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Each political note has its own anchor in case you want to link to it.
My intention is to make links only to publicly accessible, stable URLs. If you find a link to a page that requires subscription, please report that as you would report any other broken link.
US citizens: tell the U.S. Senate to reject the China Bilateral Investment Treaty. It's like a miniature TPP.
Papua New Guinea's prime minister says he will close the Manus Island prison where Australia has parked people who tried to go to Australia by boat. He asks Australia to find another place to put boat people.
Papua New Guinea's constitution has protections for human rights which are needed in Australia's constitution.
Muslim fanatics in Bangladesh have murdered 16 writers that stood for ideas that the fanatics dislike, and the murder campaign is accelerating.
China has imposed strict rules on foreign NGOs that operate in China to make it hard for them to finance local organizations.
The UK thugs have often collaborated hand with the rich and their media outlets against the rest of Britain. The coverup and denial of the Hillsborough killings were an example.
Obama Is Chipping Away at the 'New Jim Crow'. But More Needs To Be Done.
Germany is proposing measures that would make offshore tax evasion somewhat more difficult.
However, this would have no effect on tax dodging which is lawful.
In places where ISPs make users pay to access anything but Facebook and/or Wikipedia, they use those services for file sharing.
File sharing is good, and ought to be legal. Shame on that article for supporting the publishers' smear campaign by calling sharing "piracy".
I understand that Wikipedia does not want to be a site for file sharing. Besides which, it has a specific purpose, and letting people post whatever they wish is not it. Still, they should not support the smear campaign.
It is also a mistake to refer to works as "content".
US congresscritters have hired former tax-dodger lobbyists to write the tax regulations.
Australian Greens call for a tax on mines to pay for the environmental damage they do.
Chatbots are ideal for phishing, because they are running on a server that isn't yours.
Any speech recognition running on a server that isn't yours, you can't trust.
US citizens: call on Wall Street to stop giving "golden parachutes" to employees that move to government appointments.
The president should not appoint such people. Sanders would not.
US citizens: stand with striking Verizon employees.
US citizens: call on the Senate to pass Biotechnology Food Labeling and Uniformity Act.
Everyone:
call on
Niger to raise the age for marriage so that teenagers are not
forced into marriage.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-29 because the old link was broken.]
It is wrong to refer to teenagers as "children" — that tends to encourage people to disrespect their rights. They are adolescents. Forced marriage is bad enough that we need not exaggerate by calling the victims "children".
Over a million people in the UK live in destitution, meaning they can't afford the basic necessities of life.
The Tories put them in destitution by systematically searching for opportunities for dooH niboR. Their policies for driving rents up and driving wages down contributed too.
The Tories are lower than vermin — Aneurin Bevan.
A UK court found that 96 football fans that died in Hillsborough stadium in 1989 were killed by the negligence of thugs.
The thugs started constructing their cover-up almost immediately.
Bangladesh's Democracy Is at Risk if Sheikh Hasina Does Not Stop Extremists [from murdering those that disagree with them].
If Not Now, When? Young Jews Refuse to Stay Silent on the Occupation This Passover.
"Nestlé Is Trying to Break Us": A Pennsylvania Town Fights Predatory Water Extraction.
Protests have broken out in Cairo, so strongly that the state can't entirely suppress them.
How ironic that the protests that the Egyptian regime arise on an issue of misconceived patriotism.
According to the Egyptian state, the two islands in question belonged to Salafi Arabia all along, and its king asked Egypt to station troops on them in case Israel tried to occupy them. I have no reason to doubt that this is true, but apparently Egyptians won't take al-Sisi's word for it.
Whistleblowers who complain about abuse of prisoners in Australia's offshore immigration prisons face mockery and punishment.
Smoking reduction measures in Germany are quite effective; few young people start smoking there now.
Plans and models for coping with global heating should not presume we will soon be able to remove CO2 from the atmosphere in substantial quantities.
US citizens: call on Congress to support the Murphy-Paul-Lieu-Yoho law to limit arms sales to Salafi Arabia.
US citizens: Thank the legislators that defended freedom of speech by opposing bills to censor advocacy of boycott, divestment and sanctions towards Israel.
I do not support this campaign; rather, I support Gush Shalom's campaign to boycott companies that profit from Israel's colonies in Palestinian territory. However, whatever we think of the Palestinian BSD campaign as substance, we must all support people's right to advocate that policy (and various other policies).
Pressuring Australia to cut its giant subsidies for fossil fuels.
Congress Demands to Know How Many [US] Citizens Are Being Spied On [by the NSA].
"Intelligent assistants" that listen to everything you say might someday discern your intentions to buy something. Or at least they might convince you that you intended to buy it.
US citizens: call on Obama to order no more oil and gas drilling in Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico.
US citizens: tell the US government to Keep federal lands federal — don't give them to states to sell off.
Everyone: call on the US Exim Bank not to support a coal plant next to the Sundarbans.
The kelp forests of Northern California are dying across a broad region. Other species that depend on kelp are dying too.
No one knows why this is happening, but global heating and El Niño may play a role.
Uber doesn't make things easy for people whose accounts have been stolen.
Michigan Officials Charged in Flint Water Poisoning, But Gov. Snyder Has Not Even Been Questioned.
The idea that he didn't know about this, while paying close attention to little details of other issues, is not credible.
People in part of New Orleans are being invited to report "suspicious" activities, such as people sleeping on the street, people walking while Black, etc.
This is being aimed at a neighborhood undergoing gentrification, and seems tailor-made to help force the poorer "undesirables" out.
Another professor in Bangladesh has been assassinated by religious fanatics. The victim this time was, it appears, a secularist but did not campaign for secularism.
The National Coordinating Center for Communications monitors the status of cell phone networks in the US, and can shut them down, too.
EFF and ACLU Expose Government's Secret Stingray Use in Wisconsin Case.
Why destroying Kenya's collection of confiscated ivory is the right way to protect elephants.
Considering how hard it is to burn ivory, and how much CO2 that generates, I wonder if there is some other safe and effective way of ruining it for sale. If ivory is chopped into small pieces, do they biodegrade?
The FCC is investigating rules to make ISPs protect users' privacy, but the proposals don't go far enough.
The ISP need to know what you are currently connecting to, but it has no need to remember what you connected to more than a minute ago. It should not be allowed to remember this, except under a specific court order.
Why Do People Get So Upset When The Government Helps The Poor?
Applications to help women get pregnant are spyware, to help companies find out who is pregnant (and who wants to be).
Fate of World's Coastlines Rests on Melting Antarctic Ice.
Chimpanzees prefer their vegetables cooked, and will save food for later in order to have a chance to cook it.
A group of congresscritters have demanded that the NSA report how many US citizens' data the NSA has collected "incidentally" through PRISM.
Egyptian Ministry of Interior Accuses Reuters of 'Spreading False News'. Journalists could be sentenced to 3 years in prison for this.
For the Egyptian tyranny, any critical news is "false" by definition.
Medical businesses are spending heavily to defeat a proposed single-payer medical system in Colorado.
The single-payer system is good, but the way it will be paid for is badly designed. It should come from income tax instead so as to make the rich pay a bigger share.
UK immigration has a habit of denying asylum with careless snap judgments, deporting people who are likely to be tortured and so on.
It will now make that carelessness harder to resist by charging so much for an appeal that most refugees won't be able to afford it.
The "need" to charge more only exists because the government is giving that money to rich people by letting them pay little tax.
Investigative journalist Nick Turse reports on how he filed 300 Freedom of Information Act requests in a year, all for his investigative work. The Pentagon calls him a troll, and wants the law changed to block such investigations.
London Next in International Campaign to Stop Pearson (Mis)Education.
A lawsuit in Chile aims to ban the use of surveillance balloons that track everybody everywhere on the street.
Tony B'liar's staff were warned in 2001 by the head of counterterrorism in MI6 that Dubya's plans to invade Iraq would inspire terrorists.
Either he ignored this, and was incompetent, or he secretly welcomed the opportunity this would offer him to look tough by attacking Britons' freedom, and was a traitor.
The UK Labour Party refused to sell McDonalds a booth at the party conference, because McDonalds persistently refuses to negotiate with workers that are trying to form a union.
I would say "Bravo!" except that this shouldn't be seen as exceptional. It should be a "no brainer". The fact that it isn't so seen, that some even question it, is a measure of how far New Labour took it into supporting plutocracy. I am glad to see it reinvigorated.
The plutocratist Labour Party, like the Clinton-Obama wing of the Democratic Party, won't try to do anything more than slow the surrender to the rich.
A well-meaning "local currency" project seems to have total surveillance as a byproduct.
I can't understand how people who presumably do not like massive surveillance can set this issue completely aside when they judge projects and products that track people. If we want to continue having democracy, we must build systems that surveil less.
I was disgusted to see today that the only way to pay for street parking in Paris (at least on the street where I am staying) is with some sort of credit card. That tracks people's movements. Even if the card is not associated with any person, the system will record that the same person paid for parking in a series of places. This is creeping total surveillance, and we must hate every single step in this campaign against our rights.
Omar al-Bashir, tyrant of Sudan, keeps on having his thugs kill students.
Big companies such as Google and Facebook have built large installations close to sea level, and they are going to get flooded.
Reporters Without Borders now ranks the US as number 41 in freedom of the press, because of Obama's persistent attacks on journalists' sources (i.e., whistleblowers).
This is where the US has a duty to be number 1.
Faisal bin ali Jaber continues to sue for information about the US drone attack that killed his relatives.
To stop global heating, it is vital to make the rich pay taxes by ending their tax-dodging.
Poor countries need 4 trillion dollars through 2030 to reduce their emissions as much as they have already pledged, and those pledges are far from sufficient to avoid disaster.
A proposed business-supremacy treaty for Asia includes restrictions on generic medicines, and would stop India from providing many generic drugs to poor people in a number of other countries.
As with other business-supremacy treaties, often referred to misleadingly as "free trade treaties" by their supporters, there is no good in this treaty. The countries involved should kill it.
It is a fundamental mistake to call these restrictions "intellectual property" because that leads people to confuse them with unrelated issues such as copyright law. Every time that term is used, it spreads confusion — so please, don't use it!
A new natural gas pipeline to Massachusetts has been blocked.
The public in the US and Europe has turned against the TPP. Will that be enough to stop it?
The Netherlands shut down an encrypted communication service, Ennetcom, on the grounds that some of its users were using it do crime.
This seems rather dangerous to me.
Foods and supplements can't "boost your immune system".
Torture victims will be allowed to sue the psychologists that designed the CIA's torture program, and subpoena documents about it.
After Turkish academics condemned the gratuitous war against Kurds in Turkey, Erdoğan can't decide whether to accuse them of "terrorist propaganda" or "insulting Turkishness".
This is absurd. Those academics do honor to Turkishness; it is Erdoğan whose conduct insults Turkishness.
US citizens:
call
on Obama to veto the dirty energy bill.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-29 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens: tell the Treasury Department not to allow pension cuts for the Central States Pension Fund.
US citizens: call on the Senate to protect net neutrality by rejecting the bill designed to kill it.
The FCC's network neutrality regulations are not strong enough, but what SCROTUS want is none at all.
SCROTUS = Sleazy Congressional Republicans Of The United States.
Citizens of Massachusetts:
Call
for closing a loophole in campaign funding law.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-29 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens: ask your congresscritter to cosponsor the bill to audit the Pentagon.
After a Syrian or Russian plane bombed a hospital in Aleppo, the cease-fire has nearly collapsed.
Gene therapy has successfully treated a kind of blindness.
Investigating the causes of the US attack on the MSF hospital in Kunduz. It seems to have really been confusion. I wouldn't expect the US Army to attack a hospital intentionally. Journalists, maybe.
When a Robot Kills, Is It Murder or Product Liability?
The Mika Model story starts where Ex Machina leaves off. But the part with the screwdriver is not credible. The company would just send a command to shut the robot down.
The Marshall Islands are suffering the worst drought ever recorded.
Trump's big "foreign policy" statement is incoherent, packed with self-contradictions.
I think this is because he decided to include all the points that might appeal to voters he seeks, and did not consider contradictions a problem. Perhaps he knows that his supporters won't be careful enough to notice them.
Republicans: It's OK for Corporations to Kill Workers.
Volkswagen and Shell are lobbying the EU not to reduce car emissions.
The civil war in South Sudan may have ended; the leaders of the two warring parties have started a "transitional government".
I wish them success at it.
Before British colonization, the Dinka and the Nuer used to be at war all the time, but they didn't have firearms.
A study found that some neonicotinoid pesticides harm bumblebee colonies,but one other neonicotinoid does not harm them.
There are many species of wild bees, and it is possible that the one that doesn't harm these bumblebees may harm other bees.
UK Greens: "Greens are often critical of the status quo. No wonder the police monitor us."
Some US charter school chains conceal the information that would help the public judge whether they do a good job.
Obama admitted, more or less, that the UK is of no particular importance in US policies.
Of course, we've known since Tony B'liar gave Dubya everything he wanted that the "special relationship" has a name: "subservience" or "vassalage".
Philip Nitschke, advocate for those who want to die, says that Avril Henry felt compelled to kill herself sooner than she would have preferred, from fear that she would be committed to a hospital/prison for planning an eventual suicide.
Even though she was fighting only to avoid her own pointless suffering, that was a worthy goal, and she was admirably level-headed and decisive about it. Her death was the world's loss, but we had no grounds to force her to stay alive, and it would have been wrong to do so by turning her life into hell.
Nitschke has been made a pariah for refusing to judge good and bad reasons for committing suicide.
I don't agree with him entirely. Many people want to commit suicide from depression; the depression may be treated, or spontaneously end, and then they will probably be glad they are still alive. It makes sense to stop them from making an irrevocable decision.
However, there are also same people who want to commit suicide for sane reasons, and they should be allowed to do so and should be entitled to practical help in arranging to be able to do so.
As countries lackadaisically sign the Paris climate agreement and take hesitant steps to do not enough, the treaties' climate goals are slipping out of reach.
Will Real-World Emissions Tests Clean Up Diesel Cars?
To See the Real Story in Brazil, Look at Who is Being Installed as President — and Finance Chiefs.
A large dam project in Brazil's Amazonia has been stopped because it would inundate indigenous people's land.
A large coral reef has been discovered at the mouth of the Amazon River, and oil companies are already working on killing it.
College Could Be Free In America If Corporations Paid Reagan-Era Taxes.
A Michigan official asked a technician in 2008 to artificially disguise high lead readings in drinking water.
Papua New Guinea's Supreme Court ruled that it is unconstitutional to accept forced transfer of refugees from Australia. It is not clear what effect that will have, since Australia refuses to take them back.
A man writes about how his stepfather's violence crippled his mother, and in a way him also.
I used to hear, on Saturday nights, my father belittling and insulting his wife. I don't think he went as far as to hit her, but he made her miserable. And I felt miserable for her.
Pearson is privatizing the admissions decisions for teacher training in the US.
The usual pattern with privatization is that the company cuts corners, pays peanuts, and does a bad job. According to that letter, that's what's happening here.
Oklahoma thugs tried to steal $53,000 raised for charity by Burmese musicians, by claiming (against all evidence) that it had something or other to do with illegal drugs.
The CIA used prisoner Abu Zubaydeh as a guinea pig for torture methods for years, claiming he was a member of al-Qa'ida even though it already knew this was not true.
Now it wants to keep him in solitary confinement forever so that he can't testify about the way he was tortured.
Merrick Garland, proposed by Obama for the Supreme Court, sits now on the appeals court that has waited for years without ruling on Abu Zubaydeh's habias corpus petition. If he ever gets a hearing in Congress, I hope someone has the courage to pressure him about this.
But that won't affect my conclusions about whether he should be on the Supreme Court. He's not a progressive, he's a plutocrat.
Boston College has been ordered to hand over taped interviews that supporters of the IRA made, after they were promised these would be shown to others only after they were dead.
The latest digital technology is perfect at taking note of everything you do, and informing various companies and states about it.
The article says "Your devices", which presumes the reader has fallen into the trap. I hope you don't accept products like this.
"Privacy violations erode individuals' rights to autonomously make their own decisions and exercise individual power."
In the UK, as in the US, the tax authorities harp on the non-rich for small sums, but don't bother with the rich.
In the US, this was a political choice, probably because most of Congress has been bought.
In the TTIP, Chevron lobbied for the power to sue states if they take measures to curb global heating.
Various possible replacements for the "War on Drugs".
A war that's on drugs is especially dangerous because it tends to attack everyone indiscriminately.
One reason many people eat too much is that we have become accustomed to large plates.
Sheldon Adelson has turned the Las Vegas Review-Journal into a personal propaganda rag, prohibiting a columnist from criticizing him. The columnist, John L Smith, has quit in response.
Adelson had previously bankrupted Smith with a bogus defamation lawsuit.
Asha Moni, widow of murdered Bangladeshi secularist blogger Niladry Chattopadhya, says, "I must survive to seek justice," as she expects she is also a target.
Almost 80% of Junior Doctors (across England) Took Part in All-Out Strike. "Junior doctor" in the NHS includes a large fraction of the doctors.
There are now Salafi militias in Yemen, due apparently to the intervention by Salafi Arabia.
The NAACP's campaign against North Carolina's voter-ID law lost the first battle.
Brazil is considering a "cyber crime" bill that could impose broad and arbitrary censorship, as well as threatening users' anonymity.
5 billion dollars in penalty for Goldman Sachs would be just the cost of doing business— but the US government was so subservient that it will let company off paying substantial parts of that.
Trachoma could be eradicated for just a billion dollars.
Visiting investigators say that Mexican officials refused to cooperate with their investigation into the massacre of 43 students, about two years ago.
The CIA with help from Georgetown University, is censoring cold war history.
ALEC wants to keep poor people from suing, effectively end workman's compensation, and stop the US government from acting to end depressions.
If Britain leaves the EU, it will be an opportunity to escape from present and past business-supremacy treaties. But the Tories won't use it for that — quite the contrary.
What they want to get rid of is the European human rights treaty.
The UK government is now attacking the independence of the BBC. That follows a path made by Berlusconi.
Meanwhile, in the US there's no need for right-wing state control of PBS and NPR, because the same companies that mostly give orders to the state have lots of control over them.
Cruz and Kasich decided to work together to block Trump from the Republican nomination.
I don't agree that Trump is the worst of them all. All the Republican and Democratic candidates are lousy except for Sanders. While Trump blazed a new trail of overt hostility to Mexicans and Muslims, the other Republican candidates are probably more serious than he is in their hostility to women and poor people.
Meanwhile, Clinton has supported coups d'etat south of the border and bombs lots of muslims already.
Sanders is the only major party candidate that i will vote for. My second choice would be the Green Party candidate.
Chinese Journalist Sentenced to Nearly 5 Years for 'Provoking Trouble'.
Everyone: File a public comment asking California not to resume executions.
Malia Bouattia, elected head of the UK's National Union of Students, faces accusations of antisemitism for attacking Zionism.
England's NHS doctors, most of them, are planning an indefinite strike rather than accept the contract that the government wants to impose by edict.
The government's goal is to destroy the NHS, and paying its staff too little is the chosen method.
The issue affects only England as the other zones of the UK have separate NHS policies.
US citizens: call for moving marijuana out of Schedule 1, so as to stop pretending it has no medical use.
The UK government is talking about requiring foreign companies to disclose their true owners when they buy property in the UK or bid for government contracts.
That is a step in the right direction, but it should not be so limited. It should be a condition, for a payment to a foreign company to be deductible as a business expense, for that foreign company to disclose who owns it. That would come close to making it a requirement for doing business in the UK.
To avoid 2C of global heating, countries must strengthen their Paris Agreement pledges pretty soon.
But even 2C is too much.
Obama should declare a climate emergency and block US oil exports. That would not be enough to prevent global heating disaster, but it would be a step in the right direction. Even more important, it would set an example of recognizing how serious the problem is.
US citizens: call on Obama to block the merger of Syngenta and ChemChina.
Distribution of "child" pornography is now hidden on sites that normally appear to have only adult pornography. The result is that people trying to download the adult pornography may get "child" pornography they did not want. They could be jailed for this.
This is yet more proof that it is intolerable to prosecute people for having downloaded something, or having a copy of something — no matter what that something is.
Be careful not to take the term "child abuse images" on face value. It's accurate for some of the images, which are photos of real sexual abuse of real children, but not all of them. Some of the "children" are adolescents, or even adults that appear to be adolescents, and others are not real people at all.
The inhabitants of Ni'lin village continue regular nonviolent protests against the Israel wall that cut them off from their farmland, and Israel keeps attacking them.
US citizens: call on the Treasury Department to launch investigations of tax dodgers revealed by the Panama papers
Audi developed emissions test cheating software in 1999 but didn't use it. Volkswagen got it 10 years later and actually used it.
A Hamas militant put a bomb on a bus, and was killed by wounds from it.
Oakland, California, which used to have lots of slums, is now too expensive for poor people to live in at all.
What the Bay Area needs is a lot of non-luxurious housing built near mass transit lines.
Two FBI agents carried out a multi-stage plan to steer Khalil Abu Rayyan into terrorism. The first pretended to be in love with him, and broke his heart. Then the second one manipulated his suicidal inclinations by proposing terrorism as a substitute.
The plan didn't actually work: he didn't do anything. But it gave the FBI an excuse to search his house and find that he owned a gun.
Since the only reason to search his house was the plan to entrapment him, the gun should be invalid evidence and all charges should be dropped.
Alan Wainwright, who exposed the UK construction industry's blacklist, is suing because now he seems to be blacklisted.
Cambodia has banned a documentary about assassinated Cambodian activist Chut Wutty, who resisted deforestation.
It appears that the government is thoroughly corrupt and will go to great lengths to protect extractivist business. Killing Chut Wutty was part of that, and this act of censorship is too. Other environmental activists there have been imprisoned.
Maxima Acuña has blocked a big US company from digging a gold mine on the spot where her farm is located. Lawsuits, violence, and sabotage of her crops didn't make her back down, and international support helped her stand up to them.
The mine would have poisoned the whole zone, not just her farm.
The Koch brothers have spent 1.5 million dollars to fight a plan to protect the Grand Canyon region from uranium mining.
RIP Loomis Reef, the coral and the fish, killed by human action.
Extractivists keep saying, "Destruction is so far off that you shouldn't worry about it," until the destruction arrives. Then they say, "There's nothing left to destroy, so why not let us take all we wish?" But there are things elsewhere that we can still save, if we push it.
Face It, Britain's Corporate Fatcats Will Party Until We Turn the Music Off.
One way to turn it off: bring back high income tax rates for high incomes. While plutocratist governments compete to attract rich people to spend some money, democratic governments should ally to make sure the rich pay tax.
The billionaires financing Clinton's campaign are heavily invested in fossil fuels and pipelines.
Students at some US universities, campaigning for divestment from fossil fuels, have occupied school buildings and refuse to leave.
The UK Parliament voted to declare PISSI's attacks against Christians and Yazidis as "genocide".
This is a veiled rebuke to Erdoğan's hidden support for PISSI, but not overt criticism. Too bad — it would have been fun to see him demand prosecution of the UK Parliament for insulting him.
The ministers stubbornly refuse to do what Parliament told them to do.
There has to be a specific reason for such stubbornness. Are they protecting countries that helped PISSI reach the power to commit genocide?
Salafi Arabia's regime demonstrated hostility to visiting Obama, who has not given them the unstinting public support it feels entitled to.
The question is, will he have the courage to help curb the worldwide harm that Salafi Arabia does: oppression of women locally, and spreading extreme, fanatical and patriarchal Islam around the world.
Michigan officials face charges for poisoning Flint's water then lying to cover it up.
I agree that Governor Snyder should be the main target. We don't publicly have proof, but plenty of grounds for investigation.
However, starting by charging the small fry can be a fine way to make them testify against Mr Big.
The Competitive Enterprise Institute, a plutocratist "think tank" whose purpose is paid propaganda, faces investigation for aiding Exxon's global heating denial.
On the correct pronunciation of "Exxon".
Thugs that shot innocent people trying to flee flooded New Orleans have finally been sentenced to many years in prison.
Parents of children murdered in Sandy Hook are suing the gun manufacturer for marketing its product in militaristic ways that appeal to the desire to kill.
So far, global heating has affected the US mainly in less winter cold. As heating continues in this century, it will mean painful summer heat.
Unrelenting Winter Warmth Could Herald Alaska’s Future.
Another reason to leave your smartphone home: the constant search for frequent stimulation makes people more susceptible to boredom.
More trains and buses in the US record passengers' conversations.
Microphones that record all or most of the time should be banned by law in public transit vehicles including taxis.
In the UK, a university education at a non-prestigious university is no longer a path to higher income, but it saddles the student with high debt that is hard to pay off.
Malia Bouattia condemns antisemitism and says that she has always opposed this and other forms of bigotry.
It seems to be a case of the usual right-wing lie that labels all criticism of the occupation of Palestine as "antisemitism".
The leading presidential candidate in the Philippines is somewhat like another Trump, publicly promoting violence. He made a joke about a missionary who was raped and murdered, which may cost him the election.
If poor Filipinos are supporting him because society exploits them and offers them no opportunity, it follows that his campaign is yet another distraction campaign. It's the plutocrats, stupid!
Researchers are tackling the problem of extending the human lifespan.
I am very much in favor of this, but we will have even more need to reduce the birth rate.
Supposing we reduce the birth rate sufficiently, I expect life extension won't cause economic problems. This is because by the time these treatments work well and are quite common, developed countries will probably have an economic system that doesn't require people to work, and most people won't be able to find any work.
But we can't take that for granted. If the plutocrats win, they could force most people into Hunger Games poverty that few will want to extend.
The Egyptian "false news" published by Reuters is that Giulio Regeni was arrested and handed over to "homeland security" on the night he disappeared.
This doesn't prove that "homeland security" tortured and killed him, but it seems plausible from a regime so murderous.
Aggressive marketing of cosmetic surgery covers up the risk, paving the way for social pressure to make many people believe it is their only hope.
The result is a sort of beauty inflation, comparable to grade inflation in a school. When most students get an A, getting a B is in effect describes you as a bad student. When most people who aren't naturally beautiful get cosmetic surgery, an appearance that 40 years ago would have been just fine may now be regarded as ugly.
Anorexia is part of a similar phenomenon.
Republicans that oppose abortion rights mostly shy away from the logical conclusion, which is to treat their female relatives as murderers. So their excuse is to treat women as lacking responsibility for their actions.
The FISA court contrived a strained excuse to let the FBI study the bulk information that the NSA collects without half trying.
Some congresscritters are not happy with this.
Atheist Pastor Sparks Debate by 'Irritating the Church into the 21st Century'.
The amount of annual damage from "natural" disasters continues to increase.
Partly this is due to human activities; for instance, global heating makes droughts and floods happen, and deforestation also makes for worse flooding for the same amount of rain. Partly this is because of increase in human population: more people need to live in the regions that are prone to various sorts of disaster.
In addition to curbing global heating, we also need to curb the human population.
The Koch brothers say they might vote for Clinton.
This confirms that we shouldn't!
Time to Bury the 'Clean Coal' Myth.
Usually it refers to hypothetical future technology and they want you to treat it as given.
Patents will interfere with US marijuana farmers.
Patents should not be allowed to interfere with farmers' large-scale cultivation of crops.
Using the term "intellectual property" to refer to patents is a terrible mistake, because in other articles "intellectual property" refers to copyright, and in yet other articles it refers to trademarks. Patent law is totally different from copyright law, and both of them have nothing to do with trademark law, and confusing them leads invariably to total nonsense.
A decision by the CAFC effectively destroyed the right of first sale in patent law. The EFF asks the Supreme Court to reverse this decision.
New York thugs are being prosecuted for perjury, as well as for beating up a postman based on an irrational grudge.
The problems of people far away can seem very easy to fix with a little imported intervention.
Refuting several fallacious arguments offered by the lobbyists for countries that assist tax dodging.
In many US industries, profits are too high — because companies have effectively limited competition.
How Technology Helps Creditors Control Debtors, and denies ordinary people the possibility of owning things.
I think many of these practices ought to be prohibited by law. Not only because they work for the rich while restricting the liberty of the poor, but because they give publishers too much power.
A new Libyan government has been set up, mainly by foreigners. Some Libyan factions have joined it but others are reluctant. The talk about "security help" suggests that it is a vehicle for intervention, as is the government of Somalia.
I won't say that this is necessarily a bad thing, if it works. Libya is in horrible shape, due to previous US and European help. But this help could go wrong, too.
Hillary's Dance: The Two-Faced Hypocritical 12-Step.
Chemical and radioactive contamination at George Air Force Base makes the military personnel gravely ill and causes birth defects for their children.
US citizens: call on the EPA to close the loopholes in its Risk Management Plan for preventing accidents in chemical plants.
US citizens:
call on HUD
not to sell Americans' home mortgages to Wall Street.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-29 because the old link was broken.]
Palestinian poet Dareen Tatour is on trial in Israel for a poem; the court is judging her based on a translation made by a thug who isn't even qualified as a translator.
Israel has
repeatedly
demolished the houses of Araqib, an old Bedouin village that
Israel refuses to recognize. They keep rebuilding, so Israel proposes
to fine the remaining inhabitants for each day that they have spent in
their village.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-29 because the old link was broken.]
Everyone: tell Tobie Mining and Energy to drop its lawsuit against Colombia.
Colombia blocked a gold mine that could have poisoned part of the Amazon rain forest, and the mining company, based on the US, is now using the US-Colombia business supremacy treaty to sue.
It makes sense to pressure the company to drop the suit, but that's not enough. Colombia and the US should cancel this unjust treaty.
Facebook employees asked if Facebook should "stop Trump" by skewing what messages the useds of Facebook actually see.
It appears Facebook did not try to do this, but nothing prevents it. Which is another reason it is bad to be used by Facebook.
When people talk of "stopping Trump", they usually mean boosting some other candidate who is more or less right-wing, such as Cruz or Clinton. That makes no sense anyway.
India Drought 'Affecting 330 Million People' after Two Weak Monsoons.
The unparalleled heat is adding to the drought.
Chinese censorship systems actively look for Tor nodes so as to block them.
Thailand asks foreign residents to state their social media accounts, bank accounts, and the places where they buy things.
Don't go to Thailand — the state is effectively mad.
Thug representatives testifying to Congress want to add government censorship to the private censorship of corporate "app stores", as a way to ban encryption applications.
Threats by Billionaire Polluters intimidated the EU out of passing laws to curb pollution and greenhouse gases. The company threatened to move production out of the EU.
The right response would have been to tell them, "Get lost — Good riddance!"
It is true that sometimes pollution control laws can encourage companies to move the pollution to another country. That doesn't mean the laws are ineffective, though. Once some countries reduce pollution, it becomes easier to convince other countries to do likewise.
Israel has arrested a group of Jewish terrorists/ that tried to burn down a Palestinian house with a family in it.
This reminds me of what Islamist terrorists have done in Europe.
Why Is Britain Still Selling Saudi Arabia Arms to Use in Yemen?
A foolish protest at a university expresses solidarity with Muslim women who cover their hair as a statement of religious support for patriarchy.
Nobody is born with a hijab. People should have the right to cover their hair, but if you do so as a gesture of support for some religion, any religion, people are entitled to criticize you for that gesture. In particular, feminists may want to denounce the patriarchal religion that you are supporting, one that tells women (only!) that they should be ashamed if they don't do this.
Meanwhile, I suggest that the well-intentioned organizers of this event try organizing a "no hijab" day at a university in Iran, Libya, Salafi Arabia, or even Iraq.
The Council of Europe says that the EU's refugee deal with Turkey violates international law.
The EU should provide a lot more funds for food, shelter, education and health care for Syrian refugees, in the neighboring countries and internally displaced in Syria.
Half the US population lives in zones of dangerous air pollution.
Clinton gained substantially over Sanders in New York, but the fight is not over.
It would be premature to give up now and switch to supporting the Green Party.
In the US: call on American Electric Power to stop funding opponents of the Clean Power Plan.
Several Palestinian prisoners are on hunger strike against prolonged solitary confinement. Some of them have been imprisoned without trial.
US citizens: oppose the bill whose purpose is to sabotage the Endangered Species Act in name of sport.
The French government wants to extend the State of Emergency (i.e., suspended human rights) until the end of July because some important sports events are coming up.
Australian senators have proposed a ban on cosmetics with microbeads. The microbeads kill wildlife.
US citizens: call on Obama not to deliver portable anti-aircraft missiles to Syrian rebels.
The supposedly "secular" Syrian rebels collaborate constantly with al-Nusra (the branch of al Qa'ida) and any arms given to the one find their way to the other.
Thousands of Israelis rallied in support of the soldier that murdered an incapacitated Palestinian stab-attacker in cold blood.
At least one of them carried a sign saying "Kill them all." All Palestinians? All Palestinians suspected of crimes? These protesters also threatened a reporter with violence.
The UN stuck by the crushing "War on Drugs".
93% of the sub-reefs of the Great Barrier Reef have been hit by bleaching.
Bleaching typically leads to death of the coral polyps if it lasts for more than a short time.
The UK government has backed off from gagging scientists from talking about public policy, but it dragged its feet.
The UK arbitrarily ruled that MPs and their relatives are off limits for investigation for money-laundering.
The euro-banksters are starting to reveal what their next set of demands for Greece will be, after the current demands.
They say that these subsequent demands will be imposed if the current "reforms" are not "sufficient to produce" a budget surplus. That is a virtual certainty, since their real effect is to cause contraction and a bigger deficit.
What the banksters are saying is, in effect, "Next year, when it is seen that the gasoline we are throwing on the fire this year has not extinguished it, here's how much more gasoline we intend to throw."
It is a good thing that they are starting to talk about this, because it means that they have abandoned their tactic of pretending that each step is the last one. When Greeks see two steps at once, the current one and the next one, maybe they will rebel.
The FBI had many reasons to conclude that there was little pertinent information in Syed Farook's work phone, and no reason to give for demanding access to it except that there was a part of his day that it didn't know where he was. Its argument was that any gap was a valid argument for attacking all Americans' privacy.
The Swiss Federal Railways will stop collecting data on who rides where using the national rail pass.
This shows governments can respond to public demand not to accumulate data. However, what about the municipal and regional transportation authorities? Do they accumulate the data on their riders' identity, as they check the passes? They too must make a commitment not to do so.
The site makes a vicious claim to use copyright to restrict making links to this page. I spit on that, and you should too. I will never sell advertising on stallman.org, but that is for my own sense of integrity, and has nothing to do with their what they claim to "permit".
Although Obama has spoken some criticism of Salafi Arabia, he insists on continuing to give it everything it wants.
That's an Obama pattern — he does the same for the planet roasters and the banksters.
Erdoğan's latest insult to Turkishness: prosecuting a visiting Dutch journalist for tweets criticizing him.
It is not clear in the article whether she was in Turkey when she tweeted them, but Erdoğan aims to intimidate people world-wide.
Perhaps the Netherlands should post a travel advisory urging people to stay away from Turkey.
Murderer Anders Breivik is blocked from talking to other prisoners, but talks with other people every day. Is it right to call that "solitary confinement"?
"During the Second World War, our parents and grandparents had no doubt: refugee children had to be given succour and safety."
A substantial fraction of men are looking for women they can have sex with while feeling only contempt for them.
I don't understand what those men are thinking. What is the point of sex with someone you don't feel good about? I can't imagine it.
Poland's anti-human-rights government is trying to take control of a new museum built the history of World War II, so as to use it for political purposes.
I must agree with the Polish state that the term "Nazi death camps" is correct and "Polish death camps" is not. Even though Poland was antisemitic, Poles did not establish those camps, or organize rounding up Jews to kill in them. That was done by Germans under the orders of the German government.
However, the idea of prosecuting someone for expressing views about who killed how many Jews is viciously opposed to human rights. Sad to say, Poland is not the first European country to criminalize statements about that subject. France and Germany have set the example of doing so, and it is wrong there too.
Behrouz Bouchani has been given asylum in Papua New Guinea, but he never asked for asylum there. He never wanted to go there. He was forcibly taken there by Australia.
I can understand his not wanting to live in Papua New Guinea. It is not much of a happening place. There is no Iranian or Kurdish community there. And it is hot and humid. Much of Iran is also hot, but not humid like New Guinea.
On the other hand, if one is making the case, "Please let me into your country because they will kill me if I can't leave," it would seem that Papua New Guinea ought to suffice. No one will persecute him there for being a Kurd.
Will they ostracize him for not being a Christian? I don't know.
The suicide rate in the US has increased by 1/4 since 1999.
Important causes seem to be the spread of poverty, and the fact that many Americans don't have coverage for treatment for depression and can't afford to pay for it themselves.
The Nissan Leaf has a built-in cell phone modem which allows effectively anyone to access its computers remotely and make changes in various settings.
That's easy to do because the system has no authentication when accessed through the modem. However, even if it asked for authentication, you couldn't be confident that Nissan has no access. The software in the car is proprietary, which means it demands blind faith from its users.
Even if no one connects to the car remotely, the cell phone modem enables the phone company to track the car's movements all the time.
Someone I know physically disconnected the cell phone modem as a security measure.
Matthew Keys was sentenced to 2 years in prison as an accessory to digital graffiti, demonstrating that the CFAA (Computer Fraud and Abuse Act) is no less unjust now than it was when it was used to drive Aaron Swartz to death.
Industrial chicken farming is cheap only because it does not pay the costs in terms of pollution, CO2 and antibiotic resistance.
For our long-term good, we need to make it pay those costs rather than dumping them on the rest of us.
Turkey has charged thug chiefs, among others, for the murder of Hrant Dink.
I am surprised that this can happen while Erdoğan is president, but I am very glad.
A German is on trial for calling some people "cattle" and "scum".
This reveals how Germany fails to respect freedom of speech. Freedom of speech includes the right to insult anyone and anything. We should defend people's freedom of speech regardless of whether we agree with what they said.
