In this video, I go over why someone would choose Linux over Windows or MacOS.
Nearly one month to the day since these high-end desktop/workstation processors launched, the fix was merged today along with some other AMD RAS fixes.
So if using Linux 5.5 Git today or a release of Linux 5.5-rc3 or later, the new Threadripper processors should be running fine out-of-the-box.
Sadly there still is no release plan for getting the long overdue X.Org Server 1.21 out the door and at this point is looking increasingly unlikely that it would land for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. But at least this extra time for X.Org Server 1.21 has allowed more XWayland changes to flow in.
There has been recent XWayland work like multi-buffering, other stuttering issues, RandR/Vidmode emulation, and a variety of other enhancements.
Following the Weston 8.0 Alpha release from earlier this month, the Weston 8.0 Beta is now available for this reference Wayland compositor.
Weston 8.0 features include items like handling EGL partial screen updates, a direct display extension in conjunction with DMA-BUF buffers being submitted directly to the display controller, HDCP support is now wired into the Direct Rendering Manager back-end, XYUV format support with OpenGL, the ability to double-load Weston modules, support for using OpenGL rendering with the head-less back-end, and many other changes.
This is the beta release for weston 8.0.0. Full commit history below.
Daniel Stone (1): CI: Bump ci-templates dependency for working pip
Emmanuel Gil Peyrot (2): backend-drm: Remove unused variable backend-drm: Make boolean fields actually bool
Leandro Ribeiro (3): clients/window: drop support for rgb565 screen-share: define variable type before using as function argument backend-rdp: report a zero physical size to compositor
Marius Vlad (1): clients/simple-dmabuf-egl: Add some notes when using direct-display
Michael Forney (1): clients/presentation-shm: Add missing dependency on xdg-shell protocol
Pekka Paalanen (8): xwm: add newline to cardinal array xwm: debug _XWAYLAND_ALLOW_COMMITS xwm: debug what kind decoration is drawn xwm: xcb_configure_window() takes uint16_t xwm: debug ConfigureWindow gitlab-ci: image build should fail on failed commands gitlab-ci: wrap and alphabetize apt-get line gitlab-ci: install xwayland
Simon Ser (1): build: bump to version 7.0.92 for the beta release
Stefan Agner (2): renderer: change all frame_signal emission to pass previous_damage backend-drm: Define potentially missing aspect-ratio bit definitions
git tag: 7.0.92
LunarG on Friday released the Vulkan SDK 1.1.130 version with an updated license, better validation layer coverage, and support for newer extensions.
Newer Vulkan extensions now supported include VK_EXT_tooling_info, VK_KHR_buffer_device_address, VK_KHR_performance_query, and VK_KHR_separate_depth_stencil_layouts.
LunarG has released new Vulkan SDKs for Windows, Linux, and macOS based on the 1.1.130.0 header. This release includes maintenance updates, the latest extensions, and a link to the new Vulkan License Registry.
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The vktrace and vkreplay tools currently included in this SDK will be removed in the next 3-6 months. It will be replaced with GFX Reconstruct. Vktrace/vkreplay will still be available via a github repository but will not be included in future SDKs.
Announced last month at SuperComputing 19 in Denver was Radeon Open Compute 3.0 (ROCm 3.0) but it didn't end up shipping until last night. ROCm 3.0 is a big update to AMD's open-source Linux compute stack for ending out 2019.
More Mesa drivers continue to be embracing NIR as the modern intermediate representation shared between these OpenGL and Vulkan open-source implementations.
Besides the Intel drivers leading the NIR transition along with smaller drivers like Freedreno and VC4, RADV has been making use of NIR and now RadeonSI is working on transitioning to it while TGSI currently remains the default. The LLVMpipe Gallium3D software rasterizer is the newest in-tree Mesa driver making use of this IR.
With commits that were merged over night for Mesa 20.0-devel, NIR is now a supported intermediate representation alongside TGSI for this driver that commonly serves as an OpenGL fallback driver on the Linux desktop.
The latest Catfish File Search features improved support for symbolic links, various bug fixes, and a clearer preferences dialog. Tracking down files has never been better.
The Wine hackers have produced their second Release Candidate for the upcoming stable release of Wine 5.0. Currently in a code-freeze, this means they will only be doing bug fixes and no big new features will now make it in until the development builds start up again next year for Wine 5.1.
With this release, they noted 36 bug fixes. A few of them older bugs only now being noticed as fixed but there are some recent issues solved with: Batman: Arkham Knight, Magic: The Gathering Arena, Gameforge Client, Plants Vs Zombies and so on. Probably plenty more not yet checked too, going back over older bugs is a herculean task given how much people attempt to run through Wine.
Rebased off yesterday's Wine 5.0-RC2 source tree is now Wine Staging 5.0-RC2 as this testing/experimental variation of Wine with some 830+ patches on top.
Not too much has changed in the past week specific to Wine-Staging, but a few notable new patches introduced:
- A fix for a seven year old bug around SafeDisc, finally allowing Command and Conquer: Red Alert 2 to run well under Wine.
Another sweet new release of pyLinuxWheel is up, giving you even more options for managing your Logitech Steering Wheel on Linux thanks to new features.
In version 0.6.0 released today, there's a new profile saving feature. An incredibly handy feature, allowing you to set up the range, resistance, gain, change to an alternate mode and so on to save and load those specific settings any time. Useful, since certain types of racing games are better with a different range on the wheel as just one example.
SuperTuxKart continues getting even better. The 1.0 release back in April was huge, with SuperTuxKart 1.1 getting a first Release Candidate now to improve on the previous new features like online play.
Getting online play into a better state has been an "important area of focus in the new version", with the team adding in things like "IPv6 client and server support, improved synchronization (especially for collisions), expanded support for AIs, management features for server owners, and increased support for addons, along many more minor fixes and quality-of-life features" which all sounds pretty fantastic.
Released on Steam earlier this year, Din's Legacy, the newest action RPG from Soldak Entertainment is now available to pick up DRM-free from the GOG store.
Seems like Epic Games continue to open their wallet as shortly after Ore LLC were given one for Ira, game manager Lutris, painting app Krita and now Senscape have announced they've also been approved for an Epic MegaGrant to finish up ASYLUM.
Writing in their Steam announcement, they said that while the game was progessing well their finances were running on fumes. Thankfully they also said clearly there really is no strings to attached and so they're not suddenly going Epic Store exclusive. On top of that, Senscape said once again it will come to every platform originally promised including Linux. Although that shouldn't come as a surprise, as we spoke to them on that only recently.
The Plasma desktop by the KDE community is a pinnacle among open source desktops. KDE got into the Linux desktop market early, but since its foundational Qt toolkit did not have a fully open license at the time, the GNOME desktop was created. Since then, Qt has become open source, and KDE (and its derivatives, like the Trinity desktop) has thrived.
You may find the KDE desktop in your distribution's software repository, or you can download and install a distribution that ships KDE as its default. Before you install, be aware that KDE provides a full, integrated, and robust desktop experience, so several KDE applications are installed along with it. If you're already running a different desktop, you will find yourself with redundant applications (two PDF readers, several media players, two or more file managers, and so on). If you just want to try the KDE desktop without committing to it, you can install a KDE-based distribution in a virtual machine, such as GNOME Boxes, or you can try a bootable OS like Porteus.
