its membership.
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Michael Fallon is British Defence Secretary. He is adept at making the types of statements that epitomise the pro-neoliberal, militaristic rhetoric that people in the UK have become tired of.
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Never mind remembering the lessons of Vietnam – we’ve repressed even the bitter lessons of our most recent “past” conflict, the disastrous invasion and occupation of Iraq. No sooner had we fallen into that quicksand then we promptly forgot who pushed us in – which is why the authors of that disaster continue to function as foreign policy mavens and political seers whose reputations are considered sterling. The neocon clique, and any number of politicians of both parties who fulsomely supported that war, today act as if they have nothing to apologize for, and nothing to regret: far from being repentant, they are, if anything, proud of their advocacy, secure in the knowledge that “everyone” believed Iraq possessed “weapons of mass destruction,” and smug in the certainty that no one of any consequence has anything to gain by raising the subject.
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The late and lamented Rudy Rummel, a professor at the University of Hawaii and the acknowledged expert on the phenomenon of “democide,” estimated that governments murdered more than 260 million human beings in the 20th century alone. That figure excludes – and is six times as large as – military casualties in the century’s wars.
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In one of the defining moments in this year’s long contest for the Democratic nomination, Hillary Clinton cited admiration of Henry Kissinger, one of her predecessors as secretary of state, renowned for opening relations with communist China and for his Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating the end of the Vietnam War.
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On May 27, President Obama will become the first sitting president to visit Hiroshima, Japan, where at the end of World War II the U.S. became the first and only country to drop an atomic bomb. The president will use the occasion to revive attention on the need to rid the world of nuclear weapons.
Immediately, the critics assailed the president for going on an “apology tour.” The White House sought to calm the furor, assuring reporters that the president would not use the word “sorry.”
“We said that this is not about issuing an apology,” Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes told reporters on Thursday.
Why not apologize? The president will visit the 30-acre Peace Memorial Park in Hiroshima, located directly under the spot where the bomb exploded, with a museum displaying the charred belongings of the 100,000 people who perished, as everything with one mile of the bomb blast was entirely wiped out. The short inscription on the park’s memorial arch reads, in part: “We shall not repeat the evil.”
[...]
But now informed observers argue that the risks of a nuclear disaster are getting worse. Tensions are rising with both Russia and China, with the U.S. deploying forces near their borders. Nuclear stockpiles contain more than 15,000 warheads. As many as 1,000 remain on hair-trigger alert. U.S. security strategy still claims the right to use nuclear weapons first, a dangerous and dumb refusal to limit their use to actual deterrence. The U.S. just activated anti-ballistic missile system in Romania that the Russians say violates the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Agreement. President Obama has signed off on a modernization of both nuclear weapons and their delivery systems with a projected cost of $1 trillion over three decades that could very likely to trigger a new arms race.
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Foreign companies have made large investments in eastern Congo’s mines, buying from suppliers funding armed groups within the country. This type of foreign investment in the Congo’s extraction industry has led to a loss of at least $1 billion in resource revenue that could otherwise be used to reform the country’s security, health, and education sectors.
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Transparency/Investigative Reporting
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Some things just aren’t cool. One of those, according to our no-drama president, is ignorance.
“It’s not cool to not know what you’re talking about,” President Obama said during his recent Rutgers University commencement address. It was a swipe clearly intended for he-who-didn’t-need-to-be-named: Donald Trump, the likely Republican nominee for president.
Okay, no argument there.
But the Obama administration itself has been part of a different know-nothing problem. It has kept the news media — and therefore the public — in the dark far too much over the past 7 1/2 years.
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A scathing inspector general’s report this week was just the first in what is likely to be a series of official actions related to her private server stemming from the FBI, a federal courthouse and Capitol Hill.
Clinton’s presidential campaign has failed to quiet the furor over the issue, which has dogged her for more than a year.
In the next few weeks — just as the likely Democratic presidential nominee hopes to pivot towards a general election — it will face its toughest scrutiny yet.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature
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Singapore has raised concerns over transboundary air pollution at a United Nations (UN) meeting involving some 120 environment ministers in Africa last week, the Ministry for the Environment and Water Resources (MEWR) said on Sunday (May 29).
During the meeting, called the 2nd session of the UN Environment Assembly (UNEA-2), Singapore’s Dr Amy Khor said air pollution stunts economic development and has adverse impacts on human health.
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According to a fresh report from the World Health Organisation, the air in Finland is the third cleanest in the world, and one of the very cleanest parts of the world can be found in Finnish Lapland.
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A summary report of the initial findings will soon be provided to Indonesian authorities. The report is intended for the Indonesian authorities and therefore will not be made public. Upon further request of Indonesian authorities the Commission is ready to deploy a full advisory mission providing expertise and recommendations on the topics identified in the initial findings which recommend that the advisory mission focuses on advising the Government on improving the governance practices and modern fire surveillance. In addition, a small EU Civil Protection Team (2-3 experts) could be deployed upon invitation of the Indonesian authorities during the forest fires season to assist in coordinating activities during fire response operations.
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The risk that houses in some areas of Australia are likely to become uninsurable, dilapidated and uninhabitable due to climate change is kept hidden from those building and buying property along Australia’s coasts and in bushfire zones, a Climate Institute report says.
The report says there is untapped and unshared data held by regulators, state and local governments, insurers and banks on the level of risk, but that most homebuyers and developers are not told about the data and do not have access to it.
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Ten years ago this Sunday, one of the weirdest and most controversial disasters of the 2000s struck a densely populated area just outside the city of Sidoarjo in East Java, Indonesia. At 5:00 that morning, a slurry of dark gray mud burst from the soil and began oozing slowly across the landscape. Since that day, the flow of mud has never stopped or even paused.
Now, a decade into the eruption, an area of almost three square miles has been buried in mud up to sixty feet deep. At the center of a vast gray mudscape, the volcano continues to spew. More than forty thousand people have lost their houses, businesses, and land, and they can never go home.
In the wake of most volcanic eruptions, hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes, or other phenomena that are typically lumped under the contested “natural disaster” label, a tenth anniversary can be a good time to look back at how the recovery and healing happened.
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One man has died and scores of people been injured, including children, as lightning strikes hit several parts of Europe, including a park in Paris and a football pitch in Germany.
A bolt of lightning killed a man hiking in mountains in south-west Poland on Saturday. Storm lightning injured three others in the same region, and a 61-year-old man drowned in flash flooding.
In Germany, more than 30 people were taken to hospital in the western village of Hoppstädten when lightning struck at the end of a junior football match. Three adults were seriously injured, including the referee who was hit directly and had to be resuscitated before being airlifted to hospital.
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Speaking to an audience in California on Friday, presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump told the crowd “there is no drought” in their state.
Trump claimed there isn’t a real water shortage. Instead, he said, state officials are intentionally denying water to farmers in the middle of the state — choosing to reroute the water to the ocean to protect an endangered California fish called the delta smelt.
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The best storytelling about the fracking boom has come mostly from newspaper reporters who decided to write nonfiction books about real people and real events. Tom Wilber’s “Under the Surface,” Russell Gold’s “The Boom,” and Seamus McGraw’s “The End of Country,” present nonfiction accounts of the shale gas revolution and offer deep insights into the minds of people impacted by the industry.
