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● 04.20.19

● Links 20/4/2019: Weblate 3.6 and Pop!_OS 19.04

Posted in News Roundup at 2:10 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

=> ↺ Death by PowerPoint: the slide that killed seven people

• Edward Tufte’s full report makes for fascinating reading. Since being released in 1987 PowerPoint has grown exponentially to the point where it is now estimated than thirty million PowerPoint presentations are made every day. Yet, PowerPoint is blamed by academics for killing critical thought. Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos has banned it from meetings. Typing text on a screen and reading it out loud does not count as teaching. An audience reading text off the screen does not count as learning. Imagine if the engineers had put up a slide with just: “foam strike more than 600 times bigger than test data.” Maybe NASA would have listened. Maybe they wouldn’t have attempted re-entry. Next time you’re asked to give a talk remember Columbia. Don’t just jump to your laptop and write out slides of text. Think about your message. Don’t let that message be lost amongst text. Death by PowerPoint is a real thing. Sometimes literally.

Server

=> ↺ Video: A Greybeard’s Worst Nightmare (Updated)

• Trying to wrap one’s head around the paradigm changes happening in the industry can be difficult. Everything is just moving way too fast. Daniel Riek has been giving a talk for a while now entitled, “A Greybeard’s Worst Nightmare.” Here is a fairly recent iteration of his talk where he does an excellent job of providing both a historical context and a bridge to understanding the revolution and evolution that is happening. Unfortunately a lot of the progress has been coming from black box services provided by proprietary companies who don’t see lock-in as a problem. Daniel explains how the benefits that have been gained by adopting free and open source software don’t have to be abandoned in an effort to keep up with industry methodology shifts providing the most innovation and value. We can and are keeping up… but there is a LOT to learn.

Audiocasts/Shows

=> ↺ Ang Takes a Punch – The Friday Stream

• A bunch of the crew get together and share a few stories, recap the week, and play a little music.

• This is a beta test of a community live event we are doing on Fridays at 2pm Pacific: http://jblive.tv

Kernel Space

=> ↺ Linux 5.0.9

• I’m announcing the release of the 5.0.9 kernel.

• All users of the 5.0 kernel series must upgrade.

• The updated 5.0.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-5.0.y and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser:

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

=> ↺ Linux 4.19.36

=> ↺ Linux 4.14.113

=> ↺ Linux 4.9.170

=> ↺ Linux 5.1 Picking Up Keyboard Mappings For Full-Screen, Toggle Display Keys

• Coming as a late addition to the Linux 5.1 kernel are some long overdue keyboard key mappings for different functionality.

• Linux Input subsystem maintainer Dmitry Torokhov sent in a pull request on Friday of input updates for Linux 5.1. Among the changes are adding of mapping for Expose/Overview, Keyboard Brightness Up/Down/Toggle, Full Screen, and Toggle Display keys within the kernel’s generic HID driver.

=> ↺ Linux 5.2 Is Introducing The Fieldbus Subsystem

• A new subsystem queued for introduction in the upcoming Linux 5.2 cycle is the Fieldbus Subsystem, which is initially being added to the staging area of the kernel.

• This newest subsystem for the Linux kernel benefits industrial systems. Fieldbus is a set of network protocols for real-time distributed control of automated industrial systems. Fieldbus is used for connecting different systems/components/instruments within industrial environments. Fieldbus is used for connecting facilities ranging from manufacturing plants up to nuclear energy facilities.

=> ↺ Panfrost DRM Driver Being Added To Linux 5.2 For Midgard / Bifrost Graphics

• Not only is the longtime Lima DRM driver for Arm Mali 400/450 graphics set to finally premiere with the Linux 5.2 kernel, but the Panfrost DRM driver is also being mainlined for the newer Mali graphics hardware.

• The Panfrost DRM driver is set to be added to the Linux 5.2 kernel. Panfrost is the open-source, reverse-engineered DRM/KMS driver for Arm Mali Midgard and Bifrost graphics processors where as the Lima driver focuses on the 400/450 series.

Graphics Stack

=> ↺ amdgpu drm-next-5.2

=> ↺ AMDGPU Has Another Round Of Updates Ahead Of Linux 5.2

• Feature work on DRM-Next for the Linux 5.2 kernel cycle is winding down while today AMD has sent in what could be their last round of AMDGPU feature updates for this next kernel release.

• Building off their earlier Linux 5.2 feature work are more updates. That earlier round brought new SMU11 enablement code for Vega 20, various other Vega 20 features, HMM preparations, and other code changes.

=> ↺ 2019 Election Round 2 voting OPEN

• To all X.Org Foundation Members:

• The round 2 of X.Org Foundation’s annual election is now open and will remain open until 23:59 UTC on 2 May 2019.

• Four of the eight director seats are open during this election, with the four nominees receiving the highest vote totals serving as directors for two year terms.

• There were six candidates nominated. For a complete list of the candidates and their personal statements, please visit the 2019 X.Org Elections page at https://www.x.org/wiki/BoardOfDirectors/Elections/2019/

• The new bylaw changes were approved in the first round of voting.

• Here are some instructions on how to cast your vote:

• Login to the membership system at: https://members.x.org/

• If you do not remember your password, you can click on the “lost password” button and enter your user name. An e-mail will be sent to you with your password. If you have problems with the membership system, please e-mail membership at x.org.

• When you login you will see an “Active Ballots” section with the “X.Org 2019 Elections Round 2″ ballot. When you click on that you will be presented with a page describing the ballot. At the bottom you will find a number of dropdowns that let you rank your candidates by order of preference.

• For the election: There is a pull-down selection box for 1st choice, 2nd, choice, and so on. Pick your candidates top to bottom in order of preference, avoiding duplicates.

• After you have completed your ballot, click the “Cast vote” button. Note that once you click this button, your votes will be cast and you will not be able to make further changes, so please make sure you are satisfied with your votes before clicking the “Cast vote” button.

• After you click the “Vote” button, the system will verify that you have completed a valid ballot. If your ballot is invalid (e.g., you duplicated a selection or did not answer the By-laws approval question), it will return you to the previous voting page. If your ballot is valid, your votes will be recorded and the system will show you a notice that your votes were cast.

• Note that the election will close at 23:59 UTC on 2 May 2019. At that time, the election committee will count the votes and present the results to the current board for validation. After the current board validates the results, the election committee will present the results to the Members.

• Harry, on behalf of the X.Org elections committee

=> ↺ It’s Time To Re-Vote Following The Botched 2019 X.Org Elections

• While there were the recent X.Org Foundation board elections, a do-over was needed as their new custom-written voting software wasn’t properly recording votes… So here’s now your reminder to re-vote in these X.Org elections.

• At least with the initial round of voting they reached a super majority and the ballot question of whether the X.Org Foundation should formally fold FreeDesktop.org into its umbrella worked and that X.Org + FreeDesktop.org hook-up passed so all is well on that front. But for the Board of Directors elections, that’s where re-voting is needed with the voting software that now correctly records the votes.

=> ↺ NVIDIA 418.52.05 Linux Driver Brings Vulkan Ray-Tracing To Non-RTX GPUs

• As we’ve been expecting from NVIDIA’s recent DXR ray-tracing support back-ported to Pascal/Volta GPUs, there’s now a NVIDIA Linux driver beta that offers VK_NV_ray_tracing for pre-Turing graphics processors.

• The NVIDIA 418.52.05 beta driver released on Friday now officially supports the company’s Vulkan ray-tracing extension going back to GeForce GTX 1000 “Pascal” graphics cards. The line-up going back to the GeForce GTX 1060, including the Volta-based Titan V and Turing GTX 1600 series now has the ability to utilize Vulkan-powered ray-tracing. This is nice for developers though for Linux end-users/gamers there isn’t any significant available yet utilizing Vulkan ray-tracing besides a few code samples and some early engine work for allowing the functionality; most of the ray-tracing activity has been on the Windows side and focused on DirectX 12, but hopefully that will change.

=> ↺ NVIDIA Jetson Nano – Install Docker Compose

• In our last blogpost NVIDIA Jetson Nano Developer Kit – Introduction we digged into the brand-new NVIDIA Jetson Nano Developer Kit and we did found out, that Docker 18.06.1-CE is already pre-installed on this great ARM board.

=> ↺ NVIDIA Jetson Nano – Upgrade Docker Engine

• In our last blogposts about the NVIDIA Jetson Nano Developer Kit – Introduction and NVIDIA Jetson Nano – Install Docker Compose we digged into the brand-new NVIDIA Jetson Nano Developer Kit and we know, that Docker 18.06.1-CE is already installed, but…

Applications

=> ↺ 10+ Open Source Software Writing Tools That Every Writer Should Know

• Being a professional writer requires two key things to help ensure success: commitment and support. The former comes from the writer, and the latter comes from the tools he (or she) uses to get the job done. Below is a list of 11 great and lesser-known writing tools or apps, many of which are free and open-source, that can help improve the quality of your writing and make you a more productive and successful writer.

=> ↺ Tools to Empower Librarians

• Open source software is a popular choice for libraries and librarians, not simply because recent austerity measures in many developed countries have tightened available budgets. The ability to customise the software for a library’s particular needs, the potential for interoperation with other software, and the lack of license restrictions makes open source software attractive.

• Modern libraries need robust, scalable and flexible software to make their collections and services attractive, especially as digital libraries are radically transforming how information is disseminated. There are very few barriers to any library adopting an open source library system.

• To provide an insight into the quality of software available, we have compiled a list of 7 tools that help librarians embrace web technology. The software is a fairly eclectic bunch, so hopefully there will be something of interest for any librarian.

=> ↺ Weblate 3.6

• Weblate 3.6 has been released today. It brings rewritten notifications, user data download and several other improvements. It also sets depreciation timeline for Python 2 installations – after April 2020 Weblate will only support Python 3.

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ How To Install Microweber CMS on CentOS 7

=> ↺ How to install NixOS Linux

=> ↺ How to install Ubuntu 19.04

=> ↺ How to use Linux kernel 5 on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

=> ↺ What To Do After Installing Ubuntu 19.04 “Disco Dingo”

=> ↺ Howto Upgrade To Ubuntu 19.04 From Ubuntu 18.10, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

=> ↺ Set Up OpenDMARC with Postfix on Ubuntu to Block Email Spoofing/Spam

=> ↺ Set Up ParseDMARC on Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04 to Analyze DMARC Reports

=> ↺ Introducing kube-iptables-tailer: Better Networking Visibility in Kubernetes Clusters

=> ↺ How to monitor file changes with fswatch

=> ↺ dstat: Linux performance measurement tool, how to install & use?

=> ↺ How to send maintenance notifications with Cachet status page system

=> ↺ How to simulate a notch on an Android phone

=> ↺ How to Install Tor Browser on Ubuntu 18.04

=> ↺ How to Install BoltWire CMS on Ubuntu 18.04

=> ↺ How to Install Postman in Linux

=> ↺ Create a file and manipulate the date

=> ↺ Show your current network interface in use

=> ↺ Network Discover in a one liner

=> ↺ Check host port access using only Bash:

Games

=> ↺ Battlefield Bad Company 2 | Linux Gaming | Ubuntu 18.04 | Steam Play

• Battlefield Bad Company 2 running through Steam play.

=> ↺ Epic Games Store Now On Linux Thanks To Lutris

• While the Epic Games Store itself is not officially supported by the open source Linux operating system, a third-party gaming client has now made sure that you can access the store and launcher on your own distro.

• The Epic Games Store is now accessible on Linux via the Lutris Gaming client. The client is available to all Linux users, who in the past has provided the same users a way to play PC games without the need to have Windows installed in their machines.

• Although Linux is not necessarily the go-to platform when it comes to PC gaming, there is a very niche audience dedicated to making the platform work in favor of open-source and to counteract what could be perceived as a heavily Windows-biased PC gaming community. Linux gaming is somewhat tedious to the relatively casual or normal user, although there are some within the Linux community that advertise and try to foster its growth in terms of gaming, as there are some games that can run better on the operating system. That is to say, if you have a lot of patience to try and make it work.

=> ↺ You Died but a Necromancer revived you is good fun in a small package

• Sometimes, simplicity is what makes a game and in the case of You Died BaNRY that’s very true. The game has little depth to it but makes up for that in just how frantic and fun it can be. The entire gameplay is just you (or you and friends) attempting to cross a small level filled with platforms, spikes and all sorts of crazy traps. It’s ridiculously easy to get into as well, since the controls are so basic all you need to worry about is your movement.

=> ↺ Forager is a weirdly addictive casual grinding game that has mined into my heart

• I’m not usually one for games that have you endlessly wander around, collect resources, build a little and repeat but Forager is so ridiculously charming it’s lovely.

=> ↺ DragonRuby Game Toolkit, a cross-platform way to make games with Ruby

• Now for something a little different! Ryan “Icculus” Gordon, a name known for many Linux ports and SDL2 teamed up with indie developer Amir Rajan to create a new cross-platform toolkit.

• Why was it created? Well, in a nutshell they both “hate the complexity of today’s engines” and this toolkit was actually made to help ship A Dark Room for the Nintendo Switch, which shows how versatile it is.

Distributions

New Releases

=> ↺ Plop Linux 19.1 released

OpenSUSE/SUSE

=> ↺ How do you say SUSE?

• SUSECON 2019 has come and gone and was definitely one for the books. Whether you were able to attend the event in person or not, you can still view plenty of videos and content that was shared at the event. One of my favorite videos from the week was “How do you say SUSE” -which comically reminded attendees how to properly say “SUSE.” Don’t quite know exactly how to pronounce SUSE? We’ve got you covered….Broadway musical style. The keynote videos from each day are not to be missed as well as the series of amazing music parody videos that have recently been created. One of the major take-a-ways this year was the recent announcement that as of March 15, not only did SUSE become an independent company, we are now the largest independent open source company in the industry.

Debian Family

=> ↺ New Features Coming to Debian 10 Buster Release

• There is no set release date for Debian 10 Buster. Why is that so? Unlike other distributions, Debian doesn’t do time-based releases. It instead focuses on fixing release-critical bugs. Release-critical bugs are bugs which have either security issues CVE’s or some other critical issues which prevent Debian from releasing.

• Debian has four parts in its archive, called Main, contrib, non-free and optional. Of the four, Debian Developers and Release Managers are most concerned that the packages which form the bedrock of the distribution i.e. Main is rock stable. So they make sure that there aren’t any major functional or security issues.

• This is necessary because Debian is used as a server in many different environments and people have come to depend on Debian. They also look at upgrade cycles to see nothing breaks for which they look for people to test and see if something breaks while upgrading and inform Debian of the same.

=> ↺ Jonathan Carter: Debian project leader elections 2019

• I mentioned internal turmoil at the beginning of the post, this was because up until a few days before my self-nomination, I’ve been very confident, and consistently so for a very long time, that I never want to run for DPL. The work that I care about and spend most attention on doesn’t at all require me being a DPL. Also, having more responsibility in areas that I’d rather let others take care of sounded a bit daunting. I’d much rather spend time on technical and more general community issues than very specific interpersonal problems or administrative tasks like reading and approving budget proposals, sending out developer certificates, etc. On top of that, I was aware that running for DPL and opening myself like that means that I open myself to a very wide array of critique, that people might put everything I say under a microscope and try to tear it apart, and that running for DPL means being prepared for that.

• Despite that turmoil, a small nagging part kept asking the questions “But what if?”, what if I were DPL, what would I do? What would I change? What would I do as DPL that would make Debian better, and better as a DPL than I just could as a normal debian developer? These questions helped form in my head what my platform would look like, why I wanted to run for DPL, and how the rest of my campaign would shaped up. This year is also unique for me compared to previous years in that I will actually have time over the next year to focus on DPL-like activities. That, combined with the plans that were shaping up that I’m very enthusiastic about, convinced me that it’s time to step up and proceed with my self-nomination.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

=> ↺ What’s New in Ubuntu 19.04?

• If you like shiny new software, you may already know that Canonical just launched a new version of Ubuntu. It may be exciting, but is it worth the upgrade? The same question applies if you’re one of those people that don’t care about new things. Your old(er) Ubuntu installation gets the job done. But does version 19.04 solve any problems you currently have?

=> ↺ Ubuntu 19.04 Release | Stephan Fabel – Director Of Product – Canonical Ltd

• Ubuntu 19.04 integrates recent innovations from key open infrastructure projects – like OpenStack, Kubernetes, and Ceph – with advanced life-cycle management for multi-cloud and on-prem operations – from bare metal, VMware and OpenStack to every major public cloud. OpenStack Stein brings AI and NFV hardware acceleration with GPGPU and FPGA passthrough. Ceph Mimic provides multi-site replication and the latest Kubernetes 1.14 enables enterprise storage and the new containerd direct runtime. Optimised Ubuntu Server 19.04 and Minimal Ubuntu 19.04 images are available on all major public clouds.

=> ↺ 开源基础设施，桌面和物联网开发者都聚焦在Ubuntu 19.04

Flavours and Variants

=> ↺ Pop!_OS 19.04 is here!

• It’s spring again! Leaves are budding and updates are blooming for Pop!_OS. Here’s what’s new in Pop!_OS 19.04:

• -The Slim Mode option maximizes your screen real estate by reducing the height of the header on application windows -Dark Mode gives your applications a relaxing ambience for nighttime viewing. Both Dark Mode and Slim Mode can be activated in the Appearance settings menu.

=> ↺ Pop!_OS 19.04 Run Through

• In this video, we look at Pop!_OS 19.04.

=> ↺ Fixing the icon regression in Pop!_OS 19.04

• After installing Pop!_OS 19.04 yesterday, my desktop experience became an eyesore as the previously consistent icon set was replaced with what I can only describe as icon vomit soup.

Devices/Embedded

=> ↺ The Cybersecurity Weakest Link – Linux and IOT

• Linux is not only the backbone of the internet and the Android operating system, it is now expanding into domestic appliances, motor vehicles and pretty much anything else that requires a minimal operating system to run dedicated software. The Internet of Things is very much The Internet of Things Powered by Linux.

• But when Chrysler announced a recall of 1.4 million vehicles back in 2016 after a pair of hackers demonstrated a remote hijack of a Jeep’s digital systems, the risks involved with hacking IoT devices were dramatically illustrated.

• So what does the rise of Linux and IoT mean for Cybersecurity in the Enterprise? Let’s take a look.

=> ↺ Microsoft buys Express Logic, adds a third operating system to its IoT range

• Not content with having a Windows-based Internet of Things platform (Windows 10 IoT) and a Linux-based Internet of Things platform (Azure Sphere), Microsoft has added a third option. The company has announced that it has bought Express Logic and its ThreadX real-time operating system for an undisclosed sum.

• [...]

• Linux can be built with various options to offer more predictable behavior and so can address some similar scenarios. But ThreadX has another big advantage up its sleeve: it’s tiny. A minimal ThreadX installation takes 2,000 bytes of storage and needs 1KB of RAM, far less than Linux can use. By way of comparison, Microsoft’s Sphere hardware (which uses a custom-designed ARM processor with various security features embedded) has 4MB of RAM for applications and 16MB of storage. There are an estimated 6.2 billion deployments of ThreadX running on several dozen different kinds of processor or microcontroller.

=> ↺ World’s first AMD-based NUC mini-PC showcases Ryzen R1000

• ASRock Linux-ready “iBox-R1000” industrial PC and “NUC-R1000” mainboard provide the new AMD Ryzen Embedded R1000 SoC in a 4×4 NUC form-factor with up to 32GB DDR4, 2x GbE, 3x USB 3.1, triple 4K displays, and 2x M.2 slots.

• In a renewed rivalry with Intel reignited by the success of its Ryzen line of processors, AMD has started to get a bit cheeky with its larger rival. Its latest provocation is the launch (via partner ASRock Industrial) of the first 4×4 (also called 4″x4″) NUC form-factor mini-PC based on an AMD processor. As noted in the Tom’s Hardware story that alerted us to the iBox-R1000 and the board-level NUC-R1000, the NUC label “isn’t technically accurate” since it’s an Intel brand that defines a certain class of mini-PC that uses Intel processors.

• [...]

• The ASRock product page notes only Windows 10, support, but the announcement also says it supports Linux kernel 4.18 and above.

=> ↺ QNAP Linux Station Supports Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

• QNAP® Systems, Inc. today announced that Linux Station is fully integrated with Ubuntu® 18.04 LTS, allowing users to enjoy the brand-new GNOME GUI desktop with higher security and easily install apps (including LibreOffice 6.0, Inkscape, and multimedia applications) from the Software Center.

• Linux Station provides one-click installation of multiple versions of Ubuntu, and brings a streamlined NAS and Ubuntu PC experience when using an HDMI-equipped QNAP NAS with a keyboard and mouse. Linux Station also supports remote desktop connection with audio output. As QNAP is dedicated to leverage open-source software for a better user experience, Linux Station also adds support for Ubuntu Kylin – the official Chinese version of Ubuntu.

• “QNAP exclusively incorporates Ubuntu into NAS applications to give users multiple benefits from using QTS and Ubuntu applications,” said Judy Chen, Product Manager of QNAP, adding “The increasingly diverse applications in Linux Station allows users to freely utilize cross-platform, open-source software, such as multimedia applications and Inkscape.”

=> ↺ The PinePhone Linux Smartphone Dev Kit Can Run Wayland’s Weston

• While on one side of the table is the Purism Librem 5 Linux smartphone on the high-price/high-end side, the Pine64 folks continue working on the PinePhone as a lower-end Linux smartphone. A new video now shows the PinePhone running on Linux 5.0 with Wayland’s Weston.

• Earlier this week was Purism showing off the state of their software on the Librem 5 developer kit while coincidentally now is a video showing off the PinePhone running on the Linux 5.0 kernel with Wayland’s Weston compositor.

=> ↺ CrickitSnek — snek on the Adafruit Crickit

• To save cost, the Crickit design doesn’t include any crystal at all. That required re-configuring the SAMD21 clock configuration to synchronize the 48MHz system clock from USB instead of from the 32.768kHz crystal present on the Metro and Feather boards. Once I had done this, the Crickit board appeared on USB and Snek was running.

Android

=> ↺ Android Studio 3.4 now available with new Resource Manager, Android Q emulator images, and more

=> ↺ Google Releases Stable Build of Android Studio 3.4

=> ↺ Here are all the little changes in Android Q Beta 2

=> ↺ Smart Launcher 5 adds Android Q dark theme support

=> ↺ Google reveals its Android browser ballot screens for Europe

=> ↺ Google Opinion Rewards for Android updated with Material Theme redesign

=> ↺ Google offers additional search and browser options for Europe-based Android users

=> ↺ 7 Good Apps To Hide Your Photos And Other Files on Android

=> ↺ Android: 5 new games you have to play this week

=> ↺ 15 new and notable Android apps from the last week including Swoot, Waymo, and Harmony Express (4/13/19 – 4/20/19)

=> ↺ Redmi Go review: Runs on a lighter version of Android, serves user purpose just fine

=> ↺ “PreAMo” Clicker Campaign Living Inside 90 Million Android Devices

=> ↺ Asus Zenfone 5Q / 5 Lite and 5 Selfie Pro Android Pie 9.0 update delayed

=> ↺ Vivo announces Funtouch OS 9 roadmap, 13 devices will get Android Pie

=> ↺ OnePlus 3/3T Android Pie 9.0 update may not bring navigation gestures, require locked bootloader for installation

=> ↺ Rollout of Samsung Galaxy J6 Android Pie update expands to India

Free Software/Open Source

=> ↺ State of enterprise open source: 5 telling stats

• For starters, open source plays a big role in three of the biggest intersecting trends in IT right now: Containers, cloud, and DevOps. Each has open source DNA (and each encompasses highly coveted IT talent skill sets). Kubernetes has become the highest-velocity project in open source history. In fact, IT leaders now see open source not only as agile but also as strategic, according to “The State of Enterprise Open Source,” a new report conducted by Illuminas and sponsored by Red Hat, which queried 950 IT leaders worldwide.

