04.02.14
Posted in News Roundup at 5:28 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Google Relationship
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Red Hat has announced a new collaboration with Google that will enable Red Hat customers to move eligible Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscriptions to Google Compute Engine using Red Hat Cloud Access. Google joined the Red Hat Certified Cloud Provider program in November 2013.
Google announced the public availability of the Google Compute Engine platform earlier this year. Compute Engine placed the company in direct competition with Amazon Web Services (AWS), and represented a strong step into the Infrastructure-as-a-Service space. Now, Google becomes only the second Red Hat Certified Cloud Provider to earn designation as a Red Hat Cloud Access-enabled partner.
Finance
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“While we remain cautious around the maturing Unix-to-Linux migration cycle, the strength of the fiscal Q3 bounce back suggests that the combination of core Linux and JBoss (middleware), some contribution from RHEV (virtualization) and storage, and the halo effect of Red Hat’s aggressive move to become ‘Red Hat of OpenStack’ are sustaining mid-teens growth,” Turits wrote.
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Red Hat reported its full-year fiscal 2014 earnings late Thursday, showing continued momentum for the Linux server operating system business leader. As Red Hat looks for future growth, the open-source OpenStack cloud platform is front and center.
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Shares of Red Hat (RHT) today closed down $3.90, or almost 7%, at $52.23, after the company yesterday afternoon reported fiscal Q4 revenue and earnings per share that topped analysts’ expectations, but forecast this quarter, and the full year’s results below consensus.
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Red Hat is out with a slew of news this week. As Susan covered earlier, the company reported better-than-expected quarterly results, aided by strong subscription growth for its Linux operating system, but also forecast full-year profit following below average analyst estimates. Along with that news, the company announced the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.4 Beta, which builds on the recent Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.3 release, and aims to automate enterprise virtualization tasks while providing integration with OpenStack.
Virtualisation
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The new oVirt 3.4 release improves storage, high-availability and networking features.
The open-source oVirt virtualization project debuted its 3.4 release on March 27, providing users with new features to meet the expanding needs of workload virtualization.
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Red Hat begins beta test of RHEV 3.4, an enhanced KVM virtual machine designed to continue simplifying and automating enterprise virtualization tasks while providing an on-ramp and a seamless integration with OpenStack.
People
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Whitehurst is an avid advocate for open source software as a catalyst for business innovation.
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“I am to technical people what a groupie is to a rock band,” he laughs. “In other words, what’s the point of being in a rock band if you don’t have people to appreciate the music?”
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As an OpenDaylight project board member and the technical director of Software-Defined Networking (SDN) at Red Hat, Chris Wright knows what it takes to launch a successful open source, collaborative project. He’ll share some of what he’s learned through his experience with OpenDaylight in his keynote presentation at Collaboration Summit, March 26-28 in Napa. Here he gives us a preview of the talk and shares his predictions on which industries are primed for disruption through collaborative development.
Development
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If you’re a system administrator, what you really want is a stable operating system with long-term support, such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). If you’re a system programmer, what you really want is the latest and greatest program. What to do!
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The next version of Red Hat’s Software Collections package includes Apache httpd and Nginx Web servers, Ruby 2.0, and NoSQL database MongoDB. They are all part of version 1.1 of Software Collections, a beta of which can now be downloaded, Red Hat said in a blog post Thursday.
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One of Red Hat Enterprise Linux’s big selling points has been its consistency, in the operating system itself and the software packaged with it. Red Hat goes so far as to offer application certification — now with Docker support — to ensure the software running on top of RHEL behaves as expected.
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Red Hat is out with its latest Sofware Collections package, arriving at version 1.1, and it is embracing Apache httpd and Nginx Web servers, Ruby 2.0, and NoSQL database MongoDB, among other previously unseen offerings. As Infoworld has noted: “One of Red Hat Enterprise Linux’s big selling points has been its consistency, in the operating system itself and the software packaged with it. Red Hat goes so far as to offer application certification — now with Docker support — to ensure the software running on top of RHEL behaves as expected. But what about developers who want to step outside the lines, so to speak, and run something a little more cutting-edge?”
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Insiders have publicly bet against Red Hat’s platform-as-a-service, but I say it will stand by OpenShift without regret.
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Bad Behaviour
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Matthew Garrett, a former Red Hat employee who has gained something of a public profile, suggested that Piston had got itself into Red Hat’s bad books by competing against it for a contract – and winning.
Docker
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Containers aren’t quite virtual machines, but with recent advances in Linux, they can do many of the same jobs as a VM while using far less memory.
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The other is an open source tool called Docker. Docker bundles applications into self-sufficient units called “containers.” These can be easily moved from server to server, and they include everything the application needs to run. Unlike a virtual machine — which recreates the entire operating system — Docker containers are can take advantage of the host server’s operating system and other software, even though the containers are separated from each other. Basically, it’s another way of improving the efficiency of your infrastructure.
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“Containerization has emerged as an essential solution for sys-admins and developers, as it provides a flexible way to build, scale and deploy applications, and reduces the time and expense of cloud infrastructure,” said Al Hilwa, program director, application development software at IDC. “Docker is emerging as a standard for containerization, driving innovation among developers, sys-admins, and DevOps alike.”