I started feeling really tired in November, and then I realized I hadn’t taken much time off this year — a couple of days at the sea-side was most of it. So I thought it was time to do something else than bug triaging, bug fixing, writing code, acting like I’m a manager. This summer I’d bought water-soluble oil paints (Cobra, from Talens), and I have spent and hour here and an hour there learning the stuff again.
Now I had a plan. In our regular role playing campaign, we had a scene where my PC, Khushi, asked a local painter to paint a small portrait to send to a friend. And later on, the friend joined her in, and had her portrait painted for Khushi. So… A small double portrait would be fun to try to recreate.
Beelink have further extended their ‘Gemini’ range of mini PCs by adding the T45.
You might have a baby/dog/hamster that you want to keep an eye on when you’re not there. We understand: they’re lovely, especially hamsters. Here’s how HackSpace magazine contributor Dr Andrew Lewis built a Raspberry Pi baby cam to watch over his small creatures…
Jolla has announced Sailfish OS 3.2.1 "Nuuksio" as their mobile operating system update to end out 2019.
New in the Sailfish OS land with 3.2.1 Nuuksio are:
- Continued refinements to the user-interface particularly for the Phone and Messages application.
- The Sailfish Email app better handles HTML formatted messages.
First of all we wish all our customers, business associates and friends, old and new, a very merry Christmas! We are excited to have you with us on the ride to create a world with more security and digital trust.
The Nuuksio National Park location, being in such close proximity to the capital of Finland, Helsinki, is uncommon within Europe. Nuuksio has typical Finnish scenery, with lovely lakes, green forests and rugged crags. Nuuksio has one of the densest flying squirrel populations in Finland.
Sailfish OS 3.2.1 Nuuksio
We’ve included many reliability improvements in Nuuksio especially targeting Email, Calendar synchronisation and VPN settings. In addition to reliability improvements, the Email app now has enhanced support for handling HTML formatted messages. Audio routing for Android apps has been improved on Android app support 8.1, fixing issues with applications such as WhatsApp calls and Youtube. The operating system now supports hardware MPEG2, VP9 and h.265/HEVC video decoding (the exact support depends on the device).
For Sailfish OS 3.2.1 Nuuksio we’ve continued improving the Phone and Messages apps and the UI in general. The message bubbles gained a new visual style with related messages now forming visual groups to enhance readability. The address handling in the email and messages apps has also been improved, so you can now see recipient addresses, as well as having the option to easily remove unwanted recipients.
In this edition of our open source news roundup, we take a look at eliminating gender bias in open source software development, an open source database of microbes, an open source index for cooperatives, and more!
In 2017 three of us started YottaDB, having each worked on GT.M for over twenty years. With a sense of accomplishment, we could point to our contributions. But the GT.M database would never be directly accessed by any language other than M and we believed that the database had value to applications beyond those written in M (see The Anchovy Pizza Company – Not!).
At the end of 2019, we have organically grown to a team of ten. Our office in Malvern, which felt empty when we moved in, will feel cramped when we add our next couple of team members. We anticipate moving to a bigger office when our current lease ends.
At work we use the LLVM/clang libraries for pre-processing and parsing C/C++ stuff.
During some experimenting with the current master version of these libraries, I stumbled on unexpected crashes inside our unit-tests on Windows.
We work with MSVC 2019 on Windows and all worked fine with LLVM 9.x, but with master, close to all my tests did now segfault in aligned_free.
I first thought that might be some current regression in LLVM master, but after tracing it back to having DenseSet/Map crashing during destruction, this seemed unlikely.
On further investigation, the fault is really hilarious: We compiled the LLVM libraries with the default language standard as set there in the CMake tooling: C++14.
On the other side, we compiled our own tools that use these libraries with C++17.
Object-Oriented Programming Concepts, as you know we are going to learn Java programming language, the Java is an object-oriented programing language. Don’t worry about it if you do not understand what it is because I will explain it to you.
Since its launch, CC Search has become more than just a search tool for CC-licensed content; it has come to exemplify the virtuous cycle of knowledge creation—where we create, collaborate, and learn from one another.
Our recent collaboration with a group of students from UC Berkeley was a true exercise in this cycle of creation and collaboration.
In the fall of 2019, instructors of the UC Berkeley graduate course, Product Design Studio, approached us to act as “clients” to a group of students learning how to solve complex design challenges. Of course, we said yes! And thanks to prior user research on CC Search, we already knew what design challenges we faced but were struggling with how to fix them—that’s where the students’ insights were critical.
In the first article in this series, you created your first, very small, one-line Bash script and explored the reasons for creating shell scripts. In the second article, you began creating a fairly simple template that can be a starting point for other Bash programs and began testing it.
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The Bash shell, like all programming languages, can deal with variables. A variable is a symbolic name that refers to a specific location in memory that contains a value of some sort. The value of a variable is changeable, i.e., it is variable. If you are not familiar with using variables, read my article How to program with Bash: Syntax and tools before you go further.
Done? Great! Let's now look at some good practices when using variables.
On December 19, Mozilla announced that it will switch to Matrix and Riot as the main synchronous communication platform, replacing IRC. This post is aimed to give you an introduction to using Riot, the most popular Matrix client, with a screen reader.
Matrix itself is an open standard protocol that defines how a chat client, such as Riot, talks to a server, such as Synapse, and how servers communicate to each other to exchange messages in shared, or as is the jargon, federated, rooms. In the Matrix network, rooms can be federated across the whole network, so no matter which server you choose as your home server, you’ll get the messages in rooms you join no matter where they originated from. You can imagine this as if you were signing up to a particular e-mail or news server, and then getting messages from other servers depending on which newsgroups you subscribe to or e-mail lists you join.
“Those who cannot€ remember€ the€ past€ are condemned to repeat it.” So said George Santayana.
I was in the United States for a few years before I bought my first car. It was a long, white used Cadillac, with lots of problems, including bad brakes.
Baseball had an exciting year — breakout stars, a major cheating scandal, a seven-game World Series.
The Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) held its 44th annual convention in Chicago in early November, where it endorsed Sean O’Brien for General President and Fred Zuckerman for General Secretary-Treasurer in the 2021 Teamster election. They will run on the “Teamsters United” slate and challenge the incumbent leadership, whether it is led by the incumbent General President James P. Hoffa, Jr. or an anointed successor.
Sergey Sotnikov was, until his retirement this October, the manager of a helicopter landing pad in Izhma, a small town in the north of Russia’s Komi Republic. For 12 years after the airport where the helipad was located shut down, Sotnikov maintained its only runway nonetheless — all on his own initiative and without pay. In 2010, a malfunctioning Tupolev Tu-154 jet was forced to make a crash landing near Izhma, and the runway Sotnikov had kept intact and clear of debris saved the lives of the passengers and crew. Meduza special correspondent Andrey Pertsev traveled to Izhma to ask Sotnikov about his life and his regrets since then.
