at 7:36 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Stuart Keroff, a visionary middle school teacher in St. Paul, Minnesota, recently received a distinguished humanitarian award for his work in founding Asian Penguins computer club at the Community School of Excellence. This club refurbishes computers with Linux to be used both at the school itself and to deliver to the homes of students who don’t own a computer at home. View the video made by the Minnesota State University – Mankato Campus – to learn more about this award.
[iophk: "fraud"]
Leading the council will be Chris Liddell, a former Microsoft executive tapped by Trump in the early days of his presidency specifically to work with the private sector, a White House official said.
There are two things you don’t see everyday… A surfer (rider of waves, dancing with the Ocean, long salty hair, lives by the tide) and a Linux user (Linux everywhere, free and open source software)… as the same person. Well, that’s me. And I love it.
Like many Linux users, customizing the desktop experience is fun. So I took the surf approach to that. As a surfer, I’m always keeping an eye on what the Ocean is doing. And I’m awake and programming on my Linux machine really early. Long before the sun is up. Before first light, you have nothing to look at but buoy readings and swell charts.
Spanish computer company Slimbook has unsheathed its latest Linux laptop — the mighty 15.6-inch Slimbook Excalibur.
Their largest laptop to date, the Excalibur is forged entirely from aluminium (think MacBook), cutting itself a prime spot alongside the more nimble 13″ Slimbook KDE laptop.
At the recent Open Networking Summit, the SDN/NFV community convened in Santa Clara to share, learn, collaborate, and network about one of the most pervasive industry transformations of our time.
While it is fair to say all these groups are “represented,” I would argue all are are not represented equally. It’s natural to expect that those with more financial stake and cash to burn will try to pull the conversation in a certain direction. For example, telecoms like AT&T, Comcast, Charter, Verizon, Vodafone, T-Mobile, Orange.
One of the best practices to develop a containerized application is using stateless containers, meaning that data generated in one request to the application in the container is not recorded for use in other requests. However, real world applications do require stateful behavior for some of their containers: data generated in one request should be recorded somewhere in the container to be available for use in other requests.
The Cloud Foundry platform as a service is a flexible, customizable development environment for enterprise-scale app projects. While Cloud Foundry is particularly suited for the creation and deployment of cloud-native apps using the languages of Ruby and Go, its fully-scalable nature and open architecture offer an environment that can be tailored to various languages, frameworks and development goals.
Linux is a free and open-source operating system that has the largest installed base of all general-purpose operating systems (OS). Its underlying source code may be used, modified and distributed by anyone, even for commercial purposes. In part because of these reasons, and also because of its affordability and malleability, Linux has, in recent years, also become the leading operating system on servers.
The Koozali SME Server development team is pleased to announce the release of Koozali SME Server 9.2 Final, based on CentOS 6.9, which is the stable release of Koozali SME Server 9.#.
We dedicate this release of SME Server 9.2 to Tony Keane who passed away on 1st April, 2016. He was a long time user and supporter of Koozali SME Server and one of the founding members of the Koozali Foundation.
Kernel Space
Linux founder Linus Torvalds has announced that the final release of Linux kernel 4.11 is now available.
“So after that extra week with an rc8, things were pretty calm, and I’m much happier releasing a final 4.11 now,” said Torvalds.
We previously reported on the BFQ I/O scheduler finally set to land with the Linux 4.12 mainline kernel. That’s now happened along with another new I/O scheduler.
BFQ is now in the mainline Linux Git tree as the Budget Fair Queueing scheduler that has been maintained out-of-tree for a number of years now. BFQ strives for low latency for interactive applications and soft real-time applications, higher speed for code development tasks, high throughput, and strong fairness/bandwidth/delay guarantees.
The Linux 4.12 kernel is to enable KASLR support by default for x86-based systems to further improve the security.
GNU Linux-libre, a non-profit organization chartered to develop and promote a deblobbed, libre Linux kernel for GNU/Linux distributions, announced the official availability of the GNU Linux-libre 4.11-gnu kernel.
Linux Lite creator Jerry Bezencon announced earlier today that the recently released Linux 4.11 kernel is now available for installation from the distribution’s software repositories.
The Linux 4.11 kernel series is the latest stable available at the moment of writing this article, and it looks like Linux Lite users are among the first to get it. It’s available as we speak for both 64-bit and 32-bit installations, and it’s the first to include the project’s own firmware package called “linux-firmware-image-linuxlite.”
Collabora’s Mark Filion is informing Softpedia today about the contributions made by a total of nine Collabora developers to the recently released Linux 4.11 kernel.
Linux 4.11 is now the latest stable kernel that’s available for Linux-based operating systems who want to adopt the new series announced by Linus Torvalds himself on the last day of April 2017. Linux kernel 4.11 brings a lot of improvements and new features like scalable swapping for SSDs or support for OPAL drives.
Intel Memory Bandwidth Allocation (MBA) support is coming to the Linux 4.12 kernel for allocating defined bandwidth between CPU cores.
The Intel RDT (Resource Director Technology) code was extended to allow for this MBA support to allow limits on memory bandwidth for threads when they are scheduled. MBA is billed as a feature for server clusters, VMs, clouds, containers, and other situations of having shared resources. The Memory Bandwidth Allocation can be paired with the exiting Memory Bandwidth Monitoring and Cache Allocation to monitor/limit the memory and cache available to processes.
Graphics Stack
Collabora’s Emil Velikov announced today, May 1, 2017, the release and immediate availability of the third and probably the last Release Candidate (RC) build in the development cycle of the upcoming and highly anticipated Mesa 17.1.0 stable series of the open-source graphics stack for GNU/Linux distributions.
Benchmarks
Last week I posted benchmarks showing off F2FS performance with its multi-drive feature that isn’t formal RAID but can still yield better I/O performance. For additional context, here are some results on that same system and with the Linux 4.11 kernel when using Btrfs with its native RAID capabilities.
After carrying out the 1/2/3/4 disk tests with F2FS on Linux 4.11 from the Core i7 6800K Broadwell-E box, I ran some Btrfs tests. For the Btrfs tests was a single disk run, two-disk RAID0, four-disk RAID0, four-disk RAID10, and four-disk RAID1 to yield some additional perspective how it compares to F2FS’ multi-drive capability that makes just one big volume but with modified block allocation and background garbage collection differences to boost I/O speed.
Applications
NeoVim, the effort to rewrite and modernize Vim, is out with its latest feature release.
