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● 01.10.16

● Links 10/1/2016: New Tails, GNOME Airplane/WiFi Hot Key

Posted in News Roundup at 5:18 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

=> ↺ 2016: Year of the GNU/Linux phone

• Well, Linux is running significant fraction of cellphones these days… but usually very old and very patched kernel. But maybe we can run mainline kernel with free userland?

=> ↺ My payphone runs Linux now.

• Here is the sordid tale of how I made a payphone run Linux. I’m not so great at hardware hacks, and it shows. My bumbling exists for your amusement.

Kernel Space

=> ↺ Linux 4.3 vs. Liquorix 4.3 vs. Linux 4.4 Kernel Tests

• Liquorix is the Linux kernel spin that’s optimized for “desktop, multimedia, and gaming workloads.” Liquorix isn’t a fork of the Linux kernel but just a specialized configuration of the kernel and does include some out-of-tree patches. Among the changes for Liquorix right now are enabling Zen interactive tuning, hard kernel preemption, budget fair queue, AuFS support, and it’s basically an anti-debugging kernel in order to ensure faster performance.

=> ↺ Kernel 4.4 RC8 Has Been Released, Coming With Updates

Graphics Stack

=> ↺ It Will Be Interesting To See If AMD Supports Coreboot For Zen

• This year we should finally see the release of the highly anticipated AMD Zen processors that will hopefully better position their processors to compete with Intel. However, one of the unanswered questions about this next-gen platform is whether it will support Coreboot as an optional open-source firmware to replace the proprietary UEFI/BIOS.

Applications

=> ↺ Uget 2.0.4 (Download Manager) Is Now Available For All The Supported Ubuntu Systems Via PPA

=> ↺ Simple Image Resizer (SIR) 3.0 Brings A Few Changes Only

• As you may know, Simple Image Resizer (SIR) is an open source tool written in C++ and created via the Qt GUI toolkit, for batch resizing, rotating and converting images. Also, it has a feature for adding frames or text and apply color and gradient filters to the images, some functions to manipulate the histogram and works with multiple photos by splitting the tasks on the processors.

=> ↺ Atom 1.3.3 Has Been Released

• Atom is an open-source, multi-platform text editor developed by GitHub, having a simple and intuitive graphical user interface and a bunch of interesting features for writing: CSS, HTML, JavaScript and other web programming languages. Among others, it has support for macros, auto-completion a split screen feature and it integrates with the file manager.

=> ↺ Kobo firmware 3.19.5761 mega update (KSM, nickel patch, ssh, fonts)

• Since 3.18.0 there have been two new firmwares for the Kobo eInk devices. For the very recently released firmware release 3.19.5761 I have updated my collection of patches and features. As with previous mega-package, I prepared updates for all three hardwares, Mark4 (Glo), Mark5 (Aura), and Mark6 (GloHD), but only the one for Mark6 is tested by myself.

Proprietary

=> ↺ Telegram 0.9.18 Has Been Released

• Telegram Desktop is an open-source and cross-platform Telegram client for Linux. The client has support for notifications, sending messages and media files, and inserting emoji.

=> ↺ Telegram Desktop 0.9.18 Is Available For Ubuntu And Fedora Via PPA And COPR

• Telegram Desktop is an open-source and cross-platform Telegram client for Linux. The client has support for notifications, sending messages and media files, and inserting emoji.

• While the Telegram Desktop client is still under development, it allows the users to send and receive messages from the Linux desktop, has a feature for synching across all the supported platform, so you can read your mobile notifications from both the computer and your phone, without missing anything. Also, it has file transfer support and the users can create groups for up to 200 people and send broadcast messages. Unfortunately, support for sending voice messages has not been implemented yet, the users can only listen or download received voice messages.

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ Looking forward to GCC6 – nice new warning -Wmisleading-indentation

=> ↺ Linux Kernel 3.12.52 Released, Install/Upgrade Now In Ubuntu/Linux Mint

=> ↺ How To Install Stellarium 0.14.2 On Ubuntu 16.04, Ubuntu 15.10, Ubuntu 14.04 And Derivatives

=> ↺ How to Install Atom 1.3.3 on Fedora 22, Fedora 21 and CentOS 7

=> ↺ Shutter 0.93.1 Is A Bug-Fix Release

=> ↺ Managing Virtual Network Devices with systemd-networkd

=> ↺ NLP: Viterbi Named-Entity Tagger

Wine or Emulation

=> ↺ The Wine Development Release 1.9.1 Is Now Available

Games

=> ↺ Unvanquished Free First-Person Shooter Game Gets Its First Release for 2016

• The guys over Unvanquished, a free and open-source FPS (First-person shooter) game for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows operating systems have just returned from their Winter holidays and released the first Alpha build for 2016.

=> ↺ SDL 2.0.4 Was Quietly Released Last Week With Wayland & Mir By Default

• SDL 2.0.4 is the release that most notably enables Mir and Wayland support by default! It was just by chance I stumbled across the new release earlier today and doesn’t seem to really be advertised. SDL 2.0.4 was long overdue and besides enabling the Mir and Wayland back-end support by default it also adds IBus IME support, support for EmScripten and Google Native Client, modern CPU feature detection, Vivante video driver support, and much more.

=> ↺ Slime Rancher pre-alpha, DRM free, available for Linux

• Slime Rancher is the tale of Beatrix LeBeau, a plucky, young rancher who sets out for a life a thousand light years away from Earth on the ‘Far, Far Range’ where she tries her hand at making a living wrangling slimes. With a can-do attitude, plenty of grit, and her trusty vacpack, Beatrix attempts to stake a claim, amass a fortune, and avoid the continual peril that looms from the rolling, jiggling avalanche of slimes around every corner.

=> ↺ SteamOS beta updated to support Xbox One Elite gamepad

• For those not keeping an eye on the latest SteamOS updates, a new beta was pushed out a few days ago! It’s good to see Valve keeping up with new hardware support.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

=> ↺ KDE Frameworks 5.18.0 Arrives with Lots of Fixes and Improvements

• KDE Frameworks 5.18.0 has been released by the KDE Community, and its developers have upgraded a large number of packages and fixed a ton of problems.

=> ↺ KDE Frameworks 5.18 Released With Numerous Additions

=> ↺ High DPI with FLTK

• After switchig to a notebook with higher resolution monitor, I noticed, that the FLTK based ICC Examin application looked way too small. Having worked in the last months much with pixel independent resolutions in QML, it was a pain to see the non adapted FLTK GUI. I had the impression, that despite of several years of a very appreciated advancement of monitor technology, some parts of graphics stacks did not move and take advantage. So I became curious on how to solve high DPI support the hard way.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

=> ↺ GNOME 3.20 To Have Better Support For Airplane/WiFi Hot Keys

• GNOME developer Bastien Nocera has landed support in GNOME Settings Daemon for supporting the airplane (WiFi and Bluetooth) hot-keys with small notification overlays.

• The enable/disable Bluetooth and airplane/WiFi keys on many laptops should now work with GNOME for displaying small notifications when pressing these keys. This is building off the rfkill D-Bus service and new work being done in gnome-settings-daemon for audio jack notifications.

=> ↺ GNOME 3.20 to Finally Integrate Airplane Mode

=> ↺ Support for “Airplane mode” keys

• As we were working on audio jack notifications, and were wondering whether the type of notification we’d pop up in this case could be reused in other cases, I encountered a feature request that could now be solved easily with the rfkill D-Bus service we added to gnome-settings-daemon for the 3.10 release.

=> ↺ GNOME’s Mutter Tiling Code Gets Rewritten

• Prolific GNOME contributor Jasper St. Pierre has landed new tiling code into the Mutter window manager / compositor. This new tiling code is fully rewritten and based around constrained edges rather than tiling states. The new mode allows for one free-floating edge that can be resized and this new code also supports corner tiling.

Distributions

Red Hat Family

=> ↺ Red Hat Inc (RHT) Set to Announce Earnings on Thursday

=> ↺ Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) Stock Rating Analysis & Evaluation

• There are a large number of websites providing various forms of ratings on stocks and in particular Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT). They include crowd-sourced research portals as well as those from professional research analysts. Both can be helpful in helping investors make informed decisions when it comes to picking stocks.