I€ first became aware of William Shakespeare’s play The Tempest in Junior High. Our English class was reading Romeo and Juliet and each student was assigned to read another Shakespeare work of our own choosing. I chose King Lear, mostly because I felt an affinity with Lear’s youngest daughter Cordelia. Later in my life I would also find an affinity with Falstaff—at least his preference for certain beverages. A girl who sat next to me in English class chose The Tempest. The general perception in our class was that this play was a fairy tale complete with a king, a prince, a princess, a whimsical spirit and a bad guy. The year was 1967. Little did we know that in the world outside our suburban classroom all of those characters and the play itself were being reconsidered and radically redefined.
[...]
This reevaluation reflected the changes wrought by capitalism, its advances and its intrusions. To put it simply (perhaps too simply), the African Caliban, whose origins as the illegitimate son of a Black witch had so often cast him as villain, was recast as a revolutionary representative of the colonized—the people sold into slavery, forced to work their stolen homeland and die like so many insects. Prospero, the banished king whose magic allowed him to regain his throne and ensure his daughter’s future was newly perceived as the colonizer and enslaver of not only Caliban, but of the spirit Ariel, too. All that was once right-side up was now upside down. In other interpretations more favorable to capitalism, it is Prospero—whose power is based in his book-learning and knowledge—that is the revolutionary.
[...]
Ms. Scott has written a fascinating and lively take on a fascinating drama that involves history, revolution and reaction. An approachable text even for those not versed in Shakespeare, Scott’s argues that The Tempest is a work which both reveals and in retrospect critiques capitalism: its revolutionary changes to human existence and its counterrevolutionary actions against those who would move humanity beyond it. She truly knows her subject, having read, viewed, analyzed and considered multiple renditions of Shakespeare’s tale. As a result, Shakespeare’s Tempest and Capitalism is considerably more than a history of the play, as performed, rewritten, critiqued and referred to. It is also a history of British, and ultimately Western capitalism, colonialism and imperialism and the resistance to its predation and degradations.
When I grew up in the 1970s, my father often sat in an alcoholic or drug-induced stupor.
After reading the reviews below, you’d likely agree that Ovid is an invaluable resource for the left. Launched on March 22, it aggregates films from eight different cutting edge film distributors, including some whose documentaries and narrative films I have reviewed over the years: First Run, Bullfrog, and Icarus. These are the kinds of films that show up in art houses like the Cinema Village in NY or the Laemmle in Los Angeles but generally for a week or less. They may show up on Amazon or iTunes, but you will never get a head’s up as you would if you were an Ovid subscriber. The main benefit of subscribing for $6.99 per month (a real pittance) is the convenience of having an intelligently organized website that categorizes films geared to its intended audience. While Netflix groups film by genres such as horror or crime, Ovid groups them, for example, by “Don’t Mourn, Organize.” In that category, you can find “No Gods, No Masters: A History of Anarchism,” “Eugene V. Debs: American Socialist,” and the 1967 groundbreaking documentary “Far From Vietnam.” In addition to such radical documentaries, you will find avant-garde narrative films from Chantal Akerman, Claire Denis, and Marcel Ophüls. So, don’t hesitate. Ovid is the Netflix the left has always needed, supporting evidence from the reviews beneath...
One of the most pervasive informal fallacies, I explain to my students, is the “straw man” argument. A straw man argument, a version of a larger class of fallacies known as ignoratio elenchi, “occurs when an opponent’s point of view is distorted in order to make it easier to refute” (“Fallacies,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) Sometimes this is done deliberately. Progressive political programs, for example, are caricatured as “everyone gets a pony.”
Peace in our world—and in any would-be inclusive community—greatly depends on un-deifying the “Prince of Peace.” Christians need to un-wrap the supernatural signs surrounding the baby in the manger and see in him the humanity that is within every human being. That is a great challenge for many Christians who find their identity—and superiority—in the New Testament’s heavenly signs heralding the prophesized birth of a “Prince of Peace.” (See Isaiah 9: 6)
Amidst the avalanche of Amazon boxes and the mountains of plastic junk, it might seem irrelevant to point out that the most lasting symbols of the Christmas season are of German origins—from St. Nicholas’s long white flowing beard to the evergreen tree hung with ornaments and hymned with€ O Tannenbaum.
Boeing’s new Starliner capsule ended up in the wrong orbit after lifting off on its first test flight Friday, a blow to the company’s effort to launch astronauts for NASA next year.
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is back in the news on a topic close to my heart: student loans.
The adults gathered in a hotel ballroom in Peoria — school employees, caregivers, health care workers — fell silent as their instructor, a muscled and tattooed mixed martial arts fighter, stared at them to demand attention.
Over five days of training, the participants would learn how to physically control children who pose a danger to themselves or others. But first, Zac Barry focused on what he views as the most important lesson.
Before the Chicago Tribune and ProPublica Illinois published “The Quiet Rooms,” an investigation into the practice of isolating students in seclusion spaces, the state of Illinois did not collect any data on how often public schools seclude or physically restrain students, including why they did it or what types of restraint they used.
Though state rules required schools to document each incident in detail, these records were not submitted for review to the Illinois State Board of Education or any other state agency.
It was one of a series of lobbying victories by the healthcare industry in 2019 bolstered by top Democrats.
Doctors who receive money from drugmakers related to a specific drug prescribe that drug more heavily than doctors without such financial ties, a new ProPublica analysis found. The pattern is consistent for almost all of the most widely prescribed brand-name drugs in Medicare, including drugs that treat diabetes, asthma and more.
The financial interactions include payments for delivering promotional talks, consulting and receiving sponsored meals and travel.
"Sanders making a straightforward case for universality is good. This is the kind of rhetoric Democrats have been afraid to voice for decades."
Next year will mark the 10th anniversary of ProPublica’s Dollars for Docs, our ambitious effort to track pharmaceutical company payments to doctors.
When we started, we were thrilled to gain access to what seven drug companies paid physicians for speaking and consulting and to collect payment information in a first-of-its-kind database that allowed everyone to search for their doctors in one place. Now, federal law requires every drug and medical device maker, about 1,700 companies, to release information on their payments.
If you follow this website, you know how many different smart home devices there are as well as how many different protocols for them. That’s where it can get confusing: this device works with Alexa and Google Assistant. So does this device, but it also works with Apple HomeKit. This device only works with Alexa. This device works with all of them as well as IFTTT. And each of those devices has different capabilities outside of the voice assistants and IFTTT. It can lead to confusion and lead to you buying many different hubs just to get everything working together.
The Second Circuit Court of Appeals has suggested -- not exactly ruled -- that backdoor searches of Section 702 collections targeting Americans (citizens and permanent residents) is a violation of the Fourth Amendment.
African American and Asian American men were misidentified 100 times as often as white men.
With the passage of Article 25 on December 11, the town of Brookline, Massachusetts, became the fifth municipality in the nation to ban its government agencies from using face surveillance.€
Brookline joins nearby Somerville as the two Massachusetts municipalities to have banned face surveillance. The two Metro-Boston area municipalities have chosen to protect their residents now, rather than wait for the passage of state-level protections. Massachusetts is poised to become the first state in the nation to enact a state-level moratorium on all use of the technology. Brookline's State Senator Cynthia Stone Creem sponsored a bill (S.1385) that would impose a moratorium on government use of the technology throughout the commonwealth. That moratorium would remain in place until state lawmakers€ enact an authorizing statute€ that€ clearly outlines what agencies are permitted to use the technology, requires audits, protects civil liberties, and establishes minimum accuracy rates to prevent disparate impact against women, people with darker skin, and young people.€ Polling from the ACLU of Massachusetts has indicated high levels of support for the statewide moratorium, with 79 percent of likely Massachusetts voters voting in favor.