NeoVim 0.2.0 is the new release of this featureful text editor. NeoVim 0.2 features some API additions, :terminal improvements, man page improvements, Windows support is now considered fully supported, several security fixes landed, and a variety of other changes introduced.
Instructionals/Technical
With the start of a new month brings us new figures from Valve with regard to their controversial Steam Survey.
Imagine, if you will, a culture composed of passion projects and the p of people scratching their own itch to create the thing they need and want to see in the world. Each project is a complex and innovative technological undertaking requiring multidisciplinary collaborations. The culture has a strong belief in and support for the community, without which it would not exist at all. Project creators help other project creators with free and open sharing of information. Projects and the culture overall foster and value a diversity of skills, backgrounds, lifestyles, and identities.
No, I’m not talking about free and open source software (FOSS). I’ve just described independent game development.
A Story About My Uncle [Steam, Official Site] showed signs of coming to Linux back in 2015, but never did. Fresh activity on SteamDB shows signs that it might finally be coming.
Enshrouded World, a vehicular combat game powered by the game engine Leadwerks has Linux support on itch.io.
The main big addition of this new release is the addition of Fighters and Carriers. So during battles you will be able to launch Fighters, good for attacking enemy ships, but very weak.
They have also introduced basic support for alliances, but the AI cannot use it yet. They say it’s mainly useful for multiplayer games right now.
OpenSpades is a super-fun “Open-Source Voxel First Person Shooter”. I’ve been playing it for a while both on my GameOS desktop and under WINE on Linux. For whatever reason the upstream OpenSpades on github project had no Linux builds available for download, and I was lazy so I used WINE, which worked just fine.
Desktop Environments/WMs
K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
Qt 5.9 beta3 is now available. Instructions how to get the release are here: https://wiki.qt.io/How_to_get_snapshot_via_online_installer. Diff to second beta can be found as an attachment.
For those looking forward to the upcoming Qt 5.9 tool-kit release, the third beta is now shipping.
Qt release manager Jani Heikkinen has announced the Qt 5.9 Beta 3 release for testing and is encouraging users/developers to try it out to find bugs/regressions ahead of the planned release possibly at the end of May but could be delayed into June.
I love it so much so that it’s now my daily driver (having completely erased Windows whereas I normally dual-boot).
Today, May 1, Krita Foundation proudly announced the release and general availability of the third maintenance update to the Krita 3.1 stable series of the open-source digital painting app for all supported platforms.
Shipping with a ton of bug fixes, as well as a handful of cool new features, Krita 3.1.3 is here two months after the previous update to implement an option that finally allows users to run multiple instances of the app. It also implements the Cut, Copy, Paste, and Object Ordering context menu actions for the default tool.
GNOME Desktop/GTK
I am pleased with this extension. While comparisons are not purely necessary in this case, it is worth mentioning that both Dash to Dock and Dash to Panel offer a very similar experience, with roughly the same amount of options and features. D2D is slightly less complex to configure and use, but it does not come with a single unified panel as D2P does. On the other hand, it does not have any performance lags.
Whichever one you choose, you should be pleased. But since this is an article on Dash to Panel, let’s focus on what it does. Yes, it makes Gnome 3 bearable, it makes it rather productive, and you will be saving thousands of pointless mouse clicks just because you have icons on your desktop, and you can quickly start programs, rather than waste time on searching through the menu like a braindead chimp every single time. Dash to Panel is a highly desirable and needed Gnome extension, and hopefully, this little article gives you the right level of exposure and fun. It also makes Gnome 3 actually usable, the same way that Classic Shell has saved Windows 8. Oh the irony. We’re done. I would like to thank a chap named Max for this nice little recommendation.
Yesterday, we have celebrated the GNOME Release Party 3.24.1 by sharing a breakfast at Real Plaza – Centro Cívico. We were in total 18 people who knows GNOME by own experiences and previous talks I did in different universities located in Lima, Peru.
GNU/Linux developers Arne Exton is kicking off the month of May 2017 with a new release of his Ubuntu/Debian-based MeX distro, which ships with the latest Cinnamon desktop environment and a recent Linux kernel.
MeX Linux was previously based on Linux Mint, but it’s now borrowing packages only from the stable repositories of the Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS (Xenial Xerus) and Debian GNU/Linux 8.7 “Jessie” operating systems. The latest release, MeX build 170501, is shipping with a custom compiled kernel based on Linux kernel 4.10.8.
Distros h desktop environments have evolved, forked, and gone are certain bugs that annoyed me, along with features that I loved.
New Releases
Slackel 7.0 Live Openbox has been released. Slackel is based on Slackware and Salix.
Includes the Linux kernel 4.4.38 and latest updates from Slackware’s ‘Current’ tree.
The 64-bit iso image support booting on UEFI systems.
The 32-bit iso image support both i686 PAE SMP and i486, non-PAE capable systems.
Iso images are isohybrid
Iso images can be used as installation media.
Arch Family
Today being the first day of May and all that, Arch Linux users will be glad to hear that a new ISO snapshot of their beloved GNU/Linux distribution is now available for download.
That’s right, we’re talking about Arch Linux , which hit the streets earlier today incorporating all the security and software updates that were pushed to the stable repositories of the operating system during the entire month of April 2017. Also, the new ISO image is powered by the latest Linux 4.10.13 kernel.
If you were planning on reinstalling your Arch Linux computer because of various reasons, or you wanted to deploy the lightweight GNU/Linux distro on a new PC without having to download hundreds of MB of updates after installing the OS, Arch Linux
is here to make things a lot easier for you.
Red Hat Family
Back in November of 2015 I couldn’t resist bragging a bit about my old Fedora Core 1 machine reaching 1 year of uptime. Now it has managed to run another year without interruption.
It eventually ran for 489 days in the first instance. No doubt there have been many machines with much longer uptimes than that, but keep in mind this machine was first built in 1998 and is running on home utility power.
Debian Family
As a mentor, my role was to ensure that each team have best possible chances of fulfilling the evaluation criteria for the contest. I also helped teams with the development and pitching.
This month I marked 72 packages for accept and sent one email to a maintainer asking questions. The number of rejections went down to 15. I would name that a good level again.
Derivatives
Canonical/Ubuntu
It’s been many years since I regularly used Ubuntu. Back in “ye olden times” I would consider myself one of the most outspoken advocates for Canonical’s Linux distribution—often proclaiming the (near) perfection of Ubuntu—but those times have long since faded into the mist.