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Since we first wrote about Docker last August, the open source container project has advanced in numerous ways. Not only did the company behind it officially shed its original dotCloud name and put Docker at the forefront of its focus, but it also raised $15 million in funding and announced partnerships with the likes of Rackspace, OpenStack, Red Hat and Fedora.
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Open source developer adds container certification for Enterprise Linux apps, aims to improve workload portability and ease maintenance burden.
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Docker is nothing more than a handy container. But for a lot of use cases, it’s opening up amazing new possibilities for making development and deployment work together more closely than ever. It’s an open source project designed to make it easy to create lightweight, portable, self-sufficient containers of an application, allowing that containerized application to run just as easily on a massively scaled cloud as it does on a developer’s laptop. For projects like OpenStack, it’s a new way of deploying applications as an alternative to (or on top of) a virtual machine, while potentially using fewer system resources in the process.
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Red Hat’s application certification program is nominally about ensuring that third-party applications and app platforms run reliably on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
The newest candidate for certification, though, isn’t an application per se. Rather, it’s an application technology that stormed the Linux world and quickly became a major part of its landscape: containerization, which allows apps to be packaged to run almost anywhere with minimal muss or fuss.
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“One of the most-requested features is private repos. Say you’re working on a project that you want to share with the world but is not yet ready for prime time. Now you can push your work-in-progress to a private repo on docker.io and invite only specific collaborators to pull from and push to it. When you’re ready, you can make your private repo public, and it’ll automatically be indexed and publicly searchable.”
Fedora
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I saw on the Fedora Xfce mailing list today that it looks like xfdashboardand xfce4-whiskermenu-plugin are coming to the Fedora Xfce spin’s ISO, if not as default choices at least as things you can add to your desktop after the fact.
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Docker is a hot topic in the Linux world at the moment and I decided to try out the new trusted build process. Long story short, you put your Dockerfile along with any additional content into your GitHub repository, link your GitHub account with Docker, and then fire off a build. The Docker index labels it as “trusted” since it was build from source files in your repository.
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It’s been a relatively quiet week. Snapshot support in virt-manager, automatic latest-code repos with dgroc, Fedora Plasma KDE-based product proposal, and Fedora Atomic Initiative.
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We have very positive brand. When I go to a conference and talk about Fedora, obviously there are some complaints about specific things, but overall, people are happy with us. We have a very strong user and developer community — people are using Fedora in production in the real world, sometimes in amazing and crazy ways (for large-scale web hosting, as a platform for very high-stakes rapid stock trading, as the desktop for a not-small law firm, as the basis for the most popular CS course at Harvard…).
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Fedora 21
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The Fedora Engineering and Steering committee convened today for talking about another round of Fedora 21 features. One week after approving a bunch of features for this Fedora Linux update due out in late 2014, there’s more features added to the list.
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Last week there were a great number of interesting features approved for the Fedora 21 release due out in October~November. This week there isn’t quite as many items that were on the FESCo agenda, but there’s still some interesting work that hopes to make it into this next Fedora Linux release. The approved items at yesterday’s FESCo meeting were
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Profiles would cover things like TLS/SSL and DTLS versioning, ciphersuite selection and ordering, certificate and key exchange parameters including minimum key length, acceptable elliptic curve (ECDH or ECDSA for example), signature hash functions, and TLS options like safe renegotiation.
Misc.
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Red Hat (RHT) has highlighted the transition from Unix platforms to open source Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) in awarding the 2014 Red Hat Certified Professional of the Year Award. The recognition goes this year to Jorge Juarez Acevedo of Banco Azteca, who oversaw the bank’s migration from Sun Solaris, HP UX and AIX servers to RHEL.
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Red Hat did this because it believes there are three very different ways that 70 to 80 percent people tend to use Red Hat Linux distros. Businesses that want a lot of support and device and staff certification pay for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Fedora is for users, often developers who use the latest and greatest Linux and open-source software and want to be ahead of the curve. CentOS is for Linux experts who can handle their own support and want a stable platform.
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Enlightenment
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With the latest Git development work for the Elementary tool-kit and library, applications can run directly from the DRM driver interface without any display server / compositor / window manager. Applications can be created to run in DRM and by setting the ELM_ENGINE=drm option the apps will run in a standalone mode without anything else underneath.
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Current support work is being done to enable client-side applications (as opposed to making a Wayland compositor itself – that is a future plan). Currently EFL applications that use the lower-level Ecore-Evas and higher level Elementary API’s will work and display correctly in Wayland, handle input, resizing and moving. Client-side frames are already provided. Both Shared-memory buffers AND EGL/OpenGL-ES2 buffers are supported. The Shared-memory buffers are purely CPU-rendered, meaning that they will work with or without OpenGL hardware acceleration support. They are fast and usable. The OpenGL-ES2 display is fully accelerated with all primitives being rendered by OpenGL (Hardware acceleration) and already work fully due to a long history of supporting this under X11 and other embedded EGL/OpenGL-ES2 environments.