In May, San Francisco became the first city in the United States to ban facial recognition tech by city agencies. Being on the cutting edge has its drawbacks, as the city has now found out several months later. Tom Simonite and Gregory Barber of Wired report the city's legislation inadvertently nuked many of its employees' devices.
As companies and governments increasingly hoover up our personal data, a common refrain to keep people from worrying is the claim that nothing can go wrong because the data itself is "anonymized"--or stripped of personal detail. But time and time again, studies have shown how this really is cold comfort; given it takes only a little effort to pretty quickly identify a person based on access to other data sets. Yet most companies, policy folk, and government officials still act as if "anonymizing" your data means something. It's simply not true.
First there was the Securus and LocationSmart scandal, which showcased how cellular carriers and data brokers buy and sell your daily movement data with only a fleeting effort to ensure all of the subsequent buyers and sellers of that data adhere to basic privacy and security standards. Then there was the blockbuster report by Motherboard showing how this data routinely ends up in the hands of everyone from bail bondsman to stalkers, again, with only a fleeting effort made to ensure the data itself is used ethically and responsibly.
As is usual for cases being considered by the EU's highest court, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), before the main ruling a senior legal adviser offers a preliminary opinion. Although the view by the Advocate General is not binding on the court, it often gives a good idea of how things will go. That makes some of the issues raised in a new opinion by Advocate General Saugmandsgaard ÃËe (pdf) concerning the EU's GDPR privacy regulation particularly interesting. The case is yet another one triggered by a complaint from the privacy activist Max Schrems as a result of Snowden's revelations. The background is summed up well by the press release on the Advocate General's opinion (pdf):
Practical website traffic fingerprinting attacks against the live Tor network have been limited by the sheer quantity and variety of all kinds (and combinations) of traffic that the Tor network carries. The paper reviews some of these practical difficulties in sections 2.4 and 7.3.
However, if specific types of traffic can be isolated, such as through onion service circuit setup fingerprinting, the attack seems more practical. This is why we recently deployed cover traffic to obscure client side onion service circuit setup.
Facebook Inc. will no longer feed user phone numbers provided to it for two-factor authentication into its “people you may know” feature, as part of a wide-ranging overhaul of its privacy practices, the company told Reuters.
Revelations last year that Facebook was using personal data obtained for two-factor authentication to serve advertisements enraged privacy advocates, who called the practice deceptive and said it eroded trust in an essential digital security tool.
Will the US left work to normalize the impending coup attempt in Mexico the way it did for Venezuela, Bolivia, Brazil and Nicaragua?
On the evening of December 19, Russia’s Federal Security Service building in downtown Moscow was attacked. In a chaotic exchange of gunfire, two federal agents were killed and another four people were injured (one of whom is still in critical condition). One of the less severely wounded victims is a civilian. The assailant, who was also killed, reportedly carried a backpack filled with grenades and an explosive device, which a robot later defused. Federal investigators have confirmed that the man responsible for the attack was Evgeny Manyurov. His photograph is now circulating online. Meduza reviews what we know so far about this deadly incident.
Meduza has analyzed eyewitness videos from the December 19 shooting at Moscow’s Lubyanka Square. In the attack, 39-year-old Yevgeny Manyurov targeted the headquarters of Moscow’s Federal Security Service (FSB), and two FSB employees died. Their names are not yet known. Manyurov himself was shot by special forces. However, combining several videos of the shooting demonstrates that shots likely continued to be fired even after Manyurov was killed. This means at least one of the victims may have been shot by security officials because the various agencies on site did not coordinate their actions, multiple sources told Meduza.
The trove of U.S. “Lessons Learned” documents on Afghanistan published by the Washington Post portrays, in excruciating detail, the anatomy of a failed policy, scandalously hidden from the public for 18 years. The “Lessons Learned” papers, however, are based on the premise that the U.S. and its allies will keep intervening militarily in other countries, and that they must therefore learn the lessons of Afghanistan to avoid making the same mistakes in future military occupations.
"Politicians never ever ever say that. Ever."
The annual defense budget,€ passed recently€ by both the House (377-48) and Senate (82-8), came in at $738 billion for 2020, up from last year a sweet $22 billion.
The court's chief prosecutor says "there are no substantial reasons to believe that an investigation would not serve the interests of justice."
In the deadly 2017 crash of the USS John S. McCain, sailors needed to figure out the ship’s computerized navigation system to avert disaster, working through their confusion and fear to find solutions. They ultimately could not, and 10 sailors died.
Investigations done by the Navy and the National Transportation Safety Board produced thousands of pages of information and analysis, and the shared conclusion that the complex navigation system installed on the McCain a year before the crash had played a critical role in the fatal accident in the Pacific.
Rep. Pete Aguilar, D-Calif., said Republicans in Congress quietly removed the term “white nationalist” from a defense bill amendment aimed at keeping white nationalists out of the military.
The United States government should ensure that the approximately 1,250 Yemenis currently living in the US are not deported to their war-torn country, Human Rights Watch said today. The government should extend and redesignate Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Yemen, which expires on March 3, 2020.
The US has contributed to the dire situation in Yemen by continuing to supply weapons to the Saudi Arabia-led coalition responsible for numerous violations of the laws of war in Yemen.
In this case, the man was also a Turkish citizen, had already been summoned by the Danish police for terrorism, and there was an arrest warrant out for him.
The new law allows Danes with dual citizenships who have exhibited behaviour contrary to Denmark’s vital interests, including fighting for Islamic State, to be stripped of their Danish citizenship.
Network data from the NetBlocks internet observatory confirm disruptions to multiple fixed-line and mobile providers in Iran on the morning of Thursday, 19 December. The outage had partial but severe impact for just over two hours and corresponded with lesser internet disruptions in nearby countries.
Fiber optic cables that support the Internet in Eastern Europe, Iran, Turkey, etc. were physically cut on Thursday, December 19, 2019, and it was found that Internet access was blocked for about two hours. A situation where multiple cables are disconnected at the same time is usually not considered possible.
Photos purporting to show the seizure of a large cache of weapons have been making the rounds in WhatsApp groups run by Malians and Nigerians. While the posts aren’t in agreement over where the seizure took place, most all of them agree that the containers packed with weapons were shipped from France and were bound for Kidal, in northern Mali, which is home to several armed groups. Turns out, however, that is not even close to the real story behind these photos.
Presidential Candidate Bernie Sanders has a suggestion: stop spending so much money on the military and global warfare, and instead put it toward fighting climate change.
He made the argument during Thursday night’s Democratic Party debate, The Hill reports. Sanders, who’s previously introduced legislation to declare a state of emergency to mobilize against the existential threat that climate change poses, argued that the money to fund climate programs exists — but it’s being spent in the wrong places.