Nowadays, I use Ubuntu only when there is a good reason to review a new release—which has happened less and less. And even in those cases, I tend to use it sparingly.
Dell’s Precision 5520 is one of the very few laptops to offer a Linux distribution as a pre-installed operating system. Another is Dell’s XPS 13 Developer Edition, which offers great performance in a compact size. For people wanting something a little more powerful, the Precision 5520 (which starts at $1,399 but is $2,765.50 as configured) packs workstation levels of power while remaining just shy of four pounds (3.93, to be exact).
If the recent news that Canonical is killing its Unity 8 desktop/phone interface and Mir display server caught you off guard, it’s only because you haven’t been paying attention to the ups and down of the Linux world.
Unity 8 and Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth’s vision of convergence did not find a market in time for it to come to fruition.
Since the news that Unity 8 was being abandoned and staff reshuffled or cut Canonical did happen rather abruptly it is worth asking: What now?
If you’ve been around the Linux world for long you probably have a pretty good idea.
Red Hat has been down this road before, as has SUSE. If you’re new to this and stricken by a Doomsday like panic, relax. Canonical is probably going to be just fine. It’s highly likely it will more or less abandon its desktop product to the community, but the core of Ubuntu isn’t going anywhere.
Flavours and Variants
It’s their attention to minor, yet very useful small details like that which make me really respect what they are doing.
They also adjusted the Power Indicator to enable you to adjust screen brightness directly from it, yet another small, but useful adjustment.
Their screen-shot tool was also adjusted to give friendlier names of saved files for when uploading to websites, using a dot instead of a colon for separators.
The developers of the feren OS GNU/Linux distribution are kicking off the month of May 2017 with a brand new release of their Linux Mint-based operating system.
feren OS 2017.0 “Murdock” is now available after being in development for the past several months, it’s based on the latest Linux Mint 18.1 “Serena” operating system, which in turn is derived from Canonical’s Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) OS, and uses the Cinnamon 3.2 desktop environment by default.
Linux Mint is a very popular operating system — for Linux, anyway. It is based on Ubuntu, but it ditches one of the most maligned aspects of its base OS — the Unity desktop environment. Instead, it primarily offers the Cinnamon DE, which is reminiscent of Microsoft’s Windows 7. Mint’s popularity and relevance is in question lately, however, as Ubuntu itself has decided to stop using Unity too. It remains to be seen if GNOME 3 being the default DE for future Ubuntu releases will decrease the number of folks switching to Mint.
The uncertainty about Ubuntu has not deterred the Linux Mint team, however, as they are moving ahead with plans for version 18.2. While details about the upcoming version of the operating system are scarce, we have learned two important details. First, the code name for the OS will be “Sonya,” and second, the distro will use LightDM as default display manager.
feren OS, a distribution based on Linux Mint has released their 2017.0 ‘Murdock’ edition with tons of new stuff.
This is a bit of distribution-inception now though, with feren OS based on Linux Mint, which is based on Ubuntu, which is based on Debian — wow. It includes a customized Cinnamon desktop to give it their own fresh look. It also comes with the Vivaldi browser by default, which I haven’t seen any other distribution do.
In the latest edition of feran OS, they have dropped Mint Welcome, in favour of their own fork of Budgie Welcome called feren Welcome. Continuing the fork of a fork there I see!
Poslab’s open source “SavageBoard” SBC runs Linux or Android on an i.MX6 Solo, DualLite, or Quad. There’s also a commercial i.MX6 “HobbitBoard.”
There are a bunch of Android apps that let you connect to your phone remotely to do things like transfer photos or other files to a PC without wires, view text messages and other notifications on a computer, or use your phone as a proxy server for connecting a PC to the internet.
Have you grown tired of those pesky visual launchers, festooned as they are with childish icons and backgrounds? Do you have a good memory, and typically carry an external keyboard about with your phone for quick bash sessions? If Stallman is your shepherd and he maketh you lie down in open-source pastures, then this app might just be for you. Linux CLI Launcher replaces your home screen launcher with a pseudo-Linux command line.
This is every bit as hilarious and awesome as you’d expect. I mean, if you were expecting a little more than the basic “terminal” Android app dozens of developers have made, and which everyone with a rooted phone has installed. This does a bit more than those. And, of course, it’s open source.
If there is anyplace in the enterprise where the use of open source software is still a hard sell, it’s going to be with management. By now, most workers and managers in IT departments are already sold on open source, and deploy it whenever they can — if they’re allowed to do so.
Even in this day and age, sometimes they’re not. This is partly because management is often resistant to change, with the attitude that what isn’t broken doesn’t need fixing. Or it might be because in a dog-eat-dog business environment, where buying and selling rules the day, it might be difficult to understand using software that’s neither bought nor sold. You know, if it’s free it can’t be good and all that…
It sounds like a good idea in concept: Outsource costly software development and testing operations to a community of skilled developers who work for free.
Then take the fruits of their labors and package it up with other add-ons and extensions – also created by other people for free – and sell it to enterprises that can’t be bothered with all the hassle of configuration, installation and support. Undercut your competition’s prices by 90 percent and still make money because your development costs are near zero. Rinse and repeat in other product categories.
Rockbox, an open-source project providing a complete, feature-rich replacement for the proprietary software of numerous digital audio players, putting users in charge of the device, reaches version 3.14 after many years in development.
Today the Nextcloud community released the Nextcloud 12 beta. The final release will be out later this month. This is a major new step forward. And it is also an interesting release because we are entering a new area for the product.
At the beginning, 7 years ago the focus was clearly file sync and share. Of course this term did not exist at the time or at least I didn’ know it. The task was to syncronize file between all your devices and share it with others.
This coming weekend is the Community Leadership Summit in Austin (I hope to see you all there!), but there is another event I am running which you need to know about.
Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)
[Ed: This is Microsoft E.E.E. Never be foolish enough to drag PowerShell lock-in into GNU/Linux]
is being used to smear FOSS security again. Last I checked, millions of Microsoft Windows-running PCs were being hijacked because of secret NSA back doors. Let’s obsess over FOSS instead?]
As good as the OpenBSD documentation is (and vmm/vmd/vmctl are no exception) I had to do a lot of fumbling around, and asking on the misc@ mailing list to really get to the point where I understand this stuff as well as I do. These are my notes so far.
Public Services/Government
OS2, an open source community open to all Danish public agencies, is in the middle of a professionalisation process. “Over the last year, our focus has been on governance,” says Business Manager Rasmus Frey. “We decided on a new organisation and government model at the general assembly last year. This allows us to support projects and products throughout their entire lifecycles, taking them through the various stages of becoming mature open-source projects — to the benefit of the many.”
