● 04.10.13

● Links 10/4/2013: Optimus Support in NVIDIA Linux Driver, Fuduntu 2013.2 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 11:27 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• For an institution that is Asia’s oldest stock exchange, technology plays a pivotal role. With more than 30 million trades being executed on a monthly basis, and transactions running into billions — at no moment, can the BSE afford any performance issues related to its IT infrastructure.

• “We need our IT infrastructure to be extremely dynamic in nature. Almost every day, there are requests for enhancements in existing IT applications. This is extremely challenging, as every change has to be done or released by keeping in mind the impact on integrated IT systems,” says Kersi Tavadia, CIO, BSE.

Desktop

• I didn’t believe open source was properly represented by hardware companies. The big guys only flirted with open source desktops. I thought smaller companies were missing some key components to success. So, with a friend and $1,500, I founded System76 in my basement. It has worked out far better than I could have imagined.

Server

• Since 2011, HP has been developing microservers for cloud data centres under the code name Project Moonshot. Pilot customers are already able to use pre-release versions with systems on a chip (SoCs) from US company Calxeda. Each of these Energycore chips has four ARM processor cores, albeit 32-bit Cortex-A9s. The first commercial Moonshot devices are, however, equipped with Intel server Atom chips. Intel released its Atom S1200, also known as Centerton, in late 2012; the more powerful Avoton is scheduled for release in late 2013. In contrast to Atoms for netbooks and for smartphones, the server versions support more RAM, ECC error correction, virtualisation and PCI Express 2.0.

• The next generation of low-power Atom chips for microservers is due in the second half of 2013, ahead of rival ARM’s chips aimed at the data center.

• HP’s Moonshot servers went into production with Intel’s Atom processor first, but expect a fast follow with an ARM system powered by Calxeda.

Audiocasts/Shows

Kernel Space

• Software Defined Networking (SDN) is difficult to explain, mainly because most of the parts that describe it are not quite built yet. At a 10,000 ft view, as I understand it, SDN describes a set of APIs for centrally managing network devices and being able to reconfigure them on the fly. The details of how this is accomplished are still up in the air, but now that the Linux Foundation has stepped in to create the OpenDaylight project, a standardized, hardware independent protocol and syntax may not be far behind.

• Samsung developers last week provided patches for a new cpufreq governor dubbed “LAB”, or the “Legacy Application Boost”, for the Linux kernel.

• The Legacy Application Boost cpufreq governor uses historical cpuidle usage information for determining the number of currently active processor cores and uses that with the number of idle CPU cores for determining the next frequency dynamically.

Graphics Stack

• NVIDIA has released a beta version of its proprietary Linux graphics driver which introduces some support for its Optimus hybrid graphics technology. However, in its announcement of the changes in version 319.12 of the driver, NVIDIA only mentions the Optimus support in passing. Only the documentation goes into any detail about the feature. According to NVIDIA, users need an X server version 1.13 and version 1.4 of the XRandR command line utility xrandr. The Linux kernel used with this driver must also be able to provide a number of specific interfaces, but the documentation does not list which Linux kernel versions provide them.

• After a snafu yesterday with the Google Melange web-site not listing all participating organizations, it turns out that the X.Org Foundation is in for the 2013 Google Summer of Code. Here’s some of the possible X.Org/Mesa projects that might see some attention this summer.

• While it comes down to qualified students needing to apply to work on a particular project, on the X.Org Wiki is a list of 2013 ideas. While there haven’t been any X.Org student applications posted to the mailing list yet, the list of interesting items for possible work includes:

Benchmarks

Applications

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Self-publishing developer Larian Studios announced today that their KickStarter campaign to enhance Divinity: Original Sin reached its funding goal of $USD 400K in less than a fortnight.

• Divinity: Original Sin is an open-world, traditional RPG featuring turn-based combat and single-player and cooperative gameplay, in which the actions and choices of players have true significance and consequences. It will ship with the editor that was used by the developers to make the game, making it the first game in a long time to sport an RPG editor that supports multiplayer.

