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06.03.16

Links 3/6/2016: OpenSwitch Under Linux Foundation, GCC 5.4

Posted in News Roundup at 4:12 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Inner Source—Adopting Open Source Development Practices in Organizations

    OPEN SOURCE has had an enormous impact on the software industry. Software development organizations have widely adopted open source software (OSS) in a variety of ways.1 Besides adopting OSS products, as either productivity tools or off-the-shelf components, numerous organizations have adopted open source practices to develop their software. This is called inner source because the software is sourced internally, although different terms have been used, such as “progressive open source” and “corporate open source.”2 Unlike with traditional approaches, developers of an inner-source project don’t belong to a single team or department. Anybody in the organization can be a contributing member of this community, as either a user or contributor. Eric Raymond compared traditional software development approaches to building cathedrals, while calling open-source-style development a “bazaar.” 3 So, you can view inner source as a bazaar within a corporate cathedral.

  • Hackathons bring open source innovation to humanitarian aid

    In open source software, end users, decision makers, subject matter experts, and developers from around the world can work together to create great solutions. There are a lot of mature open source projects out there already in the field of humanitarian and development aid, for example: Ushahidi and Sahana in crisis management and information gathering, OpenMRS for medical records, Martus for secure information sharing in places with limited freedom of speech, and Mifos X, an open platform for financial inclusion for people in poor areas where financial services such as savings, payments, and loans are not offered.

  • ​OwnCloud closes US office, blames Nextcloud

    Yesterday, ownCloud co-founder Frank Karlitschek announced he was starting a new open-source, Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud project and company, Nextcloud. The same day, ownCloud, announced it was closing its US office.

  • OwnCloud Issues Statement Over Today’s Nextcloud Fork, OwnCloud Inc Closes Up Shop
  • ownCloud Statement concerning the formation of Nextcloud by Frank Karlitschek
  • OwnCloud forked to create Nextcloud

    As I expected, Frank Karlitschek is forking ownCloud to create a new open source project called Nextcloud. In an interview, Karlitschek told me that he is joining with Spreedbox founder Niels Mache to create a new company with the same name.

    The new company, Nextcloud, is being founded in Germany. Both Mache and Karlitschek will serve as managing directors.

  • ownCloud Founder Forks Open-Source Project to NextCloud

    NextCloud is supposed to be a drop-in replacement for ownCloud 9 with added security and stability updates as well as integration of Spreed.ME video conferencing and chat. Perhaps most importantly, Nextcloud GmbH (which is the new commercial entity behind NextCloud) has pledged that it will fulfill all contracts customers signed with ownCloud, Inc. until June 2nd – “That way customers won’t be without the support from the experts they need to keep their servers running.,” the company stated.

  • Use the Web to make interactive displays out of almost anything
  • Google Open Sources Tool for Making Interactive Displays Smart

    The digital display trend has been going through a renaissance for some time now, with many organizations reaching out to their employees and customers by curating and delivering information via displays that are, increasingly, interactive. Touchscreen displays that respond to you can create immersive experiences, and Google has announced that it is open sourcing its hardened and tested AnyPixel software for programming interactive displays similar to the one in the lobby of its New York City office.

    Hardware and software tools and references and example apps are available now on GitHub.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • Funding

    • Rapid7 CEO Aims to Secure the Future

      The company also some strong open-source roots, with the Metasploit penetration testing framework, which has both free and commercially supported editions available.

    • If Your Kickstarter Campaign Isn’t Ready for Prime Time

      If you’re an open source enthusiast who thinks you might have a good idea for a Kickstarter campaign, but are not yet ready to launch the campaign, why not launch a draft campaign and request feedback from the public? In doing so, you might be able to rally supporters before your campaign launches — and you might also receive vital cautions that could help you revise (or abandon) the planned campaign. This neat video for an Audio DSP Shield for Arduino reminds us that you can use Kickstarter to test the waters before launching a campaign.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • GDB Debugger Now Supports The Rust Language, Other GNU Toolchain Improvements

      The GNU Toolchain has continued making improvements this year beyond just the recent GCC 6 stable compiler release.

      Nick Clifton of Red Hat has sent out a mailing to share the GNU Toolchain updates made over the past two months. He covers the GCC 6 improvements with the new warning options, GDB 7.11.1 improvements, and more.

    • GCC 5.4 Released
    • GCC 5.4 Compiler Released, Fixed 147+ Bugs

      Version 5.4 of the GNU Compiler Collection is now available.

      Before getting too excited, this is just a maintenance update to GCC 5 under their funky new versioning scheme. Beyond that, GCC 6 has already been available in stable form via GCC 6.1.

      GCC 5.4 represents just another maintenance/bug-fix release to GCC 5 since its first stable release last year, GCC 5.1. GCC 5.4 is known to fix at least 147 bugs compared to the GCC 5.3 stable update from a few months back.

    • Twenty-seven new GNU releases in May

      8sync-0.1.0
      autogen-5.18.9
      cflow-1.5
      denemo-2.0.8
      fontopia-1.2
      freeipmi-1.5.2
      gcc-6.1.0
      gdbm-1.12
      gneuralnetwork-0.9.1
      gnumach-1.7
      gnupg-2.1.12
      gnu-pw-mgr-2.0
      gnutls-3.4.12
      guile-ncurses-1.7
      gzip-1.8
      help2man-1.47.4
      hurd-0.8
      icecat-38.8.0-gnu1
      jel-2.1.1
      librejs-6.0.13
      make-4.2
      mig-1.7
      parallel-20160522
      remotecontrol-2.0
      swbis-1.13
      tar-1.29
      xboard-4.9.0

  • Public Services/Government

    • San Francisco funds open source voting

      San Francisco’s open source voting project is quickly becoming a reality. Mayor Ed Lee’s proposed budget includes $300,000 towards planning and development of an open source voting system that would allow the city to own and share the software.

      Dominion Voting Systems, formerly known as Sequoia Voting, has provided San Francisco’s voting technology for years, but its contract with the city and county expires at the end of the year, according to KQED News.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • 8 steps to more open communications

      Open communications is a major change, and, as with all good changes, it will take constant care and feeding to keep it going. My leaders need to remain involved. We need to ensure newcomers are encouraged to stay. The last thing I want is for team members to feel their input isn’t heard or taken seriously.

  • Programming/Development

Leftovers

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Obama Wanted to Cut Social Security. Then Bernie Sanders Happened.

      “We can’t afford to weaken Social Security,” he said during a speech on economic policy in Elkhart, Indiana. “We should be strengthening Social Security. And not only do we need to strengthen its long-term health, it’s time we finally made Social Security more generous, and increased its benefits so that today’s retirees and future generations get the dignified retirement that they’ve earned.”

    • President Obama Finally Gets It Right On Expanding Social Security

      Nancy Altman, president of Social Security Works, was as late as last year making critical comments about President Obama’s stance on Social Security, telling Talking Points Memo that Obama “hasn’t been great on this issue.” Then, Altman was still smarting from Obama’s willingness to cut a deal with Republicans in 2011 that would have resulted in a reduced cost-of-living adjustment for Social Security benefits, and thus would have eroded seniors’ buying power over time.

    • Great Recession Caused 500K Additional Cancer Deaths
    • Thanks to Activism And Sanders, Obama Changes Course on Social Security

      Progressive groups welcomed President Barack Obama’s call to expand Social Security by increasing taxes on the wealthy, praising the effort and crediting it in part to “relentless grassroots activism” and Bernie Sanders’ political efforts.

      During a speech on economic policy in Elkhart, Indiana on Wednesday, Obama announced, “We can’t afford to weaken Social Security. We should be strengthening Social Security. And not only do we need to strengthen its long-term health, it’s time we finally made Social Security more generous and increased its benefits so that today’s retirees and future generations get the dignified retirement they’ve earned.”

      “We could start paying for it by asking the wealthiest Americans to contribute a little bit more,” he said.

    • Obama’s Social Security push pleases liberals

      President Barack Obama called for expanding Social Security on Wednesday, prompting progressive groups to declare victory after they tangled with him over a plan to save costs in the entitlement program three years ago.

      “And not only do we need to strengthen its long-term health, it’s time we finally made Social Security more generous and increased its benefits so that today’s retirees and future generations get the dignified retirement that they’ve earned,” Obama said in an economic call to arms in Elkhart, Indiana. “We could start paying for it by asking the wealthiest Americans to contribute a little bit more.”

    • Revealed: At Least 21 Cities Use Same Water Testing ‘Cheats’ as Flint Endangering Millions

      While authorities in Flint, Michigan charged three officials with a myriad of crimes for failing to properly test the city’s water supply, a major Guardian investigation released Thursday revealed at least 21 U.S cities used similar water testing methods as those that prompted a criminal probe into one of the worst public health crises in recent history.

      According to the Guardian, cities including Chicago, Boston, Philidelphia, Detroit and Milwaukee all use water testing practices that could underestimate the levels of lead present in drinking water. In Philadelphia and Chicago, officials asked employees to test the water safety in their own homes. And in cities throughout Michigan and New Hampshire, water departments were advised to leave more time for testing in order to remove results showing levels that exceed federal limits.

    • Water Departments to Change Lead-Testing Methods After Investigators Find ‘Cheats’ in 33 U.S. Cities
    • At least 33 US cities used water testing ‘cheats’ over lead concerns

      Guardian investigation reveals testing regimes similar to that of Flint were in place in major cities including Chicago, Boston and Philadelphia

    • Six Questions for Monsanto

      Monsanto may not be the largest company in the world. Or the worst. But the St. Louis, Mo. biotech giant has become the poster child for all that’s wrong with our industrial food and farming system.

      With 21,000 employees in 66 countries and $15 billion in revenue, Monsanto is a biotech industry heavyweight. The St. Louis, Mo.-based monopolizer of seeds is the poster child for an industry that is the source of at least one-third of global anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, and is largely responsible for the depletion of soil, water and biodiversity. Not to mention the company’s marginalization—and sometimes terrorization—of millions of small farmers.

    • ‘Hoop After Hoop’: How Gulf Coast States Are Playing Politics with Women’s Health

      Women on the Gulf Coast continue to face concerted attacks on their right to healthcare, as Louisiana passed new abortion restrictions this week and the ACLU sued Alabama over several recently enacted, draconian laws.

      On Tuesday, Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards (D) signed into law a bill banning the abortion procedure known as “dilation and evacuation” or D&E—which women’s health experts say is the safest and most common method of abortion for women in their second trimester of pregnancy.

    • Louisiana Bans Common, Safe Abortion Method

      The Louisiana law, called the “Unborn Child Protection from Dismemberment Abortion Act,” will likely force doctors to use an abortion method associated with a higher rate of medical complications on women after their first trimester. Women in the state already have to wait 72 hours to have an abortion after meeting with the doctor. Abortions performed later in a pregnancy are riskier, and the new policy only increases the potential dangers.

  • Security

    • Hackers Find Bugs, Extort Ransom and Call it a Public Service

      Crooks breaking into enterprise networks are holding data they steal for ransom under the guise they are doing the company a favor by exposing a flaw. The criminal act is described as bug poaching by IBM researchers and is becoming a growing new threat to businesses vulnerable to attacks.

      According to IBM’s X-Force researchers, the new tactic it is a variation on ransomware. In the case of bug poaching, hackers are extorting companies for as much as $30,000 in exchange for details on how hackers broke into their network and stole data. More conventional ransomware attacks, also growing in number, simply encrypt data and demand payment for a decryption key.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • John Kerry Gives Saudis a Big Pass on Indiscriminate Bombing of Civilians in Yemen

      Secretary of State John Kerry this week waved off concerns about U.S.-supported Saudi-coalition airstrikes in Yemen that have indiscriminately bombed civilians and rescuers, and instead blamed the Shiite Houthi rebels for the bulk of the civilian casualties.

      “There have been a lot of civilian casualties, and clearly, civilian casualties are a concern,” Kerry told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes. “I think the Saudis have expressed in the last weeks their desire to make certain that they’re acting responsibly, and not endangering civilians.”

    • America’s Greatest Threat Is Its Crazed “Leadership” And Its Brainwashed Population

      But times have changed since then. If Hitler were to attack Russia today, he would be dead 20 to 30 minutes later, his bunker reduced to glowing rubble by a strike from a Kalibr supersonic cruise missile launched from a small Russian navy ship somewhere in the Baltic Sea. The operational abilities of the new Russian military have been most persuasively demonstrated during the recent action against ISIS, Al Nusra and other foreign-funded terrorist groups operating in Syria. A long time ago Russia had to respond to provocations by fighting land battles on her own territory, then launching a counter-invasion; but this is no longer necessary. Russia’s new weapons make retaliation instant, undetectable, unstoppable and perfectly lethal.

    • As US/ Kurdish force Moves on ISIL at Manbij, Turkey goes Ballistic

      The left-leaning Beirut daily al-Safir (Ambassador) points out that less than two weeks after the Syrian Democratic Forces announced their campaign against al-Raqqa, the capital of the phony caliphate of Daesh (ISIS, ISIL), the SDF instead has veered off to the west in a bid to capture Manbaj. The SDF mainly consists of leftist Kurdish YPG fighters along with some American-trained token Arabs.

      The SDF, with help from intensive US bombing, moved to the west of the Euphrates on Wednesday, taking over a dozen villages in the vicinity of Manbaj and ending up only 10 km from the city center.

    • Trump, Trade and War

      Those questions include why the United States must play the role of world policeman, whether NATO’s mission is obsolete, why the U.S. always pursues “regime change” when the results – in Iraq, Libya, Ukraine, Syria, etc. – are a “disaster,” and why Russia has been made into an enemy.

    • A Gunfight in Guatemala

      Enrique Degenhart tried to clean up Guatemala’s immigration service. His story is part of a nation’s extraordinary fight against corruption.

    • A Hellfire from Heaven won’t Smash the Taliban

      So Taliban supremo Mullah Mansour’s white Toyota Corolla was rattling across the Baluchestan desert just after it had crossed the Iranian border when a Hellfire missile fired from a US drone incinerated it into a charred / twisted wreck.

      That’s the official narrative. The Pentagon said Mansour was on Obama’s kill list because he had become “an obstacle to peace and reconciliation.”

    • 192 Killed, 139 Wounded in Iraq Battles, Bombings

      For whatever reasons, the Iraqi government has long undercounted its casualties, and this operation appears to be no exception. A large number of civilians have also been killed, but their numbers remain uncounted. Many cannot even reach the local cemetery to bury their dead.

    • Clinton’s Foreign Policy Speech Marred by Inherent Contradictions

      “Hillary Clinton’s history of supporting interventionism puts her in a weird place to be portraying her opponent as trigger happy.”

    • Poverty, Militarism and the Public Schools

      What’s the difference between education and obedience? If you see very little, you probably have no problem with the militarization of the American school system — or rather, the militarization of the impoverished schools . . . the ones that can’t afford new textbooks or functional plumbing, much less art supplies or band equipment.

      The Pentagon has been eyeing these schools — broken and gang-ridden — for a decade now, and seeing its future there. It comes in like a cammy-clad Santa, bringing money and discipline. In return it gets young minds to shape, to (I fear) possess: to turn into the next generation of soldiers, available for the coming wars.

    • With Trump or Hillary, The Crisis in Syria Will Only Worsen

      No-fly zones, American troops on the ground, thousands more dead–that’s the future of Syria if Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have their way. Either will surely make us miss Barack Obama’s subtle restraint, at least when it comes to how he’s handled the brutal regime of Bashar al-Assad, our former ally in torture.

    • The New Facade for Regime Change: a Brief History of Humanitarian Interventionism

      Sitting in his presidential palace in 1991, Iraq’s President Saddam Hussein and his Culture Minister Hamad Hammadi drafted a letter to Mikhail Gorbachev, President of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.). Hussein and Hammadi hoped that the U.S.S.R. would help save Iraq from the West’s barrage. Hammadi, who understood the shifts in world affairs, told Hussein that the war was not intended “only to destroy Iraq, but to eliminate the role of the Soviet Union so the United States can control the fate of all humanity”. Indeed, after the 1991 Gulf War, the U.S.S.R. fell apart and the United States emerged as the singular superpower. The age of U.S. unipolarity had dawned.

    • The Bigger Nuclear Risk: Trump or Clinton?

      If the U.S. election comes down to Hillary Clinton v. Donald Trump, the American people will have to decide between two candidates who could risk the future of the planet, albeit for very different reasons, writes Robert Parry.

    • Hillary Clinton and the Politics of Overcompensation

      Likely Democratic party presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is a woman – and that seems to be a very large part of her platform. She talks incessantly about her gender and how it infuses her politics, and her supporters, taking their cues from her, are quick to label any and all criticism of Mrs. Clinton as “sexist” – a label that, these days, can mean anything from believing traditional sex roles have some basis in human biology and the survival of the species to heterosexual men whistling and making lewd comments at attractive women as they walk down the street.

    • Missouri Senator To Introduce Bill To Help Veterans Exposed To Mustard Gas

      Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., plans to introduce legislation today to help World War II veterans who were exposed to mustard gas. The vets were used in classified experiments conducted by the U.S. military, and were sworn to secrecy about their participation for a half-century.

    • A Policy of Assassinations Is Being Conducted in Our Name

      From his first days as commander in chief, the drone has been President Barack Obama’s weapon of choice, used by the military and the CIA to hunt down and kill the people his administration has deemed — through secretive processes, without indictment or trial — deserving of execution. There has been intense focus on the technology of remote killing, but that often serves as a surrogate for what should be a broader examination of the state’s power over life and death.

    • Weak End at Bernie’s

      Barack Obama is a complicated, contradictory human being. His writings, speeches and public persona show him as cool, intelligent and sensitive. Yet he has pursued drone warfare on a horrific scale, killing and maiming thousands of innocents. He has persecuted whistleblowers to the max, allowed unprecedented domestic spying and failed his own promise to close Guantanamo Bay. He has one small window left to placate those who voted – sometimes twice – for his promise of hope and change.

    • Why is a military coup in Saudi Arabia possible?

      Saudi Arabia is the most significant player in determining the future of the Arab revolutions. There are two ways to break this stalemate: replace Saudi regional hegemony, or change the regime controlling it.

    • Did CNN Finally Call Out Donald Trump For Lying? (They Did.)

      A CNN producer recalled that during an interview with Fox News in April, Trump said he supported Japan acquiring nuclear weapons.

    • What’ll It be Folks: Xenophobia or Genocide?

      Have we reached the endgame of Western democracy? When we heard Chomsky, a week or two ago on Democracy Now, saying that if pushed he’d vote for Clinton, it felt like the end. So hell is this Hobbesian choice: xenophobia or genocide? And it’s seeing the best of us choose genocide.

      Which is worse: the deportation of a few million or the destruction of a few million? Both are hellish but the extermination of millions is obviously worse. So why would Chomsky choose otherwise? He’s not alone. Western wisdom is behind Clinton even though she supported the Iraqi genocide; helped to organise the Libyan and Syrian genocides; and for the heck of it primed the weapons of genocide in Eastern Europe (Victoria Nuland is her girl).

    • Turkey recalls ambassador after German MPs’ Armenian genocide vote

      Turkey has recalled its ambassador from Berlin after German MPs approved a motion describing the massacre of Armenians by Ottoman forces a century ago as genocide – a decision that the Turkish president said would “seriously affect” relations between the two countries.

      The five-page paper, co-written by parliamentarians from the Christian Democrats, Social Democrats and Green party, calls for a “commemoration of the genocide of Armenian and other Christian minorities in the years 1915 and 1916”. It passed with support from all the parties in parliament. In a show of hands, there was one abstention and one vote against.

      The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, had voted in favour of the resolution during a test vote at a party meeting on Tuesday, but was absent from the actual vote on Thursday, as were the deputy chancellor, Sigmar Gabriel, and the minister for foreign affairs, Frank-Walter Steinmeier. Gregor Gysi of the Left party described Merkel’s absence as “not very brave”.

    • Victims of Colombian Death Squads Can Move Forward With Case Against Former Chiquita Executives
    • “I Refuse to Serve as an Empire Chaplain”: U.S. Army Minister Resigns over Drone Program

      An unlikely voice has emerged challenging the drone warfare program: former U.S. Army Reserve Chaplain Captain Chris Antal, who spent time based in Afghanistan. In April, he wrote an open letter to President Obama detailing his reasons for leaving the U.S. Army Reserves, citing his opposition to the administration’s use of drone strikes, its policy on nuclear proliferation, and what he calls the executive branch’s claim of “extraconstitutional authority and impunity for international law.”

    • Hillary Clinton’s Speech Against Trump Hypocritically Touts Her Foreign Policy Strength

      In a foreign policy speech widely hailed for its sharpest attacks yet against Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton put forward a vision that she contended was a far, far better alternative than the vision Trump has for the United States. However, a number of statements she made hypocritically disregarded her own record as first lady, senator, and secretary of state.

      Clinton also demonstrated how Democrats plan to wield American exceptionalism to try and beat Trump in November. As a rebuttal to Trump’s “Make America Great Again,” they will insist “America Is Already Great; Oh, But Of Course, It Can Always Be Greater.”

      A months-long squabble between the leaders of two political parties over the extent of America’s greatness threatens to plunge the world into one of the most insufferable debates in modern history.

      [...]

      The United States has taken the “lead” in countries like Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, and Syria, and in all of those countries, the military action taken has fueled chaos and enabled the rise of terrorist organizations, including al Qaida affiliates.

      That is not to say that Trump has the answers, but to point out that American “leadership” does not have a stellar record of preventing chaos, particularly when mounting operations under the umbrella of the war against terrorism.

      On the nuclear agreement with Iran, Clinton said, “When President Obama took office, Iran was racing toward a nuclear bomb. Some called for military action. But that could have ignited a broader war that could have mired our troops in another Middle Eastern conflict.”

      In fact, Clinton threatened to ethnically cleanse Iran if it were to attack Israel when she ran for president in 2008. “In the next 10 years, during which they might foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them.”

    • Sanders to Clinton: Yes, Trump’s Foreign Policy Ideas Are Scary. But So Are Yours

      Bernie Sanders responded to Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy speech on Thursday with a hit at her credentials, including her involvement in the Iraq War and so-called “regime change” in Libya.

      “We need a foreign policy based on building coalitions and making certain that the brave American men and women in our military do not get bogged down in perpetual warfare in the Middle East,” he said in a statement. “That’s what I will fight for as president.”

    • Hillary Comes Out as the War Party Candidate

      Choosing to speak in San Diego, home base of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, on a platform draped with 19 American flags and preceded by half an hour of military marching music, Hillary Clinton was certain of finding a friendly audience for her celebration of American “strength”, “values” and “exceptionalism”. Cheered on by a military audience, Hillary was already assuming the role to which she most ardently aspires: that of Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces.

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

    • President Obama, pardon Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning

      As he wraps up his presidency, it’s time for Barack Obama to seriously consider pardoning whistleblowers Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden.

      Last week, Manning marked her six-year anniversary of being behind bars. She’s now served more time than anyone who has leaked information to a reporter in history – and still has almost three decades to go on her sentence.

      It should be beyond question at this point that the archive that Manning gave to WikiLeaks – and that was later published in part by the Guardian and New York Times – is one of the richest and most comprehensive databases on world affairs that has ever existed; its contribution to the public record at this point is almost incalculable. To give you an idea: in just the past month, the New York Times has cited Manning’s state department cables in at least five different stories. And that’s almost six years after they first started making headlines.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • ‘Overwhelming’ Evidence Shows Path is Clear: It’s Time to Ditch Industrial Agriculture for Good

      If you can count as successes increased greenhouse gases, ecosystem degradation, rises in hunger and obesity, and unbalanced power in food systems, then industrial agriculture has done one heck of a job.

      That’s according to a panel of experts, whose new report, From Uniformity to Diversity: A paradigm shift from industrial agriculture to diversified agroecological systems (pdf), calls for breaking the chains that lock monocultures and industrial-scale feedlots to the dominant farming systems in order to unleash truly sustainable approaches—ones that use holistic strategies, eschew chemical inputs, foster biodiversity, and ensure farmer livelihoods.

    • Nigeria’s Massive Oil Cleanup Could Take Decades And A Billion Dollars

      What’s been described as the most wide-ranging and long-term oil clean-up plan in history was launched in Nigeria Thursday to restore hundreds of square miles of Delta swamps ravaged by nearly sixty years of oil extraction and spills.

      The move to restore Ogoniland, located in southern Nigeria and home to more than 800,000 people, comes a year and a half after Shell agreed to an $84 million settlement with residents for two massive oil spills in 2008 and 2009. By then Nigeria had asked the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) to study the area. UNEP released a report in 2011 noting oil impacts on Ogoniland are ongoing, widespread, and severe. In turn, Nigeria, Africa’s largest oil producer, started a $1 billion restoration plan this week to clean up decades of spills by Shell and other companies, including the state-owned company.

    • How Climate Change Will Destroy Our Global Heritage

      Last week, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization issued a report called “World Heritage and Tourism in a Changing Climate.” It contains twelve case studies and eighteen snapshots of what climate change is expected to do to places that have been designated as UNESCO World Heritage sites. More than a thousand sites around the world have the UNESCO designation, which is awarded on the basis of “outstanding universal value,” or O.U.V., in U.N. bureaucratese; it’s something between a Michelin star and an Olympic medal, both a marketable touristic imprimatur and a reminder of both the aspirations and the limits of internationalism. And so the report, co-produced with the Union of Concerned Scientists, provides an eclectic set of postcards from our cataclysmic future.

    • Highlighting Contrast with Clinton, Sanders Vows Nationwide Ban on Fracking

      On the campaign trail in California, Bernie Sanders hit the White House and his presidential rival Hillary Clinton over their stances on fracking, telling reporters this week that opening up Pacific waters to oil and gas extraction would be “disastrous.”

      Sanders criticized federal regulators for clearing the way for offshore fracking to resume in California, just days after the U.S. Department of the Interior released a pair of studies that found it would have no environmental impact.

      “Make no mistake: this was a very bad decision by the federal government that will not be allowed to stand if I have anything to say about it,” Sanders said during a news conference in Spreckels in Central California. “Offshore fracking has the potential to pollute the ocean with toxic fluid, hurt the environment, and harm our beautiful beaches. That risk to me is unacceptable.”

    • Governor Sends ‘Threatening’ Letter To Environmental Donors

      Gov. Paul LePage (R) stepped up his attacks on the Natural Resources Council of Maine (NRCM) in dramatic fashion this week by sending personal letters to the environmental group’s donors.

      “I would request that you carefully review NRCM’s policy positions before donating to them in the future,” the governor wrote, after directing members of his staff to find addresses of donors posted in the environmental organization’s public documents. “It is an activist group that says ‘no’ to every opportunity to allow Mainers to prosper.”

    • McCarthy of the Great Woods: Unhinged Maine Governor Targets Donors of Local Green Group

      Maine’s Gov. Paul LePage directly targeted donors to the Natural Resources Council of Maine (NRCM) with harassing letters (pdf) that accused the conservation group of advancing “job-crushing, anti-business policies,” the organization announced at a press conference on Thursday.

      It is unclear how LePage acquired the organization’s list of donors and donors’ contact information.

      “This seems like something Sen. Joseph McCarthy would have done in the 1950s, not a governor of Maine in 2016,” NRCM director Lisa Pohlmann said in a press statement.

    • NRCM Blasts Gov. LePage for Wasting Tax Funds on His Smear Campaigns
    • The Mainstream Media’s Climate Malpractice

      A state of disaster has been declared in 31 flooded Texas counties as rivers in the region are cresting at historic highs.

      Six people have died, up to four more people are missing and hundreds of people were evacuated from their homes in Houston as the Brazos River reached over 54 feet in Fort Bend County.

      On the East Coast, the National Hurricane Center declared that Tropical Depression Bonnie, which caused significant flash flooding in the US Southeast over Memorial Day weekend, has “revived” off the coast of North Carolina.

    • Trump’s ‘Realty Check’ on Climate

      The presumptive GOP nominee says climate change is a hoax, except when it threatens his luxury golf course.

    • Racism Fueled Outrage Over Cincinnati Gorilla Killing

      But by Tuesday, the gorilla incident was officially the headline of the day, by far eclipsing the viral photo of a 1-year-old infant whose lifeless body had been pulled out of the Mediterranean Sea and the related story about 700 refugees drowning as they fled war and poverty.

      America is outraged—over the killing of a gorilla in a zoo. A gorilla that was, by most accounts, possibly going to kill the unfortunate little boy who fell into its enclosure. So many Americans are so upset by this incident that as of this writing, nearly half a million have signed a change.org petition entitled Justice for Harambe, addressed to Hamilton County’s child protection service, demanding “an investigation of the child’s home environment in the interests of protecting the child and his siblings from further incidents of parental negligence.”

    • Charles Koch’s Disturbing High School Economics Project Teaches ‘Sacrificing Lives for Profits’

      Charles Koch is known for being CEO of industrial giant Koch Industries and a chief financier of the massive conservative political operation he runs with his brother David. In recent years, student activists and investigative journalists have exposed another of Koch’s hats: mega-donor to hundreds of colleges and universities, often funding free-market-focused academic centers housed at public and private schools alike. One Koch-funded program is advocating cutthroat economics to grade school students, even sacrificing lives for profits.

    • Climate poses conflict threat in South Asia

      Senior military experts warn that the nations of South Asia must co-operate on climate change adaptation to avoid major political instability and conflict in the region.

    • Europe’s renewables spending hits 10-year low

      Much of Europe prides itself on its determination to act resolutely on climate change, but in at least one key respect it has failed to back its rhetoric with action. Its investment in renewable energy showed a significant drop in 2015, falling to its lowest level in almost a decade.

      Globally, investment in renewables reached a record $328.9 billion last year, according to a study published by the Renewable Energy Policy Network for the 21st Century (REN21), an international coalition of governments, renewable energy trade associations, and financial institutions, including the International Energy Agency and the World Bank.

    • Is Clinton An “Environmental Champion”?

      But embracing and promoting “the agenda of big polluters” could be an accurate job description for much of what Clinton did as Secretary of State.

    • Climate Is Poised To Be A Divisive Issue For This Group Of Voters

      This may come as a shock, but not every American is concerned about preventing catastrophic climate change.

      After decades of political messaging about how clean energy would be an economic disaster, many people are skittish about changing the status quo — even if the status quo holds dire consequences for our economy, our health, and our way of life. But as the effects of climate change touch more and more people, some labor groups are making environmental issues a priority.

      “From our perspective, climate change and inequality are the two moral and existential crises of our time,” Pete Sikora, a political and legislative director for the Communications Workers of America (CWA), told ThinkProgress.

    • New York State Assembly Passes ‘Most Ambitious’ Climate Bill in the Nation

      New York’s Assembly passed a bill Wednesday that would require the state to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions from major sources to zero by 2050. But is that good enough?

    • The New York Assembly Just Passed The Nation’s Most Ambitious Climate Bill

      The New York State Assembly has passed the most ambitious climate bill in the country, one that would require the state to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from major sources to zero by 2050. The bill was passed Wednesday night with support from a broad coalition of organizations, including labor groups, environmental groups, and community leaders.

      The bill seeks to codify into law certain climate goals put forth by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who has said in the past that he wants the state to generate half of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030. In December, Cuomo mandated that the New York Department of Public Service begin establishing a plan to transition to at least 50 percent renewable electricity by 2030. Without making these goals into laws, however, Cuomo’s targets could be reversed by whoever holds the governorship next.

    • Economic Update: Pro-Environment, Anti-Capitalist

      This episode discusses fossil-fuel divestment, the economics of the Zika virus and payday loan scandals. We also interview environmental lawyer and activist Carol Dansereau.

  • Finance

    • Who is voting to leave the EU and why?

      Demographic data tell an interesting story about Britain’s EU referendum.

      Today sees the publication of the IPR’s referendum policy brief, a document that brings together contributions from a number of academics with the purpose of informing readers about the issues at stake in the EU referendum. Many of these issues are not new, but the way they are debated has changed dramatically over time.

      In the 1960s and 1970s, it was the Conservative Party that led Britain into membership of the European Economic Community. Seeking a new anchor for Britain’s geo-political interests after decolonisation and the fiasco of Suez, and despairing of the capacity of Britain’s post-war Keynesian economic settlement to solve its class conflicts, Conservative leaders orientated towards Europe’s successful social market models. The Labour Party went along with this reluctantly: for the most part, it remained Eurosceptic and wedded to the idea that the unitary British state was the vehicle for social progress. But by holding a referendum on Britain’s membership of the common market in 1975, it was able to paper over its internal divisions.

    • Consumer Protection Agency Unveils New “Payday” Lending Rules
    • Grassroots Group Responds to CFPB Payday Lending Rule, Pledges to Continue Fight to Protect Families from Predatory Lenders
    • New Payday-Loan Rules Won’t Stop Predatory Lenders

      A borrower taking out a $500 loan could still pay over 300 percent in annual interest, despite new rules designed to crack down on predatory small-dollar lending out Thursday from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB).

      The proposed consumer protections for payday loans, auto title loans, and high-cost installment loans focus on making the lenders document borrowers’ incomes and expenses to confirm that they have the ability to make their payments and still maintain basic living expenses. Payday lenders currently do minimal financial checks before issuing loans.

    • Warren’s CFPB Cracks Down on Predatory Lenders—But Will It Be Enough?

      Newly proposed rules aimed at reining in predatory payday lending are “a good first step,” economic justice groups said on Thursday, but “worrisome loopholes” must be closed in order to fully protect low-income Americans from financial devastation wrought by the high-interest, low-dollar loans.

      The U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) unveiled the new rules on Thursday, at a hearing in Kansas City, Missouri—a state, Politico notes, “where storefront lenders outnumber McDonald’s and Starbucks franchises.”

    • Washington’s Trash Is Not Minorities’ Treasure

      “Don’t be afraid to call it environmental racism.”

    • Jeremy Corbyn: I Would Kill TTIP

      Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn took aim at the TransAtlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) on Thursday, saying he would kill the controversial U.S. and EU trade deal should he become prime minister.

      His comments came during a speech in London campaigning to remain in the EU just three weeks ahead of the Brexit referendum, which Corbyn has framed as an “era-defining moment” for workers’ rights.

      “Many thousands of people have written to me, with their concerns about the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (or TTIP) the deal being negotiated, largely in secret, between the U.S. and the EU,” he said in his speech in London.

    • Labour comes out against TTIP—Global Justice Now comment
    • Closing in on EU Financial Tax Victory

      The international campaign for taxes on financial speculation is on the brink of a major European milestone that could further boost momentum in the United States.

    • Money Merry-Go-Round: Emails Show How Wall Street Execs and Alums Crafted Trade Bill

      Foreign corporations could sue to undermine US protections for consumers’ health, safety and financial security under a provision added to the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal (TPP) after executives of big banks pressed the nation’s chief trade negotiator, himself a former big-bank executive, to include it.

      A series of emails, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and released last week by Rootstrikers, an organization that opposes the trade deal now pending before Congress, confirm the push by financial service companies for the “Investor-State Dispute Settlement” provision. ISDS, as it is referred to by the cognoscenti writing the emails, would, in the words of one critic, Public Citizen’s Lori Wallach, “elevate individual investors to the status of a nation-state” in trade disputes.

    • To Pay for Subsidies to Massive Corporations, States Are Waging War on Poor Families

      To witness the consequences of a political system captured by and utterly subservient to the interests of organized wealth, take a quick look at the state of Oklahoma.

      There we see the embodiment of the economic trends that have, over the past several decades, harmed working families and lifted the wealthiest: While providing a windfall of cash to special interests, particularly big oil, the state is cutting education and slashing funds allocated for the earned income tax credit, widely recognized as one of the more effective anti-poverty programs.

      As the state cuts benefits for the poor, “Oklahoma’s tax breaks for the oil and gas companies — among the most generous in the nation — gave the industry $470 million in tax relief last year,” a recent New York Times editorial observes.

      “It’s despicable to balance the budget on the backs of the most vulnerable population” while refusing to push any of the burden onto the wealthiest, lamented State Representative Emily Virgin.

    • Colluding in Lies: the Brexit Debate

      Times in Britain are viciously partisan. No one wants to see their dog left out of this particular fight. The result is a vicious mauling being handed out by all sides on whether the leavers or stayers have the upper hand.

      The Institute for Fiscal Studies, one of Britain’s more prominent tax think tanks, went in against the Vote Leave campaign, suggesting that the austerity regime would be prolonged by a departure from the EU. That would be the only way to plug consequential multi-billion pound holes in the budget arising from lower foreign investment and poorer trade returns.

      The IFS also took issue with various figures being used by the Leave campaign, most notably the suggestion that Brussels receives £350 million every week from the sceptred isle. That particular figure has become the holy marker for former London mayor Boris Johnson. According to the body, that assessment conveniently ignored the role of the rebate and a range of other subsidies for business and research. Taken together, the amount ending in EU coffers was more likely £150 million.

    • These 7 States Still Operate Debtors’ Prisons

      They’re supposed to be illegal, but across the United States, debtor’s prisons are alive and well.

      The ACLU, among many other organizations, is hard at work trying to abolish the practice, which amounts to imprisoning people for unpaid debt, like court fees.

      In multiple states, including those with extremely high prison populations, this practice is still routine. Debtors’ prisons unfairly target low-income populations, particularly communities of color, thanks to racial profiling.

      Here’s how it works: When people make contact with the criminal justice system, they may face an array of court fees, but these fines are imposed regardless of ability to pay.

    • Despite Economic Growth, Middle-Income Americans Have Less Than They Did 40 Years Ago

      Over the past 40 years, the US economy has boomed. But what does that mean for the “American dream”? While the top 1% has had enormous gains, average US households aren’t any better off today. In fact, they’re falling further behind.

    • Ukraine’s Verkhovna Rada: an oligarchs’ club or a real parliament?

      A year ago, Ukraine’s president promised to break the oligarchs’ stronghold on power. While this is yet to happen, a new generation of deputies is changing the political atmosphere.

    • Letting ‘Wall Street’ Walk

      Legal double standards are the norm in the U.S. – no jail for law-flouting Wall Street bankers but mass incarceration for average citizens, especially minorities, who get caught up in the prison-industrial-complex, as Michael Brenner describes.

    • Job Growth Plunges in May

      The Labor Department reported that the economy created just 38,000 new jobs in May, the weakest job growth since September of 2010, when it lost 52,000 jobs. In addition, the jobs numbers for the prior two months were revised down by 59,000, bringing the average for the last three months to just 116,000.

      The household survey showed a drop of 0.3 percentage points in the unemployment rate, but this is not especially good news. The decline was almost entirely due to people leaving the labor force. The employment-to-population ratio [EPOP] was unchanged at 59.7 percent, 0.2 percentage points below the the peak for the recovery. In addition, the number of people involuntarily working part-time jumped by 468,000.

    • What If Trade Agreements Helped People, Not Corporations

      Current trade agreements have been of, by, and for transnational corporations. Growing opposition gives us the opportunity to change that in our next-generation agreements.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • EU referendum: Boris Johnson is like Donald Trump ‘with a thesaurus’, claims Nick Clegg

      Boris Johnson is like Donald Trump “with a thesaurus”, Nick Clegg will claim, “ignoring the facts” and saying “whatever he wants” in an attempt to pull Britain out of the European Union.

      In his first major speech of the campaign the former Liberal Democrat leader will claim that Mr Johnson is using the referendum campaign to burnish his chances of becoming Tory leader with scant regard for the economic impact on ordinary people of a ‘leave’ vote.

    • The ‘Major Problem,’ According to Bernie Sanders: ‘An Establishment…Led by Corporate Media’
    • Press Can’t Get Enough of Trump Dumping on Them

      “He’s Not Gonna Take it,” CNN blared on its homepage yesterday, above a large close-up photo of Donald Trump. Beneath the picture, CNN placed a headline with a link to the article, “When Donald Trump hits back, he hits back hard.”

      CNN, in essence, was pumping up the indomitable image that Donald Trump wants the media to portray of him. He and his campaign flacks consistently account for any of Trump’s reprehensible and coarse portrayals of individuals and groups by asserting that he is a “counterpuncher.” How that excuses racism, misogyny, bigoted pronouncements and childish name-calling is what the mass corporate media should be examining in their own reporting.

      However, such reporting is the exception rather than the rule. This was exemplified in the coverage of Donald Trump’s Tuesday news conference, in which he lacerated the press for questioning the sincerity of his commitment to raising money for veterans’ charities—including a personal million-dollar contribution he pledged in January.

    • Why Bernie Must (and Can) Win

      On Tuesday June 7, voters in California, New Jersey, and four other states can sway the Democratic nomination toward Bernie Sanders – the candidate who all polls show gives Democrats the greatest chance of defeating Donald Trump.

      Ignoring this factual reality, mainstream media and pundits, even California’s own Gov. Jerry Brown and Senator Dianne Feinstein, have decided for voters that the Democratic race is over – mirroring a Clinton inevitability narrative launched the day the campaign began. Party and Clinton campaign officials (close relatives to say the least) are simultaneously irate and nervous as heck that Sen. Sanders keeps winning, and has the audacity to run to the end. But if the goal is getting a Democrat in the White House, they ought to reconsider.

    • Clinton’s Vice President: A Match Made on Wall Street

      Earlier this week, Bernie Sanders warned that Hillary Clinton’s eventual vice presidential pick must not be someone from the milieu of Wall Street and Corporate America. And while Sanders is still fighting to win the Democratic Party nomination in what many have argued is a rigged system with a foregone conclusion, it appears that Sanders is also intent on influencing the course of the Clinton campaign and the party itself.

      In a thinly veiled demand that Clinton embrace the core principles of the Sanders campaign in order to secure the support of Sanders’s political base, the insurgent Democratic candidate hoped aloud “that the vice-presidential candidate will not be from Wall Street, will be somebody who has a history of standing up and fighting for working families, taking on the drug companies…taking on Wall Street, taking on corporate America, and fighting for a government that works for all of us, not just the 1%.”

    • Bernie, The Donald, and the Sins of Liberalism

      The Sanders campaign had made its stand against the liberalism of the Clinton elite. It has resonated so deeply because the candidate, with all his grandfatherly charisma and integrity, repeatedly insists that Americans should look beneath the surface of a liberal capitalism that is economically and ethically bankrupt and running a political confidence game, even as it condescends to “the forgotten man.”

    • Cheating Donald

      There are exceptions – two of the leading ones being Glenn Kessler, the Washington Post Fact Checker who has handed Trump a record 28 Four-Pinocchio awards and David Cay Johnston, a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter who has written, “Twenty One Questions for Donald Trump.”

    • Why New Jersey Needs Bernie Sanders

      Our country has fallen into a tailspin of poverty and inequality. In my home state of New Jersey our poverty rate is the highest it’s been in 50 years. Since 1980, only New York and Connecticut have outpaced the growth of New Jersey’s income inequality. Almost one-third of New Jerseyans are struggling to afford basic necessities. Like many Americans they juggle which bills to pay and which to skip: rent, utilities, food, medication. More than one million people in our state don’t have enough food.

      Finding affordable housing is the Achilles heel for many New Jersey residents in a state that has the sixth-highest housing costs in the nation. A New Jersey minimum wage worker would have to work 18 hours a day to afford a two-bedroom apartment. The average renter in Cumberland County earns about $10.50 an hour in an area where a fair market two-bedroom rents for $1129 a month; this means that an average renter who is working full-time is putting more than half their income towards rent.

    • Norman Solomon vs. Tom Hayden on Sanders vs. Clinton

      I mean, we started out by talking about RootsAction’s critical support for Bernie Sanders last summer, because he was talking about Martin Luther King Jr. but never mentioning the need to challenge what King called “the madness of militarism.” And so it goes to: we need to get rid of this idea that because you support a candidate, or were responsible for helping a candidate come into office, then you’ve got to lie about that person and lie about the positions or distort or soft-peddle or euphemize what they’re doing. So I think that is a challenge that we have going forward.

    • ‘This Campaign Is Not Over’: Polls Show Dead Heat in California

      Democratic presidential contenders Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton are locked in a dead heat in California among registered Democrats, two new polls show.

      Sanders even beats Clinton by one point when potential Democratic primary voters are surveyed.

      California’s June 7 primary is semi-open, meaning Californians registered as Democrats or “No Party Preference” are able to vote in the Democratic primary. In previous primaries, Sanders has proved “far, far more popular with independents” than Clinton, as Kevin Gosztola recently noted.

    • Paul Ryan at Last Says Donald Trump Has His Support

      House Speaker Paul Ryan apparently felt he had drawn out his highly public waiting game long enough, surprising precisely no one with his announcement on Thursday that he was throwing his support behind presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.

    • Paul Ryan Endorses Trump Hours After Hosting An Anti-Islamophobia Meeting

      On Thursday, House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) hosted a meeting with the nation’s oldest interfaith peace organization, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, who pleaded with him to publicly stand up to the Islamophobia in his party and promote tolerance of refugees. A few hours later, he announced he’d be voting for the person who has been the loudest voice stoking fear of Muslims and refugees: Donald Trump.

    • Wasserman Schultz’s Challenger, Tim Canova, is Even More “Pro-Israel” Than She Is

      Congressional candidate Tim Canova, a professor of law and public finance, is widely depicted as being a progressive challenger to Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Wasserman Schultz, of course, chairs the Democratic National Committee and has rightly come in for lots of criticism on a host of issues.

      Canova was recently endorsed by Bernie Sanders. Sanders, at the New York debate with Hillary Clinton in April had showed some minimal concern for rights of Palestinians, rare in U.S. politics, saying that Israel’s attack on Gaza was “disproportionate.”

      Recently however, on MSNBC, Canova criticized Wasserman Schultz for being unreliable on a host of issues, then added: “even support for Israel, people don’t know where she stands.”

    • Feeling Seen, Feeling Heard: Bernie At the Local Taco Joint

      In California – where Clinton once led Sanders by over 40 points – the two candidates are now statistically, improbably tied, with news outlets reporting ever-shifting slim leads. Bernie’s encounters in what he calls “the big enchilada” have run the by-now fondly familiar gamut, from impassioned crowds of up to 60,000 in Oakland – where an exceedingly chill Bernie barely reacted to rowdy animal-rights protesters before blithely going on his raspy-voiced, finger-pointing way – to a glad chance meet-up at a local taco joint in Fresno. After coming upon “the Bern himself,” one fervent fan reports, “I can 100% attest to the fact that Bernie is a man of his words.” Overall, the odds are still against Sanders, for all the wrong reasons. But let us not forget: Oh what a galvanizing, heart-stirring ride – and, hopefully, legacy.

    • Rick Perry Has The Creepiest Response To Hillary Clinton’s Speech

      “Donald Trump will peel her skin off in a debate setting,” Perry said. “Donald Trump will peel her skin off in a debate setting and actually he’ll peel it off this evening [during a campaign event] out in San Jose as well.”

    • Bill Kristol’s Candidate, David French, is Even Further to the Right Than Trump

      David French’s rebuttal to my claim was that only one abortion provider had been murdered, so Christian terrorism wasn’t that bad. He then went on to praise the police for their hard work.

    • Bernie Sanders Urges “Revolutionaries” to Join Him as California Democratic Primary Vote Nears

      Bernie Sanders and his California supporters not only expect to win big in next Tuesday’s primary, but say Democrats will not pick their nominee until July’s national convention.

      “It’s a floor fight in Philly,” said Galen Swain, a semi-retired engineer standing at street corner Santa Cruz on Tuesday hoisting a “Honk for Bernie” sign near a big hall where Sanders was to speak. “I’m absolutely certain we will close the gap on her [in Tuesday's primary]… This is a gut check for Democrats. Do they want to run a candidate who has the FBI for a running mate?”

      The feistiness of Swain’s comments were commonplace at Sanders’ rally in this mid-California coastal city with a large state university. While Swain’s swipe at Hillary Clinton was referring to her use of a personal server for e-mails while Secretary of State — which has led to an ongoing FBI investigation — his larger point was about the Democratic Party’s superdelegates, the office-holders and allies who account for 15 percent of the national convention delegates.

    • Mainstream Media Bias Is Nothing New, but What Can We Do About It?

      Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer discusses mainstream media bias in the 2016 presidential coverage.

    • The Frustrated Public: Views of the 2016 Campaign, the Parties, and the Electoral Process

      Seventy percent of Americans say they feel frustrated about this year’s presidential election, including roughly equal proportions of Democrats and Republicans, according to a recent national poll conducted by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. More than half feel helpless and a similar percent are angry.

      Nine in 10 Americans lack confidence in the country’s political system, and among a normally polarized electorate, there are few partisan differences in the public’s lack of faith in the political parties, the nominating process, and the branches of government.

      Americans do not see either the Republicans or the Democrats as particularly receptive to new ideas or the views of the rank-and-file membership. However, the candidacy of Bernie Sanders for the Democratic nomination is more likely to be viewed as good for his party than Donald Trump’s bid for the Republican Party.

    • It’s You, Isn’t It Hillary?

      She is now struggling to just stay above water, hoping to limp to the nomination based on some funny delegate math and a few earlier victories in the South. If she is the nominee, she’ll be the least popular and least trusted nominee from her party in its history, with a negative campaign based nearly 100% on hoping people dislike Trump just a bit more than they dislike her.

    • Americans Go Through ‘Rapid Cycles of Extreme Cynicism and Idealism,’ NPR Interviews Find

      In a valuable example of human interest journalism, NPR host Robert Siegel spoke with a diverse group of Americans assembled from three generations—25-, 45- and 65-year-olds—about how their experience of national events shaped their political views.

      Among them are a 25-year-old who joined the military during the economic recession, a 45-year-old who became a U.S. citizen under President Reagan’s immigration reform, and a 65-year-old who was one of the first black female firefighters in New York City.

      The media’s influence on politics emerged as a consistent theme across the groups. This included “the reporting of Walter Cronkite, coverage of the Bill Clinton impeachment and O.J. Simpson trials, which often blurred the line between tabloid sensationalism and news, [and] the emergence of the 24-hour news cycle,” NPR reported.

    • Bernie Sanders and the Fundamental Crisis of U.S. Democracy

      There is no chance for sensible laws ending the genocide without first reducing the NRA’s influence on elections. None. Clinton and her supporters say only a “realistic” approach involving negotiations with right wing lunatics like Mc Connell will work. Really? Oh, we might get a ban on the civilian use of bazookas or tanks or some such meaningless measure with that approach. Remember, after Sandy Hook, over 90% of the public favored background checks but Congress wouldn’t even pass that.

      The only way we solve the national slaughter-for-profit policy of the NRA and the gun manufacturers is to get their money out of campaigns, their lobbyists out of our legislatures and their political ads off of our airwaves and out of our media. Period.

      [...]

      It gets worse. Today, the US has troops in over 150 nations; it has over 70 bases overseas; and its defense budget exceeds half a trillion dollars. There is no clear articulation of how—or whether—any of this makes us safer, and a great deal of evidence suggesting it makes us less safe.

    • Is the Media Recalculating How It Covers Trump?

      After months of no follow ups and an estimated $2 billion in free coverage, the Times reports TV news execs may finally be ready to ask Donald Trump some tough questions.

    • Bipartisan Closets

      The two leading candidates have nothing to hide, not that it’s any of your business.

    • David Cameron Says Trump Cancelled His Call For Muslim Ban
    • Is the Contemptible Trump In Contempt of Court?

      Then, within minutes after the rabid crowd had been chanting “build that wall,” Trump said that Curiel “happens to be, we believe, Mexican.” This comment was clearly meant to further inflame Trump’s fans and suggest that the judge was not an American, was biased against him, or both.

    • Trump University: A Scam, But a Familiar One

      Four hundred pages of documents released on Tuesday by a federal judge in San Diego add detail to the tawdry story of Donald Trump’s unaccredited Trump University. The operation appears to have relied on high-pressure recruiting pitches, buoyed by deceptive claims, and it had an extensive playbook focused not on teaching students the art of the real estate deal but instead on teaching company recruiters how to separate enrollees from more and more of their money.

      The playbook directed Trump University recruiters to push students into paying higher prices for escalating levels of involvement, with the most expensive “Gold Elite” package, priced at $34,995, the ultimate target: “If they can afford the gold elite don’t allow them to think about doing anything besides the gold elite.”

      Trump University told its recruiters to play on shame, exploit aspirations, and overcome customer objections, by telling prospective students: “do you like living paycheck to paycheck? … Do you enjoy seeing everyone else but yourself in their dream houses and driving their dreams cars with huge checking accounts? Those people saw an opportunity, and didn’t make excuses, like what you’re doing now.”

    • Clinton’s Speech: A Lost Opportunity

      Clinton’s overall approach is grounded in that central tenet of Washington conventional wisdom that, as she put it in the speech, “America is an exceptional country,” that “we lead with purpose, and we prevail,” and that “if America doesn’t lead, we leave a vacuum – and that will either cause chaos, or other countries will rush in to fill the void.”

    • Anti-Intellectualism, Terrorism, and Elections in Contemporary Education: a Discussion with Noam Chomsky

      Washington DC based History Teacher Dan Falcone and New York City English Teacher Saul Isaacson sat down with Professor Noam Chomsky to discuss current issues in education and American domestic and foreign policy issues. They also discussed the place of the humanities in education and how it relates to activism, definitions of terrorism, and how education impacts the perceptions of the political process in the US.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Liberal Faux-Outrage on Freedom of Speech

      One cannot but be awestruck by the hypocrisy of intellectuals who pretend to adhere to points of principle–for transparently partisan ends.

      A recent manifestation of the distinguished tradition of elite hypocrisy is Nicholas Kristof’s two-columns-long exhortation to liberals and leftists (whom he characteristically conflates) that they be more tolerant of conservatives. Thus he joins a growing army of fellow intellectual luminaries–including Jonathan Chait, Catherine Rampell, Edward Luce, Damon Linker, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, and many others (Jerry Seinfeld, Donald Trump, etc.)–who bemoan the rise of an intolerant political correctness on social media and university campuses.

    • Censorship and Freedom of Expression
    • Did Facebook Censor the Trump San Jose Rally?

      The Trump San Jose rally on June 2 was overcome with violence as protesters threw eggs and bottles at supporters, destroyed barricades in the nearby parking garage, and tore up the American flag. But something else strange was happening at the same time. Facebook users reported that they couldn’t search for the rally on Facebook.

    • 8-9 July: The power of hip hop

      Since its birth in the Bronx in the 1970s, hip hop has made its mark. Today, graffiti artists, MCs, breakdancers and DJs across the world are still using the medium to empower themselves, from women in Columbia and political movements in Burkina Faso, to aiding the fight for free speech in Zimbabwe and challenging religious stereotypes in the UK.

      Index on Censorship has teamed up with In Place of War to create two unique full-day events that provide an opportunity to listen to, learn from and collaborate with 14 world-changing hip hop artists from eight different countries.

    • European Commission’s Hate Speech Deal With Companies Will Chill Speech

      A new agreement between the European Commission and four major U.S. companies—Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Microsoft—went into effect yesterday. The agreement will require companies to “review the majority of valid notifications for removal of hate speech in less than 24 hours and remove or disable access to such content,” as well as “educate and raise awareness” with their users about the companies’ guidelines.

      The deal was made under the Commission’s “EU Internet Forum,” launched last year as a means to counter what EDRi calls “vaguely-defined ‘terrorist activity and hate speech online.’” While some members of civil society were able to participate in discussions, they were excluded from the negotiations that led to the agreement, says EDRi.

    • Techdirt Reading List: Free Speech: Ten Principles For A Connected World

      Obviously a recurring theme here on Techdirt is the issue of free speech, and I’m frequently interested in discussions on the topic. Just a few weeks ago, for example, we wrote about the book No Law: Intellectual Property in the Image of an Absolute First Amendment. So I was intrigued this week when I ran across a thoughtful review of a new book by Timothy Garton Ash, entitled Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World. And when I saw the book mentioned again almost immediately, I figured I ought to pick up a copy.

      I haven’t read it yet, but based on what I’ve skimmed and the various reviews I’ve read (including a good one in the NY Times), it definitely seems like a worthwhile read. It pushes back on some of the current trend of people (and, all too frequently, students) trying to silence speech they don’t want to hear in various places, while noting the awkwardness of how folks for whom freedom of speech was seen as so important in past decades are turning around and seeking to block people they disagree with from speaking now. Free speech has never really been a “partisan” kind of thing, and it seems to go in waves over who is really in favor of it and who’s willing to give it up over speech they dislike.

    • Twitter unblocks spoof Putin account after widespread criticism
    • Guess who’s back? Putin parody account back on Twitter after suspension
    • Putin, Lavrov parody accounts unfrozen after sudden Twitter suspension
    • Twitter Restores Parody Account of Russian President Vladimir Putin
    • Twitter suspends popular anti-Putin parody accounts
    • Putin Parody Censorship Irks Twitter Fans, Jokes Quickly Reinstated
    • Google Removes Anti-Semitic Chrome Extension

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • The BBC is failing the public in its coverage of government surveillance

      In 1952, Conservative MP Waldron Smithers sent Prime Minister Winston Churchill a list of potentially “subversive” BBC employees. Among them was Anatol Goldberg, head of the BBC Russian service: a “Jew… who controls the selection of programmes and is a communist.” Encouraging Churchill to create a “committee presided over by an English judge or QC… who could make an extensive enquiry into communist activities”, the MP added: “we have traitors in our midst… and although I should deplore suppression of free speech they should be treated as traitors.” Churchill passed Smithers’ concerns on to MI5, whose staff concluded: “In the considered view of the Security Service, communist influence in the BBC is very slight and does not constitute a serious security danger.”

    • Is privacy dead? Not even MPs are safe from spies

      Not even MPs are safe from the security service’s snooping anymore.

      While the emails and browsing history of ordinary folk like you and I have been fair game for intelligence agencies like GCHQ for a while, it was thought that MPs were safe from spies due to a quirk of law.

    • Snowden leak: GCHQ & America’s NSA regularly intercept British MPs emails

      American spies and the UK’s listening post GCHQ regularly intercept the emails of British MPs and peers, including privileged correspondence between parliamentarians and their constituents.

      The US National Security Agency (NSA) reportedly has access to intercepted emails sent and received by all MPs and peers through Parliament’s Microsoft computer system, Office 365.

      Intelligence agency GCHQ on the other hand, allegedly accesses the data when it leaves UK’s borders on its way to Microsoft’s data centers in Dublin and the Netherlands.

      The revelations have been made public through an investigation by Computer Weekly, based on leaked documents by the now-exiled former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

    • Read the NSA’s Exceedingly Weird Guide to the Internet
    • Former NSA and CIA director recommends managing consequences instead of vulnerabilities

      Michael Hayden believes managing vulnerabilities is untenable and consequence management using the Risk Equation is preferable. Read about the equation’s components.

    • The Government Is Building A Database To Predict Who Will Be The Next Edward Snowden

      While police departments flock to use technology that predicts crime, the U.S. military is building a database that goes a step further — predicting who is most likely to reveal state secrets.

      The U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) is developing a data system that collects information on government employees and contractors with security clearances in hopes of being able to pinpoint those with the potential to become whistleblowers, Defense One reported.

    • Tattoo Recognition Research Threatens Free Speech and Privacy

      Tattoos are inked on our skin, but they often hold much deeper meaning. They may reveal who we are, our passions, ideologies, religious beliefs, and even our social relationships.

      That’s exactly why law enforcement wants to crack the symbolism of our tattoos using automated computer algorithms, an effort that threatens our civil liberties.

      Right now, government scientists are working with the FBI to develop tattoo recognition technology that police can use to learn as much as possible about people through their tattoos. But an EFF investigation has found that these experiments exploit inmates, with little regard for the research’s implications for privacy, free expression, religious freedom, and the right to associate. And so far, researchers have avoided ethical oversight while doing it.

    • 5 Ways Law Enforcement Will Use Tattoo Recognition Technology

      There’s an action movie cliché in which a cop inspects the body of a felled assassin or foot soldier and discovers a curious tattoo that ultimately leads to a rogue black-ops squadron, a secret religious sect, or an underground drug trafficking ring.

      The trope isn’t entirely Hollywood fantasy, but the reality of emerging tattoo recognition technology is closer to a dystopian tech thriller. Soon, we may see police departments using algorithms to scrape tattoos from surveillance video or cops in the field using mobile apps to analyze tattoos during stops. Depending on the tattoo, such technology could be used to instantly reveal personal information, such as your religious beliefs or political affiliations.

    • FBI Kept Demanding Email Records Despite DOJ Saying It Needed a Warrant

      The secret government requests for customer information Yahoo made public Wednesday reveal that the FBI is still demanding email records from companies without a warrant, despite being told by Justice Department lawyers in 2008 that it doesn’t have the lawful authority to do so.

      That comes as a particular surprise given that FBI Director James Comey has said that one of his top legislative priorities this year is to get the right to acquire precisely such records with those warrantless secret requests, called national security letters, or NSLs. “We need it very much,” Comey told Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark, during a congressional hearing in February.

      At issue is whether the national security letters empower the FBI to demand what are called “electronic communication transactions records,” or ECTRs. Such records can include email header information – not their content – and browsing histories.

      In 2008, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel concluded that the FBI was only entitled to get the name, address, length of service, and toll billing records from companies without a warrant. Opinions issued by the OLC are generally treated as binding and final within the executive branch.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Stranger assaults Amos Yee in shopping centre

      The suspect is seen grabbing Yee from behind as the latter struggles to escape from the bear-hug and repeatedly shouts for help.

    • Video: Singaporean blogger activist Amos Yee attacked in mall as passersby look on

      Singaporean activist Amos Yee was attacked at the Jurong Point mall in Singapore on Monday. A man physically manhandled Yee as passersby appeared to look on.

      Yee approached a man and asked if he had taken a picture of him, according to a video he shot himself. The man then gave chase as Yee repeatedly called out for help.

    • Police report made against alleged assault involving Amos Yee

      A police report has been filed by a member of public against an alleged assault that involved the teenager, Amos Yee during the last weekend. The incident was documented on video and had been reported online.

      29-year-old, Brendan Chong shared that he decided to make a police report on Wednesday as the authorities have not commented on the case till date.

      He hopes that the case is promptly investigated because, not only for Yee’s own personal safety, but for the safety and well-being of the general public as the incident happened in a crowded shopping centre.

    • EFF Joins Coalition Opposing Dangerous CFAA Bill

      EFF and over a dozen other organizations are urging U.S. lawmakers to oppose a dangerous bill proposed by Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse and Lindsey Graham that would make the already-flawed Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) worse. The joint letter sent Wednesday explains that the legislation fails to address any of the CFAA’s problems while simply creating more confusion. Although the proposal is ostensibly directed at stopping botnets, it includes various provisions that go far beyond protecting against such attacks.

      The senators proposed an almost identical bill last year. And just like last year, they may try to sneak their proposal through as an amendment to the Email Privacy Act. Last year, the tried this tactic with the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015, but they ultimately failed due to widespread opposition.

    • “Guantánamo Diary” Detainee Makes the Case for His Release

      In a hearing this morning, advocates for Mohamedou Ould Slahi made the case that the high-profile U.S. detainee should be released from Guantánamo, where he has been held for 14 years without being charged with a crime.

      If freed, Slahi plans to return to life with his family and pursue a career as a writer, following on the success of his bestselling memoir, Guantánamo Diary, which tells of Slahi’s imprisonment and torture by the United States and its counterterrorism allies. Held secretly in Jordan and Afghanistan before being brought to Guantánamo, Slahi recounts in his book beatings, sexual abuse, sleep deprivation, and a catalogue of other horrors, along with the close relationships he developed with various guards.

      Slahi was not allowed to speak during the open portion of today’s hearing. Instead, statements were made on his behalf by his attorney and by military representatives. Slahi, a slender, clean-shaven 45-year-old Mauritanian, sat quietly behind a sign identifying him as “detainee,” dressed in a short-sleeved white shirt and glasses, his arms folded on the table. A live video feed of the proceeding was shown at the Pentagon and watched by reporters, lawyers, and other members of the public.

    • Islamophobia: Why Are So Many, So Frightened

      Islamophobia has become a significant factor driving politics in many western countries.

      Islamophobia – fear of Muslims – is now highly visible among European populations concerned about terrorist responses from Islamic groups claiming Jihadi links. However, it is also evident among those same populations in relation to the refugee flow from the Middle East. In addition, Islamophobia is highly evident among sectors of the US population during the presidential race. It is a significant issue in Australia. Outside the West, even the (Muslim) Rohingya in Burma are feared by Buddhist monks and others.

      Given that this widespread western fear of Muslims was not the case prior to the US-instigated ‘War on Terror’, do Muslims around the world now pose a greater threat to western interests than previously? Or is something else going on here?

    • These Four People Were Sued for $30 Million for Trying to Stop a Toxic Landfill

      After being sued for $30 million by a corporate landfill owner for “speaking their truth in order to protect their community,” four residents of Uniontown, Alabama—a poor, predominantly Black town with a median per capita income of around $8,000—are fighting back.

      On Thursday, the ACLU asked a federal court to dismiss the defamation lawsuit against Esther Calhoun, Benjamin Eaton, Ellis B. Long, and Mary B. Schaeffer—all members of the community group Black Belt Citizens Fighting for Health and Justice.

    • Alabama Mom’s Charges Are Dropped, But Only After an Arduous Battle

      Sixteen months after her arrest, Katie Darovitz — one of at least 500 women prosecuted under Alabama’s toughest-in-the-nation chemical endangerment law — has had her case dismissed.

      Darovitz’s story, first chronicled by ProPublica last year, was especially wrenching: She has severe epilepsy, and doctors told her that the medications she was using to treat her condition carry a risk of miscarriage and birth defects.

      When she got pregnant in 2014, she discovered marijuana could control her seizures and had not been associated with birth defects. But when she gave birth, hospital staffers turned over her positive marijuana screen to a social worker who turned it over to law enforcement officials. Two police officers showed up at the house Darovitz shared with her common-law husband and their two-week-old son, handcuffed her, and hauled her off to jail. Though her son, Will, was in good health, Darovitz was charged with a Class C felony — punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

    • Environmental Protesters Fight Defamation Lawsuit Filed by Coal Ash Landfill
    • In This Poor, Black, Polluted Alabama Town, Speaking Up Gets You Sued

      Would you agree with that sentence? Would you say it yourself? It seems uncontroversial — something kids might be taught in school. Something any of us might say without blinking an eye. Unless, that is, you happened to say it in Uniontown, Alabama — an overwhelmingly Black and poor rural town in the heart of the South’s Black Belt. In Uniontown, it turns out that having the audacity to fight for your fundamental human rights — for instance, by saying the exact sentence above — can get you sued for $30 million in federal court by companies seeking to silence their critics.

    • Trump’s Immigration Raids: How Would They Work?

      As nearly as I can determine, nobody has drawn a plan for Donald Trump’ s promise to deport the more than 10 million undocumented immigrants in the United States. But some of its requirements are obvious, at least to residents of Dallas like me.

      Hispanics, about 50 million of whom live in the United States, are the most suspect population. Interning all of them, as the U.S. did with the Japanese population during World War II, is impossible because that would confine a sixth of the people who live within the nation’s borders. The only means by which undocumented immigrants can be deported is to catch them before they reach cities like Dallas—which lies 400 miles from the border– and to sort through the whole of the Hispanic population already residing here.

