When it comes to stability and performance, nothing can really beat Linux. This is why the U.S. Marine Corps leaders have decided to ask Northrop Grumman Corp. Electronic Systems to change the operating system of the newly delivered Ground/Air Task-Oriented Radar (G/ATOR) from Windows XP to Linux.
Seems like a great idea to me. It makes sense to prepare inmates for life outside of prison with useful skills, and the Linux job market is certainly hot right now.
American intelligence agencies announced Friday their plans to develop and build a new superconducting supercomputer that will increase the current computing capacity while simultaneously reducing energy consumption and the physical footprint of the machines.
Besides the many Linux graphics driver changes for Linux 3.19, there's many other non-graphics features out on the horizon in kernel land -- some of which might land in Linux 3.19 but most of the other items are post-3.19 material. Linux 4.0 also isn't likely far out.
It's been a quiet week, and the patch from rc7 is tiny, so 3.18 is out.
A new version of the Linux kernel, 3.17.5, has been released by Greg Kroah-Hartman and it's now the latest and most advanced version that you can get, at least for a few hours. The 3.18 branch is scheduled to make an appearance very soon.
Due out next week is a very significant update to AMD's Catalyst Linux graphics driver as they continue to work towards the unified AMD Linux driver strategy.
While NVIDIA's 346 Linux driver series is in beta with a great deal of improvements and new features, for those sticking to the 343.xx stable series there is out this Friday the 343.36 driver.
With Linux 3.18 likely coming out today, we can begin focusing more of our attention and testing on the code that will become the Linux 3.19 kernel over the weeks ahead. Once again, when it comes to the DRM graphics driver changes, there's lots of exciting improvements.
It's been a while since last running any open-source vs. closed-source Linux graphics driver benchmarks with AMD Kaveri APUs, but with being busy adding some Kaveri systems to the new Linux test farm, I ran some fresh Linux GPU driver tests on an AMD A10-7800 system. Here's results on Ubuntu 14.10 -- plus with Linux 3.18 and Mesa 10.5-devel -- while compared to the latest Catalyst binary blob.
Here's some more Linux 3.18 kernel benchmarks I did with the final release due out likely today. However, these results seem to be a bit odd.
With an Intel Core i7 5960X Haswell-E system on an ASRock X99 Extreme3 motherboard with 16GB of DDR4 memory, 256GB Corsair Force LX SSD, and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770 graphics I did some fresh benchmarks using the stable Linux 3.16 and 3.17 kernels. The stable vanilla kernels were compared to Linux 3.18 Git -- all kernels obtained from the Ubuntu Mainline Kernel PPA.
As you may know, CDEmu is a tool to emulate an optical drive(CD/DVD ROMs) in Linux. Using this tool you can mount images like ISO, BIN, IMG, and MNF without the need of a physical drive. Automounting is also possible. This simple and useful was developed by a small group of friends named Robert Penz and Justus Schwartz. Originally, this app was named Virtual CD, and then was renamed to CDEMU back in 2007 due to trademark issues.
Uh, I meant to blog about this a while ago, but somehow, it got lost… Anyway, I was inspired by http://openid.aliz.es and intrigued by OpenID I set out to find an implementation that comes with an acceptable level of required effort to set up and run.
While there's been signs for months that within Valve's Dota 2 game that it's transitioning from the Source Engine to Source Engine 2, it looks like Valve's next-generation game engine will be fully utilized within this multiplayer online battle arena game in 2015.
Enter the Gungeon was revealed earlier today at the Sony keynote. It is a brand new gunfighting dungeon crawler that is set to come out in 2015 for PS4, PC, Mac and Linux from Devolver Digital and the development studio Dodge Roll. Take on the role of one of several Gungeoneers, each haunted by their past and looking for a brighter tomorrow, as you Enter the Gungeon. Set your sights on the Cult of the Gundead as you blast through hand-designed chambers of the Gungeon's constantly evolving labyrinth of firepower.
One of the developers have confirmed that the new game will be available for Linux...
Valve has released a new Beta version of the Steam client, and the developers have fixed a number of problems, especially for the newly added Broadcast feature that is still far from working properly.
Looks like Bad Juju's acquisition of Desura will pay off for us Linux gamers soon. They tweeted to let people know the Desura client updates are currently in testing!