• Shovel Knight from indie developer Yacht Club Games has surpassed yet another stretch goal on Kickstarter. As a result of its ability to continuously get dat money, the game will now be available for Mac and Linux in addition to Steam, Wii U, and 3DS.

• In Consortium, you play the game as yourself. “You are you (as in you can speak as yourself, a man/woman from our world) and you’re being given the opportunity to physically control a man from a parallel world. This man is first day Consortium field agent Bishop Six, operative for a powerful peacekeeping force in a not-quite-utopia future of 2042.”

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• KDE has been, for the nineth consecutive year, accepted as a mentor for Google Summer of Code 2013. The KDE project will also be hosting Season of KDE 2013 (more details will come soon).

• The KDE Telepathy team has released version 0.6.0 of KDE Telepathy (KTp), KDE’s instant messaging suite. This release brings many, as usual, bug fixes and new features. Telepathy allows a user to interact with users from different services such as Gtalk or Facebook. Since it’s a KDE project it offers great integration with the desktop by providing plasmoids and runner interfaces as well as providing the traditional contact list and chatting application.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• I’m extremely proud to announce that MediaGoblin is in for a summer of awesome… we’re participating in both GSOC 2013 (under the GNU umbrella) and the GNOME Outreach Program for Women 2013! (Yes, you might notice we’re not a GNOME project, but the super awesome people at GNOME have extended the program to other free software projects.) Are you a student looking for a summer job contributing to free software? Or maybe you are a woman interested in contributing to free software, something like MediaGoblin maybe? Then you should apply! (Maybe you are both… we encourage you to apply to both programs then, actually!)

• Google has announced the mentoring organisations for the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2013. After reviewing 417 applications, the company has selected 177 open source projects to participate in this year’s cycle of the program that brings together organisations and students to foster development of open source code. Google pays the students a stipend while they work on projects chosen by the mentoring organisations, which provide guidance and training to the participating students.

• The application period for students will open on 22 April and conclude on 3 May, at which point the mentoring organisations will pick among student’s proposals. Google says interested students should use the time until the application period opens to familiarise themselves with prospective mentoring organisations’ ideas pages to discover which areas the various organisations are interested in. As with previous GSoCs, the mentoring organisations will decide for themselves which student proposals interest them most. In the previous eight cycles of the program, more than 6000 students from over 100 countries have taken part. Last year’s completion rate among the 1200 participating students was 88 per cent.

Distributions

New Releases

Screenshots

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• PCLinuxOS (PCLOS, for short), the once popular Mandriva-derived Live distribution, came up with a shiny new release a couple days back. Unlike in its glory days, when a minor release would set the whole Linux world abuzz, this one came out quitely with its usual set of goodies. Featuring latest versions of all major included apps, PCLinuxOS 2013.04 comes in 3 flavors — the usual KDE, the fits-on-CD MiniMe, and the extravagant FullMonty.

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat has released version 6.1 of in-memory database JBoss Data Grid. It is based on grid computing platform Infinispan and supports programming languages including Java, C# and the Spring and .NET frameworks. JBoss Data Grid was developed for enterprise and cloud use and provides a distributed, highly scalable cache which, by caching data, reduces response times and increases reliability of applications using it.

Fedora

• It just so happens that yum while performing updates is simultaneously running a journal transaction set recording your update to a transaction id along with all of the excruciatingly painful package update and dependency information you’d ever want to know. Most of the time, you’ll never care about it. In some situations however, you may encounter a post-update problem.

• The good news with yum is you have a recourse. If you need to or at the direction of your Distro’s technical support team, you may be called upon to perform a rollback.

Debian Family

• Last month I wrote about the work being done by a small Linux distribution that most users likely have never heard of, SprezzOS, trying to rewrite Debian’s APT utilities. Reported last month were significant performance gains out of rewriting the APT utilities, but work hasn’t let up. There’s more progress to share.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• The second edition of Ubuntu’s online developer summit, UDS 13.05, was announced yesterday. The virtual developer summit will run through May 14-16, from 1400 UTC to 2000 UTC. The summit is divided into five tracks – App Development, Community, Client, Server & Cloud and Foundations.