=> ↺ Key Stocks of the Day: Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT)

• As it reflects the theoretical cost of buying the company’s shares, the market cap of Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) is currently rolling at 14468.62, making it one of the key stocks in today’s market. Hence, the existing market cap indicates a preferable measure in comprehending the size of the company rather than its worth.

Debian Family

Derivatives

=> ↺ Tails 1.8.2 is out

• This release fixes numerous security issues. All users must upgrade as soon as possible.

=> ↺ Debian LTS Work December 2015

• This was my eighth month as a Freexian sponsored LTS contributor. I was assigned 8 hours for the month of December. It’s also the month in which I (re)learned an important lesson.

• I decided to take another run at backporting the security fixes for Quassel. Unlike the first time, I was successful at getting the fixes backported. Then I ran into another problem: the changes took advantage of new features in c++11 such as std::function.

Canonical/Ubuntu

=> ↺ Ubuntu Touch to Support Encryption of User Data

• The Ubuntu Touch operating system is also going to provide support for encryption of user data; developers have revealed.

• It wasn’t a secret that Ubuntu Touch will get encryption, but it’s also not listed as an upcoming feature. It’s buried in a wiki entry with plans for Ubuntu Touch, but it’s nice to see that it’s still being considered, even if it’s not going to arrive anytime soon.

=> ↺ Ubuntu ‘Spyware’ Will Be Disabled In Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

• Unity’s controversial online search feature is being disabled by default in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, due for release in April.

• Search terms typed into the Unity 7 Dash search bar will only show local file, folder and app results. No search terms will be sent to Canonical or passed to third party results providers, as is currently the case.

Devices/Embedded

=> ↺ How To Set Up The Raspberry PI 2 Model B

• This article is fairly late onto the scene but my original articles about the Raspberry PI are all becoming a little bit long in the tooth and so it is time to revisit them and make them relevant for 2016 and beyond.

• In this guide I will show you how to buy a Raspberry PI, introduce you to some key accessories, introduce you to some non-key accessories and also show you how to set up the operating system.

• Other guides will be following on from this to show how to connect using SSH and via VNC so that you don’t need it plugged into a monitor/television.

Phones

Android

=> ↺ BlackBerry Priv owners get Virtual Expert testing app for Android

• BlackBerry Priv owners can now take advantage of BlackBerry’s Virtual Expert tool on Android. The free download lets users check the health of their handset’s battery, and carry out a number of diagnostic tests on things like the display, camera, speakers, and more.

=> ↺ iOS and Android security in the spotlight in 2016

• 2015 was a year for the record books in information and cyber security. Dozens of new vulnerabilities were uncovered, and government organisations, businesses and individuals continued to find themselves victims of high-profile data breaches.

=> ↺ 5 Android apps you shouldn’t miss this week! – Android Apps Weekly

=> ↺ Best of CES 2016: the most impressive products from the show

• If there’s one event which is guaranteed to signal the start of a new year in tech, it’s the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), which took place this year between January 6th and January 9th in Las Vegas.

=> ↺ These unlocked Android phones from CES 2016 are the real reason why Apple is going to struggle in 2016

=> ↺ AT&T’s New Android App Lets You Send And Receive Text Messages From Landlines (Remember Those?)

=> ↺ Port Android To Old PCs For Some New Tricks With Remix OS: Here’s The Deal

=> ↺ Casio WSD-F10 Android Wear smartwatch hands-on review

• Don’t let the dreary name fool you – Casio’s new Android Wear smartwatch is definitely worth getting excited about, especially if you’re the type of person who loves nothing more than wading through wild streams and gutting spear-caught salmon.

Free Software/Open Source

=> ↺ Open source makes Big Data analytics software appealing to SMEs

• Big Data Analytics software revenues will experience strong growth, doubling its current global 2015 revenue of $36.20 billion (US Dollars) to $73.77 billion by 2021 and reaching $81 billion by 2022, a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 12% in the next seven years, according to Strategy Analytics IoT Strategies report “Big Data Analytics: The Internet of Things (IoT) Differentiator.”

• Strategy Analytics says that much of Big Data Analytics software will be open source which is less expensive than proprietary software. It will also have the ability to run on commodity hardware, which OEM vendors are betting will help broaden its appeal to small and midsize (SMBs) and midsize enterprises (SMEs).

Events

=> ↺ Li-f-e at BITA Show 2016

• BITA IT Show, the biggest IT exhibition in western India is coming to town on 24-26 January, We will be there promoting Li-f-e. If you are in this part of the world, drop in to check it out.

CMS

=> ↺ A WordPress Plugin to list posts in complex nested websites

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

=> ↺ GCC 6 Will Warn You About Misleading Code Indentations

• As reminded this weekend by Red Hat developer Mark Wielaard, GCC 6 will warn you about misleading code indentations.

• Among the numerous GCC 6 features to have been built up over the past year was the new -Wmisleading-indentation warning. This warning will notify you when it appears there is code that wasn’t indented properly and so may not match the intended logic of the developer.

Openness/Sharing

Open Data

=> ↺ Please support the public transportation map of Manugua

=> ↺ Public Transport Map of Managua

Programming

=> ↺ There Will Be Many Features Coming For PHP 7.1

• PHP 7 was just released over one month ago but there is already much work going into PHP 7.1, the next major update to this widely-used web programming language…

Leftovers

=> ↺ Yahoo planning 10% layoffs as early as this month, report says

=> ↺ Microsoft killed Yahoo

• Yahoo plans to lay off 10 percent of its workforce as early as this month.

• The reorganization would eliminate 1,000 positions at the troubled company, according to Business Insider, citing sources close to the situation. Cuts are expected across the board, but will hit Yahoo’s media business, European operations and platforms-technology group harder than the rest of the company.

• “A team is working on it and they want to do it this quarter,” a source told Business Insider. The company has not commented on the report.

=> ↺ Super Thursday: what do the polls say about Britain’s bumper election day in May?

• Although we don’t yet know the date of the EU referendum, it is likely to be in 2016, and we already have had a great amount of polling for it. An average of EU referendum polls in December 2015 put the ‘Remain’ camp on 45.1%, the ‘Leave’ camp on 39.1% and ‘Don’t Knows’ on 15.4%. Excluding don’t knows, that’s a Remain-Leave split of 54%-46%. This lead is smaller than it was at other points in 2015, however; in June, the Remain campaign’s lead was 14 points. It’s now 6. In June, YouGov showed Remain leading by a 54-46 margin; they now show Leave leading by 51-49.

=> ↺ Twitter goes beyond 140 characters and I still hate it

• There have been a ton of reports in the media that Twitter developers are working on the ability of users to tweet longer messages that go far beyond the current 140 character limit. The company may even go as far as allowing a 10,000 character limit for tweets.

Health/Nutrition

=> ↺ 8 Signs Americans Are Moving Towards a Healthier, Saner Diet

• One of 2015’s food trends, in fact, was a craze for healthy maize. Organic, GMO-free corn products like Kiddylicious Sweetcorn Rice Rounds, Off the Cob Sweet Corn Tortilla Chips, Pipsnacks Popcorn and Pop Art Snacks Tandoori Yogurt Popcorn tantalized health-conscious taste buds at the 61st Annual Summer Fancy Food Show last summer in New York City.

=> ↺ Boozing is unsafe at ‘any level’, thunders chief UK.gov quack

• The government’s chief advisor on health ignored more than 80 studies to produce her new Puritanical guidelines on booze – which asks Britons to forego their Friday drink.

• Civil servant Dame Sally Davies has drawn up the lowest recommendations in the West: there is no “safe drinking level”, her team declared.

• The question is what justification was used to get there. The answer isn’t pretty for “evidence based” policy.

• Repeated studies have shown that alcohol in moderation prolongs life: it reduces the risk of heart disease and strokes. In fact the benefits of alcohol in preventing strokes and heart disease are far clearer than the negatives of drinking.