    • Black Lives Matter Activist Convicted of “Felony Lynching”: “It’s More Than Ironic, It’s Disgusting”

      In Pasadena, California, Black Lives Matter organizer Jasmine Richards is facing four years in state prison after she was convicted of a rarely used statute in California law originally known as “felony lynching.” Under California’s penal code, “felony lynching” was defined as attempting to take a person out of police custody. Jasmine was arrested and charged with felony lynching last September, after police accused her of trying to de-arrest someone during a peace march at La Pintoresca Park in Pasadena on August 29, 2015. The arrest and jailing of a young black female activist on charges of felony lynching sparked a firestorm of controversy. Historically, the crime of lynching refers to when a white lynch mob takes a black person out of the custody of the police for the purpose of extrajudicially hanging them. In fact, the law’s name was so controversial that less than two months before Jasmine was arrested, California Governor Jerry Brown signed into law legislation removing the word “lynching” from the penal code. We speak with Richards’ lawyer, Nana Gyamfi, and Black Lives Matter organizer Melina Abdullah. “Her conviction is not only about punishing Jasmine Richards, but also is the lynching,” Abdullah says. “So it’s really disgusting and ironic that she’s charged and convicted with felony lynching, when the real lynching that’s carried out is done in the same way it was carried out in the late 19th, early 20th century, where it’s supposed to punish those who dare to rise up against a system.”

    • Jules Boykoff on Rio Games

      A coup and a corruption scandal that have government in disarray, an economic crisis, and an outbreak of a dangerous mosquito-borne virus have not a few people asking how Brazil can possibly host a successful and safe Olympic Games in just…one month from now? Our guest has a different take, suggesting that Brazil’s unrest might actually be a kind of boon to Olympic officials—in that it serves to distract from the myriad problems associated with hosting the Games even when they go “smoothly.”

    • A Very Brazilian Coup

      Brazil’s elites can’t win an election, but they can engineer an impeachment.

    • Credibility of Brazil’s Interim President Collapses: Receives 8-Year Ban on Running

      But the oozing corruption of Temer’s ministers has sometimes served to obscure his own. He, too, is implicated in several corruption investigations. And now, he has been formally convicted of violating election laws and, as punishment, is banned from running for any political office for 8 years. Yesterday, a regional election court in São Paulo, where he’s from, issued a formal decree finding him guilty and declaring him “ineligible” to run for any political office as a result of now having a “dirty record” in elections. Temer was was found guilty of spending his own funds on his campaign in excess of what the law permits.

      In the scope of the scheming, corruption and illegality from this “interim” government, Temer’s law-breaking is not the most severe offense. But it potently symbolizes the anti-democratic scam that Brazilian elites have attempted to perpetrate. In the name of corruption, they have removed the country’s democratically elected leader and replaced her with someone who – though not legally barred from being installed – is now barred for 8 years from running for the office he wants to occupy.

    • Temer Convicted of Breaking Election Laws As Thousands March for Democracy in Brazil

      Upheaval in Brazil continued this week as a court handed down a conviction against right-wing president Michel Temer, who took over after the ouster of leftist president Dilma Rousseff, and banned him from running in elections for the next eight years.

      A regional elections court in Temer’s hometown of São Paulo on Thursday “issued a formal decree finding him guilty and declaring him ‘ineligible’ to run for any political office as a result of now having a ‘dirty record’ in elections,” Glenn Greenwald reported in The Intercept.

      The decision came less than three weeks after Temer oversaw what has widely been described as a “coup” to overthrow Rouseff, the recently re-elected Workers’ Party president.

    • Police Brutality Has Surged In Brazil. It’s About To Get Even Worse.

      Back in April, human rights organization Amnesty International reported that the number of people killed by police Rio de Janeiro jumped 54 percent between 2013 and 2015. In preparation for the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, the country ramped up its law enforcement by stationing police and members of the military in the country’s slums, or favelas, under the guise of protecting the poorest communities. But violence in the favelas actually surged with the presence of more officers — as did the number of people killed by them.

      This year alone, police in Rio have killed 100 people, most of whom identified as black. As the city gears up for the Olympics in August, and the country scrambles to fix a crumbling political system, Amnesty International projects that the brutality will get much worse.

      According to a new report from the international organization, 65,000 police officers and 20,000 soldiers have been tapped for security during the upcoming sporting event in Rio. Once again, many of them will be stationed in favelas, where the vast majority of the country’s black population lives. And there’s no telling how long they’ll stay.

    • I Had to Leave the U.S. to Stop Pretending to Be an Extrovert

      America values the bold and gregarious, but when I moved to Switzerland, I found my people—no fake smiles required.

    • Whistleblowers and the protection of sources

      At the time of Edward Snowden’s revelations of extensive surveillance by the NSA and its international partners, like the French DGSE, a law protecting whistleblowers needs to be more than ever at the center of political and legal thinking. A lot remains to be done to ensure the public’s right to information without which there is no true democracy.

      The whistleblower status must benefit anyone that reports, discloses or condemns past, present or future acts that violate citizens’ rights or conflict with the common interest. With regard to surveillance, this status must include an exemption for state agents and contractors from the silence imposed by their employer. This would protect persons whose actions, such as those of Snowden and numerous other anonymous sources, enable an essential public debate on the drifts of security policies and resorts to the reason of state as a justification for intelligence-led policies.

    • The U.S. Is the Only Country That Routinely Sentences Children to Life in Prison Without Parole

      It was a late summer morning when Robert “Fat Daddy” Taylor woke up, smoked two blunts, and decided to turn himself in. He’d been on the run for four days, and it seemed that everywhere he went in and around the 7 Mile neighborhood on the east side of Detroit, there were photos of him in stores, and people quick to call the police, to claim the $1,000 reward for finding him.

    • What the War on Reproductive Rights Has to do With Poverty and Race

      When Justice Harry A. Blackmun authored the decision legalizing abortion in Roe v. Wade, he wrote that “[t]he right of personal privacy includes the abortion decision, but this right is not unqualified and must be considered against important state interests in regulation.” Although this was a win for those seeking to both legalize abortion and prevent harm inflicted on people seeking illegal and unsafe abortions, it also opened the door to restrictions on abortion.

    • UCLA Engineering Student Killed His Professor For Stealing Programming Code: Report

      A recent murder-suicide shooting at UCLA campus resulted in the death of a student and his professor. As the recent findings suggest, the PhD scholar accused his professor of code theft and had his name written on a “kill list”. His wife’s name, who is now dead, was also on the list.

    • FBI Internal Report Says FBI’s 2007 Impersonation Of An AP Journalist Not Exactly By The Book

      US law enforcement agencies engage in some pretty shifty behavior while pursuing criminals. The DEA and ATF love pushing randos into planning fake raids on fake drug houses containing zero weapons, cash, or drugs. (Better yet, made-up quantities of theoretical contraband are used to determine sentence length during prosecution!)

      There’s more than a coin flip’s chance that a teen in chatroom is actually a law enforcement officer between the age of 25 and 50 — and quite possibly operating extra-jurisdictionally as one of Florida sheriff Grady Judd’s child porn warriors.

      Speaking of child porn, the FBI is not above seizing kiddie porn sites and letting them run as honeypots. And that’s when it’s not doing worse things — like shoving a mixture of the mentally challenged and the easily-persuaded towards terrorism… or impersonating journalists to serve up malware to investigation targets.

      The FBI pretended to be the Associated Press in order to send malware to a 15-year-old bomb threat suspect. The payload was delivered via a “draft” version of an “article” by an “AP writer,” sent to the suspect for his “review.” The FBI defended its unorthodox investigative technique by saying it was something it “rarely” did and that it only did so in the interest of public safety.

    • White Youths Yelling Racial Slurs Chase Black Teenager To His Death

      “They were calling us n—-rs,” Smith said of the chase. “I just heard a lot of racial slurs. They were mixed — some white, some of them were Hispanic. But nobody was black.” At least one of the assailants had a gun.

    • Blacklash: Missouri State Legislature Responds to Ferguson Uprising

      Your lives don’t matter. This was the implicit anthem of conservative lawmakers in the Missouri state house throughout this year’s legislative session. Through attempts to limit Black women’s ability to decide how, if and when to conceive; by advancing the same dangerous policy that claimed the lives of Trayvon Martin and Renisha McBride; and by attacking the vote and the voice of Black Missourians, legislators pioneered an agenda aimed to codify a status quo of racial hierarchy — white property and political power reigning supreme.

    • The limits of white compassion: Imagine if Black lives mattered as much as one gorilla’s

      Harambe’s death is a tragedy—as are the deaths of Black people killed by police. They deserve your outrage, too.

    • Peru 2016: Democracy under authoritarian charge?

      But as the passing of time shows, the country did not carry out the necessary debate about what it meant to build an inclusive, demanding and open society. Doing this properly would have involved laying the foundations of basic democratic procedures so that just and fair competition in elections was possible. It meant, also, facing the fundamental challenge of strengthening the rule of law. On the contrary, given the weakness of inherited constitutional legality and systematic abuse, institutional passivity and arbitrariness of public/private powers persisted openly. What’s more, the country was governed under a constitution in place since fujimorismo, bringing about manoeuvrings both socio-political– the instrumentalisation of democracy to entrench authoritarian ends in the long-term– and economic– neoliberalism, with a vocation contrary to all social agenda, without its premises and implications being called into question.

      [...]

      However, there is something that, during the second round of the presidential elections of 2016, can be assumed realistically: it is that we must try to slow or stop a project that threatens to subvert the democratic institutions that required so much to recover (as precarious as they may be). It is about reversing the trend towards a freedom-destroying and obscurantist scenario – like that that is today creeping towards us – and opening one where democratic conversation is based on a terrain that is pluralist, open and promising.

    • What’s the ‘Goodest’ Country? Hint: It’s Not the US

      A ‘good country,’ according to the index, is one ‘that contributes to the greater good of humanity.’

    • First Director Inside Violent Juvenile Detention Facility Exposes Horrific Ways America Punishes Adolescents

      Juveniles can be tried as adults in criminal court in all states.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Dissecting the Defend Trade Secrets Act [Ed: Anti-whistleblowers law “hailed by IP practitioners as a long-overdue reform.”]

      The new law provides a civil cause of action in federal courts for companies claiming that their trade secrets have been misappropriated. This has been hailed by IP practitioners as a long-overdue reform.

    • Trademarks

      • Chanel tops US trade mark damages list since 2009 – report [Ed: Perfume conglomerates make a lot of money from brands and litigation, not sales]

        A Lex Machina report on trade mark litigation reveals the entities receiving the most damages, the most common plaintiffs and defendants, and the busiest districts

        Lex Machina has released its second annual comprehensive report on trade mark litigation over the past seven years. The report sheds light on some of the biggest decisions and judgments, as well as breaking down larger trends in trade mark litigation.

      • The Avengers, Diana Rigg and Marvel Comics: When confusion is not confusion [Ed: Trademark on single English dictionary words]]

        Why is confusion sometimes tolerated? Case in point— “The Avengers”. What comes to mind, it seems, depends upon your generation.

      • The Perversion Of Trademarks: Jose Mourinho Can’t Coach Man-U Yet Because Former Club Trademarked His Name

        Usually when we talk about professional or college sports participants running into trademark issues, it has to do with the nicknames they have taken on and either attempted to trademark for themselves, or prohibit others from using. But the case of soccer coach Jose Mourinho is different in that respect: at issue is his own, natural name. And, to truly see how trademark has been perverted from its original purpose, one can simply watch Mourinho, who was supposed to take the helm of Manchester United, have his hiring delayed because another team he formerly coached holds the trademark for his name.

    • Copyrights

      • NYT Calls for Stronger Copyright Protection Without Calculating the Costs

        All New York Times readers know that protectionism is stupid and self-defeating. It hurts everyone involved. So where were all the economic experts to give the usual lines on protectionism in response to efforts to change the Digital Millennium Copyright Act?

        The Times reported on these efforts without ever once mentioning the economic costs that would be implied by making listeners pay more money for music and the cost that intermediaries like YouTube would have to incur to comply with stronger copyright protection. The failure to mention these costs is remarkable, given how much space the Times and other media outlets have devoted to denouncing proposals from Donald Trump to impose higher tariffs and plans by Bernie Sanders to chart a different course for trade policy.

        Economics works the same, regardless of whether the item in question is a car, a ton of steel or a song. Barriers that raise the price impose costs on consumers and the economy. The biggest difference is that in proportionate terms, the barriers involved with copyright protection are likely to be far larger than any trade barriers that Trump or anyone else might impose on imported manufactured goods. While the latter are unlikely to exceed 50 percent of the sale price, and would almost certainly be far less, copyright protection can make music that would otherwise be available for free very costly.

        To get an idea of how costly such protections can be, New Zealand’s government estimated that increasing the length of copyright protection from 50 to 75 years, as required by the Trans-Pacific Partnership, would cost it 0.24 percent of annual GDP, the equivalent of $4.3 billion in the US economy in 2016. It would have been helpful to include some estimates of the costs associated with the stronger protections being discussed in this piece.

06.02.16

Links 2/6/2016: Nextcloud, Arch Linux 2016.06.01

Posted in News Roundup at 3:41 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • 7 Linux Misconceptions Debunked

    I’ll admit, it’s hard to gauge how many users exist. Linux is free to download, and no single company has control. There are no sales figures to go by. TV and print ads aren’t shaping your perception.

    Yet even if most of the people you know may not use Linux, there may be one who does. And many more will have no idea they interact with Linux every single day.

    As it turns out, Linux has millions of users. Know what else it has? Other misconceptions that continue to give people a false idea of what Linux is like.

    Let’s debunk a few, one by one.

  • Voyager Offers a Mostly Smooth-Sailing Linux Adventure

    Voyager’s integration of elements makes it a novel alternative to Xubuntu.

    Branding problems and French language intrusions aside, Voyager Live performs well and offers a look and feel that complements its stellar performance.

  • How to fix any Linux problem

    Everyone has a problem with Linux at some point. The important thing is how quickly that problem gets solved. An amazing element of the open source and computing community is the vast network of help available online in the form of blogs, websites and forums.

    Without doubt this is of huge importance in getting issues known and fixed, and it’s wonderful to see how willing the community is to help out complete strangers and beginners alike. That being said, there’s nothing that beats a bit of prior knowledge.

    To help arm you with the knowledge you need to keep your Linux systems cheerfully ticking over, we’ve taken our years of experience answering all manner of reader questions and distilled this into a rich brew of condensed Linux knowledge, which will target the top issues that Linux users regularly run into.

  • Windows 10 nagware: You can’t click X. Make a date OR ELSE

    Microsoft’s Windows 10 nagware campaign has entered a new phase, with all options to evade or escape an upgrade finally blocked.

    Recently, Microsoft’s policy had been to throw up a dialogue box asking you whether you wanted to install Windows 10.

    If you clicked the red “X” to close the box – the tried-and-tested way to make dialogue boxes vanish without agreeing to do anything – Microsoft began taking that as permission for the upgrade to go ahead.

  • Samsung: “Don’t Install Windows 10 Because We Suck At Making Drivers”

  • Server

    • New CoreOS open source storage system Torus fails to impress

      CoreOS has released a prototype version of Torus, an open source distributed storage system primarily intended for providing storage to container clusters.

    • Containers 101: Docker fundamentals

      Docker started out in 2012 as an open source project, originally named dotcloud, to build single-application Linux containers. Since then, Docker has become an immensely popular development tool, increasingly used as a runtime environment. Few — if any — technologies have caught on with developers as quickly as Docker.

      One reason Docker is so popular is that it delivers the promise of “develop once, run anywhere.” Docker offers a simple way to package an application and its runtime dependencies into a single container; it also provides a runtime abstraction that enables the container to run across different versions of the Linux kernel.

    • Infographic: Companies want flexibility and faster production time from software defined networking. And they get it.

      Results from the latest Tech Pro Research survey reveal why companies are choosing to implement SDN, why they’re choosing not to, and what happens after the implementation is done.

    • The rise of SDDC and the future of enterprise IT

      If you’ve worked in enterprise IT over the last few years, you’ll undoubtedly have heard the phrase ‘software defined’ being bandied around. Whereas software once merely played a support role to the hardware on which it was running, cloud and virtualization technologies have now moved software into the spotlight, with hardware now playing second fiddle.

  • Kernel Space

    • Linux Kernel 4.6 Gets Its First Point Release, Brings F2FS, x86 and ARM64 Fixes

      Today, June 1, 2016, renowned Linux kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman has had the great pleasure of releasing the first maintenance version of the Linux 4.6 kernel.

    • Linux 4.6.1
    • Linux 4.5.6

      I’m announcing the release of the 4.5.6 kernel.

      All users of the 4.5 kernel series must upgrade.

      The updated 4.5.y git tree can be found at:
      git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-4.5.y
      and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser:

      http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-st…

      thanks,

      greg k-h

    • Linux 4.4.12
    • Linux 3.14.71
    • Computex 2016: Linux cannot yet use Intel’s Turbo Boost Max 3.0 mode

      Beyond the sheer number of cores on offer in the new Intel Extreme Edition chips announced earlier this week at Computex, one of the other selling points for the processors is an improved Turbo Boost mode.

    • Linux Kernel 4.4.12 LTS Has ARM64, x86, and CIFS Improvements, Updated Drivers

      Immediately after informing the Linux community about the availability of Linux kernel 4.6.1 and Linux kernel 4.5.6, Greg Kroah-Hartman published details about the release of Linux kernel 4.4.12 LTS.

    • Linux Kernel 4.5.6 Arrives for Stable Distros with AArch64 and CIFS Improvements

      After announcing the release of the first update of the Linux 4.6 kernel series, Greg Kroah-Hartman informed the community about the availability of the sixth maintenance build in the Linux 4.5 kernel branch.

      Linux kernel 4.5.6 is now available for select GNU/Linux operating systems that have already adopted a kernel from the Linux 4.5 series, which many popular distributions did, including, but not limited to Arch Linux, openSUSE Tumbleweed, Gentoo Linux, Birds Linux, Webconverger, Sabayon, Fedora, Slackware, and Debian.

    • Ask SN: Help Write it — What do you Want in an Init System?

      Hi, I’m Subsentient, the original author of the Epoch Init System. It’s been around a while, and it does the job I gave it well enough for me, but Epoch has failed to reach its ultimate goal of becoming a viable alternative to systemd. This is for a few reasons, among them being a total lack of parallelism, difficulty for package maintainers to easily set up services, and a codebase even I myself am ashamed to admit I wrote. I got some things right too, like good documentation, powerful service management, lack of dependencies, and unintrusiveness, but it seems it wasn’t quite enough, because the most commonly requested features were true dependency support and parallelism.

      I’m doing a near-complete rewrite of Epoch, save for the few parts of code that were well-written, and it will be called Epoch-ng (next generation). While dependencies, parallelism and easy package manager support are the big things, I think I’d like to get feedback on what Linux users actually want from an init system, and I’ll try to write an init system that does its best to meet everyone’s desires.

    • HPE’s OpenSwitch project gets Linux Foundation backing

      OpenSwitch is an open-source operating system for data center network switches that was first built by Hewlett-Packard Enterprise before being launched last year. The Linux-based OS is designed to power network switches from various hardware vendors. The purpose is to allow enterprises to rapidly build out their data center networks while customizing them for their specific needs. To date, the project has picked up dozens of heavyweight backers, including Arista Networks, Intel Corp., Broadcom Corp., VMware Inc., and Accton Technology Corp., among others.

    • OpenSwitch is now a Linux Foundation project

      The Linux Foundation once again expanded its slate of open source networking projects.

    • Graphics Stack

  • Applications

    • Emacspeak, an audible interface for Linux

      Screen readers such as Orca work by describing the graphical environment to the user. They deconstruct an arbitrary visual environment that’s built on top of an inherently text-based system. On some systems, this is necessary because there’s no access—at least pragmatically—to the OS by any other means than the graphical interface. As most Linux users know, however, a graphical interface on a good Unix system is entirely optional in the first place, so there’s no need to generate one, deconstruct it, and describe it; the computer can just spit out text.

      I am aware of two efforts forging this path: Emacspeak and ADRIANE (on Knoppix). In this article, we’ll take an in-depth look at the former.

      Emacspeak is an audible interface that allows non-sighted users to interact independently and efficiently with a computer, entirely by way of text input and output. Emacspeak uses “audio formatting” and W3C’s Aural CSS to produce a full audio representation of input and output.

    • FreeFileSync 8.2 Released

      If you have large number of files that you want to compare to find duplicate files or replace or update old files with latest ones then FreeFileSync is a great tool to perform that. FreeFileSync compares two folders and based on what you want it can add, update, mirror files of two folders. FreeFileSync recently released 8.2 which fixes couple of bugs.

    • Nightly builds are now for TESTING only
    • Ardour 5.0 Digital Audio Workstation Makes A Step Closer To Reality

      This Ardoir 5.0-pre0 marking comes as the developers merged two of their development branches and their plans to do this major release to succeed the current Ardour 4.7 stable series. The current nightly builds of Ardour 5.0 are said to be for test-only and should be used with just “throw-away material” as it’s not yet vetted compared to Ardour 4.x versions.

    • Phoronix Test Suite 6.4 Released With Latest Improvements For Open-Source Benchmarking

    • Instructionals/Technical

    • Wine or Emulation

    • Games

      • Ecotone Linux Version Released

        Developed by Sundae Factory, Ecotone is a platform game with an evolving gameplay which allows brainwork and/or skill phases. The game’s primary focus is to invite the gamer into a new kind of world, and features a unique, dreamlike and mysterious atmosphere. In the strange Ecotone’s world, you will embody a weird little character lacking a real identity. As this character passes each level, he will earn some new skills. But beware, the environment is full of strange creatures and monsters, and some of them may be dangerous.

      • Valve announce over half a million Steam Controllers have been sold

        An awesome milestone for such an interesting device! Valve have stated in an update that the Steam Controller has sold over half a million units!

      • Steam Machines are dead in the water according to Ars, not quite

        Another problem is that the mainstream gaming press has almost never been fond of the idea anyway, and the amount of articles out looking down it probably wouldn’t have helped things. Ars hasn’t exactly been kind about it at all in previous articles. Hell, even certain Linux websites like to use sensationalist article titles talking down Linux popularity on Steam. When actually, it’s doing pretty well all things considered.

      • At Just $35, Now Is A Great Time To Try Out Valve’s ARM-Linux-Powered Steam Link

        Steam Link is Valve’s game streaming solution where when paired with a controller makes for easy gaming from a living room TV. The Steam Link is Linux-based and it does support game streaming from Steam running on SteamOS or any Linux distribution.

      • Steam’s latest Hardware Survey is out, shows Linux at 0.84%

        The key thing to remember is Steam overall is always growing, so a lower overall percentage of Linux users doesn’t necessarily mean there are less Linux users on Steam (it could actually be more, but dwarfed by also having even more Windows users on Steam).

        [...]

        You can make it appear by simply having different hardware or a different operating system. It seems to detect when you change things, as if it knows it needs to check on you again. This is by design of course, as the entire point of it is to show what people are currently using, so if you’ve changed something it wants to know about it and send it along. This is one reason why people keep saying they see it when they boot into Windows after not using it for a while, of course you will, that’s a change in your setup. This is another reason why I dislike it, as that can create an unintentional bias in the results. This bias isn’t against Linux though, as it would work the same the opposite way around of course. This is why I feel the results were actually a lot higher for Linux initially, as it did a survey for a big bunch of Windows/Mac users trying it and submitting it on Linux before moving back to Windows/Mac.

        A good bit of reading was a recent editorial titled “A different approach to calculating the popularity of Linux gaming on Steam” which will help put your mind at ease.

      • Unreal Engine 4.12 Released with Hundreds of Updates, Many New Features

        Today, June 1, 2016, Epic Games has had the enormous pleasure of announcing the release of Unreal Engine 4.12, a massive update it the 4.x stable series of the cross-platform and highly acclaimed game engine.

        Unreal Engine 4.12 comes exactly two months after the release of Unreal Engine 4.11, bringing hundreds of updates, countless bug fixes across all platforms, a multitude of new features, and the initial implementation of some brand-new technologies, such as the Vulkan Mobile Renderer.

      • DOOM 2016 can now be Played on Linux systems: See how

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • Enlightenment DR 0.21.0-rc Release
    • Enlightenment 0.21 Up To RC State With Better Wayland Support

      Mike Blumenkrantz has tagged the release candidate of the upcoming Enlightenment 0.21 release.

      This newest annual update to the Enlightenment desktop features much better Wayland support, a new gadget infrastructure, wizard improvements, and support for video backgrounds.

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • Transit routing starting to show some life-signs

        Here the departure time was set at approximately the same time as the local time here when I took the screenshots, which then would give you a trip at that time (21:50) in Portland’s timezone (and as can be seen, the gondola lift seems to have ended service for the day).

        Oh, and another thing. I added an option to override the (for now hardcoded to using localhost) URL of the OpenTripPlanner instance. This could be used if you know of some publicly available server, or would like to run your own to test with on another machine (or in a VM).

      • To Polari 3.22 and beyond

        This summer I am co-mentoring Rares Visalom and Kunaal Jain for a Google Summer of Code internship in Polari.

        Kunaal Jain is working on search and Rares Visalom is working on various user experience improvements. In this relation I’ve had the chance to be involved with designing some of the new features.

  • Distributions

    • Screenshots/Screencasts

    • Arch Family

    • Red Hat Family

      • CENX, Brocade, Red Hat, RIFT.io collaborate to set up SDNFV Innovation Lab

        Canada-based CENX, the global leader of orchestrated service assurance and management solutions for physical and virtualized networks, is collaborating with Brocade, Red Hat, and RIFT.io to showcase end-to-end service management capabilities over hybrid network infrastructure in its SDNFV innovation lab.

      • Cambridge to contribute to cloud computing

        Computer scientists at the University of Cambridge (UK) will contribute to the development of Openstack, an open source cloud computing platform, according to a press release by open source ICT services provider Red Hat.

        The University of Cambridge will contribute high performance computing capabilities to the upstream OpenStack community, Red Hat says in a press release on 29 April.

      • Red Hat’s Release of Ansible 2.1 Supports Network Automation

        Red Hat has announced the general availability of Ansible 2.1, the latest version of the company’s agentless open source IT automation framework. Ansible provides developers with the ability to deploy IT applications and environments by automating routine activities such as network configuration, cloud deployments, and creation of development environments.

      • Finance

      • Fedora

        • Pagure CI

          As my GSoC project one of the first goals is getting CI to Pagure. In my previous post I have been blogging about getting Fedmsg to work, Configuring Jenkins and my favorite Poor Man’s CI. Well, Poor Man’s CI evolved into Slightly Richer Man’s CI and now Pagure CI.

        • Fedora CommBlog Keeps it 100

          Shout-out to all the Fedora CommBlog Contributors who have helped us surpass the 💯 posts milestone!

    • Debian Family

      • Debian 7 Wheezy LTS now supporting armel and armhf

        Debian Long Term Support (LTS) is a project created to extend the life of all Debian stable releases to (at least) 5 years.

        Thanks to the LTS sponsors, Debian’s buildd maintainers and the Debian FTP Team are excited to announce that two new architectures, armel and armhf, are going to be supported in Debian 7 Wheezy LTS. These architectures along with i386 and amd64 will receive two additional years of extended security support.

      • GSoC 2016 Week 1: Reproducible Builds in Debian

        I started working from 28 May as the exams ended. This report is bit late. I started work on –hide=profiles flag.

      • My Free Software Activities in May 2016

        My monthly report covers a large part of what I have been doing in the free software world. I write it for my donators (thanks to them!) but also for the wider Debian community because it can give ideas to newcomers and it’s one of the best ways to find volunteers to work with me on projects that matter to me.

      • My Debian Activities in May 2016

        This month I marked 286 packages for accept and rejected 35. I also sent 13 emails to maintainers asking questions. Apart from this nothing unusual happened this month.

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak) Switches to a Universal Local DNS Resolver Service

            As you might know by now, Ubuntu 16.10 is currently in heavy development these days, and it is getting all sorts of new GNU/Linux technologies and improvements.

          • Creating a Snap is Not Difficult, Here’s How to Package Your Apps for Ubuntu

            Canonical’s Jamie Bennett talks in his latest blog post about how hard is to package your applications for various GNU/Linux operating systems, as well as how easy it to distribute them on Ubuntu via a Snap package.

            Snap is a new secure, isolated technology designed by Canonical for its Snappy Ubuntu Core operating system, which relies on snapd, the snap-based runtime environment, and Snapcraft, the tool anyone can use to package their applications into a Snap for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) and later.

          • QNAP to Use Ubuntu and Snaps for Distributing IoT Apps to Its NAS Solutions

            QNAP Systems, Inc., a Taiwanese corporation known for creating NAS solutions for storage management, file sharing, surveillance, and virtualization applications, announced recently that they are moving to offering IoT apps.

            It’s a bold move, but even if we don’t realize it yet IoT (Internet of Things) is the future, and like any other corporation out there that wants to survive today’s economy and fast-changing technology landscape it keep up with the latest trends.

          • Ubuntu Touch now supports Convergence over wireless display

            Canonical has just released the latest major update to the Ubuntu Touch mobile OS and it is really a major one, especially for owners of Ubuntu Touch smartphones. While those, particularly the Meizu PRO 5 Ubuntu Edition, is more than capable of offering Convergence, it was blocked by the lack of a HDMI out port. With this latest OTA-11 update, that is no longer an issue as Ubuntu Touch now supports connecting to an external display wirelessly, which means smartphone users can even more conveniently use Convergence with no wires in sight.

            As a quick recap, Convergence is a feature of Ubuntu Touch that truly lets your transform your smartphone or tablet into a portable desktop. Unlike Microsoft’s Continuum, users aren’t limited to only a specific subset of apps. As Ubuntu Touch can run both touch-friendly mobile apps as well as regular Linux desktop apps, that theoretically means everything.

          • Verdict and 10 things to know about Ubuntu bq Aquaris M10

            Mobile devices, especially smartphones, are becoming more powerful every year and are practically taking over our computing lives. Instead of bemoaning the death of the desktop, Ubuntu Touch takes the bull by the horns and creates a convergence of both worlds in a single device. It is a future that many other companies and tech pundits have pointed to. We’re definitely not yet there, but the bq Aquaris M10 Ubuntu Touch is definitely a nice first step.

          • Latest Ubuntu OS update brings in Continuum-like functionality

            The latest OTA-11 update for Ubuntu Phone and Tablet saw the light of the day today, bringing in a new convergence experience for Ubuntu device users.

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • Chitu Okoli on FOSS Business Models

    At the turn of the century, generating positive interest in free and open source software was an uphill battle. These days FOSS practically runs the enterprise and is the subject of many academic studies, including one by Concordia University’s Chitu Okoli.

  • VMware launches Liota, an open source SDK to fight gateway problem in IoT

    VMware recently announced Liota, an open source developer kit for building secure IoT apps that can work across multiple gateways.

  • We are Nextcloud – the future of private file sync and share

    You should have full control over your data. We help you achieve that: a safe home for all your data. Secure, under your control and developed in an open, transparent and trustworthy way. We are Nextcloud.

  • ​OwnCloud founder forks popular open-source cloud

    OwnCloud, a very popular, open-source Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud program, has been forked by its founder Frank Karlitschek. The fork, Nextcloud, will be available in early July.

  • You are Nextcloud, too – what we will do for contributors

    January 2015, I ran a contributor survey to see what the ownCloud community thought about the processes, development focus and our work at the company. I shared the results by the end of April and pushed internally for the feedback to be taken serious. Some of the changes were implemented but many others were left for a future project to push forward. And Nextcloud will.

  • Nextcloud is replacing ownCloud

    So today is the day: we announce that we’re forking ownCloud. We includes project founder Frank and the core ownCloud contributors who publicly quit ownCloud, Inc. over the last weeks – Lukas, Arthur, Morris, Bjoern, Jan-Christoph and quite a few others as well who can’t talk about that yet. As of now, 9 of the 10 top contributors to ownCloud core are joining and of course, we’re very busy hiring and aim to leave no (wo)man behind.

  • OwnCloud Has Been Forked By Former Developers, Founder
  • Coreboot Gains A Hybrid Graphics Driver For Lenovo ThinkPads

    Landing in Coreboot Git this week is a “hybrid graphics driver” that benefits seemingly all Lenovo laptops (except the mux-less models) with dual GPUs.

    This hybrid graphics driver in the Coreboot realm simply allows connecting the display panel to either the integrated GPU or discrete graphics processor. This hybrid driver basically comes down to setting the GPIO pins for the panel LVDS signal so you can route the display to whichever GPU you want from Coreboot.

  • How will open source AI change the tech industry?

    After years in the labs, artificial intelligence (AI) is being unleashed at last. Google, Microsoft and Facebook have all made their own AI APIs open source in recent months, while IBM has opened Watson (pictured above) for business and Amazon has purchased AI startup Orbeus. These announcements have not drawn much media attention, but are hugely significant.

    “In the long run, I think we will evolve in computing from a mobile-first world to an AI-first world,” says Google CEO Sundar Pichai. What does the appearance of AI bots and machine learning on the open market mean for business, IT, big data, and for sellers of physical hardware?

  • Events

    • The Future of Open Source

      Last week in New York, the venture firm Accel held a ninety minute lunch for an audience of financial analysts and equity professionals, a reporter or two and at least a few industry analysts. The ostensible subject for the event was Accel’s Open Adoption Software (OAS) model, but the wider focus was what the future held for open source in general. Accel’s view on this subject, as well as that of the panelists at the event from Cloudera, Cockroach Labs and Sysdig, was that open source essentially has gone mainstream. As Jake Flomenberg, an Accel partner put it, “There is a massive shift going on in the ways technology is bought. Open source has gone from the exception to the rule.”

  • SaaS/Back End

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • LibreOffice 5.2 Beta Now Available as a Flatpak for Common Linux Distributions

      The upcoming LibreOffice 5.2 open-source and cross-platform office suite has entered Beta stages of development, and a first Beta release is now available for download on supported platforms.

    • LibreOffice Is Now One Of The First Major Linux Desktop Apps With A Flatpak
    • LibreOffice Flatpak’d, Linux Misconceptions, Windows 10 or Else

      Today in Linux news Stephan Bergmann announced LibreOffice’s availability in a Flatpak bundle, bringing convenience and security to distributors. In other news, Microsoft has begun practically forcing Windows 10 upgrades upon their loyal customers while Samsung has advised its customers against upgrading. Martin Gräßlin announced virtual framebuffer support for KWayland and Bertel King, Jr. dispelled some common Linux misconceptions.

    • LibreOffice 5.2 Beta Flatpak

      Flatpak (formerly known under its working title “xdg-app”) is a cool new way of distributing images of Linux applications that run on a wide range of different distros, and run there in a secure way. I have blogged and spoken about making LibreOffice available in this format before in various places (see, e.g., these two previous blog posts and this conference talk).

  • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • BSD

    • Why I Run OpenBSD

      This post is about my journey down the OS rabbit hole and how it landed me in OpenBSD land as a happy and productive user.

      It contains information that is highly opinionated, wildly inaccurate, mostly speculation. It is, after all, on the internet!

    • bsdtalk265 – Sunset on BSD

      A brief description of playing around with SunOS 4.1.4, which was the last version of SunOS to be based on BSD.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Is GIMP the best open source alternative to Photoshop?

      It will be eighteen years this weekend since GIMP, the GNU Image Manipulation Program, hit version 1.0 on June 5, 1996, and over twenty since the open source project first became generally available to the public. In that time, it has come a long way in both the expansion of features and in usability, and for many users across Linux, Windows, and Mac machines alike it has become their preferred image editor.

      But is GIMP really a full replacement for Photoshop? It probably depends on both what you need it for, and how rigid you are in your workflow. In many educational programs, designers and artists are often taught a single proprietary option from day one of their training; they aren’t taught design so much as how to use a specific application. Industry completes the cycle by advertising job requirements around a specific tool, and building a whole design workflow around it, making it harder to break in with an open source alternative.

  • Public Services/Government

    • European Parliament continues to promote open source

      The European Parliament continues to emphasise the importance of free and open source software. In resolutions adopted in March and April, on ‘a thriving data-driven economy’ and on ‘gender equality and empowering women in the digital age’ respectively, the EC stresses there is a role for free and open source software.

    • ‘Open source values match municipal public services’

      The values ​​of free and open source software closely match those of municipal public service, says Nicolas Vivant the CIO of the French town of Fontaine, a suburb of Grenoble. Virtues include working with the community, in the public interest, openness and fair pricing, according to the IT director. “The economic benefits are a beneficial side effect,” he says.

    • Fontaine Walks The Talk

      Yet another example of a local government gradually adopting FLOSS on servers and desktops, Fontaine, France, took a decade, saving a bundle and taking full control of their IT. That’s the right way to do IT, GNU/Linux and FLOSS everywhere.

    • Majority of companies in Galicia use open source

      The majority of companies in Galicia, one of Spain’s autonomous regions, uses free and open source software solutions, reports Osimga, the region’s observatory for information society and modernisation. To overcome the remaining barriers, the agency recommends that the government continues to promote the use of this type of software – combining workshops, trainings and advise. The government should also increase its own use of such solutions.

    • FLOSS, Naturally
    • Estonian town of Koigi latest to switch to Delta

      The village of Koigi (Estonia) will start to use Delta, the document management system made available as open source software by the country’s Ministry of the Interior. The village is the most-recent public administration to switch to the open source DMS.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Transforming food service in Singapore with an open culture model

      Darwin Gosal is a visionary technopreneur in Singapore who believes in societal value creation. His company, CryoWerx, developed a smart fridge that allows users to conveniently purchase fresh food. Gosal says the company contributes to open source software projects as part of its work.

      To flatten its structure and maintain agility as it grows, CryoWerx has adopted holacracy as its approach to management. I chatted with Gosal about the impact this had on CryoWerx’s organizational dynamics.

    • Open Access/Content

      • E.U. Pushes for Open Access by 2020

        Europe is adopting a bold new roadmap toward open science: make all publications open access by 2020. Though the goal is ambitious, some European science ministers and open-access advocates are hailing the move as revolutionary. The proclamation came out of a two-day meeting of the Competitiveness Council, which comprises European business, science, and trade leaders, in Brussels. The effort has been spearheaded by the Dutch government, which holds the rotating EU presidency at the moment. “We probably don’t realize it yet, but what the Dutch presidency has achieved is just unique and huge, European science chief Carlos Moedas said during a press conference last week. “The commission is totally committed to help move this forward.”

    • Open Hardware/Modding

      • MIT researchers develop xPrint, an open-source modular bio and smart material ready printer

        Shortly after becoming interested in filament based 3D printing someone mentioned to me the similarity between pen-plotters from the 1980s. While I am a product of that decade, this plotting technology – which ultimately became obsolete thanks to laser and bubblejet printers – was initially foreign but ultimately an appropriate comparison upon brief investigation.

  • Programming/Development

    • Van Rossum promises Python 3.6 will move to GitHub

      With the planned Python 3.6 release, the popular scripting language is due for improvements in readability and cryptography. Also on the agenda: Moving the project to GitHub to help contributors participate in the language’s development.

      Code freeze for version 3.6 happens in September with the final release set for Christmastime, said Python founder Guido van Rossum at the PyCon 2016 conference in Portland this week. Version 3.6 currently is an alpha stage of development.

Leftovers

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Putting Free Speech out to Pasture: Cartoonist Lost His Job for Poking Fun at Monsanto

      Hard experience teaches that biotech companies, chemical corporations, and other agribusiness giants have no sense of respect for Mother Nature. Now, Rick Friday has learned they have no sense of humor either.

      Friday, a lifelong Iowa farmer, also happens to be a talented, self-taught cartoonist. For 21 years, he supplemented his cattle-raising income by drawing cartoons each week in an Iowa publication called Farm News.

    • Darjeeling Goes Digital

      For more than a century, buyers and sellers shouted out orders for Darjeeling tea at auctions in India before they were shipped to high-end purveyors in Europe, Japan and the U.S.

      Now, the prized black tea is poised to enter the digital age, with Darjeeling trade moving online from June. India harvested 1.19 billion kilograms of leaves in 2015—and less than 1 percent of that was Darjeeling, which is only grown in selected areas, similar to the rules on famed French wines.

  • Security

    • LibreSSL 2.4 Released
    • Security advisories for Thursday
    • Hertz: Abusing privileged and unprivileged Linux containers
    • How LinkedIn’s password sloppiness hurts us all

      Me: “The full dump from the 2012 LinkedIn breach just dropped, so you’re probably not going to see much of me over the next week.”

      Wife: “Again?”

      Yes, again. If you’re just waking up from a coma you would be forgiven for thinking that it’s still 2012. But no, it’s 2016 and the LinkedIn breach is back from the dead—on its four-year anniversary, no less. If you had a LinkedIn account in 2012, there’s a 98 percent chance your password has been cracked.

      Back in 2012, fellow professional password cracker d3ad0ne (who regretfully passed away in 2013) and I made short work out of the first LinkedIn password dump, cracking more than 90 percent of the 6.4 million password hashes in just under one week. Following that effort, I did a short write-up ironically titled The Final Word on the LinkedIn Leak.

    • The Internet of Things

      A common question is whether or not IoT is something new and revolutionary or a buzzword for old ideas? The answer is “yes”…

      Much of the foundation of IoT has been around for quite a while. SCADA systems, or Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition has been around since the 1950’s managing electrical power grids, railroads, and factories. Machine communications over telephone lines and microwave links has been around since the 1960’s. Machine control systems, starting on mainframes and minicomputers, have also been around since the 1960’s.

      The big changes are economics, software, and integration. Microsensors and SoC (System on a Chip) technology for CPUs and networking are driving the cost of devices down – in some cases by a factor of a thousand! Advances in networking – both networking technology as well as the availability of pervasive networking – are changing the ground rules and economics for machine to machine communication.

    • Signal and Google Cloud Services

      I just installed Signal on my Android phone.

      It wasn’t an easy decision. I have been running Cyanogenmod, a Google-free version of Android, and installing apps from F-Droid, a repository of free software android apps, for several years now. This setup allows me to run all the applications I need without Google accessing any of my cell phone data. It has been a remarkably successful experiment leaving me with all the phone software I need. And it’s consistent with my belief that Google’s size, reach and goals are a menace to the left’s ability to develop the autonomous communications systems on the Internet that we need to achieve any meaningful political change.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Launch Nuclear Attack? Insert Disk Seven

      It turns out the DoD systems dedicated to the operational functions of U.S. nuclear forces run on computers that still rely on eight-inch floppy disks. In fact, an IBM Series/1 computer provides the technological brainpower behind this infrastructure. That computer debuted in 1976.

    • DOD, NSA Enter A New World Order: U.S. Is Now Dependent On Foreign Companies For Its Most Sensitive Electronics

      Washington legislators have re-awakened to concerns over the Defense Department’s inability to plan for and deal with what is now the final stage in the shift of American microelectronics production offshore. Congress wants the Pentagon to figure out how it is going to deal with issues associated with purchasing “trusted” electronics for military weapons and national security surveillance systems from foreign and foreign-owned producers.

    • Police monitored Brussels terror suspect’s home months before bombings: media report

      Belgian police began monitoring terror suspect Mohamed Abrini months before he is alleged to have helped carry out the Brussels terror attacks, newspaper Le Parisien reported Wednesday.

      Federal police started investigating Abrini on July 13 last year and his home would have been under camera surveillance due to fears he was radicalized and on his way to Syria, according to the newspaper.

    • UCLA murder-suicide shooting leaves two dead on campus

      Shooter opened fire in engineering building, triggering a campus lockdown and citywide tactical alert by police who responded with helicopters and Swat teams

    • An End to Impunity for Dictators—and Their Backers—Makes the World Safer

      It was a bad week for dictators, and a good one for international justice. Two brutal, U.S.-backed dictators who ruled decades ago were convicted for crimes they committed while in power. Hissene Habre took control of the northern African nation of Chad in 1982, and unleashed a reign of terror against his own people, killing at least 40,000 of them, until he was deposed in 1990. Reynaldo Bignone was a general in the Argentinian military, and was the last dictator of the military junta that ruled that country from 1976 to 1983, the period known as “The Dirty War,” when an estimated 30,000 dissidents were “disappeared,” i.e., killed. Both men will most likely spend the rest of their lives in prison. These verdicts won’t bring back the tens of thousands they tortured and killed, but, hopefully, they will hasten the end of the modern era of impunity for human-rights abusers and their allies.

    • David French and the Cult of the Soldier

      The larger point, however, is that it is not only politicians who deserve scorn and backlash. We needn’t wait for a person with dreadful opinions to win power before expressing horror that they are even considering trying to gain it. The empire’s most ardent fans are not clean, simply because they haven’t signed any drone strike orders personally. Kristol’s first dream of an anti-Trump ticket was Dick Cheney and Tom Cotton, which literally could not be more social conservative and hawkish. So if someone comes Kristol-endorsed, run the other way.

    • The Fanatic and the Opportunist

      Wayne LaPierre is the executive vice president of the NRA and Chris Cox is its executive director for Legislative Action. LaPierre and Cox are typical of NRA stalwarts and we can see them as representative of a good percentage of the organization’s members. On 20 May 2016 both men gave speeches before the NRA convention in Kentucky announcing the association’s endorsement of Donald Trump for president. In his speech Cox spent a lot of time painting a picture of the United States as a place about to lose its “freedoms” if Hillary Clinton gets elected. Here is how he put it: the present political environment in the U.S. is mired in “dishonesty, corruption and contempt for everyday Americans” and the only thing that stands between those “everyday Americans” and “the end of individual freedom in this country” are “gun owners,” who must turn out to vote “in droves this fall.”

      Wayne LaPierre painted a similar crisis picture, again emphasizing that it is only the country’s gun owners who stand in the way of catastrophe. Here is how he put it: “We in this room, we are America’s best hope, and this is our moment. In all of history, there’s always been a time and a place when patriots stand up and rise up against the decree of the elites and shout, ‘No more! Get your hands off my freedom!’… That time and place is now. … The revolution to take America back starts here.”

      Hillary Clinton was characterized as a “corrupt politician” whose “policies and Supreme Court picks would destroy individual freedoms, and therefore destroy the America we all love.” According to Cox, Clinton’s vision of the U.S. is a place “where only law enforcement has guns and everything is free: free meals, free health care, free education.” It seems Cox has a real distaste for free access to anything that does not have lethal potential. He likens a society that provides no-cost availability to the items he lists to a prison.

    • Susan Rice: Too Many Smart White Guys on National Security Team Putting America at Risk

      Actual Black Person and National Security Advisor Susan Rice told graduates at Florida International University in a commencement speech a week or three ago that the presence of too many “white, male, and Yale” personnel in America’s national security agencies she helps staff and run is posing a threat to the very security of the United States.

    • What music are British special forces playing at ISIS to freak them out?

      British special forces troops are “freaking out” Islamic State fighters by blasting Bollywood music at them.

      The psychological warfare strategy is aimed at discrediting the extremists who claim the music is “apostasy” or un-Islamic.

      They came up with the idea after a Pakistani-born army intelligence officer with the British Army told troops Bollywood tunes would annoy ISIS.

      Bollwyood tunes are often referred to as Hindi film songs as they come from northern India and are also followed in neighbouring Pakistan.

      Ultra-conservative parts of predominantly Muslim Pakistan have banned it for being frivolous and un-religious.

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

    • Hillary on the Ropes

      Late last week, the inspector general of the State Department completed a yearlong investigation into the use by Hillary Clinton of a private email server for all of her official government email as secretary of state. The investigation was launched when information technology officials at the State Department under Secretary of State John Kerry learned that Clinton paid an aide to migrate her public and secret State Department email streams away from their secured government venues and onto her own, non-secure server, which was stored in her home.

      The migration of the secret email stream most likely constituted the crime of espionage – the failure to secure and preserve the secrecy of confidential, secret or top-secret materials.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Horse Racing’s Shame — And Ours

      One horse was already dead as Pramedya saddled up for the fourth undercard race of the 2016 Preakness Stakes, an annual Triple Crown race held in Baltimore. Unlike Homeboykris, who died of apparent heart failure after winning the first contest of the day, she wouldn’t even reach the finish line.

    • ‘Illegitimate’ Request Denied: GOP Gets Middle Finger for #ExxonKnew Ploy

      Environmental groups that have become targets of a Republican-led effort to insulate ExxonMobil against accusations of fraud and climate science suppression dug in a bit deeper on Wednesday by refusing to submit to a Congressional inquiry on the matter.

      As Common Dreams previously reported, House Republicans with the Committee on Space, Science and Technology sent a letter (pdf) on May 18th to 17 attorneys general and eight environmental organizations—including 350.org, Greenpeace, and the Union of Concerned Scientists—claiming their #ExxonKnew effort amounted to a violation of climate deniers’ First Amendment rights and demanding that they submit communications related to state investigations into Exxon Mobil.

    • They spy on us because they recognise our power, and fear it

      The climate movement has learnt from the Spy Cops scandal; we won’t let it stop us.

    • Led By Solar And Wind, Renewable Energy Grew Like Never Before Last Year

      The world added more renewable energy capacity than ever before last year, despite tumbling prices for fossil fuels, a new report has found.

      An estimated 147 gigawatts of renewable capacity was added in 2015, the largest annual increase ever, the Renewable Energy Policy Network for the 21st Century (REN21) said in its most recent report, unveiled Tuesday. For perspective, one gigawatt is enough energy to power Walt Disney World for nearly 17 days.

    • The Trial of Heather Doyle: Md. County Drops the Hammer on Anti-LNG Activist

      Anne Meador: Cove Point LNG isn’t just a huge profit-generator for one corporation. It will have enormous ramifications for the gas industry in the Marcellus Shale. Even though the gas reserves in the Marcellus have been overestimated, probably purposefully, the gas fracked in Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia is like a cork ready to pop. Frackers need to get their product to markets where they can get the best price, and that means international markets. The situation has changed since prices plummeted, but it will come back. Dominion Cove Point is the linchpin, the exit point best situated geographically for all this fracked gas to get out of the country where it can make billions in profit for these companies. A lot rides on it.

      And of course for those people opposed to all the terrible effects of fracking — earthquakes, ruined health, poisoned wells and aquifers — and to all the buildout that comes from fracking — pipelines, compressor stations and gas storage — there is a lot riding on Cove Point too. Stop Cove Point, and you can cut off the profit incentive for a lot of fracking and gas infrastructure.

  • Finance

    • Verizon Unions Deliver For American Middle Class

      Verizon is an extremely profitable company. But even with massive, astonishing profits the company was demanding that its workers provide givebacks, allow employees to be separated from families for months at a time and on top of that allow the company to send more and more call center jobs out of the country. The workers are lucky enough to have unions to fight this – The Communications Workers of America (CWA) and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW). They voted to strike, it was a long, hard struggle, and in the end they won.

    • Thinking He Owed $25,000, A Man Spent 5 Months In Rikers. He Only Owed $2.

      Unable to pay $25,000 to bail himself out, a Queens resident languished in New York City’s notoriously overcrowded and abusive Rikers Island jail for approximately five months. According to court documents, he should’ve only paid $2 for bail and been released after one week.

      Aitabdel Salem, an immigrant from Algeria, was detained in November 2014 for fighting a cop who arrested him for theft at a clothing store. He was locked away at Rikers because he was unable to pay the $25,000 bail amount. After his first week behind bars, however, prosecutors on the case were unable to indict him and he no longer owed thousands of dollars. To be released, Salem only had to chalk up two, $1 bail payments for unrelated mischief and tampering charges.

    • “Network” 40 Years Later: Capitalism in Retrospect and Prospect and Elite Politics Today

      It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today!

    • We took a stand against corporate power

      The strike by 39,000 Verizon workers–members of the Communications Workers of America (CWA) and International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW)–ended after 45 days with a tentative agreement announced late last week. Only partial details are available as union members prepare for a ratification vote. But strikers believe they’ve won a victory on balance–one made all the more significant by Verizon’s pre-walkout arrogance in its demand for drastic concessions, and also by the widespread support for the strike that clearly put pressure on the company to fold on key demands.

    • Union Membership Is Declining, and More
    • Dodgin’ Donald’s Hiding Something in Those Unreleased Tax Returns

      Donald Trump scorns traditional presidential candidate standards. The Donald doesn’t do what’s expected. And he certainly doesn’t do what he tells other candidates they must do.

      If Donald doesn’t feel like debating, he stiffs his opponents and grabs attention doing something different. If he finally realizes there’s no way to force Mexico to pay for that “big, beautiful wall” he promised ad nauseam, he converts it to a virtual barrier, a mere video-game blockade.

      And when he pledges to release his tax returns, then changes his mind, he simply comes up with an excuse not to do it. That’s Dodgin’ Donald. Donald Trump is a rich guy, a billionaire 10 times over, or so he claims. And rich guys in America don’t follow the rules that working guys must. In fact, fat cats like Donald celebrate breaking the rules. And that’s why he won’t release his income tax returns. What Dodgin’ Donald doesn’t want workers to find out from those forms is that while they paid the IRS every week, he paid nothing. Or next to nothing.

    • It’s Official: US International Trade Commission Predicts Negligible Economic Benefits From TPP

      Techdirt has written hundreds of stories about TPP over the years. So many of those have revealed troubling aspects of the deal that it’s hard to single out the worst. But there can be no doubt that one of the most extraordinary facts is that the US and the other TPP nations were negotiating for eight years the biggest so-called trade deal in history with only the sketchiest idea about its likely benefits. Instead, politicians and supporters simply assured the public that it would all be great, honest. And yet when the rigorous econometric studies began to appear, they consistently showed that TPP would produce almost no benefits whatsoever.

      Upon hearing that a planned course of action designed to bring financial gains would do nothing of the kind, most rational people in ordinary life would try something else. But not the politicians and TPP negotiators, who carried on despite these clear signs that TPP was simply not worth the effort. They either ignored these studies completely, or at most said that the only reliable predictions worth considering were the official ones, which would come from the US International Trade Commission (USITC) once TPP’s text had been finalised.

    • Jeremy Corbyn and Labour comes out against TTIP

      Today Jeremy Corbyn announced that the Labour Party will oppose the EU-US trade deal TTIP “in it’s current form” at a rally in central London.

    • TTIP and the NHS

      The proposed EU-US trade deal known as TTIP might have implications for public services, but EU officials want to include wording designed to keep governments free to run services like the NHS. This should stop the NHS from having to be opened up to US companies, although it may still mean that undoing NHS privatisation in future is more expensive. That would depend on what an international court makes of the agreement, which is still being negotiated.

    • Western Financial System Looting Greece
    • How the Big Banks Can Be Beaten

      One of these loopholes lets private equity and hedge fund managers pay a 20 percent capital gains rate on the bulk of their income — just half of the nearly 40 percent top rate the wealthiest Americans normally owe. As a result, billionaire financiers pay a lower tax rate than millions of our country’s teachers, firefighters, and nurses.

    • Uber’s Drive-By Politics

      Until earlier this month, Karl G. was an avid driver for Uber and Lyft in Austin. After the companies failed to leverage popular support against a new law requiring their drivers to pass fingerprint-based background checks in a vote on May 7th, they followed through on their promises and ceased operations in the city, claiming the requirement was too onerous. That left Karl and roughly 10,000 drivers upended. “It wasn’t necessary,” he said.

      But for the global e-hail companies, an exit was, clearly, necessary. The companies have argued that fingerprinting-based background checks are flawed, time-consuming, and antithetical to their business model: scaling massively requires an aggressive minimization of on-boarding costs, including time, to ensure access to the largest possible pool of drivers.

    • What Uber’s Massive New Investment Really Means
    • Now that’s surge pricing: Saudi Arabia invests $3.5bn in Uber
    • Saudi Arabia just invested a historic amount of cash in Uber

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • The Lazy Pundit’s Guide to Which Candidate’s Lies You Shouldn’t Care About

      The Donald Trump portion of the column mainly illustrates the laziness of a wealthy pundit looking forward to beach season. Friedman explains to Trump why “we can’t carpet-bomb the terrorists without killing all the civilians around them”—forgetting, or not caring, that carpet-bombing terrorists was Ted Cruz’s line, not Trump’s.

      He demands an explanation from Trump: “On Mexico, please tell me why it would pay for a multibillion-dollar wall on our border and how we would compel our neighbor to do so.” Trump has been claiming since last year, at least, that he could force Mexico to pay for the wall by blocking immigrant workers from sending home money—but Friedman seems not to have heard about it.

    • In California, Hillary Clinton’s Strategy Depends on Black Voters

      The mall on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard is in the heart of Los Angeles’ African-American community. Its most influential leaders were at a rally there on Saturday to stir up support for Hillary Clinton in the June 7 California presidential primary. But their task extended far beyond Los Angeles, to the suburbs east of the city, now home to thousands of black families.

      “We have to go to San Bernardino, to Riverside, to Perris,” Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters told the several dozen men and women in front of the Clinton campaign’s South Los Angeles headquarters. The communities she mentioned are part of the vast area known as the Inland Empire. “Many folks have moved out,” she said. “They’re not connected. We’re going to connect them.”

      Motivating turnout for Clinton to defeat Sen. Bernie Sanders in the primary is the challenge Waters faces. At 76, she is on the campaign trail, where she has been since the mid-’70s when she was elected to the California State Assembly. She has represented her South L.A. district in the House since 1991. In that long tenure, she has become Los Angeles’ most influential African-American political leader with a network of allies that extends throughout the state and nation.

    • Former Bill Clinton Adviser Thinks Hillary Won’t Be the Democratic Nominee

      He then goes on to say that at the Democratic National Convention, Sanders will most likely introduce a rule change “requiring superdelegates to vote for the candidate who won their state’s primary or caucus.” This too, he argues, would hurt Clinton’s chances.

      He also covers the new polling numbers that show Sanders as a stronger competitor against Trump than Clinton, and he brings up the mounting legal issues Clinton faces. He ends by pondering potential new nominations. “John Kerry, the 2004 nominee, is one possibility. But the most likely scenario is that Vice President Joe Biden—who has said that he regrets ‘every day’ his decision not to run—enters the race.”

    • Clinton Might Not Be the Nominee

      There is now more than a theoretical chance that Hillary Clinton may not be the Democratic nominee for president.

    • Green Party’s Jill Stein on the Feminist Case Against Hillary Clinton

      Hillary Clinton’s plan to win the White House relies heavily on winning the support of women voters. And she shouldn’t have much problem doing that: Not only does she have the endorsements of many marquee women’s organizations — EMILY’s List, NOW and Planned Parenthood, for example — she’ll likely face Donald Trump, a candidate who is despised by women at historic rates. (A recent poll found seven out of ten women voters have unfavorable views of him.)

    • Jill Stein Believes the Green Party Is Better for Women Than a Hillary Clinton Presidency

      A piece by Tessa Stuart published last week by Rolling Stone explains how the Green Party’s platform is better for women in many (perhaps unexpected) ways.

    • ‘Victory for Voting Rights’: Illinois Poised to Pass Automatic Voter Registration

      In a development heralded as a win for democracy, Illinois lawmakers on Tuesday passed legislation to enact automatic voter registration.

      It marks “a landmark victory for voting rights,” according to the Brennan Center for Justice’s Jonathan Brater, who adds that the move “in the nation’s fifth most populous state is a big deal in a year when the media spotlight is focused on new burdens voters will face at the polls in 2016.”

    • Donald Trump Actually Does Not Know What Brexit Is

      In an interview with the Hollywood Reporter published Wednesday morning, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump appeared to be flummoxed by a question about the United Kingdom’s upcoming vote on a potential split from the European Union.

      The Reporter’s Michael Wolff asked Trump about Brexit, the shorthand term referring to the UK leaving the European Union, but the candidate had no idea what that was.

    • Sanders Urges ‘Revolutionaries’ to Join Him as California Democratic Primary Vote Nears

      Bernie Sanders and his California supporters not only expect to win big in next Tuesday’s primary, but say Democrats will not pick their nominee until July’s national convention.

    • AUDIO: Robert Scheer Speaks With Nomi Prins About the Connection Between Washington and Wall Street

      In this week’s “Scheer Intelligence”—the Truthdig editor-in-chief’s podcast on KCRW—author, journalist and former investment banker Nomi Prins explains the culture of Wall Street and its influence on government.

      Prins worked as a managing director at Bear Stearns and Goldman Sachs for several years before leaving the financial sector around the time of the Enron crisis to become one of its sharpest critics. She has written several books about the relationship between Washington and Wall Street, including “All the Presidents’ Bankers: The Hidden Alliances that Drive American Power” and “Other Peoples’ Money: The Corporate Mugging of America.”

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Dreams of Control: Israel, Global Censorship, and the Internet

      While Israel’s central justification for its often reactionary policies is couched in hyper-exceptionalist rhetoric, current interest in censoring the Internet is far from exceptional.

      Like a machine of justification against its critics and its enemies, Israel enlists various projects under the banner of the remarkable and precious, when it is simply accomplishing what other states have done before or since: the banal and ordinary. All states want to limit expression, control criticism and marginalise the sceptics. Some do it more savagely, and roughly, than others.

    • Shahid Kapoor on Udta Punjab’s censorship issues: It’s time we allowed content that the audience wants to see

      Having lived with and survived the reputation of a ‘limited actor’, Shahid Kapoor has come a very long way. The actor is matured and evolved; well, his recent choice of films is a big testimony to that. And his next, ‘Udta Punjab’ is no exception. The actor, who is ready to welcome fatherhood soon, chats with Timesofindia.com and bares his heart about his colourful, obnoxious character in the film, difficulties in becoming Tommy Singh, why he was scared to take up the role of a drug addict, controversies about the film and issues with censorship.

    • Periscope trolls to face ‘instant jury’

      Periscope is to put its users in charge of policing offensive comments with a crowd-sourced post moderation system.

      Comments flagged as inappropriate by one person will be instantly sent to others for review, and could result in a ban for the original poster.

      The Twitter-owned video streaming app said “people in a broadcast are best suited to determine what’s okay and what’s not”.

    • Free speech has met social media, with revolutionary results

      “IT’S confusing the public, it’s impoverishing political debate…the public are thoroughly fed up with it.” That was the verdict last week by the chairman of the UK’s Treasury Select Committee on the war being waged over the country’s European Union membership, which he says has become an “arms race of ever more lurid claims and counterclaims”.

      As in any war, the first casualty has been truth. Much dissembling of information has taken the form of “mathswash”, presenting vague estimates as firm predictions with nary a caveat or error bar in sight. Other claims are misleading but catchy – designed to spread faster than efforts to debunk them.

      The net result is that the UK’s forthcoming vote on “Brexit” probably won’t be decided on the basis of level-headed arguments, but by the cognitive shortcuts we turn to when we’re clueless about the right thing to do (see “Brexitology: What science says about the UK’s EU referendum“).

    • EFF fights to end prior restraint against MuckRock

      EFF on Wednesday asked a Washington state trial court to lift its order that forced the public records website MuckRock to take down documents one of its users had lawfully obtained.

      The motion EFF filed on behalf of MuckRock and its co-founder, Michael Morisy, argues that the court order requiring the site to de-publish these public records was an unconstitutional prior restraint.

    • ADL’s Challenge to Pro-Peace & Justice Groups

      On Monday morning NPR’s Tom Gjelten reported the Anti-Defamation League’s recent challenges interfacing with peace and justice groups in the aftermath of Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson and Black Lives Matter movement. According to Gjelten, the Anti-Defamation League arose in 1913 to “put an end forever to unfair and unjust discrimination against…any sect or body of citizens.” ADL stood alongside the NAACP to end discrimination against African Americans in the South, which was the focus of NPR’s story. The ADL’s new President, Jonathan Greenblatt, a former special assistant to President Obama, wants to rekindle the spirit of solidarity encapsulated in a photo he frequently shows of Dr. Martin Luther King, Robert F. Kennedy and the heads of the ADL and NAACP in a Rose Garden snapshot with LBJ just before the famous March on Washington.

    • BDS a Bigger Issue After Israel’s Rightward Shift

      40 years after the US formally criminalized the participation of US citizens in economic boycotts of the state of Israel, Americans remain strongly divided on the question of the BDS movement, which seeks to protest Israeli behavior in the occupied territories through boycotts, divestment, and sanctions.

      While there were some ad-hoc boycotts against Israel even in the years before its formal founding, including a 1945 Arab League call to boycott anything that might lead to the realization of the Zionist ambition, the BDS movement began growing in earnest around the 1967 war, and 1973 Yom Kippur War.

    • Nikki Sloane: Dark Erotica vs Corporate Censorship

      Nikki Sloane’s Latest Novel, Sordid, Has Been Banned By Corporate Giant Amazon.

    • ‘I Am Cait’ Removed From Nigerian Cable Network After Customers Revolt
    • Caitlyn Jenner’s Reality Show Pulled From The Air Across Africa
    • I Am Censored: Caitlyn Jenner yanked off the air in Africa
    • Motion Pictures with Chidumga: Should there be censorship on TV?
    • LGBT Censorship by South African Broadcaster Complicit in Nigerian Bigotry
    • Uganda’s Covert Censorship
    • South African minister supports decision
    • Motsoeneng defends #SABCcensorship
    • Motsoeneng: SA media ‘censors’ good news
    • SABC urges investors to come to 90% local content party
    • Icasa says parties are allowed to buy airtime with broadcasters
    • LETTER: Free speech cuts both ways, liberals

      I have no patience with many so-called liberals in the media in particular who, when it suits them, will denounce the SABC’s latest stunt, the speaker ruling opposition MPs out of order for making statements about the governing party and so on, but, in a politically correct witch-hunt, see no contradiction in shutting down free speech with unfair and intemperate racism accusations.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • You Don’t Need JavaScript for That!

      Tooltips are great for showing helpful information that isn’t necessary to a user’s experience. There are a few JavaScript plugins that give us this behavior, but if you don’t feel like adding that weight to your site, we can take care of it with plain ol’ CSS.

    • Study of 1 million sites shows just how closely we’re watched

      THE web is watching you. Chunks of code hide inside every website, tracking your online behaviour.

      Now, a pair of computer scientists have published their attempt to spy back. They audited 1 million of the most popular websites for tracking behaviours – more than anyone has looked at before. Their investigation gives new insight not only into what sites might know about you, but how they’re figuring it out.

      Studying a million websites is hard. To do it, Arvind Narayanan – who heads the Web Transparency and Accountability Project at Princeton University – built a tool called OpenWPM with graduate student Steven Englehardt. OpenWPM can visit and log in to websites automatically, taking more than a dozen measurements of each one. It took two weeks to crawl through the top million websites, as ranked by web traffic firm Alexa.

      Narayanan and Englehardt discovered that many trackers are sharing the information they gather with at least one other party, sometimes dozens of times. The audit also revealed several previously unknown “fingerprinting” techniques that sites are using. Here, the website asks the browser to perform a task that is hidden from the user. The site then fingerprints individual machines based on slight differences in their performance. Trackers used to do this by watching how the browser draws a graphic; now, they check what fonts are installed or how the browser processes audio. A couple of trackers even gathered the device’s battery level.

    • Prisoners’ code word caught by software that eavesdrops on calls

      SAY it out loud and the machines will know. Search engines are moving beyond the web and into the messy real world. And they’re finding some odd things.

      Every call into or out of US prisons is recorded. It can be important to know what’s being said, because some inmates use phones to conduct illegal business on the outside. But the recordings generate huge quantities of audio that are prohibitively expensive to monitor with human ears.

      To help, one jail in the Midwest recently used a machine-learning system developed by London firm Intelligent Voice to listen in on the thousands of hours of recordings generated every month.

    • ​The UK Is Using Bulk Interception to Catch Criminals—And Not Telling Them

      UK authorities are collecting and analysing data in bulk to identify suspected child exploitation offenders on the dark web, but are not informing defendants of how they were caught.

      The practice starkly highlights the UK government’s stance on not including intercept as evidence in court. This, according to Eric King, a surveillance expert and director of activist group Don’t Spy On Us, leaves suspects “totally in the dark.”

      “The right to a fair trial relies on the fact that material being used against the defendant is shown to them, so they can answer to it and explain it,” King said.

    • GCHQ ‘routinely’ intercepting MP emails

      Emails of members of the UK Parliament, as well as their peers, have been ‘routinely’ intercepted and accessed by the GCHQ intelligence agency, as well as the American National Security Agency (NSA), Computer Weekly discovered recently.

