Running out of memory on a Linux system is generally not a sign that there's a serious problem. Why? Because a healthy Linux system will cache disk activity in memory, basically gobbling memory that isn't being used, which is a very good thing.
In other words, it doesn't allow memory to go to waste. It uses the spare memory to increase disk access speed, and it does this without taking memory away from running applications. This memory caching, as you might well imagine, is hundreds of times faster than working directly with the hard-disk drives (HDD) and significantly faster than solid-state drives. Full or near full memory normally means that a system is running as efficiently as it can — not that it's running into problems.
Do you have l33t ASCII/ANSI art skillz? Your work could grace the cover of Linux Journal!
That's right—your ASCII art on the cover of the longest-running Linux publication on the planet.
Windows and Chrome are making 2019 the "year of the desktop". PCWorld writes, "After years of endless jokes, 2019 is truly, finally shaping up to be the year of Linux on the desktop. Laptops, too! But most people won't know it. That's because the bones of the open-source operating system kernel will soon be baked into Windows 10 and Chrome OS, as Microsoft and Google revealed at their respective developer conferences this week."
Schools in Kerala are expected to save Rs 3,000 crore as they have chosen the Linux-OpenSource (OS) operating system for computers being made available for teaching under a state-wide project. “Decks have been cleared for the country’s largest ICT training for teachers, with training of over 1,50,000 primary teachers being held in Kerala. From the next academic year, we’d ply more than 2,00,000 computers in schools and each of these will be powered by the latest version of the Linux-based Free Operating System (FOSS),” says K Anvar Sadath, vice-chairman and executive director of KITE (Kerala Infrastructure and Technology for Education). “If we had gone for applications of proprietary nature, each computer would have incurred at least Rs 1.5 lakh in licence fees,” he points out. In fact, KITE has rolled out the new version, named IT@School GNU/ Linux 18.04. Based on the Ubuntu OS LTS edition, the system features several free applications customised for state school curriculum.
hiruvananthapuram, May 12 (UNI) KITE (Kerala Infrastructure and Technology for Education) has rolled out the latest version of its Linux based free Operating System ''IT@School GNU/ Linux 18.04'' to be used in the thousands of computers in the state schools, an official statement said here on Sunday. According to official statement, the new version of the Operating System is based on the Ubuntu OS LTS edition. In addition to being the ideal OS for teachers and students in schools, this Operating System can also be used for home computers used for general purposes, government offices, DTP centers which uses office packages, Internet Kiosks, software developers, college students, other computer service providers as a complete computing platform which is free of cost.
Southern Indian state Kerala is known for its beautiful backwaters. Kerala is also known for its education policy. The first 100% literate Indian state has made IT classes mandatory in schools since 2003 and around 2005 they started to adopt free and open source software. It was a long term plan to boot out proprietary software from the education system.
As a result, the state claimed to save around $50 million per year in licensing costs in 2015. Further expanding their open source mission, Kerala is going to put Linux with open source educational software on over 200,000 school computers and ‘claims’ save around $428 million in the process, reported Financial Express.
In this modern age, when you ask yourself, "What server platform should I use?" the default answer is no longer a simple, "Windows Server." There are tons of available options, from on-premise servers, to cloud-based solutions, and everything in-between. But for those who want a standard, bare-metal and OS solution, there's always Linux.
Nearly any Linux distribution can be made into a server. That doesn't, however, mean you should go with that idea. Why? There are certain distributions that simply make for better server platforms. Which ones?
Let's take a look at the five I believe to be the best platforms to meet your small to mid-size business needs. The only requirements for this are that the operating system must be open source and Linux.
This series of blog posts and corresponding talks aims to provide you with a pragmatic view on containers from a historic perspective. Together we will discover modern cloud architectures layer by layer, which means we will start at the Linux Kernel level and end up at writing our own secure cloud native applications. Simple examples paired with the historic background will guide you from the beginning with a minimal Linux environment up to crafting secure containers, which fit perfectly into todays? and futures? orchestration world. In the end it should be much easier to understand how features within the Linux kernel, container tools, runtimes, software defined networks and orchestration software like Kubernetes are designed and how they work under the hood.
Last week we celebrated one year of the Kubernetes Podcast from Google. In this weekly show, my co-host Adam Glick and I focus on all the great things that are happening in the world of Kubernetes and Cloud Native. From the news of the week, to interviews with people in the community, we help you stay up to date on everything Kubernetes.
Every few cycles we check in on the release process for Kubernetes itself. Last year we interviewed the release managers for Kubernetes 1.11, and shared that transcript on the Kubernetes blog. We got such great feedback that we wanted to share the transcript of our recent conversation with Aaron Crickenberger, the release manager for Kubernetes 1.14.
Intel's Clear Linux platform is preparing some new alternative kernel options and they are quite interesting from a testing/benchmarking perspective.
On the Clear development list they have been signing off on new bundles around a kernel-native-current and kernel-mainline-vanilla options.
Installing kernel-mainline-vanilla will provide a mainline Linux kernel build without any of the Clear Linux patches applied.
Red Hat OpenShift is part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) Certified Program, ensuring portability and interoperability for your container workloads. This also allows you to use Kubernetes tools to interact with an OpenShift cluster, like kubectl, and you can rest assured that all the APIs you know and love are right there at your fingertips.
The Kubernetes Python client is another great tool for interacting with an OpenShift cluster, allowing you to perform actions on Kubernetes resources with Python code. It also has applications within a cluster. We can configure a Python application running on OpenShift to consume the OpenShift API, and list and create resources. We could then create containerized batch jobs from the running application, or a custom service monitor, for example. It sounds a bit like “OpenShift inception,” using the OpenShift API from services created using the OpenShift API.
In this article, we’ll create a Flask application running on OpenShift. This application will use the Kubernetes Python client to interact with the OpenShift API, list other pods in the project, and display them back to the user.
Red Hat AMQ Online 1.1 was recently announced, and I am excited about it because it contains a tech preview of our Internet of Things (IoT) support. AMQ Online is the “messaging as service solution” from Red Hat AMQ. Leveraging the work we did on Eclipse Hono allows us to integrate a scalable, cloud-native IoT personality into this general-purpose messaging layer. And the whole reason why you need an IoT messaging layer is so you can focus on connecting your cloud-side application with the millions of devices that you have out there.
When diversity and inclusion are solutions to problems that affect us every day, we remain sharply focused on all the ways our efforts at cultivating more diverse teams are helping us do better work and generate value for customers. Something we might call the "D+I problem" (something we definitively "solve") becomes something more like "the D+I conversation" (something we never stop having in all our complex systems).
And when this conversation centers on a mindset that welcomes a wealth of backgrounds and experiences to the table, organizations can influence all of the components of their ecosystems to unlock their potential to be as innovative, responsive, and disruption-proof as they possibly can be.
The latest and greatest version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux ships with new features that will make routine administration tasks easier for DevOps teams, while clearing a path for hybrid cloud deployments.
According to Collabora's latest report on their contributions to the Linux 5.1 kernel, which arrived last week, it is now possible to mount and boot a mapped device by adding a kernel parameter via command-line at boot time, thus bypassing initramfs image. For Linux kernel 5.1, twelve Collabora's developers also contributed 64 commits and 111 sign-offs, along with lots of bug reports and testing.
"Helen Koike contributed a major change, providing a mechanism to mount a mapped device at boot time through a kernel command line parameter, removing the current initramfs requirement," said Collabora's André Almeida. "This change is the result of the combined effort of both Google and Collabora engineers to push upstream a feature that is shipped on Chrome OS devices and Android devices using AVB 2.0."
Merged today for the Linux 5.2 kernel are the IOMMU changes that contain some interesting Intel additions.
With the IOMMU changes for Linux 5.2 is AUX (auxiliary) domain support for the kernel's IOMMU API and necessary Intel VT-d driver support. What this "AUX domain" support allows is handling of multiple DMA address spaces / domains per PCI device.
Linus Torvalds has finally released the stable version of Linux Kernal 5.1 after almost 13,000 commits. Though the codename ‘Shy Crocodile’ remained with the latest version, it brings some major improvements and a lot of new features.
According to Phoronix, Linux 5.1 contains 17.8 million lines of code and 3.3 million lines of comments. ”On the whole, 5.1 looks very normal with just over 13k commits (plus another 1k+ if you count merges), which is pretty much our normal size these days,“ said Linus Torvalds.
Linux 5.1 arrived a bit late as compared to other releases due to some last-minute pull requests. “The requests weren’t big enough to justify delaying things over, and hopefully, the merge window timing won’t be all that painful either,” wrote Linus.
Linux machines running distributions powered by kernels prior to 5.0.8 are affected by a race condition vulnerability leading to a use after free, related to net namespace cleanup, exposing vulnerable systems to remote attacks.
Potential attackers could exploit the security flaw found in Linux kernel's rds_tcp_kill_sock TCP/IP implementation in net/rds/tcp.c to trigger denial-of-service (DoS) states and to execute code remotely on vulnerable Linux machines.
The attacks can be launched with the help of specially crafted TCP packets sent to vulnerable Linux boxes which can trigger use-after-free errors and enable the attackers to execute arbitrary code on the target system.
We keep coming across various security loopholes in different software on a daily basis, but it rarely happens that Linux kernel gets crippled by a high-impact flaw. However, things are looking a bit different today as millions of Linux systems have been found to be affected by a massive flaw.
It’s being reported that the kernel versions prior to 5.0.8 are affected by a race condition vulnerability. For those who aren’t aware, race condition attacks take place when a system designed to perform tasks in a particular sequence is made to perform two or more operations simultaneously. During this state, interference could be caused by a trusted/untrusted process.
Linux users are being warned of a vulnerability in versions of the kernel prior to 5.0.8 which allows for an attacker to issue a denial-of-service attack or potentially execute arbitrary code remotely.
The Linux kernel, at the heart of the operating system family which bears its name, is one of the most widespread pieces of software in history. As well as powering everything from desktops to games consoles, it can be found on routers, gateways, firewalls, and even smart home devices like lightbulbs and thermostats. A vulnerability in Linux, then, is serious business - and this latest discovery affects every version prior to the most recent 5.0.8 release.
Published as CVE-2019-11815, the vulnerability relates to a TCP socket closure function in the kernel's networking code: A race condition allows for a use-after-free attack, giving a sufficiently motivated attacker the ability to crash or hang the system or potentially even execute arbitrary code without the need for user interaction. It's a flaw serious enough for the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to issue an 8.1 score on its impact severity ranking, though the complexity of actually exploiting the vulnerability drops its impact score down to 2.2.
Nevertheless, the flaw is a serious one - and made doubly so by the fact it has existed for such a long time and affects such a long list of kernel versions. With many products, especially in the smart home arena, being effectively sell-and-forget, there are likely to be vulnerable systems out there for years to come - and if the complexity of successful remote exploitation can be overcome, that could spell trouble.
If you make use of BCache as a Linux block cache so that an SSD cache for a slower HDD, watch out as there is an active corruption bug.
It appears that those employing BCache and running Linux 5.0 or newer when built by GCC 9, there is a nasty corruption bug exposed.
Not only has the Linux 5.2 kernel been exciting on the x86_64 and ARM front, but there is also a fair amount of new IBM POWER architecture updates that landed for this summer 2019 kernel update.
First up, POWER is now supporting a kernel user-space access/execution prevention technology. This feature is similar to Intel's SMAP (Supervisor Mode Access Prevention) and similar SMEP / PAN / PXN technologies. This feature will prevent the kernel from accidentally accessing user-space outside of certain calls or ever executing user-space.
Input subsystem maintainer Dmitry Torokhov sent in his pull request on Monday with various touch controller additions as well as the new GPIO vibrator driver.
New input device support coming with Linux 5.2 includes Azoteq IQS550/572/525 touch controllers, Microchip AT42QT1050 keys, and Goodix GT5663 as the main additions.
There has been interest in NIR support for etnaviv for a while, for the obvious reasons: gaining access to common optimizations, better support for non-trivial code transformations, better register allocation, and the promise of OpenCL and SPIR-V support in the future.
[...]
So it comes down to my limted time and the big architectural changes I have done with unit tests and real shader compiles on the targets.
Christian Gmeiner, one of the leading contributors to the Etnaviv Gallium3D code for providing open-source OpenGL driver coverage for Vivante graphics IP, has posted a series of patches for "EIR" as a new back-end IR based on NIR and other modern open-source driver graphics compiler back-ends.
After studying the other Mesa compiler back-ends and NIR itself, Christian began work on EIR to provide "the best parts" of these different projects, including features like legalization, optimizations, a register allocator, and unit tests. He resisted from wiring NIR support into Etnaviv itself on the basis of NIR being a fast moving target and concerns about how well it will map to future hardware/drivers.
Phoronix Test Suite 8.8-Hvaler is now officially available as the newest quarterly feature release to our open-source, fully-automated benchmarking software for Linux / BSD / macOS / Windows systems.
Phoronix Test Suite 8.8 offers various PDF result/report improvements, various Microsoft Windows support updates, AVX-512 VNNI detection and other new hardware/software reporting improvements, and various statistical reporting/monitoring improvements.
In this video, we look at how to install Teamspeak 3 on Ubuntu 19.04.
There are plenty of GUI applications available to view images in Linux. But I haven’t used any CLI applications yet which displays pictures in the Terminal itself. To my luck, I found 3 CLI image viewers to display images in Terminal itself. These applications could be useful for those who wants to use CLI alternatives for GUI apps and who live in Terminal mostly.
Developer Philip Rebohle is continuing to advance DXVK, with another major release now available today.
DXVK 1.2 includes a slight rework of command buffer submissions, to make them run on a separate thread. This should hopefully increase performance in times where you're CPU-bound. Additionally, command buffers are submitted more frequently, which should avoid some stalling and also increase GPU utilization.