=> ↺ It’s Not Just Shkreli: Another Pharma Giant Hikes Drug Prices

• Former pharma CEO Martin Shkreli, widely reviled for dramatically hiking the price of a life-saving drug used by HIV and cancer patients, is in good company.

• Starting at the beginning of 2016, the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer Inc. quietly jacked up the U.S. prices of over 100 of its drugs, some by nearly a fifth.

• Reuters reported the findings on Friday, citing statistics from the information services company Wolters Kluwer that were included in a research note from by UBS Securities.

• “UBS said Pfizer increased prices by 20 percent for anticonvulsant Dilantin, hormone therapy Menest, angina drug Nitrostat, Tykosyn for irregular heartbeat, and antibiotic Tygacil,” Reuters noted.

• “The analyst report said U.S. prices were raised on a total of 105 Pfizer drugs,” the outlet continued. “No price reductions were reported.”

• Pfizer’s drug hike is consistent with broad industry trends.

=> ↺ Could Getting Rid Of Helmets Actually Make Football Safer?

• These days — thanks to mounting scientific research and the Hollywood movie Concussion — the public is much more aware of the fact that playing football can damage your brain. So now the question is: What, if anything, can be done to make the most popular sport in America safer?

• Recent research suggests the answer to that question might be counter-intuitive: getting players to take off their helmets.

• Researchers at the University of New Hampshire found that regular helmetless-tackling drills reduced the number of overall head impacts suffered by the participating players by 28 percent. This reduction was the result of removing helmets only for five minutes of drills after a few select practices — in this case, twice a week during the three-week preseason and once a week during the regular season.

• [...]

• “In football there are so many head impacts because their heads are protected,” Swartz told ThinkProgress. “The helmets, while they do serve a function, also introduce a false sense of security.”

Security

=> ↺ 602 Gbps DDoS Attack On BBC Proves That 2016 Isn’t Going To Be Any Different

• On New Year’s eve, the BBC website and iPlayer service went down due to a massive Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. The attack peaked up to 602 Gbps, according to the claims made by the New World Hacking group, who took the responsibility of the attack. In another recent attack, the Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s main campaign website was also targeted by the same group.

=> ↺ Fatally weak MD5 function torpedoes crypto protections in HTTPS and IPSEC

• If you thought MD5 was banished from HTTPS encryption, you’d be wrong. It turns out the fatally weak cryptographic hash function, along with its only slightly stronger SHA1 cousin, are still widely used in the transport layer security protocol that underpins HTTPS. Now, researchers have devised a series of attacks that exploit the weaknesses to break or degrade key protections provided not only by HTTPS but also other encryption protocols, including Internet Protocol Security and secure shell.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

=> ↺ North Korea: How Many Wake-Up Calls Will It Take?

• As the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have repeatedly warned, “We must abolish nuclear weapons before they abolish us.” This will require good faith negotiations to end the nuclear arms race and achieve nuclear zero. And these negotiations must be convened and led by the US and Russia, the two most powerful nuclear-armed countries in the world.

=> ↺ Defense Industry Revenue Forecast Gushes Over Global Turmoil

• The global aerospace and defense industry is out of its doldrums. According to a new report by the accounting firm Deloitte, “the resurgence of global security threats” promises a lucrative “rebound” in defense spending.

• The report alerts investors that “revenue growth” is “expected to take a positive turn” due to the terrorism and war in the Middle East and the tensions in Eastern Europe and the South China Sea.

=> ↺ ‘I went to join Isis in Syria, taking my four-year-old. It was a journey into hell’

• Sophie Kasiki stared at the photograph of a young English-speaking boy in a camouflage uniform and black bandana covered in Arabic calling for unbelievers to be killed in the latest Islamic State propaganda.

• Her eyes welled and she swallowed hard. “That could have been my son,” she said, her firm voice wavering. “That’s hard for me to say and makes me want to cry. I would have killed us both rather than let him become a killer, rather than let him fall into the claws of those monsters.”

=> ↺ U.S. Dropped 23,144 Bombs on Muslim-Majority Countries in 2015

• Council of Foreign Relations resident skeptic Micah Zenko recently tallied up how many bombs the United States has dropped on other countries and the results are as depressing as one would think. Zenko figured that since Jan. 1, 2015, the U.S. has dropped around 23,144 bombs on Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, all countries that are majority Muslim.

=> ↺ Latin America Has to Fight and Win!

• Indigenous people of Bolivia are proudly in possession of their own land.

• Venezuela has been inspiring the entire Latin America and the world by its internationalism and determined struggle against Western imperialism.

• Chile, step by small step, has been dismantling the grotesque legacy of Pinochet’s dictatorship, moving firmly towards socialism.

=> ↺ Though GOP Blames Obama, North Korea Developed Its Nuclear Program Under Republicans

• Despite claims to the contrary, strong stances have not always worked in the past against North Korea. Ronald Reagan was in office in 1986 when plutonium was first produced in a North Korean reactor. They continued their program under President George H.W. Bush, producing enough plutonium to make 1-2 bombs.

• During Bill Clinton’s presidency, North Korea froze its nuclear production, though it continued testing missiles until deterred by American pressure.

• In 2002, President George W. Bush took a strong stance against North Korea by including them in the “Axis of Evil” with Iran and Iraq. A year later, Pyongyang restarted their reactor and by 2005 produced another 15 kg of weapons grade plutonium. In 2006, North Korea is believed to have had between 4 and 13 nuclear bombs and tested a nuclear weapon for the first time.

=> ↺ Escalating Cold War, US Flies B-52 Bomber Over South Korea

• The U.S. military flew a B-52 bomber over South Korea on Sunday, in a Cold War-style show of force that was met with concern by human rights campaigners.

• American forces made the gesture amid climbing tensions following North Korea’s widely-disputed claim that it detonated a hydrogen bomb test on Wednesday.

=> ↺ Deaths Reported as MSF-Linked Hospital Bombed in Yemen

• A Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF)-supported hospital in northern Yemen was bombed Sunday morning, killing at least four people and wounding eleven—marking the third attack in as many months against a facility associated with the medical charity.

• MSF said in a statement that it “cannot confirm the origin of the attack” on the Shiara Hospital, which is located in the Razeh district. But the organization noted that “planes were seen flying over the facility at the time.”

=> ↺ Russian Strike on al-Qaeda Lair kills 51 at Prison, as US hypocritically slams Moscow

• The Russian air war against al-Qaeda in Syria (the Nusra Front or the Support Front) took a tragic turn on Saturday when a missile hit a downtown government building complex and prison in Maarat al-Numan. It left some 51 or more dead and 70 wounded. The Russians also bombed nearby towns of Saraqib and Khan Shikhun.

• Presumably the inmates in a prison run by al-Qaeda were a mixture of other radicals (perhaps Daesh [ISIL, ISIS] and liberals of the former Free Syrian Army. Whether what we would consider criminals were in the prison I don’t know. Al-Qaeda runs its territory in Syria in a Taliban-like way, with morals police and social regimentation. So some prisoners could just be people who didn’t go along with the al-Qaeda state practices. Alarabiya is reporting that some of those killed or wounded were in the downtown market adjacent to the government buildings. Russia needs to be more careful or it will end up simply alienating all the ordinary Sunnis in Syria with these blunt tactics. Locals are demanding that Russia be charged by the international community with war crimes.

=> ↺ The Exultation of Lethal Violence in American Culture

• Up to now Obama has shed no public tears for the victims of police violence, whether black, Hispanic, white, or any other. Moreover, when others have championed the right of the victims of police violence to justice, they have come under sustained attacked from the right wing media establishment and the powerful police unions. Consider how the filmmaker Quentin Tarantino was threatened with a nationwide boycott of his movies by police unions across the States after he attended a Black Lives Matter march and rally in New York towards the end of last year.