• Ubuntu 13.04 (“Raring Ringtail”) is nearly here. Ah, April: Cruel though it may be, it’s the month where spring finally comes to stay, and I get my tax return. Even better, it does markCanonical’s unveiling of Ubuntu 13.04. And with the final beta release now out, it’s time to take stock of what the latest and greatest iteration of Ubuntu has in store.

Flavours and Variants

• The second 2013 release of Fuduntu is here, and 2013.2 now comes with a light install for users that want a base system, and updated LibreOffice

Devices/Embedded

• Advantech has introduced a tiny, fanless embedded motherboard based on 1.6 or 1.86GHz dual-core N2000 Series “Cedarview” Atom processors. Constructed in Advantech’s unique “MI/O-Ultra” version of the Pico-ITX form-factor, the MIO-2262 simplifies system integration by providing three internal headers for all I/O, expansion, and power connections.

• Are you thinking about rolling your own Linux-powered device as part of a start-up, or through a Kickstarter project? Before you go that route, it’s best to understand what’s ahead of you, suggests Opengear co-founder Tony Merenda in this LinuxGizmos guest column.

Phones

• The developers at Jolla have released the SDKs for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows for SailfishOS, their continuation of the ideas behind Maemo and Meego. Those two operating systems were the basis for Nokia’s operating system strategy until it switched over to Windows Phone. The Jolla team have been working on SailfishOS, which combines Mer, a fork and refinement of Meego, with the Nemo project and Qt to provide a UI framework for mobile devices. SailfishOS is destined to power the company’s mobile devices which are expected to debut in the second half of the year.

Ballnux

• Both the Galaxy Mega 5.8 and 6.3 will run on Android Jelly Bean and will use Samsung’s own TouchWiz Nature UX interface.

Android

• Talking about numbers. Huawei posted its annual report and admitted it only sold 32 million smartphones all of last year, far less than its target of 60 million, the number that the management had been promoting as recently as February of this year. I mentioned in my final 2012 numbers that there were a lot of discrepancies with Huawei numbers from various sources and I had adjusted my Huawei annual number downward due to this, but not enough. Still, its good to know now officially.

• Samsung’s Galaxy S4 was revealed, all signs point to another hit smartphone and big growth for the Sammy. They keep expanding the Galaxy series as was expected and the juggernaut should continue to roll on. I found it funny that the Galaxy Camera only now arrived to American shores, we’ve had it here in Asia since last year. Samsung’s Q1 financial guidance said massive growth in smartphones, driving up their profits.. yeah, this ‘surprised’ some after the Christmas season, but not our readers, we know China’s gift-giving season is in January for Q1 and as Samsung is China’s top-selling smartphone nowadays (used to be Nokia) that means big good sales for the Samster…

• The 7-inch Asus MeMO Pad tablet can now be purchased in the US. It is one of the cheapest brand-name Android tablets ever made, as it can be yours for just $149. As you’d expect though, for that price there are a few pretty big caveats.

• Mark Zuckerberg’s landgrab on the open source space of Android poses problems for Google: given that both companies want user data, it can’t afford to sit back and watch

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• The One Laptop Per Child Association has posted a statement distancing itself from Satish Jha, an entrepreneur who founded the Association in India.

• The Association’s beef with Mr Jha relates to what it describes as “certain recent statements”.

• It was nearly one year ago that we took an in-depth look at the Pwnie Express Pwn Plug, a security appliance that absolutely exploded its way onto the scene. By combining an off the shelf hardware platform that was well supported by open source software, custom software front-end, and the experience and knowledge of their team of security researchers, Pwnie Express managed to create something totally unique.

Free Software/Open Source

• Eighteen mainly large communications and software companies have created the Open Daylight Project in the Linux Foundation to develop open source code for software-defined networks (SDNs). The group will develop a wide range of software including an SDN controller and an applications interface for it with the first elements slated for release this fall.

• UNStudio will in June relaunch as an “open-source architecture studio” inspired by technology start-ups, the Dutch firm announced today.

