● 10.01.21

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 1/10/2021: More Gemini Migrations, Proton 6.3-7

Posted in News Roundup at 6:45 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxDistributionsDevices/EmbeddedFree Software/Open SourceLeftovers

GNU/Linux

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ Gemini: the misaligned incentives

• How does gemtext suck? Let me count the ways: [...]

=> ↺ Going From A Domain Name to IP Address in DNSDB: Some “Pro Tips” To Keep In Mind

• Virtually every DNSDB user makes domain name to IP address queries. Often that will be quite straight forward, but today we’re going to talk about some of the times when you may run into surprises – and how you can easily deal with them.

=> ↺ Setting up a Gemini server

• I could not get agate to start correctly, it would not bind to the ipv4 port 1965. After some desultory troubleshooting I used gemserv instead.

• I didn’t bother compiling gemserv to use GGI, just static content.

=> ↺ Pimping My Type – Improving My Website’s Typography

• Anyway, since doing the research for the typography post, I discovered Oliver’s YouTube channel and newsletter, Pimp My Type. He’s a professional typographer, so when I learned that he offers free website typography reviews, I was on that like a tramp on chips!

=> ↺ An Introduction to JQ

• However, some things never stick in my head, nor my fingers, and I have to google them every time. jq is one of these.

• I know it’s a powerful tool, but I always end up back at Google and then copying and pasting a solution from somewhere. So I solve my problem but never learn the tool.

• It’s time to fix that. In this article, I’m going to go over the basics building blocks of jq in enough depth that you will be able to understand how jq works. Of course, you still might occasionally need to head to google to find a function name or check your syntax, but at least you’ll have a firm grounding in the basics.

Games

=> ↺ Why D&D over other RPGs?

• It’s true that our version of D&D is modified beyond recognition. Which is fine since it’s an open source game.

• It’s true that I’m a fan of D&D as a brand, as a shorthand, as a community, whereas I don’t touch “gamer” stuff with the proverbial ten-foot pole.

• It’s not true that this is out of ignorance with other systems. “Just play Fiasco” we went from Fiasco to D&D after trying both. And, we’ve mashed in stuff from Fiasco into “our” D&D.

• I had read around 200 core books until finally giving the much maligned D&D a shot. I had believed the anti-hope of haters on Usenet and TBP. “AC doesn’t make sense”, “Levels don’t make sense”, “It’s so unrealistic” etc. And I felt so dumb for looking at it last because it was exactly what I had been longing for all this time.

=> ↺ Valve Releases Proton 6.3-7 with Support for Life is Strange: True Colors, DXVK 1.9.2

• Coming about five weeks after Proton 6.3-6, the Proton 6.3-7 release is here to add support for the Life is Strange: True Colors, Quake Champions, Divinity: Original Sin 2, eFootball PES 2021, EVERSLAUGHT VR, as well as WRC (World Rally Championship) 8, 9 and 10 video games.

• This means that you’ll now be able to play these games on your Linux-powered computer using the new Proton version. However, it should be noted the fact that the Quake Champions and Divinity: Original Sin 2 games will apparently brake after a game update, so you shouldn’t update them yet.

Desktop Environments/WMs

=> ↺ Greyscale screens for anxiety

• One thing I didn’t expect to work so well was having my computer screen set to greyscale mode the past few days. I’d enabled it to test the accessibility and contrast of a design I was working on and… I didn’t turn it off.

Distributions

IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

=> ↺ Fedora Linux declared a ‘digital public good’

• Fedora Linux has been recognized as a “digital public good” by the Digital Public Goods Alliance (DPGA), a strategy group set up by UNICEF to promote sustainable development through open-source solutions that contribute to an equitable world.

Devices/Embedded

Open Hardware/Modding

=> ↺ Machine Learning Prosthetic Arm | The MagPi #110

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

SaaS/Back End/Databases

=> ↺ YottaDB Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery

• At YottaDB we have a network of a couple dozen machines that include all Supported platforms, ranging from Raspberry Pi Zeroes to x86_64 servers. We run the YottaDB test system across these machines most weekends, and frequently overnight as well. The normal run checks out the current master source code, builds it, and runs it on these machines against the current master test system. The source code is built and tested two ways, “DBG” builds with asserts that detect error and out-of-design conditions for us to debug, and “PRO” builds that are built the way binary distributions are delivered, and which invoke the recovery code for these error and out-of-design conditions. The tests involve extensive simulated crashes and recovery. They also randomly vary a number of parameters to test the various permutations and combinations of operating conditions.

FSF

Licensing/Legal

=> ↺ Can Radio Benefit From An Open Source Society?

• Radio has never been on the leading edge as an industry full of tech oriented companies so open source can be a solution that allows these companies to focus on what they are good at – delivering amazing content.

• Isn’t that the name of the game?

• Collaboration in the spirit of open-source could be an engine for much needed growth as well.

Programming/Development

=> ↺ Common mistakes when using libcurl

• I’ve been traveling this road for a while. Here’s my collection of 15 of the most common mistakes and issues people will run into when writing applications and services that use libcurl. I’ve also done recorded presentations on this topic that you can watch if you prefer that medium.

=> ↺ Things unlearned

• This post is part of a series, starting at Reflections on a decade of coding.

• This is one of my favorite questions to ask people: what are some things that you used to strongly believe but have now changed your mind about?

• I want to focus especially on ideas that I wasted a lot of time on, or that got in the way of success.

=> ↺ Fun with glibc and the ctype.h functions

• I got really bored tonight and went down some rabbit holes and turned up something from about a year ago. If you follow the latest Linux type stuff, you probably remember this, but if not, this might seem new to you. It’s just something dumb and amusing.

=> ↺ CHERI Software Release for Summer 2021

• The CHERI protection model provides architectural primitives to protect computer systems from widely-exploited security vulnerabilities. CHERI revises the hardware/software architectural interface with hardware support for capabilities that can be used for fine-grained memory protection and scalable software compartmentalization. Supported by DARPA (the US Defense Advanced Research Projects agency) as well as UKRI (UK Research and Innovation) and its Digital Security by Design (DSbD) program, CHERI is the work of a large research team at the University of Cambridge, SRI International, Arm and many industrial and academic collaborators throughout the world.

=> ↺ Understanding AWK

• It turns out Awk is pretty simple. It has only a couple of conventions and only a small amount of syntax. As a result, it’s straightforward to learn, and once you understand it, it will come in handy more often than you’d think.

• So in this article, I will teach myself, and you, the basics of Awk. If you read through the article and maybe even try an example or two, you should have no problem writing Awk scripts by the end of it. And you probably don’t even need to install anything because Awk is everywhere.

Leftovers

=> ↺ You Are Enough

=> ↺ The Holiness of Degradation

• with a title and a line from Leslie Jamison

• Anne says, what if you are notsick or bad, what if you are Katie?

=> ↺ Instituting Liberty: Contested, Changing, Conflicted Definitions

• Records of UT administrators describe an institute that would be “dedicated to the study and teaching of individual liberty, limited government, private enterprise and free markets” and promote “intellectual diversity.” Most people, myself included, support individual liberty. The remaining phrases are highly ideological and should be in scare quotes.