=> ↺ Neoliberalism Raises Its Ugly Head in South America: As Washington Targets Venezuela, Brazil and Argentina

• Politically, the neoliberal vision will mean an overturning and restructuring of the current Supreme Court, possible changes to the existing Constitution, and attempts to remove the duly-elected president from office before his term by various means. Apart from plans to stack the judiciary, as in Argentina, Venezuela’s new business controlled National Assembly will likely follow their reactionary class compatriots in Brazil, and move to impeach Venezuela president, Maduro, and dismantle his popular government – just as they are attempting the same in Brazil with that country’s also recently re-elected president, Rousseff.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

=> ↺ ‘Huge Ovation’: Citing #ExxonKnew, Vermont Governor Calls for Fossil Fuel Divestment

• ‘Owning ExxonMobil stock is not a business Vermont should be in,’ declared Gov. Peter Shumlin during State of the State address

=> ↺ After At Least 2,300 Home Evacuations, Big Methane Leak Causes State Of Emergency

• The Porter Ranch neighborhood of Los Angeles is officially in a state of emergency, according to a declaration by California Gov. Jerry Brown on Wednesday. The area has been suffering from the effects of a methane gas leak at the Aliso Canyon Storage Facility since late October. At least 2,300 homes have been evacuated, with many more requests pending.

• Southern California Gas Company (SoCalGas), which owns and operates the storage facility, has been constructing a relief well to stop the leak, which the company was unable to plug in the days and weeks immediately following the breach. The escaping methane has been treated with an odorant and is allegedly causing headaches, nausea, rashes, and other health problems among local residents. The company anticipates completing the relief well by March 15.

=> ↺ Oil Price Super-Cycle Collapse: Party Like It’s 1998?

=> ↺ Weather extremes slash cereal yields

• Climate change may have already begun to take its toll of agriculture. New research suggests that drought and extreme heat in the last 50 years have reduced cereal production by up to 10%. And, for once, developed nations may have sustained greater losses than developing nations.

• Researchers have been warning for years that global warming as a consequence of rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere – in turn, a pay-off from increased fossil fuel combustion – will result in a greater frequency or intensity in extremes of weather.

=> ↺ Heat Waves And Drought Are Already Having A Devastating Impact On Important Crops

• For all the wrong reasons, the summer of 2012 was a historic one for the American Midwest. Plagued by the worst drought the region had seen in decades, as well as weeks of high temperatures, one of the country’s most productive agricultural regions faced massive shortages in its annual corn crop, driving corn prices to a record high.

=> ↺ In Age of Extreme Weather, Industrial Farming Threatens Us All

• The study is the latest evidence of the impacts of climate change, coming just a month after global leaders gathered in Paris to finalize an agreement aimed at curbing greenhouse gases.

• Meanwhile, the Obama administration continues to push for maligned deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which critics have called a “giveaway to big agribusiness and food companies that want to use trade deals to attack sensible food safety rules, weaken the inspection of imported food and block efforts to strengthen U.S. food safety standards.”

• Over the past 50 years, 75 percent of the world’s biodiversity, soil, and water have been destroyed through the proliferation of mass food production and agrochemicals like pesticides and other synthetics, among other measures.

=> ↺ Environmental Damage Is Bad Enough To Create A New Geologic Period

• For over a decade, both climate activists and scientists have used one word to describe the mass-level changes humans are causing on Earth: Anthropocene. But whether or not this word actually describes a real, measurable geologic time period has been the source of major scientific debate.

• Now, a new study is adding fuel to that debate, finding that human influence on the environment changed the planet so dramatically that the world recently moved into a new geological epoch. In other words, there’s scientific proof that we’re living in the Anthropocene, the study’s researchers say.

=> ↺ Why James Hansen Is Wrong About Nuclear Power

• Those interested in what new nuclear power can and cannot plausibly contribute to stopping global warming should start with the most objective, independent, and comprehensive analysis done in recent years — the 2015 “Technology Roadmap” from the IEA and NEA. Those agencies’ bottom is line is that, if the industry gets its act together — a big IF, given recent history — new nuclear power can play an important but limited role. This just happens to be what I’ve been arguing consistently on Climate Progress for a long, long time.

• [...]

• A key reason new reactors are inherently so expensive is that they must be designed to survive almost any imaginable risk, including major disasters and human error. Even the most unlikely threats must be planned for and eliminated when the possible result of a disaster is the poisoning of thousands of people, the long-term contamination of large areas of land, and $100 billion in damages.

Finance

=> ↺ Update to BLS December Payroll Jobs Report: It is even worse than I reported — Paul Craig Roberts

• Good middle class jobs are continuing to decline. The new jobs are jobs that pay considerably less and often are part-time jobs devoid of benefits. Moreover, the new jobs are going to people outside the prime working age. The unavoidable conclusion is that for the majority of Americans, economic prospects are declining.

=> ↺ The CARD Act Has Saved Us $12 Billion Per Year

• Who do credit card companies make the most money from? Answer: the poor, by far, because they rack up the highest fees and the highest interest expense. Card issuers also make some money on the rich, because they buy a lot of stuff. This generates interchange fees (usually 2-3 percent of the amount charged) that exceed the cost the reward points they dole out to attract these customers.

=> ↺ US stocks suffer their worst first week of the year since records began

• Standard & Poor’s 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average fell by 6% and 6.2%, respectively, in the biggest ever fall for the first five days of January

=> ↺ Less Work, More Leisure

• The next Administration should make reducing work time a major focus. In addition to mandated paid sick days and paid family leave — proposals that have received some welcome attention thus far on the presidential campaign trail — policymakers should go much further and enact measures aimed at shortening workweeks and work years. Reducing our workweek and work years will lead to a whole host of benefits, including reduced stress and higher levels of employment.The United States has become an outlier among wealthy countries in having had little reduction in the length of the average work year since 1980. According to the OECD, between 1980 and 2013, the number of hours in an average work year fell by 7.6 percent in Belgium, by 19.1 percent in France, and by 6.5 percent in Canada. By comparison, it declined by just 1.4 percent in the United States. The average worker puts in 26 percent more hours a year in the United States than do workers in the Netherlands and 31 percent more hours than workers in Germany, a difference of more than 400 hours a year.

• [...]

• Reducing the workweek can also have another benefit: It will bring us to full employment faster.

=> ↺ Ben Carson Says He Wants To Help Working Families, Hands Massive Tax Break To The Wealthiest Instead

• On Monday, Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson released his tax plan, the center of which is a flat tax of 14.9 percent.

• Rather than different tax brackets for different income levels and categories, the flat tax levies the same rate on all personal and business income, although Carson’s 14.9 percent rate would only apply to people who have incomes above 150 percent of the poverty level, or $36,375 for a family of four. Those who make less would have to make a small tax payment: “Even those who earn little income will pay taxes, no matter how small their contribution might be,” Carson says in his plan. Currently, 46 percent of Americans don’t have to pay federal income taxes because their incomes are too low.

=> ↺ Why ‘Going Negative’ on Bernie Sanders is a Very Dangerous Move

• Going negative against Bernard Sanders is a bad career move. Every time a political opponent has attacked Sanders, it has served only to strengthen him. We have come to accept attack ads as standard fare in presidential politics. When threatened, Hillary Clinton sharpens her knives and airs ads to eviscerate opponents, while Donald Trump hurls noisy epithets daily. They might want to choose another way to weaken Sanders, because direct, personal attacks tend to backfire.

• In 1980, when Sanders ran for Burlington mayor the first time, he started out lower than a long shot, a newcomer running against an entrenched Democratic machine. How could a 39-year-old Jewish guy from Brooklyn attract voters in a small town dominated by native French Canadians and Irishmen?

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

=> ↺ CNN’s Van Jones Calls Out Donald Trump For Inspiring Support From White Supremacists

• Jones: “My Deep Concern Is That Donald Trump Is Beginning To Legitimate Some Of The Dark Things That Have Been In Our Country For A Long Time”

=> ↺ White Nationalist PAC Blankets Iowa With Robocalls For Trump

• Some registered voters in Iowa received robocalls Saturday from a white nationalist super PAC that urged them to support Donald Trump in the 2016 election.