Just two weeks after the corrected DXVK 1.1 re-release debuted and DXVK 1.2 is now available.
Philip Rebohle continues working on new features for this Direct3D 11 over Vulkan translation layer that's used by the likes of Wine and most notable Valve's Steam Play / Proton.
Thanks to a Twitter tip, I've watched over the video of id Software talking about Doom, Vulkan, Linux and Google's Stadia and it's really quite interesting. For those who don't know what Stadia is, you can see this previous article. In short, it's Google's game streaming platform powered by Linux and Vulkan.
The thing is, id Software actually talked about having a Linux version of DOOM back at GDC last year that was never released, at least now we know why.
I love trading card games, I love battle with cards and showing off a good deck and it seems Mind Your Manas could be quite amusing. It's also a little different due to the modding support.
Light Fairytale Episode 1 from French solo developer neko.works, an RPG inspired by JRPG classics has officially left Early Access.
With some good looking graphics, Chibi-styled characters (small Anime-like models best describes it) and turn-based combat it all looks very Final Fantasy. As someone who enjoyed Final Fantasy 7, I must admit I quite like the look of this one.
Nelly Cootalot: Spoonbeaks Ahoy! HD, a gentle remaster of the original Spoonbeaks Ahoy released back in 2007 is now going to set sail on May 23rd.
Following on from the Beta release last month, it's been polished up some more and it's ready for further testing with a first Release Candidate for 0.63. It comes with many improvements like music supporting additional filetypes including ogg, flac, wav, aiff, voc. You can also save your camera position with ALT+number and jump to it with CTRL+number, announcements don't overlap now as they're queued up, hotkey configuration and more.
Coming three weeks after the April 18th release of the KDE Applications 19.04 software suite, the KDE Applications 19.04.1 point release contains numerous bug fixes and translation updates for various of the included apps, including Ark, Cantor, Dolphin, Kdenlive, Kontact, Spectacle, and Umbrello.
More than 125 changes are included in the KDE Applications 19.04.1 stability release, improving various features like tagging of files on the desktop so it no longer end up with a truncated tag name, KMail's text sharing plugin so it no longer crash, and numerous regressions in the Kdenlive video editor.
KDE Frameworks are over 70 addon libraries to Qt which provide a wide variety of commonly needed functionality in mature, peer reviewed and well tested libraries with friendly licensing terms. For an introduction see the KDE Frameworks web page.
This release is part of a series of planned monthly releases making improvements available to developers in a quick and predictable manner.
The latest monthly update to the KDE Frameworks collection of add-on libraries complementing Qt5 is now available.
Over the last few days I've had a few great news and some small wins. I was accepted in Google Summer of Code as a contributor to Krita, this gave me so much happiness. I also got my passport so I feel one step closer to the Krita Sprint and it is going to be awesome, I am really excited to meet everyone because everyone who is part of Krita has been great to me, Krita has this great positive community. I also started to do contributions to the manual and even though is something small I feel proud of myself. I also asked for a KDE Developer Account.
I also had been going out more and working out, which is a nice change after being depressed and solitary for so long. And I've been more happy and optimist about life in general. I also got my grades for this four month period: 9.9,9.8,9.7,9.0,9.0, so I had a good period, but a new one has started already.
In this video, I am going to show an overview of Lubuntu 19.04 and some of the applications pre-installed.
It’s that time of year again. Spring is in the air (for those of us in the northern hemisphere), the days are getting longer, and it’s time for Cloud Foundry users to take the Cloud Foundry user survey. To get an idea of what kind of information is gathered, you can read the 2018 survey. If you haven’t taken it yet this year, here are the top five reasons to do so:
If you need to expand your cloud solution storage options, a ZFS storage pool might be ideal.
Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 578 for the week of May 5 – 11, 2019. The full version of this issue is available here.
MakeOpenStuff is launching a $145 “HestiaPi Touch” smart thermostat that runs a Linux-based openHAB stack on an RPI Zero W along with relays, a 3.5-inch display, and temperature, humidity, and pressure sensors.
In late April, we looked at ionware’s ionware sdk1 home automation controller board, which runs the open source openHAB 2.0 IoT stack on a Raspberry Pi Zero W. Now Athens, Greece based MakeOpenStuff has gone to Crowd Supply to launch a HestiaPi Touch smart thermostat that uses the same combo.
Avnet’s “MSC SM2S-IMX8MINI” SMARC 2.0 module runs Linux on NXP’s i.MX8M Mini and future i.MX8M Nano SoCs with up to 4GB LPDDR4 and 64GB eMMC plus optional microSD, WiFi/BT, dual GbE, and -40 to 85€°C support.
We missed Avnet Integrated’s April announcement of the MSC SM2S-IMX8MINI, which is still the first i.MX8M Mini based SMARC 2.0 module we’ve seen. NXP’s i.MX8M Mini has been announced in over a half dozen embedded boards including compute modules like Variscite’s DART-MX8M-Mini and F&S Elektronik Systeme’s PicoCore MX8MM, among others. The module ships with a Linux BSP, with Android support available upon request.
Linux-powered LattePanda Alpha is one of the most powerful Single Board Computers (SBC) on the market. Unlike several SBCs available, the LattePanda Alpha features an X86-based Intel Processor, a PCI express slot for installing GPU, eMMC storage, a USB type-c port and a lot more.
However, the Linux-powered LattePanda becomes even more valuable with another piece of hardware called the Nvidia GTX 1650. The entry level Graphics card was launched a few weeks ago and it is a perfect match for the LattePanda.
Using FOSS software is a great way of getting free access to valuable services and retaining your privacy and independence when you do it. Whether you’re running your own business on a tight budget or just want to use social media without fear of corporations stockpiling your personal info, there are tons of free and open source alternatives to the mainstream proprietary software that you’re probably used to.
FOSS software also fosters communities and the sharing of knowledge. For those that have the hardware and time, there are tons of benefits to self-hosting sites built on open-source software. Here are 6 of the best open-source, self-hosted applications and how they compare to their proprietary counterparts.
We sat down and talked to Janet Kuo, Software Engineer at Google, Co-Chair of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon to learn what’s exciting about this event.
The Cloud Foundry Foundation and its members work diligently each spring and fall to bring their community the best event possible in North America and Europe. Last month, the Cloud Foundry Summit took place in Philadelphia, attracting more than a thousand end users, open source contributors, software engineers, operators, CIOs and others to the Pennsylvania Convention Center. Attendee feedback dubbed it the best Summit to date, and new events like the Contributors Summit and Community Awards fostered an even stronger sense of community across a tight-knit group.
After the talk voting phase, the EuroPython Program Workgroup (WG) will use the votes to select the talks and build a schedule. The talk voting is a good and strong indicator what attendees are interested to see. Submissions are also selected based on editorial criteria to e.g. increase diversity, giving a chance to less mainstream topics as well as avoiding too much of the same topic. In general, the Program WG will try to give as many speakers a chance to talk as possible. If speakers have submitted multiple talks, the one with the highest rating will most likely get selected.
We still have 14 affordable beds available for the the MiniDebConf Hamburg 2019, which will take place in Hamburg (Germany) from June 5 to 9, with three days of Debcamp style hacking, followed by two days of talks, workshops and more hacking. If you were unsure about coming because of accomodation, please reconsider and come around! (And please mail me directly if you would like to sleep in a bed on site.)
In this episode of Let’s Talk, Swapnil Bhartiya sat down with Jennifer Cloer to discuss the evolution of her media company and the new projects she is working on.
Today the SUMO team would like to welcome Josh and Jeremy who will be joining our team from Boise, Idaho.
Josh and Jeremy will be joining our team to help out on Support for some of the new efforts Mozilla are working on towards creating a connected and integrated Firefox experience.
They will be helping out with new products, but also providing support on forums and social channels, as well as serving as an escalation point for hard to solve issues.
Lidya Christina is from Jakarta, Indonesia. Her contribution in SUMO event in 2016 lead her into a proud Mozillian, an active contributor of Mozilla Indonesia and last March 2019 she joined the Reps program.
At the LibrePlanet 2019 conference, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) recorded 40 speaker sessions -- over 24 hours of video, and they are now online on our GNU MediaGoblin instance.
The FSF team put their heads together and selected a few of our favorites from the entire 2019 Libreplanet program for you to start with -- brought to you in a Digital Restrictions Management (DRM)-free, downloadable, free format.
The Rust team was recently notified of a security vulnerability affecting manual implementations of Error::type_id and their interaction with the Error::downcast family of functions in the standard library. If your code does not manually implement Error::type_id your code is not affected.
We are applying for a CVE for this vulnerability, but since there is no embargo, we have not filed for one yet. Once a CVE is assigned, we'll make a second post to make mention of the CVE number.
One of the most popular and effective enterprise use-cases which leverage analytics today is log analytics. Nearly every organization today has multiple systems and infrastructure running day in and day out. To effectively keep their business running, these organizations need to know if their infrastructure is performing to its maximum potential. Finding out involves analyzing system and application logs and maybe even applying predictive analytics on log data. The amount of log data involved is typically massive, depending on the type of organizational infrastructure involved and applications running on it.
In part one of this series, we began by using Python and Apache Spark to process and wrangle our example web logs into a format fit for analysis, a vital technique considering the massive amount of log data generated by most organizations today. We set up environment variables, dependencies, loaded the necessary libraries for working with both DataFrames and regular expressions, and of course loaded the example log data. Then we wrangled our log data into a clean, structure, and meaningful format. Here in part two, we focus on analyzing that data.
Could 2019 be the year that SYCL really takes off for this single-source C++-based programming model? There's certainly a lot of interesting projects going on around SYCL.
Intel is making very interesting moves and among them are working on upstreaming SYCL support in LLVM. It appears this SYCL play of theirs will be a key part of their "oneAPI" effort that is supposed to be out by year's end.
The Python Jenkins package will work with both Hudson and Jenkins which JenkinsAPI only works with Jenkins. I usually use Python Jenkins because of this, although I have recently started looking to see which one works better with artifacts and I discovered that JenkinsAPI is actually better for that sort of thing. So you will need to evaluate both of these packages depending on what you need to do.
I have been working on a side project so I have not had as much time to blog. Hopefully I will be able to share more about that project soon.
In the meantime, I wanted to write an article about styling output in pandas. The API for styling is somewhat new and has been under very active development. It contains a useful set of tools for styling the output of your pandas DataFrames and Series. In my own usage, I tend to only use a small subset of the available options but I always seem to forget the details. This article will show examples of how to format numbers in a pandas DataFrame and use some of the more advanced pandas styling visualization options to improve your ability to analyze data with pandas.
The SwiftWasm tool is built on top of the WASI SDK, which is a WASI-enabled C/ C++ toolchain. This makes the WebAssembly executables generated by SwiftWasm work on both browsers and standalone WebAssembly runtimes such as Wasmtime, Fastly’s Lucet, or any other WASI-compatible WebAssembly runtime.
NodeRun is the free, easy, and social way to develop and deploy full-stack, enterprise-ready Node.js applications. We provide the cloud-based visual IDE, the database, and the server – you just need to bring your imagination.
We built NodeRun with business application development in mind. You can develop line-of-business applications faster than by traditional methods, making it an ideal solution for new and experienced Node.js developers alike. When you create an application in NodeRun, we provide you with a small instance of Ubuntu Linux, a MariaDB database, and a Node.js server running Express and our Profound.js framework. Everything you need to start developing your application and all running in the cloud.
Informal online learning communities are one of the most exciting and successful ways to engage young people in technology. As the most successful example of the approach, over 40 million children from around the world have created accounts on the Scratch online community where they learn to code by creating interactive art, games, and stories. However, despite its enormous reach and its focus on inclusiveness, participation in Scratch is not as broad as one would hope. For example, reflecting a trend in the broader computing community, more boys have signed up on the Scratch website than girls.
In a recently published paper, I worked with several colleagues from the Community Data Science Collective to unpack the dynamics of unequal participation by gender in Scratch by looking at whether Scratch users choose to share the projects they create. Our analysis took advantage of the fact that less than a third of projects created in Scratch are ever shared publicly. By never sharing, creators never open themselves to the benefits associated with interaction, feedback, socialization, and learning—all things that research has shown participation in Scratch can support.
That's according to a source speaking to iPhonesoft.fr, who claims that the iPhone 5S, iPhone SE, iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus are next in line for the chopping board. Joining them on said chopping board are the iPad mini 2 and the iPad Air - that's the one from 2013, not the identically named version from this year, before you try and track down your receipt.
The U.S. Supreme Court's liberal justices sounded alarm on Monday after the court issued a ruling overturning a four decades-old precedent.
"Today's decision can only cause one to wonder which cases the Court will overrule next," Justice Bryer wrote in his dissent (pdf), in which Justices Ginsburg, Sotomayor, and Kagan joined.
Some observers expressed fear one of the those caes could be Roe v. Wade.
On May 13, a Moscow court fined the celebrity stylist and singer Sergey Zverev after he picketed alone on Red Square. Zverev was cited for violating protest regulations. In early March, Zverev stood by the Kremlin twice to protest the construction of a water bottling plant on Lake Baikal. The facility was to be built in the village of Kultuk, where Zverev grew up. Shortly after the stylist’s picket, a court order brought the plant’s construction to a halt due in part to Baikal locals’ objections to the fact that the factory would be Chinese-owned.
Four new species of crustaceans. Samples of rock from the seafloor. Plastic pollution.
That's what American explorer Victor Vescovo found when he descended seven miles underwater to the Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean—the deepest dive in human history. The plastic Vescovo found at the bottom of the trench is a grim reminder that human refuse is everywhere on the planet.
Vescovo and his team announced they had made the journey to the bottom of the trench on Monday. Along with the dive depth record, Vescovo holds the distinction of being the first person to dive to the trench more than once.