Web Browsers

• The growing popularity of Web browsing from tablet devices and smart phones has been a boon for Apple’s Safari and Google’s Android, but Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Mozilla’s Firefox are having a hard time maintaining a hold on usage share, according to a recent report.

Chrome

• Google’s Chrome OS and Android are heading in the direction where they look and feel identical.

• While the company executives have denied merging of Android and Chrome OS they have hinted at convergence and if you are monitoring the Chrome OS development for a while you can notice how the design and layout of Chrome OS is shaping up.

• The other day, while indicating how much I loved the Chromebook Pixel, I wrote a piece on what I would change. Therefore, it only seems fair to more detail what I really liked.

Mozilla

• The project started out as a release of the Netscape browser and email client/suite back on March 31 1998, at which point Netscape Communications Foundation formally created Mozilla.

• You have to hand it to Mozilla — the company really does pursue policies that favor users even when commercial interests cry foul. Case in point: Last month, I wrote about the fact that The Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) has accusied Mozilla of “undermining American small business” with its plan to block advertising cookies by default in the Firefox browser. Fast-forward to today, and the pre-release version of Firefox version 22 does indeed proceed with the plan, which will make many users happy.

SaaS/Big Data

• What can online retailers do that their brick-and-mortar can’t? Besides not charging sales tax (in many instances, at least, and for the time being), they can leverage the cloud to expand into new geographic markets and handle fluctuations in sales volume in particularly effective ways. And a partnership announced this week between Rackspace (NYSE: RAX) and Magento is designed to make it easier to do exactly that.

• Rackspace, which provides cloud hosting services based on flexible open source technologies that it touts as protection against lock-in, already has a strong presence among ecommerce sites. It is the most popular hosting provider for Magento deployments across the world, according to BuiltWith, and is also the No. 1 host for the Internet Retailer Top 1,000 websites.

• The partnership between Rackspace and Magento, which the companies announced Monday, will expand the former’s reach into the online retailer space even further. According to a statement, the collaboration aims to provide ecommerce sites with “a low-cost entry into new markets around the world without the cost of establishing a physical presence.”

• The OpenStack project itself is not even three years old, but thanks to maturing technology, a growing membership, and the OpenStack Foundation formed last year, OpenStack has matured to the point that it is getting attention from large service provider and enterprise users, including companies in telecommunications, retail and research.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• LLVM’s Clang C/C++ compiler has been making much progress in recent months on being able to build high-priority open-source/Linux software packages. When using the latest LLVM/Clang compiler, it appears to be in good shape for handling LibreOffice.

Education

• Nearly every week, if not every day, there are more and more open source and open educational resources available and accessible to us. It’s impossible to ignore. It also seems impossible to keep pace with the sheer volume.

Business

• Brothers Aleksander and Bård Farsted founded eZ Systems with a strong belief in open source in 1999. At that time, there were no scalable open source business models, so they developed and pioneered their own while developing eZ Publish, an Enterprise Content Management System.

Funding

• Lots of open source projects raise money from their user communities by soliciting donations. Most open source projects will have the ‘Support’ or ‘Make a Donation’ button on their home page or download page. At Eclipse we have had the Friend of Eclipse program for a number of years to solicit financial support for our community.

• Earlier this year, we started looking for ways to increase the number of users making donations. We have millions of people downloading Eclipse but very few making donations. Inspired by Ubuntu’s new donation page and Mozilla’s download page we changed where and how we asked users to make the donation.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• The involvement and energy of the free software community make LibrePlanet what it is: brilliant and passionate people coming together around software freedom, drinking lots of coffee and forging the future of our movement. This year, we particularly appreciated your contributions to the theme of “Commit Change”: a focus on making connections to other movements and building diversity within free software.

Public Services/Government

• Open Source for America (OSFA), an organization promoting the use of open source technologies in the U.S. federal government, today announced the election of Deb Bryant and Kane McLean as co-chairs of the organization.

Openness/Sharing

• MapBox, a service used to design and publish custom maps, has announced that Le Monde, one of France’s largest newspapers, has unveiled a brand new paid website and used MapBox’s interactive maps.