      GCHQ managed to intercept and read who’s sending an email, to whom and with which subject line, Computer Weekly said in a long and detailed post about the matter.

    • GCHQ and NSA routinely spy on UK politicians’ e-mails—report

      GCHQ and the NSA have reportedly been spying on e-mail exchanges between MPs and their constituents as a matter of course for the last few years.

      Documents released by spook whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013 revealed details of the top secret Tempora scheme, which allowed the British intelligence agency to intercept data travelling on backbone Internet cables crossing the Irish Sea and English Channel. Bulk storage of this data by the UK’s eavesdropping nerve centre GCHQ is allowed under current law.

      According to a Computer Weekly report, co-written by acclaimed investigative journalist Duncan Campbell, parliament’s switch to Microsoft e-mail cloud services (Office 365) in 2014 means that even UK-to-UK communications often travel via Redmond’s data centres in Ireland and the Netherlands. That’s the conclusion of a study carried out by the IT publication. It tracked the path of hundreds of MPs’ e-mails, and found that 65 percent of those messages were routed overseas.

    • Whistleblower Protections

      Former US Attorney General, Eric Holder, has softened his stance on the Edward Snowden case and has tacitly admitted there should at least be a public interest legal defence for intelligence whistleblowers.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • STOP BULLYING AMOS YEE: WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU S’POREANS – MUST EVERYONE LOVE & ADULATE LKY?

      His pleas went unheard as the crowd simply looked on. The person filming the video even said, “Just a regular day at Jurong Point” before sniggering.

    • This Egyptian Author’s Dystopian Novel Has Become Reality

      When Basma Abdel Aziz wrote her latest novel The Queue, Egypt had just experienced the first phase of a revolution that overthrew the three decade rule of dictator Hosni Mubarak and resulted in the first democratically elected president in Egypt’s modern history. The country was riding a wave of democratic euphoria, but where Egyptians saw prosperity, Abdel Aziz noticed that the country’s powerful military was still lurking in the background — exactly as it had during the Mubarak era.

    • The Evidence About Prostitution That The New York Times Ignored

      On May 5, Emily Bazelon, staff writer for The New York Times, published an article— “Should Prostitution be a Crime”—that had been months in the making. I know this because Bazelon interviewed me for it during an hour-long phone call and an exchange of more than 30 emails.

      What strikes me now is her reaction when I mentioned that the women in my movement often have to deal with journalists who come to the issue of prostitution with their biases intact and their objectivity fragmented.

      “I am not biased,” she snapped.

      “I am not suggesting you are,” I replied. It occurred to me, however, that she probably had a reason for being defensive, and, sure as night follows day, it turned out she did.

    • In Wake of Coup, Should Brazil’s Olympics Be Moved or Become a Site of Protest?

      In early August, more than 10,000 athletes across the world will convene in Rio de Janeiro’s Olympic City for one of the most widely watched sporting events of the year. This comes as Brazil is battling an economic recession, a massive Zika outbreak and its worst political crisis in over two decades. Protesters have vowed to flood the streets during the Olympics, using the global spotlight to highlight a raft of domestic grievances including threats to social services, police violence, forced displacement and the recent ouster of democratically elected President Dilma Rousseff. We speak to Dave Zirin, author of the book “Brazil’s Dance with the Devil: The World Cup, the Olympics, and the Fight for Democracy,” and Jules Boykoff, author of “Power Games: A Political History of the Olympics.”

    • DOJ Says Judge Can’t Order Its Lying Lawyers To Attend Ethics Classes

      Federal judge Andrew Hanen recently benchslapped the DOJ for lying about the central element in an ongoing lawsuit between twenty-six states and the US government over changes to immigration policies. The strongly-worded order (which, despite its accusations, never once used the word “lie”) chastised DOJ lawyers for hiding information about the processing of certain immigrants — something that happened over 100,000 times even as (a) the DOJ said no such processing would take place until February 2015, and (b) the states had obtained a temporary restraining order against this processing until the courts could sort it out.

    • Appeals Court Doubles Down On Dangerous Ruling: Says Website Can Be Blamed For Failing To Warn Of Rapists

      Back in late 2014, we wrote about a case where the somewhat horrifying details were likely leading to a bad result that would undermine Section 230 of the CDA (the most important law on the internet). Again, the details here are appalling. It involves two guys who would use other people’s accounts on a website called “Model Mayhem” to reach out to aspiring models, then lure them to their location in South Florida, drug them, and then film themselves having sex with the drugged women to then offer as online porn. Yes, absolutely everything about this is horrifying and disgusting. But here’s where the case went weird. A victim of this awful crime decided to sue the large company Internet Brands, who had purchased Model Mayhem, arguing that it knew about these creeps and had failed to warn users of the service. Internet Brands had argued that under Section 230 it was not liable and the appeals court said no. The case was then reheard en banc (with a large slate of 9th Circuit judges) and they’ve now, once again, said that Section 230 does not apply.

      This case has been a favorite of those looking to undermine Section 230, so those folks will be thrilled by the results, but for everyone who supports an open internet, we should be worried. The rule here is basically that sites are protected from being held liable of actions of their users… unless those users do something really horrible. Then things change. It’s further important to note that the two sick creeps who pulled off this scam, Lavont Flanders and Emerson Callum, weren’t actually members of the Model Mayhem site. They would just use the accounts of others to reach out to people, so the site had even less control.

    • The Dalai Lama says ‘too many’ refugees are going to Germany

      Speaking to German reporters in the de facto capital of Tibet’s exiled government, the Dalai Lama apparently said that “too many” refugees are seeking asylum in Europe.

      “Europe, for example Germany, cannot become an Arab country,” he said with a laugh, according to AFP, which quoted from an interview the spiritual leader gave to Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, a German newspaper. “Germany is Germany. There are so many that in practice it becomes difficult.”

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • AT&T Falsely Blames The FCC For Company’s Failure To Block Annoying Robocalls

      Caring about the customer in this way just isn’t in AT&T’s corporate DNA. Remember, this is a company in the last few years that has been fined for ripping off programs for low-income families, settled a lawsuit for helping scammers rip off IP relay services for the hearing impaired, and paid an $18 million settlement to the government after it was found to be making bills intentionally harder to understand to help crammers. This isn’t the kind of company to give a damn whether robocall blocking technology is blocking legitimate calls, unless there’s some undisclosed financial and marketing/robocall relationships at play that benefit AT&T.

    • Breaking Up Is Hard—Especially With Your Cable Company

      Over the last few years, the cost of cable has gone through the roof. As a result, people are looking for cable TV alternatives, and cord cutting is on the rise. But as with most relationships, the breakup isn’t as simple as saying “I’m done” and walking away.

      When you finally make up your mind that it’s time to end it, you have to get up the nerve to make the call (sorry, no texting Comcast). But don’t expect it to be a quick one.

      “I called them to cancel, and they transferred me to the retention department where I went in circles with the agent for 30 or so minutes,” Joseph Teegardin told Motherboard. And that seems to be the best case scenario, as others experience trouble even getting that far.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Trademarks

      • Caribou Coffee Learns That Even When You Win As A Trademark Bully, You Can Still Lose

        Whenever we talk about trademark bullies, especially those aggressively pursuing smaller businesses on shaky claims of brand confusion, a common question arises: what can we do to make this kind of thing stop? There are potentially several answers to this question, but one of the most simple is to behave in a way that makes trademark bullying a bad business decision.

        [...]

        So, the question is whether this trademark bullying was worth it for Caribou Coffee. We can dispense with any debate over the validity of the company’s legal action, I think. Pimping some kind of customer confusion between the massive retailer and a local coffee shop and diner is beyond silly. The company trotted out the tired excuse claiming that trademark law required them to do all of this, which isn’t true. So, in light of all that, and in light of what has been a pretty clear public backlash from the very people whom it claimed would be confused, was the bullying worth it for Caribou Coffee?

06.01.16

Links 1/6/2016: Wine-Staging 1.9.11, Unreal Engine 4.12

Posted in News Roundup at 6:02 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Now, draw sketches to search for images, videos!

    Researchers at the University of Basel in Switzerland have developed a system known as vitrivr, which allows a search for images and videos by means of a sketch.

  • Vitrivr is an open source engine that lets you search for videos with a sketch

    The vitrivr system is open source and freely available on GitHub.

  • This open source software dominates the web, but what is Apache?

    The importance of the web shouldn’t be underestimated, it has helped to open up the world, democratise information and is one of the greatest ever inventions.

    While it has had a profound influence on the world, the web is made up of numerous different elements, such as web server software.

    Apache, an open source software that is available for free, is the most widely used web server software and is developed and maintained by the Apache Software Foundation.

  • ownCloud Gets Its’ Own Foundation

    Contrary to the common trend of bringing an open-source project like ownCloud into an established model, like the Linux Foundation’s Collaborative Project approach, where the Cloud Foundry Foundation, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, node js foundation, OpenDayLight and so many other now live, ownCloud is building its own Foundation.

  • Hyperledger Work on Its Open-Source Footing

    Taking a bootstrapped initiative to a healthy open-source project is difficult. But when there’s only approximately 100 developers in the world that have a deep understanding of the technology, such as blockchain, the difficulty increases dramatically.

  • Events

    • LibrePlanet forever! Watch sessions from 2016 online

      That’s right, you can now watch the keynote conversation with NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and 32 more sessions from LibrePlanet 2016: Fork the System on the Free Software Foundation’s (FSF) GNU MediaGoblin instance, including:

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Open Source Speech Recognition

        I’m currently working on the Vaani project at Mozilla, and part of my work on that allows me to do some exploration around the topic of speech recognition and speech assistants. After looking at some of the commercial offerings available, I thought that if we were going to do some kind of add-on API, we’d be best off aping the Amazon Alexa skills JS API. Amazon Echo appears to be doing quite well and people have written a number of skills with their API. There isn’t really any alternative right now, but I actually happen to think their API is quite well thought out and concise, and maps well to the sort of data structures you need to do reliable speech recognition.

  • SaaS/Back End

    • Why open source will be critical to the future of SDDC

      OpenStack, the leading solution for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), is currently being used by various organizations for their own on-premises private cloud, for hybrid cloud deployments, or for offering public cloud services to their clients. Through Nova, the compute module of OpenStack, various other components can be controlled, such as networking, block and object storage, disk imaging, identity management, key management, DNS, and search, among others. The entire deployment can be managed using the Horizon dashboard software.

      While OpenStack, itself, does not attempt to emulate the API design of popular public cloud providers, compatibility layers are being developed that provide compatibility with Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, and Google Compute Engine.

    • The Rise of Deep Learning in the Tech Industry

      Tech analysts love trending topics. In fact, that’s their job: forecast and analyze trends. Some years ago we had “Big Data”, more recently “Machine Learning”, and now it s the time of “Deep Learning”. So let’s dive in and try to understand what‘s behind it and what impact it can have on our society.

  • Databases

    • The Limitations of NoSQL Database Storage: Why NoSQL’s Not Perfect

      NoSQL databases have emerged as a leading new data storage technology. But they’re not perfect. Here’s a look at the limitations and drawbacks of NoSQL storage.

      To be sure, NoSQL offers a lot of advantages over traditional data storage techniques. But NoSQL is not a uniformly better storage solution.

      SQL-style storage systems, like MySQL, come out ahead in some contexts. In others, there’s not yet any ideal storage platform.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • How to get started with LibreOffice

      If you use your Mac or PC for word processing, creating and editing spreadsheets or putting the finishing touches on a slideshow presentation, you need a suite of office applications that come with all the tools you need to create some impressive documents, and LibreOffice is one of the best options.

      The Microsoft Office suite is near ubiquitous, but even though Mac version of Office 2016 released last year, it’s still relatively expensive.

      While iWork has become free, it lacks some of the features that come with other office suites. LibreOffice, however, is not only completely free, but it’s constantly updated with improvements and new features, and contains a host of tools that you’d expect in an expensive software collection.

  • CMS

    • How to Select the Best Open Source CMS

      In this article, I’m going to get into minute detail with you on all of the major aspects of open source CMS and the things you should consider to make an informed decision. This is my “how to select the best open source CMS” guide.

      When it comes to selecting a CMS, there’s no doubt that the process of doing so is overwhelming (hey, it’s why this site exists!) but it doesn’t have to be.

  • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Gnuisance 4.0, Plasma Features, Augmented Reality

      gNewSense 4.0 was released at the beginning of May and today blogger DarkDuck said it’s still a gnuisance due to the lack of drivers. Elsewhere, LinuxConfig.org looked at the features of KDE Plasma and Linux Laptop leader System 76 CEO Carl Richell used Linux to augment reality. The Linux Setup interviewed Korora contributor Jim Dean and Matt Hartley sent another love-letter to Ubuntu.

    • gNewSense: past 5 years, same nuisance

      The documentation says the distribution name gNewSense came from Gnuisance, the RMS’s GPG key. Is it true? Or the whole system is just a g-nuisance? Let’s check.

  • Public Services/Government

    • North American Cities Slow to Adopt Open Source Software

      The move to open source is inevitable as open source communities of developers continue to work on 1000′s of applications & as more software development companies invest in open source models to allow for greater flexibility & lower end user prices than existing proprietary competitors. Europe has more than a decade head start on North American cities. The quality of available open source software has improved so much in that decade that the transition can be far easier for cities starting now.

    • Cities And FLOSS

      Obviously there are huge savings in licensing fees to be had by cities migrating to FLOSS solutions from the desktop OS to the servers. On the other hand there is time/money/effort required to make changes happen but these are mostly one-time costs. Cities in Europe have been adopting GNU/Linux and FLOSS steadily for more than a decade. It’s about time North American cities did the same.

  • Licensing/Legal

    • Announcing the Open Source License API

      Over the last 19 years, the Open Source
      Initiative (OSI) has been the steward of the Open Source Definition (or
      OSD), establishing a common language when discussing what it means to be an
      Open Source license [1], and a list of licenses which are known to be
      compatible with the OSD.

    • New API helps open-source developers ‘become license-aware’

      The Open Source Initiative (OSI), the steward of the Open Source Definition (OSD), announced today it has created a machine readable publication of OSI approved licenses.

      According to the organization, the API will allow third parties to “become license-aware”, giving businesses everywhere the means to determine if a license is open source or not.

      The Open Source Initiative considers this the next “logical step” and quite important, knowing all the copyright and license legal battles going on nowadays, and how expensive they can be.

      Open Source Lead at GitHub, Brandon Keepers offered, “A canonical, machine-readable source of license metadata is a great step towards enabling developers to build tools around open source licensing and compliance. We can’t wait to see what the community does with it”.

    • Oracle’s Lead Lawyer Against Google Vents That The Ruling ‘Killed’ The GPL

      Except, of course, tons of copyright experts predicted exactly this result (and many more argued that APIs should not be subject to copyright at all). Famed copyright scholar Pam Samuelson has been writing extensively about the case, focusing both on why APIs should not be covered by copyright (and, why basically every other court has agreed) as well as why, even if it is covered, it’s fair use. Hell, she even wrote a response to the Hurst piece, explaining why Hurst was wrong. It’s weird for Hurst to take a position that actually seems at odds with a huge number of copyright experts, and then state that none would take the position that many did.

      [...]

      Once again, this shows a rather unfortunate ignorance of how coding works. It’s not about a desire to “copy freely.” It’s about building amazing and innovative services, and making use of APIs to increase interoperability, which increases value. Copying an API structure is also just much more about making developers comfortable in using new environments. You know, like how Oracle copied SQL from IBM. Because lots of people understood SELECT-FROM-WHERE and it made little sense to create a relational database that didn’t use that structure. It’s not about copying freely. It’s about interoperability.

      And, really, the idea that an Oracle lawyer is “concerned” about the future of the GPL is fairly laughable. Thankfully, many people have weighed in in the comments — including plenty who are quite familiar with the GPL and software development to explain to Hurst why she’s wrong. Somehow, I think she has some fairly strong reasons to ignore those responses.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Munich Open Government Day, 27 October 2016

      On 27 October, the German City of Munich is organising the fourth edition of its annual Open Government Day. This year’s theme is ‘openness, participation and digitisation — impulses for a modern community’. The day provides an opportunity for discussion and exchange of experiences with Open Government.

    • Open Access/Content

      • New open source science journal launched by Consumer Wellness Center: the Natural Science Journal

        A new science journal that focuses on food and environmental science has just been launched by the non-profit Consumer Wellness Center. Called the “Natural Science Journal,” the new peer-reviewed journal focuses on independent science pursued by laboratories and scientists who have no financial ties to pharmaceutical companies, agribusiness giants or government funding sources.

      • Open access should be the norm for EU by 2020, say research ministers

        EU research ministers have published a commitment to make “open access to scientific publications as the option by default by 2020.” The decision was taken during a meeting of the Competitiveness Council, which is made up of ministers from the EU’s member states. In addition, ministers agreed “to the best possible reuse of research data as a way to accelerate the transition towards an open science system.”

        The formal “conclusions” of the meeting define open access to publications as “free availability on the public Internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers.” This is taken from the key Budapest Open Access Initiative that helped to define open access back in 2002—an indication of how slow progress has been so far.

      • Harvard and MIT teamed up for this open-source online education platform

        It’s often said that the internet makes it possible for anyone to get educated on any subject. But just as in offline modes of education, the many models of online teaching and learning are far from perfect, with plenty of room for improvement and innovation.

    • Open Hardware/Modding

      • The story of Ultimaker: 3D printers with open source DNA

        For those who have been immersed in a capitalist society, open source thinking can seem counterintuitive. For the last three decades wealth has been determined through ownership and property rights. Businesses have been valued and financed based on the patents they own and the applications of their intellectual property. But open source, a term originating from software code being open for other developers to use, has started to change the prevailing capitalist mentality. Innovation is essential to their survival, and companies are seeing open source thinking, like sharing and collaborating, as a methods towards that goal.

  • Programming/Development

    • PHP 5.3 Through PHP 7.1-dev Tests Along With HHVM On Ubuntu 16.04

      With preparing for the upcoming release of Phoronix Test Suite 6.4-Hasvik I’ve been running through my validation tests on all supported versions of PHP going back to PHP 5.3 as well as HHVM. As part of that testing, I’ve been running my self-hosted tests of the major PHP release series once again up through PHP 7.1-dev. Here are those results if you are curious about some fresh PHP CLI benchmarks.

      The results in this article are of PHP 5.3 through PHP 7.0.7 and PHP 7.1-dev (as of this morning in php-src Git) plus Facebook’s HHVM PHP implementation via the Ubuntu 16.04 package repository. I also tested PHP 7.0.4 as currently packaged in Ubuntu 16.04 compared to my freshly built 5.3.29 / 5.4.45 / 5.5.36 / 5.6.22 / 7.0.7 / 7.1.0-dev that are basically stock builds with ensuring ZIP / XML / JSON / PCNTL support is enabled. (Basically, part of what I do for each quarterly Phoronix Test Suite release to ensure compatibility and a good out-of-the-box experience going back still to PHP 5.3.)

    • HPE targets DevOps and agile with new application lifecycle management software

      The platform makes use of common toolsets and frameworks, such as Jenkins, GIT, and Gherkin, while also providing insights to developers and application testers. This could potentially help enterprises deliver those applications more quickly, without having to cut corners in the vetting process.

    • US computer-science classes churn out cut-n-paste slackers – and yes, that’s a bad thing

      Computer science (CS) students in the US aren’t being taught properly, and their classes are too limited in scope, says one IT think-tank.

      The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) says that its most recent study [PDF] of curriculum in the US has found that not enough schools are offering computer science classes, and those that do aren’t going in-depth enough.

      As a result, the ITIF says, many universities are failing to produce the diverse, well-trained graduates that companies seek to hire.

      “There is the possibility that interest in the field could again wane like it did in 2003 following the burst of the tech bubble,” ITIF warns.

      “To maintain the field’s current momentum, the perception of computer science needs to shift from its being considered a fringe, elective offering or a skills-based course designed to teach basic computer literacy or coding alone.”

      The report found that at the high school level, dedicated computer science classes are mostly limited to affluent schools, and when the courses are taught, girls and minority students are rarely enrolled.

    • LLVM Looks At Moving From SVN To Git Via GitHub

      While there have been Git mirrors available of LLVM and its sub-projects (including Clang) for some time, this open-source compiler infrastructure project has relied upon SVN as its cental development repository. The LLVM project is now looking at finally transitioning to Git for development and quite likely utilizing GitHub for hosting.

      GitHub anyone? was spawned today on the LLVM developer mailing list about shifting their development practices from SVN to Git. In particular, utilizing GitHub for hosting and potentially using other GitHub services for managing bug reports, pull requests, etc.

    • “Stop Designing Languages. Write Libraries Instead.”

      I had a friend tell me recently that all programming languages seem very similar to each other. They all have variables, and arrays, a few loop constructs, functions, and some arithmetic constructs. Sure, some languages have fancier features like first-class functions or coroutines, but he doesn’t consider himself an expert programmer anyway and doesn’t use those features.

      What really makes a programming language productive for him, he says, are the libraries it comes with. For example, he got into programming by using the popular Ruby on Rails web framework. There is no way that he could have written a full database-driven web stack by himself, nor is he interested in doing so. But thanks to Ruby on Rails, he doesn’t have to! So he said that he has no particular opinion about the Ruby programming language, but he absolutely loves Rails. The vast majority of programmers are non-experts, like himself, and the largest gains in productivity for non-experts come from having a wide spectrum of easy-to-use libraries. Subtle language features like first-class functions, and object systems, are lost on them because they don’t really use them anyway. Computer scientists should really be spending their time developing new libraries rather than inventing new programming languages.

    • Open Source Is the Secret Sauce of DevOps
    • The Symbiotic Relationship of DevOps and Open Source

      DevOps depends heavily on open source software, and–to a lesser extent–open source projects leverage DevOps as well.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • European Commission Eyes Update Of EU Standards-Setting Policy

      As standardisation increasingly takes place at the global level, Europe needs a speedier, more streamlined way to set the technical specifications that define requirements for products, production processes, services and test methods, the European Commission said today. As part of its single market strategy, the EC announced plans for a joint initiative on standardisation (JIS), guidance to boost the development of European standards, and an annual reporting system among EU institutions on how the standardisation policy is working and contributing to competitiveness, jobs and growth.

    • HSA 1.1 Brings Multi-Vendor Support & More

      The HSA Foundation today announced version 1.1 of the Heterogeneous System Architecture.

      Heterogeneous System Architecture 1.1 most notably brings multi-vendor architecture support for allowing IP blocks from different vendors to “communicate, interoperate and collectively compose an HSA system.”

Leftovers

  • Brexit referendum folly

    The consequences of the Brexit referendum are bad for both Europe and Britain, regardless of the result.

  • Science

    • Organic Farmers Are Not Anti-Science but Genetic Engineers Often Are

      At one of the public brainstorming sessions for the New York Organic Action Plan, an organic farmer made an impassioned plea for support for “independent science” and told us that with 8.5 billion mouths to feed by 2050, we will need genetic engineering to prevent starvation.

      I would like to examine these words carefully to decipher what they mean, how those words are used by this farmer and by others, and suggest how the movement for locally grown organic food in this country should respond.

  • Microsoft

    • Windows 10 Surface Book: Microsoft Keeps ‘Sleep of Death’ bug

      It seems like Microsoft will not be fixing the ‘Sleep of Death’ bug, even though most of the Surface Book users face the problem.

      During the recent quarterly earnings report, Microsoft pointed out that the Surface line is getting popularity in the market. Microsoft also said that it has turned out to be the growth leader in its More Personal Computing line of business.

      At the event, the company said that the device has brought 61 percent growth.

    • How The World Of IT Has Turned

      Now Samsung is telling owners not to install “10” because drivers don’t work. Samsung should suggest Debian GNU/Linux instead.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • WHO-Led Study: Hepatitis C Treatment Unaffordable Globally, Threatens Health Systems

      According to a new study by experts at the World Health Organization, prices of hepatitis C treatments are unaffordable globally and put a major strain on national health systems. Hepatitis C can cause liver cirrhosis and cancer, and with an estimated 80 million people affected in the world, if untreated, the sickness could lead to 700,000 deaths per year worldwide, the study said, suggesting that governments and industry stakeholders should develop and implement fair pricing frameworks.

    • The Unique Risks of GM Crops: Science Trumps PR, Fraud and Smear Campaigns

      The purpose of this piece is to draw readers’ attention to an important chapter from a document by Aruna Rodrigues that discusses the unique risks associated with GM crops. Contrary to what supporters of GM often claim, it shows that criticisms of this technology are based on credible concerns, sound logic and solid science.

      However, some background information and context might first be useful to indicate that, while critics rely on science, the pro-GMO lobby is mired in duplicity and engages in the debasement of science.

    • New and Old Vaccines Still Out of Reach for Many

      While long-awaited new vaccines for malaria and dengue may finally be within reach, many of the world’s existing vaccines have remained unreachable for many of the people who need them most.

      The recent outbreak of yellow fever in Angola shows how deadly infectious diseases can return when gaps in vaccination programs grow.

    • Big Pharma Hobbling Federal Efforts to Rein In Dangerous Opioids

      Even as a new study suggests opioid painkillers may in fact make chronic pain worse, Big Pharma continues to work against efforts to stem the national opioid crisis, according to reporting at The Intercept on Tuesday.

      The study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) showed that addictive opioids like morphine appear to paradoxically cause an increase in chronic pain in lab rats.

      Led by Colorado University-Boulder professors Peter Grace and Linda Watkins, the study showed that “just a few days of morphine treatment caused chronic pain that went on for several months by exacerbating the release of pain signals from specific immune cells in the spinal cord,” according to a news release. The results suggest that the recent escalation of opioid prescriptions in humans may be a contributor to chronic pain, as Grace noted.

    • Big Pharma in the Crosshairs: Senator Seeks Fed Investigation of OxyContin Long-Term Pain Relief Claims

      A U.S. senator has called for a federal investigation of Purdue Pharma, the manufacturer of OxyContin, in the wake of reports that the money-making pain reliever wears off early in many patients, leaving them exposed to pain and increased risk of addiction.

    • ‘GMO Crops Are Tools of a Chemical Agriculture System’

      Anti-Monsanto rallies in 400 cities in 48 countries around the world failed to draw much US media attention, despite hundreds of thousands of people, from Dhaka to Paris to Cape Town, literally yelling out their opposition to the biotech giant’s products and practices, and the disturbing impact of their increasing control over the food supply.

    • Industry Influence Clouds New GMO Report

      New National Research Council study trumpets the safety of GMOs, but how much confidence can we have in these findings given the many conflicts of interest involved?

    • Nonprofit Hospital Stops Suing So Many Poor Patients: Will Others Follow?

      A story by ProPublica and NPR and a Senate investigation prompt a Missouri nonprofit hospital to change its policies and forgive thousands of patients’ debts. But without similar scrutiny, it’s unclear if other hospitals that sue the poor will change.

  • Security

    • Doing a ‘full scan’ of the Internet right now

      I’m scanning at only 125kpps from 4 source IP addresses, or roughly 30kpps from each source address. This is so that I’ll get below many thresholds for IDSs, which trigger when they see fast scans from a single address. The issue isn’t to avoid detection, but to avoid generating work for people who get unnecessarily paranoid about the noise they see in their IDS logs.

    • A Hacker Is Selling Dangerous Windows Exploit, Making All Versions Of OS Hackable

      A hacker is selling a dangerous zero day vulnerability on a Russian cybercrime website. This exploit is said to be affecting more than 1.5 billion Windows users as it works on all version of Windows. The hacker wishes to sell the complete source code and demo of the exploit to any person who pays him $90,000 in bitcoin.

    • Microsoft warns of self-propagating ransomware

      The new ransomware, which Microsoft has dubbed Ransom:Win32/ZCryptor.A, is distributed through spam emails. It can also infect a machine running Windows through a malware installer or fake installers like a Flash player setup file.

      The ransomware would run at boot and drop a file autorun.inf in removable drives, a zycrypt.lnk in the start-up folder and a copy of itself as {Drive}:\system.exe and %APPDATA%\zcrypt.exe.

      It would then change the file attributes to hide itself from the user in file explorer.

    • Allwinner Leaves Root Exploit in Linux Kernel, Putting ARM Devices at Risk

      Running a Bitcoin node on your ARM single board computer? Fan of cheap Chinese tablets and smartphones? Maybe you contributed to the recent CHIP computer Kickstarter, or host a wallet on one of these devices. Well, if any of these applies to you, and your device is powered by an Allwinner SoC, you should probably wipe it and put an OS on it with the most recent kernel release. Why? Allwinner left a development “tool” on their ARM Linux kernel that allows anyone to root their devices with a single command. This oversight has serious security implications for any Allwinner powered device, especially so for those of us hosting sensitive data on them.

    • 5 steps to reduce cyber vulnerabilities

      The National Vulnerability Database (NVD) — the U.S. government’s repository of standards-based vulnerability management data — says 2015 was another blockbuster year for security vulnerabilities with an average of 17 new vulnerabilities added per day.

      While IT managers can somewhat breathe a collective sigh of relief that the total number of vulnerabilities actually decreased from 7,937 in 2014 to 6,270 in 2015, there’s no time to relax. According to NVD data, 37 percent of vulnerabilities reported in 2015 were classified as highly severe, up from 24 percent in 2014.

    • How to Get an Open Source Security Badge from CII

      Everybody loves getting badges. Fitbit badges, Stack Overflow badges, Boy Scout merit badges, and even LEED certification are just a few examples that come to mind. A recent 538 article “Even psychologists love badges” publicized the value of a badge.

    • 4 Steps To Secure Serverless Applications

      Serverless applications remove a lot of the operational burdens from your team. No more managing operating systems or running low level infrastructure.

      This lets you and your team focus on building…and that’s a wonderful thing.

    • How the Top 5 PC Makers Open Your Laptop to Hackers [iophk: "Windows again"]
    • Google plans to replace smartphone passwords with trust scores [iophk: "if you have to travel unexpectedly, you'll probably get locked out."]

      Goodbye, Password1. Goodbye, 12345. You’ve been hearing about it for years but now it might really be happening: the password is almost dead.

      At Google’s I/O developer conference, Daniel Kaufman, head of Google’s advanced technology projects, announced that the company plans to phase out password access to its Android mobile platform in favour of a trust score by 2017. This would be based on a suite of identifiers: what Wi-Fi network and Bluetooth devices you’re connected to and your location, along with biometrics, including your typing speed, voice and face.

      The phone’s sensors will harvest this data continuously to keep a running tally on how much it trusts that the user is you. A low score will suffice for opening a gaming app. But a banking app will require more trust.

    • Security advisories for Wednesday

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Defeating the Islamic State will take more than gunpowder

      With the beginning of separate offensives against the Islamic State (IS) in Fallujah and Raqqa, many analysts are highlighting that this is the beginning of the end of IS, with Mosul next in sight. However, there is one key issue with this analysis; these offensives do nothing to address the structural failures in both Iraq and Syria that led to IS’ rise. Moreover, there is no valid plan for the governance of the people being ‘liberated’ from IS. Without addressing these issues, history will repeat itself and IS will either return or morph into another radicalised entity looking to represent marginalised Sunnis.

      The offensive in Fallujah happens as the prime minister of Iraq, Haider al-Abadi, is under pressure to show action against IS, due to scores of suicide bombs in Baghdad and his failure to implement reforms. The position of Abadi – and the central government of Iraq in general – optimises the chaos in Iraq, further highlighting the difficulty of implementing a successful post-IS solution.

    • The Only Way to Honor Veterans is to Stop Producing Them

      I also deplore focus on America’s war dead rather than the far, far greater numbers America has killed in our nearly continuous wars of choice. The aggregate death toll in Southeast Asia in the 1970s inflicted by direct, indirect and proxy US aggression and political destabilization in Vietnam, Cambodia and Indonesia was approximately 7,650,000. The US death toll was 58,220, a ratio in our favor of 132/1. In our gratuitously justified “War on Terror” in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, Physicians for Social Responsibility estimated 1.3 million Muslims killed while some 6,800 Americans have died, a ratio of 191/1. And that estimate excluded our destruction of Libya and ongoing proxy war on Syria with an American death toll limited to four in Benghazi and probably a few Special Forces “advisers” in Syria. Our victims deserve at least six to ten months of continuous memorial days to one day of ours, and our appropriate national mood should be not grief but remorse.

    • MSF Excoriates US, Russia, UK Over Complicity in Hospital Bombings

      On the heels of a World Health Organization report documenting pervasive—and often deliberate—attacks on medical facilities in conflicts, a humanitarian specialist with Doctors Without Borders is stressing that the world’s major powers are themselves complicit in such attacks.

      Speaking to the Guardian, Michiel Hofman directed his sharp criticism at four of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council—France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States—which provide arms, intelligence, and logistical support to forces which have conducted these often deadly attacks.

    • Building Trust in Afghanistan

      Glancing upward at one of the six U.S. manufactured aerostat blimps performing constant surveillance over Kabul, I wonder if the expensively high-tech giant’s-eye view encourages a primitive notion that the best way to solve a problem here is to target a “bad guy” and then kill him. If the bad guys appear to be scurrying dots on the ground below, stomp them out.

    • What Happened to Netanyahu?

      Instead of the comfortable and pleasant partner, Netanyahu chose a devious bully who does not even bother to hide his deep contempt for him. Avigdor Lieberman does not hide his hopes to succeed Netanyahu at the first opportunity either. A partner who the entire world views as a dangerous man. Why? There is no explanation. No logical reason. To bring Lieberman into the government is a suicidal act. To hand the Defense Ministry to him is an insane act.

    • Libya: How to Bring Down a Nation

      French president Nicolas Sarkozy’s eagerness to support a military intervention with the purported aim of protecting the civilian population contrasts with the reception offered to the Libyan president, Muammar Gaddafi, when he visited Paris in December 2007 and signed major military agreements worth some 4.5 billion euros along with cooperation agreements for the development of nuclear energy for peacetime uses. The contracts that Libya seemed no longer willing to pursue focused on 14 Dassault Rafale multirole fighter jets and their armament (the same model that France sold or is trying to sold to Egypt´s General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, the self-proclaimed marshal), 35 Eurocopter helicopters, six patrol boats, a hundred armored vehicles, and the overhaul of 17 Mirage F1 fighters sold by Dassault Aviation in the 1970s[2].

    • Turkey marks Constantinople ‘conquest’

      Turkey on Sunday marked the 563rd anniversary of the Ottoman conquest of Istanbul with huge parties and a fireworks show in the former Byzantine imperial capital once known as Constantinople.

      Around a million people were expected for a giant party in the city to mark its capture in 1453 by Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II, nicknamed “the Conqueror”.

      The Air Force aerobatics team was to perform a fly past prior to an evening fireworks display with Turkish President Recip Tayyip Erdogan and Prime Minister Binali Yıldırım due at the festivities in the Yenikapi district in the European half of the city.

    • 5 Things You See Notifying The Families Of Dead Soldiers

      In many military movies, the arrival of a green-clad soldier at a family home with a folded flag in hand often signifies both the fall of a hero and motivation for the rest of the characters. You don’t stop to think about the guy whose job it is to deliver the worst news possible to family after family. If you’re trying to find a candidate for Worst Fucking Job in the World, that definitely has to be in the top three.

      Those guys are known as Casualty Notification Officers, and we interviewed one who served during the Iraq War, when he unfortunately got plenty of on-the-job experience. He says …

    • Imperial Exceptionalism: a Cause Worthy of Defeat

      Rather than accept the onset of multipolarity demanded by the emergence of Russia and China as major strategic, military and/or economic powers, Washington and its proxies are determined to increase military, economic, and geopolitical pressure on both with the objective of returning them to their ‘rightful place’ in service to US hegemony.

    • Hillary’s Role in Honduran Coup Sunk US Relations With Latin America to a New Low

      When former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sat down with the New York Daily News editorial board in April, she was asked what must have been a surprising and unwelcome question. In the years since the 2009 coup in Honduras, there has been remarkably little scrutiny in the major media of how Clinton’s State Department handled it, and she has had to answer few questions about it.

      But Juan González asked why she resisted cutting off aid to the coup regime and instead brokered a deal for new elections. Clinton controversially doubled down on defending the coup, outrageously suggesting that the oligarchs and generals who had forced President Manuel Zelaya out had a legal justification. Worse, she suggested that Honduras emulate Plan Colombia: the U.S.-funded war on drugs and guerrillas that sparked the biggest internal refugee crisis in the world outside of Syria, involved the deliberate killing of thousands of innocent civilians by Colombian armed forces, and fostered death squads now poised to stick around even as the country nears an end to its civil war.

    • The Ongoing Rape of Japan

      When President Obama went to Hiroshima, the American media focused on what he would – or wouldn’t – say about Harry Truman’s horrendous war crime against the Japanese people. Would he apologize? Leaving aside how one apologizes for such a monstrous act – short of committing seppuku – as it turned out he just spoke in harmless generalities about the dangers of nuclear weapons, expressing a commendable albeit vague wish to rid the world of them. What the pundits mostly ignored, however, was Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s outrage at the latest murderous sex crime committed by an American soldier stationed on Okinawa; the brutal murder of 20-year-old Rina Shimabukuro by a US military contractor.

    • ISIL counter-attack in Fallujah: can Iraqi Forces maintain momentum?
    • Isis faces likely defeat in battles across Iraq and Syria – but what happens next?

      In the second of a four-part series examining Isis, Patrick Cockburn says the terror group may be under threat, but regaining the terrority it captured would not necessarily stabilise the region

    • At Least 4,164 People, Including Americans, Killed in Iraq During May

      During May, at least 4,164 people were killed and 2,396 were wounded in Iraq. These figures should be considered very low estimates. Heavy fighting at the Fallujah and Mosul frontlines prevents independent verification of any reports, but we do know there is heaving fighting going on. In April, 4,609 were killed and 1,772 were injured.

    • Turning Blind Eye to Brazilian Coup, OAS Targets Venezuela’s Maduro

      Secretary General invokes Democratic Charter at the behest of Venezuela’s right-wing opposition at the same time Brazil faces an overt crisis of democracy

    • Imperial Blues: On Whitewashing Dictatorship in the 21st Century

      Hillary Clinton’s support for the “Promesa” bill should not be at all surprising. Clinton has time and again trampled on Puerto Rico. The Democratic Party’s Clintonista wing’s preferred scare-tactic revolves around a Donald Trump presidency, but Trump is a symptom of current political indolence, the product of McCarthyism, the Red Scare, and Fox News. Clinton is a vector of transmission of this disease. She is against the release of our political prisoner, Oscar López Rivera. She represents the most reactionary conservative elements of her party and is inexcusably tied to the neoliberal agenda of Wall Street. Is it at all surprising that she would support a bill that seeks to impose a neocolonial Congressional dictatorship on Puerto Rico?

    • Preparing for the Next Memorial Day

      Memorial Day weekend was replete with parades, American flags, and tributes to our war dead, but little reflection on war, particularly the tragic fact that the United States has fallen into the death trap that President Eisenhower warned us about: the military-industrial complex.

      Instead of defending our nation as the Constitution stipulates, since the 9/11 attacks the U.S. military, CIA, and military contractors have been waging aggressive wars or interfering by proxy in other nations’ internal affairs.

    • Senate Looks To Cut Defense Spending By Taking Money Out Of Troops’ Pockets

      The Senate Armed Services Committee wants to save money by cutting back on housing benefits for armed service members, potentially costing individual military members hundreds of dollars a month.

      Currently, armed service members who live off-base in the United States receive a flat-rate stipend called the Basic Allowance for Housing (BAH), which is calculated based on their family status, rank, and cost of living by zip code. If they find housing for less than the allotted benefit or live with a working spouse or roommate, how they use the extra money is up to them.

    • Don’t Trip on Those Milestones Strewn Across America’s Wars

      Barack Obama called the drone assassination on May 21 of Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour, the leader of the Afghan Taliban, “an important milestone.”

      It might turn out to be. But I doubt it. My advice is every time you hear an American official use the term “milestone,” run the other way.

      For example, back in September 2014 Secretary of State John Kerry claimed the formation of a new Iraqi government then was “a major milestone” for the country. But on the same day that Obama was proclaiming his own milestone, protesters stormed the Green Zone in Baghdad seeking the end of that previous milestone government.

    • Trump Threatens Neocon Policies
    • Pentagon: Special Ops Killing of Pregnant Afghan Women Was “Appropriate” Use of Force

      An internal Defense Department investigation into one of the most notorious night raids conducted by special operations forces in Afghanistan — in which seven civilians were killed, including two pregnant women — determined that all the U.S. soldiers involved had followed the rules of engagement. As a result, the soldiers faced no disciplinary measures, according to hundreds of pages of Defense Department documents obtained by The Intercept through the Freedom of Information Act. In the aftermath of the raid, Adm. William McRaven, at the time the commander of the elite Joint Special Operations Command, took responsibility for the operation. The documents made no unredacted mention of JSOC.

    • How Teenagers Got Police to Back Down and Remove Military-Grade Weaponry From Their High Schools

      Los Angeles high school students and organizers forced police to remove grenade launchers and M-16s from their arsenals.

    • Part 2: In Wake of Coup, Should Brazil’s Olympics Be Moved or Become a Site of Protest?

      We continue our conversation with Dave Zirin, author of the book “Brazil’s Dance with the Devil: The World Cup, the Olympics, and the Fight for Democracy,” and Jules Boykoff, author of “Power Games: A Political History of the Olympics.” In early August, more than 10,000 athletes across the world will convene in Rio de Janeiro’s Olympic City for one of the most widely watched sporting events of the year. This comes as Brazil is battling an economic recession, a massive Zika outbreak and its worst political crisis in over two decades.

    • A US Hand in Brazil’s Coup?

      The ouster of Brazil’s left-of-center president was the latest right-wing victory in Latin America, but was this “quiet coup” driven by local politics or part of a broader U.S. strategy to reclaim dominance over its “backyard,” asks Ted Snider.

    • Inside the Perilous Journey Out of Syria

      Matthew Cassel has reported on the Middle East for over a decade, including a five-year stint covering the Arab world for Al Jazeera. Living and working in Istanbul, he saw the rising tide of refugees making their way to Europe in 2014. But as he noted in an interview with Field Notes, traditional news outlets were slow to recognize the gravity of the crisis. While coverage existed, media attention didn’t intensify “until Alan Kurdi, who was the young poor kid from Kobaní, inside Syria, washed up on the shore in Turkey — if you remember that iconic image from September of 2015,” he said. “But there were people who were dying, people who were struggling to get to Europe before that.”

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

    • Waiting for California and the FBI

      Some Democratic leaders are privately scouting around for someone to replace Hillary Clinton if she stumbles again in California and/or the FBI detects a crime in her email scandal, reports Robert Parry.

    • Emailgate: the Clinton Spin Doctors In Action

      The IG report does not make pretty reading for the avid Clintonite. It dismisses a core claim that using government servers was not standard practice during her tenure, pointing to departmental protocols dating back to 2005.

    • Just How Unprofessional IS the Trump Campaign – When Hillary In Trouble, Trump Hogs Limelight?

      So we get to see some remarkable insights into the two campaigns. (obviously this is again a blog article about the US election, not about digital/mobile/tech). Hillary had her worst days this year, from the middle of last week when the Inspector General of the State Department found she had broken rules about emails and was at fault. For a pro campaign and very seasoned veteran politician, Hillary’s campaign had a disastrous moment (every campaign has some of those) and it was clearly her worst moment of the year so far (don’t fall for any of the Bernie ‘moments’ her victory was never in doubt so they were never that bad for her). And like a pro in a pro campaign, she went immediately onto the talk shows, put out as much of the fires as possible, then went to lay down low, riding out the rest of the news cycle. Her best hope is for other news stories to overtake this bad news email story, and that it won’t grow to be any bigger than it now is.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Cleaning up mercury a must in Grassy Narrows

      The federal and provincial governments cleaning up the Wabigoon River will show a new era has dawned in our relationship with indigenous peoples

    • Passing Ban, Scottish Parliament Declares: ‘No Ifs, No Buts, No Fracking’
    • Federal Agencies Find That Fracking In The Pacific Would Have No ‘Significant’ Environmental Impacts

      A Center for Biological Diversity investigation into chemicals used in California’s offshore fracking operations found that at least 10 of the chemicals routinely used in fracking could be lethal to marine animals. Some of the chemicals have also been shown to break down into nonylphenol, a toxic substance that can lead to intersex fish species and bioaccumulate in animals further up the food chain, like in already-threatened sea otters.

    • Amazon Tribes Resist US Anthropologists’ Attempt to Forcibly Contact the Uncontacted

      Fighting back against the notion, put forth by American academics, that isolated tribes must be forced into contact with the modern world, Amazonian Indians are warning of another potential Indigenous “genocide” if such ideas come to pass.

      U.S. anthropologists Kim Hill, a professor at Arizona State University, and University of Missouri associate professor Robert Walker, have argued that in order to ensure the survival of the most remote tribal people they must be “contacted in a controlled way.”

    • North America Failing Dismally on Ocean Protection, Groups Warn

      North America is falling woefully behind on public promises to protect surrounding oceans from fishing, oil and gas development, and other harmful human activities—and those promises are paltry, found a joint report from Canadian and American conservation groups.

      The cooperative venture from the Marine Conservation Institute (MCI) and Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society (CPAWS) discovered that while Canada, Mexico, and the U.S. have promised to protect 10 percent of the continental ocean estate—”defined as the territorial sea plus exclusive economic zone, which together extend 200 nmi from each country’s shoreline”—by 2020, currently only .89 percent is protected.

    • EU never used power to scrutinise emissions labs

      The European Commission wants new powers to oversee the way new cars are approved before they are sold, but it has never used a key scrutinising power it has had for more than eight years, the EUobserver has learned.

      Under current rules, the commission can ask a member state to submit assessments of the test facilities that carry out certification tasks including emissions testing.

    • All the World’s a Stage: Thoughts on the Death of Harambe, the Cincinnati Zoo Gorilla

      As I write, the zoo’s Gorilla World page still shows a bio of Harambe, along with the bios of several remaining gorillas. They, captive and unable to safely return to their lands, should not be exhibited, but should instead be offered private refuge. No captive breeding. No public viewing or cognitive research.

    • Dear Internet Experts on Gorillas and Parenting: Save Your Outrage—There’s No ‘Justice for Harambe’
    • A Zoo Story: From Harambe to Human Bondage

      Every so often, our society — which proves daily how little it values animal life — erupts in an uproar about the tragic death of an individual animal. Whether it’s a case of lethal cruelty to a domestic animal, the high-profile shooting of a majestic lion, or more recently, the shooting of a gorilla named Harambe at the Cincinnati Zoo, public outrage typically isolates a human target and flares until a particular hashtag has exhausted itself on Twitter.

    • 2015 Saw Renewable Energy Boom, Led by Developing Nations

      Renewable energy boomed in 2015, a year that saw fossil fuel prices plummet and ended with a historic climate agreement hammered out in Paris.

      In fact, investments in renewables such as wind and solar were more than double the amount spent on new coal and gas-fired power plants in 2015, according to the Renewables Global Status Report (pdf) from REN21, an international non-profit association based at the United Nations Environment Programme in Paris, France.

      An estimated 147 gigawatts (GW) of renewable power capacity was added in 2015—the largest annual increase ever—while renewable heat capacity and biofuels production also increased. Indeed, the world now adds more renewable power capacity annually than it adds (net) capacity from all fossil fuels combined, the report states. Furthermore, employment in the renewable energy sector rose in 2015 to an estimated 8.1 million direct and indirect jobs.

    • Dam backup plan for glacier ice loss

      Summer water shortages caused by the reduction of glacier ice mass could be alleviated by dams being constructed to contain springtime runoff from melting snow.

    • Here’s What Actual Climate Scientists Think Of Trump’s New Energy Plan

      If Donald Trump is elected president, America’s approach to energy and the environment will be drastically different than it is today.

      Trump made that clear last week, when he laid out his full energy policy proposal for the first time in Bismarck, North Dakota. In that speech, Trump said he would roll back president Obama’s climate change regulations, build the Keystone XL pipeline, and “cancel” the landmark Paris climate agreement. In a nutshell, Trump promised to undo almost every major policy developed in the last decade intended to slow human-caused global warming.

      What Trump did not do in his speech, however, was mention the words “climate change.” He did not say whether he believed the phenomenon was occurring, and he didn’t speculate on how his policies would solve or worsen the problem.

    • The Nuts And Bolts Behind How The World Will Deploy A Massive Amount of Clean Energy

      Energy ministers from 23 countries and the European Commission, representing 75 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions and 90 percent of worldwide renewable power investments, will convene June 1-2 in San Francisco to encourage a new drive toward clean energy deployment, and further hasten the growing movement away from coal to the increasing use of green power.

    • Job Losses Expected As Maryland Governor Stuns Solar Industry With Clean Energy Veto

      For the past 12 years, Maryland has had a highly successful program requiring utilities to use more renewable energy. Republican Gov. Larry Hogan’s own Dept. of Environment last fall said the renewable portfolio standard (RPS) was creating thousands of jobs and would create billions in economic activity by 2020. In April, the governor signaled his own commitment to clean energy, signing the Greenhouse Gas Emissions Reduction Act.

    • Climate activists and blacklisted workers face the same struggle against surveillance

      The climate movement and trades union movement need to come together to stop repressive corporate/state spying.

    • An American Fukushima May Be Closer Than You Think

      The 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster was horrific to watch unfold. It will take decades — and billions of dollars — to clean up, as more problems seem to emerge by the minute.

      Most recently, Tepco announced that it’s still missing a large amount of spent fuel — in part because radiation remains so high that robots and other devices cannot function inside the plant to give workers a better picture of what’s going on.

    • Justice For the Gorilla, And Never Mind the Humans

      We mourn the loss last weekend of Harambe, the 17-year-old Western lowland silverback gorilla killed while either entertaining and/or threatening a four-year-old who somehow slipped away from his mother and fell into the gorilla’s enclosure at the Cincinnati Zoo as onlookers screamed, which likely didn’t help. Zoo officials, determining a tranquilizer gun might further agitate Harambe and endanger the boy, made the controversial and difficult decision to shoot Harambe. Defending the move, Zoo director Thane Maynard declared it “a sad day all the way around,” but insisted, “The right choice was made.”

      Hah, said a furious, sanctimonious, all-knowing and – once it was determined the family was black – racist Internet mob of animal lovers, mom shamers, dad blamers, parenting and/or gorilla experts, and thousands more with axes to grind. Quick as you can say “Get a life,” the outrage had fueled “Prayers for Harambe” and “Justice For Harambe” Facebook pages (130,000 likes) to “raise awareness of Harambe’s murder,” a petition (400,000 names) urging city officials to investigate the child’s “home environment,” another petition (140,000) calling for passage of a new Harambe’s Law to punish anyone harming or killing an animal, a charge by PETA that “Harambe paid with his life for others’ negligence,” a memorial, a protest, a call for a boycott, and a hit piece on the child’s father, who wasn’t even there but it turns out had a criminal history before turning his life around.

    • Did Donald Trump Deny The California Drought Because He’s Lost Touch With Reality?

      Many credible sources have said that Donald Trump has lost touch with reality. Even so, I won’t say it.

      We all have a responsibility to be judicious with words — as Trump himself explained in January, “I was going to say ‘dummy’ Bush; I won’t say it.”

      Yes, it’s true that an actual headline Friday from CBS in Sacramento was, “Donald Trump Tells California ‘There Is No Drought’ As Drought Continues.” And yes, it’s true that scientists report that 86 percent of California is still in a “moderate drought,” 61 percent in a “severe drought,” 43 percent in an “extreme drought,” and over one-fifth of the state (21 percent) is in an “exceptional drought.”

    • Celebrate the Ocean

      Join us as we celebrate and learn about our world ocean during National Ocean Month.

  • Finance

    • Trump Has a $100 Million Conflict of Interest

      This candidacy brought to you by Deutsche Bank.

    • Guess Which Presidential Candidate Top CEOs Prefer? Hint: It’s Not Trump.

      A majority of chief executives of the world’s biggest companies say they would support Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump for president, according to a new survey that upends the usual Republican leanings of corporate CEOs.

      Fortune magazine in May sent a poll to all of the executives on its 500 list asking them to rank their preference between the two candidates. (No other options were given.)

      Of those who responded, 58 percent said they would choose Clinton, while 42 percent said they favored Trump.

    • The Big Banks Can Be Beaten

      Working families are turning their anger at Wall Street into action.

    • ‘We need to be in the EU in order to beat TTIP’
    • Authoritarian Britain is made freer by the EU

      The idea that the EU undermines English liberty is nonsense: it has helped curtail the British state’s repressive surveillance.

    • It’s not just Brexit — Greece, Spain, France are also on the brink

      Last week, a research wing of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) came out with a report admitting that neoliberalism has been a failure. The report, entitled “Neoliberalism: Oversold?” is hopefully a sign of the ideology’s death. They were only about 40 years late. As Naomi Klein tweeted about the report, “So all the billionaires it created are going to give back their money, right?”

    • Our Poverty Myth

      The illusion that people are to blame for their own poverty goes back centuries in our culture.

    • University of Helsinki to introduce tuition fees of €13,000–18,000 for non-EU/EEA students

      The University of Helsinki has announced its decision to impose tuition fees of 13,000–18,000 euros on its postgraduate degree students from outside the European Union and the European Economic Area (EEA).

    • Once Homeless Student Who Worked 4 Jobs To Support Family Graduates College

      After persevering through trying times, one college student wore her cap and gown with pride.

      Bianca Jeannot, a 22-year-old who attended the College of New Rochelle in New York, has been through a lot. She has experienced homelessness and also had to work multiple jobs to support and care for her brothers while attending college, ABC News reported.

      Recently, the student saw her hard work come to fruition as she graduated from the school with honors, WABC reported.

    • Cuts blamed as London fire deaths rise by 20 per cent

      Fire deaths across the capital have gone up by 20 per cent in the last year, according to figures released by the London Fire Brigade (LFB).

      A total of 36 people died from fires in London in 2015/16, compared with 30 in the previous year.

    • ‘Employers Have an Incentive to Work People Long Hours’

      It’s no secret that those Americans who are working are working more hours for less pay than in decades–and suffering for it. And while it’s true wealthy people may be finding new clandestine ways to tuck money away, some of the core causes of working people’s problems are more out in the open, in the demonstrable erosion of worker wage protections.

      This, our next guest’s group says, is a fixable problem. And one step in that direction came recently with the Labor Department’s issuance of a new rule raising the salary threshold below which salaried workers are automatically eligible for overtime pay.

      Here to talk about the overtime rule, the pushback against it and where it fits in broader efforts to fight inequality is Ross Eisenbrey. He’s vice president of the Economic Policy Institute. He joins us now by phone from Washington, DC. Welcome to CounterSpin, Ross Eisenbrey.

    • A Legal System That Supports Businessmen
    • ‘Days of Revolt’: Chris Hedges, Lynne Stewart and Ralph Poynter on the Evolution of Radicalism

      In this week’s episode of teleSUR’s “Days of Revolt,” Truthdig contributor Chris Hedges sits down with guests Lynne Stewart and Ralph Poynter, both veterans of the 1960s civil rights movement. Stewart, a former civil rights attorney, and Poynter, a human rights activist and Stewart’s husband, have a long history of community organizing.

      The two met while working at a school in Harlem in the early 1960s—she as a librarian and he as a teacher. Hedges interviews them about their role in the civil rights and anti-war movements, before moving on to ask them whether our society has lost the political consciousness it had in the 60s and 70s.

    • OECD is Latest Economic Bigwig to Question Austerity’s “Loop of Doom”

      Less than a week after the International Monetary Fund (IMF) expressed reservations about neoliberal policies like austerity, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is urging governments to increase spending in order to “make good on promises to current and future generations.”

      Not doing so, OECD chief economist Catherine Mann told Reuters, deprives youths of job opportunities and means the elderly will not get the healthcare and pension benefits they expect. “We are breaking promises to young people and old people,” she said.

      In its twice-yearly Global Economic Outlook, the 24-nation body said the world is stuck in a “low-growth trap” that will only get worse under status quo policies like quantitative easing.

      Indeed, the OECD said “almost all countries have room to reallocate spending and taxation towards items that offer more support to growth” like investments in infrastucture as well as education.

    • After Empowering the 1% and Impoverishing Millions, IMF Admits Neoliberalism a Failure

      Last week a research wing of the International Monetary Fund came out with a report admitting that neoliberalism has been a failure. The report, entitled, “Neoliberalism: Oversold?” is hopefully a sign of the ideology’s death. They were only about 40 years late. As Naomi Klein tweeted about the report, “So all the billionaires it created are going to give back their money, right?”

      Many of the report’s findings which strike to the core of the ideology echo what critics and victims of neoliberalism have been saying for decades.

      “Instead of delivering growth,” the report explains that neoliberal policies of austerity and lowered regulation for capital movement have in fact “increased inequality.” This inequality “might itself undercut growth…” As a result, the report states that “policymakers should be more open to redistribution than they are.”

    • Va. Gov. Terry McAuliffe Took $120K From a Chinese Billionaire—But the Crime Is That It Was Legal

      When news broke that Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe was under investigation by the Justice Department and that his campaign had taken $120,000 directly from a Chinese-owned business, it may have seemed liked an open-and-shut case.

      But federal law doesn’t preclude foreign-owned businesses from making political donations, and Virginia law doesn’t limit their size. So amazingly enough, if there was something illegal here, that wasn’t it.

    • Wednesday’s papers: Plan to scrap health centres, police speed camera claims challenged, and what to do with a six-minute longer workday?

      Negotiations over a plan to lengthen the working day by six minutes – as well as cut holiday benefits and freeze pay net year – are wavering at the last hurdle, but there’s still chance of a deal this week, the papers report. Elsewhere, there’s a proposal to replace Finland’s health centres with bigger clinics offering more under one roof, and police claims that speed cameras have made a Helsinki highway safer come under scrutiny.

    • Walmart, Gap, H&M Called Out for Global Worker Exploitation and Abuse

      Some of the world’s biggest retailers, including Walmart, Gap, and H&M, have failed to improve workplace safety three years after the Rana Plaza factory collapse in Bangladesh killed more than 1,100 people and turned a spotlight on dangerous labor conditions faced by some of the world’s poorest workers.

      A series of new reports released Tuesday by the Asia Floor Wage Alliance, a coalition of rights groups and trade unions, finds that tens of thousands of laborers in Bangladesh are still making garments in buildings without proper fire exits, while pregnant workers in Indonesia and India face discrimination and wage theft.

    • Why the Verizon Worker’s Victory is A Big Deal

      On Friday, May 27, the six-and-a-half-week Verizon strike came to an end with a tentative contract agreement.

      The Communications Workers of America and International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, the unions that represent the Verizon workers, hailed the contract as a victory, citing its creation of 1300 new call center jobs along the East Coast, first-ever contracts for Verizon wireless store employees in Brooklyn and Everett, Massachusetts, and raises of nearly 11 percent over the life of the contract. The workers beat back demands from the company to cut pensions, transfer workers out of state for up to two months, and proposed cuts in disability and accident benefits.

    • France’s Nuit Debout Movement’s White, Middle Class Problem

      When the Nuit Debout youth movement erupted in Paris to protest the most significant reform to the country’s labor code in decades, it made headlines both nationally and globally as it was immediately compared to other upsrisings such as Spain’s Indignados and Occupy Wall Street. However, as the movement occupying Paris’ Republic Square approaches its two-month anniversary on Tuesday, it is still struggling to evolve into a more diverse and inclusive movement, as activists say it must do more to involve France’s marginalized communities, especially from the suburbs, who have been struggling against unemployment, police violence and state racism for decades.

    • Treasury’s New So-Called Transparency about Saudi-Held US Debt

      More likely, the vehicle of exchange and secrecy set up in 1974 were renewed when the US and Saudis signed the similar Technical Cooperation Agreement in 2008, which got extended in 2013 until 2023. Which would suggest Treasury has a reason to show us the old-style debt holdings, but not whatever they have going on now.So in the interest of “transparency” (that is, in the interest of avoiding any panic as the Saudis threaten to dump US debt if we start releasing information the Kingdom’s role in sowing terrorism) Treasury has revealed the old-style arrangement, but not whatever is the core of what we’ve got going on now.

      In other words, what Treasury’s so-called transparency actually tells us is the larger part of Saudi holdings (they threatened to dump $750 billion in US debt) are stashed somewhere even more secret than the original holdings. And they likely rolled out that even-more-secret stash in 2008, long after we knew they were sponsoring terrorism around the world.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Common Sense on the Democratic Presidential Race

      Clinton surrogates and operatives are pounding on Bernie Sanders to get out of the race, claiming they want to unify the party even as they excoriate Sanders and scorn his supporters. Perhaps it is time for a little common sense about the campaign.

    • How the Internet Is Empowering the Grass Roots and Transforming Democracy

      In the next week alone—the last before the June 7 primary in California—Sanders supporters in Los Angeles will host nearly 200 small-scale events in homes, businesses, and public parks from Burbank to Compton.

    • Write-In Voting and Political Protest

      With the increasingly likelihood of a presidential contest between the generally despised Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, millions of angry voters are considering protesting the lineup by either sitting out the election or writing in alternatives. With almost one-third of all eligible voters already failing to participate in elections, a greater abdication of voting responsibility in an election between the lesser of two evils could lead to a tyranny of the minority. On the other hand, by carefully writing in the names of their true choices, voters can exercise the only power available to them. If sufficiently widespread, such a protest could have a lasting effect on the course of the Nation, including the abandonment of the two major political parties and the emergence of new—more relevant—alignments.

    • Thanks for the Memories, Stephen Harper

      As former PM Stephen Harper quits parliament, his legacy is more of a gift to Conservatives than to Canadians.

      There’s no question that Stephen Harper, Canada’s former prime minister, will be leaving a legacy when he quits parliament this summer.

      A political mastermind, he united the country’s fractious right in 2003 when his Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) was born. In 2006, he led it to the first of its three successive electoral victories. Canada was his for nine years – at least until Justin Trudeau’s Liberals trounced his government last October.

      The party is still holding together seven months after he stepped down from the party leadership. Canadians are united as well – in celebrating his departure.

      So Harper’s legacy is more of a gift to Conservatives than to Canadians.

    • DNC Chair Wasserman Schultz Faces Criticism for Bias & Opening Up DNC to Lobbyists

      As the Democratic National Convention approaches, some Democrats are considering pressuring DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz to step down. Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has long accused Wasserman Schultz of being biased toward Hillary Clinton. Wasserman Schultz has also quietly repealed ethics rules implemented in 2008 by President Obama preventing federal lobbyists from donating to the DNC. The opposition from Capitol Hill Democrats comes as Wasserman Schultz is also in a tight race against progressive challenger Tim Canova for her own congressional seat in Florida. In an unusual move, Sanders has backed Canova. For more, we’re joined by Lee Fang, investigative reporter for The Intercept.

    • It’s Not Just the Speeches: Hillary Clinton Questioned over Son-in-Law’s Ties to Goldman Sachs

      The California primary is just over one week away, and Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are in a dead heat. Hillary Clinton has changed this week’s campaign schedule to add more California stops in order to try to reverse Sanders’ growing momentum. Yet multiple issues have continued to dog Clinton’s campaign, including the question of her connection to Goldman Sachs. The Wall Street giant paid Clinton $675,000 in 2013 to give three speeches. And now new questions are being raised about the ties between Goldman Sachs and Hillary’s son-in-law, Marc Mezvinsky. Mezvinsky worked at Goldman for eight years and then formed a hedge fund in part with help from Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein. For more, we’re joined by Intercept investigative reporter Lee Fang. His recent piece is headlined “Hillary Clinton Won’t Say How Much Goldman Sachs CEO Invested with Her Son-in-Law.”

    • Hillary Clinton’s Memoir Deletions, in Detail

      As was reported following the assassination of prominent Honduran environmental activist Berta Cáceres in March, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton erased all references to the 2009 coup in Honduras in the paperback edition of her memoirs, “Hard Choices.” Her three-page account of the coup in the original hardcover edition, where she admitted to having sanctioned it, was one of several lengthy sections cut from the paperback, published in April 2015 shortly after she had launched her presidential campaign.

      A short, inconspicuous statement on the copyright page is the only indication that “a limited number of sections” — amounting to roughly 96 pages — had been cut “to accommodate a shorter length for this edition.” Many of the abridgements consist of narrative and description and are largely trivial, but there are a number of sections that were deleted from the original that also deserve attention.

    • Trump: A Fool and a Fraud

      As Trump showed the world, it is relatively easy to run for president if you are willing to say or do anything to get attention and you believe in nothing except your own self-inflated myth. His reality-television-style campaign overwhelmed a badly fractured Republican Party. But the act is getting harder to pull off because now his words, often chosen for their shock value, have real consequences.

    • Trump University Documents Expose Presumptive Con-Man-in-Chief
    • Trump Self-destructing

      He’s also had a feud with the judge of Art Cohen v. Donald J. Trump, about Trump University fraud. He criticized the judge publicly, accusing him of being “Mexican” etc. Rather than finding Trump in contempt, the judge just decided to release Trump’s “playbooks”, recipes for roping in “students”, actually high-pressure sales tactics. It seems rather than teaching dealing in real estate, TU was applying such tactics to students and not delivering much of value, certainly not hand-picked-by-Trump instructors. The “playbooks” also showed an intense interest in the wealth of students rather than their aptitude for success…

    • Inside the Trump University ‘playbooks’

      And some of the material offers a potential counterweight to claims that Trump University’s aim was just to sell someone on the highest-priced course. For example, the 2007 sales playbook tells staffers, “you are here to meet the needs of your client, not to push product.” And the 2010 version advises that one should “sell for a relationship, not a commission.”

    • Opportunist Trump Meets Fanatical NRA

      By accepting the NRA’s presidential endorsement, Donald Trump bought into the gun lobby’s paranoid view of government and its distorted interpretation of the Second Amendment, writes Lawrence Davidson.

    • 4 Shady Business Practices That Trump University Used To Target Students

      Documents detailing exactly how Trump University convinced students to enroll in its real estate classes were made public on Tuesday after a federal court ordered their release.

      The business, which began operating in 2005 and is now defunct, was actually never an accredited university. Instead, students paid thousands of dollars for advice from professors whom they believed were handpicked by Trump. In reality, the professors were not chosen by Trump, something the real estate mogul has admitted in depositions.

    • WATCH: A retired veteran tells CNN how Trump University scammed him out of $26,000

      We’re going to be hearing a lot more about Trump University in the coming days, especially after a judge whom Trump had bashed for being a “Mexican” recently ordered the release of several internal Trump U. documents that will be out by the end of the week. CNN spent some time talking with some former Trump University students who described how the “university” took $26,000 of his money and gave him almost nothing in return.

    • Another Kind of Warrior—Bernie Sanders—Fires Up the Golden State Faithful

      There was a palpable thrill in the air as some 20,000 supporters stood in lines that stretched for blocks to hear Bernie Sanders speak Monday in Oakland, Calif. Hundreds of supporters were turned away in the name of security at the event, which marked one of Sanders’ campaign stops before the state’s crucial primary election on June 7.

    • [Column] Donald Trump: Joker’s Wild

      Since Trump has never been a politician – and presents himself as an anti-politician — his campaign has been nothing but a series of gestures. To have a platform and well thought-out positions would bring him too much into the realm of real politics. Trump rolls out proposals – building a wall in the southwest and getting Mexico to pay for it, banning all Muslim immigrants, bringing back waterboarding – as a network executive might introduce a new season of TV shows. They’re meant to generate headlines, capture attention, and create a loyal following. They’re not meant to add up to anything larger.

    • Ahead of Election, Native Americans Rise Up Against Repressive Voting Laws

      Refusing to be silenced by restrictive new voting laws, Native Americans across the western U.S. are taking their fight to the courts, arguing that tribal communities have become even further disenfranchised by rules passed in the wake of the Supreme Court’s landmark voting rights ruling.