According to a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, almost 1.1 million Americans ages 13 and over have HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.
A decade ago, the spread of HIV/AIDS was declining in America and internationally. In 2009, the World Health Organization reported that cases had declined 17% over the previous eight years.
Now, according to a May article in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM): “The United States has been unable to reduce the number of new HIV infections below a startling 38,000 to 40,000 per year.”
What is the point in central government orders and carefully thought out regulatory norms if government officials and regulators act with blatant disregard? This is precisely what we now see happening in India where genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are concerned.
India has the greatest brinjal germplasm in the world with 2,500 varieties, including wild species. Following news in April that (genetically engineered) Bt brinjal is being illegally cultivated in Haryana, prominent campaigner and environmentalist Aruna Rodrigues says:
“These varieties are now under threat of irreversible contamination (cross-pollination) because of cumulative acts over time of senseless and criminally irresponsible regulatory oversight. More properly expressed: a virtual vacuum in GMO regulation.”
The cultivation of Bt brinjal (aubergine/eggplant) contravenes the indefinite moratorium that currently exists on the commercial release of Bt brinjal in India.
The moratorium has been in place since 2010 following a unique four-month scientific enquiry and public hearings regarding field trial data and crop developer Mayhco’s application for the commercialisation of Bt brinjal. Back then, the decision to reject commercialisation was supported by advice that the then Minister Jairam Ramesh received from several renowned international scientists.
Some people may have never heard the word ‘organophosphates’ to know what they are and what they do. Others may have only heard of organophosphates in relation to nerve agent chemical attacks – such as the one in Tokyo in 1995 where sarinwas released on three lines of the Tokyosubway during rush hour, killing 12 people, severely injuring 50 (some of whom later died), and causing vision problems for nearly 1,000 others.
All those who have suffered the adverse effects of organophosphates (OPs) from sheep dipping, agricultural pesticide spraying, contaminated air on planes, among other sources, will of course know only too well the health damage and devastation these chemicals cause.
Organophosphate chemicals are in fact among some of the most toxic in the world.
Indeed a brief glimpse into the history of organophosphates shows the true and deliberate toxic purpose of these chemicals. In 1937 the first OP compounds were synthesized by a group of German chemists. These very potent compounds were originally developed as ‘nerve gas’ chemical warfare agents for potential use during World War II.
Late last week, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued a final version of its "Guidance for Industry," entitled "Considerations in Demonstrating Interchangeability With a Reference Product" regarding the as-yet unexercised provision of the Biologic Price Competition and Innovation Act (BPCIA). This Guidance is facially similar to the draft Guidance issued this past January for notice and comment, and thus reflects the agency's response to those comments (see "FDA Issues Guidance Regarding Interchangeability of Biosimilar and Biologic Drugs").
WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook, said the attack targeted a "select number" of users, and was orchestrated by "an advanced cyber actor".
A vulnerability discovered in Facebook’s WhatsApp messaging app is being exploited to inject commercial spyware onto Android and iOS phones by simply calling the target, reports The Financial Times. The spyware, developed by Israel’s secretive NSO group, can be installed without trace and without the target answering the call, according to security researchers and confirmed by WhatsApp.
WhatsApp discovered the vulnerability earlier this week and has issued a security advisory asking its users to update the app. The loophole allowed attackers simply to call a user and install the surveillance software even if the call was not picked up.
As stated in the Trend Micro report, earlier in March 2019, Atlassian the creators of Confluence, an enterprise-grade collaboration software written in the Java programming language, published an advisory report on two critical security loopholes in the Confluence program: the WebDAV and Widget connector vulnerabilities. At the time, Atlassian made it clear to users that threat actors could take advantage of the security hole to “remotely exploit a Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF) vulnerability in the WebDAV plugin to send arbitrary HTTP and WebDAV requests from a Confluence Server or Data Center instance.” For the uninitiated, a Collaborative software or groupware is an application software developed to help people involved in a common task to get their work done seamlessly.
First of all, this isn't your standard [crack]. The device isn't internet connected, so there's little room for [cracking] in that sense. It relies on SMS messages, because that's how the device itself is designed to communicate. When the vulnerable person presses the panic button, or has a slip picked up by the fall detection, the device broadcasts its GPS coordinates via a text message to friends and relatives. It also has a microphone and speaker built in, so the person can be reached in emergency.
recent report from Red Balloon pits the security of millions of Cisco Routers around the world for a serious test. The report labels the potential exploit termed as “Thrangrycat“, a Cisco Router Bug in the routers. It can be exploited to gain access to the data flowing through the huge number of Cisco devices around the world.
WhatsApp has today disclosed that a vulnerability allowed hackers to install national grade spyware on phones. The vulnerability was discovered in May this year and exploited a flaw in the audio call feature of the messaging app. The caller was able to install the spyware on the affected phones even though the receiver declined the call.
The spyware installed on the phones is called ‘Pegasus’ which is a creation of Israeli cyber-intelligence company NSO. WhatsApp did not mention NSO in its official statement, but it was evident from the statement.
According to a five-month-long, 3,000-page National Whistleblowers Center study of terror groups on Facebook, the celebration/memories algorithm is auto-generating anthology pages that celebrate and frame the most effective terror messages created by extremists, giving them much-needed help in promoting their message to their base.
The National Whistleblowers Center in Washington carried out a five-month study of the pages of 3,000 members who liked or connected to organizations proscribed as terrorist by the US government.
Researchers found that the Islamic State group and al-Qaeda were "openly" active on the social network.
More worryingly, the Facebook's own software was automatically creating "celebration" and "memories" videos for extremist pages that had amassed sufficient views or "likes."
If you would like to support the show and help keep us going strong, please become a subscriber on our Patreon page. On this week’s “Unauthorized Disclosure” podcast, we have a crossover episode with “Media Roots” radio. In the first part of the show, we talk with Abby Martin and Robbie Martin of Media Roots about some of the projects they’re involved in currently. Abby tells us about “Empire Files.” Robbie mentions he is working on another documentary in his “A Very Heavy Agenda” series on neoconservatives.
Both Rania and Kevin talk about some of their recent work. Rania highlights a recent project for “In The Now.” Kevin shares some of the work he is doing to cover Julian Assange’s case.
Hugo Chávez knew that Venezuela was very vulnerable. Its oil revenues account for 98 percent of its export earnings. Chávez was familiar with the thinking of Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonzo, Venezuela’s minister of mines and hydrocarbons in the early 1960s and one of the architects of OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries). In 1976, Pérez Alfonzo wrote, “Ten years from now, twenty years from now, you will see, oil will bring us ruin.” He called Venezuela’s oil the “devil’s excrement.” If oil prices remained high, as they were when Chávez came to power in 1999, then oil revenue could be used to finance a project for the landless workers. If oil prices collapsed, then the country—laden with debt—would face severe challenges.
Venezuela’s economy had not been diversified by the oligarchy that ruled the country before Chávez took office. By 1929, it had become apparent to the oligarchy that the flood of oil revenues had damaged the agricultural sector—which shrank in the decades to come. There was neither an attempt to enhance agricultural production (and make Venezuela food sovereign) nor was there any attempt to use oil profits for a wider industrialization program. Occasionally, presidents—such as Carlos Andrés Pérez in the 1970s—would pledge to use the influx of oil revenues to diversify the economy, but when oil prices would fall—as they did periodically—Venezuela went into punishing debt.
It would have taken Chávez a generation to pivot the economy away from its reliance upon oil revenues. But Chávez and the Bolivarian Revolution simply did not have the time. In the 2000s, when oil prices remained high, the revenues were used to enhance the social lives of the landless workers, most of whom suffered high rates of malnutrition and illiteracy. Gripped by the need to deal with the social blight amongst the landless workers, Chávez and the Bolivarian Revolution simply did not have the capacity to tackle reliance upon imports of food and of most consumer goods.
Not a day goes by without the Trump administration imposing a new challenge on us, the Iranian people. Those who think that the travel ban has been the hardest obstacle for Iranians need to catch up with latest foreign policy developments. Encouraged by Donald Trump’s foreign policy advisors, the Iranian people today face an increasing risk of military attack by the United States. Also, the Iranian currency has lost 80 percent of its value since last year, mainly reflecting the collective sense of fear caused by the increased sanctions and the decertification of the Iran nuclear deal, as well as the increasing empowerment of the most undemocratic factions of the Iranian state. Trump has proudly taken credit for bankrupting an economy that feeds 80 million people, and he has recently promised to reduce Iran’s oil export to zero.
Iran is only marginally reflected in the U.S. news, which means the American public does not hear voices that express the human suffering caused by the U.S. government far beyond its borders. The murder and dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi Arabia, Trump’s best ally in the region, is a rare instance of attention given to the nature of America’s allies and Iran’s opponents in the Middle East. Pro-democracy Iranians worldwide are experiencing a political trauma. They feel alienated from both internal and world politics. They are unable to communicate the debilitating pain of, on the one hand, expecting a military attack by the United States and on the other, the worsening of the political landscape in their home country.
Direct democracy works like a charm. Check out Venezuela’s Communes….
Venezuela’s ubiquitous Communes are proof that direct democracy works. And, interestingly enough, those same Communes are powerful buffers to attempted coups, protecting the sanctity of direct democracy in their country.
In all likelihood, John Bolton and Trump and Pence and Pompeo and Rubio were shocked beyond recognition by the failed coup attempt they helped orchestrate to overpower a democratically elected government south of the border, colloquially known as extending the concept of Manifest Destiny to its fullest extent.
To Bolton’s/Rubio’s dismay, opposition leader Juan Guaidó proved to be a clown dressed up as a proponent of democratic spirits, a motivator, a savior. Well, he’s been tossed into the dustbin as a miserable failure, an international pariah who has been shamed into seclusion. His American co-conspirators look like big fat dupes.
Interestingly enough, the citizens of Venezuela did not answer Juan Guaidó’s official call to assemble, to revolt, and eliminate Maduro, overthrowing the dictator. Those were the instructions to a public that remained dead silent and in place. Nobody showed up for the well-advertised great event, as Juan Guaidó wanted to “Make Venezuela Great Again.”
Only in the U.S. do people fall for such claptrap. Venezuela’s politically astute citizens know hollow sloganeering when they hear it. After all, they have direct democracy that works like a charm, why change anything?
There’s a new word in town, folks – or rather an old word with a new meaning. It has become the fashion among politicians and journalists to describe nations like Russia, China, and Iran, and leaders like Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Ali Khamenei, as “adversaries.” This is a term that gives me the creeps both because of what it says and what it hides.
According to Webster-Merriam, adversary is another word for “an enemy or opponent,” but in today’s parlance it has become a blurry euphemism. Russia and China are called adversaries by people who loathe and fear these governments, but who consider it crude, impolitic, and possibly dangerous to label them enemies. You go to war with enemies. But what if you want to trade with them? What if you want to trade with themandattack them, using methods short of bombs and bullets?
“Adversary” provides an answer by introducing a note – actually, a whole symphonic score – of ambiguity. The Oxford Dictionary tells us that the word means “one’s opponent in a contest, conflict, or dispute.” This is how an anti-Russian (or anti-Chinese, anti-Iranian, or anti-Anyone) critic can have his cake while eating it too. The phrase “Russian adversary” conjures up a dangerous, long-lived and malicious enemy, reminding us that the term’s secondary meaning is “Satan; the Devil.” If challenged, however, the phrasemaker can always say, “I only meant that they are our opponents in a dispute. You know, like business competitors.”
Such a convenient blur! Since the opponent is an adversary, not necessarily an enemy, it’s ok to trade and negotiate with him instead of going to war. But, since he is an opponent, and therefore assumed to be “hostile” (another current buzzword), it’s also ok to punish him using such measures as economic sanctions, cyber-warfare, and covert activities.
Seven years year later, GetUp has totally abandoned the Australian citizen. It has not issued a single statement about Assange’s persecution, or uttered a word about its consequences for press freedom. And it refuses to explain why.
Repeated attempts by the World Socialist Web Site over the past two weeks to secure an explanation from GetUp’s media liaison representatives—via phone, text messages and email—have come to nothing.
Questions about the last time GetUp issued an official statement in defence of Assange, and when and how the organisation decided not to condemn his arrest and imprisonment, have met a brick wall.
Chelsea Manning, a former U.S. Army intelligence analyst and source for online publisher WikiLeaks, could be jailed again if she refuses to comply with a new grand jury subpoena, said a U.S. law enforcement source, as well as Manning herself.
Ecuador's attorney general has informed Julian Assange's lawyer that the WikiLeaks co-founder's files, computer, mobile phones and other electronic devices will be seized during a search of the London embassy and sent to the US.
WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Kristinn Hrafnsson tried unsuccessfully to retrieve Assange's personal belongings from Ecuador's UK embassy, where he had been holed up for almost seven years before his arrest and incarceration last month. However, the Ecuadorian government has reportedly greenlighted a US request to provide it with access to the documents and electronic devices left behind by the jailed WikiLeaks editor after he was hauled out of the embassy by the British police on April 11.
Early Thursday morning, the Department of Justice unsealed an indictment against Daniel Everette Hale — a former intelligence analyst for the U.S. Air Force and National Security Agency (NSA) and later a defense contractor working for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) — for providing a reporter with classified government information. The reporter in question, although unnamed in the indictment, is Jeremy Scahill, co-founder of and journalist for the online publication The Intercept.
The indictment against Hale makes him the third Intercept source to be charged with leaking classified information to the outlet in less than two years. Notably, both of the government whistleblowers that have already been prosecuted and convicted by the Trump administration – Reality Winner and Terry Albury – were Intercept sources who were outed as whistleblowers by reporters working for the online publication.