• “I urge you to vote for Donald Trump because he is the one candidate who points out that we should accept immigrants who are good for America,” Jared Taylor said on the robocall, paid for by the American National Super PAC. “We don’t need Muslims. We need smart, well-educated white people who will assimilate to our culture. Vote Trump.”

=> ↺ 5 European Leaders Who Are Kindred Spirits With Donald Trump

• The Donald has already professed his admiration for Vladimir Putin. He’d get along famously with Marine Le Pen.

=> ↺ The Frontline of Hasbara is on PBS

• The film serves two purposes. Besides the aforementioned hasbara effect, it also tries to salvage what it can of the Obama legacy and create a post facto explanation for why this Presidency has been an almost complete disaster. In that regard, it shapes recent history into a bizarre narrative, failing to mention the words “Cast Lead” or “Protective Edge” while trying to float the preposterous idea that Obama tried to be ahead of history and support the Arab Spring. My own view, while perhaps incorrect, is that he instead succeeded in subverting the genuine democratic uprisings across the region to serve his own ends. When things in Egypt became far too complicated by having a Muslim Brotherhood government across the Sinai from besieged Gaza, a coup was initiated and al-Sisi installed.

=> ↺ Jim Hightower: The Corporate Media Is Basically Pretending Bernie Sanders Doesn’t Exist

• The Tyndall Report, a non-partisan media monitoring firm that has been tracking the nightly news broadcasts of ABC, CBS, and NBC, found that Trump is tromp, tromp, tromping over the airtime of everyone else.

• From last January through November, these dominant flagship news shows devoted 234 minutes of prime-time coverage to the incessant chirping of the yellow-crested birdbrain, with no other contender getting even a fourth of that.

=> ↺ Will Trump “Feel the Bern” at Campaign Stop in Sanders’ Hometown?

• Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is on Bernie Sanders’ turf of Burlington, Vermont—where the U.S. senator served as mayor for eight years—for a rally on Thursday night that has rankled police and the mayor while galvanizing the progressive spirit of the democratic socialist’s home base supporters.

=> ↺ How Corporate Political Spending Will Stay Secret in Wisconsin

• Wisconsin Republicans are insisting that they didn’t intend to allow corporate political donations to remain secret under the recent overhaul of the state’s campaign finance laws.

• But secrecy, in fact, has become the distinguishing characteristic of Wisconsin elections. And that is by design.

• Sweeping campaign finance changes signed into law by Governor Scott Walker last month allowed corporations, for the first time, to donate up to $12,000 directly to “segregated funds” created by political parties and legislative leaders.

Censorship

=> ↺ As Hollywood’s International Market Grows, Will Foreign Censors End Up Controlling U.S. Content?

=> ↺ Associated Press Self-Censors Anniversary Charlie Hebdo Cover

• Once you decide not to show an image for fear of offending people, the number of things people say they find offensive, and therefore worthy of silencing, may well multiply.

• So it goes today. On the cover of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo this week, the anniversary of the terrorist slaughter that killed much of its staff in Paris, you will not find any images of Mohammad. The image is a figure of God—the Judeo-Christian visualization of him—with an assault weapon strapped to his back. The text on it, translated from French, says “One year on: The killer is still at large.”

• Even though this image does not include Mohammad, the Associated Press, nevertheless, has decided not to pass along images of the cover of the issue to its many, many subscribing media outlets. There actually were some images available from AP content providers earlier, but they’ve been yanked.

=> ↺ ‘Cover-up’ over Cologne sex assaults blamed on migration sensitivities

• Public anger is growing in Germany over a series of sexual assaults against women in the centre of Cologne on New Year’s Eve, amid suggestions that authorities were slow to act due to political sensitivity surrounding the perpetrators’ ethnicities.

• Politicians and police were facing mounting questions on Wednesday over how a crowd of some 1,000 men “of North African or Arab appearance” was able to mass around the city’s main train station on New Year’s Eve, with roving gangs allegedly assaulting dozens of women with impunity.

=> ↺ German broadcaster sorry for slow reporting on mob assaults

• German public broadcaster ZDF has apologised for delays in reporting on a wave of sexual assaults blamed on men of Arab appearance amid accusations Wednesday of media self-censorship of the inflammatory issue.

• The rash of attacks and thefts in a New Year’s Eve crowd in the western city of Cologne was only widely covered by national media early this week, after police had initially reported no major incidents.

• News editors of ZDF’s flagship “heute” (today) evening news programme apologised on social media for not reporting on the incidents at least in its Monday evening bulletin, four days after the attacks.

=> ↺ The Long Silence—The Cologne Sex Attacks And The German Media.

• It took four days for the German Mainstream Media to report New Year’s Eve mass sex assaults on women by up to 1000 heavily intoxicated immigrants of “Arab or North African origin “, as the German police describe the still-unapprehended perpetrators—now. The internet and social media alone forced the MSM’s hand. And the German political class has plans for that.

=> ↺ COLOGNE: Google, Facebook and Twitter Yield to German Govt Demand to Censor Anti-Migrant ‘Hate Speech’

=> ↺ Germany cracks down on speech by citizens enraged over its immigration policy

=> ↺ Germany cracks down on free speech when it comes to Muslim immigrants

=> ↺ Germany springs to action over hate speech against migrants

• Donald Trump may be testing the boundaries of tolerance on the U.S. campaign trail. But here in Germany, the government is effectively enforcing civility, taking aim at a surge of hate speech against refugees and Muslims.

=> ↺ Jews and Arabs Kiss in Protest against Banning of Novel

• Dorit Rabinyan’s novel Borderlife treats a love affair in New York between an Israeli woman and a Palestinian man, which ends when they return to their respective homes. The novel began being assigned by those inveterate social radicals, the High School Teachers, in Israel. But then senior officials of the ministry of education banned the book. Later they said it wasn’t banned and could be taught, but would not form part of any examination. (In education systems with year-end examinations, elective material that cannot appear on the exam is usually not much taught).

=> ↺ What the Media Can Learn From Bill Maher: 1 Year After Hebdo Attack, Satirists Still Take Risks Media Won’t

• This week marks the one-year anniversary of the attacks on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo that killed 12 people, including eight of the magazine’s staff. In typical Hebdo form, the magazine has chosen to mark the event with a provocative cover that features a bearded man representing God with a Kalashnikov slung over his shoulder, accompanied by the text: “One year later: the assassin is still out there.” Their point? Little has changed.

• [...]

• And yet, one year after some of their cartoonists were murdered for daring to draw the Prophet, they are still under fire for being intolerant of religion. The obsessive critique reveals two key issues: First, despite being attacked by terrorists, the Hebdo artists are still criticized for their worldviews more than the terrorists themselves; and second, leftist politics is caught in a tough bind when it comes to openly debating religion and conflict.

=> ↺ Canadian Prof Yanked From Teaching Intro Psych Class For Insisting on Foul Language

• Via Inside Higher Ed comes one of the weirder stories about college I’ve read in a while.

• For years, Michael Persinger has taught an introductory psychology class at Canada’s Laurentian University. Before his first lecture, he has students sign a waiver that they won’t freak out over the ribald and offensive language he uses.

=> ↺ Our generation will take care of censorship and ensure there is no restriction on art: Anshuman Jha

=> ↺ Tweets About Israel Land New Jersey Student in Principal’s Office

• A New Jersey high school student found herself in a social media storm on Wednesday after she live-tweeted and apparently secretly recorded a trip to her principal’s office.

• She said administrators warned her that her comments about Israel and a fellow student on Twitter might have violated a state law against bullying.

• The student, Bethany Koval, a 16-year-old Israeli Jew, said she had been reprimanded by administrators at Fair Lawn High School in Bergen County for a tweet that contained a string of expletives directed at Israel and expressed happiness that a pro-Israel classmate had unfollowed her Twitter account.

• New Jersey has some of the toughest anti-bullying laws in the nation. After the suicide of a Rutgers University freshman, Tyler Clementi, in 2010, it passed the Anti-Bullying Bill of Rights, a far-reaching law with stiff penalties for educators who do not sufficiently respond to complaints of harassment or intimidation.