KDE
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April 1, 2014. Today KDE makes available the first beta of Frameworks 5. This release is part of a series of releases leading up to the final version planned for June 2014 following the previous alpha last month. This release marks the freeze of source incompatible changes and the introduction of the Frameworks 5 Porting Aids.
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And KDE knows what happens when you alienate a group of users since the moment when the anger of some people over KDE 4 lead to the first prominent fork of KDE software, the Trinity Desktop Environment.
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Today KDE released updates for its Applications and Development Platform, the fourth in a series of monthly stabilization updates to the 4.12 series. This release also includes an updated Plasma Workspaces 4.11.8. Both releases contain only bugfixes and translation updates, providing a safe and pleasant update for everyone.
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Part of the KDE PIM group is meeting over this weekend in Barcelona in the spacious BlueSystems offices, hacking on all sorts of things. Me and David Edmundson took the oportunity to do some super huge changes to our KPeople library that are needed and as the library is in its dawn, it’s better to do it sooner than later. These are all internal and boring changes, but one of the changes we’ve been working on here is really cool and worth mentioning.
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The CD and DVD era is coming to an end and developers don’t really bother to innovate when it comes to applications that deal with this media. There are quite a few apps that are capable of writing to DVDs available for the Linux platform, and K3B is one of the best.
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The fourth beta of digiKam Software Collection 4.0 is now available for photographers interested in testing out this popular KDE software component.
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digiKam team is proud to announce the fourth beta release of digiKam Software Collection 4.0.0.
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Qt3D is the Qt component that adds 3D support to Qt Quick for easily integrating 3D functionality. Qt3D has been in development for some time and was going to be an “essential” module to Qt 5.0 before being moved to just an add-on as part of Nokia’s Qt changes prior to selling it to Digia. Qt3D offers up a lot of potential for 3D user-interfaces and applications, but hasn’t seen too much work recently — the last time we got to mention it was when talking about OpenGL taking on a greater role within Qt in late 2012.
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The KDE Project developers have just released the first Release Candidate of Applications and Platform 4.13, and it’s all about fixes and improvements.
“KDE has released the release candidate of the 4.13 versions of Applications and Development Platform. With API, dependency and feature freezes in place, the focus is now on fixing bugs and further polishing,” said the KDE developers.
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“The Calligra team has released version 2.8.1, the first of the bugfix releases of the Calligra Suite, and Calligra Active in the 2.8 series. This release contains a few important bug fixes to 2.8.0 and we recommend everybody to update,” reads the official announcement.
GNOME
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Announcing her departure, Karen said: “Working as the GNOME Foundation Executive Director has been one of the highlights of my career.” She also spoke of the achievements during her time as Executive Director: “I’ve helped to recruit two new advisory board members… and we have run the last three years in the black. We’ve held some successful funding campaigns, particularly around privacy. We have a mind-blowingly fantastic Board of Directors, and the Engagement team is doing amazing work. The GNOME.Asia team is strong, and we’ve got an influx of people, more so than I’ve seen in some time.”
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Zukitwo, a beautiful theme designed for GNOME 3.12 that makes use of the GTK2 engine Murrine and the GTK2 pixbuf engine, is now at version 2014.03.29.
The Zukitwo theme was updated shortly after the release of GNOME 3.12 and it’s probably the first theme to support the new version of GNOME. A lot of other themes will probably follow soon but, coincidentally, Zukitwo is also one of the best ones around.
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Our dedication towards Wayland has pushed us to build a cleaner architecture overall. What used to be a proliferation of X-specific video and input drivers is mostly culminating in centralized, standardized code. For input, we have libinput, which we’re using from Weston, mutter, and Xorg as well. What used to be a collection of chipset-specific video plugins for doing accelerated rendering have now been replaced by glamor, a credible chipset-independent acceleration architecture. What used to be large monolithic components heavily tied to Xorg and the Xorg input and video architectures have now been split out into separate, easily-reusable libraries with separate, easily-maintainable codebases. New, experimental features can be prototyped faster than ever before.
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One of the great things about Linux distributions is the customization. In contrast, an operating system like Windows 8 is rather limited. Sure, you can change some colors, wallpapers and sounds, but pretty much, it is what it is. What you see is what you get. That is probably fine for most people, however, Linux users are not most people.
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Itching to get your hands on the latest goodies from Gnome? Look no further… If you’d like to see the project’s latest efforts, including getting the best look at the latest Gnome core apps (Music, Weather, Maps, Videos), Matthias Clasen has a special gift for you. He’s made a special live CD containing a complete Gnome 3.12 atop Fedora 20.
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Review When the GNOME 3.x desktop arrived it was, frankly, unusable. It wasn’t so much the radical departure from past desktop environments, as the fact that essential things did not work properly or, more frustratingly, had been deemed unnecessary.
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THE GNOME PROJECT has released Gnome 3.12, the latest version of the heavyweight Linux desktop environment, which adds support for better displays and faster startup times.
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Earlier today GNOME 3.12 has been released, bringing major new features, several redesigned programs and three new applications: Logs, Sound Recorder and Polari.