The publication, which has long been associated with the documents shared by whistleblower Edward Snowden, has yet to fire any of the reporters responsible for these breaches that have seen two whistleblowers already imprisoned and third, Daniel Hale, likely to be imprisoned.
The carbon dioxide high was recorded by the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii and tweeted out by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography Saturday, which regularly updates C02 levels. The observatory recorded a daily C02 reading of 415.26 ppm, which is the first time the daily level topped 415 ppm.
"We don't know a planet like this."
That was the reaction of meteorologist Eric Holthaus to news that atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have reached heights not seen in the entirety of human existence -- not history, existence.
Imagine that your doctor sat you down and told you, firmly and unequivocally, that your way of life was putting you at serious risk of heart failure. The only way to reduce this risk and avoid a possibly fatal health catastrophe, she said, was to make some major changes—and to make them right now. First, you had to quit smoking. Second, you had to cut way back on alcohol, greasy foods, and saturated fats. Third, you had to start exercising daily. Fourth, you had to find new and better ways to manage your stress and lower your blood pressure.
You might very well walk out of her office and say to yourself: Whoa . . . this is clearly the wake-up call I needed. I have to reconsider my choices and make these changes, as difficult as they may be. I owe it to myself and the people in my life who love and rely on me.
Then again, you might also say to yourself: Seriously? She expects me to do all that? I’ve been living this way my whole adult life. I can’t stop now. I guess there’s just nothing to be done.
Hundreds of millions of people around the world woke up on Monday morning to headlines that added up to a truly sobering prognosis for the world’s ecosystems and the human beings who inhabit them. “Humans Are Speeding Extinction and Altering the Natural World at an ‘Unprecedented’ Pace,” warned the New York Times. “Human society under urgent threat from loss of Earth’s natural life” was how The Guardian opted to phrase it. The Washington Post didn’t pull any punches, either, with its page-one, boldface augury: “One million species face extinction, U.N. report says. And humans will suffer as a result.” Even more bluntly, New York magazine went with “Humanity Is About to Kill 1 Million Species in a Globe-Spanning Murder-Suicide.”
After the hurricane, she recalls thinking, “I have everything hereââ¬Å —ââ¬Å water, lights, a roof over my headââ¬Å —ââ¬Å and they’re over there without any lights.” Hernandez said she could not sit down to a hot meal in a cool home while her brothers and nieces and nephews on the island languished without food or air conditioning. Worried about her family, she took it upon herself to deliver the relief the federal government had failed to provide. In the aftermath of the storm, Hernandez said, she spent around $8,000 to send aid to family back home, in addition to another $2,000 donated by her clients. “I swear to God, I have the best clients,” she said. The money paid for canned beef and chicken, coffee, peanut butter, batteries, solar-powered radios and lamps, as well as generators needed to operate fans, refrigerators and medical equipment, such as her brother’s dialysis machine. “I don’t think I did anything so heroic. I did what I had to do,” she said. “I took care of whoever needed the most.” She only wishes the government had done the same.
In a statement issued in Cambridge, Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, said:
"It is harder and harder to pretend that we’re not living in the middle of the most serious environmental crisis in recorded history. We desperately need people in British and Indeed global politics who are not afraid to name this challenge for what it is, and to look at what needs to change in our lives if we are to avoid terrible cost to future generations and to the most vulnerable people of our own generation across the world.
"Catherine Rowett is someone with the honesty, the courage and the clarity to speak out and think hard on these matters, and I sincerely wish there were more like her in our public life. I have deep confidence in her integrity and vision."
Catherine is a Norwich resident and Professor of Philosophy at the University of East Anglia.
Germany's Bayer, which bought the US agrochemical firm Monsanto, issued an apology on Sunday following reports that its American subsidiary drew up a list of those critical of the firm's practices.
"After an initial analysis, we understand that such a project raised concerns and criticism," Bayer said in a statement. "This is not the way Bayer would seek dialogue with different stakeholders and society, so we apologize."
The Leverkusen-headquartered firm said it would hire a law firm to carry out an external investigation into the matter.
The French prosecutor said Friday it had opened a probe after newspaper Le Monde filed a complaint.
[...]
Monsanto produces the broad-spectrum glyphosate-based herbicide Roundup. The firm and new owner Bayer deny that Roundup causes cancer.
However, last August, a US jury found Bayer liable because Monsanto had not warned users of alleged cancer risks linked to Roundup.
The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued a new decision in April that glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, which is made by Monsanto, does no t cause cancer or other health problems if used according to instruction labels.
Bayer Chief Executive Officer Werner Baumann is facing increased shareholder pressure over the litigation it inherited from Monsanto. It is the named defendant in US lawsuits concerning Roundup filed by 13,400 people.
Bayer shares have fallen about 40% since the $63 billion (€56 billion) Monsanto purchase was completed last June.
Healthy coral reefs are one of the most valuable ecosystems on Earth. They provide billions of dollars in economic and environmental services, such as food, coastal protection, and tourism. However, coral ecosystems around the world face serious threats from a number of sources, including climate change, unsustainable fishing, land-based pollution, coastal development, disease, and invasive species. Recently, scientists have discovered that some of the chemicals found in sunscreen and other personal health products also threaten the health of coral reefs. How these, and other compounds, affect reef ecosystems remains an active area of research among scientists.
Former Vice President Joe Biden has not released a detailed climate policy since he entered the Democratic presidential primary race a little more than two weeks ago. But two sources close to his campaign told Reuters Friday that he is crafting a policy that would serve as a "middle ground" between environmental advocates and blue-collar workers who voted for President Donald Trump.
Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden is crafting a climate change policy he hopes will appeal to both environmentalists and the blue-collar voters who elected Donald Trump, according to two sources, carving out a middle ground approach that will likely face heavy resistance from green activists.
[...]
On Twitter, Biden echoed the statement and said he plans to unveil policies that reflect the urgency of climate change.
“I’ll have more specifics on how America can lead on climate in the coming weeks,” he said.
The approach, which has not been previously reported, will set Biden apart from many of his Democratic rivals for the White House who have embraced much tougher climate agendas, like the Green New Deal calling for an end to U.S. fossil fuels use within 10 years. That could make Biden, vice president under Obama, a target of environmental groups and youth activists ahead of next year’s primary elections.
“I respect where they (activist groups) are coming from,” Zichal said. “What we learned from the Obama administration is unless we find middle ground on these issues, we risk not having any policies.”
More than half of the crowded field of Democratic contenders, including Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Beto O’Rourke, Cory Booker, Jay Inslee and Pete Buttigieg have backed the Green New Deal, and many have also called for a moratorium on drilling on federal land.
The U.S. is one of a few countries that has not signed on to a historic UN agreement to limit plastic pollution, the Associated Press reported.
Nearly every country in the world has agreed upon a legally binding framework to reduce the pollution from plastic waste except for the United States, U.N. environmental officials say.
An agreement on tracking thousands of types of plastic waste emerged Friday at the end of a two-week meeting of U.N.-backed conventions on plastic waste and toxic, hazardous chemicals.
Discarded plastic clutters pristine land, floats in huge masses in oceansand rivers and entangles wildlife, sometimes with deadly results.
Rolph Payet of the United Nations Environment Program said the "historic" agreement linked to the 186-country, U.N.-supported Basel Convention means that countries will have to monitor and track the movements of plastic waste outside their borders.
Did you know that the last time you spent a night in a beachfront bed and breakfast or enjoyed a seafood meal overlooking the ocean, you were supporting an industry that employs over two million people in this country? Chances are you didn’t realize that your much-needed vacation was as important to the national economy as it was to your own well-being.
One look at any of our country’s coastlines, and tourism’s allure is understandable. The ocean is our provider, from food and transportation to the endless opportunities for enjoyment that many Americans work so hard to achieve. Anyone who has been on a honeymoon in Hawaii, a fishing expedition in the Gulf of Mexico, or seen the sun set over Big Sur will tell you that they wouldn’t give those moments up for all the money in the world. And while those experiences are priceless, they also happen to contribute to the $116 billion that ocean tourism, in turn, contributes to the economy each year.
A little-noticed Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) announcement could have an outsized impact on the oil and gas pipeline industries — if the commission decides to snap shut loopholes that analysts say create financial incentives to build too many new pipelines in the U.S.
The way the rules are currently written can allow unusually high profit margins for new pipeline projects. Since 1997, FERC has allowed certain new pipelines to rake in 14 percent profits — a rate far higher than the returns presently generated by, say, corporate bonds — with little eye to how that compares to profits available from other investments.
The National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration measures atmospheric carbon dioxide at its Moana Loa observatory. You can see that on May 11 we were just about at 415 parts per million of CO2. A couple of days this week, we’ve gone over 415. When I say that, you should run screaming like a tsunami is coming over the horizon with mayhem on its mind. 415 is bigger than a million tsunamis. We put carbon dioxide into the atmosphere when we drive gasoline autos or burn coal or natural gas for heating.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders are among the high-profile advocates for bold climate policy slated to speak Monday night at the sold-out final stop of the Sunrise Movement's nationwide Road to a Green New Deal tour.
The youth-led Sunrise Movement—known for protesting at the offices of key federal lawmakers, from Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to GOP Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell—announced the tour in March, shortly after Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), another speaker at Monday's event, introduced the Green New Deal resolution.
The world is "facing a climate emergency" and is "not on track" to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said Sunday.
Speaking in Auckland alongside New Zealand's Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, Guterres said, "Climate change is running faster than what we are."
Despite clear manifestations of the climate and ecological crises—including record warm temperatures, a million species at risk of extinction, and atmosphere carbon levels at historic highs—global political leadership is not taking action in line with the needed urgency and scope, he said.
"We are facing a paradox," said Guterres.
"We are feeling clearly by what happens on the ground that things are getting worse, even worse than it was forecast," he added, referencing the recent storms in Mozambique and increasingly frequent droughts.
In a move that could set a new global precedent for how front-line communities demand ambitious government action on the climate crisis, Torres Strait Islanders submitted a landmark complaint to the United Nations on Monday charging that Australia's inaction on the crisis violates the indigenous group's human rights.
Imagine spending your whole career working on a question to which you don’t want to know the answer. We know that greenhouse gas emissions can and do warm the planet, but we don’t know one very basic thing: how hot, exactly, is it going to get? The main reason for this, of course, is that human behavior is so hard to predict. How will the people of the late twenty-first century get their energy? Will they need as much as we do, or will they have reconciled themselves to fundamentally different lives? Perhaps that decision will have been made for them by war or societal collapse. None of this is knowable. But even if we could remove all the uncertainty associated with politics, economics, technology, and demography, we still wouldn’t be sure. There are many things we don’t understand about our rapidly-warming planet. To some extent, we know why we don’t know. I have been sternly informed by communication experts that “global warming” is a better term for what’s happening than “climate change.” I have also been told the opposite. But the two are inseparable: they feed back upon each other. Rising temperatures change the planet, and these changes can speed up or, if we are very lucky, slow down the warming we’ve caused. We are not very lucky. Most of these changes will make things worse. The polar ice that we are currently melting is a good example. Right now, it reflects sunlight back to space, cooling the planet like a sunshield on a car windscreen. When it goes, it will leave behind dark land or ocean to absorb rather than reflects the sun. A little bit of warming can become much more. To study the effects of these changes, we use something artificial but useful: the concept of climate “sensitivity.” In our climate models, we abruptly double atmospheric carbon dioxide from its preindustrial value of 280 parts per million, let the model Earth evolve for a few hundred years, and then measure the increase in its temperature. In the first generation of climate models, this varied from about a degree and a half Celsius to about four and a half degrees. The best guess was about three degrees C. The next time we did this, having improved the models substantially, the best guess was three degrees C, and the range was between 1.5 and 4.5 degrees. Decades of new science and advances in computing power later, and nothing about these estimates or their uncertainty has substantially changed.
Climate change is leaving crops at risk. Driven by global warming – and with it ever greater extremes of heat, drought and rainfall – the rising mercury can explain up to half of all variations in harvest yields worldwide.
Unusually cold nights, ever greater numbers of extremely hot summer days, weeks with no rainfall, or torrents of storm-driven precipitation, account for somewhere between a fifth to 49% of yield losses for maize, rice, spring wheat and soy beans.
And once international scientists had eliminated the effect of temperature averages across the whole growing season, they still found that heatwaves, drought and torrential downfall accounted for 18% to 43% of losses.
In a second study, US researchers have a warning for the Midwest’s maize farmers: too much rain is just as bad for the harvest as too much heat and a long dry spell.
We life in the age of rampant right-wing populism. And we also live in an age of a looming ecological genocide – ecocide. Together, they create ecocidal populism. The rise of populism during recent years may not have occurred unconnected to the environmental devastation caused by global warming. Nationalistic populism rose at a time of increased environmental vandalism and the awareness of it in some quarters. Nationalistic right-wing populism is commonly defined bysetting the so-called good peopleagainst a corrupt elite. Right-wing populism depends on what Le Bon saw as the mass. Unlike traditional conservatism’s elitism, nationalistic populism needs the mass as it engineers a massive amount of right-wing voters.
Since the untimely demise of the last remaining left-wing populist– Hugo Rafael Chávez was buried in March 2015 – the field of populism is exclusively defined by nationalistic right-wing populism. Today, we see the populism of the nationalistic right in people like Donald Trump (Charlottesville Neo-Nazis are fine people), Brazil’s Bolsonaro (you should not only torture opponents, you also need to kill them), the Philippine Duterte (proudly killing drug dealers with his bare hands), Hungary’s Viktor Orbán (George Soros is behind everything), India’s Narendra Modi (Hindu nationalism), Israel’s Bibi (I protect you from an enemy that I have created), Turkey’s Recep Erdoßan, Italy’s Salvini, Austria’s deputy Neo-Nazi Strache, France’s Le Pen, Britain’s NigelFarage (crypto-Neo-Nazi Tommy Robinson, aka: Stephen Yaxley-Lennon is my friend)and Boris Johnson (de Pfeffel), the Netherland’s Wilders, Germany’s Björn Höcke and Gauland, and many more. On current predictions, there are more to come. Virtually all of them follow the propagandistic scripture of Hermann Goering:
‘That is all well and good, but voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country’.