The platformer from developer Turtle Cream has some very interesting mechanics and a beautiful soundtrack and is a welcome addition to our platform for fans of the genre. It has been available for Linux since 24th November according to the official announcement on Steam, but we would have missed it had it not been for a tip from a reader.
This past week I've been carrying out a number of system installations using Antergos as an Arch-based distribution with its quick and easy GUI/CLI installer. In seeking somewhat of a stable/sane base of settings and default packages that's easy to reproduce by others on independent systems yet still rolling-release with Arch, I've been happy with Antergos thus far.
The latest new open-source Linux desktop initiative is Budgie, a desktop focused on simplicity. The Budgie desktop is now undergoing possible review for inclusion into Fedora.
Budgie is the desktop environment designed for the Evolve OS Linux distribution. According to its developers, Budgie is "designed with the modern user in mind, it focuses on simplicity and elegance. A huge advantage for the Budgie desktop is that it is not a fork of another project, but rather one written from scratch with integration in mind."
MakuluLinux Xfce 7 is now Live, it has been a long month for me, but it is finally done and ready for public daily use.
This release contains a lot of bug fixes and smaller improvements, as well as some new features:
Alerts have a new status 'recovered', that can be filtered upon
The UI allows to hide elements that are not needed on a per user basis
The as7/WildFly plugin now supports runtime queues and topic subscribers
Further improvements in the Storage Nodes
Making a quick pit stop to mark this milestone in my professional career: today is my 3-year anniversary at Red Hat! Time has certainly flown by and I really cannot believe that it has been three years since I joined this company.
Fedora 21 is the first release of the Fedora.Next initiative that separates Fedora out into three products: Fedora Cloud, Fedora Server, and Fedora Workstation. These new Fedora "products" are fairly self explanatory and it's the Fedora 21 Workstation that most users will be after who want Fedora as a desktop operating system.
The last two days have been quite busy for the Fedora infrastructure team. Most of us are indeed meeting up in Raleigh, in the Red Hat tower down-town and together with Matt Domsch, the original developer of MirrorManager, we have been on MirrorManager2.
This Tutorial describes the downgrade process you need to run to get back stable after sid upgrade.
Not to be confused with the Dyson vacuum cleaners, Dyson OS is an attempt at becoming a general purpose operating system based on Debian while using the Solaris-derived Illumos kernel.
I'm glad to announce that I've been awarded a 5,000 USD "Flash Grant" by the Shuttleworth Foundation.
Elive, a Linux distribution based on Debian that uses the Enlightenment desktop environment to provide a unique user experience, is now at version 2.4.6 and the developers are getting closer to a stable release.
So the real issue is if the Ubuntu Community wants to tackle it is not leadership or governance because we have brilliant leaders and members of governance but instead it is making contributors feel like they are stakeholders again and kept in the loop. Mind you, the Canonical Community Team has repeatedly promised to help Canonical employees get better at keeping the community in the loop even promising such at UDS-P but my experience has been they never really got better.
Finally, I think an Ubuntu Foundation is still a great idea and could create some harmony between Canonical’s commercial interests and the community interests of the project. Projects that have had companies controlling the project have never had great success at sustaining a community because the commercial interests always win at the end of the day.
The UbuTab has already raised $15,026 of its $36,000 goal at the time of writing, with 20 more days to go. The $245 and $275 early bird tiers are already sold out, but interested backers can still pledge $290 or more. The crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo will close on Dec. 26, and the first UbuTab units are set to start shipping in March 2015. For more details about this tablet, check out the video below.
Canonical has been working on the Mir display server for some time, although most of their efforts have been made towards the mobile platform. They are now looking to optimize it for desktop use and nothing reflects the progress made more than a famous game running on Mir.
The Ubuntu Touch operating system officially supports the Nexus 4 devices and it will be out soon on some Meizu MX 4 hardware, but that's about it. There are some ports in the works, like the one for Nexus 5, but they are not complete.
Canonical is looking to improve the core apps that are already available for Ubuntu Touch and is organizing a new Core Apps Hack Days event that should galvanize the efforts of more developers towards this platform.
There are three different versions: Trisquel, Trisquel Mini and Trisquel Sugar TOAST. Trisquel is the main version and the ISO weighs in at 1.5 GB, the Trisquel Mini ISO is just 600 MB, and Trisquel Sugar TOAST is a 500 MB educational spin.