Misc.
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04.01.14
Posted in News Roundup at 9:09 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
GCHQ
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The NSA and GCHQ hacked into the systems of three German satellite communication providers, according to the latest leaks from the files of Edward Snowden, fugitive ex-NSA sysadmin.
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Huawei
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China’s Huawei Technologies Co Ltd “maintained calm” and operated “business as usual” after media reports saying the U.S. accessed servers at the telecom giant’s Shenzhen headquarters, acting Chief Executive Eric Xu said on Monday.
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American cloud companies stand to lose billions of dollars in business because of Edward Snowden’s NSA revelations, and non-U.S. companies are already preparing to pick up the slack.
Snowden and Greenwald
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Although the title of his talk was framed as a question, “Edward Snowden: Patriot or Villain?” — there really is no doubt that Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst turned political activist, considers Snowden a patriot.
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Staged ‘Leaks’ (Washington Post)
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Reeling from the leak of classified data, NSA officials have anticipated future leaks by sometimes announcing them to the media preemptively, a minimization tactic according to one of the journalists still holding the intel agency’s documents.
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A couple weeks ago, we learned from leaked documents that the NSA has the capability to record an entire country’s calls, texts, and email in real time. That’s a hell of a capability, and those documents revealed that it was being used in one country. Now, thanks to a retired NSA leader, we know which country that is: Iraq.
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The entire article is a weak (and grossly transparent) attempt to recast General Keith Alexander’s legacy — and thus it seems that Inglis, Alexander and the NSA have no problem at all revealing the details of its capabilities in Iraq when the entire purpose in doing so is an attempt to show how good Alexander was for the NSA. Rest assured, however, had the same bit of information come out from one of the reporters with access to the Snowden documents, the NSA and all its defenders would be screaming as loud as possible about how the publication of such information would cost lives and create immense damage to American interests while aiding our enemies. Yet, apparently, it’s all fine and dandy to reveal such information… when it’s part of the effort to canonize the NSA retired leader.
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The former head of the NSA, General Keith Alexander, has claimed numerous times that Edward Snowden’s leaks about the NSA’s vast spying programs on innocent American citizens and overseas allies has put the U.S. at serious risk.
‘Reform’
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One of the expected concessions to civil society is the promise to leave records at the telephone companies, so that the government would allegedly be able to obtain them only in an emergency situation. But in the cold light of the day, records will still be kept. So, what could the ‘metadata’ –information on personal phone calls, claimed to contain no names or content – reveal to the NSA or just to the people who have access to them?
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A proposal that would require telecom companies to store phone records and make them easily accessible to the U.S. government may not be an insurmountable IT challenge, analysts say. But should that proposal become law, the way companies choose to implement the needed technology raises a number of questions about how that data will be transmitted and secured, and what steps telecoms will take to protect customer privacy.
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A few plans are now on the table. There is the USA Freedom Act (Leahy-Sensenbrenner bill), the House Intelligence Committee Bill and the President’s own proposal. The latter has yet to find legislative form. President Obama’s proposal involves allowing phone companies to retain their databases of records in standardised, interoperable format. The focus on storage will shift from government agencies to telephony companies. The NSA would, in obtaining access, have to seek an order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. In turn, the FISC would have to be satisfied that the records pertained to a person connected with a terrorist organisation.
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Ron Wyden, the senator who is a leading voice in attempts to rein in the National Security Agency, has urged President Barack Obama to order an immediate halt to the bulk collection of domestic telephone metadata records.
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Gen. Keith Alexander, the head of the US high-profile National Security Agency, stepped down from his post Friday, amid turmoil at the besieged spy agency.
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Some other proposals to eliminate bulk data collection, but still offer the same sort of data on potential terrorists and their phone calls have now surfaced. One of the plans is offered by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) and backed by Obama. It would require a new authority to be created that would duplicate the core capability of the NSA program without having to collect bulk data.
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Senate intelligence committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein said she supports requiring court approval for all searches of U.S. telephone records, setting the stage for a legislative fight over how to rein in the powers of the National Security Agency.
Satire
Response From Business
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The good news for lawyers worried about maintaining their duty of confidentiality is that there are tools and safeguards to help them. In a session entitled “N.S.A.y What? Firm and Client Data Security & Encryption in the Age of Monitoring” held at ABA Techshow on Friday, Sensei Enterprises vice president John Simek and Oracle Corporation’s Chris Ries provided tips on gadgets and best practices for lawyers to use if they wish to avoid the NSA’s massive net.
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A survey of 1,000 business leaders from around the world has found that many are questioning their reliance on “cloud computing” in favour of more secure forms of data storage as the whistleblower’s revelations continue to reverberate.
Toward Real NSA Reform
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This month, the Utah State Records Committee ruled that the City of Bluffdale must release water records pertaining to the massive NSA data center located there.