      An in-depth report published by Reuters on Tuesday highlights revisions to a North Dakota law that “eliminated a provision that had allowed people without proper identification…to vote if they were recognized by a poll worker or if they signed an affidavit swearing to their identity.”

    • Stoking the Fires: Trump and His Legions

      Looking back at the 1932 U.S. presidential election is instructive. Herbert Hoover, the Republican incumbent, bore the blame for the Great Depression. It had happened on his watch. Armies of the unemployed moved into shantytowns, which they named Hoovervilles. Hoover’s main Democratic opponent, Franklin D. Roosevelt, came from establishment stock. Roosevelt’s main plank was to shrink the government and expand U.S. trade with the world. These were policy positions much favored by the elite. During the election, there was little sign that Roosevelt would expand the U.S. government and use state spending to enhance economic activity. The tone of the campaign was ugly, with Hoover calling Roosevelt (correctly as it turned out) a “chameleon in plaid” and Roosevelt responding that Hoover was a “fat, timid capon” (a capon being a rooster). Hoover felt that Roosevelt was “very badly informed and of comparably little vision”. Roosevelt was elected to three consecutive terms. He died in office.

    • Trump, Sanders and the Exhaustion of a Political Model

      Bernie Sanders, in a way, is the perfect opposite of Trump and both embody the exhaustion of the American people.

    • Cenk Uygur Warns Mainstream Media: Don’t Underestimate Impact of Libertarian Candidate

      44 percent of voters want a third-party option come November.

    • Troubles of Anti-Trump/Clinton Write-ins

      Distraught over the likely choice of Trump or Clinton, many Americans are thinking about third parties or write-ins, but the process is harder than one might expect, like much else about the U.S. electoral system, notes William John Cox.

      [...]

      Under state laws, political parties must “qualify” for their candidates to be listed on the ballots and counted. The two major parties are qualified in every state, but the Libertarian Party candidates will appear on the ballots in only 33 states, the Green Party in 21, and the Constitution Party in 13.

    • Clinton, media still counting superdelegates despite DNC pleas

      On April 28, Luis Miranda, communications director for the Democratic National Committee, did an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper to formally clarify the official position of the Democratic Party on when superdelegates are, and are not, supposed to actually count in public vote tallies.

      What he said shocked the hell out of me and should shock the hell out of you — in part because not a single media outlet or the Hillary Clinton campaign has paid one bit of attention to it before or since. Since election season began, networks, newspapers and pundits have included superdelegates in their tallies, but the DNC emphatically said that was wrong over a month ago.

    • Trump Rejects Hitler Comparison But Has A Few Alternatives

      On MSNBC and in the New York Times, he’s been likened to segregationist George Wallace. Louis CK and Glenn Beck have compared him to Adolf Hitler.

    • Bernie Sanders Fights On: The Rolling Stone Interview

      Even at this late date, with the threat of a Donald Trump presidency looming, Sanders pulls no punches against Hillary Clinton. His stump speech links her to a “rigged economy” – highlighting “hundreds of thousands of dollars” in contributions to the Clinton campaign by a member of the Walton family, whose Wal-Mart fortune, Sanders says, is richer than the combined wealth of the “bottom 40 percent” of the American people. Transforming jeers into cheers, Sanders demands of the billionaire clan, “Instead of making large campaign contributions to Secretary Clinton, pay your workers a living wage!”

    • Make Presidential Race About Issues, Not a Spitball Fight

      Donald Trump has now won the delegates needed to give him the Republican presidential nomination. The Bernie Sanders surge continues — he may even win California — but Hillary Clinton apparently has the superdelegate support needed to give her the nomination. We’re headed to a presidential race with two candidates burdened with record levels of disfavor.

    • Vast Majority of Democrats Want Sanders to Stay in Race: Poll

      A new poll released Wednesday found that a majority of registered Democrats want presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders to stay in the race.

      The national survey of 2,001 voters by Morning Consult found that 57 percent of all Democrats polled want Sanders to keep running, while 33 percent want him to drop out. Ten percent have no opinion.

      The findings contradict the pressure from prominent Democratic politicians and centrist pundits on Sanders to drop out of the presidential race—some of whom even argue that he’s already lost—despite the fact that several states (including delegate-rich California) and U.S. territories have yet to hold their primaries. (Polls also show Sanders and Clinton in a dead heat in California, which votes on June 7.)

  • Censorship/Free Speech

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Stung By Yelp Reviews, Health Providers Spill Patient Secrets

      Burned by negative reviews, some health providers are casting their patients’ privacy aside and sharing intimate details online as they try to rebut criticism.

      In the course of these arguments — which have spilled out publicly on ratings sites like Yelp — doctors, dentists, chiropractors and massage therapists, among others, have divulged details of patients’ diagnoses, treatments and idiosyncrasies.

      One Washington state dentist turned the tables on a patient who blamed him for the loss of a molar: “Due to your clenching and grinding habit, this is not the first molar tooth you have lost due to a fractured root,” he wrote. “This tooth is no different.”

      In California, a chiropractor pushed back against a mother’s claims that he misdiagnosed her daughter with scoliosis. “You brought your daughter in for the exam in early March 2014,” he wrote. “The exam identified one or more of the signs I mentioned above for scoliosis. I absolutely recommended an x-ray to determine if this condition existed; this x-ray was at no additional cost to you.”

    • Google voice search records and keeps conversations people have around their phones – but the files can be deleted

      Google could have a record of everything you have said around it for years, and you can listen to it yourself.

      The company quietly records many of the conversations that people have around its products.

      The feature works as a way of letting people search with their voice, and storing those recordings presumably lets Google improve its language recognition tools as well as the results that it gives to people.

    • Thailand Government Wants To Undermine Website Encryption, Hold ISPs Responsible For Third-Party Content

      Thailand’s government has never been considered a friend of internet services or users, thanks to its interest in suppressing dissent/ensuring its king remain unoffended. It has often claimed it has no interest in censoring the internet — sometimes in statements delivered while shutting down livestreams of discussions with ISPs on how to better censor the internet.

      Unsurprisingly, it’s not a fan of encryption. The Thai government is currently amending its Computer Crimes Act in hopes of updating its censorship abilities. In addition to codifying ISP compliance with government demands, it’s also looking to destroy anything standing between it and full control of internet activity.

    • MPs’ private emails are routinely accessed by GCHQ

      Computer Weekly investigation reveals the extent of interception of MPs’ and peers’ email communications and data

      GCHQ and the US National Security Agency (NSA) have access to intercepted emails sent and received by all members of the UK Parliament and peers, including with their constituents, a Computer Weekly investigation has established.

    • Guardian of the GPL: Online advertising is becoming “a perfect despotism”

      Time is running out to prevent complete totalitarian dictatorship until the end of human civilisation, Eben Moglen, the guardian of the GPL, told Ars in an interview.

      But let’s rewind a bit. Earlier this month, Moglen and Mishi Choudhary, both of the Software Freedom Law Center, told a packed crowd at the Re:publica conference in Germany about the worrying outlook for Homo sapiens.

      “This is the last generation in which the human race gets a choice,” Moglen said during the duo’s opening keynote for the media and technology conference. “Most of the human race doesn’t know what the choice is, and if we here, who do know, do not help them understand,” he said, “if we don’t give them proof of concept plus running code, the revolution becomes impossible.”

      Moglen is a Columbia law professor and a well-known stalwart of the free software movement. As general counsel to the Free Software Foundation for many years, he helped Richard M. Stallman draft the GPLv3. He received the EFF’s Pioneer Award in 2003, and is the author of The dotCommunist Manifesto, among many other works. Choudhary is the SFLC’s legal director and previously practised as litigator before the High Court and Supreme Court in India.

    • 4th Circuit Appeals Court Rolls Back Its Warrant Requirement For Cell Site Location Info

      The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals was one of the few appeals courts to rule on the constitutionality of obtaining cell site location info without a warrant. And it was — was — the only appeals court to find warrantless access violated the Fourth Amendment. The decision was limited to the collection of historical cell site data for extended periods of time (the court appeared to believe anything beyond two weeks was questionable), mainly because there was a good chance the records would contain considerable detail about a person’s movements in private places.

    • Cops can easily get months of location data, appeals court rules

      A full panel of judges at the Fourth US Circuit Court of Appeals has now overturned last summer’s notable decision by the standard trio of appellate judges, which had found that police needed a warrant to obtain more than 200 days’ worth of cell-site location information (CSLI) for two criminal suspects.

      In the Tuesday en banc decision, the Fourth Circuit relied heavily upon the third-party doctrine, the 1970s-era Supreme Court case holding that there is no privacy interest in data voluntarily given up to a third party like a cell phone provider. That case, known as Smith v. Maryland, is what has provided the legal underpinning for lots of surveillance programs, ranging from local police all the way up to the National Security Agency.

    • Federal Appellate Court Strikes Potential Death Blow to Privacy in New Cell Site Location Information Case
    • Privacy Takes Major Hit as Court Rules No Warrant Needed for Cell Location Data

      In a major setback for privacy advocates, a U.S. appeals court on Tuesday ruled that cellphone location data is not protected by the Fourth Amendment and can be collected without a warrant.

      By a 12-3 vote, the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia upheld what is known as a third-party doctrine, which states that consumers who willingly give information to outside parties—like telecommunications companies—have “no reasonable expectation of privacy” for that data, regardless of what it reveals. The case is United States v. Graham, in which two defendants were tracked by police without warrants for several months in 2010 and 2011 as part of an armed robbery investigation.

      The ACLU discovered in 2015 that the collected data revealed information that went beyond the scope of the case—including that the wife of defendant Aaron Graham was pregnant.

    • The FBI Wants to Exempt Massive Biometric Database From the Privacy Act

      A broad coalition of 45 signatories, including civil liberties, racial justice, human rights, and privacy organizations, published a letter Tuesday strongly condemning a proposal by the FBI to exempt its massive biometric database from certain provisions of the Privacy Act. Known as the Next Generation Identification system, or NGI, the FBI database houses the world’s largest collection of fingerprints, DNA profiles, palm prints, face images, and other biometric identifiers. The letter, signed by groups such as La Raza, Color of Change, Amnesty International, National LGBTQ Task Force, as well as the companies Uber and Lyft, criticized the agency’s May 5 proposal on the grounds that the “system uses some of the most advanced surveillance technologies known to humankind, including facial recognition, iris scans, and fingerprint recognition.”

    • FBI Wants to Remove Privacy Protections from its Massive Biometrics Database

      Since 2008, the FBI has been assembling a massive database of biometric information on Americans. This database, called Next Generation Identification (NGI), includes fingerprints, face recognition, iris scans and palm prints—collected not just during arrests, but also from millions of Americans for non-criminal reasons like immigration, background checks, and state licensing requirements. Now the FBI wants to exempt this vast collection of data from basic requirements guaranteed under the federal Privacy Act—and it’s giving you only 21 business days to object.

    • Appeals Court Delivers Devastating Blow to Cellphone-Privacy Advocates

      Courts across the country are grappling with a key question for the information age: When law enforcement asks a company for cellphone records to track location data in an investigation, is that a search under the Fourth Amendment?

      By a 12-3 vote, appellate court judges in Richmond, Virginia, on Monday ruled that it is not — and therefore does not require a warrant.

      The 4th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld what is known as the third-party doctrine: a legal theory suggesting that consumers who knowingly and willingly surrender information to third parties therefore have “no reasonable expectation of privacy” in that information — regardless of how much information there is, or how revealing it is.

      Research clearly shows that cell-site location data collected over time can reveal a tremendous amount of personal information — like where you live, where you work, when you travel, who you meet with, and who you sleep with. And it’s impossible to make a call without giving up your location to the cellphone company.

    • Anonymized Data Really Isn’t Anonymous: Vehicle Data Can Easily Be Used To Identify You

      Companies increasingly hoover up larger and larger oceans of consumer data, promising that security and privacy aren’t much of a worry because data is “anonymized.” But as research has shown time and time again, anonymous data isn’t all that anonymous — since it takes only a modicum of effort to either analyze the data — or cross reference it with other data — to ferret out personal identities. It doesn’t really matter whether we’re talking about NSA surveillance troves or social networking data: anonymous data just isn’t anonymous.

    • William Binney: NSA Surveillance Takes a Page From Nazi Germany

      With the Obama Administration’s unprecedented crackdown on whistleblowers, Radio Sputnik’s Loud & Clear speaks with National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower William Binney about the growing American police state.

      “They [the NSA] don’t care what they do, they feel that they have the right to do anything that they feel necessary, and they will cover up crimes and procedures and violations of regulations that they’ve done to achieve whatever their ends are,” Binney tells Loud & Clear host Brian Becker.

    • Facebook using people’s phones to listen in on what they’re saying, suggests professor

      Facebook could be listening in on people’s conversations all of the time, an expert has claimed.

      The app might be using people’s phones to gather data on what they are talking about, it has been claimed.

      Facebook says that its app does listen to what’s happening around it, but only as a way of seeing what people are listening to or watching and suggesting that they post about it.

      The feature has been available for a couple of years, but recent warnings from Kelli Burns, mass communication professor at the University of South Florida, have drawn attention to it.

    • Advertisers Might Already Be Using Your Phone’s Hardware to Track You

      Your phone is like your best friend. It holds all of your secrets, and there’s a bond of trust—at least, you hope that there is. Advertisers may already be exploiting this trust and turning your phone against you, by using its tiny quirks to track you across the web.

      Because people are becoming savvy to advertisers’ bag of tricks, the usual methods of following folks around online just aren’t paying off like they used to. Now and in the future, advertisers may track you with “fingerprinting”—identifying a particular device by, say, tracking its screen dimensions and plugins, alongside lots of other personalized information which is then communicated and collected through a browser before being sent to advertisers.

      Recent research has pointed to a method of device fingerprinting that uses the miniscule, unique imperfections in each phone’s accelerometer and gyroscope—basically, its hardware—to create a profile of that phone that can be used to track its user’s activities across the web, without her knowledge. Unlike location data, most sites don’t ask for permission to access a phone’s motion sensors.

    • Iran orders foreign messaging apps to store data within its borders

      Iran has ordered foreign messaging apps to store all data on its citizens within the country’s borders, Reuters reports, giving the companies one year to comply. Iran’s Supreme Council of Cyberspace announced the measures on Sunday, saying they are based on the “guidelines and concerns of the supreme leader” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, according to the local IRNA news agency.

      “Foreign messaging companies active in the country are required to transfer all data and activity linked to Iranian citizens into the country in order to ensure their continued activity,” the council said.

    • Snowden slams Clinton and Trump, but leaves Sanders unscathed
    • Edward Snowden Criticizes Hillary Over Violation of Classified Laws
    • Snowden Slams US for Ignoring Hillary Clinton’s Email Controversy
    • Should Consideration be Given When Sentencing a Criminal if the Crime Led to Positive Changes?
    • NSA leaker Edward Snowden performed a ‘public service’: Editorial
    • President Obama, pardon Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning
    • Why Obama Is Wrong About Snowden

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • New Jersey Officer Leaked Mugshots Of 14-Year-Old Gunned Down By Police

      Shortly after 14-year-old Radazz Hearns was shot seven times in the legs and buttocks by Trenton, New Jersey police, an officer used a juvenile court database to find and leak the teenager’s mugshots.

      Last August, a state trooper and an officer from Mercer County were responding to gunfire near an apartment complex in Trenton when they saw a group of three teenagers, including Hearns, in the area of the reported shots. When they exited their unmarked patrol car and ordered the teenagers to put their hands up, Hearns tried to flee. According to the police, the teenager pointed a gun in their direction, so they gunned him down in self-defense. But one eyewitness claimed Hearns was trying to pull up his pants, and findings by the state attorney general’s office differed from the officers’ account of what happened.

    • The U.S. Senator Who Thinks We Need More Incarceration

      Freshman U.S. Senator Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), a firebrand darling of the extreme right, thinks the United States has a problem with incarceration—underincarceration, that is. That’s right.

      Cotton criticized congressional efforts to reform the country’s broken prison system, arguing instead that federal and state governments ought to be building more prisons and jailing even more Americans, rather than fewer.

      According to The Sentencing Project, the U.S. leads the world in incarceration, with 2.2 million people in prison or jail, a 500 percent increase over the last 40 years.

    • Hearing Thursday Could Clear Path to Freedom for ‘Guantánamo Diary’ Author

      Mohamedou Slahi has been unlawfully detained for 14 years at Guantánamo Bay and is the author of a best-selling book about the ordeal he suffered there. A hearing Thursday could result in his freedom.

      After years of waiting and litigation, Slahi will finally receive a Periodic Review Board hearing. President Obama ordered PRB hearings for the men at Guantánamo five years ago. The board is made up of senior officials from military and intelligence agencies who are tasked with determining whether a detainee poses a “significant threat” to the United States or can be cleared for release. A PRB does not determine whether the initial detention was justified — that is a task for the federal courts deciding habeas corpus challenges. In Slahi’s habeas case, a federal court judge — still the only neutral person to have reviewed all the evidence — found in 2010 that Slahi’s detention was unlawful and ordered him released. But the Obama administration appealed, and the federal habeas case languishes still.

    • Singaporean Activists Harassed by Police for ‘Breaching’ Election Rules

      It’s a worrying state of affairs when expressing your political opinions on Facebook on a particular day is all it takes for police to gain access to all your data without a warrant or court order.

      Last Friday Singapore’s Elections Department announced that its Assistant Returning Officer had lodged police reports against news website The Independent Singapore and two individuals, Roy Ngerng and Teo Soh Lung, for breaching election rules relating to Cooling-Off Day during the Bukit Batok by-election held earlier this month.

    • Dalai Lama says ‘too many’ refugees in Europe

      The Dalai Lama said in an interview published Thursday that Europe has accepted “too many” refugees, and that they should eventually return to help rebuild their home countries.

      “When we look into the face of every single refugee, especially the children and women, we can feel their suffering,” said the Tibetan spiritual leader, who has himself lived in exile for over half a century.

    • Freedom From Violence: Lessons From Black Prisoner Organizing

      Collective rebellions are episodic. Expanded technologies of control and limited leftist movements on the outside have made such rebellions even rarer in prisons. But the long-standing black critique of the American criminal justice as a system of racial dominance continues, aided and abetted by the existence of resurgent opposition to prisons beginning in the late 1990s and with added ferocity since the economic collapse of 2008. In 1998, two organizations formed with direct connections to the previous generation of prison protest. Bo Brown, who spent seven years in prison for her involvement with the Seattle-based clandestine George Jackson Brigade, and Angela Davis were part of the intergenerational founding collective of Critical Resistance (CR). CR helped popularize a systemic analysis of prisons as part of a wider organization of the political economy — a prison-industrial complex. Alongside feminist antiviolence organizations such as Incite!: Women of Color against Violence, CR has worked to reengage a politics of (prison) abolition that updates 1970s innovations.

    • Man allegedly pooped on Kroger U-Scan machine

      A Cincinnati man was jailed after he allegedly stripped naked in front of an employee at the Kroger store in Hyde Park and defecated on a U-Scan machine.

      Colin Murphy, 23, was charged with public indecency and disorderly conduct for his actions, which took place on Sunday, according to police.

      According to a court affidavit, Murphy smelled of alcohol, had slurred speech and staggered walk.

    • Russian cyber-espionage group hits Sanoma

      Yle has obtained new evidence of cyber-attacks on Finnish targets by a cyber-espionage group linked to Russian state intelligence. The group, known as Sofacy or Pawn Storm, has attempted to hack into data communications of Finland’s largest group, Sanoma, as well as of a Finnish member of Bellingcat, an international group investigating the Ukraine conflict.

    • Effort to Expose Russia’s ‘Troll Army’ Draws Vicious Retaliation

      Seeking to shine some light into the dark world of Internet trolls, a journalist with Finland’s national broadcaster asked members of her audience to share their experience of encounters with Russia’s “troll army,” a raucous and often venomous force of online agitators.

      The response was overwhelming, though not in the direction that the journalist, Jessikka Aro, had hoped.

      As she expected, she received some feedback from people who had clashed with aggressively pro-Russian voices online. But she was taken aback, and shaken, by a vicious retaliatory campaign of harassment and insults against her and her work by those same pro-Russian voices.

      “Everything in my life went to hell thanks to the trolls,” said Ms. Aro, a 35-year-old investigative reporter with the social media division of Finland’s state broadcaster, Yle Kioski.

      Abusive online harassment is hardly limited to pro-Russian Internet trolls. Ukraine and other countries at odds with the Kremlin also have legions of aggressive avengers on social media.

    • Smugglers Made $6 Billion From Refugee Crisis in 2015: Interpol

      People smugglers capitalizing on the refugee crisis created by the Syrian conflict gleaned some $6 billion from those attempting to reach the European mainland in 2015, according to a report released by world policing bodies Tuesday.

      Interpol and Europol, the international and European cross-border crime agencies, issued a report on “Migrant Smuggling Networks” that showed that 90 percent of the influx of refugees into the European Union is facilitated by smuggling networks in Africa, the Middle East and Eastern Europe.

    • EU naval mission is ‘MIGRANT MAGNET’: Damning verdict on Brussels plan ‘helping smugglers’

      THE European Union’s flagship naval mission to crack down on migrant crossings has today been branded a spectacular failure which has HELPED the people smugglers.

    • Muslim in Eastern Uganda Kills Christian Wife for Leaving Islam, Relatives Say

      A Muslim in eastern Uganda strangled his wife to death this month for leaving Islam, relatives and neighbors said.

      Awali Kakaire, 34, early in the morning on May 8 killed Mariam Nakirya for embracing Christianity in Mbaale village, Imanyiro Sub-County, Mayuge District, the area residents told Morning Star News. She was 30.

    • Florida Prosecutors Drop Charges Against PINAC Reporter Jeff Gray – Again

      For the fifth time since 2010, Florida prosecutors were forced to dismiss criminal charges against PINAC reporter Jeff Gray before even going to trial, proving once again what we have known all along.

      That his arrests are always unlawful and unconstitutional; nothing but an attempt to keep him from doing his job.

    • Vietnam vet claims guards at El Paso VA clinic used “excessive force” against him

      Jose Oliva, 71, went to the El Paso Veterans Affairs Clinic for a check up. But what happened that afternoon still has him shaken up three months later.

      Oliva says he was attempting to enter the VA clinic. But his interaction with the guards went horribly wrong leaving him in cuffs and, he says, with injuries.

      “You know, they could have killed me,” Oliva said.

      Oliva, a Vietnam vet, said he’s had shoulder and throat surgery after what happened at the VA clinic on Feb. 16.

    • Former Miss Turkey gets suspended sentence for insulting Erdogan

      Turkey sentenced a former beauty queen to 14 months in prison on Tuesday, deepening concerns that the country is swaying toward an increasingly authoritarian form of rule.

      An Istanbul court found Merve Buyuksarac, 27, guilty of insulting a public official, after she shared a poem on her Instagram account in 2014 that was deemed insulting to Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the country’s president.

    • Fresh third party video of Amos Yee being assaulted in Jurong Point emerges

      Youtube user Jhan DABOMB who witnessed the recent assault of Amos Yee in Jurong Point and has released his video footage of the incident. He said that when he saw one youth chasing another in Jurong Point, with a girl in tow, it looked to him like a case of molestation. Only when Amos was dragged out of NTUC Fairprice did the Youtube user realise that it was Amos Yee.

    • Israeli Company Claims Its Software Can Look At Your Face And Determine If You’re A Terrorist Or Murderer

      There is a regular experience I have that I assume is common for anyone that operates within the technology industry: I will often hear non-technical people make claims about a specific kind of technology that are wildly overstated. To clarify, I am technically proficient in the barest sense, mostly meaning that I have enough of an understanding of the underlying process by which things work that I can explain them, but not implement them. To those without even that barest understanding, I can understand how technology can simply seem like magic. That can open the doors for others who know better to try to take advantage of this.

      Enter into the conversation Israeli startup company Faception, which claims its facial recognition software can look at your features and then determine if you’re a terrorist, pedophile, or criminal.

    • Fired for Speaking Out on Guantánamo, Former Prosecutor Settles With Library of Congress

      In a small but significant victory for free speech, Col. Morris Davis, the former chief prosecutor at Guantánamo Bay, announced a $100,000 settlement Tuesday in his lawsuit against the Library of Congress’s Congressional Research Service.

      Davis was fired from the CRS in 2009 for authoring two opinion pieces (one in the Wall Street Journal, the other in the Washington Post) that criticized President Obama for prosecuting some terror suspects in federal courts and others in military commissions — what Davis called a “dangerous legal double standard.”

      Davis became an assistant director at CRS after retiring from a 25-year career as an Air Force lawyer in 2008.

      The ACLU sent a letter to CRS in 2009 asking for Davis’s reinstatement, noting that his work at CRS had nothing to do with Guantánamo Bay. When CRS refused, the ACLU sued on Davis’s behalf.

    • 9/11 Suspect Calls for U.S. Judge to Step Down, Citing Evidence Destruction

      The U.S. military judge overseeing the trial of the accused mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks should step down and the case should be scrapped because he effectively conspired with prosecutors to destroy evidence, defense lawyers said in a court filing.

      The motion said Judge James Pohl, an Army colonel, and prosecutors had tainted the case against Pakistan-born Khalid Sheikh Mohammed by keeping defense lawyers from learning that the evidence had been destroyed.

    • Judge ‘manipulated’ 9/11 attacks case, court document alleges
    • Gitmo Judge Allowed Destruction of Evidence in 9/11 Case: Report

      The judge in charge of military tribunals at Guantánamo Bay allegedly colluded with prosecutors to hide evidence that supported the defense of suspected 9/11 architect Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, “irreparably” harming his case, according to a court document obtained by the Guardian on Tuesday.

      The accusation could be the impetus to reform the highly controversial tribunals at the U.S. military prison in Cuba altogether, according to Karen Greenberg, the director of Fordham University Law School’s Center on National Security.

      “This may well be the straw that breaks the camel’s back in underscoring the unviability of the military commissions,” Greenberg told the Guardian.

      According to the recently unsealed defense filing, Army Colonel James Pohl “in concert with the prosecution, manipulated secret proceedings and the use of secret orders.”

    • Europe’s War on Refugees is Repeating the Mistakes of the War on Drugs

      On 19th April 2015, the sinking of a single refugee boat off the coast of Lampedusa led to the drowning of over 700 people. By the end of the month, an estimated 1300 had drowned in the same way, making it the deadliest month on record in the Mediterranean refugee crisis. The tragedy was the direct result of a successful British-led campaign to end the Italian search-and-rescue operation Mare Nostrum, which had prevented such mass drownings before its closure in October 2014. Those events led to a public outcry and pressure to restart search-and-rescue operations; but resisting such pressure, on 23rd April 2015 the European Council instead adopted a British-drafted resolution vowing to “undertake systematic efforts to identify, capture and destroy [refugee] vessels”. The EU was giving notice that its response to the refugee crisis would no longer be based on humanitarian commitments, but on military force. It was, not coincidentally, a proposal originally made by the British fascist Nick Griffin five years earlier.

    • Chile’s Robocops

      Robocop is not only a movie. It’s real life in Chile where grown men, disturbingly silly, dress up in armored uniforms, similar to the movie Robocop (Orion Pictures, 1987) bashing peaceful demonstrations of students wearing blue jeans.

      Yes, they beat up and intimidate kids, which is a glaring example of a world gone mad! Ruled by horrifying neoliberal principles of financial domination, controlled by elitist, kicking the daylights out of teenagers. The whole affaire is simply one more example of the spirit of meanness from which neoliberal principles pit the elite class against all others.

    • Democrats Targeted for Creating, and Now Ignoring, Mass Incarceration Disaster

      A new petition released Tuesday calls on Democratic Party leadership to make ending mass incarceration a core part of the party platform.

      “So far, both [parties] have fallen short,” reads the petition created by non-partisan public policy institute the Brennan Center for Justice. “Even Democratic Party platforms haven’t merely been silent; they have actually called for policies creating more imprisonment.””

    • Why is Obama Ignoring Pleas to Release Political Prisoner Oscar López Rivera?

      Two and a half months ago, asked by award-winning playwright Lin-Manuel Mirandaabout imprisoned Puerto Rican nationalist Oscar López Rivera – whose only crime, according to Nobel Peace Laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu, is “conspiracy to free his people from the shackles of imperial justice” – President Barack Obama told the Hamilton creator that he “had [the case] on his desk.” Miranda, whose parents hail from Puerto Rico, used his invitation to the White House to bring up the issue of López Rivera’s continued incarceration, which is of tremendous importance to Puerto Ricans. Both on the island and in the diaspora, freedom for the 73-year-old political prisoner enjoys overwhelming popular support and has united people across the political spectrum.

    • Samantha Power, Former Human Rights Journalist, to Receive Award From Henry Kissinger

      In her 2002 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide,” Samantha Power lambasted former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger for his role in genocidal foreign policy. “[T]he [Ford] administration had very little credibility,” she wrote. “Kissinger had bloodied Cambodia and blackened his own reputation with past U.S. policy.”

      Now, in an ironic twist, Power is set to receive The American Academy of Berlin’s Henry A. Kissinger Prize—and it will be presented to her from Kissinger himself. The award is given “annually to a renowned figure in the field of international diplomacy.” Power, a “human rights celebrity,” began her career as a journalist reporting from war-torn regions such as “Bosnia, East Timor, Kosovo, Rwanda, Sudan, and Zimbabwe.” She eventually became a member of President Obama’s administration when he made her the United States’ youngest U.N. ambassador.

    • Samantha Power, Obama’s Atrocity Enabler

      A new documentary called “Watchers of the Sky” tells the moving story of Raphael Lemkin, Polish lawyer and resistance fighter who spent his final years seeking to secure legislation against the crime of genocide at the United Nations. Lemkin’s struggle to guarantee a legal order capable of preventing the slaughter of civilians is brought to life through the narration of Samantha Power, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and famed diplomat who earned renown with her 2002 book, “A Problem From Hell,” documenting the international community’s failure to stop genocide in Rwanda.

    • Boston to Protestings Students: You’re Not Worth it.

      The student protest outside of Boston City Hall was winding down. Of the 1,000 students who’d walked out of their schools for the second time this spring, about 100 were left, waiting to get inside in hopes of testifying before a City Council committee against proposed school budget cuts. First, though, the students had to pass through a metal detector, a process as inefficient as an airport TSA line. “This is what democracy looks like,” they chanted, a protest staple that for once felt almost true. “The whole world is watching,” they shouted, amplified by the hulking architecture of City Hall.

    • Jessica Williams, 29: Another Black Woman Gunned Down By Police

      Oscar Salinas, from the Amor for Alex coalition [formed after police fired 59 shots killing Alex Nieto while he was eating a burrito], gave a strong message of solidarity from the Black and Brown alliance that is fighting police impunity.

    • Happy Sunday, Welcome to Rikers

      Anna has made the trip to Rikers hundreds of times in the nearly six years her son has been awaiting trial. Each time, a friend picks her up early in the morning near her apartment in Manhattan’s Lower East Side and drives her out through the city, past the brick houses and manicured lawns of northwestern Queens. They park near the Q100 bus stop and sit silently in the car until the bus pulls up.

    • Blair government’s rendition policy led to rift between UK spy agencies

      British involvement in controversial and clandestine rendition operations provoked an unprecedented row between the UK’s domestic and foreign intelligence services, MI5 and MI6, at the height of the “war on terror”, the Guardian can reveal.

      The head of MI5, Eliza Manningham-Buller, was so incensed when she discovered the role played by MI6 in abductions that led to suspected extremists being tortured, she threw out a number of her sister agency’s staff and banned them from working at MI5’s headquarters, Thames House.

      According to Whitehall sources, she also wrote to the then prime minister, Tony Blair, to complain about the conduct of MI6 officers, saying their actions had threatened Britain’s intelligence gathering and may have compromised the security and safety of MI5 officers and their informants.

    • MI5 Chief ‘Right to Be Disgusted’ over MI6 Involvement in CIA Rendition & Torture

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • Factually Challenged Op-ed Insists Google Greed Is Behind FCC’s Desire For More Set Top Box Competition

      So wait, just so we’re clear, your ingenious solution for the cable industry’s aggressive walled garden anti-competitive stranglehold over set top box hardware is — to regulate Google? And for years we’ve pointed out that the idea of “search neutrality” is bullshit. Throughout the net neutrality debate it was the cry of a telecom sector and its various policy tendrils, all pretending to be willfully oblivious to why physical, last mile services without competition (broadband) aren’t regulated exactly the same as Internet services that users can choose not to use.

      And buried under the Op-ed’s conflations and bizarre omissions, that’s just the thing the editorial intentionally misses — quite painfully. Increasing set top box competition means that consumers would have a choice of set top boxes. As such, they could choose one that doesn’t rely on Google technology if this is really such a concern for them. Of course it isn’t — the great Google set top antitrust albatross is a giant red herring being pushed by cable operators via an endless number of similar editorials. All of them carry the same message: don’t open up the stagnant cable set top box market to competition or Google will run away with your daughter and pee on your azaleas.

      Again it’s a bunch of nonsense intended to misdirect the public from a central truth of the set top box debate: the cable industry is absolutely terrified of losing a central pillar in its quest to ensure cable remains a closed, walled garden ecosystem. Opening the set top box market to competition not only kills $21 billion in captive annual revenues, it suddenly opens the door to cheaper, better, more open hardware platforms — built by companies with no qualms about pushing traditional cable customers toward alternative streaming options.

  • DRM

    • Author Sues Publisher For Portraying eBook Licenses As ‘Sales’ To Pay Out Fewer Royalties

      If you’re a consumer, that piece of digital wordsmithery you purchased probably isn’t worth the paper it isn’t printed on. Like most digital media available for “purchase,” ebooks are often “sold” as licenses that allow the publisher to control use of the product indefinitely, whether through DRM or by simply attaching EULAs no one will ever read to every download.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • PDF Poland 2016: Is civic tech a good solution?

      “Civic tech is a great potential solution, but it is a solution that is vulnerable to being monopolised by elites if we don’t try to push the service beyond its traditional user base.”

      [...]

      Should be accessible to all citizens

    • Trademarks

    • Copyrights

      • 10 Years Ago Hollywood Awoke The Pirate Bay ‘Beast’

        Ten years ago today The Pirate Bay was raided by the Swedish police. While the entertainment industries hoped that this would shut the site down once and for all, they inadvertently helped to create one of the most resilient websites on the Internet.

      • MPAA Lobbyist / SOPA Sponsor to Draft Democratic Party Platform

        The Democratic Party has appointed a committee tasked with drafting the party’s platform. The 15-member panel includes MPAA lobbyist Howard L Berman, an attorney and former U.S. Representative who not only co-sponsored SOPA and tried to enshrine P2P network sabotage in law, but has also been funded by Hollywood throughout his career.

      • Re-Mixing Protected By Freedom Of Arts Fundamental Right, German Court Rules

        The German Constitutional Court today ruled in favour of the “freedom to sample” – or freedom to remix – in a case between the singer/songwriter Sabrina Setlur and the band Kraftwerk.

        The latter had filed complaints against the sampling of two seconds of rhythm from its 1977 song “Metall auf Metall” in Setlur’s 1997 “Nur mir”. The Federal High Court and several lower courts ruled in favour of Kraftwerk, pointing to German copyright legislation underlining the difference between re-using snippets from the original recording medium to re-performing them.

      • Police Target 50 Streaming Sites, Detain Five Suspects

        Police in Italy are reporting the execution of a large operation against a network offering live sports, movies and TV shows online without permission. The Guardia di Finanza say they targeted 50 sites running on 41 servers located on three continents. Five suspects were detained in what police estimate to be a 40 million euro business.

05.31.16

Links 31/5/2016: Linux Lite 3.0, Alpine 3.4.0, Krita 3.0

Posted in News Roundup at 5:38 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • ownCloud Mail 0.5 released

    Following the release early, release often philosophy when working on ownCloud Mail, we do releases quite often. The most important enhancement of this release is our first step towards tight integration with more community apps. Additionally, it marks the beginning of Tahaa’s GSOC coding period.

  • OwnCloud Forms A Foundation

    Markus Rex of ownCloud announced this morning, “Today we announced the creation of the ownCloud Foundation which will guarantee the viability and availability of free ownCloud now and in the future. We have made a commitment to open development in a blog recently and want to extend that further to ensure that the community is providing the direction, planning and atmosphere that is best for the project. The ownCloud community has matured a lot over the last few years and is certainly to play a bigger part in its own destiny.”

  • Quantifying Benefits of Network Virtualization in the Data Center

    Modern data centers have increased significantly in scale and complexity as compute and storage resources become highly virtualized. The rise of the DevOps style of application deployment means that data center resources must be agile and respond rapidly to changing workload requirements. Data center network technologies have been challenged to keep up with these rapidly evolving application requirements.

  • Apache Zeppelin Joins Several Other Projects Gaining Top-Level Status

    As we’ve been reporting, The Apache Software Foundation, which incubates more than 350 open source projects and initiatives, has been elevating a lot of interesting new tools to Top-Level Status recently. The foundation has also made clear that you can expect more on this front, as graduating projects to Top-Level Status helps them get both advanced stewardship and certainly far more contributions.

    Only a few days ago, the foundation announced that a project called TinkerPop has graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a Top-Level Project (TLP). TinkerPop is a graph computing framework that provides developers the tools required to build modern graph applications in any application domain and at any scale. Now, it has announced that Apache Zeppelin has graduated as well. Zeppelin is a web-based notebook that enables interactive data analytics.

  • 6 Open Source Operating Systems for the Internet of Things (IoT)

    Whether you are small to large enterprises, IoT is one of the useful technology that can help you to be connected on-the-go.

  • 6 open source architecture projects to check out

    The world of architecture doesn’t change as quickly as software, but architects are still finding new ways to share innovative designs and ideas.

    The open source architecture movement aims to make architectural designs, drawings, 3D renderings, and documentation freely available for integration into other projects under open source licenses. It owes much of its growth to the growing popularity of the maker movement, DIY culture, 3D printing, and CNC machines, as well as support from architects like Alejandro Aravana.

  • Yorubaname.com has gone opensource, codebase now on GitHub

    Online dictionary for yoruba names, YorubaName, has now made its backlog accessible to the public. In a post on their blog, the guys at YorubaName announced that the website codebase is now on GitHub.

  • Events

    • LibrePlanet conference videos and slides online: Edward Snowden, Richard Stallman, Karen Sandler, and more

      Tuesday, May 31, 2016 – The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today announces that recordings and slides from its LibrePlanet 2016 free software conference are now available online.

      LibrePlanet 2016: Fork the System was held in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Stata Center on March 19 and 20, 2016. Video for the opening keynote with NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and dozens more sessions from the conference – over 25 hours of free software ideas – are available on the FSF’s instance of GNU MediaGoblin, a free software media publishing platform that is a decentralized replacement to sites like YouTube and Flickr.

    • Women Dominate 2016’s O’Reilly Open Source Awards

      In an illustration of the value of diversity, four out of five of the recipients presented with O’Reilly Open Source Awards at this year’s OSCON were women.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

  • SaaS/Back End

    • Here’s how you can make a career in OpenStack

      OpenStack is one of the biggest open source movements. It is a free and open-source software platform for cloud computing, mostly deployed as an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS). The software platform consists of interrelated components that control hardware pools of processing, storage, and networking resources throughout a data centre.

      According to the official website, hundreds of the world’s largest brands rely on OpenStack to run their businesses every day, reducing costs and helping them move faster. OpenStack has a strong ecosystem globally.

  • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • BSD

    • ZFS Fault Management Daemon Added To FreeBSD

      The latest FreeBSD development code has integrated the zfsd daemon.

      ZFSD is the ZFS Fault Management Daemon. ZFSD deals with situations like drive faults in ZFS pools with hot-spares and replacements. This comes as the ZFS file-system support in FreeBSD continues to mature and is in quite a good state for ZFS outside of Oracle.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • GNU Astronomy Utilities is released

      The first public release of the GNU Astronomy Utilities (Gnuastro, version 0.1) tarball is now available for download, see below for more details. Gnuastro is an official GNU package consisting of a set of utilities, or executable programs (listed below), for astronomical data manipulation and analysis directly from the command-line (no mini-environment) and satisfying the GNU Coding Standards.

    • Gnuastro: GNU Gets Into Astronomy

      Gnuastro is the latest GNU Project.

      Gnuastro v0.1 was released today as the first public release of this package, which stands for the GNU Astronomy Utilities. Gnuastro contains utilities for astronomical data manipulation and analysis via the command-line.

  • Licensing/Legal

    • The Oracle v. Google Suit is Still an Anti-Open Move That Shouldn’t Have Happened

      All the way back in 2010, when Oracle filed a complaint for patent and copyright infringement against Google regarding parts of the Java code found in Google’s Android mobile OS, I wrote a post calling the move “the anti-open move of the year.” Fast-forward to today, and in the Oracle v. Google trial that just concluded, a jury returned a verdict in Google’s favor. It basically concluded that Oracle’s suit against Google, claiming that the use of Java APIs in Android violated copyright law, was bunk.

      Now, in an op-ed piece for Ars Technica, Annette Hurst, an attorney who represented Oracle, equates the jury’s decision with the death of open source.

      [...]

      Hurst makes a good point that dual licensing models are increasing, with many open source projects available for free, while commercial versions, often including support, come at a cost. But the Oracle suit originated because Oracle essentially perceived itself as owning a moat around Java that didn’t really exist.

      [...]

      Indeed, one of the lasting images of this long running legal skirmish is going to be Oracle behaving in a decidedly anti-open fashion. It may have been wiser for Oracle to simply let this one go.

    • Here’s how to check if software license is open source

      The Open Source Initiative (OSI), the steward of the Open Source Definition (OSD), announced today it has created a machine readable publication of OSI approved licenses.

      According to the Initiative, the API will allow third parties to ‘become license-aware’, giving businesses everywhere means to determine if a license is Open Source or not.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Most Spanish cities fail to comply with law on transparency

      The survey, which covered 54 cities in Spain (including Málaga, Saragossa, La Corogne, Alicante, Lleida, Cantabria and Castilla la Mancha), analysed the website of city councils to see if essential data had been published, as required by the law. Those data include the remuneration of senior officials, the declaration of assets of the municipal councillor, budgets, inventory, property, contracts, agreements and grants.

    • Malta’s ICT agency reaches out to youth and NGOs

      Last Saturday, Malta’s Information Technology Agency (MITA) reached out to the country’s youth and non-governmental organisations. The agency organised a public workshop, demonstrating eGovernment services, to show how these can ‘revolutionise government interaction’.

    • Austria shares thoughts on citizen-centric government

      Citizens have strong ties with municipal administrations, the Bürgerzentriertes eGovernment (BUEGO) working group writes. They consult their administration’s websites expecting immediate answers to a range of questions, such as time tables for waste collection, and information about medical care. According to the working group, the way in which Austria’s municipalities offer this information is neither systematic nor universal.

    • Open Data

      • Luxembourg launches open data portal

        The Grand Duchy of Luxembourg officially launched its national open data portal data.public.lu on April 8th. This portal, supported by Digital Luxembourg, the government agency in charge of digital affairs in the country, was presented during the Game of Code hackathon.

      • Denmark to accelerate government digitisation

        Open standards

        The existing shared solutions are to be adopted by all authorities and public sector institutions where relevant, according to a presentation in English. “Shared solutions need to be stable, secure and user-friendly, they will also be easy to implement because the infrastructure is based on open standards.”

        The strategy, an agreement involving the government, regions and municipalities, was announced on 12 May. It includes 33 initiatives, which among other things deal with ease of use, reuse of data, IT architecture, growth, security and digital skills, DIGST says.

  • Programming/Development

    • 3 Things Infrastructure as Code is Not

      The role of the network engineer is changing. This is not a result of DevOps, although some would claim it is. As DevOps takes center stage in organizations, it can seem like network engineers are being asked to become developers.

      There have been a number of talks discussing this, some of which have surfaced at Interop Las Vegas. The shift has been Infrastructure as Code (IaC), which was fundamental to the start of the DevOps movement. So maybe you could say this is caused by DevOps.

    • Introducing Blue Ocean: a new user experience for Jenkins

      While this project is in the alpha stage of development, the intent is that Jenkins users can install Blue Ocean side-by-side with the Jenkins Classic UI via a plugin.

      Not all the features listed on this blog are complete but we will be hard at work over the next few months preparing Blue Ocean for general use. We intend to provide regular updates on this blog as progress is made.

      Blue Ocean is open source today and we invite you to give us feedback and to contribute to the project.

Leftovers

  • Samsung: Don’t install Windows 10. REALLY

    Samsung is advising customers against succumbing to Microsoft’s nagging and installing Windows 10.

    The consumer electronics giant’s support staff have admitted drivers for its PCs still don’t work with Microsoft’s newest operating system and told customers they should simply not make the upgrade.

    That’s nearly a year after Microsoft released Windows 10 and with a month to go until its successor – Windows 10 Anniversary Update – lands.

    Samsung’s customers have complained repeatedly during the last 12 months of being either unable to install Microsoft’s operating system on their machines or Windows 10 not working properly with components if they do succeed.

  • Hardware

    • ARM Cortex-A73 core and Mali-G71 GPU target mobile VR

      ARM announced a 10nm Cortex-A73 architecture with 30 percent better sustained performance and efficiency than the Cortex-A72, plus a 32-shader Mali-G71 GPU.

      ARM unveiled a follow-on to the high-end Cortex-A72 mobile architecture, which was announced in Feb. 2015, and also unveiled a high-end Mali-G71 GPU to work with it (see farther below). The Cortex-A73 supports a 10nm FinFET process, compared to 16nm FinFET+ for the Cortex-A72. Using this process, Cortex-A73 cores would measure 0.65 x 0.65mm, making it the “smallest and most efficient ‘big’ ARMv8-A core” to date, according to ARM.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Dow-DuPont Merger Will Cripple Farmers and Food Sovereignty, Groups Warn

      Public interest groups urged the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) to block the mega-merger of chemical corporations Dow and DuPont, which the organizations argue is part of a larger effort to put a “corporate cabal” in charge of the nation’s food system.

    • WHO Boosts Efforts For Plain Packaging

      “Tobacco-related illness is one of the biggest public health threats the world has ever faced,” according to the World Health Organization, and plain packaging of tobacco products can save lives, it said. The theme of this year’s no-tobacco day, today, is: Get ready for plain packaging, as the WHO is calling for countries to introduce plain packaging in their territories.

    • From Albrecht to Monsanto: A System Not Run for the Public Good Can Never Serve the Public Good

      In response, people are fighting back and resisting. From Ghana to India and from Europe to beyond, food sovereignty movements are demonstrating a deep-rooted resistance against neoliberal doctrine and its negative impacts on agriculture, health, communities and the environment. And they are armed with realistic alternatives to corporate dominated agriculture and the policies and framework which allows it to prosper at the expense of both people and the environment.

    • Zika and the Olympics

      Federal troops are spraying for mosquitoes, and neighborhood health inspectors have been tasked with eliminating standing bodies of water where they are known to breed, says the government. Do you really believe that the Brazilian government is capable of eradicating mosquitoes in Rio even temporarily?, asks anyone who has ever had contact with Brazilian bureaucracy. So the argument goes, back and forth, and it’s getting ugly.

    • Thousands Of Sexual Assault Victims In The Military Have Been Denied Veteran Health Care

      Liz Luras carried three American flags over her shoulder in a Memorial Day march this weekend. Each represented a veteran who committed suicide after leaving the military. To Luras, this honor is especially meaningful, since she knows it could easily be her flag waving beside theirs.

      Luras is one of the many soldiers featured in a new Human Rights Watch report who were “honorably discharged” from the military after being the victim of rape or other sexual assault.

    • These Women Stopped a Rape From Happening, and the Story Is Seriously Terrifying

      To make a long story short (although you really should read the whole post), Ulrich and her friends next told the woman’s server and the Fig’s manager what they’d seen. After 40 cringe-inducing minutes of the attempted rapist subtly trying to get her to drink by “chinking his glass to hers,” the two finished their dinner, the Fig staff checked security cameras to confirm that the man had, indeed, poured an unknown substance into the woman’s wine, and the Santa Monica police arrived.

    • The Battle Over Public Drinking Water Has Just Begun

      It’s easy to hate Nestle’s bottled water business.

      The multinational behemoth recently fought a case at the Maine Supreme Court to continue filling Poland Spring bottles — at the same rate the locals pay for tap water. Environmental groups and locals had challenged whether the water company had the authority to sign a 25-year, 603,000 gallon/day contract for public water. The groups lost.

    • A Shockingly Easy Way to Avoid Wasting Thousands of Gallons of Water a Year

      “Typically 20 percent of every shower, the duration, is essentially lost,” said Jonah Schein, technical coordinator for homes and buildings for the EPA’s WaterSense program. “The average shower is a little over eight minutes long, so that’s a good chunk of the shower that we’re not actually being able to utilize.”

  • Security

    • Security updates for Tuesday
    • Security challenges for the Qubes build process

      Ultimately, we would like to introduce a multiple-signature scheme, in which several developers (from different countries, social circles, etc.) can sign Qubes-produced binaries and ISOs. Then, an adversary would have to compromise all the build locations in order to get backdoored versions signed. For this to happen, we need to make the build process deterministic (i.e. reproducible). Yet, this task still seems to be years ahead of us. Ideally, we would also somehow combine this with Intel SGX, but this might be trickier than it sounds.

    • Katy Perry’s Twitter Account With 90 Million Followers Hacked

      Notably, with 90 million followers, Katy Perry is the most followed person on the platform.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • NRA Tells Parents To Keep Guns In Kids’ Rooms For Safety

      During a seminar on “home defense concepts” at the National Rifle Association’s annual meeting in Louisville, an instructor encouraged gun owners to store firearms in their children’s bedrooms.

      Rob Pincus, who owns the popular firearm instruction company I.C.E. Training, paced across a conference room stage as he repeatedly warned against the threat of violent home invasions. After establishing that filling one’s home with weapons is the only solution, he then recommended that gun owners store firearms in their kids’ rooms for easy access.

    • Rules for TV News Anchors, on Memorial Day and Every Day

      These points should be obvious, but please observe the following basic conventions in your reporting.

      * Always refer to U.S. soldiers using the possessive pronoun “our.”

      * Always refer to all of our U.S. troops as “heroes.”

      * Always refer to their actions in war as “service.”

      * Always refer to their actions in war as “sacrifice” and their deaths in war the “ultimate sacrifice.”

      * Always refer to their actions anywhere as “defending our country (or Homeland)” and fighting for “us.” Acknowledge our “debt” to them.

      * Always, no matter what the cause or war theater, aver that the soldiers are always “defending our freedoms.”

      *Always express gratitude and appreciation; always thank U.S. soldiers from commanders on down for their “service,” whether in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq or wherever.

    • Opinion: In Meme-Moriam

      This weekend, America will pause to honor the thousands of men and women who fought and died to preserve ExxonMobil’s First Amendment rights, and protect it from the tyranny of justice.

    • On Memorial Day, US Troops at War with ISIL near Mosul

      On Memorial Day, it is as well to remember that US troops are still at war. Afghanistan is our nation’s longest such military engagement.

    • Modern Mongols: Sunni Arabs outraged at Iran role in Iraqi Gov’t Fallujah Campaign

      BBC Monitoring surveyed the Arabic press on 27 May for the issue of the Iranian role in the Iraq government campaign to take Fallujah from Daesh (ISIS, ISIL). Although Saudi and other newspapers say they want to see Daesh defeated, they are deeply critical of the Shiite militias or Popular Mobilization Forces, alleging that they use indiscriminate fire and create high numbers of civilian casualties when operating in Sunni Arab areas.

      Fallujah is a storied Iraqi Sunni stronghold of several hundreds of thousands of residents, the “city of minarets.” It fell to Daesh in January of 2014, and I think it is fair to say that there is much more angst in the Sunni Arab world about its liberation at the hands of Iran-backed Shiites than there has been about Daesh’s brutal occupation of the city.

    • Barack Obama’s Legacy: What Happened?

      Ever since Neocons de facto took over American foreign policy, after the collapse of the Soviet empire in 1991, rejecting the ‘Peace Dividend’ that many had expected, the cry in Washington D.C. has been to impose an America-centered New World Order by military means.

    • A fond farewell to New York’s Peace Pentagon

      Nearly 20 years ago, as I left the War Resisters League, or WRL, offices in lower Manhattan for the first time, I noticed that my fingertips were covered in black soot and ink. My hands were full of tracts and leaflets, and I had been looking through nonviolence training materials for the last hour. I tried to rub the dirt off onto my jeans, but it wouldn’t budge and later even soap and water had to work really hard.

      A few weeks ago, I went back to 339 Lafayette Street to say goodbye to the appropriately nicknamed Peace Pentagon. The visit reminded me of that sooty, inky afternoon, when the late great and gentle Karl Bissinger gave me a tour of the WRL workroom — teeter-towered floor to ceiling with books, pamphlets, leaflets, posters and signs from every demonstration of the last half century (almost).

    • Forgetting the Crimes of War

      In the U.S. political culture, Memorial Day has become one more chance to glorify American wars and to exploit U.S. soldiers’ deaths to generate sentiment for more wars, a troubling tactic addressed by Gary G. Kohls and S. Brian Willson.

    • A Veteran’s Perspective On Memorial Day

      For 31 years, Veterans For Peace has been the only veterans organization that has rejected war, violence, nuclear weapons, the destruction of the environment created by war, the steady erosion of our civil liberties, the corporate greed that drives our wars and the systemic injustice it produces, here at home and abroad, all in the name of advancing the American empire.

      As veterans, we refuse to accept the notion that, in order to protect the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic, the Constitution that we swore to support and defend can be ignored, shredded and cast aside as an inconvenient nuisance standing in the way of American hegemony.

    • Airstrikes on ISIS are Reducing Their Cities to Ruins

      Some 20,000 Iraqi soldiers, special forces, federal police and Shia paramilitaries are advancing on Fallujah, a Sunni Arab city held by Isis since early 2014. They are backed by the destructive might of the US-led coalition of air forces that have carried out 8,503 air strikes in Iraq and 3,450 in Syria over the last two years. Without such close air support, the anti-Isis forces in Iraq and Syria would not have had their recent successes.

    • Once Upon a Time, My Father Was a Soldier

      The rifle is a story in itself. It was a relic of the French war in Vietnam, the one we failed to learn from. When my father got the call to the “freedom bird” in 1970, he barely had time to pack his duffel and grab the rifle his friend had gifted him. He stepped off the plane to greet my mother at Dulles in his field greens, with the muddy tan and the mustache and the dirt of the war still stuck in the waffle of his boot. When they got to the baggage conveyor, down came the rifle, unboxed, the hard truth of the war right there in broad daylight.

    • Used & Betrayed – 100 Years of US Troops as Lab Rats

      On Memorial Day, politicians will speak at ceremonies all over the country and repeat their favorite mantra: “Support the troops.”

    • Two Men, Two Legs, and Too Much Suffering

      It took nearly 40 years for word of Nguyen Van Tu’s hardships at the hands of the United States to filter back to America. Perhaps a few more Americans will feel remorse as a result. But who will come forward to take responsibility for all this suffering? And who will give Pham Van Chap a new leg?

    • White Rose Begins Leaflet Campaigns June 1942

      In June 1942, a pair of German university students formed The White Rose, a German resistance movement that used a series of leaflets to decry Nazi militarism and call for an end to the war. Hans Scholl and Alexander Schmorell wrote the first four leaflets between the end of June and beginning of July. In the fall, Hans’ sister, Sophie Scholl, discovered that her brother was one of the authors of the pamphlets, and joined the group. Shortly after, Willi Graf, Christoph Probst, and Kurt Huber became members.

    • The Sailors of the USS Liberty: They, Too, Deserve to Be Honored

      On this 2016 Memorial Day, much like all Memorial Day commemorations since 1968, no official recognition or memorial services will be held to honor the 34 dead and the 167 wounded US Navy Men.

      In what has to be one of the most cowardly and expedient political decisions made by a Commander in Chief, politicians, and top brass to uphold the constitution of the United States and to defend American citizens, Lyndon Johnson and his underlings orchestrated a cover up of epic proportions.

      Today no one will hear about the Israeli June 8, 1967 assault on the USS Liberty, an attack so cowardly and so heinous that it exposes Israel’s penchant for manufacturing facts and its ability to manipulate American leadership and the media to gloss over its dastardly deeds.

    • Peter Dale Scott Re-Edit

      Peter Phillips and Mickey Huff devote the hour to a conversation with author Peter Dale Scott about his latest book, “The American Deep State: Wall Street, Big Oil and the Attack on U.S. Democracy.” This wide-ranging discussion examines the “deep state,” an evolving level of secret government separate from the elected government.

    • As Patriotic As Ever

      Of course, primary among those mindlessly calling for carnage he has never seen is Drumpf, “the bog monster of the American id, rising out of the masturbatory muck of our military fantasies in which the manly man slays his enemies.” In a claim that would be laughable if it weren’t so terrifying, he says he “will be so good at the military, your head will spin.” It already is. Perhaps he should read Ambrose Bierce on finding the grotesque bodies of the dead during the Civil War: “How repulsive they looked with their blood-smears, their blank, staring eyes, their teeth uncovered by contraction of the lips! The frost had begun already to whiten their deranged clothing. We were as patriotic as ever, but we did not wish to be that way.”

    • Memorial Day Should Make Us Rethink Platitudes About the US Military

      Since World War II, the US military has been used for imperial policing, not defending the country as the Constitution stipulates. Unfortunately, many of the recent military deaths that we are mourning have been unnecessary and even counterproductive – as new more radical groups are spawned from the ones US intervention helped create in the first place – al Qaeda and al Qaeda in Iraq. Some would say that not running an activist foreign policy is naïve and dangerous. What is naïve is that many Americans seem to think that the 9/11 and other terror attacks just arise out of thin air, with no cause except perhaps pure evil in the perpetrators’ hearts. Terrorists are evil, but the ones that threaten the United States (and the ones that don’t should be left alone) are doing so for reasons that the American people and their politicians and media don’t care to examine – at their own peril.

    • Iraqi troops seize control of districts of Falluja from Isis

      Long-awaited assault backed by US-led coalition forces comes with fears militants might use civilians as human shields

    • Just the Facts: The Speech Obama Should Have Given at Hiroshima

      Here’s what he could have said to try to do so:

      Seventy-one years ago, on a bright cloudless morning, an American warplane unleashed the most horrific and inhuman weapon ever invented, immediately imperiling the survival of the entire human species. This act of terrorism was the ultimate crime: a crime of mass murder, a crime of war, and a crime against humanity.

      The victims, those who died incinerated in a flash, and those who died slowly and painfully over years from chemical poisoning, were never able to see justice served. Sadly, there is no way the criminals who carried out this heinous and barbaric act will ever face justice for their crimes.

    • This Is What Happens When You Make Trump Commander In Chief

      Former senior national security leaders from across the political spectrum have said they would “fear for the Republic” in a Trump presidency, that he is “crazy,” “a gamble for the future,” and would have “dangerous consequences for the United States.” The U.S. military is the most powerful fighting force the world has ever known and has hundreds of nuclear warheads on hair-trigger alert, ready to be launched in a matter of minutes.

    • Obama and the Myth of Hiroshima

      With rare exception, the question of whether the atomic bombs were necessary to end World War Two is debated only deep within the safety of academic circles: could a land invasion have been otherwise avoided? Would more diplomacy have achieved the same ends without the destruction of two cities? Could an atomic test on a deserted island have convinced the Japanese? Was the surrender instead driven primarily by the entry of the Soviets into the Pacific War, which, by historical accident, took place two days after Hiroshima—and the day before Nagasaki was immolated?

    • Milestones (Or What Passes for Them in Washington)

      Toward victory? Peace? Reconciliation? At the very least, toward the prospect of the violence abating? Merely posing the question is to imply that U.S. military efforts in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Islamic world serve some larger purpose.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Big Oil’s “Long Twilight”

      All eyes this morning will be on the half-yearly OPEC meeting in Vienna.

      Although pundits are not expecting a production freeze, the oil price is creeping towards $50, up 80 per cent since its slump of $30 in January.

    • Hillary, Honduras, and the Murder of My Friend Berta

      Flush with tens of millions of our tax dollars for “security assistance,” the Honduran army and national police have acted with impunity since U.S.-trained generals overthrew Manuel Zelaya, the elected president of Honduras, seven years ago. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton toed the White House line that this wasn’t really a “military coup” worthy of near unanimous condemnation by the Organization of American States. The United States was more concerned about maintaining its own military presence in Honduras than objecting to local human rights abuses that have increased ever since.

    • Heat recedes from wildfires fears

      Despite extremes of heat, extended drought and greater hazards from human carelessness, wildfire is not on the increase.

      Two separate studies, in two journals, using different ways to assess the evidence, conclude that the area of scrub, forest or grassland burned to cinders every year is more or less the same, or may even be getting smaller.

    • Malaysia just established a one million hectare marine park

      Malaysia has just established the biggest Marine Protected Area (MPA) in the country. The Tun Mustapha Park (TMP) occupies 1m hectares (2.47m acres) of seascape off the northern tip of Sabah province in Borneo, a region containing the second largest concentration of coral reefs in Malaysia as well as other important habitats like mangroves, sea grass beds and productive fishing grounds.

    • Scientists Say Canada’s Proposed LNG Port Threatens Paris Climate Accord

      Ninety climate change experts from around the world urged Canadian government officials to “take urgent action” and reject a proposed, “unjustified” liquid natural gas (LNG) export terminal to be built on the British Columbia coast, joining with fierce local Indigenous opposition to the controversial project.

    • Brazil: Rules protecting Amazon under threat in new political fight

      Renewed attempts by top lawmakers to remove environmental licensing requirements for “strategic” development projects in Brazil have been stalled.

      The latest twist comes amidst rising concerns amongst environmentalists that that the new government in Brazil will move undermine environmental protections and may support the licensing move.

      Under a long-proposed constitutional amendment, PEC65/2012, environmental licensing would be “auto-approved” once an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) has been submitted.

    • Summer Break for Polluters: Congress Bows to the Chemical Lobby on Toxics Regulation

      To the applause of the chemical industry lobby, Congress is sending a new Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) bill to President Obama. Anyone familiar with this law knows that it is the weakest of all U.S. environmental statutes, leaving the majority of the 85,000 chemicals in our toys, clothes, homes, schools, and workplaces unregulated and untested for their health effects.

      And if Congress and the chemical lobby have their way, none of that will change.

    • Memorial Day: Trump’s War On Climate Action Would Ensure A World Of Wars

      On Thursday, Donald Trump declared that if elected President, he would wage an all-out war against national and global climate action. On Friday, he went so far as to to deny the reality of California’s devastating drought.

    • Threatened By Climate Change, National Parks And World Heritage Sites Draw Millions

      With spring now in full gear throughout most of the United States, it’s a good bet that Memorial Day Weekend will again be the busiest of the whole year at many national parks, including the Great Smoky Mountains, Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, and Utah’s Mount Zion. Last year, 305 million people visited National Park Service-administered sites, signifying the parks’ appeal to millions of Americans and world tourists.

    • How the Obama Administration Is Protecting America’s Wildlife

      Since taking office, President Obama has protected more land and water — over 265 million acres — than any President before him. But his conservation efforts have extended far beyond our natural landscape. In addition to protecting some of our nation’s most iconic and special places, President Obama’s conservation efforts have included wildlife from all across the country.

    • With Endangered Species Act Under Attack, Obama Manages to Score 99 Wildlife Wins

      As part of a final-year push to tackle major environmental challenges, the Obama Administration appears to be doubling down on its efforts to slow and reverse the declines in American wildlife populations.

      Though the United States has enacted and implemented some of the world’s most effective wildlife conservation laws, one in five animal and plant species in the United States — nearly 1,300 total species — is at risk of extinction.

    • As One of Its Chief Sources of Water Dries Up, California Eases Restrictions on Use Nonetheless

      A single relatively wet winter has led California officials to relax in a way some water experts fear is reckless.

    • ‘That Is Unbelievable’: Bernie Sanders Shocked by California’s Water Woes, Compares Crisis to Flint’s

      “I’ll tell you something I did not know before I came here,” Bernie Sanders told the crowd at a rally on Sunday in San Joaquin Valley, Calif.

      “I was in Flint, Michigan a few months ago and as all of you know, the children in Flint, Michigan were poisoned by the lead in the water they drank. And in Flint, Michigan, people cannot turn on their taps and use the water in their homes. Now, I thought that was Flint, Michigan. I did not know that there were thousands of homes right around here [in the same situation]. That is unbelievable … that people have got to go out and buy bottled water… is that the case?” Sanders asked incredulously. San Joaquin Valley’s water system is contaminated with nitrates from agriculture, and has been linked in studies to spina bifida, cleft palate and missing limbs.

    • Gold Mining Has Devastated The Peruvian Amazon

      When Meraldo Umiña moved to the Madre De Dios region of Peru in 1983, the toxic gold rush that’s destroyed swaths of Amazon rainforest there was in its infancy. There were no laws regulating informal or illegal mining, and artisanal miners like him were few.

      “Gold was cheap,” Umiña, 59, told ThinkProgress in Spanish — “a gram was about $12.” Using simple but still harmful chemical methods, miners worked just by the rivers then, and the gold was easy to get, he said. There was no need to encroach on the jungle, and no financial incentive to use machine-intensive techniques of extraction.

  • Finance

    • A new campaign to hold Wall Street accountable emerges

      Wall Street’s big banks remain too big to fail and its bankers apparently too big to jail. If Wall Street is ever once more to serve Main Street rather than sabotage it, citizens will have to do the heavy lifting. Last week, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit overturned a verdict against Bank of America for falsely peddling lousy mortgage loans, showing yet again that the Justice Department and courts have offered no remedy for what the FBI once warned was an “epidemic of fraud.” At the same time, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) called out Wall Street lobbyists who were “swarming this place,” pressing Congress to slip bank-friendly riders into must-pass legislation.

    • Fighting for CA Workers, Sanders Slams NYT for Ignoring ‘Real Issues’

      In an interview with Chuck Todd on Meet the Press on Sunday, Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders had harsh words for media more interested in stoking candidates’ antagonism toward each other instead of focusing “on the real issues” of a shrinking middle class and rising wealth inequality in America.

    • Sanders, Brown Speak Out On Gunboat Diplomacy For Corporations

      Members of Congress are weighing in against the U.S. government’s use of “gunboat diplomacy”-style intimidation of Colombia against that country allowing a generic version of an ultraexpensive cancer drug named Gleevec in order to protect the public’s health.

    • Capitalists of the world, unite!

      Capitalism is not a form of government. It is a system of wealth management. It does not create wealth, but only allocates it. It is indifferent to the welfare of people. It has no social purpose. Private profit is everything.

      Over several decades, as millions in Asia and elsewhere have seen living standards rise, tens of millions of Americans have seen theirs fall dramatically – low wages, and lost jobs – in a massive re-allocation of wealth abroad from the once large and prosperous American middle class.

    • Michigan Lawmakers Target Homeless With Ban On “Aggressive” Panhandling

      In Michigan, people who continue begging for money from the same person after receiving a “no” could face up to $100 in fines—money they often simply don’t have. This week the Michigan House Criminal Justice Committee approved House Bill 5103, the “Aggressive Solicitation Prohibition Act.”

      The bill would forbid a variety of behaviors when people panhandle, such as making physical contact, blocking the path of the person they are soliciting, and “approaching or following a person in a manner intended to cause bodily harm.”

    • The Elites and the Rise of Donald Trump

      If you want to see “privilege,” look to the CEO making $20 million a year as they turn in a mediocre performance managing a major corporation. Or talk to a cardiologist, an occupation with a median annual salary of more than $420,000 a year.