Clement Lefebvre, the leader of the Linux Mint project, has announced that the Linux Mint 17.1 OEM ISO images have been made available and they are now ready for download.
Yes, I hope it’s true that Samsung will be giving back to the open source community. But seeing is believing, and I prefer to wait a while…perhaps a good long while…to see if Samsung’s real-world actions match its rhetoric and public relations efforts.
The following video shows Samsung embarking on a journey. The journey is Open Source which was started 18 months ago with a single member, Linux and FOSS advocate Ibrahim Haddad. Fast forward to today and there are over 40 people at the new Open Source Innovation Group, which includes 20 developers, devoted full-time to working on upstream projects and helping the inroads of Open Source into Samsung.
There are many Android users currently running KitKat (Android OS 4.4.4) on their devices, but long for the Lollipop (Android OS 5.0) update. Phone Arena reports that less than 0.1 percent of all Android devices are running Lollipop, and this is on a global scale. There has been a lot of speculation that some devices, such as the HTC One M7, the HTC One M8, the LG G3, and Sony Xperia series, will be the first in line to receive the Lollipop update, but this update has yet to rollout entirely for these devices.
Android: If you're having trouble figuring out that complicated math problem, AutoMath will solve it for you and even give you step-by-step instructions—all just by pointing your camera at the equation.
Android's new, largely undocumented compilers are still works in progress, but aim to speed up the compilation process
Samsung's flagship smartphone will soon be getting the latest version of Android, which Google has been calling its biggest mobile software update yet.
The OSI Board met in San Francisco, CA USA on November 11th and 12th, 2014 with a focus on strengthening the organization's current outreach efforts and building new bridges between open source communities. The Board was excited to review five new applications for Affiliate Membership as well as implement several new initiatives to help drive Individual Membership through the recognition of various roles and levels of access among our community. This included new Individual Membership discounts for students, volunteers working on OSI supported activities, those already members of OSI Affiliate organizations, members of Free Software Foundation and complimentary memberships based on need.
Pydio 6.0 an open source file sharing solution that is said to offer "tight control of information" on the scale demanded by enterprises and service providers.
These include LibreOffice and OpenOffice for front-office productivity tools, MySQL, PostgreSQL and Ingres for databases, Pentaho for decision support, SugarCRM and Hipergate for customer relationship management, Apache Lucene, Opentext, Filenet, and Documentum for content management, and RedHat JBoss as an application server.
While open source applications specifically for the core functions of the insurance industry are still few and far between, there are a few options, such as OpenUnderwriter.
The main issue with open source is that while the software provides all the components needed for IT operations, expertise is needed to pull it all together for the business. But there’s always a good case to be made for open source, and often, this comes right from commercial IT vendors themselves. Prashant Parikh of CA Technologies, for instance, recently posted the reasons why open source makes sense.
However, and as paradoxical as it may be, I own a ZTE Open Firefox OS phone, which I use basically to check my email and calendar on the go, quickly browse a web page, and receive messages from family members.
I practically never use the function that gives the device its name (telephone), that, is, making calls. I see my phone as a tiny tablet thingie and use it as such.
But today, I had to take care of my 4-year-old daughter. It was raining and she is recovering from a bad flu, so going out was out of the question. The cable was not working, so no TV for her... which she did not really mind. But she wanted to use her computer to see her favorite videos online and we had no connection.
What to do? I used the phone as a hotspot to share its Internet connection with my laptop.
I also spent some time talking to folks about Firefox in Ubuntu and rebranding Iceweasel to Firefox in Debian (fingers crossed something will happen here in 2015). Also it was great to participate in discussions around making all of the Firefox channels offer more stability and quality to our users.
I used to be a big fan of Firefox, and I still use it for certain things. But it just doesn’t have the mindshare that it used to have back when it’s big claim to fame was being the alternative to Internet Explorer. Mobile has been where the growth is, and many mobile users have gravitated to Safari, Chrome and other browsers on their phones and tablets.
Mozilla has been staunchly opposed to an iOS version of its Firefox browser for a while. It wants to use its own web engine, but Apple will only let companies use its in-house code in the name of security. However, the organization is clearly having a change of heart -- VP Jonathan Nightingale has revealed that Mozilla wants to bring Firefox to iOS. He didn't say how it would happen, but it's most likely that the company will use Apple's engine and layer a custom interface on top, like Google does with Chrome. We've reached out to Mozilla and will let you know if it can say more.