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Indeed, we have gone a long way down the road of violating American’s basic civil rights, as most recently revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden who exposed the National Security Agency’s massive spy program, which Judge Richard J. Leon ruled Dec. 16, 2013, a violation of the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and “almost-Orwellian.” This egregious violation of the privacy rights of American citizens has prompted Freedom Watch to file for class action certification in its epic lawsuit against the NSA, the first of its kind, in order to open it up to all the Americans whose constitutional rights have been defiled. The new class action suit expands the allegations of constitutional violations to include the NSA’s collection of Internet metadata, social media and its spying on overseas phone calls under its so-called PRISM program.
RSA
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Security industry pioneer RSA adopted not just one but two encryption tools developed by the U.S. National Security Agency, greatly increasing the spy agency’s ability to eavesdrop on some Internet communications, according to a team of academic researchers.
Privacy
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TO keep an eye on his child via his smartphone, Marc Gilbert installed Internet-connected video baby monitors in his home in Houston. One evening, Gilbert heard a stranger’s voice bellowing obscenities from the monitor. He disconnected the device after realizing that it had been hacked.
PRISM
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Bruce Schneier: “At SXSW earlier this month, CEO Eric Schmidt tried to reassure the audience by saying that he was ‘pretty sure that information within Google is now safe from any government’s prying eyes.’ A more accurate statement might be, ‘Your data is safe from governments, except for the ways we don’t know about and the ways we cannot tell you about. And, of course, we still have complete access to it all, and can sell it at will to whomever we want.’”
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Back Doors
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Technology that remotely makes a stolen smartphone useless could save American consumers up to US$2.6 billion per year if it is implemented widely and leads to a reduction in theft of phones, according to a new report.
Torture
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CIA got DOJ to authorize “water dousing”
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For years, the CIA has been feuding with the Senate Intelligence Committee over its report on Bush-era “enhanced interrogation techniques,” and now we know why. While the 6,300-page report remains classified, on Monday U.S. officials described its contents in detail to the Washington Post. The report concludes that the CIA routinely misled members of Congress and the public by suggesting detainees gave up key information due to the use of those brutal techniques, when they had actually talked before the interrogation. “The CIA described [its program] repeatedly both to the Department of Justice and eventually to Congress as getting unique, otherwise unobtainable intelligence that helped disrupt terrorist plots and save thousands of lives,” said one U.S. official. “Was that actually true? The answer is no.”
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Sources have told the Associated Press (watch out for another round of phone record-snatching, guys!) that the Senate Intelligence Committee report at the center of a fight between the committee and the CIA confirms what many observers knew or suspected: Waterboarding and harsh interrogation techniques did not provide any useful information to catch Osama bin Laden. In every case where the CIA used torture and claimed it helped, there were other explanations as to where they got the information.
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Intelligence committee finds methods such as waterboarding did not produce any crucial evidence in hunt for al-Qaida leader, aides say
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A report by the Senate Intelligence Committee concludes that the CIA misled the government and the public about aspects of its brutal interrogation program for years – concealing details about the severity of its methods, overstating the significance of plots and prisoners, and taking credit for critical pieces of intelligence that detainees had in fact surrendered before they were subjected to harsh techniques.
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The CIA repeatedly misled the US government over the severity and effectiveness of its interrogation methods, the Washington Post reports.
A long-awaited US Senate report said that the CIA used secret “black sites” to interrogate prisoners using techniques not previously acknowledged.
These included dunking suspects in icy water and smashing a prisoner’s head against a wall.
Drones
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The Defence Ministry refused on Monday to share details of CIA chief’s visit to Pakistan with the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee.
The committee had asked for details of the visit of CIA Director John Brennan to Pakistan in the last week of February for meetings with Army Chief Gen Raheel Sharif and ISI Director General Lt Gen Zaheerul Islam.
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There are many other arenas where we could explore the tension between proclaimed individual values and the contradiction of policies which emanate from the White House. The one I wish to focus on is the use of drones – unmanned aerial vehicles – now becoming the go-to strategy for fighting “the war on terror”, even as that name has now fallen out of favor.
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Drone missiles may have prompted outcry from international human rights groups and controversy in the media, but unmanned air vehicles could be on the verge of being upstaged by a new weapon on the block: Lethal Autonomous Robotics (LARs). This emerging breed of technology will be able to select a target, aim and fire with no intervention from human beings beyond programming and deployment. War could be about to get a lot cheaper, a lot less bloody… and a lot more frequent.
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The drone assassination campaigns are one device by which state policy knowingly endangers security. The same is true of murderous special-forces operations. And of the invasion of Iraq, which sharply increased terror in the West, confirming the predictions of British and American intelligence.
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Armed drones, more than any other weapons system, need international regulation because their very nature makes it easier to stealthily wage war. Since the use of drones can cancel out the need for boots on the ground, they can be used to target countries even when the attacker has not declared war on them. Pakistan, along with Yemen, has most suffered from this new kind of war that drones facilitate and so it is no surprise that we have consistently taken the lead at international forums to have the drone war declared illegal and the use of the weapon be strictly regulated by the UN.
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What would you do if you witnessed someone killing innocent people? Would you be brave enough to do something to make them stop? We all hope we would be that brave. But if that “someone” is our government and the weapons are missiles and unmanned aerial drones, it seems that our answer is different.