The city of Madrid (Spain) should do a feasibility study to see if it can switch to free and open source software, one of its citizens has proposed on Consul, the city’s eParticipation portal.
Paris’ public housing agency Régie Immobilière de la Ville de Paris (RIVP) is reusing Consul, the eParticipation portal built by the city of Madrid, available as open source software. RIVP, a city-owned agency, is using the software to gather input on 10 of its social housing projects across the city.
Programming/Development
PGI Community Edition includes a no-cost license to a recent release of the PGI Fortran, C and C++ compilers and tools for multicore CPUs and NVIDIA Tesla GPUs, including all OpenACC, OpenMP and CUDA Fortran features. The PGI Community Edition enables development of performance-portable HPC applications with uniform source code across the most widely used parallel processors and systems.
Yesterday marked an updated release of a community edition build for the NVIDIA-owned PGI code compiler that focuses on code compilation for CPU and GPU execution.
The goal of Machine Learning is to combine existing data with a predefined algorithm like linear regression to minimize the gap between actual and the predicted values. In our scenario, based on 10 rows, we assumed that the salary increase is $1,800. But what if Stack Overflow pays better for developers with 10+ years of experience? If it adds $2,200 per each year after crossing 10 years of experience, our assumptions go haywire. Our formula is hardwired to consider $1,800 as the delta which will break the algorithm when we input anything above 10. This scenario emphasizes the need for additional data. For ML, the more the data, the better the accuracy. This is one of the reasons why public cloud providers are luring customers to bring their data to their respective platforms.
Health/Nutrition
This is a widely shared belief on the libertarian right: for example, Whole Foods owner John Mackey wrote in the WSJ to denounce Obamacare, writing that “many of our health-care problems are self-inflicted.”
Debian’s release team has decided to postpone its implementation of Secure Boot.
In a release update from last week, release team member Jonathan Wiltshire wrote that “At a recent team meeting, we decided that support for Secure Boot in the forthcoming Debian 9 ‘stretch” would no longer be a blocker to release. The likely, although not certain outcome is that stretch will not have Secure Boot support.’
Many of you already have expressed your displeasure over Intel’s Active Management Technology (AMT) and Management Engine (ME) for various reasons in the past and now it’s been disclosed that for years there has been a vulnerability in this business-oriented feature that could open your Intel systems up to attackers.
Intel Active Management Technology, Intel Small Business Technology, and Intel Standard Manageability are subject to a hole allowing an unprivileged attacker to gain control of the management features for these products. The issue was made public today via INTEL-SA-00075.
Remote management features that have shipped with Intel processors for almost a decade contain a critical flaw that gives attackers full control over the computers that run on vulnerable networks. That’s according to an an advisory published Monday afternoon by Intel.
Intel has released a patch for the vulnerability, which resides in the chipmaker’s Active Management Technology, Intel Small Business Technology, and Intel Standard Manageability. Business customers who buy computers running vPro processors use those services to remotely administer large fleets of computers. The bug doesn’t affect chips running on consumer PCs. The chipmaker has rated the vulnerability critical and is recommending vulnerable customers install a firmware patch.
Intel chipsets for some years have included a Management Engine, a small microprocessor that runs independently of the main CPU and operating system. Various pieces of software run on the ME, ranging from code to handle media DRM to an implementation of a TPM. AMT is another piece of software running on the ME, albeit one that takes advantage of a wide range of ME features.
I wanted to read Matthew Garrett’s post on Intel’s remote AMT vulnerability, but since I’m using Private Internet Access, Cloudflare has gated it behind reCAPTCHA. reCAPTCHA is much, much harder than it used to be. Although there seem to be a couple of other variants, nowadays you’re generally expected to identify squares that contain street signs and squares that contain mountains. Now either the answer key is regularly wrong, or I just don’t know what street signs and mountains are. You’d think the former… but there actually is a good degree of ambiguity in selecting which squares to tag.
Do I only tag all the squares that contain the signage-portion of the sign, or do I also tag the squares containing the signpost? (The former seems to work better, in my experience.) What if only a little bit of the sign extends into a particular square? (Jury’s out.) What if there are very distant signs in the background of the image, with many big signs in the foreground: should the distant signs be tagged too? And what constitutes a mountain anyway? Most of the “mountains” I see in the reCAPTCHA images look more like impressive hills to me. My guess is that reCAPTCHA wants me to tag any bit of elevated land as a mountain, but who knows, really.
The short version is that every Intel platform with AMT, ISM, and SBT from Nehalem in 2008 to Kaby Lake in 2017 has a remotely exploitable security hole in the ME (Management Engine) not CPU firmware. If this isn’t scary enough news, even if your machine doesn’t have SMT, ISM, or SBT provisioned, it is still vulnerable, just not over the network. For the moment. From what SemiAccurate gathers, there is literally no Intel box made in the last 9+ years that isn’t at risk. This is somewhere between nightmarish and apocalyptic.
[Ed: This Microsoft employee will not want to say it, but shift away from Windows contributes to security]
[Ed: For second time in one week El Reg links Linux Mint to terror even though it could just as well be (often is) Windows. Next time, when El Reg writes an article about terrorists and they are Windows users, will it point that out in the headline? And if not, why not?]
Defence/Aggression
[iophk: "he could clear the air by voluntarily turning himself over to The Hague for war crimes trial"]
Tony Blair has admitted he finds it hard to be hated by some people. The former Prime Minister, who swept to power on a surge of popularity 20 years ago, also insisted the image of him concentrating on making money around the world since he left office in 2007 was wrong.
Asked how he felt about being considered toxic by some and hated by others, Mr Blair told GQ magazine: “Yep, it’s hard. It’s all about coming to terms with the fact that when you’re running for power you can be all things to all people.
U.S. officials this week requested the geographic coordinates of aid groups working in Somalia, according to a document obtained by The Intercept — a move that could indicate an escalation of military action against the Shabab. The notice to NGOs comes a month after President Trump declared portions of the country an “area of active hostilities,” giving the military wider scope to launch strikes that could potentially kill more civilians.
“Due to the need for increased operational security in Somalia, and based on best practices in other complex emergencies, humanitarian and development organizations may want to provide information about their fixed locations in Somalia for deconfliction,” states the letter, written by USAID’s Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance and intended for “all international and local humanitarian and development organizations with operations in Somalia.” Aid groups have an extensive presence in Somalia, where the government declared a state of disaster in February due to crippling drought and food shortages.