DevAssistant 0.10.0 is sort of pre-1.0.0, so for next release, we’re planning to go from Beta to Stable. That’s a big promise, but I think at this point DevAssistant can afford that. There will be some backwards incompatible changes between 0.10.0 and 1.0.0, but after that we’ll keep things stable until 2.0.0. In addition to that, we’re planning a major GUI overhaul – basically we’ll rewrite it from scratch, since we want it to look completely different. We’re working with Mo Duffy on the design and while it’s not finished yet, some preliminary sketches can be found at Mo’s fedorapeople page.
Weblate 2.1 has been released today.
Makers and hobbyists that enjoy building electronic projects may be interested in this pocket sized open source CMC 3-axis drawing robot called the Piccolo that can draw pictures up to 50mm square.
According to Bienkowski’s report, an Environmental Protection Agency spokesperson, Cathy Milbourn, writes that of the seven pesticides examined, “only aluminum phosphide, diazinon, and malathion are still registered and in use.” The EPA cancelled the registrations of ethylene dibromide, 2,4,5-T, dieldrin, and parathion, Milbourn said. Aluminum phosphide, diazinon, and malathion are undergoing EPA review.
China, the world's top producer of rice and wheat, is seeking to cap the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides that have helped to contaminate large swathes of its arable land and threaten its ability to keep up with domestic food demand.
More than 19 percent of soil samples taken from Chinese farmland have been found to contain excessive levels of heavy metals or chemical waste. In central Hunan province, more than three quarters of the ricefields have been contaminated, government research has shown.
Failure to push through law in time for general election would be seen as ‘victory’ for big tobacco and lobbyists
I was disturbed to read in the Guardian that the UK government may be wavering on introducing plain packs for cigarettes. Failing to do so before the General Election would be seen as a huge victory for the tobacco companies, and have knock-on effects around the world.
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As you know, what is particularly interesting about these cases is that they use the highly controversial Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) process in order to claim an indirect expropriation of property. Since the company is doing this through subsidiaries - one in Switzerland, the other in Hong Kong - it is not even clear whether those cases can proceed. However, it is evident that one of the main reasons Philip Morris is taking this route is to intimidate other countries thinking about bringing in plain packs measures. Indeed, New Zealand has put its own plans on hold pending the result of the Australian case, which shows that strategy is having its effect.
North Korea on Sunday denied claims that it had hacked into Sony Pictures, calling the allegations a "false rumor" spread by South Korea.
The U.S. film company had come under cyber attack late last month after a series of threats from North Korea for its comedy movie "The Interview," in which the CIA plots to assassinate the country's young leader Kim Jong-un.
A soon-to-be-released comedy film about a plot to kill North Korean leader Kim Jong-un will likely be a "blockbuster" thanks to the strong protests Pyongyang has raised about it, the U.S. human rights envoy said Friday.
On Tuesday, it appears that OEN was hacked. An article that was not submitted by an editor, not submitted through the queue and not submitted by a trusted author, was published by someone who signed up the same day. The article reported that a hacker group, Cyberberkut, had hacked the phone of a member of Joe Biden's diplomatic entourage to Ukraine.
The anomaly-- an article published outside the usual routes-- led me to investigate and discover that one of the IP addresses the submitter used was associated with malware-- SQL insertion, spam, even blackmail.
I checked the name of the purported author and found someone in Ukraine with that name. But the photo used in the author ID did not match. I did a reverse image search using tineye.com and there were no other copies anywhere. I hid the article and checked google Webmaster tools, which is my first go-to place to check for malware on the site. Our webmaster also checked his tracking system. No malware was detected. I had already removed one image from Reuters because it violated copyrights. Vidya removed another image that had been included and a link, because they are higher risk for SQL insertion of malware.
The company has been scrambling to repair the damage to its computer system after a hack by a group calling itself Guardians of Peace.
In 2012, Saudi Arabia's national oil company and Qatar's RasGas were hit by a virus known as Shamoon that damaged tens of thousands of computers. In 2013, more than 30,000 PCs at South Korean banks and broadcasting companies were hit by a similar attack by a virus dubbed DarkSeoul malware.