• Does “limited government” enhance individual liberty, or does it really mean using government power to protect concentrated wealth and limit our collective ability to create a decent society? Does “private enterprise” really mean allowing corporations to use that concentrated wealth to undermine democratic decision-making? Do those corporations champion “free markets” only as long as they can extract profit, running to the government for bailouts when they fail?

=> ↺ Desire in Our Times: A Conversation With Amia Srinivasan

• What is it about sex that makes talking about it with political and moral honesty so difficult? It’s so easy to fixate on its purely political aspects, relying on the simplicity of a relationship with black-and-white consequences. It’s so tempting to reduce it to the absolutely personal, just someone’s preference, beyond anyone else’s understanding or judgment. Even among feminists, the tensions between the intimacy of sex, its potential for violence, and the fact that its participants, limitations, and consequences often fall under the supervision of public authorities are perennial sources of conflict.

=> ↺ Misquoting Einstein Is Fast And Stupid, But Not Accurate

• I was writing something a while ago, and had reason to quote the famous aphorism “Computers are incredibly fast, accurate, and stupid; humans are incredibly slow, inaccurate, and smart.” I’ll bet you’ve heard a variation on that quote before, and probably have seen a meme or two with it. It’s usually attributed to Einstein.

=> ↺ A Time of Plague in an Era of Corruption, Mistrust and Irrationality

• That so many are willing to take the word of any contrarian rather than that of peer reviewed science is astonishing. But after decades of government and corporate malfeasance and abuses, it isn’t too difficult to understand the roots for this skepticism. Indeed, government agencies and business institutions have constructed this atmosphere of distrust. Just one look at the CIA, the military, or the tobacco and fossil fuel industries and we get a litany of lies, crimes, and the obfuscation of those crimes. Indeed, most drug companies have gotten away with the many crimes they have committed, with the recent opioid scandal and the Sackler family coming to mind. But there is also a kind of collective fear and a legacy of anti-scientific credulity that is common in far-right political circles that goes beyond justified criticism of and opposition to the crimes of the powerful.

• None of this is especially original. Climate change deniers have long latched on to the proclamations of a small, but loud, group of scientists who confirm their narrative. A major part of this is thanks to a well funded campaign of disinformation by the fossil fuel industry who began lying to the public about the damaging effects of burning fossil fuels decades ago. And there are dozens of think tanks in Washington whose sole purpose it to peddle corporate propaganda to politicians on the dole and a public that is already inclined to be against any scientific warning that may alter the Western lifestyle. But there is also a conspiratorial way of thinking about these things. The very real and existential issue of climate catastrophe has been linked to crackpot theories about a tyrannical “one world government.” Those who have been alienated from society often become targets for this kind of delusion. And social media amplifies it all through echo chambers of confirmation bias, connecting the alienated with one another, albeit in a very superficial manner.

=> ↺ China’s Fortune Cookie Crumbles

• Ross Ashcroft Michael Hudson, always great to have you back on Renegade Inc.

• Michael Hudson It’s good to be back here. Thanks for having me.

=> ↺ The rise of dark web design: how sites manipulate you into clicking

• Dark design has proven to be an incredibly effective way of encouraging web users to part with their time, money and privacy. This in turn has established “dark patterns”, or sets of practices designers know they can use to manipulate web users. They’re difficult to spot, but they’re increasingly prevalent in the websites and apps we use every day, creating products that are manipulative by design, much like the persistent, ever-present pop-ups we’re forced to close when we visit a new website.

Science

=> ↺ Teaching an algorithm to identify cancer from sequence data

• Algorithms have been used to identify cells in sectional images of tissue samples. For instance, if tissue cells appear atypical, the algorithm will spot this and determine if the cells are cancerous. DNA sequence data from tumours is now being used along with imaging data to identify cancers.

Health/Nutrition

=> ↺ ‘Eye-Popping Rip-Off’: Americans Pay Nearly Double Rest of World Combined for Top Meds

• As public health advocates fumed over efforts by right-wing congressional Democrats to water down prescription drug pricing reforms proposed in their own party’s flagship Build Back Better package, a report published Thursday by a leading progressive advocacy group revealed that Americans are paying nearly twice as much for the 20 bestselling medications as the rest of the world combined.

• “Empowering Medicare to push back against inflated drug prices is the responsible and commonsense way to stand up to the industry’s greed.”—Rick Claypool,Public Citizen

=> ↺ ‘Let Them Know How You Feel,’ Voters Urged as Pharma-Backed Dems Tank Drug Cost Plan

• Supporters of drug pricing reform expressed alarm Wednesday at efforts by right-wing congressional Democrats—including some of the biggest recipients of Big Pharma campaign contributions—to water down progressive-led efforts to lower the world’s highest prescription medication costs.

• Mirroring key items on Big Pharma’s wishlist, corporate Democrats are taking aim at proposed drug pricing reforms in the $3.5 trillion Build Back Better budget reconciliation package. According to Politico:

=> ↺ University in ‘Europe’s Oil Capital’ Votes to Divest from Fossil Fuels

• A Scottish university in “Europe’s oil and gas capital” has voted to sell all of its fossil fuel investments over the next four years.

• The University of Aberdeen, which has strong ties with the North Sea oil and gas industry, announced today that its governing body had voted to exclude fossil fuel extraction companies from its £52.7 million investment portfolio by 2025. It currently has an estimated £3.1 million invested in fossil fuels, according to campaigners.

=> ↺ Sickening, Indeed: the Horrors of Big Pharma

• For this reason, there is good cause to expect that his new book, Sickening: How Big Pharma Broke American Health Care and How We Can Repair It, would make a substantial contribution to the current debate over controlling drug prices. (Unfortunately, its publication date is not until February.) The book is indeed useful in documenting the failures of the pharmaceutical industry, but it comes up painfully short in the remedies.

• The first part of the book goes over some of the major scandals of the pharmaceutical industry over the last three decades. It notes the overuse of statins, a drug designed to lower cholesterol. Abramson points out that statins are often prescribed for women, based on clinical trials showing their effectiveness for men. In spite of the lack of evidence of benefit, expensive statins have been prescribed for millions of women over the last three decades.

=> ↺ ‘You Should Get the Vaccine Despite the Media Telling You You Should’

• Janine Jackson interviewed Jim Naureckas about Covid and corporate media  for the September 24, 2021, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

=> ↺ ‘Not Ashamed’: Democratic Congresswomen Testify About Their Personal Abortion Stories

=> ↺ Opinion | These Pfizer-Backed GOP Lawmakers Are Heading to Q-Anon Anti-Vax Summit

=> ↺ House Oversight Won’t Hurt, But the Fight for Abortion Is Waged at Grassroots

=> ↺ With Infrastructure on the Brink, Manchin Refuses to Negotiate

=> ↺ Critics Slam Manchin for Invoking ‘Brutal Fiscal Reality’ to Defend Tanking of Biden Agenda

• Just ahead of Sen. Joe Manchin’s Thursday declaration that $1.5 trillion is his topline number for the reconciliation bill, the corporate Democrat referred to the United States’ so-called “brutal fiscal reality” on Wednesday to defend his opposition to the Democratic Party’s 10-year, $3.5 trillion package—a justification progressives criticized as baseless and a threat to Americans’ future well-being.