• What does that mean in practice for your peers? Is open source now connected to moving the business forward? How does security weigh in?

Web Browsers

Mozilla

=> ↺ Firefox Nightly: These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 57

=> ↺ My 20 years of web

• Twenty years ago I resigned from my former job at a financial news wire to pursue a career in San Francisco. We were transitioning our news service (Jiji Press, a Japanese wire service similar to Reuters) to being a web-based news site. I had followed the rise and fall of Netscape and the Department of Justice anti-trust case on Microsoft’s bundling of IE with Windows. But what clinched it for me was a Congressional testimony of the Federal Reserve Chairman (the US central bank) about his inability to forecast the potential growth of the Internet.

• Working in the Japanese press at the time gave me a keen interest in international trade. Prime Minister Hashimoto negotiated with United States Trade Representative Mickey Cantor to enhance trade relations and reduce protectionist tariffs that the countries used to artificially subsidize domestic industries. Japan was the second largest global economy at the time. I realized that if I was going to play a role in international trade it was probably going to be in Japan or on the west coast of the US. I decided that because Silicon Valley was the location where much of the industry growth in internet technology was happening, that I had to relocate there if I wanted to engage in this industry. So I packed up all my belongings and moved to San Francisco to start my new career.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

=> ↺ Meet the programmer-turned-drummer-turned-lawyer who’s helping open source startups stand their ground against Amazon’s cloud amid a ‘clash of ideologies’

• She’s made a name for herself as one of the top experts in the field, especially in the last year. Companies like MongoDB, Redis Labs, and Confluent turned to Meeker to help them write new, more restrictive licenses that prevent big cloud providers like Amazon Web Services, Alibaba, and Tencent from using their code freely.

• She calls 2018 a “watershed year” for these new licenses, which sparked fierce debate in the open source software community. The companies in question argued that while it’s completely legal for the big tech companies to take open source code and resell it as a commercial service for profit, it’s not especially fair — especially since Amazon, in particular, is seen as not contributing enough code back to the open source communities in return.

=> ↺ Long Lost ‘Zork’ Source Code Uploaded to GitHub, But Few People Understand It

• Using a compiler created by McGrew, the ZIL Facebook group is now testing the code—and it’s working. One user has got all three Zork games to compile. This leaves things open for ZIL enthusiasts to tinker with the code and test it in-real time, packing on additions and modding existing games. But the licenses here are tricky; Scott noted that these were given to him anonymously and “not considered to be under an open license,” he wrote in the repository notes. That’s because Activision owns the IP[sic].

BSD

=> ↺ docbook2mdoc-1.0.0 released

• After doing active development on it for about a month, i just released version 1.0.0 of the DocBook to mdoc converter, docbook2mdoc(1). The OpenBSD port was updated, too. In a nutshell, docbook2mdoc was brought from experimental status to an early release that can be considered mostly usable for production, though no doubt there are still many rough edges. That’s why i called it 1.0.0 and not 1.1.1.

• Lots of features were added including support for many new DocBook XML elements and for two kinds of file inclusion, formatting was improved in many respects, and several reorganizations were done with respect to internal code structure. The expat library is no longer needed, and no other dependency is required.

• See its homepage for all information about the utility and the release notes for details about this release.

• Thanks to Stephen Gregoratto for a number of patches and many useful reports.

• The rest of this article explains some important design and implementation decisions and mentions some use cases.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

=> ↺ GNU Spotlight with Mike Gerwitz: 13 new GNU releases!

• coreutils-8.31 ddrescue-1.24 dr-geo-19.2 gnuhealth-3.4.1 gnupg-2.2.15 help2man-1.47.10 librejs-7.19 linux-libre-5.0-gnu mit-scheme-10.1.6 nano-4.0 octave-5.1.0 parallel-20190322 unifont-12.0.01

=> ↺ Meetup – with the FSF’s John Sullivan and Donald Robertson, III (Bellingham, WA)

• Free Software Foundation (FSF) executive director John Sullivan and licensing & compliance engineer Donald Robertson, III, will be hosting a meetup in Bellingham, WA, to show appreciation for your support of the FSF’s work and to provide you with an opportunity to meet other FSF members and supporters. They will give a brief update on what the FSF is currently working on and will be curious to hear your thoughts, as well as answer any questions you may have.

Programming/Development

=> ↺ Eclipse IoT Developer Survey 2019

• The Eclipse Foundation’s IoT Working Group has released the results of its 2019 IoT Developer Survey, an annual exercise intended to deliver valuable insight into programming languages, platforms, infrastructure and tools for building IoT solutions.

• This is the fifth year that this survey has been conducted and the number of participants this time, over 1700, had more than trebled from last year’s 500. Two-thirds of of respondents are currently working professionally on IoT projects, or are expecting to do so in the next 18 months. In all 80% if respondents were already actively involved in doing or learning about IoT, 30% of them outside work.

=> ↺ imapautofiler 1.8.0

• imapautofiler applies user-defined rules to automatically organize messages on an IMAP server.

=> ↺ Modern business logic tooling workshop, lab 3: Create a domain model

• Since starting to update my free online rules and process automation workshops that showcase how to get started using modern business logic tooling, we’ve come a long way with process automation. The updates started with moving from JBoss BPM to Red Hat Decision Manager and from JBoss BPM Suite to Red Hat Process Automation Manager.

• The first lab update showed how to install Red Hat Decision Manager on your laptop, and the second lab showed how to create a new project. This article highlights the newest lab update for Red Hat Process Automation Manager, where you’ll learn how to create a domain model.

=> ↺ AiC: Adventures in consensus

• In the talk I gave at Rust LATAM, I said that the Rust project has always emphasized finding the best solution, rather than winning the argument. I think this is one of our deepest values. It’s also one of the hardest for us to uphold.

• Let’s face it – when you’re having a conversation, it’s easy to get attached to specific proposals. It’s easy to have those proposals change from “Option A” vs “Option B” to “my option” and “their option”. Once this happens, it can be very hard to let them “win” – even if you know that both options are quite reasonable.

• This is a problem I’ve been thinking a lot about lately. So I wanted to start an irregular series of blog posts entitled “Adventures in consensus”, or AiC for short. These posts are my way of exploring the topic, and hopefully getting some feedback from all of you while I’m at it.

• This first post dives into what a phrase like “finding the best solution” even means (is there a best?) as well as the mechanics of how one might go about deciding if you really have the “best” solution. Along the way, we’ll see a few places where I think our current process could do better.

=> ↺ Quansight Labs Blog: MOA: a theory for composable and verifiable tensor computations

• Python-moa (mathematics of arrays) is an approach to a high level tensor compiler that is based on the work of Lenore Mullins and her dissertation. A high level compiler is necessary because there are many optimizations that a low level compiler such as gcc will miss. It is trying to solve many of the same problems as other technologies such as the taco compiler and the xla compiler. However, it takes a much different approach than others guided by the following principles.

=> ↺ The Human in Devops

• This week a mild epiphany came to me right after a somewhat heated and tense meeting with a team of developers plus project owner of a web project. They were angry and they were not afraid to show it. They were somewhat miffed about the fact that the head wrote them an email pretty much forcing them to participate to make our DevOps initiative a success. All kinds of expletive words were running through my head in relation to describing this team of flabby, tired looking individuals in front of me, which belied the cool demeanour and composure that I was trying so hard to maintain.

• It happened. In the spur of the moment I too got engulfed in a sea of negativity and for a few minutes lost site of what is the most important component or pillar in a successful DevOps initiative. The people.

• “What a bunch of mule heads !” I thought. It’s as plain as day, once this initiative is a success everybody can go home earlier and everything will be more predictable and we can do much much more than we could before. “Why are you fighting this ?!” I was ready to throw my hands up in defeat when it finally dawned on me.

=> ↺ Python Bytes: #126 WebAssembly comes to Python

=> ↺ Testing metrics thoughts and examples: how to turn lights on and off through MQTT with pytest-play

• In this article I’ll share some personal thoughts about test metrics and talk about some technologies and tools playing around a real example: how to turn lights on and off through MQTT collecting test metrics.

• By the way the considerations contained in this article are valid for any system, technology, test strategy and test tools so you can easily integrate your existing automated tests with statsd with a couple of lines of code in any language.

• I will use the pytest-play tool in this example so that even non programmers should be able to play with automation collecting metrics because this tool is based on YAML (this way no classes, functions, threads, imports, no compilation, etc) and if Docker is already no installation is needed. You’ll need only a bit of command line knowledge and traces of Python expressions like variables["count"] > 0.

Leftovers

Science

=> ↺ Science doesn’t explain tech’s diversity problem — history does

• “Reducing female attrition by one-quarter would add 220,000 people to the highly qualified [science, engineering, and technology] labor pool,” says a 2008 Harvard Business Review research report.

=> ↺ What is ZIL anyway?

• The Infocom ZIL code dump has kicked off a small whirlwind of news articles and blog posts. A lot of them are somewhat hazy on what ZIL is, and how it relates to MDL, Lisp, Z-code, Inform, and the rest of the Golden-Age IF ecosystem.

• So I’m going to talk a lot about it! With examples. But let’s go through in chronological order.

=> ↺ Should I Resign From My Full Professor Job To Work Fulltime On Cocalc?

• Nearly 3 years ago, I gave a talk at a Harvard mathematics conference announcing that “I am leaving academia to build a company”. What I really did is go on unpaid leave for three years from my tenured Full Professor position. No further extensions of that leave is possible, so I finally have to decide whether or not to go back to academia or resign.

=> ↺ Is Email Making Professors Stupid?

• I can think of at least three strong arguments for why higher education should be that industry, significantly restructuring its work culture to provide professors more uninterrupted time for thinking and teaching, and require less time on email and administrative duties.

Health/Nutrition

=> ↺ Sitting all day ruined my health. VR saved me.

• You probably don’t know me. I’m not a famous writer.

• But I have worked on some famous games, such as Injustice 2 and Mortal Kombat 11. This story isn’t about writing fighting games, though. It’s about how my sedentary, workaholic writing habits made me overweight, and slower and weaker than I should have been. And how it rapidly went downhill from there.

• Then I’m going to tell you how I fought back.

=> ↺ Why Big Pharma Is Winning the Drug Price Wars

• Robin Feldman is a law professor at the University of California Hastings with a particular expertise in antitrust and patent issues. She is also one of those professors who are unusually good at explaining complex issues in terms laymen (like me!) can understand. Her 2012 book on how to fix the patent system, “Rethinking Patent Law,” is considered one of the more important contributions to the field in recent years.

• Feldman then turned her attention to the problem of skyrocketing drug prices. “Economically,” she says, “it doesn’t make sense. So I decided to look into it. It took years of research.”

• That research has culminated in a new book: “Drugs, Money and Secret Handshakes: The Unstoppable Growth of Prescription Drug Prices.” I spoke to her a few days ago about drug prices — and what might be done to halt their inexorable rise. What follows is a lightly edited and condensed version of our conversation.

=> ↺ John Oliver Has Famous Actors Act Out The Deposition Richard Sackler Is Trying To Hide

• One of the issues that we’ve discussed quite a bit on Techdirt over the years is the lengths that some people want to go to to hide court records and important public documents. The main story on this past weekend’s Last Week Tonight with John Oliver tackled this issue in relation to Richard Sackler, the former chairman and president of Purdue Pharma, the company that developed and promoted Oxycontin. Much of the episode focused on questionable things said or done by Sackler, but towards the end, Oliver notes that Sackler has done an amazing job hiding from public scrutiny. There are very few pictures of him even online and no real videos they could find.

=> ↺ Anti-Vaxxers Are Just as Bad as Climate Deniers

• There have been at least 555 confirmed cases of the highly contagious measles virus since January alone, prompting officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to call this sudden eruption the worst outbreak of the disease in nearly 20 years. The story about measles spreading across the U.S. is unfolding alongside a parallel and troubling trend of increased measles infection rates globally. The World Health Organization issued a report at the same time as the CDC, finding that measles cases worldwide have surged by nearly four times the average number in the first three months of the year.

• But the national and global trends spin a tale of two separate realities. An irrational fear of vaccines among well-educated and largely white Americans has fueled an utterly preventable and dangerous disease that had been considered “eliminated” by scientists. Reuters explained that “[a] growing and vocal fringe of parents in the United States oppose measles vaccines believing, contrary to scientific evidence, that ingredients in the vaccines can cause autism or other disorders.” Michelle M. Mello, a professor of law at Stanford Law School and a professor of health research and policy at the Stanford University School of Medicine explained to me in an interview that while there have been pockets of low vaccination rates in minority communities—like Somali Americans in Minnesota or Orthodox Jews in New York City—“On a national level, overwhelmingly, the demographic is educated, relatively affluent white families” that are choosing not to vaccinate their children. The epicenters of measles outbreaks are in liberal states such as California, New York, Oregon and Washington.

=> ↺ ‘Prohibition Only Ends Once’: 421 For All Group Takes Aim at Cannabis Criminal Justice Reform

• A new group, 421 For All, aims to use the day after 4/20—a national day to enjoy marijuana products—to promote what organizer Sky Cohen, a New York-based event promoter and activist, called “equitable growth in the industry.”

• “Prohibition only ends once,” said Cohen. “We want to make sure that our intervention encourages policy that guarantees access to those who have been historically criminalized.”

• The push for a more equitable marijuana industry begins with the legalization process, 421 For All founder Cristina Buccola told Cannabis Now Wednesday, but shouldn’t end there.

• “Cannabis legalization all too frequently omits meaningful criminal justice reforms, fails to repair communities that have borne the brunt of prohibition, doesn’t require diverse economic, ownership and educational opportunities, and forgets to protect patients’ rights and our environment,” said Buccola.

• The group will kick off its inaugural fundraising event on April 21 at New York’s Chelsea Music Hall.

• “The event is going to be a mixture of spoken presentation from our beneficiary organizations and music from local talent,” said Cohen. “The event will be hosted by Mike Glazer and Mary Jane from Weed + Grub Podcast.”

=> ↺ In Anti-Choice Hands, Abortion Clinic Inspections Become a Weapon

• Like many gynecological offices, Falls Church Healthcare Center in Virginia offers a range of services from annual wellness exams to Pap smears and contraceptives. The center also provides abortion care, which means that since 2011, when the state of Virginia introduced new regulations, it has needed a facility license to operate.

• Although abortion care is extremely safe in the United States, it is regulated to a different degree than other health care. If it were a dermatologist’s office, the Falls Church Healthcare Center wouldn’t need a facility license. Not only is it medically unnecessary, but the license is redundant, given that other medical bodies already oversee the abortion clinic’s equipment and staff.

• But doctors or health professionals didn’t develop the licensing requirement; politicians did. And as part of that licensing requirement, inspectors from the Virginia Department of Health can visit the Falls Church Healthcare Center at any time, without notice. This is true of abortion clinics in at least 22 other states, according to the Policy Surveillance Program at Temple University.

=> ↺ Just After Sanders Revealed Fox Viewers’ Approval of Medicare for All, Trump’s Medicare Chief ‘Smears’ Program on Network

• Days after Sen. Bernie Sanders’s town hall hosted by Fox News revealed that many Fox viewers would support his Medicare for All plan, President Donald Trump’s appointee in charge of Medicare appeared on the network in an apparent attempt at damage control.

• Seema Verma, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Administrator, appeared on “Fox & Friends” on Wednesday to claim that Sanders’s proposal would deliver worse health outcomes for Americans at a higher price than the current for-profit system—contrary to a number of studies from across the political spectrum.

• Media Matters labeled Verma’s interview an intentional “smear” of the Vermont Independent senator’s appearance and proposal.

• “What we’re talking about is stripping people of their private health insurance, forcing them into a government-run program,” Verma told host Brian Kilmeade, calling the proposal “the biggest threat to the American healthcare system.”

=> ↺ Study Shows Even ‘Moderate’ Consumption of Red and Processed Meat Increases Risk of Colon Cancer

• For over five years, experts at the University of Oxford, University of Auckland, and the cancer research arm of the World Health Organization (WHO) analyzed the diets and cancer rates of people who voluntarily participate in the U.K. Biobank research project.

• The findings, published Wednesday in the International Journal of Epidemiology, align with previous research and subsequent warnings from public health experts about the risks of colon cancer, also known as bowel or colorectal cancer.

=> ↺ Food standards on the menu at U.S.-EU talks

• With the endorsement on April 15 by a majority of the heads of government of its member states, the European Union has finally taken the formal step needed to move ahead with trade negotiations with the United States. The talks may yet blow up over automobile tariffs, airplane subsidies or a dispute about the inclusion of agriculture in the negotiations. The EU says it never agreed to include agriculture; the Trump administration claims that agriculture is included, and powerful members of Congress have asserted there can’t be a deal without it. The U.S. negotiating objectives clearly intend to cover agriculture broadly. The trade negotiation mandate adopted by the EU has two parts, one of which addresses tariffs and the other, domestic regulatory changes. The negotiation instruction on tariffs is limited to industrial goods and specifically excludes “agricultural products.” The latter instruction on regulatory cooperation and compatibility, however, does not exclude agriculture. Thus, we can be sure that food and agriculture will be directly affected by an EU-U.S. trade deal, because any potential carve-out relates only to discussing tariff reductions. As in the New NAFTA, food and agriculture—including product labeling and oversight of food safety, chemical use and emerging technologies—will still be directly affected. This is because both the EU and the U.S. have committed to reducing so-called “non-tariff barriers” through regulatory cooperation measures, conformity assessments and mutual recognition agreements specifically aimed at public protections such as food safety oversight.

=> ↺ Private Health Insurance Stocks ‘In Free Fall’ as Medicare for All Gains Momentum

• With comprehensive Medicare for All legislation now introduced in both chambers of Congress and bolstered by surging grassroots support, health insurance stocks are “crumbling” as investors grow increasingly fearful that single-payer could eventually become a reality.

• “Together, the shares of hospitals and insurers lost $28 billion in market value on Tuesday,” Bloomberg reported. “The slide in hospital and insurance stocks continued Wednesday, wiping out billions of dollars more in market value from some of the biggest health companies in the U.S.”

• As Bloomberg’s Sahil Kapur put it on Twitter, “Health insurance stocks are in free fall as Democrats introduce ‘Medicare for All’ legislation in Congress and Bernie Sanders pushes it on Fox News.”

=> ↺ Flint Residents ‘Will Get Their Day In Court’ After Federal Judge Rules They Can Sue EPA Over Water Crisis

• As Flint, Michigan, marks five years since the city’s deadly water crisis began, a federal judge ruled in favor of residents who want to sue the federal government for not acting promptly to ensure the city had clean drinking water.

• Residents filed suit against the EPA in 2017, demanding $722 million in damages and arguing that the agency was able to inform the city that its drinking water was contaminated months before it finally issued an emergency order.

• “These lies went on for months while the people of Flint continued to be poisoned,” Judge Linda Parker, an Obama appointee, wrote in her ruling Friday.

=> ↺ Fox Never Expected This—The Medicare for All Moment

• It was an unexpected teaching moment for Fox News — a lesson that all the fear mongering in your playbook doesn’t carry quite so far when you confront a mass movement for transformative change that will dramatically improve people’s lives.

• In a town hall April 15 with Sen. Bernie Sanders, Fox host Bret Baier threw out an anticipated gotcha question for the audience Fox likely presumed were Fox viewers.

• How many people “get their insurance from work, private insurance,” he asked. Most hands went up. How many, Baier then asked, “are willing to transition to what the Senator says a government run system?”

• To no doubt his shock, nearly all the hands stayed up, accompanied by wild cheers – for the Medicare for All proposal the Fox network, and the President who is their number one cheerleader, have spent months demonizing.

Security

=> ↺ Riccardo Padovani: Responsible disclosure: improper access control in Gitlab private project.

• As I said back in September with regard to a responsible disclosure about Facebook, data access control isn’t easy. While it can sound quite simple (just give access to the authorized entities), it is very difficult, both on a theoretical side (who is an authorized entity? What does authorized mean? And how do we identify an entity?) and on a practical side.

=> ↺ Integrating Password and Privilege Management for Unix and Linux Systems

• Unix and Linux build the foundation for most business-critical systems. Thus, they present target-rich environments for cyber-attackers. Privileged Access Management (PAM) helps to mitigate such risks. To succeed, security teams must follow an integrated approach, covering both privilege elevation and centralized management of shared account credentials.

=> ↺ How Not to Acknowledge a Data Breach

• My guess is that what Wipro means by “zero-day” is a malicious email attachment that went undetected by all commercial antivirus tools before it infected Wipro employee systems with malware.

=> ↺ Facebook stored millions of Instagram passwords in plain text

• Facebook says it stored millions of Instagram users’ passwords in plain text, leaving them exposed to people with access to certain internal systems. The security lapse was first reported last month, but at the time, Facebook said it only happened to “tens of thousands of Instagram users,” whereas the number is now being revised up to “millions.” The issue also affected “hundreds of millions of Facebook Lite users” and “tens of millions of other Facebook users.”

=> ↺ Update: Facebook passwords for hundreds of millions of users were exposed to Facebook employees

• Facebook confirmed March 21 that hundreds of millions of user passwords were being stored in a “readable format” within its servers, accessible to internal Facebook employees—including millions more Instagram users than previously thought. Affected users will be notified, Facebook said, so they can change those passwords.

=> ↺ Facebook ‘unintentionally’ uploaded 1.5 million people’s email contacts without asking

• This is how it unfolded: a security researcher spotted that Facebook was asking some users to put in their email passwords when they signed up with a new account to verify their identity. Business Insider then experimented with what would happen if you were brave/mad enough to do so and found that a message popped up saying it was “importing” its contacts without having the decency to check that was okay first.

• Apparently, 1.5 million people just accepted this as just one of those things, and the information was then used to build up Facebook’s uncanny ability to predict when you know somebody.

=> ↺ In new gaffe, Facebook improperly collects email contacts for 1.5 million

• Facebook’s privacy gaffes keep coming. On Wednesday, the social media company said it collected the stored email address lists of as many as 1.5 million users without permission. On Thursday, the company said the number of Instagram users affected by a previously reported password storage error was in the “millions,” not the “tens of thousands” as previously estimated.

=> ↺ Facebook says it ‘unintentionally uploaded’ 1.5 million people’s email contacts without their consent

• Since May 2016, the social-networking company has collected the contact lists of 1.5 million users new to the social network, Business Insider can reveal. The Silicon Valley company said the contact data was “unintentionally uploaded to Facebook,” and it is now deleting them.

=> ↺ With Nation Distracted by Mueller Report, Facebook Admits Millions of Users’ Passwords Affected by Latest Privacy Breach

• On Thursday, Facebook added to a blog post from March 21 to let users know that instead of storing tens of thousands of Instagram passwords, as it had reported last month, the number of users affected by the privacy breach was in the millions. Facebook is the parent company of Instagram.

• “Since this post was published, we discovered additional logs of Instagram passwords being stored in a readable format,” wrote Pedro Canahuati, vice president of Engineering, Security and Privacy. “We now estimate that this issue impacted millions of Instagram users. We will be notifying these users as we did the others.”