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The political and economic foundation of the United States is built on the corpses of legal lynching, or “lynch law”. Without the genocide and enslavement of Black and indigenous peoples, the US capitalist class could not have amassed its profits, wealth, or power. Following the passage of the 13th Amendment that supposedly ended Black chattel slavery at the close of the Civil War, the US capitalist class moved quickly to reorganize the capitalist economy so newly “freed” Blacks would remain enslaved. Convict-leasing, sharecropping, and legalized segregation ensured Black exploitation and white power. These brutal forms of exploitation were kept intact by white terrorism in the form of lynching.
Civil Rights
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People are angry over Albuquerque police’s involvement in 37 shootings, 23 of them fatal, since 2010. Critics say that is far too many for a department serving a city of about 555,000.
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Robert H. Richards IV does not work. He doesn’t have to. The great-grandson of Irénée du Pont, the chemical magnate who provided much of the financial backing to a failed effort to defeat Franklin Delano Roosevelt during the 1930s, Richards lives off a trust fund in a 5,800 square foot mansion he bought for $1.8 million. When he is not staying in his mansion, he might be found in his beach home “in the exclusive North Shores neighborhood near Rehoboth Beach.”
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After a demonstration in Madrid on Saturday night, seven photographers were assaulted, beaten and injured by police as they tried to cover an arrest.
War
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Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker Errol Morris joins us to talk about his new film, “The Unknown Known,” based on 33 hours of interviews with former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The title refers to an infamous press briefing in 2002 when Rumsfeld faced questions from reporters about the lack of evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. “The Unknown Known” is Morris’ 10th documentary feature. He won a Best Documentary Oscar for his film “The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara.” His other films include “Standard Operating Procedure,” about alleged U.S. torture of terror suspects in Abu Ghraib prison, and “The Thin Blue Line,” about the wrongful conviction of Randall Adams for the murder of a Dallas policeman. The release of “The Unknown Known” comes in a month marking 11 years since the U.S. invaded Iraq, leaving an estimated half a million Iraqis dead, along with at least 4,400 American troops.
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The Journal leaves out one other parallel with Vietnam: war crimes. The Pakistan army is responsible for disappearances, unlawful detention, extrajudicial killing, bombardment of villages, and mass displacement of Pakistan’s tribal peoples..
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A Facebook meme argues that Americans are pretty two-faced when it comes to Russia’s recent annexation of Crimea.
The meme says, “22 Countries Invaded by the U.S. in 20 Years. Russia Does It and Everyone Loses Their Mind,” illustrating its point with a photograph of Heath Ledger’s Joker character from Batman movie The Dark Knight.
A reader asked us to check this claim, so we did. Fortunately, the post that accompanied the meme listed the nations that had been “invaded,” along with the years of the purported invasion.
Intervention
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Guess which country held its ‘first free election in decades’ and which held a ‘bogus’ and ‘illegal’ referendum under military occupation.
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Posted in News Roundup at 6:39 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Warsow, a first-person shooter developed to work on multiple platforms, including Linux, has just received a major update.
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The Humble Weekly Sale offers a slew of open-source games for PC, Mac, Linux and Android, plus their soundtracks. Games up for grabs for any price you want are Magical Diary, NEO Scavenger, Offspring Fling and Planet Stronghold. Pay $6 or more to get Anodyne, Defender’s Quest: Valley of the Forgotten, Evoland and Incredipede.
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Cannons Lasers Rockets is a free space exploring game available on Steam for Linux and Windows with 3D graphics and futuristic space environments. The game was released on February 4, 2014, uses the powerful Unity Engine and takes place in various space environments, with 2D battles and a simple gameplay idea: all you need to win are three weapons, obviously cannons, lasers and yes, you guessed it, rockets.
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Valve has come a long way in the past two years over the past two years with the introduction of Steam for Linux, porting of their games to Linux, the introduction of SteamOS, pushing of other game publishers to Linux, open-sourcing some game components, and much more.
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Posted in News Roundup at 6:37 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Linux Mint is the most popular Ubuntu based Linux distribution. Some would argue that it’s even more popular than Ubuntu itself. Because of its Ubuntu base, Linux Mint shares a lot of the same great features with its parent distribution while offering a more traditional desktop design. One big feature that Linux Mint is missing though is the ability to create a Live USB stick with persistent storage. In this tutorial I’ll show how to create a Linux Mint Persistent Live USB drive using UNetbootin and GParted.
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Posted in News Roundup at 6:36 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Over the years, the Maxthon browser (formerly known as MyIE2 way back in the day) has spread its reach beyond Windows and into different platforms, including the Mac and three mobile OSes: Android, iOS, and Windows Phone. Wondering where the love for Linux is at? You don’t need to wonder anymore, because you can now download 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Maxthon for Linux.
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The developers of DVD-Ranger informed us today that they’ve released the source code of CinEx to the open source code hosting website SourceForge. The code is from the first release of CinEx which removed Cinavia successfully but which degraded the sound quality, an issue now solved with the release of CinEx HD.