Based on her research, Haugh believes the debate over shale gas drilling is about class. The ban on fracking in New York was the result of a concerted effort by “highly educated, politically liberal environmental activists,” she says in the Q&A. “In Pennsylvania, the conversation is completely different. … The environmental arguments that won over New York voters don’t fly there. For working class people with no economic security, that kind of idealism is an unaffordable luxury.”
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Duke Energy is facing serious regulatory battles in its home state of North Carolina, with climate-action groups doggedly trying to block the company’s planned fracked gas plant in Asheville and the state’s environmental agency recently deciding — at least temporarily — that all of the company’s coal ash impoundments must be excavated and the waste moved to safer dry storage.
But the power giant is fighting back with the help of friends in high places.
On the gas plant front, Duke Energy earlier this month asked the N.C. Utilities Commission to order NC WARN and The Climate Times to post a $50 million bond to continue their appeal of the commission’s approval of the company’s proposed $1 billion gas plant on the site of a shuttered coal plant near Asheville, citing a never-before-used provision of a 1963 state law allowing the utility to seek a bond from critics challenging a power plant approval. Though the bond is supposed to offset costs stemming from a delay in starting construction, Duke Energy has not shown any evidence that the appeal would lead to delays.
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Recently a Portland, Oregon school board voted to throw out textbooks that cast doubt on climate change. With an eye to making students more “climate literate,” schools are ditching materials that hem and haw about the human causes of global warming.
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What happens when an immovable object meets an unstoppable force? In the case of the fossil fuel industry meeting the growing force of the climate movement, the answer is “change!”
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From the Gulf Coast, to Colorado, Alaska, to Albany, communities are uniting to demand that fossil fuels stay in the ground, where they belong.
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A week before the action the Albany Break Free steering committee defined their basic message. Potentially explosive crude oil “bomb trains” roll through Albany and surrounding communities, polluting the air and contributing to the climate crisis. Primarily low-income communities of color are put at risk. The urgent need to address climate change means that fossil fuels have to be left in the ground and a transition made to a “twenty-first century renewable energy economy.” They called for an end to all new fossil fuel infrastructure, including pipelines, power plants, compressor stations, and storage tanks. And they called for a just transition away from fossil fuel energy with training and jobs for affected workers, so “no worker is left behind.”
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Environment and Indigenous rights organizations are indicating it’s going to be a long, hot summer of civil disobedience in British Columbia following a National Energy Board report released last week recommending conditional approval of Kinder Morgan’s $5.4 billion Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion project that allow for the transport of nearly a million barrels of bitumen per day from Alberta’s tar sands oil mines.
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Finance
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In the last few months basic income—an unconditional cash payment to every member of the population—has been getting more and more attention in the media and social networks. Three items are especially interesting.
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Recent graduates are struggling with a tough economy; let’s give them a leg up.
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No wonder Trump is afraid — a debate with Bernie Sanders would show who’s really on the side of working people.
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A Coca-Cola Visitor Center will still be off-limits, but an auditorium at Yosemite National Park named after Coke will now be permitted. Naming rights to roads are not up for grabs, but visitors could tour Bryce Canyon in a bus wrapped in the Michelin Man.
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The plan stirs up a fundamental debate about our public goods—what they are, who owns them, and how they should be managed.
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It is scorched-earth economic warfare, ordinarily referred to as neoliberalism.
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Great Britain is my adopted home. I have deep affection for this nation — for its people, for its great tradition of liberalism and for its commitment to justice and human rights. For its art, literature, theatre, music and film, its long record of groundbreaking scientific discoveries, its beautiful countryside, its National Health Service … I could go on.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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Senior Democratic National Committee (DNC) officials have rejected a request from Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders’s campaign to change the leadership of two crucial committees at the national convention this summer.
Jim Roosevelt and Lorraine Miller, co-chairs of the Rules and Bylaws Committee, dismissed a request to remove Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy and former Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank as co-chairmen of the convention’s platform and rules committees, respectively.
The campaign’s complaint, they wrote in a letter to Sanders lawyer Brad Deutsch, failed to allege a violation of the convention’s rules governing the conduct of elections or delegate selection.
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As this campaign has gone along, it seems to me that the 538 crew have at times gone beyond the realm of punditry into the realm of hackery—that is, not just treating their own opinions as though they were objective data, but spinning the data so that it conforms to their opinions.
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So from the beginning, 538 argued, Sanders had very little chance of getting the Democratic nomination, because if he showed any signs of winning, a Democratic establishment united against him would step in to “squash” him. If that’s not the definition of a “rigged” system, what is it?
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The following memo was written by a group of U.S. intelligence, diplomatic, and military veterans, calling on President Obama to expedite the FBI review of former Secretary of State Clinton’s alleged email security violations so the public can assess this issue in a timely fashion.
Clinton’s judgement — never mind the significant question of legality — is an important criterion which Americans must consider in choosing their next president.
Yeah, it is long, but sometimes important things are complex, and need to be explained clearly. That is especially true in the case of the Clinton Emails, where the media has failed in its job of explaining how classification works, and the significance of exposing classified material.
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Hillary Clinton is a lawyer, and while she’s slippery, she’s no dummy. She may have played dumb when asked earlier by reporters about her server’s hard drive being wiped clean of data before she turned it over to the FBI, saying, “What, like with a cloth or something? I don’t know how it works at all,” but she surely was involved in the deletion of her private emails — over 30,000 of which were reportedly erased.
And those erasures were made without any involvement of State Department security or legal officials. The decision, according to Clinton, on which emails were “private communications,” was made by her personal attorney, whose interest, by definition, was her and not the public or even national security for that matter.
As the Washington Post has reported, the Clintons went from being, as Hillary Clinton has said, “dead broke” upon leaving the White House in January 2000, to earning some $230 million by this year — a staggering sum of money even in a new Gilded Age of obscene wealth. Most of this money has been little more than influence buying by corporations and wealthy people trying to curry favor with a woman who was already Secretary of State, perhaps the second-most powerful position in the US government and whom many expected to become the next president after Obama.
The power couple’s two foundations, the Clinton Foundation and the Clinton Global Initiative, now together reportedly worth more than $2 billion, both function effectively as money-laundering operations providing salaries to Clinton family members and friends. And Hillary Clinton, particularly while serving as President Obama’s secretary of state, was in a perfect position to do favors for unsavory foreign leaders seeking to have their countries kept off of State Department lists of human rights violators, and for US businesses seeking lucrative business deals abroad. It’s those kinds of email conversations that would have benefitted from a private server, since US State Department official computers have dedicated back-up systems that would be hard or impossible to wipe, and are also by law subject to Freedom of Information inquiries from journalists and the public.
It beggars belief to think that Hillary Clinton wasn’t hiding such conversations when she had her private emails deleted from her server.
The FBI is known to be investigating Clinton’s private emails, with as many as 100 FBI personnel assigned to the investigation. Already, one key privately hired tech assistant who worked on Clinton’s private server, Bryan Pagliano, has become a cooperating witness, granted immunity from prosecution by the US Justice Department in that investigation (usually an indication that the FBI is expecting to indict someone else). Key Clinton aides, notably her top aide Huma Abedin, have also been interviewed by FBI agents, with the expectation that Clinton will be interviewed herself soon by federal agents. But there is no indication from the Justice Department or the FBI as to when, if ever, the results of that investigation will be released.
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Candidates must be able to glamorize war, rally the masses to believe war is necessary, rally the young to enlist in the military, promote nationalism, and jackboot countries to join war coalitions.
Candidates must be proficient in pandering to fear, using the words “terror” and “terrorism” at precisely the right moments and especially when a majority of people expresses war weariness.