[...]
Under corporate short-termism, the goal is still making money until the last moment. In reality however, avoiding the looming abyss means fundamental change and most likely the end of capitalism. Fundamental change might indicate the end of the current system or at least some very serious changes. Whatever these changes might look like, it does not look good for profit-making corporations. Yet unless very serious changes are being made, the earth faces extremely serious consequences.
[...]
All of this came not totally unconnected to capital’s second most existential threat and the rise of nationalistic populism. It is no accident that the rise of nationalistic populism that we have seen during recent times came when – despite the best lobbying efforts of media corporations and fossil fuel corporations – an increasing number of people have become aware of what we are facing. The first wave of nationalistic populism that defended an unsustainable system called capitalism from a rising working class has cost the world roughly 50 to 60 million people. Given what we are facing with the second existential threat, we might get away with 500 to 600 million deaths – and that means we will have gotten off lightly.
Sadly but true, what has been said above explains the recent rise of nationalistic populism. It is capitalism’s global effort to take our attention away from the impending environmental annihilation caused by capitalism. That we see the global rise of nationalistic populism right now is a sure sign of the seriousness of what capital has understood is coming. The inevitable conclusion is nationalistic populism will continue to grow. And it will increase in ferocity. It may even end in a similar way to the first wave, outright Fascism. Given the recent history of capitalism, one should never totally discount such a possibility. This is not to argue that 2019 is 1933. It is not. What is coming will be worse. The looming fight will be worse and even if we win, the outcome will be horrendous.
Saudi Arabia’s claim that two of its oil tankers have been sabotaged off the coast of the UAE is vague in detail – but could create a crisis that spins out of control and into military action.
Any attack on shipping in or close to the Strait of Hormuz, the 30-mile wide channel at the entrance to the Gulf, is always serious because it is the most important choke point for the international oil trade.
A significant armed action by the US or its allies against Iran would likely provoke Iranian retaliation in the Gulf and elsewhere in the region. Although the US is militarily superior to Iran by a wide margin, the Iranians as a last resort could fire rockets or otherwise attack Saudi and UAE oil facilities. Such apocalyptic events are unlikely – but powerful figures in Washington, such as the national security adviser John Bolton and secretary of state Mike Pompeo, appear prepared to take the risk of a war breaking out.
Bolton has long publicly demanded the overthrow of the Iranian government. “The declared policy of the United States should be the overthrow of the mullahs’ regime in Tehran,” he said last year before taking office.
A member of the U.S. House of Representatives last week called for a bill outlawing Americans from making cryptocurrency purchases, aligning with anti-cryptocurrency policies in countries such as Iran and Egypt. There is no language for this potential bill or any explanation of whether such a bill would ban Americans from buying cryptocurrencies, using cryptocurrencies to make other purchases, or both. Nonetheless, it’s a good moment to remind everyone why a bill outlawing cryptocurrencies is a terrible idea.
Attempts to ban cryptocurrencies are often rooted in fundamental misunderstandings. One common refrain is that criminals use cryptocurrencies to facilitate illegal activity, and thus we should ban cryptocurrencies to hamper that illegal activity. This is wrong for several reasons: first, it ignores the many entirely legal uses for cryptocurrencies that already exist and that will continue to develop in the future. Cryptocurrencies have been used for a decade to store and transfer value with near-zero transaction costs and no need for intermediaries like banks. As more applications make holding and exchanging cryptocurrencies easier, everyday consumers are using cryptocurrency regularly for innocuous activities like buying furniture on Overstock.com and sending money to family members overseas. And innovation related to cryptocurrency technology is giving rise to more use cases: for example, some cryptocurrencies enable programmers to write computer programs (so-called “smart contracts”) that automatically transfer cryptocurrency to others upon certain conditions being met. These are just a few examples of the many potential uses of this technology that a ban on cryptocurrency would undermine.
The fact that a technology could be used to violate the law does not mean we should ban it. Notably, criminals have long used cash—which, like some cryptocurrencies, allows for greater anonymity—to aid in committing crimes. But we don’t call for a ban on cash as a result, and we don’t blame Ford when one of its cars is used as a getaway vehicle in a bank robbery. Nor would such a law likely stop criminals from using cryptocurrency, since criminals are, by definition, more willing to violate existing laws. Ultimately, banning cryptocurrencies would rob Americans of opportunities to access potentially significant technologies, and have no real impact on criminals abusing these tools.
Earlier today, the Supreme Court ruled (mostly as expected, though with some caveats) in Apple v. Pepper, a case concerning whether or not iPhone users could sue Apple for antitrust concerning how it controls pricing in the iOS App Store. Most of the news on this focuses either on how this could have a big impact on Apple and other marketplaces, or on how this case (somewhat oddly) split between the two Justices appointed by President Trump, with Justice Kavanaugh writing the majority opinion (joined by Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, Kagan, and Sotomayor) and the dissent written by Justice Gorsuch (joined by Justices Roberts, Thomas and Alito).
It will be interesting to see how this plays out, but my first impression is that this case may not prove to be that big of a deal long term. It is not saying anything, really, concerning whether or not Apple's practices are an antitrust violation. It is merely letting a case go forward. And, to some extent, I think that Justice Gorsuch may be correct that all that this case will end up doing in the long run is getting Apple and other platforms to change their contracts in terms of how the money flow officially goes.
In her latest pledge to lead an administration that would fight for working Americans, Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Monday announced that she would only consider former public school teachers to be her education secretary should she be elected president in 2020.
An official who would be able to identify with the thousands of teachers who have rallied at state capitols across the country over the past year, the Massachusetts Democrat argued, would fight for far better policies than those that Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has proposed.
"Let's get a person with real teaching experience," Warren wrote in an email to supporters. "A person who understands how low pay, tattered textbooks, and crumbling classrooms hurt students and educators. A person who understands the crushing burden of student debt on students and young professionals and who is committed to actually doing something about it."
Warren directly attacked DeVos in the email and in a video she posted to social media.
Since 2007, Carlie Care Kids has run a child care out of a couple of nondescript converted townhouses in Terrytown, Louisiana. Now it’s gearing up for a big switch: This fall it will become an elementary school for up to 39 kindergarteners and first graders.
It will be done with the help of taxpayers. The school even advertises itself to parents as “free kindergarten.” Yet, like they do for dozens other private schools in Louisiana, state education officials asked Carlie Care to do very little to become eligible to take students paying with public vouchers.
Its owners basically had to fill a 16-page document with straightforward questions, many satisfied with yes/no answers. By contrast, when Arise Academy in New Orleans recently applied to become a charter school, it had to prepare a 174-page packet with questions about financial soundness, curriculum and teacher’s qualifications that demanded encyclopedic answers.
The discrepancy is by design. While public schools must meet rigorous standards and charters must face serious state scrutiny before being approved, the dozens of private schools in the Louisiana Scholarship Program faced barely a review from education officials in order to get public money, according to an investigation by NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune, WVUE Fox 8 News, WWNO and Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting.
Voucher-program schools and charters both offer the same promise: They give parents a publicly funded education, outside of the traditional public school system.
The lack of scrutiny for private voucher schools is one of the reasons for problems with the scholarship program, according to Andre Perry, a Brookings Institution fellow who holds a doctorate in education policy and leadership and formerly led the University of New Orleans Charter School Network.
For a while, a popular assessment of Donald Trump’s wild, early-morning rants and attacks on Twitter was that they served as a strategic distraction from even more sinister and potentially damaging goings-on. Eventually, however, political pundits accustomed to norms and decorum came to accept that while Trump may be a brilliant marketer, he is also just a stubborn old man whose worst habits can’t be tamed.
Twitter, for Trump, is an effective medium to continue controlling media coverage — or to complain about “Fox & Friends” — from the comfort of his bed. Unlike during the presidential campaign, during his presidency, Trump’s Twitter feed has more often served as an outlet for daily narrative-setting than as a tool of distraction. Occasionally, however, some of the president’s tweets do indeed seem as if they were meant to cover up something more serious.
You read a lot these days about polls telling us why—gasp—socialist could never win the presidency, about how “radical” progressives will make it impossible for Democrats to take the Senate, or pretty much accomplish anything else.
There are two things wrong with this. First, it’s simply not true. Polls clearly show that—at least on an issue-by-issue basis—people are overwhelmingly progressive. Second, it essentially freezes in place a de facto coup perpetrated by extremist free marketeers who accomplished it by decades’ worth of propaganda designed to move the nation to the right of center and keep it there.
And it succeeded. Today’s Republican Party is a cult of know-nothings, xenophobes, racists, anti-vaxers, climate deniers and all-around anti-Enlightenment, anti-Jesus Christians, with a few true conservatives left to hang onto the crumbling edifice of a once rational political philosophy – or at least one that accurately reflected the rational self-interest of corporations and the uber-rich.
Meanwhile, today’s Democratic Party is well to the right of where Republicans used to be in the first half of the 20th Century.
We are now in a trade war with the second-largest economy on Earth.
On Monday, China said it would raise tariffs to 20 or 25 percent on some $60 billion of American goods – already being taxed at 10 percent, in retaliation for Trump’s previous tariffs on Chinese goods.
China’s move came after Trump increased tariffs on $200 billion of Chinese goods to 25 percent on Friday.
U.S. stocks moved sharply lower Monday on Wall Street and extended the market’s slide into a second week as investors seek shelter from an escalating trade war between the U.S. and China.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average and S&P 500 index each fell more than 2% as investors sold trade-sensitive shares. Chipmakers led the big declines in technology while heavy equipment makers Deere and Caterpillar drove losses in the industrial sector.
The world’s largest economies had seemed on track to resolve the ongoing trade dispute that has raised prices for consumers and pinched corporate profit margins. Investor confidence that the two sides were close to a resolution had helped push the market to its best yearly start in decades.
Those hopes are now being dashed and replaced by concerns that the trade war could crimp what is otherwise a mostly healthy economy. Analysts have warned that failed trade talks and the deterioration in relations will put a dent in the U.S. and China’s economic prospects.
With the ring of a bell, controversial former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick became a billionaire on Friday when the ridesharing company made its debut on the New York Stock Exchange. But while Uber execs former and current cashed in on the IPO, the drivers that actually build the company’s wealth won’t see nearly that kind of payout.
“On a bad day — and there’s too many of those bad days — you make less than minimum wage after expenses,” says Vincent Suen, a rideshare driver based in Los Angeles. That’s why Suen — along with drivers around the world — went on strike ahead of the public offering to show who actually generates Uber’s wealth.
Suen is a member of Los Angeles Rideshare Drivers United, one of the labor groups behind the strike. Members of the organization, along with other California-based drivers, previously went on strike in March in protest of a change in Uber’s pay structure that effectively meant wage cuts for workers.
Pay cuts are all the loathsome given how the company has recruited its drivers — a model Lenny Sanchez, a rideshare driver and co-founder of Chicago Rideshare Advocates, calls predatory. Among the company’s misdeeds was a controversial subprime car loan program, which garnered comparisons to indentured servitude. Sanchez says he’s seen Uber “targeting low-income minority neighborhoods — people who specifically do not have credit, do not have co-signers, do not have a job, do not have a car, but people that are about as desperate as can be,” Sanchez says. “They’re just in a deep hole. So Uber and Lyft present the solution to these people.”
Burgeoning numbers of Cubans are trying to get into the U.S. by way of the Mexican border, creating a big backlog of people waiting on the Mexican side for months for their chance to apply for asylum.
The surge over the past several months has been propelled in part by loosened travel restrictions in Central America and deteriorating living conditions in Cuba.
As a result, about 4,500 asylum seekers, the vast majority of them Cuban, have descended on Ciudad Juarez, across from El Paso, Texas — an influx that has raised tensions with some locals.
“It’s a bottleneck with an opening that is getting smaller,” said Enrique Valenzuela, an official of Mexico’s Chihuahua state, which manages Juarez’s waiting list. “People keep coming.”
For decades during the Cold War and beyond, Cubans tried to reach the U.S. by air, land and sea, many of them crossing the 90 miles to Florida in dangerously rickety boats and rafts.
The Wall Street Journal's opinion page has never been a place where reality is a binding constraint. Andy Kessler demonstrates this fact in a column that tells us that the Consumer Price Index (CPI) overstates the true rate of inflation by at least 2.0 percentage points annually and possibly as much as 5.0 percentage points.
The immediate basis for this observation is an interview Alan Greenspan gave in which he said:
"Because products are continuously changing, ..... when new products go on the market, they come in at relatively high prices. Henry Ford’s Model T came in at a very high price, and the price went down as technology improved. You didn’t start to pick up the price level until well into that declining phase.”
“So there is a bias in the statistic. You’re getting statistics which are not correct. ... If you had a 2% inflation rate as currently measured, it’s the equivalent of zero for actually what consumers are buying.”
That's what Sarah Jeong says in a New York Times column. The piece argues that if Uber drivers got a living wage then Uber would just turn to using driverless cars.
It is an interesting possibility. The argument is that higher pay is a major driver of productivity growth, as it forces companies to use workers more efficiently and to invest in labor saving equipment. Many progressive economists have long made this argument, although it is rejected within the mainstream of the economics profession.
It is possible that we are seeing some evidence of this story in recent productivity data, which show productivity had risen 2.4 percent over the last year. While this is still far below the 3.0 percent growth rate of the long Golden Age from 1947 to 1973 (and again from 1995 to 2005), it is a big improvement over the 1.3 percent rate from 2005 to 2017.