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03.31.14
Posted in News Roundup at 11:31 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Health and Nutrition
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Dutch surgeons have successfully placed an entire 3D-printed skull dome over the brain of a 22-year-old woman suffering from a rare bone disorder. Doctors say this surgery is unprecedented.
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The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has recalled homeopathic remedies made by a company called Terra-Medica because they may contain actual medicine — possibly penicillin or derivatives of the antibiotic.
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In new estimates released today, WHO reports that in 2012 around 7 million people died – one in eight of total global deaths – as a result of air pollution exposure. This finding more than doubles previous estimates and confirms that air pollution is now the world’s largest single environmental health risk. Reducing air pollution could save millions of lives.
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A barge moving through Galveston Bay collided with another ship Saturday afternoon, spilling over 168,000 gallons of marine fuel oil. The spill is particularly devastating, even though it isn’t the largest in recent memory, because Galveston Bay is a migratory bird habitat and shorebird season is fast approaching. On top of that, the type of fuel that spilled is particularly difficult to clean up. The ship was being towed when it collided with the other vessel, though there are no details at this point on how the collision occurred.
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Seafood is an integral part of American cuisine. However, the ocean pays a steep price for every plate of tuna sashimi and every serving of grilled salmon that Americans consume.
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Measles was considered eliminated at the turn of the millennium. Now it’s back, thanks to the loons who refuse to vaccinate their children.
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It isn’t an epidemic and it won’t shut down corn production anytime soon. However, researchers have confirmed that western corn rootworms have developed resistance to Bt corn hybrids that express the Cry3Bba trait in some areas of Nebraska.
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Open-source software is now everywhere. For example, Android, Google’s open-source operating system, now accounts for 80% of the smartphone and tablet market. Our next guest dreams of the same kind of explosive success by applying the open-source model to one of humanity’s oldest technological achievements: agriculture. Jack Kloppenburg, a professor of community and environmental sociology at the University of Wisconsin, co-founded the Open Source Seed Initiative to help protect the public domain of seeds. He joined the Buzz on Monday, March 30th to tell us more about the project.
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He is group director at the Sainsbury Laboratory, and is also the founder of and adviser to biotech company Mendel Biotechnology, which counts Monsanto – a GM giant – as a major client. Mendel has been granted more than 20 biotechnology and GM patents.
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CropLife America (CLA) and the European Crop Protection Association (ECPA) called for a more harmonized risk assessment framework for pesticide regulations during the fourth round of negotiations of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). The comments follow the submission of a joint proposal on U.S. – EU regulatory cooperation that CLA and ECPA sent to Assistant United States Trade Representative Daniel Mullaney and Director of DG Trade for the European Commission Ignacio Garcia Bercero on March 7, 2014.
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A U.S. politician’s I-don’t-need-no-stinkin’-facts approach to health policy ran smack into some of those troublesome facts Tuesday at a Senate hearing on single-payer healthcare, as it’s practiced in Canada and several other countries.
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The European Commission’s proposal for plant reproductive material law, also known as the “seed regulation”, was voted down by Parliament on Tuesday, amid concerns that it would give the Commission too much power and leave EU countries without any leeway to tailor the new rules to their needs. Following the Commission’s refusal to withdraw its draft text and table an improved one, Parliament closed the first reading.
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European regulations restricting the growth of genetically modified (GM) foods in the UK and across the continent are to be scrutinised in a new cross-party parliamentary inquiry launched today by MPs on the Science and Technology Committee.
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) believes that GM is one of several technologies necessary to foster a “vibrant sector” in UK agriculture. But the European Union’s application of the ‘precautionary principle’ has been criticized for holding back development of the technology, despite European Commission reports finding no scientific evidence associating GM organisms with higher risks for the environment or food and feed safety.
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Volunteers who handled receipts containing the hormone-altering compound bisphenol A for two hours showed elevated BPA levels in their urine. Dina Fine Maron reports
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The new study was published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health.
Researchers suggest that Roundup, or glyphosate, becomes highly toxic to the kidney once mixed with “hard” water or metals like arsenic and cadmium that often exist naturally in the soil or are added via fertilizer. Hard water contains metals like calcium, magnesium, strontium, and iron, among others. On its own, glyphosate is toxic, but not detrimental enough to eradicate kidney tissue.
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Sweden’s government is considering suing the European Commission for stalling on criteria which are required to stop hormone-affecting substances, says the minister for the environment, Lena Ek.
In December, the Commission was supposed to publish the necessary criteria for banning different endocrine-disrupting substances found in anti-bacterial agents for shoes and clothes.
However, Commissioner for the Environment Janez Potočnik has delayed the clearance. According to Ek, Potočnik has told the Swedish government that the Commission wants to make an impact analysis first.
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Chinese scientists have warned that the country’s toxic air pollution is now so bad that it resembles a nuclear winter, slowing photosynthesis in plants – and potentially wreaking havoc on the country’s food supply.
Beijing and broad swaths of six northern provinces have spent the past week blanketed in a dense pea-soup smog that is not expected to abate until Thursday. Beijing’s concentration of PM 2.5 particles – those small enough to penetrate deep into the lungs and enter the bloodstream – hit 505 micrograms per cubic metre on Tuesday night. The World Health Organisation recommends a safe level of 25.