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The Sanders’ campaign has remained on the whole anchored on key policy issues – free university education, free universal healthcare, redistribution of wealth by taxing the rich and financial capital, among others. The tone between the two Democratic contenders has become increasingly bitter, but Sanders made it clear that, despite the big differences, he would support Clinton if she becomes the Democratic nominee. But will his supporters follow him? Various polls show that in November a significant section of Sanders’ electorate will not vote for Clinton – and a smaller proportion might even vote for Trump.
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About a year after the launch of both Sen. Bernie Sanders’ and Donald Trump’s presidential campaigns, it’s easy to conclude that the anti-establishment backlash of 2016 was somewhat inevitable. The incredulity that many in the establishment felt when these two candidates first climbed the polls and took their respective primaries by storm has passed, and now that Trump has locked up the Republican nomination, nothing seems beyond the realm of possibility (including, terrifyingly enough, a Donald Trump presidency).
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Virginia’s party boy-turned-governor Terry McAuliffe, a longtime friend and confidant of the Clintons, is being investigated by the FBI and Department of Justice for potentially taking illegal campaign contributions.
The governor’s office told CNN, which broke the story, that it was not aware the investigation was under way and that it would cooperate if asked. Details are vague, but the investigation involves Chinese billionaire businessman Wang Wenliang, who now has the rare distinction of causing problems for both McAuliffe and Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton. It’s complicated—and it highlights just how much Clinton and McAuliffe’s questionable shared connections haunt their political dreams.
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Hillary Clinton may have suspended her political career temporarily when she became secretary of state. But the Clinton fundraising machine was in full swing and raising millions of dollars for the State Department under her watch, an analysis by The Daily Beast has found.
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A Navy sailor entered a guilty plea Friday in a classified information mishandling case that critics charge illustrates a double standard between the treatment of low-ranking government employees and top officials like former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and ex-CIA Director David Petraeus.
Prosecutors allege that Petty Officer First Class Kristian Saucier used a cellphone camera to take photos in the classified engine room of the nuclear submarine where he worked as a mechanic, the USS Alexandria, then destroyed a laptop, camera and memory card after learning he was under investigation.
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What of Trump’s reputation for being a liar? “I don’t lie, I mean I don’t lie. In fact, if anything, I’m so truthful that it gets me in trouble, OK? They say I’m too truthful. And, no I don’t lie,” he told Greta Van Susteren in February. As my colleagues Michael Kruse and Noah Weiland documented earlier this month in a lengthy piece, almost everything that comes out of Trump’s mouth is provisional. Give him a few minutes, a couple hours, or even several years, and he’ll reverse most of what he has previously said.
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Pollsters and pundits have lately begun to discuss the possibility that Donald Trump could best Hillary Clinton in the upcoming presidential election. But they haven’t yet said that if that happens, Trump would soon face impeachment, or that his choice of a vice-president the most important decision in this scenario of gathering nightmares.
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More than 40,000 people have signed a petition calling on the Democratic National Committee (DNC) to remove embattled chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who has faced increasing criticism over her leadership of the party in the 2016 election cycle.
The petition, organized by the grassroots group RootsAction.org, castigates Wasserman Schultz for what the group describes as an attempt to “minimize competition for her candidate Hillary Clinton” and for her actions in U.S. Congress as “a pro-militarist and corporatist tool of the high bidders.”
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There are mountains of scientific evidence that asbestos is extremely dangerous to humans. It causes cancer and kills more than 12,000 people every year.
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Donald Trump told an audience in Fresno that “there is no drought” in California. According to Trump, the state has plenty of water but it’s being held hostage by environmentalists in government. The idea that the government is engineering the drought was popularized by professional conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones.
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Donald Trump has repeatedly called climate change a hoax, often implicating the Chinese.
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Trump spent much of 2011 and 2012 raising questions about the legitimacy of Obama’s birthplace, feeding into conspiracy theories that he was born in Kenya and ineligible to be president.
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Paul Ryan is angry with Donald Trump, not so much for failing to espouse conservative values, as for exposing America’s dirty little secret—white rage: that deep-seated determination to block black progress in this country. For years, conservative politicians have relied upon the cover of high-minded principles and slogans—“protecting the integrity of the ballot box,” or waging a “war on drugs” — in order to cloak their determination to restrict African Americans’ citizenship rights. The racism fueling Trump’s campaign and his followers, however, is so overt, that it is undoing decades of hard covert work by the GOP.
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Trump told his supporters he believes Judge Curiel should be removed from the case, citing the fact that Curiel was appointed to the bench by President Obama. Trump also said he believes Curiel is “Mexican.” The crowd — which had previously shouted “build that wall” — booed loudly.
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Where does one begin when a major party nominee comes out and tells Californians that the drought they have been experiencing for several years does not exist? One place is with the woman who, if she did not start the march toward our current idiocracy, greatly accelerated it and continues to pour gasoline on its tinder pile. Sarah Palin was making the rounds for Trump this week, warming up the crowds, spewing what can only be described as some of the most moronic batsh*t the world has ever heard, with the possible exception of words uttered by the man himself.
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At a news conference on Tuesday, I asked Reps. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) and André Carson (D-Ind.) about Hillary Clinton’s having returned money from Muslims and refusing to meet with Arab and Muslim groups in her 2000 Senate run.
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Polls are notoriously unreliable on third-party campaigns, especially this early in an election year, when low name recognition understates appeal. But it looks as if the Libertarians could easily take 5 to 10 percent of the total vote and more in key states. Almost all of this will come at the expense of Donald Trump.
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Last summer when I began pointing out the parallels between white supremacist tactics, fascist movements and the rhetoric of Donald Trump I felt like a lone voice in the wind. Now the concern that Trump is bringing a populist form of fascism to America is bouncing around the mainstream, from the Village Voice to the Brookings Institute. Of course, last summer I thought the Trump crazy-train would derail by Thanksgiving as Bush or Rubio became the rational choice of the Republican Party. I have never been so wrong in my life. I completely underestimated the number of deluded people willing to dive into a cult of personality. They aren’t a silent majority, they are a very noisy minority. A very noisy white minority.
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Devon and Cornwall Police has said it will hand the investigation of alleged electoral fraud by the Conservative Party over to another force.
The police were called on to investigate whether the party had committed fraud by failing to disclose expenses related to its election battle bus in constituencies including Camborne and Redruth, where Tory MP George Eustice was re-elected, and North Cornwall where Scott Mann won the seat for the party.
The newly elected Police and Crime Commissioner, Alison Hernandez, has also been caught up in the scandal, as last year she was the election agent Torbay MP Kevin Foster, and signed the campaign’s spending return which did not include the expenses.
Devon and Cornwall’s Chief Constable, Shaun Sawyer, said: “Following a programme aired by Channel 4 on 20 and 21 April, the force received allegations relating to improper electoral campaign spending returns in Devon and Cornwall in the 2015 general election.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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Despite the latest frontal attack on the grassroots boycotts, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement for Palestinian freedom by church member Hillary Clinton, and intense lobbying by representatives of the Israeli government with church delegates, the United Methodist Church continued its support of Palestinian rights at its General Conference in Portland last week.
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As copyright holders try to make copyrighted content harder to find, many send infringement reports to Google. According to the company’s Transparency Report the top ten targets are focused on file-hosting, site unblocking, and music downloads. Google has received a staggering 70 million complaints about them – in the last year alone.