Open Hardware

• Cyrus is an open source 3D printer currently funding on Kickstarter designed to “close the gap between consumers and makers.”

• Its frame is built from the construction tool designed for the maker revolution, MakerBeam– which also started its life as a kickstarter project.

Programming

• So back to the title of this article. VB or Qt Whats the difference? As far as I am concerned one is based on BASIC and one is based on C++. Apart from that they are both as easy to use and program with and both are very graphically rich. Oh, one more thing. Qt is cross platform while VB is not. This means that your program done with Qt can work on Linux, Windows, MacOSx, Android, IOs (iPhone, etc.), Symbian, Maemo, Unix or even different CPU architectures like ARM and x86 platforms. VB can only work on Windows.

Leftovers

• Fears of civil disorder in capital as plans are revealed for partially state-funded ceremonial funeral. Meanwhile lawyers warn against pre-emptive arrests as police scan social media to identify likely protesters

• Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s death yesterday brought waves of mostly flattering coverage of the divisive right-wing leader. It was striking to see the parallels between the way Thatcher was covered on the PBS NewsHour and Fox News Channel’s most popular show, the O’Reilly Factor. Though some people like to think that PBS and Fox couldn’t be further apart, they were basically singing the same tune.

• In the week they took hundreds of pounds from people in severe poverty, MPs and Lords claim up to £3,750 each to return from their luxury holidays to spout off in honour of Margaret Thatcher. Meantime the media are busy classifying any potential protest or expression of opinion at the taxpayer funded funeral jamboree as “potential terrorism”.

Science

• Margaret Thatcher, 87, died yesterday. She is being hailed as the Iron Lady who transformed Britain. Every newspaper across the globe has paid rich tributes to her. Some have even carried her obituary on the front page, which is quite a rare honour.

• I only know that she had a steely resolve. Whatever she thought of doing, she did it. That’s what I have read over the years. And knowing the determination with which she destroyed public sector science, I can understand why and how she earned the title Iron Lady. Nevertheless, let me share this story of how Britain’s only woman Prime Minister, the unyielding Margaret Thatcher, eclipsed one of the world’s best known research centre in plant sciences, which was emerging as a global leader in plant molecular biology and genomics.

• Stephen Moore, libertarian economist and Wall Street Journal columnist learned the hard way that spin doesn’t work in the face of facts. At 1:16, 19-year-old Zack Kopplin, science advocate and history student, offers up the only response one should give whenever a pundit starts talking about cutting science. And at 2:25, Sen. Bernie Sanders and Bill Maher both pile on and fact-check Mr. Moore’s spin again.

Security

• Six cybertools have been designated as weapons by the U.S. Air Force, allowing the programs to better compete for increasingly scarce Pentagon funding, an Air Force official said on Monday.

• Lt. Gen. John Hyten, vice commander of Air Force Space Command, told a conference held in conjunction with the National Space Symposium that the new designations would boost the profile of the military’s cyberoperations as countries grapple with attacks originating from the Internet.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Contrary to assurances it has deployed U.S. drones only against known senior leaders of al Qaida and allied groups, the Obama administration has targeted and killed hundreds of suspected lower-level Afghan, Pakistani and unidentified “other” militants in scores of strikes in Pakistan’s rugged tribal area, classified U.S. intelligence reports show.

• The administration has said that strikes by the CIA’s missile-firing Predator and Reaper drones are authorized only against “specific senior operational leaders of al Qaida and associated forces” involved in the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks who are plotting “imminent” violent attacks on Americans.

• A leaked top-secret Justice Department white paper reveals the true extent of US drone killings—and lays bare the fact that unmanned aircraft are targeting far more than just Al-Qaeda terrorists.

• It appears that the Central Intelligence Agency has been taking advantage of a legal loophole to avoid submitting reports on cyber surveillance, based on a 2007 definition of “data mining” established during the last Bush administration.