Fish catches are falling in the Gulf of Maine, Baltic cod are getting smaller. Sharks suffer acid waters’ effects as marine climate impacts grow.
"Instead of spending $1.8 trillion a year on war, globally, on weapons of destruction," said Sanders, "maybe we pool our resources and fight our common enemy which is climate change."
Could some of the most talked of solutions to climate chaos have the reverse effect and make things worse? Some critics think so, and they aren’t “deniers” who think climate change isn’t real. The concept of “net zero” carbon emissions, for example, might actually help industry pollute, because one of the commonest ways to reach for it is through “carbon offsets.” This means that if a corporation is responsible for a ton of carbon dioxide emissions – which is bad – but at the same time it funds a project which “captures” (or “sequesters”) a ton of carbon – which is good – then the “net emissions” come to zero, as one is subtracted from, or “offset” against, the other.
Arshak Makichyan, who has held climate strikes for 40 weeks straight as part of the Fridays For Future (FFF) youth movement inspired by Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, has been sentenced to six days in jail for an October 25 protest. Greenpeace Russia coordinator Konstantin Fomin posted online about the ruling from the Meshchansky District Court. The sentence represents the first time an FFF activist has been jailed in Russia; it may be the first time an FFF member has been held for their activities for multiple days anywhere in the world.
The idea of a Green New Deal, including the one proposed by a group of Democrats led by New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is hardly novel on the world scene, though potentially consequential for American politics. European Green parties, for example, introduced far-reaching policies in support of an ecological (sustainable) model of development as early as 1980. A few other European leftist parties later arrived at their own “greening” initiatives to mitigate climate disruption. The much-smaller U.S. Greens followed suit. Even the authoritarian Chinese government has introduced its own program to curb greenhouse emissions while theoretically reducing fossil-fuel consumption.
Australia is a major exporter of coal and other hydrocarbons, and with 0.7 percent of the world population is responsible for 5% of carbon dioxide emissions if exported fuels are counted. That is staggering.
The nonprofit that brought the case called it "a groundbreaking decision that confirms that individual governments must do their fair share to reduce greenhouse gas emissions."
I crossed a wooden footbridge, holding my younger grandson in my left arm. My right hand held the hand of my older grandson. Suddenly the bridge shifted. Planks broke, jutting up, down, creating gaps. Balance gone, I fell against the few planks that remained intact, managing to keep the baby close to my side, yet my other grandchild was slipping from the edge. Lightning fast, I reached, grabbing one of his ankles as I screamed for help and then abruptly woke from this dream, my heart thump, thump, thumping.
[...]
According to this study, the US Department of Defense “is the world’s largest institutional user of petroleum…the single largest producer of greenhouse gases (GHG) in the world.” Yet the Senate just approved a Pentagon spending bill of nearly $740 billion. Clearly, some countries are attempting to meet climate goals, but not the one in which I reside.
A couple of months ago, I was the only coal plant protester when our stalwart leader, Gary Richards, was out of town. I watched trucks pull in. Occasionally the person behind the wheel would look at me and nod. Most of the drivers stared ahead, ignoring. I decided to enter the building and talk with employees. Carrying my “SAY NO TO COAL” sign, I ascended stairs. I wanted to speak with employees about how they felt when they thought the plant was going to close, before University of North Carolina administrators made a decision to postpone converting to energy that won’t destroy our planet.
The woman at reception eyed me with suspicion. I said, “I support sustainable energy but don’t want anyone to lose their job.” She said that although they were assured they’d have a job there was still concern. Then she gave me her card and wrote the name and phone number of the plant manager. Once at home, I called him, leaving a message. When he returned my call, he said the plant was in the process of converting to natural gas. Yes, this means fracking. I pictured water, pouring from faucets, igniting, and contamination of both water and soil. Pollution that causes illness—damage to our bodies and to Earth.
In response to the exclusive Guardian report, critics called the actions of Canadian authorities "abhorrent and unconscionable."
The state senators grilling the CEO of Pacific Gas & Electric Corp. were upset — like millions of other Californians, some spent days in the dark when the nation’s largest utility shut off power during windstorms this fall.
A group of 18 state attorneys general is calling for construction to proceed on the controversial Atlantic Coast Pipeline proposed to carry fracked gas from West Virginia to Virginia and North Carolina, through both ecologically and socially vulnerable areas. Last week the group submitted a friend-of-the-court brief in a case asking the U.S. Supreme Court to reconsider a lower court’s decision to block a U.S. Forest Service permit allowing the project to cross the Appalachian Trail and run through the George Washington and Monongahela National Forests. Oral arguments are set for Feb. 24, with a decision expected by June.
Expect€ these companies to try reducing€ their debt through the process of bankruptcy€ and,€ like the coal industry,€ attempting to get out of environmental and employee-related financial€ obligations.€
The Prime Minister’s absence in the face of a national disaster speaks volumes about the people and places he says he loves, writes Joshua Dabelstein.
The $11 billion Nord Stream 2 project is just weeks away from completion and analysts have been divided on whether the imposition of sanctions at such a late stage will be able to halt the project.
Allseas Group, the Swiss-based company that is laying the last segments of the 1,230-kilometer pipeline, announced it has suspended its activities in anticipation of the enactment.
I read several recent opinions by women employed in Oregon’s timber industry extolling the industry’s environmental, economic, and social contributions while justifying their forest practices. Both of these women appeared to be relative newcomers to Oregon.
Botanists have made a new census of terrestrial plants — only to find that with nearly 40% of them rare, or extremely rare, this may put food at risk.
The same report also predicted that by the same year, more than half the world's population would be concentrated in India, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Indonesia, Egypt and the United States. In addition, India is expected to overtake China as the world's most populous country by 2027.
As we all know, the largest US corporations and their chief executives were the main beneficiaries of Trump’s so-called tax reform in 2017. A€ new report€ from the Institute of Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), based on the records of 379 of the€ Fortune€ 500 corporations, tells us just how much they benefited.
It may be tempting to obsess over the ways that the two main parties diverge, but it might be more important to note when they agree.€
The World Trade Organization (WTO) is on its last legs now that the Trump administration has blocked the appointment or reappointment of judges to the appeals court of its Dispute Settlement Mechanism — which is the central pillar of the 24-year-old multilateral body.
I’m writing this sitting in my kitchen, at a table for two my husband inherited from his grandmother. We have a small house in Murphysboro, in southern Illinois, and we have made it our own. I especially love it this time of year. Stockings hang from the fireplace mantel near the tree, which is decorated with an eclectic collection of ornaments we both brought to our marriage.
My dog is staring at me, wondering if he can have some of my toast. I’m wearing fuzzy slippers and drinking hot tea. There’s a light dusting of snow outside, but it’s warm in here. This is my home. It’s a place that feels safe. I spend a lot of time thinking about my home and how where we live becomes part of who we are. Where we live determines the air we breathe, where children go to school and the people we are surrounded by. Whether renting or owning, where people live has a profound impact on their quality of life.