The mainstream U.S. media, which knows President Trump disdains facts, accepted his claims about the April 4 Syrian chemical incident without question and ignored doubts of intelligence analysts, a dilemma that Lawrence Davidson addresses.
As the Trump administration rattles the sabers over North Korea and its nuclear-weapons program, peace advocates are countering with warnings about the grave dangers if war breaks out on the peninsula and expressions of hope if fresh thinking about peace and reconciliation can prevail.
“If we are ever going to build the critical mass of an anti-war movement with a U.S. social movement,” said Christine Ahn, the former executive director of the Korea Policy Institute and currently the International Coordinator of Women Cross DMZ, “we have to fight together now, to put an end to this saber rattling, and potential first strike that the U.S. may conduct on North Korea.”
Michael Fallon’s recent claim that Britain under Theresa May’s leadership would be willing to launch a preemptive nuclear strike confirms what many suspected – namely that the British people are being ruled by a clutch of certifiable fanatics who will get us all destroyed unless they can be reined in, and soon. The Defence Secretary’s stupendously stupid statement came in the same week that the BBC’s Andrew Marr asked Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn in an interview if there were any circumstances in which he would launch nuclear weapons?
Both taken together suggest that the moral sickness that has long pervaded the country’s privately educated elite, when it comes to unleashing wars against poor countries abroad and attacking poor people at home, has progressed into the realms of actual insanity. Have we seriously now entered an age when nuclear weapons are considered anything other than an abomination that no civilized country or non-sociopathic human being would ever contemplate using for more than a second?
So Trump had to order US military personnel up to the Turkish-Syrian border to put themselves between the Turkish troops and the Syrian YPG. The US military is now protecting the YPG with its own bodies, from a NATO ally.
While few Central Asians have joined the Taliban and other Islamists in Afghanistan, many more have gone to join the so-called Islamic State. Estimates vary widely, reflecting the difficulty of tracking recruits who cross multiple borders, but perhaps somewhere between 2,000 and 4,000 Central Asian citizens have travelled to Syria and Iraq in the past five years. Central Asian militants were involved in the June 2016 Ataturk airport attack and January 2017 nightclub attack, both in Istanbul. Central Asians have certainly grabbed headlines with attacks in recent months. But these are not the first signs that global jihadism is spreading to Central Asia.
Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature
President Trump has scored political points by touting coal-mining jobs, but he could create more real jobs in coal country by recognizing the potential for renewable-energy jobs, says Jonathan Marshall.
If humans go on burning ever greater volumes of fossil fuel, then dramatic rises in sea levels could turn 13 million US citizens into climate refugees and send them fleeing inland – many of them to Atlanta, Houston and Phoenix.
This latest study, in Nature Climate Change, builds on an earlier assessment of what could happen in 319 American coastal counties if sea levels rise 1.8 metres by 2100.
Over the last several decades, top government officials and even military brass have come to view climate change as a national security issue. Under President Barack Obama, the notion was codified through recognition of the link by the Department of Homeland Security, the Defense Department, the State Department, and the National Intelligence Council. Now, President Donald Trump, with nearly all the government’s climate change work in his crosshairs, is poised to dramatically scale back environmental security programs — perhaps eliminating many entirely — through dramatic budget cuts.
The People’s Climate March in Washington, D.C., also called attention to the perilous climate for environmental justice activists worldwide, where an increasing number of land and water defenders are being murdered for their organizing efforts. During the march, we spoke with Neery Carrillo, the sister of murdered Honduran environmental activist Berta Cáceres.
The Climate Group has published a new case study assessing how California is implementing innovative legislation to drive the energy storage market and support the state’s ambitious climate targets.
The case study is part of The Climate Group’s Energy Transition Platform – a global initiative supporting highly industrialized sub-national governments in accelerating the low carbon transition. It addresses California’s strategy to support the uptake of emerging energy storage technologies and provide market security to investors and suppliers through a procurement target for utilities.
Workers in the so-called ‘gig economy’ face heightening conditions of precarity and exploitation. From delivery couriers to taxi drivers, this series has shown that conditions of work are increasingly deleterious and show little sign of improvement.
To combat this, innovative new strategies of organisation and mobilisation have been developed. New, and more direct, tactics of trade union struggle have been at the heart of successful disputes led by the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain in London and via spontaneous strikes by Uber drivers and others across the USA, the UK, France, and beyond.
Third, where Uber and Lyft – the two dominant ride-sharing companies of the gig economy – have sought to establish themselves in major cities –in Argentina and Brazil, for example – a combination of worker protest and regulation has contained their ambition.
Most countries think they are special, but few have ever allowed their sense of exceptionalism to damage their interests in the way Britain is doing. British politicians, business leaders and newspaper editors are remarkably confident that Britain will flourish outside the EU. While both France and Germany sometimes bridle at the EU, neither seriously thinks that the EU diminishes their ability to pursue their interests. There is no justification for British over-confidence. The UK needs the EU as much as the Germans or French do.
From 18 February to 2 March 2017, a group from Germany travelled to Senegal to learn, among other things, about the African Movement of Working Children and Youth. It met with grassroots groups in Saint-Louis and Thiès and had the opportunity to talk extensively with delegates on the aims, activities, and experiences of the movement. The movement is active in 27 countries in Africa and has almost one million members. It has been officially recognised as representing the interests of working children and youth, and is accredited as an observer organisation by the African Union.
In January, Apple said reserves had increased by $8.5bn to $246bn. More than $230bn was parked at offshore subsidiaries, the biggest overseas holdings of any non-financial company.
When it reports its quarterly financial results on Tuesday, Apple will likely have a quarter-trillion dollars in cash in the bank.
Some 93 percent of the company’s cash and other liquid assets are kept overseas.
What galaxy are you in? That’s the real question posed by this election and one our political system is not designed to answer.
After a disastrous dinner at Downing Street last week, Jean-Claude Juncker briefed Angela Merkel that Theresa May was in a “different galaxy” to those negotiating on behalf of the EU27.
May expects Britain to leave Europe
she expects her threat to walk away without an agreement to achieve a trade deal as good as single- she expects the talks to remain secret. Juncker gently explained that all these expectations were illusory. He warned that the British prime minister was “deluding herself” and that there is now more than a 50% chance that Britain will crash out of Europe without a deal in place.