• “While I am hopeful that common ground can be found that would result in another historic investment in our nation, I cannot—and will not—support trillions in spending or an all or nothing approach that ignores the brutal fiscal reality our nation faces,” Manchin (D-W.Va.) said Wednesday night in a statement, adding that he wants to “pass on a better America to the next generation.”

=> ↺ Manchin: If You Want to Save the Planet, Elect More Progressives in 2022

• Sen. Joe Manchin said Thursday that securing sweeping climate legislation to safeguard the planet for future generations requires electing more progressives—unlike him—in 2022.

• The corporate Democrat’s assertion came as he announced to a crowd of reporters that his topline number for the broad reconciliation bill is $1.5 trillion—a fraction of the $3.5 trillion demanded by progressive lawmakers for the 10-year Build Back Better plan that includes investments to strengthen the safety net and tackle the climate emergency.

=> ↺ Manchin Admits Getting His Bill Passed and Then Tanking Progressive Package Was Always the Plan

• Sen. Joe Manchin admitted Thursday, ahead of a scheduled House vote on the Senate-passed bipartisan infrastructure bill, that it had been corporate Democrats’ plan all along to first secure passage of their fossil fuel-friendly legislation and then undermine the party’s more ambitious reconciliation package that proposes investing up to $3.5 trillion over a decade in clean energy and the social safety net.

• The conservative West Virginia Democrat told reporters Thursday that on July 28, he secured a signed agreement (pdf) from Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) outlining his conditions for voting on the final reconciliation bill.

=> ↺ Manchin Goes After Abortion Rights in Latest Reconciliation Bill Opposition

=> ↺ Relying on Public-Private Partnerships Has Weakened America’s Pandemic Response

• As the United States continues to record thousands of cases of Covid infection and as many as 2,000 deaths per day, many Americans are scrambling to get rapid tests for extra reassurance as they return to school, work and start to travel. But rapid tests are hard to find on stores shelves across the country—and when you finally track them down, they cost from $10 to $15 per test. As it happens, that’s because there’s a nationwide shortage of rapid tests. Meanwhile, other countries have plentiful amounts of tests—in Germany, for instance, rapid testing, along with vaccination, has become the bedrock of their plan to live with the virus. There, rapid testing is widely used and available outside of restaurants and gyms and other facilities. Why is something that could be so instrumental to managing the pandemic so hard for Americans to get their hands on?

=> ↺ Being “Pro NBA Player” Means Being Pro-Vaccine

• Many of America’s pro athletes are union workers, albeit union workers with a decidedly distorted social position, relative to organized working-class people more broadly. They benefit greatly from collective bargaining. As is the case for all workers, unions are a pro athlete’s best friend. Just do your own investigation into what conditions and wages were like before unions—pro sports were part playground, part sweatshop.

=> ↺ YouTube cracks down on anti-vax misinformation

• The new policy builds on existing rules against COVID-19 vaccine misinformation, which have led to the removal of 130,000 videos since October. YouTube says it has taken down more than 1 million videos for violating its overall COVID-19 medical misinformation policy.

=> ↺ Zero tolerance: YouTube blocks all anti-vaccine accounts

• The company said that while accounts will be taken down, so will any posts which express unfounded concerns about vaccines or falsely state that some vaccines cause autism or cancer or something else the vaccine has never been proven to cause.

Integrity/Availability

=> ↺ DoS Attacks against our Online Game

• Based on the rising player number the urge to deal with the DoS problem is larger than ever. A few months ago for example we organized a Tournament for everyone in the community to participate. Unfortunately the event was the continuous target of DoS attacks for multiple hours, with players fleeing from one server to the next, trying to find a safe refuge. These bandwidth graphs for our servers in Netherlands and Germany respectively illustrate the problem: [...]

Proprietary

=> ↺ Ransomware contractor paints a different picture of the genre

• A threat actor, who claims to have worked for the REvil ransomware group among others, has cast doubt on the common tendency to associate individuals from a particular country who do such work as acting for the governments of the same countries.

=> ↺ Apple ‘Still Investigating’ Unpatched and Public iPhone Vulnerabilities

• Tokarev reported the vulnerabilities to Apple between March 10 and April 29, but the last time he heard back from Apple about the three vulnerabilities was August 6, August 12, and August 25, respectively. Then the researcher said he told Apple on September 13 he would publish details of the bugs unless he heard back.

• It was only after he went public with details about the unpatched bugs that Apple reached out, according to Tokarev, who shared Apple’s email with Motherboard.

=> ↺ Apple’s fortress of secrecy is crumbling from the inside

• The tension might have stayed at a low simmer were it not for a Slack channel — #remote-work-advocacy — created in September 2020 to promote a more flexible working environment. By the summer of 2021, it had reached roughly 2,800 members, with conversations growing increasingly lively. After Cook made his announcement, employees knew they had to send a message. It was a small push back against management that would lay the groundwork for months of employee organizing and perhaps change the Apple workforce forever.

Security

Privacy/Surveillance

=> ↺ Facebook’s Latest Scandals: The Banality Of Hubris; The Messiness Of Humanity

• Over the last few weeks, the WSJ has run a series of posts generally called “The Facebook Files,” which have exposed a variety of internal documents from Facebook that are somewhat embarrassing. I do think some of the reporting is overblown — and, in rather typical fashion regarding the big news publications and their reporting on Facebook, presents everything in the worst possible light. For example, the report on how internal research showed that Instagram made teen girls feel bad about themselves downplays that the data actually shows a significantly higher percentage of teens indicated that Instagram made them feel better:

=> ↺ CIA, NSA Block Ads Network-Wide To Protect Agencies. Ron Wyden Says Rest Of Gov’t Should Do The Same.

• Not everyone uses an ad-blocker. But most people do. And no matter how much online publications claim ad blocking is the same thing as stealing, it really isn’t. If they’re bent out of shape about it, it’s because they assault users with ads, burying content behind a wall of uncurated virtual salesmen. If it bleeds, it leads, the old saying goes, but now it refers to readers’ processing power and data allotments.

=> ↺ Hillicon Valley — Presented by Ericsson — Senators gear up for Facebook hearing

• Facebook’s head of global safety will face off with members of the Senate Commerce consumer protection subcommittee on Thursday as part of the panel’s first in a series of hearings focused on kids’ safety. As criticism of the tech giant heats up following recent bombshell reports, the panel will convene again next week to hear testimony from a Facebook whistleblower.

=> ↺ Face detection for my leaf blower

• The short of it: I have a face detection algorithm running which, when a certain individual enters the field of the Pi’s vision, triggers a servo that powers on the blower, releasing a powerful air blast.

=> ↺ Apple AirTag Zero-Day Weaponizes Trackers

• An unpatched stored cross-site scripting (XSS) bug in Apple’s AirTag “Lost Mode” could open up users to a cornucopia of web-based attacks, including credential-harvesting, click-jacking, malware delivery, token theft and more.

• That’s according to Bobby Rauch, an independent security researcher who said that it’s possible to use the zero-day to fully weaponize an AirTag, with the ability to attack random strangers (or specific targets) should they interact with it.

• Stored XSS, also known as persistent XSS, occurs when a malicious script is injected directly into a vulnerable web application. An attack then only requires that a victim visit a compromised web page.