Earlier this week, photos began circulating of a recent subterranean fundraising dinner starring the presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg. Held in a glittering, ambiently lit wine cave in California’s Napa Valley, the party might have been a rich wedding reception or a set piece from HBO’s plutocrat drama Succession, except for a man wearing shorts sitting near Buttigieg. From the ceiling hung a massive inverted tree—or, the party being in a cellar, maybe a root system—tipped with Swarovski crystals. During last night’s Democratic debate, the fete had its moment above ground, when Senator Elizabeth Warren said, “Billionaires in wine caves should not pick the next president of the United States.”
“Narrative,” the word, is in its political heyday. Politicians need to assert their narrative before their opponent does it for them. They need to change it or find it or test it or deny it. We live in an angry jousting of competing narratives, each seeking to crush, scrunch, destroy and annihilate the other. But not by old fashioned empirical and rational methods in the sciences or direct and circumstantial evidence in the courtroom.
Justin E.H. Smith in Irrationality: A History of the Dark Side of Reason describes the point at which our current arena of competing narratives reached after the Trump election, an election which meant “the near total disappearance of a shared space of common presuppositions from which we might argue through our differences.”
That space which was formerly shared is now a gazillion spaces in cyberspace, some briefly colliding in social media, most totally oblivious of the existence of other spaces.
We are all now in our own cubicles of truth and reality.
Narratives are either engaging to scale or they’re not. Is there a Democratic candidate who will be as engaging on stage as Donald J. Trump? Are Elizabeth Warren’s many plans for many things as engaging as one thoughtless tweet of our president? Does critical reasoning influence us or do social media “Influencers” now own that space?
In the demented mind of the disgraced fascist oligarch Donald “Perfect Call” Trump, “the Radical Left Democrats have been trying to impeach me from Day 1.” This is nonsense on at least three levels.
Britain took a big step towards the European Union exit door on Friday when lawmakers gave preliminary approval to Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s EU divorce bill in a decisive vote that broke years of political deadlock over Brexit.
One country, two systems. Britain is leaving the European Union. The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is not leaving on the same terms.
Britain is looking drenched at the moment; colours blue and yellow seem to be streaking through the country. The Scottish Nationalists have re-asserted control lost to the Conservatives in 2016. In the rest of the country, seats never touched by Tory Blue have are now occupied by the party of Boris Johnson. Yet again, British politics shows that the posh boys, when it comes to moments of crisis, can pull in the deluded, and denuded working class. This must count as the political version of Stockholm syndrome, the working class playing hostages finding affection for their Tory tormenters.
As the House of Representatives moved toward impeaching President Donald Trump this week — by what all predict will be a vote divided largely by party — it is time for reflection.
Cults usually are one-man religions. A magnetic, dictatorial, dogmatic, demagogue draws throngs of followers and leads them into lala-land, sometimes dangerously.
The site’s social media strategy sows confusion and spreads lies.
Tulsi Gabbard’s non-vote regarding the impeachment of Donald Trump has made her the target of great disdain from people who identify as democrats.
To the extent that the third presidential impeachment in US history is a “victory” — the public jury is still out on that question and likely to remain so for some time — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) seems determined to snatch defeat from its jaws.
Al Capone wasn’t prosecuted for tax evasion because it’s cool or smart or strategic to prosecute murderers for lesser crimes, but because proving murder in court was going to be more difficult.
The impeachment and trial of Donald Trump is aimed as much at Bernie Sanders (and, to a lesser extent, Liz Warren, though she’s rapidly falling in line with the establishment) as it is at the President, if indeed it is aimed at him at all. As is often said, the Democratic Party establishment would rather lose with Trump than win with Sanders. A New Deal Democrat poses more of a bottom line threat to the corporate establishment than the fascist Trump, and the Democratic Party represents the interests of the corporate establishment no less than the Republicans and the wicked buffoon in the White House. Trump’s letter to Nancy Pelosi is chilling and politically brilliant. He is playing to his fascist base with great effect, a relatively easy thing, because the Democrats are corrupt and feckless. Nobody knows this better than Trump supporters, and nobody knows this less than “progressives.” My dear progressive friends are so obsessed with Trump that they have lost the critical distance to observe the vile machinations and total sellout (for 30 years at least) of the Democratic Party to corporate interests.
Richard Nixon was a crafty president, at war with his political enemies but inclined to carry out most of his battles behind the scenes. Donald Trump trumpets his grievances, using public lashings to diminish his enemies and nip at allies who anger him. Nixon began his second term in January of 1973 with support from nearly 70 percent of the American people. Mr. Trump’s public approval has never hit 50 percent, according to the Gallup poll. Nixon saw his support steadily erode as details of the Watergate scandal trickled out. Mr. Trump’s support has held steady despite a fire hose of accusations. His approval rating stood at a typical 43 percent when the House opened its impeachment inquiry on Sept. 24.
Ultimately, Nixon resigned after losing the support of his own party, while Mr. Trump is likely to survive a Senate trial as he runs for re-election with strong backing from his party. The difference between the two embattled presidents isn’t necessarily measured best by the severity of the accusations or the solidity of the evidence against them. Instead, factors unrelated to the facts are shielding Mr. Trump to a degree that Nixon would have envied. What are they? Here’s our assessment of how the two impeachment dramas played out:
"Trump's hijacking of our judiciary will be his most enduring legacy, and it will continue to threaten everything progressives care about long after he leaves office."
Debates are framed by the questions the journalists who moderate them ask, and, as FAIR has shown, those questions have built-in biases. Some issues are covered more than others, some policies are subject to harsher questioning, some ideological assumptions are more likely than others to inform the questions. But at the very least, debates are one of the few opportunities most voters outside of the early voting states have to hear directly from the candidates without being filtered by journalist spin. Until now.
How, exactly, did I get here? My political journey has somehow taken me from canvassing for Obama north of Fort Knox, KY in 2008, to voting for Bernie Sanders in the Democratic Primary outside of West Point, NY in 2016, to – gulp! – “defending” Trump against impeachment in 2019. What a long, strange, trip it has been, as they say. Truth is, I couldn’t sleep last night and have been watching CNN’s wall-to-wall impeachment coverage since 4AM. When the clock struck a reasonable hour on East Coast time, and once I couldn’t contain the frustration any longer, I called my father.
You don’t have to be a leftist or a liberal to worry that the demented fascist oligarch Donald Trump might try to negate the United States republic’s electoral process and term limits. Consider the following statement from the distinguished conservative scholar and American Enterprise Institute fellow Norm Ornstein last week...
The House of Representatives impeached Donald Trump for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. Impeachment is a big deal; if it doesn’t feel that way, it may be because the Trump administration has been such a blunt instrument that it’s hard to feel it can be contained or constrained by any deliberative procedure—and it also may be because corporate media have failed big time, presenting a critical story about asymmetrical power as a kinda boring, “both sides,” depends-who-you-believe Beltway story. And then claiming it’s the public that’s not interested.
While Warren arguably had the line of the night, the Vermont senator slammed the "real competition going on" between Biden and Buttigieg over who has the most billionaire supporters.
In these days of epic collapse, with the established order rapidly disintegrating before our very eyes, mankind seems to be tearing apart at the seems and resorting to the bipolar extremes of the far-left and the far-right. And why the hell not? Poor people across the globe have grown weary of the false promises and bald-faced lies of the so-called moderates. The one thing the warring camps of extremes seem to agree on is that the mass democracy of neoliberal globalism is an epic wash. A rigged shell game that only pays out to the house, and now the house is on fire.