I don't call anyone "cattle" but I've referred to some people as "sheep". (I don't hate them, but I an very disappointed with them.) I am proud to call banksters and SCROTUS scum. Would I be put on trial for saying this in Germany?
Down with censorship!
Making naloxone available where people use opioids (for instance, in their homes) could save many of them from being harmed by overdoses.
The chance that old men develop dementia has fallen considerably in the UK since 20 years ago. Scientists speculate it may be due to adopting healthier lifestyles.
The probability for women has remained mostly the same. I wonder how that probability compares with that for men.
Freddie Gray, One Year Later: Baltimore's Black Residents Still Waiting For Changes.
Smoking tobacco through a water pipe seems to have the same danger as smoking cigarettes.
A new scientific approach confirms that essentially all the global heating since 1950 was caused by human activity.
Many countries have seen urban movements for the rights of the city dwellers.
The Limits to Growth forecasts of 40 years ago were right about pollution (which includes greenhouse gases).
US citizens: file a comment opposing new coal leases on federal land.
The word "empowerment" has been taken over by business and self-promoting celebrities, and changed from "helping some group win equal rights and respect" to "doing anything you chose to do, no matter how frivolous or unimportant."
There's nothing wrong with posting a nude video of yourself, and doing so could help defeat oppressive prudism (which is still a real problem).
However, outside of special circumstances, it's not going to do anything against the world's other big injustices, such as gender or racial discrimination, and plutocracy.
Vice President Biden says Washington must pressure Netanyahu to make peace.
A first step would be to calculate the amount of US aid to Israel based on the rate of decrease of the population of Israeli colonies in the West Bank. Separately, the US could offer to finance housing construction on Israeli territory. The US could also buy colony housing constructed before 2010, and turn it over to Palestinians.
The government of Queensland loosened laws against deforestation, and almost 800 square miles were denuded in 2 years. And that measurement was almost 2 years ago; deforestation has presumably continued apace.
Deforestation is a major contribution to greenhouse gases, so it threatens the whole world.
Proof of the nocebo effect: people who think that electromagnetic fields cause them to suffer really do suffer when interacting with someone else that believes special electromagnetic fields are present — whether that's true or not.
The US Supreme Court accepted the decision that Google Books is fair use.
That is a small victory for all of us against copyright tyranny.
Even negative interest rates don't convince big companies to invest. That's because there is excess capacity, world wide, and investments don't seem worth while in any case.
The way to make the economy grow is the Sanders way: tax the rich and invest heavily in renewable energy. That will put more money in people's pockets, and they will spend some as well as save some.
Imagine a back door in your clothing.
Stephen Lawrence's mother rebuked the head of London thugs for continuing to cover up how thugs spied on the family while the family campaigned for them to do their job properly.
Calling on the World Bank to treat censorship as a reason not to lend to countries that practice it.
Arms fair protesters presented evidence in court to prove that British arms fairs promote illegal arms sales. Now some MPs want to investigate the arms fairs.
What a big victory for these protesters.
'An international disgrace': Jesse Jackson calls for Chicago to close Homan Square.
Teenagers in Colorado have not increased their use of marijuana since it was legalized for adults.
We should not call teenagers "children" — they are adolescents. That error encourages treating them as incapable and trampling their rights.
Moving Australia 100% to renewable energy by 2050 would be a very profitable investment, yielding 90 billion dollars before that year.
There would be even bigger profits afterward.
But this study seems not to count the world-wide benefits of avoiding global heating disaster. Counting that, the rational course of action is a crash program to cut down fossil fuel use much faster.
The asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs also caused the large volcanic eruptions, already in progress, to flow twice as fast.
An Interview With Gustavo Castro, Sole Witness of the Murder of Berta Cáceres.
Proposing tax disobedience by the non-rich to make governments stop letting the rich off the hook.
In the US: call on PEN America to stop working with the Israeli embassy.
Pakistan is in the process of passing a law for arbitrary censorship of the internet.
The Israeli soldier who killed Abed al-Fatah al-Sharif has been charged with manslaughter — a rather weak charge for what appears to be murder of an incapacitated man in cold blood.
It is peculiar that the Guardian obeys a foreign demand to conceal the name of the soldier, who has already been identified in Israel and world-wide.
Many Israelis celebrate that soldier as a hero for this murder, which is disgusting. I won't mention his name, because I don't think he deserves more fame, but it is in the article pointed to above.
Two Russian soldiers captured in Ukraine were tried and sentenced for "terrorism".
I don't know the details of this "terrorism" but I am skeptical about it. They might have committed a war crime, but I have no faith in Ukraine's courts to judge that question honestly. To trade them for Savchenko seems legitimate, but there was no need to try them to do that.
An airplane hit a drone while landing; it was not damaged. However, pilots are concerned that a drone might damage an engine if it were sucked in.
It is important to keep drones away from airports, and it seems reasonable to design them to stay away from certain areas. But I am afraid that this will be done in a way that requires some proprietary software in the drone.
Due to a badly designed communication protocol, anyone can track and snoop on any mobile phone.
Protesters against plutocracy are getting themselves
arrested
daily at the US Capitol building.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-29 because the old link was broken.]
Hamas is once again building tunnels from Gaza into Israel.
Making a tunnel is not in itself violence. It is a preparation for war, but Israel also is preparing for another war. I don't see anything particularly bad about this kind of preparation.
An important and quite old magazine editor in Bangladesh has been arrested.
The article seems inconsistent about the reasons for the arrest. It says "sedition" and talks about suspicion he is planning murder. Which one is he charged with?
But either way, it is clearly wrong. Charging anyone with "sedition" is automatically an injustice. That's not the case with charges of planning murder, but the idea that a respected editor would do that is totally incredible.
Everyone:
call
on the 5 biggest greenhouse emitters to deliver big emissions
reductions.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-29 because the old link was broken.]
Greenpeace activists put gas masks on many statues in London.
Brazil's President Rousseff has been impeached by a vote of many criminals in congress.
It seems a travesty that she is being removed for a much lesser accusation while they can't be removed.
The procedure will be carried out over 180 days.
The IMF calls for more government spending. However, the plutocratists that control most governments are more interested in dooH niboR.
File-sharing has failed once again to kill the movie companies, which are enjoying record profits.
What's especially sad is that most of their profits are for films that are crap. Very likely, you often pay to watch a movie while knowing in advance that it is crap. Why do that?
I recommend joining me in a near-boycott of Hollywood: don't pay to watch a movie unless you have reason to believe it is likely to be good. In principle, that's quite different from an outright boycott; in practice the results are nearly equivalent.
Several US states forbid prisoners from having blogs, even maintained by their friends or relatives in their name. They can be punished by solitary confinement (i.e., brainwashing).
Obama admitted, in effect, that the US government secrecy system is totally broken.
This creates a great opportunity for selective prosecution. Those that the government wants to get can be prosecuted for revealing insignificant "secrets" while those with establishment friends get treated in a reasonable fashion.
The pharmacy company Boots was subject to a leveraged buyout; then it began running its staff ragged, endangering the lives of sick people. Of course, also not paying taxes.
I think it would be appropriate to impose a special tax on companies that have had a leveraged buyout. That would discourage the practice for the future. For the companies that have already suffered a buyout, this could drive them into bankruptcy, at which point they will be sold off for a much lower value to someone who won't have to run them with an extractivist approach.
Real terrorists don't bother with encryption.
There's a persistent pattern that Muslim passengers on US airlines are treated as terrorists for doing things that are totally innocent.
It's a form of systematic bigotry, comparable to the systematic bigotry that leads many US thugs to irrationally regard black males as threats, and kill them.
Implausible fantasy situations, as unlikely as the "trolley problem", are regularly used to justify torture and drone bombings.
I've also written about why the trolley problem is not pertinent to real life moral choices.
The cease-fire in Yemen has not worked: Salafi Arabia continues its US-supported bombardment.
US citizens: tell the National Marine Fisheries Services to recommend protecting manta rays under the Endangered Species Act.
The Pastafarian Church has conducted its first wedding.
Thousands marched "against terror and hate" in Brussels, calling for an end to useless and harmful "security" measures.
The Afghan army uses schools for military purposes, sometimes even when children are there.
Dawkins is right: when a fetus has Down's syndrome, you should abort it and try again.
(Some) mothers can indeed love a child with grave handicaps, but that's no excuse for saddling the child with them.
Methods for ending tax dodging, both the legal kind and the illegal kind. The only hard part is building a movement powerful enough to actually do it.
With enough political will, a state can simply refuse to treat payments to a hidden company as business expenses. They will more or less disappear, then.
An interview with Lula about Brazil's political crisis.
A quarter of British Muslims want to impose Islamic law, which means they are against many human rights. Half of them want to prohibit homosexuality. About 40% are against equality for women.
We must respect people's freedom to choose their beliefs in the sphere of religion, but that doesn't mean we can't condemn their choices.
We don't have to ignore people's religious views in deciding whether to admit them as immigrants. It is rational to refuse to admit immigrants who hold the views that many British Muslims hold.
One way to do this, which has the virtue of rejecting to fanaticism regardless of which religion it is inspired by, is to require immigrants to sign a public declaration in favor of equality and human rights. That implies, in particular, rejection of Islamic law and inequality. Those willing to put their names publicly on this statement are ok.
Thugs and religious fanatics joined to attack a feminist art festival in Indonesia.
This is what US support for Salafi Arabia has wrought.
Human Rights Watch: Why We Need to Ban Killer Robots.
They would allow countries to bring about likely war crimes for which no one would be legally responsible.
The UK government is about to gag state-funded scientists from talking about the political implications of their research.
Living near a highway, like 10% of Americans, is bad for your health due to the air pollution, including ultrafine particles.
I suppose that poor Americans are more likely to live near highways, so this explains part of the 14-year difference in life expectancy between rich and poor American males.
I think these ultrafine particles are what diesel engines produce so much of, and Volkswagen was found to be falsifying in emissions tests.
Raising cattle on grass rather than farmed grain avoids causing antibiotic resistance, as well as being far more efficient.
If we ate only the beef that can be grown this way, we would eat less beef and that would be good for our health.
Snowden points out that "We didn't break any laws" is not an excuse for pursuing journalists' sources.
Shoe manufacturer New Balance says the US government offered it a contract in exchange for not condemning the TPP.
Obama said that intervening in Libya was his biggest mistake, but history will say that was the TPP and such like.
An automatic basic income for citizens is about to be tested by Finland and maybe Switzerland.
A heatwave in the sea is playing havoc with marine life near Tasmania.
Dr. Avril Henry killed herself at age 81 because various illnesses were making her life unbearable. She was already too sick to go to Switzerland for help in suicide, but her suffering could have continued for many years.
To get materials for this, she had to fool thugs who tried forcibly to prolong her suffering.
I am sorry for her that she became so ill that she could not have a life worth living, and glad for her that she succeeded in escaping in the only possible way. As for the thugs, shame on them for their "illogical and cruel" policy of forcing the innocent to suffer.
Hilary Clinton is the most hawkish candidate in the two main parties. She seems to have learned nothing from the repeated failures and backfires of US interventions.
Criminals and terrorists get AK47s in the EU through a simple scheme: they are modified simply to "deactivate" them, sold lawfully, then criminals revert the change to make them work again.
The European Union has known about this for almost a decade but is only beginning to think about changing the laws to stop it.
The banksters' imposed spending cuts and their attacks on Greece's industries have produced the expected economic contraction, and increased deficit; so now, as predicted, they demand even more cuts.
Greece will have to default. The sooner, the better, since each year of surrender to the banksters' attacks enables them to make Greece weaker and more helpless. Greece will need to act aggressively, looking for any and all threats it can make against the banksters and their institutions — including ways to cause a bigger crisis.
The Real Reason Dilma Rousseff's Enemies Want Her Impeached.
Don't believe quack claims for treatments to "cleanse" or "detox" the inside of your body.
What's worse for a Silicon Valley executive: ties to the Chinese military or friends in the US Defense Department?
In Iran, political prisoners don't get proper medical care.
The prohibition of abortion in Nigeria drives women to illegal abortions and regularly they die.
Although the Panama papers came from a business in Panama, it would be a mistake to single out Panama for blame.
However, we should not let Panama off the hook. All the governments that bow down to the plutocrats in ways that hurt the public are to blame, Panama included.
It sounds like Panama allows companies to route income through Panama and thus avoid taxes on it, and that is a specifically bad policy.
GCHQ grabs all sorts of private data bases with information about all sorts of people.
93 different diesel cars tested recently in Europe all failed emissions tests in real driving, even though they did not have specific "defeat devices" to cheat.
What they do have are systems that have many tunable parameters: enough that it is possible to tune them to reduce emissions under the sort of conditions found in the test, while increasing performance at the cost of excessive emissions in other circumstances.
There would be less pressure to create this sort of problem if the state's method for bringing about greenhouse gas emissions were a general carbon tax instead of specific measures such as "Make more diesel cars." However, the way to end this particular abuse is to test car emissions by real driving.
Replacing coal with wood from forests that won't recover after being logged does not constitute renewable energy.
Russia is flying artillery into Aleppo, apparently planning to terminate the cease-fire and attack the Syrian rebels supported by the US and various tyrannical regimes.
Mitsubishi admitted falsifying emissions data for 600,000 cars, and the Japanese investigators raided an office to look for documents.
Job opening at the Free Software Foundation.
Sanders campaign’s commitment to victory irritates media, offends Clinton campaign.
How can the Guantanamo prison be closed?
Berta Cáceres's daughter asks European countries to stop aid to Honduras to pressure for human rights.
The US deserves a president who won't support coups such as the one that crushed human rights in Honduras. In other words, not Clinton.
New York State removed a large fraction of voters from the electoral rolls before the primary this week.
Some voters are suing.
There were other obstacles to voting, too.
UK Spy Agencies Have Collected Bulk Personal Data Since 1990s, Files Show.
Even when the data is about persons "of interest", that should not mean it is ok for them to collect whatever data they can get.
Australia brought back 54 minors from prison on Nauru. Half of them show mental illness.
Drought in Africa means more than just crop failure — people actually have trouble getting enough water to drink.
Calling on Australia to close the loopholes that enable shell companies to dodge taxes.
San Francisco has adopted a law that new buildings must have solar generation or solar water heating on the roof, unless they are over 10 storeys tall.
Instead of that strange exception, they should require taller buildings to have solar panels on the south-facing walls as well as on the roof.
Activists in Oakland, California are fighting to block a new coal export terminal.
It is crazy to boost the coal trade; it shows the US is not serious about avoiding disaster. The only redeeming feature is that maybe no one will buy the coal. China is cutting down its use of coal, to reduce air pollution that makes it impossible for cities to operate; India mines its own coal. The investment of building coal terminals could be wasted.
But we can't be sure of that, so it is important to fight against the terminal.
Going from 1.5C of global heating to 2C would mean a big increase in worldwide disasters.
A leak of radioactive waste at Hanford, perhaps the largest ever, is very dangerous to workers trying to clean it up, and will increase the contamination of the whole site.
Why Isn’t Everyone In Favor of Taxing Financial Speculation?
The US could also direcly limit the kinds of financial derivatives that may be traded.
South Australia already gets half its electricity from wind and solar power.
A program to subsidize building owners in buying batteries would quickly go the rest of the way.
Why does Obama threaten to veto a bill that would allow victims of the September 2001 terror attacks to sue foreign governments if they are responsible?
Maybe because he doesn't want the US government to be sued for things like drone bombings. Or maybe he is defending Salafi Arabia. Both reasons are bad. Maybe it is both. He may not want Yemenis to sue the US for providing weapons that Salafi Arabia is using to bomb civilians there. Both Sanders and Clinton support the bill, but Sanders also calls for publication of what the government's report said about Salafi Arabia.
As for the Salafi threat to sell some assets in the US, the US should not cower in fear of that. On the contrary, it suggests that Salafi Arabia has reason to expect it will lose such a lawsuit. The US needs to stop supporting Salafi Arabia in any case, so that it can't keep spreading fanatical Islam around the world.
US citizens: tell Congress you support the bill to impose stricter conditions on US arms for Salafi Arabia.
The country's official name is "Saudi Arabia", but "Salafi Arabia" reminds people of that country's most important export: an oppressive and fanatical form of Islam.
Khairuldeen Makhzoomi, who moved to the US from Iraq as a child, was taken off a flight in the US because another passenger found it suspicious that he was speaking Arabic.
High-tech traps are designed to eradicate the feral cats that threaten Australia's small wildlife.
Maybe in the future it will be possible to eradicate other feral animals that endanger unusual local species in other places.
Oxfam reports hat the world's rich are rapidly grabbing the world's wealth from the poor: they have taken a trillion dollars since 2010.
They do this with dooH niboR policies designed to take from the poor and give to the rich. Often these actions are lawful, but that doesn't make them legitimate.
The rich are not entitled to hold on to this wealth merely because the laws they procured legalized their grab. We must strengthen Robin Hood so that he defeats dooH niboR.
Tens of thousands marched in London against bleed-the-poor "austerity" policies.
Neoliberalism — the Ideology at the Root of All Our Problems.
Renewable energy investment has succeeded in decoupling economic growth from growth in greenhouse gas emissions.
The UK's new catch-22 for low-paid workers who are forced to work unpredictable hours demands they come frequently and uselessly to appointments at a "jobcenter", and if their working hours make them miss an appointment, they get fined.
The Tories' general aim is to take as much as possible for the rich that they serve, and generate excuses to condemn and crush everyone else.
Verizon is forcing customers to switch from copper lines to fiber through a policy of refusing to fix those.
This March set a new global heat record for March.
Each of the last 11 months has set a global record for that month.
UK spy agencies presented secret evidence to quash the lawsuits of Libyan dissidents that those agencies handed over to Qadhafi's regime for torture.
This demonstrates how such secret evidence perverts justice.
German "defamation" law is extremely broad censorship.
This shows why we must fight all attempts to criticize "hate speech." People have a right to insult anyone, even you or me.
The US State Department's report on human rights in Salafi Arabia is a gross whitewash of the US-supported bombing campaign in Yemen.
The idea of a tool to determine whether a driver's phone was used for text messaging at the time of an accident is fine in principle, but it is almost impossible in practice unless it snoops on a lot more than that.
I get the impression Android Auto is based on using proprietary software to restrict users.
SCROTUS gave cable companies a present by passing a bill that threatens the FCC's network neutrality requirements.
SCROTUS = Sleazy Congressional Republicans Of The United States.
In the US, rich men live 14 years longer than poor men. Now dooH is taking years from the poor and giving them to the rich.
Syed Farook's iPhone turned out to have nothing interesting on it, but it was a handy excuse to try to set a precedent.
The Solution to the Migrant Crisis is Jobs in Low Income Countries.
However, that should not be taken as a reason to replace well-paid workers with poverty wages. The right way to boost jobs in poor countries is to block the rich elites of those countries from sneaking their wealth into tax havens.
A collection of recordings of the sounds of wildlife is now the only remnant of many wild places that humans have destroyed.
Don't believe Time Magazine's national debt panic — it's as wrong now as it was before.
This Study Shows How Low Corporate America's Taxes Really Are, But Tax-Dodging CEOs Complain about High Rates All the Same.
One less than obvious injustice of many internet services is that they decide what "service" means. If you use these more than very rarely, their algorithms run your life.
Many of the companies they talk about have bigger, absolute injustices which absolutely rule out their use. Facebook, Netflix, Amazon and Uber are examples. But even if a site isn't outright unjust, using it to the point that its algorithms control your life is unjust.
Is the UK refusing to recognize PISSI's genocide a matter of catering to Erdogan?
Over a thousand species of animals and plants have been moved by humans because humans endanger their survival in their original ranges.
US citizens: call on Congress to pass the Tax Filing Simplification Act of 2016.
In Arizona, poor people have often voted by absentee ballots which volunteers bring to the polling place. This is because there are too few polling places where poor people live. Now the antidemocratic politicians of Arizona have passed a law to imprison those volunteers.
Never mind arguing whether the embarrassment of dating a sex worker should remain private, or be exposed. The main wrong here is whorephobia.
Canada's New Democratic Party has made itself useless with a swing to the right, a la Bill Clinton and Tony B'liar. Now it is considering adopting a platform to really address national and world problems.
Sanders announced in the debate the need to support Palestinians against the Israeli occupation, and criticized Netanyahu for unjustified violence.
Protesters arrested at a London arms fair argued in court that they were preventing crimes…and the judge dropped the charges.
It is pretty clear that digital technology is increasing unemployment and driving down wages.
We need to defeat the plutocrats and share their income with the non-rich.
Merkel authorized prosecution of a German comedian for insulting Erdoğan.
Since the existing law says that such prosecutions require authorization from the government, Merkel is telling a falsehood when she claims that the decision is not for her to make and she is only recognizing independence of the courts.
If the case results in repeal of that law, at least there will be a positive outcome.
SCROTUS's latest attack on women is a bill to ban choosing an abortion based on the sex or race of the fetus.
Some feminists want to ban sex-selection abortions, because they are often based on a preference for male children. I've warned that this position is misguided and would put abortion rights in danger.
An article about tracking down a swatter shows details that could provide an easy way to stop swatting: just take note when the call to 911 is not a local call.
Apple internally expects iThings to last only 3 years.
A UK privatized prison company has been fined 100 times for violating its contracts.
For such companies, contracts are made for cheating on.
Norway's giant investment fund has divested from coal companies.
Australia is attacking journalism by accessing journalists' phone records.
A refugee dumped by Australia in Nauru tried to commit suicide. He didn't die, and was prosecuted instead.
Journalists are effectively excluded from Nauru so there is not much good information about how these refugees are treated.
Learning about what psychedelics do to the brain, from brain scans.
A UK food bank organization warns that dependence on their aid is now normal for poor people in the UK.
The Tory goal, though Tories don't openly admit it, is to stop helping poor Britons survive. This shows how successful their policies have been.
Missing Mexican Students Abducted in Front of Federal Police, Witness Says.
Coal vs Coral: will Australia destroy the Great Barrier Reef with coal mining?
The chutzpah of those who help the rich dodge taxes: "If it isn't illegal, you can't blame me."
What nonsense! Impoverishing the rest of society does not become ok just because the rich procure a law that lets them do it.
When it isn't illegal, we cannot prosecute them for it. But we can condemn them as enemies of society, boycott them, shun them and ostracize them — as part of the movement to make their tax-dodging illegal.
Burundi's tyrant is sending death squads into refugee camps in Tanzania.
A Chinese human rights lawyer has been arrested, apparently for posting information about the secret offshore bank accounts of relatives of high officials.
Beef, soy, palm oil, and wood products are the main causes of tropical deforestation.
Beyond blaming the victim: investigating the victim. Students at Brigham Young University who report being raped are suspected of violating the "honor code", and are investigated for this.
This reminds me of countries where, under unjust Islamic law, women who are raped are convicted of having sex outside marriage.
Goldman Sachs vs. Democracy Spring: America's Two-Tiered Justice System on Full Display.
Western companies should stop collaborating with Chinese censorship.
Corbyn says that leaving the EU would allow Tories to attack the rights of workers and the non-rich.
The EU is undemocratic, and should be abolished if it isn't fixed. But Tories don't want to fix what is wrong with the EU; they want to unleash it.
Clinton, defending the millions of dollars rich people spend on her campaign, uses the same arguments that were used to justify the Corporations United decision.
That group of corporations called itself "Citizens United", but we should not repeat their falsehood just because they said it. The name "Corporations United" describes them correctly.
Tory Minister John Whittingdale's scandal is not that he had a non-business relationship for six months with a woman who was a sex worker, but that he pleads about how fast he broke up with her when he found out.
Money Influences Everybody. That Includes Hillary Clinton.
Terrorists in France were at least considering an attack on a nuclear waste storage facility.
These sites are impossible to defend properly. Maybe they could keep out people armed only with bombs, guns and cars, but they can't keep out a hijacked airliner. These wastes should be stored underground in tunnels with few, well-guarded entrances.
Leaked US diplomatic messages show that US officials are very worried about violence caused by water shortages.
Global heating is not the only cause of water shortages, but it will make them worse.
A transgender man in North Carolina has prepared cards to hand out in the women's toilets that he is now legally required to use, to allay the anxiety of other women about the presence of a man.
Microsoft is suing to defend customers' right to know if the US government looked at their email.
It is a worthy attempt, but I doubt you will ever have the same rights over your email stored in a company's server that you have over your data in your own server.
The European Parliament voted for three directives that protect privacy inadequately or harm it.
The UN could have avoided loosing cholera in Haiti with a $2000 package of tests and antibiotics.
The German law that criminalizes insulting foreign rulers dates from the time of the German empire.
Italy, Poland and Switzerland have similar laws. All these countries must take this opportunity to repeal those laws.
Was the Panama Papers leak a CIA operation? There is some suggestive evidence.
Canada is considering a law offering euthanasia, but only to Canadians with terminal illnesses.
Once again, this omits people who are paralyzed and likely to live years of boredom and futility. And why be cruel to non-Canadians?
Marching across India, to free Dalits from the job of manually pawing though human excrement, without any protective gear.
That work is not only disgusting, it also exposes the workers to disease.
The US oil industry was warned in 1968 about the danger of global heating and how disastrous it could be.
New Documents Reveal Oil Industry Knew of Climate Risks Decades Earlier Than Suspected; Suggest Coordinated Efforts to Foster Skepticism.
It's Time to Get Cops Out of Schools.
A school that has thugs is asking for its students to be jailed for minor things, thus set on a path to a life of persecution.
Five big US banks still present themselves as "too big to fail": they have not provided credible plans to for handling their bankruptcy.
Above 1.5C of global heating, we are likely to encounter tipping points that will drive large global changes.
Luqman Onikosi knows that being deported to Nigeria will kill him.
Verizon is raking in billions but demands to treat its workers worse. They have gone on strike.
Bernie Sanders joined their picket line.
Would Clinton do that? I doubt it. She loves getting endorsements from the leaders of unions but doesn't really care about their members.
US citizens: call on Congress to support Peace Now rather than AIPAC.
ACLU Sues Bureau of Prisons Over Missing Torture Documents.
Keith Allen Harward was convicted of murder because the prosecutor denied his lawyer the evidence that proved the culprit was not him. 30 years later, this evidence got him freed. But prosecutors keep on with the same trickery, knowingly convicting innocent people.
A foolish man, Brok, saw a beautiful woman in a store. He posted her photo, asking people to introduce him to her.
Brok has foolishly attached exaggerated significance to a minor event, a momentary infatuation. He will learn that seeing beauty in someone is no reason to think that the two would like each other. He will learn that he has the same chance — the same minuscule chance, I suppose — of finding happiness or pleasure with any of the other fish in the sea.
The author has also foolishly attached exaggerated significance to a minor event, namely Brok's posting of the photo. However, the author's reaction is far worse, because it attacks everyone's human rights. The author advocates making it a crime to take photos of people you see in public places and publish them.
Low-Income Americans Spend As Much As $400 to Get Tax Refund, Report Finds.
Israeli Expansionism Is Key Driver of Violence.
The Israeli right wing attacks human rights organizations because it is hostile to the general idea of rights that everyone deserves.
The Israeli population is becoming ever more right-wing, nationalist, and opposed to equal respect for human rights.
Obama should support the Palestinians' Security Council resolution.
Campaigners against the death penalty in Georgia hold a vigil every time someone is executed.
I have never understood the idea that execution is wrong specifically and only for people who are mentally deficient. I think the death penalty is wrong in all cases — for the mentally deficient, for geniuses, and for people of average intelligence.
Homeless teenagers in Delhi publish a newspaper.
(I don't want to call teenagers "children" because I think that will support the idea of limiting their rights.)
A historian faces the possibility of imprisonment in Poland under an outrageous censorship law redolent of France or Turkey, but much broader.
Regardless of whether the Polish government charges Professor Gross, it is guilty of contempt of human rights.
The UK is imposing a system of extreme repression against resident foreigners, restrained only by occasional court decisions.
The 50 largest US corporations are storing over a trillion dollars in foreign countries to dodge taxes.
The Hong Kong museum dedicated to the Tiananmen Square massacre is being shut down by its landlord. The museum operators scent Chinese meddling.
Many taxi drivers in Australia are racist and refuse to take indigenous passengers. One who is famous is using that fame to push for an education campaign.
Zika causes many kinds of prenatal brain damage.
I think that subhuman babies should not be considered human beings. It is legitimate to euthanize them rather than bear the burden of taking care of them for decades.
The new Canadian government said it was too late to cancel arms sales to Salafi Arabia, while in fact it hadn't yet signed the permits.
Just how fanatical is Ted Cruz in opposition to sex?
Part of Australia proposes to give thugs power to impose restrictions arbitrarily on citizens.
US citizens: call for an investigation into a federal official's decision to let some Republican-controlled states require voters to show proof of citizenship.
Such rules are very effective at preventing some US citizens from voting, particularly poor people.
Uber gave the US government data on millions of customers.
In Hollywood movies, female actors have less dialog than male actors, and it gets to be even less when the female actors are over 30 years old.
There are some who want you to be very very worried any time a stranger talks to your children.
The Massachusetts Supreme Court rebuked prosecutors for misconduct in 250 cases, but the prosecutors never face punishment for this. Usually their names are not even published.
Israeli soldiers dumped rubble and sand on a Palestinian's farm, apparently because the inhabitants of a nearby unofficial Israeli colony want the land.
Israel's latest excuse for demolishing many Palestinian homes near the center of Jerusalem is to create new "national parks" and a "Bible trail".
Oxfam says that Israel is increasing the rate of demolitions.
EU Plans to Tackle Tax Avoidance Are a Good Start — But Only a Start.
Greenland has set a new record for widespread melting of ice.
How to make elected officials heed the voters that elected them: keep reminding them.
The European Union's woefully inadequate proposal to stop tax dodging.
Clinton turns reality upside down, pretending that the coup in Honduras was not a coup.
Dumping tritium from Fukushima into the ocean may be the safest thing to do with it.
It is a small amount of tritium compared with the amounts already in the ocean.
A man who announced he was living in a wooden "pod" in someone else's house has been forced to stop, based on "safety rules".
These rules are beneficial when it is possible for everyone to get housing that follows them. However, that's not true today. Is the pod more dangerous than living on the street?
Disposable cutlery that's also edible.
Mariah Walton's parents, religiously cruel, condemned her to a life of suffering by denying her a heart operation when she was a baby.
That's religion for you.
A poll found that more than 90% of young Iraqis consider the US an enemy of Iraq.
I can't blame them.
When US thugs kill, fairly often the state quietly decides to make no charges against them, with no announcement.
Chicago thugs killed a teenager, then said he had pointed a gun at them.
You can't take their word about such things.
Why Is the USDA Silencing Its Own Scientists' Warnings About the Dangerous Effects of Pesticides?
In Idaho, thugs are authorized to arrest runaway children, but does it make sense to arrest one because he has returned home? And smash his face, while they are at it?
Global Fisheries Are Collapsing — What Happens When There Are No Fish Left?
Overfishing is an example of extractivism: treating the whole Earth as something to use up and throw away.
Planting 40,000 trees saved a town in England from the floods that affected the surrounding region.
A study of 9000 subjects found that replacing animal fat with vegetable oil failed to reduce heart attacks.
US citizens: call on Congress not to privatize the Vieques National Wildlife Refuge.
Refugees living in Australia on "bridging visas" have no health care, and sometimes no heat or food. They are not allowed to do work to get them.
More Than 400 Arrested at the Capitol During Protest Against "Big Money".
I wonder why the newspaper put quotations around "big money" in the title.
The UK government proposes a definition of fracking which excludes lots of ordinary fracking.
The Chicago thug department made it almost impossible for lawyers to tell that their clients were being held in Homan Square for interrogation (perhaps torture).
Thugs will break any rule, if they get away with it. If all that we do when we discover such a practice is to make them stop that one, they will find another. We need to jail thugs for participation in such oppressive practices, and there needs to be a separate prosecutor for this.
US citizens: call on Congress to reject the Feinstein-Burr anti-encryption bill.
Panama Papers Show How the Very Rich Use Art to Get Richer.
Shell companies even enable them to hold on to stolen paintings by hiding from courts.
Americans agree broadly on many political issues, but plutocrats block the US government from doing what Americans want.
Goldman Sachs was just fined for deceiving investors — fined an amount too small to do any good. No banksters were jailed.
Patients Waiting Hours for Ambulances after NHS Transport Service Privatized.
Tax investigators from 28 countries will plan a joint strategy for investigating tax dodging.
However, most tax dodging is legal, and what it needs is changes in laws.
India's Supreme Court ruled that temples cannot exclude women.
Health systems should not have to rely on crowdfunding: governments must shoulder their responsibilities.
James Hanson: sounding an alarm should not be dismissed as "alarmist".
US tobacco companies marketed menthol flavoring as part of a plan to prey on US blacks' anxieties.
BP continues to search for more oil reserves even though we have too much already. What could it do with the additional reserves, other than destroy civilization?
The UK has adopted ambitious carbon emission targets, then defined them in a phony way.
A San Antonio school thug knocked a 12-year-old student to the ground, then made up lies to excuse it. The thug has been fired, but that's not enough.
A museum of pinball machines may have to close because kids these days have lost interest in taking machines apart.
Pinball machines made with integrated circuits are not worth preserving, in my opinion, because in that period they were designed to be showy and distracting. For instance, In 1970, each sound that a pinball machine made indicted a certain amount scored. A few years later, they were meant only to distract the ear. That was also the era of point inflation, when the smallest score was 100 instead of 1.
Several witnesses deny the San Francisco thugs' bogus excuses for killing Luis Gongora.
Ironically, Trump may be defeated by the nondemocratic system of Republican candidate selection.
I would not rejoice at that, since Cruz is even worse in his politics than Trump. I also don't agree with the attitude of the author that it was Trump's fault for thinking the system worked in a more democratic way. Rather, it is the system's fault for not doing so.
It appears Chicago thugs tortured Jaime Galvan to death.
Wall Street economist Asher Edelman says that only Sanders can clean up US banking.
Obama is willing to say, in the Clinton case, that most secret information is not important. When prosecuting whistleblowers, the tiniest, unimportant detail is enough excuse.
US citizens: Tell the FEC: Crack down on illegal political contributions by "ghost corporations".
Everyone: call on the members of the Internet Association to publicly disavow its endorsement of the TPP.
These members include major Internet companies, including Google, Amazon, Netflix, Facebook, Twitter, and Yahoo. Some of those companies are despicable, while others are not — either way, we want to press all of them to denounce the TPP.
Everyone: tell Unilever to clean up the mercury it dumped in the ground in Kodaikanal.
US citizens: call on Clinton to reject campaign funds from fossil fuel companies.
Plans to examine the phones of drivers, after accidents, to see if they were texting while driving.
This extremely limited search, in a situation where there are special reasons for it, seems legitimate to me.
Malware Found on Security Cameras Available Through Amazon.
A camera that records locally on physical media, and has no network connection, does not threaten people with surveillance — neither by watching people through the camera, nor through malware in the camera.
Contract official Shay Assad campaigns unceasingly to stop overcharging by companies to the Pentagon.
Now the companies are trying to win the support of treacherous congresscritters, to hamper his efforts.
Global heating will make water scarce in most small oceanic islands.
Some of them will, however, have too much water — they will be inundated.
Palestinian farmers in the West Bank face constant obstruction from the policies of the occupation.
Obama says that the intervention in Libya was a mistake.
Is Hillary's Personal Story About Student Loans a Fabrication?
Erdoğan's poison is spreading from Turkey to Germany, as a comedian faces prosecution for "insulting a foreign leader".
Germany must repeal that tyrannical law on the double.
"We Should Treat Offshore Wealth as Terrorist Finance."
I think that's not hostile enough. In Europe and the US, terrorism is a minor threat compared with plutocracy. We need to treat the organs of plutocracy as something far worse than terrorism.
Ireland's blasphemy law, which its government doesn't dare try to enforce, gives comfort to religious tyranny everywhere.
Documents confirm the torture methods of Chicago thugs.
Pity poor David Cameron, "trapped in wealth".
Thugs evicted protesters in Paris, but they plan to return.
Rebuilding parts of Palmyra with modern materials and techniques would be a lie. It is better to leave the ruins as a memorial to the evil of religious fanaticism.
The Cameron family tax-dodging strips bare the Tories' claim that the sacrifices they impose on poor Britons are for the country. Now no one can avoid seeing that those sacrifices are for the tax dodgers.
Maybe the world needs a global body to decide international tax policy.
Such a body might be helpful, but the idea does not get to the root of the matter. The article assumes that this issue is a clash between "national interests" of the poor countries and the rich countries, and that each governments involved is trying to serve the national interest of its country.
As we know, that's not always true. In particular, most governments of rich countries nowadays typically serve the interests of plutocrats rather than the interest of the country overall. If these governments tried to truly serve their own national interests, they would clamp down on tax dodging just as the poor countries would want them to.
Bleaching now affects half of the Great Barrier Reef.
Coral animals often die after bleaching. In the more equatorial parts of the Great Barrier Reef, half of them are dead.
Australian scientists are trying to breed a replacement coral that could survive higher temperatures and higher acidity.
Bravo to them, but supposing if that effort succeeds, it won't avoid disaster. 400 known species of coral that live in the Great Barrier Reef; there may be others as yet unknown to science. Losing all but one, or all but a few, would still be disaster.
Iranian presidential candidate Mehdi Karroubi, held under arrest since his last defeat, accuses the state of rigging the elections.
Now that the Panama papers show clearly how the rich are cheating the rest of humanity, the question is whether we will fight hard enough to defeat them and make them stop.
Beware the temptation to respond cynically, because that's an excuse to give up.
Right now, Americans have a special opportunity to fight back: work for the Sanders campaign. Toadies like Clinton follow the orders of the rich, and those orders say to protect all their means of cheating us. Simply electing a president who wants to stop them will bring us one big step closer to stopping them.