The crisis of income inequality in America is well-known, but there is another economic crisis developing much faster and with worse consequences. I’m talking about inequality of wealth.
The wealth gap is now staggering. In the 1970s, the wealthiest tenth of Americans owned about a third of the nation’s total household wealth. Now, the wealthiest 10 percent owns about 75 percent of total household wealth.
America’s richest one-tenth of one percentnow owns as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent.
Wealth isn’t like income. Income is payment for work. Wealth keeps growing automatically and exponentially because it’s parked in investments that generate even more wealth.
“I know that some people will be aghast. You can’t say anything today without some people getting upset. I don’t take it very seriously. Those who know me as a politician know that I am serious, but I have a sense of humour and think this is a good laugh,” he concluded.
India Today Anti fake News War Room (AFWA) found that this is a misleading claim. Though there are news reports of cows’ death in several cow shelters in Rajasthan, this particular viral image is not from Rajasthan but from Kenya, East Africa.
While banks are too big to fail, tech giants are too big to manage. Facebook has accumulated over 2 billion users on its main platform, and also owns Instagram and Whatsapp. It is far too large to operate with any sensible degree of competent oversight.
[...]
The most immediate need for reforms cover three areas: 1) user privacy and control over data; 2) the role of Facebook and Google as media companies; 3) their economic and political power as monopolies.
As Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has pointed out, lawmakers are shockingly ill-informed on the issues that they vote upon, largely because they pay sub-starvation wages to their staffers, requiring each to take on second and third jobs, leaving them without the time to research and prepare lawmakers ahead of key hearings and debates.
This vacuum has (of course) largely been filled by industry lobbyists who brief lawmakers with stilted accounts of the world (though AOC's answer, paying a living wage to every staffer, is obviously superior). Re-established the OTA would go a long way to filling in some of the gaps with neutral facts instead of parochial propaganda, and at $6m/year, it's a fucking steal.
A disconcerting number of academics and teachers in the current moment continue to join forces with right-wing politicians and conservative government agencies to argue that classrooms should be free of politics. Their shared conclusion? That schools should be spaces where matters of power, values and social justice should not be addressed.
The scornful accusation in this case is that teachers who believe in civic education indoctrinate their students. Those who make this accusation suggest that it’s possible to exist in an ideologically pure and politically neutral world where pedagogy can be merely a banal transmission of facts in which nothing controversial is stated and teachers are forbidden to utter one word related to any of the major problems facing society more broadly.
Of course, this view of teaching is as much a flight from reality as it is an instance of irresponsible pedagogy. In contrast, one useful approach to embracing the classroom as a political site while rejecting any form of indoctrination is for educators to think through the distinction between a politicizing pedagogy, which insists wrongly that students think exactly as we do as educators, and a political pedagogy, which teaches students through dialogue about the importance of power, social responsibility and taking a stand (without standing still). Political pedagogy, unlike a dogmatic or indoctrinating pedagogy, embodies the principles of critical pedagogy through rigorously engaging the full range of ideas about an issue within a framework that enables students to move from moral purpose to purposeful action in pursuit of a democratic polis.
Poor people across the nation will bring their demands to the nation’s capital next month at the Poor People’s Moral Action Congress, a gathering organized by the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for a Moral Revival.
In recent months, organizers with the campaign have led Truth & Poverty Bus Tours through nearly 30 states nationwide, including nearly every Southern state, to shine light on the impact of public policies on poor people. The tours have informed the campaign’s demands and helped it draw up what’s being called a “Moral and Constitutional Budget” that will seek to end poverty in America instead of proliferating it.
I had the opportunity to participate in last week’s North Carolina Truth & Poverty Bus Tour as an executive committee member of the state’s Poor People’s Campaign* and as a researcher concerned with the connection between public policy and poverty. It’s one thing to read that in my home state nearly 9,000 people are homeless and nearly half of the state’s residents don’t make a livable wage, but it is quite another to hear people’s stories firsthand.
The tour started in the Western North Carolina mountain community of Asheville. There we met members of the Beloved Community, which is likely the first group in the country to start a street medic team comprised of homeless and formerly homeless people. Their work underscores the fact that, in a state which has not expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, thousands of people lack access to health care, and it is often left up to community members to try to meet the needs of the most vulnerable.
COMMENTS Last week, Ben Shapiro, the conservative commentator whom The New York Times once dubbed “the cool kid’s philosopher,” went on the BBC to promote his new book, “The Right Side of History: How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great.” There, he faced off against Andrew Neil, a ruddy, prehistoric Scottish Tory and former Rupert Murdoch protégé. The segment quickly went viral.
Neil isn’t a cagey interviewer or a particularly incisive one, but whereas the American conservative tendency is toward mawkish, self-pitying grievance, the British conservative mode tends to relentlessly condescending hostility. American popular media has no such characters; some of its conservative figures—a Tucker Carlson, say—can be hectoring, but they lack the fetish for cringing awkwardness that the British seem to love so much, and in any case, they are professionally committed to providing a friendly forum for the Ben Shapiros of the world.
Neil asked a few broadly challenging, although not especially pointed, questions. He did not ask his subject to explain the irony of his book’s hyperbolic title: Shapiro has at least twice disavowed the very notion of a “right side of history,” which he called “the most morally idiotic phrase of modern times.”
Members of the U.S. public from all over the country are planning a major sit-in on Capitol Hill Tuesday morning to demand that Congress begin impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump.
Organizers with the grassroots group By the People will risk arrest by assembling in the nation's capitol, hoping not only to convince lawmakers that many Americans want the president to be impeached, but also to ask the public to join the call.
President Donald Trump welcomed far-right Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán at the White House Monday, drawing outrage from progressive quarters.
"By meeting with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán today," said Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), "Donald Trump is giving tacit approval for his racist, misogynist, 'soft fascism.'"
Orbán, as the New York Times reported, "was, in July 2016, the first foreign leader to endorse Mr. Trump's candidacy for the presidency," and is "a doyen of right-wing nationalists on multiple continents."
He's also "rolled back democratic checks on his power, mused about creating a European ethnostate, and erected a razor-wire fence to keep migrants out,"as CNN noted.
George W. Bush dodged it. Barack Obama refused it. But on Monday President Trump will grant Viktor Orban, Hungary’s far-right prime minister, his first private audience with a president at the White House since he met Bill Clinton there in 1998.
Back then, Mr. Orban was a young centrist who praised Mr. Clinton for helping Hungary to escape Russian influence by joining NATO, but today he is a doyen of right-wing nationalists on multiple continents. He has enfeebled democratic institutions, strived to achieve a Hungarian ethnic homogeneity and pulled his nation closer to the opponents of American influence, Russia and China.
He's rolled back democratic checks on his power, mused about creating a European ethnostate and erected a razor-wire fence to keep migrants out, angering the rest of the European Union.
So why was Hungary's far-right prime minister Viktor Orbán meeting with President Donald Trump in the Oval Office on Monday? "I know he's a tough man but he's a respected man," Trump said during a friendly photo-op at the start of the talks on Monday. "Probably, like me, a little bit controversial, but that's OK. That's OK." Administration officials say the invitation to the White House for talks — the first for a Hungarian prime minister in years — is part of a concerted strategy to re-engage Central European nations as Russia and China seek to exert influence in the region.
I know that everyone’s talking about the final episodes of HBO’s Game of Thrones and some are comparing our current woes to the battle for the Iron Throne of the Seven Kingdoms.
Hell, even our hopeless tinpot dictator of a president has tweeted GoT memes and in his cabinet room admired a poster of himself that promoted the economic punishment of Iran, announcing “Sanctions Are Coming." Apparently, Trump didn’t care that to normal people the Game of Thrones phrase from whence it came, “Winter Is Coming,” is about a cold and bitter threat to all of civilization’s survival. It was a picture of him and that’s all that mattered. HBO and series cast members have let their displeasure be known.
But I keep thinking instead about another fantasy tale, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, and the decades-long spell cast over good King Theodon of Rohan – the evil magic that clouds his judgment until the spell is broken by Gandalf the wizard and Theodon becomes a hero again.
A new report released Monday from Media Matters For America found that not a single day went by in the first four months of 2019 when the "hard news" arm of Fox News didn't lie to its audience.
Fox has long assured viewers and advertisers that the network's news and opinion wings are fundamentally different. But, as Media Matters president Angelo Carusone explained in a statement, that isn't really based in facts.
"Fox News likes to tout the 'hard news' side of its operation, setting up a false distinction between its right-wing prime-time hosts and its news anchors," said Carusone. "The network pushes this fictional division as a defense against those who flag the propaganda, lies, conspiracy theories, and bigotry pervading the network."
Rather, as Carusone's team found, the channel's news nachors spread the same misinformation as its more opinionated primetime hosts—people like Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and Tucker Carlson.
It has been an uninspiring election, punctuated by occasional moments of madness on the part of various candidates. Their sin was to be incautious in their previous use of social media, a form of communication that reveals everything and nothing about a person. In a political sense, the erring tweet and the injudicious remark on an online forum have laid waste to incipient political careers and ambitions.
This is a far cry from the supposedly mighty role the use of social media was meant to have in participatory politics. Now, the chickens have come home to roost in various unexpected ways. Social media outlets are condemned for being platforms for misinformation and manipulation (the horror!) and tech giants are given daily tongue lashings by politicians and representatives for not being online Bobbies.
Paradoxically, these are the same critics who have been more than happy to embrace such media to access voters at virtually no cost. As President Donald J. Trump once explained on his use of Twitter, “I like it because I can get my point of view out there, and my point of view is very important to a lot of people that are looking at me.” Various surges in the polls by presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders in 2016 were occasioned by a conspicuous and aggressive presence on social media relative to his rival, Hillary Clinton. In Britain, the rise of Jeremy Corbyn to the position of Labour leader was very much boosted by a dedicated social media following.
Social media in this Australian federal election has done quite the opposite: rather than advancing profiles and improving visibility for the candidate, mistakes have been noted, and previous misbehaviour drawn out as grave errors of judgment. Bad speech has been picked up and prosecuted by the machine men and women of various parties. Resignations have been encouraged, and, in some cases, forced.
This instances have provided marvellous distractions from policy, fitting for those who do not have any. “The offensive remarks,” noted The New York Times, “have forced at least six candidates for Parliament to quit, while many more linger like zombies – most of them from the conservative governing coalition and other parties on the right.”
Top Republicans are hunting district-by-district for just the right candidates — women and minorities in many cases — to help them recapture the House six months after a political tidal wave swept Democrats into control of the most diverse majority in history.
Among the recruits are a Republican woman in the Oklahoma state Senate and a black political novice from Houston with Iraq combat experience and three Ivy League degrees on his resume. They are part of the GOP drive to gain at least 18 seats in the 2020 elections to win the majority — historically a tall order for the party out of power in presidential election years.
Finding women and minority candidates is an imperative for an overwhelmingly white GOP openly embarrassed that just 13 of its 197 House members are women. By contrast, 89 of the 235 House Democrats are women and nearly 90 are black or Hispanic.
But Republicans want challengers with other qualities too, following a 2018 election that saw the GOP lose 31 districts that President Donald Trump had won just two years earlier, many in moderate suburbs.
In the media, both local and international, this new kid is called a “political dandy,” a “flamboyant populist,” “not your typical populist,” “the naked populist,” “the far right’s rising star,” “a new face,” and the “Dutch far right’s new figurehead.” He is sure of himself, exposing his intellectual rather than physical muscles (though certain naked poolside Instagram photos are in circulation). He likes to smile at the cameras and everybody around him. He plays piano (often Brahms), enjoys chess, believes himself likable and believes his country to be right (as “right” as he is).
Born in 1983, Thierry Henri Philippe Baudet is a Dutch politician, the founder (in 2016) and the current political leader of the right wing party Forum for Democracy (Forum voor Democratie, FvD). His party intends, among other things, to introduce a high tax-free bracket for everyone, abolish taxes on gifts and inheritance, introduce drastic changes in elementary and secondary education, expand the armed forces, and privatize the Dutch public broadcasting organization. The party promises direct democracy through binding referenda, as well as directly elected mayors and prime Minister. It also favors a government of apolitical experts, with top civil servants required to reapply for their positions when a new cabinet is formed.
Apart from that, FvD strongly opposes the European Union and has called for a referendum on Dutch EU withdrawal. According to its nationalist viewpoint, Dutch culture should be protected and border controls reinstated to prevent what it perceives as mass, unchecked immigration. To that end, the party wants to introduce a “Dutch Values Protection Act” and ban Islamic face veils and other face coverings.
A self-described “McGovern Democrat” (“Fay”) told me that, after a lifetime of supporting organized labor, she could no longer do so because, in her own stunning words, “unions have become too powerful.” A UCLA honors grad and longtime political activist (she marched with Cesar Chavez), Fay is probably the most traditional “left-wing” person I’ve ever personally known.
She dropped this bombshell on me despite the fact (1) that labor is clearly outmanned, outgunned, and outflanked by management, (2) that private sector union density is barely 6.3 percent, (3) that the middle-class, which was “invented” by organized labor, is shrinking faster than the glaciers, (4) that thanks to some bad press and insidious propaganda, organized labor hasn’t been this unpopular since before the 1935 Wagner Act, and (5) that without some form of institutional resistance, businesses can be depended upon to run wild on the working class. My initial thought? If we lose the support of people like Fay, where does that leave us?
On the other hand, there’s no denying that the labor movement has, for want of a better term, “stalled out.” Or as Susan Sontag succinctly (albeit unfairly) put it years ago, “The American labor movement rotted before it ever ripened.” Ouch.