Privacy

=> ↺ Juniper Networks NSA Hack: Tech Company Stops Use Of Suspected Eavesdropping Code

=> ↺ Networking Giant Pulls NSA-Linked Code Exploited by Hackers

=> ↺ Juniper drops NSA-developed code following new backdoor revelations

• The networking company said in a blog post published Friday that it will ship product releases in the next six months that remove the Dual_EC_DRBG random number generator from NetScreen firewalls. Security researchers have known since 2007 that it contains a weakness that gives knowledgeable adversaries the ability to decrypt encrypted communications that rely on the function. Documents provided by former NSA subcontractor Edward Snowden showed the weakness could be exploited by the US spy agency, The New York Times reported in 2013.

=> ↺ You say advertising, I say block that malware

• The real reason online advertising is doomed and adblockers thrive? Its malware epidemic is unacknowledged, and out of control.

• The Forbes 30 Under 30 list came out this week and it featured a prominent security researcher. Other researchers were pleased to see one of their own getting positive attention, and visited the site in droves to view the list.

• On arrival, like a growing number of websites, Forbes asked readers to turn off ad blockers in order to view the article. After doing so, visitors were immediately served with pop-under malware, primed to infect their computers, and likely silently steal passwords, personal data and banking information. Or, as is popular worldwide with these malware “exploit kits,” lock up their hard drives in exchange for Bitcoin ransom.

• One researcher commented on Twitter that the situation was “ironic” — and while it’s certainly another variant of hackenfreude, ironic isn’t exactly the word I’d use to describe what happened.

=> ↺ Juniper Plans to Repatch its Firewall to Root out Source of Flaw

=> ↺ Juniper will repatch its Netscreen operating system

=> ↺ What South Carolinians Think About Ryan’s Poverty Forum

• Billed as an opportunity for conservatives to outline their major plans on tackling poverty, the forum comes after months of heightened rhetoric on poverty and inequality—including a poverty tour by then-Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan. These events are part of a concerted effort by conservative lawmakers and the media to paint the War on Poverty as a failure, even though the safety net reduced the poverty rate by more than half and lifted 48 million people above the poverty line in 2012.

=> ↺ Dismantling Nehru-Gandhi Film Censorship Regime

• The government had on January 1 constituted the panel to look into the revamp of the Censor Board functioning which has been mired in controversies in the recent past. The panel includes filmmaker Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra, adman Piyush Pandey and film critic Bhawana Somaaya. National Film Development Council MD Nina Lath Gupta and Joint Secretary (Films) Sanjay Murthy are also part of the panel.

=> ↺ The risks — and benefits — of letting algorithms judge us

• China is considering a new “social credit” system, designed to rate everyone’s trustworthiness. Many fear that it will become a tool of social control — but in reality it has a lot in common with the algorithms and systems that score and classify us all every day.

• Human judgment is being replaced by automatic algorithms, and that brings with it both enormous benefits and risks. The technology is enabling a new form of social control, sometimes deliberately and sometimes as a side effect. And as the Internet of Things ushers in an era of more sensors and more data — and more algorithms — we need to ensure that we reap the benefits while avoiding the harms.

=> ↺ FBI changes animal cruelty data collection practices

• As of Friday, Jan. 1, 2016, the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) decision to begin collecting data on cases of animal cruelty as a Group A offense in the National Incident Based Reporting System (NIBRS) went into effect.

=> ↺ Facebook accused of crashing Android app to test users’ loyalty

• Facebook deliberately crashed its Android app for weeks at a time in a bid to test its users’ dedication to the social network, it has been reported.

=> ↺ New Zealand rules police raid on journalist Nicky Hager was illegal

• In a huge victory for press freedom, New Zealand’s High Court has ruled decisively in favor of independent journalist Nicky Hager in his case against the New Zealand government for raiding his house and seizing his family’s possessions in 2014.

• The court’s decision, which was released on December 17, 2015 just before the holidays, is not only a vindication for Hager and his work, but an important win for all journalists and whistleblowers in New Zealand.

=> ↺ Oregon Law Curbing Warrantless Collection of Cellphone Data Now in Effect

• On Jan.1, a new law prohibiting police from obtaining information from electronic devices without a warrant in most cases went into effect. The new law will not only protect privacy in Oregon, but will also address a practical effect of federal spying.

• Sen. Chip Shields (D-Portland), Rep. Jennifer Williamson (D-Portland), Sen. Tim Knopp (R – Bend) and Rep. John Huffman (R-The Dalles) introduced Senate Bill 641 (SB641) last February. The bill prohibits state and local law enforcement officers from using “forensic imaging” to obtain information contained in a portable electronic device except with a warrant, or by consent. “Forensic imaging” means “using an electronic device to download or transfer raw data from a portable electronic device onto another medium of digital storage,” but does not include photographing or transcribing information “observable from the portable electronic device by normal unaided human senses.”

=> ↺ Parents are worried about the new WiFi-connected Barbie, but should they be?

• Before Mattel’s new WiFi-connected, artificially-intelligent toy, Hello Barbie, had even made it onto store shelves, she was already generating terrifying news stories.

• “Your child’s talking Barbie doll may be eavesdropping on all of your private conversations,” claimed the New York Daily News. “Creepy,” wrote the Washington Post. “She’s not just creepy. She threatens children’s security,” added the Daily Beast. The New York Times warned that “synthetic friendship could supplant [kids’] real ones.”

=> ↺ ​Attorney for Edward Snowden to lead University of Hawaii law seminar

• Ben Wizner, a national ACLU attorney and head lawyer for NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, will co-teach a seminar at the University of Hawaii Richardson School of Law this month.

• Wizner, director of the ACLU Speech, Privacy & Technology Project, will teach the week-long “Liberty and Security in the Age of Terrorism” seminar along with retired four-star Army Gen. David Bramlett.

=> ↺ ‘Secret expansion’: GCHQ may be employing ‘thousands more’ than it officially admits

• David Davis, a Conservative Party MP, told the Times that secrecy surrounding GCHQ’s numerical strength was “a bad opening chapter to this new era of transparency.”

• A spokesperson for GCHQ declined to give exact numbers of those employed in the agency and its partners.

• “The total number of people working for or with GCHQ constantly fluctuates due to the complex challenges we face and the threats we aim to counter,” the spokesperson told IBTimes UK, adding: “In a complex organization like GCHQ, as you would expect, our core mission is supported by a range of partners including industry and the military.”

• GCHQ employed 5,683 full-time staff in August 2014, according to official figures from the UK parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee. MI5 had 3,926 and MI6 2,430 employees.

=> ↺ Targeted data collection could have prevented Paris terrorist attacks

• A more targeted approach to data collection could have helped French authorities prevent the Paris attacks last year, according to former NSA technical director William Binney.

• Binney told a parliamentary committee evaluating the draft Investigatory Powers Bill, however, that bulk data collection could leave analysts with too much information to carry out effective assessments.

=> ↺ Will proposed surveillance powers weaken security for UK startups?

• Instead, much of the Investigatory Powers Bill’s focus is on facilitating the practice of mass surveillance.

=> ↺ Germany restarts joint intelligence surveillance with US

=> ↺ Germany resumes domestic surveillance in collaboration with the NSA

=> ↺ German spies revive internet snooping work with US: reports

=> ↺ NSA whistleblower: ‘UK mass surveillance may cost lives’

=> ↺ ‘Snooper’s charter’ will cost British lives, MPs are warned

• He told MPs that “Britain should not go further down this road and risk making the same mistakes as my country did, or they will end up perpetuating the loss of life”.

=> ↺ The UK’s new snooping law changes are all about money, says ex-NSA tech chief

• Asked why he thinks the UK government is pressing for this kind of approach, Binney’s answer is simple: money.

• [...]

• He points to the $3.8 billion Trailblazer program to capture internet communications as evidence of this and said that people were moving freely between working for the NSA and working for a contracted firm.

• “The contractors were lobbying for this… They were trading the security of the people of the United States and the people of the free world for money,” he said.

• When questioned on whether he thought £247 million over 10 years to deploy the powers in the bill would be sufficient, Binney said that this may be enough for retention and storage, but not processing, interrogation or software development.