Defence/Aggression

=> ↺ They Fled the Taliban. Now They’re in a Tent City in New Mexico.

• In late August, 26-year-old Abul Ahmed was heading to his university in Kabul to fill out some paperwork when he got a call from a friend. “Don’t go to your house, because it’s dangerous. The Taliban are there,” Abul recalled being told. Abul said he wasn’t going to leave his family, but after the Taliban took over Kabul, he knew they couldn’t stay at home. “The Taliban broke into our compound, and they stole our car,” he told me. “They beat up my uncle and searched our stuff.”

=> ↺ Jan 6 Committee Subpoenas 11 Individuals Who Organized Trump Rally That Day

=> ↺ Open for Military Business: Ebola Research at Canada’s Only BSL-4 Lab

• By the time Qiu started work on Ebola, the mishandling of the SARS epidemic by China’s leadership was well-known worldwide. Officials had been fired for misbehavior. China had called upon leading scholars in the US, like W. Ian Lipkin, and Chinese scholars with significant success abroad, such as George Gao, to help reorganize its public health system, especially its disease surveillance methods. That year, a group of scientists from Guangdong, the centre of the SARS pandemic, arrived in Winnipeg to tour the Canadian Science Centre for Human and Animal Health, which includes both the NML, now managed by PHAC (Public Health Agency of Canada), and the animal diseases lab managed by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. China was negotiating its agreement with France, which led to the construction of the BSL-4 at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

• Natalie Salat, a reporter for Legion, a magazine about Canada’s military history, came to Winnipeg to write about the facility after the visitors from China had come and gone. Their attendance was presented to her as a mark of the NML’s global importance. Salat was told that the NML had partnerships with the Department of National Defence, the University of Manitoba, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the US Bioterrorism Response Network, etc. Stefan Wagener, whom Salat identified as the centre’s scientific director for biosafety and environment, told her that everyone who worked at the lab for more than ten days had to have a rigorous security clearance. He jokingly said that if he told her anything else about the detailed security measures in place, he’d “have to kill her.”227

=> ↺ The Untold Story of Why Palestinians Are Divided

• Palestinian political disunity is tied to the fact that the issue of representation in Palestinian society has always been an outcome of one party trying to dominate all others. This dates back to Palestinian politics prior to the establishment of Israel on the ruins of historic Palestine in 1948, when various Palestinian clans fought for control over the entire Palestinian body politic. Disagreements led to conflict, often violent, though, at times, it also resulted in relative harmony – for example, the establishment of the Arab Higher Committee (AHC) in 1936.

• These early years of discord duplicated themselves in later phases of the Palestinian struggle. Soon after Egyptian leader, Jamal Abdel Nasser, relinquished his influential role over the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) following the humiliating Arab defeat in 1967, the relatively new Fatah Movement – established by Yasser Arafat and others in 1959 – took over. Since then, Fatah has mostly controlled the PLO, which was declared in Rabat, in 1974, to be the “sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people”.

=> ↺ Who Lost Afghanistan? H.R.

• What it does not show, and what Pentagon leaders don’t seem to understand, is why.

• Whitlock’s book reads like a synopsis of the many essays, books and cartoons I produced over 20 years, which were rejected by most newspapers and news websites because editors and producers refused to publish content that criticized the war.

=> ↺ What Are The Prospects For Peace? An Interview With Coleen Rowley

• Coleen Rowley is an attorney, peace activist and whistleblower. She’s a retired FBI Special Agent and former FBI Minneapolis Division Legal Counsel. For her exposure of the FBI’s pre-911 failures, she was named one of Time Magazine’s “Persons of the Year” in 2002. We are extremely honored that she took the time to talk to us and share her views. Her responses below are exactly as she provided.

• The questions here are not philosophical or abstract. They focus on the realities of the international power struggle unfolding in real time. They directly address the role of the U.S. in the escalating tensions and its capacity to reduce them. We also probe the role of everyday citizens in affecting the relationship the U.S. now has and will have with the rest of the world community.

=> ↺ Survey Confirms Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department Is Still Home To Dangerous Gangs, Has No Solid Plan To Eliminate Them

• The Los Angeles Police Department has spent years compiling a “gang database.” The term “compile” is used loosely, because the LAPD decides people are gang members just because they know gang members, or are related to them, or live in the same buildings, or work near them, or pass through gang-controlled neighborhoods, or go to school with gang members, or just (as non-gang people are wont to do) wear clothes, shoes, and hats. It’s ridiculous.

=> ↺ Opinion | Good Riddance to the Horrible Failures of CENTCOM

• The bad news stemming from the ill-planned and ill-managed U.S. evacuation of the Afghan capital just kept coming in. The Washington Post put it this way in blowing the whistle on the culminating disaster: “U.S. military admits ‘horrible mistake’ in Kabul drone strike that killed 10 Afghans.”

=> ↺ The Myth of a New “Cold War” Between the U.S. and China/Russia

• Outraged French President Emmanuel Macron denounced the Biden-approved agreement as blatant “Trumpism” and withdrew the French ambassador to the U.S., the first and only such termination of diplomatic relations with France in some 250 years. “Trumpism” has in recent years come to be defined as “America First” or “MAGA,” Make America Great Again, including the imposition of U.S. tariffs not only against China but against Western European nations and Canada. At the time Democrats and leading U.S. corporate think tanks, including the Council on Foreign Relations, pilloried Trump’s tariffs but the Biden administrations has largely maintained them all and indeed, expanded their scope and impact. No doubt, there are always major divisions within the U.S. ruling class – not to mention among and between their international counterparts – when their base economic interests are in conflict.

• Pivot to Asia

=> ↺ Constructive Criticism Rooted in Respect: A View from Vietnam

• In other words, because Mr. Pierre has the passport of a former colonial power that brutally exploited Vietnam and its people until it was decisively defeated at the Battle of Điện Biên Phủ in 1954, he doesn’t have the right to constructively criticize anything that is happening here in 2021.

• Vietnam and presumably other countries that France colonized get an unlimited pass on any societal problem, big or small. What does that have to do with the existential problem of air and water pollution? You guessed it: absolutely nothing.

=> ↺ Black Residents of Minneapolis Say They Need More Cops—Not Fewer

• Minneapolis, Minn.—On a quiet Sunday afternoon, Don Samuels emerged from his home on the northern wing of this city, wearing a black hoodie with “Pratt” printed on the chest. Clinging to his iPhone, Samuels sat on the porch as he typed the final words of a message he had been writing to a woman.

=> ↺ Mali junta’s sovereignty push arouses hope, fear amid troubled anti-jihadist struggle

• “But even though many Malians like the emphasis on national sovereignty, they are also concerned about where it may lead,” Tounkara continued. “If private security companies and Malian troops achieve military victories, that may well strengthen anti-French sentiment. On the other hand, if Bamako cuts ties to France and to its regional allies, it risks finding itself ostracised in the anti-jihadist struggle in the Sahel, without reliable partners to support it. That would be enormously disappointing to the Malian people.”