For 25 years, Mayans from an isolated string of villages in the northwestern highlands of Guatemala have made their way to blue-collar towns in Ohio and North Carolina to work in Case Farms chicken plants. The unusual migration began after a Case Farms human resources manager recruited a group of Guatemalan civil war refugees who’d been working in the orange groves and tomato fields around Indiantown, Florida.
By late afternoon, the smell from the Case Farms chicken plant in Canton, Ohio, is like a pungent fog, drifting over a highway lined with dollar stores and auto parts shops. When the stink is at its ripest, it means that the day’s 180,000 chickens have been slaughtered, drained of blood, stripped of feathers and carved into pieces — and it’s time for workers like Osiel López Pérez to clean up. On April 7, 2015, Osiel put on bulky rubber boots and a white hard hat, and trained a pressurized hose on the plant’s stainless steel machines, blasting off the leftover grease, meat and blood.
When Theresa May called her opportunistic general election, she claimed that the public was getting behind Brexit. She just needed an endorsement from voters to stop the rotters in Westminster from denying the will of the people.
May’s assertion was always patently ridiculous, as her opponents were swift to point out. She secured a thumping majority in the Commons for her Article 50 bill – a profoundly undemocratic piece of legislation that is the nearest this country has seen to an Enabling Act – in the House of Commons.
But is the Philippines the best country in the world for female social entrepreneurs?
That was the conclusion of a 2016 study by the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the Deutsche Bank and the Global Social Entrepreneurship Network. It ranked the Philippines first, followed by Russia and Norway.
Also in the top ten were Malaysia, China, Thailand, Hong Kong and Indonesia. The study suggested that women in Asia succeed as social entrepreneurs because there is “a fairer playing field and higher drive to put compassion over valuation.”
Tennessee’s state government has inked a sweetheart deal with a company linked to the state’s billionaire governor to privatize thousands of facilities and management jobs at colleges, prisons, and other public buildings.
It’s being touted by some officials in other states as a model for the nation.
The $330 million, five-year contract covers custodial services, groundskeeping, and repair and maintenance work. Government officials say that each public facility can choose to only partially comply, or opt out, keeping their employees on the public payroll. “If they’re happy with business as usual, there’s nothing to do,” said Michelle Martin, a spokeswoman for the office that issued the contract.
But Gov. Bill Haslam has been adamant about the need to outsource state jobs. And any facility considering outsourcing will no longer be able to seek quotes from a variety of bidders. Their only choice, according to a master contract signed last Friday, will be to hire Jones Lang LaSalle (JLL), the world’s largest facilities management firm. Under a process called “vested outsourcing,” JLL actually helped write the contract.
Britain’s plan to leave the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom) when it exits the European Union will severely hinder nuclear trade and research, and threaten power supplies, a UK parliamentary committee said in a report on Tuesday.
The government says Britain must leave Euratom as part of its goal to end the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice when the country leaves the EU.
Euratom is the EU’s framework for nuclear energy safety and development, establishing a European market for goods and services and compliance with international safeguards to control the use of uranium and plutonium.
Franklin Roosevelt’s first “Hundred Days” of 1933, in which the newly-elected president and a Democratic-controlled Congress confronted the ravages of the Great Depression by enacting an unprecedented roster of 15 major new laws, have haunted the egomaniacal Donald Trump – and his own first 100 days as president have fascinated the media. While Trump in his own inimical way has been both dismissing the significance of the first 100 days and hyping the greatness of his own presidential performance in the course of those days, journalists and pundits have been keeping scorecards on him. But no consensus has emerged.
AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
One of the most promising progressives to arrive in Congress this year, Rep. Jamie Raskin from the Maryland suburbs of D.C., promptly drank what might be called the “Klinton Kremlin Kool-Aid.” His official website features an article about a town-hall meeting that quotes him describing Trump as a “hoax perpetrated by the Russians on the United States of America.”
Like hundreds of other Democrats on Capitol Hill, Raskin is on message with talking points from the party leadership. That came across in an email that he recently sent to supporters for a Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee fundraiser. It said: “We pull the curtain back further each day on the Russian Connection, forcing National Security Adviser Michael Flynn to resign, Attorney General Sessions to recuse, and America to reflect on who’s calling the shots in Washington.”
You might think that Wall Street, big banks, hugely funded lobbyists, fat-check campaign contributors, the fossil fuel industry, insurance companies, military contractors and the like are calling the shots in Washington. Maybe you didn’t get the memo.
The US Office of Government Ethics has said it was not consulted by the White House about plans to make Ivanka Trump a formal adviser to the president.
This contradicts statements from White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer, who said on 21 March that Ms Trump was working “in consultation with the Office of Government Ethics” in her transition to the new role.
A total of 3,974 civil servants were fired on Saturday from several ministries and judicial bodies, and 45 civil society groups and health clinics were shut down, according to a decree published in Turkey’s official gazette.
The Philippine president has compared himself to Hitler and vowed to kill 3 million people. Now he’s Trump’s BFF.
For most of the last 10 years, the Murdoch family, which controls 21st Century Fox, has wanted one thing for its global media empire above all else: the complete ownership of the popular and highly profitable Sky satellite and cable network.
Sky is the dominant pay television system here, a hub for Premier League soccer, movies, and networks like Fox News, MTV and Zee Punjabi. It was Rupert Murdoch who founded Sky, and 21st Century Fox already owns part of it.
The program begins with a discussion of how TV de is “Orange Is The New Black” a step forward in public understanding? Next, what’s happened to media coverage of the Black Lives Matter movement since Donald Trump took office? Finally on the program, three Project Censored student researchers at San Francisco State University describe their projects, as well as a concept called “constructive media literacy.”
American democracy is in crisis. The election of Donald Trump feels like a state of emergency made normal.
Trump has threatened violence against his political enemies. He has made clear he does not believe in the norms and traditions of American democracy — unless they serve his interests. Trump and his advisers consider a free press to be enemies of his regime. Trump repeatedly lies and has a profoundly estranged relationship with empirical reality. He uses obvious and naked racism, nativism and bigotry to mobilize his voters and to disparage entire groups of people such as Latinos and Muslims.
Russia-gate, the Democrats’ over-the-top attempt to blame the Kremlin for Hillary Clinton’s disastrous campaign, has become the party’s go-to excuse to avoid confronting how it lost touch with average Americans, says Norman Solomon.