Tourism to the Arctic, to "witness" how global heating is destroying it, is adding to the damage.
A Republican US official is trying another avenue for voter suppression: allowing Republicans in some states to demand voters prove their citizenship to register.
The Republican Party is a vast conspiracy to disenfranchise Americans.
Arizona legislators have made up an excuse to keep reporters out of the state house.
The 1% hide their money offshore — then use it to corrupt our democracy.
US citizens: Tell Senate Democrats: Don't help Republicans sabotage retirement protections.
US citizens: call on Congress to pass the Incorporation Transparency and Law Enforcement Assistance Act and thus crimp the use of shell corporations in the US.
Trump mixes dirty words with bigotry to imply that bigotry is no worse than a dirty word.
Someone tell Israel that fighting the soldiers in an occupying army is not terrorism. The proper term is "guerrilla war".
Alexandra Elbakyan is freeing scientific literature from paywalls.
Three cheers!
Shame on the article's author for taking the side of the restricted access journals, by using words such as "pilfer" to describe liberating science from its feudal lords.
The dictator of Burundi has driven 250,000 people into exile, fleeing from torture meted out to anyone that didn't support him.
Stretched and subjective definitions of "bullying", "prejudice" and "trauma" make it easy to paint political expression as "violent harassment". It's a tendency we need to reject because it leads to censorship.
UK immigration officials are allowed to crack security of refugees' computers, specifically their phones. This could endanger their right to confidential communication with their lawyers.
I think it is legitimate for the state to crack security for investigations, but only with a specific warrant.
The US created Panama for purposes of tax evasion.
David Cameron dodged around $130,000 in inheritance tax a few years ago.
Great apes in Africa are likely to be wiped out by diseases that humans help spread.
A whistleblower alleges that large Brazilian projects including the Belo Monte dam were used to siphon off money to the Workers' Party and the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party.
Anti-abortionists in Northern Ireland betrayed their flatmate to the state for having an abortion, and she was prosecuted.
Now women there fear betrayal by their acquaintances, and doctors worry that women who have complications after an underground abortion will not dare go to a hospital.
Northern Ireland's political parties are sectarian and worthless. I hope the fight for abortion rights will lead to the creation of a secular party that stands for human rights and people's well being.
I also suggest a form of action for people in Northern Ireland: post a sign on your door saying, "We do not rat on women for having abortions." The statement is not illegal, yet it clearly defies the evil law.
Research shows that an important positive feedback in global heating, water droplets in clouds, will be bigger than previously thought.
That means we need even bigger emissions cuts to avoid total disaster.
Only a fool bets that the road runs off the cliff further rather than nearer. Don't be a fool: demand big cuts soon.
The Panama Papers Prove It: We [the US] Can Afford a Universal Basic Income. Plus good infrastructure, good public education, good medical care, and so on.
The Brussels terrorist bombers were planning to attack France, but they saw that investigators were closing in on them, so they made a hurried plan to attack in Brussels instead.
This is a sign that state powers to investigate terrorists are already adequate. There is no need to give the state additional power — though using its power more efficiently could be an improvement.
People who broke free from controlling religious sects talk about how they found the strength to escape.
Italy says Egypt is being uncooperative in the investigation of the murder of Italian researcher Giulio Regeni.
Probably the killers were part of the state's mechanism of repression, which operates almost unchecked on Egyptians.
Thomas Piketty: Panama Papers: Act now. Don't wait for another crisis.
Amazon wants to wipe out local grocery stores.
I will never buy from Amazon. I hope you won't, either.
Higher crime rates in US black communities is not a cause of their poverty, it is a consequence of that poverty. White communities with similar economic levels have similar crime rates.
The US treasury proposes a badly designed rule about shell companies with another badly designed rule about shell companies that might have an even bigger loophole.
President Sanders would fix this problem for real.
A Polish Abortion Ban Would Turn Women Back into Childbearing Instruments.
Philippine farmers who received bullets instead of rice from the state are the picture of what global heating will do to ever more millions.
Ralph Nader: Big unions support Clinton at the expense of their members.
Clinton and Sanders seem to have patched up their recent harsh criticism.
I am not part of that deal. Clinton would be almost as bad a president as the self-admitted Republicans, aside from specific areas such as women's rights.
One of the banksters that rigged the Libor rate says that the bank's high executives approved of the plan.
The 1st quarter of 2016 is the third warmest year on record in the US.
Systematic special surveillance of poor people in the US feeds algorithms that tend to exclude them from ordinary opportunities, thus trapping them in poverty.
The FBI is building a data base of nearly all Americans' faces, and can search it for any reason.
Since it is made from the data bases of photo IDs, that Americans need to have to drive, to ride in a plane, to open a bank account, to buy certain prescription medicines, and in some states even to vote, it amounts to something very close to a national ID card.
When combined with the cameras on the street that recognize faces, they add up to a system of total tracking of everyone's movements.
Of course, this sort of total control over the population makes the work of the police easy. It makes the legitimate activities easy, and the illegitimate ones easy too. It can be used to find rapists, or find heroic whistleblowers.
However, while finding the occasional rapist in hiding is positive, the good it does is puny compared with the harm of intimidating potential heroic whistleblowers. The effect is repressive control that we must overthrow.
Americans, have you the courage to resist the state's seductive offer to "protect" us from various smaller dangers, at the cost of total monitoring?
There is no known way to dispose of the remains of the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown, so the plan is to cover it with a metal dome that is expected to last 100 years. Engineers hope that, within that time, we will find some permanent solution.
That approach may work assuming technology continues to advance. But what if technological advance ceases because global heating is too much of a drain on society? Then the reactor will degrade, and leak more. In centuries, or millennia, that fallout will pollute a much bigger area.
Green chemistry: designing chemical processing to avoid making hazardous wastes, even from the product itself.
Blacks have a privacy advantage against current face recognition snooping systems, but this can work against them when thugs assume the system's judgment is correct.
Cameras on the street that match everyone's face against a database are a threat to everyone's freedom. Even if you're not on a list of suspects, and they don't immediately arrest or investigate you, they are doing wrong to you.
Laws should require such cameras not to recall who they see, except court-designated suspects.
El Salvador has raided the local office of Mossack Fonseca and seized documents, apparently to investigate possible crimes involving its clients.
The melting of Greenland's ice, due to global heating, has measurable effects on the movement of Earth's poles.
In response to the Panama papers, the EU will propose tougher disclosure regulations for EU companies' foreign subsidiaries in other countries that are considered tax havens.
Why not apply this to all other countries? This would avoid the need to define which countries constitute "tax havens".
If regulators were not scared of the power of the businesses, they would not try to take such small steps.
Yet another man convicted due to "bite mark" matching has been exonerated.
That technique is worthless.
Stand Your Ground, Unless You're a Battered Woman.
The Clinton campaign has made a series of false attacks against Sanders, with gaps between them, but now it is attacking in high gear.
Senator Warren and a few others blocked a vote of the Banking Committee about two Obama nominees for the SEC that are banksters' pets.
Estimating the funding of paid climate obstructionism: perhaps $500 million a year.
The UK government has cut the rate of solar installation to 1/4 the rate of a year ago.
Good work, planet roasters!
Although courts and the prosecutor now recognize that the conviction of Fran and Dan Keller for "satanic abuse" was based on no evidence, and that a retrial could not convict them, they refuse to drop charges.
The participants in the system believe it should go to the mat rather than admit anyone's innocence.
US publisher McGraw-Hill discontinued a textbook because it included a map of Palestine, which met with condemnation.
Evidence Shows New Pipelines Will Not Solve Alberta's Economic Woes or Support a Clean Energy Transition.
US citizens: Call on Obama to think about his climate legacy and put public lands and waters off limits for gas and oil extraction.
Spanish banks will have to repay some of the charges they made to people who were foreclosed.
Unfortunately, that won't be enough to save many of these people from spending the rest of their lives excluded from all visible employment. (If they earn any money, they would have to pay it to the bank.) In Spain, they are known as "fiscally dead".
I've suggested they should do a protest on the Day of the Dead, but nobody seems to have picked up on the idea.
The new government of Myanmar has freed many political prisoners, carrying out Aung San Suu Kyi's new policy.
Mass peaceful night-time political discussion meetings have spread across France.
Assad has released an imprisoned American journalist after 4 years.
Assad didn't have the journalist beheaded, as PISSI would have done, but that is damning with faint praise.
General Electric CEO Immelt said GE executives "saw it as our task to outsource manufacturing". No wonder he condemns Sanders, and the feeling is mutual.
The new Argentine government, apparently turning repressive, has imprisoned a local leader for protesting. Amnesty International has taken up her cause.
A mother in South Carolina was arrested for letting her 9-year-old nephew accompany her 3-year-old son to buy a snack.
Oh, wait — they were headed for McDonalds. What neglectful parenting, allowing a kid to eat McDonald's food. Parents are supposed to know that this is "fast food", made for fasting, not for eating.
World wide: participate in global heating protests May 4-16.
Clinton favors continuing to operate the Indian Point nuclear power plants. Sanders says it is dangerous and should be shut down.
Clinton wants to continue fracking. Sanders says it is dangerous and must be banned.
David Cameron Admits He Profited from Father's Offshore Fund.
The thug that killed John Crawford III was not punished, but the man who called 911 may face criminal charges for exaggerating the situation.
This is backwards. A thug, as a public officer, has a specific responsibility to tell when there is no real threat, and is supposed to know how. Citizens of course should not lie or exaggerate about such dangers, but they have no responsibility to get training in doing so.
Two Widely Used Pesticides Likely to Harm 97% of Endangered Species in US.
The EPA dropped its investigation into water pollution from fracking in Wyoming, but two scientists continued the research and proved the contamination came from fracking.
A thug was in a big hurry to shoot Yvette Smith dead, and he lied to excuse it. Now he has been acquitted of murder by a judge who more or less said he would always take the thug's side.
We will never be safe until thugs face real punishment for their killings and their lies.
Doublespeak in IT security: the UK will certify VOIP systems as "secure" only if they have been built with a back door.
Many US school principals are studying interrogation methods that often make students give false confessions.
Los Angeles has prohibited homeless people from keeping more property than what will fit in one garbage bin.
I suppose that is to facilitate putting their property in the trash, which thugs do from time to time as a harassment measure.
If the city wants to do reduce how much they keep on the street, it should offer each homeless person a substantial shed. That would not cost much — the building codes for sheds are not very strict — and it would keep their property off the street without screwing them.
Of course, what the city should really do is provide them with decent places to live.
An illegal traffic stop, followed by an illegal public strip search, were the penalty for Driving While Black in South Carolina.
A Clinton-supporting Alaska "superdelegate" shows stubborn
determination to support Clinton
in the
teeth of the Alaskan public.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-29 because the old link was broken.]
If Sanders clearly wins the public primaries and caucuses, and superdelegates make Clinton the nominee, the public will not respond well to such treatment.
Here's how the Clinton campaign bought the support of 33 state Democratic Party organizations, including superdelegates.
Global disparity of income between countries has grown tremendously in recent decades, and it is still growing.
Disparity of income within countries is growing too in the advanced countries.
Koch and co. are pumping millions of dollars into US senate races.
"As a taxpayer, David Cameron is innocent. As a lawmaker, he is guilty."
An officer of the former US-backed military regime of El Salvador will stand trial in Spain for murdering civilian dissidents.
It is noteworthy that the US knowingly sheltered this murderer for 15 years.
El Salvador's other elite repression unit was called the Atonal Battalion. They used to torture prisoners by making them listen to Schönberg's music for hours on end ;-{. (I wish that were true, but I suppose they did much worse things.)
Everyone: call on Wolf Blitzer to ask Clinton and Sanders how they would deal with Panama-style tax-dodging in their trade policy.
SCROTUS are trying to relax regulations to protect borrowers from misuses by banks.
The banksters say respecting borrowers' rights is "too expensive". How can that be true? US banks are not losing money.
Beyond Panama: What the World Really Needs is the Delaware Papers.
In Fact, Sanders Has a Very Clear Plan on How to Break Up Too-Big-to-Fail Banks.
A poll found that 1/4 of Sanders supporters would not support Clinton in the general election.
I am one of them. Clinton is not as bad as Republicans on all issues — I am sure she would support women's rights more than Cruz or Trump — but on the crucial issues of corporate power and armed aggression she is no better than them.
The US government wants to collect data about movements of boats and use that data for all sorts of things.
I see nothing wrong in requiring large vessels (over 65 feet) to be tracked all the time. I would not object to requiring this for vessels owned by corporations, since they are not entitled to the same rights as real persons.
However, luring people into more surveillance in the name of safety is a dirty trick.
The US has developed a robot ship to scan for submarines.
It won't be long before other countries have such a system, too. They won't even have to design one, since they could steal a US ship and reverse-engineer it. Enemies of the US have done this with cruise missiles.
Some states in India have banned sale of alcohol. However, the prohibition policies are not as strict as the US prohibition of various other drugs.
Why We'll Continue Our Fight to Save Lambeth's Carnegie Library.
Cutbacks on libraries are part of the right-wing policy of not bothering to educate poor people.
If It Weren't for Tax Havens, Lambeth Might Be Able to Afford Its Libraries.
Of course, tax havens alone are not solely responsible for dooH niboR. Many other unjust policies help take from the poor and give to the rich.
US citizens: call on Congress to invest in world-wide family planning.
We Are Blind to an Epidemic of Domestic Abuse.
That applies to many countries, perhaps all. Meanwhile, right-wing rulers are cutting funds to the centers that support victims of domestic violence.
Mining magnate Donald Blankenship has been sentenced to prison for directing Massey Energy to persistently disregard workers' safety.
The World Bank says it will put 28% of its future investments into dealing with global heating.
This is a small step forward but nowhere near enough to avoid disaster.
Hungary's right-wing ruling party wants to
ban
encrypted communication outright.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-29 because the old link was broken.]
Even worse than solitary confinement: two people kept 23 hours a day in a tiny cell that's too small even for one person.
The Problem With Hillary Clinton Isn't Just Her Corporate Cash. It's Her Corporate Worldview.
The Global Consequences Of Hillary Clinton's Predatory Pragmatism.
Clinton prefers to take advantage of the Corporations United big money rather than fight to change it.
US citizens: call on Obama to ban new fracking on public lands.
Everyone: call on 5 big fast food companies to stop using meat made with regular use of antibiotics.
David Cameron acted directly in 2013 to keep offshore tax dodging schemes functioning in the UK.
How Big Telecom Gets Away With Rewriting America's Laws (to ban municipal WiFi and broadband).
Just because a WiFi network is municipal does not necessarily mean it respects users' freedom. If the network requires users to identify themselves, or to run nonfree JavaScript code, that's an injustice no matter who does it.
Why Is Honduras the World's Deadliest Country for Environmentalists?
Clinton played a significant role in bringing this about, by allowing or endorsing the coup.
Many teenagers can be dissuaded from joining PISSI by conversing with them and paying attention to what they say.
A plutocrat says his million dollar donation to campaign for Jeb Bush was laudable because it was opposing Trump.
I don't think it is clear that Jeb Bush was better than Trump, or that Cruz is less bad than Trump.
However, buying elections is not democracy even when the purchase is a good one.
A US court ruled that people don't in general have the right to record what thugs are doing on the street.
Let's hope that this decision is overruled by others.
Technology for efficient heating and lighting in buildings could be based on tracking people through the building.
I am sure there are other ways to implement the goal of controlling heating and light locally.
A Bangladeshi atheist blogger was murdered; he had made postings criticizing Islamism.
Note that Islamism is not the same thing as Islam. The latter is a religion; the former is a political stance. Human rights include the right to criticize either one.
Oculus virtual reality is going to provide only a virtual suggestion of privacy.
1000 nonviolent protesters that were arrested for no good reason in the G20 protests in Toronto will sue the thugs.
In order for this to be effective at controlling wrongdoing by thugs, the thugs must be held personally responsible. When the city pays the damages and the thugs do not, the thugs can still shrug off responsibility.
The US and Canada announced a useful plan to cut methane leaks, but they act as if they had all the time in the world.
Recognition that eating sugar is a major cause of obesity was suppressed in the 1970s by scientists who had endorsed the "blame saturated fat" theory.
Poverty continues because it's very profitable for some (just not for those who suffer it).
The UN half-plan to make airlines reduce CO2 emissions is too weak.
It seems that plutocracy is having its usual effect, helping companies continue practices that they know damage the world.
China is trying to suppress all mention of the Panama papers.
Queensland in the north of Australia is rapidly destroying forests and wiping out wildlife.
An extractivist government made this happen.
Citizens of Massachusetts:
call
on Massachusetts senators to support designating a Marine National
Monument in the ocean off Cape Cod.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-29 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens: call on NOAA Fisheries not to help fishing boats cover up
the
amount of
"bycatch" (sea animals that they catch inadvertently, and throw
away dead).
[Reference updated on 2018-03-29 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens: call on Congress to provide lawyers to represent children in immigration hearings. Stop making children as young as five years old represent themselves.
Everyone: call on the CEOs of the 50 largest companies to come to an Earth Day meeting and make a plan to curb global heating and environmental destruction.
US citizens: Support Fish and Wildlife Service for blocking Alaska's plan to kill lots of predators and screw up ecosystems.
The right-wing terrorists in Colombia are having a resurgence.
The paramilitares have been Colombia's worst terrorist group because they have connections with the army, with politicians such as ex-president Alvaro Horrible, and with the elites that think they should own the country.
Wall Street lobbyists are raising funds for Clinton while she quibbles about the details of Sanders's plan to neutralize the banksters they lobby for.
Meanwhile, the major US media didn't try very hard to understand Sanders' plan.
Big banks are systematically providing big loans to the owners of rent-controlled buildings, obviously expecting the buildings to be converted to condominiums and the tenants kicked out.
Flint residents have brought a racketeering lawsuit against Governor Snyder and his collaborators.
One of the plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the arbitrary and unaccountable US "no fly" list is a child, not quite 5 years old.
Apparently he was put on the list when he was 7 months old.
Over 100 Medical Groups Urge Congress to Fund CDC Research on Gun Violence.
The obstacle is NRA pressure.
Google/Alphabet has intentionally shut off home automatic control products, cheating the customers who bought them.
Google/Alphabet had that power because the product depends on a company server. The lesson is, don't stand for that! Insist on self-contained computers that run free software!
The article doesn't take a firm line against anything. How weak that seems to me.
Pfizer canceled its merger with Alergan, once the US Treasury decided to block the intended tax dodging.
Hot Dusty Weather Makes Flint's Lead Crisis Worse, because lead comes out of the soil.
It got into the soil from burning leaded gasoline.
Americans with lower income get much less social security benefits, because they die several years younger.
Thousands of Bangladeshis are protesting plans for coal-fired generators that would kick them off their land. Thugs shot some of them dead.
The US is a bigger tax dodge sanctuary than Panama is.
The UK does plenty of it, too.
Mississippi has legalized discrimination against people on the basis of almost anything related to sex, as long as it is motivated by religion.
In effect, religion is the designated place for hostility to accumulate.
The activists of the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition say that there is no sharp boundary between surveillance and harassment.
Our greatest cities are now pricing out even middle-class people.
Poaching has wiped out tigers in Cambodia.
The UK, and China have similar net censorship systems, and maybe soon South Korea.
After Australia eliminated its tax on CO2 emissions, emissions went up.
It appears that HSBC has refused a bank account to a Hong Kong political party as an act of political interference.
In the sick and prudish spirit imposed on US universities in the name of Title IX, even a mural that refers to sex is considered dangerous and illegal.
When the "safe space" obsession goes overboard, an anonymous political poster is seen as "harassment".
Good thing King George III didn't have this idea. If he had had this excuse to turn people against anonymous pamphlets, he could have prevented the American Revolution from starting.
In the UK under Tory austerity, "care" companies regularly cheat their workers, who then mostly cheat the old people they are supposed to take care of.
The workers can't possibly afford to spend as much time with the patients as they are supposed to, since then they'd be paid well below minimum wage.
The US allows tax-exempt organizations to support violent Israeli extremists.
I have to point out that while celebrating the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin is despicable, criminalizing the expression of such views is disrespect for freedom of speech.
Rabin was assassinated because he wanted to end the occupation of Palestine. There used to be large demonstrations in Rabin's honor, for as long as many Israelis continued to want peace.
A few Israelis still want peace, and joined Palestinians for a protest march against the occupation.
But only a small minority of Israelis still want peace. For the most part, anyone like Rabin would be ridiculed in today's Israel. Most Israelis don't today celebrate his assassination, but they don't miss his efforts any more.
Israel is considering a bill to imprison children younger than 14. Palestinian children only, one understands.
Good news for Australia: the coal market is collapsing so fast that the cost of cancelling all planned fossil fuel projects now would be only 1/5 what it was in 2013.
In Tennessee, a mother faces punishment for allowing her children to go farther away than arms' length.
It's the parents that drive their children around that are negligent. They are failing to protect their children from obesity and all the consequent illnesses.
A cupcake sale intended to teach about gender and racial inequality in wages inspired nasty men to post death threats.
The UK economy is screwing the poor for the sake of trickle-up to the rich, but the rich confuse the issue by presenting it as a conflict between old and young.
Half the UNESCO World Heritage nature sites are threatened by human activities in the vicinity.
A protest in Parliament took place against UK cuts in benefits to disabled people.
The Tories ordered the BBC to stop broadcasting the protest.
Sanders plans to phase out nuclear power plants, one by one, by not relicensing them.
I would be in favor of continuing to run them, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, if they were not so dangerous. Meanwhile, with a massive campaign to install renewable generation, we can do without them.
Goretti Horgan says she will continue buying abortion pills for women in Northern Ireland.
The Treasury Department changed the rules on "inversions" that allow "US" corporations to become officially foreign corporations and dodge US taxes.
Wisconsin illustrates three ways that the rich undermine US democracy by controlling elections.
Over 30 New York State legislators want to ban a campaign for Palestinian rights from the City University of New York, after accusations that it is "anti-semitic" which appear to be based on equating opposition to Israel's occupation policy with "anti-semitism".
Be careful of the term "hate speech", because those who use it want you to presume it ought to be and is prohibited.
US prosecutors are never held responsible for arranging unfair trials, not even when that causes conviction of the innocent.
The White House warns that global heating will kill perhaps around 30,000 Americans a year by 2100.
How many people the heat kills would depend on heating occurs. But this seems like an underestimate, not counting many kinds of effects. Another study suggested global heating would kill 100 million people world-wide by 2030.
Christian Universities Increasingly Apply for Exemptions From Anti-Discrimination Rules.
The Australian government decided to cut scientific research for the public good, in order to focus on research that appears profitable.
But their idea of "profitable" was focused on the short term. In the long term, the most profitable investment humanity can make is to cut down on carbon emissions fast, and climate research is a start on that investment.
Egyptian Editor, Press Freedom Advocate Faces Arrest.
What else would one expect from the US-backed military regime in Egypt.
Thailand is preparing "re-education camps" for dissidents.
US Abortion Providers Faced 94 Threats of Violence in 2015 And Just One in 2014.
Tinder collects and saves lots of data about its users, including their locations.
The fact that others can see this information too is a secondary symptom of Tinder's collection of the data.
100 women in the Central African Republic charge UN peacekeepers with rape.
Vietnam has sentenced 7 dissident bloggers to prison.
The Vietnamese have got the worst combination in their government: subservience to the US, and oppression to the Vietnamese.
Why does Clinton believe the millions she gets from rich people can't alter her political views?
It's simple. She has already shaped those views to match the donors.
Chambers of Commerce across the US took a poll of their member CEOs and found that most of them supported various measures to help working people, such as increasing the minimum wage and better benefits.
So they told their lobbyists to design a way to convince the members to forget about it.
Drought destroyed the crops in part of the Philippines, so people are demanding the government provide food. Instead, soldiers shot them.
A second Indonesian minister says it is not true that de Caprio faces a threat of being excluded from Indonesia for campaigning against deforestation.
I would like to see a clear statement that Indonesia will not bar foreigners merely for criticizing anything about Indonesia: in other words, that Indonesia respects freedom of expression.
Tax-dodging through companies such as Mossack Fonseca adds up to hundreds of billions of dollars per year.
An investigation of posted Russian bombing videos reports that nearly all the Russian air attacks in Syria through the end of February were outside PISSI's territory.
This is no surprise, because it was clear at that time that Syria was mainly attacking enemies that Assad found threatening. And that was before the partial cease fire, I believe. Since then, Russia does seem to be fighting PISSI.
5 years ago, Bernie Sanders objected to the US - Panama business supremacy treaty because it would exacerbate the problem of tax dodging through Panama.
Polar bears' suffering from decreased Arctic sea ice has been measured: the average weight of females in one area has gone down by 10% since 1984.
I speculate it will be harder for them to have and rear offspring with the lower weight. Thus, the population will dwindle and eventually disappear.
Non-rich retired people in the UK can get some meals from charities on a pay-what-you-can basis. But only if they are well enough to travel to the meal.
A woman in Northern Ireland was convicted of having an abortion using abortion drugs. Here are the other lousy options she rejected.
In parts of the US, women are imprisoned for having miscarriages.
The participation of Muslim scholars enables polio vaccination campaigns in Afghanistan and Pakistan to make progress.
Corbyn says the UK has the power to directly order the tiny British islands to stop permitting tax dodging.
Here are suggested measures for prying open the secrecy.
But why would Tories screw up a racket that is so useful for them?
Educating Girls Could Cut Child Marriage in Bangladesh by a Third.
The UN denies its responsibility for bringing cholera to Haiti, but an internal report took note of the UN's faulty sanitary measures just before that occurred.
To refer to the UN's troops as "peacekeepers" is misleading, since there was no war there, only a US-backed overthrow of the elected government.
Disabled and poor people in Britain, who can barely afford to eat, face jail because they are now required to pay as much as 10% of their income as local tax.
These vicious Tories don't really expect to get blood out of those stones (people), who already can barely survive. They want to reduce the expense those people cause and have found an excuse to drive many of them to death. Not quickly, but faster than they would have died while they could still afford food.
Instead of shame, the victims should feel hatred. They are martyrs and they should recognize the cause they are dying for: fighting the tyranny of the banksters.
If they have courage, they have a way to carry the fight to the enemy: they can dare the state to burn up more of its money by jailing them. Once in jail, they must thwart any state plan to extract money from them, such as by making them do work.
Thailand has become a totally military state in which soldiers can arrest people anywhere. Their powers are almost arbitrary.
Please don't ignore this injustice by vacationing in Thailand. As for me, that dictatorship is so crazed that I would not risk going there at all.
Big US school districts hire cops rather than counselors.
Thugs in San Francisco maimed Stanislav Petrov, leaving him too injured to use his hands for work, then tried to cover up their crime by offering his belongings to homeless witnesses so they would keep silent about what they had seen.
Now the FBI is prosecuting Petrov and refuses to say what those charges are.
I have no way of knowing whether Petrov was guilty of some crime, but if so, it cannot justify acting like this.
Everyone: state support for witness Emad Abu Shamsiya, who faces threats from Israeli fanatics.
Prisoners in Texas prisons have gone on strike against abuses such as being charged for medical care, solitary confinement, and forced labor.
I think it is legitimate to make prisoners work to keep the prison going, but when they do any other work, they deserve the same rights and working conditions as other workers. Otherwise, prison labor is an injustice to the prisoners and to the non-imprisoned workers that they compete with.
I admire this strike. Joining with others for the common good is exactly the sort of activity that can transform a habitual criminal into an upstanding and dependable member of society. It builds the skill to defer immediate gratification for long-term good, which helps people stay away from crime.
UK government officials no longer waste time pretending to pay attention to heed human rights organizations.
The Tories are lower than vermin — Aneurin Bevan.
WordPress Wants Statutory Damages for DMCA Abuse.
Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are trying to make the "self-driving" cars of the future depend on their servers (and thus be totally tracked and controlled remotely).
These cars won't be "self-driving", they will be driven by a company, one that has a history of snooping.
The workers in Trump's hotel in Las Vegas voted to unionize.
Protecting parrotfish might save coral reefs, for a while.
Racism against blacks is rampant in the San Francisco thugs.
Charlie Hebdo receives criticism for calling Islamist terror the extreme point on a spectrum of campaigns against criticizing Islam.
I think that is not true — that Islamist terrorists aim for something far beyond merely suppressing criticism of Islam.
There is a campaign to deny people the right to criticize Islam, and we must fight it resolutely, starting with rejecting the idea that such criticism is wrong. But we should not confuse this campaign (which is not violent, only unjust) with other forms of Islamist activity, such as terrorism.
It is clear that we should not hesitate to criticize any aspect of any religion, including Islam, when we have a reason to. People have a right to choose their beliefs, and within some limits to practice them, but no one is entitled to the right not to be criticized.
A study estimates that the economic damage to human assets from global heating above 2C could range from 2.5 trillion dollars to ten times that.
It would be far cheaper to spend the money now to prevent global heating. The question is whether the rest of us can defeat the planet roasters who have spent millions to confuse and delay. They are the biggest enemies of human civilization — PISSI is a pipsqueak by comparison.
On the correct pronunciation of "Exxon".
Yanis Varoufakis argues for trying to save the European Union by making it democratic.
A democratic union of Europe might be a good thing, but it won't be easy to achieve against all the institutions that are already tentacles of the banksters.
I noticed the EU's lack of democracy a decade ago, and proposed that vote of the citizens should replace the council of Europe for final approval of directives.
Using computers for receiving votes is dangerous. Using obsolete computers leads to additional problems, because they break.
Having people cast their votes in a computer creates a risk of massive centralized undetectable fraud. Don't do it!
The ID requirements for students to vote in Wisconsin are especially complicated, and no one has told students what they need to do.
Each additional activity that requires a government-issued ID is a step towards the tyranny of massive surveillance.
Atrocities in Conflict Mean We Need the Geneva Conventions More Than Ever.
HSBC lobbied Mossack Fonseca to continue serving Assad's cousin despite sanctions.
For some people, belief that ads were targeted at them based on their "sophisticated" interests can flatter them into being more interested in a product.
I expect that advertising agencies are years ahead of other psychologists in discovering things like this, and already use them.
Thus, the massive surveillance on which digital ads are based not only threatens really important things, such as democracy, whistleblowers, dissidents, and your willingness to state views that are controversial. It also threatens to cause you short-term trouble by luring you to spend more money.
It is well established that people tend to spend more when they are not paying cash.
Don't be tracked (and save money)
Pay cash.
Face recognition creates a danger of systematic tracking of everyone everywhere, in businesses and on streets.
Suitable laws could reduce the danger, but they have to be strict and stern, not lax. They must go beyond the bare minimum that one might claim will be sufficient. They must not presume either the good will or honesty of the companies involved, or their ability to maintain proper security.
Imagine if people could wear specially reflective jewelry which had the effect of telling most cameras "Blur my head!" Of course, anyone could have a camera which did not obey this, but businesses would need special permission to use such a camera, and publishing such photos would require justification such as serving journalistic purposes. Security cameras, not connected to any network and making only local recordings, would not have to obey the blurring.
Employment laws were designed to protect rights for employees. Businesses increasingly game the system by converting staff into "independent contractors" whose work is controlled tightly by the company but get none of the rights or benefits of employees.
One way to fight back is for the state to rule that these people are employees or must get the same benefits as employees.
Another, which may be more durable, is to redesign the protection of workers' rights and benefits so that it doesn't depend on who is the employer at any given minute. Benefits should be paid from income taxes and wealth taxes, not from payroll taxes. There should be minimum rates for piecework jobs based on how long they are likely to take, or actually do take.
The danger of plutonium fallout, and a few ideas that might help reduce the danger.
At present, nearly all the plutonium we have generated is highly localized, so most people are not in any real danger from it. But substances tend to mix. In 10,000 years, will the plutonium have spread around enough that all humans get lung cancer eventually? If technology advances, we will presumably have no trouble treating those cancers — but if it collapses due to global heating, that could wipe out humanity (and other sufficiently long-lived species).
Cancelling the UK's planned new nuclear power plant at Hinkley Point would save 60 billion dollars.
Right-wing austerity and mass unemployment, over some years, can destroy permanently the social ties that show young people a path to strive for a successful life.
New York State has joined California in programming a $15 minimum wage, though it won't take effect for several years.
However, as more and more workers become piecework contractors, we need to cover them too.
Decommissioning Europe's nuclear power plants will cost almost half a trillion dollars.
But that's a lot less than what it would cost to run them until they fall apart and spew fallout.
Ecuador has started drilling for oil at the edge of the pristine Yasuni forest.
Over a set of comparable Austronesian cultures, human sacrifice was more common in the societies with less equality.
Nowadays millions of people are effectively sacrificed by the Cult of the Invisible Hand.
"Tax Havens Don't Need to be Reformed. They Should Be Outlawed."
When car loans impose a remote shutoff device, loan companies can use this power to get away with cheating.
They have various habitual ways of screwing customers. Pushing across the line, to see if they get away with it, is their way of life.
I think it should be a crime for companies associated with selling or insuring a car to put remote shutoff or interference devices into cars.
Tasmania has the same problem as Venezuela: shortage of rain leads to shortage of electricity.
One of the predicted effects of global heating is bigger and more frequent droughts, as well as bigger and more frequent floods. We will more and more often find big expensive hydropower dams high and dry, leading to more use of fossil fuels. This is a positive feedback effect, and they make it even harder to escape disaster.
But we can still escape, if we push hard enough in the right direction.
US citizens: call on Obama to nominate commissioners for the Federal Trade Commission who will defend people from abuses by businesses.
Expanding a natural gas pipeline close to a nuclear power plant: asking for trouble.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission puts its rubber stamp on every pipeline application. This is the inspiration for the "rubber stamp" protest that is planned.
The rebellious area of eastern Ukraine is full of landmines, which kill civilians trying to return home.
Mexico is torturing Mexicans that speak only Mayan, demanding that they say they are Guatemalan and give the state an excuse to deport them.
A Key Similarity Between Snowden Leak and Panama Papers: Scandal is What's Been Legalized.
Medicine is recognizing that chronic fatigue syndrome is a physical illness often resulting from some sort of infection.
The Air France flight attendants' union rejects the company's order for female flight attends to cover their heads while stopping over in Iran.
I suggest a way to protest this: the male flight attends can wear headscarves saying, in French and Farsi and English, "Solidarity with all women in Iran."
The company that makes proprietary software for filing US tax returns also lobbies heavily to stop the US government from providing any easier automatic method.
I refuse to run proprietary software. I fill out my tax returns by hand. It is not terribly hard — the main work is collecting the data on my income and deductible expenses, which I would have to do anyway.
The US media don't subject Clinton's health care proposals to scrutiny. Perhaps because they are so vague it is hard to evaluate them at all.
The real crisis in US education consists of setting up to blame public schools for social conditions, as an excuse to privatize them, so businesses can wolf down public funds and cheat the students and the teachers.
The article uses the word "monetize" to mean "profit from". I shun that usage and recommend that you shun it too.
Habitat for Humanity proposed to use Federal funds to improve housing in Bedford-Stuyvesant for poor people. But gentrifiers took over the housing.
What our expensive cities need now is not upgrades to housing. They need more places where poor people can afford to live — and that calls for driving prices and rents down.
For Older Americans, Divide between Rich And Poor Gets Bigger.
One secondary danger of the systematic tracking of mobile phones is that crackers could steal the data and use them for criminal purposes.
However, the worst danger from the data is that the state can get them easily. Many countries are using panic inspired by rare acts of terrorism as an excuse to eliminate all protections.
Rather than offer users an opportunity to "opt out", the data should not be collected at all except when the state gets a specific warrant to track a specific phone.
Tax havens that enable people and companies to dodge taxes, whether legally or not, do great harm.
In Africa, the high rate of offshoring wealth impoverishes everyone.
The claim that corporations' duty to shareholders takes priority over all other responsibilities was imposed by a systematic effort starting in the 1970s. We have no obligation to grant it any legitimacy.
Leaked documents papers from a company that arranges offshore tax havens show that many people are hiding lots of wealth, including politicians from many countries.
One of them is the Prime Minister of Iceland, who probably will face a new election as a result. The Pirate Party has a chance to form the next government.
The documents show Putin has enriched his friends and family by 2 billion dollars by making the state give them preferences and financing. Alas for Russia, it doesn't have the option to replace Putin democratically.
Special beacons will make it possible to track a mobile phone's location to within 10 cm, inside buildings.
More reason to refuse to carry one.
US citizens: tell Congress to stop exposing fetal tissue researchers to threats from religious fanatics. It is doing this with a gratuitous harassment-investigation, as an extension of the gratuitous harassment-investigation of Planned Parenthood.
Fetal tissue research is vital for advancing medicine, including understanding the effects of Zika on fetuses.
Put it all together, and this harassment scheme aims at saddling as many women as possible with brain-damaged babies.
US citizens:
ask your congresscritter to
support internet radio broadcasting and stop the RIAA from killing it
off.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-29 because the old link was broken.]
The governor of Mississippi has proclaimed April "Confederate Heritage Month", showing no recognition of the evil of slavery, the perpetuation of which was the purpose of the Confederacy.
I would encourage Bernie Sanders to propose a rally during this April to recognize "Confederate Heritage Month" by denouncing all of its evil forms: slavery, the KKK, lynching, the "Jim Crow" segregation laws, the great foreclosure fraud of a few years ago (which disproportionately affected blacks), the many killings of blacks by thugs who hastily assumed they were criminals, and today's voter-suppression laws.
British Museum Must Sever Its Links With BP.
Will No One Stop Poland Destroying Europe's Most Precious Forest?
The MPAA opposes a ban on revenge porn in the name of freedom of speech.
The worse contract for most NHS doctors is especially hard for women and is likely to drive them out of medicine.
Trump probably won't be elected president, but he has convinced most Americans to ban Muslims from visiting the US.