• The stored passwords were found in January during a routine security check, according to Facebook. In March, when the breach was first announced, the company said the passwords were never visible to anyone outside of Facebook.

=> ↺ In 2019, Most Linux Distributions Still Aren’t Restricting Dmesg Access

• Going back to the late Linux 2.6 kernel days has been the CONFIG_DMESG_RESTRICT (or for the past number of years, renamed to CONFIG_SECURITY_DMESG_RESTRICT) Kconfig option to restrict access to dmesg in the name of security and not allowing unprivileged users from accessing this system log. While it’s been brought up from time to time, Linux distributions are still generally allowing any user access to dmesg even though it may contain information that could help bad actors exploit the system.

• The primary motivation of CONFIG_SECURITY_DMESG_RESTRICT and an associated sysctl tunable as well (dmesg_restrict) is for restricting access to dmesg so unprivileged users can’t see the syslog to avoid possible kernel memory address exposures among other potentially sensitive information that could be leaked about the kernel to help anyone trying to exploit the system. But even with these options being available for years, most Linux distributions leave dmesg open to any user.

Defence/Aggression

=> ↺ Ho Chi Minh City: Nguyen Thai Binh Street

• The United States had intensified its bombing of both northern and southern Vietnam earlier in April. 1972. Nixon, Kissinger and their henchmen in the Pentagon called the campaign Operation Freedom Porch. The northern cities of Hanoi and Haiphong were carpet-bombed with wave after wave of United States Air Force B-52s dropping their explosives across both metropolises. Meanwhile, the US Navy was preparing to mine Haiphong Harbor.

• On April 20th, 1972 a rally against the US bombing northern Vietnam and the mining of its harbors took place in Seattle, Washington at the University of Washington. It was one of hundreds such protests against the US actions taking place that week around the world. I attended one in Frankfurt am Main, Germany that ended up being broken up by police with truncheons and water cannons. People I knew in Maryland and DC wrote to me about similar police attacks at protests in DC and at the University of Maryland. Following their stories about the bombing raids, the military’s daily newspaper Stars & Stripes (published for men and women stationed overseas) provided its readers with a brief summary of demonstrations against the latest US attacks. So did the International Herald Tribune and various European newspapers available at the newsstands in downtown Frankfurt.

• Anyhow, back to that rally in Seattle. One of the reasons for the protest there was unique to that city. It involved a student at the University who was being threatened with deportation because of his antiwar activities. That student’s name was to become the name of the street I opened this story with: Nguyen Thai Binh. Born in southern Vietnam, Binh was attending the university on a scholarship provided by the US Agency for International Development (USAID). Now, despite the claims made by the agency and many of its staffers, USAID was (and is) essentially a branch of the CIA. It is the carrot that operates along with the stick; the good cop who works with the bad cop.

=> ↺ Sixth Circuit Court Dumps Lawsuit Seeking To Hold Twitter Responsible For The Pulse Nightclub Shooting

• Another one of 1-800-LAW-FIRM’s lawsuits has been tossed for a second time. After being shut down at the district level for attempting to hold social media companies responsible for the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida, the law firm asked the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals to take another look at its dubious legal theories.

• The Appeals Court has taken another look and it doesn’t like what it sees any more than the district court did. The violent act committed inside the nightclub was horrible, but the court cannot provide a remedy for every wrong — especially not in a case where the plaintiffs are trying to hold a third party responsible for violent acts they neither encouraged nor committed.

=> ↺ Video evidence of Islamic cleric beheading 38-year-old mam emerges

• An Igbosere High Court in Lagos, on Tuesday admitted in evidence a video recording of a confessional statement of an Islamic cleric, Taofeek Adamu, charged with beheading a 38-year-old congregant.

• [...]

• Section 84 of the Evidence Act provides that a computer generated document shall be admissible as evidence of any fact stated in it of which direct oral evidence would be admissible and the period in which the document was generated, the computer was operating properly.

• The judge said that the prosecution was able to show that the computer from which the document was generated was working properly at the time the evidence was generated.

=> ↺ Saudi runaway sisters plead for help on social media

• Two Saudi sisters appealed for help Wednesday from the former Soviet republic of Georgia after fleeing their country, in the latest case of runaways from the ultra-conservative kingdom using social media to seek asylum.

• Using a newly created Twitter account called “GeorgiaSisters,” they identified themselves as Maha al-Subaie, 28, and Wafa al-Subaie, 25. Like other Saudi women who have fled and turned to social media, they posted copies of their passports to establish their identities.

=> ↺ Defending Venezuela: Two Approaches

• Recent US attacks on Venezuela have generated a widespread international response. Good willed people from all walks of life have come forward to express their solidarity with the Bolivarian revolution and their opposition to intervention. This is inspiring and leads one to conclude that there is generalized dissatisfaction with the global system and, together with it, a willingness to be critical and work for change.

• Naturally these defenses have focused on imperialism, intervention and interference. The overall consensus is “Hands off Venezuela.” This slogan is a good one, since every thinking person today defends democracy, and a condition for democracy is that nations maintain (or attain) their sovereignty. (Nothing could be more antidemocratic than having foreign powers interfere in a country and have them sponsor foreign-appointed pretenders such as Juan Guaidó).

• However, this focus on imperialist interference, correct as it is, has sometimes led to an apparent indifference to the content of the revolution and its internal dynamic. One might think that the oversight is actually for the better since internal affairs are “none of our business, but rather the responsibility of Venezuelans.” Yet I think that this sidelining of the internal dynamic and contents of the Bolivarian process is mistaken. Although it has been a pattern of internationalist behavior for some time, I believe it is not necessary and could be even harmful.

• From the start, the Venezuelan revolution skillfully interpellated people from all around the world. It said to them: Our struggle is your struggle, your struggle is our struggle. That is not just a tactically useful position but is actually scientifically correct.

• For this reason, the Venezuelan revolution declared from the beginning that the problems of neoliberalism, imperialism, and later capitalism, were not unique to Venezuela. They were challenges that peoples from all around the world faced, and it invited people to join in a common struggle.

=> ↺ Rosneft wants ‘Reuters’ news agency banned in Russia for report about Venezuela

• The Russian state oil company Rosneft says a recent report by the news agency Reuters contains “patently false” information that President Nicolas Maduro is funneling money from Venezuelan oil sales through Rosneft to evade U.S. sanctions.

• In a press release on April 19, the Russian energy giant called Reuters a “pseudo news agency” and accused its journalists of “spreading disinformation,” “legitimizing rumors,” and “inventing news opportunities” to damage Rosneft. The company says it plans to turn to Russian law enforcement agencies to stop the news agency’s “illegal activities.”

=> ↺ By not investigating the U.S. for war crimes, the International Criminal Court shows colonialism still thrives in international law

• On April 5, the United States revoked the visa of the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) chief prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, for her attempts to open an investigation into alleged war crimes committed by the U.S. in Afghanistan. A week later, judges at the ICC rejected Bensouda’s request to open a probe into U.S. involvement in Afghanistan.

• While rights advocates condemned this move as amounting to U.S. interference in the workings of the ICC, it’s more alarming than mere obstruction — and is rooted in the pre-existing hierarchy and embedded colonial structures in international legal order.

• Bensouda’s visa revocation underscores the existing systematic inequality in international legal order. This is rooted in the presumed hierarchy by a group of elite nations that have dominated international order from a position of assumed racial, cultural, political, historical, material, economic and legal superiority.

• These developments come in light of comments made by the Trump administration’s national security advisor, John Bolton, who delegitimized the role of the ICC in a speech he delivered in September 2018. He said that “the U.S. will take any means necessary” to overcome “unjust prosecution by this illegitimate Court.”

=> ↺ Is the American Psychological Association Addicted to Militarism and War?

• When hijacked planes hit their targets on the morning of September 11, 2001, the American Psychological Association (APA) sprang into action. Within hours, through its disaster response network the APA mobilized expert practitioners and worked with the American Red Cross to provide psychological support to families of the victims and to rescue workers. The APA’s public affairs office moved quickly as well to assist the public—and especially families, children, and schools—by developing and disseminating materials that provided psychological guidance about coping with fear and trauma.

• But with comparable urgency, the APA also ensured that the Bush Administration would view the association as a valued partner in the military and intelligence operations central to the new “war on terror.” Within days, the APA’s science directorate called upon research psychologists to identify how psychological science might contribute to counter-terrorism initiatives. Shortly thereafter, a newly established APA subcommittee on psychology’s response to terrorism directed its attention to “offering psychologists’ expertise to decision-makers in the military, Central Intelligence Agency, Department of State and related agencies” and to “inventorying members’ expertise and asking government psychologists how agencies could put that expertise to use.”

=> ↺ As We Mourn Notre Dame, Let Us Remember Black Churches Also Matter

• When Notre Dame burned, I mourned. A beautiful cathedral, a destination, a sanctuary for quiet invocation, Notre Dame was also an architectural gem, a landmark for more than 850 years. The collapse of its beautiful spire was heartbreaking to see. I am glad that the world stopped, recognized that the fire that engulfed the cathedral roof was a significant loss to us all, and gathered, albeit virtually, to bear witness.

• While I felt sad as I watched news coverage of the Paris event, as a woman of color, I couldn’t help but also feel a certain indignation, a kind of anger, an unexpressed rage. The kind of unexpressed rage that, for over 400 years, Black folks have just swallowed like a communion wafer in pursuit of infinite grace.

• My sadness mixed with resentment partly because, stretching over a 10-day period in one rural Louisiana town just last month, three Black churches burned to the ground. Officials recently arrested a white man, Holden Matthews, the son of a parish deputy sheriff, and charged him with a hate crime. This one case is enough to spark sorrow, but it is not the sole reason for my consternation.

=> ↺ Notre Dame: We Have Always Belonged to Her

• Some have said that Notre Dame represented colonial oppression and feudalism. But indeed, the same could be said about the Imperial Palaces of China, the monasteries of Tibet, St. Basil’s in Moscow, the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, Akshardham in Delhi, even the ancient ruins of the Acropolis or Teotihuacan. All of them represent some kind of oppression, caste or injustice. And of course each of them should be understood beyond mere romanticism and in this historical context. Many of the colonial structures we see today were erected on the razed temples or cities of conquered peoples and were placed there erase that peoples history. A message of ruthless and brutal imperial supremacy. But there is often a tendency to reduce the power of place, that enduring spirit of loci, to fit places and their nuanced and complex meaning into neat and tidy narratives. What is lost is ambiguity, movement, and the very weight of human history itself.

=> ↺ Who Are the Real Terrorists in the Mideast?

• Back when I still wore the uniform of a U.S. Army officer, and well before many of my former brothers in arms labeled me a traitor, I taught freshman (“plebe”) history at West Point. I loved asking my cadets provocative questions, the sort of queries they never heard in high school Advanced Placement U.S. history courses. Consider just one. At the end of the class on World War II, I always asked: “What is the moral difference between flying three planes into the Twin Towers and Pentagon—killing 3,000 civilians—and using hundreds of U.S. planes to firebomb Tokyo on March 9, 1945—killing some 90,000 civilians?” Suffice it to say that most cadets didn’t like this question at all.

• Nevertheless, let’s break that debate query down. The standard retorts of cadets ran something like this: “Well, Japan attacked us first,” or “It’s different—the U.S. had officially declared war on Japan!” Fair points, both. Still, an honest analysis complicates the standard American apologetics. Osama bin Laden and company would argue that actually, the U.S. had attacked (the Muslim world) first. After all, U.S.-imposed sanctions on Iraq caused the death of an estimated 500,000 Iraqi children from 1991 to 2003. Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright admitted as much on camera, callously declaring that “we think the price is worth it.” Indeed, bin Laden pointed to the Iraqi sanctions regime as one of his three core motives for attacking the U.S. homeland. Furthermore, I’d remind my cadets, bin Laden did publicly declare jihad on America on Aug. 23, 1996, more than five years before the 9/11 attacks.

• Now, I’m no fan of al-Qaida or bin Laden, or of any attacker of civilians. I grew up in a Staten Island neighborhood in New York where the avenues are named for dead firemen. I took 9/11 personally. Still, intellectual honesty demands a fair analysis of complex ethical issues in warfare—my profession of choice. Critical thinkers must be able to hold two seemingly opposing thoughts in their heads at the same time; in this case, that the 9/11 attacks were criminal and that American firebombings of Japanese women and children were lawless. One of the architects of that deliberate bombing—former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara—has admitted as much.

=> ↺ Trump Cracks Down on Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela

• The Trump administration on Wednesday intensified its crackdown on Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela, rolling back Obama administration policy and announcing new restrictions and sanctions against the three countries whose leaders national security adviser John Bolton dubbed the “three stooges of socialism.”

• “The troika of tyranny — Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua — is beginning to crumble,” Bolton said in a hard-hitting speech near Miami on the 58th anniversary of the United States’ failed Bay of Pigs invasion of the island, an attempt to overthrow the Cuban government.

• The measures seem likely to hit hardest in Cuba, which is at a moment of severe economic weakness as it struggles to find cash to import basic food and other supplies following a drop in aid from Venezuela and a string of bad years in other key economic sectors.

=> ↺ Pompeo is “Setting the Stage for a War with Iran”

• Last week, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo suggested that the Trump administration would not rule out going to war with Iran even though there is no explicit authorization from Congress to do so. Pompeo said this in the context of being asked whether the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) could be used to attack Iran on the basis that Iran supported the 9/11 attacks and is connected to Al Qaeda, which carried out the 9/11 attack.

=> ↺ ICC Makes “Dangerous Decision” to Drop Probe into U.S. War Crimes in Afghanistan After U.S. Pressure

• The International Criminal Court has announced it will not investigate possible war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by the United States and other actors in Afghanistan. The court suggested the U.S.’s lack of cooperation with the investigation was behind the decision. Earlier this month, the U.S. revoked the visa of the ICC’s chief prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda. A 2016 report by the ICC accused the U.S. military of torturing at least 61 prisoners in Afghanistan during the ongoing war. The report also accused the CIA of subjecting at least 27 prisoners to torture, including rape, at CIA prison sites in Afghanistan, Poland, Romania and Lithuania. We speak to Katherine Gallagher, senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights.

=> ↺ We already know who will win the war in Libya – western arms dealers

• In the shadow world of the arms trade there is one business model that outshines all others: selling arms to both sides in the same war. Ideally it works best when weapons you have sold to one side destroy weapons you have sold to the other. Thus if one side uses air-launched precision-guided missiles to destroy the other’s aircraft (or tanks, armoured personnel carriers or whatever), then it will need to buy replacement missiles, will need to have your people service its aircraft and, if it ‘wins’ the war it will most likely buy new planes from you as it rearms. The other side will need to replace the materiel destroyed, will want to upgrade its weapons and also buy in heavily for the next phase of the conflict.

• All this is a matter of routine business and the results of a war will often be reflected in marketing afterwards. In 1982 the UK fought a short and bitter war with Argentina for control of the Falklands/Malvinas; in the months that followed military magazines carried full-page adverts for ship-based anti-aircraft missiles that had been successfully used to shoot down Argentine aircraft. The adverts were the same as those published before that war but for the words ‘combat proven’ stamped across them.

• There was bitter irony in this when it was learned that one such missile, fired from a British Type 42 destroyer, had shot down a British army helicopter by mistake, killing all four people on board. To add to the bitterness, two Type 42s had also been sold by Britain to Argentina before the war.

=> ↺ Libyan Humanitarian Crisis Worsens as Over 170 Killed, 18K Displaced in Warlord Assault on Tripoli

• At least four people died in heavy shelling on Tuesday in the capital city of Tripoli. According to the United Nations, over 170 people have been killed and 750 injured since a Libyan warlord launched an assault on Tripoli on April 5. The fighting pits the U.N.-backed Government of National Accord against a militia led by former Libyan General Khalifa Haftar, who already controls much of eastern Libya. The Libyan government has accused the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Egypt of funding and arming Haftar, who has dual U.S.-Libyan citizenship. Meanwhile, Qatar has called for the enforcement of an arms embargo against Haftar. The fighting has displaced nearly 18,000 people, but authorities fear the humanitarian crisis could quickly escalate if the fighting continues. We speak to Anas El Gomati, director of the Tripoli-based Sadeq Institute, Libya’s first independent research organization.

=> ↺ We Are All Complicit in America’s War Machine

• You’ve probably heard that tired old trope. Whenever someone dares suggest that after eighteen years of fruitless wars perhaps it’s time for Uncle Sam’s losing war machine to de-escalate in the Greater Middle East, you can expect some version of the worn out platitude of “here” and “there” justification. Utterly simplistic and regularly debunked by existing evidence, the cliché remains ever so pervasive and (for some) persuasive. As a facile, fear-based rationalization it’s rather effective. It’s very superficiality seduces a populace that is utterly apathetic towards U.S. foreign policy – and make no mistake, the owners of this country count on that indifference to wage profitable (for shareholders and CEOs) forever wars in places few Americans could find on the map.

• Still, with three more US Marines killed by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan – all reservists from a Massachusetts-based unit (so much for that one weekend a month deal) – its time to tear down the intellectually dishonest rationalizations for America’s longest war. The Taliban – which is really a coalition of impoverished young nationalists dedicated to drive out the American occupier – simply is not heading to the US to kill your family anytime soon. There were no Afghans on the 9/11 planes and even though the Taliban regime had harbored Osama Bin Laden no Afghans had directly attacked America.

• The September 11th attack was a singular event. The catastrophic outcome – the towers collapsing – doubtlessly surprised even the Al Qaeda organization. Critical was America’s militarized response, the original sin of the war on terror, especially the decision to maintain the occupation of Afghanistan once the Taliban was deposed. Shifting gears from counter-terror to counterinsurgency and nation-building was the true turning point, the moment when any sort of American “victory” became impossible. (As if it ever truly was!)

• That decision was based upon a series of lies. The lie that if done “right” counterinsurgency can remake whole societies (faux military “intellectuals like that one in particular); that Afghanistan could be transformed into a Jeffersonian republic at the point of a foreign bayonet; that trapped inside every Afghan there’s an American just dying to escape. But the biggest lie is the notion that if the US doesn’t transform that country or keep our military in place indefinitely, the result would be another 9/11. Taliban fighters – think scruffy farm boys really – are highly unlikely to travel to America and attack our cities. They can’t read, hardly afford to travel, and inhabit a narrow world centered on village and district life. Their goals have always been much more circumscribed and limited to ruling Afghanistan. Anything else is grandiose fantasy. Taliban does not equal Al Qaeda, or ISIS, and it never has.

• Make no mistake, the Taliban movement is largely abhorrent and brutal. Still, this doesn’t mean they present a existential strategic threat to the Homeland. Nor does this mean they’re easily beatable since, like it or not, the Taliban is popular in large swaths of the country. That inconvenient fact must drive any sober assessment of the costs and benefits of perpetual US military intervention in Afghanistan. Is the US presence in the country making us any safer? What if our foreign occupation actually generates a nationalist backlash and drives young men into the ranks of the Taliban? These are the sorts of hard questions that sober strategists must consider before asking another young American soldier to fight and potentially die in a war with no end in sight.

• To its credit, the Trump administration is now attempting to negotiate with the Taliban, but such peace attempts have dragged on before (during the late Obama years) and, frankly, the Taliban holds the stronger hand. Don’t be surprised, then, if the Taliban ends up getting most of its demands, especially if the peace process is protracted. Which is a scary notion – because we’ve seen this before, in Vietnam.

=> ↺ Kim Jong-un to visit Russia in late April for first-ever meeting with Putin

• North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has reportedly accepted an invitation from Vladimir Putin to visit Russia. According to the Kremlin’s official website, Kim and Putin will meet in late April. It’s still unclear where the two leaders will meet, though the North Korean media has suggested it could happen in Vladivostok, near Russia’s border with China and North Korea.

=> ↺ Jimmy Carter: US ‘Most Warlike Nation in History of the World’

• The only US president to complete his term without war, military attack or occupation has called the United States “the most warlike nation in the history of the world.”

• During his regular Sunday school lesson at Maranatha Baptist Church in his hometown of Plains, Georgia, Jimmy Carter revealed that he had recently spoken with President Donald Trump about China. Carter, 94, said Trump was worried about China’s growing economy and expressed concern that “China is getting ahead of us.”

• Carter, who normalized diplomatic relations between Washington and Beijing in 1979, said he told Trump that much of China’s success was due to its peaceful foreign policy.

=> ↺ Hell Mixed With Futility

• Oh, the normalcy of militarism! Our annual financial hemorrhage to this complex menagerie of institutions — from the Pentagon to Homeland Security to the Nuclear Security Administration to the CIA and its secret expenditures — must not be seriously questioned in the corridors of Congress, even though, all things considered, it comes to almost a trillion dollars annually.

• Call it the Defense budget, smile and move on.

• Even the current “liberal revolt” in the House of Representatives over the Dems’ proposed budget isn’t a serious questioning of the American way of war but, rather, a demand for “parity” between social and defense spending, which, if anything, further hardens the latter into an unquestioned reality. Yes, yes, America spends more on its military than the next seven countries combined, but let’s make sure we have money available for healthcare too, OK?

• Norman Solomon called it the “toxic lure of guns and butter,” this creation of an America that has both the values of democratic socialism, a la Canada and Western Europe, and yet is the global cop extraordinaire, fighting (and creating) terrorism, bombing civilians, operating some 800 military bases in over 80 countries and maintaining a nuclear arsenal second to none (indeed, developing “usable” nukes). What’s wrong with that?

• The headache here for the Dem establishment is the “democratic socialism” part, which is often covered with disdain by the mainstream media, e.g.:

• “U.S. House of Representatives Democrats on Tuesday canceled a planned floor vote on legislation to set federal spending levels for next year after the party’s left wing demanded more money for domestic programs,” Reuters reported last week.

=> ↺ U.S. Continues Supplying Kurds to Counteract Turkey

• The mass media has been widely covering the details of the disastrous humanitarian situation in Rukban refugee camp over recent months. By the way, the crisis in other sites deserves more considerable attention. Al-Hol refugee camp located in Al-Hasakah province and run by the Syria Democratic Forces is one of them.

• Every single day from 10 to 20 people, mainly women and children die due to the lack of drinking water, essential goods, and medicine. Only for the past two months, 250 children passed away in the camp. According to estimates, now more than 50,000 refugees reside there, although initially it was designed only for 25,000.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

=> ↺ On WikiLeaks Email Releases, Mueller Team Ignored Findings Of Former US Intelligence Officials

• Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report on an investigation into alleged Russian efforts to meddle in the 2016 presidential election does not confirm, without a doubt, that Russian intelligence agents or individuals tied to Russian intelligence agencies passed on emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign to WikiLeaks.

• Mueller’s team highlighted statements from WikiLeaks on Twitter about former Democratic National Committee (DNC) staff member Seth Rich, which seemed to relate to the alleged source of emails and documents the organization published. Yet, more explicit claims from WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange on the source of emails from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta were not addressed in the report.

• A group of former military and intelligence officials, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), conducted their own forensic tests that received a bit of attention in the United States press because they were some of the first people with prior backgrounds in government to question the central allegations of hacking into DNC servers. They asserted their examinations of the files showed DNC emails published by WikiLeaks were leaked, not hacked.

• However, the Mueller report makes no mention of the claims made by VIPS over the past two to three years—not even to debunk them.