=> ↺ Bill Binney: New UK spying law is going to kill people, ex-NSA technical director and whistleblower warns

• He described as “absolute horses**t” the claims by government lawyers that it wouldn’t be possible to sift through data before it was collected.

=> ↺ An NSA whistleblower just told government that mass surveillance doesn’t work

• William Binney, the former technical director of the NSA, today warned a UK parliamentary committee that proposed mass surveillance laws will damage the country’s national security.

=> ↺ Ex-NSA Official to Warn UK Lawmakers Against Online Surveillance Bill

=> ↺ Mass surveillance and bulk data collection won’t prevent terrorism, warns ex-NSA director William Binney

• “If we did everything through analysis and collection smartly, in a targeted way, we’d give privacy to everybody in the world because you don’t take in their data.”

• Referring to the 9/11 attacks, Binney suggested that targeted surveillance rather than bulk surveillance could have stopped the whole tragedy from happening.

• “All of these people were in knowledge bases already. If they’d taken a targeted approach from the beginning, keeping the data finite, the analysts would have found the threats,” he claimed.

=> ↺ Mass-surveillance ‘undermines security’ and failed to stop 9/11 attacks, says ex-NSA officer

=> ↺ French intelligence ‘could have prevented Paris attacks’

• The Paris attacks might have been prevented if French intelligence services had targeted their surveillance, he told the committee scrutinising the draft bill on 6 January 2016.

=> ↺ Snooper’s charter would be out of date in five years, says defence industry

• Vodafone, the UK telecoms company, said the government’s bill risked “significantly undermining trust” and rejected any move to require them to hand over data passing over their networks from outside the UK,.

• The criticism from the Silicon Valley internet giants is perhaps the most serious for Home Office ministers as it was their rejection of proposed British government requests to require them to hand over their customers’ confidential web data which lay behind the Liberal Democrats’ veto of the last snooper’s charter bill in 2012.

=> ↺ NSA Stalwart to Tell Parliament: ‘Bulk Collection Costs Lives’

• Binney is also set to argue that the UK government has misled parliament in claiming that MPs and other sensitive groups would be protected under the bill because there is so much data flowing along the pipe it “isn’t intelligible at the point of inception.”

• “These statements are false,” he will say. “They were made by someone who does not understand the technology.”

=> ↺ New UK spying law is going to kill people, ex-NSA technical director and whistleblower Bill Binney warns

• “It is 99 per cent useless,” Mr Binney said in a letter sent to MPs. “Who wants to know everyone who has ever looked at Google or the BBC? We have known for decades that that swamps analysts.”

• He said that strategy had led directly to mistakes that allowed the attacks on 9/11 to go ahead. The US had collected information from the terrorists involved in the attacks, but had not been able to check them because of resources, he claimed.

=> ↺ NSA whistleblower William Binney: Bulk data collection costs lives

• For example, Microsoft reported that 82 billion photos had been viewed…

• The revelations should be worrisome, according to Martin Brinkmann, founder of Ghacks.net: “While it is unclear what data is exactly collected, it is clear that the company is collecting information about the use of individual applications and programs on Windows at the very least.”

Civil Rights

=> ↺ Has principle of “innocent until proven guilty” fallen wayside?

• “Innocent until proven guilty” is a phrase that is often bandied about. From popular cop shows on TV to courtroom dramas on the silver screen, this phrase has been repeated over and over again. While we are all familiar with the words, have we become desensitised to the true significance of those four words?

• It is human nature to pre-judge. In the high-tension environment of a courtroom, it is easy to get emotionally swayed which could in turn, return a verdict that may not end up serving the course of justice. This is why such rigorous steps have been put in place as the judiciary evolved to ensure that this risk is mitigated. Indeed, this is one of the reasons cited for why jury trials were abolished in Singapore. It was thought that laypersons without a holistic knowledge of the law might be easily manipulated by the machinations of a wily lawyer.

• With the advent of the Internet and the rapid evolution of the social media and blogs, which has revolutionalised the spread of information, has the sacrosanct principle of “innocent until proven guilty” fallen to the wayside?

=> ↺ The Big Lie in the War Against Drugs

• Since the beginning, the War on Drugs has been about controlling political power–by breaking up Black communities and the dissident left.

=> ↺ Judge Mocks Inmate Who Soiled Himself Because Guard Wouldn’t Let Him Go To The Bathroom

• An Ohio judge has elicited chuckles for a poem he wrote to shoot down an inmate’s lawsuit this week. The inmate, Darek Lathan, sued after guards at the Correctional Reception Center in Orient refused to let him go to the bathroom, causing him to have diarrhea in his pants.

• Lathan is serving a 17-month sentence for a vandalism conviction. In his lawsuit seeking $2 million in damages, Lathan said the officer wouldn’t let him get out of line to go to the bathroom, even after he told the guard the prison’s cold showers were making him sick.

=> ↺ Muslim Woman Ejected from Trump Rally as Crowd Hurls Epithets

• A Muslim woman wearing a shirt which read “Salam, I come in peace” was forcibly ejected from a Donald Trump rally Friday night as some supporters of the 2016 presidential candidate reportedly hurled Islamophobic epithets at her.

• Rose Hamid, a 56-year-old flight attendant, had attended the rally at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, South Carolina with a small group of people who wore yellow stars with eight points, a reference to the markers Jews were forced to bear during the Holocaust. The symbols read “Muslim” and “Stop Islamophobia.”

=> ↺ WATCH: Trump Supporters Harass Muslim Woman as She Is Kicked out of Rally

=> ↺ 12 People Who Made a Difference (and You Can Too!)

• Take a sweeping look at history and you will discover that almost all movements that mattered started with just one or two people—from the fight to abolish slavery, to the creations of the environmental, trade union, consumer protection and civil rights movements. One voice becomes two, and then ten, and then thousands.

=> ↺ Everything is a culture war now – even sports. I just want to watch the game

• Everything is a culture war now. It’s everywhere. And it’s impossible to avoid, even in the movies and sports many of us go to in hopes of finding a brief respite from all the yelling we find online and off. Sometimes I just want to watch the game, you know? Maybe flip on the TV and forget for a few hours that Donald Trump could become president of the free world.

=> ↺ Unions brace for supreme court case that could be a heavy blow to liberals

• Justices prepare to hear arguments in of case of California teacher and co-plaintiffs who say ‘tyranny’ of unions violates their rights through forced dues

=> ↺ Right-Wing Network Puts Anti-Union Case in Samuel Alito’s Lap

• Justice Samuel Alito has been scouring the land looking for a case to make his mark on history.

• Could he find a way to hold a big bank accountable for ripping off millions of consumers? Could he interpret intellectual property law to give more desperately ill people access to essential medicines? Could he hold a chemical company to account for poisoning people and hiding it for decades?

• No. Alito apparently decided to make his mark by helping a massive right-wing funding machine crush wages for teachers, nurses, firefighters, cops and prison guards.

=> ↺ What It’s Like To Be Shia Inside The Ardently Sunni Saudi Kingdom

• That population has often been on the receiving end of Saudi Arabian posturing on geopolitical issues, especially as they relate to Iran. While the Kingdom might oppose extremist Sunni militant groups like ISIS, it continues to promote extremist views in favor of Sunni predominance in the Muslim world.

=> ↺ Oregon Sheriff Meets Ammon Bundy, Greets Him With Handshake Not Handcuffs

• On Thursday, Harney County, Oregon Sheriff Dave Ward met Ammon Bundy in a remote area near the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. Bundy has been leading an illegal armed occupation of a federal building for almost a week. But Ward greeted Bundy with a firm handshake instead of handcuffs.

=> ↺ The Proof Is In: The US Government Is The Most Complete Criminal Organization In Human History — Paul Craig Roberts

• Unique among the countries on earth, the US government insists that its laws and dictates take precedence over the sovereignty of nations. Washington asserts the power of US courts over foreign nationals and claims extra-territorial jurisdiction of US courts over foreign activities of which Washington or American interest groups disapprove. Perhaps the worst results of Washington’s disregard for the sovereignty of countries is the power Washington has exercised over foreign nationals solely on the basis of terrorism charges devoid of any evidence.