In July 2014 Haneen Zoabi, the first Arab Israeli woman to be elected to the Israeli legislative body, the Knesset, was banned by the Knesset Ethics Committee from all Knesset activities. As Lahav Harkov reported in October 2014, this was a direct response to her declaration that the June kidnapping of three Israeli teenagers (later found murdered) was not an act of terrorism.
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They covered Zoabi’s initial suspension and followed her story of failed appeals to the Knesset and the High Court. Corporate news sources such as CNN and the New York Times, on the other hand, have not reported on any aspect of the matter, while Al-Jazeera America briefly mentions Zoabi’s suspension at the end of an article about Hamas’ terms for a ceasefire.
The infamous general overthrew Salvador Allende’s socialist Chilean government in a coup d’état in 1973 with help from classified CIA support as well as cloak-and-dagger cheerleading from distant corners of the world, Milton Friedman in Chicago and Henry Kissinger in Washington, D.C.
I prefer a cautious president to a reckless one. Invading Iraq was reckless, doubling down on that is foolish.
Lethal aid to Ukraine has been authorized by recently passed United States House Resolution 758, which calls for President Barack Obama to send both lethal and non-lethal aid to the Ukrainian military. If the U.S. Senate passes similar legislation, it’s possible Obama may choose to escalate the confrontation with Russian leader Vladimir Putin.
The American people ought to realize — and critically respond to — the dangers involved in two directions of national-security policy that their government is pursuing:
1) It is escalating the war against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (while extending its war in Afghanistan), and 2) discarding a previously espoused disarmament agenda in order to push a “massive modernization of nuclear-armed missiles, bombers and submarines,” to cost beyond $1 trillion over 30 years.
These are concerns not only of Americans. They also affect the rest of the world’s peoples.
Not only that, Mr. Aftergood found out the National Archives and Records Administration had already offered tentative approval in August of the plan to — as a spy might put it — disappear the email of every worker but the C.I.A.’s top 22 managers, three years after they left the agency.
One of Britain’s oldest oil companies BP could be about to be sold to its biggest rival for a fiver per share.
The rumoured deal, if realised, would complete one of the most ignominious falls for the once great Persian Oil company that powered Britain’s Navy to victory during the First World War.
Methane gas, a main component linked to damaging climate change, is being released in record amounts in the Four Corners region where Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah meet. The Four Corners regions is one of the prime location for fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, the process of extracting natural gas from shale rock layers deep within the earth. A joint study by researchers at the University of Michigan and NASA finds that the environmental impacts of fracking are more significant than previously documented. With the help of a new satellite instrument — the European Space Agency’s SCIAMACHY — a team at University of Michigan has been able to get regional methane measurements over the entire United States back in 2009. Using this tool, they were able to identify the hotspot at the Four Corners. The footprint is so large it is visible from space.
Currently the official government measure of poverty under-represents the number of poor in the United States. The seemingly simple formula, created in the 1960s, has set the national poverty threshold for decades. Last year the official poverty threshold was about $23,600 for a family of two adults and two children. Yet our official poverty yardstick fails to recognize the difference in standards of living across the United States. Whether a family lives in Cheyenne, Wyoming or San Francisco, California, where the average housing costs are 225% higher than Cheyenne, the government standard makes no adjustment for regional variations in cost of living.
It has the Silicon Valley, Hollywood and Napa Valley wineries. It has something else, according to the Census Bureau. It's the poorest state in the world's largest economy.
Market Watch columnist Brett Arends wrote that China has surpassed America as the number one economy, a move he claims may lead to a collapse of U.S. political and military hegemony. But does China truly have the strongest economy in the world?
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We have lived in a world dominated by the U.S. since at least 1945 and, in many ways, since the late 19th century. And we have lived for 200 years -- since the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 -- in a world dominated by two reasonably democratic, constitutional countries in Great Britain and the U.S.A.
The ILO report’s key chart below summarizes the key wage results of global capitalism over the last decade. Economic growth, rising real wages, and rising standards of living are the economic reality of China. Economic crisis, stagnant wages, and deepening inequalities of income and wealth are the economic realities for western Europe, the US, and Japan.
I’ve found that the conspiracy theories spread most widely — and the ones that seem plausible to many, unfortunately — are those based on current headlines and often propagated by public figures such as politicians, celebrities and media figures. They travel by word-of-mouth at light speed and become “a known fact.” These theories are often believed by those who assume there must be a coherence behind world events and occurrences don't just happen randomly. Using that as our criteria, here are the most insidious conspiracy theories of 2014.