• Official Washington has long ignored the genocide and terrorism that Ronald Reagan inflicted on Central America in the 1980s, making it easier to genuflect before the Republican presidential icon. That also helped Reagan’s “death squad” tactics resurface in Iraq last decade.

• A recent British documentary Death squads, torture, secret prisons in Iraq, and General David Petraeus are among the featured atrocities in a new British documentary – “James Steele: America’s Mystery Man in Iraq” – the result of a 15-month investigation by Guardian Films and BBC Arabic, exploring war crimes long denied by the Pentagon but confirmed by thousands of military field reports made public by WikiLeaks.

• For much of the past century, US relations with Tibet have been characterized by kowtowing to the Chinese and hollow good wishes for the Dalai Lama. As early as 1908, William Rockhill, a US diplomat, advised the Thirteenth Dalai Lama that “close and friendly relations with China are absolutely necessary, for Tibet is and must remain a portion of the Ta Ts’ing [Manchu] Empire for its own good.” Not much has changed with the Fourteenth Dalai Lama one hundred years later. After a meeting in 2011 with President Obama in the White House Map Room—the Oval Office being too official—the Dalai Lama was ushered out the back door, past the garbage cans. All this, of course, is intended to avoid condemnation from Beijing, which regards even the mildest criticism of its Tibet policy as “interference.”

Cablegate

• Bangalore: Julian Assange, Wikileaks founder has launched a new search engine, which is a portal to an archive of 1.7 million US diplomatic cables, reports Times of India.

• Named as PLUS D (The Public Library of United States Diplomacy), the search engine includes 2, 50, 000 leaked State Department cables that were publicized during Cablegate, a time when memos of Henry Kissinger as U.S. Secretary of State were made public in U.S. history.

• The US Government had suggested musicians Bod Dylan, Don McLean, Joni Mitchell and James Taylor as part of a plan to undermine communism in the Soviet Union in the 1970s.

• In what appears to be a pretty remarkable coincidence, a 1970s–era cable in which a U.S. diplomat shares his early impressions of Margaret Thatcher was released by the website WikiLeaks, just hours before the death of the former British Prime was announced.

• THREE months before Indonesia invaded East Timor in December 1975, Gough Whitlam dismissed an Indonesian proposal to send a joint international military force to restore peace to the civil-war-torn colony.

• WikiLeaker-in-chief Julian Assange, who is languishing in self-imposed confinement in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, has kept himself busy by scraping more than one million documents from the US national archives.

• The votes are in, with Julian Assange and WikiLeaks winning the People’s Choice Award for 2013. Noam Chomsky won the 2013 Human Rights Award and the 2013 Grassroots Award Honoree is Crystal Lameman, member of the Beaver Lake Cree First Nation.

• Global Exchange organize and run the voting for these prestigious Human Rights awards and this year they are celebrating their 25th anniversary. The Human Rights Awards honor the achievements of groups and individuals whose work embodies the principles of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights: peace, justice, and equality.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

Finance

• Not surprisingly, the Goldman Sachs “occupation” of the US Treasury coincided almost exactly with the Fed’s embrace of financialization, leverage, and speculation as crucial tools of monetary management. Its legates in Washington during this era, Robert Rubin and Hank Paulson, never once agonized over violating free market rules. They simply assumed that the good of the nation depended upon keeping the Wall Street game up and running.

• Cyprus-style confiscation of depositor funds has been called the “new normal.”

• Margaret Thatcher enforced essential reforms to revive the British economy, but the nation paid a heavy price for her rigorous laissez-faire dogma, German editorialists write on Tuesday. Thatcherism no longer provides solutions to today’s problems. In fact, they argue, it even caused some of them.

• The latest wheeze to come to light is the rapid growth of people, mostly young and desperate, trapped in what are euphemistically called zero-hours contracts. The number doubled between 2004 and 2011, and rose 50% last year.

• According to the National Audit Office, The UK National Debt rose by £1.5trn as a result of the Bank Bailout. This is twice the nation’s total annual budget. For this amount, the UK could have funded the health service (£106.7bn a year) for fourteen years , the entire education system for forty years (£42bn a year) or over three hundred years of Job Seekers Allowance (£4.9bn a year). Not a single banker has gone to court, let alone to jail. Instead bankers are being let off with fines and the removal of honours, effectively buying their way out of justice.