France’s Jewish community is watching the second round of this year’s presidential election with profound unease, as Marine Le Pen of the far-right National Front has unveiled plans to ban the ritual slaughter of animals for kosher and halal meat and promoted a deputy who has been accused of praising an infamous Holocaust denier.
Le Pen temporarily stepped aside this week as the leader of the extreme nationalist party founded by her Holocaust-denying father, Jean-Marie, as part of an effort to present a more moderate face in the general election.
That attempt was immediately spoiled, however, by the revelation that the former associate of her father she put in charge of the party, Jean-Fran?ois Jalkh, told a scholar in 2000 that he did not accept evidence that the Nazis used the pesticide Zyklon B to murder Jews in the death camps.
In these times of renewed nationalism, it is notable that three cultural and political icons – all in flux – also claim the same choices in their national flags:
red, white and blue.
But the trio of colors share a far deeper narrative than just positions on the chromatic spectrum.
Red Republicans have taken dubious control of all three branches of the US government, white ultra-nationalists are threatening to overwhelm the rationale of the French Revolution, and Britons have become increasingly blue after digging themselves the virtual grave of Brexit.
It is perhaps the single-most important failure of progressives across Europe since the outbreak of the 2008 financial crisis and Brussels’ blundering crush of the Athens Spring in 2015 – an utter inability to come together and present a solid front, and a sensible, non-sectarian agenda, against the xenophobic and toxic nationalistic forces tearing apart the European Union.
While the urgency to once and for all overcome such a failure to unite should have become painfully obvious after the Brexit and Trump experiences of 2016, the latest wakeup call to European progressives after the first round of the French presidential election may also go ignored along with another missed opportunity for progressives to come together.
Regardless, we must try.
Despite that dramatic falling out, the elder Le Pen voted for his daughter in the first round of France’s presidential election, along with 7,679,492 others, and proudly called her achievement in advancing to the May 7th run-off against Emmanuel Macron, the former economy minister, “the culmination of a 45-year political battle” for the party he started in 1972.
Now Jean-Marie Le Pen is eager to offer his daughter some advice, whether she wants it or not: to win, she needs to drop the facade of moderation and “campaign à la Trump,” by channeling the anger of disaffected working-class voters who have abandoned mainstream parties for the far-left as well as the far-right.
The 100-day mark may be an artificial measuring stick for a U.S. president. Obviously much can happen in the remaining 1,361 days of a four-year term. But Donald Trump’s decisions in his first three months in office have put him on an almost irreversible path to failure.
Trump promised to be a transformational leader. It wasn’t an idle threat. He has assembled an unprecedented governmental wrecking crew. This is the third installment on Trump’s unique combination of kleptocracy and kakistocracy that is reshaping America in ways that most of voters won’t like.
So what is he?
An authoritarian.
An authoritarian would instead assail judges who rule against him, as Trump has done repeatedly. He’d also threaten to hobble the offending courts, as Trump did last week in urging that the 9th Circuit (where many of these decisions have originated) be broken up.
Likewise, an authoritarian has no patience for normal legislative rules – designed, as they are in a democracy, to create opportunities for deliberation.
Which is why Trump told Mitch McConnell to use the “nuclear option” against the time-honored Senate filibuster, in order to confirm Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court.
The idiots know only one word—“more.” They are unencumbered by common sense. They hoard wealth and resources until workers cannot make a living and the infrastructure collapses. They live in privileged compounds where they eat chocolate cake and order missile strikes. They see the state as a projection of their vanity. The Roman, Mayan, French, Habsburg, Ottoman, Romanov, Wilhelmine, Pahlavi and Soviet dynasties crumbled because the whims and obsessions of ruling idiots were law.
Donald Trump is the face of our collective idiocy. He is what lies behind the mask of our professed civility and rationality—a sputtering, narcissistic, bloodthirsty megalomaniac. He wields armies and fleets against the wretched of the earth, blithely ignores the catastrophic human misery caused by global warming, pillages on behalf of global oligarchs and at night sits slack-jawed in front of a television set before opening his “beautiful” Twitter account. He is our version of the Roman emperor Nero, who allocated vast state expenditures to attain magical powers, the Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang, who funded repeated expeditions to a mythical island of immortals to bring back the potion that would give him eternal life, and a decayed Russian royalty that sat around reading tarot cards and attending séances as their nation was decimated by war and revolution brewed in the streets.
Everyone understands that when you go into a negotiation you have to make trade-offs. No one expects to get everything on their wish list. For this reason, no one should have been surprised that Donald Trump wasn’t able to run the table when he met with China’s President Xi Jinping last month, but they might be surprised at what he apparently gave up.
A central theme of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign was that our trade negotiators were stupid and that they had negotiated rotten trade deals. He claimed this was the cause of the country’s $500 billion-plus trade deficit (a bit less than 3 percent of GDP).
The first 100 days of Trump’s administration have been an unending assault on democracy and our communities: from stacking his cabinet with people committed to dismantling the very agencies they lead, to travel bans and deportations. Among these attacks, Trump has outlined a budget that was nothing short of a declaration of war on our families. When I think about what lies ahead, I worry most about the health and safety of our families.
Ten days later, Trump issued an executive ordered cutting U.S. vehicle fuel-efficiency standards put in place by the Obama administration.
It was a victory for the auto industry and – like his order promoting “clean” coal – strengthening his anti-environmental stance.
Censorship/Free Speech
Online platforms must be allowed to assert their anonymous users’ First Amendment rights in court, EFF argued in a brief filed Monday in a California appellate court.
The case, Yelp v. Superior Court, concerns whether online review website Yelp has the legal right to appear in court and make arguments on behalf of its users.
Courts across the country have increasingly recognized that online platforms do have the right to argue for their users’ free speech rights, particularly when private litigants or government officials seek to learn the speakers’ identities.
Journalists’ safety especially women journalists is becoming a serious problem that is effectively silencing them leading to self-censorship and even some women leaving the profession. It is however saddening that in many instances these threats remain unreported and are not taken seriously.
Censorship tactics have become more complex, posing new challenges for journalists and non-journalists alike, a new report finds.
In its annual “Attacks on the Press” report, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has documented a range of censorship cases from around the world and revealed a new world of media repression.
“[Censorship] is definitely becoming more sophisticated and complex and is occurring at a variety of levels,” CPJ’s Advocacy Director Courtney Radsch told IPS.
White House press secretary Sean Spicer confirmed Monday that the Trump administration is actively—and in his words “substantively”—reviewing the nation’s libel laws as it explores ways it could more easily sidestep First Amendment protections and target press coverage or news stories it deems objectionable.