Though this compendium is strangely lacking in frogs or any other animals (perhaps they’re catalogued elsewhere), it is a list of the new pornography restrictions that the UK government—through the Audiovisual Media Services Regulations 2014, something I’d never heard of before today—introduced on 1 December to 'safeguard children.' Which is the same reason five major UK Internet service providers (ISPs) gave for blocking my own website, even though it’s more about literature, publishing, and current affairs than it is about pornography. (Most of these ISPs unblocked the site when I told them that there were no words on it that could be 'deemed sensitive to a young audience.')
Lawmakers in the United Kingdom have deemed face-sitting to be a "life-endangering" act worthy of censorship, the Independent reports.
Continuing on its recent censorship-happy path, the U.K. government amended regulations this week to prohibit online porn from depicting a variety of erotic activities. Now-illicit acts range from the very specific (female ejaculation; "spanking, caning, and whipping beyond a gentle level") to the incredibly broad ("verbal abuse"). But basically, the U.K. has banned BDSM and certain forms of fetish porn—or at least, charging money for that sort of porn.
As you might have already heard, an act of state censorship has been declared against British pornography in the guise of innocuous regulation. But what you might not know is that it has also marked the first stage in a campaign to impose global trade sanctions. Strangely, this proposition has received less coverage.
Let us say that we have not ourselves suffered from the Censorship at all. We have never submitted, and have never been asked to submit, any article to the Press Bureau. Such censorship as has been exercised in our columns has been the purely voluntary censorship which is exercised at all times, whether in war or in peace, by every editor who has any sense of public duty, and that remark, we believe, applies to the whole British Press, daily and weekly. We have, of course, constantly asked ourselves whether it would be wise on general grounds to make this or that comment, or whether we ought to refrain from comment which we thought sound in itself because we knew or believed it to run counter to the Government view, and to be likely to interfere with their action and policy. Our feeling was that, as the Government and not we were responsible for the conduct of the war, it was our business as good citizens to support their action, even when we did not think it wise. There can be only one driver of a coach, and as long as he is on the box he must be trusted, and no effort must be made to jog his elbow or snatch at the reins. For example, there are certain things which we believe it would be to the public interest to say about foreign States, and which it would be practically impossible for the Government to suppress even under the most exaggerated interpretation of the rights of the Censor ; but these comments we have not made on the ground just given—that it is the Government who are responsible for foreign affairs, and we must not do anything which in their opinion, whether right or wrong is no matter, would injure or weaken them in the difficult task before them.
Internet users in Russia and Turkey have been subjected to the greatest increase in web censorship over the past year, according to the latest Freedom on the Net survey.
Majority among the top ten worst countries are from Asia, including Iran, Syria, China, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.
When state officials seek to censor online speech, they're going to use the quickest and easiest method available. For many, copyright takedown notices do the trick. After years of lobbying and increasing pressure from content industries on policymakers and tech companies, sending copyright notices to take media offline is easier than ever.
The government crackdown on the media during the anti-government protest and corruption scandals of last year and the two elections this year have led to the growth of a number of independent news portals as an alternative source of information for many in Turkey.
Hannity Indignant Over Boehner's Calls For Congressional Hearings On Garner's Death Rather Than Benghazi
The issue of UK citizens being stripped of their nationality has not been well covered, especially in major US news outlets. For example, since 2003 the New York Times has published only three stories on the topic, while the Washington Post, Philadelphia Inquirer, and USA Today have published just one story each, for a total of just six stories over the course of eleven years in major US newspapers. Instead, significant coverage of this issue comes from the independent sources, such as the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which maintains an ongoing series of reports under the title, “Citizenship Revoked.”
Americans watched in horror as the police descended on peaceful protesters in Ferguson...
Secretary of state John Kerry has asked Senator Dianne Feinstein to “consider” the timing of the expected release of a long-awaited report on the CIA’s harsh interrogation techniques.
The Senate Intelligence Committee, led by Dianne Feinstein of California, is soon expected to release its summary of the so-called CIA Torture Report, the committee’s four-year-long investigation into the CIA’s Bush-era torture practices. Release of the summary is the result of months of wrangling and negotiating with the White House on what would be released to the public and when—and it will likely be heavily redacted. During an interview conducted on Friday, November 21, by Esquire writer at large Scott Raab, outgoing senator Mark Udall of Colorado, who lost his reelection race on November 4, once again said that if the report is not released in a way he deems transparent, he would consider all options to make it public. In this excerpt from the interview, Raab asks Udall if he will read the document into the record on the floor of the Senate before he leaves in January, an act for which he cannot be prosecuted.