=> ↺ From Jesus Christ to Julian Assange: When Dissidents Become Enemies of the State

• When exposing a crime is treated as committing a crime, you are being ruled by criminals.

• In the current governmental climate, where laws that run counter to the dictates of the Constitution are made in secret, passed without debate, and upheld by secret courts that operate behind closed doors, obeying one’s conscience and speaking truth to the power of the police state can render you an “enemy of the state.”

• That list of so-called “enemies of the state” is growing.

• Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is merely the latest victim of the police state’s assault on dissidents and whistleblowers.

• On April 11, 2019, police arrested Assange for daring to access and disclose military documents that portray the U.S. government and its endless wars abroad as reckless, irresponsible, immoral and responsible for thousands of civilian deaths.

• Included among the leaked materials was gunsight video footage from two U.S. AH-64 Apache helicopters engaged in a series of air-to-ground attacks while American air crew laughed at some of the casualties. Among the casualties were two Reuters correspondents who were gunned down after their cameras were mistaken for weapons and a driver who stopped to help one of the journalists. The driver’s two children, who happened to be in the van at the time it was fired upon by U.S. forces, suffered serious injuries.

• There is nothing defensible about crimes such as these perpetrated by the government.

=> ↺ Media Cheer Assange’s Arrest

• Julian Assange was arrested inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London on April 11. The Australian-born co-founder of Wikileaks had been trapped in the building since 2012 after taking refuge there. He was immediately found guilty of failing to surrender to a British court, and was taken to Belmarsh prison. An extradition to the United States is widely seen as imminent by corporate media, who have, by and large, strongly approved of these events.

• [...]

• Both the United Nations and the ACLU have denounced Assange’s arrest, with the former condemning Sweden and the UK for depriving him of liberty and freedom, ordering them to pay compensation for the many years he was confined to the embassy. Despite this, establishment media have overwhelmingly described this situation with a euphemism: Mr. Assange’s “self-imposed isolation” (CNN, 4/11/19; USA Today, 4/11/19; New York Times, 4/11/19), a phrase that conjures a very different image of the situation and the responsibilities of the various parties involved. The Daily Beast (4/11/19) made this implication explicit, describing Assange’s predicament as “voluntary confinement.”

• Assange is a controversial character who originally took refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy after England’s High Court ruled to extradite him to Sweden to face charges of rape. Yet most of the media coverage downplayed or even did not mention this (e.g., Bloomberg, 4/11/19; National Review, 4/12/19; Daily Beast, 4/11/19), suggesting they did not consider it relevant.

=> ↺ A Marriage of Conscience: Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning

• No one should have been surprised by this despicable spectacle carried out in the noonday light for all to see, for the British government has not served as America’s jailer for the past seven years for no reason. It doesn’t take x-ray eyes to see that the British and the Moreno government in Ecuador are twin poodles on the American leash. After a phony display of judicial fairness, the British, as required by their American bosses, will dispatch Assange to the United States so he can be further punished for the crime of doing journalism and exposing war crimes.

• Assange has suffered mightily for American sins. The Anglo-American torturers know how to squeeze their victims to make old men out of the young. Abu Ghraib was no aberration. The overt is often covert; just a thin skin separates the sadists’ varied methods, but their message is obvious. No one who saw Assange dragged to prison could fail to see what the war-mongers, who hate freedom of the press when it exposes their criminal activities, can do to a man. Nor, however, could one fail to see the spirit of defiance that animates Assange, a man of courageous conscience cowards can’t begin to comprehend.

=> ↺ Nearly 100,000 Pentagon Whistleblower Complaints Have Been Silenced

• I don’t know if I’d have the nerve to be a whistleblower. I’d like to think I would. We all like to think we would, just like we all like to think we could catch the game-winning touchdown, triumph on “America’s Got Talent,” and fold a fitted sheet quickly and without cursing.

• But to blow the whistle on a huge organization with a lot of power, likely drawing that power to come crashing down on your head—that takes some serious spine-age. Now, imagine the organization you’re calling out is arguably the largest, most powerful, most secretive and most violent organization on planet Earth. I’m speaking, of course, of the U.S. Department of Defense.

• Yet thousands, even tens of thousands, of people have taken that step over the past five years. (More on this in a moment.)

• All the while our organized human murder machine continues its work around the world. Every day. Every hour. Never a moment of rest. Never pausing to clip their toenails or scratch their ass. Bombs dropped. Buildings blown up. People killed or imprisoned. No end in sight.

• By the way, that’s the term I like to use instead of “military”—Organized Human Murder Machine.

=> ↺ Assange and the Cowardice of Power

• Trump has never heard of WikiLeaks, the publishing organization whose work he repeatedly and unequivocally touted during the 2016 election campaign. “I know nothing about WikiLeaks,” he told reporters after Julian Assange was illegally arrested, after being illegally detained for seven years, in London. “It’s not my thing and I know there is something having to do with Julian Assange.”

• Moving past the Trumpian contradiction (he knows both “nothing” and “something” about WikiLeaks”), here’s a question for our dear leader: is your own Justice Department “your thing”? Because it was your Justice Department that filed the charges against a man who risked his liberty, and his life, to tell the truth about the most powerful criminal organization in the world—the American empire.

• Is Trump’s cabinet “his thing”? Was he golfing when his erstwhile attorney general, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, told the press that arresting Assange was “a priority”? How about when his secretary of state called WikiLeaks “a non-state hostile intelligence service”? Trump’s regime appears to have a remarkable level of interest in an organization about which he knows nothing.

• “The weakness of the US charge against Assange is shocking.” That was Edward Snowden’s reaction to the Justice Department’s indictment against Assange. He adds that one of the government’s principal allegations—that Assange attempted to help Manning crack a password in the interest of protecting her identity—has been public knowledge for nearly ten years. Also that Obama, no friend to whistle-blowers, refused to act on it, citing dangers to press freedom.

=> ↺ All Will be Punished

• The image of London police dragging Julian Assange from the Ecuadorian embassy was so disturbing and resonant on so many levels, one hardly knows where to begin. First, this person, this Moreno, has disgraced and degraded himself beyond historical repair. His name will be forever synonymous with betrayal of the most abject, vicious, and cowardly sort. Paul Craig Roberts has called him Judas, and the comparison is apt. Indeed, to see Assange carried out of the Ecuadorian embassy was to witness a contemporary crucifixion, complete with smirking Centurion and a smattering of curious, if not bloodthirsty, onlookers.

• But another association comes to mind, and that is rape. As Harold Pinter famously noted in his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize, which should be required reading in US high school civics’ classes—it certainly would be in mine, if I were still teaching—the US (used to) carry out its imperial depredations with a kind of wicked panache, disguising its true predatory intentions with clever language and even a certain wit. But no more. With a brief, somnolent interlude for the reign of the smiling assassin (who, above all, was skilled in the arts of public relations, an exemplar of the Pinter model), we have had, since the reign of Bush the Lesser, unapologetic, snarling, in-your-fucking-face, imperial barbarity. Now, with our very own fascistic goon, our Mussolini (another comparison, between Assange and Gramsci, is also apt), we are taking it to new depths, reveling in (trumpeting!) our lawlessness and undisguised brutality. It is the savage cry of the rapist, the brute, the one who knows only naked aggression and force. It is us.

=> ↺ Assange: Between Gratitude and Betrayal

• Julian Assange was arrested in England on Thursday, April 11, and is feared to be extradited to the United States to face charges for his actions during the Obama administration.

• According to an editorial in the Washington Post in 2011, such a conviction “would also cause collateral damage to the liberties of the U.S. media so Washington should not attempt to do so with Julian Assange.

• The Post’s editorial of years ago is still relevant, given that Assange would be tried for a “crime” which took place almost a decade ago. What has changed since then is the public perception of Assange and, in a supreme irony, that of Donald Trump. At one point in Trump’s demagoguery, he proclaimed himself a fanatic twitter lover of WikiLeaks,. Now he has now been left as the ultimate beneficiary of public support for initiating a process that the Obama administration hesitated to push when he was President.

• The current accusation is the extension of a years-long effort, begun prior to Trump, to build a legal argument against those who release secrets the government finds embarassing.

• But much of the U.S. citizenry now sees the arrested founder of WikiLeaks through the lens of the 2016 elections, having been denounced as a Russian ally in favor of Trump’s election.

=> ↺ Why Academics Should Oppose Julian Assange’s Extradition

• The attempt to extradite Assange to the US sets a dangerous precedent for academics. Attacks on whistleblowers, the press and academics all aim to undermine the foundations of democracy. Each group seeks the truth and is a potential thorn in the side of governments attempting to hide their activities from the public.

=> ↺ ‘Stupid Brexit’ should hit UK fast & hard if Assange is handed over to US – German MEP

• The UK should get its “stupid Brexit” right now and face the hardest divorce deal possible if it extradites Julian Assange to the US, which is keen to cover up Iraq War crimes, a German MEP said in an emotive speech. The controversy over Julian Assange’s arrest in London seems to have spilled over into the European Parliament this week. Martin Sonneborn, a long-time contributor to Spiegel and ZDF, used his time to tell“a couple of words to the Brits who are likely to remain in the EU until Halloween.”

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

=> ↺ Movement to Build National Support for Green New Deal Starts in Boston, ‘City of Revolutions’

• The past two years, 2017 and 2018, brought the U.S. two major youth-led movements. The first was borne out of the March for Our Lives, which saw hundreds of thousands rallying for gun violence prevention in D.C. and across the country. The second was the Sunrise Movement.

=> ↺ Critics Say Louisiana ‘Highjacked’ Climate Resettlement Plan for Isle de Jean Charles Tribe

• Albert Naquin, Chief of the Isle de Jean Charles Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Tribe (IDJC), often loses sleep over his tribe’s fate as its historic island homeland continues to lose land at an alarming rate. His dream to relocate the tribe from Isle de Jean Charles with a federal grant has turned into a nightmare.

• After helping the Louisiana Office of Community Development (OCD) win a $98 million grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the Tribe no longer wants to be associated with the State’s project, which included $48 million earmarked to relocate the IDJC Tribe.

=> ↺ South Dakota Can’t Silence Our Protest Against the Keystone XL Pipeline

• For Indigenous Peoples in South Dakota, the land is more than just the ground beneath our feet.

• We believe in and act upon the notion that people, nature, society and all living things are interconnected, in relation to one another, and operate as a system. Our Indigenous cultures have taught us through our languages, stories and life ways that our identity and very existence is directly connected to the land.

• First proposed in 2008, the 1,200-mile Keystone XL Pipeline would carry as much as 830,000 barrels of heavy crude oil per day from the Alberta, Canada, oil sands through South Dakota to Steele City, Neb., en route to Gulf Coast refineries. Though the proposed pipeline route does not go through federally recognized reservations in South Dakota, should there be an oil spill, it has the potential to seriously affect our land, our water, our environment and future generations.

=> ↺ It’s Time to Transform the Tax Code and Implement a Green New Deal

• One area where the two parties of the millionaires and billionaires put in place policies that favor the rich are tax laws. Tax policy has favored the wealthy under both parties, but the Trump-administration has brought this tax corruption to new levels. We need to transform tax policy to build the working class base of the economy, shrink the wealth divide, and confront the climate crisis. An honest analysis of the tax code calls out in stark detail the extreme injustice of the economy in the United States.

• The tax system favors the wealthy as low- and middle-income people are hit the hardest while big business and high-income people are subsidized. The most regressive tax of all is the FICA payroll tax at 15.3 percent for Social Security and Medicare. 15.3 percent includes the employer match. But employers include the tax in their labor budgets and it limits what they can pay their workers. The 12.4 percent Social Security share of FICA is outright regressive because it is capped for high-income earners at $128,400 in 2018.

=> ↺ Why Is Going Green So Hard? Because Our System Isn’t

• Every year around Earth Day, I’m reminded of papers I graded in an environmental sociology class. The assignment was to assess your values, explain how you thought you would live as an adult (about 20 years in the future), and then complete an online calculator to find out: If everyone in the world lived like you, how many planets would we need? The students were all young and idealistic, and most of them cared deeply about the environment. In their papers, they professed how they would live their lives in the most sustainable ways possible — eating vegan diets, avoiding car travel, growing their own food, and so on. Most were sure they’d find a way to make it work without sacrificing luxuries like international travel. Then they calculated how many planets would be needed to support everyone in the world living with their ideal lifestyle. Every single student required more than one planet. Most needed about three. That’s right: If everyone in the world lived like these idealistic, passionate environmentalists, we’d need three planets to produce enough resources for their needs. These papers hit me hard emotionally. When I was their age, I was them. Their dreams were my dreams — only for me, those dreams are dead. Even the most committed of them couldn’t get her environmental footprint down to what one planet can provide. There’s almost no way to live in the United States as it is now and be fully sustainable. Attempting to do so requires a constant, overwhelming amount of effort.

=> ↺ New Interior Chief Bernhardt Reportedly Held Secret Meeting Linked to One of His Predecessor’s Many Scandals

• It’s only been a week, but newly-confirmed Interior Secretary David Bernhardt’s conflicts of interests are already raising questions about his involvement in the very same scandals for which his predecessor is now under investigation.

• The Guardian reported Wednesday that Bernhardt, who was confirmed last week over the objections of climate action and conservation groups, met in 2018 with a lawyer for the Schaghticoke tribal nation of Connecticut, which opposed the operation of a new casino in the state by two other tribes.

• Former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke resigned in December after coming under scrutiny for a number of conflicts of interest, including allegations that he was involved in blocking the Mohegan and Mashantucket Pequot tribes’ approval for the casino.

=> ↺ Bernie Sanders ‘Raises the Bar Even Further’ on Climate With Vow to Ban Fracking, All New Fossil Fuel Projects

• Bernie Sanders won praise from environmental groups after releasing a climate platform that calls for a complete ban on fracking, a moratorium on all new fossil fuel infrastructure, an end to oil exports, and a Green New Deal.

• “Climate change is the single greatest threat facing our planet,” the Vermont senator and 2020 contender wrote on the climate page of his website, which was unveiled this week.

=> ↺ ‘You Cannot Ignore Science’: In Emotional Plea, Greta Thunberg Begs EU to Take Urgent Climate Action

• “My name is Greta Thunberg, I am 16 years old, I come from Sweden, and I want you to panic. I want you to act as if the house was on fire.”

• That’s how the young climate activist began her address to members of the European Parliament (MEPs) on Tuesday.

• In a 13-minute speech that equated civilization to “a castle built on sand” and was punctuated by applause from the chamber, Thunberg admonished the MEPs for inaction on the climate crisis and begged them to “wake up” and “unite behind the science.”

=> ↺ Children’s Moral Power Can Challenge Corporate Power on Climate Crisis

• The famous anthropologist, Margaret Mead, once said to me that children have a distinct moral authority to change some of their parents’ habits or opinions. She gave use of seat belts and smoking cigarettes as examples.

• Indeed, most of us know instances when sons and daughters have looked into the eyes of their fathers and mothers and urged them to wear their seatbelts or stop smoking. They say in their own plaintive way that they want mommy and daddy around for them. Many mothers and fathers have had such experiences.

=> ↺ Walruses are jumping off cliffs to their deaths — yes, because of climate change

• The new Netflix series “Our Planet” documents the devastation wrought by humans on animals and their habitats. It’s heartbreaking. In fact, some scenes are so wrenching that Netflix last week tweeted a list of time stamps for scenes that “animal lovers may want to skip.”

• One of those scenes is in the second episode (“Frozen World”). It shows Pacific walruses, one after another, tumbling off 250-foot-high cliffs to their deaths.

• As a scientist who works to protect walruses and other species from the ravages of climate change, I dreaded watching this scene with every bone in my body. But I did. And I want everyone to watch it, especially “animal lovers.”

• There’s a difference between covering your eyes during the ending of “Old Yeller” and fast-forwarding through this walrus footage.

=> ↺ New Report Highlights Need for Clean Energy Transition That Doesn’t Rely on Dirty Mining

• The report, entitled Responsible Minerals Sourcing for Renewable Energy (pdf), was prepared by the Institute for Sustainable Futures (ISF) for Earthworks, as part of the U.S. nonprofit’s new “Making Clean Energy Clean, Just & Equitable” initiative. It was released Wednesday.

• “As we scale up clean energy technologies in pursuit of our necessarily ambitious climate goals, we must protect community health, water, human rights, and the environment,” said Payal Sampat, director of Earthworks’ Mining Program.

• “We have an opportunity, if we act now,” Sampat added, “to ensure that our emerging clean energy economy is truly clean—as well as just and equitable—and not dependent on dirty mining.”

=> ↺ This Blessed Plot, This Earth

• This week, residents of a village in Russia’s far eastern Kamchatka Peninsula saw this exhausted, emaciated polar bear – a species some consider the poster child for climate change – prowling for food over 500 miles from its native habitat. With the Arctic warming, the ice receding, the seals slowly disappearing and the ever-mindless, greedy cretins in charge still pushing to drill drill drill, enraged environmentalists, scientists and cognizant humans ask, “At what point are we going to take climate change seriously?”

=> ↺ A Climate Rebellion in Downtown New York

• On Wednesday, more than 100 activists from the New York chapter of Extinction Rebellion descended on City Hall to protest the extraction of fossil fuels and raise awareness about a crisis that threatens the very survival of humankind. Patch reports that police have arrested 62, with demonstrators laying down in the streets and climbing light poles to unfurl banners declaring a climate emergency. According to an April 14th press release, Extinction Rebellion has planned to “disrupt business as usual” in 80 cities across 33 countries, from India to Australia and throughout Europe and the U.S.

=> ↺ Perverse Housing Policy Perverts Forest Policy

• As many Americans know all too well, concerns about forest conservation and affordable housing have drawn increasing attention across the US. These topics are of special interest in regions where logging is primarily devoted to provided lumber for human housing.

• What may be less known is that the pairing of forest and housing policy has had a long and colorful history spanning the past 70 years.

• In his 1947 book, Breaking New Ground, Gifford Pinchot, an early head of the U.S. Forest Service, wrote that, “The rightful use and purpose of our natural resources is to make all the people strong and well, able and wise, well-clothed, well-housed…with equal opportunity for all and special privilege for none.”

• Back then, if only briefly, America’s political leadership was responsive to ordinary needs and dreams of being “well-housed.” In 1949, America passed its Housing Act, which stated that it is the policy of the United States to provide “…a decent home and suitable environment for every American family.”

• With this, Congress stated a clear end-use of forest products when logging delivers wood to the market.

=> ↺ Global Climate Rebellion Hits New York City (Photo Essay)

• On Wednesday, approximately 350 activists from the New York chapter of Extinction Rebellion descended on City Hall to protest the extraction of fossil fuels and raise awareness about a crisis that threatens the very survival of humankind. Patch reports that police have arrested 62, with demonstrators laying down in the streets and climbing light poles to unfurl banners declaring a climate emergency. According to an April 14 press release, Extinction Rebellion has planned to “disrupt business as usual” in 80 cities across 33 countries, from India to Australia and throughout Europe and the U.S. Truthdig’s Michael Nigro reports from downtown New York.

=> ↺ This Earth Day, Beware of Greenwashing

• This Earth Day, I’d like to warn you about “greenwashing.” That’s the practice of corporations branding their products “eco-friendly,” even when they actually pollute, to deceive environmentally concerned customers.

• Even if you’ve heard nothing about greenwashing, you’ve probably read about the Volkswagen emissions scandal, “Dieselgate.”

• A few years ago, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) found that many Volkswagen cars being sold in America had been outfitted with software that enabled their diesel engines to detect when they were being tested. This allowed the engines to improve emissions performance under controlled laboratory conditions.

• But out on the road, the engines were emitting 40 times above the nitrogen oxide pollutant levels allowed in the United States. The software was simply covering that up.

• Volkswagen apologized for the scandal and recalled its cars. But for customers who bought from the company thinking they were having a positive impact on the environment, the damage was already done. Volkswagen had successfully duped them — while also doing enormous environmental destruction.

• Unfortunately, Volkswagen is nowhere close to alone. Greenwashing has a deep history dating back to the start of the modern environmental movement in the 1960s. Since then, no industry has been immune to greenwashing.

=> ↺ Ways to Save the World

• With all the doom-and-gloom studies that have come out about climate change, you might be feeling a little guilty about your carbon footprint. Did you turn off the lights when you left for work this morning? Or leave the air conditioner running?

• Doing what you can individually to bring down greenhouse gas emissions is important to keep in mind this Earth Day, April 22, although this can only make so big a dent. If we really want to make a difference, we have to confront the problem at its source and euthanize the fossil fuel industry.

• The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has found that capping warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius, as is necessary to avoid catastrophic consequences, will require huge reductions in the use of coal, oil and gas by mid-century. Meanwhile, a recent analysis by Carbon Tracker found that 92 percent of top oil and gas companies directly incentivize growth in fossil fuel “production, reserves, or both.”

=> ↺ Watchdog Sounds Alarm Over Regulatory Capture as New Reporting Shows Nuclear Plants Unprepared for Climate Crisis

• New reporting highlights how the nation’s nuclear power plants are woefully unprepared to handle the growing impacts of the climate crisis.

• Despite that threat, says a watchdog, the industry’s regulatory capture means its interests are set to continue to take precedence over public health and safety.

• As Bloomberg’s Christopher Flavelle and Jeremy C.F. Lin laid out Thursday, in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima disaster the five-member Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) tasked the roughly 60 operating plants in the U.S. with assessing what their flood risks were compared to what flood risks the plants were actually built to withstand.

• That was a logical step, given many of the American plants’ proximity to waterways, and the heightened risk of flooding in the face of the climate crisis.

=> ↺ The Iran Floods and US Sanctions: 10 Million at Risk, But Who Cares?

• You have certainly not heard much about this in the West. And it didn’t get a fraction of the media attention (and none of the hundreds of millions of Euro pledges by the perversely rich) that the Notre Dame fire did.

• However, if disastrous floods had hit 28 out of 31 provinces and affected 10 million people in some European country or in the US, I believe you would have heard about it from Day One.

• But now it is Iran. Only the Iranians.

• The situation is disastrous but not so much because thousands have died. Rather, because floods of this magnitude are likely to have terrible long-term consequences for agricultural and other production, infrastructure, energy production, transport and daily lives (see pictures below and on the links).

=> ↺ A political stalemate over Puerto Rican aid is leaving all US disaster funding in limbo

• Senate Democrats recently blocked US$13.5 billion in relief for Americans whose lives were disrupted by hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires, flooding and other natural disasters. The objections had to do with Puerto Rico.

• In addition to aid for Kansas, Missouri, Iowa and Nebraska, this bill included $600 million to cover six months’ worth of nutritional assistance requested by Puerto Rican Gov. Ricardo Rosselló. But Democrats refused to back the bill because it lacked funds that would protect the island from floods and rebuild its electrical grid.

• The result is an impasse between a Congress that wants to assist a U.S. territory in distress and a hostile White House. As the daughter of Puerto Ricans who moved to the mainland and a policy analyst of racial inequities, I’m concerned that the Trump administration’s neglect of Puerto Rico is based in racial bias.

=> ↺ Noam Chomsky: The Green New Deal Is Exactly the Right Idea

• Supporters of the Green New Deal are launching a nationwide tour Thursday to build support for the congressional resolution to transform the U.S. economy through funding renewable energy while ending U.S. carbon dioxide emissions by 2030. Democracy Now! spoke with Noam Chomsky about the Green New Deal and the lessons of the old New Deal in Boston last week.