In principle, it would make sense to exclude people with fervent Muslim or Christian or Orthodox Jewish views, since they are likely to promote repressive policies towards women if they become powerful enough here. However, it is too late, since there are so many of those people (especially Christians) in the US already. It would have been necessary to enact the policy around 1615.
Poor children in San Jose, who are a large fraction of the city, say, "My mom won't let me get a [library] card because she doesn’t want fines."
I wonder why they so often return books late. I suspect that children in poverty face simple practical obstacles to returning books on time, and I wonder if there are practical solutions. For instance, could a system for them to return library books through their school help?
Hello magazine admitted its "exclusive interview with George Clooney" was completely fabricated.
The magazine says it did not know the article was fabricated, but will someone be held accountable enough to make sure it doesn't happen again?
Coal companies will evade the obligation to clean up their polluted strip mines and mine waste by going bankrupt.
Arizona has passed a law to obstruct access to abortion drugs.
Knee-jerk reactions to a shocking event tend to be bad ones. The biggest danger to Europe from terrorists is in the foolish attacks on freedom in Europe that are now threatening.
The big record companies, through their tentacle the RIAA, are pushing to make the DMCA even nastier.
Americans have not fought hard enough to demand repeal of the DMCA.
Many physical retail stores have stopped ordering products for ordinary sale. Instead, they tell customers to order the product on the internet, then show a government photo ID to pick up the product.
This is a massive surveillance system. I won't use it, and I hope you will reject it too. Don't reward or encourage surveillance!
When I buy things, I absolutely refuse to give any personal information. The store has a right to my payment. If the store demands more, I say "no sale".
"We won't accept a coup": Brazilians rally to defend president Rousseff even though they were not her supporters.
Indigenous people do not have a right to demand "return" of everything that they gave or sold to Europeans, nor a right to control all the ideas of their culture.
No one has a right to a monopoly over a cultural practice. An Australian indigene has no more right to enforce ownership over a style of artifacts, or all its examples, than an American has the right to enforce ownership over jazz, rock or rap. And people have the right to make fusions of these with other styles, too.
If you don't like those fusions, don't watch or listen to them.
The Australian government found a cute way to shift the blame for insufficient spending and taxes onto the states — so taxes won't be raised, and hospitals and schools will continue to run short.
Disabled artists in the UK use their art to show what the state's contempt for the disabled means.
Erdoğan's war of choice is leading many young Turkish Kurds to join the armed PKK.
The PKK had had a cease-fire with the Turkish state for many years until Erdoğan broke it. If he had respected it, those youth would be campaigning for the human rights party HDK instead of planning to fight. Poor Kurds, poor Turks, as long as Erdoğan oppresses them both.
But that's fascism for you: scapegoat a minority, whip up hatred for it among the majority, and get its support to impose tyranny on all.
"Donald Trump's disastrous comments on abortion show that the best way to undermine irrational politicians is to give them a platform to speak."
"Modest" fashion, designed to suit dress codes imposed on women by male clerics, teaches us about the patriarchal demand for women to be "modest".
Al Qa'ida, PISSI and Netanyahu all say, "Never mind what we do to people we hate."
Everyone: Thank state attorneys general for investigating Exxon's global heating fraud.
Everyone: call on New York Mayor de Blasio to fire all the thugs involved in killing Ramarley Graham.
Everyone: call on the Georgia governor to veto the guns-on-campus bill.
Honduras has decided to allow Gustavo Castro Soto, witness to the murder of Berta Cáceres, to leave the country.
As long as he remains in Honduras, the murderers will have easy access to kill him too.
The EPA raised the allowed level of cadmium in waters, ignoring its duty to consult about the danger to wildlife.
Ohio plans to make electric customers bail out old and dangerous power plants.
Chicago Teachers, Workers Come Together for 'Unprecedented' Strike for Public Funding.
A Briton was convicted of the crime of treating his wife (who arrived from Pakistan) as a domestic slave.
The Muslim religion and the culture that goes with it is partly responsible for this crime, because it is pervaded by that attitude towards women. Not all Muslim men act this way, but when you teach men to despise women, some will follow their teaching.
The Indonesian government spoke of deporting Leonardo DiCaprio because he criticized the policies that encourage massive deforestation.
To consider deporting someone for that reason is disrespect for human rights. Indonesia deserves better government than that.
Most women in Papua New Guinea suffer from domestic violence, and most men participate in gang rapes. Women are fairly often burned for "witchcraft".
The New York Times obeyed an Israeli demand not to mention the name of the soldier that murdered a Palestinian in cold blood.
The other soldiers and medics who saw the murder did not react at all, suggesting that they were accustomed to witnessing such murders.
The American Association of University Professors accuses a branch of
the US government of imposing far-reaching censorship on college
courses, based on
equating
uncomfortable subject matter with harassment.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-29 because the old link was broken.]
In effect, the Department of Education has set up an unofficial system for censorship, bypassing actual courts, and trying to pretend it doesn't punish universities while in fact threatening to cut off their funding if they don't comply.
Some US states have
laws
to boycott companies that boycott Israel, or even decide not to
have subsidiaries in Israel.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-29 because the old link was broken.]
When Massachusetts adopted a boycott of companies that did business in Burma, the US government decided that state purchasing boycotts were prohibited by the WTO. I wonder if that will be enforced in this issue too. However, I think that states should have the right to boycott for any criteria.
Wisconsin's voter-ID law called for a public education campaign so that voters would know how to comply. But the Republican legislature disregarded that and never appropriated funds for it.
No surprise. After all, the real purposes of these bills is precisely to bar poor, old, minority and student voters from voting.
Awareness of general surveillance leads people to self-censor their dissenting opinions.
We must seize the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity of Bernie Sanders. Being cautious will at best continue the status quo, whose nature is to keep getting worse.
The Mexican state couldn't bear the scandal of trying soldiers who murdered civilian prisoners, so it has stopped releasing information about such cases.
New York State has given employees paid family leave, but this is paid for by the same employees while they are working.
It would have been a mistake to make employers pay for this leave for their employees. That would have discouraged hiring workers.
But it is also a mistake to make the employees pay. That turns it into a forced savings plan that will be useless to those that don't have children and don't take time off work to care for parents.
The right way to fund such programs is by taxing the rich, and companies in ways that have nothing to do with how many people they employ.
Protesters chained themselves to cars to block the road to a Trump rally.
Some towns near the border of Texas supply water with so much arsenic that it isn't safe to drink.
This is a extreme case of a general problem in the US: too little money for infrastructure. The cause is the success of businesses and the rich in reducing their tax rate, starting under Reagan.
Pollution Is Now Coming from Donald Trump's Golf Course, in Addition to His Mouth.
South African president Jacob Zuma faces calls to resign for his corruption, including from one of the heroes of the African National Congress.
Assad's forces report finding a mass grave in Palmyra containing 42 corpses, over half of them civilians and including three children.
One can't entirely trust Assad's forces, but this is a plausible claim. Gratuitous cruelty and violence are part of PISSI's ideology and recruiting method.
A fool notices that bringing children into the world facing disaster is not a wise choice, then convinces himself that it couldn't be wrong because it feels so good.
You don't have to be foolish like that.
The idea of a "biological imperative" that constitutes a reason why you should reproduce is nonsense. There is a biological tendency to reproduce, which exists for well-known evolutionary reasons, but a tendency to do something is not a reason to do it. I have a tendency to mislay things and forget where I put them, but that is no reason why I ought to forget.
Anything that makes you focus most of your attention on the well-being of one specific other person — which is almost guaranteed to call for more money than you can gain honestly — is a road to cheating or abusing people. It is wiser not to set foot on that path!
The EU-Turkey deal to return Syrian refugees to Turkey without considering their applications for asylum might violate treaties about refugees.
Hibo Wardere describes the suffering that genital mutilation caused her, and continues to cause her now that she is an adult. She now dedicates herself to putting an end to the practice.
Those accused of sexual abuse, but never tried, have no way to clear their names. They are treated in many ways as guilty.
In Texas, at least 100,000 women have tried to give themselves abortions due to the law denying them access to safe abortions.
Greenpeace Reveals Indonesia's Forests at Risk as Multiple Companies Claim Rights to Same Land.
Finally, a good reason why the UK should leave the EU: to thwart the IMF's continuing attack on poor Greeks.
Amerindians are protesting an oil pipeline that could pollute their drinking water: the Missouri river.
Snowden urges future whistleblowers not to regard exile as defeat or disaster. He says he can campaign more effectively for freedom from exile than he could have done in the US.
Belgium plans to require immigrants and long term visitors to sign a statement in favor of "European values" and promising to report plans of terrorism.
I think this is basically legitimate, but "European values" is too vague.
It is self-contradictory to claim (1) that one can take this for granted so there's no need to raise the issue and (2) it would drive some immigrants away.
I think most immigrants will agree with it and sign it, and it will lead them to reflect on the values they are agreeing to.
El Al staff told a female passenger to change seats because her neighbor, a Jewish religious fanatic, said that a woman near him was against his religion.
This sort of thing has happened on El Al many times before, but now the defenders of equal rights for women have a good case to fight. The woman in question was an 81-year-old widow, making the supposed danger of her attractiveness absurd.
However, even if she had been a beautiful 21-year-old wearing something skimpy, that would not give another passenger the right to demand that she move. There is nothing wrong about being 21 and beautiful, and wearing revealing clothing is not an aggression against anyone.
If the man had been less arrogant, if his goal had been to follow his beliefs rather than to subjugate women in general, he might have looked for someone who would switch seats with him.
The ultra-orthodox continue looking for ways to oppress women in Israel, and I fear that as their numbers grow they will eventually win. At that point, non-orthodox Jews will face oppression in Israel and will need to seek a homeland somewhere else.
New pun: "Sculpture of David Cameron".
Canadian journalist Ben Makuch says he will go to prison rather than reveal the messages he exchanged with a source who is now in Syria fighting PISSI.
Piketty and Varoufakis explain what it takes to save the sinking ship of Europe, but the elites are getting into the lifeboats already.
Elizabeth Warren Warns Banks Are Lying About Upcoming Rule Change, Potentially Breaking The Law.
During Erdoğan's visit to the US, his bodyguards attacked Turkish journalists as they tried to enter the hall in Washington where he was going to speak.
They also threatened to kill one of the journalists.
It looks like Erdoğan and Putin are Trump's role models.
The FBI has replaced the publicly visible order for Apple to crack security on an iPhone with another case, which is being argued in secret. The FBI is trying to sneak this past the American people.
In this case, the targets of prosecution are gang members, not terrorists. In other words, this is part of the cruel and foolish "War on Drugs".
This should teach people to stop thinking of the FBI's demands as an "anti-terrorism" measure. It's an "anti-anyone-accused-or-suspected-of-anything" measure — exactly what our constitution is supposed to put limits on, for our freedom's sake.
The ACLU defends our constitutional rights. I'm an ACLU member. How about joining?
The scorn directed from all quarters at women who have been raped pressures many of them to deny that it happened.
Why is it worse to be raped than to be stabbed? As a physical injury, the stabbing is worse; but there is no general pattern of scorning people for being stabbed.
In a healthy society, the word "slut" would be incomprehensible.
When a right-wing terrorist killed Hanne Lovlie, her family decided to help victims of violence as her memorial.
The UK is trying to set a precedent of requiring people to turn over passwords to them, using someone accused of cracking US computers as a convenient example. It is keeping the trial secret so Britons won't notice their rights are being threatened.
Clinton claims she doesn't take money from fossil fuel companies. But she has accepted over a million from their lobbyists.
Greenpeace organizer Eva Resnick-Day describes how she confronted Clinton about this.
Obama has worked to improve security for the world's civilian stores of highly enriched uranium, but has neglected the far larger military stocks.
In the US: participate in the Democracy Awakening rally in Washington on April 17.
Everyone:
call
on Quebec not to destroy the old-growth forests around the
Broadback River.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-29 because the old link was broken.]
The immediate proposal is to build roads, but companies would use them to cut down as many trees as they can sneakily get away with.
US citizens: call on your congresscritter to support the bill to audit the Pentagon.
US citizens: call on Obama and Congress not to sell fighter jets to Qatar until it stops funding al-Nusra (the Syrian branch of al Qa'ida).
Turkish border guards are accused of shooting Syrian refugees at the border.
This is part of a general pattern: it isn't entirely safe to be a Syrian refugee in Turkey.
A peace agreement in Syria could enable many of the refugees to go home. That should be the goal.
France accuses Russia of bombing civilians in Damascus for purposes of terrorism.
Many Arab countries quietly cooperate with Israel. If Israel only were willing to end its occupation of Palestine, those countries would become its eager friends.
Most of them are eager friends with US money, and as a patriotic American I find the friendship of such tyrants rather embarrassing. But Israel has less world influence than the US and perhaps shouldn't be asked to reject possible friends on such grounds. If Israel simply pulled back its colonists and ended the occupation, I would have no criticism of its foreign policies.
There remains, however, the issue of democracy. Israel is considering a law that would allow it to expel all the Arab members of parliament.
Middle-Class Feminism Has a Blind Spot over Female Cleaners.
The many articles about the "glass ceiling" for female executives strike me as a distraction from the main issue.
Doctors and teachers in the UK should go on strike together.
Gouging in US health care shows why we need a single universal health care payment system.
Women in parts of Nepal and India are treated as disgusting when they are menstruating.
How cruel superstition is.
Use of tissues from aborted fetuses is essential for research on Zika.
Step by step, Australia abolishes the right not to testify against oneself.
North Korea kidnaped people from various countries in the 1970s to force them to train spies.
The Japanese ruling party calls itself the "Liberal Democratic Party" but it is really a conservative party.
Xi Jinping's grab for total power over China is compelling him to develop an Erdoğan-like sensitivity to criticism, which he implements with Erdoğan-like overt repression.
Nuclear Power Plants Are Pre-Deployed Weapons of Mass Destruction.
Meanwhile, accidents are still a danger. The Indian Point nuclear plants, near New York City, are among the most accident-prone in the US.
If an accident occurs, it may make New York City unsafe to inhabit, decades before the rising seas would do so. However, evacuating 5 million people from New York and surrounding suburbs would be impossible as well as unsustainable.
Senator Warren called for replacement of the government's system for collecting college loan payments.
Using private companies to do the government's work is inviting fraud. Each indirection in the chain reduces accountability, and we have seen the effects here.
GlaxoSmithKline announced it will not patent its new drugs in countries that are the poorest of the poor, such as Afghanistan, Rwanda and Cambodia.
I wonder, though, whether this apparent magnanimity will have any practical effect. I don't think there are generic drug factories in countries such as Afghanistan, Rwanda and Cambodia. If the countries such as India that actually make generic drugs are not covered, if GSK continues using patents to prevent the manufacture of generic drugs in those countries, this gift will turn out to be an empty gesture.
The reason this problem exists is that the World Trade Organization treaty requires India to allow patents on drugs.
The real solution for this is to abolish the World Trade Organization.
Senator Wyden's speech for a bill to defend encryption from state interference and to narrow the "third party" doctrine that is the excuse for so much state surveillance.
These would be major advances, but what we really need is to prevent systems from keeping records about what people do. We should require digital systems to offer the maximum possible level of anonymity.
The UK pays to discourage coal-fired power plants, then pays to keep them running.
Such a policy contradiction can also be seen in the area of trade secrets: the US adopted the patent system explicitly to discourage trade secrecy, then adopted specific trade secret laws to encourage trade secrecy.
The UK's foreign aid "for the poor" is being diverted to consultants in the UK.
California has increased the minimum wage. After several steps it will reach $15 in 2022.
Prince Edward Island, in Canada, will legalize abortion.
Some US food companies are going to stop using BPA, a hormone disrupter. But the replacements may be bad for people, too.
After Leading The Attack On Investigative Journalism, President Obama Whines About A Lack Of Investigative Journalism.
In Mexico, the ability of the rich to buy their way out of prosecution is now coming under exposure.
US citizens: support the rule to require companies to report how their pay scale varies with employees' gender and race.
Movie companies are suing to eliminate a Star Trek fan film, and trying to stretch copyright law in the process.
An imprisoned computer manipulation operative says he helped manipulate elections in Mexico and several other countries.
Donald Trump's Most Recent Attacks on Women Point to a History of Misogyny.
The Corporations United decision allowed foreign companies and people to fund US election campaigns.
The corporations called their organization "Citizens United", but there is no reason to support their falsehood.
Poland's right-wing government is also fanatically Christian and wants to ban all abortions.
Mississippi is passing a law privileging religious discrimination and hatred.
This shows the nastiness at the heart of common American versions of Christianity.
Hindu nationalists failed in their attempt to excise coverage of bigotry against Dalits from California textbooks.
Delivering an abortion drug by mail can avoid many of the artificial impediments imposed by right-wing state legislatures.
If Azerbaijan Is a Democracy, Why Were We Imprisoned for Our Views?
US ex-officers condemn Trump for rejecting the Geneva Conventions.
Soldiers understand that they depend on the Geneva Conventions as much as, or more than, civilians do.
The thugs who shot Jamar Clark while he was handcuffed will not be prosecuted.
The city of Nantes is moving its administration completely to LibreOffice. I hope this will be followed by moving to GNU/Linux.
The article uses the confused term "intellectual property" which refers to a dozen or so unrelated laws and misleadingly suggests they are similar. Too bad.
Merrick Garland is a "moderate" in the sense that he decides cases to support the power structure. He was a prosecutor, so his decisions tend to support the state over people and especially accused people.
Watch a Black Student Assault White Teen Because His Dreadlocks Are Cultural Appropriation.
No person or group is entitled to own a hair style or any other cultural practice.
Imitating practices that in some other group have a meaning you don't understand can in some cases be insensitive, and doing so might make you look foolish — but that doesn't entitle them to stop you. And some practices, such as your hair style, don't have any meaning unless you say they do.
Colorado proposes to make sexting a misdemeanor for teenagers, which could result in more prosecutions of teenagers for sexting.
Laws concerning teenagers and sex or reproduction tend to be twisted up by prudish irrational impulses.
San Francisco thugs stopped a public defender from protecting her clients' rights by arresting her on false charges.
To reclaim our cities from these thugs, we need to teach them a lesson. We need to put them away for periods of many years.
Mass transit in the US is scraping to a halt for lack of maintenance funds. We need to increase the gasoline tax — but the politicians in the pocket of the planet roasters will never allow that.
Japan's public pensions are so meager that old people can only survive by stealing and getting in jail.
"The more money [or gifts] doctors receive from drug and medical device companies, the more brand-name drugs they tend to prescribe, a new ProPublica analysis shows."
The EFF is starting to fight more strongly against Digital Restrictions Management.
Senator Wyden will personally block bills to require software developers to block their encryption.
Drought is crippling hydropower in Venezuela.
This is likely to be a world-wide problem — it will rain too little, except where it rains too much.
Now people in Turkey are threatened with prosecution for repeating rumors.
This resembles China and Thailand.
Queers still face repression in Ukraine; the pro-Western (but somewhat fascist) government is no better than the previous pro-Russian government.
Subcontracting is increasing in Silicon Valley, and this is spreading poverty.
Shell's Headquarters Raided and Formal Investigation Launched over Billion Dollar Nigerian Oil Deal.
The French minister for women's rights compared women that wear burqas to American blacks that supported slavery.
I agree. Those women are entitled to wear what they wish — it should not be prohibited — but we should recognize what the burqa stands for.
Meanwhile, there is nothing insulting about the word "negro". The fuss about the minister's word choice is foolish.
Pakistan's government promised religious fanatics it would not repeal the vicious blasphemy law.
This crowns with success the murder they rallied to support.
Depending on a GPS navigator leads you to lose your ability to read maps and understand where you are.
A new study, considering more processes that affect the Antarctic ice, estimates an additional meter of sea level rise in this century.
Sea level will rise further after 2100. Many coastal cities are likely to be swamped sooner or later.
France is trying to extend the so-called "right to be forgotten", i.e., right to exclude articles from searches for your name, into a global censorship regime.
The French state has a pattern of attacking freedom of speech. It is forbidden to say there was no genocide of the Armenians, as well as to say there was no genocide of the Jews.
I reject both of those statements (see evidence for the genocide of the Armenians) but we must defend people's right to say these things even if they are incorrect.
You can also be prosecuted for saying "Don't buy from Israeli companies."
That goes somewhat beyond my form of opposition to Israel's occupation policies, but the right to advocate a boycott is part of human rights.
Even saying "I am not Charlie Hebdo" can get you harassed by thugs.
When France, a supposed champion of freedom, imposes persistent and ever-extending censorship, that clears the path for tyrants such as Putin and Erdoğan to impose their own forms of censorship.
US government standards, being effectively imposed on colleges, say that it's not enough to say "yes" to sex — only an "enthusiastic" agreement is enough to avoid accusations of crime.
It won't take much more to reach a 1950-style "abstinence only" rule.
The idiotic arguments that have put the US and Europe in danger of surrender to plutocrats are now being deployed against Africa.
Understanding some of the biological basis of anorexia.
The Smart Con: Clinton vs. Trump.
Clinton Campaign: No More Debates Until Sanders Starts Being Nicer.
The FCC told some app developers to stop working with SilverPush. It seems that SilverPush is claiming to have stopped this practice, while also continuing to offer it to advertisers.
The root cause of this practice comes from advertising that tracks people. We need to put an end to that, totally.
Monsanto is pressuring the government of Nigeria to grow Bt cotton, but farmers are fighting back.
Obama is choosing drug treatment over drug repression, to reduce heroin addiction.
This much is good, but I am still concerned about the War on Pain Sufferers.
Cooper Union has removed all gender signs from its toilets.
It would be useful, however, to indicate which ones have urinals, since some people may want to use a urinal, and others may prefer not to see exposed penises.
Sanders is the only candidate that recognizes the precarious nature of work for young Americans.
Hollywood romantic comedies teach people to expect, even demand, behavior that is rather twisted.
Human Rights Watch accuses Louisiana of denying prisoners access to medical care for HIV.
Top Scientists Back Federal Plan to Protect Alaska Predators.
The predators to be protected are animals that prey on animals (not multinational mining companies.)
A lawsuit tries to stop Canada's sale of arms to Salafi Arabia.
Trump's campaign manager faces criminal charges for grabbing and yanking a journalist.
Erdoğan petulantly ordered the German ambassador to have a satirical German video deleted because it makes fun of him.
Trump, despite all that is bad about him, has the merit of attacking business supremacy treaties constantly.
I am reluctant to trust that he would really try to get rid of them, however. Trump is more manipulative than honest. The people who support Trump for this reason should support Sanders instead.
Everyone: Support a new wildlife refuge in Massachusetts.
Everyone: call on Connecticut to drop charges against Cherelle Baldwin.
US citizens: call on the Department of Justice to investigate Arizona voter suppression.
US citizens: call on Congress not to fund groups that attack Syrian Kurds.
Why Do the Tories Want to Hide Who Owns British Land?
The US and Russia are cooperating to fight PISSI in Syria.
Evidently, Russia is not withdrawing all its forces from Syria quite so fast.
This cooperation is useful. It also demonstrates that the US and Russia don't need to be enemies. To be sure, Putin is capable of various sorts of aggression. Nonetheless, if the US avoids pushing too hard (for instance, inviting parts of the former Soviet Union to join NATO), the US and Russia need not be in conflict.
It will still be a shame that Putin has done away with democracy, the independent press, and other human rights in Russia. But the US is not in a position to do much about that.
I am concerned that Russian bombardment of Raqqa will be indiscriminate, a series of war crimes. The US makes some effort to avoid killing civilians, though it denies these killings when they happen. Russia hardly bothers to try to avoid killing civilians.
The Fight for the Environment And the Fight for Blue-Collar Jobs Are One And the Same.
In both cases, it's a fight for democracy against plutocracy.
Link between Fossil Fuels and Great Barrier Reef Bleaching 'Clear' And 'Incontrovertible', Say Scientists.
Koch Brothers Attempt to Kill Single-Payer Health Care in Colorado.
The FBI wants prominent people in the Muslim community to counsel troubled youths, and report in detail on them.
One might expect them to report any actual criminal plans that they learn about, but this demand goes for beyond that.
A trillion dollars in planned investment in new coal-fired power plants will be a wasted and the money lost, assuming we save civilization from disaster by not actually using those power plants.
Was the British colonization of Australia an invasion?
Colonization is not synonymous with invasion. The British colonization of Massachusetts started very slowly and did not become a violent conflict until many years had gone by.
The colonization of Australia, starting 170 years later, went much faster; exiled were sent by thousands. "Invasion" could be an accurate term for that.
Thousands of Pakistanis are rallying in favor of a religious fanatic who murdered an official for advocating tolerance.
Pakistan is one of the countries I absolutely refuse to visit, because it is a hotbed of vicious fanaticism.
Repression in Thailand has reached absurd levels: posting a photo with a gift from exiled former PM Thaksin Shinawatra brought a woman prosecution for "sedition" and a possible sentence of 7 years in prison.
Perhaps they will sentence her to one year in prison and ask to be admired for how merciful they are. However, the very idea of prosecuting someone for "sedition" is evil, never mind what the punishment is.
Rich people like to think poor people have genes for stupidity, rather than admit that growing up in deprivation holds them back.
An FBI informant won Khalil abu Rayyan's heart, then got him to talk about fantasy terrorism to impress her. Now he is being prosecuted.
Writer Akram Aylisli is being persecuted in Azerbaijan because he wrote about the persecution of Armenians.
Sperm whales are dying from filling their stomachs with floating plastic waste.
Global heating will cause bigger heat waves and floods, which could cause large numbers of people to get sick at once. The UK's medical system could be overwhelmed. That is probably true in other places as well.
France's plans to punish convicted terrorists by loss of citizenship have been defeated.
Hooray! Alas, some other countries have similar plans, but this may deal them a setback.
This measure was never conceived as a rational scheme to reduce terrorism.
"When Israeli leaders keep pushing the message that killing Palestinian attackers is a laudable act, is it any wonder that the shooters become our national heroes?"
Breaking the Silence, which organizes former Israeli soldiers to witness the crimes they committed or saw other soldiers commit, is now the target of a right-wing phony scandal, comparable to the one cooked up against Planned Parenthood and previously against ACORN.
Israel has adopted higher taxes for bank executives' pay above a certain limit.
It is a step in the right direction, but I would do it in a more general way, by adding higher tax brackets with higher tax rates.
US Girl Scouts' rules say that even high school students are not allowed to sell cookies without an adult's supervision.
China is considering blocking access to all non-Chinese internet domains.
This would amount to cutting China off from most of the world's internet entirely.
Spreading in the UK: boroughs where no state school even offers the advanced high school classes that universities expect entering students to take.
This results from the combination of two aspects of Tory plutocracy:
20 US states are investigating Exxon's climate lies together.
The American College of Physicians calls for the US government to keep the prices of medicines down.
The natural way to do this, used by most other wealthy countries, is to have a national health service that negotiates with manufacturers on behalf of all patients.
The Associated Press got permission to keep operating in Nazi Germany by serving as Hitler's propaganda outlet to the US, and aiding Nazi propaganda in Germany.
Many US companies and business leaders eagerly helped the Nazis. IBM's cooperation is famous, and there was also Mr Bush.
US citizens: phone the FCC to oppose the merger of Charter and Time Warner Cable.
Most of the ancient city of Palmyra is still in good condition.
We should recall that Assad's bombers have destroyed other ancient urban areas.
Everyone: Call on Nike to stop renting a big store in Trump Tower.
A poll reports that most Israelis support the recent murder of an incapacitated Palestinian.
They have dehumanized Palestinians to the point of being ready to kill them with hardly a thought.
Utah has found a creative way to endanger pregnant women with fetuses with severe birth defects: requiring anesthesia for their abortions.
Brazil should recognize Zika is a sexually transmitted disease, and promote condom use.
The FBI backed off from demanding Apple write software to facilitate decrypting data on an iThing.
However, other such cases are still pending.
The Arctic set a record, this February, for least ice in winter. This broke the previous record, set last year.
The lack of ice is not just a sign of global heating, it also tends to cause more heating.
Right-wing Israelis cheered the summary execution by a soldier of an incapacitated Palestinian suspect. Perhaps a majority of Israelis support the murder.
Next the Israeli state will punish the deceased's family by destroying its home.
Some during the 70s and later in the second intifada Palestinian militants often treated Israelis as vermin. They have mostly stopped doing so. Now the Israelis have taken over that attitude.
US citizens: call on Arizona election official Helen Purcell to resign.
US citizens: call on the US government to investigate Arizona voter suppression apparently aimed at Latinos.
US citizens: call on Democrats to reject non-budget riders in budget bills.
The Australian minister in charge proposes to work hard to protect the Great Barrier Reef from all the major threats, except for the biggest one: global heating.
Meanwhile, the same CO2 that causes the heating will eventually kill all coral by making the ocean too acidic for them.
Chinese journalist Jia Jia was, apparently, jailed for a few days for warning colleagues it might be dangerous to republish the anonymous open letter that called for strongman Xi Jinping to resign.
Clinton's fund raiser offers rich people access to her for $353,000 each.
This shows what sort of president she would be.
The Belgian state's attitude in 2013 was, "Let those radicals leave for Syria, and good riddance."
It turned out to be a mistake, but it wasn't obviously wrong at the time.
If you let a company sequence your DNA,
the
state will use that against you.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-29 because the old link was broken.]
PISSI made an explicit plan to spread terror around the world through underground suicide squads.
PISSI expects Europeans to panic and play into PISSI's hands with harsh security measures. Instead, people should learn to cope with the occasional occurrence of medium-scale terrorist attacks.
After all, they are rather small compared with the other dangers.
It would be a mistake to give up on trying to curb people's disproportionate, irrational responses to these attacks. If we even help a few people to avoid panic, that is good in itself; further, it can make the difference between passing or defeating a foolish unjust law.
The first step is to stop legitimizing and supporting the panic reaction.
A petition demanding the right to carry guns at the Republican Convention hoists gun nuts on their own petard.
How about a petition to allow people to carry petards (bombs) at the Republican Convention?
Bryan Sanders, who was punched by a Trump supporter at a Trump rally, says Trump is the one responsible.
A Colombian general is being prosecuted for killing civilians.
Erdoğan condemned a foreign diplomat for being photographed with one of the persecuted Turkish journalists.
Poor Turkey, saddled with a president that insults Turkishness.
Melting Arctic ice is an invitation for cargo and cruise ships to risk causing deaths and oil spills.
Georgia's governor says he will veto the pro-discrimination law just passed by the legislature.
I think it should be vetoed, but I find it disturbing that businesses exercise so much power to block laws. There are other laws that we need to adopt, to reduce businesses' power, that they also want to block.
Angolan protesters have been sentenced to years in prison for publicly reading from a book by Gene Sharp.
Ralph Nader: Why Bernie Sanders was Right to Run as a Democrat.
Gustavo Castro Soto, colleague of Berta Cáeres who witnessed her assassination, fears the US-backed Honduran state will frame him for killing her.
Clinton, I see you!
To be sure, I don't think that Clinton suggested framing him, or suggested killing her. The point is that she helped put in power the power-at-all-costs elites for whom this is typical practice.
The UK is about to criminalize a wide range of currently legal drugs.
A guide for identifying products made by Israeli companies in colonies in Palestine. They often try to hide this.
American meteorologists now firmly recognize that human activities cause global heating.
Israel has backed down on trying to make Brazil accept a prominent anti-peace politician as ambassador.
Netanhayu now plans to use him to foist a similar gesture of fealty on the US.
Microsoft and some other large companies decry North Carolina's new pro-discrimination law, but their repeated donations to Republicans are the cause of it.
Before the CIA handed prisoners to other countries that were considered likely to torture them, the CIA took nude photos of them to serve as proof that the torture wasn't done by the CIA itself.
Why it should matter whether the CIA maimed someone directly or through an subcontracted government is beyond me. Either way, the US is culpable.
Chomsky, Snowden, Greenwald on Privacy in the Age of Surveillance.
Snowden's remarks, as quoted here, seem to consider an omniscient state as a reasonable option, and objects only to failing to ask the public for consent. As I've shown in before, an omniscient state means no democracy.
Bosnia-Herzegovina needs to escape from the nationalist fragmentation that the peace arrangements of the 1990s have left it in.
Chinese expat journalist Zhang Ping says his brothers in China have been jailed as hostages; the Chinese government demands he withdraw an article he published.
Honduras has arrested a suspect in the murder of environmental activist Nelson García, who was killed shortly after Berta Cáeres.
Most British teachers have students who come to school hungry.
A large revolutionary mural in Cairo, part of the little that al-Sisi has not crushed, is being torn down by the American University as part of a construction plan.
If the FBI gets the power to order proprietary software developers to make changes, it will use that to do more than snoop on you. It will take over your digital devices' proprietary software and do to you whatever it wants.
The argument about a car directed to bomb the White House is invalid, because that car is no more or less dangerous than one driven by a suicide bomber. I presume the Secret Service has already arranged measures to stop either one.
Even if laws stop the FBI from turning all your devices against you, the software's developers could do it. So could rogue employees, blackmailed employees, and crackers that have broken the company's security.
There is only one real solution, and that is to shun nonfree software in these devices. You can never trust a nonfree program.
If "democratic" states cede power and responsibility to big tech firms, there may be no way to prise them back.
Protests are planned in May against the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which should stop rubber-stamping every request that the fossil fuel industry makes.
Some psychological studies suggest that most people want autonomy rather than control over others.
Sanders won landslide victories in caucuses in Washington, Alaska, and Hawaii and has reduced the delegate gap from 300 to 200.
Apple designs its own servers, from concern that commercially available servers have been modified by the NSA to enable snooping.
I am also concerned about this threat.
The Federal Trade Commission warned app developers to inform users about snooping on them.
While this is well-intentioned, I don't think it goes far enough to solve the problem.
Lawrence Faulkenberry's security cameras proved that the thugs who beat him up and gave him permanent injuries also tried to frame him.
So where's the prosecution for perjury? We must not let these thugs get away with these lies.
The Challenge of Secularism and Human Rights in Africa.
Assad's forces say they have recaptured Palmyra.
Trump's supporters are people he despises as "losers".
Does it make sense to invest almost 400 million dollars in a train system for Miami?
For other cities, I'd say it is important to invest in reduced fossil fuel use. In the case of Miami, will people live there long enough for this system to be worth the cost? (The reduction in greenhouse gas emissions can be counted as part of the repayment.) Even though the train line itself will be elevated, it won't be much use once flooding starts making people leave.
Perhaps it would be wiser to invest in moving people to higher ground — perhaps in Georgia.
The Briton charged with a crime for saying he asked a Muslim woman to "explain Brussels" has had charges dropped, for now.
It seems that the thugs bring such charges on their own; higher officials must approve it. So the charges have been dropped. It is conceivable that he will be charged again.
We must defend his right to say these things even if we don't agree with them.
A California city wants to make it a crime to be present at a loud party.
Indiana's new abortion law bans choosing to abort because the fetus has a medical problem. It is also calculated to expose doctors to terrorism.
How about aborting because the fetus has a different kind of problem? Can we detect fetuses that are likely to turn out to be religious fanatics?
Some US congresscritters call on the NSA to cease and desist from its plans to expand spying on the US.
A committee of experts as called for decriminalization of using recreational drugs, to avoid the deaths and sicknesses caused by the War on Drugs.
It's only barely the start of Spring, but there's already a record-breaking wildfire in Kansas.
The primaries in North Carolina and Arizona show that Republican voter suppression methods are effective enough to steal an election.
In the US nowadays, being poor means 13 or 14 years less life expectancy.
The UK government plans to turn all public schools into "academies", which means eliminating local control and for the most part privatizing them.
Teachers say that they expect less pay for more work under more pressure, so many of them plan to quit.
A strike is in the works.
When you meet someone with cancer, don't urge a quack remedy. It's at best condescending, at worst victim-blaming.
I have never had cancer, but I've faced similar annoyances over much lesser problems: for instance, people who insist on trying to be helpful by telling me background information I already know. They are not helping me at all, only creating an excuse to feel they are being helpful.
If you can't help someone, there's no good in pretending you can.
French anti-genocide investigative journalist Florence Hartmann revealed that the Bosnian war crimes tribunal had withheld information from the International Criminal Court. The war crimes tribunal has now jailed her and is subjecting her to 24-hour sleep deprivation.
Obama strongly condemned attempts to stigmatize Muslims in general. I agree completely. I just wish he would also avoid bombing Muslims in many countries.
Wen Yunchao says China has disappeared his parents and brother because someone claimed he was the author of a published letter that called on Chinese ruler Xi Jinping to quit. The Chinese state apparently suspects him of writing the letter. If true, it would be no excuse to arrest or disappear anyone.
Poland Approves Large-Scale Logging in Europe's Last Primeval Forest. It might be the right decision if it prevents beetles from causing even worse harm. But that sort of defense doesn't often work.
Many ways that the establishment has tried to block Sanders from a fair chance against Clinton.
Humanitarian Groups Refuse to Partake in 'Mass Expulsion' of Refugees (from Greece to Turkey).
'This Is a Coup': Brazil's Workers Party Faces Its Greatest Test.
Mass protests for democracy are planned for April in Washington DC.
North Carolina's law that requires toilets to be designated for people's biological sex may be unconstitutional.
US citizens: stop Arch Coal from building roads in the Sunset Roadless Area.
US citizens: call on Obama to end fracking on public lands.
US citizens: tell Clinton, release your speech texts.
US citizens:
call on
Congress to hold gun manufacturers responsible when their
negligence gets someone shot.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-29 because the old link was broken.]
Simply making a gun does not constitute negligence, and the gun manufacturer should not automatically be liable when someone is shot, just as a car manufacturer should not automatically be liable when someone is hit with a car. However, the gun manufacturer should not get an automatic free pass which the car manufacturer doesn't get.
US citizens: call on the Democratic National Committee to impose sanctions on Democrats that support the TPP in a lame-duck session of Congress.
Massachusetts citizens: call on House Speaker DeLeo to raise the "net metering" limit, which limits selling solar-generated electricity to the grid.