These are boom times for national security reporters, with government surveillance becoming a major topic after Edward Snowden leaked a trove of NSA documents, but one of the most well-known journalists on the intelligence beat, Siobhan Gorman of the Wall Street Journal, has decided to throw in the towel and join the Dark Side—in Gorman’s case, a global communications company called Brunswick, where she will reportedly focus on privacy and data security.
Gorman has done very solid reporting for the Journal and her previous employer, The Baltimore Sun. She has been prolific–and not just on the printed page. It turns out that she has had a lot of correspondence with the Central Intelligency Agency’s public affairs office, 246 pages of which were provided to us under a Freedom of Information Act request. We published the emails without comment earlier this year, as part of a story about reporter Ken Dilanian’s eyebrow-raising interchanges with the CIA, but in the event Gorman or her employers need a copy of her correspondence with our spymasters (perhaps the Journal has already revoked her access to its computers), we are re-upping them.
It’s colorful reading—Gorman shows a lot of interest in learning about the CIA’s gym facilities (“I was just told that the facilities at the black sites were better than the ones at CIA”), and a year to the day after the killing of Osama bin Laden she cheerily began an email to the agency by asking, “So do I wish you a ‘happy anniversary’ today’?” There’s also this mysterious missive she sent the CIA about an apparent meeting she had with an agency official: “What prompted my guest to leave so suddenly? Bat phone rang twice, and then he excused himself?” And a word of warning to her next boss at Brunswick—watch what you say, because Gorman, when asking the agency for guidance on a rumor that Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad had been killed, explained to the CIA that the info came from the editor of her paper “but his tips aren’t always accurate.”
The US Senate’s intelligence committee should release as planned its report summary on the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)’s detention and interrogation program, Human Rights Watch said today. The White House’s expressed support for the release has been undermined by statements from the State Department raising concerns over the timing of the release and possible foreign policy implications.
Udall can wield a lot of power, forcing even classified portions of the report into the spotlight.
The 51-year-old doctor was sent to Washington by voters furious with a system that kept swelling the national debt, and anxious over what Paul sees as government zeal for war and encroachment on American civil liberties.
The full report runs 6,700 pages, covering the committee’s review of 6.2 million pages of documents from the CIA and the Defense Department. Feinstein met fierce resistance from the CIA during the entire investigation, and now with less than a week before she hands the Intelligence Committee gavel to North Carolina Republican Sen. Richard Burr, she is battling the White House over its refusal to declassify the report.
The United Nations Committee Against Torture issued a lengthy report today assessing the performance of the 156 countries whose governments have ratified the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, which took effect two decades ago.
Norfolk chief constable Simon Bailey believes thousands on police database ‘pose no threat’ and don’t belong in prison
Mass protests in New York were stretching into their third day when a new grand jury was announced on Friday. Not for the case of Eric Garner—a previous grand jury’s decision earlier this week not to indict the officer seen choking him on film before he died sparked the current protests. The latest grand jury will investigate the death of Akai Gurley, another unarmed black man who was killed by a police officer months after Garner’s death, in what the department says was an accidental shooting.
Now, more than ever, it is vital to show the world that real democracies are not like terrorist groups because they demand real accountability
"Black lives matter" is the rallying cry of the burgeoning nationwide movement against police killings. The Associated Press (12/5/14), covering that movement, has produced a perfect example of what journalism looks like when black lives don't matter.
[...]
Or even to make the basic medical point that being able to talk is a sign that you don't need the Heimlich maneuver–not that you don't need a cop to stop administering a notoriously lethal chokehold.
You don't get any of those points in the article, because AP didn't feel any need to quote (or, seemingly, talk to) anyone who thought that the life of Eric Garner was more important than the feelings of New York Police Department officers. Because, one has to assume, to AP black lives don't matter.
Oh, and if you need to you can move your Kindle books over to Marvin via Calibre by removing the DRM. I, of course, do not advise you to do this one way or the other. It’s entirely your choice and may be affected by whatever the relevant laws are for that sort of thing. ;)