=> ↺ Arson attack on house of critic of Islam in Dresden, Germany

• The so-called Molotov cocktail was thrown onto the balcony on the first floor of the shell of the building in the street Brückenstraße at around 3:30 a.m. last Saturday. As a result, a fire broke out. The resulting damage to property cannot yet be quantified. The Police Counter-Terrorism and Counter-Extremism Centre has taken over the investigation.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

=> ↺ Scientist: Mysterious beacons source of MS Estonia survey interference

• A scientist says he believes he has found the source of mysterious interference experienced in sonar and other devices during an investigation into the wreck of the MS Estonia, which sank in 1994 with the loss of 852 lives. The scientist, a hydrographer called Peeter Ude, says the source is transmitter beacons installed on the sea-bed and close to the wreck, but who placed them there, why and when remains unclear, he says.

Environment

=> ↺ 50 years of Greenpeace: Looking back and looking forward

• Some observers object, claiming that “there is no limit to growth,” or “no limit to human ingenuity,” but the lessons of the natural world tell us otherwise. Some extreme technology-obsessed billionaires imagine that we’ll colonize other planets and leave the depleted Earth behind.

• I ask this question to myself virtually every day: How do we change the human trajectory, away from growth, chaos, and collapse? What path will lead us toward genuine sustainability? I suspect that our progeny — and all other species — will be far better off if we embrace our relationship with the living Earth, learn from nature itself, consciously contract, slow our economies, and allow wild, untrammeled natural habitats to expand.

=> ↺ Joe Manchin, America’s Climate Decider in Chief, Is a Coal Baron

• This story originally appeared in The Guardian and is republished here as part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration cofounded by The Nation and Columbia Journalism Review to strengthen climate coverage.

=> ↺ ‘Be Our Climate President’: Biden White House to Face Full Week of Protests

• Climate justice campaigners plan to descend on Washington, D.C. in October to protest outside the White House for a week straight, calling on President Joe Biden to declare a climate emergency and end all new fossil fuel projects.

• The Build Back Fossil Free coalition announced the People Vs. Fossil Fuels: Biden’s Test demonstrations, to be held October 11-15, in a statement Thursday. The week of action will come just before COP 26, a United Nations climate summit scheduled to begin in Scotland at the end of next month.

=> ↺ The New ‘Con’ in Conservation: Why the Proposed Voluntary, Paris Agreement-Style, ‘30×30’ Target for Protected Areas Won’t Save the World’s Biodiversity

• Proposals to protect a third of the Earth for wildlife (or even ‘half Earth’, as suggested by some extremist conservationists) have been around for decades, but the idea has only been taken up as a serious proposition over the last couple of years. A target of 30% by 2030 has been included in a new draft action plan for 2020 to 2030 under the global Convention on Biological Diversity. A coalition of 60 governments led by France and Costa Rica is lobbying heavily for the idea.

• During the World Conservation Congress just finished in Marseille, I asked the French government’s co-coordinator of this so-called ‘High Ambition Coalition’ how they foresaw the target working in practice. Key issues are not clear. Would each country have to designate 30% of its territory for conservation, or would it be a global target and, if so, how would it be determined which countries protected what, bearing in mind that biodiversity is very unevenly distributed around the planet?

Energy

=> ↺ PennEast Pipeline Cancelation Could Signal ‘End of an Era’ for Unnecessary Fossil Fuel Projects

• A major natural gas pipeline in Pennsylvania was canceled this week in the face of a thicket of legal obstacles and intense local opposition. The cancelation may punctuate what could be the end of a decade-long pipeline building frenzy in the U.S. as federal regulators begin to heed calls from activists and local communities to increase scrutiny over unneeded pipelines crisscrossing the country. 

• The PennEast pipeline would have carried Marcellus shale gas from Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, across the Delaware River and to Mercer County, New Jersey. But the developers of the project canceled it on September 27, citing its inability to obtain state-level water quality permits from New Jersey. The decision came three months after the company won a case before the U.S. Supreme Court related to the corporation’s ability to seize state land using eminent domain authority.

=> ↺ Head of California Utility Regulator Resigns Less Than One Year Into Six-Year Term

• The head of California’s powerful utility regulator announced to staff that she would be leaving her position at the end of the year, less than one year into a six-year term.

=> ↺ Oil Production To Grow Over the Next Five Years, OPEC Says

• In that year, the planet will have 9.5 billion people who will consume 108 mbd of crude oil, although the diffusion of energy efficient technologies could reduce the oil demand by over 8 mbd. Despite this, oil “will continue to be the fuel with the largest share in the world energy basket.”

Wildlife/Nature

=> ↺ Wild Birds Will Be Protected Once Again, As U.S. Resumes Enforcing Rules On Companies

• The Biden administration said Wednesday it will draft rules to govern the killing of wild birds by industry and resume enforcement actions against companies responsible for deaths that could have been prevented, a longstanding practice that ended under President Donald Trump.

• The move came as North American bird numbers have plummeted drastically in recent decades. That decline was punctuated by news Wednesday that the famed ivory-billed woodpecker and 22 other species of flora and fauna have gone extinct.

Overpopulation

=> ↺ Religion, religiosity, fertility and contraception in Sub-Saharan Africa – Part 1, Introduction to studies of religion

• How important is religion and belief in the supernatural for family life, contraceptive use, fertility, and family size? Presumably many of our readers have considered the role played in high-fertility societies by the belief that “children are God’s will”. In this blog series based on a literature review1, we focus on Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) and summarize much evidence about the importance of religion and religiosity. SSA has the highest degree of religiosity and highest fertility rate in the world. In part 1 below, we give background on scientific research into religion – an active field with intriguing theories and findings.

=> ↺ We Used Up All the Earth’s Resources on July 29th—Here’s What That Means for the Planet (and Us)

• This year, Earth Overshoot Day fell on July 29th, which means humans currently use 74% more resources than what the planet can regenerate. In this episode of Good Together, Brightly’s co-founder and CEO, Laura Wittig, spoke with Sarah Baillie, the population and sustainability organizer at the Center for Biological Diversity, about how our everyday consumption plays a role and what we can do to ensure our resources are sustained.

=> ↺ Over-population: Threat to mankind

• Finding a long-term solution to overpopulation is bringing down the human population which our earth can support and living with decent conditions is all that’s needed. If the equilibrium doesn’t maintain it creates a misbalance on the environment and economy. It’s a fancy issue for those that don’t know the way overpopulation could be a threat to mankind and our earth evolved changes within the past few decades. Somewhere the population increasing with the speed of sunshine and somewhere it’s minimal.

• Overpopulation is an alarming threat and if not taken into control, it will cause severe consequences in the future. Literacy and poverty are the two main causes that should be taken in control with the right steps to avoid the misbalance. Overpopulation is the evil root for climate change, poverty, unemployment, and conflicts. There are a million children who don’t have family their adoption is an option and home or shelter will be provided to them and collectively as humans, we have the power to make a world a better place to live in.

Finance

=> ↺ Progressives Deliver Message to Democrats on Infrastructure: ‘Don’t F**k This Up’

• The progressive activists in the stands at Wednesday night’s congressional baseball game held up a series of banners, one of which said “Dems Don’t Fuck This Up,” and another that read “Our Lives Are a Game: Pass $3.5T.” A third banner declared: “Reconciliation First / Hold the Line.”