=> ↺ 5 Ways to Celebrate National Parks Week

• Happy National Parks Week! This year, between April 20 and 28, escape to the beautiful national parks — either in person or in your imagination — and celebrate the amazing wildlife that calls these spaces home.

Finance

=> ↺ Getting Serious About Power

• t was 1971 and Lewis Powell, a corporate lawyer in Richmond, Virginia, who had been president of the American Bar Association and a member of the board of the giant tobacco company Philip Morris, had come to believe that American capitalism was facing a dire threat. Americans were angry about corporate abuse and corporate pollution; President Richard M. Nixon had responded by signing the National Environmental Policy Act and creating the Environmental Protection Agency through executive order. Across the country, activists marched for Earth Day, and Congress passed the first air pollution standards. Ralph Nader and other consumer advocates had successfully fought for safer cars and other products.

• [...]

• The Democracy Alliance, created in 2005, attempted to remedy that anarchy, with mixed success. It was launched with a smart PowerPoint elaborating on how the left should respond. But, as current Democracy Alliance president Gara LaMarche admits, “liberal values aren’t command and control. It’s a steep climb to get donors to consider collective aims. The right believes in long-term funding and general operating support while the left requires groups to perform against metrics in project grants and cuts them off after a short time to fund something new.”

• Progressives are unlikely to adopt the hierarchical approach that works on the right, but we do need something like a Powell Memo of our own, an overarching strategy that focuses on winning and maintaining power, not just on issues; one that recognizes the need for large-scale and long-term investment in progressive infrastructure—think tanks to generate ideas, media to disseminate them, lawmakers to enact them, and judges to uphold them. Right-wing foundations are indeed famous for long-term funding of core institutions. Liberal foundations tend to have short attention spans. For our ideas to take hold and remain strong, we need to understand that long-term victories will require locking in democracy with a small d: nonpartisan districts, broad access to the voting booth, and fair-minded judges.

=> ↺ Refused U.S. Visa Eight Times, Zoom CEO Is Now a Billionaire

• Yuan, Zoom’s chief executive officer, joins Alphabet Inc.’s Sergey Brin, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and Tesla Inc.’s Elon Musk as immigrants who became billionaires after helping create Silicon Valley companies. The U.S. is the favored country for more than three-quarters of wealthy Chinese looking to emigrate, according to the Hurun Research Institute and immigration adviser Visas Consulting Group.

=> ↺ Nuclear Lobbying Power: N.J. Utility Customers Will Pay $300M in Subsidies

• After a long, expensive lobbying effort over the fate of nuclear power in New Jersey, the energy company PSEG on Thursday secured $300 million in subsidies for the state’s aging nuclear plants.

• It was an important victory for PSEG, which had threatened to close the three plants, and for the nuclear power industry as it seeks to preserve its place in the energy market amid an abundant supply of natural gas.

• And in New Jersey, the vote by the Board of Public Utilities laid bare the effectiveness of the efforts, as board commissioners voted yes even as some of them expressed doubts about the need for subsidies.

• “The board is being directed to pay ransom, and the hostages are the citizens of New Jersey,” said Commissioner Bob Gordon, a former state legislator, who voted for the subsidy.

• Indeed, the 4-1 vote came despite findings by the board’s staff that the nuclear plants were financially viable and over the objections of the state’s chief advocate for utility customers.

=> ↺ U.S. to Allow Lawsuits Over Properties Seized by Castro’s Cuba

• The Trump administration on Wednesday opened the door for lawsuits against foreign firms operating on properties Cuba seized from Americans after the 1959 revolution.

• Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said he won’t renew a bar on litigation that has been in place for two decades, meaning that lawsuits can be filed starting on May 2 when the current suspension expires. The decision could affect dozens of Canadian and European companies to the tune of tens of billions of dollars in compensation and interests.

• “Any person or company doing business in Cuba should heed this announcement,” Pompeo said.

• Pompeo said the administration was acting because it recognized the “reality” that the bar on lawsuits, which has been in place since 1996, had not achieved the goal of pressing Cuba to enact democratic reforms or reining in what he called its export of oppression throughout the Western Hemisphere, particularly in Venezuela.

• “We see clearly that regime’s repression of its own people and unrepentant exportation of tyranny in the region has only gotten worse because dictators perceive appeasement as weakness, not strength,” he told reporters at the State Department.

=> ↺ Making Wall Street Pay for the Financial Crisis

• Last week, as Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., convened a House Financial Services Committee hearing, featuring the CEOs of Wall Street’s biggest banks, the financial watchdog group Better Markets released a stunning report on the banks’ criminal records: Wall Street’s Six Biggest Bailed-Out Banks: Their RAP Sheets and Their Ongoing Crime Spree

• The report profiled the records of Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo. Detailing the staggering $8.2 trillion that was committed to bail out these banks when their excesses blew up the economy in 2008, the report laid out what it called their RAP sheets — the record of illegal activity for which they have been fined a cumulative total of $181 billion in over 350 major legal actions.

• The report concludes that these big banks “have engaged in — and continue to engage in — a crime spree that spans the violation of almost every law and rule imaginable. …That was the case not just before the 2008 crash, but also during and after the crash and their lifesaving bailouts. … In fact, the number of cases against the banks has actually increased relative to the pre-crash era.”

• The scope of the illegal activity is breathtaking — overcharging soldiers on their mortgages, conspiring to fix the price of credit card fees, massive improper foreclosure practices, billing customers for services never provided, rigging interest rates, violating sanctions against countries like Iran, and more. The large fines are, for these mega-banks, merely a cost of doing business. And so the crime wave continues.

=> ↺ Making American Schools Less Great Again

• Three weeks ago, I sat in a cramped conference room in the large public high school where I teach in Beaverton, Oregon. I was listening to the principal deliver a scripted PowerPoint presentation on the $35 million budget deficit our district faces in the upcoming school year.

• Teachers and staff members slumped in chairs. A thick funk of disappointment, resignation, hopelessness, and simmering anger clung to us. After all, we’ve been here before. We know the drill: expect layoffs, ballooning class sizes, diminished instructional time, and not enough resources. Accept that the teacher-student relationship — one that has the potential to be productive and sometimes even transformative — will become, at best, transactional. Bodies will be crammed into too-small spaces, resources will dwindle, and learning will suffer. These budgetary crises are by now cyclical and completely familiar. Yet the thought of weathering another of them is devastating.

• This is the third time in my 14-year-career as a visual arts teacher that we’ve faced the upheaval, disruption, and chaos of just such a budget crisis. In 2012, the district experienced a massive shortfall that resulted in the firing of 344 teachers and bloated class sizes for those of us who were left. At one point, my Drawing I classroom studio — built to fit a maximum of 35 students — had more than 50 of them stuffed into it. We didn’t have enough chairs, tables, or spaces to draw, so we worked in the halls.

• During that semester I taught six separate classes and was responsible for more than 250 students. Despite the pretense that real instruction was taking place, teachers like me were largely engaged in crowd management and little more. All of the meaningful parts of the job — connecting with students, providing one-on-one support, helping struggling class members to make social and intellectual breakthroughs, not to speak of creating a healthy classroom community — simply fell by the wayside.

=> ↺ Stop the Gucci and Prada Talk

• Western leftists are obsessed with this topic. They do not even realize how ridiculous, how racist their arguments actually are!

• China, with some 6,000 years long history, 1.3 billion inhabitants and the second largest economy in the world, has almost eradicated extreme poverty in the cities, and in the countryside. For the first time in modern history, people are moving from the urban centers to the villages. The great Ecological Civilization effort is demonstrating to the world how to save the environment, and the planet. The country is firmly back with its brilliant model of “Communism with the Chinese characteristics”. Its foreign policy is more and more internationalist.

• But the more progressive, independent-minded and kind to its people China becomes, the more it is attacked and antagonized by the West. The more is its Communist model scrutinized, under the microscope.

=> ↺ In a Time of Cheap Fossil Fuels, Nuclear Power Companies Are Seeking — and Getting — Big Subsidies

• The energy company PSEG had a simple message for the New Jersey Legislature as it weighed the fate of three nuclear plants in the state.

• “What’s good for New Jersey is what’s good for PSEG,” Ralph Izzo, the company’s chairman, president and CEO, told the Legislature at a December 2017 hearing in Trenton. “What’s bad for New Jersey is bad for PSEG.”

• And with rock bottom natural gas prices, costly safety upgrades looming and energy usage flat, the outlook for the plants was bleak, he said. Within two years, the Salem 1, Salem 2 and Hope Creek nuclear plants in South Jersey would be “cash negative” and the company would have to close them, Izzo said.

• Hundreds of people would lose their jobs. And the state would lose a source of cleaner energy generation, forcing it to rely more heavily on natural gas. But the Legislature could avert that, Izzo said. To keep the plants open, PSEG would need about $300 million in subsidies over the next three years.

• It would be a “safety net” for the company’s nuclear operations in New Jersey, Izzo said. It would not, he emphasized, be “a bailout.”

• On Thursday, regulators in New Jersey are scheduled to decide whether PSEG has shown that it needs the subsidies, which would be paid for through a surcharge on all customer bills in the state. If the Board of Public Utilities approves the requests, New Jersey would join two other states, Illinois and New York, in giving nuclear power plants hundreds of millions of dollars in order to stay competitive in the wholesale energy market.

=> ↺ ‘Women Take Home Less Money Than They’ve Rightfully Earned’ – CounterSpin interview with Deborah Vagins on the gender pay gap

• Designating April 2 the day when US women’s salary “catches up” to men’s of the previous year, is a device, of course, a way to illustrate the gap that persists between what women and men are paid. Equal Pay Day is not, as The Root’s Maiysha Kai put it, a day to celebrate, but to educate, coordinate and advocate. Media can help or hinder that effort, and they do some of both.

=> ↺ A Revolutionary Idea to Close the Racial Wealth Divide

• The gap between America’s ultra-wealthy and the rest of us is growing dramatically as wealth continues to concentrate at the top at the expense of the rest of us. One major symptom of this economic rift is the racial wealth divide, which is greater today than it was nearly four decades ago.

• The median Black family today owns $3,600 — just 2 percent of the $147,000 of wealth the median white family owns. At the extreme top, the Forbes 400 richest Americans own more wealth than all Black households, plus a quarter of Latinx households, combined.

• When analyzing the racial wealth divide, it’s important to note that this is a systemic issue — a result of policies, not individual behavior.

• Darrick Hamilton, the executive director of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State, emphasizes that the key ingredient of how successful you’ll be in America isn’t how hard you work individually — it’s how wealthy your family is.

=> ↺ What the Teapot Dome Scandal Has to Do With Trump’s Tax Returns

• There have been a lot of comparisons between President Donald Trump and President Richard Nixon, but Warren G. Harding’s 1920s administration — and the Teapot Dome scandal that tainted his presidency — may actually be a better guide to what’s going on right now. The scandal also helps address the question of whether Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee Richard Neal (D-MA) can lawfully request Trump’s tax returns from the IRS.

• This request takes on extra urgency in light of the news that Trump’s sister Judge Maryanne Trump Barry recently retired from the federal bench, thereby ending an inquiry into her taxes. Both siblings stand accused by the New York Times of allegedly violating tax laws for years.

• On April 3, Chairman Neal asked the IRS to provide Trump’s personal tax returns and the tax returns of several of his business entities. As the debate unfolds over whether Congress has the authority to obtain the president’s tax returns, it’s worth considering two outcomes of Teapot Dome: (1) Congress has the authority to obtain the president’s tax returns and (2) Congress can compel testimony from hostile witnesses.

=> ↺ Amazon—and 56 Other Corporations—Took Your Tax Dollars

• Yeah, yeah, yeah, Bernie Sanders, castigator of the one percent, is a millionaire now. So are Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren. Big whoop. There’s a crucial difference between these candidates seeking the Democratic presidential nomination and the super wealthy – particularly 60 gigantic, massively profitable U.S. corporations. The candidates faithfully pay federal taxes. The corporations don’t.

• That’s right. Sixty profitable corporations paid no federal taxes in 2018, twice the number that typically paid nothing in the years before the 2017 tax breaks took effect. In fact, it’s worse than that. Fifty-seven of these corporations demanded rebates from the government – which means taxpayers like you and me paid them to exist. These are corporations on the dole. They claim to hate socialism if it means Medicare for All, but they sure as hell love socialism when it’s welfare for them.

• Sanders, Harris, Warren and other candidates seeking the Democratic nomination paid their taxes because they are patriots. Most working Americans pay a fair share to support their country. True citizens pay so that their nation can thrive. They pay so that the United States can afford to educate its citizens, pave its roads, operate its courts, care for its vulnerable and sustain its military. They pay because they understand they have a duty to the country that nurtured them, that protects them and that they love.

• But too many U.S. corporations, which the U.S. Supreme Court has anointed with human rights, refuse to acknowledge their concomitant obligations. Corporations and the super wealthy pushed hard for the tax breaks Republicans bestowed on them in 2017. Fat cats paid untold tens of millions to dark money groups that served as cash cows for GOP candidates who, once elected, shepherded those tax breaks.

=> ↺ Two Russian brothers started a video game company and got onto Bloomberg’s billionaire list. Here’s their first long interview.

• In April, Bloomberg added Igor and Dmitry Bukhman to its list of U.S. dollar billionaires. The brothers, born in the northwest Russian city of Vologda, founded a video game company out of their hometown in 2004. Now, Playrix, which employs more than 1,000 employees and entertains about 30 million users every day with popular games like Homescapes and Township. The Bukhmans made their first games out of their Vologda apartment and almost immediately started raking in a profit. Now, Igor is 37 years old, Dmitry is 34, and each is said to have a net worth of $1.4 billion. We spoke with the Bukhmans about how they started making more money off their games, why they no longer live permanently in Russia, and what’s going on in the country’s domestic video game market today.

=> ↺ ‘Oppressed Labor’ Not Backing Down as Stop & Shop Strike Enters Second Week

• The New England Stop & Shop strike entered its eighth day Friday as the grocery store’s parent company continued to refuse to honor the union’s demand for a fair contract.

• At the heart of the dispute is an inability for Ahold Delhaize, a Dutch grocery conglomerate that owns Stop & Shop, and the United Food and Commercial Workers union (UCFW) to reach an agreement on a new contract. The sticking point is Ahold Delhaize’s refusal to back down from its demand that the grocery store’s workers take a cut in benefits—even as the parent company is reporting billions in profits.

• “We want our pension to be left the way it is, our healthcare not to be taken away from us, to keep our time and a half,” Watertown, Mass., striker Chris Pacitto told Hell World’s Luke O’Neil. “Everything that we fight for every day.”

• It’s the largest strike in at least three years for a private company and comes on the heels of two years of public school teacher strikes that have transfixed the country from West Virginia to Oakland, California.

• The strike, which affects 240 stores in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island, has closed “several dozen” stores—and the ones that are open, according to The Boston Globe, are struggling to keep fresh products in place.

=> ↺ Democrats Battle Over How to Raise the Minimum Wage

• The call for a $15 minimum wage is getting louder, and more people are hearing it. The Fight for $15 has won numerous victories, as states (including California and New York) and localities have passed their own laws to institute a $15 minimum wage—or even higher. In January, Democratic Representative Bobby Scott of Virginia and independent Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont introduced the Raise the Wage Act (RTWA), which would make $15 the national wage floor by 2024. As of now, 31 Democratic senators and 205 House Democrats have signed on to the proposal.

• But Democrats need to persuade a few more members to ensure they can pass the bill in the House (it will go nowhere in the Republican-controlled Senate)—if all House members vote, the Democrats need 218. In early April, however, new legislation to raise the minimum wage was introduced by Democratic Representative Terri Sewell of Alabama. Instead of a universal minimum wage, this legislation calls for differing minimum-wage levels across the country, varying by region and cost of living. Only about a dozen Democrats have yet signed on to this legislation, and some who have signed on are also co-sponsors on the RTWA.

• Sewell’s act, as she said in a statement, “establishes a regional minimum wage structure that provides all minimum wage workers with a much-needed raise while protecting jobs, giving every community the flexibility to grow their economy and taking into account that the cost of living in Selma, Alabama is very different than New York City.” Regional wage proposals have been discussed over the past several years as an alternative to a national wage floor.

=> ↺ Stephen Moore Gets Something Right: It’s Capitalism vs. Democracy

• The dominant American ideology has long claimed that capitalism is about democracy. It isn’t – and one need not be an anti-capitalist “radical” to know better. My old copy of Webster’s New Twentieth Century Dictionary defines capitalism as “the economic system in which all or most of the means of production and distribution … are privately owned and operated for profit, originally under fully competitive conditions: it has been generally characterized by a tendency toward concentration of wealth and, [in] its latter phase, by the growth of great corporations, increased government controls, etc.”

• There’s nothing—nada, zero, zip—about popular self-rule (democracy) in that definition. And there shouldn’t be. “Democracy and capitalism have very different beliefs about the proper distribution of power,” liberal economist Lester Thurow noted in the mid-1990s: “One [democracy] believes in a completely equal distribution of political power, ‘one man, one vote,’ while the other [capitalism] believes that it is the duty of the economically fit to drive the unfit out of business and into extinction. … To put it in its starkest form, capitalism is perfectly compatible with slavery. Democracy is not.”

• Thurow might have added that capitalism is perfectly compatible with fascism, racism, nativism, sexism, militarism, and imperialism among other authoritarian and anti-democratic forces and formations. More than being merely compatible with slavery, moreover, U.S.-American capitalism arose largely on the basis of the Black cotton slave system in the nation’s pre-Civil War South. This is demonstrated at length in historian Edward Baptist’s prize-winning study The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism.

• “We must make our choice,” onetime Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis is reputed to have said or written: “We may have democracy in this country, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.” This statement (whoever made it) was perhaps unintentionally anti-capitalist. Consistent with Webster’s(above), the historically astute French economist Thomas Piketty has shown that capitalism has always been inexorably pulled toward the concentration of wealth into ever fewer hands.

=> ↺ Why Boeing and Its Executives Should be Prosecuted for Manslaughter

• Type the word “manslaughter” into any news search engine and up will come a series of stories of ordinary Americans charged with killing others through criminal negligence or recklessness.

• One such case that came up this month involved a Pennsylvania man who plead guilty to manslaughter. The man was accused of texting while driving and as a result killed a 12-year old girl walking on the side of the road. The driver obviously didn’t intend to kill the 12-year old girl. But due to his recklessness, he did. And he will now spend time in jail.

• If manslaughter charges can be brought against ordinary American citizens, why not against powerful American corporations and their executives?

• Two Boeing 737 Max 8 jets have crashed within five months leaving 346 dead. Early evidence of Boeing’s wrongdoing in the design of the 737 Max 8 and the company’s failure to train pilots to handle its Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) warrants a criminal manslaughter prosecution of both the company and the responsible executives.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

=> ↺ How the IRS Gave Up Fighting Political Dark Money Groups

• In the past decade, people, companies and unions have dispensed more than $1 billion in dark money, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The very definition of that phrase, to many critics, epitomizes the problem of shadowy political influence: Shielded by the cloak of anonymity, typically wealthy interests are permitted to pass limitless pools of cash through nonprofits to benefit candidates or political initiatives without contributing directly to campaigns.

• Such spending is legal because of a massive loophole. Section 501(c)(4) of the U.S. tax code allows organizations to make independent expenditures on politics while concealing their donors’ names — as long as politics isn’t the organization’s “primary activity.” The Internal Revenue Service has the daunting task of trying to determine when nonprofits in that category, known colloquially as C4s, violate that vague standard.

• But the IRS’ attempts to police this class of nonprofits have almost completely broken down, a ProPublica investigation reveals. Since 2015, thousands of complaints have streamed in — from citizens, public interest groups, IRS agents, government officials and more — that C4s are abusing the rules. But the agency has not stripped a single organization of its tax-exempt status for breaking spending rules during that period. (A handful of groups have had their status revoked for failing to file financial statements for three consecutive years.)

=> ↺ Trump raged at former White House counsel Don McGahn for taking notes about their conversations

• People familiar with Trump’s thought process said he was particularly incensed about McGahn’s contemporaneous notes, The Post reported.

=> ↺ Mueller identified ‘dozens’ of US rallies organized by Russian [astroturfer] farm

• Special counsel Robert Mueller in his highly-anticipated report said his team identified “dozens” of U.S. political rallies organized on social media by the Internet Research Agency (IRA), a Russian [astroturfer] farm that was later indicted for attempting to interfere with the 2016 presidential election.

=> ↺ Top 20 Mueller Report “Findings”

• There are a number of things that stand out as the most relevant and interesting in Robert Mueller’s Special Council report on alleged Russian interference in the 2016 campaign, which was released in redacted form on Thursday. After consuming as much of the report as a person can without going blind or insane (I’m attempting to save you the trouble), here are what I see as the more alluring Mueller finds. Please note: save your harassment for someone else that Mueller got it all wrong, that Russia didn’t hack, that Assange was used etc. I’m only reporting and commenting on what Mueller claims to have found, not that he got it right. A few of these “findings” were already part of the public record and they are listed in chronological order, not by order of importance.

=> ↺ After Mueller Report, Progressives Say ‘Begin Impeachment Hearings Now’

• After Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s 400-page report detailed numerous instances in which President Donald Trump may have attempted to obstruct justice, progressive lawmakers and advocacy groups on Thursday made the case that it is the duty of Congress to begin impeachment proceedings.

• “Mueller’s report is clear in pointing to Congress’ responsibility in investigating obstruction of justice by the president,” tweeted Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.). “As such, I’ll be signing onto Rashida Tlaib’s impeachment resolution.”

• Formally introduced last month, Tlaib’s resolution directs the House Judiciary Committee to immediately begin investigating whether Trump “committed impeachable offenses.”

=> ↺ Mueller Went Looking for a Conspiracy, What He Found Was Conflict and a Cover-Up — “Trump, Inc.” Podcast

• On Thursday, the “Trump, Inc.” team gathered with laptops, pizza and Post-its to disconnect — and to read special counsel Robert Mueller’s report.

• What we found was page after page of jaw-dropping details about the inner workings of the administration of President Donald Trump, meetings with foreign officials and plots to affect our elections. But we also found rich details on how Trump ran his business dealings in Russia, itself the subject of our recent episode on his Moscow business partners.

=> ↺ The Destruction of the Palestinians Will Be Israel’s Undoing

• The Israel-Palestine conflict is at the heart of politics not only in the Middle East, but in the United States. As the Israeli government led by Benjamin Netanyahu moves further toward the hard right with the support of U.S. President Donald Trump, the plight of Palestinians is reaching a new level of urgency. Journalist and filmmaker Mariam Shahin, the daughter of Palestinians, has dedicated much of her life’s work to documenting Palestinians’ stories through film as well as in her book “Palestine: A Guide” (Interlink Books, 2006). Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer describes Shahin’s films as poignant portrayals of “the forgotten people of every intrusion, every war.”

• “What I loved about your work,” Scheer tells Shahin in the latest installment of “Scheer Intelligence,” “is you capture … the ordinary person living in a place like Gaza. How they eat, how they survive. Male, female, children. These are not people who invented the situation. These are not people who have agency of any significance.”

• While the situation in the Palestinian territories looks increasingly dire, Shahin has found reasons for hope. “I think as the world increasingly becomes more polarized, there’s more people willing to listen to Palestinians,” the journalist tells the Truthdig editor in chief.

=> ↺ RussiaGate is Dead! Long Live Russiagate!