News reporting should present the thousands of dead and mutilated victims of US-supported bombing the way it presents the dozens of dead and mutilated victims of PISSI's bombings.
After months of bombardment by Salafi Arabia (with US support), 80% of the people in Yemen need aid.
The bombardment and the blockade have caused shortages of food and medicine.
The UK spits on freedom of expression: a Briton actually faces criminal charges for tweeting that he asked Muslim to "explain Brussels".
That tweet expresses hostility towards Muslims in general, which I don't think is justified. But that's of no relevance — freedom of expression includes the right to express hostility, whether justified or not.
In Belgium, each month, around 60 people are killed by traffic accidents [1], around 15 by murderers [2], and around 150 by tobacco [3]. Heart attacks kill around 400 a month [4].
By comparison, a terrorist attack once in a while is simply not a big danger. Sure, it's worth some effort to investigate so as to prevent terrorism, because there's a good chance of having some success at it. But it's not something to freak out about, and not worth surrendering freedom for.
[1] WHO, Global Health Observatory data repository. Website. Table: Estimated number of road traffic deaths & Estimated road traffic death rate (per 100 000 population), 2013
URL for table: http://apps.who.int/gho/data/node.main.A997
[2] United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime Accessed through the 'UNdata' database. Source for figures: UNODC Homicide Statistics 2012 Table: Intentional homicide,number and rate per 100,000 population
URL for table: http://data.un.org/Data.aspx?d=UNODC&f=tableCode%3a1
[3] WHO, "Global Report - Mortality Attributable to Tobacco", page 60. Report, published in 2012.
URL for Website: http://www.who.int/tobacco/publications/surveillance/rep_mortality_attributable/en/
URL for PDF (4.6 MiB) http://whqlibdoc.who.int/publications/2012/9789241564434_eng.pdf
[4] WHO, "European Detailed Mortality Database". Database, last updated in Dec. 2015.
URL for website: http://data.euro.who.int/dmdb/
Turkish journalists will be prosecuted for their work in a secret trial.
Now that there is video proof of one cold-blooded murder by an Israeli soldier, we must not let it be dismissed as an isolated incident.
British Arms Sales to Saudi Arabia Are Immoral And Illegal.
The US arms sales to Salafi Arabia are just as immoral, whatever the law says.
British troops and Jordanian troops are fighting in Libya.
The UK government refused to discuss this with Parliament.
Egyptian thugs say they identified the people who killed Giulio Regeni and shot them dead, every one of them.
Sounds like a case of "Now shoot the usual suspects!"
How the World's Biggest Polluters are Two Trade Deals Away from Steamrolling Climate Protections.
Native Americans Are Taking the Fight for Voting Rights to Court.
Protesters at an Indian university were arrested and have been kept incommunicado.
A flight over a large part of the Great Barrier Reef found that 60% of the coral was bleached.
Coral that bleaches is likely to die, unless it gets an unstressed and cool period to recover.
Obama and Biden proudly announce they tried to choose a nonprogressive Supreme Court nominee to satisfy Republicans.
They chose someone not worth going to bat for.
Obama is no progressive, and this was always obvious. That's why I never voted for him.
Video proves that an Israeli soldier killed a wounded, helpless Palestinian suspect in cold blood.
The Palestinian was suspected of stabbing a soldier. Perhaps he did it, but that is no reason for summary execution.
Electing people who hate government gets you a government that does not do its job right.
They are happy with that result, because they can use it to get reelected. And the rich people they serve can buy their way out of the problems, more or less.
Singapore Court Sentences Online Editor for Sedition.
If "sedition" is a crime, the country stands convicted.
The head of the London thugs says he wants bank customers to be left with the losses due to online fraud.
I don't do online banking, and Professor Ross Anderson, a security expert, says you shouldn't.
The trial of Radovan Karadžić helped lead to a better understanding of the significance of such atrocities.
New pun: "Not signal processing".
In the US: call on employers to offer fossil-fuel-free 401k plan options.
US citizens: call for an end to money bail.
It discriminates heavily against the poor.
Most investment has moved from fossil fuels to clean energy.
We can call this the end of the beginning. Alas, the world has so much fossil fuel generating capacity already, pumping out so much CO2 each day, that we need to get rid of most of it in order to be safe.
Texas Mothers Jailed Five Days in Louisiana over Two Hot Dogs (which they say they didn't take).
Just because they pled not-guilty, they were going to be jailed for two months. The prosecutor defended this pointless harm by saying they do it all the time.
The International Labor Organisation is moving, slowly, against Qatar for encouraging enslavement of workers.
Radovan Karadžić Sentenced to 40 Years for Genocide at Srebrenica.
There's a plan to dredge the US's only barrier reef in order to improve access to the port of Fort Lauderdale.
Fort Lauderdale is less than 3 meters above sea level — about two feet higher than Miami, which already floods regularly. If James Hansen is right about projected sea level rise, Fort Lauderdale won't even be there for much longer. Any investment in it is folly.
Some buses in the US record passengers' conversations — all conversations.
If the state recorded everything everyone says and does, that would be perfect for catching all criminals, except those that the state doesn't want to catch. It would also be tyranny. Catching criminals is not as important as some other goals.
TSA "explosive" sniffers detect hand sanitizer.
Three Iranian artists face imprisonment for their work, after a joke of a trial where they were not allowed to talk with lawyers.
On Tuesday, Sanders won two of the three primaries.
More importantly, he got more delegates than Clinton did.
"Far from being a bridge to the future, natural gas turns out to have been a costly detour."
The US must entirely stop fracking to meet its greenhouse gas targets.
An appeals court ruled that thugs can't seize people's cash based on vague suspicions they are engaged in some sort of crime.
It is a step in the right direction, but not far enough. "Civil forfeiture" is an excuse for punishment without trial.
Legalizing all recreational drugs could solve a lot of problems, and would not necessarily mean much more abuse of them.
I am not sure I advocate unrestricted sales of physically addictive drugs. A half-way step would be to prescribe them only to addicts. But if legalization works — if the problems of use are not much bigger — it would be better.
The EU's proposed business tax reform is far too weak. It covers only payments to other companies based in the EU.
"To rescue capitalism from its own arrogance."
The Rockefeller family charity says it will divest from all fossil fuel companies.
NFL Finally Admits A Link Between Football And Traumatic Brain Disease.
Anti-privacy senators are pushing a bill to give the state power to order companies to break whatever encryption they provide for people to use.
If this bill passes, it would be great for free software, since no other software could offer encryption that can't be broken. Until, that is, the day that they ban free software.
Promoting secularism in African schools, to reduce religious war, disease and abandoned babies, and encourage practical problem-solving.
US citizens: call on the government to forbid using fracking wastewater to grow organic food.
If you have Javascript disabled, this page may appear not to work, but in fact it does work.
The TPP will not help farmers.
Politicians that hate our freedoms, in the US and Europe, are already using the Brussels bombs as an excuse.
Eliminating the nuclear family, presented here as a joke, might be a good idea.
PISSI intends its bombings in Europe to undermine international cooperation such as the Schengen agreement and to make European countries waste lots of money on "security" measures.
Reports from the modern city of Palmyra say Russian planes are bombing indiscriminately.
Ted Cruz proposes a sure plan way to make Muslims angry and resentful: to "patrol Muslim neighborhoods".
Croatia's government has cancelled a satirical TV show, calling it "hate speech."
Prohibiting "hate speech" leads straight to attacking free speech.
Arizona's voter suppression hit Latinos heavily.
When humans remove the top predators from an ecosystem, the result can be extinction of many other species.
What our greenhouse emissions are doing to the world would be scary enough in a computer game.
In Britain, the growing season for plants is now one month longer than it was in 1960-1990.
In a few more decades, there will effectively be no winter for plants, just a not-quite-summer.
Industrialised Nations Must Lead an Exit Strategy for Fossil Fuels.
The Madres de la Plaza de Mayo condemn Obama for planning a speech in Buenos Aires on the date of their annual large march for justice.
Can the UN be held accountable for the failure to protect civilians?
It seems to me that the root of the failure in South Sudan is that only a much larger mission could have protected more than a small fraction of the civilians there. Basically, peacekeeping missions depend on the prestige of the name, "United Nations Peacekeeping Mission", which depends over the long term on the willingness of the Great Powers to use their might against those who disrespect those missions. The Great Powers had better do their job.
Everyone:
call
on President Zuma not to legalize trade in rhino horn in South
Africa.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-29 because the old link was broken.]
Everyone:
Tell
world leaders, 15000 nuclear weapons add up to no nuclear
security.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-29 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens: call on Congress to fight the practice of wage theft.
Bacteria living on the Greenland ice cap may be speeding up the melting.
Nearly all ash trees in Europe are likely to be killed by a fungus and a beetle. Many species that live on ash trees will go extinct.
Oxfam is now aiding poor people in the UK.
The Tories have cut billions for welfare funding since the election last year even though they have just been forced to back off from further cuts.
Since poor people in the UK are on the edge of destitution, many of them are going to be forced onto streets or into cemeteries.
The Tories are lower than vermin — Aneurin Bevan.
The UK thugs must come clean about their infiltration of dissident groups.
Courageous Vietnamese protested the trial of a blogger accused of publishing things that the government doesn't like.
The Australian government plans a big cut in spending on renewable energy.
Obama has quietly sent more US troops to Iraq, and it's not clear what they do. Are they running artillery?
Creepy Ad Company Says It Will Stop Eavesdropping With 'Audio Beacons' (to tell what TV shows or podcasts are playing nearby).
That's good, but how can we stop other companies from taking up the practice? We need to demand free software, so that the community can check for malicious functionalities, and the community can remove them.
See https://gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-even-more-important.html.
Making all UK schools into "academies" is privatization, disguised as "applying higher standards" by eliminating local democracy.
When we criticize Cuba for trampling human rights (which it does), we must not pretend that the US or other countries respect them properly.
The US respects human rights more than Cuba does. A person who rejects injustice really can run for president in the US and at least have a chance at winning. In Cuba, that is impossible. In the US, people campaign to influence government policy (see the Urgent Action notes on this site); in Cuba, though the constitution says that is allowed, in practice people are treated terribly for doing that.
Sarkozy will face trial for selling political influence.
It is no surprise to me that he would do this.
The "limited autonomy" of the Palestinian Authority is a fraud, as Israel breaks the rules of the Oslo Agreement whenever it wants.
Tim Canova is challenging Rep. Wasserman Schultz, a plutocratic Democrat, in the Democratic primary. The Florida Democratic Party has denied him access to the party's voter data base.
A group of economists say Sanders' tax on Wall Street speculation would bring in 300 billion dollars and would create millions of jobs.
His plan is a form of the "Robin Hood" tax, which was proposed originally by Tobin to stabilize the stock market.
Sanders Declines To Pander To Israel Lobby In Speech Prepared For AIPAC.
Sanders supports Israel, but does not support the occupation on Palestine.
Here is the text of Sander's statement.
"Islamic State can't win in Brussels — we are fighting hate with love."
Salafi Arabian bombardment of Yemen continues killing lots of civilians.
WHO says humanity needs to plan to cope with thousands of brain-damaged babies (due to Zika).
I think it would be smarter to plan to prevent the birth of those thousands of brain-damaged babies.
Bahraini dissident Zainab al-Khawaja has been imprisoned for tearing up a picture of the brutal, repressive king.
May all his pictures be torn up soon.
Hillary Clinton Goes Full Neocon at AIPAC, Demonizes Iran, Palestinians.
Clinton told AIPAC that criticism of Israel's occupation policy is antisemitism.
A US general apologized to the victims of the bombing of the Kunduz hospital.
Jewish anti-occupation activists respond to Clinton's insults.
13 years after conquering Iraq, the US has not learned much.
Climate scientists warnings that global heating would damage coral terribly were right on target.
Porn, often violent, is giving young people a warped idea of what sex is like.
They need to see the spectrum of what non-violent mutually pleasing real sex is like. The way you get information that is by having sex with various kind and compassionate people that know considerably more than you do.
UK policies that hurt the poor are making people physically sick.
New York's Millionaires to Governor Cuomo: 'Raise our Taxes, Please'.
Balinese protest a plan to convert a bay into artificial islands for tourists to visit.
The article errs in stating that the 1906 puputan occurred in the "final years of Dutch rule". On the contrary, that was when the Dutch took control of Bali: many rulers and their courtiers committed suicide-by-invading-army rather than surrender. The final years of Dutch rule occurred after World War II, when the Dutch tried to reclaim control.
Many students in Illinois were arbitrarily blocked from voting.
Using disenfranchised prisoners as an excuse for gerrymandering has been ruled unconstitutional.
In the US: phone the FCC to oppose the merger of Charter and Time Warner Cable.
Our Response to the Brussels Bombings Requires Patience And Restraint.
I fear that a frenzied and frustrated public will give some politicians an excuse to attack human rights in Belgium.
Obama in Cuba under Pressure to Criticise Human Rights Violations.
Cuba has repressed dissidents harshly. On the other hand, the Cuban revolution has spared Cubans the horrible experiences of plutocratic rule, that we can see in Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala and Colombia. The multinationals that US plutocrats serve would like Cuba to go down that path.
Several species of butterflies in Britain are declining gravely in population for no obvious reason. Global heating is suspected as a cause.
Facebook is effectively racially profiling its useds, in an indirect and deniable way.
James Hansen predicts several meters of sea level rise within 50 to 150 years. This is a controversial result, since other reputable climate scientists forecast only one meter.
We don't really need to know the answer, because the implications in either case are the same: we need a crash program to cut CO2 emissions (and methane emissions), not the lackadaisical approach adopted so far.
Britons were unjustly arrested in 2003 to stop them from protesting against Dubya's invasion of Iraq. They fought in court for 10 years for compensation. Now it appears one of them was an undercover thug, who concealed evidence about their case.
Burglars in Flint City Hall pulled out the documents about lead poisoning and strew them around the room. It is impossible to tell whether they stole any documents, but surely they must have intended to.
Sanders Says 'Never' to Nuclear Power, Clinton Claims US Needs It.
The US deployed terrorism against Cuba for many years.
The "Cuban 5" were convicted of espionage in the US for spying on terrorists shielded by the US.
The Committee to Protect Journalists is carefully documenting how Erdoğan cracks down on freedom of the press in Turkey.
Cuts in UK funds for energy efficiency in homes have been 80% effective in reducing the number of such improvements.
The Tories intend to crush renewable energy, but they don't want to admit this is their goal, so they are changing the policies a step at a time.
Eat Less Meat to Avoid Dangerous Global [Heating], Scientists Say.
Gentrification in San Francisco may be part of the cause of Alex Nieto's killing by thugs, as he sat eating in a park.
Uncontrollable — Pentagon and Corporate Contractors Too Big to Audit.
Explaining the fallacies in economists' arguments for "free trade".
They have a rational argument that free trade tends to increase the overall efficiency of production; then they want us to presume that this will benefit everyone. That second step is false; as we know, the business supremacy treaties with which they implement free trade tend to shift wealth to the rich and impoverish the rest of us.
Amnesty International condemned Latin American governments for restricting contraception and for threatening women with violence for having abortions.
Now Clinton will only release her paid speeches if Republicans do.
In effect, she says, "Compare me with Republicans, not with Sanders."
Australia has inspired other countries to tow boats full of refugees out to sea.
A study tied thousands of coastal floods to the human activities that are causing global heating.
And sea level is faster than at any time we have records for.
This article makes it clear that we don't have records before 2800 years ago.
Snooping digital devices could enable insurance companies to control people's lives.
Just as we must forbid ISPs to offer cut-price access only to some sites, we must forbid insurance companies to offer cut-price insurance to people who accept such control.
Fatal kidney disease has become surprisingly common in a few regions, and Roundup might be responsible.
India's government is persistently attacking freedom of speech by arresting people for "sedition".
It appears Sanders praised Obama's plan to shift imprisonment without trial to US territory.
I hope that is not really the position he took. In any case, I still support him, because defeating plutocracy is crucial. He is the first chance we have had in many years to shift the "range of acceptable opinion" outside what plutocrats are willing to pay for.
Obama's Lethal Drone Policies Still Shrouded in Secrecy.
Some US congressional candidates are campaigning on the issue of surveillance.
Congressman Robert Smalls showed compassion to the aged, demented widow of the man who had formerly owned him — after his freedom was secure.
As Guber outsources its customer service reps, it also has them call drivers to propagandize against unionization.
Proposed European emissions cuts to curb global heating at 1.5C will require "profound lifestyle changes".
In the US, it will require smaller houses. I wonder if it will be possible to insulate some interior walls so that some rooms can be excluded from heating or cooling.
UK Parliament Report Rejects Encryption Backdoors, Other Parts of Sweeping Surveillance Bill.
Sanders Forges Ahead: 'No One Said a Political Revolution Would Be Easy'.
Our rate of greenhouse gas emissions is more than at any time since the extinction of the dinosaurs, 66 million years ago.
The International Criminal Court has convicted the former vice president of the DR Congo (formerly Zaïre).
To End HIV in Drug Users, Stop Chasing the Dream of a Drug-Free World.
PISSI is committing genocide: we should recognize this now.
I don't think it changes much of the conclusions, because even without this, PISSI is clearly a great evil.
Amazon has another obnoxious computational idea patent on paying by identifying yourself with a photo.
On the one hand, this might have the good effect of discouraging use of that foolish practice. On the other hand, it might also help Amazon, which is bad.
Regardless of the specific consequences of this patent, it is one more example of why we should not allow patents to apply to software.
McConnell: No New Supreme Court Justice Until The NRA Approves Of The Nominee.
[Thugs] in Maryland Routinely Used Tasers When Suspects Posed No Threat to Their Safety.
The webmaster of a group for disabled Tories will join the Labour Party in response to the Tories' latest attack on disabled people.
The people that run Britain have no compassion for people who are not rich. Cameron probably cares about his disabled son, but non-rich disabled strangers mean no more to him that non-rich able strangers.
The tyrant of Chechnya is battling all-out against the Committee to Prevent Torture.
Cruz and Trump would just love Chechnya.
Some cities in Europe have appointed "night mayors" (what an unfortunate term!) to manage coexistence between nightime music/booze establishments and the other residents.
A Russian show trial found a captured Ukrainian solder guilty of war crimes, disregarding evidence that she was somewhere else at the time.
The way to understand Putin: think of Donald Trump, only clever.
Current Record-Shattering Temperatures Are Shocking to Even Climate Scientists.
When this El Niño ends, temperatures will go down somewhat. We can expect the planet roasters to say, "This shows we're safe!" That's because they are playing for time: time to sell more fossil fuels, time to lock more investment into future fossil fuels.
A foreign visitor in the US is struck by the stark and extreme poverty. It's the same feeling I got when I first visited India and saw the shanty towns in the middle of the city.
This is what plutocracy does.
Criticism from the UN made the extractionist government of Tasmania back down from an plan to log forests that are labeled as "world heritage".
A witness to the murder of a Palestinian family by Israeli extremists was the target of an arson attack.
Putin's regime is planning to make it a crime to post information about how to access blocked sites.
In a state that regularly tramples all sorts of human rights, this is nothing special. But the multinational companies that want this in Russia will try to impose it elsewhere.
Right-wing extremists in Ukraine forcibly shut down an LGBT festival.
US citizens: call on Obama to protect the Grand Canyon watershed.
A lobbying group is flouting US lobbying law by refusing to say what businesses it represents. SCROTUS allow this to continue because they are working for the same businesses.
Dallas now deals with homeless people that have other major problems by first giving them a place to live.
Too bad they don't do this for the homeless people who are not mentally ill.
The TTIP would give the US government a veto over EU legislative proposals.
Sanders Must Build a Progressive Movement All the Way to the Convention and Beyond.
Clinton Campaign Boosted By More Rumors And Dishonest Attacks Against Sanders.
50,000 Australians demonstrated for compassion for asylum seekers.
US citizens:
call
on Obama's task force to advocate full tracing of seafood for
commercial sale.
[Reference updated on 2018-03-29 because the old link was broken.]
New solar-powered street lamps provide surplus electricity as a side benefit.
Governments with a proper sense of urgency about coming climate mayhem would install these lamps in large quantities as a crash program.
Letting bars stay open later in the UK increased total alcohol consumption very little; but it led a significant fraction to occasionally go in for bigger binges.
Is there, I wonder, a way to discourage overdrinking?
Even some Tories have trouble stomaching the cuts that the UK government wants to make now.
Those who track patterns of sickness see a national water crisis in the US, developing over the timescale of decades.
The causes of the water problems are many, but the root cause is simple: plutocracy. Take Flint, for instance. Why did all the jobs in Flint disappear? Why did Flint go bankrupt? Why did Michigan Republicans impose the emergency manager law? Why did Snyder impose an emergency manager on Flint? Why did the emergency manager decide to use the unsafe water from the Flint river? Plutocracy is at work in each case.
Thousands of US government employees are subject to constant investigation to see if they might perhaps be whistleblowers.
The Tories have stirred up so much hatred towards people who get welfare payments that many carry out random hate crimes against them.
The UK government wants to promise it will pay an extra 30 billion dollars to the owners of its new nuclear plant if it shuts the plant before 2060.
A future British government will have to impose a life sentence on the employees of any company that tries to collect compensation for shutting down a power plant.
The plant is so expensive that makes no economic sense except as a giveaway from governments to their cronies.
US citizens: call on Congress to preserve food stamp support for people that are looking for jobs or training, even when they can't find those.
An unjust law in France prohibits calling for boycotting any country.
While the murder of Charlie Hebdo's cartoonists was more bloody, the biggest enemy of freedom of expression in France is the French state.
The US government has made companies hand over proprietary software source code so it can search for bugs to attack.
With proprietary software, you're forced to put your trust 100% in a company that couldn't protect you if it wanted to. And code-signing by the company won't do any good if the NSA forces some employee to hand over the signature key.
With free software, you are assured that the NSA can't get anything that you don't get.
The US (or rather part of it) Is Becoming a Terrifying Nation for Women.
Protesting against right-wing extremists and Trump sometimes plays into their hands. Sometimes it is better not to give them what they want.
Amazon closes customers' accounts, which implies confiscating their money, if they return too many defective products.
The company refuses even to discuss why.
The Pentagon does not have effective control of its contracts or its inventory.
WikiLeaks accused Facebook of blocking useds from following links to Clinton's email release.
It's not just insulting Erdoğan that can get you imprisoned in Turkey. Defaming women in general is also a crime.
I disapprove of statements that insult women, but they are covered by freedom of speech.
Facebook guesses the race of each used, and companies use this to show people different ads.
How Ladar Levison dragged his feet when the FBI ordered him to betray all Lavabit's customers.
The Apple encryption cases parallels the Lavabit case.
When the US government says, "Let us spy on everyone — we'll only look at that one target?" Whether the one target is a terrorist, or a hero like Snowden, we know from many examples that we can't trust the US government with such power. When you give those snoops an inch, they take a mile.
If applying the first amendment to Apple's encryption software gives a good result, it will be the exception to a long string of horrible decisions resulting from that bad practice.
China requires all digital maps to have pervasive random errors.
I suppose the US government has made accurate maps of China from satellite data, but they are not available to the Chinese. At least, not today. It would be a great propaganda coup for the US to publish them.
Is Open Street Map at work on China? Contributions would have to be made in secret, but they could be made.
The most disturbing statement in the article is that GPS devices have back doors so that China can order them to shut down or give erroneous answers. Of course, China would impose this on products sold in China; perhaps on all products made in China, such as iThings. And that would include most devices — but are there no exceptions?
The EU made a deal with Turkey about sending back Syrian refugees that arrive in Greece by sea.
The deal includes the absurd agreement to consider EU membership for Turkey just as it is being turned into an explicit tyranny. Why not Belarus, and Russia too?
Sheldon Adelson's Israeli Newspaper Has a Crush on Donald Trump.
"What price an Olympics that protects the rights of children and their families?"
Olympic games do harm in many ways. I am glad that the people of Boston pushed away the olympics bid that was planned, and I urge the people of every city to organize against such plans.
The main Brazilian political parties are full of corruption, and the elite-supported major media are using this to try to replace the corrupt Workers' Party with the corrupt elite-supported parties.
The judge investigating them is not acting very well either.
A lawyer that sues climate scientists to cause trouble for them was paid by a coal company very recently.
Americans are starting to grasp how dangerous global heating is.
Think Again Hillary Democrats: 10 Reasons Why She Could Lose this Fall.
US states are passing laws to try to stop participation in the Palestinians' Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign against Israel.
US citizens: call on Senator Grassley to bring the CARERS Act, S.683, for a vote in the Senate Judiciary Committee.
This would protect some state-legal medical marijuana activities from federal interference.
British citizens: oppose plans to track everyone's browsing history.
Everyone: call on Vanguard retirement fund to vote in favor of stockholder resolutions for companies to disclose political spending.
An opposition newspaper in Venezuela had to shut down because it could not buy paper.
In India, airlines and legislators are pressured to make public pledges of militaristic loyalty.
Because of landmines and murderous neighbors, the Yazidis cannot go home even though their home is no longer controlled by PISSI.
Uri Avnery: Hesbollah is not a terrorist organization, if you judge by its actions. It suits politicians to pretend about this.
Confirmed: the US attacked all the users of Lavabit specifically to get at Snowden's email.
The Pentagon says it has identified the soldiers responsible for the bombardment of the MSF hospital in Kunduz, and says it was only errors.
Human rights groups say they consider this a slap on the wrist.
If they really were errors, rather than intentional acts, it would not be right to treat those responsible as criminals. But it would be just like the US Army to diminish the seriousness of their responsibility. Without some external investigation, we don't know if there were crimes.
The drought in the eastern Mediterranean appears to be the worst in 900 years.
Tony B'liar is making lots of money from the houses he owns in the UK.
Clearly anyone that owns substantial property has a conflict of interest with anyone that wants a place to live.
Several US cities, and even states, have high levels of lead in the water and have had it for a long time.
The Clinton-installed post-coup government of Honduras has sentenced a journalist to prison for insulting a prosecutor.
Americans of Asian or African descent double their chances getting a job interview by disguising their ancestry, thus demonstrating that racism is operating.
Rich universities entrust endowments to speculative hedge funds whose managers make more money than they spend on education. They invest in companies that attack and drain society.
People ask me why I am motivated to keep fighting, for free software and other causes. This article presents the reasons clearly.
Increasing trade with China cost the US millions of jobs, and the workers who are not very highly skilled were hit especially hard.
Obama's nominee for the Supreme Court is no progressive. The best thing you can say about him is that he is better than Scalia.
Obama the plutocrat is telling big donors that Sanders has lost and they should support Clinton the plutocrat.
What else would you expect from a plutocrat?
A massive temporary expansion of stop-and-search in London had no measurable effect on the crime rate.
Why do blacks die at a higher rate than whites from heart attacks? Because the hospitals where the blacks live are overloaded and slow.
Systemic racism in US appeals courts: decisions by black judges are more likely to be overturned.
The US Senate rejected the DARK Act that Monsanto sought.
US citizens:
call
on Obama not to allow any new undersea oil drilling.
US citizens:
call
on Obama to cancel oil drilling in the Arctic Ocean.
Disappeared Hong Kong booksellers/publishers have been
charged
with illegally selling books in China. Reportedly the books they
supposedly sold were made by the Chinese state in order to frame them.
Unanswered
questions about the scope of NSA snooping.
As thousands starved during the Irish famine, plenty of food was
produced in Ireland but the farm owners
exported
it.
This is what happens when the rich dominate society. Similar things
are happening today, though not in Ireland.
US states are escalating the war on painkillers: states are passing
laws
making
it hard to prescribe them enough to treat some peoples' pain.
Millions of people are likely to face horrible suffering from this.
In effect, the law not only authorizes but requires torture.
A splinter group took responsibility for a
bombing
in Ankara that was aimed at civilians. This group split off from
the PKK, which does not attack civilians. Naturally, Erdoğan
used the bombing as an
excuse
to arrest supporters of the PKK.
In Turkey, no one is safe from prosecution for "supporting terrorism";
even those that call for a cease fire can be imprisoned. But that's
not broad enough.
A study suggests that certain gun control laws
could greatly reduce the
rate of killings with guns.
UN
experts' suggestions about dealing with North Korea.
Doubling global clean energy by 2030
would
save trillions of dollars and save millions of lives, as well as
curbing global heating.
However, I suspect it may be too small a target. With a real effort
we could do much more than double it, and we had better do so,
double-time.
Thugs in Dallas have been
arrested
for murdering fleeing suspects.
Maybe they deserved to be arrested, but not killed.
There is some evidence that FBI agents are
lying
about the killing of LaVoy Finicum.
They are thugs, so why wouldn't they lie?
A Russian human rights activist was
attacked
by an organized gang in Chechnya.
The Netherlands has imposed an
arms
export embargo on Salafi Arabia.
An expat professor was
deported
from Turkey for possessing leaflets inviting people to a Kurdish
new year celebration.
Mere friendship with Kurdish culture is intolerable for the repressive
regime.
North Carolina's voter suppression law is hitting
substantial
numbers of minority group members.
Clinton got the majority of the delegates in the
latest
Democratic primaries.
However, Sanders may win the large states that come next.
Professors are suing Southampton University because it
demands
they pay around 40,000 dollars for permission to hold their
conference on Israeli policies.
Naomi Klein
explains
why she does not trust Clinton.
The UK now
plans
to remove all public schools from local control, making them
effectively unaccountable.
Rising temperatures and associated drought have
caused
36 million people in Africa to be short of food.
Syrian liberal activist Bassel Khartabil was imprisoned in 2012. Now
the
Assad regime refuses to state his whereabouts, and he might be
killed.
In parts of India,
villages
don't allow Dalits to get water from the public well with the public
pump.
New pun: "Pour
l'émir, le chardonnay".
US citizens:
call
on Obama to prosecute Exxon for its climate fraud.
On the correct pronunciation of
"Exxon".
US citizens:
tell the
Department of Education to come clean about the student loan
profit scandal.
US citizens:
call
on Obama and Congress to stop arms sales to Salafi Arabia.
US citizens:
demand that
Republicans allow a vote on the Voting Rights Amendments Act.
Kim Foxx
defeated
thug-protecting Anita Alvarez for DA of Chicago.
A smoothie is
not
as good for you as the fruit it is made from.
Humans' CO2 emissions
did
not increase in 2015, which is good, but evidently not good enough
since temperatures continue to rise dangerously.
Coal protesters in Australia
face
harsh punishments if their protests cause any inconvenience.
This is what it looks like what government is in the pocket of
business. You will see it in many places including the US.
News reporting in Malaysia is shutting down in response to
harsh
repression.
Towns That Jail People Because They're Poor Are
Put
On Notice.
Donald Trump's Volunteer Contract
Forbids
All Criticism of Trump for Life.
Tory Cruelty: Disability Cuts Threaten to
Destroy
Independent Living for Thousands.
US civil officials are too subservient to the military
on
questions of whether to fight wars.
Russian bombs in Syria have killed
2000
civilians in the 6-month period of intervention.
US schools sometimes
punish
students in cruel ways for the smallest defiance.
I am not surprised that this happens more often to black male
students. Unconscious racism would be enough to cause that.
In the Arctic,
2016
was the year without a winter.
Or, perhaps we should say, the first year without a winter.
Baltimore had no increase in crime after Michael Brown was shot in
Ferguson, Missouri, but did have a
spurt
in crimes after thugs in Baltimore killed Freddie Gray.
McGill graduates are returning their diplomas,
demanding
divestment from fossil fuels.
People arrested in the US for the smallest reasons may be
denied
bail if they are in the "terrorist watch list", which is compiled
in a slipshod manner.
A whistleblower says that Volkswagen
deleted
documents when the emissions test fraud was discovered.
Thugs in Washington DC
got
search warrants by citing "practice" as the reason.
With robot "carers", old people who can't leave the house
will
be able to survive for years without talking to another human
being.
Make
the whole Arctic region a marine reserve, then license specific
fisheries when they are safe.
Calling on the Labour Party to
firmly
reject antisemitism, while criticizing Israel's occupation
policies.
The Isle de Jean Charles, in Louisiana, is
vanishing
under rising seas, and the last 85 inhabitants are asking for a
place to move to.
When we have to move millions of people from Miami, it won't be so
easy.
The EU has
suspended
direct aid to Burundi's tyrannical government.
The Icelandic Pirate Party is now the
largest
in the country, with support from 38% of the voters.
Putin is
withdrawing
Russian troops and planes from Syria. It looks like the
intervention was always intended to be temporary.
Maybe Putin chose this moment in order to pressure Assad to be more
flexible in the peace talks. If the US and Russia have both decided
that the fighting among the non-Jihadi parties in Syria is bad for
everyone, maybe there is a path to a good outcome.
Environmental pollution contributes to
1/4
of human deaths.
The Pentagon is
trying
to stop soldiers from buying a book about the toxicity of the "burn
pits" in Iraq and Afghanistan where it burned all sorts of
rubbish.
With
"free
trade", the US is following a path that we can observe in Mexico.
People Are Going To Prison Thanks To DNA [Analysis] Software —
But
How
It Works Is Secret
A man who was sentenced to death, then exonerated, challenged
Clinton's
support of the death penalty.
Michigan's "emergency manager" law is being
challenged
on civil rights grounds.
Some areas of medicine are already
coping
with the absence of antibiotics.
A model suggests that
13
million Americans may be forced to move by rising seas during this
century.
Far larger numbers are likely to be affected world-wide, but the focus
on Americans is useful: when they realize what it will do to them,
they may take action to stop it.
Exploitative real estate developers continue
building
in places that will surely be flooded. Some of them are building
commercial establishments that might have a hope of repaying the
investment before they are wiped out. The rest must intend to sell to
suckers.
Advanced kinds of disguise systems for military vehicles would
violate
the laws of war if they make the vehicles appear to be civilian.
The "non-lethal" weapons that thugs use against protesters
cause
lots of injury, even death.
How
Bernie
Sanders' Solutions Would Dramatically Improve Wages, Poverty and
Inequality.
US citizens:
oppose
"campus carry" laws that allow guns in college campuses.
US citizens:
call
on Obama to end fracking in the US.
February was
1.35C
hotter than the usual temperature for February.
Tennessee's response to pregnant drug addicts is to put them
in
prison after they give birth.
To steer them towards abortions would give better results.
The World Bank's Weird Way of Helping the Poor —
Investing
in Luxury Hotels.
More
information.
It's a great
handout
for a few millionaires.
The Obama regime seems to be
planning
to order WhatsApp to decrypt messages that it can't decrypt.
Old-Fashioned Mechanical Systems, Plus Humans,
May
Help Avert Catastrophic Breaches.
Babar Ahmad never supported terrorism, but the Obama regime
effectively ordered the UK to jail him for years then hand him over
for
trial
for "terrorism" based on a technicality.
He still wants the UK thugs to
apologize
for torturing him. An apology would be more important than the
money they paid as compensation.
The US-UK extradition treaty is fundamentally unjust. The US Congress
was right to refuse to ratify it. The UK has a duty to repudiate it.
Sanders challenges Clinton to
commit
to killing the TPP.
Clinton's emails show
the
real motive for the intervention in Libya: not Qadhafi's tyranny,
but his strengthening of Libya.
Rachel Maddow: Donald Trump Chose to Visit
Cities
with Recent Racial Unrest.
The Tories' next target is
Britons
who need help to dress themselves or use the toilet.
This is one step in a series that has run many years already and is
surely intended run many years more. The overall goal is more
important than any one step, but the Tories don't admit what their
goal is, so we have to guess.
My guess is that disabled people's "care" will be in circumstances
that kills them pretty fast. Same with support for the unemployed.
Poor children will be sent to schools that are really prisons as a
path to putting them in real prisons. After all, they won't be needed
as workers any more.
The Tories are lower than vermin — Aneurin Bevan.
Everyone:
Call for
devestment in the Agua Zarca dam that Berta Cáceres was
killed for opposing.
Everyone:
call
on New York City Mayor de Blasio to fire the thugs that
participated in killing Richard Haste and/or in covering that up.
US citizens:
call
on presidential candidates to commit to appointing officials that
will get tough on Wall Street.
US citizens:
call
on Sanders to affirm that Israel's colonies in Palestinian
territory are not Israel.
Legalizing carrying guns in college classes
tends
to intimidate professors. This might be exactly what Republicans
aim for.
Most Israelis want to exile the Arab citizens who constitute
20%
of the population.
The FBI is
already
searching at will through the NSA's giant data base of Americans'
communications.
Reportedly
Obama inwardly understands that Salafi Arabia is not America's
friend and should not get much US support.
If this is true, it doesn't seem to show in his actions, such as
supporting Salafi Arabia in bombarding Yemen.
27
Giant Profitable [US] Companies Paid No Taxes in 2015.
The
Koch-Fueled
Plot to Destroy the Veterans' Administration.
In the US,
toddlers
shoot and kill more people than terrorists.
The US should sign the
convention
against cluster bombs and stop making them.
Calling
for a Congressional investigation of how the FBI investigates
dissidents.
Near where Freddie Gray was arrested and killed,
1/3
of the people surveyed reported being mistreated by thugs.
Don't
assume that Senator Cruz is less bad than Trump. Cruz is a
religious extremist that has no respect for the human rights of people
that don't follow his religion.
Trump is the culmination of
decades
of Republican hatred which usually is presented in disguised form.
US citizens:
tell
Clinton (and Congress) that Israel's colonies in Palestinian
territory are not Israel.
Clinton doesn't speak in favor of torture but she has
supported
it for many years.
US citizens:
call on Obama to
block Pfizer's "tax inversion" plans.
US citizens:
call
on the Department of Agriculture to drop the idea of speeding up
the production lines in pig slaughter factories.
US citizens:
call
on the FTC to ban "conversion therapy", which claims to make
homosexuals into heterosexuals, as a fraud.
Citizens of Massachusetts:
support
legal requirements to identify political donors.