    • Anthony Barnett in conversation with Yanis Varoufakis

      openDemocracy founder Anthony Barnett discusses DiEM25, Brexit and European democracy with Yanis Varoufakis. Recorded at the Another Europe is Possible event in London, 28 May 2016.

    • The State of the Left: Many Movements, Too Many Goals?

      A substantial number of Americans are interested in redistributing wealth and making government work for the 99 percent

    • The Sociology of War

      Mises had long struggled to intellectually combat the Marxist class warriors who sought to introduce Bolshevism to Austria. For example, his 1920 explication of the socialist calculation problem demonstrated the fatal flaw in Soviet-style planning. Soon Mises found himself also hounded by race warriors. As a Jewish liberal, he was compelled to flee the rise of the Nazis: first to Switzerland, and then to America.

      The events of World War II proved to Mises that warfare sociology had won the hearts and minds of the west.

    • Husbandry: a feminist reclamation of men’s responsibility to care

      But if you’re like me, you want to make the economy work in the service of the things that we care about, like human and planetary well-being. That’s tough if we imagine that people in their economic lives are solely self-interested and motivated by monetary rewards. It’s also problematic if people think that men, if they want to be caring, have to compromise their masculine gender identity.

      If you try to combine ‘economy’ and ‘care’ using images found on Google, no cogent narrative emerges. A man in a suit sitting on a pile of money…while holding a baby? A woman in nursing scrubs sitting with an elderly person…while engaged in a power handshake? Those images don’t work.

    • Trade Pacts and Deregulation: Latest Leaks Reveal Core Problem with TISA

      The 18th round of negotiations on a secret deal to limit public oversight over the services economy starts this week at the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Geneva, and negotiators will have a new item on their agenda: how to deal with the onslaught of leaks of proposals that were supposed to remain locked away in secret until five years after the deal was concluded or abandoned.

      That’s because WikiLeaks released draft texts on three previously unpublished cross-cutting annexes of the proposed Trade in Services Agreement (TISA) yesterday: disciplines on the way governments can regulate State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs); Professional Services, and New Provisions Applicable to All Services.

    • Billionaires Eager To Sue Outlets That Criticize Them Would Thrive In A Trump Presidency

      Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against Gawker Media was about more than Hogan’s payout from the beginning.

      Now, reporting from Forbes alleges that Silicon valley billionaire and pledged Trump delegate Peter Thiel — who has referred to Gawker writers as “terrorists” — has been secretly backing the suit. The New York Times also reports that Thiel is bankrolling the case. The revelation adds a twist to a case already tied up in questions over freedom of speech, and has big implications for how critical press functions in an age of billionaires.

    • Donald Trump in 2006: I ‘sort of hope’ real estate market tanks

      Two years before the housing market collapsed in 2008 and millions of Americans lost their homes, Donald Trump said he was hoping for a crash.

      “I sort of hope that happens because then people like me would go in and buy,” Trump said in a 2006 audiobook from Trump University, answering a question about “gloomy predictions that the real estate market is heading for a spectacular crash.”

      The U.S. housing bubble burst two years later, triggering the stock market crash of 2008 that plunged the U.S. economy into a deep recession, leaving millions of Americans unemployed.

    • Elizabeth Warren Slams ‘Small, Insecure Money Grubber’ Trump For Profiting Off Housing Crisis

      In a 2006 Trump University audiobook, Trump was asked about “gloomy predictions that the real estate market is heading for a spectacular crash.” He responded by saying the prospect was actually something he was looking forward to.

      “I sort of hope that happens because then people like me would go in and buy,” Trump said. “If there is a bubble burst, as they call it, you know you can make a lot of money… If you’re in a good cash position — which I’m in a good cash position today — then people like me would go in and buy like crazy.”

    • GOP Congressman Tries To Hijack Civil Rights Movement Language To Destroy Anti-Poverty Programs

      Conservatives who want to weaken anti-poverty programs are a lot like black civil rights protesters who put their lives and freedom on the line to defeat Jim Crow laws in the heart of Ku Klux Klan country, according to Rep. Peter Roskam (R-IL).

      Roskam made the comparison at a Ways and Means Committee hearing on Tuesday, moments after Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) had spoken of his own impoverished upbringing on farmland in rural Alabama.

    • World’s Low-Cost Economy Built on the Backs of 46 Million Modern Day Slaves

      Close to 46 million men, women, and children are enslaved across the world, according to a harrowing new report from the Australia-based Walk Free Foundation.

      Many of them, the analysis notes, are in fact ensnared providing “the low-cost labor that produces consumer goods for markets in Western Europe, Japan, North America, and Australia.”

      The organization’s 2016 Global Slavery Index—based on 42,000 interviews conducted in 53 languages, covering 44 percent of global population—found there to be 28 percent more “modern slaves” than previously estimated.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • ‘Rigged’ 2016 Election Has Voters Feeling Helpless, Unheard, and Ashamed

      The survey, conducted by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and published Tuesday, reported that a full 90 percent of voters lack confidence in the country’s political system while 40 percent went so far as to say that the two-party structure is “seriously broken.”

      Seventy percent of voters, including equal proportions of Democrats and Republicans, said they feel frustrated about the 2016 presidential election and 55 percent reported feeling “helpless.”

    • Democrats at a Clinton-Sanders Crossroad

      Please don’t commit suicide by nominating Hillary Clinton. Allow me to explain. I have been a Democrat since birth. My first political memory was Robert Kennedy’s assassination. I remember thinking that perhaps the best politician that ever was had died and being terribly sad from that thought.

    • How Democracies Are Subverted

      The repeated indicators of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s authoritarian tendencies bring to mind that Erdogan once said, “Democracy is like a streetcar. When you come to your stop, you get off.”

    • Clinton Scrambles for California as Sanders Challenges for Nation’s Biggest Prize

      As Bernie Sanders launched a campaign blitz in California on Monday ahead of the state’s June 7 primary, his presidential rival Hillary Clinton found herself cancelling appearances in New Jersey to catch up with him.

      Clinton skipped out on plans to campaign in the Garden State on Wednesday and Thursday in favor of a five-day tour through California, where some recent polls have seen her lead on Sanders shrink to a dead heat—though others have put her a few points ahead.

      California will be the nation’s biggest primary, where 475 delegates are at stake.

    • Establishment Democrats Courting Disaster

      In the 1964 film classic, Dr. Strangelove, Slim Pickens is seen riding a nuclear bomb down to his certain death – and perhaps to the end of us all – while he calmly inventories his survival equipment.

      The Democratic Party Establishment’s commitment to Hillary Clinton is a lot like that.

      As Hillary falls behind Trump, the Establishment is doing all it can to to continue to discredit Sanders — who beats Trump handily — and chase him out of the race. Meanwhile, they comfort themselves with self-deluding lies to justify backing the only candidate Trump could beat.

    • No, I Won’t Work for Hillary Clinton: A Response to Robert Reich

      I don’t know Robert Reich personally, but I greatly respect and appreciate his work; his voice is an important one in the fight against inequality.

      He has, however, repeatedly come down on the wrong side of one crucial issue, an issue that has serious implications for the future of American politics broadly, and for the future of the American left in particular.

    • In Estonia, we should be careful not to overstate the impact of the information war

      The Baltic States are now seen as the next frontline in Russia’s hybrid war. But the political preferences of ethnic Russian communities are more complicated than meets the eye.

    • A pay-to-play pick for the Democratic Party platform committee

      In a rare move, both remaining contenders for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination will pick some of the party’s platform drafting committee members, while the Democratic National Committee (DNC) chair, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, will choose the rest.

    • 58 Donald Trump Conspiracy Theories (And Counting!): The Definitive Trump Conspiracy Guide

      Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump not only surrounds himself with conspiracy theorists, he has spent years pushing conspiracy theories himself, much to the delight of his supporters.

      At times, Trump tries to remain evasive about whether he actually believes these conspiracy theories, insisting that he simply “heard” or “read” them somewhere or is just asking a question.

    • Another Big Lie From Trump: His Supporters Are the ‘Silent Majority’

      Unlike Nixon’s famous “silent majority,” Trump’s backers are loud—and growing in volume.

    • Why Bernie Sanders Is Still Standing

      One big reason, undoubtedly, is that Clinton is a weak candidate, damaged by her insider status, history of scandal (the email controversy is only the latest in a long line) and the public’s grave doubts about her honesty.

      Her unfavorability ratings—along with those of Donald Trump, her front-running GOP counterpart—sit at historic highs.

      But Clinton’s deficits are only part of the overall picture.

      Another reason Sanders remains in the fight is that the Red-baiting tactics directed against him largely have failed. Those tactics—which have been deployed in both overt, traditional forms and in coded, latter-day garb—have been continuous and unrelenting. They have come from Democrats and Republicans as well as from the mainstream media.

    • North Korean State Media Calls Trump A ‘Far-Sighted’ And ‘Wise Politician’

      In perhaps the most interesting praise of Donald Trump yet, North Korean state media has described the likely Republican presidential nominee as a “far-sighted” and “wise politician.”

      According to NK News, on Tuesday, an editorial in the state outlet DPRK Today noted that “there are many positive aspects to the Trump’s ‘inflammatory policies,’” like his proposal to stay out of the conflict between North and South Korea.

    • North Korea praises Trump and urges US voters to reject ‘dull Hillary’

      North Korean state media has praised US presidential hopeful Donald Trump, describing him as a “wise politician” and “far-sighted candidate” who could help unify the Korean peninsula.

      An editorial in DPRK Today, an official media outlet, welcomed the Republican presidential candidate’s proposal to hold direct talks with Kim Jong-un, saying he could help bring about Pyongyang’s “Yankee go home” policy.

    • Trump v. Clinton: Judging ‘the Lesser Evil’

      The mainstream U.S. media rightly criticizes Donald Trump for his bigoted remarks about Mexicans and Muslims – and his know-nothing-ism on global warming – but wrongly ignores Hillary Clinton’s role in futile and bloody wars, Gilbert Doctorow notes.

    • Lame Duck TPP Push Hands Trump A Powerful Issue Against Clinton

      More and more the word is getting out that President Obama, along with the giant multinational corporations and Wall Street, will launch a push in Congress to pass the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) during the “lame duck” legislative session following the election.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Apple, Arbiters Of Art, Say Game About Surviving The Gaza Strip Isn’t A Game, Even Though It Is

      Search for stories about Apple’s App Store in the Techdirt archives and you will quickly notice a theme. That theme is that Apple routinely appoints itself as the arbiter of artistic quality and morality when it comes to content within the app store, particularly gaming content, and that its application of these standards swings like some kind of absurd pendulum. Ban a game over here for telling a bible story that includes violence against children, but allow the actual bible to be sold as well. React to the South Carolina massacre by pulling down games about the Civil War because they include images of the Confederate flag. Reject a wargaming simulation, then approve it, and nobody knows how the company might decide to react tomorrow. You often hear that stability breeds a good ground for business, whereas Apple runs its App Store like some kind of experiment in chaos.

      And in order to apply its standards in a way that apparently makes the folks at Apple feel all warm and fuzzy inside, it occasionally has to truly lower its explanations to absurd levels of outright lying. For instance, Apple recently disallowed a game about surviving on the Gaza Strip in its store, claiming it wasn’t a game at all, but a news publication, even though the briefest review of the app reveals that it’s obviously a game.

    • Court Says MuckRock Must Take Down Smart Grid Company’s Documents Because Judge Has ‘No Time’ To Review Case Properly

      Last week, we covered a multinational corporation’s attempt to force MuckRock to take down documents supplied by the city of Seattle to Phil Mocek. Landis+Gyr, which was awarded the contract to supply the city with “smart meters” in conjunction with the publicly-owned utility, claimed the documents released — along with documents the city was planning to release — would be a boon to competitors and terrorists, although it didn’t specify which of these it was more worried about.

    • Pakistani Newspaper Alters Readers Comments to make Censorship Point

      Pakistan’s Daily Times, an English-language newspaper, changed online commenters’ posts to make a point on press freedom, Ad Week reported.

      The newspaper and ad agency Grey Singapore created a “Free My Voice” campaign that included “an algorithm that automatically flipped the meaning of commenters’ posts, and applied it to comments beneath a controversial article about the Islamic country’s blasphemy law,” according to Ad Week.

    • Column: Shining light on campus censorship

      Something weird is happening in higher education. Although liberal ideology has controlled the campuses for generations, some liberals seem to be suffering a crisis of faith. In the New York Times (May 7), columnist Nicholas Kristoff, for instance, wonders about the campus’ rather peculiar view of diversity: “We progressives believe in diversity, and we want women, blacks, Latinos, gays and Muslims at the table – er, so long as they aren’t conservatives. We’re fine with people who don’t look like us as long as they think like us.”

    • Reject Censorship at Conference on Refugees. The “Dirty War on Syria” is the Cause of the Refugee Crisis [Ed: more context in the item below]

      Unfortunately the organizers have been pressured to censor discussion and debate. A campaign was launched to disinvite keynote speaker Dr. Tim Anderson (University of Sydney). His book “The Dirty War on Syria” exposes the role of the USA and its allies in destabilizing Syria, funding and promoting the conflict that has led to the current refugee crisis. As they have in the past, some groups and individuals who support the armed opposition in Syria are trying to prevent a broader discussion.

    • Video: The Dirty War on Syria – Prof. Tim Anderson on GRTV

      The Dirty War on Syria has relied on a level of mass disinformation not seen in living memory. In seeking ‘regime change’ the big powers sought to hide their hand, using proxy armies of ‘Islamists’, demonising the Syrian Government and constantly accusing it of atrocities. In this way Syrian President Bashar al Assad, a mild-mannered eye doctor, became the new evil in the world.

      The popular myths of this dirty war – that it is a ‘civil war’, a ‘popular revolt’ or a sectarian conflict – hide a murderous spree of ‘regime change’ across the region. The attack on Syria was a necessary consequence of Washington’s ambition, stated openly in 2006, to create a ‘New Middle East’. After the destruction of Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, Syria was next in line.

    • China’s 50 Cent Party: The Other Side of Censorship

      Russia has its famed “troll factories” – shadowy organizations quietly supported by the Kremlin to flood Internet comment sections with vitriolic anti-U.S. posts intended to provoke the worst sorts of responses.

      Iran may boast of its “halal Internet,” a giant nationwide web only for those inside Iran supposedly being built to keep out “unclean” or anti-Islamic content, as well as critical comments about the government.

      But when it comes to altering or censoring the web, the worldwide leader by far is China. For decades, Beijing has celebrated what it calls the Golden Shield, what the rest of the world has come to know as the “Great Firewall of China.”

    • Minister backs SABC protest censorship
    • Cosatu rejects SABC “censorship”
    • Communications minister welcomes SABC protest ‘censorship’
    • SA editors slam SABC decision to ban coverage of violent protests
    • We Spoke With That Utah Mormon Republican Who Wants to Institute Porn Filters
    • Duo held for posting obscene images of Goddess Kali, PM on FB; may be tried under NSA
    • MP govt slaps NSA on duo for Facebook post
    • NSA invoked against two for ‘liking’ FB post on Kali

  • Privacy/Surveillance

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • ‘Europe, This is Unbearable’: Deadly Crossings Drive Migrant Fatalities to New Heights

      Describing a heartbreaking and horrific scene of hundreds of bodies floating on the surface of the Mediterranean, the United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR) confirmed Sunday that more than 700 asylum seekers drowned last week, capping off the deadliest period for those fleeing war and violence in over a year.

      “The casualties happened in three separate incidents on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday after more than 13,000 people set sail from Libya for Italy in an eight-day period,” the Guardian reported.

      UNHCR spokeswoman Carlotta Sami said that with 700 dead, last week was the deadliest since April 2015, when roughly 1,300 refugees were killed in two fatal shipwrecks off the coast of Libya. Médecins sans Frontières (MSF) Sea, the Doctors without Borders’ Mediterranean migration team, estimated that as many as 900 might have drowned.

    • More than 700 migrants feared dead in three Mediterranean sinkings

      More than 700 people are believed to have drowned in the Mediterranean last week, the deadliest seven days for Europe-bound asylum seekers in more than a year.

      The casualties happened in three separate incidents on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday after more than 13,000 people set sail from Libya for Italy in an eight-day period.

    • Surprise Ruling In Favor Of Labor Opens Up New Options For Workers Looking To Sue Their Employers

      Workers cannot be prohibited from bringing class-action lawsuits against their employers, an appeals court panel ruled Thursday, even if the boss makes them sign away that right in order to keep their job.

      The case involves Epic Systems, one of the largest medical software companies in America. Founded in the late 1970s, the billion-dollar business only recently began making workers agree to so-called “forced arbitration” clauses in which they forswear their rights to go to court either individually or collectively.

      By doing so, the judges found, Epic violated its workers’ federal labor rights to take collective action, making the clauses unenforceable.

    • Child abuse inquiry turns to Kincora home and claims of MI5 blackmail

      An inquiry into child abuse across a range of institutions in Northern Ireland will focus on Tuesday on the Kincora boys home scandal including allegations that MI5 blackmailed a paedophile ring which operated there in the 1970s.

      The historical institutional abuse inquiry will hear evidence from men who were abused at Kincora when they were children and their allegations that the perpetrators were protected because they were state agents spying on fellow Ulster loyalists.

      A number of Kincora abuse victims have tried through the courts to force the scandal to be included in the national investigation into allegations of establishment paedophile rings operating in Westminster.

    • The Center Doesn’t Hold

      That does not explain Lieberman, whose party consists of immigrants from the former Soviet Union, about a million and a half, generally called “Russians”. Why are so many of them extreme rightists, racists and Arab-haters?

      A class by themselves are young leftists, who refuse to support any party. Instead, they turn towards non-party activism, regularly founding new groups for civil rights and peace. They support the Palestinians in the occupied territories, fight for the “purity of our arms” in the army, and do wonderful work for similar causes.

    • Senate Republicans Further Complicate Obama’s Efforts To Close Guantanamo

      Senate Republicans put forward a bill Wednesday that would send ISIS fighters to prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The legislation, presented by Sens. Cory Gardner (R-CO) and Steve Daines (R-MT), is the latest attempt by Republicans to derail President Obama’s attempts to fulfill a campaign promise to close the notorious prison.

      “Instead of closing the prison, the Administration should transfer detained ISIS fighters to Guantánamo Bay,” the senators said in a statement.

    • Time to begin to disarm more and more officers.

      Time to repeal the Stupid Second Amendment so the citizens of the US can slowly lose their lethal firearms and police will not have as much justification for packing guns everywhere they go, shooting everyone who might make them twitch.

      Time to retrain police to resolve conflict without violence.

      Time to begin to disarm more and more officers.

    • How We Decided to Test Racial Bias in Algorithms

      In 2014, former Attorney General Eric Holder wrote a letter to the U.S. Sentencing Commission asking them to study racial bias in risk scores. It never did the study. So ProPublica did. The team of reporters, led by Julia Angwin, found that an algorithm being used across the country to predict future criminals is biased against black defendants. And what’s more, the algorithm is not very good. Only 20 percent of the people predicted to commit violent crimes actually have actually been found to have done so. I spoke with Julia about the investigation and how her team is uncovering machine bias.

    • A Call to Reopen Investigation of Terror Campaign Against Journalists

      An advocacy group says ProPublica and Frontline’s reporting on the murders of Vietnamese-American reporters requires a renewed probe by the FBI.

    • The Bill Clinton-Era Law That Could Put The Charleston Shooter On Death Row

      That changed in 1994, when President Bill Clinton’s Federal Death Penalty Act greatly expanded the list of offenses for which federal defendants can face the death penalty. There are currently 54 people on federal death row, sentenced after Clinton’s expansive crime bill. Roof would bring that number up to 55 if convicted.

    • Congress Boosts Rehab but Gives Opioid Pushers a Pass

      The legislation focuses on treating addiction and does nothing to limit the role of pharmaceutical companies in fueling the opioid crisis. In fact, it instructs the federal government to review and potentially undo sweeping new guidelines that recommend less prescribing of highly addictive opioid painkillers such as OxyContin, Percocet, and Vicodin.

    • What Big Pharma Does Not Want You to Know About the Opioid Epidemic

      The Pharma-driven opioid epidemic may be as big a con as the mortgage housing bubble collapse.

    • Democratic Leadership Is Missing In Action on Mass Incarceration

      Even though it now looks like Americans will be deprived the drama of a contested Republican convention, the gathering in Cleveland could hold at least one surprise.

      The Republicans are set to vote on an RNC resolution to reduce mass incarceration. The measure asks for “reforms for nonviolent offenders at the state and federal level” and urges “state legislators and Congress to…provide substance abuse treatment to addicts, emphasize work and education, and implement policies that cut costs while obtaining better outcomes.”

      Finally, Democrats may say, Republicans have woken up to mass incarceration as a 21st-century civil-rights struggle, joining what has for years been a progressive fight.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • EDRi and Access Now withdraw from the EU Commission IT Forum discussions

      Today, on 31 May, European Digital Rights (EDRi) and Access Now delivered a joint statement on the EU Commission’s “EU Internet Forum”, announcing our decision not to take part in future discussions and confirming that we do not have confidence in the ill considered “code of conduct” that was agreed.

    • Bulgaria to complete plans for broadband expansion

      The government of Bulgaria aims to finalise its plans to connect its broadband networks to those in neighbouring Romania and Serbia. A meeting is set for June, and will involve experts from the three countries, the European Investment Bank, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and the European Commission, announced Bulgaria’s Ministry for ICT.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Mahamedi IP v. Paradice & LI: DTSA Between Patent Lawyers

      With that in mind, a new Defend Trade Secrets Act (DTSA) lawsuit has been filed by the patent attorney Zurvan (Van) Mahamedi against his former partner William (Trip) Paradice. The Mahamedi-Paradice firm split in April 2016 and both lawyers reached-out to firm clients (including Qualcomm) claiming to be the successor firm.

    • Copyrights

      • German Constitutional Court sends sampling saga into another loop

        In 1997, German music producer Moses Pelham took a two second sample from Kraftwerk’s 1977 song “Metall auf Metall” and used it as a continuous loop for the song “Nur mir” performed by Sabrina Setlur. In 2004, Kraftwerk sued Pelham for violation of their phonogram producers’ rights and obtained an injunction against the distribution of “Nur mir”. The case went all the way to the Federal Court of Justice (BGH), which held in 2008 that even sampling the “tiniest sliver” (“kleinste Tonfetzen”) of a record infringed the record producer’s right (§ 85(1) German Copyright Act). The defence of Article 24 Copyright Act (Freie Benutzung) was in principle applicable, but required that it was not possible to recreate the sampled sound without copying from the original recording. The BGH sent the case back to the lower court for the factual determination whether it was possible to recreate the sampled sound in the specific case.

      • European Commission Consultation: More Panorama, Less Neighbouring Rights

        On 23 March, the European Commission launched a consultation on the role of publishers in the copyright value chain and on the ‘panorama exception’. While this consultation reflects the will of the Commission to tackle possible exemptions to copyright, it is far less progressive than the recommendations made by the European Parliament through the Reda report. Even worse, the questionnaire is directed towards creating a new kind of “editor’s right”, at the expense of authors and users, a path that the Parliament rejected at the time.

      • Sorry not sorry – Justin Bieber and Skrillex deny copying vocal loop to produce ‘Sorry’

        Justin Bieber and Skrillex have been accused of copyright infringement by artist Casey Dienel, aka White Hinterland. The suit probably does not come as a complete surprise to the duo as Dienel claimed that she contacted Bieber’s lawyers when “Sorry” was initially released, but did not receive a response.

        Dienel alleged that Bieber and Skrillex, whose 2015 hit single ‘Sorry’ has received 1.4 billion hits on YouTube, copied her vocal loop from her 2014 song ‘Ring the Bell’. The allegedly copied segment can be heard in the first five seconds of each song. Skrillex and Bieber have both denied the claims on their Twitter accounts.

      • Independent Musician Sues Justin Bieber & Skrillex For Copyright Infringement… Over A Sample They Didn’t Use

        Late last week, the press had a bit of a frenzy with the news that indie musician Casey Dienel, who releases music as White Hinterland, had sued Justin Bieber and Skrillex (along with some others) for copyright infringement, claiming that the pair used a sample from her song “Ring the Bell” that was released in 2014. The accusation is that Bieber’s 2015 hit “Sorry” uses the same sample of a female musical riff. You can read the lawsuit here, which might be useful since most of the rest of the media didn’t link to it.

05.30.16

Links 30/5/2016: Linux 4.7 RC1, Best Linux Distros

Posted in News Roundup at 10:45 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Linux Lexicon: Getting Started With Linux

    Be it the smallest Android smartphone or the biggest of servers, Linux has become the very foundation of our digital lives, something Linus Torvalds could have hardly fathomed.

  • Desktop

    • Best Linux Distro: Linux for old laptops, privacy and USB sticks

      The best Linux distro is a matter of personal taste and use case. On the following pages, we take you through four potential Linux use cases and select the best for each. We’ll look at the best overall OS for general computing, the best for an old laptop, a lightweight distro for USB drives and a privacy-focused option.

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • Enlightenment’s EFL Getting New DRM Library

      Chris Michael of Samsung has been working on a new DRM library for the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries (EFL) with a number of improvements.

      The initial implementation of this new library, Ecore_Drm2, has been added to EFL Git.

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • KDE Partition Manager Now Lets Users Resize Encrypted Filesystems with LUKS

        Andrius Štikonas announced the release of the KDE Partition Manager 2.2.0 open-source partition editor software designed specifically for the KDE Plasma 5 desktop environment, as well as the KPMcore 2.2.0 utility.

        KDE Partition Manager and KPMcore 2.2.0 are two major release, finally bringing proper LUKS (Linux Unified Key Setup) support, in the way that the software is now capable of creating LUKS volumes on disk drivers, as well as to format the inner file system, besides detecting the LUKS container.

      • KDE Partition Manager 2.2 Brings Proper LUKS Support

        The KDE Partition Manager, the promising disk partitioning application that’s become a viable alternative to GParted, is up to version 2.2.

        KDE Partition Manager 2.2 was released this week by Andrius Štikonas and its big feature is proper LUKS support. The KDE Partition Manager can now properly handle LUKS encrypted volumes with support for creating them and formatting the inner file-system, opening/closing LUKS volumes, resizing support, and more.

      • I have a problem…

        Every day, a sizable number of people posts problems on the KDE Community Forums and the ever-helpful staff does their best to solve whatever issues they’re facing. But what exactly does one do when this happens? This post provides more insights on the process.

  • Distributions

    • Reviews

      • Kicking the Tires on Arch Based Antergos

        We decided to take the Arch Linux based distribution Antergos out for a test drive. Here’s how it handled, out in traffic and on the track.

        A few months back, a fellow tech writer mentioned in an email exchange that I might try using the Arch Linux based Antergos distro as a way to grab the latest and greatest versions of popular software titles for review. Mainly because of Arch’s community repositories, in which users suggest and vote on packages to be included, many popular software titles are available within days after a new release. And since Antergos is a simple install compared to Arch, it would be easy to quickly throw up an installation on a test machine just to look at the latest and greatest from LibreOffice, GIMP and the like.

      • Antergos 2016.05.28 Screenshot Tour

    • Screenshots/Screencasts

    • Gentoo Family

      • Sabayon ARM 16.06 Linux Gets Kodi-Based Media Center Edition for Raspberry Pi 3

        Today, May 29, 2016, Sabayon ARM developer Ettore Di Giacinto announced the release of Sabayon ARM 16.06 Media Center Edition for Raspberry Pi 3 and Raspberry Pi 2 SBCs.

        We were expecting to see today the release of Sabayon 16.06 for computers, which is the monthly update to the Gentoo-based GNU/Linux operating system for July 2016, because the Sabayon people are always announcing a new monthly release on the 29th of each month, but this time, things were a bit different.

    • OpenSUSE/SUSE

    • Red Hat Family

      • Building ProudCity as an open organization

        Open is at the core of ProudCity, a web platform that “lets municipalities easily launch and manage government digital services all in one place.”

        As government service providers, it is our duty to ensure cities get the most sustainable, flexible technology available, so that they can best serve their residents, businesses, and visitors. We will do this by following the ethos of what Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst calls the “open organization.”

      • Finance

      • Fedora

        • Fedora loves PyCon 2016

          Will you be attending the annual Python Conference in Portland, Oregon this year? Then you should totally come and find us at the Development Sprints! Check out our PyCon 2016 Wiki page for details.

        • PHP Tour 2016 Clermont-Ferrand

          I gave a talk about “Forget mod_php”. It is about this PHP installation method, the most documented, the simplest, but which have given a bad image about Apache HTTPD Server, and encourage user, needing performance, to migrate to nginx and its threaded mode and so with FPM. But, it is also possible to use Apache in thread mode, using the worker or event MPM, also with FPM.

        • Fedora 24 alpha – Whatsie.
        • Pravin Satpute: How do you Fedora?

          Pravin Satpute started using Linux in 2004 when he was working with Dr. Nagarjuna Gadiraju of the Free Software Foundation of India. He was working on a project to develop libre fonts for Indian languages. At that time, he was using Knoppix with the KDE desktop. In 2006, he became interested in Fedora and starting using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) in 2007 when he was given a laptop with RHEL 5. Quickly after receiving the laptop, he switched to Fedora 8. His childhood heroes were Steve Jobs, Ratan Tata and Sachin Tendulkar. His favorite movies are Inception and The Mummy.

    • Debian Family

      • OpenPHT 1.5.2 for Debian/sid

        I have updated the openpht repository with builds of OpenPHT 1.5.2 for Debian/sid for both amd64 and i386 architecture. For those who have forgotten it, OpenPHT is the open source fork of Plex Home Theater that is used on RasPlex, see my last post concerning OpenPHT for details.

      • vcswatch is now looking for tags

        About a week ago, I extended vcswatch to also look at tags in git repositories.

        Previously, it was solely paying attention to the version number in the top paragraph in debian/changelog, and would alert if that version didn’t match the package version in Debian unstable or experimental. The idea is that “UNRELEASED” versions will keep nagging the maintainer (via DDPO) not to forget that some day this package needs an upload. This works for git, svn, bzr, hg, cvs, mtn, and darcs repositories (in decreasing order of actual usage numbers in Debian. I had actually tried to add arch support as well, but that VCS is so weird that it wasn’t worth the trouble).

      • Derivatives

        • Parsix GNU/Linux 8.10 and 8.5 Receive the Latest Security Fixes, Update Now

          A lot of good things are happening lately for the Debian-based Parsix GNU/Linux operating system, and the distribution’s maintainers announced a few hours ago, May 29, 2016, the availability of new security fixes for supported releases.

          Both the stable Parsix GNU/Linux 8.5 “Atticus” and the upcoming Parsix GNU/Linux 8.10 “Erik” operating system have received important security fixes for various core components, including expat, libgd2, libndp, ImageMagick, libidn, jansson, IceDove, libarchive, QEMU, Wireshark, librsvg, WebSVN, libxstream-java, xerces-c, swift-plugin-s3, and atheme-services.

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • QNAP and Canonical Optimize Ubuntu For IoT Purposes

            The Internet Of Things movement has attracted a lot of attention in recent years. Not just enthusiasts, but also major firms in the technology sector are working on developing new IoT initiatives. A Partnership between QNAP and Canonical will help optimize Ubuntu on NAS systems for Internet of Things applications.

          • Ubuntu bq Aquaris M10 Review Part 2: Software

            In part one of our rather lengthy review, we took a look at the bq Aquaris M10 Ubuntu tablet’s hardware. Suffice it to say, it perfectly played the role of a mid-range tablet. While the device had a few ups, like its lightweight design, bright display, and substantial battery, it would have been easily passed for a mediocre slab if not for the software running on it. In this round, we take a deeper look into what makes this tablet truly one of a kind, and almost literally too. This time, we take a dive into the alien world of Ubuntu Touch.

          • Meizu Pro 5 Ubuntu Edition review

            IT’S NOT EVERY DAY that a smartphone crosses our desk running Canonical’s open source Ubuntu operating system.

            The Linux-based OS already commands millions of installations across desktops and tablets the world over, and makes a welcome change from the endless run of Android-based devices. Anticipation levels were therefore high and, on first impressions, we believed we were in the presence of a truly desirable smartphone.

          • Ubuntu Touch’s Web Browser to Improve the Google Hangouts Experience in OTA-11

            The long-anticipated OTA-11 update for Ubuntu Phone and Ubuntu Tablet devices is just around the corner, and today we’ll have a quick look at what’s coming in the Web Browser app.

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • Open Source Program Improves IoT Connection Security with Unikernels

    Developers can find UniK on Github.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla turns Firefox OS into IoT hub

        As an operating system, Firefox OS has undergone a massive transformation in the past 24 months – it’s far more than just a web browser nowadays. But now Mozilla is looking to take Firefox to the next level by using it as a hub for a plethora of Internet of Things projects.

        Mozilla is currently working on four IoT projects behind the scenes: Project Smart Home, Project Link, Project Sensor Web and Vaani. Each of the projects will deal with IoT technology in different ways, but all are aimed at making the end consumer’s home and devices smarter. In a blog post, Mozilla’s SVP of Connected Devices, Ari Jaaksi, posted: “Everything is connected around us. This revolution has already started and it will be bigger than previous technology revolutions, including the mobile smartphone revolution. Internet of Things, as many call it today, will fundamentally affect all of us.”

  • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • BSD

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Supercomputers, a global community, and more OpenStack news

      Are you interested in keeping track of what is happening in the open source cloud? Opensource.com is your source for news in OpenStack, the open source cloud infrastructure project.

    • Open Hardware/Modding

      • Hovalin: An open source 3D printed violin

        A recent message on Twitter about an open source 3D printed violin sent me in search of more information about Hovalin. Much of the 3D printed universe is about robots and drones, so seeing a violin in the mix caused me to pause and wonder more about this unique project. I reached out to husband and wife team, Kaitlyn and Matt Hova.

  • Programming/Development

    • The Quiet Crisis unfolding in Software Development

      The reason I’m sharing this is because over the last ten to fifteen years I’ve noticed a quiet crisis unfolding in software development leading to low quality applications, unhappy employees and unhappy users. Silver bullet solutions keep creeping into our awareness (Scrum, anyone?) and predictably keep letting us down.

Leftovers

  • More flight delays hit Swedish airport

    Travellers at Stockholm’s Arlanda airport were beset again with delays on Saturday afternoon after technical problems with flightplan management software.

    “The flightplan management system is not working as it should,” Per Fröberg of Swedish air traffic control told Swedish newspaper, Aftonbladet.

  • Microsoft Surface line hit by Sleep of Death bug

    Microsoft’s Surface line, reported as one of its better earners in its most recent quarterly results, suffers from a bug which has come to be referred to as Sleep of Death.

    When the Surface Pro 4 or the Surface tablet are put into sleep mode for a few hours or more, they are unlikely to wake up.

    The devices have to be powered back on and this means there is a risk of data corruption.

    This means that anyone who has left the system with files on which they are working open, has to shift through auto-saved versions, hoping against hope that one of those will mean that work is not lost.

  • Fearing forced Windows 10 upgrades, users are disabling critical updates instead

    Microsoft stepped on the gas in its quest to drive Windows 7 and 8 users to Windows 10 over the past couple of weeks, rolling the upgrade out as a Recommended update. Watch out! The only behavior that could deny the Windows 10 upgrade before—closing the pop-up by pressing the X in the upper-right corner—now counts as consent for the upgrade, and worse, the upgrade installation can automatically begin even if you take no action whatsoever.

    It’s nasty business, and it’s tricking legions of happy Windows 7 and 8 users into Windows 10. Over the past week, I’ve received more contact from readers about this issue than I have about everything else I’ve written over the rest of my career combined. But beyond merely burning bridges with consumers, these forced, non-consensual upgrades could have more insidious consequences.

  • Science

    • The 10 commandments for influencing policymakers

      Persuading politicians and officials to ingest the fruits of new research and then to regurgitate them in the form of sensible policy is a frustrating process at the best of times. Policymaking is intangible, diffuse and shapeshifting. One result is that too little research with lessons for policymakers hits the target.

      The government has recently performed a U‑turn on a policy that could have banned publicly funded academic researchers from campaigning for changes to the law. So this is a good moment to consider how to manage academics’ expectations while ensuring that their research has the biggest possible impact. Bearing in mind these 10 commandments – based on my own experience of policymaking – will help.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • From the Green Revolution to GMOs: Living in the Shadow of Global Agribusiness

      What can we do about the powerful transnational agribusiness companies that have captured or at the very least heavily influence regulatory bodies, research institutes, trade agreements and governments? How can we assess the safety and efficacy of GMOs or their other technologies and products when narratives and decision-making processes have become distorted by these companies?

      Through the ‘green revolution’ chemical-intensive model of agriculture these corporations and their powerful backers promoted and instituted, they have been able to determine what seeds are to be used by farmers, what is to be grown and what inputs are to be applied. This, in turn, has adversely affected the nutritional content of food, led to the over-exploitation of water and diminished drought resistance, degraded soil, undermined biodiversity, polluted the environment, destroyed farmers’ livelihoods and so much more: with 60 years’ farming experience behind him, Bhaskar Save outlined many of these impacts in his open letter to Indian officials some years back.

      These powerful corporations increasingly hold sway over a globalised system of food and agriculture from seed to plate. And with major mergers within the agribusiness sector in the pipeline, power will be further consolidated and the situation is likely to worsen. While scientific innovation has a role to play in improving agriculture, the narrative about farming has been shaped to benefit the interests of this handful of wealthy, politically influential corporations whereby commercial interest trumps any notion of the public good.

    • GMOs As A Corporate Control Tactic

      It’s impossible to talk about GMO ethics without considering how corporations like Monsanto use GMOs as means of control.

      [...]

      But safety issues are just the tip of the iceberg. Consumer rights, state rights and the overuse of “probably carcinogenic” pesticides like Roundup are all crucial aspects in this debate. They go hand in hand with the massive consolidation within the food industry and a lack of choice at the grocery store.

      When biotech companies like Monsanto, Dow, Dupont and Syngenta create GMO seeds, they’re also creating entire systems of food production. By creating a suite of products designed to work together – seeds for crops engineered to withstand Roundup, a probably human carcinogen, for example – they’re able to control the entire farming cycle and block out competition. Not only that, but the explosion of herbicide-resistant seeds has given way to herbicide-resistant weeds, fueling the growth of “superweeds” and ensuring that farmers must continue to buy increasingly harsh chemicals, often from the same company, to compensate.

    • NHA issues warning about selling NHS blood plasma supplier to Chinese company Creat

      The National Health Action Party issued warnings in 2013 about the potentially dangerous consequences of selling the NHS’ state owned blood plasma supplier, Plasma Resources UK (PRUK) to US private equity firm Bain Capital. Now we are issuing a warning again as it has been sold on.

      PRUK was specifically brought into public ownership in 1975, by Dr David Owen, because of the risks associated with contaminated blood under for-profit conditions.

    • Portland Students Will Drink Bottled Water For The Rest Of The School Year To Avoid Lead

      Portland, Oregon is the latest place in the country gripped by unsafe levels of lead exposure. On Friday, Portland officials announced that the school district will shut off all drinking water for the rest of the school year following reports of high levels of lead in water samples from two schools.

      Elevated levels of lead were found in six of the 56 drinking fountains and other water sources at the Creston School and eight of the 36 fountains and sinks at the Rose City Park campus, according to a local NBC news affiliate.

    • Unsafe at Any Dose: Chemical Safety Failures from DDT to Glyphosate to BPA

      Piecemeal, and at long last, chemical manufacturers have begun removing the endocrine-disrupting plastic bisphenol-A (BPA) from products they sell.

      Sunoco no longer sells BPA for products that might be used by children under three. France has a national ban on BPA food packaging. The EU has banned BPA from baby bottles.

      These bans and associated product withdrawals are the result of epic scientific research and some intensive environmental campaigning. But in truth these restrictions are not victories for human health. Nor are they even losses for the chemical industry.

  • Security

    • Parrot Security OS 3.0 “Lithium” Is a Linux Distro for Cryptography & Anonymity

      A few days ago, Parrot Security OS developer Frozenbox Network teased users on Twitter with the upcoming release of the long anticipated Parrot Security OS 3.0 “Lithium” distribution.

      Based on the latest Debian GNU/Linux technologies and borrowing many of the packages from the Debian 8 “Jessie” stable repositories, Parrot Security OS 3.0 just received new Release Candidate (RC) ISO builds that users can now download and install on their personal computer if they want to get an early taste of what’s coming.

    • Parrot Security OS 3.0 “Lithium” — Best Kali Linux Alternative Coming With New Features

      The Release Candidate of Parrot Security OS 3.0 ‘Lithium’ is now available for download. The much-anticipated final release will come in six different editions with the addition of Libre, LXDE, and Studio editions. The version 3.0 of this Kali Linux alternative is based on Debian Jessie and powered by custom hardened Linux 4.5 kernel.

    • Regulation can fix security, except you can’t regulate security

      Every time I start a discussion about how we can solve some of our security problems it seems like the topics of professional organizations and regulation are where things end up. I think regulations and professional organizations can fix a lot of problems in an industry, I’m not sure they work for security. First let’s talk about why regulation usually works, then, why it won’t work for security.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Geopolitics versus the political marketplace: the origins of the war in Ukraine

      The United States and the European Union poured millions into democracy promotion in Ukraine, which fed what Sakwa calls a monist (ethnically purist and pro-Western) conception of the Ukrainian nation, and this directly threatened the Russian geo-political position. As evidence., he quotes Putin’s remarks on May 24 2014 when he said that: “some of the events in Ukraine directly threaten our interests, first of all with regard to security. I”m talking about Ukraine’s potential accession to NATO. As I said earlier, such an accession could be followed by the deployment of a missile strike system in Ukraine, including Crimea. Should this happen it would have serious geopolitical consequences for our country. In fact, Russia would be forced out of the Black Sea territory, a region for legitimate presence in which Russia has fought for centuries.”

    • To Hell and Back: Hiroshima and Nagasaki

      Pellegrino’s book is a moving and grueling close-up look at the horrors experienced by the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki both on the day of the bombing and in the days and years afterward. I have the heart of a dried-up raisin but even I got a little teary in places.

    • A cycle of permanent intervention in Libya

      In the aftermath of NATO’s destruction of Libya, official rhetoric fluctuated between transition and reports of violence which were swiftly brushed aside as mere consequences of a country struggling to embrace a democratic framework.

    • Obama in Hiroshima, Memorial Day and the Iran Deal

      Although it is true that Obama has been the least successful president in some time in reducing nuclear stockpiles, there is one area where he has had success in reducing world tensions, and that is with regard to Iran. Moreover, the Iran breakthrough has implications for both nonproliferation and for conventional warfare. A war on Iran was one of the central objectives of the Cheney/ Neoconservative faction in the George W. Bush White House, and had their war of aggression on Iraq not gone sour, the would have likely gone on to Tehran.

      The standing War Party in Washington has figured out how to pursue conventional wars of aggression in the face of public skittishness: They simply hype a country they want to plunder as an unconventional threat– i.e. as a country that could have nuclear weapons or even chemical and biological weapons.

    • Burn Pits: US Government Ignores 60,000 Suffering US War Vets

      There are over 60,000 U.S. veterans who served in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan who are now sick and dying. But the Pentagon denies there is such a health crisis, and the Department of Veterans Affairs is denying these suffering men and women the benefits they desperately need and deserve.

      These veterans are not the victims of enemy fire. They are suffering from medical ailments associated with the open-air burn pits that were constructed on over 230 military bases across Iraq and Afghanistan. These fiery pits, which were hastily dug in violation of the military’s own health and environmental regulations, were used to dispose of the mountains of trash created by war. Every type of refuse imaginable was thrown into these burn pits, including such toxic materials as plastics, metals, medical waste, batteries, tires, old ordnance and even human body parts.

    • The Defense Department Is Ruining America: Big Budgets, Militarization and the Real Story Behind Our Asia Pivot

      “Our defense contractors await your business.” That was the message behind Obama and Carter’s visits to Asia.

    • Obama in Hiroshima Paints a Peace Sign on a Bomb

      President Obama went to Hiroshima, did not apologize, did not state the facts of the matter (that there was no justification for the bombings there and in Nagasaki), and did not announce any steps to reverse his pro-nuke policies (building more nukes, putting more nukes in Europe, defying the nonproliferation treaty, opposing a ban treaty, upholding a first-strike policy, spreading nuclear energy far and wide, demonizing Iran and North Korea, antagonizing Russia, etc.).

      Where Obama is usually credited — and the reason he’s usually given a pass on his actual actions — is in the area of rhetoric. But in Hiroshima, as in Prague, his rhetoric did more harm than good. He claimed to want to eliminate nukes, but he declared that such a thing could not happen for decades (probably not in his lifetime) and he announced that humanity has always waged war (before later quietly claiming that this need not continue).

      “Artifacts tell us that violent conflict appeared with the very first man. Our early ancestors having learned to make blades from flint and spears from wood used these tools not just for hunting but against their own kind,” said Obama.

      “We may not be able to eliminate man’s capacity to do evil, so nations and the alliances that we form must possess the means to defend ourselves,” he added, leaping from a false claim about the past to a necessity to continue dumping our resources into the weapons that produce rather than avoid more wars.

      After much in this higly damaging vein, Obama added: “But among those nations like my own that hold nuclear stockpiles, we must have the courage to escape the logic of fear and pursue a world without them. We may not realize this goal in my lifetime, but persistent effort can roll back the possibility of catastrophe.” He even said: “We’re not bound by genetic code to repeat the mistakes of the past. We can learn. We can choose. We can tell our children a different story. …” That’s right, but the U.S. President had already told a really bad one.

    • Pat Buchanan, Dick Cheney, and American Exceptionalism

      America has a Donald Trump problem — one that its diversity will probably defeat, at least in the short term. But underlying that Donald Trump problem is a desperate insistence on clinging to the myth of American exceptionalism, with its more offensive parts even embraced in the mainstream. For the sake of the white men who’ve relied on those myths for their sense of dignity, but also to prevent future Trumps, it is time to start replacing that exceptionalist myth with something else.

    • Tragic Valor of Marines at Con Thien

      Memorial Day is exploited by politicians glorifying war and armed services recruiting new soldiers, but it should be a time to reflect on the ugly reality of warfare and the tragic valor of the combatants, says war correspondent Don North.

    • As Chilcot Inquiry Nears, Tony Blair Hints He May Fight Verdict

      Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair has hinted that he would refuse to accept the verdict of the highly anticipated Chilcot Inquiry into the 2003 invasion of Iraq if it concludes that he privately signed the country up for war while publicly claiming a final decision had not yet been made.

      In an interview on the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show on Sunday, Blair rejected the idea that the growth of the so-called Islamic State (ISIS) was fueled by the Iraq War, stating, “I understand all the issues and we’ll debate them when we get to Chilcot, but this idea that all of this comes from the decision to remove Saddam [Hussein], you’ve got to go back into this and look at the roots of it.”

      Marr then asked, “The big problem that people still think is that you planned and thought you were going to war, but didn’t tell us…. Will you accept Chilcot’s verdict on this as a fair assessment after all this time, all this evidence?”

    • Samantha Power to Receive Prize From Henry Kissinger, Whom She Once Harshly Criticized

      Samantha Power built her journalistic and academic career around human rights, criticizing powerful nations for their complicity in abuses and failure to stop acts of genocide.

      Then she joined the Obama administration, where she currently serves as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

      Early next month, Power will be receiving an award named for a man used to criticize quite harshly: former secretary of state Henry Kissinger, who has been implicated in a significant number of war crimes across the globe.

      And she’ll be getting it from Kissinger himself.

      The American Academy of Berlin’s Henry A. Kissinger Prize is awarded annually to a European or American diplomat.

    • There Has Been A Coup In Brazil

      In Brazil the country’s largest newspaper has published a transcript of a secret recording leaked to the newspaper. The words recorded are the plot by the rich Brazilian elite, involving both the US-corrupted Brazilian military and Supreme Court, to remove the democratically elected president of Brazil under false charges in order to stop the investigations of the corrupt elites who inhabit Brazil’s senate and bring to an end Brazil’s membership in BRICS. The Russian-Chinese attempt to organize an economic bloc independent of Washington has now lost 20% of its membership.

    • Cheerleader for US Aggression, Pushing the World to the Nuclear Brink

      Michael Fallon is British Defence Secretary. He is adept at making the types of statements that epitomise the pro-neoliberal, militaristic rhetoric that people in the UK have become tired of.

    • Abolish Memorial Day

      Never mind remembering the lessons of Vietnam – we’ve repressed even the bitter lessons of our most recent “past” conflict, the disastrous invasion and occupation of Iraq. No sooner had we fallen into that quicksand then we promptly forgot who pushed us in – which is why the authors of that disaster continue to function as foreign policy mavens and political seers whose reputations are considered sterling. The neocon clique, and any number of politicians of both parties who fulsomely supported that war, today act as if they have nothing to apologize for, and nothing to regret: far from being repentant, they are, if anything, proud of their advocacy, secure in the knowledge that “everyone” believed Iraq possessed “weapons of mass destruction,” and smug in the certainty that no one of any consequence has anything to gain by raising the subject.

    • This Memorial Day, Remember the Victims of Democide

      The late and lamented Rudy Rummel, a professor at the University of Hawaii and the acknowledged expert on the phenomenon of “democide,” estimated that governments murdered more than 260 million human beings in the 20th century alone. That figure excludes – and is six times as large as – military casualties in the century’s wars.

    • Can Hillary Clinton Renounce Henry Kissinger?

      In one of the defining moments in this year’s long contest for the Democratic nomination, Hillary Clinton cited admiration of Henry Kissinger, one of her predecessors as secretary of state, renowned for opening relations with communist China and for his Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating the end of the Vietnam War.

    • Obama Must Recommit to Eliminating Nuclear Arms

      On May 27, President Obama will become the first sitting president to visit Hiroshima, Japan, where at the end of World War II the U.S. became the first and only country to drop an atomic bomb. The president will use the occasion to revive attention on the need to rid the world of nuclear weapons.

      Immediately, the critics assailed the president for going on an “apology tour.” The White House sought to calm the furor, assuring reporters that the president would not use the word “sorry.”

      “We said that this is not about issuing an apology,” Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes told reporters on Thursday.

      Why not apologize? The president will visit the 30-acre Peace Memorial Park in Hiroshima, located directly under the spot where the bomb exploded, with a museum displaying the charred belongings of the 100,000 people who perished, as everything with one mile of the bomb blast was entirely wiped out. The short inscription on the park’s memorial arch reads, in part: “We shall not repeat the evil.”

      [...]

      But now informed observers argue that the risks of a nuclear disaster are getting worse. Tensions are rising with both Russia and China, with the U.S. deploying forces near their borders. Nuclear stockpiles contain more than 15,000 warheads. As many as 1,000 remain on hair-trigger alert. U.S. security strategy still claims the right to use nuclear weapons first, a dangerous and dumb refusal to limit their use to actual deterrence. The U.S. just activated anti-ballistic missile system in Romania that the Russians say violates the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Agreement. President Obama has signed off on a modernization of both nuclear weapons and their delivery systems with a projected cost of $1 trillion over three decades that could very likely to trigger a new arms race.

    • The Paradox Of Congo: How The World’s Wealthiest Country Became Home To The World’s Poorest People

      Foreign companies have made large investments in eastern Congo’s mines, buying from suppliers funding armed groups within the country. This type of foreign investment in the Congo’s extraction industry has led to a loss of at least $1 billion in resource revenue that could otherwise be used to reform the country’s security, health, and education sectors.

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

    • Obama promised transparency. But his administration is one of the most secretive

      Some things just aren’t cool. One of those, according to our no-drama president, is ignorance.

      “It’s not cool to not know what you’re talking about,” President Obama said during his recent Rutgers University commencement address. It was a swipe clearly intended for he-who-didn’t-need-to-be-named: Donald Trump, the likely Republican nominee for president.

      Okay, no argument there.

      But the Obama administration itself has been part of a different know-nothing problem. It has kept the news media — and therefore the public — in the dark far too much over the past 7 1/2 years.

    • Clinton email headache is about to get worse

      A scathing inspector general’s report this week was just the first in what is likely to be a series of official actions related to her private server stemming from the FBI, a federal courthouse and Capitol Hill.

      Clinton’s presidential campaign has failed to quiet the furor over the issue, which has dogged her for more than a year.

      In the next few weeks — just as the likely Democratic presidential nominee hopes to pivot towards a general election — it will face its toughest scrutiny yet.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Singapore raises concerns over haze at UN meeting in Africa

      Singapore has raised concerns over transboundary air pollution at a United Nations (UN) meeting involving some 120 environment ministers in Africa last week, the Ministry for the Environment and Water Resources (MEWR) said on Sunday (May 29).

      During the meeting, called the 2nd session of the UN Environment Assembly (UNEA-2), Singapore’s Dr Amy Khor said air pollution stunts economic development and has adverse impacts on human health.

    • WHO: Finland’s air third-cleanest in world

      According to a fresh report from the World Health Organisation, the air in Finland is the third cleanest in the world, and one of the very cleanest parts of the world can be found in Finnish Lapland.

    • Answer given by Mr Stylianides on behalf of the Commission

      A summary report of the initial findings will soon be provided to Indonesian authorities. The report is intended for the Indonesian authorities and therefore will not be made public. Upon further request of Indonesian authorities the Commission is ready to deploy a full advisory mission providing expertise and recommendations on the topics identified in the initial findings which recommend that the advisory mission focuses on advising the Government on improving the governance practices and modern fire surveillance. In addition, a small EU Civil Protection Team (2-3 experts) could be deployed upon invitation of the Indonesian authorities during the forest fires season to assist in coordinating activities during fire response operations.

    • Reef spending spree welcome: Branson
    • Bleaching kills third of coral in Great Barrier Reef’s north
    • Mass coral bleaching cast shadow over future of Great Barrier Reef
    • Reef needs $10bn Murray Darling Basin package: conservationists
    • Climate change action vital to reef
    • Australia’s censorship of Unesco climate report is like a Shakespearean tragedy
    • Homeowners kept in dark about climate change risk to houses, says report

      The risk that houses in some areas of Australia are likely to become uninsurable, dilapidated and uninhabitable due to climate change is kept hidden from those building and buying property along Australia’s coasts and in bushfire zones, a Climate Institute report says.

      The report says there is untapped and unshared data held by regulators, state and local governments, insurers and banks on the level of risk, but that most homebuyers and developers are not told about the data and do not have access to it.

    • Indonesia’s Unnatural Mud Disaster Turns Ten

      Ten years ago this Sunday, one of the weirdest and most controversial disasters of the 2000s struck a densely populated area just outside the city of Sidoarjo in East Java, Indonesia. At 5:00 that morning, a slurry of dark gray mud burst from the soil and began oozing slowly across the landscape. Since that day, the flow of mud has never stopped or even paused.

      Now, a decade into the eruption, an area of almost three square miles has been buried in mud up to sixty feet deep. At the center of a vast gray mudscape, the volcano continues to spew. More than forty thousand people have lost their houses, businesses, and land, and they can never go home.

      In the wake of most volcanic eruptions, hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes, or other phenomena that are typically lumped under the contested “natural disaster” label, a tenth anniversary can be a good time to look back at how the recovery and healing happened.

    • Lightning strikes kill man in Poland and injure dozens across Europe

      One man has died and scores of people been injured, including children, as lightning strikes hit several parts of Europe, including a park in Paris and a football pitch in Germany.

      A bolt of lightning killed a man hiking in mountains in south-west Poland on Saturday. Storm lightning injured three others in the same region, and a 61-year-old man drowned in flash flooding.

      In Germany, more than 30 people were taken to hospital in the western village of Hoppstädten when lightning struck at the end of a junior football match. Three adults were seriously injured, including the referee who was hit directly and had to be resuscitated before being airlifted to hospital.

    • Donald Trump Tells Drought-Stricken Californians There Is No Drought

      Speaking to an audience in California on Friday, presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump told the crowd “there is no drought” in their state.

      Trump claimed there isn’t a real water shortage. Instead, he said, state officials are intentionally denying water to farmers in the middle of the state — choosing to reroute the water to the ocean to protect an endangered California fish called the delta smelt.

    • The Trouble with Fracking Fiction

      The best storytelling about the fracking boom has come mostly from newspaper reporters who decided to write nonfiction books about real people and real events. Tom Wilber’s “Under the Surface,” Russell Gold’s “The Boom,” and Seamus McGraw’s “The End of Country,” present nonfiction accounts of the shale gas revolution and offer deep insights into the minds of people impacted by the industry.

      Based on her research, Haugh believes the debate over shale gas drilling is about class. The ban on fracking in New York was the result of a concerted effort by “highly educated, politically liberal environmental activists,” she says in the Q&A. “In Pennsylvania, the conversation is completely different. … The environmental arguments that won over New York voters don’t fly there. For working class people with no economic security, that kind of idealism is an unaffordable luxury.”

    • Duke Energy Flexes Political Muscle on Fracked Gas, Coal Ash

      Duke Energy is facing serious regulatory battles in its home state of North Carolina, with climate-action groups doggedly trying to block the company’s planned fracked gas plant in Asheville and the state’s environmental agency recently deciding — at least temporarily — that all of the company’s coal ash impoundments must be excavated and the waste moved to safer dry storage.

      But the power giant is fighting back with the help of friends in high places.

      On the gas plant front, Duke Energy earlier this month asked the N.C. Utilities Commission to order NC WARN and The Climate Times to post a $50 million bond to continue their appeal of the commission’s approval of the company’s proposed $1 billion gas plant on the site of a shuttered coal plant near Asheville, citing a never-before-used provision of a 1963 state law allowing the utility to seek a bond from critics challenging a power plant approval. Though the bond is supposed to offset costs stemming from a delay in starting construction, Duke Energy has not shown any evidence that the appeal would lead to delays.

    • What Happens When Kids Ask A Climate Scientist Questions

      Recently a Portland, Oregon school board voted to throw out textbooks that cast doubt on climate change. With an eye to making students more “climate literate,” schools are ditching materials that hem and haw about the human causes of global warming.

    • Unstoppable Force or Immovable Object: Which Do You Want to Be?

      What happens when an immovable object meets an unstoppable force? In the case of the fossil fuel industry meeting the growing force of the climate movement, the answer is “change!”

      [...]

      From the Gulf Coast, to Colorado, Alaska, to Albany, communities are uniting to demand that fossil fuels stay in the ground, where they belong.

    • This is What Insurgency Looks Like

      A week before the action the Albany Break Free steering committee defined their basic message. Potentially explosive crude oil “bomb trains” roll through Albany and surrounding communities, polluting the air and contributing to the climate crisis. Primarily low-income communities of color are put at risk. The urgent need to address climate change means that fossil fuels have to be left in the ground and a transition made to a “twenty-first century renewable energy economy.” They called for an end to all new fossil fuel infrastructure, including pipelines, power plants, compressor stations, and storage tanks. And they called for a just transition away from fossil fuel energy with training and jobs for affected workers, so “no worker is left behind.”

    • Environmentalists, First Nations Vow Summer of Action Against Trans Mountain Pipeline

      Environment and Indigenous rights organizations are indicating it’s going to be a long, hot summer of civil disobedience in British Columbia following a National Energy Board report released last week recommending conditional approval of Kinder Morgan’s $5.4 billion Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion project that allow for the transport of nearly a million barrels of bitumen per day from Alberta’s tar sands oil mines.

  • Finance

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • DNC rejects Sanders’s request to remove committee chairs

      Senior Democratic National Committee (DNC) officials have rejected a request from Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders’s campaign to change the leadership of two crucial committees at the national convention this summer.

      Jim Roosevelt and Lorraine Miller, co-chairs of the Rules and Bylaws Committee, dismissed a request to remove Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy and former Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank as co-chairmen of the convention’s platform and rules committees, respectively.

      The campaign’s complaint, they wrote in a letter to Sanders lawyer Brad Deutsch, failed to allege a violation of the convention’s rules governing the conduct of elections or delegate selection.

    • 538 Sacrifices Integrity to Go After Sanders on Independents

      As this campaign has gone along, it seems to me that the 538 crew have at times gone beyond the realm of punditry into the realm of hackery—that is, not just treating their own opinions as though they were objective data, but spinning the data so that it conforms to their opinions.

      [...]

      So from the beginning, 538 argued, Sanders had very little chance of getting the Democratic nomination, because if he showed any signs of winning, a Democratic establishment united against him would step in to “squash” him. If that’s not the definition of a “rigged” system, what is it?

    • Memo to the President Regarding the Hillary Clinton Email Server

      The following memo was written by a group of U.S. intelligence, diplomatic, and military veterans, calling on President Obama to expedite the FBI review of former Secretary of State Clinton’s alleged email security violations so the public can assess this issue in a timely fashion.

      Clinton’s judgement — never mind the significant question of legality — is an important criterion which Americans must consider in choosing their next president.

      Yeah, it is long, but sometimes important things are complex, and need to be explained clearly. That is especially true in the case of the Clinton Emails, where the media has failed in its job of explaining how classification works, and the significance of exposing classified material.

    • With Clinton’s Nixonian Email Scandal Deepening, Sanders Must Demand Answers

      Hillary Clinton is a lawyer, and while she’s slippery, she’s no dummy. She may have played dumb when asked earlier by reporters about her server’s hard drive being wiped clean of data before she turned it over to the FBI, saying, “What, like with a cloth or something? I don’t know how it works at all,” but she surely was involved in the deletion of her private emails — over 30,000 of which were reportedly erased.

      And those erasures were made without any involvement of State Department security or legal officials. The decision, according to Clinton, on which emails were “private communications,” was made by her personal attorney, whose interest, by definition, was her and not the public or even national security for that matter.

      As the Washington Post has reported, the Clintons went from being, as Hillary Clinton has said, “dead broke” upon leaving the White House in January 2000, to earning some $230 million by this year — a staggering sum of money even in a new Gilded Age of obscene wealth. Most of this money has been little more than influence buying by corporations and wealthy people trying to curry favor with a woman who was already Secretary of State, perhaps the second-most powerful position in the US government and whom many expected to become the next president after Obama.

      The power couple’s two foundations, the Clinton Foundation and the Clinton Global Initiative, now together reportedly worth more than $2 billion, both function effectively as money-laundering operations providing salaries to Clinton family members and friends. And Hillary Clinton, particularly while serving as President Obama’s secretary of state, was in a perfect position to do favors for unsavory foreign leaders seeking to have their countries kept off of State Department lists of human rights violators, and for US businesses seeking lucrative business deals abroad. It’s those kinds of email conversations that would have benefitted from a private server, since US State Department official computers have dedicated back-up systems that would be hard or impossible to wipe, and are also by law subject to Freedom of Information inquiries from journalists and the public.

      It beggars belief to think that Hillary Clinton wasn’t hiding such conversations when she had her private emails deleted from her server.

      The FBI is known to be investigating Clinton’s private emails, with as many as 100 FBI personnel assigned to the investigation. Already, one key privately hired tech assistant who worked on Clinton’s private server, Bryan Pagliano, has become a cooperating witness, granted immunity from prosecution by the US Justice Department in that investigation (usually an indication that the FBI is expecting to indict someone else). Key Clinton aides, notably her top aide Huma Abedin, have also been interviewed by FBI agents, with the expectation that Clinton will be interviewed herself soon by federal agents. But there is no indication from the Justice Department or the FBI as to when, if ever, the results of that investigation will be released.

    • Wanted: Daddy or Mommy in Chief

      Candidates must be able to glamorize war, rally the masses to believe war is necessary, rally the young to enlist in the military, promote nationalism, and jackboot countries to join war coalitions.

      Candidates must be proficient in pandering to fear, using the words “terror” and “terrorism” at precisely the right moments and especially when a majority of people expresses war weariness.

    • Democracy after Sanders

      The Sanders’ campaign has remained on the whole anchored on key policy issues – free university education, free universal healthcare, redistribution of wealth by taxing the rich and financial capital, among others. The tone between the two Democratic contenders has become increasingly bitter, but Sanders made it clear that, despite the big differences, he would support Clinton if she becomes the Democratic nominee. But will his supporters follow him? Various polls show that in November a significant section of Sanders’ electorate will not vote for Clinton – and a smaller proportion might even vote for Trump.

    • Socialism vs. barbarism: Only social democracy can defeat the right-wing radicalism of Donald Trump

      About a year after the launch of both Sen. Bernie Sanders’ and Donald Trump’s presidential campaigns, it’s easy to conclude that the anti-establishment backlash of 2016 was somewhat inevitable. The incredulity that many in the establishment felt when these two candidates first climbed the polls and took their respective primaries by storm has passed, and now that Trump has locked up the Republican nomination, nothing seems beyond the realm of possibility (including, terrifyingly enough, a Donald Trump presidency).

    • Did This Chinese Billionaire Try to Buy Hillary Clinton and Terry McAuliffe?

      Virginia’s party boy-turned-governor Terry McAuliffe, a longtime friend and confidant of the Clintons, is being investigated by the FBI and Department of Justice for potentially taking illegal campaign contributions.

      The governor’s office told CNN, which broke the story, that it was not aware the investigation was under way and that it would cooperate if asked. Details are vague, but the investigation involves Chinese billionaire businessman Wang Wenliang, who now has the rare distinction of causing problems for both McAuliffe and Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton. It’s complicated—and it highlights just how much Clinton and McAuliffe’s questionable shared connections haunt their political dreams.

    • Revealed: The State Department’s Hidden Hillary Donors

      Hillary Clinton may have suspended her political career temporarily when she became secretary of state. But the Clinton fundraising machine was in full swing and raising millions of dollars for the State Department under her watch, an analysis by The Daily Beast has found.

    • Sub sailor’s photo case draws comparisons to Clinton emails

      A Navy sailor entered a guilty plea Friday in a classified information mishandling case that critics charge illustrates a double standard between the treatment of low-ranking government employees and top officials like former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and ex-CIA Director David Petraeus.

      Prosecutors allege that Petty Officer First Class Kristian Saucier used a cellphone camera to take photos in the classified engine room of the nuclear submarine where he worked as a mechanic, the USS Alexandria, then destroyed a laptop, camera and memory card after learning he was under investigation.

    • How Donald Trump Destroyed the Interview

      What of Trump’s reputation for being a liar? “I don’t lie, I mean I don’t lie. In fact, if anything, I’m so truthful that it gets me in trouble, OK? They say I’m too truthful. And, no I don’t lie,” he told Greta Van Susteren in February. As my colleagues Michael Kruse and Noah Weiland documented earlier this month in a lengthy piece, almost everything that comes out of Trump’s mouth is provisional. Give him a few minutes, a couple hours, or even several years, and he’ll reverse most of what he has previously said.

    • The Impeachment of Donald Trump

      Pollsters and pundits have lately begun to discuss the possibility that Donald Trump could best Hillary Clinton in the upcoming presidential election. But they haven’t yet said that if that happens, Trump would soon face impeachment, or that his choice of a vice-president the most important decision in this scenario of gathering nightmares.

    • Thousands Call on DNC to Oust ‘Corporatist Tool’ Wasserman Schultz

      More than 40,000 people have signed a petition calling on the Democratic National Committee (DNC) to remove embattled chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who has faced increasing criticism over her leadership of the party in the 2016 election cycle.

      The petition, organized by the grassroots group RootsAction.org, castigates Wasserman Schultz for what the group describes as an attempt to “minimize competition for her candidate Hillary Clinton” and for her actions in U.S. Congress as “a pro-militarist and corporatist tool of the high bidders.”

    • 12 Fringe Conspiracy Theories Embraced By A Man Who Might Be The Next President

      There are mountains of scientific evidence that asbestos is extremely dangerous to humans. It causes cancer and kills more than 12,000 people every year.

      [...]

      Donald Trump told an audience in Fresno that “there is no drought” in California. According to Trump, the state has plenty of water but it’s being held hostage by environmentalists in government. The idea that the government is engineering the drought was popularized by professional conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones.