• “We are going to make sure we deliver the entirety of the president’s agenda, because… 96% of Democrats in the House and Senate agree that that’s the right thing to do.” —Rep. Pramila Jayapal

=> ↺ Progressives Remain United on Holding Democrats to Infrastructure Promises

=> ↺ Opinion | Close This Perverse Tax Loophole in Order to Save Jobs and Fund Infrastructure

• The multi-trillion-dollar budget reconciliation bill moving through Congress represents an enormous opportunity to invest in unmet human and environmental needs. It’s also the best chance we have to close loopholes that help the wealthy avoid their fair share of taxes.

=> ↺ Opinion | When the New York Times Colludes With the Billionaire Class

• According to a White House analysis (9/23/21), the country’s 400 wealthiest families have an effective tax rate of just over 8%. At the New York Times (9/23/21), reporter Jim Tankersley was quick to cast doubt on the figure.

=> ↺ “A Moral Crisis”: Reverend William Barber on Why Congress Must Pass $3.5 Trillion Bill

• Activists continue to call on Democratic leaders to pass the $3.5 trillion Build Back Better Act, which expands the social safety net and includes measures to address the climate crisis. Progressives remain resolute in their opposition to passing a bipartisan $1 trillion infrastructure bill unless it is paired with the larger package. The Build Back Better Act represents “economic investment in the lives of poor and low-wealth people in this country,” says Reverend William Barber, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign. “The question here is not ‘What will it cost if we do this?’ What will it cost if we don’t do this?”

=> ↺ Schumer Announces Deal Reached With GOP Senators to Fund Government Through Dec

=> ↺ Utilities Took $1.25 Billion in Pandemic Aid Then Shut Off Power to Households Nearly 1 Million Times: Report

• Over a dozen leading U.S. utility companies took more than a billion dollars of publicly-funded pandemic bailout money while pulling the plug on power to vulnerable households nearly a million times, according to a new report out Thursday.

• “It is clear that private utilities prioritize profits and shareholder satisfaction over all else, including customer health and the climate.”—Chris Kuveke, BailoutWatch

=> ↺ “In Those Pictures, You Can See the Community”

• In East and West Garfield Park, Chicago, we sought out residents’ archives to shed light on a neighborhood the city neglected.

=> ↺ When Will the US Break Free from the Clutches of Its Grifters?

• Thus it surprises nobody to discover that when Donald Trump and the people around him learned, in mid-November of 2020, that there was absolutely no meaningful voter fraud in that month’s election, they chose, instead of acknowledging the truth, to go ahead with a plan to raise over $200 million dollars (and counting).  That even today “President Trump” is sending out one or two fundraising emails a day, each one with the tiny “make this a recurring donation” box pre-checked.

• Republican appointees on the US Supreme Court cracked open the door for professional grifters in 1976 when, for the first time in American history, the Court redefined politicians taking money from billionaires away from being “political corruption” and “bribery” — what such behavior had been called since the beginning of the republic — to instead say it was a mere “exercise of free speech” on the part of the morbidly rich.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

=> ↺ When Democrats Go Small, They Lose Big

• President Franklin Delano Roosevelt taught Democrats how to keep power by enacting bold programs that spoke to the pressing needs of working-class Americans. Unfortunately, the heirs to what is still referred to as “the party of FDR” have spent the better part of 75 years trying to unlearn that lesson.

=> ↺ Social Media Regulation In African Countries Will Require More Than International Human Rights Law

• There has been a lot of focus on moderation as carried out by platforms—the rules social media companies base their decision on what content remains online. There has however been limited attention on how actors other than social media platforms, in this case governments, seek to regulate these platforms. 

=> ↺ Progressives Hold the Line as ‘Manchema’ Side With Oligarchy Against Biden Agenda

• Political observers predicted three options late Thursday as it remained unclear whether Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi would still hold a vote on the Bipartisan Infrastructure Framework, or BIF, which has stirred a Capitol Hill fight between a small band of corporate Democrats in Congress and the rest of the party anchored by the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

• As of this writing, there was no final word other than promises earlier in the day by Pelosi that a vote would come—even though fresh public comments from Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.V.) made it clear that a chasm remains between his opposition and that of Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) and House Democrats  on the $3.5 trillion Build Back Better Act that must ultimately be passed via the bicameral reconciliation process.

=> ↺ Donald J. Trump: Traitor

• “There is an unfolding assault taking place in America today,” President Biden said in Philadelphia on July 13. “An attempt to suppress and subvert the right to vote in fair and free elections, an assault on democracy, an assault on liberty, an assault on who we are — who we are as Americans.”

• All the world knows who is leading that assault: Donald Trump. Why then isn’t the President, or Democrats, or liberal and progressive opinion writers calling Trump and his high-ranking followers traitors? Not just “fascists” and “autocrats” but traitors. Aren’t the Trumpists committing treason by actively subverting constitutional democracy, the very fabric of our political system?

=> ↺ Most Americans Want Dems in Charge of Congress Next Year, Polling Data Shows

=> ↺ In Anti-Reconciliation Blitz, Exxon Spent $275,000 on Facebook Ads in One Week

=> ↺ Biden’s Immigration Policy Picks Up Where Trump Left Off

• Mass opposition to Donald Trump began with immigration. His racist rhetoric and barbaric policies around immigrants and asylum-seekers are what first fueled outrage among liberals, as well as among people who were otherwise apolitical. Politicians, pundits, and rank-and-file Democratic voters alike rightfully decried Trump’s migrant policies, with some going as far as to compare the administration to the Nazi regime.

=> ↺ YouTube Deletes RT German-Language Channels Over COVID-19 ‘Misinformation’

• Video-sharing platform YouTube has deleted two German-language channels managed by Russia’s state-owned media company RT, prompting Moscow to blast the company for “censorship” and vow retaliation.

=> ↺ Keynote Speech by President of the Republic of Finland, Sauli Niinistö, at the FIIA Forum, Helsinki, 29 September 2021

• An important legacy of the original Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, held here in Helsinki in 1975, was the spirit of that meeting. The willingness of competitors and adversaries to sit at the same table, despite their disagreements. Such a spirit is in high demand today, on the global level.

• We urgently need to respond to fundamental questions of war and peace, climate change and biodiversity loss, pandemics and the challenges of new technologies. We can only succeed in that together. It is a question of our common human responsibilities. What kind of a world will we leave to future generations?

• Above all, these are not some distant global issues, somehow detached from our national interests. They are at the heart of our own security. And therefore, they reside at the very centre of Finland’s foreign and security policy.

Censorship/Free Speech

=> ↺ U.S. Supreme Court Upholds Public School Students’ Off-Campus Speech Rights

• The case, Mahanoy Area School District v. B.L., involved a public high school student who was placed on the junior varsity cheerleading squad after failing to make varsity. Out of frustration, Brandi Levy (later identified by her full name since she is no longer a minor) shared a “snap” with her middle finger raised and text that said, among other things, “fuck cheer.” The message was posted on a Friday night from a local convenience store. The cheerleading coaches suspended Levy from the J.V. squad for a year after one of her Snapchat connections took a screen shot of the message and shared it with them.

• The school justified the punishment of Levy’s off-campus speech by invoking the Supreme Court’s opinion in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District (1969), which held that students may not be punished for their on-campus speech unless the speech “materially and substantially” disrupted the school day or invaded the rights of others. The school further justified Levy’s suspension on the ground that social media posts generated off campus can easily be brought onto campus given the widespread use of cell phones and the internet. We argued that Tinker should not be used to punish off-campus speech—including social media speech.