According to a report by the news agency€ “Rossiya Segodnya,” almost half of the articles in the foreign press about Russia are “negative.” This recent study leans heavily on the British media (which makes up more than a third of the entire sample), where nearly 40 percent of the selected coverage is supposedly biased against Russia.€ Meduza€ learned that hundreds of the articles€ Rossiya Segodnya€ examined in the British press share the same author: a man who’s worked in Russia since 1992 and now simply rewrites blurbs he finds in Russian tabloids, selected for him by Russian staff working at his news agency.
Clint Eastwood is a great filmmaker.€ Unforgiven€ is a flawed, but still magnificent, western that deals with the tension between legend and reality. Eastwood’s latest film –€ Richard Jewell€ – is another example of tight, well-wrought filmmaking. But as good as the film is as storytelling, it emits a rotten smell. OK, it’s hardly as rotten as the classic€ Birth of a Nation, another well-wrought film with a dark propaganda edge; but in€ Richard Jewell, Eastwood isn’t shooting straight from the hip. In this Trump impeachment moment, the culture-war spin often seems crude and obvious.
At the sixth Democratic primary debate, a smaller field displayed greater distinctions and fiery disagreements. The PBS/Politico debate at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, California, opened with questions echoing GOP talking points, such as claims about the alleged economic harm of wealth taxes (which Warren rebuffed well) but eventually ventured into real substance with challenging questions about Guantánamo Bay, Israel and Palestine, and the U.S. war in Afghanistan. The flash points of the evening were the debates among the candidates on money in politics, universal programs vs. means-tested ones, and what experience prepares one for the presidency.
A Saudi "state-backed" effort saw thousands of Twitter accounts used for "aggressive" liking, retweeting, and replying to boost messages favorable to the Saudi government. Some of them were active in threads about Iran.
The U.S.-based company said on December 20 that it deleted 39 Facebook accounts, 344 pages, 13 groups, and 22 Instagram accounts originating in Georgia.
Facebook said the pages posed as news organizations -- such as FastNews.ge and Mypress.ge -- and impersonated political parties, public figures, activist groups, and media entities.
But the facts in this instance are unambiguous: The president of the United States attempted to use his political power to coerce a foreign leader to harass and discredit one of the president’s political opponents. That is not only a violation of the Constitution; more importantly, it is profoundly immoral.
President Donald Trump blasted a prominent Christian magazine on Friday, a day after it published an editorial arguing that he should be removed from office because of his “blackened moral record.”
Trump lashed out at the publication, calling it a "far left magazine" on Twitter the day after Christianity Today posted an editorial calling for him to be removed from office. Trump was impeached by the House of Representatives on Wednesday and faces possible removal in a Senate trial next year.
The editorial in Christianity Today called Trump's Twitter feed "a near perfect example of a human being who is morally lost and confused."
"His Twitter feed alone -- with its habitual string of mischaracterizations, lies, and slanders -- is a near perfect example of a human being who is morally lost and confused."
But the editorial warned evangelical leaders that their support for Mr. Trump was making them into hypocrites. Addressing the "the many evangelicals who continue to support Mr. Trump in spite of his blackened moral record," Galli wrote: [...]
Yesterday the Scottish Government published “Scotland’s Right to Choose“, its long heralded paper on the path to a new Independence referendum. It is a document riven by a basic intellectual flaw. It sets out in detail, and with helpful annexes, that Scotland is a historic nation with the absolute and inalienable right of self-determination, and that sovereignty lies not in the Westminster parliament but with the Scottish people.
It then contradicts all of this truth by affirming, at length, in detail, and entirely without reservation, that Scotland can only hold a legitimate Independence referendum if the Westminster Parliament devolves the power to do so under Section 30.
Both propositions cannot be true. Scotland cannot be a nation with the right of self-determination, and at the same time require the permission of somebody else to exercise that self-determination.
As I’ve recently learned from his wife, activist and prison journalist Marty Gottesfeld — recently sentenced to ten years for a denial of service attack on the website of the Boston hospital that was holding a young girl against her will and that of her family while denying her treatment for the painful condition they claimed was all in her head — has been held incommunicado from his family by the Bureau of Prisons for well over seven months.
In our latest “Dissenter Weekly Update” episode, we highlight how the United States government won its lawsuit against NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and may confiscate proceeds he earned from his book,€ Permanent Record,€ as well as his speeches.
The U.S. government accused Snowden of violating secrecy agreements he signed with the NSA and CIA when classified information was published that did not go through prepublication review. The American Civil Liberties Union and Knight First Amendment Institute have challenged prepublication review, contending it undermines First Amendment rights.
Billionaire casino mogul Sheldon Adelson has been known to be a bit litigious at times. Way back in 2015, when there was an effort underway to overturn Nevada's very good anti-SLAPP law, there was speculation that Adelson was behind the effort, due to him losing a case thanks to that law. It turns out that the remnants of that particular case are still going, despite dating all the way back to events in 2012. The issue involves the National Jewish Democratic Council posting a link concerning operations in Adelson's Macau casinos. The case went through a variety of different courts and was dismissed under Nevada's anti-SLAPP laws.
The Trump administration says it’s anti-Semitic to criticize Israel. That’s the gist of a recent executive order that would treat campus calls to boycott Israel over its treatment of Palestinians as anti-Semitic discrimination on the basis of “national origin.”
Millions of Indian citizens are currently without internet access as the Indian government has taken the controversial move of shutting down internet access in major cities around the country. NDTV reports that the Special Branch of the Delhi Police, under the direction of the Indian Government’s Ministry of Home Affairs, sent a letter to internet service providers and mobile data providers in India telling them to execute the internet shutdown. Affected ISPs include Vodafone India and Airtel. The local police has instructed data providers to shutdown internet access in specific locations across cities where protests were planned to be held. It is reported that Indian citizens are protesting against a new citizenship law which some see as discriminatory towards India’s large and integral Muslim population.
On December 13, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights released a powerful statement that criticized India’s new citizenship law. This “fundamentally discriminatory” Citizenship (Amendment) Act of 2019 would expedite citizenship for persecuted religious minorities from India’s neighboring countries. But in the list of those minorities, it names only Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis, and Christians. It does not name Muslims, despite the fact that there have been several important cases of Muslims being persecuted in Pakistan (the Ahmadis), in Afghanistan (the Hazaras), and in Myanmar (the Rohingyas). The UN said that not only does this law violate India’s obligations to conventions, treaties, and compacts that it has signed at the global level, but also that it is in violation of its own Constitution.
"What are they hiding in Kashmir?"
Police banned public gatherings in parts of the Indian capital and other cities for a third day Friday and cut internet services to try to stop growing protests against a new citizenship law that have left 11 people dead and more than 4,000 others detained.
For centuries, love has been a revolutionary force in the lives of individual human beings and societies, too. Now, there’s also something called “revolutionary love,” though you won’t find that variety on the Wikipedia page for love, which lists “conjugal love,” “free love,” “platonic love” and more. Now, there’s also a contemporary “revolutionary love movement” that’s driven in part by the recent explosions of hate that come from the alt-right and from enclaves of white power, but that are not limited to one single ethnic group, gender or social class.