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After the murders at Charlie Hebdo last year, the public intellectual Timothy Garton Ash — once a dashing foreign correspondent, long since a scholar amid the spires of Oxford — issued an appeal to news organizations: Publish the offending cartoons, all of you together, and in that way proclaim the vitality of free speech.
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Defending free speech, alas, takes more than standing up for science, sound argument and brave eloquence
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The same speech rights that entitle us to put our views in the public space demand of us to engage our interlocutors on the content of their criticism of our work, writes Eusebius McKaiser.
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The Right2Know Campaign is highly dismayed by the SABC’s decision not to show footage of people burning public institutions in any of its news bulletins. This is a form of self-censorship and it’s unjustifiable.
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Privacy/Surveillance
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Holder went on to say that Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor, should serve time in jail if he is ever brought back to America because “harmed American interests.”
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Former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder says Edward Snowden performed a “public service” by triggering a debate over surveillance techniques, but still must pay a penalty for illegally leaking a trove of classified intelligence documents.
“We can certainly argue about the way in which Snowden did what he did, but I think that he actually performed a public service by raising the debate that we engaged in and by the changes that we made,” Holder told David Axelrod on “The Axe Files,” a podcast produced by CNN and the University of Chicago Institute of Politics.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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THOUSANDS OF workers stand for up to 12 hours straight in freezing-cold, foul-smelling factories–aching, hurting, gasping for air, struggling to go on until their next bathroom break–while they relentlessly pull, cut and jab at dozens of chickens churning down the line every minute at dangerous speeds, repeating the same, intensive body-motions more than 20,000 times a day.
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Well, I started working on the Confederate over 15 years ago, as an art project, first by recoloring it red, black and green for the black nationalism colors.
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Why are so many Americans gripped by fear? Fear of terrorism, fear of immigrants, fear of the deficit, fear that the government will take away guns, fear of socialism, gay rights, and women’s rights. Despite, the Boston Marathon bombings and the mass shooting in San Bernardino, America has not been attacked by foreign terrorists in fourteen years, yet the right is deathly afraid of terrorists. It’s their number one concern. Number two is the problem of immigrants even though America is a country of immigrants. Meanwhile, the deficit has shrunk to less than 3% of GDP yet Republicans claim the deficit is bankrupting the country. The right to own a gun is written into the Constitution, yet gun-owners are afraid background checks are a step down a slippery slope to government seizing their weapons. Trump claims Hillary will repeal the Second Amendment.
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“I witnessed the entire incident. When attacked, Amos ran all the way to the Fairprice supermarket. The man who assaulted him and his girlfriend waited outside the supermarket for him, and when he came out they grabbed him by the neck and dragged him all the way to a Japanese restaurant. Many people witnessed the incident but none came forward to help, except a Caucasian man. He asked the aggressor to let Amos go, but the aggressor just ignored him. Amos managed to get free when the aggressor held him with one hand and used the other to call his gang members on the phone.”
The 17-year-old blogger is facing trial in Court and faces six charges of intending to wound the feelings of Muslims or Christians – via five videos and a photo – and two counts of failing to report to the Jurong Police Division for investigations. He is out on a $5000 bail.
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Netanyahu was questioned under caution – as someone who might be charged with a crime – in December 2015 by Israel Police’s Lahav 433 fraud investigation unit.
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Hungary’s Viktor Orbán got there first, beating the drums of fear at the prospect of reincarnated Ottoman hordes streaming through Europe in an Islamic remake of a modern continent. With the British referendum on the EU fast approaching, the demonic Turk is again taking the centre stage in terms of terrifying metaphor.
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Given that labour conditions in global supply chains have been in the public spotlight for over two decades, it is no surprise that the topic ‘decent work in global supply chains’ is on the agenda of this month’s 105th session of the International Labour Conference (ILC). However, it can be argued that the accompanying report is a missed opportunity. Whilst it is a thorough assessment of the status quo regarding labour rights and working conditions in global supply chains, it does little to move the debate forward.
It is a well-known fact that western companies at the top of the global supply chain tree (called ‘lead firms’) not only outsource their production through global supply chains, but also their potential legal liability. They therefore reduce both their costs and their responsibilities.
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Dr Cocco said that the brain scan appointment could have led to life-saving treatment.
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British people are not demanding more transparency from the intelligence services as loudly as Americans, the former director of the US National Security Agency (NSA) and CIA has said.
Michael Hayden played a pivotal, leading role in American intelligence until he was replaced as director of the CIA shortly into the presidency of Barack Obama.
In a wide-ranging talk on the fourth day of the Hay festival, Hayden addressed CIA torture, targeted killings, what he thinks about Edward Snowden and how Facebook is perhaps a greater threat to privacy than government.
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More than 4,300 federal inmates were kept in prison beyond their scheduled release dates from 2009 to 2014 — some of them for an extra year or more, according to a report released on Tuesday that highlighted wide confusion in the prison system.
The findings by the Justice Department’s inspector general are a potential embarrassment for the United States Bureau of Prisons at a time when the Obama administration has assailed what it says are unfair and unduly harsh sentences for many inmates, particularly minorities and nonviolent offenders.
While it is unusual for an inmate to be held past his sentence, the consequences “can be extraordinarily serious,” the report said. The delayed releases “deprive inmates of their liberty,” and have led to millions of dollars in added prison costs and legal settlements with former inmates, it concluded.
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We have 5 percent of the world’s population and 25 percent of its prison population. More than 60 percent of the 2.2 million incarcerated are people of color. If these poor people were not locked in cages for decades, if they were not given probationary status once they were freed, if they had stable communities, there would be massive unrest in the streets. Mass incarceration, along with debt peonage, evictions, police violence and a judicial system that holds up property rights, rather than justice, as the highest good and that denies nearly all of the poor a trial, forcing them to accept plea bargains, is one of the many tools of corporate oppression.
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A federal court has sided with a domestic violence victim who was treated like a criminal after a prosecutor threw her in jail for refusing to testify that her abusive boyfriend hit her in the face, according to court documents filed Friday with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.
Plaintiff Kristin Loupe was called as a witness to testify against her then-boyfriend David Adams during a bond hearing in January 2014. She said that during a domestic fight, he hurt her arm “in a dispute that went too far.” When Robin O’Bannon, the Ascension Parish Assistant District Attorney, pushed for more details about the abuse and repeatedly asked whether Loupe was hit in the face, Loupe would not confirm whether that had happened.
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This will be the 105th session of the International Labour Conference, but how many people know what it is and why it’s important?
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The wave of revolutionary politics that Bernie Sanders and his supporters are riding can be traced back to George W. Bush. When Bush decided to Invade Iraq in 2003 he ignited a counter protest movement of young activists that the country had not seen since the Vietnam War. The activism continued through the second Bush election when many felt inspired by Senator John Kerry’s run for president as a well-known anti-war advocate. A presidential run that failed for many reasons, one of which being Kerry positioned himself as anti-war, yet voted in favor of the Iraq invasion.
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SWEDISH police have blamed Scandinavian teenage girls’ “Nordic alcohol culture” and Western behaviour for a steep rise in sex attacks carried out by migrants.
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Visitors to Cincinnati Zoo have blamed the parents of a boy who fell into the gorilla enclosure – forcing staff to shoot and kill the rare 400-lb animals.
As zoo officials explained that they had no alternative but to take the reluctant decision to kill the animal, a wave of outrage and anger began to focus on the as yet unidentified parents of the four-year-old, who was captured on video in the ape’s enclosure.