• In ruling in favor of Levy, the Supreme Court did not go as far as we had hoped. The Court held that Tinker may sometimes justify restrictions to off-campus speech: “[W]e do not believe the special characteristics that give schools additional license to regulate student speech always disappear when a school regulates speech that takes place off campus.”

=> ↺ Leader of Prestigious Yale Program Resigns, Citing Donor Pressure

• Four months of wrangling over the program later, Professor Gage resigned after the university administration informed her that a new advisory board it was creating to oversee the course under previously ignored bylaws would be dominated by conservative figures of the donors’ choosing, including, against her strong objections, Henry A. Kissinger, the former secretary of state under President Richard M. Nixon.

• Her resignation, which Yale has not yet made public, raises the question of where universities draw the line between honoring original agreements with donors and allowing them undue sway in academic affairs. It’s a question that can become turbocharged when colliding political visions, and the imperatives of fund-raising, are involved.

=> ↺ Iranian Singer Googoosh Raises Her Voice To Keep Her Nation’s Culture Alive

• She was forbidden from participating in any type of public gathering. “They tried hard to erase me—I mean, erase my name, erase my position, erase my songs, erase my face, erase the memory of me,” she says. “But they couldn’t.”

• At the peak of her career, Googoosh was forced to live in silence for 21 years. Then, in July of 2000, the government granted her permission to visit her family in Los Angeles, and she left. Her first stop was in Toronto. At the Air Canada Center Arena, 18,000 fans waited for her return with open arms.

• Reminiscing about that auspicious day when she returned to the stage, Googoosh tears up. “I was speechless, and then I had fear,” she explains. “I didn’t know if I can take care of these people. But it happened.”

=> ↺ In Hong Kong, access to online museum about Tiananmen Square appears blocked

• Hong Kong users have not been able to access the website from the city since Thursday without using virtual private networks. Internet service provider PCCW declined to comment. Providers HKBN and 3HK did not respond to requests for comment.

• “This is a disgraceful act to erase historical memory,” the online museum said in a statement.

• Police officers take away a cardboard featuring the image of Goddess of Democracy from the June 4th museum in Hong Kong on Sept. 9, 2021.Kin Cheung / AP Hong Kong police said they could not comment on individual cases, but said national security legislation states that “police may require service providers to take actions to prohibit electronic messages posted on electronic platforms that are likely to endanger national security.”

=> ↺ Govt wants to impose centralised censorship office: RSF

• In a statement issued on Wednesday, the Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said that along with its Pakistani partner, the Freedom Network, it is supporting the campaign that Pakistani journalists have launched against the proposed legislation.

• The draconian proposed law was unveiled in June and would create a powerful new entity called the Pakistani Media Development Authority (PMDA).

=> ↺ Woman gets death, fine for blasphemy in Lahore

• The judge, after going through the statements of the witnesses and their cross examination, observed that the oral and material evidence proved beyond reasonable doubt that the suspect wrote and distributed the writings attributed to her.

=> ↺ Xiaomi censorship allegations may cloud its global ambitions, expansion plans

• Last week, a report by the Lithuanian defence ministry’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) alleged that Xiaomi’s Mi 10T 5G smartphone, which is widely sold in Europe, has a built-in ability to detect and censor terms such as “Free Tibet”, “Long live Taiwan independence” or “democracy movement”.

=> ↺ First look: Rick Scott probes LinkedIn, Microsoft on censoring U.S. journalists in China

• Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) sent a letter to Microsoft and LinkedIn leadership on Thursday questioning why LinkedIn censored the profiles of U.S. journalists from the company’s China-based platform this week, according to a letter obtained by Axios.

• Driving the news: LinkedIn — which is owned by Microsoft — notified several U.S. journalists this week, including Axios’ Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian, that their accounts will no longer be viewable in China due to “prohibited content” on their profile.

Freedom of Information/Freedom of the Press

=> ↺ Inside the CIA plot to kidnap, kill Julian Assange

=> ↺ Australian visitors to Assange demand answers

=> ↺ Report On CIA Plans To Kidnap Or Kill Assange Show Clearest Evidence Yet Of Improper Pressure On Prosecutors

• Though District Judge Vanessa Baraitser ruled against the United States’ extradition request, she rejected the argument from the legal team for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange that hostility within U.S. intelligence agencies “translated into improper pressure on federal prosecutors to bring charges.”

Civil Rights/Policing

=> ↺ This Supreme Court Term, Conservatives Have One Aim: Stop Progress

• On the first Monday in October, the Supreme Court, the most powerful government body controlled by conservatives, returns to work. Democrats have the White House and both chambers of Congress; Republicans, who have lost the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections, are currently confined to the unelected, unaccountable branch of government.1

=> ↺ “Language” Arguments Against Immigration Freedom are a Tower of Babble

• The simplest, and most appropriate response to that argument comes from comedian Doug Stanhope: “Then don’t talk to ’em.” Problem solved. But I can’t get a whole column out of that response, so let’s take apart the fake “issue” in a little more detail.

• Often, the argument starts off with fake tones of sympathy. Those poor immigrants — how will they ever get jobs and “assimilate” if they don’t know “the national language?” Send them back for their own good!

=> ↺ Democratic Congresswomen Testify About Their Personal Abortion Stories

=> ↺ Media Fixate on Missing White Women and Ignore Black, Brown and Indigenous Women

=> ↺ As Canada Honors Indigenous Children, Judge Rejects Trudeau Challenge to Compensation

=> ↺ Abattoir labour shortage sees Yorkshire farmer kill piglets

=> ↺ ‘A Stunning About-Face’: Rights Group Lambast Biden for Expanded For-Profit Immigrant Detention

• Human rights organizations on Wednesday criticized the Biden administration over an expansion of privatized immigration detention they said represented an “inexcusable” walk-back of a campaign promise.

• “When will Biden act on his promise to bring justice and fairness to the immigration system?”—Setareh Ghandehar, Detention Watch Network

=> ↺ Warning of ‘Looming Harsh Winter,’ IFRC Calls for Urgent Humanitarian Aid for Afghan People

• “After living through decades of fleeing and fighting, Afghans now face a severe drought which has devastated food production, leaving millions hungry and destitute.”—Alexander Matheou, IFRC

=> ↺ ‘Appalled’ UN Human Rights Experts Urge Immediate Release, Compensation for Steven Donziger

• Ahead of Steven Donziger’s sentencing scheduled for Friday, five United Nations human rights experts ruled that the American attorney who won a multibillion-dollar judgment against Chevron in Ecuadorian courts has been “arbitrarily” detained in the U.S. for 787 days.

• “The appropriate remedy would be to release Mr. Steven Donziger immediately and accord him an enforceable right to compensation and other reparations.”—UN Experts

=> ↺ Missing White Woman Syndrome: Media Obsess Over Some Cases as Black, Brown & Indigenous Women Ignored

• Wall-to-wall coverage of the case of Gabby Petito — a 22-year-old white woman and blogger who went missing while traveling with her fiancé Brian Laundrie and whose remains were found in a national park in Wyoming — has renewed attention on what some call “missing white woman syndrome,” the media’s inordinate focus on white female victims and the disparity in coverage for women of color. We host a roundtable discussion with Amara Cofer, host and executive producer of the podcast “Black Girl Gone”; Mary Kathryn Nagle, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation and lawyer focused on tribal sovereignty; and Melissa Jeltsen, a freelance reporter who covers violence against women. “There is an underrepresentation of Black women, of women of color in these stories,” says Cofer.