The Vatican office responsible for processing clergy sex abuse complaints has seen a record 1,000 cases reported from around the world this year, including from countries it had not heard from before — suggesting that the worst may be yet to come in a crisis that has plagued the Roman Catholic Church.
Naama Issachar, an Israeli citizen, was sentenced to seven and a half years in a Russian prison for allegedly attempting to smuggle 9.6 grams of cannabis into the country. She was on a layover between India and Israel when a police dog signaled at her luggage, which was not in her possession and was set to be claimed only when she arrived in Tel Aviv. Russian officials offered to exchange Issachar for Alexey Burkov, a Russian hacker who was being held in Israel pending extradition to the United States, but those negotiations were unsuccessful. On December 19, a hearing took place to determine whether Issachar’s sentence would be overturned. Kristina Safonova reported from the courtroom.
As temperatures dip near or below freezing, scores of Mexican refugees huddle in their makeshift tents of layered plastic sheeting at the foot of the Santa Fe Bridge that connects Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, with El Paso, Texas. Many small children form part of the group. No colorfully wrapped packages wait below a Christmas tree. No heart warming lyrics from mariachi singers enliven the site, though a small figurine of the Virgin of Guadalupe watches over the people who wait and wait and wait for their chance to argue a case for political asylum in the United States.
The Thirty Meter Telescope will not be built atop Mauna Kea at this time. Hawai’i Governor David Ige announced in an internal memo Thursday morning that law enforcement personnel will be leaving the site.
In October, California Gov. Gavin Newsom greenlit new criminal legal legislation that has drawn considerable attention. Among its provisions, Assembly Bill 32 claims to halt contracts with private prisons, end immigration detention camps, and alleviate some of the burden associated with court, parole and probation fees. While this legislation is a small victory in its own right, the flurry of reports celebrating it deeply mislead us about the nature of incarceration, policing and justice in the United States.
The year seems to be ending on a positive note for Uzbekistan.
The Economist magazine this week declared Uzbekistan its ‘country of the year,’ arguing “no other country travelled as far” as the Central Asian nation in 2019 in terms of economic and other reforms.
Our children’s rights team at Human Rights Watch spends a lot of time focused on the abuses that children suffer around the world. But as we wrap up the year, we’d also like to recognize some of the positive things that have happened for children. Here are 10 good news stories for kids from 2019:
Many children will benefit from these actions, though millions are still out of school and suffer exploitation and abuse. We should take a moment to celebrate the progress of 2019, but we still have a lot of work to do.
The year 2020 could finally bring the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) — the constitutional amendment banning sex-based discrimination that was passed by Congress in 1972 but has been in limbo since 1982, the deadline by which 38 states were required to have ratified it.
The first time I heard the phrase was back in the spring of 1991. I was a senior in college, and I had friends who spent lots of time in the computer lab, which in my memory was a dark room lit only by green-screen CRT monitors, although I’m sure it was brighter than that. These were the days of BBSs and IRC. My friend told me about all the people he was interacting with and he called it “online community.”
While facing increased competition from YouTube, Gaana — which is owned in part by Tencent and is India’s leading music streaming service — announced that it had reached 125 million monthly active users.
In Germany, where Uber is active in seven cities including Frankfurt, Berlin and Munich, the company exclusively works with car rental companies and their licensed drivers.
Thursday’s verdict is effective immediately but can be appealed. “We will assess the court’s ruling and determine next steps to ensure our services in Germany continue,” an Uber spokesperson said.
A person close to the company said that Uber will now change the way it operates in Europe’s largest economy, adding that it is also considering taking legal action against the ruling.
Uh oh, Senators Chris Coons (D-DE) and Thom Tillis (R-NC) have teamed up again to introduce legislation that would promote the interests of patent owners at the public’s expense. This is the same duo that earlier this year sought to dismantle the protections against patents on human genes and abstract ideas that we have thanks to Section 101 of the Patent Act, as the Supreme Court confirmed in 2014’s Alice v. CLS Bank decision. Having failed thus far to muster support for that misguided effort, Senators Coons and Tillis have apparently re-focused their attention on a new effort to service patent owners.
There’s no reason patent owners need more tools to stop infringement at the U.S. border.
For a number of years now, publishers who expect losing revenue in a transition to Open Access have been spreading fear about journals which claim to perform peer-review on submitted manuscripts, but then collect the publishing fee of a few hundred dollars (about 5-10% of what these legacy publishers charge) without performing any peer-review at all. Identifying such journals, however, in order to study if they have any actual detrimental effect on scholarship beyond the claims of these publishers with their commercial interests has proven difficult, as clearly defining the properties such so-called “predatory” publishers is problematic. Today, a new, consensus definition of a “predatory” publisher or journal was published:
Predatory journals and publishers are entities that prioritize self-interest at the expense of scholarship and are characterized by false or misleading information, deviation from best editorial and publication practices, a lack of transparency, and/or the use of aggressive and indiscriminate solicitation practices
Selling second-hand paper books is regular business for thousands of companies around the world, but what if those books are digital? A ruling just handed down by Europe's highest court has determined that the unauthorized sale of second-hand copyrighted eBooks via a website constitutes a communication to the public and an infringement of the owners' rights.
Mangastream, one of the largest manga scanlation sites on the Internet, appears to have shut down. The site disappeared this week and its official Twitter account was removed as well. While no official statement accompanied the closure, we can confirm that the Japanese publisher Shueisha targeted the site in a US court earlier this year.
Internet provider Cox Communications is responsible for the copyright infringements of its subscribers, a Virginia federal jury has ruled. The ISP is contributorily and vicariously liable for the copyright infringements and must pay a group of music companies $1 billion in damages. The ISP has already announced that it will appeal.
We've highlighted the many problems with the various lawsuits against Cox Communications arguing that the company should be held liable for failing to wave a magic wand and stop all piracy from occurring on its service. The internet access provider was originally sued by music publisher BMG, and they got a judge who made it clear that he was not a fan of the internet, and didn't see why it should be a problem for anyone to be kicked off the internet at all. Cox lost the case mostly because the company didn't really follow its own internal repeat infringer policy. That ruling was upheld on appeal, leading the company to settle the case for $25 million.
A man who generated income of around €£400,000 by selling pirate IPTV subscriptions has been sentenced by a court in Cornwall. The 34-year-old, who previously pleaded guilty to copyright and fraud offenses, was handed a one-year prison sentence, suspended for two years, a 20-day rehabilitation activity requirement, and was made the subject of a €£10 confiscation order.
Bucking a recent trend in the music industry, singer-songwriter Romeo Santos has succeeded in dismissing a copyright infringement lawsuit filed against him for his song “Eres Mia.”
Hadopi, the French law built to punish copyright infringers in graduated steps, was always controversial. In addition to many in the public scoffing at the punishment ramp the law put on the public, the actual effects of the law have been murky at best. While Hadopi basically ceased to be in 2016, it is true that the French public has been trending towards less piracy and more legal practices in its wake. Always at question is exactly how direct a relationship that kind of trend has with laws like Hadopi. Studies have straddled both answers to that question, even as we all realize the truth, which is that the impact of laws like Hadopi is nuanced.