      [...]

      Donald Trump has repeatedly called climate change a hoax, often implicating the Chinese.

      [...]

      Trump spent much of 2011 and 2012 raising questions about the legitimacy of Obama’s birthplace, feeding into conspiracy theories that he was born in Kenya and ineligible to be president.

    • Trump Exposes the GOP’s Dirty Secret: They Build Everything by Nurturing White Rage

      Paul Ryan is angry with Donald Trump, not so much for failing to espouse conservative values, as for exposing America’s dirty little secret—white rage: that deep-seated determination to block black progress in this country. For years, conservative politicians have relied upon the cover of high-minded principles and slogans—“protecting the integrity of the ballot box,” or waging a “war on drugs” — in order to cloak their determination to restrict African Americans’ citizenship rights. The racism fueling Trump’s campaign and his followers, however, is so overt, that it is undoing decades of hard covert work by the GOP.

    • Trump Attacks Judge Overseeing The Case Against His Fake University: ‘He’s A Hater’

      Trump told his supporters he believes Judge Curiel should be removed from the case, citing the fact that Curiel was appointed to the bench by President Obama. Trump also said he believes Curiel is “Mexican.” The crowd — which had previously shouted “build that wall” — booed loudly.

    • 5 Insane Right-Wing Moments This Week: Sarah Palin Invents Bizarre Nickname for Trump

      Where does one begin when a major party nominee comes out and tells Californians that the drought they have been experiencing for several years does not exist? One place is with the woman who, if she did not start the march toward our current idiocracy, greatly accelerated it and continues to pour gasoline on its tinder pile. Sarah Palin was making the rounds for Trump this week, warming up the crowds, spewing what can only be described as some of the most moronic batsh*t the world has ever heard, with the possible exception of words uttered by the man himself.

    • Layers of Islamophobia: Do Liberals Care That Hillary Returned “Muslim Money”?

      At a news conference on Tuesday, I asked Reps. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) and André Carson (D-Ind.) about Hillary Clinton’s having returned money from Muslims and refusing to meet with Arab and Muslim groups in her 2000 Senate run.

    • Why the Libertarians Might Help Tilt the Election to Hillary

      Polls are notoriously unreliable on third-party campaigns, especially this early in an election year, when low name recognition understates appeal. But it looks as if the Libertarians could easily take 5 to 10 percent of the total vote and more in key states. Almost all of this will come at the expense of Donald Trump.

    • Thugs, Bullies, and Donald J. Trump: The Perils of Wounded Masculinity

      Last summer when I began pointing out the parallels between white supremacist tactics, fascist movements and the rhetoric of Donald Trump I felt like a lone voice in the wind. Now the concern that Trump is bringing a populist form of fascism to America is bouncing around the mainstream, from the Village Voice to the Brookings Institute. Of course, last summer I thought the Trump crazy-train would derail by Thanksgiving as Bush or Rubio became the rational choice of the Republican Party. I have never been so wrong in my life. I completely underestimated the number of deluded people willing to dive into a cult of personality. They aren’t a silent majority, they are a very noisy minority. A very noisy white minority.

    • Cornwall’s chief constable Shaun Sawyer confirms investigation into alleged Conservative election fraud

      Devon and Cornwall Police has said it will hand the investigation of alleged electoral fraud by the Conservative Party over to another force.

      The police were called on to investigate whether the party had committed fraud by failing to disclose expenses related to its election battle bus in constituencies including Camborne and Redruth, where Tory MP George Eustice was re-elected, and North Cornwall where Scott Mann won the seat for the party.

      The newly elected Police and Crime Commissioner, Alison Hernandez, has also been caught up in the scandal, as last year she was the election agent Torbay MP Kevin Foster, and signed the campaign’s spending return which did not include the expenses.

      Devon and Cornwall’s Chief Constable, Shaun Sawyer, said: “Following a programme aired by Channel 4 on 20 and 21 April, the force received allegations relating to improper electoral campaign spending returns in Devon and Cornwall in the 2015 general election.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

  • Privacy/Surveillance

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • The hidden horrors in poultry plants

      THOUSANDS OF workers stand for up to 12 hours straight in freezing-cold, foul-smelling factories–aching, hurting, gasping for air, struggling to go on until their next bathroom break–while they relentlessly pull, cut and jab at dozens of chickens churning down the line every minute at dangerous speeds, repeating the same, intensive body-motions more than 20,000 times a day.

    • A New Memorial Day Tradition — Burning The Confederate Flag

      Well, I started working on the Confederate over 15 years ago, as an art project, first by recoloring it red, black and green for the black nationalism colors.

    • The Republic of Fear

      Why are so many Americans gripped by fear? Fear of terrorism, fear of immigrants, fear of the deficit, fear that the government will take away guns, fear of socialism, gay rights, and women’s rights. Despite, the Boston Marathon bombings and the mass shooting in San Bernardino, America has not been attacked by foreign terrorists in fourteen years, yet the right is deathly afraid of terrorists. It’s their number one concern. Number two is the problem of immigrants even though America is a country of immigrants. Meanwhile, the deficit has shrunk to less than 3% of GDP yet Republicans claim the deficit is bankrupting the country. The right to own a gun is written into the Constitution, yet gun-owners are afraid background checks are a step down a slippery slope to government seizing their weapons. Trump claims Hillary will repeal the Second Amendment.

    • Toppling the Status Quo
    • Amos Yee is attacked in Jurong Point

      “I witnessed the entire incident. When attacked, Amos ran all the way to the Fairprice supermarket. The man who assaulted him and his girlfriend waited outside the supermarket for him, and when he came out they grabbed him by the neck and dragged him all the way to a Japanese restaurant. Many people witnessed the incident but none came forward to help, except a Caucasian man. He asked the aggressor to let Amos go, but the aggressor just ignored him. Amos managed to get free when the aggressor held him with one hand and used the other to call his gang members on the phone.”

      The 17-year-old blogger is facing trial in Court and faces six charges of intending to wound the feelings of Muslims or Christians – via five videos and a photo – and two counts of failing to report to the Jurong Police Division for investigations. He is out on a $5000 bail.

    • Israel Police Recommend Indicting Sara Netanyahu Over Irregularities at PM’s Residence

      Netanyahu was questioned under caution – as someone who might be charged with a crime – in December 2015 by Israel Police’s Lahav 433 fraud investigation unit.

    • Turkey as Terror: the Role of Ankara in the Brexit Referendum

      Hungary’s Viktor Orbán got there first, beating the drums of fear at the prospect of reincarnated Ottoman hordes streaming through Europe in an Islamic remake of a modern continent. With the British referendum on the EU fast approaching, the demonic Turk is again taking the centre stage in terms of terrifying metaphor.

    • The ILO report on ‘decent work in global supply chains’ – much ado about nothing?

      Given that labour conditions in global supply chains have been in the public spotlight for over two decades, it is no surprise that the topic ‘decent work in global supply chains’ is on the agenda of this month’s 105th session of the International Labour Conference (ILC). However, it can be argued that the accompanying report is a missed opportunity. Whilst it is a thorough assessment of the status quo regarding labour rights and working conditions in global supply chains, it does little to move the debate forward.

      It is a well-known fact that western companies at the top of the global supply chain tree (called ‘lead firms’) not only outsource their production through global supply chains, but also their potential legal liability. They therefore reduce both their costs and their responsibilities.

    • Inquest jury finds failures in detainee healthcare

      Dr Cocco said that the brain scan appointment could have led to life-saving treatment.

    • Former NSA head on Trump: ‘He’s feeding their recruitment video’
    • Facebook posing greater privacy risks than governments: Hayden
    • UK people more tolerant of ‘aggressive intelligence actions’ than Americans says former CIA chief Michael Hayden
    • CIA ex-boss: secretive spooks tolerated in UK more than in US

      British people are not demanding more transparency from the intelligence services as loudly as Americans, the former director of the US National Security Agency (NSA) and CIA has said.

      Michael Hayden played a pivotal, leading role in American intelligence until he was replaced as director of the CIA shortly into the presidency of Barack Obama.

      In a wide-ranging talk on the fourth day of the Hay festival, Hayden addressed CIA torture, targeted killings, what he thinks about Edward Snowden and how Facebook is perhaps a greater threat to privacy than government.

    • Thousands Held in Federal Prisons for Too Long, Report Finds

      More than 4,300 federal inmates were kept in prison beyond their scheduled release dates from 2009 to 2014 — some of them for an extra year or more, according to a report released on Tuesday that highlighted wide confusion in the prison system.

      The findings by the Justice Department’s inspector general are a potential embarrassment for the United States Bureau of Prisons at a time when the Obama administration has assailed what it says are unfair and unduly harsh sentences for many inmates, particularly minorities and nonviolent offenders.

      While it is unusual for an inmate to be held past his sentence, the consequences “can be extraordinarily serious,” the report said. The delayed releases “deprive inmates of their liberty,” and have led to millions of dollars in added prison costs and legal settlements with former inmates, it concluded.

    • Lock Up the Men, Evict the Women and Children

      We have 5 percent of the world’s population and 25 percent of its prison population. More than 60 percent of the 2.2 million incarcerated are people of color. If these poor people were not locked in cages for decades, if they were not given probationary status once they were freed, if they had stable communities, there would be massive unrest in the streets. Mass incarceration, along with debt peonage, evictions, police violence and a judicial system that holds up property rights, rather than justice, as the highest good and that denies nearly all of the poor a trial, forcing them to accept plea bargains, is one of the many tools of corporate oppression.

    • Woman Treated Like A Criminal For Refusing To Testify Against Her Abusive Boyfriend

      A federal court has sided with a domestic violence victim who was treated like a criminal after a prosecutor threw her in jail for refusing to testify that her abusive boyfriend hit her in the face, according to court documents filed Friday with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.

      Plaintiff Kristin Loupe was called as a witness to testify against her then-boyfriend David Adams during a bond hearing in January 2014. She said that during a domestic fight, he hurt her arm “in a dispute that went too far.” When Robin O’Bannon, the Ascension Parish Assistant District Attorney, pushed for more details about the abuse and repeatedly asked whether Loupe was hit in the face, Loupe would not confirm whether that had happened.

    • BTS explainer: what is the International Labour Conference?

      This will be the 105th session of the International Labour Conference, but how many people know what it is and why it’s important?

    • The Socialist Revolution Beyond Sanders and the Democratic Party

      The wave of revolutionary politics that Bernie Sanders and his supporters are riding can be traced back to George W. Bush. When Bush decided to Invade Iraq in 2003 he ignited a counter protest movement of young activists that the country had not seen since the Vietnam War. The activism continued through the second Bush election when many felt inspired by Senator John Kerry’s run for president as a well-known anti-war advocate. A presidential run that failed for many reasons, one of which being Kerry positioned himself as anti-war, yet voted in favor of the Iraq invasion.

    • It’s not their fault, it’s yours! Swedish GIRLS blamed for rise in migrant sex attacks

      SWEDISH police have blamed Scandinavian teenage girls’ “Nordic alcohol culture” and Western behaviour for a steep rise in sex attacks carried out by migrants.

    • Cincinnati zoo: Parents of boy blamed as anger mounts over shooting dead of gorilla

      Visitors to Cincinnati Zoo have blamed the parents of a boy who fell into the gorilla enclosure – forcing staff to shoot and kill the rare 400-lb animals.

      As zoo officials explained that they had no alternative but to take the reluctant decision to kill the animal, a wave of outrage and anger began to focus on the as yet unidentified parents of the four-year-old, who was captured on video in the ape’s enclosure.

    • Governments Turn to Commercial Spyware to Intimidate Dissidents

      In the last five years, Ahmed Mansoor, a human rights activist in the United Arab Emirates, has been jailed and fired from his job, along with having his passport confiscated, his car stolen, his email hacked, his location tracked and his bank account robbed of $140,000. He has also been beaten, twice, in the same week.

      Mr. Mansoor’s experience has become a cautionary tale for dissidents, journalists and human rights activists. It used to be that only a handful of countries had access to sophisticated hacking and spying tools. But these days, nearly all kinds of countries, be they small, oil-rich nations like the Emirates, or poor but populous countries like Ethiopia, are buying commercial spyware or hiring and training programmers to develop their own hacking and surveillance tools.

      The barriers to join the global surveillance apparatus have never been lower. Dozens of companies, ranging from NSO Group and Cellebrite in Israel to Finfisher in Germany and Hacking Team in Italy, sell digital spy tools to governments.

      A number of companies in the United States are training foreign law enforcement and intelligence officials to code their own surveillance tools. In many cases these tools are able to circumvent security measures like encryption. Some countries are using them to watch dissidents. Others are using them to aggressively silence and punish their critics, inside and outside their borders.

    • Keep Calm and (Don’t) Enable Macros: A New Threat Actor Targets UAE Dissidents

      This report describes a campaign of targeted spyware attacks carried out by a sophisticated operator, which we call Stealth Falcon. The attacks have been conducted from 2012 until the present, against Emirati journalists, activists, and dissidents. We discovered this campaign when an individual purporting to be from an apparently fictitious organization called “The Right to Fight” contacted Rori Donaghy. Donaghy, a UK-based journalist and founder of the Emirates Center for Human Rights, received a spyware-laden email in November 2015, purporting to offer him a position on a human rights panel. Donaghy has written critically of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) government in the past,1 and had recently published a series of articles based on leaked emails involving members of the UAE government.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • House Republicans Move To Eliminate Net Neutrality

      A new proposal by House Republicans would effectively put an end to net neutrality while slashing funding for the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The legislation would reduce the agency’s funding by more than 17 percent, likely leaving the agency crippled and incapable of enforcing its regulations.

      [...]

      Over the past two years, Rogers has received more than $25,000 in campaign contributions from the telecom industry, according to OpenSecrets.org, a resource for federal campaign contributions.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • WHA Gets First UN Framework Managing Non-State Actors; Countries Satisfied, Actors Concerned

      The first agreement on how to manage relationships between a United Nations organisation and non-governmental actors, such as industry, philanthropic organisations and public interest groups, was adopted on 28 May by the World Health Assembly. The framework, which had been discussed for several years, was hailed as historic by many countries, but met a mixed reaction from those primarily concerned.

    • Trademarks

      • The Nominative Fair Use “Defense” in Trademark Law: Confusion in the US Circuit Courts of Appeal

        Chief Judge Kozinski, the well-known libertarian, is the author of the excellent “Trademarks Unplugged” article. Nominative fair use is different from the classic descriptive fair use defense because the alleged infringer is essentially using the trademark of another to refer to the trademark owner. The classic descriptive fair use defense is ordinarily utilized when an alleged infringer is using the trademark of another to fairly describe the alleged infringer’s goods or services. However, nominative fair use could even apply to a fanciful mark because the alleged infringer is trying to directly refer to the trademark owner itself.

05.29.16

Links 29/5/2016: NetBSD 7.0.1, Genode OS 16.05

Posted in News Roundup at 5:53 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Rise of Open Cloud Architecture and Over-the-Top (OTT) Network Services
  • Amazon’s Giving Away the AI Behind Its Product Recommendations

    Amazon has become the latest tech giant that’s giving away some of its most sophisticated technology. Today the company unveiled DSSTNE (pronounced “destiny”), an open source artificial intelligence framework that the company developed to power its product recommendation system. Now any company, researcher, or curious tinkerer can use it for their own AI applications.

  • Genode OS Framework release 16.05

    The current release marks the most profound API revision in the project’s history. The new API is designed to reinforce the best practices for implementing Genode components. It is the result of countless experiments and the practical experiences made while developing over hundred genuine components during the past ten years.

  • Old projects and the free-software community

    The Community Leadership Summit (CLS) is an annual event for community managers, developer evangelists, people who work on public-facing forums, and those with a general interest in engagement or community development for free-software projects. The 2016 edition was held in Austin, Texas the weekend before OSCON. Several sessions at CLS 2016 dealt with the differences exhibited between old and new free-software projects where community management is concerned. One of those tackled the problem of how to foster community around an older software project, which poses a distinct set of challenges.

  • Events

    • Reporting on OSCON 2016

      Last week was OSCON 2016, and the first year that the conference was held in Austin, Texas. OSCON has always been an important conference for Conservancy and for me personally. In 2011, it was the first conference I ever keynoted (I was also on a keynote panel in 2008, which was the closest I’d gotten before then), and where I really started talking about my heart condition and medical devices. OSCON was also the conference where we had the first Conservancy booth and debuted Conservancy t-shirts and stickers.

    • Day -1 of PyCon US 2016

      I reached Portland two days back, was happy to see that Remy helped us to find a hotel just opposite to the conference center. As I am typing this, I can see the empty roads, and the main doors of the venue. Yesterday also I woke up by 5AM, the virtue of being in a place 12:30 hours apart from your standard timezone :) After writing the article about Microbit support in Fedora (it is still under review) I moved to the conference venue. It was very easy to find the staff room. As usual Doug,Lvh,Eric were already there, later I met Ewa, and then met Betsy for the first time. While discussing security practices when I asked, Lvh pointed out that getting golang vendored sources in the source code repository and then not updating them later, is more of a software engineering problem than a security problem as he sees.

    • Running a Hackerspace

      I wrote parts of this post after our last monthly assembly at Athens Hackerspace. Most of the hackerspace operators are dealing with this monthly meeting routinely and we often forget what we have achieved during the last 5 years and how many great things this physical space enabled to happen. But this post is not about our hackerspace. It’s an effort to distant myself and try to write about the experience of running a hackerspace.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Thunderbird powered by SoftMaker

        Thunderbird, powered by SoftMaker, is a custom version of the popular email client featuring enhancements that come all in the form of extensions.

        [...]

        SoftMaker, a company best known for its SoftMaker Office suite, announced recently that it plans to include the Thunderbird email client into the 2016 version of the office suite.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • BSD

  • Licensing/Legal

    • The open-source generation gap

      OSI General Manager Patrick Masson was one of the session’s attendees, and he pushed back on that last point. There is too much “open-washing” these days, he said, but it does not come from the OSI. There is still only one Open Source Definition; the dilution of the term comes from others who use “open” to describe organizations, workflows, processes, and other things unrelated to software licensing. “We have open hardware and open data, but also ‘open cola’ and ‘open beer.’ That blurs over an important distinction. Not everything fits.”

      [...]

      Among the other points raised during the session, attendees noted that it was important that the community distinguish between minting new project contributors and minting new free-software activists, and that it was important for projects to put a check on flamewar-style debates—particularly those that focus on dismissing certain technologies. It is easy for experienced developers to become attached to a language or framework, but there will always be new languages and projects popping up that are the entry points for new coders. Project members deriding language Y because it is not language X may only serve to tell newcomers that they are not welcome.

    • A discussion on combining CDDL and GPL code

      Within the context of an event dedicated to discussing free and open-source software (FOSS) legalities, such as the Free Software Legal & Licensing Workshop (LLW), the topic of conflicting licenses was bound to come up. The decision by Canonical to start shipping the ZFS filesystem with its Ubuntu server distribution back in February led to a discussion at LLW about distributing the kernel combined with ZFS. Discussions at LLW are held under the Chatham House Rule, which means that names and affiliations of participants are only available for those who have agreed to be identified. This year’s LLW was held in Barcelona, April 13-15.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Open Data

    • Open Access/Content

    • Open Hardware/Modding

      • Hackaday Prize Entry: An Interface For The Headless Linux System

        Connecting a headless Raspberry Pi to a wireless network can be quite a paradoxical situation. To connect it to the network, you need to open an SSH connection to configure the wireless port. But to do so, you need a network connection in the first place. Of course, you can still get command-line access using a USB-to-UART adapter or the Pi’s ethernet port – if present – but [Arsenijs] worked out a much more convenient solution for his Hackaday Prize entry: The pyLCI Linux Control Interface.

      • RepRap, Open Source and 3DPrinting

        The RepRap project started in 2005 by Adrian Bowyer – “Mister RepRap”, when the patent about this technology expired. 3DPrintings isn’t a new technology, history dates that the first model of stereolithography printing emerged in 1984. The main idea around RepRap projects is to produce 3DPrinters that can auto-replicate most of the parts itself. And in 2006, the RepRap 0.2 successfully printed the first part of itself and in 2008, the first 3d model was printed by an end-user. Currently, the printer more replicated and customized of the 67 printers that are listed on RepRap website, is the Prusa Mendel, the model created by Josef Průša, that was disponibility to the public in 2011 and had a lot of development since.

      • Here is a web interface for switching on your light

        Like I mentioned in a previous post, I wanted to try out a more hackable wifi plug. I got a Kankun “smart” plug. Like the other one I have the software is horrible. The good news is that they left SSH enabled on it.

      • LeMaker Guitar review

        Anyone who has worked with the Compute Module will find the LeMaker Guitar immediately familiar. The system-on-chip processor, an Actions S500, sits alongside 1GB of memory, a combined audio and power management unit, and 8GB of NAND flash storage on an over-sized small-outline DIMM (SODIMM) form factor circuit board. This board then connects to a baseboard, supplied with the Guitar, which provides more accessible connectivity than the SODIMM’s 204 electrical contacts.

  • Programming/Development

Leftovers

  • Hardware

    • For this gadgethead, the HTC Vive may force my Oculus Rift to collect dust

      In walking the long path to VR on the PC, I’ve built a new gaming computer from scratch, bought peripherals out the wazoo, and, of course, pre-ordered both an Oculus Rift and an HTC Vive so I wouldn’t have to choose between the two. If we’re including things like the peripherals I use when playing some VR games—like my Warthog HOTAS and Slaw Device pedals—then my grand total is hovering at $4,000 or so in VR-related expenses.

      That’s a hell of a lot of cheddar to drop in pursuit of gaming, but the results make me happy. There isn’t a PC VR-related thing I can’t have. If it exists for Oculus Rift or SteamVR, I can play it. And I’ve been casting that net wide, jumping from VR game to VR game, trying over the past six weeks to eat as much as I can from this new buffet of experiences.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Europe Medicines Group Joins Initiative To Fight Fake Medicines

      Fight the Fakes campaign “represents a great opportunity for a multi-stakeholder and multi-disciplinary collaboration,” said Adrian van den Hoven, Medicines for Europe director general. He also highlighted the fact that fake medicines are “illegal and dangerous.”

    • Shift In Discussions About R&D At This Week’s World Health Assembly

      Public health advocates – and many nations – had high hopes that this year’s World Health Assembly could finally agree on some alternative ways to fund research and development that can lead to affordable medical products by de-linking R&D costs from prices, through the long-awaited discussion of a landmark 2012 report of a WHO expert group on medical R&D. This week, that discussion has spread across the highest profile topics of the week such as antimicrobial resistance and emergencies, but some are concerned that the public health safeguards recommended by the expert group may be being left behind.

    • Reactions To WHA Resolution On R&D Financing Generally Positive

      Today, the annual World Health Assembly is poised to approve a new plan on research and development into medical products that are affordable to all. NGOs, industry and other observers welcomed the outcome.

    • The U.S. Just Got One Step Closer To A Deadly ‘Superbug’ Crisis

      On Thursday, researchers revealed that for the first time, they’ve found a case of U.S. bacteria resistant to last-resort antibiotics. Researchers at Walter Reed found the germ in a 49-year-old Pennsylvania woman diagnosed with an E. coli infection last month. The E. coli carried a specific gene, MCR-1, that rendered it immune to the antibiotic colistin — the drug doctors turn to to kill an infection when nothing else works.

    • These Vegetables Would Have Normally Been Thrown Out. Instead, They’ll Feed Our Hungriest.

      On another day, in another life, these vegetables would have all been taken to a very different place. The eggplants — some a little too small, some a little too bruised — would have been carted to a landfill and left to rot. The cauliflower pocked with tiny dark splotches — a sign of oxidation — would have been mistaken as moldy and passed over by customers at the supermarket until they, too, joined the eggplants in the landfill. The carrots — some the size of wine bottles — might not have even made it to the supermarket, turned away because they would not have blended into the store’s uniform display. They too, probably, would have ended up in a landfill.

    • Bayer and Monsanto: a Marriage Made in Hell

      The two multinationals that teamed up during the Vietnam War to poison millions of people with its Agent Orange herbicide—St. Louis, Mo.-based Monsanto and Germany’s Bayer AG—are looking to become one.

      Bayer has announced a bid to buy Monsanto in a deal that would expand Bayer’s GMO and pesticide holdings and add drugs to Monsanto’s global portfolio. Monsanto has rejected the latest bid, but the two are still in talks.

    • Seven Myths About GMOs Debunked

  • Security

  • Defence/Aggression

    • NATO in Montenegro: Securing the Rear Before Barbarossa II?

      The strategic importance of Montenegro is inversely proportional to its size. With it, NATO will have full control of the Adriatic Sea, finish the encirclement of Serbia, and be emboldened to pursue a more aggressive stance towards Russia.

    • A helmet for a F-35 pilot costs $400,000, more than a high end Ferrari.

      Like Steven Starr, Stephen Cohen, myself, and a small number of others, the Saker understands the reckless irresponsibility of convincing Russia that the United States intends to attack her.

      It is extraordinary to see the confidence that many Americans place in their military’s ability. After 15 years the US has been unable to defeat a few lightly armed Taliban, and after 13 years the situation in Iraq remains out of control. This is not very reassuring for the prospect of taking on Russia, much less the strategic alliance between Russia and China. The US could not even defeat China, a Third World country at the time, in Korea 60 years ago.

      [...]

      A helmet for a F-35 pilot costs $400,000, more than a high end Ferrari.

    • Putin: Romania ‘in crosshairs’ after opening NATO missile defense base

      During a visit to Greece intended to repair ties with the EU, Vladimir Putin said that Russia has “no choice” but to target Romania, which has recently opened a NATO missile defense base, and Poland, which plans to do so within two years.

      “If yesterday people simply did not know what it means to be in the crosshairs in those areas of Romania, then today we will be forced to carry out certain measures to ensure our security. And it will be the same with Poland,” Putin said during a joint press conference with Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras in Athens on Friday.

    • Sweden Dumps Neutrality, Signs Major Agreement with NATO

      The Agreement makes Sweden a possible host country for aggressive NATO exercises during peacetime. In addition, the Swedish government may allow NATO to invade the country if a crisis or a conflict should occur. Inevitably, Sweden will become directly involved in NATO’s armament proliferation and their aggressive provocations against Russia. Large-scale fleet exercises in the Baltic Sea will further increase the danger of confrontation and war.

    • Tony Blair will not be accused of breaking laws in Iraq War inquiry

      Tony Blair will not be accused of breaking any laws in the Iraq War inquiry report, the Telegraph can disclose.

      Sources close to the inquiry said the report – which will be published in six weeks’ time – was not set up to take a view on the legality of the acts of individuals or events. That includes whether the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was legal.

    • US military uses 8-inch floppy disks to coordinate nuclear force operations

      The U.S. Defense Department is still using — after several decades — 8-inch floppy disks in a computer system that coordinates the operational functions of the nation’s nuclear forces, a jaw-dropping new report reveals.

      [...]

      The report shows that creaky IT systems are being used to handle important functions related to the nation’s taxpayers, federal prisoners and military veterans, as well as to the U.S. nuclear umbrella.

    • New Nukes for a New Cold War

      Mythology about the rightness of dropping two atomic bombs on Japan is relevant to today’s “modernization” of the U.S. nuclear arsenal and the revving up of a new Cold War with Russia, says ex-Pentagon military analyst Chuck Spinney.

    • The World Reaps What the Saudis Sow

      With a population of only 1.8 million people, Kosovo has sent more of its young people per capita than any other country to fight and die in Iraq and Syria. Since 2012, some 314 Kosovars have joined the Islamic State, including two suicide bombers, 44 women and 28 children. Even Belgium, widely seen as a hotbed of extremism after the attacks on Paris and Brussels, lags behind it in the recruitment rankings. …

      The United States and NATO invested heavily in helping Kosovo gain independence from Serbia in 2008 and establish democracy. That Saudi Arabia should be using Kosovo as a breeding ground for extremists, or allowing it to be used as a breeding ground by any Saudi entity or citizen, is a cruel reminder of the contradictory and even duplicitous behavior of America’s partners in the Persian Gulf and helps to explain why its relationships with those countries have become increasingly troubled.

      Kosovo, rescued from Serbian oppression after months of NATO bombing in 1999, has been known as a tolerant society. For centuries, the Muslim majority has followed the liberal Hanafi version of Islam, which is accepting of others. Since the war, that tradition has been threatened by Saudi-trained imams, their costs paid by Saudi-sponsored charities, preaching the primacy of Shariah law and fostering violent jihad and takfirism, which authorizes the killing of Muslims viewed as heretics.

      Most Kosovars have resisted such proselytizing, and officials in Kosovo say that support for the United States and the West remains strong. Yet experts point to a number of reasons the country has been fertile ground for recruitment to radical ideology: a large population of young people living in rural poverty with little hope of jobs; corruption and an attendant lack of faith in government; and, according to a 2015 report by the Kosovar Center for Security Studies, an education system that does not encourage critical thinking.

    • Donald Trump used 9/11 funds program to net $150G payday

      Donald Trump made a pretty penny off a program to help small businesses hurt by 9/11, one of many times where The Donald took advantage of government programs to save or make money off the taxpayer.

      The self-proclaimed billionaire, who has so far refused to release his tax returns, was one of many wealthy individuals and businesses who used a loophole in a program intended to help smaller companies in lower Manhattan recover after the Sept. 11 tragedy.

      Trump got $150,000 for his swanky property at 40 Wall Street because the Empire State Development Corporation, run by the state, didn’t enforce federal guidelines on what defines a small business. Instead, the state used much looser rules that let The Donald and others including Morgan Stanley and Bank of China take money that was earmarked by Congress to help small business owners in the neighborhood recover after the tragic attacks, a 2006 Daily News expose found.

    • Rep. Jerrold Nadler Denounces Donald Trump for Taking 9/11 Small-Business Aid
    • Remembering All the Deaths From All of Our Wars

      I am staggered by the amount of firepower the US used, and the incredible death and destruction it caused on an innocent people.

    • ISIS and Israel on the Golan Heights

      There is a strange relationship between Israel and a small sect of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) based next to the Golan Heights. The very presence of a group like ISIS so close to Israel brings up many questions.

      Firstly why has ISIS not attacked Israel – a country they have sworn to destroy – from said base? Similarly why has the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) not attacked this small and weak group of extremists on their border? The answers to such questions show the truth behind the rhetoric all actors use in this conflict.

      The Yarmouk valley is wedged between Jordan, Syria and the Israeli occupied territories of the Golan Heights. The valley consists of a few small towns, the majority of which are now controlled by the ISIS affiliated Liwa Shuhada al-Yarmouk or the Yarmouk Martyrs Brigade (YMB). This group was established by Mohammad al-Baridi, known by his nickname ‘The Uncle’ in 2012 in southwest Syria. The group started off relatively moderate, with a close alliance to the Free Syrian Army. But the moderation quickly dissipated during the course of the Syrian civil war.

      [...]

      There seems to be very different treatment for rebel groups on the south of the Golan Heights border than for those in the north. But why would Israel, which authorised multiple bombings on Syrian militant groups, take such a relaxed view towards ISIS on their doorstep?

      Israel is focused not on ISIS and Sunni groups, but on the Shia groups in Syria. Israel’s airstrikes have hit Assad’s Shia backed regime and Hezbollah, not ISIS or al-Nusra. Correspondence between the then-Sectary of State Hillary Clinton and political advisor Jacob Sullivan about Israel’s aims in the region tried to rationalise why Israel ignores ISIS.

    • The Debate Over Whether Families Of 9/11 Victims Should Be Able To Sue Saudi Arabia

      The House’s Foreign Affairs Committee held a hearing on Tuesday where legislators from each party took cracks at Saudi Arabia.

      The country has come under heavy criticism of late after the Senate unanimously approved legislation that would allow the families of 9/11 victims to sue over Saudi Arabia’s alleged connections to Al Qaeda.

    • US Spec Ops Troops on Front Line in Syria with Leftist Kurdish Insignia: AFP

      Agence France Presse got the scoop on Thursday, with their reporters in Fatisa just 19 miles from Daesh territory in northern al-Raqqa Province, Syria saying they saw some 20 US special operations troops embedded with leftist Kurdish YPG units and wearing YPG insignia. (The latter move is to prevent friendly fire incidents, signaling to the Kurds that despite their foreign appearance, they are white hats).

    • Pivoting to War

      Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies was commissioned by the Pentagon to analyze U.S. military strategy and force posture in the Asia-Pacific region and produced its report in January 2016. It was not surprising that a major recommendation was that “the United States should sustain and expand U.S. military presence in the Asia-Pacific region.” Always tell your paymasters what they want to hear, especially when it was made clear by President Obama that his “pivot to Asia” is aimed at military dominance.

    • Obama in Hiroshima: time to say ‘sorry’, and Ban the Bomb!

      President Obama should overcome political constraints in Hiroshima this week to say ‘sorry’ for the nuclear bombs, writes Linda Pentz Gunter. Even more important, he must change his stance on nuclear weapons – abandoning the US’s $1 trillion WMD modernization program and lifting the threat of world-destroying nuclear conflict.

    • Why the US Dropped Its Demand That Assad Must Go

      It’s interesting to see a US commander crossing the border to cheer on participants in a civil war. That’s also what the American military has been doing in Iraq, where forces have been encouraging Shia militias fighting on the outskirts of Fallujah, and even providing air support to the forces of the perilously weak government in Baghdad.

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

    • Sweden’s Assange Problem: The District Court Ruling

      A schizophrenic aspect of the entire Assange affair from the Swedish perspective is the inability of the legal establishment to let go. Despite the contrarian wishes of his alleged victims; despite dissent within the Swedish legal establishment that Assange be hauled over the coals; despite the evidence, the higher authorities insist that he can be detained on suspicion of rape by prosecutors.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Anti-Parks Leaders In Utah Called Out For Hypocrisy

      The quixotic efforts of Utah politicians to seize and sell national forests and other public lands poses a dire risk to tourism and visitor spending in the state, according to a new public awareness campaign that launched this week.

    • Fact-Checking Donald Trump’s Low-Octane Energy Policy

      Time was, picturing what Donald Trump’s presidential energy policies might look like required parsing his fact-defying tweets, forehead slap-worthy comments and threats to seize Middle Eastern oil by force. Now that the presumptive Republican nominee has unveiled his “America First” energy policy, there’s less guesswork to do.

    • California Back in Big Oil’s Crosshairs as Feds Quietly OK Offshore Fracking

      Two federal agencies on Friday quietly finalized two reports, set for release next week, that found offshore fracking in California poses no “significant” risk to the environment—paving the way for oil and gas companies to resume the controversial extraction method in the Santa Barbara Channel and imperiling the region’s wildlife in the process, opponents said.

      The announcement Friday from the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (OEM) and the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement puts an end to a court-ordered ban on offshore fracking in federal waters off the coast of California. The moratorium was put into place in January as part of a settlement with the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD), which challenged the Obama administration’s ‘rubber-stamping’ of offshore drilling activity without an environmental review.

    • The Funny Business of Farm Credit

      In May of 1998 we held a conference dedicated to two Government-sponsored Enterprises (GSEs) – Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. In my statement to that assembly, I noted that both corporations had been enjoying good times, but cautioned that one of the unintended consequences of fat profits over a long period is the tendency of both government and private corporations to start believing in the fantasy of ever-rising profits. GSEs often escape the accountability that Congress or regulatory agencies should impose.

      Recent hearings in the U.S. House and Senate have provided some much needed oversight on another GSE―the Farm Credit System (FCS).

      The Farm Credit System was the first GSE to be established by the United States in 1916. Unlike Fannie and Freddie, the Farm Credit System can make direct loans to farmers, ranchers and others involved in agriculture. However, as The Wall Street Journal reported back in 1985: “the Farm Credit System would lend money to anyone. Herbert Ashton, an Indiana fruit farmer, recalls being wined and dined at a local country club by bankers from his local [farm credit] system bank who extolled the virtues of inflation and offered to lend him $1 million on the spot. ‘I turned it down,’ he recalls. ‘But they sounded like a soap testimonial. They were giving money to whoever passed their way, and they didn’t ask too many questions.’”

    • 1,000,000,000 Birds – Just Gone

      The just released State of North America’s Birds report is grim reading. Based on a comprehensive evaluation of species population size and trends, ranges and threat severity the assessment reaches a stark conclusion.

    • Bill Gates And Exxon Now Share The Same Climate Policy. They’re Wrong.

      Memo to Gates: It just might be time to rethink your position when the biggest corporate climate villain on planet Earth embraces your climate policy. And it might be time to rethink your message when the head of the company that has funded disinformation about climate science and solutions longer than any other says he has “had this conversation” with you and you are in total agreement.

    • Long Island as a Nuclear Park

      Meanwhile, PSEG is pushing ahead with its plan to install taller and wider utility poles throughout Long Island with their bottoms coated with pentachlorophenol or penta—a cancer-causing substance banned by nations around the world.

    • Exxon’s CEO Just Won: His Shareholders Rejected Climate Change Proposals

      After a long battle to even get on the agenda for ExxonMobil’s 2016 Annual Meeting, the company’s shareholders on Wednesday voted against four initiatives to address climate change, even while the company is facing an investigation for its climate denial activities.

      Investors were hoping to force Exxon to add a climate expert to its board, to enact a policy to avoid 2°C warming, to increase capital distributions (with the understanding that continued investment in assets likely to be stranded is not a good long-term strategy), and to report on the impact climate change policies worldwide to the company’s bottom line.

    • “When you buy coal, you have a moral right to ask where it came from”

      A new report highlights a stark truth: the UK’s dependence on international coal not only devastates the environment, but disenfranchises local communities.

    • The Environmental Implications Of A Trump Presidency

      He will also have to decide what he would actually do with U.S. energy and climate policy. He’s already offered some rhetoric about saving coal jobs, denying climate science, and bashing renewable energy. But on Thursday he is expected to reveal his agenda in keynote speech at an oil expo in Bismarck, North Dakota.

  • Finance

    • The Right Marches on Brazil

      Brazil’s interim government is orchestrating a stunning transfer of power to the country’s elites.

    • Millions for the Boss, Cuts for You!

      More is never enough. By now we really don’t need yet another statement of inequality, but here goes anyway: The average ratio of chief executive pay to employee pay has reached 335-to-1 in the United States.

      And some of the highest paid CEOs were at the companies that stash the most money in overseas tax havens. Among the giant corporations that comprise the Standard & Poor’s 500, the 25 at the companies with the most unrepatriated profits hauled in 79 percent more than other S&P 500 chief executive officers, reports the AFL-CIO union federation’s Paywatch 2016 report. Just 10 corporations — Apple, Pfizer, Microsoft, General Electric, IBM, Merck, Cisco Systems, Johnson & Johnson, Exxon Mobil, and Hewlett-Packard successor HP Inc. — are believed to be holding about $948 billion in accounts outside the reach of tax authorities.

    • Blatant Hypocrisy: the Latest Late-Night Bailout of Greece

      Once EU’s and US’ common aim of imposing austerity and anti-popular economic restructuring on Greece has been concluded, then the two partners-um-competitors jostled the one against the other for the terms and the consequences of the necessary debt relief for Greece. Debt relief is necessary because the troika’s Economic Adjustment Program for Greece is unfeasible and Greek debt is unviable. A few days ago, IMF in its recent preliminary debt sustainability assessment had accepted this.

    • More Young Adults Live With Parents Than Not—for the First Time in 130 Years

      Live with your parents, again? Chances are you’re not lazy, nor a loser, nor any other stigma that might be hovering in your subconscious due to cultural stereotyping—you’re just a normal millennial responding to the economic realities of the age. For the first time in 130 years, more Americans between ages 18-34 are living with their parents than in any other living situation. That is according to an analysis by the Pew Research Center published May 24. The study is based on national census data from 2014.

    • Chris Hedges on the Legacy of Rosa Luxemburg (Video)

      “Liberalism, which Luxemburg called by its more appropriate name—opportunism—is an integral component of capitalism,” he said. “When the citizens grow restive, it will soften and decry capitalism’s excesses. But capitalism, Luxemburg argued, is an enemy that can never be appeased.”

      Hedges also said: “Luxemburg’s murder illustrated the ultimate loyalties of liberal elites in a capitalist society: When threatened from the left, when the face of socialism showed itself in the streets, they would—and will—make alliances with the most retrograde elements of the society, including fascists, to crush the aspirations of the working class.”

    • Minimum Wage Workers Can’t Afford Rent Anywhere In The Country

      People who make the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour can’t find an affordable place to live anywhere in the country, according to a new report from the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

      But perhaps even more surprising is that even if the minimum wage were raised to $15 an hour — the level low-wage workers have been demanding in a constant flow of strikes and protests and the highest level supported by Democratic lawmakers — they would still be out of luck.

    • FFII comments on TTIP human rights assessment

      Citizens in Europe and elsewhere are harassed by software patent trolls, and experience issues regarding sequential innovation, remixing, and access to knowledge and culture. The FFII has argued that the EU should bring its IP law into line with human rights obligations. [4] TTIP may undermine this through exportation of EU law.

    • Yanis Varoufakis warns that anti-immigrant rhetoric is being used to distract from austerity

      The anti-immigration tactics being used by the Leave campaign in the EU referendum amount to a “divide and rule trick”, Yanis Varoufakis has said.

      The former Greek finance minister – who faced down EU institutions in his previous job negotiating with the Troika – said the British establishment was trying to use fear of immigrants to distract from the effects of austerity.

      “Lest we forget: turning the native poor against migrant labour is a variant of the old divide and rule trick that the British establishment honed ages ago to dominate the empire,” he said.

    • Students With Nowhere to Stay: Homelessness on College Campuses

      When the College Cost Reduction and Access Act took effect in 2009, neither lawmakers nor school administrators had any idea how many college students would check the box on the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) — the document that determines eligibility for Pell grants, subsidized loans and work-study awards that help students pay for college or vocational training — to indicate that they were homeless.

      At last tabulation, the number was 58,000, a small percentage of the 20.2 million students presently enrolled in both undergraduate and graduate study. Nonetheless, school counselors and advocates believe the number is starkly inaccurate and represents a mere fraction of university students who actually lack a permanent home.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Feel the Hate

      It hasn’t just been about insults, put-downs, and smears. There’s also the Clinton-captive Democratic Party’s systematic and authoritarian distortion and, yes, rigging of the primary nomination process at the local, state, and national levels. There are abundant reasons to believe that Hillary has benefitted from electoral and administrative shenanigans across the (seemingly endless) primary season. The fixing process was evident in Las Vegas recently, when the Nevada Democratic Party chair “shut down debate behind a screen of uniformed police” after the party excluded 58 Sanders delegates with sudden “rules changes” clearly made to block Sanders’ rightful claim to have won Nevada. No wonder a Sanders delegate grabbed a chair and thought about tossing it.

    • Trump Backs out of Debate Against Sanders After Tech Company Offers to Pay for It

      Donald Trump reneged on his intention to debate Senator Bernie Sanders on Friday in a brief statement on his website.

    • The Surge Of Trump-Fueled Anti-Semitism Is Hitting Jewish Reporters Who Cover Him

      Granted, the newly minted Republican nominee for president has long insisted that his is not himself anti-Semitic, and regularly points out that his daughter is a Jewish convert. Yet Trump has done little to quell a rising tide of anti-Semitism among his supporters since launching his campaign last year: Trump initially refused to disavow anti-Semitic Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, a Trump surrogate implied at a rally that Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders should convert from Judaism and “meet Jesus,” prominent anti-Semites went on radio shows to encourage their supporters to “get out and vote” for Trump, and a man was filmed leaving a Trump rally shouting in Cleveland shouting “Go to fucking Auschwitz.”

    • News Use Across Social Media Platforms 2016

      But which social media sites have the largest portion of users getting news there? How many get news on multiple social media sites? And to what degree are these news consumers seeking online news out versus happening upon it while doing other things?

    • Bernie Calls Trump a Coward: ‘Hey, Donald, Come On Up, Let’s Have a Debate About the Future of America’

      Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders is making the west coast late-night rounds ahead of California’s primary, stopping by “Real Time with Bill Maher” last night for a one-on-one interview.

      Maher mentioned the great missed opportunity that was Sanders’ rumored debate with GOP nominee Donald Trump, who backed out on Friday.

      After making guttural noises, Sanders said he “would have loved” to debate Trump.

    • What’s Really Best for Israel?

      Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump went before AIPAC this year and pandered to those who blindly support Israel’s hard-line policies, but Bernie Sanders’s more evenhanded approach is better for Israel, says Rabbi Michael Lerner.

      [...]

      As if not to be undone by the Times, Jane Eisner, editor of the center/right Jewish Forward magazine, issued a statement that insisted that Sanders unveil a full plan for how to achieve peace in Israel and Palestine. Clinton’s plan has been to give 100 percent unconditional support to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

    • Progressive Challenger to Wasserman Schultz Nabs Major Endorsement

      Tim Canova, the progressive challenger running to unseat embattled Democratic National Party (DNC) chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, on Friday was endorsed by the grassroots advocacy group Democracy for America (DFA), which called Canova a “political revolutionary.”

      In a statement on Friday, DFA chairman Jim Dean criticized Wasserman Schultz for allying with “wealthy interests” that fuel inequality and said that “if Democrats are going to be the party that confronts the wealthy and powerful who dominate our political process and enable growing income inequality, we need political revolutionaries like Tim Canova in the U.S. Congress.”

    • Hillary Clinton’s Memoir Deletions, in Detail

      Clinton praises Latin America for its high rate of economic growth, which she revealingly claims has produced “more than 50 million new middle-class consumers eager to buy U.S. goods and services.” She also admits that the region’s inequality is “still among the worst in the world” with much of its population “locked in persistent poverty” — even while the TPP that she has advocated strongly for threatens to exacerbate the region’s underdevelopment, just as NAFTA caused the Mexican economy to stagnate.

      Last October, however, she publicly reversed her stance on the TPP under pressure from fellow Democratic presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley. Likewise, the entire two-page section on the conference in El Salvador where she expresses her support for the TPP is missing from the paperback.

    • Hand Jobs: Heidegger, Hitler and Trump

      Heidegger cuts Jaspers off abruptly. “Education is irrelevant,” the moral philosopher of Nazism shouts. “Just look at his wonderful hands!”

      Moral: the smaller the hands, the more fanatic the compensation.

    • 35 protesters arrested outside Trump rally in San Diego

      San Diego police arrested 35 protesters Friday outside a Donald Trump rally after a peaceful demonstration devolved into chaos, according to police.

      Three hours into the calm protests, which drew up to 1,000 people, a number of demonstrators tried to breach an off-limits area, resulting in arrests, the police department said on Twitter.

    • Donald Trump rally sparks clashes in San Diego

      Supporters and opponents of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump have clashed in the city of San Diego in California.

      Police declared a gathering outside the city’s convention centre unlawful and made 35 arrests, as stones and water bottles were thrown.

      Mr Trump was in the city near the Mexican border to hold a rally ahead of the 7 June California primary.

    • By the Numbers: Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are Fringe Candidates

      The practice of the American political establishment has for decades been to marginalize dissenting views as a means of silencing them. The dominant Parties have long contended that eligible voters who don’t vote don’t care, and therefore don’t matter. However, a more plausible explanation for their abstention (in addition to institutional impediments to voting) is that the great majority of voters want neither of the dominant Parties in power. In other words, the American system of political and economic representation neither includes nor represents true democratic participation. The growth of registered Independent voters (graph below) at the expense of the dominant Parties adds credence to this view. So does that fact that other alleged democracies have much higher voter participation rates than the U.S.

    • No Cake for Nazis: Meet the Young Libertarian Gunning for the Millennial Vote

      This could be a big year for a Libertarian candidate. Trump and Clinton are deeply unpopular, and a recent poll found that nearly half of all voters would consider supporting a third-party candidate if Trump and Clinton are the nominees. The Libertarians already credit Trump for a surge in new party memberships and are eager to pull in disappointed Sanders fans.

    • 10 Things to Know About DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz’s Super Progressive Challenger
    • “Significant Security Risks”: State Department Says Clinton Broke Rules Using Private Email Server

      An internal government watchdog has concluded Hillary Clinton broke government rules by using a private email server without approval while she was secretary of state. That was the key finding of a long-awaited report by the State Department inspector general. The report concluded that Clinton would not have been allowed to use a private server in her home had she asked department officials in charge of information security, because it posed “significant security risks.” This contradicts claims by Clinton that use of a home server was allowed and that no permission was needed. The report also criticized Clinton for not properly preserving emails she wrote and received on her personal account. According to the report, Clinton and eight of her deputies, including Cheryl Mills, Jake Sullivan and Huma Abedin, declined to be interviewed for the inspector general’s investigation. Clinton’s use of a private email server for State Department business is also the subject of an ongoing FBI investigation. We speak to journalist Michael Tracey.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Australia references stripped from UN climate change report over tourism concerns

      All references to Australia have been removed from a UN report on climate change after the Environment Department expressed concerns it could cause confusion and negatively affect tourism.

      The report, jointly published by UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation), the Union of Concerned Scientists and the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP), initially contained a chapter on the Great Barrier Reef and sections on Kakadu and Tasmanian forests.

    • I’m launching a campaign to end geoblocking in the EU. Are you in?

      The EU continues taking baby steps towards a Digital Single Market, when what we need is a leap: An “anti-geoblocking” regulation that does not cover online video, like the one presented by the European Commission today, misses the mark. The Commission’s sector inquiry and the public consultation on the topic have proven just how widespread digital borders are in Europe today, and that Europeans overwhelmingly support broad action.

    • This YouTube Star Got Sued, Raised $130,000, and Wants to Change the Site Forever

      When Ethan Klein found out he was being sued by a fellow YouTube creator over a video he had produced for his channel, he never thought his personal legal battle would spark a backlash that raised tens of thousands of dollars and could change the way users of the video site fight lawsuits.

      But three days after the lawsuit was made public by Klein on May 24, YouTube creators and their fans have collected more than $130,000 to help the embattled video star and his wife (and co-star) Hila fight back against a copyright claim by another YouTube user, Matt Hosseinzadeh. And with all that money, Klein, the 30-year-old founder of h3h3productions, now has his sights set on bigger things: protecting other YouTube creators who need a legal defense but lack his own stature.

      As Klein tells it, the entire affair began when Hosseinzadeh sued him, alleging that a Klein video mocking Hosseinzadeh improperly used Hosseinzadeh’s content. In a video revealing the lawsuit, Klein vigorously defended himself, saying the footage he used was covered under fair use law.

    • Got a Beef With the Media? Pay Someone Else to Sue Them

      The revelation that Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel bankrolled Hulk Hogan’s sex tape lawsuit against Gawker sent shockwaves through the media industry. Commentators had barely recovered from the $140 million in damages awarded to Hogan. Now they were grappling with a bigger question: Is this kind of financial arrangement even legal? Could it happen to them?

    • Udta Punjab censorship: politics, not expletives, behind the move
    • Mark Zuckerberg’s Dilemma With Conservatives

      According to one of the former Facebook curators located by Gizmodo, the site that broke the story, the alleged political bias on the social network’s Trending Topics site amounted to a preference among the curators for outlets “like the New York Times, the BBC, and CNN” instead of those “like Breitbart, Washington Examiner, and Newsmax.” Given the respective reputations of those media outlets, in the real world, that would look like simple prudence. But, presumably because a story headlined “Anonymous Source Alleged Intelligent News Judgment in ‘Trending’ Choices” would not have resulted in a fraction of number of page views, Gizmodo bannered its “scoop.”

    • SABC’s non-coverage of violent protests compared to apartheid censorship

      There’s been wide-ranging criticism of the South African Broadcasting Corporation’s (SABC) decision to stop showing visuals of property being destroyed by protesters, with some comparing it to media censorship during apartheid.

      Today, the national broadcaster announced it will no longer be showing visuals of protesters destroying public property as this incites violence.

      The SABC insists this is not self-censorship but rather a duty to ensure that such footage doesn’t encourage others to follow suit.

    • S Africa broadcaster SABC condemned for ‘censorship’

      Freedom of expression groups and opposition parties have condemned the South African state broadcaster’s (SABC) decision to stop showing violent anti-government protests, claiming the move disregarded the right to dissent in the country.

    • ANC calls for debate around role of media covering violent protests
    • Sanef calls on SABC to review new policy on violent protests
    • SANEF slams SABC plan on violent protests
    • Sanef, R2K raise concern over SABC ‘censorship’
    • SABC clarifies stance on coverage of violent protests
    • SABC censorship decision questionable: Sanef

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Is this the end of decentralisation?

      In a response to this critique, Moxie wrote about how he feels that innovation can not happen as quickly and easily as needs be with federated and decentralised structures. To prove his point, he argued that the premise that the internet could not have gotten to where it is without interoperable and federated protocols is false.

    • An Entire West Virginia Town That Was Formerly a Spy Base Is for Sale

      If you have $1 million just sitting around and dream of living out the premise to M. Night Shymalan’s psychological thriller The Village, have we got a deal for you.

      An entire town, which was once part of the National Security Agency’s massive surveillance operation, includes 80 single-family homes, a fire station, a swimming pool and a bowling alley in picturesque rural West Virginia, is up for auction with bids starting at $1 million.

    • Untangling the Web: the NSA’s supremely weird, florid guide to the Internet

      Now, at 650 pages, there’s far too much to go into in depth here, but fortunately, as you can see from the table of contents…

      you don’t have to go very far before this takes a hard turn into “Dungeons and Dragons campaign/Classics major’s undergraduate thesis” territory. The preface employs a comical number of metaphors to describe what the internet is and isn’t – sometimes two a paragraph.

    • Read This Spectacularly Zany Guide to the Internet

      A version of this post titled “NSA’s ode to the Internet” originally appeared in the Cyber Saturday edition of Data Sheet, Fortune’s daily tech newsletter.

    • Anonabox Tunneler & Anonabox Pro: Helping You Stay Anonymous Online

      Given our open-source/Linux reader base and many of our readers being very privacy-minded, Anonabox sent over their Tunneler and Pro products for us to try out. The Anonabox Tunneler is a WiFi VPN router and the Anonabox Pro is a WiFi Tor and VPN router.

    • A Controversial Surveillance Firm Was Granted a Powerful Encryption Certificate

      A controversial surveillance company whose products have been detected in Iran and Sudan was recently issued a powerful encryption certificate by a US cybersecurity company. The certificate, and the authority that comes with it, could allow Blue Coat Systems to more easily snoop on encrypted traffic. But Symantec, the company that provided it, downplayed concern from the security community.

      Blue Coat, which sells web-monitoring software, was granted the power in September last year, but it was only widely noticed this week.

      The company’s devices are used by both government and commercial customers for keeping tabs on networks or conducting surveillance. In Syria, the technology has been used to censor web sites and monitor the communications of dissidents, activists and journalists, The Washington Post reports.

    • Beware public mobile charging points – your phone can be hacked in minutes

      Your smartphone can be easily hacked easily if you plug it in to charge via USB at a public place like an airport, cafe or on public transport.

      Researchers at security firm Kaspersky Labs found that they could install a third-party application, like a virus, onto the phone via its USB cable connection to a computer. It took them under three minutes.

    • Don’t have a Facebook account? Its advertising cookies are still following you

      Facebook will begin tracking people without Facebook accounts across the web as the social media giant expands its advertising empire.

      The company’s advertising network plans to install pieces of code known as “cookies” on internet user’s browsers, even if they do not have Facebook accounts, it has announced.

      Cookies monitor the websites that internet browsers visit and are used to target adverts at users. For example, after looking for furniture online you may see an IKEA advert on another page.

    • Tor – from its creators mouth 11 years ago

      A little more than 11 years ago, one of the creators of Tor, and the current President of the Tor project, Roger Dingledine, gave a talk for the members of the Norwegian Unix User group (NUUG). A video of the talk was recorded, and today, thanks to the great help from David Noble, I finally was able to publish the video of the talk on Frikanalen, the Norwegian open channel TV station where NUUG currently publishes its talks. You can watch the live stream using a web browser with WebM support, or check out the recording on the video on demand page for the talk “Tor: Anonymous communication for the US Department of Defence…and you.”.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • In Honduras, USAID Was in Bed with Berta Cáceres’ Accused Killers

      Less than three months before Lenca leader Berta Cáceres was brutally assassinated, the social arm of Desarollos Energeticos SA (DESA)–the Honduran company leading the Agua Zarca dam project Cáceres was campaigning against–signed a contract with USAID implementing partner Fintrac, a Washington DC based development contracting firm.

      The DESA representative who was present for the public signing of the USAID agreement was none other than Sergio Rodríguez, the company’s Social Investment Manager, who is now accused of Cáceres’ assassination along with another former DESA employee and individuals with military ties. The arrests also included Douglas Geovanny Bustillo, a retired military officer and the former head of DESA’s security detail. The trial against the accused murderers began on Monday.

    • Mold-Infested Prisons Sicken Guards and Prisoners

      During much of her three years awaiting trial in New York’s Rikers Island jail, Candie Hailey was locked in a solitary confinement cell ventilated by a mold-covered air duct. The purpose of the vent was, of course, to pump fresh air into her 6-by-10-foot concrete room, but the mold infestation instead added to an array of hazards and discomforts that made her life unbearable at Rikers, where she made multiple attempts at suicide. “There was big, dark, gray, blackish mildew around the air vent and that’s where the air was coming from,” Hailey told me. “It’s what I was inhaling — it smelled like death.”

    • Defendants In Freddie Gray Case Sue Marilyn Mosby For Defamation

      Two officers charged in the case surrounding Freddie Gray’s death for failing to get the 25-year-old medical help are now suing Baltimore’s top attorney for her decision to prosecute them.

      Court documents filed by Sgts. Alicia White and William Porter claim that State Attorney Marilyn Mosby charged them “not for the purpose of prosecuting crimes that had allegedly been committed by White and Porter, but rather for purposes of quelling the riots in Baltimore.”

      Both officers blame Mosby and the state for damaging their reputations. They’re seeking at least $75,000 for defamation and invasion of privacy, arguing that “they continue to suffer mental pain and anguish, and humiliation.”

    • A War of All Against All

      If the Left is serious about changing society it has to appeal to the mainstream. To everyone’s shock, Occupy did that. But once people like the whites in Albuquerque started saying more than “We are the 99%,” many Leftists were outraged. This is naïve. How often do activists denounce American society as racist, sexist, heterosexist, anti-Black, anti-immigrant, or transphobic? Is it so hard to believe then that many who joined Occupy reflected those biases in their language, ideas, and even deeds? Rather than analyze how systemic oppression is reproduced at the molecular level and how to dismantle it, Taking Sides sows distrust, creates divisions, and encourages self-righteousness.

    • Pakistani men can beat wives ‘lightly’, say Islamic council

      A Pakistani Islamic council has sparked outrage after suggesting husbands may “lightly beat” their wives as a form of discipline in their draft of a women’s protection bill.

      In the draft bill, released on Thursday, the Council of Islamic Ideology (CII) said it was permissible to beat a woman lightly should he need to punish her.

    • Apparently Taiwan’s President Practices ‘Emotional’ Politics Because She’s Single

      Taiwanese President Tsai Ing Wen practices “emotional” and “extreme” politics because she is a single woman, according to a member of China’s political body that handles relations with the self-ruled island of Taiwan. The criticism comes at a time when tensions have been stoked between Beijing and Taipei officials after Tsai indicated that she supports formal Taiwan independence, which challenges Beijing’s “one-China” stance.

    • Why Women Don’t Play Best-Of-Five Matches At Grand Slams

      The French Open, the second Grand Slam of the tennis year, is underway at Roland Garros, which means that, like clockwork, it’s time to question whether women’s tennis players deserve equal pay — something they’ve had at all four major tournaments since 2007 and at the U.S. Open since 1973.

      That argument has been particularly heated in recent months, sparked by (now former) Indian Wells CEO Raymond Moore saying women’s tennis players “ride the coattails of the men,” which No. 1 Novak Djokovic followed up by referring to the female athletes’ “hormones.” Earlier this month, Madrid tournament owner Ion Tiriac fueled the flames when he openly ogled women’s tennis players for having “long legs” but complained that he had to pay them so much money.

      These comments inspired a recent Associated Press column: “Women need five-sets tennis to win equality battle.”

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • Beware zero ratings, the new threat to Net neutrality

      Music and video streaming services take a lot of bandwidth, and now that most people have cellular plans that charge by the amount of data they use, streaming becomes a lot less attractive. Even at home, a sizable percentage of U.S. broadband customers have data caps that work against streaming media displacing standard TV and radio.

      Thus, the carriers and Internet service providers have come up with a new notion called zero rating, best known in the form of T-Mobile’s BingeOn and Music Freedom programs.

    • House Republicans Again Target Net Neutrality With Budget Attack

      Many Republican leaders in Congress loathe US rules protecting net neutrality, the principle that all content on the internet should be equally accessible—and they’re expressing their feelings by targeting the Federal Communications Commission, the agency charged with upholding those rules.

      That much became clear this week when the GOP released its fiscal 2017 financial services appropriations bill, which slashes funding for the FCC by $69 million, and severely hobbles the agency’s ability to enforce its net neutrality rules, crack down on abusive “zero-rating” practices, and move ahead with reforms designed to open up the video set-top box market.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Drug Pricing, Generics Figure Into WHO Strategies On HIV, Hepatitis

      As the 69th World Health Assembly draws to a close, member states are in the process of approving a series of draft global health sector strategies for HIV, viral hepatitis, and sexually transmitted infections. And the issues involve some questions of intellectual property rights.

    • WHO Drafting Group Agrees Resolution On Health R&D

      A closed-door drafting group this evening arrived seemingly easily at agreement on a resolution on broadening work on new ways to fund research and development into medical products, according to participants. The agreement includes the creation of a new expert committee on health R&D, and calls for a WHO proposal on a pooled fund, they said.

    • WHO Reforms Health Emergency Response But Who Will Pay The Bill?

      But while states were largely favourable to the new forms, money once against appears to be the shoal on which the ship is in danger of foundering.

      [...]

      The United States and United Kingdom – WHO’s two largest overall funders – endorsed the increased budget request. So did Germany, who’s delegate admonished the committee, “Let us not fool ourselves. We knew that this would not be cost-neutral.” Australia announced it is contributing $4.3 million ($6 million AUD) and Japan will donate $50 million over 5 years.

    • Resolution On WHO Work With Non-State Actors Down To Wire

      With the end of the annual World Health Assembly looming tomorrow, member states are working away behind closed doors to finalise a resolution on how the World Health Organization shall work with outside actors going forward.

    • Trademarks

    • Copyrights

      • BSA Pays Disgruntled Employees to Rat on ‘Pirating’ Bosses

        The Business Software Alliance, a trade group representing Adobe, Apple and Microsoft, is known to offer cash payments to people who help them find companies that run unlicensed software. Today we speak with an attorney who has represented more than 250 defendants in these cases, which are regularly triggered by disgruntled employees.

      • Help save Freedom of Panorama – Tag photos with #SaveFoP

        Our right to take photos of public art and buildings and share them on social media and photo sharing websites is under serious threat.

        This right is called the Freedom of Panorama and the European Commission is discussing proposals that could remove it. This could put a huge burden on people sharing or using pictures they’ve taken that contain sculptures, buildings, and skylines.

        Holiday photos, photos by professional street photographers, and images that sites like Wikipedia use to illustrate articles could all be badly affected.

        If the artist or architect is alive or died in the last 70 years, you might have to ask for their permission before sharing your photos on social media or photo sharing websites. This would be a huge and unnecessary burden.

        The Commission wants to harmonise the rules governing the sharing of theses pictures across the European Union. One of the big questions is about whether there should be Freedom of Panorama for commercial as well as non-commercial purposes. This might not seem controversial but individuals sharing pictures on Facebook, Flickr or Instagram would count as commercial sharing because the sites are commercial entities.

        UK law currently allows the sharing of these pictures without asking permission – the so-called Freedom of Panorama. But lots of European countries don’t allow it. Because photos you share can be accessed from those countries, your photos could be blocked or removed in those countries. You could even be threatened with court action by the rightsholder of the public art or building.

        Instead of placing restrictions on public photography, the EU should remove the current mess of laws and replace it with a simple Europe-wide rule allowing people to share images of public art, buildings and skylines for all purposes.

05.28.16

Links 28/5/2016: Wine 1.9.11, New Gentoo

Posted in News Roundup at 8:32 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Java Fair Game, Millennium Bug, Open Source DNA

    The top story today was the court decision in Oracle vs Google for copyright infringement. Everyone is celebrating but Oracle. In other news Phoronix.com reported today that Linus is questioning the benefits of new Y2038 patches and Bryan Lunduke said that Open Source has been in our DNA since cave painting days. The Open Source Initiative released an Open Source License API and The Document Foundation posted a video explaining The Document Liberation Project.

  • Open-source vs. Proprietary – Keeping Ideology Out of the Equation

    Most users of software sensibly employ a mixture of software tools that span open-source, closed-source, proprietary, ‘free’ and in-house. Many modern software developers also decide to use a hybrid of open-source and proprietary models within an integrated code-base. Advocating either open-source only, or commercial only, software dogmas are both narrow-minded and unhelpful in allowing the researcher or the business the freedom to deliver the best outcomes.

  • Genode OS 16.05 Adds Rust Support, Updated Device Drivers

    Genode OS 16.05 has been released, the research Opearing System Framework project that’s been making very good progress over the years and has a loyal open-source following.

    Genode OS 16.05 has a new API for implementing Genode components, improved documentation, all ported Linux kernel drivers were re-based to their state from Linux 4.4.3, added support for the Rust programming language, new ACPI features, and support for using GDB with the 64-bit version of their NOVA hypervisor.

  • Twitter open-sources Heron for real-time stream analytics

    Heron, the real-time stream-processing system Twitter devised as a replacement for Apache Storm, is finally being open-sourced after powering Twitter for more than two years.

    Twitter explained in a blog post that it created Heron because it needed more than speed and scale from its real-time stream processing framework. The company also needed easier debugging, easier deployment and management capabilities, and the ability to work well in a shared, multitenant cluster environment.

  • ONF to Release Guidelines for Deploying Secure SDN Controllers

    The Open Networking Foundation’s security working group is preparing to release guidelines for designing and deploying secure software-defined networking (SDN) controllers. The guidelines are currently in review and will be published in June, according to Sandra Scott-Hayward, vice chair of ONF’s security project.

  • What sets PatternFly apart from Bootstrap?

    Last June, Opensource.com gave readers a behind the scenes look of PatternFly, how it came to be, and why developers should know about the project. This time around, I thought it was important to hear from the people who are actually using PatternFly. This series aims to learn more about PatternFly through the eyes of the developer.

  • Events

  • SaaS/Back End

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Sun, sea, and open source: How Spain’s Balearic islands are trying to turn into a tech paradise

      However, work remains to be done, especially on civil servants’ desktops. “We started by replacing MSN Office”, explains Villoslada. “Thanks to free office suite LibreOffice 5, we may overcome compatibility problems with documents coming in from different versions of MSN Office. We already have 1,000 Office licenses which are not necessary anymore, and we plan not to renew over 5,500 licenses purchased in 2007″, he adds.

    • The Document Liberation Project: What we do

      While The Document Foundation is best known for LibreOffice, it also backs the Document Liberation Project. But what exactly is that? We’ve made a short video to explain all…

  • Education

    • Using Open Source Software, Powering Potential and the Raspberry Pi Foundation Bring Technology to Schools in Tanzania

      Thanks to open source, Powering Potential and the Raspberry Pi Foundation are able to bring computers and a library of digital education content to rural schools in the East African nation of Tanzania. Recently, the Foundation funded a project now distributing Raspberry Pi computers with uploaded educational content alongside portable projectors and screens to 56 schools across the Zanzibar archipelago and two mainland regions of Tanzania. The Segal Family Foundation also provided matching funds, which enables the project to give computer training as well.