While there still seems to be a genuine—if weirdly idealized and unfocused—“pro-worker” sentiment in the country, there’s precious little codified social/political activism to go along with it. And in this era of well-crafted disinformation and Wall Street hegemony, evidence of an accompanying codified political activism isn’t simply a luxury. It’s a necessity.
Listed in no particular order are six factors that have contributed, and continue to contribute, to the general decline of the American labor movement.
“We are standing on the grounds of what once was Carcross Residential School (also known as Choutla Residential School). Here, concrete stairs that lead nowhere. There, a truck with the windows busted out. Beyond are some scattered buildings, sagging and decrepit. The site where the actual school stood is empty, save for trash and broken glass. There is heaviness here, and deep sadness. I have brought tobacco with me, but it doesn’t feel right to offer it to the ground. The space is empty, and not in a triumphant way. Not like a racist monument falling, not like a wall that divides being apart stone by stone. Empty like lungs after a desperate sigh. Empty like my hands. Empty like my mouth, with no words to offer into this space.”
A member of the Tlingit Kwanlin Dun First Nation in Whitehorse, Yukon, Anne Spice tells the poignant and disturbing story of her mother, who testified before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), telling of her father’s suffering and demons that ransacked his tormented mind. “We watched our father—we watched our father be destroyed from the inside out. And that was his sacrifice to us, so that we could have a ‘normal’ -a normal life.”
Spice tells us that her mother’s testimony accomplishes three things. First, she breaks the silence, releasing words into the formerly empty space. Second, she “reframes silence as both an enactment of suffering and an act of agency.” Her grandfather held his suffering tight to the ribs and it ripped him apart from the inside out. Spice, ever so tenderly, points out that her mother named his suffering as an act of sacrifice. “Silence is clearly not a simple or passive symptom of trauma, here. It is a powerful tool that both harms and contains. Third, Spice affirms that her mother’s testimony to the TRC “illuminates the inability of the TRC to account for those who did not survive by powerfully evoking my grandfather’s presence, by telling his story even though we do not know exactly what happened.”
China is blocking Wikipedia in every language, reports the Tor Project, expanding its censorship to cover editions other than Chinese.
OONI measurements show that many of these Wikipedia domains were previously accessible, but all measurements collected from 25th April 2019 onwards present the same DNS anomalies for all Wikipedia sub-domains. The few DNS anomalies that occurred in previous months were false positives, whereas the DNS anomalies from April 2019 onwards show that Wikipedia domains are blocked by means of DNS injection. Most measurements were collected from China Telecom (AS4134).
Since OONI measurements collected from China suggest blocking by means of DNS injection, we can further measure the DNS-based blocking from outside of China as well. To this end, we ran the OONI Probe DNS injection test from a vantage point outside of the country, pointing towards an IP address in China.
What is it with plastic surgeons suing their former customers over negative reviews? We've written stories with that basic plotline over and over and over again. The latest involves Miami-based plastic surgeon Dr. Leonard Hochstein, who the article lets us know, has appeared on "The Real Housewives of Miami." Except, now he's getting attention for suing two of his former clients who left negative reviews online. Even though there's now a law, the Consumer Review Fairness Act, that bars anyone from forcing customers to sign a non-disparagement clause, Hochstein did so anyway. He insists he only recently became aware of that law. But he won't stop suing those customers.
[...]
Unfortunately, despite "obtaining" those legal documents, The Blast didn't actually post them, so we have to rely on what they claim. Similarly, the NBC article above doesn't link to the actual court records, and a quick search of the Miami Dade court records online finds other unrelated lawsuits involving a Dr. Leonard Hochstein, but not the cases discussed here. So perhaps there are more details here, but doctors suing patients over reviews is never a good look -- especially after having them sign a non-disparagement clause. Asking to lock up patients for their reviews is even worse. And since Hochstein claims he was unaware of the Consumer Review Fairness Act, he might also be unaware of Florida's anti-SLAPP law. He might want to familiarize himself with it, because it certainly seems like he might run into some issues with that law as well.
Civil liberties advocates on Monday eagerly awaited the results of a vote by San Francisco officials on the city's use of facial recognition technology—hoping the city's Board of Supervisors would vote to ban the surveillance tool.
The board is set to vote Tuesday on the Stop Secret Surveillance Ordinance, a law that advocates say would make history and potentially encourage other cities to ban the use of facial recognition technology, which is being used increasingly by police and private companies.
Since San Francisco is the "most technologically advanced city in our country," privacy expert Alvaro Bedoya told the Associated Press, the city's rejection of cameras which can capture anyone's image for use by the police or city agencies could send a strong message to other government officials.
San Francisco is on track to become the first U.S. city to ban the use of facial recognition by police and other city agencies, reflecting a growing backlash against a technology that’s creeping into airports, motor vehicle departments, stores, stadiums and home security cameras.
Government agencies around the U.S. have used the technology for more than a decade to scan databases for suspects and prevent identity fraud.
But recent advances in artificial intelligence have created more sophisticated computer vision tools, making it easier for police to pinpoint a missing child or protester in a moving crowd or for retailers to analyze shoppers’ facial expressions as they peruse store shelves.
Facebook has chosen London as the center to expand the operations of its WhatsApp messaging service, as the company seeks to establish new methods of monetizing its operations, especially as existing revenue sources increasingly come under political and regulatory attack. The timing of the announcement is as interesting as the choice of venue. Perhaps Facebook is taking a view on the likely outcome of the longstanding Brexit divorce between the UK and European Union, as well as pointing to the kind of economy to which Britain will evolve once the separation is finalized. If the latter points to a country that may become known as a “European Singapore,” effectively embracing a widespread form of regulatory arbitrage, what does that mean for other sectors, notably financial services?
Since the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke, Facebook has been under sustained attack. That the company has not yet encountered a direct legislative/regulatory threat to its overall business model stems largely from the fact that there has been no overriding consensus as to how best to deal with it. Certainly, in hearings with the Facebook CEO last year, Congress displayed complete cluelessness in terms of understanding the main business, let alone having any concept of constructing adequate regulation for the company.
On Friday, Mark Zuckerberg went to France, just in time for the French government to release a vague and broad proposal to regulate social media networks. Similar to Zuckerberg's pleas to Congress to ramp up its regulation of the company (and because he knows that any pushback on regulations will likely be slammed by the world of Facebook-haters), Zuckerberg tried to embrace the plans.
We've noted repeatedly that if you're upset about Facebook's privacy scandals, you should be equally concerned about the wireless industry's ongoing location data scandals. Not only were the major carriers caught selling your location data to any nitwit with a checkbook, they were even found to be selling your E-911 location data, which provides even more granular detail about your data than GPS provides. This data was then found to have been widely abused from everybody from law enforcement to randos pretending to be law enforcement.
Throughout all this, the Ajit Pai FCC has done absolutely nothing to seriously police the problem. Meaning that while carriers have promised to stop collecting and selling this data, nobody has bothered to force carriers to actually confirm this. Given telecom's history when it comes to consumer privacy, somebody might just want to double check their math (and ask what happened to all that data already collected and sold over the last decade).
The lawsuit has fueled speculation that Facebook is dealing with another problem similar to Cambridge Analytica, in which up to 87 million users' information was improperly shared with a political consulting firm that did work for Donald Trump's presidential campaign. The Cambridge Analytica scandal triggered a Federal Trade Commission investigation into Facebook that could result in Facebook paying a multibillion-dollar fine.
The worst thing is this isn't even the first time this has happened in the last 12 months. Back in August, a mobile telecom outage took out the system for a day, leaving 450 suspects without tracking.
The glitch (below), first outed in January, allowed anyone to call an iPhone or Mac and listen in before the other person picks up by exploiting a bug Apple's Group FaceTime feature.
Cities like LA want to master the mayhem. They want to keep streets safe for everyone, and traffic at bay. They want to fight pollution and climate change. They want to know where to spend money on infrastructure and where they can skimp. They want to ensure that companies allowed to use public streets and sidewalks make products available to as many residents as possible, regardless of income or color or community. And they want to ensure that the companies they’ve permitted to operate on their streets are following the rules.
All of that requires data. And Los Angeles officials think they’ve found an unlikely place to begin collecting it: scooters. Scooters use public sidewalks, so they require permits from municipal officials. Data on where those scooters are parked, and where they travel each day, could help officials plan for the future. Over time, the data also could provide the foundation for an app offering residents real-time info about their favorite transit modes. Bike? Scooter? Jet pack? An air traffic control of the ground.
But LA’s strategy for getting that data is making privacy advocates—and companies like Uber and Lyft, which operate both scooter and ride-hail services in the city—nervous. [...]
The Australian Labor Party has ruled out repealing the encryption law that was passed last year if it is elected, but says it will speedily incorporate the 170-odd amendments that were drafted, but not included in the law.
The Administration’s proposal of sending immigrant children to Guantanamo Bay is dangerous and inhumane. Over the last year, the country has been shocked by reports of the inhumane treatment of children and families in immigrant detention. Now, the Trump administration appears to be increasing the scope and severity of its immigrant detention scheme by potentially detaining immigrants at Guantanamo Bay.
News broke last week that the Defense Department awarded a $23 million dollar contract to construct a “Contingency Mass Migration Complex” at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Station with capacity to detain 13,000 people and built to last “a minimum of 50 years.” In April, we also learned that the Department of Homeland Security considered sending migrant children to an old “dormitory facility” at Guantanamo.
I’ve been to Guantanamo. I visited in 2015 as an observer of the military commission proceedings, staying in a dusty tent barrack for a week. With a stunning landscape and ugly history, it is full of contradictions—like selling Mickey Mouse-Guantanamo Bay souvenirs in the gift shop, mere miles from where men have languished in detention without fair trials, or even charges, for more than a decade. I left with a pit in my stomach, unsettled by this deeply strange place. It has been a site of torture, where our country’s leaders have long embraced or tolerated injustice. It is certainly no place for children.
No child should grow up in jail, no matter where it is located. Studies show that kids in immigration detention suffer emotionally and physically, with traumatizing conditions including “sleep[ing] on cement floors,” “insufficient foods and water,” and “extremely cold temperatures.”
Whoever leaked it, did it quick. The autopsy report appeared on newcasts only hours after the public defender collapsed in his apartment. An internal investigation was opened following some public criticism of the PD's handling of sensitive info. The leaking of this document suggested someone in the force wanted to take a shot at the public defender (and fierce critic of the PD) only hours after his passing by letting the public know about the illegal substances found in Adachi's system. City officials recognized this and came down hard on police officials.
In response, the SFPD has apparently decided to externalize its internal investigation. While it's possible this raid will ultimately result in the discovery of the leaker, this end does not justify the means. Law enforcement does serious damage to protected speech when it goes after journalists to out their sources. If the SFPD had restricted its investigation to its own officers, journalists wouldn't be feeling a chill descending on their line of work.
And this all came about because the SFPD can't take "no" for an answer. Journalists should protect their sources. If they don't, they soon won't have any. Courts have recognized the need to protect sources, as have a handful of journalist shield laws around the nation.
To take you back through the entire history since Suburban Express made it onto the Techdirt radar would take more words than I care to spend, but we'll do the short version. Suburban Express runs van lines between Chicago and a couple of local universities. It also, somewhat oddly, regularly goes to war with its own customers, as well as the wider internet. The internet side is mostly well-worn assholery: bitching about review sites, bitching about Reddit, and threatening everyone in between with legal actions. Where the company blazes new trails is when owner Dennis Toeppen gets arrested for harassing critics and customers online, sends out blatantly racist advertisements, and gets itself sued by the Illinois AG for roughly all of the above.
This whole saga of stupid has featured guest spots like government employees, law enforcement officers, and even Ken "Popehat" White. But, as all such sagas go, it had to eventually come to an end. And that end comes in the glorious form of Suburban Express shutting down.
[...]
In the end, the fact that Suburban Express is shutting down in this way does serve a positive purpose. That purpose would be as a warning for other businesses that want to go on anti-consumer, anti-internet tirades simply due to legitimate complaints about the business itself and the people running it. Thin skin is not an asset in any part of life, but it must certainly be least useful when running a business.
Maybe if Toeppen had bothered treating people like human beings, he and his business wouldn't have ended up in the business gutter.
Local bus company Suburban Express shut down all operations Tuesday, according to a court filing from owner Dennis Toeppen posted late in the day.
Suburban Express' website was unreachable Tuesday afternoon except for a refund submission form, as required by the consent decree Toeppen reached last month with the Illinois Attorney General's Office.
[...]
"Although Mr. Toeppen has informed the court that Suburban Express has ceased operations, the defendants are still obligated to comply with the consent decree," she wrote. "Our office is currently reviewing Mr. Toeppen's filing to determine its impact on the consent decree and Suburban Express customers."
In his filing, Toeppen didn't shy away from taking a parting shot at his competition.
"We have decided not to facilitate or aid in replacement of Champaign-Urbana service," he wrote. "Instead, we prefer to sit on the sidelines and watch as competitor's fares rise, frequency falls, and passenger injuries and fatalities increase."
[...]
Madigan filed a 39-page lawsuit in April 2018, attaching 182 pages of exhibits filled with screenshots of Yelp comments on negative reviews, Suburban Express' notorious "Page of Shame," emails, copies of the email advertisements, a copy of the contract customers must agree to and an internal list of banned customers.
The militia group was hunting for border-crossers near the U.S.-Mexico boundary. Soon it encountered a group of migrants. Its members made them “take off their shoes and walk for half an hour in their socks,” then “lie face-down in the dirt for an hour.” The militia’s members stole the migrants’ food and fed it to their horses. They took the migrants’ sweaters, tossing them dirty blankets covered in cactus spines to use against the cold.
Actions like these have made the militia infamous. Human rights researchers log its many crimes. Legal organizations record thousands of its abuses. But the militia, defiant, is digging in.