=> ↺ Australia returns world’s oldest tropical forest to indigenous owners

• Listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1988, the Daintree National Park was handed back to the Eastern Kuku Yalanji people in a ceremony in the remote town of Bloomfield on Wednesday.

• The 135-million-year-old tropical rainforest is famed for its rich biodiversity – from a giant clawed cassowary bird to plants that have existed since the age of the dinosaurs. But it has come under sustained pressure from climate change and industries such as logging.

• In striking a new deal to manage the rainforest, Queensland said the Daintree would be returned to the traditional owners of the land.

=> ↺ UK police officer sentenced to life in jail for woman’s murder

• The judge said that Couzens’ use of his police status to carry out the “grotesque” offences warranted the highest penalty, a rare whole-life jail term for which there is no possibility of parole.

=> ↺ The Lancet: More than half of police killings in USA are unreported and Black Americans are most likely to experience fatal police violence

• To examine the extent of under-reporting, researchers compared NVSS data to three non-governmental, open-source databases on police violence: Fatal Encounters, Mapping Police Violence, and The Counted [2]. These databases collate information from news reports and public record requests. When compared, the researchers’ new estimates highlight the extent to which deaths from police violence are under-reported in the NVSS and the disproportionate effect of police violence on Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous people in the USA.

=> ↺ Study: Police kill more people in this state than any other. And many deaths go unreported.

• About 84% of police killings in the state from 1980 to 2018 were unreported or misclassified in official government reports, according to the peer-reviewed study in The Lancet, one of the world’s oldest and most renowned medical journals.

=> ↺ UAE: Tolerance Narrative a Sham

• Domestic critics are routinely arrested and, since at least 2015, UAE authorities have ignored or denied requests for access to the country by United Nations experts, human rights researchers, and critical academics and journalists. The government’s pervasive domestic surveillance has led to extensive self-censorship by UAE residents and UAE-based institutions; and stonewalling, censorship, and possible surveillance of the news media by the government.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

=> ↺ Google, NBC Bring Dumb Cable TV Blackout Feuds To Streaming

• For years cable TV has been plagued by retrans feuds and carriage disputes that routinely end with users losing access to TV programming they pay for. Basically, broadcasters will demand a rate hike in new content negotiations, the cable TV provider will balk, and then each side blames the other for failing to strike a new agreement on time like reasonable adults. That repeatedly results in content being blacked out for months, without consumers ever getting a refund. After a few months, the two sides strike a new confidential deal, your bill goes up, and nobody much cares how that impacts the end user. Rinse, wash, repeat.

=> ↺ My changing (citation) style of external links here on Wandering Thoughts

• Instead, the growing amount of information I include about the link is a quiet reaction to the unfortunate fact that over time, an increasing number of URLs will stop working. More and more I’ve come to feel that the more information I include about a URL, the better for the future, both for me and for other people. If I put in the full title and even the name the author uses, there’s a higher chance that some copy of the page can be found in search engines, even if the domain changes, the site is restructured, the form of the URLs all change, and so on.

=> ↺ Open Access Model Can Leverage Historic Funding to Drive Broadband Expansion

• The model comes with several inherent benefits over conventional approaches, the conference heard. “When a community owns [the infrastructure] they’re going to build it to the specs they need,” McKinley explained. “Private [carriers] will employ cost-cutting methods wherever they can.”

Monopolies

=> ↺ Google Urges EU Judges to Slash ‘Staggering’ $5 Billion Fine

• The search-giant’s power over mobile phones is the focus of a week-long court hearing. Google’s lawyers are arguing that the European Commission blundered by demanding changes to allegedly anti-competitive contracts with suppliers of phones running its Android operating system — the engine room for the vast majority of mobile devices in the region.

Patents

=> ↺ How to respond to China’s bid to join the CPTPP

• The CPTPP is largely an agreement to treat companies equally, regardless of the country they come from. Importantly, it is intended to be a ‘high quality’ agreement. So, for instance, while Article 2.4 focuses on the elimination of customs duties, China has recently demonstrated a willingness to use informal trade restrictions, such as unofficial instructions to simply not process goods coming from Australia. Such moves would certainly be against the spirit of the CPTPP.

Copyrights

=> ↺ Eddy Grant Copyright Infringement Lawsuit Against Donald Trump Moves Forward

• Eddy Grant filed the lawsuit in New York in September 2020 after the campaign used his work in an online video. The clip features a fast train mean to represent the Trump campaign, while Joe Biden trails along in a manually operated vehicle. Twitter removed a viral copy of the video following a copyright claim from Grant.

• Eddy Grant is just one of many artists who pushed back against the Trump campaign using his music. Other artists who objected to their music being featured in political campaigns include Neil Young, The Rolling Stones, Panic! at the Disco and many more.

=> ↺ Disney and Scarlett Johansson have settled their lawsuit

• Terms of the settlement weren’t disclosed

=> ↺ YouTube TV and NBCUniversal agree to ‘short’ extension to avoid channels disappearing

• According to NBCUniversal, the standoff over carriage — which has become all too common in the streaming wars, particularly when it comes to regional sports programming — involved a demand for what an NBCUniversal source close to the matter described as a fair rate relating to marketplace terms. A spokesperson for YouTube, meanwhile, said that the company was negotiating for terms that it sees as fair based on industry standards and the size of its service. The spokesperson also said that NBCUniversal asked YouTube TV to bundle Peacock, which the spokesperson claimed would result in users paying twice for the same content.

=> ↺ Cloudflare Books Partial Victory in ‘Thothub’ Piracy Lawsuit

• Cloudflare has booked a partial victory in a piracy lawsuit filed by several models whose photos leaked online. The CDN provider previously offered its proxying service to the now-defunct website ‘Thothub’. The court agreed with Cloudflare that there’s no evidence for direct infringement, but the contributory copyright infringement claim remains intact.

=> ↺ Accused Pirate Asks Court to Dismiss Lawsuit from Suspended ‘Copyright Troll’

• An accused pirate has asked a Texas federal court to dismiss a copyright lawsuit filed by Malibu Media. The adult entertainment company, which has sued thousands of people over the years, is currently suspended by California’s Franchise Tax Board. The defense argues that, due to this suspension, the company is not allowed to maintain a lawsuit.

=> ↺ Copyright Continues To Be Abused To Censor Critics By Entities Both Big And Small

• We’ve talked far too many times about how the DMCA takedown processes across internet industries as they stand are wide, wide open for abuse. From churches wielding copyright to attempt to silence critics engaging in protected speech, to lawyers using copyright to try to silence critics engaging in protected speech, to freaking political candidates abusing YouTube’s DMCA notice process to silence critics engaging in protected speech… well, you get the idea. The point is that we’ve known for a long, long time that the current method by which the country and companies currently enforce copyright law tilts so heavily towards the accuser that it’s an obvious avenue for misuse.

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