Veterans
Urge Presidential Candidates to Say No to Militarism.
California is
considering
a bill to allow Guber drivers to unionize.
The FBI plans to demand Apple
hand
over its signature key to authorize software to run in an iThing.
This is Obama's last attack on our security.
Users of iThings can't decide on their own what operating system to
install: they are forced to trust Apple to do it, because Apple can
sign systems to run in the product. If the FBI prevails with that
argument, users of iThings will be forced to trust Big Brother too.
The
New
War on Poverty.
The state of Georgia will provide funding for phony "crisis pregnancy
centers" whose purpose is to
mislead
women about abortion.
PISSI
reportedly
attacked with poison gas in Iraq today.
How Trump's $50m Golf Club
Became
$1.4m When It Came Time to Pay Tax.
Why Does the Gun Lobby
Encourage
Small Children to Handle Guns?
The article offers an answer: it's part of a business campaign
to market guns to children.
The
Five
Foreign Policy Questions Every Candidate Should be Asked.
A computer has
defeated
the world champion Go player.
This means that the political issues raised by AI can't be put off.
Clinton
praised
Nancy Reagan's handling of AIDS, and was hit by lots of criticism.
Banking
for the Common Good, proposed to replace commercial big banks.
Obama is
arranging
for various government agencies to look through the NSA's data
collections to fish for opportunities to prosecute Americans.
The lesson is, "emergency" powers that the government takes to cope
with some mind-clouding threat will
tend
to be used for everything.
Sanders endorses a carbon tax
and
banning fracking.
A part of President Clinton's "welfare reform" is about to take
delayed effect,
cutting
off food stamps for at least half a million long-term-unemployed
Americans.
We have not yet seen the full damage that that law will eventually do,
but Hillary Clinton still supports it.
Thailand's dictatorship
plans
to restrict foreign journalists like China.
UK "academies", somewhat like US charter schools, tend to have the
same
problems as the ordinary state schools they replace.
In the US, the impetus for school privatization comes from those who
desire to
divert
public funding into their pockets. I suspect there is an ulterior
motive in the UK as well.
The FCC wants to make cable and phone companies ask customers'
permission
for some uses of data collected about their communications.
I am not impressed. The real danger here is that the data are
recorded at all, because they are
always
available to Big Brother.
Zoning laws are used to
keep
unrelated people from sharing housing.
The general effect of zoning laws is to make housing expensive.
Thus, I think they are harmful.
Kansas Republicans passed a law to
impeach
any judges that rule a law is unconstitutional. This is meant to
get rid of the last obstacle to eliminating public education and
public services.
Former presidents of Brazil, Colombia and Mexico state that the "war
on drugs" is an
"unmitigated
disaster".
When a war gets on drugs, it starts attacking everyone at random.
The US has 30 reactors that use the same design as those of Fukushima
and has
neglected
the danger for 5 years.
CPJ: Venezuelan editor sentenced to
4
years in prison for criminal defamation.
This is an injustice regardless of what he said, or whether it was true.
Sanders and Clinton After Michigan:
A
Look at the Map.
Oxfam and other organizations accuse
the
US and Russia, among others, of fueling the Syrian civil war.
Uri Avnery: Neither side of the debate about BDS calls for
peace
between Palestine and Israel, but that must be the goal.
Violence
erupted outside of a Trump rally.
Then a rally in Chicago was cancelled, because the
protesters
were so numerous that the supporters didn't dare attack them.
Trump's complaint, "Cancelling my event violates my freedom of
speech," is one I would usually agree with. When protesters bring
about cancellation of an event, their intimidation has succeeded.
In Trump's case, however, he's the one who has been using intimidation
against protesters, so the fault is his. He has
regularly
called on his supporters to be more violent.
Finally one of his violent supporters has been
charged,
but it's time to charge Trump too.
Clinton's role, in regard to Iran and later Syria, has been
to
encourage war.
A Danish children's rights activist faces charges for
giving
food and a lift to a family of Syrian refugees that she found
walking along the road.
This exemplifies a pattern we have often seen from states and bullies.
I think the best term for it is "conspicuous cruelty."
If we cease to have effective antibiotics, infections will kill
ten
million people a year. (In addition, many operations won't be
done because of the danger of infection.)
Newark public schools were found to have
high
levels of lead in the water.
The Israeli government
wants
to punish the relatives of Palestinian attackers by imprisoning
them in Gaza.
The latest, refined models say we are
on
track for a whole meter of sea-level rise by 2100. That in itself
will be disaster world-wide.
Libya repeats the lesson of Iraq: that overthrowing a tyrant is easy,
but you
don't
know what will pop up instead.
Trump faced criticism for calling the Tien An Men protests a "riot"
and
praising
the "strength" of the Chinese government.
I think that interview represented his real thoughts. He wasn't
running for president then.
Zero-hour contracts
continue
increasing in the UK even though supposedly employment has
"recovered".
New Zealand has
banned
zero-hour contracts.
This is a big step in the right direction, but I think there needs
to be protection against demanding people work at short notice.
Workers must be free to plan other activities and not be required
to cancel them at the last minute in order to work instead.
A Hong Kong film projecting future Chinese tyranny has
disappeared
from movie theaters. Chinese threats are suspected.
It is a shame that people who want to see it are obliged to be used by
Facebook.
Five years later, cleaning up the Fukushima meltdowns is
going
slowly, and it will take many decades to finish (using methods yet
to be developed).
If civilization collapses due to global heating, and the melted fuel
is still there, it could have a nuclear fizzle and spew a lot more
fallout than it did the first time.
The Fukushima reactors had known safety flaws that made it vulnerable
to an earthquake. Many other reactors have them too. These flaws
were
covered up for the
sake of the company's profits.
Israel is
investigating a video that appears to show that a thug shot
and killed a Palestinian that was lying wounded on the street.
Anti-coal activists in Bangladesh are
going
to march 400km (around 270 miles) to call attention to the harm
done by burning coal.
A fracking company will have to pay 4 million dollars to families
whose wells it polluted, but there is
no
way to restore the water to its former drinkable state.
Obama and Trudeau said that the US and Canada would
lead
the world towards lower greenhouse gas emissions.
I wish I could have confidence this is more than just talk.
Not long ago, Trudeau
called
for more pipelines to export tar sands oil.
Nowadays few wars ever end — most of them just
freeze over.
Trump, the political temper tantrum.
2015 saw the
largest annual CO2 increase
for as far as we have data for.
Republicans Against Human Rights calls for putting
more prisoners into Guantanamo.
The captured ISIS officer should be treated as a prisoner of war.
The UK has put many pitfalls into its welfare system, so that people
can become ineligible and
forced into destitution
on the street.
Increasingly, the homeless face repression.
For right-wingers, such as the Tories, homeless people are an
inconvenience
and the place to put them is the cemetery.
At a Trump rally, a supporter
punched a black man
as the local thugs were forcing him out of the hall. The thugs responded
by physically
attacking the victim and arresting him.
Nothing was done against the puncher, but it is not too late to
prosecute him if his identity can be determined. Trump incites such violence frequently. He should be charged
for this.
Austin, Texas, applied to Guber the same regulations that apply to
other transportation companies. Guber
funded a referendum
to exempt companies such as Guber from these regulations.
Then Republicans saw an opportunity to start a recall election against
the city council member that implemented the decision, piggybacking it
on Guber's campaign. Unlike her, I don't want to work with Guber. Unless it allows
passengers to be anonymous, and stops requiring nonfree software,
Guber should not be allowed to exist. For your own freedom's sake,
don't ever use Guber.
The UK's National Health System is so overwhelmed that patients could
die for lack of treatment.
Unable to provide children with psychotherapy,
it gives them drugs.
This results from lack of funds, and it was the Tories' plan all
along.
Next they will offer to put in some of the lacking funds, but only
through
privatization.
Tim Atkins was framed by thugs, and imprisoned for 31 years. Now
exonerated,
he is
denied
compensation for his wrongful imprisonment.
Have we made enough reform to assure that other people are no longer
being framed as Atkins was? I don't think so.
John Perkins, the confessed Economic Hit Man,
relates what he did
(and many others, including Obama and Clinton, still do) to Guantanamo
prison.
The US government has
used military drones
to spy on the US, but won't say where or when.
The
Break Free from Fossil Fuels
campaign plans a series of protests
and civil disobedience against the planet roasters.
US citizens: call for an
end to garnishment
of Social Security benefits to pay back loans.
US citizens: call on the Office of Management and Budget to
implement protection for workers.
US citizens: tell the Democrats, and Rep. Wasserman Schultz, to
defend the CFPB,
not payday loan companies.
Everyone: tell the World Wide Web Consortium
not to approve DRM.
Global heating is
destroying the pasture
for the herds of Mongolian nomads.
'Funny' Stories from the Frontlines of Dagestan's Gender War.
I think there should be no forgiveness or forgetting for the men
that carry out this violence. When the state does not give justice,
private revenge is not only legitimate, it is also necessary
to change the practices.
US citizens: call on Congress to
reject bills
to help companies
get away with cheating the public and their investors.
A
large
fraction of Americans killed by thugs had some sort of disability.
The US says it killed 150 Somalis and that they were all fighters for
al-Shabaab.
Can
we believe that?
If they really were al-Shabaab fighters, I would not criticize killing
them, but the sad thing is that we can't trust the US about that.
Honduras has forced Gustavo Castro, witness to the murder of Berta
Cáceres, to remain in Honduras, where he remains
in
danger.
A
trend of increasing energy use per person could get humanity in
hot water (and hot air) as soon as 2030.
Sanders said he will try to be
even-handed
between Israel and Palestine.
There has been a rash of
murders
of human rights activists and indigenous rights activists in
Colombia.
I suspect that the killers are the
paramilitares.
Turkish journalist sentenced to 21 months in prison
for
insulting Erdoğan.
By acting like a tyrant, Erdoğan insults himself worse than
anyone else could.
A UK activist went to Australia to confront the
undercover
thug who had pretended to love her as a front for infiltrating
environmental activist groups.
Now he is associated with a training program for thugs, which is
probably part of setting up in Australia to snoop on, sabotage and
provoke protests.
Hysteria about terrorism is so great in France that
students
are being encouraged to smoke tobacco inside schools because it is
considered too dangerous for them to stand and smoke in the street.
Thus, the very large danger (albeit one that takes decades to kill
people) of tobacco is being encouraged for fear of the very small
danger of terrorism.
Lula, the former Brazilian president, has been
charged
with hiding property from tax rolls.
I am disappointed in him over this, because I admire him for making
Brazil's policies better in various areas.
The TPP uses the weasel-term
"free
flow of information", which sounds like it refers to freedom of
expression for people, but really only defends businesses' data
collection.
Activists from the Committee for the Prevention of Torture tried to
escort journalists into Chechnya, but a gang
attacked
them with sticks.
Putin and Kadyrov are very proud of their torture practices. Trump
would love them.
William Perry says the US under Clinton and Dubya was responsible for
spoiling
the military cooperation with Russia that developed in the first
few years after the fall of the Soviet Union.
I agree that extending NATO up to the Russian border was a mistake.
It's wise to have a buffer zone.
Six
Pieces of a Real Democracy Movement We've Never Had Before.
Two Baltimore school thugs
face
charges for attacking a student.
There should not generally be thugs in the schools anyway, because
they direct students into the school-to-prison pipeline.
The Polish constitutional court
overturned
as unconstitutional a law that was designed to screw up its
functioning.
Google has been
ordered
to disclose the IP addresses of people who posted fake reviews of
a daycare facility, which wants to sue them.
Tories' method of giving young people better opportunity
is to
cut
the funds to help young people of deprived backgrounds.
Obama proposed reforms to make the government answer Freedom of
Information Act requests faster; then the Justice Department
secretly
pressured Congress to reject the reforms.
Was the Justice Department betraying Obama, or was it obeying Obama
and the two of them betraying us?
Frackers are
still
investing money in Clinton's campaign.
US citizens:
call
on Congress to enact Obama's proposed reforms for reporting on
civilian casualties of drone attacks.
Everyone:
sign
this petition against including DRM in the specs for the World
Wide Web.
Snowden says that the FBI's arguments for demanding Apple write code
to weaken iThing security are
based
on lies.
PEN Norway Awards Snowden,
Calls
on Government to Grant Safe Passage.
US citizens:
call
on the US government to remove lead from US drinking water (not
only in Flint).
US citizens: phone the White House and call on Obama to nominate a
progressive who rejects the idea that corporations are necessarily
entitled to human rights.
The White House comments line is 202-456-1111.
US citizens:
call
on Kerry to pressure the government of Honduras to protect union
organizers from assassination.
Hillary Clinton's State Department
Armed
Saudi Arabia to the Teeth.
Salafi Arabia (as I call it) is now using those weapons to bombard
Yemen. Obama is responsible, both for approving what Clinton did
and for supporting the attack on Yemen.
The EU has agreed to an
incoherent
refugee deal with Turkey: for each Syrian refugee returned from
Greece to Turkey, the EU will admit one Syrian refugee from Turkey.
This gives Syrian refugees in Turkey a gigantic incentive to make sure
lots of Syrian refugees arrive in Greece.
Meanwhile, European governments
won't
dare criticize Erdoğan's tyranny. It's a great deal for
him, a lousy deal for Turkey.
Burma's military is respecting democracy, but its
violence
and impunity are still there.
Sanders
won
the Michigan primary, which he was expected to lose.
Violence and abuse experienced by pregnant women tends to go with
bad
health for the resulting baby.
I think right-wingers will not care about this. Their concern for
fetuses only applies when it provides an excuse to repress women.
Al-Shabaab acknowledges that the latest US drone bombing
hit
its training camp.
I don't see anything to criticize about killing al-Shabaab fighters,
but many other US drone bombings are
not
so well targeted.
Al-Shabaab would not exist, if not for the Ethiopian intervention that
destroyed Somalia's previous effective government
under
US sponsorship.
Washington Post Ran
16
Negative Stories on Bernie Sanders in 16 Hours.
The [Republican and Democratic] Parties Are
Ruining
the Primary Debates.
You
can't
survive as a poor person in the US by being lazy, but many
right-wing Americans think you're poor because you're lazy.
Tracing the poisoning of Flint to
right-wing
billionaires.
In Australia's refugee prison in Nauru,
66
prisoners are on suicide watch. Some are forcibly injected with
sedatives.
To commit suicide under such a situation is not an indication of
mental illness. It can be a rational response (depending on details
of one's situation).
Sanders knows that political decisions are a
matter
of life and death for the people affected.
An economy based on reputation has
all
the bad characteristics of an economy based on money, and worse:
once someone is rich in reputation, he can get more "likes" by
behaving like a jerk.
Daily showers are
wasteful
and bad for the skin.
How and why satellite temperature measurements required the
recalibration which now shows that
global
heating continued steadily since 2000.
E-books can contain Javascript code, and sometimes this code
snoops
on readers.
The UK government propagandizes the public with
ad
campaigns asking people to report welfare cheaters — so the
public is more worried about welfare cheaters (who are few) than about
disabled or unemployed people suffering terribly (who are many).
Everyone:
call
on Obama to tell the FBI to withdraw its demand for Apple to write
software to help break encryption.
Everyone:
call
on Turkey to drop charges against Can Dündar.
US citizens:
support
the Congressional Progressive Caucus climate resolution.
US citizens:
call
on Congress to rebuke Turkey for crushing the press.
US citizens:
support
the Seniors and Veterans Emergency Benefits Act.
Everyone:
call
on major food companies to get serious about preventing
deforestation caused by their palm oil purchases.
What we really need is for countries to pass laws banning import of
palm oil that doesn't follow strict strict standards. If any treaty
gets in the way, kick it aside.
Research suggests that roughly
1/3 of all the Americans
killed by strangers are in fact killed by thugs.
The Trump campaign apparently
ordered
some black students removed from its rally at Valdosta State
University, then lied about it.
Alternatively, the thugs might be lying (they have practice).
But I don't think they would lie to hurt Trump.
PISSI must be getting
big
donations from rich people in Salafi Arabia and other Gulf states.
A thug in Cincinnati showed his arrogance as well as his racism by
harassing,
then attacking, then framing Charles Harrell.
The way other thugs came to the defense of that thug illustrates the
reason why nearly all cops deserve to be called "thugs". The
exceptions, those who have the courage to denounce thugs' false
accusations, are police officers rather than thugs; but they are few.
Malaysian Internet Censorship is
Going
from Bad to Worse.
Clinton pushed for war
in
Iraq, in Libya, in Syria, and some months ago in Iran.
A
proposed
code of ethics for virtual reality.
The article insults Luddites by treating the word as an insult.
I, as a Luddite, denounce the insult.
The Luddites believed in judging technologies based on their effects
on people in general, rather than letting manufacturers decide
unilaterally which technologies to use. In the same way, I believe
that certain technologies should be banned — for instance,
fracking and DRM.
How the media machine supports Clinton:
cherry-picking
among interruptions and using that to distract from real issues.
EFF
Opposes
McCaul-Warner Encryption Commission.
In many American cities, evictions are running fast — poor
people
can't
afford any place to live.
It is clear that a lot of Eagle Moving's income comes from holding its
victims' property for ransom, and selling whatever they don't pay for.
Community organizers have an opportunity here. If they organize
people to help those evicted by storing their stuff, evictions would
get a lot more expensive.
Lots
of women in Africa will want contraceptives, if we can give them
access.
The CIA Torture Report
Belongs
to the Public.
Spoofing a fingerprint can be
easy.
Nancy Reagan's love for her husband did not excuse the
policies
she supported.
50 anti-fracking protesters were
arrested
at a gas storage site in New York.
Green Climate Fund Must Say No to
Partnerships
with HSBC, Crédit Agricole.
Clinton Benefits From US Media's
Misleading
Reporting Of Delegate Counts.
Most of the "superdelegates" are Clinton supporters, and they may well
vote for Clinton, but not necessarily. If Sanders is leading by the
time of the Democratic Convention, public pressure (which we have to
try to create) may oblige them to support Sanders.
The
Transformative
Power of Democratic Uprisings.
An independent turned Democrat writes about
going
to the Colorado caucus to support Sanders.
The Marshall Islands is suing nine nuclear powers for
failing
to carry out the obligation to promote nuclear disarmament.
The strategy of mutual deterrence worked during the Cold War, in that
neither the US nor the Soviet Union ever intentionally launched a
nuclear war. With the help of some lucky escapes, when nuclear bombs
almost
exploded by accident or retaliations were almost launched for
nonexistent
attacks, it was a success.
But it is not effective in a world where tiny countries and even
non-state groups could develop nuclear weapons. How would you carry
out massive nuclear retaliation against al-Qa'ida? Or North Korea?
Clinton, as Secretary of State,
promoted
fracking world wide. Now, confronting Sanders, she has to turn
around.
Clinton's
jobs program is designed to help the banksters, too.
The poverty-spreading consequences of President Clinton's "welfare
reform" law are still growing today, as states carry out the
"race
to the bottom" that people warned about in 1996.
In 1996, we called this law "welfare fraud", and it is why I did not
vote for Bill Clinton in 1996.
Hillary Clinton endorses the law now, as she did before. It is one of
many reasons I will not vote for her.
Europe's "bailout" package for Greece
has
only tightened the vice.
It was clear, that this would happen. The longer Greece waits
to exit the Euro, the weaker it will be. Have courage!
The UK has distorted researchers' findings to
fabricate
an excuse to claim that it is safe to send refugees back to
Eritria.
In India, British rule meant
high
taxes and deadly famines.
That's because the British wanted to export the wealth that Indians
produced, rather than keep it locally.
By 2100, many regions of Africa will be unable to grow their current
staple crops, because they
won't
get enough water.
European armies are
trying
"nation building" in Libya in order to exclude PISSI.
It would be a good thing, if they could do it, but this has almost
always failed. Is there any chance it will work in Libya?
Lead poisoning
harms
adults, too.
Protests against statues in Britain are a call to remember the injustice
of the British Empire's colonialism and Britain's
history
of slavery.
The
Religious
Roots of Shaming-as-Rehab Programs.
Republicans took control of the South Coast Air Quality Management
District in California, and
immediately
voted for more pollution.
One CREOSOTUS (*) is
single-handedly
blocking federal funds for water in Flint.
CREOSOTUS = Crazy, Right-Wing, Extremely Oppressive Senator Of The
United States
The head of Médecins Sans Frontières says that major
powers are becoming barbaric in
making
war on civilians.
Ironically, they say they are fighting "terrorism" — but
terrorism is making war on civilians.
Economic policies have
systematically
harmed the generation born from 1980 thru the 1990s, in many
countries.
The problem is that the brunt of dooH niboR policies fell on them.
But some are
trying
to blame old people for receiving adequate pensions and distract
criticism from the
rich
people and businesses that no longer pay enough tax.
With Europe desperate for Turkey's help in blocking Syrian refugees,
Erdoğan sees his
opportunity
to crush freedom in Turkey.
US citizens:
call
on Obama to stop new offshore drilling.
A
bus
ad for a meeting of a group for nonreligious people.
Some
schools use software to build a dossier of good or bad behavior
about all students, to show to their parents.
The school will probably keep the data forever, and so I suspect will
the company that developed the app (which is surely a nonfree
program).
The lack of an ethical compass we can see
facilitated
the rise of Donald Trump.
Sanders won the Maine caucuses with a large margin, after the
unusually high turnout caused
very
long lines.
An Australian "terrorist suspect",
accused
of possessing forbidden documents, is being held in solitary
confinement for not answering questions.
China's total greenhouse gas emissions
seem
to have stabilized, perhaps started decreasing.
Erdoğan's men have seized the newspaper Zaman and
turned
it into a propaganda sheet.
Egypt accuses the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas of together organizing
the
assassination
of a prosecutor who played a central role in Egypt's repression.
If it is true, we could hardly criticize them for killing someone
responsible for so much evil. Sure, it would have been better
to put him on trial, but there is no hope of that.
In prosecution of thugs for crimes such as murder and rape,
prosecutors
bend over backwards to praise all other thugs, describing the
defendants as exceptions.
Many
US cities cheat on their tests for lead in the water.
Virtual reality entertainment, when overused,
could
cut people off from reality.
On the other hand, so does TV.
Some of the Hong Kong publisher staff that were grabbed by China have
been
freed.
Imagine Obama's National Security Policies
in
Trump's Hands.
I am sure he will do bad things, but so would Clinton — and so
does Obama. I think Sanders would do less of these bad things. But
the real issue in this area is to reduce the president's power.
Chimps make piles of stones in hollow trees, and throw stones against
certain trees, for
no
evident practical reason.
NATO warns that Russia is running a
massive
trolling and disinformation campaign directed at political
influence in Europe.
The same analyst says that Russia is
funding
various sorts of extremists just to make trouble.
NATO might be inclined to exaggerate this, but I find it plausible.
The UK should not be
selling
protest-suppression weapons to repressive governments.
Behavioral targeting of advertisements can
reinforce
people's image of themselves, whatever that image may be.
I think we
should
not let them get such data about us.
A thug in Arizona
faces
prosecution for murder.
Syria's cease fire is holding, even to the point that people
have held
peaceful
protests against Assad.
US citizens:
tell
Agriculture Secretary Vilsack, and Congress, that QR codes are not
adequate labels for GMOs.
US citizens:
call
on the EPA to close the pollution loopholes for oil and gas
operations.
US citizens:
tell
the Secret Service not to interfere with journalists.
Everyone:
call on Obama to end new
fossil fuel sales on public land.
Governor Walker told Wisconsin that being cruel to the poor would
reduce poverty. Naturally, the actual result is the
opposite.
The Turkish government
has
taken over an important anti-government newspaper, Zaman.
Here's a
copy
of article about this from the paper's English affiliate, Today's
Zaman.
The New York Thug Department
used
weapons against protesters that fire intense sound that can cause
bodily harm.
John King, nominated by Obama for Secretary of Education, supports the
centralized model of
harsh
testing and privatization.
It is noteworthy that Republicans have not vowed to refuse to vote on
his nomination. They see he is on their side — the side of the
corporations.
Fallout
and mutations are observed in many species of wildlife in the
Fukushima region.
Senator Warren rebuked the Department of Education for
bending
over backwards to protect student loan companies, rather than
students.
Tracking some British families from 200 years ago found
little
social mobility: the descendants of then petty criminals are
working-class and the descendants of the wealthy are still well off.
Japanese women pay
thousands
of dollars to be photographed in a wedding dress.
I don't criticize fantasies, though the fantasy of a perfect wedding
has never appealed to me, But surely you can enjoy your fantasy
without getting ripped off.
The FBI boasted of convicting a group accused of trafficking a minor,
but it appears
the
supposed victim was neither a minor nor trafficked, and that the
alleged crimes did not happen.
China has imposed very strict censorship about
sexual
relationships in TV shows.
This is what theocratic Christians aim to impose in the US.
Amazon's recent "upgrade" for its modified version of Android was
really a downgrade — it
removed
the data encryption feature from
tablets.
Amazon backed off from this change after it attracted
widespread
criticism.
This change was in Linux, which is the kernel used in
Android
(as well as in the
GNU/Linux system).
Amazon tries to prevent users from installing their own modified
versions of Linux, by
making
the (nonfree) bootloader check for Amazon's signature on the
kernel it loads. Users have so far been able to defeat that attack,
but they should not have to. If Linux had advanced to
GNU General
Public License version 3, Amazon would not be allowed to do this.
Surveillance of phone calls
makes
whistleblowers fear to call Patient Privacy Rights.
Peace Activist
Wrongfully
Becomes Subject of Investigation.
The people of Michigan voted to repeal the emergency manager law, so
Lead Poison Snyder and his Republican henchmen
imposed
another law almost identical.
Lead Poison Snyder then used the new law to impose an emergency
manager on Flint, which was responsible for poisoning Flint's
children.
Desperation Shows As Critics Argue That Nominated Librarian Of
Congress Is
'Pro
Obscenity'.
The basic wrongs are in a prudish approach towards sex and in the idea
that sharing is
"piracy".
Kanhaiya Kumar
says
he was falsely accused of calling for Kashmir's independence from
India.
If he had really advocated that, it would be part of his human right
to freedom of political expression. People have the right to advocate
separating Kashmir from India, just as they have the right to advocate
keeping Kashmir in India. It's the same right in both cases.
A woman who was born as a prisoner in Auschwitz, and almost died from
malnutrition, is
testifying
against a man accused of being one of the guards there.
I object to her claim that causing a hypothetical person not to be
born is equivalent to murder. It would imply that celibate priests,
monks and nuns are all murderers, along with anyone that decides not
to have sex with someone, not to mention anyone that uses birth
control.
The Nazis murdered 7 million real living helpless prisoners. Surely
that is sufficient evil to condemn — I don't think we need try
to stretch that figure by counting nonexistent potential people too.
There are three things I don't understand about this testimony:
Many poor countries were on the path to effective development,
including the poor, until US/UK/France
intervened
60 years ago to impose plutocracy and repression.
Jeremy Corbyn
has
the courage to stand up to prudes that want to prosecute
prostitutes or their customers.
The New York State Common Retirement Fund lost
$4,500
per member by investing in fossil fuels.
Trump
now
says he would not order torture, or assassination of relatives of
designated enemies.
This doesn't surprise me. He only advocated those things to appeal to
fleeting passions; he didn't really care about it as a policy.
I've seen articles comparing Trump's hate rhetoric with Hitler's, but
I think that is an error. Hitler was obsessed with hatred of Jews,
long before he got anywhere in politics. I don't think Trump really
hates Mexicans or Muslims. I think he is only using them as
scapegoats to get support, and if he won, he would not need these
scapegoats any more.
We can't tell much about what Trump would really do as president from
what he says, and likewise for Clinton. They would be lousy in
different ways, but we can't be sure who would be worse.
We can tell that neither of them deserves our support. The only
candidate now in the race that deserves support is Bernie Sanders.
Bernie
Sanders and the Future of Liberalism and Socialism.
Orangutans populations have been found in additional parts of Sumatra,
but that won't save them from
extinction.
Some orangutan cultures may be extinct even sooner.
Syed Adam Ahmed is
still
on Canada's no-fly list, despite reaching the advanced age of 6,
and the Canadian government refuses even to say why.
Reproductive justice and economic justice
go
together: for many women, pregnancy implies poverty, as they can't
afford the cost of an abortion, and can even less afford the cost of
having a baby.
Republican abortion sabotage measures are often designed to make
abortions prohibitively expensive.
"My friend was texting prayers. If this is
suspicious,
the terrorists have won."
The basic injustice here is kicking a passenger off a flight because
some other passenger is irrationally upset. If airlines made it clear
that they would not do this, and told the irrational passengers "You
can leave the plane if you like, but we see no reason to punish that
person," they would learn to control themselves and there would be no
problem.
I think it is also an injustice to set a standard that passengers
should show all their secrets in the vain hope of being allowed to
travel, or that a much-used bible can prove they are good people. In
the US, at least,
Christian
terrorists are right up there in violence with the Muslim
terrorists.
Hindu nationalists seek to
falsify
the history of India to make it support their ideology, and they
attack historians that don't cater to them.
It resembles US right-wing theocratic Christians.
US citizens:
call on the
Federal Election Commission to ban Super-PACs.
Everyone:
call on the
UK to change the visa policies that facilitate treating domestic
workers as slaves.
Everyone:
call on the
president of CBS News to stop boosting Trump for profit's sake.
US citizens:
call
on Congress to demand that Honduras properly investigate the
murder of Berta Cáceres.
Craig Murray says insiders have told him that intelligence agencies
can activate a portable phone's microphone
even
if its battery has been removed. He reports this, even though he
can't see how it can be true.
My guess is that this refers to the phones that have a large,
removable battery and another nonremovable battery.
Oregon has
almost
finished passing a law to phase out coal power by 2035.
The improvement in the environment and the added expense go hand in
hand. Either they will both be small, or both large. Either way,
this is a step in the right direction. I worry that it is too small,
too slow.
Human rights in Iran are
still
in a deplorable state.
It is not clear that President Rouhani has any control over most of
these injustices. Many government bodies are officially not under his
authority.
The UK has
imposed
censorship on universities, and a requirement to report on suspect
students, in the name of trying to block "terrorist" ideas such as
animal rights.
Now the US is doing the same, only more broadly,
asking
students and teachers to inform on each other.
January and February set
new
records for seasonally adjusted heat.
It's almost entirely due to global heating, not El Niño.
The Northern hemisphere is currently
2C
hotter than what used to be normal.
Increased world-scale digital interconnectedness
creates
unanticipated
vulnerabilities that can lead to disaster.
I recommend the book Normal Accidents, by Charles Perrow, for a
picture of how even much simpler systems can cause disasters because
they are too complex for their operators to understand.
Egyptian thugs arrested journalist Sabry Anwar, but
won't
say what they did with him. This raises suspicions that they
tortured him to death.
CNN is
trying
to legitimize the Ku Klux Klan.
Regarding
freedom of speech, Clinton and Trump are both lousy.
Canada's new Prime Minister Trudeau advocates the
absurd
idea of transitioning to a low-carbon economy through long-term
investments in tar sands pipelines.
If such a transition does occur, those investments will turn out to be
wasteful — so whoever owns them will fight like hell to prevent any
such transition.
Many progressive organizations are
trying
to pressure Republican senators to hold hearings for Obama's
possible Supreme Court nominee.
I supported this campaign until Obama's men started talking about
nominating a Republican. At that point, I realized we can't count on
Obama to nominate someone that we should want to have on the court.
If he nominates a progressive then I will support campaigns for that
nominee.
Clinton
has fought for business-supremacy treaties since the 1990s and will
surely go back to them if elected president.
George Lakoff
explains
Trump's success in terms of framing: he appeals to people that
want a strict father family and think only in terms of direct effects,
not system effects.
Dubya
taught
most Americans to consider stupidity and incompetence desirable in a
president. They prove he's an "ordinary guy".
Commercial web ad-blockers are proprietary software, and like many
other proprietary programs, they
snoop
on users.
I don't use an "ad blocker". I use IceCat, which is designed to block
surveillance. It has the effect of blocking most ads, but I don't
care about ads as such; if an ad is implemented in a way that doesn't
track people, I don't mind seeing it.
The US mainstream media refused to mention the
large
rallies for Sanders in cities across the US.
Trump's core supporters are the personality type known as
"authoritarian followers", but stirring up fear of "enemies" can
convince
frightened people to act like authoritarian followers.
US politicians in both parties have been doing this since 2001, which
is why the US has become so authoritarian already.
Retailers Experiment With
Surveillance
Tools Used by [state surveillance]
It should illegal for anyone to aim such a camera at a place where the
public is admitted, except under a court order that covers only a
specified place and period of time.
A woman had an
RFID
chip implanted in her; she said it was done by someone who
trafficked her.
If it was indeed implanted by a trafficker, I think its purpose was to
demoralize or intimidate her.
US citizens: on Monday March 7, phone your senators to
oppose
the DARK Act (which would stop states from requiring labeling of
GMOs in foods).
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and
888-355-3588.
India denied visas to US government representatives that
wanted
to check on religious freedom in India.
Religious freedom includes freedom to adopt and to proclaim the
beliefs of one's choice in the area of religion. These freedoms are
increasingly threatened in India, as the
prosecution
of a comedian for imitating a preacher demonstrates.
Before that was the banning of
Sita
Sings the Blues and the prosecution that
drove
secularist leader Sanal Edamaruku into exile.
Meanwhile, the
repression
of Dalits that want to officially register as Buddhists has been
going on for a long time.
Reducing CO2 emissions from concrete is making great
progress at the research level, but
putting
into practice faces obstacles including "convincing clients and
contractors to use it."
A carbon tax, making emitters pay for the damage they do, would help
convince them.
DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a Close Ally of Hillary Clinton,
Is
Trying
to Gut Regulations on Loan Sharks.
Clinton is in the banksters' camp, which is one of the reasons
we should not vote for her.
I expect to be much worse as president than the way she is talking
now. Meanwhile, since Trump will say anything to shock people, I
think he won't even try to do all the bad things he says — only
some of them, Meanwhile, Clinton would do some of them too.
Thus, if it comes down to Clinton vs Trump, I will vote Green.
It is a mistake, in the long term, to vote for the "lesser evil"
because that ensures things get
more
and more evil.
An Argentine human rights champion calls on Obama not to visit there
on the anniversary of the US-backed military coup, which began years
of
repression,
murder and torture.
The US has not changed its ways very much. The 2009 coup in Honduras,
under the sponsorship of Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State,
brought in a corrupt and murderous government. Anti-dam indigenous
activist Berta Cáceres
was
just murdered.
The reason for the coup was to keep the local rich people in power,
and that is what Clinton would do as president of the US.
UN's
Own Experts Chastise Ban Ki-moon Over Handling of Haiti Cholera
Outbreak.
An Australian kangaroo court
does
not allow witnesses to tell anyone they have been ordered to testify,
and imprisons them if they refuse to answer a question.
Melting is making Greenland's ice darker, as it concentrates soot on
the service. Being darker causes it to
absorb
more sunlight and melt faster.
Poland's right-wing government
plans
to squeeze out wind power the way Texas squeezes out abortions.
While Trump eagerly talks about killing suspected terrorists'
families, Obama actually does it, over and over, but
pretends
it isn't happening. The main difference is that Trump would drop
the pretense.
This difference would have a real effect: it would openly
commit the US to murder of innocents.
A bankster who has put lots of money into Clinton's campaign
wants
to be Secretary of the Treasury if she is elected.
Methane
Leaks Across US Pose a Much Greater Threat Than Aliso Canyon.
The Turkish army is
bombarding
the rubble of a Sur.
Reportedly 80% of the buildings have been destroyed, but that leaves
20% still to be blasted down.
This was
Erdoğan's
war of choice.
Planet-roasters have put a
hundred million dollars
into Republican candidates' campaigns.
An Atheist in Russia is
being prosecuted
for "offending the sentiments
of Orthodox believers". He said that some of the Bible is "bullshit".
He's right, and that's why it's called the "buy-bull": some people
will buy any sort of bull.
Calibrating satellite measurements of atmospheric temperature for the
time
of day of the measurement shows a
lot more global heating.
A big psychosocial trend is that younger generations show more
narcissistic behaviour traits — they become proud not to
care about other people.
Advances in sustainable energy will not end use of fossil fuels
without
making them pay for the costs
of global heating.
Note that fossil fuels are currently
highly subsidized.
Bill Clinton
broke Massachusetts election law
while campaigning for Hillary Clinton.
Volkswagen's CEO was
told about emissions cheating
a year before he admitted it.
Everyone: call on various companies to
refuse to sponsor the Republican Convention
if Trump is going to be nominated.
I think it is scandalous corruption for any political party to accept
sponsorship from businesses, but that is another issue.
A teacher was
pressured into resigning,
and faces possible
prosecution, because a student took her phone and copied her
nude selfies out of it.
I wish she had refused to resign. In the US, anything relating to sex brings out the cruelty of
self-righteous prudes.
Despite a reduction in poaching, the elephant population in Africa is
still falling.
Proposed new coal mines in Australia would
directly wipe out
an endangered bird.
Then the CO2 would wipe out much, much more. Flooded Sidney?
Global inequality makes
lots of people homeless.
When the plutocratic state's policies impose a certain level of
homelessness, everyone competes avoid being a victim. Those who
become homeless are the ones that lose this competition, so typically
they have weaknesses and flaws. That doesn't excuse those policies.
Some investors are
divesting from factory farms.
The fact that we need to try to pressure companies to stop the massive
use of antibiotics is a symptom of the weakness of democracy. In a
democratic state, we would not allow food companies to choose whether
to stop a profitable practice that
endangers public health.
Clinton won more delegates than Sanders on Super Tuesday, but Sanders
is not giving up.
Sudanese Journalists Launch Historic Hunger Strike Against Free Press
Crackdown.
Podemos in Spain has rejected becoming part of a coalition supporting
right-wing economic policies. This means there will be
a new election.