Censorship tactics have become more complex, posing new challenges for journalists and non-journalists alike, a new report finds.
In its annual “Attacks on the Press” report, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has documented a range of censorship cases from around the world and revealed a new world of media repression.
“[Censorship] is definitely becoming more sophisticated and complex and is occurring at a variety of levels,” CPJ’s Advocacy Director Courtney Radsch told IPS.
Privacy/Surveillance
We’ve been talking about Australian politicians’ odd obsession with passing ever more draconian data retention rules for years now. As you may recall, the politicians pushing for this appeared to have absolutely no clue what it actually entailed. Just a few months ago, we wrote about reports about how Australia’s data retention laws had been abused to spy on journalists and their sources. While some parts of the law went into effect a year and a half ago, it appears some parts just went into effect a few weeks ago. These new rules require every ISP to retain metadata on all online communications for at least two years. And… it took just about two weeks before the Australian Federal Police (AFP) were forced to admit that it had used the info to spy on journalists (again). They insist this was a mistake, of course.
Late on Friday afternoon, the Commissioner of the Australian Federal Police waltzed out in front of the microphones and admitted that his agency had misused the metadata that the nation’s telecommunication companies are forced to store.
It was a stunning admission. The nation had barely made it a fortnight since the deadline for telcos to have their data retention systems in place had passed, yet here was the AFP self-reporting an event that saw an officer in breach of the metadata laws, and despite years of preparation and interaction with metadata, placed the blame on “human error”.
[Ed: Should say that NSA and its ilk claim so, which means it’s not a fact. The reality .]
On Wednesday, May 3, at 9:30 am, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) will argue that an FBI search warrant used to hack thousands of computers around the world was unconstitutional.
The hearing in U.S. v. Levin at the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit stems from one of the many cases arising from a controversial investigation into “Playpen,” a child pornography website. The precedent set by the Playpen prosecutions is likely to impact the digital privacy rights of Internet users for years to come.
[Ed: Not good advice from Micah Lee. He's ignoring Vault 7 -- Signal compromised through phones (all have back doors).]
The Internet of Things, as it’s called, is also lacking a critical ethical framework, argues Francine Berman, a computer-science professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a longtime expert on computer infrastructure. Together with Vint Cerf, an engineer considered one of the fathers of the internet, Berman wrote an article in the journal Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery about the need for an ethical system.
I spoke to her about ethical design, and how to balance individual privacy with the potential for social good of connected devices that share data with one another.
The impact the dropping of the “about” collection will have on the NSA’s upstream harvesting will either be massive or minimal, depending on who you ask.
For years, U.S. government surveillance of innocent Americans has been a topic of heated debate, especially for those in the tech community.
With Congress gearing up for a fight over the 2017 reauthorization of a surveillance authority that lets the NSA spy on innocent Americans without a warrant—Section 702, enacted as part of the FISA Amendments Act—that debate is sure to rage on in the coming months.
So we sent a reporter to the RSA Conference in San Francisco, California in February to ask one simple question: What don’t you want the NSA to know about you?
[iophk: "predatory"]
Leaked documents said to describe how the social network shares psychological insights on young people with advertisers
A leaked document revealed how the company was able to establish if users as young as 14 were feeling “worthless”, “insecure” or “anxious”.
Civil Rights/Policing
If defense lawyers did this, you can bet the local prosecutor’s office would be there in an instant to file charges. But since it’s a prosecutor’s office doing it, local prosecutors see nothing wrong with lying to witnesses to obtain testimony. Charles Maldonado of The Lens looks into the unethical practices of the Orleans Parish District Attorney’s Office.
Milwaukee County Jail staff cut off an inmate’s access to water for seven days straight before he died of dehydration, and the man was too mentally unstable to ask for help as he slowly died, prosecutors said Monday at the beginning of an inquest.
The statements from prosecutors are the first official account validating what inmates previously told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel about Terrill Thomas’ access to water in his cell. In prior interviews, the inmates said they begged jail staff to help Thomas as he grew weak without water.
A woman is suing the Milwaukee County jail, alleging that deputies refused to unchain her while she was giving birth because of a jail policy requiring inmates to remain shackled while they’re hospitalized, regardless of the circumstances.
The federal lawsuit filed Tuesday seeks class-action status, claiming at least 40 other women experienced similar circumstances at the jail since 2011.
The sheriff’s office did not immediately respond to the lawsuit, but generally the county can’t comment on pending litigation.
President Trump has pushed for the expulsion of millions of undocumented immigrants, but they are pushing back by using May 1 to demonstrate the importance of their hard work, reports Dennis J Bernstein.
he Bracero Program, as it was dubbed back in 1942, an agreement between the United States and Mexico, to provide workers, Mexican workers, to the United States. Not only to work in agriculture, but to work in an important industry–the railroad industry–throughout the United States. Some 3 million to 4 million Mexican immigrant guest workers, contracted workers, were brought into the United States to work in these industries. And that program lasted from 1942 to 1964.
Clashes after the death of a young Bahraini after being shot outside the home of the Shiite leader in Bahrain on March 25, 2017. NurPhoto/SIPA USA/PA Images. All rights reserved.Six years ago, New York Times journalist Nicholas Kristof described his experience of being detained during the aftermath of Bahrain’s Arab Spring protests as a glimpse “through a haze of tear gas, [at] hints of a police state.”
An important ruling handed down by the Supreme Court today recognizes that when banks systematically discriminate against their customers, entire communities and cities are harmed.
Today’s decision rejects the claims of banks that racial discrimination against a city’s residents has no impact on the city itself. The lawsuit stems from the recent foreclosure crisis, and was brought by the city of Miami, which was hit particularly hard. As in other cities across America, neighborhoods where people of color live were disproportionately devastated. That can be largely attributed to the fact that Black and Latino homeowners received more expensive mortgages than their similarly creditworthy white counterparts.
Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
If the Federal Communications Commission still intended to enforce net neutrality rules, a court decision issued today would have qualified as great news at the commission.
The US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit denied the broadband industry’s petition for a rehearing of a case that upheld net neutrality rules last year. A three-judge panel ruled 2-1 in favor of the FCC in June 2016, but ISPs wanted an en banc review in front of all of the court’s judges. The request for an en banc review was denied in the order issued today.
Five broadband trade groups, including USTelecom and CTIA, as well as AT&T, CenturyLink and other providers, challenged the rules.
The US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit denied the broadband industry’s petition for a rehearing of }