      With a five-fold increase in the number of students in the decade following 2003, the nation is struggling to provide more schools, classrooms, teachers, desks, and textbooks. Yet whenever you visit rural secondary schools in Tanzania, you will find eager girls and boys in roughly equal numbers outfitted in uniforms with ready smiles.

    • EBSCO Information Services Continues to Support Open Source Technology for Libraries

      EBSCO Information Services (EBSCO) continues to provide support in advocating open source and open access. EBSCO has agreed to provide additional financial support to Koha, the world’s first full-featured, free open source Integrated Library System (ILS) that is used worldwide by more than 15,000 libraries of all types.

  • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Public Services/Government

    • Study: Sweden should boost open source competence

      Sweden should bolster its competence on the use of open source and open standards in public administrations, a study for the country’s Ministry of Enterprise and Innovation recommends. Public administrations must also be required to consider switching to free and open source alternatives, when procuring ICT solutions, and justify why they continue to use proprietary software.

    • Amen! Sweden Will Prefer FLOSS
    • Italy to develop 3-year government ICT strategy

      Italy will define a three-year ICT strategy for public administrations, Antonio Samaritans, General Director of the country’s Agency for the Digitalisation of the Public Sector (Agenzia per l’Italia Digitale, AGID), announced this week. This includes the development of information systems that can be used by all public administrations, the agency announced in a statement.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • SuperTux Returns, Proprietary Open Source & More…

      Also included: Google in a TKO over Oracle, four distro releases and Microsoft’s latest trick to force Windows 10 upgrades.

    • An intro to Linux commands, the EU’s open source mathematics toolbox, and more news

    • Open Hardware/Modding

      • Open source wifi enabled 3D printer controller Franklin speeds up with new release

        3D printing hit the mainstream a few years ago thanks in part to the open-source 3D printer market. The origins of this transition had to do with expiring patents held by the traditionally held commercial 3D printing companies. Since then, several small businesses have sprung up around the emerging low-cost 3D printer market. Some of these companies embraced the open-source mentality, while others are seeking shelter with patents.

      • Hackaday Prize Entry: Open-Source Myoelectric Hand Prosthesis

        Hands can grab things, build things, communicate, and we control them intuitively with nothing more than a thought. To those who miss a hand, a prosthesis can be a life-changing tool for carrying out daily tasks. We are delighted to see that [Alvaro Villoslada] joined the Hackaday Prize with his contribution to advanced prosthesis technology: Dextra, the open-source myoelectric hand prosthesis.

      • BCN3D Technologies releases open source files for BCN3D Sigma 3D printer

        As our readers will know, an important part of the 3D printing community is the idea of accessibility. Of course, it is more than just an idea, as everyday makers around the world share their 3D designs and models for free, and even 3D printing companies exercise an open-source philosophy with DIY 3D printers and accessible models. Recently, Barcelona based 3D printer developer BCN3D Technologies decided to further embrace the additive manufacturing open-source philosophy with their latest initiative, Open Source 360º. As part of the initiative, the company has announced that it will share all of its engineering, design, and fabrication information used in the manufacturing of their flagship product, the BCN3D Sigma 3D printer.

      • Shellmo: Aquatic 3D printed robot for fun and education

        Recently I came across a very interesting open hardware project called Shellmo. What caught my eye was that it’s a 3D printed crustacean that seems to have no apparent real world use, though with a little creativity I can see educational implications.

        Shellmo is a unique, almost cartoon-like creatures that could captivate the imagination of children while at the same time affording them an opportunity to 3D print their own robot. With the current emphasis on STEM in education, Shellmo appears to be the kind of project that would stimulate student interest.

  • Programming/Networking

    • 10 Best Cheat Sheets That A Programmer Must Have
    • Thoughts on JSRs, TCKs, and Open Source

      In the Java EE umbrella every piece of technology is standardized under a JSR (Java Specification Request). The Expert Groups of the JSRs have to deliver the specification, a Reference Implementation, and a TCK (Technology Compatibility Kit). For most of the JSRs, the TCK is licensed as closed-source software and is not available for the public.

    • Omniscient DevOps? JFrog introduces Xray
    • Ciena Intros Blue Planet DevOps Toolkit for SDN/NFV

      The kit consists of a set of software development tools and community resources that allow operators to integrate network resources such as devices, functions, or domains (physical or virtual), as well as customize service templates, with the Blue Planet Network and Service Orchestration software.

    • Devops: A Culture or Concrete Activity?

      In traditional software development, the professionals who were responsible for building a company’s applications were referred to as development. The team that tested the applications was QA management. At this point, the program would be handed off to operations, which would then be responsible for maintenance and update management.

    • Rise of Open Cloud Architectures and Over-the-Top Network Services
    • Vodafone Demands More From NFV Vendors

      Big Communications Event — Vodafone is making significant progress towards the implementation of its Ocean virtualization strategy but is still encountering some significant challenges as it works with the vendor community on its plans.

      That was one of the key messages from the Vodafone’s head of SDN and NFV, David Amzallag, during his keynote presentation at the Big Communications Event (BCE) here this week.

    • SD-WAN Demands Different Network Monitoring

      ThousandEyes, a company that does network monitoring, says software-defined wide-area networking (SD-WAN) is making visibility more difficult, so it has created agent-to-agent tests to make it easier to pinpoint issues in both the forward and reverse paths.

Leftovers

  • Your Vote at the EU Referendum Will Determine Our Future

    The EU referendum on June 23 will be one of the most significant decisions British citizens will ever have to make. The outcome will affect how the UK is governed, national security, the economy, human rights, the environment, culture… every aspect of our lives. It will define what it means to be British and could alter this country’s relationship with the world for generations to come.

  • The BBC and British branding

    The corporation’s claims to the public and to neutrality are crucial for the British state and its power across the globe.

  • Science

    • USA Today Fail: Trump Science Column by Corporate Front Group

      USA Today fell to a new low in science and election coverage this week with a column speculating about presidential candidate Donald Trump’s science agenda, written by two members of a corporate front group that was not identified as a corporate front group.

      The column, “Would President Trump Be a Science Guy?”, was authored by Hank Campbell and Alex Berezow of the American Council on Science and Health, a group that promotes various corporate agendas via its science commentaries while secretly receiving significant funding from corporations, according to leaked documents reported by Mother Jones.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Climate Change Could Be Poisoning Your Food

      By now, it’s fairly well-established that climate change is going to be a major challenge for food production.

      Rising temperatures are set to severely damage crop yields, lessen the nutritional value of important crops, and make large portions of the planet inhospitable to crop production. And some studies argue that it won’t be easy to innovate our way out of these problems, with data suggesting that developed countries have a more difficult time maintaining yields during droughts and heat waves — two things set to increase with climate change — than developing countries.

    • Ross Eisenbrey on Overtime Pay, Patty Lovera on Monsanto Protests

      This week on CounterSpin: “Federal Regulations Work Overtime to Kill American Prosperity”—you see what they did there; that’s Reason magazine on new Labor Department rules that mean more people will get overtime pay when they, well, work overtime. We’ll get a different take from Ross Eisenbrey of the Economic Policy Institute.

    • For Many of Connecticut’s Disabled, Home Is Where the Harm Is

      The woman was sent to a Connecticut emergency room 19 times in 15 months. Her injuries were ghastly. She swallowed pieces of razor blades. She burned herself. She inserted pins, nails, metal can lids and other objects inside her vagina and rectum.

      She was developmentally disabled; living in a group home overseen by Connecticut state authorities. Each of her injuries should have been investigated by the state. None of them were.

      The woman’s experience is part of a federal report formally released Wednesday by the Department of Health and Human Services Office of the Inspector General. Hers were among more than 300 emergency room visits examined by federal investigators between January 2012 and June 2014.

    • Stung by Yelp Reviews, Health Providers Spill Patient Secrets

      The vast majority of reviews on Yelp are positive. But in trying to respond to critical ones, some doctors, dentists and chiropractors appear to be violating the federal patient privacy law known as HIPAA.

    • Woman found to harbor infection resistant to antibiotic of last resort

      For the first time, doctors have diagnosed an American with an infection that can’t be treated with an antibiotic of last resort, an ominous development in the battle against antibiotic resistance, according to a new study.

      The antibiotic, colistin, is used when infections become impervious to all other drugs, including a class of antibiotics called carbapenems. Colistin, which was approved in the 1950s, fell out of favor in the 1970s because of its toxicity. Doctors have resumed using it when nothing else works.

      In the past six months or so, scientists have found bacteria that are resistant to colistin in more than two dozen countries, said study co-author Patrick McGann, a senior microbiologist at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Md. Given the danger of colistin-resistant bacteria, doctors at Walter Reed decided to begin testing samples from the U.S.

    • The superbug that doctors have been dreading just reached the U.S.

      Colistin is the antibiotic of last resort for particularly dangerous types of superbugs, including a family of bacteria known as CRE, which health officials have dubbed “nightmare bacteria.” In some instances, these superbugs kill up to 50 percent of patients who become infected. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has called CRE among the country’s most urgent public health threats.

    • Dreaded ‘Nightmare Bacteria’ Resistant to All Antibiotics Is Finally Here

      A so-called superbug immune to all antibiotics was discovered for the first time in a person in the U.S., reports a study published Thursday in the journal Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy.

      The discovery “heralds the emergence of a truly pan-drug resistant bacteria,” the study’s authors warned.

    • German Cops Bust Dude Who Bought Weed on Silk Road Years Ago

      We’ve seen plenty of high profile and often technical busts on dark web sites targeting dealers, users, and administrators. In a recent case, German cops tracked down a marketplace user who placed orders for just a few grams of cannabis at a time, three years ago.

      A German user of the original Silk Road and another dark web market was recently fined over €3,000 for ordering cannabis 17 times, according to independent researcher Gwern Branwen. Branwen said in a Reddit post that the buyer contacted him recently. He also uploaded an apparent March 2016 letter from German law authorities detailing the transactions. (Names and other information have been redacted from the letter, so Motherboard was unable to contact its supposed recipient).

    • Big Pharma Sells Risky Meds We Don’t Need for Disorders It Made Up That We Don’t Have

      “Intermittent explosive disorder.” “Overactive bladder disorder.” Professional medical societies and paid drug industry researchers have loaded society up with new definitions of alleged ill health from which drug companies can profit when millions of otherwise well people are labeled as ailing.

      “In 2003 and again in 2010,” for example, write MedPage Today editor Kristina Fiore and Milwaukee Journal reporter John Fauber, “the American Diabetes Association tinkered with the definition of a condition known as prediabetes, which independent doctors say is an unneeded label that has led to overtreatment with drugs, exposing patients to risks without proof of real benefit.”

      “The changes, which twice lowered the threshold for hemoglobin A1C, increased the number of people fitting the diagnosis from 17 million to 87 million. Indeed, a March report from the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research estimated that 46% of Californians—13 million people—had prediabetes.”

      “A Journal Sentinel/MedPage Today investigation found the ADA has long received more than $7 million in current annual funding. In addition, nine of the 14 experts who authored the 2010 change worked as speakers, consultants or advisers to companies that marketed diabetes medicines.”

  • Security

    • Friday’s security updates
    • Judge Says The FBI Can Keep Its Hacking Tool Secret, But Not The Evidence Obtained With It

      Michaud hasn’t had the case against him dismissed, but the government will now have to rely on evidence it didn’t gain access to by using its illegal search. And there can’t be much of that, considering the FBI had no idea who Michaud was or where he resided until after the malware-that-isn’t-malware had stripped away Tor’s protections and revealed his IP address.

      The FBI really can’t blame anyone but itself for this outcome. Judge Bryan may have agreed that the FBI had good reason to keep its technique secret, but there was nothing preventing the FBI from voluntarily turning over details on its hacking tool to Michaud. But it chose not to, despite his lawyer’s assurance it would maintain as much of the FBI’s secrecy as possible while still defending his client.

      Judge Bryan found the FBI’s ex parte arguments persuasive and declared the agency could keep the info out of Michaud’s hands. But doing so meant the judicial playing field was no longer level, as he acknowledged in his written ruling. Fortunately, the court has decided it’s not going to allow the government to have its secrecy cake and eat it, too. If it wants to deploy exploits with minimal judicial oversight, then it has to realize it can’t successfully counter suppression requests with vows of silence.

    • Researcher Pockets $30,000 in Chrome Bounties

      Having cashed in earlier in May to the tune of $15,500, Mlynski pocketed another $30,000 courtesy of Google’s bug bounty program after four high-severity vulnerabilities were patched in the Chrome browser, each worth $7,500 to the white-hat hacker.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Cornel West Accuses Israeli PM Netanyahu of “War Crimes”

      Meanwhile, racial justice scholar and activist Cornel West, who is one of Bernie Sanders’ five appointees to the Democratic Party’s platform drafting committee, has accused Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of “war crimes” in the continued occupation of Palestinian territories. This comes as Netanyahu moves his government even further to the right with the addition of the right-wing nationalist Yisrael Beiteinu party. Professor West and another Sanders appointee, James Zogby, are looking to incorporate opposition to Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories into the Democratic Party platform when the drafting committee meets at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia in July.

    • Risks of Citizens Suing Foreign Governments

      Well-meaning legislation would permit 9/11 families to sue Saudi Arabia for its alleged role in the terror attacks but the principle of individuals suing foreign governments is fraught with problems, says ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar.

    • Peace Activist and Holocaust Survivor Hedy Epstein Dies at 91

      Holocaust survivor and peace activist Hedy Epstein has died at the age of 91. Epstein was born in Germany and left in 1939 on a Kindertransport to England. Her parents died in Auschwitz. She later returned to Germany to work as a research analyst for the prosecution during the Nuremberg trials. She was involved in civil rights and antiwar movements throughout her life. In 2011, she was part of the Gaza Freedom Flotilla and was a passenger on the U.S.-flagged ship, The Audacity of Hope. She was a frequent guest on Democracy Now! She first appeared on the program in 2009, as she and other activists were planning for the Gaza Freedom March.

    • “I Want the World to Wake Up”: Hiroshima Survivor Criticizes Obama for Pushing New Nuclear Weapons

      Extended interview with Setsuko Thurlow, who survived the Hiroshima atomic bombing, about the bombing of 1945 and her push to eliminate nuclear weapons. On August 6, 1945, Thurlow was at school in Hiroshima when the U.S. dropped the first atomic bomb on a civilian population. She has been an anti-nuclear activist for decades.

    • Imperialism’s Junior Partners

      On May 12, Brazil’s democratic government, led by the Workers’ Party (PT), was the victim of a coup. What will the other BRICS countries (Russia, India, China, and South Africa) do?

      Will they stand by as the reactionaries who took power in Brasilia pivot closer to Western powers, glad to warm Dilma Rousseff’s seat at the BRICS summit in Goa, India in five months’ time? Or take a stronger line, following the lead of Latin American progressive countries (Venezuela, Cuba, Ecuador, Bolivia, Nicaragua and El Salvador)?

      Here in South Africa, few expect Jacob Zuma’s African National Congress (ANC) government to react constructively on the international stage. Making waves isn’t likely at a time when Standard & Poors and Fitch are on a South Africa visit, deciding whether to downgrade the country’s credit rating to “junk” status, as happened in Brazil late last year.

      This is a shame because the last two weeks have offered excellent opportunities for diplomatic rebellion: revelations have emerged implicating the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in assisting the apartheid state’s 1962 arrest and twenty-seven-year imprisonment of Nelson Mandela. This isn’t exactly surprising; the State Department did keep Mandela on its terrorist watch list until 2008.

    • Senator Scolds Obama for “Preaching Nuclear Temperance From a Bar Stool”

      While President Obama called for a “moral awakening” in Hiroshima and restated his ambition for a nuclear-weapon free future, back in Washington, Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., criticized him for moving forward with a costly plan to renovate the U.S. nuclear arsenal.

      “The U.S. cannot preach nuclear temperance from a bar stool,” Markey wrote in a Boston Globe opinion piece.

      Obama’s Hiroshima speech was reminiscent of the one he gave in Prague, only three months into his presidency, when he announced that he would “seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.”

      In 2010, he negotiated a treaty that limited the U.S. and Russia to 1,550 deployed, strategic nuclear weapons each.

      But that was as far as he would go. Obama is set to maintain the U.S. arsenal of 1,528 deployed warheads — almost half of which are on 30-minute alert — despite a 2013 White House assessment that he could safely reduce the U.S. arsenal by a third.

    • On President Obama’s Hiroshima Visit

      President Obama will be the first sitting U.S. president to visit Hiroshima since the bombing 71 years ago in 1945.

      Japan seeks not an apology or reparation but an awareness and intimate connection to the common humanity we all share and that is at once threatened by the continued existence of nuclear weapons.

      Any nation that continues to keep these weapons is not more secure or powerful but rather a bully ready to threaten others and indeed themselves.

    • Defending Israel’s Attacks on Civilians—A Harbinger for Clinton’s Presidency?

      Going well beyond the normal “pro-Israel” rhetoric expected of American politicians, she has defended Israeli attacks on heavily-populated civilian areas as legitimate self-defense against terrorism, even in cases where the Obama administration and members of Congress—including Sanders—have raised objections.

      Her statements raise serious questions as to what kind of rules of engagement she would support for U.S. forces in the “War on Terror.”

    • The Brazilian Coup and Washington’s “Rollback” in Latin America

      It is clear that the executive branch of the U.S. government favors the coup underway in Brazil, even though they have been careful to avoid any explicit endorsement of it. Exhibit A was the meeting between Tom Shannon, the 3rd ranking U.S. State Department official and the one who is almost certainly in charge of handling this situation, with Senator Aloysio Nunes, one of the leaders of the impeachment in the Brazilian Senate, on April 20. By holding this meeting just three days after the Brazilian lower house voted to impeach President Dilma Rousseff, Shannon was sending a signal to governments and diplomats throughout the region and the world that Washington is more than ok with the impeachment. Nunes returned the favor this week by leading an effort (he is chair of the Brazilian Senate Foreign Relations Committee) to suspend Venezuela from Mercosur, the South American trade bloc.

    • Silencing America as it prepares for war

      Returning to the United States in an election year, I am struck by the silence. I have covered four presidential campaigns, starting with 1968; I was with Robert Kennedy when he was shot and I saw his assassin, preparing to kill him. It was a baptism in the American way, along with the salivating violence of the Chicago police at the Democratic Party’s rigged convention. The great counter revolution had begun.

      The first to be assassinated that year, Martin Luther King, had dared link the suffering of African-Americans and the people of Vietnam. When Janis Joplin sang, “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose”, she spoke perhaps unconsciously for millions of America’s victims in faraway places.

      “We lost 58,000 young soldiers in Vietnam, and they died defending your freedom. Now don’t you forget it.” So said a National Parks Service guide as I filmed last week at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. He was addressing a school party of young teenagers in bright orange T-shirts. As if by rote, he inverted the truth about Vietnam into an unchallenged lie.

      The millions of Vietnamese who died and were maimed and poisoned and dispossessed by the American invasion have no historical place in young minds, not to mention the estimated 60,000 veterans who took their own lives. A friend of mine, a marine who became a paraplegic in Vietnam, was often asked, “Which side did you fight on?”

    • Washington Uses US Troops As Lab Rats

      Civilians, not soldiers, are always the vast majority of war’s casualties. People die not for freedom and democracy but in order for armaments manufacturers to make large fortunes. General Smedley Butler said that his US Marines died for the sake of the profits of the United Fruit Company and some lousy bank investment—truth that you never hear on Memorial Day or July 4th.

    • Ticking Closer to Nuclear Midnight

      President Obama embraced Japanese survivors of the Hiroshima bomb, but his policies, such as heightening tensions with Russia, have raised the potential for a far worse nuclear catastrophe, explains Jonathan Marshall.

    • During Historic Hiroshima Visit, Obama Didn’t Apologize, but Here’s What He Could’ve Said

      With President Obama’s historic visit Friday to Hiroshima, he became the first sitting U.S. president to visit the Japanese city that was the target (some might say victim) of the first atomic bombing, in August 1945. Many Japanese, and most people in the world, consider Hiroshima to be a milestone in human history, a chilling symbol of how science and technology, capable of such creativity and creation, can also deliver terrible forms of destruction and cruelty. Of course, the bar for his speech, at the city’s Peace Memorial Park, was set very high.

    • NPR, Yemen & the Downplaying of U.S. War Crimes

      Liberals and left-leaning individuals in the U.S. trust NPR more than any other news outlet. And, I certainly consume NPR news more than any other mainstream source, usually listening to it at least twice daily, though I abhor its coverage of international events. For these reasons, and with the reader’s forbearance, I have chosen to single NPR out to look at how we in the U.S. are collectively misled into ignoring or accepting our own government’s atrocities.

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

    • The New State Department Report on Hillary’s Email, and Why it Matters

      The State Department Inspector General’s (IG) investigation report leaked out a day early on May 25 makes a number of significant points. These matter, and need to be considered by anyone voting in November.

      [...]

      The other shoe has yet to drop. Though the Inspectors General from the intelligence community have stated unequivocally that Clinton did handle highly classified material on her unsecured server, the FBI report on the same matter has not yet been released.

      For those who wish to defend Clinton with the “but everybody did it” argument, Condoleezza Rice did not send any emails on any unsecured system at all. Powell and Albright sent a handful in the early days of the web. All of them cooperated in the State IG investigation. None of them ran a fully private system for four years and most importantly, none of them are asking us to trust them now running for president.

      If your support is whittle down to a sad Hillary is down to “well, she’s not Trump,” do be careful what you wish for. She’s not Trump, but she is all of the above.

      [...]

      BONUS: If Bernie Sanders will not discuss any of this publically, he does not want to be president.

    • Did the Clinton Email Server Have an Internet-Based Printer?

      The Associated Press today points to a remarkable footnote in a recent State Department inspector general report on the Hillary Clinton email scandal: The mail was managed from the vanity domain “clintonemail.com.” But here’s a potentially more explosive finding: A review of the historic domain registration records for that domain indicates that whoever built the private email server for the Clintons also had the not-so-bright idea of connecting it to an Internet-based printer.

    • MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinksi: It Feels Like Hillary Clinton ‘Is Lying Straight Out’

      MSNBC hosts and analysts severely and unanimously criticized Hillary Clinton on Thursday after the Obama-appointed inspector general of the State Department that she once led published a damning report contradicting her repeated claims that she was allowed to conduct official correspondence on a private email server.

      The rebuke is remarkable because with a few exceptions MSNBC has treated Clinton favorably in the 2016 primaries.

      “I really don’t want to be the one delivering this, but I’ve got to tell you, this is really hard to believe. It feels like she’s lying straight out,” host Mika Brzezinski said in a discussion on “Morning Joe.”

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • G7 Wants to Kill Fossil Fuel Subsidies by 2025, But We Could Do It ‘Twice as Fast’

      For the first time, the G7 has set an actual deadline for ending massive fossil fuel subsidies: the year 2025.

      But while it’s great to “finally have an endgame for these perverse incentives,” as Overseas Development Institute research fellow Shelagh Whitley wrote on Friday, “we could easily get there twice as fast.

    • In Oil-Soaked Niger Delta, ‘Avengers’ Bombing Pipelines in Struggle for Compensation

      In the oil-rich Niger delta, where communities suffer “enormous” effects from decades of spills, a militant group claiming responsibility for a spate of attacks on oil infrastructure now appears to have the backing of some community members.

      The group, Niger Delta Avengers, whose links and sponsors are unclear, said it was responsible for blowing up Chevron’s main electricity power line, which grounded the oil giant’s activities in Nigeria, the company said Thursday, while another attack on a Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) pipeline took place late Thursday.

      The Avengers, the Guardian reports, “say they are fighting to protect the environment and to win locals a bigger share of the profits.”

    • Hillary Clinton Tried to Push Fracking on Other Nations When She Was Secretary of State, New Emails Reveal

      Emails obtained by The Intercept from the State Department reveal new details of Hillary Clinton’s behind-the-scenes efforts to export fracking—a method of extracting oil and natural gas from underground shale deposits—to foreign countries during her tenure as Secretary of State. The emails, acquired through a Freedom of Information Act request, could be particularly damning in light of Clinton’s recent attempts to ally herself with the anti-fracking movement.

    • Fox’s Special Report Claims Scientific Consensus On Climate Change Is “Subject Of Vigorous Debate”
    • Greenwashing or Progress? Exxon Shareholders Issue Calls for Climate Accountability

      At ExxonMobil’s annual shareholder meeting in Dallas this week, activist shareholders and investors demanded the company own up to its deceptive practices regarding climate disruption and begin to implement adaptations and regulations to mitigate climate disruption’s impacts.

    • Exxon investors aim to force reckoning with impact of climate change policies

      Group of largest shareholders will vote for resolution calling on firm to publish annual assessment of business impact of policies such as Paris Agreement

    • New Team Trying to Stop Another Year of Massive Indonesian Wildfires

      Indonesian organizations are teaming up for the massive task of preventing forest and ground fires that blanket the region in haze every year during the dry season.

      Last year, fires in the peatland forest of Sumatra and Kalimantan created an environmental crisis due to an extended drought and El Nino weather conditions.

      In Palangkaraya, the Central Kalimantan capital, the haze was so bad schools and businesses closed and thousands suffered respiratory and eye problems.

    • Australia’s Removal From UN Climate Change Report Labelled ‘Scientific Censorship’
    • Censorship of UN climate report to edit out Great Barrier Reef leaves questions for Hunt
    • Australia cut from UN report on climate threat to avoid damaging reef tourism
    • Coalition’s great big climate hoax turns to outright denial

      The far right of the Coalition has maintained enormous ideological discipline to insist – in the face of ever mounting evidence to the contrary – that climate science is a giant hoax.

      That climate denial – still evident in most of the conservative rump of the party, even if Barnaby Joyce now wonders if “climate change might be real” after staring at a dry creek bed on his family property – has now seeped through to everyday government.

      Two events this week highlight how this ideological intransigence retains its hold over the Turnbull administration.

    • Aust pressure gets reef cut from UN report

      Australia has pressured a United Nations agency into removing the Great Barrier Reef from a report detailing climate change risks on world heritage sites.

      That’s despite mass bleaching at the world’s largest coral reef, which scientists strongly link to global warming.

      Australia is not mentioned in the 87-page UNESCO report that lists other sites in the Asia-Pacific region and which says coral reefs are “particularly vulnerable” to climate change.

    • Stonehenge and Statue of Liberty ‘in direct and immediate danger’ from climate change

      Some of the world’s most famous heritage sites – from the Statue of Liberty and Venice to the Galapagos Islands – are threatened by climate change , a report has warned.

    • Solar Surges: Renewable Energy Jobs Topped 8 Million in 2015

      On the heels of clean fuel milestones in Germany and Portugal , a new report finds that the renewable energy industry employed over 8.1 million people worldwide in 2015.

      According to the International Renewable Energy Agency’s (IRENA) annual review, that figure marks a 5% increase from the previous year. China led the pack, accounting for 3.5 million jobs. Brazil and U.S. ranked second and third, respectively, for the highest number of renewable energy jobs.

    • Sanders, Warren Blast Republican Efforts to Derail #ExxonKnew Probe

      Republican efforts to stifle any federal inquiry involving climate change should be considered “Exhibit A among the reasons why the Department of Justice should take a full and honest look at possible fraud in the fossil fuel industry’s climate denial operation,” leading progressive senators said Thursday in a letter to U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch.

      The letter from Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) provides a counterpoint to a separate missive (pdf) issued Wednesday by five Republican senators including Ted Cruz (R-Texas).

      That letter called on Lynch to drop any federal investigations into whether oil companies like ExxonMobil committed fraud when they worked to downplay the science and impact of climate change. The Department of Justice (DOJ) has suggested it is considering such a probe.

    • Climate damage threatens heritage sites

      Scientists warn that some of the jewels in the crown of the world’s natural and man-made treasures face decay and destruction because of climate change.

    • UN World Heritage Sites Imperiled by Climate Change, New Report Warns

      From the city of Venice to the Statue of Liberty, dozens of natural and cultural World Heritage sites in 29 countries are under direct threat from climate change, warns a shocking new report from UNESCO, the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), and the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS).

    • Arizona’s Getting Hotter, But State Leaders Oppose Solutions

      On average, 2,000 Arizonans visit the emergency room because of heat-related illnesses every year. Unfortunately, things are likely to get worse because it’s only getting hotter. This April was just named the hottest on record, making it the 12th consecutive month to break a temperature record. Last year was named the hottest year on record, and at this pace 2016 is set to top it. This week, the Obama administration recognized Extreme Heat Week — something Arizonans have become well-acquainted with in recent years.

  • Finance

    • Yanis Varoufakis talks about Privatization, Human Rights & Capitalism with acTVism Munich

      In this interview with the former finance minister of Greece and founder of DiEM25 (Democracy in Europe Movement 2025), Yanis Varoufakis, a host of issues are discussed which include privatization, human rights, media, his experience with the EU and capitalism’s ability to reform.

    • The leaning tower of TISA

      The news out of Geneva on Thursday is that multiple countries participating in the Trade in Services Agreement aren’t happy with the European Union. At a meeting where the EU presented its latest market offer, the United States, Canada, Mexico, Japan, Colombia, Peru, Australia and New Zealand all complained about the level of market access the EU is offering, according to senior officials involved with the talks.

    • Twitter loses two more top execs, reportedly dissolves commerce division
    • Two Top Execs Leaving Twitter
    • America’s Worst Laid Plans

      The U.S. government seeks to impose neo-liberal economics on the world even though those “free-market” policies funnel global wealth to a tiny fraction at the top, cause widespread despair and spark political turmoil, Michael Brenner explains.

    • Protests Intensify, Spread Across France as Workers Refuse Submission

      Amid ongoing blockades and intensifying clashes with police, protests against President François Hollande’s controversial set of labor reforms deepened on Thursday as workers in France’s nuclear plants joined the hundreds of thousands of people taking part in a nationwide strike.

      Fueled by “a groundswell of public anger,” as the Associated Press put it, the strikes have already shut down France’s gas stations forced the country to dip into reserve petrol supplies.

      “After oil refinery shutdowns, ” Euronews reports, “Thursday’s strikes at nuclear sites have taken the stand-off one stage further. Power cuts are not expected but tension is growing as France prepares to host the Euro 2016 football tournament in two weeks time.”

    • In Nine Democratic Debates, Not a Single Question About Poverty

      Over 45 million Americans live in poverty—but you wouldn’t think potential leaders of the country are expected to know or care anything about this, listening to the questions asked by the elite journalists who moderated the Democratic debates this primary season.

      A FAIR analysis of all nine democratic debates over the past seven months shows that not one question was asked about poverty. By contrast, 30 questions were asked about ISIS or terrorism (almost half of them concentrated in the December 19 debate, which took place days after the San Bernardino shootings) and 11 questions were asked Russia. Ten questions were asked about socialism or communism, all of which were directed at Bernie Sanders.

      The candidates themselves have brought up poverty, either in their prepared remarks or in response to more abstract questions about the economy. Sanders brought up poverty in all but two debates, broaching the topic 12 times, or approximately 1.3 times per debate. Clinton brought up the issue five times in total, or a little more than once every other debate.

    • Wells Fargo Sponsorship of Black Lives Matter Panel Draws Scorn

      Wells Fargo’s sordid practice of steering minorities into exploitative mortgages burst into public view after the housing crash in 2008. But to a black business group the bank has partnered with — by donating nearly half a million dollars — it’s ancient history.

    • ‘On Like Donkey Kong’: How a Dubious Super PAC Boosted a Questionable Penny Stock

      A little more than a year ago, Hillary Clinton’s imminent entry into the race for the Democratic presidential nomination was setting off political and financial ripples around the country. One of the most unlikely was a spike in the stock price of an obscure Las Vegas company that once built tables for beer pong.

      The company, CrossClick Media, had been issuing press releases for months, saying it had won a contract to run call centers and other services for a super PAC called Voters for Hillary. Getting hired by the PAC was “a milestone” for CrossClick and would lead to growing revenue “predicated largely on Ms. Clinton becoming a Presidential candidate and the Company pursuing other clients for our services,” the firm’s chief executive had declared in December 2014.

      Excited posts about CrossClick’s bright future started filling Internet message boards popular with investors in so-called penny stocks, which, like CrossClick, trade for less than five dollars per share.

      “Soon the 1st lady announces her candidacy and it’s on like Donkey Kong,” read a comment posted March 28, 2015, on a site called InvestorsHub. “Hope you have some shares :)”

      Days after Clinton announced, a person with the same user name wrote, “We are in the midst of our biggest gain day yet. You’re close to changing your life, so hang tight! XCLK is the new hot riser!”

    • Even the IMF—the IMF!—Turns on Neoliberalism

      New paper by three IMF economists finds that policies of capital account liberalization and austerity fuel inequality, which in turn hurts growth—”the very thing that the neoliberal agenda is intent on boosting.”

    • Hillary Clinton Won’t Say How Much Goldman Sachs CEO Invested With Her Son-in-Law

      When Hillary Clinton’s son-in-law sought funding for his new hedge fund in 2011, he found financial backing from one of the biggest names on Wall Street: Goldman Sachs chief executive Lloyd Blankfein.

      The fund, called Eaglevale Partners, was founded by Chelsea Clinton’s husband, Marc Mezvinsky, and two of his partners. Blankfein not only personally invested in the fund, but allowed his association with it to be used in the fund’s marketing.

    • Emails Show TPP ‘Collusion’ Between Big Banks & Obama Administration

      A series of emails released Friday show what activists describe as “collusion” between U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman and Wall Street executives to push for the passage the controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

      The emails (pdf), obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by the group Rootstrikers, which organizes against money in politics, include a message to Froman from a managing director at Goldman Sachs urging him to push for “robust commitments” on Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) provisions—which allow private corporations to sue governments for perceived loss of profits—to be included in the divisive trade deal.

      “I wanted to underscore how important it is for the financial services industry to get robust commitments on ISDS in the agreement… denying our industry the same rights as enjoyed by every other sector would be terribly unfortunate,” the email states.

      Another mentions it would be “good for the U.S.” if lawmakers in U.S. Congress passed Trade Promotion Authority (TPA), also known as “fast track,” which would allow the president to send trade deals to the House and Senate for a yes-or-no vote, rather than allowing them to make amendments to the agreements.

    • Economic Update: Listen, Professor Krugman

      This episode discusses ride-share companies, the latest from the pope and evidence against Professor Paul Krugman’s rosy view of inequality. We also examine why markets shouldn’t undermine a co-op-based economy, and European leaders’ failed policies on Greece.

    • Sanders Has Always Wanted to Debate Trump—or Any Other Representative of the ‘Billionaire Class’

      Bernie Sanders relishes ripping on Donald Trump, describing the billionaire as “someone who must never become president of this country.”

      No surprise there.

      Sanders has run his entire 2016 presidential campaign in opposition to plutocracy, oligarchy, and billionaire-dominated politics—proudly declaring that his run is paid for by small donors and “not the billionaires.” In fact, Sanders has run his entire political career in opposition to plutocracy, oligarchy, and billionaire-dominated politics. He has, as well, spent decades critiquing a media system that pays more attention to “lifestyles of the rich and famous” celebrity than the real-world issues facing working-class Americans. That’s made Trump, a billionaire byproduct of the media’s cult of celebrity, a preferred target for the senator, who rips the Republican’s rhetoric as “shameful” and complains that “every day he comes up with another stupid remark, absurd remarks.”

    • After Six-Week Strike, Verizon Workers Claim Major Victory as Deal Reached

      After a nearly six-week strike, Verizon workers are celebrating a huge victory on Friday after a deal was reached in principle with the telecom giant that will bring gains for union members and end one of the nation’s largest work stoppages in recent history.

      The deal, announced Friday afternoon by U.S. Labor Secretary Thomas Perez, reportedly includes a four-year contract between Verizon and its two biggest unions, CWA and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW).

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Hillary’s Gun Gambit

      In their view, and in the view of “liberal” corporate media, Bernie Sanders and the masses of people his campaign has mobilized are merely nuisances, not worth taking seriously. They livened up the primary season for a while, but now they are pointlessly standing in the way of the Queen’s coronation.

    • All Donald Trump’s Men

      Donald Trump claims to fight for the little guy against a rigged system, but the presumptive Republican presidential nominee has turned to political operatives who have scammed money for the rich and powerful, says Michael Winship.

    • Clinton Clinches Democratic Nomination

      MSNBC’s Chris Matthews has revealed that the major television networks plan to call the Democratic primary for Hillary Clinton during the day on June 7th — hours prior to the close of polls in California — on the grounds that Clinton has “clinched” the nomination as soon as she crosses the 2,383-delegate threshold via both pledged delegates (who are already committed to her) and super-delegates (who cannot, by Democratic Party rules, commit themselves to her or be tallied until July 25th).

      In other words, as recently indicated by Mark Murray, NBC’s Senior Editor for Politics, the networks will make the news on June 7th rather than report it — as, per the Democratic National Committee, the final and indeed only authority on the tabulation of super-delegates, Clinton cannot clinch the nomination on June 7th unless she wins 78.3 percent of the pledged delegates on that date.

      Which she won’t.

      No more than Sanders will get 70 percent of the pledged delegates on June 7th.

    • Bernie Sanders supporters sue to have California’s voter registration extended until election day

      A federal lawsuit alleging widespread confusion over California’s presidential primary rules asks that voter registration be extended past Monday’s deadline until the day of the state’s primary election on June 7.

      “Mistakes are being made,” said William Simpich, an Oakland civil rights attorney who filed the lawsuit Friday.

    • Bernie Sanders Supporters Sue Over California’s Voter Registration Rules

      William Simpich, an Oakland civil rights attorney, told the L.A. Times, “Mistakes are being made.” As RT notes, there are more than 4.1 million California voters who are registered without a party preference—and it has been shown that independent voters lean toward Sanders.

    • The Arrogant Ignorance of Campbell Brown: Education Journalism in Decline

      TV Networks such as NBC, MSNBC and Telemundo have broadcast various education segments on “Nightly News” and “Today” underwritten by Bill Gates and Eli Broad.

      The Education Writers Association – which boasts more than 3,00 members – receives money from Gates and Walton. The L.A. Times receives funds from Broad for its Education Matters Digital initiative.

      On-line publications also have been infiltrated. The Education Post took $12 million in start-up funds provided by Broad, Bloomberg and the Waltons. The site focuses on “K-12 academic standards, high-quality charter schools and how best to hold teachers and schools accountable for educating students,” according to the Washington Post.

      Even well-respected education blogs including Chalkbeat and Education Week are funded in part by the Waltons (in the latter case, specifically for “coverage of school choice and [so-called] parent-empowerment issues.”) Education Week even tweets out paid advertisements for Teach for America as if they were news stories!

      We’ve all seen “Waiting for Superman,” the infamous union bashing, charter loving propaganda film packaged as a documentary. Its popularity was helped with outreach and engagement funds by the Waltons and a host of other privatizers. It’s far from the only effort by market-driven billionaires to infiltrate popular culture with corporate education reform. They tried to sell the parent trigger law with “Won’t Back Down,” but no one was buying. Efforts continue in Marvel Studios television shows.

      A plethora of teachers, academics and other grassroots bloggers have taken to the Internet to correct the record. But they are often ignored or drowned out by the white noise of the same corporate education reform narratives being told again-and-again without any firm footing in reality. In fact, after blogger and former teacher Anthony Cody won first prize from the Education Writers Association in 2014 for his criticism of Gates, the organization banned bloggers from subsequent consideration.

    • Donald Trump: Caligula of the Lowest Common Denominator Empire?

      If this awful parody of democracy was not tragic for Americans, it would be rather comical. In early December 2010 I wrote a commentary entitled “The US Empire is Collapsing, and Americans Will Be the Last to Know.” In 2016, in the extremely unlikely case Trump gets (s)elected, could he be the Caligula of the new Rome? Even though the process has gained momentum, Americans still do not know that their empire is doomed. They do not know that the United States of America is not a democracy with the Democrats on one side and the Republicans on the other side, but instead a global empire run by oligarchs and plutocrats; most do not know that Bill and Hillary Clinton are good friends with Donald Trump; they do not know that almost all of politicians elected for office are not public servants, but instead are working of the behalf of worldwide corporate interests; Americans do not know that they have been conned for almost four decades into the notion that their vote matters; they do not know that the so called “leader of the free world” is not much more than an anchor man with a law degree reading a teleprompter; they do not know that he doesn’t lead anything, but he is instead the global corporate spokesperson of their enslavement; they refuse to know that they not only live but actively export a police state which still prints on its currency, In God We Trust; they do not know that the corporate empire of chaos, whomever its figurehead is, is joyfully leading us all to oblivion.

    • Advice for Divided Democrats

      It’s true that Bernie’s chances are slim, but it’s inaccurate to say he has no chance. If you consider only pledged delegates, who have been selected in caucuses and primaries, he’s not all that far behind Hillary Clinton. And the upcoming primary in California – the nation’s most populous state – could possibly alter Sanders’s and Clinton’s relative tallies.

    • Bernie and Utopia

      Bernie’s got flaws, no doubt. For instance, he shouldn’t talk about breaking up the banks; he should talk about nationalizing them. And he should talk about nationalizing (or, better yet, internationalizing) more than just that – not to mention debt amnesty. In spite of these shortcomings, however, he’s the only presidential candidate who could, however slightly, help the U.S.A. to clean up its act. Sure, Sanders most likely won’t be able to get much accomplished. At least, though, he’d prevent Clinton or Trump from accomplishing their maniacal plans. And just doing that would help the U.S.A. to clean up its act – even though what we really need is for the U.S.A. to change its act altogether.

    • Sanders Closes in on Clinton Ahead of California Primary

      The timing couldn’t be worse for Clinton, who is losing ground in hypothetical match-ups against the presumed Republican nominee. A Real Clear Politics general election poll from May 24 shows Clinton eking out a win against Trump 43.2 to 42.8. The same poll has Sanders beating Trump by over 10 points.

    • As Sanders Campaigns in California to Change the Democratic Party, How Far Can He Push It?

      Can Bernie Sanders change the Democratic Party from the inside out? Several campaign developments this week have posed that question. The Sanders campaign’s latest TV ad before California’s June 7 primary features Sanders asking, “What choice do Californians have in this election?” His reply, “The biggest one of all. You have the power to choose a new direction for the Democratic Party.”

    • Like Clinton, Trump Chickens Out of Debate with Sanders

      Looks like Donald Trump took a page from Hillary Clinton’s book and chickened out.

      The presumptive GOP presidential nominee said Friday afternoon that he would not debate Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders, despite having said one day prior that he’d “love to debate Bernie.”

      Sanders’ rival for the Democratic nomination said earlier this week that she would not participate in a debate with Sanders in California ahead of that state’s primary next month, despite having agreed to do so previously.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

  • Privacy/Surveillance

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • New York City has been shining surveillance lights on its black population for the last 300 years

      There are more than 250,000 streetlights in New York City, and while the recent change to LED bulbs have made them a nuisance for some residents, they don’t make the people whose windows they illuminate feel watched. But some residents of the city’s public housing have recently had to deal with a harsher light shining on them.

    • A Big Win for Women Who Seek Care at Catholic Hospitals in Illinois

      Illinois passes a bill to protect women at religious hospitals that routinely deny care.

    • Heads Up Internet: Time to Kill Another Dangerous CFAA Bill

      The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), the federal “anti-hacking” statute, is long overdue for reform. The 1986 law—which was prompted in part by fear generated by the 1983 techno­thriller WarGames—is vague, draconian, and notoriously out of touch with how we use computers today. Unfortunately, Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse and Lindsey Graham are on a mission to make things worse. They’ve proposed (for the second time) legislation that fails to address any of the CFAA’s problems while simply creating more confusion. And they may try to sneak their proposal through as an amendment to the Email Privacy Act—the very same sneaky tactic they tried last year.

      Their latest proposal is ostensibly directed at stopping botnets. It’s even named it the “Botnet Prevention Act of 2016.” But the bill includes various provisions that go far beyond protecting against attacks by zombie computers:

      First, the bill would expand the CFAA’s existing prohibition against selling passwords to trafficking in any “means of access.” The broadening is unnecessary and misguided, as other statutes—like the U.S. code section concerned fraud in connection with access devices—already cover what the authors seem to be targeting. The bill also doesn’t define “means of access,” another sign of its poor drafting. With no guidance, it’s unclear how broadly prosecutors or courts will apply this provision. The provision could make criminals of paid researchers who test access in order to identify, disclose, and fix vulnerabilities.

    • Official RNC Protest Rules Designed to Stifle Demonstrators, Groups Say

      The city of Cleveland’s rules for the Republican National Convention (RNC), released Wednesday, are “unacceptable and far too restrictive,” according to advocacy groups and protest organizers.

      The convention, which runs July 18-21, is expected to attract scores of protesters. For example, a coalition of social justice groups is organizing a large End Poverty Now march for July 18, and a political action group founded by American Muslim doctors and young professionals in the Midwest, Stand Together Against Trump (STAT), is planning for a 10,000-person march and rally in downtown Cleveland on July 21—the day Donald Trump is expected to formally accept the party’s nomination after surpassing the necessary delegates on Thursday.

      According to the Washington Post, “there are at least 10 applications on file for major parades, protests, and news conferences beginning the week before the convention.”

      Politico reports: “The planners of those events insist they’re taking precautions to encourage nonviolence, but some fear that the strong feelings Trump engenders among supporters and detractors alike will create a combustible atmosphere.”

    • California Supreme Court Overturns Murder Conviction Based on Flawed Bite-Mark Evidence

      In a unanimous ruling released Thursday, the California Supreme Court overturned the 1997 conviction of Bill Richards for the murder of his wife, Pamela, finding that false forensic testimony had impacted the outcome of his trial. “Needless to say, we are thrilled,” said Richards’s attorney Jan Stiglitz, a founder of the California Innocence Project, which has represented Richards for the last 15 years. “It’s been a long time coming.”

      Richards’s controversial conviction for Pamela’s grisly 1993 murder has long been considered a clear case of wrongful conviction that was based on the discredited science of bite-mark analysis. Indeed, it took the state four attempts to convict Richards — two full trials ended in a hung jury and a third ended in a mistrial during jury selection — and prosecutors were successful only after putting on the stand a legendary forensic dentist who testified that Richards’s highly unique lower dentition was a match for a bite mark found on Pamela’s hand. The dentist, Norman “Skip” Sperber, told the jury that based on his 40-plus years in the field, he could say that out of 100 people, only “one or two or less” would have the same “unique feature” in their lower teeth.

    • Robert Scheer and Sandy Tolan Confront the Grimness of Life in the West Bank

      In this week’s edition of “Scheer Intelligence,” Truthdig editor in chief Robert Scheer speaks to Sandy Tolan, a University of Southern California professor of journalism and author of the book “Children of the Stone: The Power of Music in a Hard Land,” about music’s role in the life of children in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and the lack of media coverage of the grim daily reality there.

    • Detroit police accused of needlessly killing dogs while searching house

      They came to serve a warrant on a suspected drug house, but what a lawsuit filed in federal court claims is Detroit police officers systematically shot and killed three family pets.

      When police came to serve the warrant at a home on Sussex Street on Detroit’s west side, the owner claims she told them there were dogs in the house and she would put them away.

    • Consumers believe they have more rights than they really do in digital media

      ownershipTo buy or to license? That is the question that’s stumped a lot of e-book and other digital media consumers over the years, recently culminating in an author’s lawsuit against Simon & Schuster over sales versus licensing revenue. But just how badly has it stumped consumers? A pair of law school researchers undertook to find out, and the 60-page report on their study is fascinating reading.

    • Rare Media Interest in Native American Views–on Behalf of Indian Mascots

      It’s naturally worth listening to a range of Native American people, but that happens so rarely in media that an instance like this merits some scrutiny. For some, the word to describe these results would not be the one the Post chose—”unambiguous.”

      Jaqueline Keeler noted in The Nation (5/25/16) that more than half of respondents were over 50, when Native Americans have a median age of 26—or some 10 years younger than the general US population. The Post says they weighted the results numerically, but those were still the comments reflected in the report. No respondents were under 18, and that might be justified methodologically—you need to follow certain protocols to interview minors—but it does leave a hole in the data’s meaning, given that it leaves out the Native American students attending the 2,000 high schools in the US that use Native Americans as mascots, and that the White House has reported face discrimination connected to it.

    • ‘Has Our Country Gone Just Mad?’

      Michael Ratner, who passed away last week at the age of 72, president emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights, investigated, defended and spoke up for victims of human rights abuses around the world. He didn’t inspire hundreds of lawyers because he won cases, but because he saw law as an instrument of justice.

      Ratner brought the first challenge under the War Powers Resolution Act to the use of US troops in El Salvador, he prosecuted US officials on behalf of Nicaraguans murdered by the Contras, and he made CCR the first human rights organization to stand up for the rights of detainees at Guantánamo Bay. His work will live on.

      Here’s Michael Ratner interviewed by CounterSpin’s Steve Rendall in November 2004 on the occasion of Alberto Gonzales’ nomination to be US Attorney General.

    • Virginia Cabbie Faces 48 Years in Prison After Driving Aspiring Terrorist To Airport

      A federal grand jury charged a 26-year old Virginia taxi driver with helping provide support for terrorists after he transported one of his associates, a would-be member of Islamic State, 90 minutes to the airport.

      The cabbie, Mahmoud Amin Mohamed Elhassan, was also charged with making false statements to federal agents. He faces up to 48 years in prison under federal sentencing guidelines — more than twice the maximum of 20 years faced by the budding terrorist he transported.

    • David Cameron Says He Would Welcome Trump To UK

      But Senate Republicans aren’t the only people in the world walking back their criticisms of the man now confirmed as the Republican Presidential candidate. Great Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron, who previously called Trump “stupid”, said he would welcome Trump should he visit the UK during the run up to the presidential elections. While that is a far cry from an endorsement, it is a shift in position after Cameron responded to Trump’s proposed Muslim-ban by saying that Trump would “unite us all against him.”

    • ‘What Happens to These Hundreds of Thousands of People That Are Being Deported?’

      Disturbing words from a young woman explaining to Al Jazeera why she made the perilous trip from El Salvador to the US. After being kidnapped and assaulted at age 16 by armed men, she became one of tens of thousands of children coming into the US without a guardian from the three Central American countries—El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras—known as the Northern Triangle. Most are fleeing a level of violence that’s hard to fathom, but the Obama administration is stepping up raids and deportations, which officials tell the New York Times are aimed mainly at Central American mothers and children.

    • EU Turns to Sudan’s Wanted War Criminal to Stop Flow of Migrants from Africa

      Explosive classified documents obtained by German reporters show that the EU is working out a plan to fund the construction of detention centers and provide refugee processing equipment to various African countries, including Sudan, in an effort to stem the flow of migrants from Africa to Europe.

    • “Civil Disobedience is Survival”: Ireri Carrasco Sues Obama Admin for Denying Her DACA over Protests

      In Chicago, a migrant justice activist is suing the Department of Homeland Security for refusing to renew her DACA protection because of her activism. Twenty-nine-year-old Ireri Unzueta Carrasco received Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals status in 2013. DACA is the Obama administration’s program shielding some undocumented people brought to the U.S. as children from deportation if they meet certain conditions. Even though Unzueta Carrasco says she met those conditions, the Department of Homeland Security denied her DACA renewal because of her participation in acts of civil disobedience aimed at pressuring the Obama administration to halt its record deportations. We’re joined by Ireri Unzueta Carrasco.

    • Prevent ISPs From Following Your Ev

      Blasting a military that continues to act with impunity and a willfully blind judiciary that continues to serve as “the Occupation’s fig leaf,” Israel’s foremost human rights organization B’Tselem has declared that “there is no longer any point” in seeking justice for Palestinians through complaints to military courts they long hoped would serve as “a path to accountability.” The decision to stop cooperating with an intransigent military judicial system is the latest sign – along with the appointment of uber-hawk defense minister Avigdor Lieberman and the growing power of zealous settlers – that Israel is still moving inexorably toward its most right-wing incarnation ever.

    • New York City Homeless Take Action Against Police Efforts To Break Up Their Communities

      Last summer, the New York Police Department (NYPD) began a concerted effort to target a growing community of homeless people living on the streets of East Harlem, issuing “move along” orders and threatening arrest, tickets, or the destruction of their property if they didn’t comply. Now the homeless and advocates are fighting back against the practice.

    • In Memory of Michael Mariotte—Activist, Journalist, Musician

      Long-time anti-nuclear activist, journalist and punk rock drummer Michael Mariotte died May 16 at the age of 63 in his home in Kensington, Md., after a three-year battle with pancreatic cancer. Mariotte was executive director of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS) in Takoma Park, Md., for 27 years. Under Mariotte’s leadership NIRS became a key information resource for anti-nuclear activists around the world.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • Millions Annoyed As Frontier Bungles Acquisition of Verizon Customers Across Three States

      In February of last year, Frontier Communications announced it would be buying Verizon’s unwanted fiber (FiOS), DSL, and phone customers in Florida, Texas, and California for $10.5 billion. The deal was yet another chapter in Verizon’s effort to give up on fixed-line networks it no longer wanted to upgrade, as it focused on more profitable (read: usage capped) wireless service. The deal was, as Frontier’s CEO stated at the time, a “natural evolution for our company and leverages our proven skills and established track record from previous integrations.”

    • Secret New Internet Rules in the Trade in Services Agreement

      This week new materials from the Trade in Services Agreement (TISA) were released by Wikileaks, revealing that negotiators from around the world have been continuing to craft new rules that will affect all Internet users, without public scrutiny or consultation.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Copyright Doesn’t Mean Unlimited Control

        True competition could finally come to the market for TV set-top boxes thanks to a new set of proposed rules from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Under the FCC’s “Unlock the Box” rule, you’ll be able to use a device from any manufacturer to connect to your cable or satellite TV service.

        Disappointingly—but not surprisingly—the cable industry has not responded well. Cable and satellite providers’ comments on the proposed rule have followed a predictable pattern: cable operators and their TV studio subsidiaries think that copyright law affords them complete control over the devices that we use to consume their content.

      • Star Trek Fan Film Axanar Lawyers Tell Court About JJ Abrams Claims Of Paramount Dropping Suit, Express Confusion

        Over the weekend, the internet blew up over the story that Paramount and CBS were going to drop their silly lawsuit over a professional looking Star Trek fan film. The news was “broken” by the producer of the next official Star Trek film, JJ Abrams, sitting alongside the director of that film, Justin Lin, at a Star Trek fan event. Lin had previously expressed support for the fan film on Twitter, and Abrams claimed that Lin urged Paramount to settle, and that “within a few weeks” there would be an announcement that the case had been settled.

        Of course, between now and “within a few weeks,” the case is still going on… and the folks behind the fan film, called Axanar, had to file their reply to the amended complaint. And they have. And, as per usual with these things, it goes through and rebuts various claims and then tosses in a bunch of counterclaims. Normally we’d go through and analyze the more interesting/important claims, but given that there’s still a pretty good chance the whole case is going away shortly, we’ll skip all that and jump to the part where Axanar’s lawyers point to the JJ Abrams/Justin Lin statements and basically throw their hands in the air and say “we don’t know what to do about this.”

      • The life and death of the PRINCE Bill

        The recent passing of Prince left many fans in mourning and potential heirs clambering for a piece of his estate. The singer, who died intestate, left behind a wealth of copyright protected works. His right to publicity, however, did not survive him, as the common law right in Minnesota, where Prince was domiciled, only applies to the living.

        The Minnesota State Legislature hastily attempted to pass a bill to change this, by creating a post-mortem right of publicity. On May 9, the Bill, entitled Personal Rights in Names Can Endure Act, was put forward, two weeks before the end of the Legislature’s session on May 23. The bill was subsequently pulled amid concerns that it was not properly thought out and could have unintended consequences, but this Kat commends the carefully created name.

      • Critics Pounce on Proposed PRINCE Act in Minnesota

        In the wake of the death of Prince, lawmakers in Minnesota have introduced legislation named after the pop star that establishes a right of publicity for celebrities in the state and their heirs.

        Keith Harris, a writer and attorney in Minneapolis, has an article in MinnPost looking at the reaction to the bill. Minnesota wouldn’t be the first state to codify rights of publicity, but some IP experts are critical of the broadly worded proposal.

05.27.16

Links 27/5/2016: Android for Raspberry Pi, Google Beats Oracle in Court

Posted in News Roundup at 5:56 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Open source is in our DNA

    The same thing that compels us to make Linux (and many other projects) free and open source is present in many of humanity’s greatest achievements

  • Why Open-Source Pros Are in Great Demand

    The majority of hiring managers predict that the demand for open-source IT professionals will rise more than other recruitment-based areas of interest over the next six months, according to a recent survey from the Linux Foundation and Dice. The resulting report, “Moving Toward Professionalization: Rising Need for Open-Source Skills in 2016,” indicates that these managers struggle to fill open-source positions, especially when trying to find candidates with needed cloud, networking and/or security experience. Meanwhile, when considering an offer, open-source professionals said they’re most interested in working on appealing projects with cutting-edge technology challenges. Money and perks are of secondary interest, even though, given the hot market, many open-source specialists are able to negotiate a great compensation package. According to the report, “In the last decade, open-source development has experienced a massive shift: Once a mostly community and volunteer-based concern, the model has since become a mainstay of the IT industry. Flexibility in accommodating new technologies and speed at adapting to a changing market have made open source vital to modern companies, which are now investing zealously in open source and open-source talent. More and better code is the way forward, and the skilled professionals who can make it happen are highly in demand.” More than 400 hiring managers and 4,500 open-source professionals took part in the research.

  • Open Source Realm Mobile Database Hits Version 1.0

    Citing advantages over the SQLite and Core Data databases commonly used in iOS and Android apps, Realm today launched version 1.0 of its namesake “mobile-first database.”

  • Realm has hit the version 1.0 milestone, and now reaches over 1 billion users

    As mobile databases go, Realm was already a fan favorite. Now we get an idea of just how popular it really is, as the company notes it now reaches one billion iOS and Android users via 100,000 active developers.

  • Rackspace Adopts OX’s Dovecot Pro Open Source IMAP Email Platform

    Dovecot, the open source email platform from Open-Xchange, received a significant endorsement this week from Rackspace, which announced that it will use the company’s Dovecot Pro product for email hosting.

  • An Apparent Exodus Continues At OwnCloud

    This week we’ve now seen the announcements by Jos Poortvliet, Lukas Reschke, Björn Schießle, and Arthur Schiwon are among those leaving ownCloud Inc. Each of their blog posts confirm they are leaving but don’t shed much light on the underlying situation at the company.

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Google Inbox Notifications

        I made a Firefox addon that brings that functionality to Google Inbox. It gives you a notification when new mail arrives and updates the pages title with the unread mail count. You can get it here!

  • Networking

    • Accelerating and Maintaining NFV Adoption: Prodip Sen, HP and OPNFV
    • AT&T: OPNFV Can Bring Open Source Sanity

      The Big Communications Event — It will be up to one open source group, the Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV), to provide a “fair playing field” to sort the multiple industry open source initiatives around orchestration, an AT&T executive said here Wednesday.

    • Telecom Companies Collaborate Through OPNFV to Address Unique Business Challenges

      Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) is an emerging alternative to using dedicated hardware appliances, particularly for service providers, where quick, flexible responses to traffic pattern shifts and user demand changes are essential. It implements network tasks like access security, load balancing, and packet filtering as software modules suitable for virtualized cloud environments.

    • Securing the Cloud With SDN

      It’s becoming clear that rising network security threats will drive increasing integration between network virtualization (NV) and security, as we’ve long predicted here. This means that software-defined networking (SDN) will become a key technology for securing the cloud.

    • Telstra Shares PEN Plans

      Just one year after Telstra completed its acquisition of Pacnet, the Australian-based service provider is taking big steps to expand its global footprint using its PEN platform built on SDN.

    • Cisco Looks to Open Source for ‘Badder Ass’ Internet

      Big Communications Event — Cisco needs open source to build a “badder ass” Internet — a network with sufficient performance, reliability and security for major business applications, a company executive said.

    • ETSI Open Source MANO group delivers first code package

      The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) announced that its new ETSI Open Source MANO group has delivered its Release 0 code package, a month ahead of schedule. The institute said OSM Release 0 integrates the seed code supplied by Telefonica, RIFT.io, Canonical and others into a documented package of running code. Release 0, which is available now for download from the OSM project website, meets the commitment made at MWC 2016 to deliver working code that enables end-to-end service instantiation and represents a number of significant steps forward since the MWC demo.

    • ETSI Open Source MANO group releases initial code package

  • Education

    • American schools are teaching our kids how to code all wrong

      To truly impact an children’s cognitive development, and prepare them for future computing jobs that may not even exist yet, we must move beyond pop computing. I strongly believe that learning computing should become mandatory in all schools, and should be viewed in the same context as reading and writing. Students must be challenged and encouraged to think differently in each grade level, subject matter, and read/write various computing projects every day in their academic life. With this mindset and approach we’ll help this generation of students fill those one million jobs, all of which require so much more than dragging and clicking.

  • BSD

    • Faces of FreeBSD 2016: Michael Lucas

      Back by popular demand, we’re again sharing a story from someone involved in FreeBSD with our Faces of FreeBSD series. It may be a story from someone who’s received funding from us to work on development projects, run conferences, travel to conferences, or advocate for FreeBSD. Or, it may be from someone who gives back to FreeBSD financially or in another way. Regardless, it is always from someone who is making a positive difference in the FreeBSD world.

    • pfSense 2.3.1 FreeBSD Firewall Update Patches Web GUI Security Issue, Seven Bugs

      Released a week ago as the first maintenance build in the 2.3 stable series, pfSense 2.3.1 received its first update, bringing a patch for a major security issue in the Web GUI, as well as seven other bug fixes.

      pfSense 2.3.1 was a major point release of the FreeBSD-based network firewall distribution that introduced over 100 changes, but pfSense 2.3 brought a new pkg system that lets the project’s maintainers update only individual parts of the system.

  • Public Services/Government

    • Upcoming governance workshop for the European Catalogue of ICT Standards for Public Procurement

      On the 15th June, 2016, DG Connect and DG Growth wil be co-hosting an interactive workshop for the European Catalogue of ICT Standards for Public Procurement. This catalogue of standards is being developed to assist public procurers implement interoperable ICT solutions across Member States, as well as reducing incidence of vender lock-in, and ultimately to assist in the continued development of the Digital Single Market.

  • Licensing/Legal

    • Announcing the Open Source License API

      Over the last 19 years, the Open Source Initiative (OSI) has been the steward of the Open Source Definition (or OSD), establishing a common language when discussing what it means to be an Open Source license, and a list of licenses which are known to be compatible with the OSD.

      This is taken to its logic next step this year, with the OSI providing a machine readable publication of OSI approved licenses at api.opensource.org. This will allow third parties to become license-aware, and give organizations the ability to clearly determine if a license is, in fact, an Open Source license, from the authoritative source regarding Open Source licenses, the OSI.

  • Programming/Development

    • Announcing Rust 1.9

      The Rust team is happy to announce the latest version of Rust, 1.9. Rust is a systems programming language focused on safety, speed, and concurrency.

    • Rust 1.9 Released

      Rust 1.9 brings controlled unwinding support, support for deprecation warnings, new targets (MIPS Linux Musl C library and i586 Windows MSVC), compile-time improvements, more library stabilization work, and new Cargo features.

Leftovers

  • Science

    • How Paper Shaped Civilization

      Over centuries, writing moved across more than a dozen materials. Clay tablets dominated for three thousand years—“a considerably longer period than the reign of paper up until now,” Kurlansky writes—because they had the advantage of being inexpensive, readily available, and easy to use. But the tablets’ lack of portability was a problem. People turned to papyrus, the reedy plant found in marshy areas, but that disintegrated easily, and much of the world’s supply was too spindly for making high-quality writing sheets. Wax was one alternative, but it was best for disposable writing, so parchment was next in line, made by scraping and processing animal skins. As many as two hundred animals were needed to make a single book.

  • Hardware

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Most Drugs Aren’t Tested on Pregnant Women. This Anti-nausea Cure Shows Why That’s a Problem

      For years, Zofran was the most popular morning-sickness medication in the U.S. Now it’s being accused of causing birth defects. The larger issue is a drug-safety system that excludes women from clinical trials, potentially putting them and their babies at risk.

    • Scientists Just Discovered Exactly What Air Pollution Does To Your Arteries

      Air pollution has been linked to heart disease for years, prompting concern as well as some skepticism, as the physiological steps showing a cause-and-effect have gone less understood. But now, a multi-year study has for the first time documented that air pollution thickens blood and hardens arteries, a condition that causes cardiovascular problems like heart attacks and strokes.

      “What’s new here is the linkage between air pollution and actual evidence of progression of atherosclerosis, the underlying disease process that leads to most [heart] attacks and strokes,” Joel Kaufman, lead author and University of Washington professor, told ThinkProgress. “The study provides important new information on how pollution affects the main biological process that leads to heart disease.”

    • Bayer and Monsanto: A Marriage Made in Hell

      The two multinationals that teamed up during the Vietnam War to poison millions of people with its Agent Orange herbicide—St. Louis, Mo.-based Monsanto and Germany’s Bayer AG—are looking to become one.

      Bayer has announced a bid to buy Monsanto in a deal that would expand Bayer’s GMO and pesticide holdings and add drugs to Monsanto’s global portfolio. Monsanto has rejected the latest bid, but the two are still in talks.

      If Monsanto, perhaps the most hated GMO company in the world, joins hands with Bayer, one of the most hated Big Pharma corporations on Earth (whose evil deeds date back to World War I and the Nazi era), the newly formed seed-pesticide-drug behemoth would have combined annual sales of $67 billion.

    • Who Will Replace Our Century-Old Water Pipes?

      The water that comes out of your tap is clean, right?

      It should be. But in the United States, we can’t afford to keep taking for granted that safe, clean water flows from our taps.

      The crisis in Flint, Michigan is the leading edge of a desperate situation for our tap water in communities across the country as our water infrastructure crumbles. That’s why Food & Water Watch has worked with Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) to introduce the WATER Act, one big step to ensure our water’s safety for generations to come.

    • Nebraska Drug Warriors Lose Bust Thanks To Jurisdictional Limits On Criminal Conspiracy Charges

      The legalization of marijuana in a few states has led to some interesting law enforcement problems. To date, most of the “solution” appears to be camping out on the borders and seizing drugs from travelers headed out of the state. The lack of legalization on a federal level inflates drug bust stats but doesn’t do much for visitors to pot-friendly states whose purchases are completely legal, but their possession — once crossing the border into a neighboring state — suddenly isn’t.

      The legality of the transaction at the point of purchase also makes for some rather unusual court decisions, like the one highlighted by Noel Erinjeri of Fault Lines. Two Minnesota natives were traveling to Colorado to purchase some weed when they were stopped by Lancaster County (NE) Sheriff’s deputies, resulting in their arrest and seizure of the cash they were carrying.

  • Security

    • Security updates for Thursday
    • Paul Vixie on IPv6 NAT, IPv6 security and Internet of Things

      Internet pioneer Paul Vixie spoke with SearchSecurity about IPv6 NAT, IPv6 and the Internet of Things, and the long, thankless path to deploying IPv6.

    • PHP 7.0.7 Released Fixing 28 Bugs

      As is the case with a .xy update, this is mostly a bug fix update, with at least 28 different issues being fixed in an effort to make PHP 7.x more stable. Though the PHP project hasn’t identified any specific security vulnerabilities that are fixed in the update, I see at least one with bug #72162.

    • Skimmers Found at Walmart: A Closer Look

      Recent local news stories about credit card skimmers found in self-checkout lanes at some Walmart locations reminds me of a criminal sales pitch I saw recently for overlay skimmers made specifically for the very same card terminals.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Britain’s nuclear deep: a new transparency

      For its part, the UK’s ministry of defence may claim to be unconcerned by the prospect of the Trident system being no longer able to remain hidden in the depths. But the global trend is very much towards the oceans’ increased transparency. That process is already well underway. How much further will it go over the twenty-year timespan for developing and deploying a new class of missile submarines?