• Now that Mueller’s $40 million Humpty Trumpty investigation is over and found wanting of its original purpose (to retire Trump), perhaps the ruling class can return without interruption to the business of destroying the world with ordnance, greenhouse gases, and regime changes. A few more CIA-organized blackouts in Venezuela (it’s a simple trick if one follows the Agency’s “Freedom Fighter’s Manual”), and the US will come to the rescue, Grenada style, and set up yet another neoliberal regime. There is a small solace that with Trump, Pompeo, and Bolton, there is at least a semblance of transparency in their reckless interventions. The assessed value of Guaido and Salman, they forthrightly admit, is in their countries’ oil reserves. And Russians better respect the Monroe Doctrine and manifest destiny if they know what’s good for them. Crude as they may be, Trump’s men tell it like it is. And when Bolton speaks of “the Western Hemisphere’s shared goals of democracy, security, and the rule of law,” he is of course referring to US-backed coups, military juntas, debt bondage, invasions, embargoes, assassinations, and other forms of gunboat diplomacy.

• That the US is not already formally at war with Russia (even with NATO forces all along its borders) has only to do with the latter’s nuclear arsenal deterrent. Since World War II, a period some describe as a “a period of unprecedented peace,” the US war machine has wiped out some 20 million people, including more than 1 million in Iraq since 2003, engaged in regime change of at least 36 governments, intervened in at least 82 foreign elections, including Russia (1996), planned more than 50 assassinations of foreign leaders, and bombed over 30 countries. This is documented here and here.

=> ↺ The Mueller Report: Glenn Greenwald vs. David Cay Johnston on Trump-Russia Ties, Obstruction & More

• The Justice Department has released a redacted version of special counsel Robert Mueller’s 448-page report detailing Russian meddling in the 2016 election, the Trump campaign’s contacts with Russia and President Trump’s attempts to impede the special counsel’s investigation. The report states the campaign “expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts,” but Mueller concluded, “the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.” Mueller also outlined at least 10 instances where Trump attempted to impede the special counsel’s investigation, but Mueller came to no definitive conclusion on whether Trump broke the law by obstructing justice. In the report, Mueller suggests that this is a decision for Congress to make. We host a debate on the report’s findings between two Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists: Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept and David Cay Johnston, who has covered Donald Trump since the 1980s. His most recent book is “It’s Even Worse Than You Think: What the Trump Administration Is Doing to America.”

=> ↺ Why Russiagate Will Never Go Away

• Whatever might come of the remaining details of the Mueller probe, lessons ‘learned’ by the American press won’t be among them. The story was never about truth, so exposing bits and pieces as untrue won’t undo its success. And the government officials and pundits who put it forward largely got what they wanted from the effort. The national security and surveillance establishments were rehabilitated, the ‘press’ was shown once again to be a reliable mouth-piece for official interests and the 2016 electoral outcome was successfully portrayed as an accident of history made worse by the moral depravity of voters.

• Given that Russia’s economy today is smaller than Italy’s and its military budget wouldn’t buy a toilet seat or hammer in the U.S. military procurement system, the question of why Russia would seem a great mystery outside of history. And left unstated is that the U.S. defense industry needs enemies to survive. ‘Radical Islam,’ an invention of oil and gas industry flacks that turned out to be serviceable for marketing Tomahawk missiles and stealth fighter jets as well, lost some of its luster when ISIS and Al Qaeda came over to ‘our side.’ And humanitarian intervention ain’t what it used to be with Libya reduced to rubble and open-air slave markets now dotting the landscape.

• From 1948 through the early 1990s Russia was Pennywise the evil clown, helping to sell bananas, nuclear weapons and cut-rate underwear around the globe wherever American empire alighted. Costumed ‘communists,’ locals paid a day-rate to dress up and shout whatever slogans conveyed evil most effectively, were a staple of CIA interventions from Iran to Guatemala to the streets of New York, Boston and Los Angeles. Never mind that the slayer of monsters is more monstrous than an army of evil clowns, as the Koreans, Vietnamese, Laotians, Cambodians, Nicaraguans, El Salvadorans, Chileans, Iraqis, Afghanis, Yemenis and on and on, were to learn.

=> ↺ What Will It Take For Trump to Get His Due?

• It is hard to recall now but before the 2016 election, blatant contempt for the rule of law and other longstanding (small-r) republican values, public displays of stupidity, extreme character flaws, and irrefutable evidence of psychological instability could wreck a presidential campaign; and it was practically axiomatic that no presidency could be headed by anyone to whom those descriptions apply.

• No longer. By force of example, Donald Trump has proven the conventional wisdom wrong.

• The sixty percent or so of Americans whose heads are screwed on more or less correctly have therefore had to face up to the fact that as many as forty percent of their fellow citizens are either too benighted to face the truth about the president they elected, or, if they do have some inkling, that they either don’t care, or actually like being led by “a fucking moron.”

• It was one of the handful of by now long gone “adults in the room,” Trump’s first Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, a man of impeccably nefarious capitalist (and anti-environmentalist) credentials, who described Trump that way. He was spot on right.

• Persons outside the Trump base cannot help but believe that there is a tipping-point somewhere; that, while Trump mentally decomposes, the other forty percent cannot maintain their collective idiocy indefinitely. However, this belief, which I share, is based solely on respect for and faith in humankind; at this point, the available evidence does not support it.

=> ↺ House Escalates Trump Inquiry With Subpoena for Full Mueller Report

• The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee issued a subpoena Friday for special counsel Robert Mueller’s report as Congress escalates its investigation of President Donald Trump.

• “It now falls to Congress to determine the full scope of that alleged misconduct and to decide what steps we must take going forward,” said Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y. He expects the Justice Department to comply by May 1.

• While Mueller declined to prosecute Trump on obstruction of justice, he did not exonerate the president, all but leaving the question to Congress.

• Mueller’s report provides fresh evidence of Trump’s interference in the Russia investigation and challenges lawmakers to respond. The risks for both parties are clear if they duck the responsibility or prolong an inquiry that, rather than coming to a close, may be just beginning.

=> ↺ ‘Purity Tests’: How Corporate Media Describe Progressives Standing Up for Principles

• In the political world, the term “purity test” has a very specific meaning, largely used by elites to chastise and attack the left, or to gaslight them into supporting more centrist or right-wing policies. Boston Globe columnist Joan Vennochi (4/24/17), for example, bemoaned the ideological “activists” infiltrating the Democratic Party, undermining “more pragmatic party leaders everywhere” with their “purity tests.” She highlighted the supposed “danger” in “pushing the party too far to the left and imposing rigid orthodoxy,” warning that they are creating a “one-size party suitable only for zealots.”

• An example Vennochi gave of an intolerable and self-defeating purity test was leftists’ pressure on Sen. Elizabeth Warren to change her mind about supporting Trump nominee Ben Carson to lead the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Apparently opposing one of Trump’s most stridently right-wing appointees constitutes a “demand for ideological purity.”

=> ↺ Trump abruptly blocks U.S. from appointing anyone to UN committee on racism

• The Trump administration will not nominate anyone from the United States to serve on the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.

• A State Department official told Politico that the White House intervened to stop the expected renomination of a human rights lawyer selected by Barack Obama to the 18-member UN panel. As a result, the U.S. will not nominate anyone to the committee.

• Gay McDougall, who has served on the committee since 2015, was informed by State Department officials that she would be renominated before the White House abruptly scrapped the plan without providing an explanation, according to the report.

• The committee meets three times per year in Geneva to review progress toward the implementation of a 1960s global pact on “the elimination of all forms of racial discrimination.”

• McDougall, a human rights expert, told the outlet she intended to finish out her four-year term, which ends this fall.

• “I regret that I’m not able to continue, and that was not of my choosing,” she said.

• McDougall previously criticized Trump for emboldening racists in the United States around the world.

=> ↺ Snubbing UN and Fight Against Racism, Trump Admin Blocks Seat on Key Committee From Being Filled

• Also criticizing the development was Jasmine L. Tyler, advocacy director for Human Rights Watch’s U.S. Program, who called it “yet another example of the U.S.’s backpedaling from multilateralism/international organizations,” noting “a series of U.S. withdrawals from international treaties and supporting organizations.”

=> ↺ ‘Justice Delayed Is Democracy Denied’: Trump to Fight Subpoenas From House Dems

• President Donald Trump is making clear he will resist Congressional subpoenas into his personal finances and his administration’s behavior, setting up a clash between two ostensibly co-equal branches of government.

• That announcement came Tuesday evening via reporting by The Washington Post. The Post, citing sources inside the White House, described Trump as digging in his heels over the requests.

• “The administration does not plan to turn over information being sought about how particular individuals received their security clearances, Trump’s meetings with foreign leaders and other topics that they plan to argue are subject to executive privilege, according to several aides familiar with internal discussions,” the Post reported.

• At issue are records pertaining to Trump administration security clearances from the House Oversight and Reform committee, the president’s tax returns from the Ways and Means Committee, and business loans from international banks from the House Intelligence and Financial Services committees.

=> ↺ How Volodymyr Zelenskiy went from comedian to Ukraine’s presidential front runner

• In Ukraine’s current presidential elections, the first round of voting left actor and comedian Volodymyr Zelenskiy on top. In a sense, Zelenskiy has already held the Ukrainian government’s leading role — at least in Sluha Narodu (Servant of the People), a television series produced by his company, Studio Kvartal 95. Shortly before the election took place, Meduza correspondent Ilya Zhegulev visited Ukraine to find out how the enormously popular comedian decided to transfer his presidential image from a sitcom into the real world — and what Zelenskiy the politician has to offer besides his already evident skills in showmanship.

=> ↺ At Risk—the Idea of America

• Perhaps the most damaging legacy of the Trump years is the disservice he and his associates are doing to Americans’ sense of self and nation. In ordinary times there would not be much debate about what it means to be an American or what are American values. Every school child learns these things: It’s Civics 1. Race, class, and gender identity have always been important, but generally they have been subsumed under a larger identification with the nation. “We’re all Americans, we all share the dream, we live in a land of opportunity.” But under Trump identity politics has come to the fore, pushing aside the tenets of liberal democracy and respect for diversity, and replacing them with right-wing white nationalism framed by a (false) populist (i.e., anti-establishment) political agenda, a narrowing of opportunity, and mean-spirited discourse.

• Liberal intellectuals uniformly denounce that agenda but they differ among themselves, as the latest issue of Foreign Affairs shows, about whether or not racial, class, and other identities promote or undermine national unity. Those identities are critical to maintain in the face of unequal treatment, yet the (liberal) nationalists fear they will undermine a focus on repurposing America. A related debate is evidently taking place at the state level. In Michigan we learn that public school educators are arguing over whether curricula should describe the American form of government as a republic or a democracy, with implications for how civil society and social equality are taught. These debates reveal just how uncertain the idea of America still is.

• So long as these debates persist, America will have no special claim to being an enlightened example to the world. Instead, America will remain divided, consumed by antagonisms between races, classes, and gender, and by contending nationalisms, rather than propelled by demonstrating how a pluralistic society is able, through consensus politics and democratic choice, to surmount differences. Chalk up these painful debates to Trump’s intentionally divisive way of governing, which he relied on to get to the White House and is relying on again to stay there.

=> ↺ Russian Foreign Ministry official says Mueller report contains ‘no evidence’ of election meddling

• “There’s nothing there that would attract attention. It actually confirms the absence of any argument that Russia supposedly meddled in the American elections. There’s not a shred of evidence there. In fact, the report’s authors concede that they have no evidence,” Borisenko says.

=> ↺ Chomsky: By Focusing on Russia, Democrats Handed Trump a “Huge Gift” & Possibly the 2020 Election

• As Attorney General William Barr releases Robert Mueller’s long-anticipated report into Russian interference in the 2016 election, we speak with world-renowned political dissident, linguist and author Noam Chomsky about what he sees as the political perils of “Russiagate.”

=> ↺ Barr Lies Down With Trump, Wakes Up With Fleas

• Ladies and gentlemen, today’s Final Jeopardy question in the category Lost Americans: Where was Special Counsel Robert Mueller?

• He wasn’t standing there at the Department of Justice press conference Thursday morning, despite the fact that the event was about Mueller’s report on Russia, President Donald Trump and his possible acts of obstruction. Attorney General William Barr insisted that the purpose of the briefing was to “discuss my response to that report.” and not, by implication, a platform from which Mueller might steal the spotlight or worse, protest the jabberwocky that came flying out of the AG’s mouth.

=> ↺ Top Democrats Accuse Barr of ‘Acting to Protect Donald Trump’ Ahead of Mueller Report Rollout

• In response to news that Attorney General William Barr plans to hold a morning press conference before the Mueller report is sent to Congress on Thursday, top House Democrats accused Barr of attempting to “shape public perceptions” of the Special Counsel’s findings in President Donald Trump’s favor before anyone can read them.

• The group of Democrats—which included House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (N.Y.) and Financial Services Chairwoman Maxine Waters (D-Calif.)—also raised alarm about reports that Justice Department officials have had “numerous conversations” on the Mueller report with White House lawyers in recent days.

=> ↺ No More Excuses. Donald Trump Must Be Impeached.

• Over the course of more than 400 scalding pages, the Mueller report details the parallel and often cooperative course traveled by Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and the sophisticated Russian operation devoted to his victory. Mueller’s report also lays out the myriad ways Trump obstructed justice through his ham-fisted attempts to either take over the investigation or obliterate it entirely.

• There is but one conclusion to reach after reading this exhaustively prepared report: Donald Trump must be impeached. There is no more time for vacillation, and no room for doubt.

• The report is divided into two distinct hemispheres: Volume I deals with the Russian attack on the 2016 presidential election and the question of Trump campaign participation in that attack, and Volume II deals with the manner in which Donald Trump actively obstructed the investigation into Russian election meddling.

• Many of the report’s details have been in the public sphere for months and even years. Having it all in one place, however, gives the document the depth and gravity of gruesome history. There are also plenty of new and alarming surprises. It is atomically detailed and deeply sourced, ultimately conservative in its conclusions regarding the law but profoundly damning nonetheless.

• Donald Trump was right to fear its release, and after reading it, I believe those fears are only just beginning.

=> ↺ Sarah Sanders must go: After Mueller, White House press secretary is toast

• The Justice Department released on Thursday a redacted version of special counsel Robert Mueller’s long-awaited 400-plus-page report on the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. According to the report, when Sanders faced the press at two different press conferences in May of 2017 to explain Trump’s firing of James Comey as FBI director, she told bald-faced lies.

• On May 10, 2017, Sanders said that Trump “had countless conversations with members from within the FBI” and learned that “the rank and file of the FBI had lost confidence in their director.”

• That same day she said that “most of America had decided on their own that Director Comey was not the person that should be leading the FBI, as evidenced by the numerous comments that we’ve seen from Democrat members in the House and Senate, Republican members, members of the FBI, and people across the board.”

=> ↺ “Don’t Listen to Barr—Read Mueller’s Words Yourself”: Here Is the Special Counsel’s Report

• Attorney General William Barr delivered a redacted version of the Mueller report to Congress and posted the special counsel’s findings online Thursday morning.

• The document’s publication followed a Justice Department press conference that critics and Democratic lawmakers denounced as an effort to spin Mueller’s findings and protect President Donald Trump.

• “Before the American people can read it themselves, Barr is trying to spin a report he knows will damage his boss,” tweeted Rep. Barbara Lee during Barr’s morning press conference. “Don’t listen to Barr—read Mueller’s words yourself.”

• Though Democrats demanded the full report, the findings delivered to Congress were redacted. During his press conference, Barr insisted that none of the redactions were the result of “executive privilege.”

=> ↺ William Barr reveals he “disagreed” with Robert Mueller on “legal theories” of Trump obstruction

• Ahead of the release of a redacted version of special counsel Robert Mueller’s nearly 400-page report detailing his nearly two-year investigation into foreign interference in the 2016 presidential election, Attorney General William Barr said ten documented episodes involving President Donald Trump and “elements of an obstruction offense” were not illegal.

• Barr revealed that both he and his deputy, Rod Rosenstein, “disagreed with some of the special counsel’s legal theories and felt that some of the episodes did not amount to obstruction as a matter of law,” although they accepted Mueller’s “legal framework.”

• “After finding no underlying collusion with Russia, the special counsel’s report goes on to consider whether certain actions of the president could amount to obstruction of the special counsel’s investigation,” Barr added. “As I addressed in my March 24 letter, the special counsel did not make a traditional prosecutorial judgment regarding this allegation. Instead, the report recounts ten episodes involving the president and discusses potential legal theories for connecting these actions to elements of an obstruction offense.”

=> ↺ Barr Gets in Last Word Before America Sees Mueller Report

• After nearly two years of waiting, America is getting some Trump-Russia answers straight from Robert Mueller.

• Eager to get in a first word ahead of the public release of the special counsel’s report, Attorney General William Barr on Thursday laid out in advance what he said was the “bottom line:” No collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian government hackers.

• While Mueller drew no conclusion about whether President Donald Trump had obstructed justice in the investigation, Barr said he and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein personally had concluded that while Trump was “frustrated and angry” about the Mueller probe, nothing the president did rose to the level of an “obstruction-of-justice offense.” Barr said Mueller’s report examined 10 episodes pertaining to Trump and obstruction.

=> ↺ Demanding to Hear Directly From Mueller, Nadler Subpoenas Full, Unredacted Report Friday

• House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler said Friday morning that the committee would issue a subpoena for the entire unredacted Mueller report “in the next couple of hours.”

• The demand reinforced a sense of dissatisfaction from House Democrats with the Trump administration’s suggestion that the report is a closed matter.

• On ABC’s “Good Morning America,” Nadler told George Stephanopoulos his committee would demand access to the full report, which, while it did not establish a criminal conspiracy between President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia, also did not exonerate the president of potential obstruction of justice.

• Attorney General William Barr, Nadler said, “misled the country” when he held a press conference focusing largely on Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s findings regarding collusion.

=> ↺ Biden Expected to Launch Presidential Campaign Next Week

• Former Vice President Joe Biden is expected to join the crowded 2020 Democratic presidential race next week.

• The decision answers one of the most significant outstanding questions of the early presidential primary season, which has already seen announcements from 18 high-profile Democrats. Biden, 76, would be the oldest and most experienced politician in the race.

• His plans were confirmed by three people with knowledge, who insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. The announcement is expected as early as Wednesday and would cap months of deliberation over his political future.

• The specific launch date and location is unclear. Biden is likely to quickly make visits to early-voting states.

• One person said Biden’s advisers are also considering an early event in Charlottesville, Virginia, the site of a deadly clash between white supremacists and counterprotesters in 2017. The location would be intended to draw a contrast between Biden and President Donald Trump, who initially said there were some “very fine people on both sides” of the violent confrontation.

• Biden has been particularly outspoken against the rise of white supremacy in the Trump era.

=> ↺ Russia’s ruling political party releases viral campaign videos ahead of local elections outside Moscow

• In the videos, United Russia candidates from different precincts in the district recite the names of streets and boroughs in Odintsovsky. Each clip ends with a call to go vote on Sunday. The candidates are never identified as United Russia politicians and the name of the party is never mentioned or shown on screen.

Censorship/Free Speech

=> ↺ UK Porn Filters Could Mean Sweaty Palms For Piracy Blockers

• This summer the UK government will attempt to ban underage access to sites that have a third or more of their content dedicated to porn. Everyone will be required to verify their age and sites that don’t comply with the regime will be blocked by ISPs. However, citizens who seek to circumvent the rules with VPNs, for example, will also find pirate sites wide open again.

=> ↺ Porn block: UK to require age checks for adult content as of July 15

• Opponents of the new rules pointed out that they won’t cover smaller sites or social networks, and can be circumvented by the use of VPNs. Others fear the systems used to verify age will be open to exploitation, and could result in people’s privacy being violated and their browsing histories being circulated beyond their control.

=> ↺ Facebook Pulls Plug on Anti-Immigration News Site Ahead of Danish Elections

• The social media giant has banned a Danish news outlet critical of the EU, immigration and mainstream media two times in a single day. The blackout occurred after a state broadcaster blew the whistle ahead of looming general elections.

=> ↺ US Slides Down Annual Press Freedom Ranking, With Watchdog Calling Nation ‘Problematic’ for Reporters’ Rights

• An annual accounting of press freedoms around the world describes an “intense climate of fear” in which reporters are being forced to work, calling out world leaders like U.S. President Donald Trump and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro for their attacks on the media.

• Trump’s repeated statements that journalists are “the enemy of the people” and his threats to roll back their right to report political news have been a contributing factor in the United States’ descent to 48th place in the Press Freedom Index, which was released Thursday by Reporters Without Borders or Reporters Sans Frontières (RSF).

• The U.S. slid down the list three places and is now categorized as a “problematic” country for journalists’ rights, according to RSF.

• “The violent anti-press rhetoric from the highest level of the U.S. government has been coupled with an increase in the number of press freedom violations at the local level as journalists run the risk of arrest for covering protests or simply attempting to ask public officials questions,” RSF reported.

=> ↺ US slides down global press freedom rankings amid warning of ‘climate of fear’ for journalists

• Releasing its annual Press Freedom Index after a tumultuous 12 months for the media, Reporters Without Borders sounded the alarm over an “intense climate of fear” for reporters, and condemned attacks on press outlets by world leaders including Donald Trump.

• The US slid three places to 48th in their global rankings, dropping below Botswana, Chile and Romania and entering the category of “problematic” regions for press freedom. Norway claimed the top spot for the third consecutive year, ahead of Finland, Sweden and the Netherlands, and North Korea climbed off the bottom of the table.

=> ↺ Global press freedom under threat, says Reporters Without Borders

• Once again, Norway tops the global ranking, followed by Finland and Sweden.

=> ↺ Journalist shot dead in Derry during rioting in the city

• Dissident republicans are being blamed for killing 29-year-old Lyra McKee during rioting after police searches in Derry’s Creggan area on Thursday night.

=> ↺ An Open Source Survey of the Shooting of Lyra McKee

• By the end of the night, a man would open fire from the crowd’s position towards the police, killing Lyra McKee. The shooting was captured on video from at least four vantage points. Additionally, the authorities have released a CCTV compilation showing some of the unrest, including the moment that the shooter opened fire.

• What follows is an account of the events in Creggan on the night of April 18 2019 that ended with the killing of Lyra McKee.

=> ↺ The U.S. Now Ranks As A ‘Problematic’ Place For Journalists

• Reporters Sans Frontières, or Reporters Without Borders, dropped the U.S. to No. 48 out of 180 on its annual World Press Freedom Index, three notches lower than its place last year. The move downgrades the country from a “satisfactory” place to work freely to a “problematic” one for journalists.

=> ↺ Under Chinese censorship, Game of Thrones becomes a mundane medieval documentary

• Chinese viewers who watched the censored version of the season 8 premiere became confused when they participated in post-episode discussions. Many fans were angry about the censorship because it kept important plot points hidden from them, including the fall of the Last Hearth, the death of Ned Umber, and the Night King’s message. But others simply suggested that pirating the show was a better solution than watching a bowdlerized version. One user wrote a comment half in English and half in Chinese on Weibo, China’s Twitter-like social media platform: “I want my money back, #TencentVideo. I want a refund, I don’t want the censored version of #GameofThrones #EighthSeason.”

=> ↺ Scribd taking down the Mueller Report is the future the EU has voted for

• Scribd thought the Mueller Report was copyrighted because there was no one to think otherwise—the company uses an algorithm to make determinations about intellectual property violations.