• Even as news is surfacing that the Cypriot bank “bail-in” will now confiscate up to 62.5% of depositor funds, a new budgetary document from Canada’s finance minister suggests that America’s neighbor to the north may be considering a Cyprus-like bail-in system of its own.

Censorship

• This Monday, I received a reply from the President of the European Parliament Martin Schulz, where he confirmed that a decision to block certain emails from citizens to members of the parliament was taken on March 7, and said that this decision was ”justified”.

• The wife of a hunger-striking Libyan journalist has told Amnesty International of her disbelief that her husband has been imprisoned and denied bail for ‘offending’ the judiciary under an al-Gaddafi-era law.

• Amara al-Khattabi, the editor-in-chief of al-Umma newspaper, was arrested last December and has been on hunger strike since 28 February in protest at his detention. He was arrested a month after his newspaper published a list of 84 judges allegedly involved in corruption.

Privacy

• But wait… there’s more. The report also found that it’s likely GCSB violated other laws as well, including the Privacy Act and the Defence Act. Not surprisingly, the report also finds a mess of an agency with terrible management, poor record-keeping and little oversight. Shocking, isn’t it, that such conditions would lead to abuse of power and illegal surveillance, huh?

Civil Rights

• Anti-Kremlin punk band member gives defiant first interview with western media since being sent to prison eight months ago

• Journal Communication’s right-wing talker Charlie Sykes (WTMJ Radio 620), delights in stirring controversy. But last week he went too far. In a segment discussing whether food stamp recipients should be allowed to buy unhealthy food, Sykes played a clip of an incredibly offensive video that is a favorite of neo-Nazi websites.

• Dwelling on a popular Sykes topic the “growing gigantic culture of dependent people” or “moocher culture,” Sykes slips in a long clip (at 29.20) where the voice of an African American woman can be heard listing all the fast food joints — even liquor stores — where one can allegedly use an electronic benefits (EBT) card. Sykes did not explain the clip or where it originated. The full song portrays women as having kids in order to receive food stamps to fund a party lifestyle. (For the record, you can’t buy booze with food stamps.)

• The Arizona House of Representatives will not cooperate with the federal government in denying due process to citizens of the Grand Canyon State.

• By a vote of 34 to 24, the House passed HB 2573, a bill that would, among other things, prevent state officials from participating in the indefinite detention of Americans by the president as authorized by the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 (NDAA).

• The measure would amend Title 41 of the Arizona code by adding a section prohibiting state governmental compliance with unconstitutional federal mandates.

• A majority of Arizona’s state lawmakers recognize that Arizona is, along with her 49 sister states, a sovereign entity endowed with what James Madison described as “numerous and indefinite powers.” The federal government, on the other hand, possesses only “few and defined” powers, Madison wrote in The Federalist, No. 45.

• “He said, ‘Heil Hitler, Heil Hitler,’ said Harvey, who did not want to give his last name.

• On Yom Ha-Shoah, one of the few remaining living survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto, Chavka Fulman-Raban, delivered a fierce denunciation of evil and injustice, including the Israeli Occupation. Her speech was offered to guests at the ceremony of Beit Lohamey Ha-Getaot (the Ghetto-Fighters House).

Intellectual Monopolies

• When it comes to picking issues that bring protesters out onto the street, alfalfa probably isn’t the first one to jump to mind.

• But plans to allow a genetically engineered variety of the crop to be planted in Ontario has activists readying to rally across the country Tuesday, including in London, Sarnia, Stratford, Goderich, Kitchener, Guelph, Brantford and Toronto.

• The London protest is planned for noon hour in front of the office of London West Conservative MP Ed Holder.

• “We know that genetically modified alfalfa will contaminate farmers’ field. This is a huge problem that no one appears to be addressing,” said Lucy Sharratt of the Canadian Biotechnology Action Network, which is organizing the protests in partnership with the National Farmers Union.

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