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In the last five years, Ahmed Mansoor, a human rights activist in the United Arab Emirates, has been jailed and fired from his job, along with having his passport confiscated, his car stolen, his email hacked, his location tracked and his bank account robbed of $140,000. He has also been beaten, twice, in the same week.
Mr. Mansoor’s experience has become a cautionary tale for dissidents, journalists and human rights activists. It used to be that only a handful of countries had access to sophisticated hacking and spying tools. But these days, nearly all kinds of countries, be they small, oil-rich nations like the Emirates, or poor but populous countries like Ethiopia, are buying commercial spyware or hiring and training programmers to develop their own hacking and surveillance tools.
The barriers to join the global surveillance apparatus have never been lower. Dozens of companies, ranging from NSO Group and Cellebrite in Israel to Finfisher in Germany and Hacking Team in Italy, sell digital spy tools to governments.
A number of companies in the United States are training foreign law enforcement and intelligence officials to code their own surveillance tools. In many cases these tools are able to circumvent security measures like encryption. Some countries are using them to watch dissidents. Others are using them to aggressively silence and punish their critics, inside and outside their borders.
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This report describes a campaign of targeted spyware attacks carried out by a sophisticated operator, which we call Stealth Falcon. The attacks have been conducted from 2012 until the present, against Emirati journalists, activists, and dissidents. We discovered this campaign when an individual purporting to be from an apparently fictitious organization called “The Right to Fight” contacted Rori Donaghy. Donaghy, a UK-based journalist and founder of the Emirates Center for Human Rights, received a spyware-laden email in November 2015, purporting to offer him a position on a human rights panel. Donaghy has written critically of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) government in the past,1 and had recently published a series of articles based on leaked emails involving members of the UAE government.
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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A new proposal by House Republicans would effectively put an end to net neutrality while slashing funding for the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The legislation would reduce the agency’s funding by more than 17 percent, likely leaving the agency crippled and incapable of enforcing its regulations.
[...]
Over the past two years, Rogers has received more than $25,000 in campaign contributions from the telecom industry, according to OpenSecrets.org, a resource for federal campaign contributions.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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The first agreement on how to manage relationships between a United Nations organisation and non-governmental actors, such as industry, philanthropic organisations and public interest groups, was adopted on 28 May by the World Health Assembly. The framework, which had been discussed for several years, was hailed as historic by many countries, but met a mixed reaction from those primarily concerned.
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Trademarks
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Chief Judge Kozinski, the well-known libertarian, is the author of the excellent “Trademarks Unplugged” article. Nominative fair use is different from the classic descriptive fair use defense because the alleged infringer is essentially using the trademark of another to refer to the trademark owner. The classic descriptive fair use defense is ordinarily utilized when an alleged infringer is using the trademark of another to fairly describe the alleged infringer’s goods or services. However, nominative fair use could even apply to a fanciful mark because the alleged infringer is trying to directly refer to the trademark owner itself.
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Posted in America, Patents at 5:11 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: New patent stories and even extensive coverage at PBS, which dedicated a whole program to these matters but failed to address the core issue, which is software patenting
IN A WORLD or a society so overly obsessed with brands the problem and overt hostility of patent trolls is hardly grasped by most people until some troll like VirnetX sues and wins against Apple (huge amount of money).
Earlier today a question arose: “When will Apple finally become a key player in the patent reform movement?”
The context was this article from a site that glamourises Apple patents (especially when Apple attacks other companies). It has just said: “The California Institute of Technology has filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Broadcom and Apple (and Avago Technologies owned by Broadcom). The patent infringement lawsuit concerns Apple’s iPhones beginning with the iPhone 5, the iPad, MacBook Air, Apple Watch and more. Apple’s use of Broadcom’s technology is using IRA/LDPC encoders and/or decoders invented by the California Institute of Technology. In this lawsuit, Apple is drawn in by virtue of using Broadcom Wi-Fi products. This week AirPort Extreme and Time Capsule were pulled from U.S. Apple Stores. Whether this is due to next-gen versions of these product arriving next month or complications related to this lawsuit is unknown at this time.”
“The subject of parasitic elements in the patent system is gradually becoming mainstream.”Apple likes software patents and other overly broad patents… until it gets sued itself, along with Broadcom in this case. We are not suggesting that the California Institute of Technology is a patent troll per se, but as we explained many times in the past (in relation to other US universities), the practice is using tax money or government subsidies to acquire patents and then make products artificially more expensive for everyone (by litigation or royalties) is neoconservative and growingly unjust. Some people make a killing, whereas the rest of the people pay the price.
The subject of parasitic elements in the patent system is gradually becoming mainstream. For instance, titled “U.S. innovators dogged by money-grubbing ‘patent trolls’,” this new show from PBS is summarised as follows: “The U.S. economy is driven by innovation, but unwelcome “patent trolls” are gunking up the system. Patent reform bills sit idle in Congress as the “trolls” set up companies for the sole purpose, critics say, of shaking down inventors while never creating anything. “We just have to write ‘em a check so they’ll go away,” says one disgusted app maker. Economics correspondent Paul Solman reports.”
Ante Wessels from FFII, writing about “software patent trolls” (combining patent trolls and software patents), remarked on the TTIP the other day as follows:
Citizens in Europe and elsewhere are harassed by software patent trolls, and experience issues regarding sequential innovation, remixing, and access to knowledge and culture. The FFII has argued that the EU should bring its IP law into line with human rights obligations. [4] TTIP may undermine this through exportation of EU law.
The Linux Foundation, which is well funded by patent aggressors (large ones) and software patents lobbyists, has become rather useless when it comes to activism against software patents. It did, however, publish two posts about Newegg’s fight against patent trolls [1, 2, 3, 4]. One is a video and another is an article that says: “As Lee Cheng explained in his keynote speech at the Collaboration Summit held March 29-31 in Lake Tahoe, California, fighting patent trolls as part of his job at Newegg Inc. is a natural progression from his earliest legal involvement in civil rights advocacy.”
“Some circles fail not only to attribute this to software patents but also won’t mention patent trolls.”It is worth noting that Newegg deals with software patents in this case. This is very typical and this debate ought to focus on software patents, not patent trolls.
A large Web site for realtors covered the matter just under a week ago and noted that “NAR took a forceful step against patent trolls last week by filing a petition with the U.S. Patent Office challenging the validity of patent claims by a company that’s been threatening infringement lawsuits against several real estate companies.”
This, again, is about software patents. Some circles fail not only to attribute this to software patents but also won’t mention patent trolls. For example, not even once does IAM say "patent trolls" in relation to the Eastern District of Texas litigation, instead choosing to just remark on raw numbers and mentioning Alice as follows: “One of the stories of the year so far has undoubtedly been the dramatic fall in US patent litigation filings in the first quarter. There were 947 from the beginning of January until the end of March, down from 1,554 the year before. It seems likely that the introduction of heightened pleading requirements last December had an impact, as plaintiffs rushed to file new suits last November before the new rules were introduced. The first full year since the Supreme Court’s Alice decision may also have had an effect as potential plaintiffs become more accustomed to a far greater level of uncertainty in infringement litigation.”
“We continue to argue that the best way to tackle trolls is to limit patent scope, especially when it comes to abstract software ideas (as per Alice).”Those who spent resources accumulating data and charting this data regarding litigation are falling on deaf ears when it comes to IAM, which merely tries to garner sympathy for trolls this way and occasionally bashes Alice (grounds for invalidating software patents in the US).