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UN Report Says Small-Scale Organic Farming Only Way to Feed the World
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Right now an important case is being heard halfway around the world in Western Australia about organic farmer Steve Marsh, whose organic field was contaminated by his neighbor’s genetically engineered canola. As a result, Steve lost his organic certification and as much as 70% of his Steve’s farm has been contaminated with Monsanto’s patented genes.
Warming
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The American Association for the Advancement of Science came as close as such a respectable institution can to screaming an alarm last week. “As scientists, it is not our role to tell people what they should do,” it said as it began one of those sentences that you know will build to a “but”. “But human-caused climate risks abrupt, unpredictable and potentially irreversible changes.”
In other words, the most distinguished scientists from the country with the world’s pre-eminent educational institutions were trying to shake humanity out of its complacency. Why weren’t their warnings leading the news?
In one sense, the association’s appeal was not new. The Royal Society, the Royal Institution, Nasa, the US National Academy of Sciences, the US Geological Survey, the IPCC and the national science bodies of 30 or so other countries have said that man-made climate change is on the march. A survey of 2,000 peer-reviewed papers on global warming published in the last 20 years found that 97% said that humans were causing it.
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Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson is involved in a legal battle over fracking. The weird part is, he’s on the side that’s against it.
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Singapore suffers its longest dry spell on record, while Malaysian cabinet mulls whether to declare a national emergency
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The Koch brothers and their wealthy allies pledged to spend $400 million on the 2012 elections — and it looks like they did it.
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It’s a method of argument perfected by disgruntled men in the corner of pubs
Nuclear Energy
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When most of us think of the ongoing Fukushima nuclear disaster we think about leaks of contaminated water, criminal gangs hiring ill-trained workers to work on cleaning up radioactive materials on the site, ice-dams to stop water flowing, or government announcements that never improve anything.
What we often don’t think about are the victims. More than 150,000 people were made victims by this disaster, most are still victims. But these days there is little coverage of their daily lives and the problems they continue to face.
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The bottom line here is that TEPCO has just acknowledged that at least 50-tons of rubble has fallen on top of and into the spent fuel pool in Unit 3. What does this 50-ton pile of debris mean to the Unit 3 spent fuel pool and its cleanup?
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Introduction: “In response to growing concern around cancer risk to children, in particular young girls, in and around the Fukushima Prefecture, we’re reissuing a film we made last year. [...] 1 in every 100 young girls will devlop cancer for every year they are exposed to Fukushima’s radiation”
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Tens of thousands have marched in anti-nuclear protests across Taiwan, calling on the government to phase out nuclear energy. The protest comes ahead of the third anniversary of the Fukishima disaster.
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A stunning new report indicates the U.S. Navy knew that sailors from the nuclear-powered USS Ronald Reagan took major radiation hits from the Fukushima atomic power plant after its meltdowns and explosions nearly three years ago.
Pollution
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It is a sobering fact that the chip fabrication industry which is so vital to our modern society is also the cause of a lot of pollution. This unglamorous topic doesn’t get much media attention. No one wants to be reminded that the hi-tech world of computers isn’t possible without the use of a lot of caustic chemicals.
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The dredging and dumping of 3m tonnes of spoil in Great Barrier Reef marine park waters posed an “unacceptable social and environmental risk”, the authority in charge of the world heritage area wrote in draft assessments just months before it approved the permit to carry out the disposal.
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Across America, the impacts of climate change are already being felt as temperatures rise, droughts are prolonged, and weather becomes increasingly severe and unpredictable. But solutions seem few and far between — and solutions that both sides can agree on even fewer. Outraged Republicans and recalcitrant conservative Democrats cut down the cap-and-trade bill in 2009; and President Obama’s promised regulations are probably destined for years of give-and-take between the Environmental Protection Agency, the courts, and the power industry. The result: America remains one of the few advanced nations with no national policy of any sort to curb its carbon dioxide emissions.
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The negotiations were long and painful, but in the end a deal was done. EU member states finally agreed to back reforms that will mean large listed companies are required to report on their environmental and social impacts.
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America has grown a vast and complex regulatory and financial support system for cheap, dirty energy. This isn’t over
Misc.
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David Cameron is peddling bullshit of the premium Aberdeen Angus kind today. At today’s oil prices, recoverable North Sea oil is worth a minimum of 1.2 trillion and a maximum of 2.4 trillion dollars. Cameron is claiming that potential will not be released without government subsidy of 24 billion dollars, and that only the UK government’s “broad shoulders” can raise this.
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It was 2am when a fireball pierced the inky night sky above a small community in the Niger delta. The explosion near Port Harcourt last June killed several people and released 6,000 barrels of crude oil. The cause: contractors hired by Royal Dutch Shell to stop pirates siphoning oil from a huge pipeline were themselves stealing fuel, and something went terribly wrong. The blast led to the shutdown… Shell, the largest foreign operator in the country, was responsible for more than 20,00 barrels of last year’s spills.
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