• Consider a few examples. Washington first forced the Swiss government to violate its own banking laws. Then Washington forced Switzerland to repeal its bank secrecy laws. Allegedly, Switzerland is a democracy, but the country’s laws are determined in Washington by people not elected by the Swiss to represent them.

• Consider the “soccer scandal” that Washington concocted, apparently for the purpose of embarrassing Russia. The soccer organization’s home is Switzerland, but this did not stop Washington from sending FBI agents into Switzerland to arrest Swiss citizens. Try to imagine Switzerland sending Swiss federal agents into the US to arrest Americans.

• Consider the $9 billion fine that Washington imposed on a French bank for failure to fully comply with Washington’s sanctions against Iran. This assertion of Washington’s control over a foreign financial institution is even more audaciously illegal in view of the fact that the sanctions Washington imposed on Iran and requires other sovereign countries to obey are themselves strictly illegal. Indeed, in this case we have a case of triple illegality as the sanctions were imposed on the basis of concocted and fabricated charges that were lies.

=> ↺ Atlanta Police Stop and Put Gun to Head of Rapper After He Withdraws $200,000 From His Bank

• According to Sam Benson — who goes by the stage name of “Blac Youngsta” — he had just exited a Wells Fargo branch in the upscale community of Buckhead after withdrawing $200,000 in order to buy a new car.

• “I come out the bank, I see the police, I’m walking to my car, I see one of them point to my bag like ‘him,’” explained the rapper. “They come bum-rushing me at the car, put me on the ground, putting guns to my head.”

=> ↺ When money matters more than lives: The poisonous cost of austerity in Flint, Michigan

• A few days ago my partner and I were sharing some of our less-pleasant encounters in the New York City subway system. Nothing too outrageous, just the kind of awkward run-ins with mentally unwell people that have long been part of living in this city (and have become harder to avoid as of late). If you live here long enough, you eventually become pretty inured to these moments; but they’re still always a little sad.

• Sometimes, though, they’re not so much sad as they are scary. Far more often than not, people suffering from severe mental health issues are harmless. But that’s not always the case. My partner, for example, recounted that once she accidentally — but very slightly — stepped on a woman’s foot. She apologized, but for the rest of the time my partner was on the train, this woman was screaming at her. My partner knew it wasn’t really about her, of course; but it was still a shitty experience.

=> ↺ Judge allowed to sit on sharia court set up by Hebdo protest cleric

• A crown court judge has been allowed to rule on sharia cases, in the first case of its kind.

• District Judge Shamim Qureshi, who sits at Bristol Crown Court, received permission from the Judicial Office to double as “presiding judge” at the Muslim Arbitration Tribunal (MAT).

• The MAT was established in 2007 by a hardline cleric, Sheikh Faiz-ul-Aqtab Siddiqi, who led an anti-Charlie Hebdo demonstration after 11 of the magazine’s staff were murdered by terrorists.

• Theresa May, the Home Secretary, is due to launch an independent review into sharia courts and councils amid concerns that a “parallel” justice system is developing in Britain. There are particular concerns that the courts are discriminatory towards women.

• Judge Qureshi has overseen MAT, which is based in Nuneaton, Warks, and has four other branches.

=> ↺ Debbie Wasserman-Schultz Wants to Keep Arresting Pot Smokers

• Wasserman-Schultz doesn’t explain how giving people criminal records for smoking pot makes them “safer,” and she appears to still subscribe to the discredited gateway theory that if people start with marijuana, they’re going to end up as heroin addicts.

=> ↺ Obama’s Legacy is Executive Abuse

• When I got back from my winter vacation, America was still being run by a two-term president who believes it’s his job to impose his notions of morality, safety and decency on everyone, often trying to work around the limits the system places on him. This week, Barack Obama is going to institute new restrictions on Americans unilaterally—expanding background checks, closing supposed “loopholes” and tightening the process for law-abiding gun owners—because Congress “won’t act” and also because he believes it’s the right thing to do. Neither of those is a compelling reason to legislate from the White House.

=> ↺ One Day After Obama Announced New Gun Reforms, Scott Walker Threatens Lawsuit

• Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker waited just one day after President Obama announced a package of modest gun control reforms before directing his attorney general to explore challenging the new rule — becoming the first governor to threaten legal action over the regulations.

• Accusing President Obama of “disregarding the constitutional principles of separation of powers and exceeding his authority as chief executive,” Walker said in a statement that the executive order creates “uncertainty and fear of prosecution for law-abiding citizens who wish to exercise their right to sell firearms lawfully. Forthcoming federal rules could also deprive millions of Americans of their Second Amendment rights without any indication of imminent danger.”

=> ↺ Will the Canadian government shed light on the no-fly list?

• In 2007, when the Passenger Protection Program (PPP) — copied on the U.S. model — was established in Canada, the Canadian government at the time failed to produce any concrete evidence of the efficiency of such a program. Canada was under a lot of pressure from the U.S. government to have this program and prevent “unwanted” travellers from boarding planes. The problem with this list is that it is shrouded in secrecy. The number of persons listed is not public. It is estimated to be between 500-2,000 persons. The government refused to release the exact number, claiming that this might help the terrorists in their plans to attack or harm us.

=> ↺ After Cologne, we can’t let the bigots steal feminism

• In a perverse sort of way, it’s progress. After months of dog-whistle xenophobia, European authorities have finally started to treat migrants as they would treat any other citizen. They have achieved this by choosing not to make a fuss when migrants are accused of raping and assaulting women.

• On New Year’s Eve in Cologne, Germany, hundreds of men, almost all of reportedly ‘Arabic and North African’ appearance and including many asylum seekers, viciously attacked women who were celebrating in the central plaza, robbing and groping and tearing off clothes. At least one rape complaint has been filed. The police and the press were initially slow to react, and the Mayor of Cologne reacted to eventual protests by suggesting that women should adopt a code of conduct in public and keep an ‘arm’s length’ distance between themselves and strange men.

• This is not the first time a European city administration has responded to an outbreak of sexual violence by blaming the women. It is the first time in recent history that the right-wing press has not joined in the condemnation of these wanton strumpets who dare to think they might be able to have a good time without worrying what ‘invitation’ they’re sending to men. Instead, the right wing blames… liberals. Who apparently caused all this by daring to suggest that refugees should be able to come to Europe in safety.

=> ↺ Truthdigger of the Week: Fatema Mernissi, a Founder of Islamic Feminism

• In her book “Islam and Democracy,” published in 1992, the feminist thinker also analyzed the role that the first Gulf war had in turning the Arab world against the idea of democracy, a concept many have come to conflate with “violence and religion in the west, as perceived by Arab observers of American broadcasts.”

=> ↺ Clinton Renews Criticism Of Sanders Gun Record

• Sanders has indeed expressed a desire to modify the law rather than simply repeal it, in part because he says gun sellers should not be liable for crimes they could not have anticipated when they sold someone a weapon.”If you are a gun shop owner in Vermont and you sell somebody a gun and that person flips out and then kills somebody, I don’t think it’s really fair to hold that person responsible, the gun shop owner,” Sanders said in October.

=> ↺ Bundy Militia Standoff Escalates When Another Heavily-Armed Group Arrives to Provide ‘Security’

• The Oregonian reports that the Pacific Patriot Network has sent armed “security” — some of whom are carrying semi-automatic rifles — to the standoff on Saturday. But an attorney mediating the dispute between Ammon Bundy and federal officials said Bundy wants them to leave.

• “We don’t need that. We don’t want it and we’re asking you to leave,” Todd MacFarlane, an attorney mediating the dispute on behalf of the Bundys, told reporters Saturday.

• In a press conference Saturday morning, a representative from the Bundy group said they are looking to de-escalate the situation.

• Locals in the area of the standoff have, in turn, condemned the Bundy takeover. Residents have expressed fear at the presence of armed militia and asked the outsiders to leave.

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