IAM never speaks about trolls [1, 2], but it does mention “NPEs” in this other new piece: “Elsewhere, we explore how the growing threat of fee shifting is changing the calculations in US patent litigation and explain why NPEs now have no choice but to rethink their established business models. Look out too for our annual listing of every entity that owns 1,000-plus active US patents. With plenty more besides, including a special management report on issues affecting FRAND and standard-essential patents, subscribers will be kept busy right up until issue 79 appears at the end of July.”
Watch how IAM calls trolling “established business models.” It’s more like a Mafia’s modus operandi and IAM’s bias is rather revealing here.
We continue to argue that the best way to tackle trolls is to limit patent scope, especially when it comes to abstract software ideas (as per Alice).
“Members of Congress who are asked by lobbyists to annul or weaken Alice are essentially asked not only to disallow patent reform but to actively make matters worse.”“Presentation last week on Alicestorm patent eligibility forecast,” one person wrote, noting: “Lots of good data.”
“This is an extended an annotated version of my presentation at AIPLA Spring 2016 meeting,” wrote the author himself after he had spent a lot of time accumulating data and charting data about Alice invalidations (we covered this many times before).
Members of Congress who are asked by lobbyists to annul or weaken Alice are essentially asked not only to disallow patent reform but to actively make matters worse. █
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Posted in Europe, Patents at 4:25 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Publicado en Europa, Patentes at 8:20 pm por el Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Source: Reporters Without Borders
Sumario: BlueCoat, que la EPO usa para oprimir a sus empleados en sus premisas Europeas, acaba de ajustar más y hacerse más intrusiva y los empleados pueden estar en riesgo
EL AÑO pasado escribimos acerca de la relación entre BlueCoat y la EPO. Algunas personas ya lo saben, pero otras no. BlueCoat es (por lo menos era) usada para espiar y censurar a los empleados de la EPO, comoal principio sospechamos en aquel entonces (más tarde esto nos fué confirmado). Dimos un marco de referencia acerca BlueCoat en aquel entonces. Es militarizado, simplemente como Control de Riésgos. Hay varios elementos miltitarizaodos en la EPO bajo Battistelli y cada vez esta empeorándo más, al punto donde un hombre en traje paranoico tiene media docena de guarda espaldas, que cuestan una fortuna.
“Hay varios elementos miltitarizaodos en la EPO bajo Battistelli y cada vez esta empeorándo más, al punto donde un hombre en traje paranoico tiene media docena de guarda espaldas, que cuestan una fortuna.”
“Por favor difunda esta mala noticia que leí en Twitter,” nos escribió una persona el día de hoy. Es de una fuente confiable.
“BlueCoat,” nos informaron, “la compañía que hace equipo TLS MitM usado por gobiernos [Y LA EPO] para violar los derechos humanos, tiene ahora una REAL UNRESTRICTED CA.”
Por favor difundan esto, realmente son malas noticias.
“BlueCoat es utilizado por la OEP para filtrar el tráfico web (al menos lo fue en 2013/2014),” nuestra fuente nos dijo. Esto es algo que hemos podido verificar de forma independiente. “A partir de ahora todas estas personas (bastardos) pueden interceptar (como Man-in-the-middle, MitM) y leer (posiblemente), sin que siquiera se da cuenta también tráfico https: //, ya que el navegador va a confiar en ellos, porque tienen un verdadero certificado sin restricciones -como su banco, y la propagación de modo sucesivamente .please esto realmente malas noticias.
“He aquí algunas links.”
Para que quede claro: BlueCoat, la compañía que hace el equipo TLS MitM presuntamente utilizado por govs para violar los derechos humanos, tiene ahora un verdadero UNRESTRICTED CA.
— Filippo Valsorda (@FiloSottile) May 26, 2016
BlueCoat ahora tiene una CA firmada por Symantec https://t.co/8OXmtpT6eX
He aqui como deshacernos de ella https://t.co/NDlbqKqqld pic.twitter.com/mBD68nrVsD
— Filippo Valsorda (@FiloSottile) May 26, 2016
Gracias Filippo.
Network equipo existe que puede leer tráfico https (usualmente regulado) compañías. Esto puede descifrar lo que sea. https://t.co/rVwBJeA7TS
— Kenn White (@kennwhite) May 26, 2016
Este tweet ahora borrado dijo: “fabricante del dispositivo de interceptación red concedió una autoridad de certificación capaz de MitM HTTPS en cualquier ordenador.”
“Solución”, nos dice, “parcialmente, pero quizás no para mala suerte en la oficina”, es la siguiente. “Así es cómo UNTRUST que,” aparentemente cree que nuestra fuente, a pesar de que en sí mismo puede despertar sospechas desde dentro de la Oficina. Esto puede haber prolongado durante bastante tiempo porque, en palabras de la entrada en el blog: “Este mes muy interesante apareció, al parecer generada en septiembre de 2015:” Blue Coat Servicios Públicos de CA intermedia “, firmado por Symantec. (No hay certificados firmados por esta entidad emisora han alcanzado los registros de CT o Censys hasta ahora.) “
Representantes de los empleados de la EPO, aunque acosados y reprimidos, puedan desear reportar esto a las autoridades Europeas, la clase de grupos con los que la EPO se asocia. Bajo Battistelli, en la tristemente Eponia, los derechos humano no son respetados más que en Bahrain.
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Posted in Europe, Patents at 4:20 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Publicado en Europa, Patentes at 7:52 pm por Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Megalomania y paranoia no están lejos una de la otra
Sumario: Battistelli esta destruyéndo lo que queda de la reputación de la EPO (después de las décadas que le costó a ella construírla) mientras los medios continúan escrutinando su desastroso régimen
A PESAR de un esfuerzo para mantener un perfil bajo, la EPO está recibiéndo atención no-deseada de parte de la TV Europea, de políticos Europeos, e incluso autoridades Croatas. Hay mucho más por venir de acuerdo a nuestras fuentes. Mientras tanto, a juzgar por este artículo de esta mañana, la esfera de patentes en la EPO cae bajo fuego de nuevo. Para citar:
En mayo, un récord de 65.000 personas de 30 países y 32 organizaciones han respaldado la denuncia emitida a la Oficina Europea de Patentes debido a la aprobación de una patente acerca del tomate descubierto en América del Sur y cultivada por métodos tradicionales para Syngenta.
El tomate fue aceptado como una “invención” en agosto de 2015, con EP1515600 patente, que describe además una “ruta de los flavonoides en el método de producción y la domesticación del tomate.” Esto le da a la empresa suiza Syngenta el poder sobre todas las plantas con las características mencionadas , incluyendo las semillas e incluso frutas y alimentos derivados de ellos.
“Este llamado” invención “, sin embargo, no es más que un cruce de tomates originarios de Perú y Chile, con las variedades cultivadas actualmente en los países industrializados”, dijo por correo electrónico a La Gran Época María Carrascosa, de la asociación Red de Semillas, que se ha unido a la coalición internacional “contra las patentes sobre las semillas”.
Debería haber movimiéntos similares contra las patentes de software en la EPO. Esto se relacióna con la UPC y nos estamos enterando de que hay un trabajo de organización contra ella (aparentemente en vias de materializarse, esperamos).