Netanyahu threatens to
exile the families of Palestinians
that attack Israelis.
Is it legitimate to attack the relatives of those that attack you?
Israelis, think twice before you say yes to that: if Palestinians
apply the same principle, you may not like the conclusions.
By 2050, global heating is likely to
kill half a million people
a year just by making fruit and vegetables more expensive.
But that's small potatoes compared with what will happen when China's
rice crop fails — which is projected to happen 1/4 of the years,
by the end of this century.
Extreme inequality in South Africa means that most students can't
afford to attend even a public university. Debt pressure has led to
large protests.
The role of drought in increased poverty is global heating at work.
A thug in Montgomery, Alabama, has been charged with
murdering
Gregory Gunn, age 58.
Everyone:
call on Coca Cola Company
not to sponsor a Trump-led Republican Convention.
US conservatives can't admit that their abortion restrictions are
intended
to make abortion nearly impossible. They have to pretend there is
some medical purpose.
Trump is
allowing
closer associations with white supremacist hate groups.
The Turkish army has
turned
much of Cizre into rubble.
Erdoğan started this war hoping to get a better result from new
elections. It partly worked.
The UN security council
approved
new sanctions on North Korea calling for inspection of all its
shipping.
This has China's support, so maybe it can actually be enforced.
Maybe.
Based on data for 900 years, Syria's current drought is
probably
the worst in that whole period.
That's surely because of global heating.
Bruce Schneier endorses the idea of
regulating
what data businesses
can collect.
Almost
2000 people in Turkey have faced legal threats for "insulting"
President Erdoğan.
Engineers at the Mosul dam say it could break at any time. A gate in
the dam is jammed, so there is
no
way to release the water that will soon build up from snow melt.
However, there is no way for the population of Mosul to move 6km away
from the river, because there is no place there for them to live or
work. And then there's the question of whether PISSI would let them
go.
UK local governments are starting to recognize that outsourcing their
activities
makes
them bad and inefficient.
The contractors are in a great position to skip and overcharge.
Watch out for techniques of
altering
a campaign message for a specific voter.
For instance, when a canvasser shows up at your door with a tablet,
the tablet may be saying how to spin the candidate's message
specifically for you.
Why We Should Teach About the FBI's
War
on the Civil Rights Movement.
A New Wave of Climate Insurgents
Defines
Itself as Law-Enforcers.
Many
armies use rape as a weapon of war, but there are ways to
discourage this in most conflicts.
These solutions are no use against PISSI or Boko Haram.
Military force is needed to stop them.
Food workers in New York City are
making
things very uncomfortable for Hot and Crusty's union-busting. It
changed its name, disguising its owners, but that won't enable it to
hide.
I have occasionally bought things there, but I will never buy there
again until I get word that it has settled with the union.
Some US schools have
shut
off their drinking water because of high levels of lead.
The former director of Guantanamo prison did not appear in the trial in
France, where he is being
sued
by victims of torture.
The new UK snooper's charter, no better than the previous try,
is an
attack
on human rights for everyone in the UK.
It is done, of course, in the name of protecting people from secondary
dangers.
Vulture Paul Singer, fresh from a mostly-victory over Argentina, is
bankrolling
Marco Rubio to do the same to Puerto Rico.
Trump had local thugs remove some black students preemptively from a rally,
presuming
they might protest somehow.
This reminds us of the way that a repressive US law imposes long
prison sentence on peaceful protests at presidential campaign events,
driving protests far away to where the mainstream press can completely
ignore them.
San Francisco thugs forced prisoners to fight each other, for
gambling.
It seems they have done this for more than a year.
On-line sales have lead to
false
information about products' energy efficiency.
Basically, on-line selling makes it harder to hold sellers
accountable, so it is going to result in various kinds of mistreatment
unless governments put more funds into checking for fraud and
prosecuting it.
Elif Shafak: Turkey is
dominated
by "intimidation and paranoia". State-supported Islamic
fundamentalism has made it possible to force many teenage girls into
marriage, and created fertile ground for PISSI.
A thug in Raleigh
shot
a black man who was running away.
The man was wanted for arrest, but there is no indication he was
violent. He certainly didn't respond with violence.
New York thugs
often
illegally search homes, especially those of blacks.
In-N-Out Burger
Commits
to Eliminating Overuse of Antibiotics in Beef.
The TPP
threatens
indigenous people's rights.
In the US:
phone to oppose the
proposed merger between Charter and Time Warner Cable.
Walmart and Kraft are being sued for stretching "100% parmesan cheese"
with
wood.
US citizens:
call
on Congress to pass the Stop Corporate Inversions Act.
'Like Putting Lipstick on a Pig':
Changes
to CETA Make it More Corporate-Friendly Deal.
The proposed "data protection" deal between the EU and the US
over personal data of Europeans is bogus, since it
does
nothing to resist NSA bulk surveillance.
Press Release:
"Privacy
Shield" Is The Same Unsafe Harbour.
Activists and tech companies are deadlocked in a dispute about
proposed privacy protection schemes that
would
be woefully inadequate.
They would be a more codified form of today's "privacy policies",
which are hardly worth paying attention to.
Once data are collected, they will be misused — by
rogue staff, by criminal crackers (please don't call them
"hackers"), and by the US and
other governments, and probably by the company too, because its
"privacy policy" allows harmful use.
What we need is to
stop
systems from collecting the data.
A Hong Kong publisher, in Chinese hands,
says
he has renounced his UK citizenship.
I hope the UK has the guts to say he can't surrender his citizenship
while in under some other government's power.
A court quashed one subpoena against Apple that
would
have required it to develop software to weaken security.
It is good that Apple is defending people's privacy on this one front,
but Apple software
does plenty to
undermine and mistreat users.
Some Israeli artists
compare
the current situation with McCarthyism.
Urban women with children are
especially
likely to be evicted in the US. The record of the eviction can
make them struggle for many years.
Guatemalan officers have been convicted of
raping
indigenous women as part of the US-organized civil war.
The US was supporting the local plutocrats against people who were
fed up with being ruled by them.
Climate Activists
Threaten
to Shut Down World's Major Coal Sites.
Several
ambassadors warned China not to define dissent as "terrorism".
I agree completely. I wish the US would stop
investigating
dissidents and whistleblowers by accusing them of "terrorism".
Evidence
substantiates that Zika can cause Guillain-Barré paralysis.
It's a grave symptom, since 40% of them still can't walk three months
later.
Journalists in Chhattisgarh, India, face
harsh
state repression.
Sanders
opposes
the Sandpiper and Clipper pipelines.
The executives of TEPCO face criminal charges for
ignoring
the known danger of a higher tsunami than they admitted publicly
was possible.
The CEO of CBS says Trump is great, because his spewing hatred
enriches
media giants.
Everyone:
encourage
Nebraska legislators to vote to end gerrymandering in Nebraska.
Everyone:
Demand
an investigation into the killing of Hernan Jaramillo by thugs in
Oakland.
Billboards are
starting
to track people's mobile phones. Even nastier, some use cameras
to try to learn about who walks by.
Both of these practices should be illegal.
The brother of Colombia's former President Uribe has been arrested and
accused of leading a
murder
squad.
El President Horrible was associated while in office with the
paramilitares, the worst group of terrorists in that country. It
sounds like this murder squad was a part of the paramilitares.
Lack of sleep
makes
some people crave sugar and fat, activating natural chemicals with
marijuana-like effects.
Facebook
can
tell when its useds are asleep. Via Facebook, others can tell
that too.
In Papua New Guinea, men's violence towards their wives and daughters
is
so
common that women are very lucky if they don't suffer it.
The vultures that attacked Argentina
gained
75% of the money they demanded. I'd call this a 75% victory for
evil.
We need to change US law so that next time the vultures will get
nothing.
Trump insults anyone that comes within range, even
soldiers
and veterans.
When hawks say we should "support our troops", they mean we should
support whatever unjust wars the hawks send those troops to fight in.
The right way to support them is to bring them home.
We should not blame the soldiers just for fighting an unjust war.
(It's their commanders that should be imprisoned for that.)
However, we must not forgive them for war crimes.
Snyder told his aides he wanted to avoid declaring a disaster in
Flint, so they
falsely
claimed he was not authorized to do so.
The hands of Argentine prosecutor Alberto Nisman had
no
traces of firing a gun, which is evidence he was killed by someone
else.
The prima facie hypothesis is that he was killed to stop him from
testifying the next day against then-president Fernández.
Iraq has
warned
people in Mosul to move away from the Tigris river because of the
danger that the Mosul dam might collapse.
The EU is
emitting
too much CO2 to keep its Paris climate pledge.
If Apple develops software for the FBI to guess the pin or password on
one iThing,
every
cracker and internet army in the world would try to get ahold of
it.
Funding better education for girls in Africa is a very
efficient
way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions there.
It's not enough, though — we also have to cut down in emissions
in other parts of the world.
Towns in the UK are
banning
activities such as sleeping or begging in public, just as critics
predicted they would.
US citizens:
Thank the FCC
for adopting network neutrality.
Many web sites
block
or harass visitors that use Tor.
What the article does not mention is that the CAPTCHAs typically
operate through nonfree Javascript code. We who refuse to run nonfree
Javascript code simply can't access these sites.
Around the world,
mining
is associated with violence. (And often pollution too.)
Thousands
May Have Died in Syria Sieges, UN Human Rights Chief Says.
Sanders proposes to
mobilize
the US economy for growth, so establishment-supporting economists
and media claim it won't work, without really studying it.
FBI Says Apple Court Order Is Narrow, But
Other
Law Enforcers Hungry to Exploit It.
What would thugs do, if not lie?
Indonesia is
imposing
harsh repression on prostitutes.
They will still work as prostitutes but it will be more dangerous for
them.
On watching one's father die in useless and terrible suffering;
doctors were
not
allowed to give him enough morphine to end the pain (and with it
his life) although he begged for that.
In 2000, Trump knew who David Duke was, enough to refuse to be
associated politically with him. Now he
pleads
ignorance of Duke as an excuse not to reject his support.
US citizens:
call
on Congress to approve contraceptive aid for regions affected by
Zika.
Scalia
did
grave damage to American workers and consumers by allowing
companies to impose arbitration requirements on them, thus denying
them the right to go to court when mistreated.
Charges
have been dropped against a UK student who was prosecuted for an
insult against Tories.
Bravo to anyone that insults Tories, but Aneurin Bevan expressed it
much more clearly. The Tories are lower than vermin.
Australia is allowing so much forest-cutting that it
will
bust its climate target.
Republicans in Georgia
want
to legalize religion-motivated discrimination against same-sex
couple.
The cease fire in Syria is mostly holding, but
Assad's
side carried out some air strikes. Perhaps they were directed at
al-Nusra or PISSI.
Some questions that
Trump's
tax returns would answer.
A UK MP visiting southeast Turkey was arrested by soldiers for
making
a recording of the sounds of Turkish tanks firing on Kurds.
Many US companies impose noncompete agreements on lots of employees
just because they can — so these employees,
if
laid off, can't work anywhere.
The fact that most of these contracts would not be enforced by a court
does not stop them from doing harm. If it were up to me, I would
penalize companies for asking employees to sign them, outside some
narrow cases.
Supposedly "left-leaning" economists are
supporting
the establishment in criticizing Sanders' economic plans.
The US
proposes
very light regulations for undersea fracking.
Do we have to risk learning the hard way?
The people of Nevada are organizing strongly to
reverse
the decision to remove support for individuals to install solar
power.
If we taxed carbon emissions enough, and eliminated subsidies for
fossil fuels, specific policies to encourage solar power would not be
needed. Simply avoiding the cost of fossil fuel would be enough
incentive for people to switch.
China's rulers admit that, now that they can't please the people with
fast growth, they depend more on
control
of the people through the media.
More Than Ever,
Science
Must Be Central to All Our Lives.
US citizens:
call
on Democratic superdelegates to follow the people's vote.
Clinton won the
South
Carolina primary.
However, Sanders leads nationwide and can still win the nomination.
People in the UK have reported around a million cases of alleged
benefit fraud, but only 15% of them were real fraud. The other
85%
of those accused were honest.
Putting surveillance cameras in nursing homes
would
violate the privacy of the people living there.
One possible trade-off is to install security cameras instead of
surveillance cameras. The difference is that a surveillance camera
can be watched remotely, while a security camera makes only a local
recording that is overwritten in a short time. The security camera
would deter abuses while not lending itself to watching everyone.
I believe that
only
security cameras, not surveillance cameras, should be allowed pointing
at places where the public is admitted, with exceptions allowed
only under court orders for a specific place and time period.
As for nursing homes, they could install security cameras in the rooms
of those patients that request them.
Everyone:
call for making
Nestle pay to use Lake Michigan water.
US citizens:
support
the Congressional Progressive Caucus climate resolution.
US citizens:
support
the US government stand that Israel's colonies in Palestine are
not part of Israel.
Anti-Government Protesters
Rally
for 'Free And Open Poland'.
In the UK,
protesters
must now damage property in order to get a fair trial.
Dalits worship a "demon" that in mythology was killed by the goddess
Durga. They believe he was a king that challenged the dominance of
the caste system. Jawaharlal Nehru University uses this feast day as
an occasion for political debates about caste, for which it
faces
prosecution for offending the religious feelings of higher caste
Indians that worship Durga.
I suppose they offend the religious feelings of Dalits, reciprocally,
but they won't be prosecuted for that.
Religious freedom means that people are free to hold any views in the
area of religion, and freedom of speech means they are free to
praise or condemn any religion.
Republicans in Illinois
want
to exclude children of single mothers permanently from school and
employment, as well as state aid, if the mother does not (or
cannot) name the father, or find some substitute.
I think the state should offer a gratis abortion to any woman
in that situation.
A right-wing think tank is demanding budget cuts
so
extreme that even Paul Ryan doesn't dare endorse them.
Joyce Curnell went to the emergency room, but the hospital informed
the local thugs that she was wanted for not paying debts. They took
her to debtor's prison, and the thugs
killed
her there by denying her water and medical care.
The film and TV industry in the US gets big subsidies, which is a
waste
of our money. The same companies then
turn
around and buy government support for unjust copyright laws such
as the DMCA.
Democratic debate moderators from PBS posed
questions
with right-wing presuppositions.
The US right wing is not grateful for this support; rather, it
continues to condemn PBS as "liberal" no matter how reactionary it
gets. This is part of its long-term strategy to fool Americans into
considering all views but the most extreme reactionarism as "leftist
extremism".
The support for Sanders shows that many Americans are starting to
recognize this lie.
Plutocrats in the US and the EU will try to get This Treaty Is
Plutocratic finished
in
time for Obama to sign it.
They realize that the next president may be Sanders.
Benjamin Todd Jealous, former president of the NAACP, says
why
he supports Sanders rather than Clinton.
U.S. House of Representatives Approves Bill
Slashing
Wildlife Protections. The victims of this SCROTUS initiative
would include wolves in the US and elephants in Africa.
SCROTUS = Sleazy Congressional Republicans Of The United States.
After finding no usable scandals in one batch of NOAA emails,
denialist Lamar Smith has
demanded
a lot more NOAA emails to try to manipulate.
Two of the computational idea patents Apple used to attack Samsung
have been
invalidated
by a court.
That's a victory for software freedom, but an limited and extremely
expensive one. We need to protect software from all patents on
computational ideas, all at once.
These patents are often called "software patents", but that term gives
the wrong idea of what such patents do. A patent is never associated
with any specific code. Rather, it is a
monopoly
on implementing some specific, stated idea & in these cases, a
computational idea. Any code which implements the patented idea, or
any hardware which does, can be the basis for a lawsuit.
Another solution I've proposed is to
legislate
that software is exempt from patent law.
This illustrates the error of focusing on "patent trolls" and ignoring
other patent aggressors. Apple is the biggest patent aggressor in the
software field, and we can hardly call it a patent troll. Its
products are
full
of proprietary software
with
malicious
functionalities, but they are certainly a real business.
AT&T gave
62
thousand dollars to Missouri state legislators to get a committee
to approve a bill to block municipal internet access in that state.
Even if they have to pay 10 times as much to get the whole legislature
to approve the bill, AT&T will get tremendous return on investment.
Two Florida schoolchildren face
felony
charges for putting red pepper in a teacher's soda.
The school should punish them, but taking it to court is incompetence
on the school's part.
I reject the practice of calling teenagers "children" merely because
they are minors, but these are 12 years old, not even teenagers.
They really are children.
"Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was
worth
billions of dollars to corporate America," extrapolating from
evidence that his death has denied them the chance to make off with
billions more.
An
E.Coli's Last Message to President Obama.
Growing marijuana indoors
uses
up lots of electricity.
Why grow marijuana indoors? Because it's illegal. Even were it is
legal, they still grow it indoors because they invested so much effort
in learning to grow a good crop indoors. But legalization will change
that over time, even if not instantly.
Baltimore thugs shot Keith Davis, apparently having mistaken him for
the robber of a taxi, then
went
all-out to frame him for that robbery. They failed.
Will those involved in the frame-up be prosecuted for this abuse of
power?
Whistleblowers Challenge Candidates:
Stand
Against Wall Street Fraud.
Everyone:
call
on Obama to endorse world-wide action against the men that murder
their daughters or sisters.
Everyone:
call
on Indonesian President Widodo to protect the survivors of the
1966 massacre and give them justice.
US citizens:
call
on Kerry to block the Alberta Clipper pipeline.
So Which Clinton Is It Today:
Rebel
Girl or Super Predator?
How to Get Rich From Public Schools
(Without
Actually Educating).
For 70 years, a study has tracked the medical history of everyone born
in Britain during one week. It has uncovered a
series
of injustices that systematically caused avoidable illness, and some
were corrected, before the UK fell to the plutocrats.
I think the Tories will end this story before it shows any more about
what the state ought to
do.
A team of local women has had
great
success in reducing poaching in one region of South Africa.
More money and more political will would do a lot of good in inspiring
such teams. Pay alone won't do it, but these efforts cost money.
Seaworld sent an employee to infiltrate PETA, where he
tried
to provoke them into violence.
It seems to me that a fraudulent attempt to lead others into crime (so
as to prosecute them) should itself be a crime.
The wealthy countries
imposed
tax avoidance treaties decades ago, through which multinational
companies pay poor countries hardly any tax.
Since the FBI knows it can't ban or break encryption, it is now
trying
every possible method to break computer security in general.
Trump proposes to
quash
press criticism with expanded libel laws.
UAE
Beat
Foreign Prisoners And Gave Them Electric Shocks.
No wonder it is a US ally.
Some of Gov. Snyder's top advisers called for switching Flint's water
supply back to safer water in
October
2014.
If Snyder did not know about this, he was incompetent at his job.
New Mexico has
legalized
sexting for teenagers 14 and over.
I fear 13-year-olds are still in danger of punishment. You might
think it is wiser for them not to sext, or have sex, but some will do
it anyway and it is wrong to jail them when they do.
US citizens: call on Obama to nominate a progressive to the Supreme Court.
Israel has released Palestinian journalist Mohammed al-Qiq from imprisonment without trial. However, he is too sick to leave the hospital.
In Indonesia (and elsewhere), Islam stands for intolerance of queers.
Tradition in Java and Bali includes a lot of public cross-dressing.
The forms of Islam that were common in Java in the past did not go in
for repression. In the past few decades, repressive Islam has spread
there. I've heard this attributed to funding from Salafi Arabia.
One of Australia's prisoners in Manus Island was just granted refugee status,
after a long hunger strike. He can't walk or eat normal food.
The Papuan government wants to move him away from the only place he
can get medical care.
The US will start blocking imports of sea food from Thailand where there is suspicion forced labor was used.
In San Francisco, even employed people are homeless.
It is fine to insist that housing for people must meet certain
standards, but not as an excuse to push people around on the street.
San Francisco's first step should be to legalize sleeping in RVs. Its
next step should be to provide homeless people with RVs, if not better.
With all the wealth flowing into the city, it will have no trouble paying
for this, if it taxes that wealth properly.
Senator Cruz wants the US government to have the power to take away people's citizenship by administrative order (not even a trial).
What next, Mr Cruz? Round up people on the street and shoot them?
The UN working group's conclusion that Julian Assange has been
"arbitrarily detained" is based on the specific injustices of his
case: how Sweden is using an unjustly conducted investigation as
excuse to grab him and violate his rights. Here is its opinion.
This reasoning and conclusion would not apply if a war criminal
(Dubya, for instance) were hiding in an embassy to avoid honest, overt
and justly conducted prosecution.
They would also not apply if Sweden conducted its investigation of
these accusations against Assange in an honest and above-board way.
2015: When Global Governments Trampled Human Rights in Name of National Security.
Haneen Zoabi: Why Israel Is Fighting the Indigenous Palestinians.
Global heating resulted in fires in forests in Tasmania, that for at least a thousand years have been too wet for any fire. Their entire ecosystem is likely to burn away as heating continues.
TV Pundits Praise Hillary Clinton On Air, Fail to Disclose Financial Ties to Her Campaign.
Many heroin users are using it to blunt the permanent pain of their lives, which comes from a lack of love as children.
I don't know if there is a way to help those people,
but making reliable birth control and abortion easy to get
will avoid many of them.
People who were not killed by Ebola have long-lasting brain problems.
The European Parliament adopted a non-binding resolution to stop selling arms to Salafi Arabia.
Obama is considering the ultimate treachery: nominating a Republican for the Supreme Court. With "Democrats" like that, who needs Republicans?
Fortunately, the official Republicans rejected this nominee.
But that doesn't mean Obama, the great weakling, won't offer
them an even bigger compromise.
The US government hired CMU researchers to break Tor anonymity.
India's subsidy for installing solar power systems it applies only to solar cells made in India. The WTO called this a barrier to trade, apparently under prodding from the US.
Its logic makes sense, but its priorities are twisted.
Facebook's Five New Reaction Buttons: Data, Data, Data, Data, and Data.
A disabled British woman, and her husband that cares for her, may become homeless because of the "bedroom tax".
The Tories keep imposing cuts on the poor and sick, which they know
must push increasing numbers of people into penury. Precisely whom or
why, they don't care. The cuts must be applied rigidly, even
dishonestly, or they would not achieve the goal.
Sanders plans to solve two US problems at once: curbing speculation in the big casino and funding US infrastructure.
Incidentally, rebuilding the infrastructure will create lots of jobs.
The UK has treaties with many very poor countries, limiting what taxes they can charge to UK companies.
The TTIP could force privatization of national health systems, in the UK and (I presume) in the rest of Europe.
It could also stop the US from setting up a proper national health service, which it badly needs.
Foreign companies could the use TTIP and other such treaties to forbid states from imposing new taxes.
US citizens:
Call
on Congress to vote on whether the government can make companies
change their products to snoop on people, and debate and vote on what
power the state should have.
Post-war Iraq:
'Everybody
is corrupt, from top to bottom. Including me'.
Terrible news: to avoid 2C of heating,
we
can only emit 1,200 bn tons more CO2 (or equivalent)
from now on.
That is only half what scientists estimated before.
"If we don't start reducing our emissions immediately, we will blow
[the carbon budget] in a few decades."
A French drug trial
caused
grave brain damage, sometimes fatal. A previous test of the same
drug on dogs did similar damage, but it was covered up by trade
secrecy.
Drug companies should not be allowed to impose secrecy on any
information about drug trials. Any arrangements made by the company
that impede publication should land the executives responsible in
prison for a long time, and the company should be punished by
cancelling the patent on that drug.
However, this alone is not enough, because imposing secrecy is not the
only method these companies use to do corrupt medicine. For instance,
when drug companies finance or control drug testing, they ruin its
results. It is a fundamental conflict of interest. For a test to
kill subjects is rare, but lesser forms of harm happen
all
the time.
Drug companies should have nothing to do with tests on drugs. The
government should run them, and drug companies
should
pay through their taxes.
Drug companies have
many
ways of corrupting medicine.
Some members of US Congress have proposed to
end
the practice of requiring money bail for people accused of crimes.
The system keeps indigent people in jail for months or years, and many
plead guilty to crimes they did not commit because the sentence is
less jail time than they would spend waiting for a trial.
As Rivers Run Black in Peru,
Indigenous
Tribes Left Cleaning Big Oil's Disaster.
When an ice age ends, the Earth heats up — but
nearly
as fast as we are heating it now.
Bill Gates
says
there will be a "clean energy breakthrough" that will solve the global
heating problem.
Mr Bill's faith in future technology is touching, but it's lunacy.
Such a breakthrough may or may not happen. Our plans for avoiding
global heating disaster must not depend on it.
Fortunately, we can avoid disaster even without any
breakthrough — if we have the political will to make a forced
march to sustainable energy. If, that is, we do not justify laziness
by assuming that a "breakthrough" will make it easy.
Many web sites are
blocking
connection through Tor, or making users answer a CAPTCHA. The
CAPTCHA typically requires nonfree Javascript software. Thus, these
sites demand that you either (1) let them track your location or (2)
run a
nonfree
program. Either one means mistreating you. I refuse to do those
things — I would rather not access those sites.
I hope you will join me in rejecting them.
The European Parliament is voting on a
proposal
to ban arms sales to Salafi Arabia, which is using the arms to
impose horrible suffering on Yemen.
Salafi Arabia pretends that its enemies the Houthis are "terrorists"
that Europe needs to fight, but the Houthis are
only
interested in controlling Yemen. They are no friends of Sunni
terrorists such as al-Qa'ida.
Why the FBI's demand to Apple
should
be judged invalid under US law.
The article's arguments is entirely valid, but at the same time it
endorses "entrusting our digital lives" to companies such as Apple
that develop
proprietary
malware. No thanks!
Advocates to EPA: It's
Time
to Ban Organophosphate Pesticides.
SCROTUS have proposed bills to allow lots more mining and
cutting
down of national forests.
SCROTUS = Sleazy Congressional Republicans Of The United States.
"Smart guns" that recognize fingerprints
could
reduce gun violence.
A Canadian court ruled that
medical
marijuana users have the right to grow their own marijuana.
Journalists
Should Stand Up for Whistleblowers.
Bolivia's voters
declined
to change the constitution to allow Evo Morales to run for
president again.
He was a big change for the better, but it is dangerous to let one
person be president on and on.
France has demanded
almost
two billion dollars in avoided taxes from Google.
After
Sweeping Nevada, Trump Declares: 'I Love the Poorly Educated'.
Pick any cruel and bigoted government action:
a
substantial fraction of Trump supporters are in favor of it.
His supporters want someone who will be "tough" on all sorts of
undesirables, but
will
Trump really do that?
I think Trump would be tough on the weak.
Clinton Campaign
Relies
On Rumors And Dishonesty To Attack Sanders.
Putting more CO2 in sea water, as an experiment,
slowed
growth in a real coral reef.
1/4
of US abortion clinics have closed in the past five years.
This is the Republicans' war on women.
Tories in the UK have suppressed
almost
800,000 voters.
Pressuring
restaurant chain In-N-Out Burger to stop using beef raised with
routine use of antibiotics.
Black
Thinkers Like Bernie Sanders. They've Studied the Clintons' True
Cost.
This is
good
news, but since real outcomes will come soon, I will wait and post
about them.
The Nissan Leaf
records
where it has traveled, tracking the driver's movements.
This article reports on how crackers have been able to extract that
information from the car. However, I think the worst thing is that
the car keeps these records at all. I am sure Nissan has a way to get
at them, and I suppose governments can make Nissan extract them too.
The Heathrow Airport climate protesters were given a
suspended
sentence.
This means they won't be imprisoned now, but they are effectively
blocked from further protest activity.
One of the protesters, expecting to be imprisoned, said she
has
no regrets.
I wish someone could tell her how to write her favorite music onto an
audio CD with GNU/Linux.
The UK should repeal its
"aggravated
trespass" law.
Calling on the US and Canada to
judge
projects such as pipelines based on their climate impact.
The US
spied
on the UN Secretary General as well as leaders of various allied
countries.
US musicians are afraid that if they criticize Israel's occupation of
Palestine,
their
careers will be crushed.
Israel
demolished
the school in a Bedouin village in Palestine.
Israel has
demolished 400
Palestinians' homes in 2016.
It's
Obama's
own fault that he has not closed the Guantanamo prison, because he
accepted nearly all of its injustices.
Bahraini dissident Ibrahim Sharif has been
sentenced
to a year in prison for condemning government repression of
peaceful protests.
In the twisted language of the Bahraini regime, criticizing injustice
constitutes "inciting hatred".
The repression in Bahrain was
imposed
by troops from Salafi Arabia *, with the implicit support of the
US.
* It's official name is "Saudi Arabia", but I think
"Salafi
Arabia" better describes the poison it spreads.
Arch Coal was secretly funding an organization that
harassed
climate scientists.
Regarding
"antisemitism"
in an Oxford student club.
Real antisemitism was widespread in the UK in the past, and it may
still exist today, but the criticism of Israel's occupation policies
as "antisemitism" is a falsehood.
Russia is convicting people of treason in secret trials, apparently
based
on no evidence.
I wish this practice were limited to Russia.
Organized crime now
finances
illegal unsustainable fishing of endangered species around the
world. A group of volunteers work to catch the criminals.
I do not approve of releasing tuna from a fish farm, which they did
once before, but that is a side issue.
Chinese
dissident
and whistleblower Li Xin has disappeared in Thailand.
At least one of the Hong Kong publishers was apparently taken from
Thailand. It appears that Thailand is basically unsafe for anyone
that China wants to grab.
This resembles what the US did,
kidnaping
a man in Italy and sending him to Egypt to be tortured. One
former CIA agent is going to be extradited to Italy for trial for
this.
US citizens:
phone
Senator Stabenow to oppose the DARK Act.
Everyone:
call
on the New York Times to admit US involvement in the war in Yemen.
US citizens:
call
on the Senate to reject the DARK Act.
It would ban states from requiring labeling of GMOs.
Prison thugs
blocked
delivery of printouts of EFF articles to Chelsea Manning,
supposedly from concern that they violated the EFF's copyright. This
excuse is even more ludicrous than it seems, because printing a web
page to show a person who can't see it on the net is probably fair
use.
The US and Russia have
agreed
to a cease-fire in Syria applying to all sides except al-Nusra
(al-Qa'ida) and PISSI.
I hope this can work. But given the way the non-Islamist rebels are
closely allied with al-Nusra, I am not sure the distinction is
practical.
Whole Foods
systematically
lies to customers. Perhaps it should be called Whole Cloth, as in
"made up out of".
The EU's trade negotiator told Exxon that the TTIP would
protect
it from pesky regulations.
That's effectively a confession that the TTIP is a form of corruption.
On the correct pronunciation of
"Exxon".
Right-wing law professors adopted "safe space" censorship tactics to
claim
that other professors had no right to dissent from praise of
Scalia.
The article argues against the idea that we have to praise evil people
merely because they are dead.
Protesters
blocked
the doors of the meeting room where plutocratists were going to
meet to negotiate the TTIP.
Many Americans are
rebelling
against the establishment.
Those who blame the real culprits support Sanders. Those distracted
with scapegoats support Trump.
Jobs After Jail: Ending the
Prison
to Poverty Pipeline.
Pro-Palestinian activists put up posters in the London metro,
pretending to be advertisements, which
criticize
aspects of Israel's occupation of Palestine.
As described here, the posters seem to be factual and accurate.
Israel and its supporters take offense at this contradiction of the
one-sided official picture, so they describe the posters as
"vandalism" and even pretend that they threaten violence.
Reporters Without Borders
calls
on Egypt to release dozens of imprisoned journalists.
Natural gas is
not
a bridge to a sustainable future.
Africa's Forests 'Threatened by
Palm
Oil Rush'.
China has imprisoned a Tibetan blogger for
reporting
visible facts people were not supposed to talk about.
Privatization of probation officers in the UK
led
naturally to mistreating them and the people on probation.
Global warming has caused sea level to rise at the
fastest
rate in the last 2,800 years.
It is not clear whether sea level rose faster 2,800 years ago, or we
simply don't know how fast it rose then.
This study forecasts only 1.3 meters (4.3 feet) of sea level rise by
2100, but we don't know how much global heating will melt the
Greenland ice cap in this century.
In any case, sea level will continue rising, and over centuries the
rise could amount to
25
meters. Many of the world's major cities will be inundated.
Obama once again
proposes
to move imprisonment without trial from Guantanamo Bay to United
States territory.
The evil of the Guantanamo prison is imprisonment without trial.
Moving it to the US would not reduce the evil, only smash the last
barrier against making it standard US practice.
Justice requires that each prisoner be tried or released.
Sanders once
called
for abolishing the CIA. So did President Kennedy, President
Truman, and various other elected officials.
Sanders's opposition to the TPP exposes the bias of US mainstream
media. MSNBC was covering Sanders' press conference, but
stopped
when he brought up the TPP.
Egyptian
Army Court Sentences 4-year-old To Life in Prison For Committing
Multiple Murders.
The copyright industry finds Australia's "three strikes" system for
punishing people for sharing files
not
worth using unless they make it super cheap to run, and
unreliable.
The relatives of people shot dead in Sandy Hook
want
to sue the manufacturers of the rifle and ammunition that the
killer used.
I think this sort of unpredictable liability is the wrong way to
decide what kinds of guns may be sold. That policy should published
explicitly in advance, and companies that follow it should not be
liable.
Thus, I advocate prohibiting large magazines, but not suing the
companies that made them lawfully.
Maryland has
adopted
rules to encourage community solar electricity projects.
44 Years in Solitary Confinement Is
Even
Worse Than You Can Imagine. So says another person who spent
years in solitary confinement.
A poll finds that US Democratic voters are
more
favorable towards socialism than towards capitalism.
I advocate a mixture of capitalism (allow private businesses) and
socialism (regulate them tightly, tax them a lot, and keep them
small).
Ugandan opposition leader Kizza Besigye was arrested again, reportedly
to
stop
him from gathering evidence of the rigged election before the
deadline to challenge it.
US citizens: phone the White House and call on Obama to appoint a
progressive to the Supreme Court.
The White House comments line is 202-456-1111.
US citizens: phone your senators to oppose the DARK act that would
prohibit states from requiring labeling of GMOs.
1-877-796-1949
US citizens:
call on Obama
to withdraw the demand for Apple to break security on iPhones.
US citizens:
Call
on state attorneys general to investigate Exxon's climate lies.
On the correct pronunciation of
"Exxon".
Greenhouse emissions often go with air pollution. Cutting emissions
to avoid global heating disaster could save almost
300,000
Americans from death from respiratory diseases by 2030.
At every stage, the winner of the war in Afghanistan has been …
opium.
The suggestion at the end to put US money into rural development is,
however, easier to say than to do. The US has scattered lots of cash
for this, and
often
it only fed corruption.
Clinton ought to recuse herself from the presidential race for
conflict
of interest: namely, her million-plus in pay from the big banks.
The Pope's small concession on birth control
does
nothing to help women facing Zika under prohibition of abortions.
The US
needs
democratic socialism to fix its public schools.
Leading
climate scientists call on the American Geophysical Union to
reject funding from Exxon.
On the correct pronunciation of
"Exxon".
The Heatland institute* has published another report denying global
heating,
full
of falsehoods.
* Its official name is "Heartland", but "Heatland" describes it more
accurately.
US citizens:
call
on the FCC to require thugs to register Stingrays and get warrants
to use them.
A Cairo art gallery was shut down by the government and will face
strict
censorship of what it shows.
Mexico's Missing Students:
International
Investigators Say They Are Being Obstructed.
Egyptian Anti-Torture Group
Vows
to Defy Government Move to Shut It Down.
The Australian government is subjecting democracy to a
"corrosive"
attack. It is promoting secrecy and reducing accountability to
the public.
Australia had a
series
of three springs with record-breaking heat, and global heating
seems to be responsible.
Right-wingers want to repress transsexuals with
laws
requiring them to use the toilets for the sex they were born with.
There is a real dispute here, between male-to-female transsexuals who
want to use toilets for females, and other females who feel
uncomfortable with people in their toilets that are rather similar to
males. Both of them have good reasons, and I don't see how to satisfy
them both. I don't have a solution to offer, but these laws clearly
only do harm.
Now that a public inquiry will be held into UK thugs' practice of
infiltrating dissident groups (often by getting sexually involved with
women in them),
the
thugs want the inquiry to be secret rather than public, to
"protect" these infiltrators.
Sanders
did
much better in Nevada than was expected a few weeks ago, and got
almost as many delegates as Clinton.
The mainstream media are spinning this as "Clinton won".
Michael Moore's latest film shows what's missing in the US political
establishment (including the mainstream media): the idea that
issues
matter, not only "winning".
The FBI
unwittingly
stopped Apple spyware from operating automatically in the shooting
suspect's iPhone.
Colombia's supreme court has
banned
mining and drilling in the high-altitude plains which provide most
of the country's water supply.
The "Success Academy", a group of charter schools, succeeds by
ejecting
students that aren't a big success.
There's a place for schools for gifted children. Just don't judge
ordinary public schools against them.
US citizens:
call on Congress not to privatize
air traffic control — reject HR 4441.
The latest excuse for imposing total surveillance on the internet is
the UK's
plan to make
all sites that have sexual material identify their visitors to check
their ages.
It would be wrong to do this even if it were easy.
US Army "burn pits" in Iraq and Afghanistan
seem
to have made lots of soldiers sick, some fatally. Toxins were
contributed by the garbage that they burned, as well as remains from
Saddam Hussein's former chemical weapons programs.
Criminalising Boycotts Will
Help
Unethical Businesses Thrive.
Snowden
explains why the FBI's demands to Apple are unnecessary.
Specifically,
If Apple makes a modified iThing decryption program to facilitate
trying more decryption keys, that
will
affect all users of iThings.
Apple's current defense of one aspect of user's privacy would be
admirable if it were the whole story. In fact, it is the exception
among a long string of abuses.
The article mentions one of the malicious functionalities of the
iPhone and the iBad: they are tyrant devices. This means
they do
not allow the user to run an operating system that wasn't signed by
Apple. This gives Apple total power over the user.