=> ↺ Don’t Force Web Platforms To Silence Innocent People

• The U.S. House Judiciary Committee held a hearing this week to discuss the spread of white nationalism, online and offline. The hearing tackled hard questions about how online platforms respond to extremism online and what role, if any, lawmakers should play. The desire for more aggressive moderation policies in the face of horrifying crimes is understandable, particularly in the wake of the recent massacre in New Zealand. But unfortunately, looking to Silicon Valley to be the speech police may do more harm than good.

• When considering measures to discourage or filter out unwanted activity, platforms must consider how those mechanisms might be abused by bad actors. Similarly, when Congress considers regulating speech on online platforms, it must consider both the First Amendment implications and how its regulations might unintentionally encourage platforms to silence innocent people.

• Again and again, we’ve seen attempts to more aggressively stamp out hate and extremism online backfire in colossal ways. We’ve seen state actors abuse flagging systems in order to silence their political enemies. We’ve seen platforms inadvertently censor the work of journalists and activists attempting to document human rights atrocities.

=> ↺ EU Parliament Votes To Require Internet Sites To Delete ‘Terrorist Content’ In One Hour (By 3 Votes)

• A bit of deja vu here. Once again, the EU Parliament has done a stupid thing for the internet. As we’ve been discussing over the past few months, the EU has been pushing a really dreadful “EU Terrorist Content Regulation” with the main feature being a requirement that any site that can be accessed from the EU must remove any content deemed “terrorist content” by any vaguely defined “competent authority” within one hour of being notified. The original EU Commission version also included a requirement for filters to block reuploads and a provision that effectively turned websites’ terms of service documents into de facto law. In moving the Regulation to the EU Parliament, the civil liberties committee LIBE stripped the filters and the terms of service parts from the proposal, but kept in the one hour takedown requirement. In a vote earlier today, the EU Parliament approved the version put for by the committee, rejecting (bad) amendments to bring back the upload filters and empowering terms of service, but also rejecting — by just three votes — an amendment to remove the insane one hour deadline.

=> ↺ Stop Saying That Section 230 Was A ‘Gift To Internet Companies’

• Saying that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA 230) is a “gift” to internet companies that should be taken away because some people use the internet badly is like saying the interstate highway system is a “gift” to the big shipping companies, and should be destroyed because some people send illegal things via UPS or Fedex.

=> ↺ New Paper: Why Section 230 Is Better Than The First Amendment

• We’ve talked a lot over the years about the importance of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA) in helping to create and enable the internet and all of the free speech on the internet. Expect us to continue to talk about it as it is increasingly under attack. Professor Eric Goldman has now released a short, and very worth reading, paper about Section 230, with the provocative title: Why Section 230 Is Better Than the First Amendment. The importance here is that many have argued that CDA 230 and the 1st Amendment go hand in hand. At times, in the past, I’ve argued that in a reasonable world we shouldn’t even need a CDA 230, because the proper application of liability should obviously be with the person posting the law-breaking content, rather than the platform hosting it. But, that was clearly talking about in an idealistic world that does not exist. Given the frequency of lots of people — plaintiffs, journalists, politicians, and more — going after platforms for actions of their users, CDA 230′s broad immunity is absolutely necessary if we’re to have free speech online.

=> ↺ That Was Quick: Thomas Goolnik Already Gets Google To Forget Our Latest Story About Thomas Goolnik Getting Google To Forget Stories About Thomas Goolnik

• Right. So if the rest of you hadn’t guessed by now, Thomas Goolnik has, once again, successfully convinced Google to “erase” our most recent article about Thomas Goolnik getting Google to delete a previous article about Thomas Goolnik getting Google to delete a previous article about Thomas Goolnik getting Google to delete a previous article from its search results on the name Thomas Goolnik in the EU. Even if one were to agree that the original articles he wanted delisted from searches under his name (which began with a NY Times article from 2002, which we don’t believe should have been delisted under the RTBF guidelines in the EU), the fact that Goolnik continues to get more modern articles about his abuse of the RTBF process delisted seems problematic. It seems like the sort of thing that is very much in the public interest to monitor and report on, seeing as many supporters of the GDPR insist that the RTBF process would not, in fact, be used to censor news stories. It is being used to do exactly that.

Privacy/Surveillance

=> ↺ Government Tossing Child Porn Cases Rather Than Discuss Its Torrent-Tracking Software In Court

• The federal government isn’t done tossing cases rather than let defendants have access to slightly more level playing field. A new investigation by ProPublica has uncovered more dismissed prosecutions due to the government’s unwillingness to allow defendants to examine the software used to build cases against them.

• The cases deal with child porn and BitTorrent distribution. The defendants are hardly the most sympathetic. But, like the cases that exposed the FBI’s use of malware to gather identifying information from devices around the world, child porn investigations are on the front line of the government’s tech deployments. From the description of the cases covered here, it almost appears the government had enough evidence to see the prosecution through to the end. It just chose not to because continuing the cases would mean turning over info on their tracking software to the accused

=> ↺ Facebook fights to “shield Zuckerberg” from punishment in US privacy probe

• According to NBC, FTC officials are “discussing whether and how to hold Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg personally accountable for the company’s history of mismanaging users’ private data.” However, NBC said its sources “wouldn’t elaborate on what measures are specifically under consideration.”

=> ↺ Facebook’s Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Privacy Week

• I know that some will argue that “every week” is a bad week for Facebook with regards to privacy, but this week in particular is looking especially awful, with (last I checked!) three “big” stories regarding the company’s bad decisions and handling regarding data. Of course, because this is Facebook, I still think the reporting is getting the story a bit wrong. The story that has gotten the most attention is the least concerning, while the ones getting less attention are the real problems.

• First up is the NBC News story going through a big pile of leaked internal documents from its ongoing lawsuit with app developer Six4Three. If you don’t recall, the company, which made a skeezy app to let you find pictures of other people on Facebook wearing bikinis, got mad and sued Facebook when Facebook (finally) realized that maybe it shouldn’t give app developers access to so much data, and cut them all off (effectively killing Six4Three’s entire ability to operate). Many people reacted to this week’s story as if it was some big reveal that Facebook cut favorable data deals with some partners, and that it toyed around with business models selling access to data, but frankly, I don’t see all that much that’s different from the cache of documents that was released back in December.

• As I said then, most of the stuff that people are freaking out about appears to be taken out of context. Facebook investigating different business models isn’t inherently bad. And many people are framing those discussions completely outside of the context of what Facebook was actually doing at the time or how people viewed the data it had access to. A lot of focus is on the fact that Facebook put a dollar value on the data — but that doesn’t actually mean (as many are suggesting) that it ever planned to “sell the data.” It did look at charging app developers to access the data, but that’s not a particularly crazy idea — and one that lots of people discussed at the time, and one that plenty of companies with lots of data use.

=> ↺ James Comey Offers Up Half-Assed Apology For Being Such An Asshole About Encryption

• Former FBI director James Comey’s move to the private sector has been… well… annoying, if we’re honest. After being booted by President Trump for allegedly failing to pledge his fealty to the Oval Office throne, Comey has become a hero of the so-called Resistance. Those lionizing Comey as some sort of truth-to-power speaker seem to have forgotten he ignored everything ever about pre-election propriety to announce his reopening of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server, and his years spent trying to undermine encryption.

• You can take a man out of the FBI, but you can’t take the g-man out of the man. Comey may be as unimpressed as many of us are with the current White House leadership, but that only makes him somewhat relatable, not some hero molded from the fires of the long tradition of reshuffling agency leadership with every peaceful transfer of power.

• Comey will speak to whoever will listen and/or publish his thoughts. He recently spoke at a conference and offered up his limited apologies for the War on Encryption he waged following the San Bernardino shooting.

=> ↺ Google’s Sensorvault Can Tell Police Where You’ve Been

• In a new article, the New York Times details a little-known technique increasingly used by law enforcement to figure out everyone who might have been within certain geographic areas during specific time periods in the past. The technique relies on detailed location data collected by Google from most Android devices as well as iPhones and iPads that have Google Maps and other apps installed. This data resides in a Google-maintained database called “Sensorvault,” and because Google stores this data indefinitely, Sensorvault “includes detailed location records involving at least hundreds of millions of devices worldwide and dating back nearly a decade.”

• The data Google is turning over to law enforcement is so precise that one deputy police chief said it “shows the whole pattern of life.” It’s collected even when people aren’t making calls or using apps, which means it can be even more detailed than data generated by cell towers.

• One deputy police chief said Google’s location data “shows the whole pattern of life.”

• The location data comes from GPS signals, cellphone towers, nearby Wi-Fi devices and Bluetooth beacons. According to Google, users opt in to collection of the location data stored in Sensorvault. However, Google makes it very hard to resist opting in, and many users may not understand that they have done so. Also, Android devices collect lots of other location data by default, and it’s extremely difficult to opt out of that collection.

=> ↺ Google’s Infinite Reach – How Google Builds a Profile on Everyone

• [...] People who refuse to participate are still tracked by FaceBook cookies and url tracking.

• The difference is that Google’s method of attack is by aggregation. Google builds many tools that are useful to users and administrators, but they are engineered to gather data about users and build as much of a profile as possible, which is then sold to advertisers, governments, other data brokers, or anyone else who is willing to pay.

• [...]

• Google AMP is a service that caches data, usually media, on Google servers around the world. This means that when you load a website with AMP enabled, the images and media come from Google’s servers. This means that when you are visiting a website with AMP enabled, Google knows every resource that you’ve loaded on the page. Interestingly, this gives Google access to substantially more information than your ISP would be able to get, because https encryption prevents the ISP from seeing what specific pages you visit. They can only see the domain. As an example, your ISP could see that you visited Reddit, but not what subreddit or posts. Google AMP linked content on Reddit (there is a ton of it) gives Google a direct IP – Content link that they can document and use to profile user behavior and activity.

• This problem is widespread. WordPress sites, which is the most popular content management system in the world, have AMP on by default.

• Even worse, Google has recently announced that mobile Chrome users wont even be able to tell when they are using amp-served content. Chrome will hide the AMP content behind the original URL.

=> ↺ NYC subway denies using ‘real-time face recognition screens’ in Times Square

• Young says that the recordings aren’t being monitored to identify individuals in the footage, though. “There is absolutely no facial recognition component to these cameras, no facial recognition software, or anything else that could be used to automatically identify people in any way, and we have no plans to add facial recognition software to these cameras in the future,” he tells The Verge. “These cameras are purely for the purpose of deterring fare evasion — if you see yourself on a monitor, you’re less likely to evade the fare.”

• The cameras can supposedly detect motion and recognize that a human is on-screen, which is a feature that’s common in security cameras as well as general purpose photography and video equipment. “But again, there is no capability to recognize or identify individuals and absolutely no plan to,” says Young. New York’s subway system is already heavily surveilled; the MTA contracted with Lockheed Martin and others to install 1,000 cameras and 3,000 motion sensors across the system in 2005, and in 2015, the MTA said there were 4,500 cameras watching the subways. Police also conduct random bag checks in subway stations.

Civil Rights/Policing

=> ↺ How Social-Media Surveillance of Teenagers Led to a New Kind of Policing

• [...] Jelani was charged with two counts of attempted murder in connection with a shooting outside a public-housing development in Harlem, with the cops citing an eyewitness account as well as Jelani’s “likes” of Goodfellas photos on Facebook. A judge denied him bail. The teenager’s social-media use helped earn him a trip to Rikers Island, where he would remain for 19 months.

• As Jeffrey Lane writes in his new book The Digital Street, such blurring of the physical and online worlds can be particularly dangerous for many teenagers of color, especially those growing up amid poverty and violence. Legal surveillance of spaces like Facebook and Twitter gives police new power to interpret behavior and—in the case of the Henry brothers—weave narratives that can suggest guilt by digital association. Asheem ended up striking a plea deal for a reduced sentence on his conspiracy charge; Jelani’s case was eventually dismissed because of the lack of a speedy trial.

=> ↺ ‘Tank man’ video for Leica sparks outcry in China ahead of Tiananmen anniversary

• The five-minute dramatisation, released this week, touches on a highly sensitive topic in China. The ruling Communist Party has never declared how many people died in the crackdown and discussion of the incident is censored on social media.

• The video shows the photographer hiding and running from Chinese-speaking policemen before taking a picture that has come to symbolise the protests – the “tank man” – a protester standing in front of a convoy of tanks to block their path. The video ends with the Leica logo.

=> ↺ How Chinese [Internet] [shills] go after Beijing’s critics overseas

• Facebook (FB) is banned in China, as are Twitter (TWTR) and Reddit — accessing them requires jumping the Great Firewall, the country’s vast censorship and surveillance apparatus.

• Despite this, these sites appear to be becoming a key battleground of Chinese influence, as a growing army of [Internet] [astrotrufers] assemble on Chinese forums and in Facebook groups to attack voices they perceive to be hostile to Beijing’s interests.

=> ↺ Secrecy, Self-Dealing, and Greed at the N.R.A.

• LaPierre is right that the N.R.A. is troubled; in recent years, it has run annual deficits of as much as forty million dollars. It is not unusual for nonprofits to ask prospective donors to help forestall disaster. What is unusual is the extent to which such warnings have become the central activity of the N.R.A. Even as the association has reduced spending on its avowed core mission—gun education, safety, and training—to less than ten per cent of its total budget, it has substantially increased its spending on messaging. The N.R.A. is now mainly a media company, promoting a life style built around loving guns and hating anyone who might take them away.

• On NRATV, the organization’s programming network, the popular host Grant Stinchfield might appear in a “Socialist Tears” T-shirt, taking a sledgehammer to a television set cycling through liberal news shows. The platform’s Twitter account circulates videos of the spokesperson Dana Loesch, a former Breitbart News editor who has said that mainstream journalists are “the rat bastards of the earth” and deserve to be “curb-stomped.” Over menacing images of masked rioters, she asserts that the only way to stop the left is to “fight its violence of lies with the clenched fist of truth.” A lawyer and activist called Colion Noir, whose real name is Collins Idehen, Jr., also has a large following. After the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Florida, Noir appeared in a video chiding “all the kids from Parkland getting ready to use your First Amendment to attack everyone else’s Second Amendment.”

=> ↺ Peachtree Officials Come To Their Senses, Vote Down Plan To Finance Lawsuits Against Critics Following Widespread Criticism

• The intent is never pure when the goal is for public officials to sue critics. And, the problem was not that it wasn’t written correctly. The problem was with the whole idea. Hopefully, this doesn’t mean there’s a plan to “rewrite” this proposal. Just leave it be and maybe get a somewhat thicker skin if you’re going to work for the government.

=> ↺ Peachtree City Wants To Use Taxpayer Money To Sue Critics Of City Government

• What is it with the state of Georgia and its attempts to stifle free speech and a free press? It’s the state that argues its official copy of the law is covered by copyright and cannot be posted online. The same state that is currently trying to regulate journalism by creating “ethical standards” they have to follow. The same state that is so bad in responding to public records law that an official was actually criminally charged for it?

• The latest, as sent in by a few people, is that tonight, Peachtree City, a suburb of Atlanta, is voting on a laughably obviously unconstitutional provision that would allow city officials to file bogus SLAPP suits, using taxpayer funds, against critics. Really. Specifically, the proposal says that the city will provide “coverage for legal expenses when a City official has been defamed in a public media outlet or otherwise slandered or libeled to the public…” It does note that the defamation must be a “valid claim for defamation… under Georgia law.” So, one might argue that filing a bogus SLAPP suit wouldn’t be covered by this policy — but it’s unclear how that will work.

=> ↺ Zero Tolerance: Inside the Secretive Network of Immigrant Youth Shelters in Illinois

• This week, ProPublica’s reporting on the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance policy was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for public service journalism (and ProPublica reporter Hannah Dreier won a Pulitzer for her amazing feature reporting on MS-13).

• We encourage you to read all of ProPublica’s zero-tolerance reporting, but we’d also like to take this opportunity to recap our work on immigrant shelters in Illinois, reported by Melissa Sanchez, Jodi S. Cohen and Duaa Eldeib.

=> ↺ Beyond Prisons: Native Feminisms feat. Dr. Kimberly Robertson

• Kim Wilson interviews Dr. Kimberly Robertson on her work on Native feminisms and practices, use of beadwork and zine making to generate knowledge, and the uncompensated emotional labor of Black and women of color in the academy and liberatory work.

• Kimberly Robertson is a citizen of the Mvskoke nation, an artivist, scholar, teacher, and mother who works diligently to employ Native feminist theories, practices, and methodologies in her hustle to fulfill the dreams of her ancestors and to build a world in which her daughters can thrive.

• She was born in Bakersfield, CA and currently lives on unceded Tongva lands. She is an Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at California State University, Los Angeles. Robertson is also a founding member of the Green Corn Collective and a member of the Indigenous Goddess Gang.

=> ↺ Real Sanctuary Demands More Than Lip Service. Cities Must Step Up.

• President Trump is ramping up his threats against Democrats and progressives, tweeting repeatedly over this past weekend that he plans to send detained immigrants to sanctuary cities like Chicago and New York, and to sanctuary states like California. This is a childish attempt at retaliation against his perceived political opponents — leaders and constituents who have declared their intent for their communities to be safe havens for immigrants who are tirelessly hunted down by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

• While Trump may see this as some sort of punishment to Democrats, instead he is reinforcing the divide that his politics represent, and prompting our communities to step up and demand more. Leaders in 27 states across the country have rebuffed the president’s racist and xenophobic agenda, resisting this administration’s attempts to persecute migrants, asylum seekers and the Latinx community. It isn’t just the blue states that reject his cruel vision. Sanctuary sites can be found in red states that voted for Trump in 2016, including 14 counties in Iowa, 18 counties and cities in Pennsylvania, and six counties in North Carolina.

• It is time to defend the right of these jurisdictions to act in solidarity with immigrants, and to demand a full realization — and expansion — of sanctuary. We have now borne witness to the cruelty of immigration enforcement under Trump, and conditions are more than likely to worsen, as they just did with Attorney General William Barr’s announcement on Tuesday that asylum seekers can be detained indefinitely instead of being released on bond. Now is the time to push sanctuary cities and counties again to be proactive and enact policies that eliminate the threat of ICE persecution from our cities and be the sanctuary that our communities need right now.

=> ↺ Using the Law to Build a Socialist Society

• This is an extraordinary moment for civil liberties lawyers, unfortunately not in the happy sense. “America,” Heidi Boghosian says in the Foreword, “is in a constitutional crisis.” Ordinary, long-assumed rights are being challenged in the courts, by law-and-order conservative judges, unabashedly repressive police (largely freed from restraints) and the rigged system of incarceration. Rather than advancing rights, radical lawyers find themselves struggling to stay in one place and keep their clients from harm.

• This situation is, of course, not so new and, just as important, not the project of looney conservatives. “In 2011, President Obama signed into law the National Defense Authorization Act, a bill drafted in secret, behind closed doors. The Act authorizes the U.S. military to pick up and indefinitely imprison American citizens without charge or trial…” We could say that 9/11 opened up the Pandora’s Box and out jumped those who were eager, Republican and Democrat alike, to extend the authoritarian state wherever it wanted to go.

• Michael Steven Smith, a former board member at the Center for Constitutional Rights for many years, a scholar by inclination, and a socialist by commitment, is eminently qualified to connect several generations of courtroom militants.

• Not that the logic of legal defense is new. Smith cites the capacity of lawyer Leonard Weinglass to put the CIA decades ago. Students at the University of Massachusetts, including presidential daughter Amy Carter, resisted attempts of the Agency to recruit on campus. Arrested after they obstructed the recruitment by sitting in, they were defended on the grounds of “necessity,” that is the act of halting an ongoing crime by committing a lesser one.

=> ↺ ‘The FBI Appears to Be Engaged in a Modern-Day Version of COINTELPRO’

• Does that sound like a bizarre and dangerously imprecise targeting of people of color engaged in righteous and constitutionally protected protest? It sure does.

• But as we discussed at the time with our next guest, a tool in the hands of the country’s most powerful law enforcement need not be precise to be used to do tremendous damage.

• Nusrat Choudhury is deputy director of the ACLU Racial Justice Program. She joins us now by phone from here in town. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Nusrat Choudhury.

=> ↺ Parents Who Starved and Shackled Children Get Life Sentence

• The eldest son and daughter of a couple who starved and shackled 12 of their children spoke publicly for the first time Friday, alternately condemning and forgiving their parents before a judge sentenced the pair to up to life in prison.

• Since being freed from their prison-like home more than a year ago, the two adult children of David and Louise Turpin described how they had gained control of lives and, despite receiving little education at home, were now enrolled in college and learning simple things, including how to ride a bike, swim and prepare a meal. They are still thin from years of malnutrition.

• “I cannot describe in words what we went through growing up,” said the oldest son, now 27. “Sometimes I still have nightmares of things that have happened, such as my siblings being chained up or getting beaten. But that is the past and this is now. I love my parents and have forgiven them for a lot of the things that they did to us.”

=> ↺ More Than Me Founder and CEO Katie Meyler Resigns

• Katie Meyler, the CEO and founder of More Than Me, has resigned six months after a ProPublica investigation revealed her charity missed opportunities to prevent the rapes of girls in its care by a senior staff member, Macintosh Johnson, with whom Meyler once had an intimate relationship.

• Meyler, who founded the charity in 2009 to save vulnerable girls from sexual exploitation, had been on a leave of absence pending the results of three separate inquiries by the charity and the Liberian government into ProPublica’s report, which outlined that Meyler and charity officials gave Johnson significant power over vulnerable students, were not transparent about the extent of his abuse and failed to make sure that all of his potential victims were tested after it came to light that he had AIDS when he died.

• The findings of these inquiries have yet to be made public, but Meyler announced her departure Friday evening on Facebook:

• “Over the past few months, false allegations have been circulating around the horrific mistreatment of girls in our program. Some of the false allegations suggest I knew or should have known what was happening to these girls. That’s simply not true,” Meyler wrote.

• “Here’s the truth: I first learned about these crimes in June 2014 and immediately ensured the perpetrator was reported to the Liberian authorities; he was in jail four days after I learned of his abuse. I cooperated fully with the police investigation and did everything I could to protect our students.

=> ↺ United Against Forgiveness

• Bolsonaro is probably not the most forgiving person around. He freely spews misogynistic, anti-LGBTQ, and racist statements. However, he is a devout Christian and forgiveness is central to Christianity of all denominations. Forgiveness is not an ‘option’ as far as Christianity is concerned, it is actually a must. Forgiveness in Christianity is a manifestation of submission to Christ.

=> ↺ Officer Attack on Teen Reignites National Debate on Cops in Schools

• On January 29, 16-year-old Dnigma Howard was asked to leave Chicago’s Marshall High School after using her cellphone in class. Her father, Laurentio, was at the school to pick her up when two police officers arrived and violently attacked her in front of her father without provocation.

• School resource officers Johnnie Pierre and Sherry Tripp lied about punching, Tasing and stomping on Howard, as well as dragging the child down a flight of stairs. They falsely charged Howard with attacking them and tried to send her to jail. Even more disturbing is the fact that the officers brazenly lied about their criminal actions despite all the people, both students and adults, who witnessed the attack. Luckily, camera footage exposed the officers, because, as Howard said, “It was just my word against the court’s word.”