Acerc de la historia de la bicicleta presidencial (actualizada tres veces hasta ahora), unapersona pregunta: “¿Por qué una (supuesta) manipulación de los frenos es materia para todos? No me puedo imaginar BB [Battistelli] frenado para cualquier persona o cualquier cosa … “
Incluso actualmente hay un artículo entero acerca de ello, publicado temprano por The Register. Para citar algunos fragmentos: “Cada CEO sabe que es imposible de ser querido por todos. Pero cuando el personal empieza a recortar sus frenos, tal vez es hora de considerar seguir adelante.
“El presidente de la Oficina Europea de Patentes (EPO), Benoit Battistelli, ya ha estado en el extremo receptor de una censura oficial de su administración, una serie de huelgas, varios informes de noticias muy críticos, y un margen de confianza del cero por ciento. Pero un anuncio enviado a todo el personal el miércoles derribó a todos.
“Daño deliberado a la propiedad del Presidente,” lean el sujto de un correo electrónico envíado por el vice presidente de la EPO Željko Topić y visto por The Register.”
Aquí un hecho nuevo. Battistelli aparentemente tiene al presente al menos de seis (6) ¨Guardaespaldas¨. Eso es una locura y no es de extrañar que sea tan caro. Para citar: “Eso no es todo. Según los informes, la EPO ha contratado recientemente a no menos de seis guardaespaldas para proporcionar “protección personal” de Battistelli durante seis meses para que la suma de € 550.000 ($ 615.000).
“La ironía de la EPO para pagar cientos de miles de euros para proteger a Battistelli de sus propio empleados, mientras se corta de los salarios y beneficios de los representantes del personal que se levantarón contra sus planes de reorganización no se han perdido en la gente.
“Increíblemente, sin embargo, a pesar de las protestas cada vez mayores contra Battistelli y su equipo ejecutivo varias reuniones del Consejo de Administración de la EPO se centrarón exclusivamente en la forma de superar la ruptura de la comunicación personal y la administración, Battistelli sigue negándose a ceder un centimetro.
“A pesar de ser dicho que arregle la situación los problemas escalaron desde Marzo, además Battistelli ha propuesto reformas que han enfurecido aún más personal. Ahora están planeando aún más protestas que tendrán lugar durante la máxima competición anual de PR de la organización, el Premio Inventor Europeo de junio de EPO”.
“Vale la pena explicar que a la EPO le ha sido otorgada status sobernao por la Comisión Europea, he aquí por que las leyes locales no son aplicables y su presidente tiene un status casi igual al de una cabeza de estado (uno totalitario).”
–Anonymous
Esto es publicidad muy negativa para la EPO. “La EPO también califica No. 1 en tener el Presidente Más Impopular,” escribió Patent Buddy, talvez aludiéndo a la tonteríá de IAM (también publicada temprano hoy).
Mirando a algunos comentarios en este artículo, no hay simpatía alguna por Battistelli. Una persona dice: “Hay una línea en HHGG acerca de “esperando por el…precio correcto”. Botaría a toda la gerencia, se supone que ellos aseguren que cosas como esta nunca ocurran.”
Otro comentario dice: Vale la pena explicar que a la EPO le ha sido otorgada status sobernao por la Comisión Europea, he aquí por que las leyes locales no son aplicables y su presidente tiene un status casi igual al de una cabeza de estado (uno totalitario).
Entonces se resalta el número de guardaespaldas: “SEIS Guardias Pretoriános?
“Asumo que significa que tiene protección todo el día y más de un guardaespaldas gran parte del tiempo. Al parecer están preocupados por un equipo que viene por él, no un solo individuo descontento”.
Muchas bromas sigue: ¨Buen trabajo nadie trató de asesinar al VP¨.
“Quiero decir si él necesita guardaespaldas, seguramente una bicicleta no es una opción.”
–Anonymous
“Eso es salirse del tópico”
Aqui otro chiste: “¿Tienen bicicletas sus guardaespaldas, y si es así como exáctamente eso trabaja?
“¿Lo cubren de lado a lado? ¿Lo siguen detras desde una distancia segura?
“Quiero decir si él necesita guardaespaldas, seguramente una bicicleta no es una opción.”
Finalmente: “De ahora en adelante, él usará una biciclea a prueba de balas.”
Hay más por venir en el camino de Battistelli en un sentido público negativo. Lo más que se trata a sí mismo como victima, lo más peor es para él.
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Posted in Deception, Europe, Patents at 4:15 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Publicado en Decepción, Europa, Patentes at 9:30 am por el Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Es como preguntar a Les Echos acerca de la EPO en medio de distracciónes ceremonialesdonde un montón de Dinero cambia de manos
Referencia (investigarse a sí mismo)
Sumario: Los caraduras de la ‘revista’ IAM, viejo aliado de la EPO, da la impresión a la gente de que en la EPO todo esta bien y dandy aunque claramente ese no es el caso
Hay un montón de como distraer y de que distraer actualmente en la EPO. También hay un gran cantidad de dinero destinado a relaciónes públicas (casi un millón de dólares, €880,000 para ser preciso, gastado en ‘ayuda de afuera’ para una firma que paga a la ¨revista¨ IAM).
“Una muestra limitada puesta en tál encuesta es suficiéntemente malo; lo que es peor es que ellos son lectores exclusivos (selecciónados) de un sitio pro-EPO, ¿así que cuán confíable eso puede ser?”
El cabildeo de la EPO para la UPCactualmente es una cosa diariayel sr. Battistelli tiene uno bueno (efectivo) trapo de propaganda en IAM, que acaba de salir conesta tonteríá. Escoger un ángulo pro-EPO en el titular, es una especie de extraña cherry picking de datos. “El resultado repite lo que la oficina hizó con su encuesta del año pasado”, dice, pero recuerda que la EPO tiene una historia reciente de ‘correo basura’ en el juego de apuntalar/arreglar sus propias encuestas [1, 2].
“Hemos recibido más de 600 respuestas en total,” dice IAM varios párrafos más abajo (de esto no se hace hincapié, porque este número es relativamente bajo). Simplemente hay más de 10 veces ese número de empleados de EPO - ¿a quién quieren engañar?-. Una muestra limitada puesta en tál encuesta es suficiéntemente malo; lo que es peor es que ellos son lectores exclusivos (selecciónados) de un sitio pro-EPO, ¿así que cuán confíable eso puede ser? Probablemente tan confiable como una investigación de Facebook acerca de su propia censura de temas de moda o una sonda del Pentágono acerca de sus propios crímenes de guerra (de ahí la referencia anterior).
“Con ayuda de FTI Consulting, CRG y aparentemente guardaespaldas/agencias de seguridad (contratos secrétos, pase de Con ayuda de FTI Consulting, CRG y aparentemente guardaespaldas/agencias de seguridad (contratos secrétos, pase de grandes cantidades de riquezas a manos privadas) La EPO no es más una oficina de patnetes pero una cada vez más maleánte agencia de propaganda que ataca agresivamente a quienes se atrevan a cuestionara su propaganda”
Esto es algo a lo que la gente se ha acostumbrado pero que no está preparada para aceptar. La EPO es una organización maliciosa admite que hay una crisis debido a la gerencia. ¿Comenzará la gente a quejarse a sus delegados acerca de los alegatos de ‘compra’ de votos de Battistelli o ¿la gente necesita más evidencia? Una auditoría interna no lo hará. Como una persona lo puso temprano hoy, “muéstrame la propuesta detallada y prueba concreta que será puesta ante el CA y veré que puedo hacer con mi queja al representante de mi país to de CA.”