Schneier says that "either everyone gets security, or no one does."
For the iThings, it's the latter. No user of an iThing has security
against Apple, because Apple can do any nasty thing whatsoever in the
next "upgrade". It is infamous for
mistreating its own users.
In general, no user of proprietary software has any
security
against the program's developer.
A
Pentagon
report in 2012 predicted that support for the (mainly Islamist)
anti-Assad rebels in Syria was likely to result in a "Salafist
Principality", basically something like PISSI.
That's what Salafi Arabia and Turkey wanted, but why did the US
support them? Even in 2012, some in the Pentagon knew that the Syrian
rebels were mainly Islamists. That doesn't mean Obama and his
advisers knew this — but if not, they should have.
The US may have expected this "Salafist Principality" to be more like
Salafi Arabia rather than the actual PISSI. That is hardly an excuse.
Mèdecins Sans Frontiéres has decided to
stop
telling Assad and Russia where its medical facilities are located.
It believes that they attack these facilities intentionally.
In many cities, apparently public areas are private property and
people's
rights are restricted there. This article describes the UK.
New York City has done it too, for instance in
Zucotti
Park.
The UK's dooH niboR government is proposing a pension "reform" that
would
hurt 20 million low-paid workers when they retire.
What has Bernie Sanders actually
accomplished?
Thousands
of people in Sydney protested against laws that have made bars,
restaurants and music venues shut down.
These laws have avoided dozens of alcohol-related injuries each year,
but maybe it is possible to keep the venues open and reduce how much
alcohol people can drink in them.
Prolonged
imprisonment of young refugees is 'state-sanctioned child abuse',
says a leading Australian doctor.
The Australian law that
punishes
personnel who report this or other abuse of prisoners is a
state-sanctioned coverup of systematic crime.
US citizens:
call
on the National Marine Fisheries Service to protect sea floor
habitats.
US citizens:
call
on the National Marine Fisheries Service to protect forage fish.
US citizens:
tell the FCC to stop Charter
from merging with Time Warner Cable.
US citizens:
call
on your state governor to support a clean power plan for your
state.
The UK lobbied the UN, apparently with success, to tone down its
criticism of
repression
in Bahrain.
Many uncontacted indigenous tribes in the Amazon are making contact,
mainly because they have been
attacked
by murderous criminal gangs.
There is no vaccine against the common cold — or against the flu
in general.
How Clinton
enabled
the coup in Honduras. Honduras still suffers from the effects of
that coup.
Clinton's policy towards Latin America:
support
for the oligarchies against elected politicians that aimed to reduce
their power.
Judges Have No Idea What to Do About
Student
Speech on the Internet.
Thugs across the US
protested
the conviction of the thug who killed Akai Gurley.
The thug did not intend to shoot Gurley, but did nothing to save him.
The UK
plans
to gag government-funded scientists (even at universities) to stop
them from campaigning against harm that they have discovered.
An Egyptian novelist has been sentenced to
two
years in prison for publishing a book that mentions sex and drug
use.
French Constitutional Council
Rejects
Data Copy During House Raids.
Large
numbers of protesters surround the Australian hospital where a
refugee baby is being treated. They are concerned lest the state send
the baby back to the prison in Nauru, where the baby was burned.
Environmental Degradation Takes a
Heavy
Toll on Women and Children's Health.
Scalia was no "originalist". He turned the constitution upside down
to permit
Republican
voter suppression.
Most of the election issues in the US this year are really forms of
the issue of
plutocracy
vs democracy.
Erdoğan's move to tyranny, with the support of a substantial
part of the population,
compared
to fascism in Italy.
Studying the
relationship
between forced labor and business.
A
useful
infographic from the EFF explain the injustice of the TPP in the
area of copyright.
The article itself uses self-defeating terminology
such as
"digital
locks" and "digital rights management", but the infographic itself
does not use them.
Global heating hits the Arctic especially hard.
This
January set a record for the smallest amount of Arctic sea ice in
winter.
Global heating will
make
the groundwater shortage worse in parts of the US.
Florida is
passing a bill to make a list of organizations
that support
boycott, divestment or sanctions directed at the occupation of Palestine,
and specifically cut funding to them.
Similar bills have been proposed in Illinois and California. These are not local initiatives. It is an extension to the US
of the campaign to
prohibit dissent
in Israel.
Global climate mayhem
has happened before,
and it causes entire ecosystems
to collapse and disappear.
Trump stated his
admiration for an atrocity
(perhaps mythical) attributed to US General Pershing in the colonized
Philippines,
I've read (though not in detail) that the US's suppression of the
Philippines in 1900, when it had kicked out Spanish rule, was quite
brutal.
Sanders now
leads Clinton
in a national poll.
Clinton's strategy of trying to prevent voters from learning about
Sanders,
by having few debates and obscure ones, was cunning, and it almost
worked.
Maybe now it will fail.
A company
hires actors
to pretend to be "concerned citizens",
reading from scripts.
Documents show
additional Volkswagen lies
about the overpolluting cars.
Some US states long ago banned paying low wages to employees and telling
them
to
make it up with tips.
It works fine.
I tip waiters in restaurants, because I know they depend on it, but I
would rather get rid of the practice and require employers to pay them
an adequate wage.
Restaurants should not add a "service charge" to the price on the
menu. Hidden extra charges are dishonest business. The restaurant
should expect customers to pay what the menu says, no more, and
calculate those prices to allow for paying waiters a decent wage.
Five questions
to ask CIA Director Brennan.
US citizens: call for strong rules to
protect US wildlife refuges
from oil and gas drilling.
To reduce inequality, we need to
change the rules
that the super-rich
have set up to grab most of the wealth that we produce.
Exxon is still
lobbying and spreading misinformation
about global heating, trying to stop society from protecting itself from
the likes
of Exxon.
On the correct pronunciation of
"Exxon".
Prisoner Albert Woodfox, who has been in solitary confinement for 43
years after bogus trials, was
released from prison.
(The article was written before the release took place; I've heard
elsewhere that it did occur.)
Connecticut has
arranged housing
for all its homeless veterans.
All states should do this — but not just for veterans.
US citizens: call on Senator McConnell to
allow a vote
on sentence reduction.
US citizens:
call on the Senate
not to undermine the independence of financial oversight agencies.
Ocean heating is
harming
some marine species.
An experiment shows shoppers on Ebay
act in a sexist way.
For most products, they offer a higher bid if the seller is male.
For a few products, the effect goes the other way. Sexism has been demonstrated in other areas; for instance, evaluation
of the merit of scientific work is
affected by sexism.
My father's second wife was a painter. When she was young, she signed
her
paintings with a name that could be take for masculine, to avert sexism.
Her paintings sold better that way.
Increased CO2 in the water may not directly wipe out coral, but makes
coral
deformed and more more vulnerable to viruses.
Young coral organisms have special difficulty, so a reef might not
recover
after events that kill part of it.
If you want to stop Trump in November,
vote for Sanders now.
The
EPA will investigate
how pesticides, including Roundup, affect endangered species.
Uri Avnery: Israel is
planning a law
to provide an excuse to kick elected Arabs out of Parliament.
PISSI is using
children of 12
as suicide bombers, as well as teenagers.
Pope Francis Relaxes Catholic Prohibition Against Contraception.
This is a positive step, but a very limited one.
Evidence from Australia
substantiates the theory
that lead poisoning controls society's overall crime rate.
Uganda's main opposition presidential candidate
has been arrested.
It is a fitting end to an apparently rigged election.
The FBI boasts of "disrupting" lots of supposed terrorist threats or
plans, but
won't explain concretely
what "disrupting" means.
It also isn't clear whether these were real terrorist plans,
or
fantasy plans
that wont go anywhere unless facilitated by the FBI.
San Jose Police Officer Fired for Racist Tweets Back on Patrol
Nauru has tightened security against exposure of how it treats the
prisoners
it imprisons for Australia by
restricting visits
by Australians.
This is in case they might be journalists. Nauru basically does not
allow
journalists to enter. Nauru is Australia's equivalent of Guantanamo, except used for people
not even accused of terrorism and even less accountable.
The EU is proposing to
reduce regulations
on clinical trials of drugs.
The biggest problem with clinical trials today is that they are run by
the drug companies that make the drugs. This is a
form of corruption.
One specific aspect of this problem is that many
trials go unpublished.
"Lighter regulation" on clinical trials does not sound like it would
do anything to improve this. Indeed, it could make things worse.
What we need is specific additional regulation. This article gives too little information to judge the change,
and that itself is a cause for suspicion.
French free software groups are
suing
the government for signing a deal with Microsoft. They accuse
Microsoft of dumping.
The main wrong in the Microsoft deal is not an issue of competition,
but that it is
trying to impose
dependence on user-subjugating software on the country.
Five Places [in the US] Where Police Shooting Scandals Have
Altered
the Political Landscape.
US
policy in Syria is based on the fiction that a "moderate" armed
opposition exists which is separate from al-Nusra (al-Qa'ida).
Obama and his top staff must know this. What I don't see is what they
hope to achieve. Convert part of al-Qa'ida into a US ally? It might
not be a ridiculous idea, given that nearly all sides in Syria have
committed great crimes (the exception being the Kurds). But if we can
forgive al-Qa'ida its crimes, why not Assad too?
US 'Likely Culprit' of Global
Spike
in Methane Emissions Over Last Decade.
It's the result of
fracking.
US citizens:
call on the
FCC to stand up for network neutrality.
The UK Labour Party is
concerned
about anti-semitism in its student club at Oxford.
I agree with the opposition to anti-semitism; however, the claim that
comparing Israel's occupation with apartheid constitutes
"anti-semitism" makes me concerned that their definition of
"anti-semitism" is too broad and that this is being used as an excuse
to repress criticism of Israel.
The UK government has
banned
many entities from boycotting companies for several reasons,
including involvement in arms trade and involvement in tobacco.
Boycotts Are Vital to Democracy.
So
That's Why the Tories Will Ban Them.
The Tories are attacking democracy in the UK on a wide range of
fronts, including
voter
suppression,
gerrymandering,
and
attacks
on Labour party funding. This adds up to a plan to quash
democracy and seize permanent power while pretending not to.
The Tories are
lower than
vermin.
Israel's politicians
openly propose annexing part of
the West Bank.
The Israeli Labor party
proposes
permanent apartheid in the West Bank, and terror bombing of civilians
in Gaza.
Terrorism means making war on civilians. It doesn't become any more
legitimate when the bombs are fired from planes instead of carried by
suiciders.
Israel's parliament is
trying
to prevent "biased" (that is, critical) foreign press coverage.
Neel Kashkari, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis,
says the
big
banks remain a danger to society.
We know that the US
has
not adopted the necessary reforms to prevent the banks from causing
another crisis. The banksters did not allow sufficient reforms.
It is interesting to see a member of the financial structure say so.
The fight to
keep
80% of fossil fuel reserves in the ground is making great
progress, but it's a race against the clock.
As part of this campaign,
protesters
disrupted a US auction of oil and gas leases.
The pragmatic case for voting for Sanders:
Clinton
is less electable, and her vaunted "experience" consists of
supporting hawks and plutocrats.
The practice of
tracking
voters through massive surveillance threatens further danger to
democracy as well.
Workers fired from a Lexmark factory in Mexico are
holding
a sit-in strike.
When NAFTA gave Lexmark the option of moving its factory to Mexico, it
gave Lexmark the option of treating workers like dirt. I have nothing
against hiring Mexicans; I object to mistreating workers in any
country or paying them so little.
A judge
ordered
Apple to change the software in a suspect's iThing so that
investigators can try more than 10 different passwords.
(I say "suspect", because legally that's what's pertinent; but there
is little doubt that this suspect, now deceased, was guilty of
murder.)
I do not object to this in principle, because it is part of
investigating one suspect and doesn't imply snooping on everyone.
US citizens:
call
on the US Army to tear down Yellowstone dam and save the Pallid
Sturgeon.
US citizens:
call on
the FCC to stop T-Mobile from violating Net Neutrality.
Lead in Chicago's water supply is the cause of a lawsuit.
Women in South America are begging for help to get abortions.
It appears that microcephaly can be detected at 22 weeks. That's not too late for an abortion a fetus with a grave birth defect.
The NSA's algorithm for detecting al Qa'ida couriers was an experiment, not a system used to choose targets.
The New York Times is suing the author and publisher of a book which shows how the Times' coverage of the US conquest of Iraq glorified that war.
Fair use in the US is not an explicit right, just a defense available
to those accused of copyright infringement. Thus, even if you are
pretty sure from precedents that you're going to win the case on
grounds of fair use, you're still in a perilous position.
Americans rallied at 800 public schools to oppose school budget cuts, violation of local democratic control of schools, and imposed standardized tests.
Patients are suing a US Catholic organization for its broad interpretation of the policy of not doing abortions, which it imposes on Catholic hospitals in the US.
The Catholic Church should remove itself from operating hospitals rather than impose its dogma on patients.
Clinton promises total support for Netanyahu and Israeli hawks.
The EPA will start making rules to prevent spills of toxic chemicals.
Russian censorship of childrens' books is so absurdly strict that it provides a wonderful tool for selective enforcement, and for squeezing publishers.
Some of the superdelegates that support Clinton are actually lobbyists.
France has extended its state of emergency for another three months. The emergency powers don't seem to have done much good so far, except for the fossil fuel companies by crushing rallies during the Paris climate meeting.
Why Stopping Killer Robots Is A Battle Worth Fighting.
The Tories' latest attack on poor people is to eliminate funding for refuges for women victims of domestic violence.
Israel's soldiers demolish Palestinians' houses, farms, even outhouses over and over.
"Every single child of these families who experienced the arrival of
the bulldozers and army jeep at dawn needs no social networks to hate
and hate more."
People who report sensitivity to electromagnetic waves may really be suffering from something, but it isn't caused by electromagnetic waves.
Runaway inequality in the US has extended from wealth to life span.
Venezuela has raised the price of gasoline — a very important measure.
Subsidizing fossil fuel puts the whole world in danger.
The UK's local medical care directors say the NHS is degrading under the impact of Tory funding cuts.
It has been clear for years that the Tories aimed to destroy the NHS but were unwilling to say so.
Kanhaiya Kumar, charged with "sedition" for criticizing India's trampling of human rights, was attacked in court by a Hindu-extremist fanatic.
Hindu fanaticism has been a dangerous force in India since before
India was founded. Shortly after that, a Hindu fanatic assassinated
Gandhi.
As for charges of "sedition", any state that charges a person with
"sedition" (under whatever name) convicts itself of oppression.
Burundi is crushing independent media, trying to hide the repression so as to pretend that the situation is normal.
Meanwhile, the country is plagued by hunger and disease.
As protesters in Berlin called Netanyahu a war criminal German thugs threatened to prosecute them for saying so.
Another instance of disrespect for freedom of speech.
The US government is selling student debt to collection agencies, which immediately pile on more debt, and send US marshals to arrest debtors.
A plutocratic state regards the people as its prey.
Big Pharma is trying to whitewash its image with a campaign directed only at 7000 elite policymakers.
This way, they avoid the embarrassment that would result if the rest of us saw their bullshit.
Each year, a thousand other women in Pakistan are murdered by their families. Sharmeen Obaid was shot by her father for choosing who to marry. By a freak accident, she survived to tell the tale.
The killer got off without punishment after she was pressured to "forgive" him.
Until state punishes these killers, private revenge is justified. Feminists in Pakistan would be justified in organizing to kill these killers.
The Nadeem Centre for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Violence tries to monitor torture in Egypt. The government, finding this embarrassing, is shutting it down.
While Lead Flowed Through the Pipes, Flint Residents Paid America's Most Expensive Water Bills.
John Kiriakou: The CIA officially tells agents to make false reports, which supposedly will be corrected by other reports. But sometimes the false reports are passed on to Congress and the corrections are not.
A particularly arrogant selfish jerk made the callous cruelty of San Francisco's wealthy people manifest.
After the "official" TPP text was posted, a sneaky one-word change was made that make the copyright provisions even nastier.
The tyrannical government of the Maldives imprisoned an opposition politician for "terrorism" because he led a protest against the
imprisonment of dissidents.
In most countries, "anti-terrorism" measures are a far bigger danger to the people than terrorism itself. Labeling of dissent as
"terrorism" is a world-wide tendency, found also in the US.
Strange that governments urge women not to get pregnant and do not urge men not to get women pregnant.
I think it is ridiculous to demand that either men or women go without sex for years, when a better solution is available.
There is no solid proof that Zika causes microencephaly, but evidence is accumulating. There's enough evidence to base practical decisions on the
likelihood. Life decisions cannot always wait for scientific
certainty, which can take many years to achieve.
It is plausible for an insecticide to cause birth defects, but
implausible that the insecticide alone could explain the big increase
in microencephaly between 2014 and 2015 in Brazil.
Perhaps the microencephaly results from the combination of Zika and a
pesticide. Or maybe this idea can be ruled out, if some of the cases
occurred in cities and the pesticide is used only on farms.
Sanders And Clinton Offer Different Solutions For Nevada's Sabotaged Solar Industry.
Seven Syrian towns are besieged and lack food and medicine.
In trying to cope with climate mayhem, we must admit that we can't save everything. As global heating advances and causes additional mayhem, we will
have to choose what to protect.
The only way we can save everything — at least, everything
that will only become threatened at later stages of heating — is to
keep the fossil fuels in the ground. This is why spending money
on mitigation instead of emissions reduction is total folly.
US citizens:
call
on Obama to cut military and nuclear weapons spending.
Everyone:
Thank
Kamala Harris for investigating Exxon's climate lies.
On the correct pronunciation of
"Exxon".
US citizens:
call
for an end to clearcutting in the Tongass National Forest.
Climate activists protested the
US
government's sale of oil and gas leases.
Zika turns the spotlight on the failure of the Brazilian state
to
attend to the people's needs.
The European Commission's plan for "sustainable energy" is based on
the
natural
gas myth.
It formerly appeared that natural gas produced less greenhouse effect
than other fossil fuels, but that was based on failing to take account
of the
methane
leaks.
Privatization of public services, such as schools, hospitals and
prisons, leads to perverse incentives, so that the company
oppresses
people to profit.
New Rate Survey of 500 U.S. Water Systems Finds
Private
Water Providers Charge 58% More.
Of course — they need to make a profit somewhere.
To the Washington Post,
perpetuating
a right-wing majority on the Supreme Court is "preserving
balance".
A report says UK incomes have returned to the
pre-crash
level.
I suspect, however, that this does not take account of the way
house costs and rents have ballooned.
US citizens:
call
for repeal of the military draft.
US citizens:
call
on the Senate to consider Supreme Court nominees promptly.
US citizens:
Call
on the Senate to pass the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act.
Many indigenous women in Canada have been murdered or disappeared,
but there are signs it
could
be 4000 rather than 1000.
Part of Australia
wants
to require music venues to scan guests' IDs, not just to check
their ages.
This seems to imply a system of massive surveillance, far more
dangerous than occasional fights.
Indonesia is
planning
to attack human rights, following the bad examples of Australia
and Malaysia. People could be jailed for months on mere suspicion.
One part of the proposal is legitimate: to make it a crime to plan a
terrorist act.
Global
heating threatens Australian wine.
Vineyards will have to move to Tasmania, to the land where
the old growth forests are burning down.
100
million people are short of food due to El Niño.
17 US states have
agreed
to accelerate renewable energy efforts.
US citizens:
call
on Congress to restrain US support for the corrupt regime in
Honduras, by insisting on the non-corruption condition for US aid to
it.
Turkey arrested a journalist
for
interviewing possible PKK supporters.
The US has
banned
imports of products made with slave labor.
I expect that some companies or countries will try to use trade
treaties to make the US repeal this law,
as
they have done with other important laws to protect something
important.
UN human rights experts say Australia violated David Hicks's human
rights by
jailing
him as part of a deal with the US.
The deal was to get him out of Guantánamo, where the US was
violating his human rights. Is it right to agree to violate someone's
rights in order to get a worse violator to stop? And if you do,
should you break the deal? It is a difficult question.
US citizens:
Call
on your state legislature to pass a Shareholders United act to
limit corporations' political spending.
Everyone:
Call for the arrest
of Governor Snyder for recklessly poisoning the children of Flint,
Michigan.
US citizens:
call on
the Senate to vote on the replacement for Scalia.
Israel's campaign to make peaceful opposition to its occupation
policies a crime has
led
to oppressive policies in France and the UK, and they are trying
it in the US too.
Some twenty years ago, Massachusetts passed a law to boycott companies
that did business in Burma. At the time, the US had not yet adopted
strong trade sanctions against Burma. Other countries called this a
"non-tariff barrier to trade" and said it violated the World Trade
Organization rules. Congress passed, and President Clinton signed, a
law that prohibited states from adopting such boycotts: a victory for
plutocracy over democracy.
This is one of the many plutocratist actions I condemn Bill Clinton
for. Hillary Clinton appears to be basically the same in
her
support for plutocracy, which is why I will not vote for her for
president.
Turkey
proposes
to establish a safe zone in Syria, near the Turkish border, for
refugees.
I think the plan is a good idea, if it can be prevented from leading
to a war between Turkey and Russia.
Turkey
accuses
Russia of intentionally attacking civilians to send them fleeing.
I would not put this past Putin. That doesn't prove it is an
intentional plan. Maybe sending so many people fleeing is just a
byproduct. If so, Putin clearly does not mind.
Federal
Contractors with History of OSHA Violations Battle New Safety
Rules.
Women rescued from enslavement by Boko Haram are
rejected
by their own communities.
This is not only an injustice, it will help Boko Haram too. They can
tell their captives, "If you escape, your family will hate you. Your
only future now is with us."
Patriarchy is so cruel.
The Issue is Not Hillary Clinton's Wall St Links But
Her
Party's Core Dogmas.
No
one in Egypt is safe from the thugs. The torture-killing of
Giulio Regeni called attention to what Egyptians suffer every day.
Why we must defeat Facebook's
plans
to become a hub for publication.
Facebook
apologized
for deleting Viz magazine's page, but the point is that
publications should have to depend on Facebook to act responsibility.
US Shrugs Off Yet Another Report of
Cluster
Bombs Launched By Saudis In Yemen.
Beavers Blamed for Flash Floods in Scotland
May
Actually Control Problem.
The TTIP would give companies a
lever
to get rid of taxes.
Only companies — not people, of course. After the Corporations
United* decision said that corporations deserve
the same rights as humans, what businesses want is more rights than
humans.
However, German judges say that there is
no
legal basis for the TTIP's special courts.
* That group of corporations called itself "Citizens United", but I
call it what it was, not what it pretended to me.
Why
Not Being Friends With A War Criminal Like Henry Kissinger
Matters:
A review of Kissinger's
atrocities
and crimes against humanity. He's not the source from which the
president of the US should seek advice.
Clinton has done little to distance herself from Kissinger's crimes.
US citizens:
call
on Congress to support the Food Recovery Act, whose measures would
reduce waste of edible food.
US citizens:
call
on the Senate to give proper consideration to Obama's Supreme
Court nominees.
In the US:
tell
Republican state governors not to legalize religious-based
discrimination.
US citizens:
support
clean energy in/for US cities.
US citizens:
call on
the FCC to stop T-Mobile from violating Net Neutrality.
Marks and Spencer was lauded for pledging to pay garment workers a
living wage. In practice, the effect of the pledge is nil. These
workers are paid so little they
can
hardly get by.
The low pay for these workers, and workers in general around the
world, is the intended result of "free trade" treaties. That's why we
must replace them with a different global system of trade, one that
keeps wages up.
Bangkok Bombing Suspect was
Tortured
into Confessing, Says Lawyer.
Chemical businesses fund research — even sheer fiction passing
as research — to give them
excuses
to defeat lawsuits and regulation to protect the public health.
Being bilingual
helps
the brain — so urge parents not to miss a chance to pass a
minority language on to their children.
Why Conservatives start
culture
wars, and why they usually lose.
One of the few Egyptian thugs who was
convicted
for killing protesters (while most thugs were acquitted) will has
been given a new trial.
I suppose the idea of convicting a thug was too shocking.
Matt Taibbi: banksters and their friends the Clintons have
contempt
for the little guys — how irrational of them to dislike
being pushed into poverty and losing their homes!
France ordered Facebook to stop
tracking
the browsing of people who are not usedsof Facebook. (Remember,
Facebook does not have users, it has
useds.)
Facebook does this through Like buttons. The GNU browser
IceCat already blocks
Facebook Like buttons so it cannot track you.
Efforts to prevent "radicalization" or "violent extremism"
must
not trample human rights.
The FBI
has ever more ways to snoop on everyone
even despite the use
of encryption.
Part of the blame
falls on companies that want to surveil people
through advertising.
"Smart" appliances are also
untrustworthy. This increasing
snooping is dangerous for democracy
.
Several Tory ministers
secretly agreed to give fracking priority over
protecting national parts and sites
of scientific interest.
They don't expect to get cushy gigs from nature lovers or scientists,
after all.
Saudi Arabia
has investigated its own war crimes
in Yemen and found
itself innocent.
US ISP Cox
is still fighting against being required to snoop
on its users.
Australian censorship, specifically the criminalization of "hate
speech",
interferes with the debate
about whether to legalize same-sex
marriage.
Stating opposition is likely to lead to prosecution.
I support same-sex marriage, but I also support freedom of speech,
and this includes the freedom to offend, insult, condemn or mock
any person, belief, practice, institution, or group. That includes
gays, and that includes straights.
The Conspiracy Theorists
Who Have Taken Over Poland.
The Mosul Dam
is in danger of collapsing
and killing up to half a
million people.
Can't they release the water downstream to lower the pressure?
European Leaders
Told to Keep Aid for Poor People
, Not Hosting Refugees.
Without taxing the rich properly, support for refugees will in the
short term fall on the poor. In a longer term, the refugees will
contribute to the economy if there are jobs for them; but there may
be no housing for them.
New York thugs
want the power (in effect) to declare anyone a felon
on their own say-so.
PISSI
is accused of using chemical weapons
against Kurds in Iraq.
Bahrain
arrested American journalists
who were covering a protest.
The government accuses them of participating in the protest, and of
doing journalism without permission. By doing so it confesses
disrespect for human rights. The US government can't object much, since it supports the repression
in Bahrain.
Overfishing
Is As Big a Threat
to Humanity As It Is to Our Oceans.
What the article does not mention is that human population growth is
the other jaw of the vice. To stabilize fish populations won't be enough
unless we stabilize the human population too.
Russian air power
is supporting
the Kurds to advance in Syria.
I suppose this is because Russia regards Turkey as the regional enemy,
and the Kurds are the enemy of Russia's enemy. Azaz is near to, but not part of, the strip by which PISSI trades
with Turkey. It would be a very good thing if the Kurds captured that
strip. However, Turkey's recent shelling of Kurdish fighters suggests that it
is on the verge of starting a broader war against Syrian Kurds. If
that happens, the Kurds might lose greatly unless they get more support.
A giant bank
bullied the UK government
into weakening regulations
by threatening to leave.
The courageous response, what the world needs, is to tell the banks to
jump in the lake. But I won't say that the Tories were cowardly. I
doubt they ever wished to deny such a powerful company what it wanted.
Tens of thousands
protested in North Carolina against voter
suppression laws.
Trump
Booed for Reminding
GOP of Bush's 9/11 Failure and Iraq War Lies.
Oh, the irony! Plain, unexaggerated truth from Trump! Right-wing
nuts
insisting on Dubya's lies instead! Dubya and Cheney repeated those lies over and over, even after the
facts were established; it was evil, but very effective at building a
movement disconnected from reality.
TTIP of the Iceberg: Consumer Concerns
Could Sink
the US-EU Trade Agreement.
If we are lucky, we will elect Sanders and he will pull the plug on
This Treaty Is Plutocratic (TTIP).
MSF
Condemns 'Deliberate' Attack
After Two Hospitals Bombed in Syria.
In Russia, official censorship
is surrounded
by a cloud of intimidation.
A few days before Uganda's presidential election, the state
has jailed
an opposition candidate.
All protests have been banned in
Kempala, in a Paris-style "state of
emergency".
India
arrested a student
at Jawaharlal Nehru University for
"sedition", leading to a strike which has received support from other
campuses.
5
Reasons
the Top Tax Rate Should Be 80 Percent.
Puerto Rico
is turning
itself into a tax shelter for billionaires to
parasitize the US.
Due to the failure of the US to rescue Puerto Rico from horrible debt,
I must admit that Puerto Rico is acting based on provocation.
Still, the competition to bow down to billionaires will hurt all of us,
except the billionaires. We must put an end to it.
Everyone:
Call
on Tennessee not to oppose settlement of refugees.
US citizens:
call
for implementation of the Dodd-Frank provisions for alternatives
to usurious payday lending companies.
The Union of Concerned Scientists reports on how lobbyists for the
chemical industry have
undermined
government efforts to protect the public, as well as research on
toxicity.
Many organizations have called on the FCC to ban ISPs from collecting
personal
data about customers and making them available to anyone else.
What they propose would be a step in the right direction, but it does
not go far enough. It would still permit massive general surveillance
by ISPs on behalf of Big Brother.
For democracy's sake, we must stop considering this kind of "solution"
as a real solution. Regardless of what entity collects the data, it
is Big Brother's use of the data that
threatens
democracy.
ISPs should be forbidden to keep any records of a user's internet
contacts, except when ordered by a specific warrant.
Some UK doctors paid to attend a meeting with the health minister Tory
liars
moved
the meeting and told them it had been cancelled.
What else would you expect from a Tory?
The Tories are lower than vermin.
As banks gentrify old black neighborhoods, the Koch brothers are
funding
efforts
to cover up the history of blacks in the US — of slavery,
and the civil rights movement.
The UAE tortured foreign businessmen into confessions, and they are
likely
to be sentenced to death.
Zahara Heckscher:
Why
I Faced Arrest, Even as I Battle Cancer, to Fight TPP.
Relating US poverty and inequality to the
systematic
corruption of plutocracy.
A
protest
in London against putting public spaces under private owners that
can impose private rules.
We have the
same
problem in the US.
Cornell West presents
why
American blacks should vote for Sanders.
The US has spent
almost
2 billion dollars on the useless "abstinence-only" substitute for
sex education.
It's effective for promoting pregnancy and diseases among teenagers,
but no one can point to any good results.
Why Does the US Government
Pursue
Student Debtors in Prison?
Poland's right-wing government plans to strip a historian of an award,
because he
acknowledges
the anti-semitism of Poles during World War II.
A plant disease is spreading around the world and
could
wipe out many kinds of trees and herbs.
Attacks on medical facilities and personnel are
becoming
common in today's wars.
Sorry, Corporate Media:
The
More Americans Hear Bernie Sanders, The More They Like Him.
Now that Justice Scalia can no longer spread injustice in the US,
SCROTUS
have declared the intention to reject whatever replacement Obama
proposes.
I fear Obama will propose someone "moderately" right wing in the hope
of gaining SCROTUS's approval. Obama has not much record of standing
firm, but this would be an outrageous surrender.
US citizens:
call on Obama
to cancel nuclear weapons upgrades.
Yazidi women, former sex slaves, have
formed
a brigade to fight PISSI.
Right on!
Beyond contributing to the possible defeat of PISSI, they will also
help the struggle against the general patriarchal cruelty of Arab
society.
An autopsy shows how Giulio Regeni was
tortured
in Egypt.
The US Senate passed a bill to
name
a square in Washington after imprisoned Chinese dissident Liu
Xiaobo.
China deserves this rebuke, and I hope it is adopted. Meanwhile, I
wish the US would cease its practices of
imprisonment
without trial,
extracting
false confessions through torture, and
imprisoning
whistleblowers, so that it could be in a good moral position to rebuke
other countries.
Forcing girls into marriage, often in their early teens,
continues
in many countries around the world.
It not only harms them economically and endangers their health, it
also increases the birth rate, which endangers everyone. It's also a
fundamental wrong.
The London "Garden Bridge" boondoggle, approved in a corrupt way,
would
drain the public treasury uselessly at a time when the government
is
cutting
public libraries,
squeezing
the NHS, and
driving
poor families onto the street.
Warner/Chappell has
agreed
that it has no copyright on "Happy Birthday to You", and will
compensate those that it made to pay royalties before.
The song is probably in the public domain, but there is no way to
prove that.
Turkey has
shelled
Kurds (or rather some Arab allies) that captured an air base in
Northern Syria.
According to Wikipedia, Azaz was held by al-Nusra (al-Qa'ida) together
with other Syrian rebels; the Kurds cooperated with Russia to take it.
I can't begin to figure out what this implies.
New elections are not enough to right the wrongs of Haiti's
rotten
political system.
US intervention is largely to blame for the rottenness, what with
forcibly
removing President Aristide and
imposing
the former president Martelly.
The UK is concealing
thousands
of injuries done to minors in private prisons. These injuries
range from suffocation to broken bones. The companies falsify records
and deny the victims medical treatment. But hey, they have to make
money, right?
To allow a privately run prison is to invite injustice. This practice
must be abolished. More generally, no government function should be
privatized unless that gives the public the benefit of a competitive
market.
Destroying
Democracy Under the Cloak of Defending It: surveillance in the UK.
Lexmark succeeded in using patents to
block
a company from refilling toner cartridges.
Yet another reason why we should
abolish
patents.
Hillary Clinton
Sugarcoating
Her Disastrous Record.
President Clinton's media law,
bought
by media companies' lobbyists, allowed them to merge and
concentrate, increasing their power. The biggest victim is democracy
itself.
No wonder they now support Clinton for president.
Kasich
played a central role in Bill Clinton's welfare "reform" bill.
US prisoners' phone calls are
often
recorded — even the calls with their lawyers, which are
supposed to be private.
Snyder's
top aides were informed about Flint's toxic water within weeks.
A data analysis company tracked
16,000
people at the Iowa caucuses.
I've read elsewhere that data brokers do reassociate these profiles
with people's names, by correlating data from various sources.
Judge Paul Cassell is
begging
Obama to give clemency to the man that Cassell was required to
sentence to 55 years in prison.
Congress has
prohibited
mitochondria replacement (to make a healthy embryo) in the US.
This appears to be SCROTUS at work.
I think that public funds should not be spent on fertility treatments.
Public policy should aim for a lower birthrate, as long as the human
population is too high and still rising.
The US birth rate is low enough for population stability, if it were
not for immigration; but since we do have immigration, and the US
population is still rising, we should aim to reduce both causes of
population increase.
Argentina's new government is offering vulture funds
75%
of the face value of the debt they bought for almost nothing.
Some vultures are holding out for more.
If they get as much as a cent, that will be a victory for evil. The
court should award those fund managers 10 years, not 10 dollars.
The poisoning of Flint's children resulted from Michigan Republicans'
denial of democracy: the
"emergency
manager" law must be repealed.
US citizens:
call on Obama to
update the salary limit for required overtime pay promptly, so SCROTUS
won't get a chance to cancel it.
US citizens: call for providing the needed resources to
protect
unaccompanied migrant minors from traffickers.
US citizens:
call
on Obama to bar fossil fuel extraction near Western national parks
and in Arctic and Atlantic Oceans.
US citizens:
Support the Congressional
Progressive Caucus proposal for curbing global heating.
In a blow to the traditional rights of Englishpeople, a UK court
approved
of general warrants allowing the state to snoop on broad classes of
people.
An unusually high tide
nearly
flooded parts of London. The tide itself comes on top of
sea-level rise.
Tides are not likely to change much in the next few million years, but
our greenhouse gases are pushing sea-level rise. In a few centuries,
much
of London will be permanently inundated.
Egyptian thugs attacked two doctors; now doctors are
threatening
to strike.
Israel's parliament is working on a
plan
to kick out the elected Arab members of parliament.
Eradicating
rats on the Scilly Isles has allowed seabird populations to start
to recover.
It's really Scilly to introduce non-native species.
DeRay McKesson, a Black Lives Matter activist, is running for mayor of
Baltimore, and proposes to
abolish
many of the special privileges of thugs accused of violence.
Indonesia has
prohibited
messaging apps that permit use of LGBT symbols.
You can blame this on proprietary software. This prohibition is
effective because the apps are proprietary software and can restrict
what users can say. A state would find it a lot harder to restrict
people through making demands on free software.
Academics are defying copyright law to
share
copies of paywalled scientific articles.
Hooray, and may this lead to the elimination of copyright from
scientific publishing,
as I
called for 15 years ago.
When for-profit colleges
promise
graduates jobs which they generally can't get, are the colleges
guilty of fraud? Of false advertising? Or are they simply displaying
their grasping nature?
There is no need to investigate precisely how bad for-profit colleges
are, because there is no good reason for them to exist at all. The US
government should stop offering aid to study in them. That would more
or less get rid of them all. Traditional not-for-profit colleges
would pick up the load.
Clinton's Social Security Plan Is a Little Hazy. And
Sanders
Called Her Out on It.
That Brutal Charter School Video Shows That
Rich
People Love No-Excuses Discipline … for Other People's
Kids.
Erica Garner — daughter of Eric Garner, who was killed by thugs
—
has
endorsed Sanders.
Perfluorocarbons, used in waterproof clothing and on surfaces of pots,
can be
toxic
in minute quantities and persist essentially forever.
It's Not Just Flint. There's an Ugly
History
of Lead Poisoning and the Poor in the US.
Refugees in France, camped at Calais because they can't get into the
UK, are facing
increased
violence from French thugs and right-wing gangs.
They are not allowed to go to the UK, but France does not seem to be
trying to kick them out. If they can stay in France, isn't that good
enough to escape the persecution of whichever country they are fleeing
from?
Stop
relying on a navigation system, and get a map!
Kissinger was involved in
launching
wars and planning murders. With her hawkish views, it is no
surprise that Clinton is following his advice.
The Clintons have had a
close
personal relationship wit
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[Reference updated on 2018-03-28 because the old link was broken.]