    • Greenpeace Calls Out Obama’s Double Standards for a Nuclear-Free World at Hiroshima Visit
    • Obama’s Historic Hiroshima Visit Underscores Nuclear Hypocrisy

      President Barack Obama on Friday will become the first sitting U.S. president to visit to Hiroshima, Japan—a visit, according to anti-nuclear campaigners, that “rings hollow without far bolder efforts to rid the world of nuclear weapons.”

      During his visit, Obama will reportedly offer no apology for the atomic bomb the U.S. dropped on the Japanese city 71 years ago, which killed 140,000 people, though lingering effects, both physical and psychological, remain today.

      At the start of his presidency, in 2009, Obama gave a speech in Prague during which he called for world without nuclear weapons and said, “the United States will take concrete steps towards a world without nuclear weapons. To put an end to Cold War thinking, we will reduce the role of nuclear weapons in our national security strategy, and urge others to do the same.”

    • My Dreams Seek Revenge: Hiroshima

      Unlike President Obama, who today is the first sitting president to ever visit the site of the first atomic bombing, I’ve visited Hiroshima many times while living in Japan.

      The thing that always struck me about Hiroshima was simply being there. The train pulled into the station under an announcement that you had arrived in Hiroshima. It was another stop on the bullet train’s long run from Osaka to Fukuoka, so they called out the name as if it was just another stop. I’d get off the train, step out into the sunlight — that sunlight — and I was in Hiroshima. I had the same feeling only once before, taking a bus out of Munich and having the driver announce the next stop as Dachau. Somehow such names feel wrong being said so prosaically.

    • Israel, a Palestinian State and Anti-Semitism

      The issues of anti-Semitism and support for Israel reared their serpentine heads once again when major candidates either attended, or refused to attend, the yearly conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in March 2016. AIPAC is seen by many as the single most important molder of public opinion regarding Israel in the US. Ben Norton wrote in Salon that Hillary Clinton “sounded indistinguishable from that of a neocon,” when she spoke before the AIPAC conference about Israel and the greater Middle East. Bernie Sanders did not speak at that conference, and has been the only major candidate with a critical stand on the issues surrounding the establishment of a Palestinian state.

    • The Coming Drone Blowback

      The targeted assassination of Taliban leader Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansour last weekend wasn’t just another drone strike.

      First of all, it was conducted by the U.S. military, not the CIA, which has orchestrated nearly all drone strikes in Pakistan.

      Second, it didn’t take place in Afghanistan or in the so-called lawless tribal region of Pakistan known as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, or FATA. The guided missile turned a white Toyota and its two passengers into a fireball on a well-traveled highway in Balochistan, in southwest Pakistan.

      Prior to this particular drone strike, Pakistan allowed the United States to patrol the skies over the northwest region of FATA, a Taliban stronghold. But President Obama decided to cross this “red line” to take out Mansour (and a taxi driver, Muhammad Azam, who had the misfortune to be with the wrong passenger at the wrong time).

    • A 10-Minute Debate on War

      And this is the state of American democracy during an election year: a 10-minute debate in Congress about the future of war and a reckless cowboy’s logical conclusion that since we’ve made a whole lot of nuclear weapons — we have over 7,000 in the stockpile right now — a president ought to have the right to use one or two if he’s really annoyed with another country’s behavior. No doubt this is how you make America great again.

      In other words, the United States is under the almost total control, politically and emotionally, of a confluence of economic and military interests that go by various names: the military-industrial complex, the Deep State. And the defense budget, of course, quietly passes in Congress, releasing a new round of unquestioned funding — more than $600 billion — for the Department of Defense to use as it sees fit. Funding is scarce for everything from schools to lead-free water pipes to addressing the Zika virus. But nukes and weapons development and the war on terror continue unchallenged.

      Lee asks: “Since 1991, the U.S. has spent trillions of dollars, dropped hundreds of thousands of bombs and lost thousands of brave servicemen and women in Iraq. Do you feel any safer? Are we any safer?”

    • The Death Toll in Syria: What Do the Numbers Really Say?

      What is the Syrian death toll now? 400,000? Less? More? While the aphorism “One death is a tragedy, one million deaths is a statistic”, has been attributed to many, it is likely none foresaw the inverse utility of this concept for shaping narratives in an age of humanitarian intervention. Statistics are now weapons in themselves. Raw numbers are ambiguous; as journalist Sharmine Narwani writes, “It doesn’t tell us who is killing and who is dying. And that information matters – the global political response to a genuine civil conflict would be different than to a genocide committed by a ruthless authority.”

      When the United States’ Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) released its eighth summary of the Syrian death toll in mid-2015 it painted this confused picture: 230,000 total deaths, between 150,000 and 160,000 ‘opposition deaths’ (civilian and military), a further 98,000 ‘other’ civilian deaths, and a very precise 18,476 ‘regime’ deaths – an actual minimum total of 266,476.

    • Some Light in Iraq’s Dark Tunnel

      The U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 blasted apart the country’s political structure and left behind widespread chaos, but Iraqis may be slowly digging out of the wreckage, says ex-CIA official Graham E. Fuller.

    • The New York Times’s (and Clinton Campaign’s) Abject Cowardice on Israel

      In fact, essentially the entire world recognizes the reality of Israeli occupation with the exception of a tiny sliver of extremists in Israel and the U.S. That’s why Chris Christie had to grovel in apology to GOP billionaire and Israel-devoted fanatic Sheldon Adelson when the New Jersey Governor neutrally described having seen the “occupied territories” during a trip he took to Israel. But other than among those zealots, the word is simply a fact, used without controversy under the mandates of international law, the institutions that apply it, and governments on every continent on the planet.

    • USA Still Uses Floppy Disks To Control Its Nuclear Missiles And Bombers

      According to a report of the US Government Accounting Office, many important government institutions are still using more than 50-year-old systems to perform important tasks. While the U.S. Defense Department uses 8-inch floppy disks to handle the function of its nuclear force operations, the Treasury Department calculates tax returns on a 56-year-old IBM mainframe computer.

    • A European army is exactly what the EU and UK needs

      Germany has been among the most vocal opponents of Brexit. So it was perhaps surprising that it was from here that a mini-missile was launched into the referendum campaign, with leaked details of a defence White Paper pushing the creation of a European Army.

      For the UK’s flailing Brexiteers, this was just what was needed. Veterans for Britain duly popped up to warn of the threats to UK sovereignty and to Nato, the alliance that had kept the country safe through the Cold War and beyond.

    • James Bovard on the Cost of the War on Terror
    • Natural borders, beware a dangerous idea

      Whatever borders follow the ongoing violence and war, they must under no circumstances be ‘natural’.

    • Europe Revolts Against Russian Sanctions

      From ministerial offices to barricades on the streets, Europe is in open revolt against anti-Russian sanctions which have cost workers and businesses millions of jobs and earnings. Granted, the contentious issues are wider than anti-Russian sanctions. However, the latter are entwined with growing popular discontent across the EU.

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

    • State Dept. IT staff told to keep quiet about Clinton’s server

      Former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s decision to use a private email server ran afoul of the government’s IT security and record retention requirements, according to a report by the department’s inspector general released today.

      This use of a private email server did not go unnoticed within the Department of State’s IT department. Two IT staff members who raised concerns about Clinton’s use of a private server were told not speak of it.

      Clinton was secretary of state from 2009 to 2013 and during that period she used a private email server in her New York home.

    • Clinton’s Imperious Brush-off of Email Rules

      The State Department’s Inspector General issued a blunt report criticizing Hillary Clinton’s imperious refusal to follow email rules as Secretary of State, adding to Clinton’s credibility problem, notes ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern.

      [...]

      It turns out that she deliberately chose to use a hacker-friendly, unprotected email server, and not so much for convenience – unless you define “convenience” as the ability to operate in total secrecy with no possibility of being held accountable for your policies or behavior. In one email to an aide, Clinton explained, “I don’t want any risk of the personal being accessible.”

    • ‘Smart Grid’ Company Demands MuckRock Turn Over Info On Anyone Who Might Have Seen Public Records Docs Involving It

      The replacement of regular meters with potentially-invasive “smart meters” is due to begin in 2017, despite concerns about health and privacy. As the EFF points out, the power company’s ability to record pinpoint data on customers’ power use may seem innocuous, but it’s not nearly as benign if that information is shared, either purposefully or inadvertently.

      [...]

      Multiple documents were provided to Mocek by Seattle City Light, including documents related to the company awarded the smart meter contract: Landis+Gyr. Landis+Gyr isn’t happy the city of Seattle has made these documents public, so it’s logically responded by suing MuckRock. Yes, it’s also suing the city and the utility, but for some reason has decided MuckRock (and Phil Mocek) should be included in the litigation, despite them only being the recipients of documents Landis+Gyr wants to keep out of the public’s hands.

      It’s seeking to have future planned responses from the city involving its “trade secrets” blocked. (Seattle plans to release another batch of documents to Mocek on May 26.) But it’s also making requests pertaining to MuckRock that are both chilling and completely ridiculous. Not only does Landis+Gyr want the documents taken down, but it also wants info on every MuckRock reader who may have viewed them.

    • New WikiLeaks Trove Further Exposes TISA’s Neoliberal Agenda

      Docs reveal trade deal negotiations have gone ‘very far from legitimate trade concerns into the territory of a sweeping deregulatory political agenda’

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Deadly effect of farming’s dirty needs

      Farming is a dirty business – so dirty now that, according to new research, air pollution from agriculture in the form of fine particles of lung-choking dust outweighs all other human sources of that kind of pollution.

      These particles are calculated to cause around 3.3 million deaths a year worldwide − and most of this lung-penetrating murk is from fertilisers. Back in 1950, the world produced 20 million tons of artificial fertilisers, but farmers now spread on their fields every year around 190 million tons.

      Ammonia from the nitrogen-based compounds gathers in the air, and combines with the sulphates and oxides of nitrogen from the combustion of fossil fuels and wood smoke to make tiny aerosols, each around one-thirtieth of the thickness of a human hair.

    • Hundreds of Millions to Be Displaced by Climate Change, French Minister Warns

      Calamitous global conflict as a result of climate change will produce hundreds of millions of refugees by 2100, said France’s environmental minister Ségolène Royal to representatives from 170 countries at the UN environment assembly in Nairobi on Thursday.

      [...]

      “The difficulty of having access to food resources leads to massive migration, south-south migration,” she said, referring to migration between developing countries.

      “The African continent is particularly hit by this south-south migration,” Royal continued. “If nothing is done to combat the negative impact of climate change, we will have hundreds of millions of climate change migrants by the end of the century.”

    • The Desperate Plight of Petro-States

      Some petro-states like Venezuela and Iraq already appear to be edging up to the brink of collapse. Others like Russia and Saudi Arabia will be forced to reorient their economies if they hope to avoid such future outcomes. Whatever their degree of risk, all of them are already experiencing economic hardship, leaving their leaders under growing pressure to somehow alter course in the bleakest of circumstances — or face the consequences.

    • Congressman to Red Cross: ‘How Do You Get Lost Going to a Disaster Area?’

      Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., the ranking member of the congressional committee that oversees the Red Cross, sent a three-page letter to the charity’s CEO on Monday demanding that she explain why the Red Cross struggled to respond to record flooding in Mississippi this spring.

    • Utah Congressman Wants To Block Proposed National Monument In Maine

      Despite Bishop’s criticism of a potential Maine Woods national monument, polling shows that two-thirds of Maine residents support creating a unit of the national park system in the Katahdin region. More than 200 Maine businesses have signed a letter stating their support for a park.

    • In ‘Epic Fight for Justice,’ Activists Descend on Chevron Meeting

      Chevron CEO John Watson became “visibly flustered” at his company’s annual shareholders meeting on Wednesday, after being confronted by an Indigenous leader whose community has been gravely affected by the oil company’s pollution in the Amazon.

    • We Stopped Keystone, Canada Can Stop Energy East

      Since I last visited Canada to share my experiences dealing with TransCanada as a rancher along the proposed Keystone XL path, and as a member of Bold Nebraska, a lot has changed. President Obama has since put the final nail in the coffin of Keystone XL, listening to the voices of ranchers, Indigenous communities and climate activists united in their opposition to the tar sands, or oil sands, pipeline.

    • Meet Proterra, The Next Generation Of Bus

      “Everything that has an urban drive cycle will ultimately be an electric vehicle.” That’s what Ryan Popple, the president and CEO of Proterra, the leading U.S. electric bus company, explained to me in a recent interview.

      The future of transit isn’t cleaner diesel, hybrids, natural gas, or hydrogen fuel-cell buses, argues Popple. The rapidly dropping price for electric batteries combined with new fast-charging technology appears to render the competition obsolete. Right now, the biggest question isn’t which technology will win in the bus market — it’s how quickly all-electrics will take over, and whether Proterra can keep ahead of the Chinese competition, like electric vehicle giant BYD.

    • Deadlock over political coercion at work causes 3 FEC commissioners to issue scathing statement

      The complaint stemmed from a piece The New Republic published on Oct. 4, 2012, about how Murray Energy required all employees to attend a Mitt Romney campaign event. Attendance was mandatory, even though the company shut down the mine and those workers reportedly were not paid for that day.

    • How coal shipping accidents are damaging coral reefs around the world

      Just a few kilometres from the wild south-western coast of Madagascar, home to part of the world’s third largest coral reef system, the coal-laden New Mykonos ship has sunk and is slowly breaking apart.

      The sinking of the coal vessel comes as a new scientific study published in Nature warns of the damaging effects of coal on coral, seagrass and fish.

      Back in late February the Panamanian-registered New Mykonos left the Richards Bay Coal Terminal in South Africa and set sail for the Indian port of Vizag with 160,000 tonnes of coal aboard.

    • Burned By Slow Government Response To A Polluter, Residents Mistrust Cleanup Efforts

      When residents don’t trust the company who poisoned their water and soil, and they don’t trust the government agencies mandated to stop the company, they’ll either ignore everything and hope for the best, or they’ll take matters into their own hands.

      Both reactions are in abundance in Vernon, California near the site of a now-shuttered battery recycling plant now owned by Exide Technologies. Exide and the plant’s previous owners knowingly leached lead and other carcinogens into the soil, air and water in surrounding residential neighborhoods, a problem made much worse by inadequate government oversight.

      State regulators repeatedly warned Exide Technologies, which ran the Vernon battery smelting facility since 2000, and its previous owners that the plant was releasing dangerous chemicals into the atmosphere. Exide responded only by paying fines and continuing business as usual.

      The fines were small considering the scope of the damage. A Los Angeles Times investigation found that, over more than 15 years, Exide paid $869,000 in penalties and that “most of the fines were assessed in the last two years.”

    • Student Activism Pushes UMass to Become First Major Public University to Divest

      University of Massachusetts students—who just over one month ago were arrested for demanding that their school divest from fossil fuels—were validated on Wednesday after it was announced that the school would become the first major public university to pull its direct holdings from polluting industries.

      The decision was made by a unanimous vote of the Board of Directors of the UMass Foundation, which oversees the endowment, valued at $700 million at the end of the last fiscal year.

    • Our Lives are on the Line: Protesters Blockade Planned Pipeline Site Near Nuclear Plant Outside NYC

      In Peekskill, New York, just about an hour north of New York City, residents have launched a blockade in efforts to stop the construction of a gas pipeline slated to run only hundreds of feet from the aging Indian Point nuclear power plant. The proposed project has sparked concerns from residents and nuclear experts that a pipeline break could cause a catastrophic nuclear disaster that would threaten the entirety of New York City. The pipeline is being built by Spectra Energy and is officially known as the Algonquin Incremental Market Project, or AIM pipeline. Well, only hours ago, Peekskill residents and activists escalated the campaign to stop this pipeline’s construction by installing a fully sustainable shipping container at the entrance of Spectra’s work yard—complete with two activists living inside. Democracy Now! was there as the blockade was launched.

    • EU referendum: Ed Miliband and Jeremy Corbyn to join forces in climate change warning

      Jeremy Corbyn and Ed Miliband will publicly join forces to warn that Britain’s membership of the European Union is vital in the fight against climate change.

      In their first major appearance together since the Labour leader took over the party eight months ago, Mr Miliband and Mr Corbyn will share a platform together at Raventhorpe solar farm to emphasise the central role the pair believe the EU has had in tackling climate change.

      The intervention by Mr Miliband, who led the Labour party to a bruising election defeat in May last year, could also quell rumours about of tensions between the two men.

    • Hope and Burnout in the Anthropocene

      Between May 3 and May 16, thousands of people gathered in 20 acts of civil disobedience spanning 6 continents, to protest society’s continued reliance on fossil fuels. Dubbing their collective action “Break Free 2016,” they placed themselves in the paths of oil trains, coal ships and mining equipment, in an effort to convince those in power of the urgency of action on climate change.

    • Climate Action is Needed Whether Exxon Likes it or Not.

      Last week, we were among a handful of organizations who received a letter signed by 13 members of Congress claiming that we may be violating Exxon’s right to free speech. They’re requesting that we divulge any communication we may have had with state officials and many private organizations with regard to looking into what Exxon knew about climate change and when. At face value this request is a threat to constitutional rights. The signers of the letter clearly want to send a message that advocacy organizations and others should only pursue their rights to petition the government, exercise free speech and enjoy freedom of association at their own peril. In short, it’s a blatant attempt to use governmental power to find and deter anyone that shares our values and wants to join us in our efforts.

    • On Climate, Trump Promises To Let The World Burn

      President Obama’s climate change policies would be undone. Regulations on greenhouse gas emissions would be eliminated. The Keystone XL pipeline would be built. There would be no international agreement to prevent catastrophic climate change.

      That is what Donald Trump’s energy policy would look like should he be elected president, the presumptive Republican nominee promised on Thursday before a pro-fossil fuel development crowd in Bismark, North Dakota.

      In a speech laying out his energy agenda for the United States, Trump promised to undo essentially every major policy developed in the last decade intended to slow human-caused global warming.

    • Treating cattle with antibiotics affects greenhouse gas emissions, and microbiota in dung and dung beetles

      Antibiotics are routinely used to improve livestock health and growth. However, this practice may have unintended environmental impacts mediated by interactions among the wide range of micro- and macroorganisms found in agroecosystems. For example, antibiotics may alter microbial emissions of greenhouse gases by affecting livestock gut microbiota. Furthermore, antibiotics may affect the microbiota of non-target animals that rely on dung, such as dung beetles, and the ecosystem services they provide. To examine these interactions, we treated cattle with a commonly used broad-spectrum antibiotic and assessed downstream effects on microbiota in dung and dung beetles, greenhouse gas fluxes from dung, and beetle size, survival and reproduction. We found that antibiotic treatment restructured microbiota in dung beetles, which harboured a microbial community distinct from those in the dung they were consuming. The antibiotic effect on beetle microbiota was not associated with smaller size or lower numbers. Unexpectedly, antibiotic treatment raised methane fluxes from dung, possibly by altering the interactions between methanogenic archaea and bacteria in rumen and dung environments. Our findings that antibiotics restructure dung beetle microbiota and modify greenhouse gas emissions from dung indicate that antibiotic treatment may have unintended, cascading ecological effects that extend beyond the target animal.

  • Finance

    • Clean-Energy Jobs Surpass Oil Drilling for First Time in U.S.

      The number of U.S. jobs in solar energy overtook those in oil and natural gas extraction for the first time last year, helping drive a global surge in employment in the clean-energy business as fossil-fuel companies faltered.

    • Good News: Turns Out Most People Don’t Want to Give Their Business To A Small Insecure Money-Grubber

      Savagely telling it like it is, our favorite woman warrior Elizabeth Warren shredded the presumptive Drumpf this week in a speech at the Center for Popular Democracy’s annual gala. Citing his newly revealed and fabulously revealing remark in a 2007 interview that he was kinda looking forward to the idea of a housing meltdown” – who SAYS these things out loud?!? – because he could rake in the profits, Warren called him out not just as a sorry specimen of manhood but as a small, cruel, greedy, amoral human being who’s spent his whole life saying to hell with the social contract most sentient beings at least acknowledge. Now, after his lifetime of fuck yous, it seems, Warren is ready to return the favor.

      Noting Drumpf admitted he was “drooling over the idea of a housing meltdown because it meant he could buy up a bunch more property on the cheap,” she rhetorically asked, “What kind of a man does that? Root for people to get thrown out on the street,” to lose their jobs and pensions and sometimes end up living in a van? She then furiously responds, “I’ll tell you exactly what kind. A man who cares about no one but himself. A small, insecure money-grubber who doesn’t care who gets hurt, so long as he makes some money off it.” Warren went on to blast Trump for suggesting he’d dismantle Dodd-Frank because he is “worried about helping poor little Wall Street,” adding, “Let me find the world’s smallest violin to play a sad, sad song.” Oh yes. She’s good.

    • India says Apple must sell locally-sourced goods to set up stores: source

      India has said Apple Inc must meet a rule obliging foreign retailers to sell at least 30 percent locally-sourced goods if it wishes to open stores in the country, a senior government official told Reuters.

      Apple is hoping to expand its retail presence in India, one of the world’s fastest-growing smartphone markets, at a time when sales in the United States and China have slowed.

      A change in legislation last year exempted foreign retailers selling high-tech goods from the rule, which states 30 percent of the value of goods sold in the store should be made in India.

    • Foxconn replaces ’60,000 factory workers with robots’

      Apple and Samsung supplier Foxconn has reportedly replaced 60,000 factory workers with robots.

      One factory has “reduced employee strength from 110,000 to 50,000 thanks to the introduction of robots”, a government official told the South China Morning Post.

      Xu Yulian, head of publicity for the Kunshan region, added: “More companies are likely to follow suit.”

    • Britain’s poorest people pay more of their income in tax than the very richest

      Britain’s poorest people pay more of their income in taxes than the very richest, official figures reveal.

      The worst-off tenth of households handed 47% of their money back to the government in 2014/15 – up from 43% two years earlier.

      Yet the richest tenth paid just 34%, down slightly from 35% in the two years previously.

      The gulf was laid bare today in annual figures by the Office for National Statistics which show the richest 10% earn £108,000 while the poorest earn just £4,467.

    • Report says banks still generate billions in overdraft fees

      A new federal law implemented six years ago was supposed to resolve the issue of bank overdraft fees, which often blindsided consumers with unexpected expenses.

      Before the law was passed, a consumer making a debit card purchase, and not having sufficient funds to cover the purchase, would be automatically “loaned” the funds to cover the purchase. The bank would then charge the consumer a fee of $30 or so for that service.

    • I, Daniel Blake

      More space has been devoted by the mainstream media in the last week to the terrible effects of “austerity” on the vulnerable, than in total since the Westminster election.

    • Bank of America’s Winning Excuse: We Didn’t Mean To

      Back in the late-housing-bubble period, in 2007, Countrywide Home Loans, which was then the largest mortgage provider in the country, rolled out a new lending program. The bank called it the “high-speed swim lane,” or HSSL, or, even more to the point, “hustle.” Countrywide, like most mortgage lenders, sold its loans to Wall Street banks or Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two mortgage giants, which bundled them and, in turn, sold them to investors. Unlike the Wall Street banks, Fannie and Freddie insured the loans, so they demanded only the ones of the highest quality. But by that time, borrowers with high credit scores were getting scarcer, and Countrywide faced the prospect of collapsing revenue and profits. Hence, the hustle program, which “streamlined” Countrywide’s loan origination, cutting out underwriters and putting loan processors, whom the company had previously deemed not qualified to answer borrowers’ questions, in charge of reviewing loan applications. In practice, Countrywide dropped most of the conditions meant to insure that loans would be repaid.

    • Greek Debt Negotiations: Will the IMF Exit the Troika?
    • Demanding ‘What We Need to Survive,’ Workers to Descend on McDonald’s Shareholders Meeting

      As McDonald’s prepares to hold its annual meting on Thursday, low wage workers—buoyed by successes from the “unstoppable” Fight for $15 movement—are gearing up to confront the burger giant and again demand a decent wage and union rights.

      On Wednesday, in addition to a mid-day strike at the flagship Rock N Roll McDonald’s in Chicago, organizers say thousands of underpaid workers will stage a protest at the company’s headquarters just outside the city, in Oak Brook, Illinois.

      The suburban location will be the site of a second rally and march on Thursday as well as the shareholder meeting takes place.

    • The TPP Has Always Been About Corporate Dominance, Not Trade or Economic Growth

      A report released by the U.S. International Trade Commission last week found, as Deirdre Fulton notes, “that the controversial trade deal” — the Trans-Pacific Partnership (also known by some as NAFTA on steroids) — “will produce negligible economic benefits while damaging most Americans’ jobs and wages.”

      To a large extent, the report falsifies — or, at least, calls into question — many of the key premises of the Obama administration’s argument in favor of the far-reaching pact.

      President Obama, himself, has stepped into the fray and lobbied aggressively for the agreement, often demeaning those who speak out against it. He has made it clear that he views the passage and implementation of the deal as a crowning achievement that will ultimately cement his legacy as an advocate of free trade and economic development worldwide.

      He has insisted that the deal will boost growth, create jobs, “promote American values,” “protect American workers,” and erode unnecessary trade barriers.

      The agreement’s contents, however, differ wildly from the advertised product.

      Indeed, much of the discussion of the deal’s potential effects on economic growth is, in fact, a red herring, a distraction that prevents discussion of the underlying purpose of trade deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

    • CUNY Professors and Staff Consider Future Strike to Defend Public Education Funding

      Higher education in the United States is facing serious problems with state disinvestment, lack of protections for adjuncts and low pay for faculty, among other reasons. The situation is no different at the City University of New York (CUNY), where the problems have affected professors, staff and students for decades. But 92 percent of the Professional Staff Congress (PSC), the union representing more than 25,000 CUNY professors and staff, decided earlier this month to approve use of a strike to fight not only for a new contract, but also to ensure a quality education for students.

    • New Mexico Officials Accused Of Tampering With Documents To Deny Citizens Emergency Food Stamps

      Kimberly Jones knows just how hard it is to wait for emergency food stamps to come through. New Mexico is supposed to grant people in dire financial situations expedited benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) within seven days, rather than the 30 it takes to process regular applications. But it often doesn’t work out that way.

    • America’s Cosmic Tax Gap

      That wouldn’t matter all that much if the IRS had plenty of agents out in the field doing in-depth audits. But the IRS has been losing staff. The tax agency had 50,400 full-time-equivalent enforcement staff available in 2010. The 2016 figure: only 38,800.

    • Average CEO Raise Last Year Amounted to 10x What Most Workers Made in Total

      It was another banner year for chief executives at the biggest companies.

      For its latest annual study of CEO compensation, the Associated Press, using data from Equilar, looked at what 341 executives at companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 index brought home from salary as well as other perks like stock awards and deferred compensation.

      The study found that the median compensation was $10.8 million, up from $10.3 million the CEOs took in the year before.

    • CEO pay climbs again, even as their stock prices don’t

      CEOs at the biggest companies got a 4.5 percent pay raise last year. That’s almost double the typical American worker’s, and a lot more than investors earned from owning their stocks — a big fat zero.

      The typical chief executive in the Standard & Poor’s 500 index made $10.8 million, including bonuses, stock awards and other compensation, according to a study by executive data firm Equilar for The Associated Press. That’s up from the median of $10.3 million the same group of CEOs made a year earlier.

    • Greek media and independent journalism under austerity

      In Greece, the media landscape under austerity has created bleak conditions for journalism and media freedom; a post-austerity agenda could change this situation.

    • Hillary Clinton: A Major Gold-Digging Liability

      As much as the Clinton machine may welcome their stay at Hotel California in early June, they might check out any time they like only to find themselves never leaving the Trump-leads-the-national-average-poll syndrome.

      This was never the original script, as Manifest Destiny was supposed to have – finally – fully entitled the Queen of the Perma-Smirk to the Presidency. What has she done to deserve this? Well, a myriad of factors come into play. Let’s cut to the chase and follow the money.

      Now that I found you I can’t let you go

      While still in the Senate, the Queen of Chaos manifested a vague interest in going after tax havens, as in “people who create a mailbox, or a drop, or send one person to sit on the beach in some island paradise and claim that it is their offshore headquarters.” But – and that’s a crucial “but” – no bills proposed by Hillary ensued. After all, what to do about the Clinton machine’s virtually unlimited access to a pool of vast, non-transparent funds?

      The Clinton machine could not be savvier on onshore/offshore tax havens. Six years ago their home in Chappaqua, New York, of subterranean email fame, was conveniently placed in a “residence trust.”

      Bill Clinton for his part spent a wholesome five years as just a mere adviser to $3.2 billion-worth playboy Ron Burkle – now reduced to the status of former Clinton pal. While the friendship lasted, Burkle’s investment fund registered in Dubai and the Cayman Islands added at least $15 billion to Bill’s piggy bank.

    • Los Angeles Is Considering Taxing Millionaires to Help Homeless People, and More

      In today’s On the News segment: Los Angeles is considering taxing millionaires to help homeless people; global unemployment is expected to overtake 200 million people for the first time on record by the end of 2017; a new poll shows that two-thirds of all Americans would struggle to cover a $1,000 crisis; and more.

    • This Confirms It was a Coup: Brazil Crisis Deepens as Evidence Mounts of Plot to Oust Dilma Rousseff

      A key figure in Brazil’s interim government has resigned after explosive new transcripts revealed how he plotted to oust President Dilma Rousseff in order to end a corruption investigation that was targeting him. The transcripts, published by Brazil’s largest newspaper, Folha de São Paulo, document a conversation in March, just weeks before Brazil’s lower house voted in favor of impeaching President Rousseff. Romero Jucá, who was then a senator but became a planning minister after Rousseff’s ouster, was speaking with a former oil executive, Sérgio Machado. Both men had been targets of the so-called Car Wash investigation over money laundering and corruption at the state-controlled oil firm Petrobras. In the conversation, the men agree that ousting President Rousseff would be the only way to end the corruption probe. In the transcript, Jucá said, “We have to change the government so the bleeding is stopped.” Machado then reportedly said, “The easiest solution is to put Michel in”—a reference to Vice President Michel Temer, who took power once Rousseff was suspended. We speak to Maria Luisa Mendonça, director of Brazil’s Network for Social Justice and Human Rights.

    • Wall Street’s New Man in Brazil: The Forces Behind Dilma Rousseff’s Impeachment

      According to recent internal documents, provided by WikiLeaks, on several occasions Michel Temer was an embassy informant for U.S. intelligence. Temer secretly shared information to the U.S. Southern Command concerning the 2006 election of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and the vitality of his center-left Workers’ Party. Temer assured the Defense Department that despite Lula’s clear path to reelection the president would have to negotiate with the opposition, the Brazilian Democratic Workers Party (PMDB), who had just won most governorships and the Senate. He also assured the U.S. that the PMDB would soon coalesce with Brazil’s right wing parties, therefore greatly minimizing the Workers’ Party platform. Additionally, Temer also criticized the social programs being implemented by Lula and the Workers’ Party, claiming Lula was too concerned the poor and not concerned enough about “economic growth.” In these communications a thin line was drawn between espionage and informant. Temer’s loyalty seemed to be with the United States and capital and not to Brazil and democracy.

    • Clinton accuses Trump of “rooting” for a crash caused by her own donors

      A new attack ad put out by the Hillary Clinton campaign this week achieves the near-impossible, making Donald Trump look wronged and (almost) like a victim. More believably, it makes the Democrats look sleazy and disingenuous in comparison.

      [...]

      This ad is disingenuous in a dozen different ways. For one thing, the destruction that the Clinton campaign describes was not caused by people swooping in after the bubble burst, buying at the bottom of the market.

    • To Avoid Regulations, Uber Describes Itself as Either, Neither and Nor

      Uber is a traditional employer recruiting employees. Or Uber is a non-employer facilitating the work of independent contractors. Or Uber is a technology company supplying an app to small businesses.

      It depends on which lawsuit you read. The company, valued at over $62 billion, changes its description of what it does depending on what best allows it to avoid regulatory scrutiny.

    • Poultry And Meat Workers Face Some Of The Cruelest Working Conditions In The Country

      “The conditions that these workers are forced to endure is an outrage, and have no place in our nation,” Casey said, according to The Hill. “This is a matter of basic justice. The meat and poultry industry must quickly take substantial steps to improve the workplace conditions for those in this industry.”

      Latinos and immigrants make up a large part of the meat and poultry industry workforce, according to a 2005 human Human Rights Watch report. But because some of the immigrants are undocumented, they often “suffer violations of their rights but are afraid to challenge them,” which allows employers to exploit them with bad pay and dirty, dangerous working conditions.

      Jose Gaytan, an immigrant from Mexico, began working in slaughterhouses at the age of 19 because he thought the job would pay well. He began to feel his hands change from the effects of his job to “pull the tenderloin, which is where the filet mignon comes from,” he previously told ThinkProgress. Every night, his hands would “sting” and hurt.

      Pedro, a poultry worker at a Tyson plant in North Carolina, processes 45 to 60 chickens every minute. To treat his hands — which get so swollen from handling the chickens that he has to wear 3XL-sized plastic gloves — a nurse told him to take ibuprofen and to soak his hands in Epsom salt and hot water.

      Although Pedro and Jose have to work through the pain, they are actually among the fortunate in the meat industry. Other workplace injuries in this sector have resulted in fatalities. The new GAO report found that between 2004 and 2013, 151 workers died on the job, with transportation incidents cited as the most frequent cause of death.

    • REXLot Suspends Trading After Shares Tumble on Anonymous Report

      REXLot Holdings Ltd. suspended its shares from trading in Hong Kong after they tumbled on a research report questioning the lottery machine maker’s accounting.

      REXLot sank 9.3 percent to 44 Hong Kong cents, the lowest intraday level since August 2012, before the stock was halted from trading at 11:33 a.m. local time. Volume was about quadruple the three-month daily average. Anonymous Analytics rated the company a strong sell with a target price of 12 Hong Kong cents in a report today, saying REXLot exaggerates its revenue and the amount of cash on its balance sheet.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • The ‘Woman Card’ Brings a Wealth of Disadvantages

      I am no fan of Hillary Clinton, simply because she is a neoliberal centrist wolf cloaked in progressive sheep’s clothing. However, she has many advantages propelling her toward the Democratic nomination, including the support of her party’s establishment, Wall Street executives and even Republicans.

    • Neil Young Now Okay With Donald Trump Using His Music

      That familiar situation played itself out again last June, when iconic singer-songwriter—and big-time supporter of Bernie Sanders—Neil Young told Donald Trump to cease and desist using his classic song “Rockin’ in the Free World.” Since then, the billionaire has become the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, resulting in an awful lot of backtracking on the part of big-money donors and former political foes. Amid this group, surprisingly, is Neil Young, who is now apparently totally okay with the Donald using his music.

    • Writers speak out against Donald Trump

      An Open Letter to the American People

    • Sanders to Trump: Let’s Debate in ‘Biggest Stadium Possible’

      Donald Trump has doubled down on his challenge to debate Bernie Sanders, telling reporters in Bismarck, North Dakota on Thursday that he would agree to a one-on-one with the Vermont senator for “something over $10 million.”

      “If we can raise for maybe women’s health issues or something, if we can raise $10 or $15 million for charity,” he said. “We have had a couple of calls from the networks already and we’ll see.”

    • Happy 25th birthday, TV-2, or the rise and fall of independent Russian TV

      This month TV-2, an independent TV channel in the Siberian city of Tomsk, turns 25 years old. It hasn’t been on the air for 18 months.

    • Trump and the Polls of Loathing

      Caught between a cynical Clinton machine and a shape-changing reality television show, US politics has featured its latest twist in the saga of surges and poll ratings. Now, we are being told that Donald Trump does have a chance against Hillary Clinton, spluttering ahead in some of the figures.

      There should be no sharp intake of breath on this. Reactionary politics and a certain voodoo mastery of reality was already perfected by Ronald Reagan when he secured the White House and ensured the irrevocable decline of an ailing empire. Making America great has remained the caption of failed politics, but it seems entirely at home in the Trump argot.

    • The Bruenig Firing: ‘Civility’ As A Tool To Control Political Dissent

      The idea that political civility is a necessary element of political discourse—one which is meant to emulate a kind of ideal courtroom politesse—is a bourgeois conviction. Expressions of civility are said to uphold democratic standards and tame violent language, and are therefore considered hallmarks of respectability and, mostly importantly, of enlightenment.

      In a report from 2004 entitled Democracy Online, Zizi Papacharissi, professor and communications department head at the University of Illinois at Chicago, described George Washington’s work on the subject of civility as a guiding factor in the conceptualization of the characteristics of consummate citizenry. Papacharissi writes that this “model of civility…was integral to American citizenship and democracy,” guiding one’s morality, and above all, helped to “cool hot passions of citizenry.”

      This civility model is designed to restrain and adjudicate what’s often characterized as being the savagery of political disobedience. For those who depart from this standard, there may be material consequences.

      On May 20, the progressive public policy organization, Demos, fired Matt Bruenig, a popular writer who covered poverty and inequality.

    • Read Between the Lines: The Case for Bernie Sanders Running as an Independent

      Everyone seems to think Bernie Sanders is finished. The establishment wants him out, Hillary Clinton has moved onto the general election and pundits clamor over the mathematical impossibility of his nomination. Even Donald Trump, who likely has ulterior motives, has called attention to this reality. But through all of this, one individual appears unfazed: Bernie Sanders himself. He has been called to back away and give up, but he has done just the opposite. If anything, he has further embroiled and empowered himself and his movement with his recent rhetoric.

    • Who’s Lobbying for Millennial Interests? Meet the “AARP for Young People”

      Millennial voters have gotten a bad rap when it comes to politics. They’re often brushed off as self-obsessed and disengaged, a stigma rooted in their abysmal turnout in recent elections. Just 21 percent of millennials voted in the 2014 midterms.

    • ‘Game On’: With Clinton Refusing, Sanders Agrees to Debate Trump in California

      Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders have seemingly agreed to a one-on-one debate ahead of California’s primary on June 7—or, as Politico puts it, “the debate the world has been waiting for.”

      Appearing on ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live” on Wednesday night, Trump said he would debate Sanders if the proceeds from the event went to charity.

      “If I debated him it would have such high ratings,” the presumptive Republican nominee said.

      Minutes later, Sanders tweeted, “Game on.”

    • Jeffrey Sachs: Bernie Sanders easily wins the policy debate

      Mainstream U.S. economists have criticized Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders’s proposals as unworkable, but these economists betray the status quo bias of their economic models and professional experience. It’s been decades since the United States had a progressive economic strategy, and mainstream economists have forgotten what one can deliver. In fact, Sanders’s recipes are supported by overwhelming evidence — notably from countries that already follow the policies he advocates. On health care, growth and income inequality, Sanders wins the policy debate hands down.

    • Neck-and-Neck in California as Sanders Virtually Erases 50-Point Deficit

      Less than two weeks before California’s critical Democratic primary, Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton are locked in a dead heat in that state, according to a poll released Wednesday.

      The same poll (pdf) shows Sanders outperforming Clinton in a hypothetical match-up against presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump.

      The survey, conducted by the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC), shows that among Democratic primary likely voters, 46 percent support Clinton and 44 percent support Sanders. Sanders leads Clinton among those who are very liberal (64% to 35%) as well as among younger voters (66% to 27%). Latino voters are slightly more likely to support Clinton (52% to 43%), while white voters are more divided (47% Clinton, 41% Sanders).

      The San Jose Mercury News points out: “Sanders started the campaign a year ago trailing Clinton in California by more than 50 percentage points in early polls, but he had pared down her lead to single digits earlier this year. PPIC’s last poll in March found Sanders trailing by seven percentage points.”

    • Amid Election Chaos, Communities Show Where the Real Power Is

      Economic pain is the most obvious reason so many feel alienated. Many economists tell Americans we should be celebrating the recovery, but I found communities stuck in poverty and debt and lacking affordable health care, decent housing, and even safe water. We are told it is our own fault if we are struggling, even though the structure of the economy has shifted profoundly to the advantage of the superrich.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • European Parliament prepares for actual Internet Censorship using “Terrorism” as justification buzzword

      Under the pretext of fighting terrorism, groups in the European Parliament wants to give police the power to censor the Internet and even individual accounts with social media providers at will. This is not just a stark attempt to justify sharp reductions in liberty with the buzzword “terrorism”, it also flies in the face of the most fundamental anti-censorship principles. The Directive (sort of a European Federal Law) isn’t completed yet, but is starting to take shape, and it’s looking horrifying.

    • New test for VCE literature sparks censorship concerns

      Books, plays and films studied for VCE will soon be screened to ensure they don’t offend religious and cultural groups.

      Education Minister James Merlino has ordered the Victorian Curriculum Assessment Authority (VCAA) to review its text selection process for VCE English, literature, drama and theatre studies.

      A spokesman for Mr Merlino said the Minister requested to “extend” the guidelines to “ensure that the views and sensitivities of cultural and religious groups are considered”.

      This comes after two Jewish groups slammed the inclusion of a play on the VCE drama list, Tales of a City by the Sea, which depicted life during war in Gaza, and was written by Palestinian playwright Samah Sabawi.

    • A WTO challenge to China’s internet censorship is long overdue [Ed: Corporate lobby (AEI) wants to expand the Empire of Corporations to China and uses censorship as WTO excuse]
    • The Great Rap Censorship Scare of 1990

      Jack Thompson, a conservative lawyer from Coral Gables, spearheaded a campaign to restrict sales of the album in Florida’s Broward County, eventually leading to a U.S. District Court ruling that declared the album’s lyrics obscene. A record store owner in Ft. Lauderdale was subsequently arrested for selling As Nasty As They Wanna Be, and members of 2 Live Crew were detained and charged with obscenity after a show at an adults-only club in Hollywood, Florida.

    • Looking To Destroy A Media Organization Through Lawsuits Is A Big Deal Even If You Don’t Like The Media Organization

      So I had thought that our post yesterday about Peter Thiel allegedly financing Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against Gawker would be the only time we posted about that story, but a few things have happened that seem to merit a further post. First, Thiel has admitted to it, and insisted that he views it as “philanthropy.” There are a number of claims that Thiel makes that are quite troubling. First, he admits that he didn’t just back Hogan, but rather gave lawyers money to go hunting for anyone who might want to sue Gawker, directly out of spite.

      [...]

      Incredibly, Thiel, who has given a large amount of money to the Committee to Protect Journalists, and who has claimed to be a big supporter of freedom of expression and freedom of the press, pulled a classic “I support freedom of speech, but…” line in response to questions along those lines, basically saying that he doesn’t think Gawker counts.

    • Facebook admits: ‘Rogue employees’ may be behind censorship of conservatives

      After investigating itself, the social media giant Facebook said it saw no “systematic political bias,” but admitted that “rogue employees” may be behind the censorship of conservative news on the site, the Washington Times reported Monday. Facebook also said it couldn’t rule out the possibility these rogue employees unintentionally acted with malice in “isolated improper actions.” The report did not specify what these “actions” might have entailed.

    • Unrepentant Facebook Censors Complaints of Censorship, Makes Tiny Tweaks

      It’s been over a week since Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg met with leaders of conservative media to calm down accusations that the social media site was censoring conservative news and opinion. After the meeting one of the attendees, Media Research Center Pres. Brent Bozell “characterized the meeting between Zuckerberg and conservative leaders as generally positive and ‘cordial’ – but, also expressed a cautious wait-and-see reaction to Facebook’s promises of reform, citing the social media giant’s loss of public trust.” He also said “We’ll see how the [internal] investigation turns out”

    • Twitter abuse – ’50% of misogynistic tweets from women’

      Half of all misogynistic tweets posted on Twitter come from women, a study suggests.

      Over a three-week period, think tank Demos counted the number of uses of two particular words as indicators of misogyny.

      It found evidence of large-scale misogyny, with 6,500 unique users targeted by 10,000 abusive tweets in the UK alone.

    • Hong Kong cartoonist drops publisher amid charges of self-censorship

      A Hong Kong cartoonist claimed he is the victim of “self-censorship gone too far” after a publisher wanted to edit or delete content in his new political satire book.

      Artist Ar To said on Facebook Thursday that he couldn’t reach a compromise with the publisher, whom he did not wish to name. He is now seeking a new publisher who will issue the book without any changes.

    • ‘Satya’ to ‘Veerappan’: Watch Ram Gopal Varma talk about cinema, censorship

      Among other changes they demanded, Varma reveals that the Censors asked him to cut out a line from the film in which the real-life bandit Veerappan points out that LTTE chief Prabhakaran killed former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. Varma says the Censors expressed concern that these words uttered as a statement of fact could hurt Tamil sentiments and asked him to replace them with a speculative sentence about Prabhakaran’s role in Rajiv’s assassination.

    • ‘Don’t you know that you’re toxic?’

      Amos Yee is back: After an apparent short escape to Australia and less than a year since his jail stint, the controversial teen blogger with a potty mouth will be charged in court today. He faces eight charges, including five for hurting the feelings of Muslims and Christians. If convicted, he could go to jail for up to three years and be fined.

    • Singapore teenage blogger Amos Yee back in court for ‘insulting Islam’
    • Singapore blogger faces fresh insulting Islam charges
    • Local blogger Amos Yee to claim trial to 8 new charges
    • Amos Yee claims trial to 8 charges, bail extended
    • Amos Yee back in court, faces eight new charges
    • Teenage blogger Amos Yee faces 8 new charges
    • Teen blogger Amos Yee to claim trial to eight charges

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Privacy Shield must be Schremsproof, says one MEP—others wave it through

      MEPs have expressed concern about the many “deficiencies” in the current text of the Privacy Shield data-sharing deal with the US, and urged officials to negotiate a better agreement.

      In a non-binding resolution passed by 501 votes to 119 with 31 abstentions on Thursday, politicos urged the European Commission—which is the executive wing of the EU—to address issues such as US authorities’ access to data; the possibility of collecting bulk data in “exceptional cases” contrary to the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights; the independence of a proposed US ombudsperson, and the complexity of the redress system.

      The Privacy Shield deal is expected to replace the now defunct Safe Harbour mechanism to allow the transfer of European personal data to the US. Safe Harbour was ruled invalid by the European Court of Justice last October in the Max Schrems case. Many MEPs acknowledged that Privacy Shield was a substantial improvement on the previous system, however gaps opened up between political groups on how to approach it.

    • Microsoft and Facebook building underwater transatlantic ‘MAREA’ data cable [Ed: surveillance companies take control of the Internet backbone/infrastructure]

      As the world’s need for high-speed internet grows, there will be an increasing strain on existing infrastructure. While both the internet and the web can create a border-free exchange of data, something still needs to connect continents so that it can be shared. While you will likely never see it with your own eyes, there are actually data cables under the sea which connect large masses of land.

      Today, Microsoft and Facebook announce a partnership to build a transatlantic subsea data cable. Called ‘MAREA’, it will connect the United States to Europe. More specifically, it will connect the State of Virginia to the country of Spain. The project will begin this August, with a targeted completion date of October 2017.

    • Facebook and Microsoft to build private internet highway underwater

      The two technology companies announced on Thursday they are to install an undersea cable from the east coast of the US to Spain to help speed up their global internet services.

      Fast connectivity is particularly important to Facebook, which wants to encourage users across the world to broadcast live video and meet in virtual reality. Both activities can consume vast amounts of bandwidth.

    • Facebook and Microsoft team up to lay a massive internet cable across the Atlantic
    • Audio fingerprinting being used to track web users, study finds

      A wide-scale study of online trackers carried out by researchers at Princeton University has identified a new technique being used to try to strip web users of their privacy, as well as quantifying the ongoing usage of some better-known tracking techniques.

      The new technique unearthed by the study is based on fingerprinting a machine’s audio stack via the AudioContext API. So it’s not collecting sound played or recorded on a machine but rather harvesting the audio signature of the individual machine and using that as an identifier to track a web user.

    • Academics Make Theoretical Breakthrough in Random Number Generation

      Two University of Texas academics have made what some experts believe is a breakthrough in random number generation that could have longstanding implications for cryptography and computer security.

      David Zuckerman, a computer science professor, and Eshan Chattopadhyay, a graduate student, published a paper in March that will be presented in June at the Symposium on Theory of Computing. The paper describes how the academics devised a method for the generation of high quality random numbers. The work is theoretical, but Zuckerman said down the road it could lead to a number of practical advances in cryptography, scientific polling, and the study of other complex environments such as the climate.

    • Mission: Montreal! (Building the Next Generation of Onion Services)

      A few weeks ago, a small group of Tor developers got together in Montreal and worked on onion services for a full week. The event was very rewarding and we wrote this blog post to share with you how we spent our week! For the record, it was our second onion service hackfest, following the legendary Arlington Accords of July 2015.

    • Billionaire’s revenge: Facebook investor Peter Thiel’s nine-year Gawker grudge

      Billionaire Silicon Valley investor, Donald Trump delegate and Facebook board member Peter Thiel has made secrecy his brand. So when it emerged that Thiel appeared to be bankrolling former wrestler Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against Gawker, many people were surprised.

      Yet by publicly outing him as gay in 2007, Gawker founder Nick Denton shattered the privacy of Thiel’s fiercely guarded personal life and techno-libertarian vision. And Thiel, it turns out, can hold a grudge.

    • The name’s Mum – Spy Mum: Government recruiting middle-aged mums to be SPIES because of their ‘skills and mindset’
    • British spy chiefs’ mission to recruit female spooks
    • Wanted – Middle aged mothers to spy for MI5 (flexible hours available): Intelligence agencies target women after being told to become more diverse
    • Spy chiefs’ Mumsnet mission to recruit Jane Bonds [Ed: femmewashing day (appealing to women they spy on)]
    • Less than 10% of Germany’s SIGINT Spying Targets Terrorist

      Among the things I did was attend a presentation from Konstantin von Notz, one of the Bundestag members who is investigating Germany’s SIGINT spying in the wake of the Snowden leaks.

    • Surveillance cameras could put your home at risk

      FOX23’s Michelle Linn is taking a closer look at how security cameras could let anyone watch you
      Security experts say some websites give people access to security cameras

      For less than $200 people can install a security camera and keep an eye on what’s happening, but FOX23 found out it’s very easy for anyone to see what’s going on at their house.

    • Surveillance technology has advanced far beyond the laws that govern it

      Last week, we filmed our second episode of Ars Technica Live in Oakland, California, and we had a tremendously interesting conversation with UC Davis law professor Elizabeth Joh, who researches surveillance technology and policing. Right out of the gate, Joh made it clear that the problem isn’t surveillance per se—governments “need surveillance,” she said, to figure out what its citizens require in terms of benefits, help, and security. The problem is when this surveillance becomes invasive, and the government inhibits freedom of expression and punishes unconventional behavior. How do we balance the need for surveillance and the need for free expression and privacy in a democratic society?

      Joh talked a lot about the future legal landscape we’re creating with cutting-edge technologies like self-driving cars, facial recognition, and body cams. When you’re talking about law and policy, the issue is always that adoption of devices like body cams tends to precede careful thought about what rules will govern them. After the Ferguson protests, for example, police departments started using body cams as an accountability measure. But there are no federal guidelines for how cops will use these cams. Will they be able to turn them off whenever they want? Who has access to the data they collect? Can they use facial recognition in body cams? All of these questions remain unanswered, yet body cams are in widespread use across the US.

    • Secret Text in Senate Bill Would Give FBI Warrantless Access to Email Records

      A provision snuck into the still-secret text of the Senate’s annual intelligence authorization would give the FBI the ability to demand individuals’ email data and possibly web-surfing history from their service providers without a warrant and in complete secrecy.

      If passed, the change would expand the reach of the FBI’s already highly controversial national security letters. The FBI is currently allowed to get certain types of information with NSLs—most commonly information about the name, address, and call information associated with a phone number or details about a bank account.

      Since a 2008 Justice Department ruling, the FBI has not been allowed to use NSLs to demand “electronic communication transaction records” such as email subject lines and other metadata, or URLs visited.

    • Report: Impacts of surveillance on contemporary British activism

      St Andrews University and openDemocracy interviewed 25 activists, and surveyed more than a hundred, about the impacts of surveillance on activism in the UK. Here are our findings.

    • Top Websites Using Audio Fingerprinting to Secretly Track Web Users

      Despite browsing incognito, blocking advertisements, or hiding your tracks, some websites monitor and track your every move online using a new web-tracking technique called Audio Fingerprinting.

      This new fingerprinting technique can be utilized by technology and marketing companies to deliver targeted advertisements as well as by law enforcement to unmask VPN or Anonymous users, without even decrypting the traffic.

    • Government still holding on to 5 years of NSA phone-snooping metadata

      The National Security Agency’s phone-snooping program ended six months ago this Saturday, but the government is still holding on to the mountain of data it piled up over the previous five years, worrying civil liberties advocates who say it’s time to start expunging the legally questionable information.

      Government officials say they no longer access the information, but the intelligence community’s past behavior has some civil libertarians skeptical of those assurances. And the mere existence of the data, which includes the time, duration and numbers involved in phone calls, worries critics who say there’s no reason for it to be sitting under government control.

    • Feds say they have no evidence of any NSA surveillance of refuge occupiers

      Federal prosecutors say they have no evidence that any national security surveillance was used to investigate the armed takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.

      Assistant U.S. Attorney Ethan Knight said intelligence agents made no wiretap interceptions in the case, and he’s not aware of any electronic surveillance by national security agencies targeting the 41-day occupation of the refuge in Harney County.

      [...]

      The surveillance under question falls under what’s called Executive Order 12333, a Reagan-era directive signed in 1981 to extend the powers of U.S. intelligence agencies and direct the leaders of federal agencies to cooperate with CIA requests for information.

    • America shut down the original NSA because ‘gentlemen do not read each other’s mail’ [Ed: B-I puff pieces for NSA continue]
    • Don’t Spy On Us: British surveillance campaign ignores BND and NSA and resorts to orientalism

      Stereotypes about the “threat from the east” should have been buried along with the Cold War. Regrettably, they are seeping back into Western discourse. Such crude pigeonholing coarsens debate as a new British poster campaign proves.

      Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping are the poster boys for a new British anti-surveillance advertising campaign. Meanwhile, Barack Obama and Angela Merkel are absent – never mind the ample proof showing that the NSA and BND routinely spy on ordinary citizens.

      The BND is so generous with Germans’ most private information it routinely passes it on to NSA colleagues. On the other hand, there is no proof the Russian and Chinese services have developed, or are deploying, data gathering schemes similar to their Western counterparts.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • G4S promises (again) to repaint asylum seeker red doors and relocate families at risk

      Back in January I helped The Times expose racial abuse of asylum seekers whose landlords in the north east of England — the security company G4S and its subcontractor Jomast — had painted their front doors a distinctive red.

      People who had fled their home countries to escape persecution reported having dog excrement pushed through their letterboxes and graffiti daubed on their doors, because their homes were so easy to locate.

    • Will Canada Recognise Rights of Indigenous Peoples in Developing Countries Too?

      While Canada’s long-awaited support for the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples brought hope and celebration last week, it’s not yet clear whether the rights of Indigenous people in developing countries harmed by Canadian mining companies will also be included.

      The Special Rapporteur on the rights of Indigenous Peoples, Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, told IPS that Canada’s support for the Declaration is a “breath of fresh air.”

      For almost a decade, Ottawa had voted against the Declaration, a global set of collective human rights covering an array of indigenous issues. The Conservative government that was voted out last year claimed that the provision requiring government to consult indigenous groups before making any decision that might impact their way of life or their ability to exercise rights over traditional lands and territories would amount to a indigenous veto on major resource projects. Signing the Declaration would be ignoring the human rights of non-indigenous Canadians, it asserted.

    • Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson Takes High-School Detention to a New Level

      Thursday, Jan. 28, was a cold morning in Durham, North Carolina. Wildin David Guillen Acosta went outside to head to school, but never made it. He was thrown to the ground and arrested by agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). He has been in detention ever since. Wildin, now 19 years old, fled his home in Olancho, Honduras more than two years ago. He was detained when crossing the border, but, as he was a minor at the time, he was allowed to join his family in North Carolina. He started out at Riverside High School, and was set to graduate this June. He wanted to become an engineer. Instead, he has been locked up in the notorious Stewart Detention Center in rural Lumpkin, Georgia, which is run by the for-profit Corrections Corporation of America.

    • Theresa May launches review of Sharia law in England and Wales

      The Government has announced the launch of its long-awaited independent review into Sharia law in England and Wales, to be chaired by Professor Mona Siddiqui.

      It said that there is “evidence some Sharia councils may be working in a discriminatory and unacceptable way, seeking to legitimise forced marriage and issuing divorces that are unfair to women”. A statement released by the Home Office claimed this was “contrary to the teachings of Islam.”

    • Sharia councils face inquiry into ‘discrimination against women’

      Home Secretary Theresa May has launched an independent inquiry into the state of Sharia law in the UK to examine whether Islamic courts are being used to support forced marriage and issue unfair divorces.

      The government is concerned that some Sharia councils in Britain may be misusing the religious legal code to cause “harm” in communities.

      The Home Office announced the review, which will be chaired by Islam expert Professor Mona Siddiqui, on Thursday.

      The inquiry is part of the government’s counter-extremism strategy and is expected to be completed by 2017.

    • Holocaust Survivor and Human Rights Activist Hedy Epstein Dies at 91

      Holocaust survivor Hedy Epstein, 91, died at her home in St. Louis, Missouri, USA, on May 26, 2016. An internationally renowned, respected and admired advocate for human and civil rights, Hedy was encircled by friends who lovingly cared for her at home.

      Born August 15, 1924, in the Bavarian region of Germany, her lifelong commitment to human rights was formed by the horrific experiences she and her family endured under the repressive Nazi regime.

    • NYPD Commissioner Calls Rappers ‘Thugs,’ Blames Them For Violence At Concert

      By calling rappers “thugs” Bratton is relying on coded language with specific, racist associations for black men.

    • Former NBA Player Calls Out Racist Train Rider

      On Friday, Thomas posted an account on Facebook about an experience he had while riding a train in an unnamed city. He wrote that he asked to sit in the empty seat next to a white woman, and she told him it was taken. Moments later, however, when a white man asked for the same seat, she moved her things for him.

    • We Shall be the Prey and the Vulture

      The police kill protestors all over the country and vulnerable groups like prisoners, sex workers, street traders and squatters are ruled with violence all over the country. But while the most egregious single incident of rule by violence was, of course, the massacre of striking workers at Marikana near Rustenburg in 2012 the problem of political violence is particularly acute in the province of KwaZulu-Natal. It is usually assumed that this is rooted in the militarisation of politics in this part of the country during the last years of apartheid.

    • Cancelled brain scan could have saved UK immigration detainee

      Inquest, Day Four: Neurologist testifies that he might have saved 25 year old Bruno Dos Santos.

    • How Anti-Choice Groups Push Message “Directly Into Women’s Phones”
    • Saudi Cleric Says Posing for Photos With Cats Is Forbidden

      A prominent Saudi cleric has declared photographs with cats, and other animals, forbidden unless completely necessary due to an upsurge in Saudis “who want to be like Westerners.”

      On a televised broadcast, Sheikh Saleh Bin Fawzan Al-Fazwan, a member of the Saudi Council of Senior Scholars, was told about “a new trend of taking pictures with cats has been spreading among people who want to be like Westerners.”

    • Woman left with horrific burns after acid attack for rejecting marriage proposal

      A young Pakistani woman had her skin burned off in a brutal acid attack for turning down a marriage proposal.

      Saima Mehmood, 21, from North Karachi, had acid thrown in her face as punishment for refusing to marry a suitor, leaving her with horrific injuries.

      The victim recently got engaged to another man, resulting in the revenge attack, according to The Express Tribune.

    • Elderly Christian woman stripped naked and paraded through streets by mob

      The 300-strong mob of Muslim men in rural Egypt also burned down seven homes belonging to Orthodox Coptic families, over rumours of an affair between a local Christian man and a Muslim woman

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • EU Commission Releases Plans To More Directly Regulate Internet, Pretending It’s Not Regulating The Internet

      Well, this isn’t a surprise. After all, we warned you that it was likely to happen, and we helped get together folks to warn the EU Commission that this was a bad idea, but the EU Commission has always seemed dead set on a plan that they believe will hold back big successful American internet firms, while fostering support for European ones. This week they made their first move by releasing details of some of their plans. This is all part of the “Digital Single Market” plan, which, in theory, makes a ton of sense. The idea is to knock down geographical regulatory barriers on the internet, such as geoblocking. And the first part of the EU’s plan is right in line with that idea and makes perfect sense. It talks about getting rid of geoblocking and also making cross-border delivery of packages easier and less expensive — basically making e-commerce work better. That’s all good.

      But it’s the second part that is concerning, and that’s where they start talking about updating “audiovisual rights” and the regulation of “online platforms.” The audiovisual rights stuff is getting most of the press attention, because of silly rules like requiring video platforms to promote more European-created content.

    • As Expected, Verizon’s Attempt To Woo Millennials Is Falling Flat On Its Face

      For years now Verizon has made it clear that it no longer wants to be in the fixed-line broadband business. Despite countless billions in taxpayer subsidies and numerous unfinished obligations, the company has all-but frozen serious fiber deployments. It has also been either selling off unwanted DSL customers to smaller, ill-equipped telcos (which which almost always ends poorly for everybody except Verizon accountants and lawyers) or has quite literally tried to drive unwanted users away with both rate hikes and apathy.

      Instead, Verizon executives decided to try and transform the stodgy old telco into a sexy new Millennial-focused advertising juggernaut. So far that has involved launching the company’s Millennial-targeted “Go90″ streaming video service, spending $4.4 billion on acquiring AOL, trying to acquire the drifting wreckage that is Yahoo, and developing controversial stealth ad tracking technology to build covert profiles of customer behavior as they wander around the Internet.

    • How the Internet works: Submarine fiber, brains in jars, and coaxial cables

      But how does it work? Have you ever thought about how that cat picture actually gets from a server in Oregon to your PC in London? We’re not simply talking about the wonders of TCP/IP or pervasive Wi-Fi hotspots, though those are vitally important as well. No, we’re talking about the big infrastructure: the huge submarine cables, the vast landing sites and data centres with their massively redundant power systems, and the elephantine, labyrinthine last-mile networks that actually hook billions of us to the Internet.

    • Cities Rushing To Restrict Airbnb Are About To Discover That They’re Violating Key Internet Law

      Fights over tech policy are going increasingly local. Most technology regulations have been federal issues. There have been a few attempts to regulate on the state level — including Pennsylvania’s ridiculous attempt to demand ISPs filter out porn in the early 2000s. But state legislators and Attorneys General eventually learned (the hard way) that federal law — specifically CDA 230 — prevents any laws that look to hold internet platforms liable for the actions of their users. This is why state Attorneys General hate Section 230, but they need to deal with it, because it’s the law.

      It’s looking like various cities are now about to go through the same “education” process that the states went through in the last decade. With the rise of “local” services like Uber and Airbnb, city by city regulation is becoming a very, very big deal. And it seems that a bunch of big cities are rapidly pushing anti-Airbnb bills that almost certainly violate Section 230 and possibly other federal laws as well. In particular, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Chicago are all pushing laws to further regulate platforms for short term housing rentals (and yes, the SF effort comes just months after another shortsighted attempt to limit Airbnb failed).

    • House Budget Bill Guts Net Neutrality, Kills FCC Authority — All Because The FCC Dared To Stand Up To Comcast & AT&T

      We’ve noted a few times now that ever since the FCC passed net neutrality rules, loyal ISP politicians in the House and Senate have been engaged in a full-court press to punish the agency for daring to stand up to big broadband ISPs. That has involved an endless parade of taxpayer-funded hearings pretending to be about agency transparency and accountability — but are really just about publicly shaming the agency. It has also involved a laundry list of bills that attempt to thoroughly gut FCC funding and authority under the pretense of saving the country from a power-mad FCC.

    • The Next Battle for Net Neutrality Is Getting Bloody

      Net neutrality is a slippery subject. Months after the government appeared to get greedy telecom companies in check, carriers have come up with another clever trick to make more money and jeopardize the open internet. The latest trick is something called zero-rating, and your mobile carrier probably already uses—or abuses—this net neutrality loophole.

      This week, 58 tech companies, including Reddit, Yelp, and Kickstarter, asked the FCC in a letter to lead a transparent discussion about zero-rating practices. Basically, they want the same open discussion that spurred 4 million people to send comments to the FCC because they believe zero-rating policy could have a dramatic effect on the health of net neutrality in the US.

    • House spending bill takes swipes at FCC rules

      Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee are pushing a spending bill that would temporarily block a slate of controversial regulations at the Federal Communications Commission.

      The panel’s Financial Service and General Government spending bill would block the agency from enforcing its net neutrality rules until a court challenge is over, and it would block the commission from using those rules to regulate broadband prices.

      In addition, the spending bill would force the FCC to complete a study before it finishes writing its regulations to open up the TV set-top box market. It would also force the commission to post the text of new rules on its website for 21 days before any vote.

      A House Appropriations subcommittee advanced the bill Wednesday, which will later get taken up by the full committee.

      The bill is largely a GOP wish list. Similar provisions to blunt the agency’s internet service regulations were included in last year’s spending bill. But they were stripped out of a final deal that make it to President Obama’s desk.

      Republicans are almost universally against the FCC’s net neutrality rules approved last year, which reclassify internet service providers under strict common carrier regulations. The new authority gives the agency power to ban internet service providers from blocking, throttling, create fast lanes or unreasonably discriminating against certain kinds of internet traffic.

    • Jesper Lund – Internet Regulation: A Danish Perspective

  • DRM

    • Huge Billboard Protests VPN Blocking at Netflix HQ

      Netflix’s ongoing VPN crackdown is meeting fierce resistance from concerned users around the world. Today, privacy activists are driving a massive billboard around Netflix’s headquarters, hoping the company will respect their privacy and reverse the broad VPN ban.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Threatening someone with IP infringement? Law Commission explains what you need to know about the new IP (Unjustified Threats) Bill

      No threats action can be brought against a professional adviser acting for a client in a professional capacity providing legal or attorney services for which they are regulated.

    • Copyrights

      • Should it be legal to resell e-books, software, and other digital goods?

        One of the most interesting questions in the world of modern entertainment may soon be pondered at Europe’s top court: can people resell the e-books that they buy?

        This question is vital in the digital era, and relevant not just to the world of book publishing, but also the realms of music, film, and games. You’re able to resell the CDs and DVDs that you buy, so why can’t you do the same with downloaded copies of albums and movies?

        The case involves a Dutch second-hand e-book platform called Tom Kabinet, which took a previous ruling by the European Court of Justice, involving second-hand software, as the go-ahead for its own business model. Since 2014, Tom Kabinet has been at war with the Dutch Publishers Association (NUV), which sees it as a threat to the entire book industry.

      • Bankruptcy Fight May Be The Least Of Team Prenda’s Concerns, As The FBI Comes Knocking

        Of course, it’s been three years since then and a few things have happened. One of the three main members of Team Prenda (though, probably the least involved of the three) passed away. But the other two are both facing bar complaints over ethical violations. Paul Hansmeier also famously tried to declare bankruptcy, but appears to have lied to the court in the process. Fight Copyright Trolls just recently had an update on that case, and suffice it to say, it’s hilarious. Hansmeier has not just lost his lawyer after she told the court that she could no longer represent him and be a servant of the court (i.e., heavily hinting that Hansmeier was likely asking her to lie to the court), but he’s also lashed out at the trustee handling his bankruptcy for… buying a new car.

        And, of course, both Hansmeier and Steele have moved on to a revamped version of the same old trolling trick, but this time using the Americans with Disabilities Act as the fulcrum, rather than copyright law.

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