Nunca confíén en algo que la gerencia de la EPO diga, sea acerca de bicicletas, armas, Nazis, e incluso sus llamados ‘resultados’ [1, 2, 3]. Con ayuda de FTI Consulting, CRG y aparentemente guardaespaldas/agencias de seguridad (contratos secrétos, pase de Con ayuda de FTI Consulting, CRG y aparentemente guardaespaldas/agencias de seguridad (contratos secrétos, pase de grandes cantidades de riquezas a manos privadas) La EPO no es más una oficina de patnetes pero una cada vez más maleánte agencia de propaganda que ataca agresivamente a quienes se atrevan a cuestionara su propaganda.
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Further Recent Posts
- Europe Should Listen to SMEs Regarding the UPC, as Battistelli, Team UPC and the Select Committee Lie About It
Another example of UPC promotion from within the EPO (a committee dedicated to UPC promotion), in spite of everything we know about opposition to the UPC from small businesses (not the imaginary ones which Team UPC claims to speak 'on behalf' of)
- Video: French State Secretary for Digital Economy Speaks Out Against Benoît Battistelli at Battistelli's PR Event
Uploaded by SUEPO earlier today was the above video, which shows how last year's party (actually 2015) was spoiled for Battistelli by the French State Secretary for Digital Economy, Axelle Lemaire, echoing the French government's concern about union busting etc. at the EPO (only to be rudely censored by Battistelli's 'media partner')
- When EPO Vice-President, Who Will Resign Soon, Made a Mockery of the EPO
Leaked letter from Willy Minnoye/management to the people who are supposed to oversee EPO management
- No Separation of Powers or Justice at the EPO: Reign of Terror by Battistelli Explained in Letter to the Administrative Council
In violation of international labour laws, Team Battistelli marches on and engages in a union-busting race against the clock, relying on immunity to keep this gravy train rolling before an inevitable crash
- FFPE-EPO is a Zombie (if Not Dead) Yellow Union Whose Only de Facto Purpose Has Been Attacking the EPO's Staff Union
A new year's reminder that the EPO has only one legitimate union, the Staff Union of the EPO (SUEPO), whereas FFPE-EPO serves virtually no purpose other than to attack SUEPO, more so after signing a deal with the devil (Battistelli)
- EPO Select Committee is Wrong About the Unitary Patent (UPC)
The UPC is neither desirable nor practical, especially now that the EPO lowers patent quality; but does the Select Committee understand that?
- Links 1/1/2017: KDE Plasma 5.9 Coming, PelicanHPC 4.1
Links for the day
- 2016: The Year EPO Staff Went on Strike, Possibly “Biggest Ever Strike in the History of the EPO.”
A look back at a key event inside the EPO, which marked somewhat of a breaking point for Team Battistelli
- Open EPO Letter Bemoans Battistelli's Antisocial Autocracy Disguised/Camouflaged Under the Misleading Term “Social Democracy”
Orwellian misuse of terms by the EPO, which keeps using the term "social democracy" whilst actually pushing further and further towards a totalitarian regime led by 'King' Battistelli
- EPO's Central Staff Committee Complains About Battistelli's Bodyguards Fetish and Corruption of the Media
Even the EPO's Central Staff Committee (not SUEPO) understands that Battistelli brings waste and disgrace to the Office
- Translation of French Texts About Battistelli and His Awful Perception of Omnipotence
The paradigm of totalitarian control, inability to admit mistakes and tendency to lie all the time is backfiring on the EPO rather than making it stronger
- 2016 in Review and Plans for 2017
A look back and a quick look at the road ahead, as 2016 comes to an end
- Links 31/12/2016: Firefox 52 Improves Privacy, Tizen Comes to Middle East
Links for the day
- Korea's Challenge of Abusive Patents, China's Race to the Bottom, and the United States' Gradual Improvement
An outline of recent stories about patents, where patent quality is key, reflecting upon the population's interests rather than the interests of few very powerful corporations
- German Justice Minister Heiko Maas, Who Flagrantly Ignores Serious EPO Abuses, Helps Battistelli's Agenda ('Reform') With the UPC
The role played by Heiko Maas in the UPC, which would harm businesses and people all across Europe, is becoming clearer and hence his motivation/desire to keep Team Battistelli in tact, in spite of endless abuses on German soil
- Links 30/12/2016: KDE for FreeBSD, Automotive Grade Linux UCB 3.0
Links for the day
- Software Patents Continue to Collapse, But IBM, Watchtroll and David Kappos Continue to Deny and Antagonise It
The latest facts and figures about software patents, compared to the spinmeisters' creed which they profit from (because they are in the litigation business)
- 2016 Was a Terrible Year for Patent Trolls and 2017 Will Probably be a Lot Worse for Them
The US Supreme Court (SCOTUS) is planning to weigh in on a case which will quite likely drive patent trolls out of the Eastern District of Texas, where all the courts that are notoriously friendly towards them reside
- Fitbit’s Decision to Drop Patent Case Against Jawbone Shows Decreased Potency of Abstract Patents, Not Jawbone’s Weakness
The scope of patents in the United States is rapidly tightening (meaning, fewer patents are deemed acceptable by the courts) and Fitbit’s patent case is the latest case to bite the dust
- The EPO Under Benoît Battistelli Makes the Mafia Look Like Rookies
Pretending there is a violent, physical threat that is imminent, Paranoid in Chief Benoît Battistelli is alleged to have pursued weapons on EPO premises
- Links 29/12/2016: OpenELEC 7.0, Android Wear 2.0 Smartwatches Coming
Links for the day
- Links 28/12/2016: OpenVPN 2.4, SeaMonkey 2.46
Links for the day
- Bad Service at the European Patent Office (EPO) Escalated in the Form of Complaints to European Authorities/Politicians
A look at actions taken at a political level against the EPO in spite of the EPO's truly awkward exemption from lawfulness or even minimal accountability
- No “New Life to Software Patents” in the US; That's Just Fiction Perpetuated by the Patent Microcosm
Selective emphasis on very few cases and neglect of various other dimensions help create a parallel reality (or so-called 'fake news') where software patents are on the rebound
- Links 27/12/2016: Chakra GNU/Linux Updated, Preview of Fedora 26
Links for the day
- Leaked: Letter to Quality Support (DQS) at the European Patent Office (EPO)
Example of abysmal service at the EPO, where high staff turnover and unreasonable pressure from above may be leading to communication issues that harm stakeholders the most
- Negative Publicity (Personal or by Association With the EPO) is Devouring the Institution
Willy Minnoye, Ciarán McGinley, Lionel Baranès, Theano Evangelou and others near the top of the EPO pyramid recalled in light of old news about them
- 2017 Will be the Year Team Battistelli Collapsed and EPO 'Reform' Became All About Detoxifying the Organisation
Battistelli's circle (or "Team Battistelli") is starting to disintegrate, perhaps in anticipation of a tough year full of new leaks ("WillyLeaks" as some put it)
- With the Demise of Software Patents and Likely Soon Patent Trolls (Based on SCOTUS), Trump Appointments Matter Even More
In light of Trump's awkward history with judges (e.g. attacking them) one can hope that upcoming patent cases at the highest court won't be affected by his pro-big corporations agenda
- Wolf in Sheep's Clothing: Bilski Blog is Actually AGAINST Alice and Bilski, in Favour of Software Patents
Looking at some of the latest promotions of software patents in the US and where this is all coming from (and why)
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