• Howard’s father filed an amended federal civil rights lawsuit against the two officers, the city of Chicago and the Chicago Board of Education on April 11, after the school security footage showing Pierre dragging Howard down the stairs was released. The lawsuit states that “the City of Chicago’s lack of directives, oversight, and standards pertaining to its police officers in its schools has resulted in the violation of students’ civil rights and unnecessarily involved students in the criminal justice system.”

• It also states Chicago police officers are assigned to the school “without proper recruitment, training, directions, or supervision.” Many organizations and individuals have been calling for reform of policing in Chicago’s schools, from the Office of Inspector General, to concerned community members, to various news agencies. Chicago is now under a federal court order to address the problems in its highly troubled police department, including the way officers interact with students.

• Pierre, the police officer filmed dragging Howard down a flight of stairs in the school, has more use-of-force incidents in his record than 96 percent of his colleagues, according to data from the Invisible Institute database. Yet, he was assigned to Marshall High School on Chicago’s West Side.

=> ↺ There’s No Such Thing as a Right Not to be Called a Nazi

• Gavin McInnes’ attempt to silence those who have every right to call him out for his bigoted views should fall flat For years, Gavin McInnes has spewed bigoted views on everything from race and religion to gender and immigration. He has described a transgender person as “[a] hideous man who thinks he’s a woman;” claimed that “Muslims can rape children with reckless abandon;” and argued that a Black man who is “mistaken for a homeless man,” should be “mad” not at the person who mischaracterizes him, but “at all the homeless black men who . . . created this stereotype in the first place.” As a result, McInnes has made quite a name for himself.

• Yet in a lawsuit he filed in February against the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), McInnes claims that it’s SPLC’s characterizations of him, not his own repugnant views that have given him a bad name in the eyes of the public. Specifically, he claims that SPLC has inaccurately characterized him as a “neo-masculine reactionary” and “self-described Islamophobe” who founded a “hate group” and expresses “extremist,” “blatantly misogynistic,” and “anti-gay” views. Because he maintains that he should instead be referred to as a “satirical” and “rebellious, humorist, businessman, political commentator and social critic,” McInnes sued SPLC for defamation.

• As tweeted by his attorney, his theory is, in part, “You may not agree with what I say. But I hope you’ll fight with me for the right not be called a Nazi for saying it[.]” It’s worth noting it was McInnes’ attorney who used the term “Nazi” – that one didn’t come from SPLC.

• The problem with McInnes’ theory is: that’s not how the First Amendment works.

=> ↺ Armed Bounty Hunters Raided Our Clients’ Home to Prevent Private Companies from Losing $1,670.

• The for-profit bail industry condones trauma and incentivizes violence to improve their bottom line. Around 9:20 p.m. on Sunday, April 23, 2017, Eugene Mitchell, Shayleen Meuchell, and their four-year-old daughter were in bed at their home in Lolo, Montana, when they heard a violent crash. “It sounded like a truck had driven straight into our house,” Mitchell later said. In a surreal flash, armed bounty hunters kicked in the front door, broke into the bedroom, pointed assault rifles and pistols at the family, and shouted at them not to move.

• The bounty hunters terrorized the Montana family. But the trauma and harm did not end there.

• The bounty hunters arrested Mitchell, drove him to another county about an hour away in handcuffs, and eventually surrendered him to the jail, all despite not having a valid warrant for his arrest. The entire family remains shaken by the experience, and the damage to their property—which they cannot afford to fix—has caused a dramatic increase in their utility bills.

• The bounty hunters were sent to arrest Mitchell not by police; they were hired by a bail bondsman. That past January, Mitchell was in jail related to a driving with suspended license charge, he could not afford his $1,670 bail, and so he used a commercial bail bondsman to secure his own release and return to his family and return to work to support them. When Mitchell accidentally missed a court date that April, his bail bondsman immediately activated a network of bounty hunters to search for and apprehend him.

=> ↺ Roger Waters to Madonna: Don’t Normalize Violations of Palestinians’ Rights With Performance in Tel Aviv

• Continuing his call to musicians to boycott an upcoming international song competition, rock legend Roger Waters on Wednesday urged Madonna not to perform at a Tel Aviv contest.

• The venue at issue is the Eurovision Song Contest, which takes place mid-May. Madonna’s press team confirmed this month that she’d be performing. But in so doing, according to Waters, Madonna would be ignoring the Israeli occupation’s deprivation of Palestinians’ human rights.

• In op-ed published Wednesday at the The Guardian, Waters wrote that Madonna’s acceptance of the invitation to perform raises “fundamentally important ethical and political questions for each and every one of us to contemplate.”

=> ↺ Police in St. Petersburg arrest 11 LGBTQ-rights activists at annual ‘Day of Silence’ protest

• Police in St. Petersburg arrested 11 LGBTQ-rights demonstrators at the city’s annual “Day of Silence” protest. According to the website OVD-Info, the activists picketed the Great Gostiny Dvor department store plaza on Wednesday. After one arrest, the remaining demonstrators made their way toward the Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood, wearing red tape over their mouths. Police started arresting more people, as they marched, including some minors.

=> ↺ Dialing 911 Can Get You Evicted

• The eviction of Beverley Somai for calling the police is part of a disturbing trend.

• Last year, Beverley Somai learned a brutal truth that too many people across the country face: Calling the police can get you evicted.

• In 2017, Ms. Somai and her adult disabled son moved to Bedford, Ohio, to seek housing stability and better educational and employment opportunities. However, a few months after settling in, Ms. Somai discovered that her neighbor played loud music at all hours of the night, making it impossible for her and her son to rest. Even worse, the neighbor began to intimidate Ms. Somai and her son by following them on their errands and lurking outside their home.

• She asked for help from her landlord, who told her to call the police. So she did. But then the city of Bedford sent a letter to Ms. Somai’s landlord, citing her calls for help and threatening to impose steep penalties for any future police responses to the property. Because of the letter, her landlord filed an eviction action against Ms. Somai.

• Ms. Somai’s experience is far from an anomaly. Bedford’s criminal activity nuisance ordinance imposes civil and criminal penalties against property owners when there are two or more alleged violations of any law, excluding traffic violations, within a one-year period. The city enforces the ordinance based on calls for police assistance — even if the resident is the victim of the crime or needs aid, such as Ms. Somai and her son.

=> ↺ “No One is Above the Law:” You Have to be Kidding

• Reacting to the arrest and detention in British custody of Julian Assange from the Ecuadorian embassy, UK Prime Minister Theresa May said that the arrest confirms “that no one is above the law.” This was a phrase repeated multiple times by members of her government.

• It is, or ought to be, a fundamental principle of a society based upon the rule of law, that this is indeed the case. If an individual, or group of individuals, transgress upon the law then they ought to be held accountable. That ought to apply regardless of that person’s status. We know of course that this is an ideal not always applied. There is ample sociological evidence to that effect.

• A related principle is that a person is presumed innocent until they either plead guilty or are found guilty by a court of competent jurisdiction applying the law to the standard of beyond a reasonable doubt.

=> ↺ The European Union and Refugees in the Mediterranean

• The modern UN Refugee Convention is now so flea-bitten it’s been put out to the garbage tip of history. At least the enthusiastic fleas think so, given their conduct as political representatives across a range of parliaments keen on barbed wired borders and impenetrable defences. Across Europe, the issue of refugees arriving by sea – in this case, the Mediterranean – has become a matter of games and deflection. Lacking any coherence whatsoever, the approach to certain, designated arrivals is to push them on to the next port in fits of cruel deflection, hoping that the next recipient will give in. Such conduct demonstrates how states have adopted notions of penalisation and discrimination against the arrival who seeks sanctuary, positions severely in breach of international humanitarian law.

• Australia remains the undisputed pioneer in this, at least in the last two decades. Incapable of establishing a decent environmental policy, hostage to the gunpoint of the mining lobby, and suspicious of enshrined rights, its backwater parliamentarians have been dazzling with other efforts: finding a suitably bestial policy to repel maritime arrivals, for instance. Boats have been towed back to Indonesia, a country which many of its representatives grudgingly do business with. People smugglers, the very same ones demonised as “scum” by Australian politicians, have been paid when and where necessary. A veil of secrecy has been cast with suffocating effect across the operations of the Royal Australian Navy, and criminal provisions have been passed punishing any whistle-blower who dares disclose the nature of operations in the detention centres on Nauru and Manus Island.

=> ↺ Will Albania fail again to join the EU?

• On April 11th, the majority of Parliament of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, upon request of the three parliamentary groups: the Christian Democratic Party, the Socialist Party and the Liberal Party, voted for the proposal of the reinstatement of visas for Albanian citizens due to the growing criminality as well as the increase of the illegal emigration in Holland.

• Yesterday, on April 17th, the Parliament of the Netherlands voted in favor of the reinstatement of visas for Albania proceeding with the formal request for the approval of the EU institution to implement such a decision. This came as a big blow for Albania’s government which most likely will face another refusal from Brussels on the invitation of opening the negotiations for the EU membership.

=> ↺ State corporation Rostec fires Chelyabinsk CEO after offices are raided by feds

• The state-owned corporation Rostec has fired Alexey Adaev, the CEO of the “Turbine” Special Design Bureau, following a raid by federal agents on the enterprise’s offices in Chelyabinsk. Rostec did not directly tie Adaev’s termination to the FSB searches, which are part of a criminal investigation into the alleged theft of more than 300 million rubles ($4.7 million) allocated to defense contracts. A nonprofit organization owned by “Turbina,” however, previously reported the theft of more than 200 million rubles ($3.1 million).

=> ↺ Good Samaritans Punished for Offering Lifesaving Help to Migrants

• Todd is the county attorney for Jeff Davis County, a vast expanse of mountains, cactus, and 2,500 residents — as well as undocumented migrants hiking and stumbling north from the U.S.-Mexico border. She’s also the city attorney for Marfa, in neighboring Presidio County.

• The three siblings had just walked 65 miles in eight days. For the past two days, they’d had no food or water. Esmeralda was in terrible shape and would later be diagnosed with rhabdomyolysis, a life-threatening condition that develops when a person’s muscle tissue dies. It can be caused by overexertion and dehydration.

• Todd put the siblings in her car and — according to her attorney, Liz Rogers — called two friends, a Border Patrol lawyer and a lawyer who works with ICE, to ask how to help the immigrants.

=> ↺ Amee Chew on Philippines Under Duterte

• Note the passivity of “have been slain,” and the choice to lead with an official death toll, rather than human rights groups’ less self-interested numbers. The “12,000” figure provides a link to a Human Rights Watch report that has never been the subject of a Washington Post news story.

• Among many things such reporting wouldn’t lead you to suspect: Two years ago, when the Philippine Senate tried to cut funding for the campaign of state and state-sanctioned violence, for which the toll of “even 20,000” is almost certainly conservative, it was the United States that stepped in with the money to fill the shortfall. That’s a direct line from your tax dollars to the leader who said, “Hitler massacred 3 million Jews…. There’s 3 million drug addicts. There are. I’d be happy to slaughter them.”

• Corporate media don’t talk much about the Philippines, much less about the US responsibility there. A recent piece from Foreign Policy in Focus, headlined “It’s Time to End US Military Aid to the Philippines,” filled some of that void. We’ll hear from its author, Mellon-ACLS public fellow Amee Chew, and hear also from two Filipino activist/organizers, Ed Cubelo and Mong Palatino.

=> ↺ ACLU Demands Investigation Into Pro-Trump ‘Fascist Militia’ Unlawfully Detaining Migrants at Gunpoint

• “The Trump administration’s vile racism has emboldened white nationalists and fascists to flagrantly violate the law,” the group wrote in a letter to New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham and Attorney General Hector Balderas.

• “This has no place in our state: we cannot allow racist and armed vigilantes to kidnap and detain people seeking asylum,” the letter continues. “We urge you to immediately investigate this atrocious and unlawful conduct.”

• The ACLU cited videos and photographs posted to social media that appear to show the right-wing militia group, the United Constitutional Patriots, detaining dozens of migrants.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

=> ↺ [Older] A Map of the Internet from May 1973

• The first part of ARPANET was built nearly 50 years ago and became the basis of the modern [Internet].

=> ↺ The DOJ Isn’t Buying T-Mobile’s Nonsensical Merger Benefit Claims

• Back in 2011 DOJ regulators blocked AT&T from acquiring T-Mobile, arguing that that the deal would have harmed consumers and resulted in higher rates by eliminating one of just four major wireless players. That’s a pretty easy argument to make, given every time a country allows four wireless carriers to morph into three, the sector gets less competitive and prices go up (see: Ireland or Canada). Blocking the deal wound up being a good thing: T-Mobile went on to be even more disruptive, and has helped introduce a number of consumer-friendly market shifts like cheaper international roaming and the death of long-term contracts.

• In 2014 T-Mobile and Sprint tried to merge, and regulators (quite correctly) pointed out the deal wouldn’t be good for consumers or the market, and blocked it from happening.

=> ↺ FCC Under Fire For Putting ALEC Rep On ‘Consumer’ Advisory Board

• In 2017, FCC head Ajit Pai came under fire for filling a new “Broadband Deployment Advisory Council” (BDAC) task force with oodles of industry representatives, but few if any consumer representatives or local town or city officials. Not too surprisingly the panel saw a significant amount of controversy, several protest resignations, and the arrest of a one-time panel chair for fraud, but the panel itself never actually accomplished much of anything to address the problem it was created for.

=> ↺ Don’t Regulate The Internet Like Every Company Is The Same

• This year seems to be the year in which governments all over the globe really, really want to regulate the internet. And they’re doing a ridiculously dumb job of it. We’ve talked a lot about the EU, with the Copyright Directive and now the Terrorist Content Regulation. And then there’s Australia with its anti-encryption law and its “abhorrent content” law. India has already passed a few bad laws regarding the internet and is discussing a few more. Then there’s the UK, Germany, South Korea, Singapore, Thailand, Cameroon, etc. etc. etc. You get the idea.

• Oh, and certainly, the US is considering some really bad ideas as well.

• When you look at what “problem” all of these laws are trying to solve, it can basically be boiled down to “people do bad things on the internet, and we need to regulate the internet because of it.” This is problematic to me for a variety of reasons, in part because it seems to be regulating the wrong party. We should, ideally, be going after the people doing the bad things, rather than the tools and services they are using to do the bad things (or to merely promote the bad things they’re doing). However, there is an argument — not one that I wholly buy into — that one reasonable way to regulate is to focus less on which party is actually doing the bad thing, and more on which party is best positioned to minimize the harm of the bad thing. And it’s that theory of regulation (applied stupidly) that is behind much of the regulatory theory on the internet these days.

• Well, there’s also a second theory behind many of the regulatory approaches, and it’s “Google and Facebook are big and bad, so anything that punishes them is good regulation”. This makes even less sense to me than the other approach, but it is certainly driving a lot of the thinking, at least in the EU (and possibly the US).

=> ↺ Google Pays $3.8 Million To Clean Up Its Fiber Mess In Louisville

• When Google Fiber launched in 2010, it was lauded as a game changer for the broadband industry. Google Fiber, we were told, would revolutionize the industry by taking Silicon Valley money and disrupting the viciously uncompetitive and anti-competitive telecom sector. Initially things worked out well; cities tripped over themselves offering all manner of perks to the company in the hopes of breaking free from the broadband duopoly logjam. And in markets where Google Fiber was deployed, prices dropped thanks to this added competition.

• The fun didn’t last. In late 2016 Alphabet began getting cold feet about the high costs and slow return of the project, and effectively mothballed the entire thing — without admitting that’s what they were doing. The company blew through several CEOs in just a few months, laid off hundreds of employees, froze any real expansion, and cancelled countless installations for users who had been waiting years. And while Google made a lot of noise about how it would be shifting from fiber to wireless to possibly cut costs, those promises so far appear stuck in neutral as well.

=> ↺ The Internet now contributes to Russia’s economy almost as much as Rosneft generates in tax revenue

• In 2018, the Internet contributed 3.9 trillion rubles ($61.1 billion) to the Russian economy — an 11-percent jump from just a year earlier, according to statistics released by the Russian Association of Electronic Communications. E-commerce generated a large chunk of this income — about 1.95 trillion rubles ($30.5 billion). Marketing and advertising brought in another 263 billion rubles ($4.1 billion); Internet infrastructure, including domain, hosting, and cloud services, earned 106 billion rubles ($1.7 billion); and media and entertainment generated 75 billion rubles ($1.2 billion).

Intellectual Monopolies

=> ↺ Rising Confusion About ‘Arising Under’ Jurisdiction in Patent Cases

• By statute, all cases “arising under” patent law must be heard exclusively by the federal courts (not state courts) and, on appeal, by the Federal Circuit (not the twelve regional circuits). But not all cases involving patents “arise under” patent law. As recently as 2013, the Supreme Court ruled that the mere need to apply patent law in, for example, a malpractice case involving a patent lawyer, is insufficient to trigger exclusive jurisdiction. Rather, the Court held, for a case that does not involve claims of patent infringement to arise under patent law, the patent issue must be “important . . . to the federal system as a whole.”

• Despite the Supreme Court’s clear holding that “fact-bound and situation-specific” patent issues do not warrant exclusive jurisdiction outside of infringement cases, the lower courts’ precedent in this area remains unsettled. The Federal Circuit has, at times, tried to resurrect its older case law extending exclusive jurisdiction to practically any patent-related tort, contract, or antitrust case. But, in other decisions, the Federal Circuit has constricted jurisdiction so dramatically that the Fifth Circuit, earlier this year, refused to accept a case transferred to it by the Federal Circuit, deriding the Federal Circuit’s jurisdictional ruling as not just wrong, but “implausible.” All of this uncertainty incentivizes costly and wasteful procedural maneuvering in a field where litigation is already notoriously expensive.

• This article is the first to chronicle the rising confusion about the scope of the federal district courts’ and the Federal Circuit’s exclusive jurisdiction over cases arising under patent law. The article critiques the case law emerging in the lower federal courts and proposes a jurisdictional rule that is both clear and consistent with Supreme Court precedent: for a case that does not involve claims of patent infringement to nevertheless arise under patent law, it must present a dispute about the content of federal patent law or a question about the interpretation or validity of the federal patent statute.

• In arguing for this new approach, the article also engages broader questions about the jurisdictional structure of patent litigation. Among other things, it suggests that the courts or Congress should rethink longstanding doctrine that makes the test for Federal Circuit appellate jurisdiction precisely the same as the test for exclusive original jurisdiction in the district courts. Exclusive district court jurisdiction entirely precludes state courts from shaping their own state’s law, so federal courts should be hesitant to exercise jurisdiction over a tort or contract claim simply because there is a patent lurking in the background. But when a patent-related case is properly in federal district court, the Federal Circuit’s expertise in patent law and ability to provide uniformity counsel in favor of giving the court a broad scope of appellate jurisdiction.

=> ↺ Patent case: Handel’s Enterprises Inc. v. Schulenburg, USA

• An ice cream parlor franchisor showed that information it gave to a franchisee was not known outside the business and was restricted by confidentiality agreements and was therefore likely a trade secret, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled.

Trademarks

=> ↺ Battle for .amazon Domain Pits Retailer Against South American Nations

• The dispute has dragged on for seven years, with a number of proposals and counterproposals. Last year, Amazon.com offered $5 million worth of Kindle e-readers and various hosting services as part of a proposed compromise.

=> ↺ The End Of The Absurdity: Iceland, The Country, Successfully Invalidates The Trademark Of Iceland Foods, The Grocerer

• Way back in late 2016, we asked the same question that has been on the minds of all of humanity for eons: who gets to trademark Iceland? If that seems like an odd question to you, perhaps a little context will help. See, Iceland has been a sovereign nation since the early 1900s, whereas Iceland Foods has been a grocery chain in the UK since the 1970s. And, yet, somehow the latter managed to get an EU-wide trademark for the term “Iceland” and then went around bullying companies from Iceland out of using that term in their own names, even when they weren’t competing in the grocery marketplace. How did the EU manage to think it would be okay to grant this trademark in the first place, you ask? By not putting a whole lot of thought into it, would be my guess.

• Well, when Iceland, the country, applied for a trademark for “Inspired by Iceland”, only to have it blocked by Iceland Foods, it apparently represented the last straw. Iceland petitioned the EU to invalidate this absurd trademark, leading to reps from Iceland Foods trekking to meet with the nation’s officials. The outcome of that meeting was apparently Iceland Foods being totally confused as to why Iceland wasn’t just being cool, maaaaan.

Copyrights

=> ↺ What happened with Demonoid and Deimos?

• With great sadness, I want to announce that Deimos, the founder of Demonoid known as someone who was one of the earliest and influential people on the torrent scene since it’s beginning has died in an accident back on August, 2018.

=> ↺ EFF Backs Stream Rippers in Legal Battle Against Record Labels

• Digital rights group EFF has filed a brief in support of the stream-ripping sites FLVTO.biz and 2conv.com. The sites are involved in a legal battle with several record labels and have appealed a district court decision to dismiss the case over a lack of jurisdiction. EFF sides with the stream ripper operator, while highlighting that these sites have plenty of legal uses.

=> ↺ Huge Video-Hosting Site Openload Stops Paying Uploaders

• Openload, one of the world’s most-visited sites, particular by those looking for movies and TV shows, has ended its uploader affiliate program. The announcement is tied to falling advertising revenues and related economic stresses. Last year it was reported that Openload generated more traffic than Hulu or HBO Go.

=> ↺ ‘Suspending’ parties not enough to save EU rule of law

• From Bucharest to Valetta, to Budapest and Warsaw, the very threads of the values that bind the fabric of our European Union together are being torn apart. In Poland, judges were forced to occupy courthouses to fight against the government’s attempts to control the judiciary.

=> ↺ We lost the fight for balance in the EU’s Copyright Directive, but here’s what we won

• On the eve of her departure, Reda has published her postmortem on the Directive and what it means. It’s an uplifting and important missive, one that draws a distinction between the incredible political malpractice from European politicians who continue to treat the internet as though it were a video-on-demand service, or a jihadi recruiting tool, or a pornography distribution system; and the mass-scale, unprecedented popular perception that the internet is our planetary, species-wide electronic nervous system, whose regulation needs to take account of all that we do online, not just one industry or lobby’s corner of it.

• We are living through an all-out, global blitz on online free speech, privacy, competition and self-determination, a realtime Chinafication of the western internet, and the past year has set us back a decade or more. But as Reda notes, the difference between the fight now and the fight a decade ago is the size of the army we’re fighting with: the cause of online freedom has a self-recruiting mass movement of people, more of whom wake up every day and realize that their future is tied to the internet’s future.

=> ↺ EU copyright reform: Our fight was not in vain

• Member states now have two years to implement the reform into national law. The wording of the Directive does leave some leeway – for example, in the specific interpretation of what constitutes a “large amount” of user uploads, and thus how many platforms fall under the scope of Article 17 (formerly 13).

• The publishers’ lobby will without doubt advocate for the strictest possible interpretations of the Directive – civil society must resist, and we must do this in all member states. So please stay involved – or at least support NGOs like EDRi and Epicenter.works, who will continue lobbying for our rights. SaveTheInternet.info, the activists who started the petition, have also announced that they will keep working on the subject.

=> ↺ Movie Studios Are Suing Canadian BitTorrent Users, But That’s Nothing New

• There’s some uproar in Canada about a supposed ‘novel’ tactic that’s being used to sue alleged BitTorrent pirates. In reality, however, these lawsuits have been ongoing for years. They are typically known as “copyright trolling” efforts and have targeted thousands of Canadians already. For the record, this has nothing to do with Game of Thrones.

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