“We are America’s frontline,” their manifesto reads. “We safeguard the American homeland at and beyond our borders. We protect the American people against terrorists and the instruments of terror.”
Its members dismiss detractors. One man, recently retired, said he was “completely positive” about the outfit, stressing that “they’re doing the best that they can,” especially given some politicians’ efforts to restrict militia activity. “I wish all those guys in Washington would spend just one day down here to see what the hell they’re talking about,” a long-serving member declared.
But charges against the group have accumulated in recent years. They range from legal violations to physical, psychological and sexual abuse.
The April jobs report was, for the most part, pretty good news. The overall unemployment rate fell to 3.6 percent, a level not seen in almost 50 years. The survey of businesses showed the economy generated more than 260,000 new jobs in the month — a very strong pace of job growth.
While not great, the average hourly wage grew 3.2 percent. That is more than a percentage point above the 2 percent inflation rate, meaning that wages are at least rising faster than prices, and workers are getting their share of the gains from productivity growth. This was not true earlier in the recovery when the labor market was weaker.
But the situation for Black Americans, and especially Black men, is disturbing. While the data are erratic, we now have enough of it to indicate that the employment prospects of Black men may actually be deteriorating even as the overall labor market continues to improve.
As a rule of thumb, the unemployment rate for Black people is twice the unemployment rate for white people. That is not a pretty story, but the implication is that Black folks disproportionately benefit from a drop in the unemployment rate. A 1 percentage point drop in the white unemployment rate is typically associated with a 2 percentage point drop in the Black unemployment rate.
Furthermore, there is a tendency for the ratio to tighten when the unemployment rate gets low. We saw this in 2018 when the unemployment rate for white folks averaged 3.5 percent, while the unemployment rate for Black folks averaged 6.5 percent. A 6.5 percent unemployment rate hardly seems like cause for celebration, but that compares to unemployment rates of more 16 percent at the trough of the recession in 2010.
NYU said on Monday that it had hired a prominent law firm to investigate whether the namesake of its school of education, Michael H. Steinhardt, had engaged in inappropriate conduct with students, faculty or staff.
The review will be headed by Joan McPhee, a lawyer who last year helped lead an investigation of Lawrence G. Nassar, a USA Gymnastics team doctor who last year was sentenced to 40 to 175 years in prison for sexually abusing young women. McPhee was hired by NYU as part of its response to a New York Times-ProPublica article that alleged a pattern of crude and demeaning sexual comments by Steinhardt toward women over decades.
Steinhardt, a hedge fund pioneer and philanthropist, denied many of the specifics of the allegations, saying that his behavior was always meant in jest, and never involved physical contact.
The NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development, the largest graduate school at the university, got its name after Steinhardt and his wife, Judy, donated $10 million to the school in 2001. It was the largest gift NYU had ever received.
The exuberant greeter, who said her name was Wanda, hugged each of the secretaries of state as they walked through the doors of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. “Thank you for being here,” she said as each crossed into the small, orange-brick building.
It was, she said, “hallowed ground.” Martin Luther King Jr. had preached here for six years and organized the Montgomery bus boycott in the church’s basement. The church is only feet away from the Alabama State Capitol, on whose steps Jefferson Davis was sworn in as president of the confederacy. At the end of Dexter Avenue is the Court Square Fountain, once the site of a slave trade.
Wanda greeted those arriving on the second day of the “Democracy Tour” organized by Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson and Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill — a three-day visit to Alabama’s most historically significant civil rights monuments and museums for the chief election administrators of 18 states. It was the first time election administrators had done such a tour, and they made clear to note there were 11 Republicans and seven Democrats in attendance.
URA.ru and MBK Media reported that police officers deployed tear gas against protesters in Yekaterinburg. Around 2,000 people had reportedly gathered around a city square on the evening of May 13 to voice their objections to plans for a cathedral to be built in place of the square. Together, the protesters pulled down fencing around the square and seemed prepared to occupy it overnight.
On the evening of May 13, Yekaterinburg residents organized a protest against plans to build a cathedral to replace a city square. That morning, fencing was installed around the square in preparation for construction work to begin. After photographs of the fencing spread on social media, opponents of the construction project began gathering around the square to protest. They were able to knock down the fencing, and once inside the square, the protesters erected a tent to remain there overnight. Several activists attempted to block a nearby road but stopped after facing resistance from police.
The protest began at 7:00 PM local time. Journalists reporting from the site of the demonstration told Meduza that about 2,000 people gathered around the square. According to Yekaterinburg Online, the protesters formed a human chain around the fence closing off the area and then knocked the fence down together. People poured onto the square and began to demand that Yekaterinburg mayor Alexander Vysokinsky make an appearance. They also began setting up tents to spend the night occupying the area.
Evidence that sequences in Saving Syria’s Children were fabricated is set out on my blog. Readers are free to make their own topographical analogies.
During the programme’s making BBC Panorama reporter Ian Pannell and cameraman Darren Conway were embedded with then ISIS partner group Ahrar al-Sham – a group described elsewhere by the BBC as “hard-line Islamist”. Less than three weeks earlier Ahrar al-Sham, ISIS and other groups together killed over 190 civilians, including women, children and elderly men, and kidnapped over 200 mostly women and children.
In the programme’s climactic scenes of the aftermath of an alleged incendiary attack the BBC crew filmed at close quarters an ambulance prominently bearing the ISIS emblem and its militarily attired occupants, at least one of whom was armed.
Tens of thousands of anti-goverment protesters have clashed with Albanian state police in Tirana. The rally resulted in dozens of protestors injured, many arrests, and the uncontrolled use of gas by the police in the vicinity of dwelling houses and apartments endangering the health and lives of protestors and inhabitants of Tirana. Opposition leaders accuse Edi Rama’s government of graft and election fraud. They seek the withdrawal of the Prime Minister and the establishment of a transitory government which will ensure a fair and democratic election process.
It seems like only yesterday that the TV sector was busy insisting that TV cord cutting was a "fiction." Once that claim was proven hollow by the data, plenty of industry folks shifted toward claiming that the trend was being over-hyped and only temporary. Many claimed the trend would reverse itself once the housing markets stabilized (didn't happen) or Millennials started to procreate (didn't happen). Often, angry users who cut the cord (usually due to high prices or terrible customer service) were brushed side by executives and analysts as being irrelevant nobodies.
And while many in the TV sector now like to insist they saw the problem coming all along, it's genuinely embarrassing how many industry execs tried to wish the rise of additional competition away, believing that if they stuck their head deeply enough in terra firma, this major industry trend would just somehow go away.
Californians have successfully pushed the state's legislature to restore two-thirds of the 2015 Open Internet Order through state laws. Stopping legislation from Assemblymember Lorena Gonzalez—backed by AT&T and Comcast (A.B. 1366)—is the final piece to bringing back those critical protections to promote broadband choice.
The California Assembly will soon take up this bill, which would renew a 2011 ISP-backed law that expires this year. That law had the stated goal of promoting choice and competition for Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services. In practice, however, it has sidelined state and local governments from exerting authority over broadband and led to fewer choices for consumers at higher prices.
Today, most Californians face a monopoly for high-speed broadband access. If we let the 2011 law expire, California could instead choose to empower state and local governments to create policies to eliminate local monopolies. Doing so now is even more crucial than it was in 2011, as the FCC no longer oversees the broadband industry.
A wrongfully-issued preliminary injunction (PI) is a case where a PI is given, only to be later revoked, typically because the underlying right turns out to be invalid or not infringed. The latest referral to the European Court of Justice (C-688/17, opinion of AG Pitruzzella available here in French) under the Enforcement Directive (2004/48/EC) addresses the intriguing question of whether a “launch at risk” (i.e. the commercialization of a product without first suing for cancellation of any relevant patents prior to market entry) should exclude any compensation in the event that a PI is wrongly issued.
In a recent UK High Court case (Emson v Hozelock), Mr Justice Nugee, in a follow-up to the classic UK case Windsurfing, considered the issue of when a disclosure may be considered public. Mr Justice Nugee assessed whether the prior use of an invention by the inventor in his own private garden was a public disclosure, given that the garden was visible from the public road.
The case concerned the alleged infringement and invalidity of a UK and EP patent for an expandable garden hose - the XHose. Licencees of the patent, Emson, sued Hozelock for infringing the patent by manufacture of their own expandable hose - the Superhoze. Hozelock counterclaimed that the patents were invalid. Hozelock argued that the Patents were obvious in view of the inventor's manufacture and use of XHose prototypes in his private garden. Hozelock argued that the prior use by the inventor was a public disclosure, given that the inventor's activities could potentially have been seen from the public road.
West-Ward (now known as Hikma) is seeking to make and sell a generic version of the Novartis chemotherapy drug everolimus (Afinitor). After filing its Abbreviated New Drug Application (ANDA), Novartis sued, alleging infringement of its U.S. Patent 8,410,131.
Following a bench trial, the district court sided with the patentee – finding the claims enforceable – not obvious. Novartis Pharm. Corp. v. West-Ward Pharm. Int’l Ltd., 287 F. Supp. 3d 505 (D. Del. 2017). On appeal, the Federal Circuit has affirmed.
The claims at issue are method-of-treatment claims with one step — “administering … a therapeutically effective amount” of everolimus. The preamble of claim 1 indicates that the treatment is for “inhibiting growth of solid excretory system tumors.” Dependent claims 2 and 3 add limitations that the treatment is for a kidney tumor or “advanced solid excretory tumor.”
At the time of the patent filing, the compound (everolimus) was already known as an mTOR inhibitor; and mTOR inhibiors were known to inhibit tumor growth. Everolimus a derivative of rapamycin and structurally similar to temsirolimus — both of which were already identified as chemotherapy treatments for similar cancer types.
The district court took this evidence and agreed that a person of skill in the art would have been motivated to pursue everolimus as a potential treatment for advanced solid tumors. However, the court’s opinion then seemed to contradict itself by saying that there was no motivation to combine the prior art. The district court also found that everolimus was one of many different research paths and that the prior art was not sufficient to create “a reasonable expectation of success in using everolimus” to treat advanced kidney tumors.
[...]
Note here that the requirement is an “expectation” of success — would PHOSITA have expected that the drug would work? In this case, at the time of the invention, there was no clinical data on everolimus (as an anti cancer agent) and no completed trials for the other similar compounds (only phase I safety-focused data). And, the district court noted that there had been many many past attempts to find a compound that works — most of them starting with some promise.
The USPTO’s examination guidelines for cannabis trademarks – in response to the 2018 Farm Bill – present a path forward for some brands, but leave much up to the FDA
The USPTO issued the examination guidelines for cannabis-related goods and services on May 2. The office previously had a practice of “outright denying any application with a whiff of cannabis,” according to Sarah Robertson...
Part VI of the AfCFTA Agreement (Protocol on Dispute Settlement) introduces the Protocol on the Rules and Procedures on the Settlement of Disputes. The Dispute Settlement institutions and processes are quite similar to those of the WTO. There is a Dispute Settlement Body consisting of representatives of Member States, which will take decisions by consensus. The Dispute Settlement Body has the powers to establish Dispute Settlement Panels, and an Appellate Body. See Article 5 of the Protocol. Whether the Dispute Settlement mechanism can assure a level playing field or actually settle IP disputes remains to be seen and may also depend on the contents of the Protocol on IP.
As I took a look at the EUIPO’s index of pending Grand Board cases, the above proved to be the case in an interesting referral (by way of an interim decision) from the EUIPO First Board of Appeal.
The EUIPO First Board of Appeal was asked to decide over the relevant public’s perception of the term “SPA” which is polysemic: on the one hand, the term “SPA” is the designation of the Belgian town Spa, where there is also a health spa, well-known to the Belgian public; on the other hand, it is also the common name that designates a spa-facility (a hydrotherapy facility).
[...]
The First Board of Appeal considered the issue of consumer perception to be of importance to the case and therefore, pursuant to Article 1(b)(a) of the Rules of Procedure of the EUIPO, referred the case to the Grand Board for further assessment.
In 1984, GNR’s co-founders Tracii Guns and Axl Rose, combined their respective bands-- ‘LA Guns’ and ‘Hollywood Rose’, to form the band ‘Guns N’ Roses’. Since the formation, GNR has achieved national and international fame and commercial success, which has earned for its name world-wide recognition. GNR is the owner of three federal trade mark registrations for the mark GUNS N’ ROSES, including for Class 25 (clothing, namely, T-shirts, shirts, hats, caps, bandannas, sweatpants, and thermal shirts).Since 2018, a Colorado brewery, Oskar Blues, has been marketing and selling throughout the United States 'Guns ‘N’ Rosé' beer and associated memorabilia containing the 'Guns ‘N’ Rosé' logo, such as hats, t-shirts, pint glasses, stickers, buttons, and bandanas. GNR has not given approval, a license, or consent to such uses.
In 2018, Oskar Blues tried to register GUNS N ROSE name for beer but the band intervened requesting that, inter alia, the brewers cease using GUNS N ROSE or any other marks “confusingly similar” to the GUNS N’ ROSES mark, and abandon their trade mark application. Following GNR’s opposition filed before the USPTO’s Trademark Trial and Appeal Board, the application was abandoned but the beer, clothing and other products remained on the market. After multiple requests to cease sales and marketing, the brewers agreed to stop, but not until March of 2020.
Copyright-trolling outfit Strike 3 has suffered a severe blow in a New York federal court. U.S. Magistrate Judge James Orenstein has thrown out over a dozen cases, signaling a variety of problems. Among other things, the Judge noted that the frequency of improperly accused pirates, more than one in three, is alarmingly high.
Google has voluntarily agreed to remove 832 pirate sites from its search results after reaching a "voluntary" agreement with content owners and ISPs in Australia. That's according to Village Roadshow chief Graham Burke who described the move as "Google doing the right thing". The news appears to come with some caveats, however.